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+{"text":"\n\n**EGMONT**  \n _We bring stories to life_\n\nFirst published in the United Kingdom by Egmont UK Limited, 2014  \nFirst published in the United States of America by Egmont USA, 2014  \n443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806  \nNew York, NY 10016\n\nCopyright \u00a9 The Shadow Gang, 2014  \nAll rights reserved\n\nwww.egmontusa.com\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nGrant, Michael, 1954-  \nBZRK apocalypse \/ Michael Grant.  \n1 online resource.  \nSequel to: BZRK reloaded.  \nSummary: In the concluding book in the BZRK trilogy, war is again being waged in the macro and the nano, and Lear's identity is finally uncovered.  \nISBN 978-1-60684-409-0 (eBook) -- ISBN 978-1-60684-408-3 (hardcover) [1. Utopias--Fiction. 2. Nanotechnology--Fiction. 3. Conjoined twins--Fiction. 4. Twins--Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.  \nPZ7.G7671  \n[Fic]--dc23  \n2014006440\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.\n\nv3.1\nFor Katherine, Jake, and Julia\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\nChapter One\n\nChapter Two\n\nChapter Three\n\nChapter Four\n\nChapter Five\n\nChapter Six\n\nChapter Seven\n\nChapter Eight\n\nChapter Nine\n\nChapter Ten\n\nChapter Eleven\n\nChapter Twelve\n\nChapter Thirteen\n\nChapter Fourteen\n\nChapter Fifteen\n\nChapter Sixteen\n\nChapter Seventeen\n\nChapter Eighteen\n\nChapter Nineteen\n\nChapter Twenty\n\nChapter Twenty-one\n\nChapter Twenty-two\n\nChapter Twenty-three\n\nChapter Twenty-four\n\nChapter Twenty-five\n\nChapter Twenty-six\n\nChapter Twenty-seven\n\nChapter Twenty-eight\n\nChapter Twenty-nine\n\nChapter Thirty\n\nChapter Thirty-one\n\nChapter Thirty-two\n\nChapter Thirty-three\n\n_About the Author_\n\n# **ONE**\n\nSandra Piper was having dinner with friends when it started.\n\nShe was eating chilled lobster on the teak deck of a producer friend's Malibu home, along with a former costar named Wade Talon (a ridiculous screen name in Sandra's opinion), her current director (Quentin\u2014no last name necessary), a very rich and rather magnificently tattooed woman named Lystra Reid who had an odd vocal tic that added \"Yeah\" to random sentences, and an extraordinarily fit, tall, and broad-shouldered man whose name she kept forgetting but who might have been named Noble, or something very close to that.\n\nThe Noble creature was listening, rapt, while the more famous folk discussed work and mutual friends and more work. In fact, in one way or another it was all work.\n\nSandra had been nominated: Best Actress. Very tough competition. The oddsmakers called her a long shot at six to one. Long but not impossible. And despite the fact that Sandra Piper was a mother of two, a down-to-earth thirtyish woman with a masters in economics who had smoked pot exactly twice in her life and never drank more than two glasses of wine, she was thinking of seducing young Mr. Shoulders. Mr. Shy Grin. Mr. Large-But-Sensitive Hands.\n\nBecause he was definitely interested, and she had been divorced for two years and had dated no one in that time. And she was exhausted from long days on the current shoot, plus her son, Quarle (three years old), had just gotten over a two-week-long bout of the flu.\n\nAnd really, what the hell was the point of being America's Sweetheart if you couldn't even get laid? Would a male actor in the same situation even hesitate? Well, some, sure. But lots wouldn't. So why should she? Wasn't that why Quentin had invited Noble...? No, wait, now she remembered. His name was Nolan. Whatever. Wasn't he there for her, um... amusement?\n\n_Unless_. Oh, had he come with the Lystra person? Was he here for _her_? She would be closer to his age, not a beauty but attractive enough, given that she was not Hollywood at all but some sort of health-care billionaire.\n\nNo. No, young Mr. Body of Steel was not eyeing Lystra. He was eyeing the next winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress. _Uh-huh_.\n\nBut the idea sighed inside her and deflated like a balloon with a slow leak. She shook her head, a tiny movement not intended for anyone else, and took a deep breath. She had to help Quinn (seven years old) with her stupid California Mission project, due tomorrow.\n\nGod, she was boring. Boring and responsible and definitely America's Sweetheart, except that when it came right down to it, she was Mommy.\n\nSuddenly her hand jerked and she tipped her wineglass over. The last ounce of white wine drained onto the wood surface, alarming no one.\n\n\"Sorry. I just\u2014\"\n\nSandra frowned. Shook her head.\n\n\"What's the matter, Sandy?\" Wade asked.\n\n\"I'm just...\" She shook her head again. Frowned, despite the fact that frowning would crease her ageless forehead. \"Oh my God, is there something in the wine? I'm... I'm seeing something.\"\n\nNolan looked at her from beneath lashes that would probably have tickled her cheeks (and other places, too, if she'd just said the word) and asked, \"Are you feeling ill?\"\n\n\"It's...\" She laughed. \"This is going to sound crazy. It's like I can see something that isn't there. I'm...\" She looked away from them, stared out toward the black Pacific Ocean, wondering if somehow what she was seeing was a reflection off the wineglasses.\n\nBut no. It was still there. It was as if she had a second set of eyes, and they opened onto a small TV screen in a corner of her _own_ eyes.\n\n\"I'm seeing, like, like... just flat, but weird.\" Then, a sudden, sharp gasp. \"Oh my God, a second one. Like another window in my head.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should lie down,\" Nolan suggested.\n\n\"Or have another glass of wine,\" Quentin said, and laughed. But now he, too, was staring at her sideways, with concern on his face.\n\n\"There's two... Oh! Oh! Oh! There's a giant insect. I'm going nuts. Maybe I'm having a stroke.\"\n\n\"I'm calling nine one one,\" Nolan said, and pulled out his phone.\n\n\"Jesus Christ! It's a huge bug. I can see it! It's turning, it's coming toward me.... Oh, oh God, I think I'm moving it! I think I'm making it move!\"\n\nShe pushed back hard from the table. Glassware clattered and toppled. Wade leapt to his feet and caught her arm as she lurched away from the table.\n\n\"It has eyes! It has eyes! Oh, God. Oh, God. My face! My eyes! Those are _my_ eyes!\"\n\nShe pushed Wade aside violently, then, abashed, shocked by her own behavior, she tried on a fleeting smile, reached out a reassuring hand and said, \"I think I need help. I think I'd better see a doctor.\"\n\n\"That would be best,\" Lystra Reid said coolly, then added, as if an afterthought, \"Yeah.\" She had moved to place her back against the railing and was watching with detached interest. At least she wasn't taking a picture to tweet later.\n\n\"Ambulance is on the way,\" Nolan reported.\n\nAnd Sandra thought, _Well, he certainly won't sleep with me now_. But that thought came and left in a heartbeat, because something else was happening on that eerie picture-in-picture view in her head. She was seeing a falling drop of liquid that must have been a million gallons. It was far bigger than the terrifying bugs with her face smeared across them, her eyes; those nightmare insects with _her own damned eyes_.\n\nThe drop landed. It swept around the two bugs, engulfing them. And instantly it began to eat away those insect legs. It chewed burning holes into those insect carapaces. It burned away those distorted reflections of her own face like an old-time filmstrip jammed in a projector that bubbles and caramelizes and is gone.\n\nThe picture frames in her head blinked out.\n\nThey were gone as fast as they had come.\n\nSandra stood now, seeing only through her own eyes, seeing only what was real.\n\nShe laughed. \"Hah-hah-hah-hah. Hahahahahahahah!\"\n\nAnd then she screamed. \"Ahhhh! Aaaaaahhhh! You're devils! Devils!\"\n\nNolan moved to grab her because she was climbing awkwardly onto the table. She slipped, skinned her knee against the edge, stared down at the blood, and shrieked, shrieked like a mad thing.\n\nShe snatched up a knife. Not a very big knife, just a dinner knife with a point and modest serrations. She stabbed it into Nolan's thick bicep.\n\nThe strong man screamed, a more feminine sound than one might have expected.\n\n\"Hah! Hah, devil!\" Sandra yelled, happy at the sight of his blood, fascinated.\n\nWade and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.\n\nIn Sandra's eyes they were not backing away, they were coming for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire dripping from their eyeballs\u2014it was all about the eyeballs, it was there, in the eyes, the demons.\n\nSandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly. It didn't go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.\n\n\"Hey, hey, hey!\" Quentin yelled.\n\n\"No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,\" Wade said.\n\nNolan made another move\u2014this time wary\u2014to take the knife from her.\n\nSandra spit at him. \"Hah!\" she yelled, and stabbed the knife into her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with viscous goo.\n\nCries of horror, and now even she could see that they were backing away, the devils. It was working. _Hah! Run, devils, run!_\n\nShe then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.\n\nHer knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.\n\n\"Stupid Mission project,\" she said. Then fell onto her back, laughing and howling, laughing and howling. \"Devils! Dev\u2014\"\n\nIt was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.\n\nNot that Sandra Piper could see that.\n\n# **TWO**\n\nHer name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She'd never liked the freckles\u2014they seemed to be accompanied by the word _cute_ and she didn't like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.\n\nThe cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hidden by a rich, deep tan.\n\nHer name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.\n\nIt was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defiantly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.\n\nShe had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security under a Mr. Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point, but what had stuck was the Mr. and the Stern.)\n\nShe had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had _done_ terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.\n\nShe was sixteen years old.\n\nA month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the _Doll Ship_ had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor waterfront. A month since the president of the United States had blown her own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of murdering her husband.\n\nA month since Sadie as Plath had sent her biots into Vincent's brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him. The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same connection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward spiral into madness.\n\nVincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious injury to a second.\n\nFrom a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that terrible day was compartmentalized if not forgotten, and Sadie was doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster, and a bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.\n\nThere was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of vodka, now partly empty.\n\nAnd there was a boy.\n\nHe was naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.\n\nWhether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash from the joint in Sadie's mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah's nose, and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion had interesting side effects.\n\n\"Laugh again,\" Noah said.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Sadie said.\n\n\"You're torturing me.\"\n\n\"I'm teaching you endurance,\" she said, voice slurring.\n\n\"I'm standing right at the very edge of a cliff,\" he said, and his eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. \"If you laugh... or even move at all... or even breathe deeply, I'll go right... _mmmm_... over... the edge.\"\n\n\"You're going with a cliff metaphor?\" she asked, and giggled.\n\nWhich was all it took.\n\nShe watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shuddered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But then that feral look softened into an expression like you'd see on the face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.\n\nAnd then he laughed, too.\n\nAnd opened his blue, blue eyes and said, \"Don't go yet.\"\n\nHe remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than the period at the end of a sentence\u2014a creature that was built from an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah's own\u2014was deep within Sadie's brain. This was a _biot_. One of _his_ , Noah's biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2. Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned pocket of his shorts, which were... he looked around... over there, somewhere.\n\nK2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstakingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie's brain. Left alone, the aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment, which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of pain-filled hours.\n\nNoah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie's eye, down the optic nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain\u2014quite a long trip for a biot\u2014then carefully threaded in place. Basket weaving.\n\nAll the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah's own mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D special-effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.\n\nNoah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people who did not travel _down in the meat_. When she became aroused, he could feel the artery beneath his biot's six legs pumping faster, harder. But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes, her lips, her tongue.\n\nShe kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth and then his neck. Then she rolled off onto the blanket and looked toward the food.\n\n\"You didn't...,\" he said.\n\n\"No.\" She struggled to find the right tone. Unconcerned but not indifferent. Nonchalant, not like it mattered. Then tried switching to a sexy purr. \"But I loved every minute. That's not the only thing in the world, you know.\"\n\n\"It's not?\" he asked, trying to be funny.\n\n\"Want some lobster?\" she asked, deflecting him. She didn't like talking about sex. The effects of weed and wine were ebbing, leaving her tired and groggy. She could be cranky in a minute if she let herself.\n\nThere were things nagging at her, distractions. She wanted to keep pushing them away, but self-medication had its limits and all those niggling worries would resurface, frequency and intensity increasing. She had pushed it all away for a month and now \"it\" was pushing back.\n\n\"I do want some lobster, I absolutely do,\" Noah said.\n\n\"Then trot on over there and get me some, too.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"It's always something with you. _Undress me. Make love to me. Feed me lobster_. You are so demanding.\" He stood up, and she saw that half his hard, lean behind was coated with sand. She lay back, head resting on one hand, enjoying that particular sight, and the view beyond. They were in a secluded lagoon on the western edge of the island, facing the much larger island of Madagascar, which was a blur of green ten miles off.\n\nA quarter mile to both north and south, armed men\u2014fashionably attired in white Tommy Bahama shirts and automatic rifles\u2014watched for any threat to their privacy. Just out of sight behind a rocky point, a yacht crewed by ex-soldiers rolled in the gentle swell and kept a radar lookout over the area.\n\nNoah brought her pieces of lobster on a small china plate.\n\n\"We're out of wine,\" he said.\n\n\"Good. Time to sober up, anyway.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" he asked. \"Why?\"\n\nShe sat up and reached for her T-shirt. He interrupted her with a kiss and gently stroked her breasts as if saying good-bye to them. \"I quite like these,\" he said.\n\n\"I guessed that. Can I put on my shirt now?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" He started to dress as well: shorts, a T-shirt, sandals. He reached down and pulled her to her feet.\n\n\"I'll call for our cab,\" Sadie said. She pressed the talk button on a handheld radio\u2014there was no cell-phone reception this far up-island.\n\nFive minutes later, as they packed up the picnic, a glittering white cabin cruiser appeared around the point.\n\nThe captain gave a little _toot-toot_ on the horn, and the boat blew up.\n\nIt took a few seconds for the flat _crump!_ of the explosion to reach them. It took a bit longer for the debris to splash into the water.\n\nAnd just like that Sadie and Noah were Plath and Keats once again, running now, food and blanket forgotten. McLure security men were tearing along the beach from north and south, assault rifles in their hands, yelling, \"Get under cover, get under cover!\"\n\nThe boat burned for a while\u2014there was no possibility of anyone having survived\u2014and then it slipped beneath gentle waves that were a very similar color to Noah's eyes. The pillar of black smoke was smothered. A black smudge rose until it was caught by a breeze and blown away over the island.\n\nVacation was over. The war for the human race was back on.\n\n# **THREE**\n\n_The roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship's ballast had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air_.\n\n_The inside of_ Benjaminia _was a slaughterhouse\u2014dead Marines, many more dead residents hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air_.\n\n_Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on, and now people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into the painted mural of the Great Souls_.\n\n_Water rushed in through the opened segments_.\n\n_The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to steam as the_ Doll Ship _sank, and settled on the harbor floor_.\n\nWhen the _Doll Ship_ sank, the Armstrong Twins had found themselves in Hong Kong's Victoria harbor.\n\nThey could not swim. With some effort, and if they felt in a cooperative mood, they could manage to walk, dragging the useless third leg. But swim?\n\nIt was Ling who had saved their lives. Tiny, ancient, birdlike Ling. She had cupped her hand beneath their chin and churned the filthy water with her legs. She'd sunk beneath the waves repeatedly, rising each time to gasp in a single breath mixed with salt water, to cough and gag, and yet to keep her legs churning, until a fishing boat had come to the rescue.\n\nThey would find a way to reward Ling. They vowed that. She had saved their lives and very nearly died herself.\n\nThe Armstrong Twins had made their way from Victoria harbor to Vietnam, where they had financial interests and owned a small but useful number of local government officials. From there they'd made their way to Malaysia, to the Sarawak state on the island of Borneo.\n\nThe Armstrong facility there was involved in mining rare earths. And it did a bit of logging, as well, all very eco-friendly, with careful replanting programs and all of that. Whatever it took to avoid too much scrutiny. The Armstrongs were good corporate citizens out of self-interest.\n\nBut this facility was not strictly about mining or logging. It was built of three elements: there were two identical buildings, each a crescent, facing each other across an elongated oval that formed an enchanting tropical garden, a sort of tamed version of the surrounding rain forest.\n\nThere were trees and flowers, streams full of fish and waterfowl, pink gravel pathways leading to benches, and seating areas where the white-collar employees could take their lunches alfresco.\n\nAt the top of the oval, connecting the two crescents, was a stumpy tower topped by a domed observatory. There was an impressive optical telescope that profited from the profound darkness of the surrounding countryside.\n\nNo one was using the telescope at the moment because it was pouring rain. It often poured rain here. And when it poured it was unlike anything Charles Armstrong had ever known in New York. It came down not in drops but in sheets. The heavens did not sprinkle on Sarawak, they emptied buckets and bathtubs and swimming pools.\n\nCharles watched a lizard climbing up the glass side of the dome, pushing against the stream of water. Sarawak had lizards. It had lizards and snakes and birds in abundance.\n\n\"I would have thought the rain would wash it off,\" Charles said.\n\nHis brother, Benjamin, was less interested by the lizard or the rain, but of course could see both since it was impossible for the twins not to face in the same direction. Their individual eyes could roam this way or that, focus independently under the direction of their separate brains, but they did not have separate heads, rather two heads melded together.\n\nThis gave them two mouths, one nose, and three eyes. The middle eye was a bit smaller than the other two and often had an unfocused, glazed quality. It could see, but its focus was not consciously directed by either Charles or Benjamin. Rather it often seemed to have a mind of its own and would focus where it willed, suddenly granting depth perception to one or the other twin, but never both at once.\n\nThey were large, the twins were, tall but even more broad, with shoulders capable of carrying the unusual weight of their doubled head. Two arms, neither muscular; two fully developed legs; and a third, stunted leg.