A POUND OF FLESH by Richard A. Lovett

* * * *

Is honesty always the best policy?

The day got off to a bad start when I put my wife’s MemriDrops in my eyes. At least, technically she’s still my wife. I guess I should call her my soon-to-be-ex-, but that sounds as bad as it feels.

Mornings have never been my thing, and with Marion’s departure I find it hard enough to get to sleep at night, let alone climb out of bed in the morning. You know how it feels when you try to sleep in, only to discover that once you’ve prodded yourself out of bed, you can’t really get moving? That’s how it is with divorce. The more time I pretend to sleep, the less I’m required to be awake—which is a good thing, especially because, all too often, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything worth doing when I’m awake. Which is a separate problem, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Even though they must have been nearing expiration, the ‘Drops firmed up into contact lenses just fine. But I was slow to realize they were the wrong lenses. Halfway downstairs, I started getting that stepping-off-a-curb feeling that comes when your eyes insist your legs are three inches too short.

In the kitchen, the AutoPot was perking, so I thought I’d wake myself a bit before dealing with the eyes. Bad idea. My arms didn’t feel any closer to the right length than my legs, and I wound up spilling the pot’s contents all over the counter in an overshoot/undershoot effort to hit the mug. It might have been comical if all that hot coffee hadn’t trickled down and caught me where it really hurts.

There’s one good thing about pain: it wakes you up even better than caffeine. I yelled, cursed, and with remarkable accuracy for a man whose depth perception wasn’t working, turned and threw the mug through the vidscreen, where a perky newscaster with a voice too similar to Marion’s was reciting today’s pinpoint forecast. “On the West Side, the waterfront will see brief showers at 9:15, 11:20, and 12:45—” she managed to say before my lucky shot found its mark, terminating not only her broadcast, but my favorite mug and a bunch of electronics I could ill afford to replace.

“Damn you, Marion!” I roared into the silence. “Why didn’t you take those stupid ‘Drops when you took everything else?”
Another problem with divorce is you think everything’s a conspiracy. Professionally, I’ve dealt with enough divorces to know all about that, but for the moment I was sure Marion had left the ‘Drops as a booby trap and was now sniggering at me for breaking the vid.

Meanwhile, my own ‘Drops were in the medicine cabinet and my vision wasn’t going to improve on its own. I stumbled upstairs and rummaged for a bottle of Erasure. Even the big print on the label was hard to read, but I was awake enough now to find the right bottle by shape, without compounding my problems by squirting something nasty into my eyes, like rubbing alcohol or sunscreen.

When I could see again, I located my own ‘Drops—and chose the Baby Blues, whose bottle, I realized, was the same color as Marion’s.

And suddenly I knew why she’d left it. A few years ago she’d gone on a togetherness binge and matched several of my eyeshades, with the idea it made us look more like a couple. I’d thought it silly, but that’s the way I’ve always been about most of that “togetherness” stuff. She was a romantic; I’m strictly utilitarian. I’ve got a variety of eyeshades, but all for practical purposes. Today, I wanted the Baby Blues because the rent was due and I needed that frank, innocent gaze when I begged for Extension.

Sadly, the rent wasn’t my only problem. If someday soon I didn’t come up with enough to pay my lawyer’s retainer, Marion would clean me out and the rent nano wouldn’t be the only one to come home to roost in ways that might almost make me wish I’d just poured bleach in my eyes and gotten it over with.

Still, the rent was today’s concern. A few minutes later my landlord proved it by intercepting me on my doorstep.

“Sorry, Trevor,” I said, practicing my innocent gaze. I’d planned on calling him for an appointment later in the day, but I already know my spiel. “I’m expecting a nice fee, but it’s been delayed. Can you give me a week’s Extension?” Actually, I’d not seen a paying client in a fortnight, but a week was the most I could ask for with a straight face. In the back of my mind, I was trying to remember the terms of my lease. Landlord/tenant law requires the enforcement nano to be non-lethal and non-maiming, but that leaves a lot of room for unpleasantness. When I’d accepted it, I’d been more than marginally solvent. Marion was a computer tech whose career seemed immune to the forces that had ruined my own, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the fine print. If I were lucky, I’d simply agreed to turn blue or have “deadbeat” appear on my forehead in neon tones. But I might have accepted a month of diarrhea, an ugly skin disease, narcolepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, or any of a host of other legally permissible ailments that merely make you wish you could die. Too bad Trevor hadn’t insisted that Marion accept the nano, too, because now she was the one with the money while I was the one stuck with the nano. It wasn’t fair—but who’s ever seen a divorce that was?

Trevor had chosen a stern, dark look: his bill-collector persona. Actually, he’s a pussycat who’s given me a lot of slack, but he has his own nanos to tend to, and property taxes were due sometime soon. Getting the government to give you Extension is damn near impossible.

“Blast it, Alex,” he said. “You know I like you, but I need the rent. Preferably on time.”

I shrugged. “Tell that to my client. I gave him Extension, but that means I need it from you.” A total fabrication, but I was getting desperate. What had been in that rent nano?

Trevor was still trying for stern, but I could see the softness around the edges. “Come on,” I wheedled. “Just a week.”

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Five days?”

“Three.”

“Four?”

Sometimes, I push too hard. It was one of the things Marion complained about. “Three,” Trevor said. “And count yourself lucky.” He tapped a trio of triangular pills from a packet labeled RENT EXTENSIONS and slid them into a pill-sized envelope. It amazes me that he dispenses Extension this way, rather than just reprogramming the nanos with a code-locked scanner. Maybe he doesn’t trust scanners, even though they’re pretty much the same devices the bank uses when you log a payment. Or maybe he’s just old-fashioned. After all, he’s willing to visit tenants in person, rather than hiding behind a rental agency that would never give even a day’s Extension.

Briefly I wondered how many pills were in his packet and what would happen if someone got really desperate. Then I decided it didn’t matter because the number was finite and eventually the clock would run out. Still, I wouldn’t flash something like that around when rents were due. Maybe it’s just my profession that makes me cynical, but Trevor is too trusting.

I started to thank him, but he interrupted. “I mean it,” he said. His normally open face clenched and I realized that even pussycats have limits. “Don’t even think about trying to tell me you lost one. Three days, or you can just rot.”

Not rot in hell. Rot. As in a literal threat. Had Trevor once talked rich, complacent me into some kind of flesh-eater? Perhaps because he knew he was a pussycat and needed a big gun to back up threats he didn’t want to enforce? The worst of those were reserved for the IRS, but commercial ones could be pretty nasty—muscle atrophiers, rashes that deprived you of a month’s sleep. Gads, the prospects were endless.

* * * *

My office is a dive. Once upon a time, I had digs in the financial district, back when I was a junior partner in the law firm of Lorencz Biggle Tracy & Epstein. My 43rd-floor window office had been only a mile from here on the map, but infinitely removed in the hierarchy of what-you-can-afford. Now Alexander Copley, Private Investigator, operates out of a hole-in-the-wall in Old Town, domain of drunks, derelicts, and druggies.

Ours is one of several cities whose Old Towns boast of being the original Skid Row. Here, in the ancient logging capital of the Northwest, the term had a literal meaning: Skid Road was where timber was “skidded” into the river to be lashed into rafts for shipment downstream. Today, rather than being an embarkation point, it’s where everything fetches up when it hits bottom, including yours truly. Rents are low, nanos mild to nonexistent, and if there’s any mystique to being a PI, having your office in the most disreputable part of town doesn’t hurt.

The first order of business was caffeine. I scooped a healthy dose of instant coffee into a mug—no fancy AutoPot for the office—added water, and popped it into my economy microwave: you know, one of the mini-ones that convenience stores use to nuke stale hamburgers into a semblance of edibility. Mine wasn’t a whole bunch cleaner than those in the convenience stores. Someday, I really should do something about that, but I figure that each time I turn it on, the radiation kills anything nasty growing inside. Or maybe I’m creating mutant superbugs that will someday take over the world. As far as I’m concerned, they can have it. Let them deal with the nanos.

I should have seen the writing on the wall when I read about the first nanocontracts in the Bar Journal, but who in their right mind would put their bodies up as collateral?

People take worse risks with loan sharks, though, and nanotech is a lot more respectable. Suddenly you couldn’t even get a charge card without a nano. The first profession to suffer were bail bondsmen. Who needs bail if suspects can simply be given a nano nasty enough to guarantee they’ll show up in court? For the same reason, prisons needed fewer guards.

Soon, civil lawyers were also feeling the pinch. Nanocontracts still leave room for squabbling, but unless a court intervenes and orders Extension, they’d better be brief squabbles. Not the type that make attorneys rich. Then the insurance lobby pushed through the Tort Reform Nanobot Bill, which required plaintiffs to accept a nano before filing suit. Anyone could still have their day in court, but if you didn’t win, you didn’t receive the antidote. Frivolous lawsuits weren’t the only ones to disappear—and with them went the bread-and-butter work of defense attorneys like me.

By the time Lorencz Biggle, etc., were showing me the door, I was even hearing of nano-wills in which heirs had to take nanos before the reading of the will. Those who declined waived their inheritance; the rest could only obtain Release by agreeing not to contest the will. It was brutal but effective, and suddenly another class of attorneys was out of business.

In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the moneylender Shylock makes a loan to a man he despises. There are many things he could have sought as collateral, but what he wants is the option to extract a pound of flesh from the debtor’s chest. The borrower, secure in a successful business, accepts this barbaric term, but ships sink and Shylock forecloses. Then, at the last moment, he is stymied by the fact that his contract said nothing about blood. He can seize his pound of flesh, but if he sheds one drop of blood in the process, he will be charged with murder.

What Shylock needed were nanos. Off-the-shelf varieties aren’t that nasty, but custom jobs can do just about anything. Fatal flesh-eaters are illegal except as bail for violent felonies, but if you’re stupid enough to accept one, you’re going to be more interested in getting the antidote than reporting it. Today, anyone with the money for black-market nanos can be Shylock.

* * * *

Waiting for the water to heat, I scooped old mail from the table where I’d deposited it yesterday, flipped junk mail into the trash, and tried to decide whether to open the telephone statement. At least it didn’t involve nanos. I’d opted for the pre-pay alternative, but that still gives the phone company plenty of leverage with the old-fashioned threat of simply turning off the service.

My PI business had never turned a profit. The sad fact was that two out of every three attorneys were out of work and I wasn’t the only one thinking that years of trial preparation might have taught me something about investigation. My main hope was that if I waited long enough, most of the competition would starve out.
Still, I hadn’t been losing a lot of money, so when necessary, I’d made it up from Marion’s and my savings. Then she moved out. A week later, irony of ironies, she hired a hotshot attorney who froze the savings account so I couldn’t spend any more of it until she got her share. If my own attorney was as good as he claimed, some of that money would eventually be mine, but it would be a long fight and meanwhile I was living hand-to-mouth.

