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Adam, Unwilling

Written by Gary Kloster

Illustration by Marcus Mashburn

Amar was drowning. Fluid filled his lungs and throat, stopped his ears and blurred his vision, slowed his convulsions with its thick embrace. Caught, he struggled weakly, trying to cry out against the liquid that filled him. Then he felt the shock of cold as the stuff began to flow away, rushing out to leave him huddled on the rubbery floor of his tiny cell, puking and coughing out the remnants of its syrupy warmth. He lay there, slowly gaining control of his body, and his mind pieced itself back together. Finally he rolled over to look at the soft walls of the tiny womb and began to swear, soft and hoarse at first, then with greater volume and vigor as his lungs cleared and his new-found flesh recovered. Amar was out of the system, embodied in his flesh again, on the outside. Something was very, very wrong.

Amar wiped the pseudoamniotic fluid from his eyes and saw the tiny pulse of blue from the control panel set in the thick flesh of the womb near the hatch. He gathered himself together and pushed upwards, forcing through his body's protestations to reach out and thumb the switch, telling the hatch to slowly pull itself apart and allow him to slip out into the tiny airlock he had grafted onto this womb when he'd built his bolt hole so many years ago. Stepping down into the chamber, shivering violently, he saw the tiny communications panel set in the wall light up, and the voice of his assistant program, Sophie, poured out.

"Thank Turing, Amar, it worked. Are you okay? It did work right, didn't it Amar? Are you all there?" There was an edge of hysteria in her voice that threatened to pull off the cover that Amar had slapped down over his own fears in the face of what had happened.

"I'm okay, Sophie, just trying to shake off being born." He reached out with a trembling hand to open the hatch set into the side of the airlock and slowly pulled out the supplies he had put there, the heavy towels, bottled water and energy gel. "My last memory is going up to download, right after coming back from the party where I saw Morgan. What happened? Did he kill me?"

****

Five Days Before

The you-are-here maps had become ubiquitous on the ship, a cute idea turned fad, and then as time ground on a sort of desperate plea for progress. Amar was long sick of them, but he had to admit that the one in the briefing room had a certain overwrought style. The great wooden table was almost covered by the old parchment unrolled across it, its cracked and curling edges pinned down by candles, antiquities, and half emptied rum bottles. Weathered colors illustrated the ship's route, from the gold-leaf Sol at the foot of the table to the gleaming disc of Scorpii 18 at the head. It was charming, but that still didn't change the fact that though the clipper ship representing the Sprenger's position was almost two thirds of the way across the map, it was still years from its destination.

Sitting near the foot of the table, Amar had little to distract him from brooding over the realities of sub-light-speed travel over interstellar distances. The annual briefing of the ship's executive council had never been particularly exciting, but at least in years past the department heads had tried to liven it up, adding humor, action, music or sex to their bland presentations. Those efforts had faded away over time, leaving the meetings stalled out in tedium. The ship was in the doldrums, and even though they had slowed down the artificial reality system that contained their minds to the point that days in the outside passed like minutes for them, time was still an anchor that dragged on them all.

Trapped, Amar toyed with his pewter tankard of wine and waited through the droning status reports until finally Captain Kwon waved her hand towards him. Amar took a drink, then slid the data sheet he had brought with him over the map to let it fade out as its information was added to the meeting's notes. "Resource allocation management would like to report that nothing at all of interest happened. Once again, there were no significant conflicts of resources between individuals or departments, which isn't surprising since there's jack all for most of us to do. I'd still like to commend everyone for playing nicely though." No one seemed to notice the flippancy.

Long minutes later, the meeting adjourned and with a grateful mutter the other department heads pushed away from the table. Most stood quickly and stepped back from their chairs to fade into the darkness, returning to their personal realms or to the public spaces. Amar stood more slowly, looking for the shining bald head of Piotr, head of engineering. They had talked about playing dominos on the beach after the meeting, and the idea of hot sun and drinks sounded good. He found the engineer at the head of the table, arguing something enthusiastically with the captain while waving a rusty cutlass he had picked up from the map to emphasize his points. Amar started to walk over to join them when he felt a hand touch his shoulder.