\n\nAt the moment they were sitting in a modified electric wheelchair. It was far more capable than the usual motorized wheelchairs and had been given an almost dashing, exotic look with burgundy velvet trim, two side panels that likely concealed weapons, and wheels that looked more racetrack than hospital, but it remained, in the end, a wheelchair.\n\nThe observatory was their haunt for now. There was a bedroom down a ramp, and a specially outfitted bathroom. But the bedroom had only conventional windows. All their lives had been spent indoors, and they craved the openness of the observatory, even when all they could see was water sheeting down the glass and a lizard struggling against that tide.\n\n\"Looking at lizards,\" Benjamin said, disgusted.\n\nThey had both been depressed since the sinking of the _Doll Ship_. The _Doll Ship_ had been their happy place, the place they could think about when life became too gloomy or the pressure too intense. Now it was gone. All those poor people, the people who worshipped them, who saw beauty in their deformity, all of them gone.\n\n\"Fish food,\" Charles said, knowing where his brother's thoughts had wandered. \"And we still don't know how it happened.\"\n\n\"A Swedish intelligence officer and a British admiral.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"Many questions, brother.\"\n\nThey turned the wheelchair to face the large monitor that hung above a touch-screen desktop. The monitor was divided into twenty-four smaller frames. Three were tuned to various news outlets. The rest were clearly surveillance cameras. An empty room with desks. A break room with one woman making coffee. A lab with two people in white coats moving to some unheard music while they tapped on keyboards. A puzzling view of what might be a warehouse.\n\nOne by one the video tiles flipped to be replaced by different views. Every corner of the Armstrong empire.\n\nThey could see everything, but what could they control? They weren't even sure they could return to New York. London, too, might be out of bounds.\n\n\"We are hiding like rats from a cat,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"We're foxes at the very least,\" Charles said, trying to make it sound like a good thing, trying not to think about the way fox hunts usually ended with dogs tearing at the cornered animal. \"System: locate Burnofsky.\"\n\nA larger picture appeared, in the center of the monitor. The object of their search had his back to them. He was hunched over a terminal.\n\n\"There's our Karl,\" Charles said, steel in his voice.\n\n\"Ours?\"\n\nCharles sighed. \"Either he hit bottom on some grand, final bender and decided to turn his life around. Or\u2014\"\n\n\"Or BZRK wired him,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"Ling!\" Charles yelled. \"It's dinnertime, and I find I would enjoy a drink.\"\n\nThey shared a digestive tract, despite having two mouths. It took consent from both for either to drink alcohol. Or to eat, though they tried to be tolerant on that. Benjamin liked to snack on a bowl of Chex Mix sometimes, and Charles preferred fresh fruit. Apricots. He loved a perfect apricot, though a really good one was hard to find.\n\n\"A drink, yes,\" Benjamin said. \"And maybe more than one apiece.\"\n\nLing appeared, moving with a gliding speed that belied her advanced years.\n\n\"Ah, our friend and hero, Ling. I shall have a glass of wine,\" Charles told her. \"A Cabernet, I think.\"\n\n\"I'll have a Cognac,\" Benjamin said. \"You know what I like.\"\n\nThey sat glumly watching the video frames opening and closing around Burnofsky as the system cycled randomly through the hundreds of surveillance cameras. Here was a woman making copies. There a man staring blankly into space. A couple putting on coats ready to go home. Jet-lag-dulled shoppers at the Twins' O'Hare Airport store. Two men debating something, both pointing at tablets.\n\nAt the bottom of each window was a small tag giving the location. Athens. Newport News. Tierra del Fuego. Johnson City. AFGC\u2014the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation\u2014had locations all over the world, even without counting the shops in virtually every airport.\n\n\"We have not lost, brother,\" Charles said softly, with what he hoped was an undertone of iron resolve.\n\n\"Yet we're in hiding.\"\n\n\"We have not _lost_. We are not _beaten_. We have the Hounds. We can rebuild the twitcher corps. We can start again. And we have Floor Thirty-Four.\"\n\n\"Floor Thirty-Four's a losing tactic,\" Benjamin snorted. \"Defensive. It takes down BZRK. But it does not give us back the president we lost, or the premier we lost, goddammit! God _damn_ it!\" He slammed his fist down on the desk, making Charles's glass of wine jump. \"Or Bug Man. Or the _Doll Ship_.\" He moaned. \"What we have lost! What we have _lost_!\" He drained the snifter of Cognac in a single long swallow.\n\n\"When Floor Thirty-Four is ready, we take down BZRK and all they have within weeks. It spreads, brother; it will find them in all their hiding places. And when it has done its work, we will be without enemies, we\u2014\"\n\n\"Without enemies? You think BZRK is our only enemy? Don't you know the Chinese are dissecting every body they fish out of Hong Kong harbor? They know. They _know_! And if the Americans and Europeans don't know yet, they will soon.\"\n\n\"What is it you want, Benjamin? To unleash the gray goo?\"\n\nThe _gray goo_ , a ridiculous name for a deadly threat: self-replicating nanobots. Nanobots building more nanobots with whatever material they found at hand. Going from thousands to millions and billions and trillions in mere days, consuming every last atom of carbon and a good many other elements as well. Everything that lived or had lived on the surface of planet Earth. Everything that made life possible.\n\nNanobots were the mechanical answer to biots. Just as small, but without the eerie and inexplicable link that connected a biot to its maker. Nanobots had to be run through a game controller. They were somewhat less capable, but they had a huge advantage: it was nothing to lose a nanobot. But to lose a biot? Well, that way madness lay.\n\nBenjamin gestured at the screen. He happened to be focused on a family at one of the AFGC shops, this one at Airport Schiphol in the Netherlands. A family. Man, woman, blond child, poring over souvenirs. \"I hate them sometimes. I hate them enough to do it.\"\n\nCharles intuited which frame his brother was focusing on. \"Yes, but imagine them as _ours_ , brother. Imagine them united with us. Imagine them happy to look at us. Imagine what we can make them into with our nanotechnology and our friends from Nexus Humanus.\"\n\n\"Nexus Humanus,\" Benjamin snorted. It was a cult they had financed as a way to recruit twitchers to control nanobots, and other useful folk. But it had lost steam, like bargain-basement Scientology. \"We had it, the world we seek. The _Doll Ship_.\" A tear welled in Benjamin's eye, swelled, and went rushing down his cheek.\n\n\"Nonsense, brother, it was only a _model_ of the world we seek.\"\n\n\"A world united,\" Benjamin said, bitterly wondering at his own naivety. Weeping, figuratively at least, for the benighted human race that was being deprived of the utopia he saw so clearly. \"One vast interconnectedness, with us at the nexus.\"\n\n\"It can still be. It can. But not if we unleash the SRNs. Not the gray goo, not that final act of G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung. The lesser tack, though...\" Charles was offering a sacrifice to the god of Benjamin's rage. A step short of apocalypse.\n\n\"Massed preprogrammed attack,\" Benjamin said, accenting the final word. Nanobots could be programmed to carry out simple commands autonomously. Large numbers of them, so long as the task was simple. Millions of them if necessary. They could be programmed to destroy all in their reach for a certain period of time and then turned off, a sort of localized, small-scale gray goo.\n\n\"If it's true that the intelligence agencies either know or will soon, then we won't be safe, even here. But if we disrupt... If we launch mass releases. Washington. London. Beijing. Give them something to keep them very busy. And at the same time use the Floor Thirty-Four weapon to take out BZRK...\"\n\n\"There he goes. Burnofsky. He's doing it again.\" Benjamin had spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnofsky's image pushed all the others aside.\n\nIn the image\u2014high-def, no grainy monochrome\u2014Burnofsky had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took another drag on the cigarette.\n\n\"Here it comes,\" Benjamin said.\n\nBurnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photograph of a young girl.\n\n\"The daughter,\" Charles said. \"He's never gotten over it.\"\n\nBurnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the hidden camera. They could see only the side of the man's face, but the smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.\n\n\"Volume up,\" Charles ordered.\n\nBurnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful, somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.\n\n\"Bugs in your brain, baby,\" he said, laughing happily. \"Bugs in your brain.\"\n\n\"System: zoom in on Burnofsky's face,\" Benjamin ordered. The camera zoomed. \"He's crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing. Here it comes.\"\n\nBurnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly. They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.\n\nBurnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.\n\nThey heard the sizzle.\n\nHe held it there; held it, held it, held it... and then, with a cry of pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last pulled the cigarette away.\n\n\"Karl, Karl, Karl,\" Charles said.\n\n\"Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.\" Benjamin recited the relevant facts. \"Seemingly less depressed. And this self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it's BZRK, brother. You must _know_ that. He's wired. They've taken our genius from us.\"\n\nCharles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was going to be swigging brandy. \"I don't _know_ it. But, do I suspect it?\"\n\nHe let the question hang.\n\n\"We must return home. Home to the Tulip.\"\n\n\"Back to the Tulip?\" Charles's voice was troubled. \"Even now that will be dangerous.\"\n\n\"I've spent\u2014 _we've_ spent\u2014our lives skulking and hiding, brother. Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?\"\n\nCharles didn't argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin would have his own _G_ \u00f6 _tterd_ \u00e4 _mmerung_. Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be realized. A world of peace. A world free from want and hate and fear and pain because every human being would be brother, sister, father, mother to every other human being. _One vast interconnectedness_.\n\n\"We hit back,\" Benjamin was saying. Over and over. \"We hit back!\"\n\nCharles closed his eye and heard the voice of his brother, so many years ago, so long ago, before they understood. Before they came to accept their isolation and loneliness. The voice of the child Benjamin was the voice of the grown man now.\n\n_Hit back, hit back, hit back_.\n\nOn the screen Burnofsky was giggling and crying.\n\n# **FOUR**\n\nSadie and Noah were bundled into a Land Rover and driven straight, without packing, without ceremony, without time to breathe, to a privately owned airstrip and practically shoved aboard a Gulfstream.\n\nThe pilot filed a flight plan for the relatively short hop to Sambava Airport on the main island of Madagascar. But that would be the expected route, and if the enemy had gone to the trouble of blowing up a boat, would they hesitate at an airport assassination?\n\nSo the Gulfstream flew on, took on fuel in Kenya, and made the long haul to Madeira to prepare for the final leg to New York's Teterboro.\n\nAt Madeira the security men let them off the plane. Plath and Keats took a taxi into the whitewashed city of Funchal, where they ate voraciously at a caf\u00e9 that smelled of garlic, red wine, and cedar, and served cod and prawns and good, doughy bread in a sky-blue stucco dining room. The Gulfstream had left in too great a hurry to take on food, and despite their picnic lunch hours earlier, they were starving.\n\n\"So what do we do now?\" Keats asked. He had the sense that this might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the restaurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have obscured their words in any case.\n\n\"Back to New York,\" she said with a shrug.\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.\" It sounded bitter. It was.\n\nKeats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy. \"That's not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what I care about,\" Plath said. \"Table manners.\" She offered him a smile and put her hand on his.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense, that's the thing,\" Keats said.\n\n\"Manners?\"\n\n\"Blowing up the boat.\"\n\nOne of Plath's continuing joys in her relationship with Keats came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the na\u00efve dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.\n\n_When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah?_ She asked herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not Keats. Keats was work. Noah was... well, what? Love?\n\nHe loved _her_. Did she love _him_?\n\nWas it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow? She wouldn't have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just a bit of swagger to her worldview.\n\nShe was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the micro-subjective.\n\nShe knew that down there, where distances were measured in microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows were bright false-color bacteria.\n\nShe knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things, unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they didn't look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of the armored oliphaunts from the _Lord of the Rings_ movies, except that they could jump a thousand times their own height.\n\nShe knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit, all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express, was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the wet folds of his brain.\n\nShe had not just seen these things on an image captured from a scanning electron microscope. She had _been_ there in her biots. She had seen them all with biot eyes that were as real to her as her own.\n\nEven now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers\u2014P1, P2, P3\u2014were in the vial she wore on a chain around her neck for safekeeping, but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual field. And if they ever began to go dark... then would come the madness she defied by taking the name Plath.\n\n_Down in the meat_.\n\nOnce you had gone down in the meat, the images could not simply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination, so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as they would look at m-sub.\n\nShe would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples; and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he ejaculated.\n\nIt was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never seemed to distract _him_ \u2014\n\nKeats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Plath said, and snapped back to reality. \"I was considering. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.\"\n\n\"Armstrong wouldn't come at us that way,\" he said. \"If they knew where we were, they'd deploy nanobots. There have been servants in and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning; there were opportunities for infestation.\"\n\n\"Or they could have targeted some of Stern's people and bounced the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two members of BZRK are, you try to _wire_ them, you don't try to kill them.\" She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word _BZRK_ , pronounced with vowels intact: \"Berserk.\"\n\nKeats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more gravy, and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky and rising from below to crush and\u2014\n\n_I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts_.\n\nToo easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be able to be with another human being without always picturing that other, stranger reality.\n\n\"Maybe it was something totally different,\" Noah suggested. \"Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we're just overreacting.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Plath said. \"But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We're supposed to be running things.\"\n\nKeats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. \"No, not we. You, Sadie.\" Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. \"You, _Plath_.\"\n\nShe could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.\n\nBut she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.\n\nShe wondered if she should tell him now.\n\nBut instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn't have time to worry about tending to Keats's ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.\n\nDriven.\n\nManipulated.\n\n\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7\n\nAnthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.\n\n_Nutella_\n\n_Beans_\n\n_Bread_\n\n_Pasta (store brand, nothing fancy)_\n\n_Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1\/2 pound)_\n\n_Cheerios_\n\n_2 oranges_\n\n_3 onions (the white kind)_\n\n_Three onions. The white kind_.\n\nThis was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To _school_!\n\n\"You don't want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That's most likely why you were let go.\"\n\n_Let go_.\n\n_Well, no, Mum, I wasn't exactly let go. I ran for my life\u2014flew for it, actually, all the way back to England\u2014after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn't because I couldn't conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings_.\n\nHe didn't say that to his mother, of course.\n\nHe walked down the cereal aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping cart. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.\n\nSmall, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.\n\nHe'd been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.\n\nA pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him as if he was invisible.\n\nHe'd had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She'd been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.\n\nTop of the world, that's where he'd been. But all that was gone now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs of wealth or future prospects. Why _would_ they look at him?\n\nHe rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that, entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of meat to one side, heading to onions.\n\nHe felt rather than saw that something had changed.\n\nInstinct. Some sense that was not quite sight\u2014sound, smell, or touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to look he knew he was being followed. His speed was being matched.\n\nHe walked slower, stopped, pretended to admire the lamb; but the presence did not pass him by.\n\nHe moved suddenly toward the produce department, walking too fast, and he felt his pursuer keep pace.\n\n_Well_.\n\n_Well. Ah. So_. So was it cops or killers?\n\nHis heart was heavy in his chest. His feet dragged a bit, just the toes scraping on the tile. Shit, he'd just started to think maybe he was out of it, that maybe the Armstrongs would let him go. He'd given them a lot of good work, after all.\n\nIf not some hitman for the Armstrongs, was it police? Or even MI5?\n\nHe stopped in front of a bin of oranges and rested his hand on one, just feeling it. He liked oranges. Was this the last one he would see for a long while? Or the last one ever?\n\nHe turned, resigned, not seeing the point really in continuing to pretend. And there was his pursuer.\n\nNow surely _that_ was not a cop or MI5.\n\nThe man was well dressed, almost like a banker. Far too elegant looking to be a cop. He was a black man, tall, thin, with glasses, and when he met Anthony's eyes he smiled. Like an old friend. At first Bug Man felt himself relaxing, but no, no, that was a bad idea. A smile meant nothing.\n\n\"You want something?\" Bug Man asked. His voice was ragged. Maybe the expensive suit hadn't noticed.\n\n\"Anthony Elder?\"\n\nHe nodded. What would be the point in lying?\n\nWhat about running? He could surely outrun this man.\n\n\"Are you here to kill me?\"\n\nThe man was not surprised by the question. \"Not at this time.\" He smiled. \"But you will be taken for questioning by this time tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Haven't done anything.\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, you know better than that. People of our particular skin tone don't need to be guilty of anything to be questioned by the police, now, do we?\"\n\nBug Man moved a step sideways, edging along the oranges. He spotted the onions. The white ones.\n\n\"Met police will pick you up tomorrow, but of course it's not really for themselves. They'll turn you over to the Security Service, to MI5, for questioning.\"\n\nThe man moved closer so he could speak more quietly. He smelled of sandalwood and spearmint. Bug Man liked the cologne, didn't like the man belonging to it. He had a ridiculous urge to ask him whether it was available for sale here at Tesco.