“Where’s Dad?”

“Here, Ambrose, sorry.” The deeply resonant voice came from a patch of faintly buzzing negative space that represented the thought patterns and personality of Martin Truax, who lived exclusively within Unison and projected himself into the real-world office for major events and board meetings. His fleshbound self remained in permanent stasis in a location so secret not even his sons knew where it was.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ambrose, struggling to focus on the blur.

“I’m having some bandwidth issues,” his father explained, quivering slightly. “Had to fire Chen’s team last night. Diverted some resources to fill the gap. The bulk of Unison remains unaffected, but a few backend problems have yet to be resolved.”

Ambrose nodded, trying to picture Mr. Chen. Programming and Process Flow Associates rarely sought one another’s company.

“I wanted him gone last year,” Len said. “If you’d taken my advice, you could’ve saved—”

“Ah!” Tiny lines within the gray blur began to glow faintly like lightning inside a cloud. The lines connected and a human outline emerged. The room brightened as Martin Truax’s projection revved up to 100 percent. Two previously unseen technicians appeared at the far end of the room, bustling around the gleaming scan-tube on its raised platform. Len vapored away his data stream and waited for the creator of Unison to finish arriving.

Their father was seventy-one years old but looked no older than forty. And it wasn’t just a favorable projection: all his life, Martin Truax had taken advantage of the finest antiaging modifications that the world had to offer, traveling yearly to the Free Asian Union for rare, untested treatments. Ambrose watched as his father’s sandy hair filled itself in. It always looked slept on, the direct opposite of the rest of his immaculate appearance: blue suit, maroon cuffs, gold UniCorp U stitched to the lapel.

The technicians at the other end of the room stopped and stared. Even projected, Martin Truax’s kinetic force was impossible to resist. The man was a frayed wire of energy and ambition. Ambrose straightened his posture as the familiar mix of pride and anxiety washed over him.

Martin Truax smiled and extended a hand to his youngest son. Ambrose took it, and his palm receptors sent false sensations tingling up his arm. It felt just like shaking a human hand.

His father winked at him, then got down to business and began giving orders. The technicians scrambled. Ambrose followed his brother to the scan-tube, which slid open to reveal smooth, unbroken steel—except for one tiny hole for the micro-scalpel beam. Ambrose closed his eyes. His mouth was suddenly very dry. He had flowed out his possible nervous reaction many times, and knew with 100 percent certainty that he would get in the tube.

“Ambrose,” Len said, surprisingly gently, “you won’t feel a thing. You know that.” Len’s eager blue eyes stopped their customary darting and gazed reassuringly at Ambrose, who nodded once. He looked back at his father, who was picking lines of code out of some externalized program file and replacing them with strings of glowing numbers from his palm. Len put a hand on Ambrose’s shoulder.