Jani Kussa, the system head, stood behind him. That title at the current moment ranked her somewhere around the captain and God in the hierarchy. Amar was amused to note an immediate spike of attraction that surged through him as he saw her, wiping his boredom away. She was a beautiful woman, with night dark skin and shoulder length braids that were banded in a dark gold that almost matched the amber-brown of her eyes. That beauty, combined with her intelligence and the strength of her personality were strong attractants. Never mind the fact that they were in opposing cliques. Amar felt himself fall into the immediate posture of the interested male, straightening up, meeting her eyes and smiling broadly. "Hey, Jani. Need something?"

Jani returned his smile with a cool one of her own. "Actually, I do." He expected the condescension he heard in her voice, but there was a thin edge of uncertainty there too. "I was wondering, are you free sometime soon to meet with me?"

Amar watched and waited to see if she would expand, but she shifted her eyes from him toward the map and was silent. "Sure. I think I have an opening in my schedule. Say from now until we reach Scorpii. Good enough?"

"It should do. Can I meet you at your place tonight, say about seven?" It was an odd thing for her to come to his personal realm to talk business, and Amar felt his curiosity grow.

"Yeah. Have your assistant set it up with mine."

"I will." She turned and stepped away, the dull gleam from the gold in her hair flickering and disappearing into the shadows. Amar watched her go as Piotr stepped up from behind him, tossing the cutlass back onto the table with a crash.

"What'd she want?" he asked.

"I have no idea." Amar shrugged. "You still want to hit the beach?"

"Still rum there?"

"All you can drink. Especially if we're betting on the dominos."

"Lottsa luck with that, light weight." Piotr slapped him on the back, and they stepped through the shadows and into the brilliant light of the tropical sun.

****

Another swallow of rum and Coke, and then Amar tilted his head back to watch the sun finish drowning itself in the sapphire sea. To one side, Piotr sat at the end of a lounge chair rubbing his wife Nicole's feet, beginning to pay off his collected debt to her after a particularly bad run with the dominos that lay abandoned behind them. On the other side, Maria, another member of their clique lounged on the rock wall that bounded the edge of the bar from the rest of the beach. She scratched the gray fur on her belly as she watched a group of crew members dance and drum around a fire a short ways up the sand, then looked over to Amar, dark eyes sparking with the sunset. "You should be careful with her, you know." Her voice was soft and serious, a contrast from the raucous and often dirty suggestions she had made earlier about Amar's meeting with Jani.

"Why?"

"You're interested, I can tell. But she doesn't like you. Any of us, really, but especially you. She's practically the leader of the transcendents on this ship and they can't stand us geezers. Don't trust anyone over two hundred, y'know, and you're pushing three." She rose to pace the wall on all fours, her tail twitching behind her with agitation. "She might be setting you up."

"Bit paranoid, aren't we?" asked Nicole. "Besides, she's the head of systems. If she wanted to be unethical and mess with our poor pen-pusher here, she sure as hell doesn't have to visit his realm."

"Of course not. But . . . I don't know. Why would she want to see you anyway?"

"Maybe it's actually work related," suggested Amar. Maria snorted once and then launched herself off the wall to land on his belly. Amar grunted as her weight hit him, tipping him backward in his chair and sending his drink spilling across the ground. "Hey," he protested, "Watch it."

Maria snorted again and settled on his lap, folding her arms over her chest. She stared at him down her long baboon muzzle and spoke slowly, her sharp canines sparking in the dim bar lights. "Amar, you need to get a grip. You do logistics, which will be important when we get to Scorpii, but it's almost useless out here. She's after something. Try to focus on that, instead of whether or not you can lay her." She thumped him in the chest with one long finger, then hopped off to scamper down the steps leading out into the sand, her fur flashing with the firelight as she moved away towards the dancing.

Nicole watched her go, and then looked back to Amar. "Huh. Didn't know she was that in to you."

Amar shrugged, picking his glass up from the ground and draining out the dregs before tossing it over his shoulder towards the bar. "She's been flirting for a while now. She's pretty good about it usually, but I don't think she likes Jani much to begin with."

"Why haven't you done anything about it?" asked Piotr.

"What, Maria? I might, but she's spent most of the last few decades switching from one primate form to another. I know some people may not care about that sort of thing, but I do." Amar grinned a little. "She knows it too. I think she regards it as a challenge, to see if she can win past my prejudices."

"Is it working?" asked Nicole.

"Maybe. But not right now, that's for sure." Amar shuddered slightly. "Baboons freak me out." He swung his legs out from the lounge and stood up. "I should be going. My assistant is probably bouncing off the walls." Amar looked one more time out at the figures dancing around the fire, but in the bizarre forms that had been adopted by most of the dancers Maria's didn't stand out. "You think she's right?"