\n\n\"They will detain you on a secret warrant, and in all likelihood you will be given a chance to plead guilty so as to avoid a public trial. They'll put out a statement accusing you of something like embezzlement. Something safe for public consumption. They'll promise to let you out in a few years, and they would, really they _would_. Except that you'll have been gutted by some hardened lifer in your cell long before that. They'll make sure of that. If they don't, their cousins will\u2014the Americans.\"\n\nBug Man licked his lips. This was a threat, but not just a threat. This was the beginning of an offer.\n\n\"Whatever they want, the Twins, whatever they want, I'm still the best; I'm still fucking _Bug Man_.\"\n\n\"The Twins?\" The man made a crestfallen face, an act, a little show that he was putting on. Bug Man wanted to punch him. \"Oh, yes, the _Twins_. Well, Anthony, this is not really about them. I'm not able to tell you anything, really, but I can tell you that I don't work for the Twins.\"\n\nBug Man took a breath. He'd forgotten to do that. \"Who are you, then?\"\n\n\"My name is George. George William Frederick.\"\n\nHe said it as if it should mean something to Bug Man. And it did ping some distant, dusty strand of memory. But nothing meaningful. It was a name out of a different time, Bug Man felt.\n\n\"You slept through history, didn't you?\" George William Frederick said. \"That's a shame. History is everything important, really. In any case, I'm here because the surveillance team that has been on you for every minute of the last month is outside, in the parking lot, drinking coffee in paper cups and eating HobNobs, confident that you will soon emerge with your groceries. They'll follow you home, as per their orders, log your movements, and go off shift at eight p.m. They won't bother with physical surveillance after that; they'll be watching on the cameras they have in your home. Yes. So, as it happens, this would actually be an opportune time for you to follow me, out of the back of the store, to a waiting car.\"\n\nBug Man immediately ran through some of the more embarrassing things that would have been observed by cameras in his home. But he was mostly over the concept of privacy. The Twins had had cameras on him from the start of his employment by them.\n\n\"And then?\" Bug Man asked.\n\nGeorge-With-Three-Names shrugged. \"All I can tell you is that an Armstrong hit team is also looking for the right moment to shoot you, and tomorrow MI5 will bundle you off to prison where they or the Americans will do for you, and the third alternative, the one I'm offering you, is preferable.\"\n\nBug Man knew the man was speaking the truth. Or at least believed himself to be telling the truth.\n\nGeorge-With-Three-Names. George William Frederick. The penny dropped.\n\n_George III_.\n\n_The mad king_.\n\n\"You're BZRK.\"\n\n\"Think what you like,\" George said with a self-satisfied smile. \"I'm your way out.\"\n\n\"You _are_ going to kill me.\" Bug Man was proud that he managed to get the words out with only a minor tremor in his voice.\n\nGeorge tapped his waist. There was something there that was no belt buckle. \"If that were my instruction, you'd never know about it. By the way, you're not Roman Catholic, are you?\"\n\n\"What? Church of England, I guess. But\u2014\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nBug Man let it go. The point was, this wasn't an assassination. \"Will I have time to say good-bye to my mother?\"\n\nGeorge shook his head.\n\n\"Good,\" Bug Man said. He nodded, smiled for himself alone, and thought, _Okay then: back in the game_.\n\n# **[ARTIFACT]**\n\nAn exchange of texts\n\n**Plath:** Back in NYC. What is our mission?\n\n**Lear:** Destroy AFGC.\n\n**Plath:** What does that mean?\n\n**Lear:** Find and kill the Twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.\n\n**Plath:** I'm to do this with 7 people?\n\n**Lear:** You had your vacation. Besides there is an 8th.\n\n**Plath:** Caligula?\n\n**Lear:** I've always found him very useful.\n\n[Long pause]\n\n**Lear:** Time is short, Plath.\n\n**Plath:** Short why?\n\n**Lear:** AFGC very close to developing remote biot killer. Nature unspecified. Days not weeks until it is weaponized. You must strike before then. Ticktock. Death or madness.\n\n# **ELAPSED TIME**\n\nThe Gateway Hotel could not be repaired or rebuilt. The blowtorch heat of the burning LNG carrier ship had burned everything capable of burning. Natural gas burns at temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 3,6000 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's enough to incinerate furniture, carpet, and paint. It's also enough to melt glass and soften structural steel. A human body is a marshmallow.\n\nThe Gateway was a black, bent, crumpled horror that reminded some observers of a very old woman, bent by arthritis, in the act of falling to her knees.\n\nBuildings on either side had burned as well. Buildings farther back in Kowloon, where the gas had rolled through the streets before catching fire, were burned. Some had exploded, simply popped open like rotting fruit. Kowloon Park was a field of ash.\n\nThe Chinese government had not been able to conceal the extent of the disaster. It was visible from satellites and from the decks of passing ferries and cruise ships. This was Hong Kong, not some provincial outpost. The whole world passed through Hong Kong.\n\nThe government had kept a faithful account of the dead and presumed dead. Now over a thousand. The \"presumed dead\" included those so badly burned that no more than a few bones with the marrow boiled away had survived and could not be identified.\n\nDivers were still pulling bodies out of the blistered and twisted hulk of the liquid natural gas carrier\u2014the ship dubbed the _Doll Ship_ \u2014that lay at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor. The Chinese government was nowhere near as forthcoming on this part. The official story was that it had been simple error on the part of the ship's captain. He was dead: he wasn't going to argue.\n\nNo one spoke openly of the bodies of children found blown apart. No one spoke of the fact that one of the ship's spheres, and possibly a second one as well (it was hard to tell), had never contained LNG but had instead been something very much like a human zoo.\n\nCrewmen who had managed to jump ship were picked up and spirited away to a camp in far-off Qinghai Province. A small number of British Royal Marines were held there as well. And twenty-four civilians, neither crew nor soldiers\u2014inmates on the _Doll Ship_ \u2014were being held at a small local hospital that had been taken over by the Ministry of State Security. The MSS had drafted a dozen radiologists, neurosurgeons, and pathologists, snatched them up from cities all over China and bundled them off to Qinghai.\n\nInterrogations were under way.\n\nMedical investigations were under way.\n\nNeither was terribly gentle.\n\nChinese premier Ts'ai attempted to shut down the camp, ordered all survivors to be executed and their bodies cremated. Which would have worked had not the governor of Qinghai Province slow-walked that order. He smelled a rat.\n\nTwo weeks after the Hong Kong disaster, the MSS briefed certain members of the Central Committee on their findings from the survivors. And on Ts'ai's unusual and very out-of-channels effort to shut down the investigation.\n\nTwenty-four hours later the Chinese official news agency reported that Premier Ts'ai had suffered a stroke. He was getting the best care available, but doctors were not hopeful.\n\nIn fact, the top of the premier's head had already been sawed off. His brain had been carefully scooped out of his skull, flattened and stretched, frozen, cut into handy one-centimeter sections, and was now being examined minutely under a scanning electron microscope.\n\nThey found numerous strands of extremely fine wire\u2014nanowire\u2014in segments as long as three centimeters, and a dozen tiny pins.\n\nSimilar wire had been found in the brains of survivors of the _Doll Ship_.\n\nA careful\u2014but less drastic\u2014autopsy of President Helen Falkenhym Morales found no evidence of brain abnormality. Then again, the single nine-millimeter bullet she had fired into her own head had bounced around a bit inside her skull and made a mess of the soft tissue.\n\nThe FBI director, a man who would not have fared well himself if his brain had been carefully examined under an electron microscope, pushed for the conclusion that the suicide was a result of depression following the death of her husband.\n\nFBI forensic experts produced a report stating that the videotape purported to have been taken (by means unknown) directly _through_ _the president's eye_ \u2014the videotape that seemed to suggest that President Morales had beaten her husband to death\u2014was a clever fake.\n\nThere was obviously no way for the images to be real. Presidents did not commit murder.\n\nThen again, they didn't make a habit of committing suicide, either. But that undeniably happened.\n\nIn a bit of historic irony, the authoritarian state of China discovered the truth, while the American democracy had thus far missed it.\n\nBut there were other investigations under way. A joint committee of Congress. An independent blue-ribbon panel featuring a former secretary of defense, a former senator from Maine, and the chairman, a former president of the United States.\n\nOnly one of them had thus far been compromised by busy little creatures laying wire.\n\nMinako McGrath, who had been kidnapped and taken aboard the _Doll Ship_ , was one of the few to escape entirely. With the help of an ex-marine, former gunnery sergeant Silver, who'd been aboard that floating horror show, she made her way back from Hong Kong to Toguchi, Okinawa, one step ahead of the Hong Kong authorities.\n\nBut she found some changes when she finally reached her home. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts were closed. Her Internet access\u2014in fact her whole family's Internet access\u2014was blocked.\n\nThen her mother was called in to see the commander of the local base where Minako's father\u2014himself a U.S. marine\u2014had been stationed before he was sent to Afghanistan and killed. She was told quite simply that if she could keep her daughter quiet, her family would be safe and her late husband's official military service record would remain unblemished.\n\nThere was no direct threat. Just that promise. Just the carrot. The stick was only implied. The general looked sick to his stomach going even that far, but marines obey orders, and it was clear that he was passing on an order that came from very high up the chain of command.\n\nHaving been saved by one marine, and honoring the memory of her father, upon hearing the ultimatum Minako nodded solemnly and raised a hand in salute.\n\n\"Semper fi,\" she said.\n\nA week later Minako's mother, the police chief of their little town, was offered a civilian contract to work in security on the base, at a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month increase in pay.\n\nMinako got a Vespa motor scooter.\n\nAnd from that point on Minako discussed the _Doll Ship_ only with her marines-supplied therapist, who duly shredded all records of her visits and prescribed Prozac.\n\nDespite the separate efforts of the Chinese and U.S. governments, Google searches for various conspiracies were up in the last month.\n\nWay, way up.\n\nPossible suspects included the Illuminati, the Church of Scientology, Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bilderberg Group, Iran, China, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, Ag\u00eancia Brasileira de Intelig\u00eancia, Direction Centrale du Renseignement Int\u00e9rieur, the Russian Federal Security Service, and, of course, space aliens.\n\nWith far fewer searches: the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.\n\nAnd with only a handful of searches, most as a result of accidental misspellings: BZRK.\n\nThere was no change whatsoever in searches for \"Lear.\"\n\n# **FIVE**\n\nPlath. That was her name again. Plath, not Sadie.\n\nShe'd been back in New York for just thirty-six hours, sleeping the first half of that.\n\nPlath was provided by the weather with a perfect disguise to move about the streets of New York. It was freezing and the faux-fur-lined hood of her coat along with superfluous glasses and her newly blonde hair made it very unlikely that anyone would recognize her.\n\nShe had taken a cab to the Tulip. The Armstrong headquarters was not a place where she could take any, even slight, risks of being recognized.\n\nBut she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.\n\nShe had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen the video. They'd had a unit on terrorism in school.\n\nThe Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the Freedom Tower.\n\nShe had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September 11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was, playing over and over in her mind.\n\nThe jets.\n\nThe initial explosions.\n\nThe spreading horror of billowing smoke.\n\nTwo hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more slowly of smoke and flame.\n\nThe awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out building fell.\n\n_Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated_.\n\nIt was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists. The Twins. Up there at the top floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight? She'd been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the concrete and haze of the city.\n\nA single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.\n\nHer breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was looking at her.\n\nUnder her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-motion explosion.\n\nLystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplating destruction, _yeah, yeah, yeah_. Destruction. She was envisioning it already.\n\n_That was quick. But then, if you want great results, hire great people. Even if they are a wee bit nuts_.\n\nLystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drinkable coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm, that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become complacent.\n\nTime for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be born. Even the greatest game was eventually played out. When you had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4...\n\n\"Yeah. Yeah.\"\n\nShe shivered\u2014it was cold\u2014and tossed the cup into a trash can. Her newest tattoo was itching, and she scratched her rib cage discreetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what, fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they _would be_ , in this new game Lystra was creating.\n\nShe acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess. Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.\n\nNo, the truth never scared Lystra.\n\n_Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon a time, yeah, but no longer_.\n\nShe closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you got only from seeing things firsthand.\n\nShe remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bedsheet. Crazy people did crazy things. _Back in the day, back in the old days, yeah_. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now _that_ was crazy.\n\nSad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.\n\nAnd then?\n\nAnd then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.\n\nThe idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.\n\nHe'd been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carnival shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks\u2014bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her\u2014and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.\n\nThe nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She'd seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.\n\nBack then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things: For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol, and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.\n\nLystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes\u2014but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.\n\n\"Yeah!\" Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.\n\nBut yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.\n\nEven a brother would have been welcome.\n\nInteresting thought.\n\n\"A game within a game?\" Lystra muttered under her breath.\n\nWould it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.\n\nIt would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.\n\n\"Minions,\" she said, and laughed. \"I need minions. Yeah.\"\n\n# **SIX**\n\n\"No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.\" This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. \"He may never be ready.\"\n\nPlath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy's level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.\n\nThey were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr. Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age\u2014perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties\u2014but to Plath, at least, she seemed beautiful, sophisticated, and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must come only with some age and some experience.\n\nAnya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.\n\nShe understood all that, but Dr. Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya's former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more... stable... than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent's recovery.\n\nBut Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that's what she was. Worse yet, she'd always been rich. She'd had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because _there_ was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.\n\nBut Keats was totally loyal to Plath.\n\nBilly was a child. Wilkes was... well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.\n\nPlath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya's smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.\n\nIn the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr. Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.\n\nThey had obtained it through numerous cutouts and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.\n\nJust twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cutouts had been just a bit less well managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath's money.\n\nThe _fake_ safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within\u2014TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn't stand up to in-depth surveillance, but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.\n\nLet Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Numbers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else, believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.\n\nPlath, Keats, and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor where Nijinsky, Vincent, and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent on the couch. Plath stood, leaning back against a walnut Restoration Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich, and looked over her sparse troops.\n\nNijinsky was a bit less elegant and less well turned out than he'd been just a few weeks ago.\n\nWilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes\u2014named for Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King's _Misery_ \u2014was a tough chick, a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of down-swept flame tat under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened when Wilkes lost it.\n\nBilly the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong survivors.\n\nKeats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was; in fact, she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.\n\nShe took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she'd intended, and she wondered if people guessed that she'd been daydreaming.\n\nFinally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He'd been their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.\n\nThe biot\u2013human link was still not understood. The mechanism that allowed the human \"parent\" to see through biot eyes, to move biot limbs, and to be so intimately connected with them that losing a biot was like some kind of psychic lobotomy\u2014that mechanism, that _force_ , was not understood. In fact, it had been a complete surprise when first discovered at McLure Labs by Plath's father, Grey McLure, and had remained a mystery to him to the day he had been murdered in spectacular fashion.\n\nThe effects of the brain\u2013biot connection were plain to see. Vincent, who had once been so dead calm, so in control, had fallen into madness. And the only way to save him had been with crude intervention down in the folds of his brain.\n\nPlath herself had done the job. She had delivered acid to sites in Vincent's brain that stored specific memories of his dead biot. She had watched through her own biot eyes as Vincent's brain cells burst and boiled and died, erasing memory, thoughts, ideas, and perhaps some piece of his personality.\n\nAfter that Vincent had clawed his way back from madness. He had gone back into battle against Bug Man, and he'd won. But that did not mean Vincent was _back_.\n\n\"Okay,\" Plath said. \"It's been a month. Things have calmed down a bit. Where do we stand?\" When no one volunteered an answer, she nodded and said, \"Jin?\"\n\nNijinsky turned cold eyes up to her. He had not fared well in the last month. While Keats and Plath were both tanned and rested\u2014well, as rested as they could be, given the fact that their boat had been blown up\u2014Nijinsky had become increasingly frayed and ragged. His clothing was no longer perfect. His hair was at least two weeks past its optimum. He was still by any normal standard a spectacularly handsome, well-turned-out person, a tall Chinese American with a graceful way of moving and a sad, sympathetic smile.