The Security Associate sitting next to Len struggled to control his smirk. His mouth twitched and spasmed. Ambrose wished he could see what he looked like when he tried to be forceful and assertive. Apparently, it was hilarious. He wondered if his UniCorp colleagues had been laughing at him for years, if he’d been too blinded by his own last name to see the contempt all around him.

Paranoia.

Ambrose turned and shifted his attention to a scene out the window. The entrance to a topside airlock was swarming with subcanopy cops. They parted to clear the way for a pair of technicians in white thermal suits and helmets. Someone in the crowd tossed a banana peel that hit a cop in the shoulder and slid down his back. The other cops drew their stunners. Then the transport turned a corner and the scene disappeared behind a shanty-stack.

“Anyway, you know the Unison backend better than almost anyone,” Len continued. “You should be able to translate your skill set into a query system to filter out the gossip and define the next steps in your investigation. If it were me, the first thing I’d do would be to—”

“Okay, Len, seriously, just shut up for one second. There was this freelance App creator who told me the cross-chatter about Greymatter’s been freaky lately. Like, Martin’s Version 3.0 might have already started. I asked her when the gears started turning, and she told me yesterday.”

“See, now that makes sense—as soon as you ran, he had to act. You probably made him jump the gun, too. Which means he’s doing two things at once: rushing to get his project off the ground and searching for you.”

The transport merged onto the access road that encircled Rio II and cruised next to all manner of long, unwieldy commercial vessels heading for the topside dock. Ambrose watched as the transports in line ahead of them were boarded and searched by helmeted canopy cops on black scoots. When one of them pulled alongside the cover vehicle, the driver palmed down the window and said a few words to the cop, who saluted once and left them alone.

“Huh,” Ambrose said. “Red Squirrel Tea.”

Len gave a hearty thumbs-up. “People love it.”

*   *   *

The interior of the transport lit up when they reached the surface as Len and the security team externalized their personal Inboxes. Ambrose unraveled his bandages and winced. One small, neat hole marked the center of each palm, where Ivor had rebooted his hardcoded ID. The wounds were still raw but no longer bloody. Ambrose had always healed quickly: scrapes and bruises often faded in less than a day. Vitamin-rich synth-food saw to that. Or maybe Martin and the lab Associates had simply made him that way? He wondered if he had vast reserves of untapped power. If regular human beings used only a fraction of their brain, how much of his was left to explore?