Piotr patted his wife's feet and looked up at Amar. "I think Maria's making too much of it, but she has a point. Jani and her clique don't think much of us, and though it still feels like forever we are in the last leg of the trip. Soon enough we'll all be out of the doldrums and working our asses off getting ready to explore Scorpii. When a lot of us start embodying and stepping outside the system, Jani and her friends are going to lose some of their clout. In the outside people will suddenly be reminded why geezers like us are along for this ride. Some kind of preemptive power play isn't impossible."

"Gods, I hate primate politics," sighed Nicole.

"Aw, c'mon, it's what makes things interesting," said Amar. "Why fight against an uncaring universe when you can battle your own hairy friends?" Nicole grimaced at the sarcasm, and as Amar turned to step toward home he saw his friends wrap their arms around each other and draw close under the star filled sky.

****

Stepping into his own realm, Amar was wrapped in a cooler night than what he had left at the beach, but not as cold as he was expecting. It'd been snowing heavily here when he'd left this morning, but now it felt like spring, the snow gone and the scent of green growth and rain strong in the air. Sophie was already fussing with things, he thought as he stepped up onto the wide porch of his cabin. Even as his feet hit the boards, the door swung open, his assistant standing there and looking out at him impatiently. Small, with short dark hair and pale skin, Sophie still managed to pack a strong presence with her bright eyes and quick movements, a strong contrast to most assistants who were designed to fade into the background.

"Why is she coming here?" she asked.

Amar walked past her, noting how the interior of the cabin had been straightened up from its usual clutter. A fire was crackling in the stone fireplace, and enough candles were lit to make everything shine.

"You've been busy." Amar watched her glare at him for a moment, and then relented. "Don't know. She suggested it. Maybe she's fallen for me."

"Please." Sophie's rich contralto, with its touch of east-Canadian French, was made for sneering and she laid it on heavy with that word. She swung the door shut and stalked over to the fireplace. Amar watched with amusement as the hem of the dress she wore subtly shifted upward, finding that perfect line of almost as she moved. When he had her personality matrix constructed, he'd made sure to have a touch of jealousy added to it, something that most people would consider idiotic to add to their assistants. But the touch of frisson it added to moments like this was one of the things that Amar valued about Sophie. "Why is she really coming?"

Flopping down on his couch, Amar shrugged. "I really don't know, Sophie, and . . . " He trailed off as her head snapped up to stare outside while her dress suddenly shifted, turning into her normal formal wear. "She's here?"

"She's not that impolite at least. I just got a five minute warning from her assistant." She looked over at him, taking in his ragged beach clothes. "Are you going to wear that?"

"It's my realm," he pointed out.

"True. But if you're going to spend points on making sure I know my etiquette, you might want to pay attention to my advice on the subject occasionally."

"Fine, Sophie. Whatever you think is appropriate." His assistant snapped her fingers, and a reflection of Amar appeared next to her. Amar looked it over, ignoring the long dark hair, brown skin and even, slightly ageless features that he was well acquainted with to examine the shimmering green silk outfit that draped it. "Huh. Nice jammies. That's business casual now?"

"Formal lounging. Fads have been cycling fast out here, with so little to do. Most led by Jani and the rest of her clique."

"Well, that's fine." The reflection winked out of existence, and Amar felt the cool touch of silk on his skin as the clothes surrounded him. "Anything else we should take care of before they pop in?"

Sophie stepped close and smoothed the silk over his shoulders. "I guess not. Her assistant Apep will be with her, and I've agreed to permit full recording in exchange for the same right. The files are to be kept private."

"Gotcha. Apep?"

"Egyptian mythology. Giant snake demon who wants to eat the sun."

"Charming."

"She has a thing for snakes. From public archives of her talks, she seems to identify the transcendents with Prometheus-like figures, including the serpent from the Judeo-Christian creation story."

"Okay. And in her allegory, geezers like me are . . . "

"Adam, the ignorant dumbass who eats of the fruit of knowledge and instead of embracing it, freaks out at the implications and tries to pretend it never happened. Here she is." There was a step on the porch, and Sophie turned, stepping across the room and swinging open the door even as a sharp rap came from it.

"Greetings, Jani. Hello, Apep. Welcome to Amar's home."