\n\nThe changes would be visible only to someone familiar with his previous level of perfection. But the signs were there, even more visible in the red-rimmed eyes, the stress lines above the bridge of his nose, the grim tightening around his mouth. And of course the sour smell of a body oozing alcohol residue through its pores.\n\n\"It's been a busy month,\" Nijinsky said. \"Sorry you two missed it.\"\n\n\"Lear agreed I should disappear for a while,\" Plath said calmly. \"I'm known.\"\n\n\"Yes. And Lear agreed that I should get stuck with the shit work.\" He shrugged and tried on an insincere smile. \"Well, here's where we stand. Vincent is about seventy percent.\" He looked at Vincent and asked, \"Fair?\"\n\nVincent nodded. His cold gray eyes focused, then lost focus. \"Fair.\"\n\n\"Billy is thoroughly qualified for missions down in the meat. He has two biots. Wilkes is still Wilkes, God help us all.\" This he said with a certain wry tone that was very much the old Nijinsky.\n\n\"What else could I be?\" Wilkes asked, framing her face with her hands.\n\n\"Anya remains a bitch,\" Nijinsky said, trying to sound jokey about it and not succeeding. \"The president is dead, long live the new guy, President Abbott. The country is freaked out, but we are still not under surveillance\u2014as far as we can tell. The Chinese premier just had a very sudden illness, and we know he'd been compromised by the Armstrongs. So, it's possible the Chinese government is... aware.\"\n\n\"And Burnofsky?\" Keats asked.\n\nNijinsky shrugged. He looked away, not avoiding Keats, but seeing that weirdly colored window inside his brain. He had a biot resting on Burnofsky's optic nerve. The biot was tapped into visual input from Burnofsky's right eye.\n\n\"At the moment he's working,\" Nijinsky said. \"I can't make out what's on his monitor\u2014I have a pretty good tap, but you know what it's like.\"\n\nThey all, all except Anya, did know what it was like. Tapping an optic nerve was a bit like watching an old-fashioned TV in a thunderstorm back before cable, when the picture could be wildly distorted and never entirely clear.\n\n\"Has he been in touch with the Armstrong Twins?\" Plath asked.\n\nNijinsky nodded. He tapped a cigarette out of some exotic, foreign pack and lit it. \"Four days after that ship went down in Hong Kong. By the way, Lear is sure that was an Armstrong thing. Some kind of messed-up human zoo. By that point I was done wiring Burnofsky. I sent him back in. But nothing face-to-face. Wherever the Twins are now, they aren't talking to Burnofsky in person; it's all video link.\"\n\n\"Do you have a biot in his ear?\" Plath asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThere was pause while everyone absorbed this. It meant Nijinsky could see what Burnofsky was seeing, but could not hear what he was hearing.\n\n\"Why not?\" Plath asked, deceptively quiet.\n\nNijinsky blew his smoke toward her. It was not a subtle gesture. He resented being demoted and didn't mind if she knew. \"Because I was using my other biots to train Billy, here.\"\n\n\"For a month?\"\n\nNijinsky shook his head. \"Fuck you, Plath.\"\n\nKeats's eyes narrowed angrily, but Plath remained cool. \"A lot has been asked of you, Jin. And you've endured a lot.\"\n\n\"Endured,\" he said, sneering at the word. \"Yes, I've endured a lot. A lot of enduring has gone on.\"\n\n\"Why not have Anya generate a new biot and use it?\"\n\nBilly and Wilkes were watching the back-and-forth between the two, like spectators at a tennis match. Vincent was elsewhere in his mind. Keats was keeping still, irritated by Nijinsky, but accepting that this was up to Plath to handle.\n\n\"Why not generate a new biot?\" Nijinsky mocked. \"When you play Russian roulette, you put one bullet in the gun and spin the chamber. _Click_.\" He mimed shooting himself in the head. \"A one-in-six chance you're dead. Two bullets? That's a one-in-three chance. Three? At that point it's fifty-fifty. You _know_ why not, Plath, so don't give me that hard look. Vincent barely survived the loss of one biot. Keats's brother is shackled in a loony bin for losing two biots. You want to hear what Burnofsky's hearing? Tell Wilkes to do it. Or do it yourself, Plath.\"\n\nPlath nodded. \"Okay. Fair enough.\"\n\n\"What are we doing?\" Anya asked wearily. \"What is this all about anymore? The Armstrong attempt to control the president is obviously ended. And it seems the same is true of the Chinese premier. The Twins are in hiding. Burnofsky has been wired and switched sides. Bug Man is gone. What are we doing? Are we playing a game? If so, what is our next move?\"\n\n\"They still have the technology,\" Plath said. \"They will try again. In some other way. They won't give up.\"\n\n\"How do we know that?\" Anya demanded.\n\n\"They found Keats and me. They blew up the boat that was coming to pick us up.\"\n\n\"Convenient, wasn't it?\" Nijinsky said.\n\nPlath didn't say anything to that, because she'd had the same thought. _Convenient_. If you wanted to push her and Keats back to New York. Say, after you'd ignored an order to get your ass back there already.\n\n_The punishment for desertion is death, isn't it? Or is that some Hollywood bullshit?_\n\nThe boat had blown up, but there was no follow-up. No attack on the beach, no attack on the compound they'd been staying in. No attack as they rushed to the airport and flew away from the island.\n\nNo attack waiting for them when they refueled in Kenya or Madeira, and no attack when they'd landed at Teterboro.\n\nHad a quick change of hair color somehow thrown off the kind of people capable of tracking her to Madagascar and then to \u00cele Sainte-Marie? Not likely.\n\nJust enough violence to send her running back to New York. Not as if someone was serious about killing her.\n\nLike someone wanted her back in the game.\n\n_Get back in the game_.\n\nThat had been the text from Lear. The one she'd ignored, because, why? Because she was Sadie McLure, that's why. Since when did she take orders? What was she, someone's butler suddenly? _Fuck you, Lear. I'm on a beautiful island with a beautiful boy who loves me and wears himself out trying to please me_.\n\nFor the first twenty-four hours after that she had felt liberated. Like maybe she had regained control of her life. But slowly her doubts had grown. What right did she have to blow off Lear? Lear was BZRK. Lear was the general, and she was a lowly lieutenant or whatever.\n\nAnd he'd been right, hadn't he, Lear? Right that she had to get back in the game? The Armstrong Twins seemingly still lived. The nanobot technology still existed. The liberty of all humanity was still in danger.\n\nThe Armstrongs still had to be stopped. Didn't they?\n\n\"I've heard from Lear,\" Plath said. She wasn't sure why, but she was reluctant to tell them. Maybe because once she said it she would have to take action.\n\n\"Did he mention whether he liked the whole blonde look you have going on?\" Wilkes. Of course.\n\n\"Lear says the Armstrongs have developed some kind of remote biot killer. Nature unknown. No other details. But...\" She shook her head ruefully. \"But his instructions are to destroy AFGC. Destroy their data in particular so this new technology doesn't go into use.\"\n\nLong silence. Much mute staring. Biots already faced a number of potential enemies, from the slow but irritating defenses of the body itself to the much more dangerous nanobots. But nanobots could be faced, fought, and, with luck and skill, killed. The idea of a weapon that could kill in some unfathomable way, in some way that did not even allow for a fight, was terrifying. It would be push-button madness.\n\nFinally, Nijinsky laughed, a low, slow sound weighed down by cynicism. \"Well, I'm going to use that word again. _Convenient_. We're all sitting here wondering why we're still playing this game, and what do you know? Turns out the bad guys have the means to drive us all insane and then enslave the human race.\" He lit a second cigarette and blew the smoke insolently at Plath.\n\nShe thought about telling Nijinsky to put it out. Show him that she was back and in charge.\n\nBut was she in charge? That was not clear.\n\nShe checked Keats. He was as dubious as Nijinsky.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said by way of acknowledging their doubts. \"Yeah. Convenient. But I guess unless we want a visit from Caligula, we'd better...\" She faded out, realizing what she was saying.\n\nIt was Anya who put it into words. \"In the Great Patriotic War\u2014what you call World War Two\u2014Russians had soldiers. And behind the soldiers they had NKVD. Secret police. If a soldier complained, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier failed, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier said, 'To hell with this, I am going home,' the NKVD shot him. And then they arrested the man's family and sent them to the gulag.\"\n\n\"Well, they _were_ fighting the Nazis,\" Billy piped up.\n\nAnya snorted a derisive laugh. \"Yes, murderous, evil Nazis. And who were the NKVD? Murderous, evil Communists.\"\n\n\"I'm confused. Which are we supposed to be?\" Wilkes asked.\n\n# **[ARTIFACT]**\n\n_A News Item_.\n\n**Wellington, NZ**. Wellington Police Superintendent Thomas DuPr\u00e9 gave a press conference today in which he discussed the recent suicide of two Wellington Police Department officers, and the attempted suicide by a third, who remains in care at Wellington Hospital.\n\n\"All three officers reported seeing strange visions about an hour prior to their suicide attempts. They variously described these hallucinations as involving bizarre insects and strange objects.\"\n\nSuperintendent DuPr\u00e9 said all three were tested for drugs but results were negative. \"It's possible that this tragic episode is simply a rather horrible coincidence.\"\n\nAll three incidents occurred nine days ago. The two successful and one attempted suicides were particularly brutal and appeared to be unplanned.\n\nThe investigation is ongoing.\n\nNothing was said publicly about the fact that the three officers, while on their way together to a soccer match a week earlier, had come across an overturned truck on the highway apparently headed to the port.\n\nThe truck had appeared to be carrying military grade weapons.\n\nHigher authorities were called in to take over the case. And the three policemen would have nothing further to say on the matter.\n\n# **[ARTIFACT]**\n\n_From Deadline Hollywood:_\n\nThe Academy announced today that Sandra Piper's name would remain on the ballot for the Best Actress Oscar. There had been suggestions (surely not from studios and press agents tied to competing actresses, heaven forfend!) that the actress's bizarre suicide would send a bad message to movie lovers and especially young fans. The statement reads in part, \"We believe that an Academy Award is given for the work, and only for the work, and should not be affected by the tragedy that took this great talent's life.\"\n\nComments:\n\n**QxT:** _Sandra Piper was a great lady and a great actress. Shame on those who are trying to prophet from her death_.\n\n**KeyAgrippa:** _She was nuts. That's who we want to show off as a symbol of Hollywood?_\n\n**Book Guy:** _Tragedy my ass. She was murdered. I don't know how. Yet. But I knew Sandra, we worked together on UTD. No way she killed herself, she had everything to live for_.\n\n# **SEVEN**\n\nSeven thousand, two hundred and fourteen miles south and a bit east from the watery grave of the _Doll Ship_ , where bloated, bleached-out bodies still fed indifferent fish, a very different sort of vessel was roaring across very different waters. The navy called it an LCAC\u2014landing craft air cushion\u2014a hovercraft some eighty-eight feet long and forty-seven feet wide.\n\nThis LCAC was no longer part of the U.S. Navy; it was privately owned, and it had been extensively modified with more efficient turbines, tougher skirts, and integrated deicing systems.\n\nIt was one of two in active service in Antarctic waters. The craft were used to carry large cargos ashore and, just as critically, to remove garbage, and to do so in weather that would swat a helicopter down onto the ice.\n\nEnvironmentalists were determined to keep Antarctica \"green,\" despite the fact that green was rarely seen on the ice.\n\nThe LCACs shuttled back and forth between shore and a refurbished navy-surplus amphibious assault ship now called the _Celadon_. Celadon being a shade of green. (Her sister ship was the _Shamrock_.) The LCACs were the _Jade Monkey_ and the _Emerald_ , again, shades of green. But the LCACs were in fact painted white and gray with splashes of rescue-orange.\n\nThe particular LCAC arriving in a whirlwind of salt spray and noise was the _Jade Monkey_ , skippered by Imelda Suarez. Suarez\u2014no one called her Imelda\u2014had a four-person crew and a cargo of booze, diesel fuel, and a massive electrical generator covered by a tarp, as well as a climate-controlled steel container filled with potatoes, apples, fresh spinach, grapes, and oranges. The box was painted with the logo of Whole Foods, and indeed all the produce was organic.\n\nFor the old-timers the very idea that fresh fruit and meat could be almost (not quite) year-round was astonishing, and it caused quite a bit of grumbling about how easy things had gotten.\n\nIt was nearing summer in Antarctica, and there in McMurdo Sound the thermometer showed a pleasant twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The wind was a noticeable but manageable eighteen knots. The sun was shining. This time of year it shone pretty nearly all day. All in all about as pleasant as you could ask for at McMurdo.\n\nThe _Jade Monkey_ floated over the water and up onto gravel, its big black rubber skirts all puffed out and vibrating like a trumpet player's cheeks. Suarez powered down, and the vehicle came to rest with a disgruntled wheeze of engines and a long, slow fart as the air cushion bled out.\n\nImelda Suarez was twenty-eight years old, five feet seven inches tall, dark-skinned, weather-beaten but pretty in the right light. She had worked for Cathexis Inc., owner of the _Celadon_ and her two LCACs, for three years, two as skipper of the _Jade Monkey_.\n\nIt was grueling, brutal, often boring, but occasionally terrifying work. Suarez had never lost a cargo, she had never lost a crewman, and she had kept that spotless record by never underestimating the A-factor. The Antarctic factor. The capacity of the most alien of all continents to complicate or obliterate the schemes of _Homo sapiens_.\n\nAntarctica was always out to kill you.\n\nBut the advent of the Cathexis era had changed life on the ice. In the old days the bases that dotted the rim of the continent had been cut off for as much as ten months out of the year. Aircraft get a bit unsafe in high crosswinds. LCACs do, too, but these specially modified versions could make a forty-mile run from the _Celadon_ in all but the worst conditions\u2014and in emergencies, even then.\n\nAll of which was extremely useful, because McMurdo Base\u2014MacTown, as it was known\u2014was growing more rapidly than just about any place on Earth. There was oil under the ice and offshore. With the Middle East in turmoil even the greens admitted that oil exploration on the ice was a better option than fighting wars to maintain supplies from volatile countries.\n\nMacTown, which had once been full of nothing but scientists, academics, and support staff\u2014generally from cold lands like Alaska and Montana and Maine\u2014was now home to a whole lot of people from Texas and Louisiana. The same evolution was occurring at British, Russian, Aussie, Kiwi, Chinese, Japanese, Chilean, and Argentinean bases. The effort to locate oil and develop the technology to survive the harsh environment was big, well financed, and in a hurry. And they could afford oranges that cost fifteen bucks apiece to bring in from Wellington or Tierra del Fuego.\n\nSuarez stepped out of her cockpit, nodded at her chief who was in charge of matters from this point, stretched up onto her toes, hefted a rather heavy shoulder bag, and headed up the long gravel slope into MacTown. Solid ground, ground that was not bucking and vibrating like the deck of the _Jade Monkey_ , felt oddly uneven and unsteady. She headed toward the new admin building where Cathexis Inc. had a small wing of cubicles\u2014nothing but a bunk and an electrical outlet, really. This was her third trip of the day, and Suarez was required by company policy to grab a minimum six hours of sleep. LCACs did not want to be steered by sleepy pilots. LCACs steered by sleepy pilots had a tendency to flip over.\n\nShe was intercepted on her way up the road by a tall, not-bad-looking man with a full beard, sunglasses, and a big grin. Jim Tanner was Lockheed security. Lockheed ran McMurdo. But it was well known that Tanner was former Naval Intelligence. And it was widely assumed that he was the U.S. government's eyes and ears on the base. Or at least, one set of eyes and ears.\n\n\"Well, hello there, Suarez. Whatcha got in the bag?\"\n\n\"What, this bag?\" Suarez asked innocently.\n\n\"Wouldn't be contraband booze, would it?\"\n\nSuarez stopped, unzipped the bag, and pulled out a bottle of scotch. \"Huh,\" she said. \"I wonder how this got in there? And look, it has a twin. You here to help me destroy the evidence, Jim?\"\n\nAlcohol was sold at McMurdo, but it was also rationed. Nobody begrudged you a drink, but there were supposed to be limits.\n\n\"I would like nothing better.\" Tanner took one of the bottles, held it up to read the label. \"Ah, the Macallan Sixteen. You've grown and matured, Suarez. You have grown and matured.\"\n\n\"If you're nice to me and let me get to sleep eventually, I'll share.\"\n\nTanner handed her back the bottle, grinned, looked away a bit sheepishly, and said, \"Sadly, I am here in an official capacity.\"\n\nSuarez's eyes narrowed. \"Your _official_ official capacity? Or your _unofficial_ official capacity?\"\n\nHis smile thinned out. \"This will be a conversation that involves your signing a legal document promising not to disclose the nature of the conversation. The document in question is not a company document. It's a _company_ document.\"\n\nThe company was Lockheed. The _company_ was the CIA.\n\n\"What the hell did I just step in?\" Suarez demanded, no longer in a joking mood.\n\nTanner's office was tiny\u2014space was always at a premium in a place where Home Depot was ten thousand miles away. It was overheated, so neat that no piece of paper could be found, and seemed to have been furnished entirely with the kind of office furniture that a self-respecting Goodwill store would reject.\n\nThe document he had for her was on an iPad. If it had been printed out it would have taken up four pages. Pages full of threats and requirements and official language. The long and short of it was that if she spoke of this meeting to anyone not properly cleared for top secret or better, she would go to jail.\n\n\"I'm going to remind you that even though you have been separated from the Marine Corps, Lieutenant Suarez, the corps still owns you.\" Tanner turned the pad to her. She scribbled a fingernail signature and at his prompting spoke her full name to the camera.\n\n\"And now do we get to the reason for this cloak and dagger, _Captain_ Tanner?\"\n\nHe was behind the desk in the good chair, the one that swiveled. She had a steel-frame chair with the stuffing half blown out. The bag of booze was at her side on the floor.\n\n\"Cathexis Base,\" Tanner said.\n\n\"Okay. What about it?\"\n\nCathexis Base was a facility built by Suarez's corporate masters. It was used as a transshipment point, a storage facility, a rescue facility for the _Celadon_ and her sister ship. There were repair facilities for the LCACs there, as well as for the helicopters and planes Cathexis used on the ice.\n\n\"Well, let's start with this: Have you ever seen anything suspicious at Cathexis?\n\nNo, she had not.\n\n\"What about at the satellite facility. What do they call it? Forward Green? Good grief, sounds like a golf course.\"\n\n\"I've never been there.\"\n\nTanner nodded. \"Know anyone who's ever been there?\"\n\nSuarez shrugged. \"I imagine a lot of the support people have. Must have been to handle construction.\"\n\nTanner shook his head, and watched her. \"No. In fact, the crews have been kept almost entirely separate. There's very little crossover. There's Cathexis Base and its people, and there's Forward Green and its people.\"\n\nSuarez looked at him expectantly, waiting for some kind of clue. When all he did was look back at her, she said, \"So?\"\n\n\"So, it's odd.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nHe was an experienced interrogator and had mastered the trick of waiting. But Suarez had nothing to offer, so all she could do was wait as well.\n\nHe nodded as if he'd satisfied himself on some point, then leaned forward on his elbows. \"Anyone at Cathexis ever suggest you might want to try piloting a new kind of hovercraft? Something faster?\"\n\n\"Well, the navy already has\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about a piece of navy equipment.\"\n\n\"Then what _are_ you talking about, because I'm tired, I need sleep, and before that I need a drink.\" She was bouncing one leg, a habit when she was impatient.\n\nHe opened his laptop, hit a few keys, then turned it so she could see. \"The video is just seven seconds long.\"\n\nThe film was obviously taken from a great distance. It shook and wobbled. What it showed, or seemed to show, was a sleek, low-slung object shooting across the ice.\n\n\"Do you recognize that?\"\n\n\"Do I recognize what? Something going zoom across the ice?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"We did a bit of enhancement and a bit of informed speculation, and the best guess from Langley is that it's a hovercraft, quite small, so not designed for cargo. There appears to be a bubble canopy large enough for one, possibly two people. Speed in excess of a hundred and twenty knots. And it appears to be armed.