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  “Rock the Cosmos!” the display flashed, throbbing with the loud treble and hammering bass of the latest fad, “sycho” music.

  I set the timer for ninety seconds and slipped on the helmet.

  And man, did I ever rock! I was strutting around the huge stage, surrounded by a crowd that went on as far as I could see-a hundred thousand fans at least. They were waving their arms and dancing to the wild pulse of the music-and it was all about me. I was the center of attention, the target of all the screaming and adoration! Not so bad, I had to admit. Certainly better than being chased around by the police and the Agency.

  One of the huge amplifiers suddenly exploded, showering the spectators, and me, with debris. The crowd cheered louder, danced even closer to the stage, screamed the lyrics along with my vocals-

  Abruptly, the concert was gone-and I was standing alone in the sound booth.

  “Presented by Toyz Corporation,” a blinking message stated. “We hope you enjoyed-”

  I wheeled around, tugging off the helmet. Honestly, I had been lost in the moment!

  Then I looked for the witness.

  It was a little disorienting, and dizzying, what you experienced after a SimStim even as brief as that. Could that be good for you? Especially for people who used SimStims as much as ten to fifteen hours a day?

  Finally, I spotted the female witness, alone now, moving up an escalator. I managed to catch up to her on the mezzanine floor. I needed to be careful.

  “So, did you ever get one of those iSpielberg imagers?” I asked.

  She turned and looked at me, slightly confused. “Umm-do I know you?”

  “We talked the other night. Don’t you remember? After the murders.”

  “Murders? Oh. Here at the store, right? So terrible. Mindless violence.”

  “I’m Ben,” I said, trying not to show surprise at her detachment. “You? Your name is?”

  “It’s Chuzie. I’m Chuzie.”

  “Chuzie, like-”

  “Like I’m choosy about, well, all sorts of things,” she said, looking me up and down, apparently approving of something.

  “So what happened? What did you see? The night of the murders?” I asked her.

  “Why are you asking me? I don’t understand. You said you were there too.”

  “I know. That’s the really strange part. I’m having trouble remembering any of it myself.”

  Chuzie nodded her head several times. Then she frowned, looking confused again. “You know, I had this crazy dream about the murders…”

  “What happened-in the dream?” I asked, gesturing for her to sit on the edge of an XRBed-a magnetic-field-assisted mattress that exercised your muscles while you slept.

  “Well, there were a lot of city cops everywhere. I believe the Agency was here too. And something else I can’t quite remember.” Her shoulders twitched in a little shiver. “Whatever it was, it was bad.”

  This was ridiculous. Why would a civilian, an Elite, be going to such lengths to distance herself from the truth?

  “Chuzie, people were killed. You were standing right next to them. I saw you. Don’t you remember anything?”

  She was biting her lower lip furiously, starting to look a little scared. “In the dream there was all of this screaming. Then blood everywhere.”

  “Did anybody say anything? Do you remember any of the faces? The attackers?”

  “A human… with a big knife. A machete? He was-he was cutting off someone’s head. And he said, ‘Now we’ll find out what you know.’ ”

  Abruptly, she clapped her hands to the sides of her face. “Why are you asking me this? Who are you?”

  And then a shrill voice yelled out, “It’s him! It’s Hays Baker. Get him! He’s human scum!”

  Chapter 36

  Speechless, I looked down to see that one of the Jacob dolls had followed us. He was pointing an accusing finger at me. And then little Jacob said, “You are going to get the slow death, big man!”

  “Well, better that than the swift kick,” I said, picking him up and punting him out over the escalator bank. I took some satisfaction in hearing his shrill little scream silence as he smashed through a Perfumone display case-but it was a short-term fix to a much larger problem.

  The store’s alarms were blaring, security bolts on the doors began slamming shut, and police sirens started to wail in the distance.

  “Thanks for your help,” I told the Elite woman. “I have to run.”

  I picked up and heaved a 300- to 400-pound SimStim booth through a window. Then I leaped after it, landing on the street outside in a shower of splintered glass.

  “Halt, Hays Baker!” a loud digitized voice boomed somewhere behind me. “We will shoot to kill! Repeat, we will shoot to kill!”

  Tell me about it. I took off past the simulation booth, zigzagging my way back to the car.

  Minutes later, I was in the ZX and weaving through the streets of New Lake City, keeping the speed down to 180 miles per hour so as not to attract undue attention. I was pretty sure I’d gotten away from the store without the cops spotting me. Even better, I didn’t see anyone following now.

  At the city’s northern outskirts, high-rise buildings and fancy houses gave way to an industrial area filled with long, low warehouses and factories.

  As the streets opened into freight-friendly freeways, I jacked my speed up to 300.

  It looked like I’d made it one more step on this journey-wherever it was leading.

  I set the locator code for my parents’ house and switched the car over to automatic pilot. My folks lived far out in the north country, so the trip would take approximately four hours.

  “OK, I need to rest,” I said. “May I have a very dry vodka martini? I think I deserve it.”

  “With pleasure,” said the personal-attendant program. Slim, red-fingernail-tipped hands opened the bar compartment and mixed the drink. “What else can I do for you?”

