The guard watching them was a red-bearded one named Bjarte. He was standing on an upturned plastic crate to stay out of the nastiness. Eiko had notes on Bjarte: a bit sloppy on the job, got distracted easily, liked to talk. He was a bully—enough of one to stand out among the others. He carried a long, serrated bowie knife in a sheath on his calf.

While his hands sorted fish into the flash-freeze slots, a good portion of Eiko’s mind was elsewhere. He kept going back over his last day in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, where he had been abducted. Kept trying to find the exact moment when his former life had ended and this one had begun. Where the two Eikos had been severed, one from the other. But he couldn’t find the connection, the sharp division where the rope was cut: His former life untangled into a frayed vagueness. His new one started in the same way.

What did he remember? It had been hot that day. Hotter than Japan, more humid. He had buzzed for an autotuk from the desk of the cheap hotel where he was staying. It was his first day in the Autonomous Trade Zone. He was excited. The HCMATZ. You could make a fortune here, if you were smart. He knew other Japanese programmers who had come home from the ATZ and bought beach houses in Okinawa after a few years.

Eiko already had the company picked out. They were the biggest in the ATZ, their regional corporate headquarters looming fifty stories above District Three, a shield of mirrored glass: DIANIMA, the international tech company that designed the top-of-the-line artificial intelligences—minds that ran governments, managed economies. He would work his way up. Start small, push into R&D, reinforce what he had learned at the university with practical experience. By the time he was thirty, he would be a DIANIMA project manager. From there, who knew?

But that was all for tomorrow. On his first day he had wanted to see the main square first, the ancient brick French cathedral in the town’s center, the old post office. Things like that. Just a day spent touristing in this megalopolis, before he got down to making money.

The autotuk had feigned a malfunction, pretended not to understand his directions. Bleeping in fake distress, faking alarm at its own wrong turns, it circled him farther and farther from the center, through a series of high-rise slums, skeletal stalled building projects rammed full of container squats and shanties, with spiderwebs of illicit power cables snaking across every possible surface. Finally, the ’tuk stopped at a storefront on a side street, and refused to go any farther.