Jim walks through this place untracked, his uneasiness bouncing back from every mirror, every glossy leaf and fabric. The memory of his night in Egypt is overlaid on his sight like the head’s-up display of a fighter pilot’s helmet. IR images in a faint green wash: of beggars in Cairo, too poor even to live in the jammed miserable tenements around them. How many people could live in a structure like SCP? The luxury surrounding him, he thinks, is a deliberate, bald-faced denial of the reality of the world. A group hallucination shared by everyone in America.

Jim wanders this maze, past the sleepwalkers and the security police, until he has to sit down. Disoriented, dizzy, he might even be sick. Some mall kids hanging out by the video rental window stare at him curiously, suspecting an OD. They’re right about that, Jim thinks dully. I have ODed on South Coast Plaza. The kids stand there hoping for some theatrics. Jim disappoints them by getting up and walking out under his own power. His damaged autopilot gets him through the maze of escalators and entry levels to the parking lot, to his car.

He calls Arthur. “Please, Arthur, give me some work. Is anything ready to go?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact there is. Can you do it tonight?”

“Yes.” And Jim feels immense relief that he can act on this feeling of revulsion.

That night he joins Arthur enthusiastically as they stay up all night to arrange a successful strike against Airspace Technology Corporation, which makes parts for the orbiting nuclear reactors that provide the old space-based chemical lasers with their power. Off to the rendezvous at Lewis and Greentree, in the little warehouse parking lot; the same men load the boxes into Arthur’s car; and they’re off to San Juan Hot Springs Industrial Park. Despite security precautions that include fence-top heat-seeking missiles, the strike succeeds; in Airspace Tech’s main production plant, all that was composite has fallen apart.…

But the next morning, back in his ap, exhausted to emptiness, Jim has to admit that the operation hasn’t changed all that much for him. He’s still sitting in his little ap under the freeway looking around. Nothing in it soothes him. He’s heard his music too often. He’s read all the books. The orange crate labels mock him. He’s looked at the maps till he knows them by heart, he’s seen all the videos, he’s scanned every program in the history of the world. His home is a trap, the complex and massively articulated trap of his self. He has to escape; he looks around the dusty disorderly room, with its treasured shaft of nine A.M. sunlight, and wonders how he ever stood it.

The phone rings. It’s Hana. “How are you?” she says.

“Okay! Hey, I’m glad you called! You want to come down to my place for dinner tonight?”

“Sure.”