“Nice happy ever after,” Alik mocked. “But I’m biting.” He leveled a finger at Jessika. “What were your findings? Bad enough to make you switch allegiance back again?”

She gave a reluctant nod, almost as if she was embarrassed. “That kind of criminality, snatching helpless low-visibility people for profit, simply doesn’t happen in the Utopial society. And I really am an office girl at heart. So I went back, looking for the quiet life. How dumb is that?”

Yuri let out a dismissive grunt but didn’t actually challenge her. “That whole case certainly justified Ainsley’s suspicion about the Olyix,” he said.

“How?” Alik said. “They helped you.”

“That they did. They gave me all the information I asked for about using Kcells for a brain transplant, and how the whole concept remains pure science fiction. All very diplomatic and cooperative. But Hai-3 also said: man.”

“I don’t get it,” Eldlund said.

“The exact words it said to me were: I will pray for your success in recovering the unfortunate man who has been abducted.”

“You didn’t say who you were looking for,” Alik said, clicking his fingers. “Male, female, or omnia.”

“Right,” Yuri confirmed. “Ainsley never quite believed the Olyix being so saintly. And this proves it. They’ve taken on the aspects of our greed and run with it to an extreme, because they see that as a normal human trait. Unchecked, it’s a bad attitude. And it is unchecked, because they don’t really understand us, they just mimic us. No moral filter, remember? They just don’t have it. That’s why we keep a very special watch on them now.”

He glanced at me, and I nodded confirmation for everyone to see. But I understood now where his prejudice came from; it was quite reasonable given the circumstances. Yuri wasn’t an agent for alien disinformation; Hai-3 had been stupid. Its mistake there in the embassy had strengthened Yuri’s paranoia, and in turn he’d gone on and convinced Ainsley Zangari to suspect the Olyix of limitless intrigue in the pursuit of money. Subsequently, every crime committed in the Sol system, from jaywalking to political manipulation, Ainsley blamed on the Olyix.

Okay, so eliminating Yuri as a suspect was a step forward, but I still didn’t understand where the whole Kcell-enabled brain transplant myth originally came from. Because that is now embedded so deeply in popular culture, it’s never going away. I’d been hoping for a clue in Yuri’s tale, but he was clearly as puzzled by that as I was.

“You think the Olyix fired the hellbuster missile at you?” Alik asked.

“Not directly,” Jessika said. “That was Cancer.”

Alik’s reaction was interesting. He sat bolt upright. “You’re shitting me!”

“No.”

“Je-zus. Can you back that up?”