Then another light clicked on—a small flashlight—and floated around the middle of the room. The beam played along the piles of laptop computers, air conditioners, console games. The lonely Cabbage Patch doll. Mistletoe ducked out of the way as the beam swept across the window gap.

It won’t end, she thought. Ivor was right about Martin Truax: he will never rest.

She slid the stunner out of her sleeve and crouched in the doorway to wait.

8

THE FACE OF THE DRAGON

SONIA CARTER had big eyes full of glittering grays like the surface of a fast-moving river. They gave Ambrose the queasy sensation that Unison had inverted around him and formed a tunnel into her head. She accepted his Friend request. Her Thoughtstream blinked to life and meshed with his own.

Sonia Carter wonders why Takashi waits so long between visits.

Takashi Nakamura is 0111001101101111011100100111001001111001.

Binary, Ambrose thought. He’s excited. They were standing in a small conference room—round table, a dozen chairs, no windows—deep within the labyrinthine guts of the Mass Entertainment Immersion Center, where Sonia had just finished giving a presentation to investors on the latest upgrade for her UniPetz Application. The upgrade allowed for the integration of a sentient pet into a user’s Thoughtstream. Ambrose didn’t really see the point of a window into the soul of a soulless creation, but figured it would be highly profitable.

All around them, ghostly investors chattered as they filed out.

Ambrose blinked away Sonia’s hypnotic eyes. She wore a spotless white leather trench coat with a wide stripe of crimson near the bottom, where it enclosed a pair of black boots. A furry, ferretlike creature with a wrinkly nose curled around her ankle and busied itself with sniffing Takashi’s Mood-shadow, which had reappeared as a pulsing red and orange splatter.

“Welcome to the MEIC,” she said. Her voice was measured and restrained. The opposite of Mistletoe’s brash subcanopy patter, he thought with a sharp and unexpected pang. He promised himself that he would shimmer out and check on her after he wrangled some information from Sonia, whose coolly professional gaze was making him uncomfortable.

“Thanks,” he said.

“First time here, I take it?”

“Just created his Account today,” Takashi said.

She smiled. “Shimmer-shocked?”

Ambrose played dumb. “I’m not sure.”

“How’s your throat feel? The residue builds up.”

Ambrose gave her an exaggerated gluuckkkk and shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

Sonia waved to the last ghost, an old bald man, as he left the room. Ambrose and Takashi had missed the entire presentation, winding their way through the endless hallways of Unison’s gaming epicenter. It had been a distracting journey. A user-created playground like the MEIC was something Ambrose had no time for in his old life, so his awe at the sheer magnitude of the place was genuine. A peek inside one door revealed an infinite landscape of rolling hills, dense forests, and crumbling granite monuments to a civilization that had never existed: four-armed giants, their stone limbs stumped with age. Another door opened straight into the ocean. Ambrose had pressed his palm flat against the wall of water that rippled like a hanging sheet in the doorway.