He was without fear, Rustem saw. He was the kind of person who had never done anything more serious than jaywalking in his life. The kind of person who had no need to break laws, because he was too consumed with his own scientific interests to think of such a thing.

And because, Rustem noted with resentment, he had always been successful. He had always had a place for himself in the world.

“Several years ago,” the modulated, shifting voice began, “you volunteered to have your neural connectome mapped and uploaded.”

“Right, yeah. DIANIMA project. Back when they were renting a big lab here at the institute. There were four—no, five of us chosen for that. There were a lot of volunteers, but the qualification process was long. Lots of questionnaires, that sort of thing.”

“Did you know what they were going to do with the data?”

“With the connectome models they made of us? Yeah. The project was to create companions for people. It was supposed to be therapeutic. The idea was that certain people—well, lots of people—aren’t capable of relationships. This causes them to feel isolated, depressed. The idea was to create these models and use them as the basis for a construct isolated people could have a sort of ‘pseudo-relationship’ with. The constructs would have all the little quirks of real people. The people who used them could interact with them. Could practice being with other people. They were expensive, but I know the republic now offers them to citizens in need, on a limited scale. And I heard you could have one prescribed to you by your insurance company, and that some private firms were even providing them as a benefit.”

“A benefit?” Rustem interjected.

“Sure. Especially out in the SF-SD Axis. The tech firms there have people practically living on campus. No time for real relationships. These constructs are an efficient shortcut.”

“Provide people with a relationship they don’t have to devote much time to,” Rustem said.

“Something like that.”

“It must be strange,” Rustem said, “thinking of all those people out there having a relationship with you.”

“They made changes. The iterations are based on the connectomes of the subjects they scanned, but they are each a customized variant. So, I guess nobody’s having a relationship with me—more like an alternate take of me. Which, yeah, is a little strange. To be honest, I think I was more interested in the money at the time than I was in what they were going to do with my data.”

“Grad student days?” asked Rustem.

“Yeah. And I wasn’t getting the teaching hours I needed, so I was pretty broke. It was better than donating plasma. So—what’s this all about? I take it it’s something criminal, given the abglanz and all the mystery.”