No, neither a man nor a granite monument of one. This was only a thing, a soulless clone being operated long-distance by a twisted specimen of decadent humanity ensconced in a “control pod” in order to experience the world through the senses of an avatar.

Shrieking like a Harpy that would gut him with her talons, Anna came at David so fast that she seemed to fly, clawing viciously at his face, drawing blood from one cheek, going for his eyes, driving him backward until he came up against a wall. He straight-armed her, the butt of his hand slamming her chin, snapping her head back, staggering her, so that he might slip away to the armchair.

She saw his intent and seemed suddenly to know that there was something other than money in the tote. She got to it as he did, and they both seized the handles.

“You killed only the meat machine he was operating,” she said. “He’ll activate another. There’s no way out for you, pretty boy.”

He was terrified that she would accidently pull the trigger string, all but vaporizing them and bringing the house down on the cellar, in some corner of which Emily waited to be revived.

Face-to-face, breath merging with breath, she sneered at him, at the hesitation inspired in him by her familiar face and form. “I can make one Emily after another and use them as I wish, use them to kill, make whores of them.”

He shot her in the abdomen and then the chest, killed this ersatz Emily to save the real woman if he could, and her hand slipped off the handles of the tote as she fell.

Somewhere far below, Anna might already be seeking to control some other avatar.

Movement drew his attention to the door. The third member of the mission, whatever his or her name, appeared in the Nanette avatar. She had a pistol in a two-handed grip.

Before she could open fire, David curled the line of floss around the index finger of the hand with which he held the tote. “This bag contains two kilos of a plastic explosive. I can trigger it in an instant. Shoot me, and I’ll trigger it reflexively. If I fail Emily again, I have nothing to live for. I’ll gladly die, and take you with me—this house, your mission, the bridge through time across which you came here. Now bring her to me.”

| 95 |

David stood in the foyer, by the front door, the tote bag in his right hand, the trigger string taut.

The Nanette avatar had wanted him to descend into the basement with her, where Emily lay in suspended animation, but he dared not go. He couldn’t know what else waited below, in addition to Emily, and he might be disarmed by some means unforeseeable.