Pretty soon, I’d have to take the first of Trevor’s little pills. In theory, I could hire someone to reverse-engineer the fulfillment code and make as many as I wanted—in Old Town, you can find people with some pretty arcane skills. It’s another reason Trevor is too trusting. But if I had the money for that, I could pay the rent, so why bother? And there are some nasty rumors about what happens when fake Extension meets a nano that can tell the difference.

Better would be to delay taking the first pill as long as I dared, then stretch the interval between them, hoping there was enough safety margin to gain me an extra day or so. I was getting desperate enough I might actually try it.

I swiveled my chair, ignoring its squeak of protest. If I ever get rich, I’ll buy a new one, but that’s not exactly a high priority. Leaning back, I propped my feet on the bookcase that doubled as a credenza and stared through what passed for my window on the world.

It really was a window, although the little daylight it yielded came from a ventilation shaft that provided even less ventilation than light. What it did offer was a view of the opposite wall, built eons ago of honest-to-goodness bricks. If we ever get the earthquake the doomsayers fret about, all those bricks will probably peel off and tumble below in a giant pile that will make me glad I’m on the fourth floor, even if half the time I have to walk up because the elevator’s on the fritz or just too damn slow. Life sucks, but hey, if it all comes crashing down, I’d rather be on top of the pile than under it.

Some people work crossword puzzles when they have nothing better to do. Me, I count bricks. The trick is to get the same number twice in a row. Some days, I can kill hours before I manage it. Yesterday, I’d tallied 413 on the first attempt and 415 on the second before getting two repeats of 416. Today I had a slightly different angle, so the number would be different.

* * * *

I was on my third recount—something on the order of 435 seemed to be today’s tally—when there came a knock on the door.

I don’t get many visitors. Most of my clients are referred by Lorencz Biggle, where a few of the survivors do what they can to help keep me from starving. But those referrals are always preceded by phone calls, and the phone hadn’t been disconnected—yet. This had to be someone who’d tracked me down from what little advertising I could afford.

Walk-ins rarely amounted to much, but still, it paid to look like I had other work.

“Just a moment,” I called.

I scritched my chair back into alignment with the desk, woke up the computer, and was pulling a couple of files from a drawer when my client lost patience and walked in.

My first thought was that she looked out of place—and not just because she was a she. Plenty of women venture into Old Town, though usually not in snappy business suits or carrying those discreetly elegant attache cases that are the first and most useless purchases of on-the-make junior attorneys.

Even in the financial district, her attire would have rung false. I’d served a stint on Lorencz Biggle’s hiring committee, and there’s a big difference between the jobseeker and the jobholder. This woman had dressed to impress, but the jacket, blouse, and black leather pumps were no more natural to her than being in Old Town. The ensemble was too perfect—as though she’d gotten it from a store clerk whose idea of lawyers was based solely on vid shows—but her hair flowed across her shoulders in a fetching style that mixed poorly with the crisp formality of her wardrobe. She was older than my fledgling attorneys—somewhere in her thirties, with body language that spoke of self-assurance, and poise that clashed with the job-interview attire.

Whatever she normally did, she’d been doing it long enough to take it for granted that she was good at it, but the business power suit wasn’t part of it. I wondered why she felt the need to impress the likes of me. Not that I was in a position to be picky.

“Mr. Copley?” Her voice was another conundrum: crisp, self-assured, polite—but, like the hair, too feminine for executive-standard. I was reminded of Marion’s computer-geek friends, happiest in blue jeans and running shoes, but sometimes forced into greater formality for a wedding or the theater. She was rather pretty in a dark-skinned brunette manner—which, I admit, has always been my type.

I pushed aside the still-unopened files in a move I hoped rang more true than her attire. “Call me Alex.”

Her handshake was firm but damp, producing an odd, almost electric tingle as our flesh met. Highly disconcerting. Was I so starved for female attention that a handshake was giving me the shivers? I suppressed an urge to wipe my palm on my pants leg, and gradually the tingle diminished. “What can I do for you?”

“I have a problem,” she said, “but first, what’s your billing rate?”

It’s one of those things people usually wonder about, though normally they’re not so forthright. Again, I sized up the power suit and attache case. Whatever message she intended to convey, she was making no effort to look poor.

“I usually charge $195 per hour plus expenses. But I can come down a bit for an interesting case.”

It was one of those great lines that’s sort-of true. That had been my minimum rate in my Lorencz Biggle days, and I’d done a lot more billing then than now, so the “usually” was almost accurate. Almost being the operative word. It was also the type of figure that ought to impress someone masquerading as a high-priced whatever-she-thought-she-was. Early in my PI days, I’d learned that you can more easily lose a client by citing a too-low rate than a too-high one because it makes them think you’re incompetent. When they gasp and start for the door, you can always offer a discount. Then they think you’re being generous.

But my visitor merely gazed at me. Her eyes swept the office, taking in the desk, the unopened folders, the brick-view window. When she looked back, I’d have sworn she was puzzled. “Really?” She looked around again. “Even in today’s economy?”

She had me with that one. But her attire said money wasn’t an object to her, so I wasn’t going to let it stand in my way, either. “Yes.”

For a PI, lying is an important job skill. It’s not that I’m inherently dishonest; it’s just that sometimes it pays to preserve wriggle room. But now, my cheeks burned and I found myself sweating.

She smiled tightly. “I don’t think so. Could you work for, say $95 per hour?”

“That’s kind of low,” I said, but the sweating and blushing continued.

“In fact, I bet you’d work for $45.”

This was the oddest negotiation I’d ever been part of. When she’d suggested $95, my heart had leapt because I’d figured we’d wind up somewhere in the middle, and if the job was big enough to be worth haggling about, it was going to be enough for me to deal with Trevor and the phone company and a few other things, as well. Offering $95, then dropping yet again was the weirdest tactic I’d ever heard of.

“That’s really low,” I said.

“But would you do it?”

I gulped. How could I get her back into triple digits? “No,” I said, and again found myself blushing and sweating.

“I thought so.” She made it sound as though I’d accepted. “But I’ll give you $1,600 a day, with the understanding that overtime is on you. No nanos, though. I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way.”

I nodded encouragingly. In theory, an exchange of nanos would work to both our benefits, forcing me to perform and her to pay. But unless you want to go completely black market, there end up being records of payments, extensions, and releases. She wouldn’t be the first client to prefer cash.

“No problem, but I’ll need an advance.”

“Of course. What do you say to a week’s pay as a retainer, with additional installments as you do the work?”

What I’d say was something on the order of “Halleluiah!” but I wanted to preserve what was left of my dignity. “That sounds fair,” I said, and for once, I didn’t blush.

“More than fair, since you would have taken $45. But before I tell you how I know that, how good are you at keeping secrets?”

“Very.” That’s something else that comes with the Lorencz Biggle background. Every attorney learns early on the importance of client trust.

Again, she made me feel as though I were under a microscope. Then she smiled, and for a moment, I might have been seeing a trace of whatever lay behind the falsely corporate exterior. Something warmer and a bit more playful. Or maybe she was just happy she could trust me—though I was baffled why she believed that when she hadn’t believed the $95. Maybe she was simply a nice girl, about to get divorced and tired of acting tough. Yeah, right. A rich nice girl, looking for a way to stick it to her husband. Then I squelched the thought. I couldn’t afford to cast my only client in Marion’s image.

Divorces are another arena in which lawyers have suffered: nanos add new meaning to the term “iron-clad prenuptial.” But in many cases, all that’s done is shift the battleground from the lawyer’s office to the streets. To the extent I have a bread-and-butter business, it’s staking out soon-to-be-divorced husbands or wives in the hope of finding evidence for a court order neutralizing the nuptial nano. It’s easy work because cheating spouses can be incredibly sloppy. Maybe tempting fate is part of the lure or maybe they’re like teenagers and really don’t think anything nasty could happen to them. Either way, it’s fun to watch their faces when they’re confronted with the evidence and realize they have old-fashioned, expensive legal fights on their hands. Just like I do, though in my case it’s because Marion’s and my marriage predated nanos.

“Anything you tell me is completely confidential,” I added.

“I know.” The smile vanished and she was again the faux-whatever. She snapped open her briefcase and pulled out a prepaid credit chit. “Is your computer set to read these?”

“Yes. But don’t you want to tell me what this is about, first?”

“Not until I have you on retainer. Just in case you were playing word games with me about confidentiality.” She gave me the barest hint of the smile. “Like you must have been about your ‘usual’ fee.”

I logged onto the banking web, then let her plug the chit into my computer’s credit-acceptance slot. She used her own keypad to authorize the deduction from what must have been a sizeable balance, and milliseconds later, $11,200 was in my account.

“That’s seven days,” she said. “Until this is over, you’re working for me every day. Report at least once a week, never lie to me again, and you get another week in advance each time, until we’re done or one or the other of us gives up. If, after I’ve explained it, you don’t want the case, you can return the retainer—minus a suitable sum for the next few minutes. Are you okay with that?”

I nodded, mesmerized by that $11,200 figure and the thought of more, just like it. “Normally, the consultation’s free,” I managed to say.

“That’s okay. It’s worth it just to find out how you fooled me. Now, tell me, how can $195 be your ‘usual’ fee, when I know you’d take a lot less?”

I thought about trying to dodge the question, but she had me thoroughly unnerved. Besides, with money in the bank, I could afford to be at least vaguely honest.

“Prior life,” I said.

She nodded as though that made perfect sense. “It had to be something like that.”

“So what’s this about?”

She leaned forward in my guest chair and tugged her skirt down toward her knees—one of those “modest” gestures that have the reverse effect of drawing attention to itself. I’ve never been sure whether women know this, and on the off chance they don’t, I’ve never wanted to be the one to enlighten them. With difficulty, I prized my gaze back to her face and waited for her to begin.

“My name is Megan Fordham,” she said. She pronounced it Mee-gan. “I work for a small nanotech company: an outfit called SNS. Once upon a time, that meant Southern NanoSystems, Inc., but now it’s just SNS. Unless you’re an industry insider, I doubt you’ve ever heard of us.”

I shook my head. Nano-providers are like chip manufacturers. There are a few big ones and a host of little ones.

“We make custom nanos,” she continued. “Suppose you wanted one that would produce the symptoms of poison oak. Not just some generic itch, but honest-to-goodness poison oak, medically indistinguishable from the real thing. Why, I haven’t a clue, but we’re the type of company you’d turn to.

“A couple of years ago, we began experimenting with highly time-sensitive nanos: ones you might give to chronically late employees to get them to work on time. The idea was that each time they came to work, they’d use a device like a time clock to reset their nanos for next time. We actually had an asthma nano that worked nicely—you’d start wheezing within about five minutes of schedule. But we never figured out what to do about sick days. Sure, you could use a remote reset for anyone who called in sick—just like the scans the banks use when you pay your mortgage at an ATM...”