Amar stood and stared at Jani as she came in. Her appearance took him by surprise for a moment, though he knew it shouldn't have. For meetings like the executive council, everyone used their standard bodies, but most of the crew had much more imaginative forms that they spent most of their time in. Jani's social form wasn't nearly as wild as some he had seen, but it was striking, her skin darkened to obsidian and her eyes made molten gold. They matched the eyes of the black serpents that replaced her braids, moving and shifting around her, slipping silent across her black silks. Almost unnoticed among them a dark cobra lay draped around her neck, its crimson eyes taking in everything. That must be Apep, thought Amar, and the thought snapped him out of his momentary distraction enough for him to step forward and smile. "Hi, Jani. What's up?"

The systems head barely looked at him as she took in the cabin. Her snakes shifted warily, looking curiously around, and Amar caught the tiniest disdainful shake of her head when she finally turned her eyes to him. "Interesting place. Your old home on Earth?"

"The cabin belonged to my family, but I changed its location to a hillside overlooking Vancouver. Not a view I could afford on the outside, even after the tsunami."

"Oh." Losing interest, she folded her arms and went straight into business. "Amar, I need you to do an audit for me. On a member of my department. And I need it done quietly."

"An audit? What've you found?" Amar asked.

"I'm not sure." Jani held out one arm, letting Apep slither down it to coil on the coffee table, then started to pace. "I was reviewing some of my staff reports, routine stuff, and I noticed that there were irregularities. I started poking around a little, and found that one of my staff has portioned off system resources into a personal project. A lot of them. He shouldn't have been able to take that much without us noticing."

"Then how did he?"

"I'm not sure. But I'm afraid he might be infringing on other people's usage. We've been getting complaints about lag in some simulation programs and a few other areas. Also, he's well positioned to pull this sort of thing." She stopped and frowned at the fire crackling in the grate. "Do you know Morgan Hastings?"

"Name's familiar, but it's a small town. Does he do something with some of the game realms?"

Jani laughed. "Yeah, you could say that. He's helped design some of the most popular ones on board the ship, ones that blow away most of the stuff they sent with us from Earth. Incredible imagination and fantastic system skills. If he could deal with people better, he'd have my job. Instead, he does the internal policing of the system, rogue program elimination, privacy enforcement, etcetera. Which he does well, all while designing game worlds on the side."

"So he could hide things from the rest of the sys-ops, even his boss." Amar tapped his fingers against the worn fabric of the couch back, considering. "Why come to me? Sounds like you caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. It's regulation to pass this on, but I'd have thought you'd rather handle this in-house and not bothered talking to me."

"You could say that." She turned from the fire and stared back at him. "I'd rather not bring bureaucrats into this. I don't appreciate them. I'd hoped we could have left them back on Earth, along with the rats and roaches. No offense."

"Offense?" asked Amar, mildly.

"Look, Morgan is brilliant. My guess is that he is creating some new realm for people to play in, and a lot of us could use that at this stage in the trip. If he's shifting a few cycles to himself on the sly, it's not that big a deal. That's all that's probably going on." She shrugged, her serpents stirring agitatedly around her. "But I'm not sure that's it. His security is too good. If I try to find out what he is up to, I'll have to hit hard on his protections, and he'll know what happened, and who did it. I don't want to annoy him if possible."

"So you want me to?"

Her golden eyes flashed at that, and a few of the serpents turned toward him, fangs flashing as their mouths snapped. "No. Not exactly. Look, you have different codes than I do. I can show you what I've found, and I thought you could poke around discreetly and see what you can come up with. Maybe you can see what he is up to without tripping his alarms."

"Maybe." Amar watched her bite her lip nervously, noticing for the first time the sharpness of her teeth. "I can give it a shot. It's not like I'm busy." He could see the tension in Jani ease, the frenetic movement of her snakes slowing. Amar wondered if she realized how much information her Medusa fashion gave away.

"Thank you, Amar. Even if you can't find anything, I appreciate it." She looked over at Apep, who bowed his head to the table, a data sheet appearing where he touched. "That's the information I have. If you have questions, have your assistant contact mine." She walked over and reached out, allowing her snake to slither back up her arm. As he wrapped around her shoulders, she took another look around. "Why this nostalgia, Amar? Why live in what we've left behind?"

"It's familiar. It helps keep me grounded in reality." Amar baited her without even thinking about it, wondering what she would do.