\"\n\n\"Armed?\" That stopped the bouncing of her leg.\n\n\"Mmm. Armed. With a type of Russian missile, essentially an antitank weapon, although obviously it would work even better against a tractor or a Sno-Cat or a shelter.\"\n\nThe thing that came to her mind was obvious and a bit stupid. But she said it, anyway. \"Weapons are forbidden on the ice. Nothing beyond a couple of handguns for the security people.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Why would somebody need missiles? On some souped-up hovercraft?\"\n\n\"That's the question,\" Tanner agreed. \"Why would they? Speculate, Suarez.\"\n\nShe pushed back, tilting the hind legs of her chair. \"If it's as fast as you say, it would be tough to hit from the air. White on white, going one hundred twenty knots? You'd see a hell of an infrared signature, so if you went after it in an Apache you could use the thirty mil, but an Apache's top speed is one hundred fifty knots, so you don't have much of an edge in speed.\"\n\n\"I knew a good pilot like yourself would see it all clearly,\" Tanner said. \"A pilot with SEAL training, and right here close at hand. Let's have that drink, Suarez.\"\n\nShe hefted a bottle, unwound the capsule, and poured into paper cups. \"Am I going to need it?\"\n\n\"Lieutenant Imelda Suarez, I am informing you that pursuant to a special directive of the Department of Defense, you are hereby returned to active duty.\"\n\n\"Whether I like it or not?\"\n\nTanner raised his cup. \"Cheers.\"\n\n\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7\n\nSailing in the San Francisco Bay in blustery weather, Francis Janklow, the CEO of Janklow\/MediStat, was not as happy as he should have been. He loved his boat in the abstract, but now that he'd bought the damned thing for two million dollars he felt as if he had to use it. But the truth was, he was just not that crazy about sailing. Especially when the wind was up so that he was constantly drenched by a spray that ranged from cooling mist to fire hose.\n\nHis guests seemed to be having a good time, though. These were a senior state senator and the senator's much younger \"assistant,\" a rival CEO, a supposed painter whom Janklow's wife was sponsoring, and of course Janklow's wife.\n\nThe boat had been his wife's idea. According to her, you could not own a waterfront property on Belvedere Island and not also own a boat of some sort, and after all Janklow had sailed as a youth.\n\nAnd yet, Janklow thought glumly even as he affected many a grin in the face of the elements, he would much rather have been home with a spreadsheet on his screen and a scotch in his hand. Instead he was at the wheel, yelling instructions to the kid, Antonio, who sometimes crewed for a day.\n\nAnd also seeing things. Definitely seeing things. He frowned and peered off toward the Golden Gate, open water ahead, trying to figure out just what he was seeing.\n\n\"I think I'm seeing things,\" Janklow said. He forced a laugh. No one heard either the remark or the laugh.\n\nNo one heard him say that it was as if a window... no, two windows... had opened in his head.\n\nAntonio saw him stagger back from the wheel and raced back to take over.\n\n\"You okay, Mr. J.?\"\n\n\"I'm... Nah. Nah. Yeah. Oh, shit.\"\n\nAnd then suddenly Janklow was racing up the mast, hand over hand, like a much younger man.\n\nEveryone saw this. The state senator's assistant yelled something and pointed. All eyes turned to look at Janklow, now thirty feet up, his sparse hair flowing in a wind that was too strong for those below to make much sense of what sounded a lot like disconnected, wild ranting.\n\nAnd then Janklow fell. Although it looked very much as if he actually leapt.\n\nHe plunged straight down into the sea.\n\nPandemonium. All the passengers jumped up and began yelling to Antonio to _turn the boat around, turn the boat around_.\n\nBut sailboats are not so easy to turn around when under wind power. So first Antonio\u2014without help\u2014had to lower the sail and start the engine. Only then, a quarter mile away from Janklow, could they turn back and effect a rescue.\n\nJanklow could be seen. He was in the water, waving his hands wildly, but more as if he was a little kid splashing in the tub.\n\nAs the boat drew up alongside, the state senator had the presence of mind to throw a life vest to Janklow, while his wife berated him for being so careless.\n\nBut Janklow just laughed; a wild, manic sound that sent chills up his wife's spine. And then, pushing himself along the side of the boat and refusing all proffered hands, Janklow went to the stern, dove down, and came up with his face shoved straight into the churning propeller.\n\nIt would be listed as an accidental death, not a suicide.\n\n\"I'm looking at the spreadsheet right now,\" Lystra Reid said. She had a phone propped against her ear and a pad open before her. Tiburon police officers and California Highway Patrol detectives were milling around the marina of the Tiburon Yacht Club. They had taken statements from everyone on the Janklow boat. Lystra had little enough to say, and none of it useful, and the detectives had let her go.\n\nBut rather than take off immediately, Lystra savored a bourbon rocks and split her attention between the mild chaos of the investigation and the neat order of her spreadsheets.\n\n\"Yes, I am very much aware of some of my off-book expenses, and no, I won't enlighten you further, Tom. One of the reasons I don't take the company public, yeah, yeah, is because I like to spend my money without being second-guessed. It is, after all, mine.\"\n\nAt the age of nine, Lystra had been sent away. Her father had finally decided that he could not raise her properly. His own business was falling on hard times; the carnival business was fading fast. Her father's act\u2014he was a trick shooter and put on an impressive if threadbare show with guns, knives, and hatchets\u2014no longer drew enough of a paying crowd for the carny life to make much sense.\n\nHe'd sat her down and explained it all to her. She would be going to a good, decent family that would raise her properly, with school, and friends, and all of that.\n\n\"You won't be my dad anymore?\" She hadn't cried. She'd felt sick with betrayal, but she hadn't cried.\n\nHer father, his lined face half hidden in the gloom of the Louisiana dusk, had said, \"I won't be with you. I won't be seeing you, I... I have to find some way to make a living. But listen to me, Lystra. Listen to me. You're a very smart kid. And better than smart, you're determined. You'll do fine. And if you ever need me, really need me, life-and-death need, I'll be there.\"\n\n\"What about Mom? Is she dead?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said.\n\nShe knew he was lying. She couldn't recall the exact moment when it dawned on her that her father had killed her mother. But once the idea _had_ dawned, certainty soon followed.\n\nHer mother had been a bit of a party girl. That was the nicest way to put it. Lystra's mother liked a good time, and she had not found it in the life her husband gave her. She'd looked for comfort elsewhere. In booze, in drugs, in sex.\n\n_\"I know,\"_ Lystra had said. Nothing else. Just those two words.\n\nHer father had said nothing. The two of them just sat there on the broken-down lawn chairs. Then her father had poured two fingers of bourbon into a paper cup and handed it to her.\n\nGod, it had burned her throat, but she had swallowed it and not made a sound.\n\n\"Bad things happen in this life,\" he had said at last.\n\nLystra had held out her paper cup and said, \"More.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"That taste was enough. You're still a kid.\"\n\n\"You killed my mother. Now you're dumping me. Okay. That's all done. Yeah. Maybe I'll never see you again.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"But if I do, you'll do whatever I ask you to do.\"\n\n\"Will I?\" He'd seemed almost amused, but seeing the look in her eyes he had flinched, looked down, and finally poured her a second drink. \"I will,\" he had said, and there was a sacredness to that vow.\n\nLystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely bothering to crack a book. She wasn't just a smart kid; she was brilliant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless-but-never-bullied kid.\n\nBut at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walking through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity on the back of a man's neck until by sheer force of will she could make him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.\n\nHer father's voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels, sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl with the odd name of Scowler.\n\nShe never told anyone about the voices; they had universally warned her not to. _Yeah, don't tell anyone we're here, they'll lock you up. Yeah_.\n\nThen both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lystra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years, she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.\n\nThe police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the rear bumper and the two Reids.\n\n\"When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"I felt the impact, and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.\"\n\n\"Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That's your story. You're sticking to that?\"\n\n\"How can I do otherwise? It's the truth.\"\n\nNo, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?\n\nBut in the end the cops couldn't prove a thing.\n\nThere wasn't a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.\n\n\"She's a very difficult subject,\" he had reported. \"Hard to test. Her IQ is very high\u2014very smart, very quick\u2014so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she's concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.\"\n\nLystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an accident. Double indemnity, they called it.\n\nTwo million dollars. She'd been unable to touch it until she was eighteen, and at that time other family members had petitioned the court to examine her psychologically again.\n\nThe court had found her legally sane.\n\nThe voices in her head had congratulated her on the finding.\n\nOn her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she'd gotten her first tattoo. She'd told the tattoo artist, \"I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.\"\n\nThe tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.\n\nThe placement she'd chosen was strange. Her stepmother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her stepfather, also screaming, was beneath the other.\n\nOnce both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra, she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.\n\nBut they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr. Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, D.C.\n\nSo the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a midsize competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.\n\nLystra Reid bought the stricken company and brought in the best security people around to ensure that a similar fate would never befall her. The result was a medical testing company, Directive Medical, which had never suffered a successful break-in, while\u2014not so strangely\u2014security problems plagued her competitors.\n\nAt the age of twenty-four, Reid controlled a third of the independent medical labs in North America, as well as significant portions of other markets around the world.\n\nIt was amazing what you could learn from data mining the health records of more than two hundred million people worldwide. You could, for example, learn that the wife of a brilliant medical researcher named Grey McLure had a rare cancer. And you could learn that this McLure fellow was suddenly in a desperate search for living cell samples. And with just a bit more work you could discover that he was also looking for a wide range of animal tissue samples for a very secret project of some sort.\n\nLystra hung up the phone, indifferent really to the current spreadsheet drama from her office. It didn't matter. There was no future to worry about. She swallowed the last of the bourbon and stood up to stretch. The marina was nestled between Tiburon and the adjoining Belvedere Island. Unpretentious yet extremely expensive homes rose on a cute little hill to her left and up the longer, wooded slope of Belvedere to her right. Looking south through the forest of masts, she could see San Francisco. Fog was rolling out, revealing the city, all muted pastels and off-whites.\n\nIt was all in all a beautiful location, with sailboats and ferries and container ships passing by in review. A genteel, civilized, prosperous place.\n\nAnd all of it about to come to a terrifying end.\n\nIt had been good to watch Janklow go mad; he had annoyed her on more than one occasion. She wanted to get a few tastes of the madness out here in the real world\u2014before the final chapters, which would force her to hide out and watch it as well as she could via electronic means. The personal, real-world experiences would help her to enjoy the next step.\n\n\"All done?\" the waiter asked, coming to clean her table.\n\n\"Soon,\" she said.\n\n# **EIGHT**\n\nThe first thing Bug Man had asked was, \"Where are we?\"\n\nBug Man had flown on a private jet before. He wasn't indifferent to it, but he wasn't overly impressed, either. George had not told him where they were going but had retreated into a book, remaining sullen and uncommunicative.\n\nBug Man saw a city in the distance. It was all tan walls and terra-cotta roofs, a large blur extending far out in every direction, reaching beneath the jet with roads full of small cars.\n\n\"The former center of the Earth, once upon a time. The Eternal City,\" George had said.\n\n\"Yeah, which is what?\"\n\nGeorge sighed. \"Your education is deplorable. The Eternal City is a reference to Rome.\"\n\n\"Rome? That's like, Italy, right?\"\n\nGeorge managed not to roll his eyes, but only just. \"Yes, Italy, Bug Man. Pizza, pasta, wine, priests, fashion, Rome. The Coliseum,\" he added. \"Gladiators and all of that.\"\n\n\"I saw the movie,\" Bug Man said. \"Also, I played the game. Not a great game.\"\n\n\"No?\" The plane took a little lurch as a crosswind hit it. \"What makes a good game?\"\n\nBug Man had been much more sure of his ground on this topic. He didn't know much about history, but he knew games. \"A good game? That's one where you can't stop playing it, even when you're asleep. Whatever you have to do that takes you away from the game, all you're thinking about is getting back into it.\"\n\n\"Hard?\"\n\n\"It's not about hard. Yeah, it has to be challenging. Can't be so easy it's over in five minutes, right? But it's not just about hard; otherwise, you could play online chess or work a Rubik's cube, man.\"\n\nHe heard the grinding of the landing gear coming down.\n\n\"Why are we in Rome?\" Not that he was complaining. He'd been locked away for several days in a safe house in the emptied-out Lake District before George had come to retrieve him. He'd been about to lose his mind looking at rain falling on green hills.\n\n\"We need a good twitcher. A nanobot twitcher.\"\n\n\"Where'd you get nanobots? The people you work for don't do nanobots, and I am not doing any biot bullshit. I saw what that did to Vincent.\"\n\n\"Nanobots,\" George reassured him. \"We came across some, and a portable controller. Compliments of a former friend of yours.\"\n\n\"Burnofsky?\"\n\nGeorge laughed and didn't answer. He rolled into the nearest seat and motioned Bug Man to buckle up.\n\nBug Man didn't exactly miss Burnofsky. The old man was an unreliable, unpredictable, sometimes cruel degenerate. But he and Bug Man had played a great game. The greatest game Bug Man would probably ever play.\n\nGod, that was a depressing thought. Was it all downhill from here? He supposed that would depend on just what George here had in mind.\n\n\"What do you want me for?\" Bug Man asked, but the question was lost in the impact of tires on tarmac. The jet rolled down the taxiway to a waiting car.\n\nBug Man walked down the steps to the tarmac\u2014it was warmer out than it should have been for this time of year. Was Rome always warm? He had no idea. The sun was setting, and all he could see were featureless hangars and repair sheds. In the distance was a Fiat sign, and beyond that a billboard for what looked like a juice drink.\n\n\"I don't speak Italian,\" he said.\n\n\"You won't need to,\" George said. \"Get in the car.\"\n\nBug Man did not like that, the bossy tone. He needed to draw a line right here and now, before he was driven off to wherever. \"Tell me what we're doing here, dude.\" When George looked evasive, Bug Man held up one hand, cutting him off. \"No, man, now. Right here, right now. Enough playing around.\"\n\nGeorge nodded, as if expecting this. As if he'd have preferred to do it somewhere else, but okay, if his impatient young friend insisted.\n\n\"The Pope,\" George said.\n\n\"The Pope? The freaking Holy Father? _The_ Pope? What about the Pope?\"\n\n\"You know he's in Rome?\" The question was obviously insulting, spoken as it was with more than a trace of condescension.\n\n\"What's with the Pope?\"\n\nGeorge dropped the snarky look and got serious. \"You are wanted by MI5. A word from them and every other intelligence and police agency on Earth will be looking for you. And of course, the Armstrong Twins want you dead.\" He stepped closer, put his face right up close to Bug Man's face, close enough that Bug Man could have told you the man's toothpaste brand. \"But forget all of that, because we have a fellow named Caligula. A charming name, I'm sure you'll agree. He already knows your name. A single text from Lear to Caligula and your death is assured.\" He held up an index finger. \"I don't mean that you will _likely_ be killed. I mean that you will without the slightest doubt be killed. Caligula has never failed. _Never_.\"\n\nBug Man swallowed. He knew the name. He knew the reputation. And he did not like the fact that Caligula knew what he was about.\n\n\"As to what you are to do, Anthony 'Bug Man' Elder, you are to retrieve a sample. A few cells. That is all. And then you will be free to go. We won't protect you, but neither will we harm you. And you'll be paid. A hundred thousand pounds.\"\n\n\"Cells?\" Bug Man asked with a dry mouth.\n\n\"Cells. A tissue sample. From the Pope. And it must be done quickly.\"\n\n\"The Pope. Tissue samples.\" Bug Man let this sink in. George waited, expectant, curious to see whether Bug Man would put it all together.\n\n\"Jesus,\" Bug Man said. He let loose a short, sharp bark of a laugh. \"Jesus bloody Christ on a cross.\"\n\nGeorge got a dreamy look on his face. \"See, Anthony, control is so much easier when you don't require the victim to carry out complex actions. Reduce it to the binary and it's all more efficient and effective.\"\n\nBug Man nodded, seeing it\u2014and fearing it. \"You don't even need Caligula anymore. You just need a tissue sample.\"\n\nGeorge threw back his head and laughed, showing teeth that had had many encounters with dentists. \"I quite like you, Anthony. I'd have done this later, not here on the tarmac, but you're such a clever boy.\" He pulled a small plastic bag from the inner pocket of his jacket. From it he withdrew a vial and a Q-tip. \"I'll just swab the inner cheek, if you don't mind.\"\n\nBug Man did mind. He pulled away.\n\n\"Oh, it's far too late for that, Anthony. You're in. Like it or not. You haven't a friend in the world, and so many people want you dead. Turn and run and I'll let you go, but Caligula will get to you if the Armstrongs don't find you first. Now open wide.\"\n\nBug Man opened his mouth. George swabbed his inner cheek with the Q-tip and sealed it in the vial.\n\n\"We won't create the biots unless you make it necessary. You have Lear's word on that.\"\n\n_\"Lear's word,\"_ Bug Man said bitterly.\n\n\"You are not in a position to argue, Anthony. You are lost and despised and scheduled for destruction. And now, you are BZRK.\" He grinned and made an ironic power salute with his fist. \"Death or madness, kid. Death or madness.\"\n\nThe Starhotels Michelangelo didn't look like much from the outside; in fact, it looked like any number of the wearily functional, '60s-era buildings that deface Rome. Inside it was moderately posh, and Bug Man was hustled into a large suite with a balcony.\n\nThe balcony had a very nice view of the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica. (And a red-trimmed Total gas station in the other direction.) The walls of Vatican City were just four hundred feet away.\n\nThere was also a nice little restaurant serving\u2014unsurprisingly\u2014Italian food. The TV featured the BBC and CNN International as well as other non-Italian fare, and there was WiFi, but it was a bit slow.\n\nFrom here Bug Man could easily manage nanobots within Vatican City. But what he needed was a pathway. X to Y to Z to the Pope. And then back out with a dozen or so cells.\n\n\"Don't leave this room,\" George instructed. \"Except for lunch, which you will take downstairs in the restaurant. That's when the maids will come in and clean the room. They have to come in, or it will set off alarm bells down at the desk. Normal. Everything normal.\"\n\n\"I can't sit in here twenty-four\/seven,\" Bug Man argued.\n\n\"You can and you will,\" George said flatly. \"Order all the in-room movies you like. But don't draw attention to yourself. Italian police may not be geniuses, but let's not give them a chance. Right?