She continued talking, but her mention of mortgages had reminded me of Trevor. Soon, I either needed to get to an ATM myself or take one of his pills. Briefly, I took inventory of my body. Nothing itched. Nothing ached that didn’t normally ache. For the moment I seemed okay, and I really didn’t want to start gobbling Extension in her presence.

Luckily, another of my skills is tuning out without letting anyone realize it, and I didn’t appear to have missed much.

“...not really ill?” she was saying.

The question appeared to be rhetorical, so I grunted and, reassuringly, she continued. “That was the end of that project. But it got us thinking. Was there a way to differentiate phony sick calls from the real thing? When the body is under pressure, it makes chemicals called stress proteins. It also produces various neurological responses, all chemically triggered.

“It didn’t take long to realize we were onto something a lot more valuable than a tardiness nano. What our research was leading to was a lie detector that could be linked to any effectuator we wanted. Combined with an asthma nano, for example, it’s a pretty powerful incentive to tell the truth. The version you got simply makes it easy to tell when someone isn’t.”

“Wait a second. Are you saying you slipped me a nano?”

She ducked her head but didn’t look particularly repentant. “Yeah, I know it’s illegal. The nanos were on my hand when you shook it, and enough to do the job were in your bloodstream by the time you said hello. Want to give back my money?”

“Not yet.”

“I didn’t think so. Besides, what the law is really concerned about is giving harmful nanos without permission. This one didn’t hurt you. All it did was make you flush. I know I told you not to, but go ahead, tell me a lie.”

“Such as?”

“Anything. Tell me it’s raining.”

“It’s pouring.” I said it as calmly as possible, but sweat broke out on my forehead, and again I felt my cheeks redden. “Wow. How long does it last?”

“The flush? Only a few seconds. The nano itself wears off in a few hours, though we could have made it last forever.”

“So you’re telling me you’ve developed a nano-based truth serum.”

“Not a truth serum. A lie detector. A truth serum would force you to speak. This merely shows when you’re lying. And it’s not perfect. A good liar can hide parts of the truth without triggering it—as you did when you told me about your ‘usual’ billing rate. And if you really believe the moon is made of green cheese, it’s going to register as truth. It’s probably also useless on pathological liars.”

“That’s all very interesting, but what’s it got to do with me?”

“I was getting to that.” She tugged again at the skirt, though as far as I could tell, she was showing no more leg than before. “Our lead scientist is Darryl Marnier.” She pronounced the first name as Darr’l and the last in the French manner, as Mar-nee-ay. Must be a Southern thing, though for all I knew, the “southern” in SNS meant California. “Or maybe I should say he was our lead scientist. He’s vanished. I’m hoping you can track him down.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking about the nano and what I could and could not get away with promising. I’d done my share of missing persons work, but it was mostly heir searches or hunts for runaway kids—depressing work because all too often I wasn’t doing the parents any favor. Hi, here’s your drug addict back. You owe me another $500. See you again, next time she runs away. Contrary to what you see on the vid, PIs don’t get many chances to hunt for adults who want to stay disappeared.

Still, how hard could it be? It’s almost impossible to live without generating a gazillion electronic footprints. With the nano reading my mood, though, I didn’t want to sound too optimistic.

Fortunately, uh-huh appeared to be truthful enough.

She paused a heartbeat, then continued. “I’m worried about him. We were coworkers and ... friends.” She blushed, and I realized that the nano must work both ways. How intriguing. She tugged yet again at the skirt and I decided not to embarrass her by pressing for details. Senior researcher Darryl. Beautiful whatever-she-was. I could connect the dots. I’d seen it often enough in my divorce work.

“Married?” I asked.

She looked puzzled. “No. I’m single.”

“Not you. Him.”

She shook her head. “I told you, we were just friends.” But she blushed again, and sweat was beading her brow. I tried to feel sympathy, but having been the victim of the truth gizmo, what I felt was vicious delight. Still, she was paying me a lot of money, so I again let her off the hook.

“What I meant was, is there anyone other than you who’d miss him?”

She was still blushing, but composed herself nicely. “Well, the whole company does. That’s why I’m here. The project can’t proceed without him, and the president, Graham”—she pronounced it Gram—”figured I’d be extra-motivated to find him.” The blush deepened and I wondered why she didn’t just come out and tell me they were lovers. Did she really think I’d care?

“But you already have a perfectly good truth nano.”

“Sure. And we can clone as much of it as we want. But Darryl never made an antidote and wherever he went, he took his lab notes with him.”

“Why don’t you just reverse engineer an antidote?”

“Because Darryl used a 96-bit encryption code.” She read my look, sighed, and leaned back. “Look, you know how nanos work, right? Each has two codes, one for Extension, the other for Fulfillment. Sometimes three, if it’s for a recurring obligation that you want to be able to reset without terminating.”

“Like a rent nano,” I said, my mind again wandering to Trevor’s little envelope.

“Right.” She hesitated, probably trying to assess how stupid I was.

I tried to look smart, but in her field, the answer undoubtedly was very dumb.

“Most nanos use a 24-bit code,” she said. “That means there are about 16 million possibilities—good enough for most uses, but not for something you really, really want to protect. Darryl’s code allows something like 1020 times as many possibilities. It would take forever to reverse engineer.”

“So you’re saying the nano’s worthless without the code?”

“No. There are uses for which an antidote isn’t necessary. We were going to call our product the NanoGraph and start by test-marketing it as a replacement for the polygraph. But our first big market would have been for trials. You know, ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—’”

“‘—so help me, nano.’”

Again, a hint of the smile softened the corners of her mouth. “Something like that. You were a lawyer. You can see the value of it.”

I certainly could. Lying witnesses are one of the banes of the profession. Though sadly, a truth nano would put yet more lawyers (and PIs) out of business, because you wouldn’t need as much trial preparation. On cross-examination, you could do a lot with a single, all-purpose question: Is there anything important you failed to mention?

“So why do you need Darryl?” I hated to ask—what if I talked her out of hiring me?—but the more I understood, the better were my chances of finding him.

“You mean why do I want the antidote?” No trace of a blush. Either the nano was already wearing off, or she’d worded the answer carefully enough to steer it away from whatever extracurricular relationship they might have had. “It’s not needed for formal settings like polygraphs or trials. But there are a lot of ... let’s call them informal settings, in which it would be nice if the questioner were more free to ... tweak ... the truth—and where the nano might have to be administered in ways that make it likely both people would be infected.”

“Like you and me?”

“Among others.” She didn’t say police interrogations, but it didn’t take much imagination to see how much the police might love such a thing. Would it be permissible under the Fifth Amendment? An effective, painless lie detector would raise interesting questions about why we have a right against self-incrimination. It’s one thing to let the guilty clam up because we don’t want the police beating confessions out of those who might be innocent. But do criminals really need an absolute right to their secrets? Part of me—the part that had been tricked into revealing my lowest, cut-rate fee—thought privacy was important. But another part liked the idea of being able to probe other people’s secrets. And with the nano, you could ask at random whether people were terrorists or child molesters and immediately catch the ones who were.

“So why not just redesign it with different codes?” I asked.

Her sigh suggested that I’d fallen on the technological-intelligence scale from very dumb to whatever lies below. “That’s not possible. Nanos are comprised of two pieces: the detector and the effectuator. On most, the detector’s not much more than a molecular clock, but for security reasons, you always make sure that it and the fulfillment codes are inextricably linked. That way, someone can’t just clone your nano and peel off the codes. Unfortunately, it also means you can’t peel off the detector from the codes. With the NanoGraph, the detector’s the important part, and only Darryl knows how it works. Bottom line: you can modify the effectuator all you want, but you have to know the codes to do anything else.”

* * * *

Megan and I had a lot more details to go over, but there was one question she would be expecting me to ask, whether I wanted to or not. “Why me? There are a lot of other PIs out there.”

“What makes you think you’re the first I tried? Maybe you’re just the first to meet my requirements.”

“And those are?”

“Oh, several. You came well recommended.”

I made a mental note to thank Lorencz Biggle.

“You’re a smooth talker, but not so smooth you can evade the nano. Also, I know you really will keep things confidential. You wouldn’t believe how many of your competitors flunked that one. Maybe they just blab to their wives or girlfriends, but I’d rather they didn’t. As I understand it, you have neither, right?”

“Correct,” I said, then remembered the nano. “Well technically, I’m still married. But we’re not on ‘blabbing’ terms.”

“Good enough. I want to find Darryl, but I don’t want to risk one of our competitors getting wind of the project.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d said I, not we. Maybe Megan was a bit more than Darryl’s lab assistant. Maybe she was the boss and he the beautiful assistant. Who just happened to be the brains behind the project? Nah. More likely they were peers and I’d been led astray by her looks and the fact that every time their relationship had come up she’d lied about something or other. I’d presumed it was just their romantic involvement, but was she clever enough to use an obvious lie as a smokescreen for a not-so-obvious one? Not that it mattered. It was a neat way to trick the nano, which wouldn’t care whether you were telling one lie or a hundred, but if by holding back, she made my job more difficult, my fee would simply be that much larger. I could live with that.

Megan unsnapped her briefcase and handed me a small glass vial. “A sample. You might find it useful. A drop or two is all you need.”

* * * *

She spent another hour filling me in on details, but when she finally departed, my first job was to deal with my nanos. That required a trip to the credit clinic because even Trevor isn’t naive enough to allow his codes to be accessed by a non-secure machine.

Before leaving, I took one of his pills, just to be on the safe side, then dumped the envelope in a drawer. Damned if I knew the shelf life of his brand of Extension—it was another of those things I really didn’t want to learn by experiment—but that didn’t mean it made sense to throw away the pills.

As always at month’s end, there was a line at the credit clinic, but eventually I reached the auto-tech machine, keyed a payment to Trevor’s account, and stuck my arm into the machine’s maw while the bank transferred the funds.

TRANSACTION COMPLETED, the screen flashed a moment later. THANK YOU FOR USING CREDIT CENTRAL. PLEASE WAIT WHILE WE EXTEND YOUR COMPLIANCE-ASSURANCE NANOBOTS. The ATM hummed to itself, flashed a series of status lights, and did whatever it does to reset my nanos so I don’t have to worry about them for another month.

Except that I was going to worry. Hell, I was worried already. I paused, my arm still in the machine, even though it was now wishing me a good day.

“Hey man,” a voice behind me said. “You wanna move it?”

“Just a moment.”

Ignoring the ensuing theatrical sigh, I queried for a description of the nano and was informed it was mock ringworm, ten percent body coverage, six weeks’ duration, intensity just below true medical emergency.

I tried to imagine ringworm as a near “medical emergency,” and shuddered.