"Reality?" she asked, rising to it. "What do you think this is?"

"The system? Understand something, Jani. When I was young, virtual reality was a place you visited, something you plugged into when the real world was too boring, and while you played your games or screwed or talked there, your body was slumped over in a chair getting a stiff neck. Protocol chips and the ability to load your brain into the system like it was another piece of software didn't come along until I was already old." Amar opened his hands and swung them out, his gesture including the cabin and all in it. "I can't think of the system and its visions as anything but illusions. And while I'm in here, neurons modeled in quantum states, I can't think of myself as anything but a ghost."

"That's ridiculous. The system is just as valid a world as outside. Where we think, we exist." Serpents twined and shifted as she shook her head. "Why you geezers insist on the idea that the outside world has more validity I'll never understand."

Amar smiled grimly at that. "Maybe because I know that right now in the outside world our ship is traveling at almost a third the speed of light. If our equipment screwed up and we hit some stray bit of junk floating out there this ship and our wonderful system would be just be a new smear of stray atoms halfway to nowhere in interstellar space. We might make reality here, but outside reality is still imposed upon us. Something good to remember."

She glared at him, and he remembered how little transcendents liked to be reminded of how far they really were from immortality. "Why are you even on this trip then?" she snapped. "A half century of system time, and no guarantee that we will even be able to embody ourselves at the end if the astronomers picked wrong. Why put yourself through it?"

"Because I think it's worth it. I may not like system time, but I would put up with much worse for the chance to be part of this, the first attempt to reach an alien world. If we can't cheat Einstein, then interstellar travel will always be such a slow trudge that being in system will be the only way we can take it." Amar let his face shift from serious to a broad smile. "Anyway, it's been great talking with you, Jani. We should do it again." At that cue, Sophie slid forward and swung open the front door. "We'll get right to work on your little problem." Jani glowered at him, then apparently thought better of what she was about to say and strode out.

Sophie watched her disappear, and then slammed the door shut. "Cute. You go for that sort of thing?" she asked.

Amar shrugged and sat down, grinning slightly. "Young fanatics. They're passionate about things. I barely remember being passionate about anything anymore. Cutting cynicism just isn't the same. Beer, please?"

Sophie sighed and walked into the kitchen, her formal clothes dissolving back to her dress. She swung open the fridge and dug two bottles out. After handing him one, she touched the data sheet that Apep had left on the table.

"Careful with that," commented Amar, "you've no idea where it's been."

"A snake's gullet, apparently. Don't sweat my precautions; she may be a system pro, but you spent so many points raising my paranoia that I can't leave the house without disinfectant underwear." She stared down at the sheet, which slowly dissolved under her hand. "It's clean, but big. It'll take a little while for me to be able to make a good breakdown for you." She popped the top off her beer and took a drink. "What do you think?"

"I think Jani has a little problem. She's got a good but temperamental worker who's playing fast and loose with the rules, probably to help him out with a hobby of his. And that hobby happens to be something that entertains a hell of a lot of the people on this ship. Jani feels obligated to check out what he's doing, but he'll probably bust her when she does. She's afraid he'll be angry, which will make working with him difficult. Even worse, she might mess up his project, which would piss a lot of people off, probably at her."

Sophie flopped down on the couch next to him, leaning her warmth against his shoulder. "So what's a girl to do?"

"Hmm, what? Hey, maybe she could get some other schmuck to do the dirty work for her by blundering around trying to find out what this guy's up to. If he makes it work, she finds out what was going on without her boy genius getting pissed. If it blows up in the schmuck's face, he gets tarred with it." Amar took a swig of beer and slumped lower in the cushions. Sophie looked at him thoughtfully.

"Just might work. If only she could find someone who might be able to do it, but who she'd love to see look like an idiot if he failed."

"Yeah." Amar grinned at her. "Almost like the good old days, huh?"

"Those days were good? Departmental politics and scumbags?"

"They were interesting, at least. First thing—"

"Yep?"

"Organize that data. Step two, get me what you can on Morgan. Everything." Amar's grin faded. "I want to try to figure out why Jani, if she's so convinced that this is just a game, is troubled enough to keep worrying at it. She might be hoping that this will just turn into a mess for me, but that's not why she came tonight. There's something to this that's bugging her."

Sophie nodded and closed her eyes, and the cabin fell to silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the gentle patter of more rain outside. When she finally began to speak again, Amar leaned back and listened as the night rolled on into the day.