\"\n\nThat was a depressing reminder. When would he be free to walk out in the world without being afraid? Maybe never. But never was a long time, and Bug Man was an optimist.\n\n\"So what's my path?\"\n\n\"Path?\"\n\n\"How do I get from here to there?\"\n\nGeorge sat down in the easy chair. Bug Man stood looking out through the balcony's sliding glass door.\n\n\"We have access to the wafers used for the Pope's communion.\"\n\nBug Man snorted. \"Are you nuts?\"\n\n\"Is it a religious objection, because\u2014?\"\n\n\"It's an objection over the fact that the mouth is not a point of entry unless you want to end up riding an infallible papal turd out the far end.\"\n\nGeorge shrugged dismissively. \"Surely there's some way to\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you ever seen a mouth down at the nano level? It's about as big as a valley, and it's full of massive boulders chomping, plus a tongue and spit and wind. Maybe you can grab onto a tooth and get safely up under the gums, but I'm not trying it.\"\n\n\"All right, there's a second way. We have access to a person who has an audience with the Pope on Tuesday. It's traditional to kiss the papal ring. Does that work for you?\"\n\n\"I'm still sitting out there on a lip hoping this dude doesn't get nervous and lick them.\"\n\n\"It's a woman, and she's not the nervous type.\"\n\n\"A woman? Who?\"\n\n\"Her name is Lystra Reid. Owns some clinical testing company or other. Directive Medical? Rich American.\" He didn't seem to approve of rich Americans. \"She owns medical labs and such. A lot of them. And she's made some big contributions to an African mission the Pope is fond of.\"\n\n\"Is she one of your people?\"\n\n\"No. But her maid has debts, and we have money. So we can get the maid to place the biot... sorry, nanobots in this case... on Ms. Reid. You then merely have to be on her fingertips when she takes the Pope's hand, or on her lips when she kisses the ring. Then it's grab a sample and find your way out.\"\n\nA loud guffaw erupted from Bug Man. He turned to look at George, feeling that he had the better of him for the first time. \"You don't know much, do you? What do you think? My nanobots walk back here to the hotel? It's only a few hundred yards, maybe, but that's a hell of a long walk when you're two hundred microns long. A nanobot can't even see objects at much distance. The optics are calibrated for work down in the meat, so I wouldn't know where it was and where to make it go, even if we had a month or so to walk it back here.\"\n\n\"We'll find a way,\" George said, and yawned.\n\n\"Oh, will we...\"\n\nIt was meant to be sarcastic dismissal, but George didn't take it that way. He clapped his hands once as if drawing the scene to a close. And in fact, he did draw the scene to a close, by leaving behind a baffled, worried\u2014but also excited\u2014Bug Man.\n\nPlath and Keats arrived at the alleyway door of the McLure building after much skullduggery that made them both feel like spies. They were reasonably sure they hadn't been followed.\n\nThey were ushered into a private elevator and whisked to the twentieth floor. It was a bit of an old-home week for Plath, not all of it good. She'd been in and out of this building since childhood, but her last visit had begun with Anya creating Plath's biots and ended in a massacre between McLure security men, AFGC hired hands, and Caligula. Needless to say, Caligula had come out on top.\n\nMr. Stern met them in his office then led them down a guarded hallway to an unmarked door.\n\n\"So, how are you adjusting to being back in New York?\" he asked them both.\n\n\"I liked the island better,\" Keats said.\n\n\"I can imagine. Well, let me show you what we have.\" Stern slid a keycard and opened the unmarked door. Inside was just a room with half a dozen workstations, each focused on a large monitor. The ambient light came from the monitors, the keypads with keys outlined in light, and softly glowing touch screens.\n\nIt had the feeling of a room that had just been emptied of people. Plath touched a coffee cup and felt that it was still warm. Stern had emptied everyone from the room for greater privacy.\n\nHe sat down and Plath and Keats pulled up chairs.\n\nStern tapped a few keys, then switched to a touch screen.\n\n\"You asked me for what we have on the Tulip, and specifically whether there's a data center,\" he said as the image of that strange building appeared. \"This is the Tulip. This is a photo, obviously, taken from across the street. And this\"\u2014he swiped the screen\u2014\"is the heat signature using infrared.\"\n\nThe skyscraper was now a sort of layer cake of red, purple, and blue\u2014mostly red.\n\n\"Of course we had to wait until the building was in shadow so we didn't just pick up reflected sunlight,\" Stern explained. \"We took three readings, three different days, and this is the composite heat signature. This\u2014\"another swipe\u2014\"is the same building but shot from the north. And this is from the east. We don't have a westerly view, but we have a high degree of confidence that these heat signatures are persistent and not just one-time things.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Plath said, making a puzzled face at Keats, who was looking intently.\n\n\"There's a lot of variation by floor,\" Keats said.\n\n\"Oh, obviously,\" Plath said, with just a little sarcasm.\n\n\"But it's all centrally air conditioned, yes?\"\n\n\"It is. Normally,\" Stern said with unmistakable pride. \"But we turned off the AC. We risked using our back door into their computer network and reset the thermostat overnight. It takes a while for the system to catch up when it's turned back on, and in the meantime we could get a picture of what's being done and where.\"\n\n\"Can you show the temperature readouts?\" Keats asked.\n\nStern winked at Plath. \"This one's smart.\" He tapped a few keys, and numbers popped up beside each floor. \"You get a clearer picture off this data.\"\n\n\"One floor is far hotter.\" Keats used his finger to count the floors. The eighteenth, yes? Something is giving off a lot of heat.\"\n\n\"Servers, we believe,\" Stern said. \"They have their own emergency climate control, but it's not enough to disguise the heat signature when the overall air-conditioning system is down.\"\n\n\"So, the eighteenth floor is where they have their main computers. Their own personal cloud,\" Plath said.\n\n\"That seems likely,\" Stern said.\n\n\"Okay, how do we get to it and destroy it?\"\n\nThere it was again in Plath's head, that crystalline memory of the World Trade Center falling. It seemed almost sensuous. Had she just become used to it? Had she seen that imagery so often that it had lost its potential to shock and had now become almost balletic?\n\nStern sighed. He pulled up a different diagram of the building. \"Those are the elevator shafts. If you see those thicker areas there, that indicates an elevator stop, a door. If you look even closer, you'll notice there are none for the eighteenth floor. And I'll spare you the suspense and just tell you that the stairs, the emergency access, also doesn't open onto eighteen. There is a single stairwell connecting eighteen to seventeen. And there's a stumpy freight elevator that goes only from seventeen to eighteen, and nowhere else. Floor seventeen, in case you were wondering, is where AFGC security lives.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Keats said.\n\n\"Indeed. There are never fewer than ten security\u2014TFDs as we call them: Tourists from Denver, since that's the look they put on\u2014on that floor at any time. Another two dozen or so patrol the building or watch the entrances. They are all armed. They are mostly very well trained, many are former special forces or commandos. U.S. Marines, ex-Delta Force, Royal Marines, SAS, ex-Mossad... dangerous people.\"\n\n\"So, how do we do it?\" Plath asked. \"How do we get in there and destroy those servers?\"\n\n\"I believe what Mr. Stern is about to tell us is that we _don't_ ,\" Keats said. \"We'd have to get past ground-floor security, go up to seventeen where we would be shot at. A lot. Then somehow we'd have to reach the connecting stairwell and climb to eighteen, where we would have another fight on our hands, with forces coming from all over the building to attack our rear.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Now, we'd have some advantages\u2014we can use our network access to shut down elevators, block some doors, turn off cameras, that sort of thing. But to actually have a decent chance of success? We would need a hundred men.\"\n\nHe laid that last fact out like a poker player showing the ace that would win the pot.\n\nKeats snorted. \"A hundred men?\"\n\n\"In Midtown Manhattan. Imagine a hundred armed men appearing on the street outside the Tulip. There would be no way to avoid the police being involved, especially once bullets started to send plate glass falling down onto pedestrians.\"\n\n\"Isn't there some kind of... I don't know,\" Plath said, frustrated. \"Some Tom Cruise kind of thing? Crawling up the side of the building?\"\n\n\"The shape of the Tulip, with that suggestive bulge at the top, means that's physically impossible, even if we were insane enough to try such a stunt.\"\n\nStern turned away from the monitor with an air of finality, but Keats leaned past him and pointed at the screen. \"Did you see this? Eighteen isn't the only floor that's shut off from elevators. This is, what? Thirty-four, yes?\"\n\nStern spun back and peered closely at the monitor. \"I believe you're right. But the heat signature is quite average on thirty-four, so that's not our server farm.\"\n\n\"No,\" Keats agreed. \"But it's _something_.\"\n\n\"In the end, as you can see, the building is effectively impregnable. Not that we would ever have participated in such a thing, anyway, but just so that you know: that server farm cannot be taken out by direct attack.\"\n\n\"Which means our friend Lear has ordered us to do something impossible,\" Keats said.\n\nPlath looked troubled and uncertain. But she finally stood up, took Stern's hand, and thanked him.\n\nBack on the street Plath said, \"So why did Lear tell us to do the impossible?\"\n\nKeats had no answer to that.\n\n_Unless, of course, it isn't impossible_.\n\nIn Plath's mind the towers fell.\n\n# **BRAZIL**\n\nLystra Reid was nowhere near when the president of Brazil was discovered naked and babbling on a street in S\u00e3o Paulo, apparently collecting dog feces in a Gap shopping bag.\n\nThe president was taken to a hospital, where no explanation could be found for his condition. He was diagnosed first as suffering a breakdown as a result of stress and overwork. But it soon became clear that this was no mere nervous breakdown but a complete psychotic break.\n\nHe had gone mad.\n\nA solemn vice president assumed the office and attempted to reassure a worried nation. But halfway through her speech she appeared to become distracted.\n\nThere were, she said..., \" _Bugs_.\"\n\nAnd soon after she began to weep and curse violently, and from there began to scream and had to be taken away by her chief of staff and security personnel.\n\n# **LOS ANGELES**\n\nThe Los Angeles County coroner, Dr. Baldur Chen, issued two different reports on the death of actress Sandra Piper. One was very thorough and public and reached the obvious conclusion: suicide.\n\nThe second was a report prepared with help from an agency in Washington. That agency sent its own pathologist to \"assist.\" This second pathologist focused on an exceedingly careful examination of the actress's brain. Dr. Chen had never seen an autopsy that involved centimeter-by-centimeter microscopic investigation of the brain tissue.\n\nIt would have taken a much more obtuse man than Dr. Chen to fail to recognize that the agency pathologist was looking for something very specific.\n\nBoth pathologists signed off on a second, eyes-only report that dealt with this second, microscopic examination. The conclusion was that there was no evidence of nanotechnology present.\n\nDr. Chen was required to sign an official secrets document and was solemnly warned that he would go to a federal prison if he revealed the existence of this second report.\n\n# **NINE**\n\nThe Twins arrived back in New York with no more fanfare than Plath and Keats. It had been expensive, but crossing into the U.S. without a passport was possible. Not impossible. Not with enough ready cash.\n\nThey had been helped into their specially built shower, then slept for many hours until Jindal had them awakened as per their orders.\n\nCranky, but relieved to be home again where the environment had been shaped to their needs, they drank coffee, ate pastries, and sat in their tent-size bathrobe while Jindal gave them the rundown. This program and that business.\n\n\"We don't care about the P and Ls,\" Benjamin snarled after a few minutes of spreadsheets. \"Do you think we give a damn about long-term profits? Have you found BZRK?\"\n\nJindal licked his lips and rocked back on his heels. He always stood in their presence. \"No, sir. Thrum's lead took us up a dead alley. She's beginning to suggest that she's being played.\"\n\n\"Played? Hannah Thrum?\" Charles made a dubious face.\n\n\"She thinks, and sirs, I agree, maybe, that Sadie McLure and the McLure chief of security are laying a false trail to\u2014\"\n\n\"We're being played by a _teenager_?\" Charles was usually the calmer brother, but this insulted his intelligence.\n\nBenjamin slapped the table with his palm. \"If we can't find them, we can still go after their allies. This chief of security. His whole department.\"\n\nJindal started to smile, almost as if he thought it was a joke. Then his smile faded. \"Sir?\"\n\nBenjamin glared at him. \"Never mind. Not your sort of work. No. No, get Burnofsky in here.\"\n\nJindal stiffened. He had kept Burnofsky at arm's length, suspecting, suspecting very damned strongly that the genius had been compromised by BZRK.\n\n\"Are you sure you want\u2014\"\n\n\"Get him. And get out.\"\n\nBenjamin remained silent a while, judging his brother's mood. Charles, he concluded, was frustrated, but not yet ready to accept that they were entering a new phase. Charles did not yet understand that they were _losing_. In fact may already have lost.\n\nCharles still half believed the silly cult they'd financed, Nexus Humanus, was of some use. He still seemed to think that the work of their remaining twitchers\u2014no great prodigies among them\u2014was just marking time, doing damage control.\n\n\"You're still trying to hide,\" Benjamin said aloud at last. \"Our whole life, you always wanted to find a way to hide what we are.\"\n\n\"What we are?\" Charles said a bit pompously. \"What we are is two great men, who have\u2014\"\n\n\"We are freaks,\" Benjamin said, but not angrily. \"Everywhere except on the _Doll Ship_. They've taken that from us. BZRK, the intelligence people, the police, all of them, all the forces of _the normal_. They've destroyed the one, small place where we could be. Just... be.\"\n\n\"We have this place, still,\" Charles said.\n\n\"Our cage. Our gilded cage.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Charles admitted. Then he heaved a sigh. \"The tide has turned, has it not, brother?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Benjamin said. He reached awkwardly across their body to pat his brother's chest. It was as much physical affection as they could deploy. You could not hug a man who was attached to you. \"The tide has turned. The governments have become aware. In secret we had a chance. But secrecy is impossible now. They will come for us, and they will take us. They'll put us on display. They'll call it a trial, but it will be a carnival freak show. And then they'll put us in a cell until we die.\"\n\nThe angled mirror that let them look in each other's eye revealed that Charles was crying.\n\n_So_ , Benjamin thought. _Perhaps he sees at last_.\n\n\"You were too softhearted, Charles. Always. You thought you could improve them, as we did on the _Doll Ship_ , and yes, it was a magnificent dream, brother. But we now face Sodom and Gomorrah, and no righteous man is to be found to justify their salvation.\"\n\nThe silence that followed was long.\n\n\"What,\" Charles asked finally, sounding exhausted, \"would you have us do?\"\n\n\"We tried to gently show the world the error of its ways,\" Benjamin said. \"We tried the carrot. Now comes the stick. Now comes judgment. Now comes righteous wrath, brother. Or do we wait for our chance to star in their freak show?\"\n\n\"No,\" Charles whispered. Then louder. \"No, by God. Now comes Judgment Day. We hit them. We hit them so hard they can't stand up. And then we show them that we have worse still in store unless they submit.\"\n\nBenjamin smiled. The doorbell sounded. \"That would be the good Dr. Burnofsky.\"\n\nIn Rome, the Pope was working his way methodically through his daily audiences. He was a humble man despite the pomp of his ancient office, and he still, after many years in the job, felt a bit put off by the need to play the kingly role.\n\nFirst up there was the priest who had defied death threats to keep an inoculation program going in narco country. The priest was young and cocky and brave and offered to shake the Holy Father's hand rather than kiss his ring.\n\nThen the two Little Sisters of the Poor, one of whom had been attacked on a mission in Burma. The Pope rose from his seat to embrace them each in turn and to whisper words of encouragement. They left with tears streaming down their faces.\n\nThen the usual collection of businesspeople and media people, all of which would culminate in the Pope getting to meet a famously good-looking actor to thank him for his charitable work. As far as the Holy Father knew the actor was not a Catholic, but he was still a great talent and this Pope rather liked the conversation of talented people.\n\nA banker, a reporter, a union boss, an Argentinean politician (the Pope was not fond of politicians as a rule), a scientist who had discovered a way to raise sorghum crop yields dramatically, and last, before the actor, Lystra Reid, a youngish woman with tattoos peeking out from beneath her expensive clothing.\n\n\"Your Holiness,\" Lystra Reid said, and knelt, and kissed his ring.\n\nAnd at that moment four of Bug Man's nanobots leapt from her lips, slick with lipstick, to the cold metal of what was known as the Fisherman's Ring.\n\nA quarter mile away, Bug Man said, \"And that's how the pros do it,\" and did a little fist pump.\n\nThe Pope's audience was broadcast via a closed-circuit station from the Vatican, and of course streamed, so Bug Man could see it all play out in the macro even as he was marveling at the unusual smoothness of the ring's gold surface.\n\n\"You're back,\" Burnofsky said. \"I mean, welcome back.\"\n\nThey stared at him, unnerving him as they often did. Were they going to kill him right here, right now? Surely they must suspect that he had been wired. Maybe he should just put it out there; maybe he should just blurt it out.\n\n_Are you watching all this, Nijinsky? Or are you in my ear listening? Or are you drunk and passed out, you sad degenerate?_\n\nBurnofsky was pleased to realize that he was not afraid to die. Yet, he was afraid to die too soon. BZRK had reprogrammed him, brutally shifted his emotions, but it was crude work. Typical of the lesser BZRKers. Vincent would have done a better job. Vincent would have found a way to wire him for true loyalty. All Nijinsky had accomplished was to turn Burnofsky\u2014for now at least\u2014away from the bottle and the pipe. He had implanted very strong inhibitions against telling the Twins all he knew. He had turned Burnofsky's most terrible secret into a source of sickening pleasure, and oh, that had been cruel work.\n\nBut still: crude and ham-fisted. Burnofsky could no longer be said to be working for the Twins, true, but he was still working for himself, still pursuing his own agenda. Nijinsky thought his watchful biot would allow him to see and understand what Burnofsky was doing.\n\n_Foolish boy. Male model. I'm one of the great minds of the century, and you think I can't carry out my work right under your nose?_\n\n\"Karl, it's good to see you,\" Charles lied.\n\nBenjamin's one-eyed stare would freeze lava.\n\n\"It's good to have you gentlemen back,\" Burnofsky said. \"I'm, um, well, sorry for your...\"\n\n\"Defeat?\" snarled Benjamin. \"Are you sorry for our _defeat_?\"\n\n\"Your loss,\" Burnofsky said, finding the right word. \"I'm sorry for your loss.\"\n\n\"Fuck your sympathy,\" Benjamin snapped.\n\nCharles intervened smoothly. \"My brother and I are both grieving. You can understand our... impatience.\"\n\n\"What can I do for you?\" Burnofsky asked. Benjamin's anger had sent him back in his mind to Carla. To his daughter. It had been in this room, just over there, closer to the desk. That's where he had come to them\u2014drunk, stoned, filled with sorrow so deep and shame so dark that it would poison him as surely as a dose of strychnine. There, yes, right there he had reported to them that the deed was done and his daughter was dead.\n\nThey had said then that they were sorry for _his_ loss.\n\nHe swallowed hard, trying to avoid the terrible rush of pleasure that flowed each time he recalled the murder, each time, oh, God, to enjoy it, to be excited by it...\n\nFor a moment he thought he might vomit. Or actually become physically aroused. Or both at once.\n\n_I will kill you, Nijinsky. I don't know how, but I will kill you_.\n\n\"Massed preprogrammed attack,\" Charles said, trying to take control of the conversation to forestall more rage from his brother. They could still use Burnofsky, so long as they were careful. Let him reveal all to BZRK: without details it would mean nothing.\n\n\"What about a preprogrammed attack?\" Burnofsky asked cautiously.\n\nCharles smiled. \"It's time we learned more about some of our... toys.