She swore for the benefit of Simms and the empty room, then drained her tea genteelly and went to make another cup. When she returned the image was back. No, this was another one: same building, different angle. Now there were two figures under the pall of evening, by a lit streetlamp. The two figures were…

They had just been standing there, maybe conversing. Now they were embracing. Two big Plug-ugly men, one with an Old Testament-looking beard and a balding head that showed his sloping brow, the other younger, wearing a flat cap, jowls dark with stubble.

Her hand inched for the mouse, then pulled back. The image stepped forwards a handful of frames, the two men parting.

It moved again, becoming video without transition. The older man was at the door of the house, looking back. The younger was walking away, and away, and away. Alison stared at it, knowing you could do this with video trickery or CGI. Hell, Georges Méliès could probably have done it with double exposure and a little patience. But the young man was walking away in a direction that did not involve any of the usual ones. Then he was gone, as though he’d suddenly understood he was within a two-dimensional image and could take a third dimension out of there.

“Where?” she demanded out loud. She moved the cursor into the suddenly vacated space, clicking furiously as though she could dig through all her nested documents and catch up with the Plug-ugly.

She was getting a headache, but she reckoned this was about par for the course given how the universe was messing her around right then.

Her screen moved. Or, no, it didn’t, but she had the sense that the corners of the screen were flying away in all directions. Her unfocused gaze was opening it up, letting her get past the mundane nonsense of Official Copies and lists of creditors to reach something…architectural, a complex network that fell away into a profound depth that her screen couldn’t hold. It had to be a hallucination brought on by tiredness, overwork and the frankly freakish direction that Mouser was going. Or it was a simulation, the distance and perspective she was seeing merely an illusory trick of the screen. But she knew, at some level, that it was real.

Her breath plumed in the sudden cold, and Simms complained bitterly. He bolted up onto the kitchenette counter, where the just-boiled kettle maintained a ring of warmth, fending off the feathery frost that crept out everywhere else.