Accelerando

possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested,

some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her

m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by

way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They

spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International,

the Space and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being

booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a

middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already

ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly

on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's

connections. 'Can you help me get my cat back?' she asks the

policewoman earnestly.

'Name,' the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous

translation. 'To please wax your identity stiffly.'

'My cat has been stolen,' Amber insists.

'Your cat?' The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with

foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her

repertoire. 'We are asking your name?'

'No,' says Amber. 'It's my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen.'

'Aha! Your papers, please?'

'Papers?' Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the

outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell,

and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. 'I want my cat! Now!'

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and

produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. 'Papers,' she

repeats. 'Or else.'

'I don't know what you're talking about!' Amber wails.

The cop stares at her oddly. 'Wait.' She rises and leaves, and a minute

later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed

glasses that glow faintly.

'You are making a scene,' he says, rudely and abruptly. 'What is your

name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here.'

Amber bursts into tears. 'My cat's been stolen,' she chokes out.

The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this

scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness

and sinister diplomatic entanglement. 'You wait here,' they say, and back

out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a

cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

The implications of her loss – of Aineko's abduction – are sinking in,

finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with

bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her

wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty

that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose

her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up

for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled

with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation

room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search

for backups to synchronize with.

But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw

despair, there's a knock – a knock! – at the door. An inquisitive head

pops in. 'Please to come with us?' It's the female cop with the bad

translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath,

but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various

states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard

box wrapped in twine. 'Please identify,' he asks, snipping the string.

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to

synchronize their memories with her. 'Is it -' she begins to ask as the lid

comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up,

curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. 'What

took you so long?' asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks

her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

* * *

'If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges,' says Amber. 'Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me – round up the usual suspects – and give them root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ.

Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns.'

'That may be difficult,' says the ghost. 'Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.'

Amber sighs. 'You guys really are media illiterates, aren't you?' She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. 'I'll also need my -' it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. 'Hang on. There's something I've forgotten.' Something important, she thinks, puzzled.

Something that used to be around all the time that would… know?… purr? … help? 'Never mind,' she hears her lips say. 'This other human. I really want her. Non- negotiable. All right?'

'That may be difficult,' repeats the ghost. 'Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe.'

'Eh?' Amber blinks at it. 'Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?'

'Illustration: ' The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle.

Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. 'Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact.'

'Well, can you get me into that space?' asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. 'Give me some leverage -'

'Risk may attach to this course of action,' warns the ghost.

'I don't care,' she says irritably. 'Just put me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?'

'Understood,' says the ghost. 'Prepare yourself.'

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but