  “You know, what I really want is some sleep. Wake me up a few minutes before we get to the south shore of Lake Wabago, will you?”

  “Of course. How about a full-body massage to help you relax?” she said, and added, “It’s one of my specialties.”

  “Sounds terrific,” I said.

  And was it ever. Her fingers started on my neck and shoulders, probing gently into my exceedingly tense muscles. Like all the best robotic massages, this one featured infrared heat radiating from the android’s fingertips, soothing body tissue clear down to the bones.

  When I finished the martini, I reclined all the way back in the seat and stretched out as far as I could. The attendant’s smooth hands unfastened my shirt and started working on my chest.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you’ve got a great body,” she murmured.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Most people have been kind of down on me lately.”

  Sleep, I told myself. You have to sleep.

  And that’s what I did.

  Chapter 37

  Afew hours later, I was fully alert and back at the wheel. The personal attendant gasped excitedly as I made a sharp left turn and plunged the ZX headfirst into the lake that surrounded the island where my parents lived. Stabilizing fins shot out from the sides of the pod, and the drivetrain instantly disengaged from the wheels and connected to the rear water jets.

  “Oooh, I’m so wet,” the attendant chirped seductively. This was a sports model after all, a boy’s toy.

  I loved the car for its performance attributes, if nothing else. I’d already decided that if I survived long enough, I was going to find the guy I’d taken it from and buy it for real.

  It glided along smoothly, skirting sunken logs and sending schools of bass and perch darting away. When I was a kid, I’d spent a lot of time up here on the lake with my dad, fishing for walleyed pike, lake trout, even eels, which can be surprisingly delicious when cooked up fresh after the catch.

  I hadn’t seen my folks much since university-and then I’d become an Agent of
Change and married Lizbeth. I loved and respected my parents, but, well, they weren’t the easiest people to be around.

  I’d always known they were unusual, even odd. Before I was born, they’d invested in the biotech industry and done well. But they decided they wanted a simpler life, so they moved to this faraway, wild north country on the lake. Now they spent their time gardening and tinkering without much connection to society, and they seemed to like it that way. They saw Lizbeth, me, and the kids once a year, and that seemed enough for them, which was strange to me. My parents had always been warm and loving when I was a child.

  The ZX shot up out of the water and onto a pebbly beach, then it snaked through a stretch of thick, tangled forest while tree limbs brushed its roof and windows.

  It was late morning now, cloudy and warm, the leaves glistening with dew and the air thick with birdsong. The forest opened into a large clearing-and there was the sprawling, old-fashioned house where I’d grown up. Everything looked just the way I remembered it, cedar shingles and all. Even the smell of the pine trees was familiar.

  Except that someone I didn’t recognize was up on a ladder, working on the roof. It was a woman who had her hair tucked under a painter’s cap. She must have been a human my parents had hired to do the chores, although I didn’t recall them mentioning it, or ever doing that before. They’d always taken care of the place themselves. Well, they weren’t getting any younger, were they? Nobody was.

  “So you made it here on your own,” the menial worker called as I climbed out of the car. “I’m impressed. You’re more resourceful than I would have guessed.”

  The timbre of her voice registered immediately in my brain, and it was like I’d been zapped with a Taser-the woman was the leader of the gang of skunks who had attacked Lizbeth and me, the one who got away.

  Chapter 38

  I fought back wild surprise-and then a wave of rage-and managed a frosty smile worthy of my former rank and station at the Agency. Am I walking into an ambush? Are my parents here-are they even alive? I wondered, in that order.

  “Well, well,” I said. “Last time we met, you tried to kill me.”

  “If I’d tried,” she said, putting down a hammer and removing leather work gloves, “you’d be dead.”

  Was the woman deliberately trying to provoke me? Clearly she and whomever she was working for were a step ahead of me. Maybe several steps. How was that even possible?

  “Where are my parents?” I asked as I judged the height of the roof and got ready to leap up there, fight her, and kill her.

  “They’ll be out in a minute to say hello to their favorite son. Calm down, Hays. No need for you to come up here and try out your fancy commando moves on me.”

  This time her condescending tone-as if she were soothing an upset child-was a little too much for my nerves.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. You’re a common killer-a criminal and a skunk.”

  “I guess by your standards I am. But by most other standards, you’re the criminal. How many humans have you killed in your life, Hays Baker?” she shot back. “Or have you lost count? And what does that say about you?”

  Just then the front door of the house swung open, and out came my mother. She hurried toward me with a welcoming smile and open arms.

  “Hays, darling, it’s so wonderful to see you! I’m so happy you’re here.”

  Mom was thinner and noticeably older than the last time I’d been here, but her eyes were more luminous than ever. She looked healthy and spry enough.

  “I see you’ve met Lucy,” she said, gesturing up at the roof. But then her eyes were back on me, her favorite son. Of course, I was her only child.

  “What a sight you are,” she said, looking me up and down, then clasping me again in her warm embrace. Ah, the feel of her, the scent of her skin, the sound of her voice… I really was home, wasn’t I?