\" He nodded. \"Yes, Karl, we want to learn how to do it.\"\n\n\"You mean, how to program an attack using self-replicating nanobots? Yourselves?\"\n\n\"Are we too stupid?\" Benjamin demanded. \"Is that what you think? Do you think we rose from where we began to all of this by being stupid?\" He waved his hand to encompass all of what he'd earlier called his gilded cage.\n\n_No, by being rage-filled lunatics_ , Burnofsky thought. _And by having a very rich grandfather_.\n\n\"I am very well aware of your intellect,\" Burnofsky soothed.\n\n\"Perhaps not quite on your level, Karl,\" Charles said. \"But as I understand it, there's an app for this.\"\n\nBurnofsky's first thought was that they meant to use it against him. But no, there were so many ways they could kill him, they wouldn't be cute about it.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" Burnofsky said, \"if you have thirty minutes, I can teach you to use the app.\"\n\n\"Wake up, Anthony. You have a visitor.\"\n\nBug Man sat up fast. The lights were on. But it must still be night out beyond the shuttered windows.\n\nGeorge III had a cup of coffee in his hand. He gave it to Bug Man.\n\n\"What?\" Bug Man said.\n\n\"Someone wants to meet you.\"\n\nBug Man was not yet fully awake, but he was getting there fast. \"No one knows I'm here.\" Awful suspicion blossomed. \"You sold me out! You mother\u2014\"\n\n\"Drink your coffee,\" George said, and sighed. \"If I was selling you out, would I start by bringing you a cappuccino? It's full-fat milk\u2014you're not watching your cholesterol, I hope.\"\n\nBug Man took a sip. George was trying to act cool, but he was upset. Something had disturbed his typical sangfroid.\n\n\"Put on some clothing. It's just one of my compatriots here to brief you on next steps.\" He was lying. He was lying and he was jumpy, very unlike his usual self.\n\n\"In the middle of the night?\"\n\n\"She has an early flight.\" George left the room. Bug Man took another sip of coffee. A soft knock at the door.\n\n\"Yeah, George,\" Bug Man yelled, \"I'm getting up. Damn, give a brother a few minutes to\u2014\"\n\nThe door opened. It was not George, but a white woman. Medium-tall, slender, good-looking but sharp edged. Brunette.\n\n\"Hello, Anthony. I'm sorry to barge in on you. But I have to get back to New York, so I don't have a lot of time.\"\n\nShe sat down on the foot of the bed, a position that made Bug Man quite uncomfortable since under the blankets he wasn't wearing anything. He was very conscious of his skinny chest and well-formed but not exactly muscular shoulders.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name is Lystra.\"\n\n\"You were the pathway.\"\n\nShe smiled. She tilted her head, looked closely at him, making eye contact, taking her time in responding. _Smart_ , that's what he thought of her on first impression. That she was smart. And not bad if you liked older women. And she was on his bed....\n\n\"I'm a lot of pathways,\" Lystra said.\n\n\"So, George said\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you like George?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not really,\" Bug Man said.\n\n\"No, you wouldn't. George isn't really like us, is he?\"\n\n\"Like us?\"\n\n\"George is so serious. He never plays games. You and I, we like to play. We enjoy the game _as a game_.\"\n\n\"Do we know each other?\" Bug Man asked. Alarm bells were going off in his head. He recalled George's furtive eyes.\n\n\"In a way. I've played you at different times in different games, yeah. I use several online identities. But you're better than I am. Quicker reaction time; very, very good at taking advantage of terrain. And an amazing three-dimensional thinker. I can see why the Armstrong Twins hired you: your natural abilities, yeah, and your total lack of moral core.\"\n\nBug Man wasn't sure he liked that. On the other hand, he wasn't sure he could argue the point. Was he without a moral core? He frowned, considered it, shrugged it off\u2014figuring that if he couldn't think of a good counterargument, maybe it meant she was right.\n\nSo he said, \"Thank you. George said you weren't part of BZRK.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Well, at that point I wasn't sure we should meet, you and I. Yeah. You've extracted the sample?\"\n\n\"The cells? Yeah, I got the Pope's cells out. They're with my nanobots on the Pope's sleeve.\"\n\n\"Yes, which goes to the laundry where it will be intercepted by someone working for... well, _us_.\" She said the plural pronoun mockingly. As if it made no sense.\n\nThe alarm bells were going crazy now. Bug Man almost felt the floor tipping beneath him. Lystra laughed, almost as though she could read his mind.\n\n\"Ah, suspicion begins to form, yeah,\" Lystra said. \"See how quick you are? That's why I like you. I'm done with you, I mean you've done what... _we_... wanted you to do. You harvested the cells. And I thought maybe, yeah... we... would just kill you now.\"\n\nBug Man froze. The playful tone was more frightening than a threat. An overt threat might ring false, might be a bluff. But this woman was not bluffing. She could have him killed.\n\n\"Here you are, though, a young man without a place to go. So very many people, yeah, want you dead.\"\n\nHis throat was dry, and the first words came out in a rasp. \"What do you...\" He swallowed, tried to get some moisture going.\n\n\"What do I want?\" She sighed. The sigh was melodramatic and false. \"Do you know the difference between us, Bug Man? Aside from the obvious\u2014gender, age, race. We both know none of that's important. The real difference between us is that you are a superb game _player_. Whereas I am a game _designer_.\"\n\n\"Yeah? What game?\"\n\n\"This one. Yeah. The game I call BZRK. Nanobots and biots. On the one side, twisted idealist freaks who would deprive humans of free will in order to give them all contentment. On the other hand...\" She let it hang, then added a superfluous, \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"That's the Twins' game,\" he said dully.\n\nThe not-very-convincing mask of friendliness disappeared so suddenly and so completely that it must never have been there. He had the terrifying impression that the skin on her face had shrunk so that bone and teeth and the hollows of her eye sockets were all suddenly outlined and shadowed.\n\nHer eyes glittered. \"Oh, them,\" she said, striving to regain her jokey tone and failing. \"They have _their_ game. Mine is better. More levels.\"\n\nHe noted that she no longer used the plural. Not _our_ game. _Mine_.\n\nShe stood up suddenly. \"Get dressed. I've decided. You're coming with me.\"\n\n\"But... where? Why am I\u2014?\"\n\n\"Where? Oh, places with tall buildings. New York City. And then cold, cold places. As cold as it gets this side of the grave. But what do you care, Bug Man?\" She sounded weary now. \"Don't you want to see how the game plays out? Don't you want to know what it was all about?\"\n\nHe shook his head slowly. \"Games aren't about anything. Games are just about the game.\"\n\nShe leaned down and laid a soft palm against his cheek. \"See? That's why I like you, Anthony Bug Man. You and I are going to be friends. Or I can have George put a bullet in your head.\"\n\n\"Friends,\" he said.\n\nAnd Lear smiled.\n\n# **TEN**\n\nNijinsky was shopping when it happened.\n\nHe was at Saks, the big one, the flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Christmas was coming and he had nephews. But he was shopping more for himself than for them. He liked shopping. It was a Zen thing for him. He had an eye for style, which had been useful in his life as a model but was entirely neglected in BZRK.\n\nSaks was already in full Christmas swing, decorated in a fantasy of silver and white; the storefront windows were dioramas of highly stylized snowmen appearing in Russian-themed settings. There were delicate flights of abstract snowflakes arched across the ceiling, and a restrained seasonal soundtrack played unobtrusively.\n\nNijinsky lifted the leg of a pair of slacks, felt the weight of the wool, ran sensitive, knowledgeable fingertips along the crease and then inside the waistband.\n\nAnd to no one he said, \"What?\"\n\nHe froze, just stood there, seeming to stare at a mannequin dressed in a sleek but uninspired Canali suit.\n\n\"The hell?\" Nijinsky said.\n\n\"Are you finding what you're looking for?\" It seemed an almost philosophical question, but of course it was just a salesperson, a woman, blonde, well put together but with tired eyes.\n\nHe stared at her now, just as blankly as he'd stared at the mannequin. \"Something...\" he said.\n\n\"Are you all right, sir?\"\n\nHe was not all right. Nijinsky had four biots. One was in Burnofsky, in his eye, tapping the nerve and watching the computer upon which Burnofsky was busily typing. The others were in their cr\u00e8ches\u2014holders for dormant biots\u2014in the basement of the safe house. All were out of range, so that rather than seeing detailed pictures of what they saw, he was seeing something more like two open picture-in-picture displays with vague shapes, fuzziness, lack of detail. Like looking through a very dirty window at a poorly lit scene.\n\nExcept that now, suddenly, there was _another_ window. And this one was perfectly clear.\n\nA new biot.\n\nHe looked around then, frantic, searching for an explanation. A fit, attractive middle-aged man was trying on an Armani blazer. Two children and their nanny killing time, the kids playing tag around hanger racks. An attractive woman with ornate ink peeking out of her d\u00e9colletage. Clerks. An older man; a store display designer carefully placing a hat on a mannequin.\n\n\"Sir?\" the blonde saleswoman prompted.\n\nNijinsky shook his head. \"No. I don't think I am all right.\"\n\nThe saleswoman said nothing to that.\n\nAnd then, a second new window, as clear as the earlier one. A clear biot's-eye view of the interior of a glass tube. He could see the curvature, the texture\u2014like stretch marks somehow\u2014because nothing was entirely smooth down at m-sub level.\n\nWithout so much willing it as thinking it, he turned the two new biots. They moved, obeying his will. And both biots now saw his opposite: six-legged; insectoid, but with dangerous tail stingers; a spider's spinnerets; and the disturbing biot rendering of his own eyes, a nightmare twisting of his own face.\n\nBiots. Two of them. And suddenly he understood.\n\nHe had seconds left.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said to the saleswoman. \"I believe I'm about to go mad. You may want to move away.\" He pulled out his phone and opened his messaging app. Who? Who should he tell?\n\nShould he even bother? Plath had pushed him aside. Why should he help her now?\n\nHe keyed in her phone number, hit the button for text, and typed.\n\nThere was a sudden rush of liquid rolling down the inside of the tube. It was no more than a droplet in the real world, but it was as big as a house in the m-sub.\n\n\"Ah,\" he said, as the acid engulfed both his new biots.\n\nThe next thing he said was also, \"Ah,\" but this time he shouted it.\n\nAnd the next \"Ah\" was screamed.\n\nAnd the next twenty or so.\n\nHe broke into a run\u2014frantic, terrified, still clutching the phone with its typed but unsent message.\n\n\"No! No! No!\" he shrieked as he raced to the open escalator and threw himself down it. Threw himself, as if he was trying to fly. Arms outstretched, face forward.\n\nHe hit the steel steps, and his face exploded in blood. He climbed to his feet but was pulled off-balance by the moving stairs and pirouetted down until he landed again, hard.\n\nBut not hard enough to kill himself.\n\nNijinsky swung around, off the bottom of the escalator, and this time he had a plan, a mad, desperate plan, one he could barely hold on to. He tied his long scarf into a knot as he descended a second, upward-bound escalator.\n\nPeople ran out of his way, bounded up the steps to avoid him. They yelled things like, \"What the hell, man?\" But mostly they just got out of his way.\n\nNijinsky knelt on the stairs. Rising, rising, and lay the end of his silk scarf on the step before him.\n\nFive seconds.\n\nFour.\n\nA wild, giggling shout rose from his throat as the end of the scarf was sucked into the escalator. The shout ended abruptly as the relentless mechanism devoured the scarf, tightened it around his neck, slammed his bloody face into the steel, chewed up his left hand, cut off his air.\n\nHe could no longer speak. No longer scream. Blood filled his head, and still the noose tightened.\n\nHis windpipe was crushed. Blood now seeped from his eyes and ears. The phone fell from his fingers and lay with message unsent on the steel serrated edge of the escalator.\n\nBy the time some bright shopper thought to push the emergency-stop switch, Nijinsky was dead.\n\nThe message on Plath's phone was from Nijinsky.\n\nIt read, _2 new biots_.\n\nBut she had muted her phone and would not see the message until later because she was meeting with Stern. Again.\n\nPlath did not ask Keats to join her this time. She would discuss the Tulip with Mr. Stern, but she would mostly be asking him what he had discovered about Lear.\n\nAttempts to learn about Lear counted as treason within BZRK. Treason led to bad things, and she did not want to implicate Keats in that.\n\nOf course, Keats had a biot in her brain. If he was very curious he could make the long trip out into an ear canal and listen in.\n\nShe didn't think Keats did things like that. It would be out of character. But in this new world she had entered such things had to be considered. In this new world the human body was not a singular object\u2014it was an ecosystem. It was a Brazilian rainforest full of flora and fauna, from creepy, crawly mites to big, fat balls of pollen to Dr. Seuss\u2013like fungal trees, to a hundred different types of bacteria, all the way down to viruses. None of it strictly human. The average human body had far more nonhuman cells than human ones, though they comprised only a fraction of the weight\u2014about five pounds in most people.\n\nYou moved differently through the world when you truly came to accept that fact. When you knew that you were crawling, covered, congested by nonhuman life-forms. Sometimes you couldn't quite see the line between yourself and the world around you.\n\nAll about her on the sidewalk were other ecosystems, each body a similarly complex environment. Each body in turn a small part of a larger system. A system called New York. Or, more inclusively, the human race. Formerly meaningful divisions had lost some solidity. What seemed solid in the macro was so much less so down in the meat.\n\nThe meeting with Stern followed all the rules of spy craft. They set up the meeting using text messages. They both spent an hour throwing off any possible pursuers. Their phones were off and therefore impossible to track. If she were being followed, then it was very professionally done.\n\nAnd yet when Plath arrived at the steps of the public library in Bryant Park, there was a man sitting across the street in the window of a hotel caf\u00e9, sipping a latte and making no effort to go unnoticed.\n\nHe was middle-aged, with long graying hair and a wry, observant expression. He was dressed like a dandy\u2014a purple velvet blazer, a top hat that sat on the counter beside him.\n\nIf he had ever had a real name, Plath didn't know it. His nom de guerre, his BZRK name, was Caligula.\n\nPlath had seen him in action. He was a confident and extremely capable killer. He was the eighth person of whom Lear had spoken. But it was not possible for Plath to imagine giving him orders.\n\nIt was Caligula who had killed Ophelia after she was captured by the FBI. He had burned out her brain so as to leave no traces of nanotechnology behind. If Plath brought him into BZRK now\u2014into her BZRK\u2014Wilkes, who had been close to Ophelia, who had very nearly died beside her, might try to kill him. And that would be the end of Wilkes.\n\nAnd yet, here was Plath meeting Mr. Stern to discover what he had learned in his efforts to track down the elusive personality behind BZRK. Was that why Caligula was here? Did he already know? Should she be expecting a bullet or a knife or the killer's trademark hatchet?\n\nCould Caligula guess what they were talking about? Surely not. But he had found a way to follow her, or perhaps to follow Mr. Stern. That knowledge made her feel faint. It weakened her knees.\n\nGod, it was true: there was no escaping the man in the velvet suit. _The NKVD_. Plath had Googled it. Anya had spoken the truth. And now here was her own personal NKVD sipping a coffee and watching to see what she would do.\n\nOr fail to do.\n\nAs Nijinksy's body was being cut loose by paramedics, Plath bought a street pretzel and a Nantucket Nectars cranberry. Stern had a coffee and an Italian sausage. They looked, perhaps, like a girl meeting her father. Or a student with her atypically tough-looking professor.\n\n\"Now that we're alone, how have you been, Sadie?\"\n\n\"Getting used to being back in the world,\" she said, looking around at the other lunchtime diners, all somewhere between coats and sweaters on this gray day.\n\n\"It was good of you to pay the money to the boat crew who died. One of them had two young kids. Softens the blow.\"\n\n\"What have you found?\" she asked, too cold to want to chat, and too aware of Caligula's cobra gaze.\n\n\"On the Armstrong Twins? I suspect they are in a place called Sarawak, which is in Malaysia. AFGC owns a facility in Malaysia, a rare earths mine. Rare earths are a class of rare minerals used in some sophisticated electronics components. It makes sense that AFGC would have a source.\"\n\n\"How likely do you think it is that they're there?\"\n\nStern thought it over. \"I'd say seventy percent. It seems consistent with what we're seeing. But it's possible they're elsewhere. It's even possible they are back in New York.\"\n\n\"And the _other_ person you're looking for?\"\n\nStern glanced at Caligula. \"There sits the one man who might be able to take us to Lear.\"\n\n\"Stay away from him,\" Plath said too quickly.\n\n\"You're that scared of him.\"\n\n\"I've seen his work, Mr. Stern. The man who warned me about him doesn't scare easily.\" Vincent. Back when Vincent was _Vincent_. \"But he was scared of Caligula.\"\n\nStern raised his cup, sipped, and said, \"I have leads, nothing solid. Lear's cell number is obviously switched out daily. You gave me four such numbers. All the numbers are throwaways. Burner phones. But interestingly, two of them were purchased in odd locations.\"\n\n\"Odd how?\"\n\n\"Well, one was bought in London; one was bought in Wellington, New Zealand; one was bought in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The last was from Punta Arenas, Chile.\"\n\n\"What am I not seeing in those four locations?\"\n\n\"Wellington and Punta Arenas share a distinction as major jumping-off points for Antarctica.\"\n\n\"Antarctica. Why... never mind. I had another text exchange with Lear. Here's the number.\" She read it off to him. \"Why doesn't Lear just block the number?\"\n\n\"Excellent question,\" Stern said approvingly. \"Arrogance? Or, more likely, he's deliberately leaving breadcrumbs. Either a false trail, or...\"\n\n\"Or what?\"\n\n\"Or a trail meant for the right person to follow.\"\n\nA game? Was she supposed to believe that Lear was playing a game with her?\n\nIn the coffee shop, Caligula was standing up. He put on his hat, straightened it carefully, and looked directly at Sadie, who returned his gaze evenly. Then he tugged at the front brim in a slight but unmistakable acknowledgment of her, and faded from view as he moved away.\n\nStern caught the gesture and said, \"And you're sure we shouldn't question _him_?\"\n\n\"He's tight with Lear. He's Lear's attack dog. And I may need him.\"\n\n\"What are you planning?\"\n\nPlath shrugged. \"Lear's orders. He still wants us to wipe out all AFGC data on nanotechnology. And soon.\"\n\nStern took a long pause at that. He searched her face, looking for something to reassure himself. But reassurance did not come, and now he was wary. \"Have you told Lear about the practical objections to such a harebrained scheme?\"\n\n\"No,\" Plath said. \"Not yet.\"\n\nShe hesitated, unsure if she should go forward. Stern was an experienced interrogator\u2014he knew when just to wait.\n\n\"It's just...,\" Plath began. \"It's just, well, I was thinking... a bomb of some kind?\"\n\n\"A bomb? Are we back to that?\" He shook his head slowly without shifting his gaze from her. When she said nothing, he said, \"Sadie, please listen to me. I've been to war. I was in Iraq, and before that I was in Somalia. When you're in it, when you're scared and when you're mad and you want revenge, maybe, you find yourself thinking about doing things no human being should do. You think about crossing the line.\"\n\n\"Where's this line, Mr. Stern? The Armstrongs killed my father and brother. They basically killed the president of the United States, even if that's not what they intended. Burnofsky was trying to unleash self-replicating nanobots that could kill every living thing on the planet. So where's the line?\"\n\nStern put down his coffee, carefully crumpled the paper from his sandwich, and set it aside. He wiped his hands with a napkin. Then, with a clean forefinger, he pointed at Plath's forehead. \"In there.\" Then he pointed at her heart. \"In there. That's where the line is.\"\n\nIt was not easy to meet his worried, penetrating eyes.\n\n\"Sadie, you need to ask yourself: Is this _you_? Are you really, truly a person planning what would look like a terrorist attack in Midtown Manhattan?\"\n\nFinally she couldn't take it and turned away. \"No, of course not. But get me everything you can, okay? Everything you feel okay about giving me. I still need to find a way....