****

"Mostly I've been going over Jani's work with Sophie. I'm not a systems guru, but everything she told us has checked out so far." Amar leaned up against a tree trunk, watching as Maria swung slowly back and forth above him in her tire swing.

"I told you it was a setup," she called down.

"Well, glory in your correctness. However, she does have a real issue. Morgan is up to something, and he's taking way more processing power than he has any right to. More than he should need even if he was putting together a new game world. Not such a big deal really, with the resources we have, but he's hiding it by slipping time away from others, including some of the research projects, which is not kosher at all."

"Medical in there?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"No wonder my histamine sequencing is taking forever." She reached out a foot and shoved off a branch, sending her tire spinning. "So why do you want to meet him?"

Amar looked away, feeling slightly dizzy. "It's going to take us a day or two to see if it's possible to peek at what he's doing without him knowing it. More than likely the answer is no, so I'll have to just brute force it with my codes and confront him directly. Jani seemed eager to avoid that, and I'd like to see why. I've had Sophie check him out, but there's not much in the public record." He glanced up at her again. "You and he were going out for awhile, weren't you?"

"Quite a while back, Amar. Before my monkey period. I liked his games, so I thought I'd get to know him better." She stilled her motion, turning in the tire to peer down at him. "Smart but awkward. It didn't last long."

"Why not?"

Maria ran her hand through her fur, thinking it over. "Not exactly my type. A little on the obsessive side, good for a programmer maybe, but not for me. I wasn't with him long, and it wasn't exclusive, but he seemed to take it way too seriously. Whiney at the break up."

"Ah-huh. You seen him much lately?"

"Only casually, and not a lot recently. He usually comes to the mystery gamers' meetings, but lately he's been hit and miss. He's been dropping hints that he's got something big in the works, a whole new concept for a world. Working overtime on it. Fits with this, I guess."

"Hmmm. So when is the next one of those meetings you mentioned?"

Maria suddenly pushed off from her tire, ricocheting off a couple of trees and landing next to Amar. "Why, in just a few minutes actually. Would you happen to be trying to fish for an invite or something?"

Amar looked innocently down at her. "Well, the few games I have done were all mysteries. It might be interesting to go along with you."

She looked up at him slyly. "Kinda like a date?"

"No, not really. Unless you want to manipulate me into asking you out so that I can try to do my job."

"I'm cool with that."

"Any chance you could . . ."

"Not be a baboon? No."

"Right." Amar bent over and scratched her behind one furry grey ear. "Could you possibly escort me to the meeting? Your gracious and bright bottomed company would thrill me."

Maria leaned into his fingers and grunted happily. "You got it, accountant."

****

The meeting realm was a sprawling old Victorian where the mystery aficionados milled and chattered about their hobby, most wearing the forms of characters from their favorite books or games, some easily recognizable, others purposefully obscure. Amar and Maria stood out in the crowd for the plainness of his form and the extravagance of hers. They had been there close to an hour, Amar talking with a few acquaintances while Maria continued what appeared to be a running battle about something Sam Spade-related with an environmental engineer. Finally, across the crowded parlor, Amar spotted his target stepping out from a hidden door behind a bookshelf, a small crowd trailing behind him. Amar reached out and tweaked Maria's tail, causing her to squawk and glare at him.

"Hey, ow. Sorry, gotta go, someone's apparently antsy." She turned and looked at Amar. "What was that for?"

Amar nodded his head towards Morgan, who had taken over an overstuffed love seat and was holding court to a small group.

"Right." Maria sighed. She took his hand and led him over in that direction.

The discussion going on had something to do with some dispute among trade guilds in Azurlyn, a fantasy realm that had been Morgan's first creation on the Sprenger. Amar ignored the talk and carefully watched Morgan. In system, it could be hard reading physical cues when it was so easy to shape one's appearance, but Morgan was wearing his own form, which made it possible at least for Amar to guess at things. Dressed in what appeared to be early twentieth-century pulp-detective style, the system man's eyes were bright and haggard, and he seemed impatient and brusque. He looked wired, and Amar felt a vague tremble of suspicion run through him.

"Look, I don't care if they're ruining the world. I stepped out of Azurlyn a long time ago. I've moved on to bigger things." Amar focused in on that statement as Morgan settled back on his couch, eyes hectic but coy.

A flapper behind him leaned forward to breathlessly ask, "What is