  She finally stepped back, taking hold of my hands and looking me over again. “But for heaven’s sake-what happened to your beautiful hair?”

  I ran my hand over my bald head. “It’s the new look in the city,” I said. Then I asked, “Who is she, and why is she here?”

  My mother looked deep into my eyes, and then she said, “She’s here because she’s your sister.”

  Chapter 39

  I immediately swiveled my head back and forth from the smart-mouthed criminal-and, perhaps, murderer-up on the roof to my mother. My mom was clearly not under any kind of duress or threat. If anything, I sensed embarrassment coming from her.

  “What do you mean, my ‘sister’?” I asked the obvious question.

  “We just couldn’t tell you about Lucy. It would have been too risky,” my father said, stepping out of the house. “It was too important that you accomplish what you’ve done so well. Become one of them. Become an Elite bastard.”

  What the hell was going on here?

  What was my father talking about? What had they done? Had my parents played me like some sort of unwitting pawn? Had they purposely set out to make me a traitorous “bastard”? Was I a sleeper agent?

  “Come with me. Please, Hays,” he said. “Just come. I have something to show you.”

  I obediently followed him to the outbuilding that he used as a workshop. It was all so very familiar, especially the cloying smell of oil and paint inside.

  “Nothing changes, does it?” I muttered. “It’s as if I never went away.”

  “Looks just like what you’d expect from a harmless, bumbling eccentric, right?” my father said, gesturing with his hand at the contents of the musty, cluttered space. Several tables were covered with a jumble of random electronic gadgetry. None of it seemed to point to any unified purpose or goal.

  “That’s a good way to put it,” I agreed. Like most young kids, I had never paid too much attention to what my parents actually did in their work.

  In my human-history studies at university, I’d come across countless descriptions of the “hippie” movement of the 1960s. Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, a movie called Woodstock. I soon realized that my parents-with their off-the-grid, tuned-out-of-the-mainstream lifestyle-bore more than a passing resemblance to the long-haired movement of that time, years before the humans had taken their full-on path toward world destruction.

  In fact, my parents had even dressed the part of hippies. My mom usually wore her hair in a long, graying braid, and she favored baggy jeans, or sometimes ankle-length dresses. My father, almost always in a beat-up leather hat and faded work clothes, had sported a heavy commune-style beard. And they kept a large collection of books, magazines, and other print-based relics from the era before 7–4 Day. I’d read most of the material myself.

  Now I picked up a silicone circuit board and examined the chip array. It was from a top-of-the-line processor, as far as I could tell anyway.

  “You were always a mad-professor type,” I said.

  “Well, in some ways you’re right, Hays. In others, though… Well, that was actually a bit of a pose,” he said. “A charade. A bold-faced lie, if you will.”

  He opened the door of a closet crammed with more junk. The closet’s back wall swung inward, revealing a concrete staircase that led down under the earth. The steps were old and worn. The passageway must have been here all along, but I never knew that it existed. Or that I had a sister, of course.

  I gave him a sharp glance. “Another thing that was too risky to tell me about?”

  “Probably still is,” he said, unperturbed. “Come this way. It’s time you knew.”

  “It’s a fallout shelter,” my mother said, coming up behind us. “People built them in the old days so they could hide in case there was a nuclear war. That’s part of why we moved to this place. It was a good space for our laboratory.”

  “Laboratory? You have a laboratory? What are you doing with a-”

  She touched her finger to my lips to shush me. “Look first,” she said. “Talk later.”

  The large underground chamber we had entered was ver
y much the opposite of the chaos and goofy ineptitude featured upstairs. Everything in it was cutting-edge, modern, ordered, very precise.

  There were gleaming metal worktables, well-organized racks of equipment, a row of incubating chambers. Vats filled with clear liquid appeared to have living tissue growing in them. Through a doorway, I glimpsed a fully equipped surgical operating room.

  My parents had set up all this? A pair of gentle, aging homebodies? Two hippies?

  My mother guided me into a side room that had a few comfortable chairs, a couch, and an ancient video apparatus known as a television-I’d never seen a real one, only pictures of them.

  “We’ve saved these all this time, Hays, hoping you’d see them someday. And these discs you should watch,” she said. “They’re what used to be called ‘home movies.’ You’re the star of most of them.”

  Chapter 40

  I put in a disc, and the TV screen came alive with grainy images that must have been shot with a camera as old as the television.

  A cute little boy, about age three, was toddling along at his mother’s side, clinging to her hand. They were walking toward a pebbly beach on a lake with a house in the background.

  The smiling, familiar woman was short-haired, young, and very beautiful. One of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, actually. She could have easily been a movie star.

  The boy was moving along awkwardly, making happy infantile sounds as only a human baby would. Elite children of that age-raised in vitro for a full twenty-four months-were as physically coordinated as human ten-year-olds and already talking coherently. Elite children also didn’t have belly buttons, and this one had an outie as big as a grown man’s knuckle.

  I kept watching with shocked fascination as the “home movie” images changed and continued to flicker gently before my eyes.