But I didn’t have to live in dread. For the first time in months, I was solvent. The rent had dented my newfound lucre but I had a lot left, and it looked like that was just the beginning.

What if I went on the pre-payment plan? I’d have to check my lease to see how many months I’d have to pay in advance—probably at least six—but if I did, I could be rid of Trevor’s nanos forever. No more arm in the slot. No more wondering what would happen if the damn thing malfunctioned and reset the little beasts for next Monday rather than next month. That isn’t supposed to be possible, but I really hate having to trust so much to a machine.

* * * *

Missing-persons work is mostly computer drudgery. For years it’s been possible to track people via credit card charges, phone records, EasyPay toll passes—anything that leaves a swath across the cyber landscape. Getting that information isn’t a matter of skill, it’s connections—as in what databases can you access, officially or otherwise?

Thanks to my divorce work, my access is pretty good. Early on, I’d realized that as long as I was underemployed, it behooved me to take whatever work came my way—especially because there are forms of payment more valuable in the long run than money. There’s nothing like helping a cop fleece his stockbroker wife to get you access to some dreamy databases. And my clients have included not only police officers, but folks in some very interesting bureaucracies. I suspect Lorencz Biggle sends them to me to improve my value for some of their messier divorce cases. Maybe referring Megan was a form of thanks.

One reason she fetched up at my office, rather than half a continent away, was that Darryl began his escape by flying here, twelve days ago. Megan herself had traced him this far, via a contact in Homeland Security, for whom her company had once done “some work.” She’d not specified what type of specialty nano Homeland Security might want, and I was just as happy not to know.

Darryl had taken vacation leave and bought a round-trip ticket with a return that would have brought him home last Sunday. He’d checked two bags, boarded the morning nonstop, and (needless to say) not come back. Megan must have been instantly suspicious, because the first day he missed work was when she discovered the missing notes. If he had friends or relatives here, she didn’t know of them.

Her Homeland Security agent must have had access to a lot more data than he’d shared, but he hadn’t been willing to go very far out on a limb for her. My clients owe me their financial lives, and I’m not averse to reminding them of it.

It helped that Megan either had a key to Darryl’s home or had broken in and searched his files. Either way, she’d provided me with a list of his bankcards, etc. She’d even given me his customer loyalty numbers for two grocery chains, a movie theater, and a bookstore. (Don’t laugh; I once caught a runaway kid when he cashed in his CineTower viewer points for a free movie and popcorn.)

Except for buying a return ticket he never intended to use, Darryl made no attempt to disguise his airline trip. But once he was on the plane and done with security checks, he’d started covering his tracks. I started by searching for a car rental, then for any use of his bankcards or cell phone, but pulled a blank.

That complicated matters, but bankcards and cell phones are fairly easy to avoid using, at least in the short run. Nanos are a different matter. Even if you know they produce electronic traces on the ATM, there are payments that even the most desperate fugitive isn’t likely to ignore.

The hard part is getting access to the ATM records. The cops simply ask. Folks like me use worms. Back when Marion and I were on better terms, she knew people who knew people who could create such things. They’re a violation of U.S. privacy laws, but that’s not an issue offshore, and I can keep my hands clean, at least in theory, by simply asking for a report and pretending I don’t know how it’s created.

Getting a report on Darryl and setting up an alert cost me $1,000. Hopefully, Megan would reimburse me. For an extra $300 of my own, I asked for a quickie report on Megan herself because she was obviously keeping at least one secret and there might be more.

By 6:30, I was ready to call it a day. You can only do so much computer work in one sitting and remain sane. Darryl’s electronic trail, if it existed, would still be there tomorrow.

* * * *

I’m not proud of what I did next. Marion’s job involves long hours, but she’s a morning person, not an evening one. It’s one of those differences that seem inconsequential until you’ve been married a few years. Then you realize that neither of you is ever going to change and that trying to arrange your schedules to meet in the middle simply means you’re both miserable. Me, I’m still going strong at midnight. Marion has trouble keeping her eyes open after 9:30.

All of which is a convoluted way of saying it was now late enough she should be home from work.

Her new home is in Bill’s Landing, one of the most notoriously you-can’t-get-there-from-here sections of town. I have no idea what kind of riverboats once docked there, but now it’s a re-gentrifying residential district rising up the bluff behind a narrow floodplain. Every time I have to go there, I find myself too far up the hill, staring at tiers of chimneys and wondering how the hell you’re supposed to get down there without levitating.

Marion’s apartment occupies the ground floor of one of the most inaccessible Victorian monstrosities in the neighborhood. I reached it eventually and found her car in the street, which has enough parking rules to keep the sign manufacturers in business for the foreseeable future.

So far, nobody’s come up with a way to add nanos to parking enforcement, but as I pulled to the curb near a sign reading, “2-hour limit or Zone F Residential Permit 7 A.M.-6 P.M.,” it crossed my mind that this was only because nonconsensual nanos were outlawed. If Darryl’s truth nano opened the door for others, a parking ticket might someday be accompanied by a nano on your door handle, with the ticket serving double-duty as a warning. Hi, you owe $40 for overstaying your meter and, by the way, you’ve been infected with a nano that will make your fingernails drop off if you don’t pay within a week. Oh, joy.

Not that my present plan gave me any right to complain.

Getting Marion to shake hands was the tough part. Even among enemies, the handshake is a strongly engrained custom, but divorce trumps social convention and she left me standing long enough with my hand out that eventually I pulled it back.

“My lawyer said not to talk to you,” she said, starting to close the door.

“Wait.” Gambling, I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “I just want to understand.”

She pulled free, then, discovering the moisture and the tingle from whatever it was that carried the nano through your skin, wiped her hand on her jeans. Too late, but dermal contact was an awkward means of delivering the nano. Megan really needed to find a better way, like dissolving it in cologne. Of course, then you’d wind up infecting everyone within breathing distance.

“I’m not here to talk about the property settlement,” I said, remembering at the last moment that the nano worked both ways and I had to be scrupulously honest or I’d wind up blushing and sweating myself. Luckily, talking property hadn’t been my primary goal and I had a split second to decide I didn’t really want to do it at all.

“What else is there to talk about?” she asked.

“I just want to understand what went wrong.”

“Oh, Alex, we’ve been through this a thousand times.”

“Yes, but this time I’m prepared to really listen. Was there really nobody else?”

“You’ve asked that before.”

“I know. Just tell me the truth. I promise I’ll believe.”

She stared at me long enough I was sure she was going to refuse. Then she sighed. “No. Not then, not ever. The problem was that too much of the time there wasn’t you, either.”

No sweating, no blush. Not at all what I’d hoped for. “What does that mean?”

She sighed again. “How many times are you going to ask that?”

“This is the last, I promise.” If you’d asked me, I couldn’t have told you whether I meant it, but the seconds ticked by and I wasn’t sweating, and presumably not blushing. Nano as self-lie detector. How interesting. Let’s put the psychologists out of business along with the lawyers.

“Okay,” she said. “But it’s nothing new. When I married you, we were both pretty committed to our jobs and didn’t have a lot of time for each other. But at least when we were together, you were witty, fun, alive. Then the recession hit and you lost your job. I kept telling you it didn’t matter, that you could do anything you wanted: write the great American novel, make good art, make bad art, whatever. But all you did was rant against nanos. Somewhere along the line, that obsession started meaning more to you than I did.”

I drew breath to speak, but Marion beat me to it. “Let me finish. This is the point where you always say that this isn’t so, that you always loved me, etc., etc. Maybe you thought you did, but you forgot what it meant. You weren’t you anymore.”

“People change.”

“Yeah. But you changed into someone I didn’t want to be around. I kept telling you, but you wouldn’t listen. At first, you just talked about feeling useless. Then you became useless. You wouldn’t lift a finger around the house. You’d never been a great lover, but after a while, you didn’t even try. Then you started that PI business, which would have been okay, except look at what you wound up doing: mostly it’s just helping your old law buddies screw rich people in divorce cases. Well, now you’re getting a taste of your own medicine. You deserve whatever my lawyer can do to you.

“Goodbye, Alex. Don’t come here again. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, and you never will. Maybe you never did.”

And with that, she shut the door. There had never been a blush, never a bead of sweat. I didn’t know how much of what she said was true, but she definitely believed it.

When I got back to the car, I found a canary yellow envelope stuck under the windshield wiper. The officer had checked a box labeled “Other parking violations, described below,” then scribbled, “section 137 (f), Thurs., $53,” which wasn’t very informative.

I walked up and down the block until I found a sign reading, “No parking this side, first Thursday each month, street sweeping.” Damn this neighborhood. Damn Marion. Damn Megan and her nano. Damn everything.

* * * *

The next day, I went back to looking for Darryl’s electronic trail. If he’d gone to ground in a cheap motel using a prepaid chit as well stocked as Megan’s, he was going to be hard to find. But why fly here for that? He had to know how easy it would be to trace his ticket, which meant he didn’t care because he was long gone. For most people, that meant a car.

One of my divorce clients manages a firm that archives records for companies wanting off-site backup. Much of that data, nobody could get without a subpoena. But there’s a lot I can view with only a modicum of arm-twisting, including most of the airport’s security vids.

Picking cameras located near the rental-car desks, I downloaded the feeds, scanned a portrait of Darryl into a face-and-body-recognition program I’d once been rich enough to purchase, and went back to counting bricks. Every now and then, the computer would inform me that it had found nothing useful, and I’d sic it on the next vid. Tedious, but computers don’t eliminate tedium; they merely expand its scope.

There were nine rental-car agencies and twenty-four cameras. When they all came up blank, I called it a day and tried to loosen my thoughts with a beer. One became three, but nothing loosened except endless replays of Marion’s blush-and-sweat-free accusations, so I forced myself to go home before I was in hangover territory. At least, for the first time in months, I didn’t want to sleep away half the next day.

In the morning, I went back to basics. Darryl had landed at gate E4 at 1:29 P.M. His baggage had gone to carousel 7. If he’d bothered to bring it, he must have collected it, and there were plenty of security cams near the baggage carousels. I pulled three feeds, each spanning the hour from 1:30 to 2:30, and set my software to work on them.

Still nothing. To say that I was getting frustrated was a colossal understatement. But I reminded myself how much I needed Marion’s money and started viewing the vids by hand.

By lunchtime, I had a big-league headache, but also a likely candidate. He’d not shaved and was wearing a shapeless windbreaker and a baseball cap: three of the world’s oldest disguises and ones my software was supposed to be able to see through. But he’d done a good job of keeping the hat pulled low, so that combined with the stubble, the program saw only a seventy-eight percent match, even in image-enhanced freeze-frame. Still, who else could it be?

I watched Mr. Baseball Cap retrieve his luggage—a small duffel and a wheeled suitcase that didn’t look big enough for a week, let alone a permanent disappearance. Then I followed him from camera to camera toward the rental-car ghetto.

