I SLINK BACK TO THE NEW ANNEX AT ABOUT 10 P.M. WITH MY tail between my legs, to check my various bits of hardware back into Harry the Horse’s toy chest and deliver an accounting of myself to the irate managers on overtime who are waiting in Briefing Room 201.

Except, they’re not there. The bastards have all gone home, leaving me a terse email instructing me to show up tomorrow at nine sharp for the inevitable circular firing squad that is the After-Action Debrief/Lessons Learned meeting, wherein we will play pass-the-parcel with a blame bomb until it explodes, spraying shit in the lap of whoever can most plausibly be credited with causing the fuck-up. Which, in this case, almost certainly means me.

How the fuck was I supposed to know that Mhari of all people was already in the loop and wrapping up the highly suspicious outbreak of algorithmically induced dementia? What is this I don’t even, as they say on the planet Reddit. I thought we—okay, her colleagues in HR—fired her sorry ass a decade ago . . . well, reassigned her to the inactive list, bound her to silence, and gave her a pointed shove down the greasy out-placement playground slide.

But there’s no getting around it. The key facts are:

• While furtling around with my data mining project I identified a heinous hotspot of horrible brain-eating nastiness located right on our doorstep
• One of our medical liaison experts confirmed that it wasn’t your regular strain of Krantzberg syndrome . . .
• . . . But it wasn’t CJD, Kuru, New Variant CJD (aka Mad Cow Disease), or any other known prion disorder
• I inspected the latest victim, confirmed that it was something related to K syndrome, and dropped in on her place of work . . .
• . . . Whereupon a pencil-necked maths nerd (not unlike my younger self) proved to be immune to some of my basic tools—including my junior league Eater of Souls mojo—bushwhacked me with some help from his dental hypertrophy support group, and dragged me into what looks like an external black op being orchestrated by my Ex–GF From Hell who doesn’t work here anymore (except apparently when she wants to)

I mean, what the fuck? What the fucking fuck?

I check out and go home in a buzzing haze of exhaustion and cognitive dissonance, not to mention fear and loathing. I’m too tired to safely use the back way—a branch line of the old nineteenth-century Necropolitan Line, long since turned into a bike trail, that gives pedometers a nervous breakdown and lets me cover the six kilometers to home (according to Google maps) in about two klicks, as long as I don’t mind an occasional haunting. Instead, I splash out on a taxi and slump in the back, trying my hardest to ignore the world.

Tomorrow’s going to be a bad day. I can tell.

• • •

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