He didn’t immediately go to a clerk, but instead took a seat in the waiting area, watching. After a while, he got in line, pulled something from his pocket, and handed it across the counter. There was a brief conversation, then he retrieved whatever he’d given the clerk and wandered off, eventually taking a new seat. A few minutes later he repeated the process with a different clerk.

Ha! I had him! Hand in the pocket ... finding an excuse to get the clerk to touch something ... questions.... It had to be Darryl, doing his own bit of nano-interrogation.

On the fourth or fifth clerk, the conversation lasted longer, and when I zoomed in, damned if the clerk didn’t appear to be red in the face.

The clerk’s flush faded as the conversation proceeded, and I’d have given several hours of Megan’s money to be able to listen in. Still, I bet I knew the gist of it: Darryl was looking for a dishonest clerk. The lack of an antidote was a problem, but if I were in his shoes, I’d have rehearsed a few times to see just what I could say without triggering the nano. Then I’d imply that I was some kind of auditor and ask the clerks if they ever bent the rules. They’d all say, “Of course not,” but the nano would sort them out. If I started sweating myself, I’d just hope the clerk put it down to the weather.

When I found a liar, I’d shift gears and try to convince him that no auditor would ever ask such an obvious question (though once the nano hits the market, they all will). Then I’d see what kind of deal I could strike up. If necessary, I’d switch to extortion and threaten to turn the clerk in for the rule bending I already knew he was doing.

A minute or two later, the vid confirmed my hunch. Apparently the clerk didn’t know he was on camera, because the recording caught him accepting a big wad of cash. A few moments later, Darryl walked away with a set of keys.

I noted the time stamp on the vid, then dipped into another database to check for matching transactions. And there was what I was looking for, a rental at exactly the right time to a David Miller.

What is it that draws people to pseudonyms that preserve some imprint of their true names? Is it a Freudian wish to be caught, or merely a desire to hang onto a shred of their real identities? Either way, “D.M.” confirmed an identity that my software still questioned.

There was no nano on the rental. No surprise about that. There’s no nano on most vid rentals, either. Nanos encourage timeliness. If you’re reasonably certain of eventually getting your property back, there’s a lot of money to be made on late fees. And I’m sure “D.M.” had put down a substantial deposit.

* * * *

Once I had the car, the next step was easy. The state has vid cams on a lot of highway overpasses. Officially, they’re for studying traffic patterns, but the resolution is good enough to read license plates. I’m sure the police have direct access to the data, but I have to go through another of my grateful clients, who works in a radio station that uses the cams to create “drive time” traffic reports.

Darryl had left town two weeks ago, but one of the axioms of computer life is that nothing is ever erased. For 150 miles he went south at a sedate sixty miles per hour: a man who was either in no hurry or who absolutely didn’t want a ticket. I lost him briefly, but then he reappeared forty minutes behind schedule, presumably having stopped for dinner. He continued monotonously south, well into the evening ... then vanished again a few miles shy of the California border.

I’d been wondering what I’d do if he continued all the way to California. Presumably, the Golden State also had freeway cams, but the radio station didn’t link to them, and while I have access to a couple of pretty esoteric databases, I was going to have to pull some major favors to tap into the California system.

As it turned out, this was as far as he went. I set up a macro to fast-scan license plates at the next cam to the south, but he didn’t reappear that night, nor the next morning—nor, or for that matter, anytime until the present. Just to be thorough, I checked both directions, but there was no sign of him coming back this way, either. He’d left the freeway at the tiny town of Franklinville, more or less in the middle of nowhere, and apparently stayed there.

As a hiding place, it stank. It was the start of tourist season, so for a while, he could blend in as a vacationer, but Franklinville lay in a horseshoe valley surrounded by mountains, with no way out except the freeway. Darryl had rented his car for a full month, so it wasn’t due back yet, but when he failed to return it, I wouldn’t be the only one looking for him, and even though he was obviously ignorant of the freeway cams, he had to know he couldn’t drive around forever in a stolen car.

* * * *

The next morning, I called Megan to see if she knew why Darryl would hole up in such an odd place. She didn’t and was all for dashing straight to Franklinville to check it out.

It took some effort, but I talked her out of it. Darryl’s self-imposed trap was a lot smaller than the West Coast as a whole, but he still had a lot of room to hide and I didn’t want to scare him underground by floundering around at random. Especially not before I had at least a basic understanding of why, of all places, he’d picked it.

“And how do you think you’re going to do that?” Megan asked.

That was simple. I needed to know more about Darryl: the person, that is, not the shadowy figure in the baseball cap who’d nearly eluded the airport vids. I needed to understand the man who created a truth nano, then stole the key to a fortune. “Tell me about him,” I said.

“Well, he’s brilliant. Straight A’s at Harvard. Then dual PhDs, one in biochem and the other in computer science. After that—”

I shut off the stream of useless data. “Not his resume. What makes him tick?”

There was a long pause. “Well, he works really hard.”

“That’s obvious.” What is it about these career-driven folks that keeps them from truly seeing even the people closest to them? “What about when he’s not working?”

There was another pause, and while I was still convinced they’d slept together, I began to wonder: did she really know him other than in the biblical sense? Abruptly, I realized it wasn’t just techies: it was anyone who melted so deeply into their careers. Like me, according to Marion. Maybe like her, too? Had we, a lawyer and a computer tech, simply been a pair of Megans?

As the comparison formed, I wondered how much of Marion’s anger might be self-directed. Before the nanos, making partner at a large law firm, even in the supposedly laid-back Pacific Northwest, was an exercise not just in working midnights and Sunday mornings, but being seen doing so. It took years, and by the time you could relax, you’d forgotten not only how, but why. Marion’s job had been much the same.

Perhaps, when it all fell apart, she had realized what I had not: that the nano-depression had given me a way out. But instead of jumping at the chance, I’d hared off after a new all-consuming career, even when it hadn’t given me much to do but count bricks and grumble. Deep inside, where even the nano wouldn’t find it, had she realized that she too was trapped by her own ambition?

None of this had anything to do with finding Darryl. I heard Megan draw breath, and for a moment, feared I’d missed something. But apparently not.

“I’m not sure I know what you’re looking for,” she said, and I suspected that if she were under the nano, she’d be right on the edge of blushing, because the real answer was probably simpler: I don’t really know him. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a good, practical solution. “Why don’t you come down here and take a look at his apartment?” There was another long pause. “That might be more useful than talking to me.”

* * * *

Megan’s invitation came with two revelations, one big, one small. The big one was that hotshot researcher Darryl had an apartment, not a condo: strong confirmation that he too had no life. The small one was that “here” was New Orleans. That explained the French pronunciation of his last name.

Megan, not one to waste time once a decision had been made, booked me on the next flight while I packed. That evening, she met me at the New Orleans airport and hustled me to Darryl’s French Quarter apartment.

I’d never been to New Orleans before, and the first thing I noticed was that even though it was after 11 P.M. on a Sunday night, the downtown was very much alive. The second was that Bourbon Street reeked of beer and vomit.

“We’re in a drought,” Megan said. “It’s not so bad after a rain.” Which was probably the case, but party-till-you-puke is just another form of not having a life. Between alcoholism and workaholism, I’ll go with work. If nothing else, it’s better for your liver.

Darryl’s building was on a side street, just far enough from the main action to almost qualify as quiet. Megan let me in, then snapped on the lights with the ease of someone who knows exactly where to find the switch. But however many times she’d been here, the apartment showed no sign of feminine occupancy. The living room was a manly haven of wraparound video and infinite-channel sound—so state-of-the-art that I could barely recognize the components. Beyond it gleamed a steel-and-polish kitchen suitable for a master chef.

I’d never seen such a kitchen except in movies, and I wandered in, amazed. “I take it he cooks.”

Megan shrugged. “Usually he eats out. But when he does cook, he likes to do it right.” She paused. “I guess that’s the type of thing you’re looking for, isn’t it? Darryl won’t do anything unless he thinks he can do it right. Otherwise he doesn’t bother.”

Her voice had an odd tone, and I wondered whether I might just have gotten an insight into something else about their relationship. Maybe their sex life? Or mine and Marion’s? Don’t go there, I told myself, and surprisingly, I didn’t.

Back in the living room, I examined the vid-and-sound system. There were no racks of chips, which meant everything was on an optical stack in one of those stylishly melted-looking boxes whose functions I could barely guess. Luckily, Darryl wasn’t a control freak (another interesting piece of information) and he’d let Megan use his toys whenever she wanted.

I asked her to show me the index to the drive, because, if books are windows to the mind, music is a window to the soul. Darryl’s collection was enormous—nearly 100,000 titles of such diversity I suspected he’d bought the whole thing intact: an instant music library for the man with a soul, but no time for life. Or maybe a man in search of a soul.

“When did he get this?” I asked.

Megan hesitated. “Shortly after his mother died,” she eventually said, and I perked up at yet another tidbit of information. “About a year ago.”

“Did he take her death hard?”

“It had been coming for a long time,” she said, which she thought was an answer, but wasn’t. Marion and I had been sick for a long time, too.

With a lot of experimental button poking, I pulled up the machine’s play log, which showed a recent taste for opera. High drama, high emotion. Not surprising for a man about to abandon his entire life for ... what? That, of course, was the question, and the answer wouldn’t be in Wagner. Time to check a few of those windows to the mind.

Darryl’s living room had only one bookcase, but there could be a lot more than that on his bookreader. Like the stereo, it was state-of-the-art, but this time, the contents were limited. A few mysteries and thrillers—the type of thing everyone reads on sleepless nights. More interesting were the print books: three full shelves, and not a nanotech tome in sight. Darryl probably had plenty of professional books in his office, but what dominated here were adventures. Mountaineering, Antarctic treks, deep-sea exploration—you name it. All beautifully cared for but also obviously read.

Megan was looking over my shoulder, but I didn’t want to break my chain of thought by speaking. Darryl had a stack of adventure books. He’d gone to ground in a small town on the edge of the wilderness. He didn’t do anything he didn’t think he could do well. And based on the sound system, he had a penchant for taking up new activities ... full-blown. Darryl, I suspected, was no longer in the snug confines of Franklinville.

There were only three other rooms, a den, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The bedroom and bath were unremarkable; the den had a computer, more books (this time including some professional texts), and stacks and stacks of magazines.

I have a friend who’s a voracious reader but never touches books because she’s a single mother and doesn’t want to start anything she might have trouble finishing. She would have loved Darryl. More interesting, though, was his taste in magazines: Backpacker, Canoe and Kayak, National Geographic Adventure, Field & Stream, Couloir. There were outdoor magazines on at least a dozen other topics, but none dated back more than a year. When his mother died, Darryl had started looking for his soul. To all appearances, he hoped to find it in the backcountry.

Along with the magazines was a bundle of mail, wrapped in a rubber band.

“They were holding that at the post office,” Megan said.

“And you just waltzed in and got it?”

“More or less.” She tossed her head and flashed a high-voltage smile. “I thought you might be interested.”

She’d guessed right on that. I was already pulling off the rubber band and flipping through junk mail. Most was useless, but halfway through, I struck gold. Literally. It was a subscription-renewal notice from Goldbug magazine, which styled itself as “The World’s Leading Gold-Panning Journal,” implying it had a lot of rivals. Dubious advertising claims aside, what caught my attention wasn’t that Darryl had an interest in panning; it was that I’d not seen a single issue of Goldbug in his den.

I may not have much of a life, but I love trivia, and one piece of trivia I long ago collected was that the California Gold Rush extended slightly north of the border. I also knew that the gold was by no means exhausted: new deposits show up each spring. Five minutes ago, I couldn’t have said whether Franklinville was in Gold Rush territory. Now, I was sure it was, and I knew why there were no copies of Goldbug in Darryl’s apartment.

Darryl had taken them with him.

* * * *

I slept on Darryl’s couch while Megan used his bed. Before turning in, I’d suggested that we make a morning visit to his office, but she’d nixed the idea. “There’s nothing there,” she said. “I’ve checked.”

Given how much she’d missed in the apartment, I wasn’t sure, but before I could find a polite way of saying so, she was yawning.

“I’m beat,” she said, “but I presume that now you’re ready to go to Franklinville?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s going to take a few days, so obviously you’re going to be working for a second week.” She pulled her credit chit from her purse. “You’ve also incurred some expenses. Let’s take care of those and next week’s fee, before I forget.”

It was a patent attempt to distract me, but when it comes to that kind of cash, I’m easily distracted. There probably wasn’t anything worth learning at the office, anyway.

* * * *

When I woke up, Mardi Gras was in full force on the street outside. No, that wasn’t right. It was in the room with me, shaking me, hard, and calling my name.

“Damn, you sleep soundly,” Megan said, as I squinted at my watch. The first digit was 4.

“Urrrh?” As brilliant repartee goes, it wasn’t much, but she got the idea.

“Your computer’s beeping. It says ‘urgent.’”

Actually, it was long past beeping. As she spoke, it shifted from something that sounded like an airhorn with an anger-management problem to a boisterous rendition of the “William Tell Overture.” I’d obviously spent too much time sleeping in, of late, because even jetlagged, the milder tones that must have preceded these should have been enough to get my attention.

I’d left the computer logged on, in case something came through on one of several automated alerts. Earlier, in fact, it had informed me that the nano-payment reports on Darryl and Megan had finally arrived, but there’d been no privacy in which to read them.

This alert had to be something major. Briefly, I hoped Darryl had used one of his credit cards, but instead it was the car, which had tripped a freeway cam. As my still-sluggish neurons processed this information, the car tripped a second cam, heading north.

“What the...?”

Megan put it more succinctly. “Crap. He’s heading back to the airport.”

I saw the rest of my big fee disappearing. “Do you think he’s coming home?”

Megan’s voice was ice. “He took his lab book. Nobody does that and expects to come home. Wherever he’s going, it isn’t here.”

* * * *

From Franklinville back to the airport is a six-hour drive, and there’s no such thing as a five-hour flight from New Orleans. Still, there was nothing for it but to try. With the search heading into a new phase, somehow it was just presumed that Megan would be going with me.

Seven-and-a-half hours later, she and I were pushing our way off the plane and sprinting through the concourse. Enduring a tirade from a cabbie incensed at such a small fare, we passed up the too-slow rental car shuttles ... and found that miracles really can happen. During the flight, I’d not been able to boot up the computer to check Darryl’s progress, but in the cab I got a wireless connection and discovered that his car had stopped for a couple of hours in a rest stop. Hurrah for naps.

With a big tip to the still-cursing cabbie, we beat the car to the rental lot and found a waiting place where Darryl would be across the “severe tire damage” strip before he could see us.

It proved an unnecessary precaution because Darryl wasn’t in the car. Instead, the driver and sole passenger was a teenage girl who was thoroughly frightened when we intercepted her. She was so spooked that Megan couldn’t get close enough to infect her with the nano, but her story rang true, so it hardly mattered.

No, the car wasn’t hers. Some man had paid her to return it but told her there was no hurry. Was that against the law? Were we cops?

Yes, she could describe him. His name was David something-or-other. The full name was on the rental form.

When had he given her the car?—let’s see, it was two days before her best friend’s birthday, so it must have been last Thursday, which was what, a week-and-a-half ago? Something like that. He’d gotten talking to her at the restaurant where she waited tables, then given her the keys a day or two later.

Afterward? He’d just walked away. He’d not asked her to give him a ride anywhere, and the deal would have been off if he had. He’d seemed nice, but there was no way she was getting in a car with him.

How had he known she could be trusted? She had no idea, but she’d always been honest. When she was picking up his dinner plate, he’d looked her in the eye, asked her point-blank if she was dependable, and somehow known she was. And he was right, wasn’t he?

I left her to the tender mercies of the rental-car company, which undoubtedly gave her a rude education about unauthorized drivers. It should have been happy just to get its car back. Until the alert went off this morning, I’d have given long odds it was at the bottom of a lake.

I thought again about Darryl and his quest for a soul. Whatever his game was, the only thing he’d been willing to steal was the lab book. I wouldn’t be so honest. Now, Megan and I knew exactly when he’d hit the backcountry, and unless he had another means of transportation, he must have started on foot, from the center of town.

* * * *

As it turned out, he did have another means of transport: oar-powered. Franklinville is on the Kalmiopsis River, and unlike the roads, the river goes right through the mountains. Darryl had bought a drift boat—a flat-bottom craft capable of going only one direction: downstream. En route, he would have passed a multitude of creeks where skill with a suction pump and sluice box would allow you to earn a grubstake if you weren’t too picky about the grub.

But before leaving for Franklinville and this discovery, I begged a few hours’ leave from Megan and used part of it to read the nanopayment reports on her and Darryl.

Megan’s was unexceptional except for the size of her mortgage. She might not have been comfortable in her executive-on-the-make attire, but if she could afford payments like that, she was a lot more than a mere lab assistant. For an extra $3,000, my worm-programmer offered to trace her credit-card statements, but I wasn’t going to authorize that.

Darryl had been financially even better off, with the emphasis on had been. In a series of transactions beginning three months ago, he’d pulled money out of his retirement account to pay off his nanos, one by one. With the tax penalties, that had pretty much wiped out his savings. Then he’d finished the process by withdrawing his remaining cash. Except for the IRS, whose computers nobody could hack, Darryl was now off the nano grid. But he was also pretty close to broke, and unless he intended to eat moss and live in hollow logs, he wasn’t going to last long without finding some of that gold.

But the most intriguing report was one I hadn’t requested. Perhaps in hopes of inspiring me to spend the extra $3,000, my online friend had done an unasked favor and run a quick check on Megan and Darryl’s employer. It turned out that Southern NanoSystems, Inc., was an extremely small outfit indeed—small enough that if its product were law rather than technology, it would be called something like Graham Darryl & Megan, LLC. Or more precisely, Marnier Marnier & Fordham, because Darryl and Graham were brothers. Graham was CEO and head marketing guru; Darryl and Megan paired up on research.

Presumably, there were other employees, but the important thing was that Megan was a principal—a junior partner by the look of it, but still a partner. That meant she had enough money that it was possible that I had been hired not by SNS, but solely by her. She also had her own Ph.D. in combinatorial biochemistry, a field I’d never heard of before, but which sounded impressive.

Reluctantly, I set aside the report and packed for an extended trip. My aging car wasn’t up to the job (if it had been, I’d have sold it, weeks ago, to pay my rent), so Megan and I had rented something newer and I’d promised to pick her up soon. In the mean time, as I loaded the trunk, I speculated about love triangles.

Maybe Megan had dumped Darryl for Graham, and Darryl had stolen the research notes as a way of striking back. Maybe she was afraid of what would happen when Graham found out the notes were gone. That would explain why she’d kept me away from the office and any chance of bumping into him. As theories go, it was as good as any.

* * * *

In Franklinville, I was sure we’d pick up Darryl’s track if we played it smart. That’s because I know small towns; I grew up in one, east of the Cascades. Mine had been a cow town, but some things are universal.

Small-town people love to gossip about strangers, but are slow to gossip with them. The solution is not to be pushy. Years ago on a hiking vacation, after several days of buying lunch supplies at the only general store in the vicinity, I’d had the proprietor warn me, with no trace of irony, to be careful of strangers because there’d been a murder in the vicinity, and the killer must have been from out of town.

At first, everyone in Franklinville was suspicious as hell because the story of how Megan and I intercepted Darryl’s car had beaten us to town. But they were also curious, and that could work to our advantage. The hard part was persuading Megan that it was more important to be nonthreatening than to immediately start asking questions. Once she got the idea, she found just the right mix of sexiness and girl-next-door charm, and even managed to produce a disarming Southern accent. In public, we exchanged glances and touches and generally gave the impression that chasing Darryl wasn’t the thing we really wanted to be doing. Not exactly the most difficult of duties.

When asked, I told folks I was “David’s” cousin and that his sister had been diagnosed with cancer. David, I said, was writing a book about living off the land, but hadn’t thought to tell his family precisely what land he intended to live off of. We were afraid that by the time he got back, it would be too late.

It was one of those stories with just enough truth to fit what people had seen of him, and soon enough, they were volunteering information.

There was no reason for people to lie to us, but Megan insisted on verifying everything under the nano. Because we were ourselves living a lie, that created logistical difficulties which we solved by doing what I thought of as a form of the old good-cop/bad-cop routine, but which Megan compared to a lab technique known as “clean-hands/dirty-hands.” I would start each interview by introducing myself and shaking hands. Then Megan would follow suit, using the nano. That left her with little to do but look pretty and keep quiet while I spun the dying-sister tale. The only time it failed was when some chivalrous soul insisted on shaking Megan’s hand first, therefore infecting all three of us with the nano and pretty much nixing that interview, plus the rest of the afternoon.

Soon enough, we found the woman who’d sold Darryl his gold-mining equipment, plus the clerk who’d equipped him for the wilderness. But I wasted quite a bit of time trying to find someone who might have sold him a packhorse or a llama before I stumbled, more or less by accident, on the man who’d sold him the boat. What can I say? I’m not a river person, and even though our hotel was right next to the water, it had never crossed my mind that there was a way out of here that wasn’t on foot.

* * * *

Three days later, Megan and I were floating downriver in a pair of inflatable kayaks. Since we were carrying ten days’ food, I’d gotten her to advance me an equal number of days’ pay, then paid up all of my nanos, even those that weren’t all that close to due. Running low on food was one thing, but with downstream rapids boasting names like Widowmaker, Leap of Faith, Submarine Hole, and Mixmaster, I didn’t want to be worrying about getting to an ATM if we were delayed.

A local outfitter had talked us out of buying a drift boat similar to Darryl’s. “If you know what you’re doing, you can get one of those over Leap of Faith,” he said, “but if you don’t line it up perfectly, it’s not coming out the other side. You sure you don’t want a guide? If not, I recommend something small and easy to portage.”

* * * *

Darryl had the better part of a three-week head start, but the mining-supply clerk didn’t think he’d be hard to find. “There’s plenty of color in some of those gravels,” she said, “and he’s got a metal detector good enough to find nuggets down to this size”—she held her fingers a tiny pinch apart. “Once he gets the hang of it, he’ll find a good spot and stay there until he runs low on food.”

It helped that Darryl’s boat was too big to hide. So long as we kept our eyes open, we couldn’t miss it.

* * * *

It’s not always that easy, though, to keep your eyes open in an inflatable kayak. Too often, you’re either concentrating on paddling, or floating backward with a great view of where you’ve been, but a crappy one of what lies ahead.

An inflatable kayak isn’t really a kayak. It’s a mini-raft that you paddle with a kayak paddle. And while it’s nice and zippy, it tends to zigzag all over the place until you give up and try to relax. Then it immediately spins into that tail-first orientation, which makes it hard not only to get advance notice of beached drift boats, but, more importantly, of rocks.

The outfitter had insisted that we buy wetsuits, and within minutes, I was glad we’d complied. Not only was the water surprisingly cold, but Megan looked unbelievably cute with nothing but a layer of form-fitting neoprene between her and the world. In theory she should have been wearing a life jacket, but I wasn’t going to be the one to remind her until we hit serious whitewater.

For the first few miles, the river was swift but calm, and, other than trying not to stare at Megan, my primary goal was figuring out how to make my boat go where I wanted. We’d bought top-of-the-line models, which the outfitter had described as “self-bailers,” but it wasn’t until we actually pumped them up that I understood how they worked. Paddling, I sat on an inflated mat, like an oversized air mattress. Below that was the true floor, which was full of holes an inch or so in diameter. The first time I hit a sizeable wave, I got a big load of water in my lap, but within seconds, it had all run out the bailing holes as the air-mattress floor lifted everything back to the surface. Impressive, and nearly as much fun as watching Megan in her wetsuit.

Sometime after lunch the canyon narrowed and a throaty roar announced the first rapids big enough to have a name. My map was tucked away in a waterproof bag, but I remembered what it was called: Upper Kicking Horse, rated class 3.
A kayaking primer I’d speed-read in Franklinville had told me that rapids are rated on a six-point scale according to danger. Class 6 means experts beware; class 1 means suitable for kiddies. Class 3 is in the middle but mild enough that injuries are rare. Big deal, I figured, and rounded the bend.

I was greeted by a bank-to-bank wall of foam. A recent landslide had pinched the river into a green “V” leading to a chute that dropped three or four feet to a chain of whitecaps. Just the type of thing the tourist rafts love in places a bit closer to civilization. Remembering my speed-read guidance, I aimed for the heart of the V, murmured a barely remembered prayer, and slid over the lip.

The good news was that I made the drop just fine. The bad news was that whitecaps were even bigger than they looked. Panicked, I tried to dodge them but didn’t make it and hit the first one at an angle. Bad mistake: the boat flipped so quickly I don’t actually remember it happening. One moment I was thinking “oh-oh” and the next I was in the water.

Fortunately, I have quick reflexes. Clutching the paddle with one hand, I grabbed the boat with the other and let the current pogo me through the remaining whitecaps into calmer water downstream.

Now what? The inverted boat would take forever to tow ashore. Furthermore, my mind had belatedly produced the thought that if there was an Upper Kicking Horse Rapids, there was probably a lower one. In fact, I thought I could hear it, though that might just be my imagination.

What I needed was to get back in the boat, and the first step had to be un-flipping it. The how-to book hadn’t bothered to say how to do this, but there were those convenient bailing holes—the only features on the boat’s otherwise-smooth bottom.

Still gripping the paddle, I hooked my fingers in the holes and dragged myself partly out of the water. Then, I reached across to the farthest holes, dug a knee into the nearside of the boat, leaned backward, and plop—it came over on top of me. I got dunked again, but the boat was now upright, and I was still holding its gunwale. An explosion of apples bobbed in the water from a bag I’d failed to close securely enough, but everything else appeared to have been well tied down.

I still had to get back in the boat, and now I was sure I could hear the lower rapids. I tried slithering over the gunwale, but it dipped alarmingly, and I barely managed to slide back into the water without flipping the boat back onto my head. The downstream roar was louder than ever.

I was running out of time. Unlike Megan, I was wearing a life jacket, but my imagination was producing rapid-fire images of cracked kneecaps, bashed skulls, dislocated shoulders, and other injuries which would be as bad as drowning, and probably more painful.

Adrenaline is marvelous stuff. It not only gives you strength, it slows time so you can think through important details, like how not to die. Or maybe there’s no true, conscious thought involved, merely chemically directed action that has the same effect. However it works, I realized that the paddle was the key. I placed it crossways, so I could distribute my weight across both gunwales. Then, kicking vigorously enough it’s amazing I didn’t pull a muscle, I swarmed across the nearside gunwale with all the grace of a beached walrus. I flipped my feet around in front of me, got my butt firmly into the seat, and looked forward to find the source of the roar.

What I saw was a maze of rocks and ledges stretching nearly to the next bend. I had about one second to think that I should pull to shore to scout the best route, followed by another half-second in which I realized it was too late. Then the foam ate my apples, one by one. I just barely had time to decide that the current had probably taken them along as good a route as any, then I followed suit. I steered to the right of an enormous rock, accelerated, and it was too late for second thoughts.

As I passed the rock, things began to happen very quickly, but somehow the same adrenaline-induced clarity that had led me to figure out how to get back in the boat now left me thinking like the river, rather than trying to fight it. A secondary rock materialized ahead of me, and I danced my tiny craft sideways just far enough to miss it—like a golf ball rimming the cup on a narrowly missed putt. Another reflex dodge scooted me off line from an impressive hole, but that sent me toward a two-foot pour-over across a wide ledge. Having learned the hard way that it was better to meet obstacles head-on than be caught in the middle of an unsuccessful attempt to dodge, I pointed for the ledge, took three or four sharp strokes to provide headway for steering, and hoped the water was deep enough not to bruise my tailbone. Then I was in the turbulence below, whooping like a teenager.

I found a gravel beach and pulled to shore, still giddy with adrenaline. From there, I could see Megan, dragging her boat around the first rapids, so, making sure my own boat was well beached, I trudged upstream to help. I suppose I could have offered to paddle her boat through, but I didn’t want to stretch my luck, so I simply assisted with the portage. It was tough going, and when we got around the lower rapids, we’d done enough for one day.

* * * *

By the time we found Darryl’s boat, we were rating portages on a scale like that used for rapids. Leap of Faith Rapids was a class 5—a twisty series of chutes spilling into a fissure of bubbling water—but the portage scored a solid 4, with poison oak at every flat spot and a constant threat of rattlesnakes. The portages around Submarine Hole and Mixmaster were even worse, and there were others where, if it weren’t for the threat of losing our boats and equipment, we would rather have taken our chances with the river.

All the way, I half-expected to see Darryl’s boat wrecked on a rock, but apparently Megan was right: he really didn’t do anything unless he was sure he’d be good at it.

The boat was winched ashore with a line looped around a big pine. Darryl was nowhere to be seen, but a well-beaten path indicated frequent trips up a side creek, and a fishing pole and tackle box on the beach suggested he might soon be back.

The boat’s storage lockers were crammed with equipment: another indication that Darryl made frequent return visits. I rifled quickly through, but all I saw were food, stove fuel, a life jacket, clothing, and camping supplies. Nothing that looked like a lab book, though for all I knew, I was looking for a bookreader chip hiding in a bag of granola. I’d never asked Megan what form the notes might take, because until now it hadn’t mattered. It probably still didn’t, because if I were Darryl, I wouldn’t leave them here, unattended.

All the way downriver, I’d been playing out scenarios in which sometimes we found Darryl with the boat, and sometimes we didn’t. Megan must have been doing the same. “Let’s paddle back upriver a bit and hide our boats,” she said. “Then we can find a spot to wait for him to come back.”

I’d been thinking along the same lines. Luck had dealt us the advantage of surprise, and there was no need to squander it by strolling up Darryl’s trail in broad daylight. If we had to look for him that way, I’d rather go at dawn.

* * * *

The current was gentle enough to make upriver paddling feasible, and the walking was a lot easier than most of our portages. Unfortunately, we were in full sun, on a west-facing slope.

“Damn, it’s hot,” Megan said, halfway back to Darryl’s boat. We were still wearing our wetsuits—normally not a problem with all of that cold water nearby. But if our goal was to keep out of sight, splashing in the river wasn’t the way to do it. Luckily, she’d thought to bring a fanny pack: one of those runner-things that also holds water bottles. She passed me a bottle and a granola bar, and we settled down to wait.

The water was nearly gone by the time Darryl arrived. One moment I was wondering if the Sun would ever drop below the canyon wall; the next, he stepped into sight so unexpectedly he might almost have teleported from outer space. He walked directly to his boat, bent over the bow compartment, and began rummaging.

He looked surprisingly like his photograph. Surprisingly, that is, because he’d had time to turn the stubble into a beard, shave his head, gain or lose weight, or do any of the things I would do if I were in hiding. He wasn’t even dressed all that oddly, though he probably didn’t usually wear hiking boots to work and his pants showed stains. Maybe he figured there was no reason for disguise because anyone who managed to track him this far would see right through it, but the impression was of a person who was comfortable with his appearance and didn’t want to change. I again thought about his yearlong search for a soul. Whatever Darryl had been running from, it didn’t appear to have been himself.

It was Megan who first rose to intercept him. She caught me off guard because on the river I had half-forgotten that I was nothing more than a well-paid employee. Relegated to a supporting role, I circled to the side, moving to cut off Darryl’s retreat should he make a dash for his camp or the rugged country beyond.

Megan was halfway to him before he looked up.

“Hi, Darryl,” she said.

He straightened, his expression unreadable. “Megan.”

“You left me,” she said, and I wondered which was more important: that, or the nano. Probably both. Marion and I could never stay focused on any single issue, so why should Megan and Darryl? The one thing I was sure of was that my speculations about love triangles were wrong. Megan was obviously the dumpee, not the dumper.

“We no longer wanted the same things,” he said in another echo of things I’d heard too many times before. “I gave up trying to explain. There had to be a better way to live.”

Megan’s eyes swept the beach and Darryl’s grubby clothes. “What, this?” She was trying for contempt, but there were a lot of other things mixed in.

Darryl chose to ignore them all. “You know what I mean. There are just too many nasty uses for that thing. We should have thought them through before we started.”

“So you just decided to stop the project on your own? We’d sunk too much into it. We couldn’t afford to just quit.”

“Yes, we could. Graham must have told you so. The company will survive.”

“Who wants just to survive? We were on the verge of being rich, and you decided to piss it away for this?” Again her gaze swept the canyon. Cliffs leaping to a cerulean sky. Water gurgling against grass-and-pine riverbanks. Muscles hardening into contours not seen since youth. Nobody else around. Some people wait years for a vacation like this, and Darryl had found a way to make it a lifestyle.

Megan wasn’t in a mood to see any of that. “What happened to you?”

“People change.”

“Not that much.”

Darryl’s lips were tight. “Maybe I didn’t change. Maybe I finally found out who I really was.”

Megan started to retort, then bit it off. She reached into the fanny pack that had held the granola bars, and suddenly she had a gun: a tiny, snub-nosed .22. It didn’t look very accurate, but from ten feet away, how could she miss?

I hadn’t signed on for this. Maybe I tensed, or maybe she read my mind, because the gun shifted until it was pointed squarely at my chest, though she continued talking to Darryl.

“I want the notes,” she said.

“What makes you think they still exist?”

“Because you took the chips with you rather than just erasing them as you did with the backups. And because you like to keep your options open, in case there’s a time when you need a change of plan.”

The gun shifted. “Like now,” she said, and there was a pop. Even before the first blood appeared on Darryl’s shirt, she’d taken two steps backward and lined the gun back up on me. “Don’t even think of it,” she said.

Darryl was still standing, gaping at the blood. “Ow,” he said, which seemed a bit of an understatement from someone who’d just been shot.

Megan had retreated far enough that she’d have time to get off more than one shot if I tried to rush her. Not that I had any plan of doing so. A .22 may not pack a lot of punch, but the bullets can penetrate. As a kid, I once tried target shooting with an abandoned barn as a backstop. When I was done, there was a nice pattern of holes in the boards on the near side of the barn—and a matching pattern on the far side. I’d have to be pretty desperate to risk letting Megan do to my chest what I’d done to the barn.

Oddly, Darryl didn’t seem badly hurt, and the blood was oozing from several holes in his shirt, all too small even for a .22 bullet.

It took a moment for my brain to catch up with my eyes. “Birdshot?” I asked. I’d heard of such things: a handful of tiny pellets in a .22 cartridge. In theory you could bring down a grouse if you got close enough. In practice, it had to be a damn hard way to hunt.

“More like rock salt,” Megan said.

Darryl paled. Then my brain clicked again, to the reality the two of them shared. “Nanos,” I said. And I’d thought Megan needed a more efficient delivery vehicle. Gads. Nothing like just shooting them into someone’s chest.

“Yes.” The gun was still on me. “Believe me, this isn’t a nano you want.”

“What exactly does it do?”

“Three guesses.” The playful belle was gone, along with every other persona I’d seen her wear. What I saw now was colder, more calculating. Too emotionless not to be another facade, but an effective one.

“The truth nano.”

“Give the man a kewpie doll. But”—she was now talking to Darryl, who still hadn’t spoken—”with a new effectuator. This one’s a bit nastier.” Her eyes looked like Marion’s when she’d told me what she hoped her lawyer would do to me. “Lie to me now, and you die.”

Darryl finally found his voice. Not necessarily a good thing, since silence seemed his best survival tactic. “The asthma nano.”

“Nah. A heart arrhythmia’s easier to make fatal. And this one won’t wear off in a few hours. So now, we both have an interest in the antidote. I hope those notes still exist.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Darryl said. “This is exactly the type of thing I had in mind when I decided we had to cancel the project.”

He had not said that the notes didn’t exist, and Megan was too smart not to have picked up on it. If Darryl hadn’t destroyed them, my bet was that they were somewhere nearby, and if they were, it didn’t matter what he said now, because she would find them eventually. Even if they were buried, there’d be enough metal in the chips’ plug-in cartridges that the damn things would probably show up on Darryl’s gold-nugget detector.

Darryl must also have realized he’d said too much, because suddenly he rushed her. Pop went the gun. Pop, pop, and I realized that he didn’t have much to lose from being shot again. But there’s something so intimidating about a gun that it took me until the third shot to figure it out.

I, of course, had a lot to lose, so I stood my ground until he reached her, grabbed her hand, and wrenched at the gun. It went off again, with a slightly different sound, but maybe that was because it had swung my direction and something whizzed by me, too close for comfort. Then Darryl had it and Megan was staggering back.

“Your turn,” he said, and shot her point-blank.

I’d like to believe it happened faster than I could react, because at the moment I certainly shared his attitude. Give her a taste of her own medicine. See how long she can go without telling a lie. It was a frightening mix of Marion’s farewell words to me and the way I’d been thinking when I’d infected her with the original nano. The stakes were higher, but the motivations identical.

Megan didn’t simply say “ow.” Instead, she stutter-stepped backward, her mouth working soundlessly. Another step and she was swaying, and there was blood on her wetsuit. Too much blood. Lots of blood.

I’ve watched people die before, but always in hospitals, with the patient comatose and the final event announced by the nothing-there tone of a cardiac monitor on flatline. This was different. I don’t know what artery Darryl managed to hit, but it was a big one and it didn’t take a fancy monitor to count the heartbeats pumping the life from her body.

I now know that there really is a light in the eyes that goes out at death, at least death by trauma. I have no idea whether it coincides with the precise point of death, but Megan’s eyes were alive when I lowered her to the ground and leaned on the wound with all of my weight, in a useless attempt to stem the blood. They weren’t alight when the flow slowed on its own and I shifted to CPR. Still, I worked on her for a long time.

I worked to assuage my own guilt. I worked because I didn’t know whether she was an evil person, a greedy person, a driven person, or merely another person lost in a world too subject to change—whether it’s divorce, a career that vanishes, or a lover who wants to do the right thing before you’re ready. I worked because people change and her chance had been cut short. I worked because my own change was past due. I worked long enough to become more than just emotionally drained: long enough that my arms ached and my own breath came in wheezing gasps.

When I finally gave up, Darryl was still holding the gun, trying to figure out what had happened. But I knew. There’s an old bear-protection trick used in grizzly country: you take a 12-gauge shotgun and load it with slugs, followed by a couple of rounds of buckshot. The idea is that if the bear keeps charging after being hit by the slugs, the buckshot might blind it. Megan had used a similar trick in reverse, loading her gun with nano pellets followed by real bullets. But she’d used too many pellets and forgotten to warn us about the bullets.

If she’d been able to pull the trigger just a little faster, it might have been Darryl on whom I wound up doing CPR. But I want to believe that murder had never been her intent. Most people underestimate the deadliness of a .22, and I need to believe that she was one of them. Hurt, not kill. That’s the norm when love goes away.

* * * *

Darryl didn’t even know my name, or why I’d been with Megan, though he could probably guess the latter. Still, when I reached for the gun, he surrendered it. And when I threw it in the river, he nodded. As introductions go, it wasn’t bad. Then neither of us spoke for a long time.

“I loved her,” he said at last.

He needed to talk, but it wasn’t wise. “Darryl...”

“I really did. I always thought that someday she’d understand.”

“Darryl.”

“Did she tell you her father was an accountant? His money was part of what got us started at SNS. But he kept having to tell one of his main clients, a big law firm, to fire people who’d been with them for years. He was a good man and it depressed him. Last year, he committed suicide.”

“About the time your mother died?” The question was out before I could stop it.

Darryl had been staring at Megan’s body, but now I had his full attention. “Has something happened to my mother?”

Oh, Megan, I thought. Lies and half-truths and onion layers on onion layers. It had been her parent’s death that had set Darryl to reexamining his life, but she’d not been ready to admit it, probably not even to herself.

“Your mother’s fine,” I said. “I misunderstood something.”

I could see him start to ask, then change his mind. “Anyway, that made me reexamine what the hell we were doing,” he said. “But Megan acted as though nothing had changed.” He looked back at her body. “Maybe for her, it hadn’t.”

I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps Darryl was right and it was all just money to her, but maybe she had fixated on the truth nano as though, in all its ramifications, it might hold the key to her own tumult. The death of her father explained a lot about why she’d picked me, of all PIs, and why she’d been so generous with her money.

But now wasn’t the time to debate it. “Darryl, remember the nano.”

“But it’s true. I—”

“Shut up. You’re feeling guilty and confused, and the nano might not know the difference.”

“Well, one thing I’m sure of is that I’m not making the antidote. Letting that get out is a risk I won’t take.”

I had no idea how big a risk it actually was, but he didn’t clutch his chest and drop dead, so it didn’t matter: it was too much for him, and that was that.

* * * *

There were, of course, myriad practical matters. First, Darryl had to learn that being a basically honest person wasn’t enough. Even on the most mundane subjects, he had to make sure he thought very carefully before speaking. I suggested he write everything out in advance. That way, he could play with the wording to his heart’s content without doing anything the nano might see as lying.

Then we had to decide what to do with Megan’s body. There really was only one choice, so we buried her among the trees. If we called in the authorities, Darryl would either die under questioning or be forced to reveal the nano, and then everything would have been in vain. Afterward, he stood by the river: quiet, pensive. Then with a sidearm gesture, he threw something in that skipped like a stone, followed by another, and another.

The next day, I headed for home. The trip out was as tough as the one in, but lonelier. It sounds odd to miss a woman who might have killed me, but I’ll always wonder whether she realized we were kindred spirits, or knew in her final moments that in losing herself, she saved me.

Back home, I used her money to pay off Trevor’s nanos. Then, as soon as the lease was up, I moved a cot into my office. Not exactly high-class, but at least I’m solvent, and it’s another reason I’ll always think kindly of Megan.

Someday, when my divorce is final and I get my savings unfrozen, I’ll pay off the rest of my nanos. Then maybe I’ll actually make some of that bad art. Or maybe it will be good art and I’ll become famous. More likely, by that time the world will again be coming down around everyone’s ears. Because one thing I’m sure of is that ideas can’t be suppressed forever—and if it’s possible to develop a nano that reads moods, it’s probably possible to invent one that creates them. Such as LOVE ME or LET ME MANAGE YOUR INVESTMENTS or VOTE FOR X.

If I see it coming, I know where I’m going. Darryl could use a mining partner. And if he tells me he knows of rich diggings, I know I can trust him to a degree unique in the history of mining.

Every few months, he puts a carefully worded classified ad in Goldbug magazine so that when the time comes, I’m sure I can find him.

Copyright © 2006 Richard A. Lovett