\"\n\nHe wasn't buying it. And for a moment she was afraid he might just walk away. Then, with a pained expression, an expression of loss, he nodded his head.\n\n# **ELEVEN**\n\nSaks would not release the store surveillance video. But Mr. Stern had excellent connections throughout security companies in New York. An underpaid guard, when offered ten thousand dollars in untraceable cash, decided he could in fact arrange for the video file to make its way to Mr. Stern.\n\nHe in turn passed it along to Plath. Who watched it for the third time with Keats, Wilkes, and Anya. Billy had not been asked to be present, but he was, anyway.\n\nThey decided that there was no need for Vincent to be subjected to it in his condition.\n\nHis _condition_. Fragile, that was his condition. Borderline nuts, still. High-functioning unbalanced.\n\n\"Jin lost his shit,\" Wilkes said on a second viewing. \"Look. That's when it starts. He's fondling a pair of pants. Then that's him texting.\"\n\n\" 'Two new biots,' \" Plath said dully.\n\n\"The text was sent three minutes later,\" Noah pointed out. He had compared the video time code to the time signature on Plath's phone.\n\nThey watched the second part of the tape. Nijinsky hurling himself down the escalator. There was no sound. The video was decent quality, but the angle was poor. They were seeing him from behind.\n\n\"Jesus Christ, how many times do we have to watch this?\" Wilkes cried suddenly. She stormed off to the kitchen. Then came back with a bag of chips.\n\n\" 'Two new biots,' \" Keats said. \"But he was _against_ getting anymore.\"\n\nThe third segment of tape showed a distraught Nijinsky, face-on this time, kneeling, feeding his scarf into the escalator.\n\nIt went on for way too long. Nijinsky dead. People milling around helplessly. Store employees rushing over with scissors, trying to get at the scarf and cut him loose. Failing, because it was too tight, too tangled.\n\nEventually a security guard. Then, at last, far too late, the paramedics.\n\n\"He went crazy,\" Anya said. \"It was deliberate. He was looking at clothing and then he was killing himself. Madness.\"\n\nShe wasn't thinking about Nijinsky. She was thinking about Vincent. She glanced nervously toward the stairs leading up to his room, then tried to cover the telltale gesture with a reach toward Wilkes's chips.\n\n\"New biots,\" Plath mused.\n\n\"Just totally lost his shit.\" Wilkes spoke around the crunching of a corn chip.\n\n\"Who could make a biot for him?\" Keats asked. \"It takes a tissue sample and the equipment.\" He didn't mean to single Anya out by looking at her, but she was the only one in the room with the skills, and she controlled the equipment that had been hidden in the basement of the safe house.\n\n\"It takes a tissue sample, the equipment, and the skills,\" Anya said. Then, angrily, \"Why would I do that to Nijinsky?\" She didn't wait for an answer. Everyone knew the answer. Anya sighed. \"Yes, I disliked him. But I would never do this.\"\n\nThat earned her carefully blank looks.\n\n\"No, you listen to me, all of you. I would never. I did never. I did not do this.\"\n\nAll eyes were on her.\n\n\"No!\" Anya cried. \"No, do not do this! Suspicion will destroy us.\"\n\n\"What 'us'?\" Wilkes asked. \"Look at _us_. Ophelia's dead. Renfield. Vincent's out of it. Now Jin. Fucking Jin, man.\" She laughed her weird heh-heh-heh laugh and looked ready to cry. \"We're a fucking joke.\"\n\n\"We stopped the Armstrongs,\" Keats said reasonably. \"We accomplished a lot. More than we should have been able to.\"\n\nAnya ignored him and instead pleaded with Plath. \"Plath, you know I didn't do this. Look at me. I did not hurt Nijinsky.\"\n\nPlath wanted to say something reassuring. But she couldn't quite get the words to come out. If not Anya, then who? Someone at McLure Labs? But how many people there even knew of the existence of biots? And of those, how many could make one? And of _those_ , how many would use the knowledge to kill Nijinsky? Was Anya a traitor?\n\n\"I know what you are thinking.\" Anya's Russian accent was coming to the fore. The word came out _thinkink_. \"You are wrong.\" _Wronk_. \"It was someone else. Why would [ _vwould_ ] I...? For what reason?\"\n\nKeats said, \"No one suspects you, Anya. I don't, at least. But the thing is, who else then? Not you, okay. But who?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Anya pleaded. \"I can think of only three others at McLure Labs with the knowledge and the access to equipment. But how would they have a tissue sample from Nijinsky?\"\n\n\"He's dead now, can we call him by his real name? Shane Hwang. Not some dead, crazy Russian ballet dancer.\" This from Wilkes. She punched the bag of chips and sent crumbs flying. \"His name was Shane fucking Hwang. I never even knew Ophelia's real name. And poor old Renfield. And when I'm dead or crazy, you people won't know me, either.\" The flame tattoo under her eye looked like extravagant tears. \"Jesus, no one will even know me.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Plath said, bringing silence. \"I believe you, Anya. I think... I mean, I choose to think... that this is the remote biot-killer technology that Lear was talking about. Which means we are all in danger. But still, Anya, I\u2014we\u2014need to be able to watch you.\" Plath put a finger to her eye. It looked like a gesture, some kind of evil-eye, maledictory gesture. But in fact Plath had sent one of her biots racing around her own eyeball to clamber over lashes and reach the cheek.\n\nThrough her biot's eyes she could see the vast column of flesh descending like some cylindrical meteor from the sky to press a giant furrowed fingertip within a few seconds' walk.\n\nHer biot ran beneath the vast curve, ran on until fingertip and depressed cheek met, then clambered upside down onto the finger.\n\n\"No,\" Anya said. \"No. Nyet. Is not happening.\"\n\n\"I promise you, Anya, I won't lay any wire. I will not make any changes in your brain.\"\n\n\"Your promise,\" Anya sneered.\n\n\"Yes, my promise,\" Plath said. \"I can't just let you walk away. I have to maintain surveillance.\" She leaned toward Anya and stretched a finger up to the older woman's eye.\n\nAnya swallowed in a dry throat. \"So you will watch me. You will tap into my eye and see everything that I see.\"\n\n\"It's the only way,\" Keats said, though he didn't sound too sure of it. He pressed his lips together and stole a worried glance at Plath, who revealed no emotion.\n\n_Look how hard she's gotten_ , Keats thought.\n\nWhen they had first met, he'd marked her down as a spoiled little rich girl, probably a snob, who would condescend to him, look down her nose at him.\n\nBut that had not been true. She had been anything but a snob. But even then, early days, he'd noticed that effortless authority she carried with her. That was, without question, a product of wealth and privilege. Plath would admit that much. A billionaire's daughter simply had an air about her that could not be faked by a working-class kid like Keats.\n\nPart of him was proud of her in an uncomplicated way. He wanted to say, _Well, look at you, all grown up and in charge_. But part of him was small enough to focus on their relationship rather than BZRK. He was in love with her. He believed she loved him back. But how stable could a relationship be when there was this much of a difference in their circumstances? My God, the girl basically had a private army.\n\nAnya let Plath touch her, just below her left eye.\n\nPlath held the contact for a few seconds as her biot scampered off and began the journey to the optic nerve.\n\nFrom now until Plath let her go, Anya's sight would be shared. Plath would see what Anya saw. In the bathroom and bedroom, too, inevitably. The idea made Keats's skin crawl, but this was BZRK.\n\nFighting for freedom. Saving the world.\n\nYeah, but hadn't they done that when they stopped the Armstrongs from controlling the president? And when they stopped Burnofsky's gray-goo scenario? Hadn't they already won?\n\nThen how was it they were still trapped in this paranoid universe where they used the names of dead or made-up madmen? How was it that they were still taking orders from an invisible character called Lear?\n\nThe thought was out of his mouth before he could check it. \"Why are we still doing this?\"\n\nWilkes snorted. \"Pretty blue eyes asks the right question. Why are we still doing this?\"\n\n\"Because we haven't won yet,\" Plath said. But she didn't quite like that answer. \"It's not over yet.\"\n\n\"How does it get to be over?\" Keats asked. \"How will we know it's over?\" He had been leaning forward, now he drew back. \"Look, isn't this about the knowledge, really? Once we know how to make nanobots and biots, how do we ever unlearn that? It's like nuclear bombs, isn't it. How do you stop it spreading once the technology exists?\"\n\n\"When the last of us is dead, it's game over. For us. Right?\" This was the first time Billy had spoken. \"I mean, it's a game, right? Biots versus nanobots. Take over the world. Isn't it a game?\"\n\n\"No, it's real,\" Plath insisted. \"The Armstrong Twins are real, and we're real, and Jin was real.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but...\" Billy felt the weight of disapproval. \"Yeah, but games _are_ real. That's what you don't get, with respect to you, Plath. Games are real to the people playing them. While they're playing.\"\n\nNo one said anything; after all, Billy was just a kid. But Keats couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just heard something important, that Billy had blurted out the truth. _It could be real, and dangerous, and deadly, and yet still be a game_ , he thought.\n\nWhen was a game over? When you lost.\n\nOr when you won and went off in search of a new game.\n\nBiot versus nanobot. That was the game. But now, according to Plath by way of Lear, a new level was being revealed. Something out there could kill biots remotely. Dead biots meant madness. It meant killing yourself on an escalator in Saks.\n\nSo why bother to blow up a boat? If you could generate then kill biots, then why did it seem so much like manipulation? The Armstrong Twins would not hesitate if they could kill Plath and him.\n\nSo why wasn't he dead?\n\nBecause the game was somehow more complicated than that.\n\nThe video played again, looping. Keats watched the faces watching Nijinsky. They watched in surprise as he stared and spoke to the air. Then in shock as he threw himself down the escalator. Horror as he fed the silk scarf into the mechanism that choked the life from him.\n\nThen, Keats picked up the remote and rewound.\n\n\"Enough!\" Wilkes yelled.\n\n\"Wait,\" Keats said. \"Don't watch Jin. Watch the people around him. That woman. The one with the ink.\"\n\nHe advanced it in slow motion, focusing on the woman.\n\nShe pulled out her phone and glanced at it. Checking e-mail? Or checking the time?\n\nShe stole a glance at Nijinsky.\n\n\"She's looking at Jin,\" Keats said.\n\n\"He was a good-looking dude, maybe she\u2014\" Wilkes began, but then she fell silent, because now was the part where Nijinsky started to lose it. The people nearest were shooting him irritated or concerned looks. The woman was not. She was half smiling, watching... waiting.\n\n_Waiting_.\n\n\"She knows,\" Keats said.\n\nHe cut to the next video, the horrific one showing Nijinsky on the escalator. There was a woman just a dozen steps behind him.\n\n\"Fuck! It's _her_ ,\" Wilkes said.\n\nNow everyone was leaning toward the screen, checking the dress, checking the shoes, the hair, comparing them to the first images.\n\n\"Yes,\" Plath confirmed. It's the same woman. Jin got to this place by running, then hurling himself down the escalator. And she _followed_ him? What kind of person follows a crazy man?\"\n\nNow, again, Nijinsky fed the scarf into the escalator.\n\nBut this time they watched the woman behind him\u2014the shoulders, the hair.\n\nShe stepped past and over the strangling Nijinsky. Not panicked. Calm.\n\nShe knelt by Nijinsky. Her hand shot out, took something.\n\n\"The phone,\" Plath said. \"She took his phone. The time signatures. She sent the text.\"\n\n\"It's an Easter egg,\" Keats said. \"Billy's right: it's all a game. And that woman is an Easter egg. We are _supposed_ to see her.\"\n\nJindal could barely restrain himself. His first meeting with the returned Twins had ended with his being dismissed like a disappointing schoolboy. Now they would have to listen. \"We have confirmation. Proof. They've hacked our network. Somehow they exploited a hole in the AmericaStrong computer system and worked their way back to us, back to core AFGC systems.\"\n\nCharles saw the meat of it immediately. \"Floor Thirty-Four?\"\n\nJindal shook his head so hard he couldn't speak until he had stopped. \"No, that is walled off entirely. But the good\u2014\"\n\n\"Do they have our nanobot blueprints? Our technical specs?\"\n\n\"Yes. And they've been looking at this building.\"\n\n\"With an eye to infiltration or attack?\" Charles demanded, while Benjamin remained ominously silent.\n\n\"No way to tell. But gentlemen, there's good news as well.\"\n\nCharles raised his eyebrow. Benjamin glowered at Jindal, as if holding him personally responsible. \"Good news?\"\n\n\"The hackers have been hacked in return,\" Jindal said. He was giddy now, torn between excitement and fear. \"We tracked them back and found a way into some of their systems.\"\n\n\"BZRK?\"\n\n\"No. McLure Labs Security. That's who's been watching us. McLure Security. Presumably at the direction of\"\u2014Jindal hesitated, knowing the effect his next words would have on the Twins\u2014\"Sadie McLure.\"\n\n\"The little bitch,\" Benjamin spat.\n\n\"Do we know where she is?\" Charles asked.\n\nJindal shook his head, impatient to get to the one remaining piece of good news. \"No, nothing directly on BZRK. But we can now track the movements of the main McLure Security folks, and if we follow them, we'll likely find a way back to Plath herself.\"\n\n\"Bah,\" Benjamin snorted. \"No time. They're planning an attack here, that's obvious. We have to hit them hard, now. Now!\"\n\nCharles looked queasy, but as Jindal watched, he could see wary acceptance grow on the wiser brother's face.\n\n\"We don't have the gunmen we used to, thanks to that disaster in Washington. But we have other means, as you know well. Massed preprogrammed attack,\" Benjamin said harshly.\n\nCharles smiled faintly at that. He shrugged his shoulder. \"Go ahead, Benjamin. You know you've wanted to say it ever since you came up with that name for the drones. Go ahead.\"\n\nFor once Benjamin did not scowl. He smiled. And said, \"Locate Stern. And any other important actors in McLure Security. And as soon as you have the location and Burnofsky is ready... I will release the Hounds.\"\n\n# **TWELVE**\n\n_Down in the meat_.\n\nP2: soulless, mindless biot, Plath's creature, Plath's bizarro-world daughter. P2 zooming across Plath's eye, six legs stroking as Plath had learned to do, like an Olympic speed skater.\n\nThe room was dark, shades drawn, door locked, a GO AWAY Post-it note on the door. In the darkness, her eyeball\u2014which in light could look like a frozen lake\u2014looked like some impossibly vast jellyfish, at least here on the white.\n\nHer eyelids\u2014the onrushing \"shore\" lined with palm trees\u2014looked less benign, more like needle-sharp teeth.\n\nHer eyelid swept over her, rubbing across her biot back, a slight pressure, greater darkness; then it rushed away as though that row of teeth had rejected the tiny meal.\n\n_Sadie, you need to ask yourself: Is this_ you _?_\n\nThat barb stuck. It stuck, and Plath could not shake it off.\n\n_Are you really, truly a person planning what would look like a terrorist attack in Midtown Manhattan?_\n\nThe World Trade Center was falling in her memory, and now there was a musical track to go with it. An old, old song, a Beatles song: \"Piggies.\"\n\nIt added a vengeful but playful note to the video atrocity.\n\nHow had she felt about that footage the first time she had seen it, back in the classroom? She had been horrified. Sickened. She had always been that way, always capable of being outraged by terrible injustice. In school they had done a unit on World War Two, and as part of that they had done a couple days on the Holocaust. She was not Jewish. She was not part of any group that had been touched by the Holocaust, but she'd been unable to sleep afterward, unable quite to control the sickened hatred of people who could do that to other human beings.\n\nThey had watched parts of _Shoah_ in class\u2014actual first-person testimony from Holocaust survivors. She remembered vibrating with the suppressed fury she'd felt. She remembered giving up finally on any effort to control the tears.\n\nShe still felt that way when she recalled the Holocaust unit. But she no longer felt horrified by the World Trade Center. Now it was... what?\n\nBeautiful, is what it was.\n\n_Is this you?_\n\nWas it really this easy to cross lines that should never be crossed? Had the stress of this unasked-for war of hers, this BZRK existence, simply washed away the part of her that cared about right and wrong?\n\nOr. Or had she had some help?\n\n_Is. This. You?_\n\nPlath had three biots. She had sent P1 into Anya's brain. It sat now on Anya's optic nerve, looking out through Anya's left eye. It was a window open in Plath's head, showing, at the moment, a bowl of soup, a rough hunk of baguette, and three slices of sausage. Anya's hand lowered a spoon. Raised a spoon. Pause. Lower spoon. Raise spoon. Put down spoon, hands to bread, tear off a hunk, raise it toward mouth.\n\nPlath's final biot, P3, was an enhanced model. Faster, with better sensors, stronger. It was still in the vial attached to a chain around Plath's neck, staring at nothing\u2014a very dull TV show of curved glass wall, and not so much of that in this light.\n\n_The line is there..._\n\nMr. Stern suspected she'd been caught up in something, and needed some time to think it through more calmly. Plath had different suspicions. Because, yes, she _was_ thinking of attacking the Tulip. Guns blazing. Bombs blasting. The image of the Tulip disintegrating, toppling, falling to the ground in fire and smoke was almost... almost erotic.\n\nAnd this was Plath\u2014Sadie\u2014who had refused when she had the chance to kill the Armstrong Twins.\n\nShe had left for \u00cele Sainte-Marie feeling betrayed that she'd been trapped into BZRK. Feeling sickened by the violence and by what she had seen and done down in the meat. Now she was ready to launch an actual attack. To kill. To kill innocent people. Why? Was it just because Lear had told her to?\n\nWhat had changed?\n\nThe benign explanation was that she had learned and matured and come to grips with grim necessity. The less benign explanation was that she had become hardened and had lost her soul.\n\nBut she feared the truth was a third possibility: that she had been wired.\n\nHow and by whom? The obvious suspect was Keats. After all, he had a biot in her brain, ostensibly protecting her from a blown aneurysm.\n\nBut why would Keats wire her? Orders from Lear? Or had he gone over to the other side? Both seemed absurd. Keats would not blindly take orders. And he would never join the people who had put his brother Alex in a mental institution.\n\nUnless he had decided that BZRK was to blame. And wasn't that a plausible conclusion? _Wasn't_ BZRK responsible, in a way?\n\nShe ran down the list of other people who might have done it. Maybe one of the McLure Security guys. Maybe one of the house servants who washed sheets and delivered food. Or maybe someone had gone to work in her brain as soon as she got back to New York. But that would mean whoever was doing it had had very little time. Which in turn meant that someone was very, very good at the job.\n\nSomeone.\n\nBut the _obvious_ suspect?\n\nShe was circling the globe, around the eye that twitched beneath her, making all the minute adjustments that eyes must do. She skimmed the edge of her iris-serried ranks of gristly muscle fiber waiting to react to light, opening and closing the dark, deep hole of her pupil.\n\nDown and around, beneath the permanent retraction point of the eyelid, so that her \"sky\" was now an eternal mucous membrane. Her biot skated on, slowed slightly by the claustrophobically low roof. With absolutely no ambient light, she had illumination switched on\u2014glowing nodes built out of the DNA of exotic deep-ocean creatures. She was in the land of muscle bundles now, massive cables seemingly fused into the melting ice of the eyeball and ascending into the dark.\n\nAnd onward, farther around the globe\u2014and now, at last, like Yggdrasil, the tree that supported the world in Norse mythology, the optic nerve rose into view.\n\nSuddenly the world shifted wildly beneath her. Muscles jerked crazily. In the real world, the light had snapped on.\n\nShe sat up.\n\nKeats looked at her, saw her surprise, and said, \"Sorry, did I startle you?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" she lied. \"I just... there was a Post-it note.... Never mind.\" She could see it lying on the floor of the bright hallway. \"Are you coming to bed?\"\n\n\"Was kind of hoping to,\" he said, not wolfishly, more just a tired boy.\n\nPlath pulled the blanket back to bare the sheets for him. He nodded at the open space, smiled at it as if it was an old friend. He stripped off his clothes while she lay back and closed her eyes, hoping he would get the message.\n\nShe tried to calm her breathing. Keats was in her brain; he would know from the pulse of blood through the aneurysm whether she was perturbed.\n\nKeats was warm beside her. He leaned over to give her the lightest of kisses. Just a brush of lips and a whispered, \"Good night.\"\n\nBut to her surprise Plath found herself wanting more. She pushed her fingers through his hair and pulled him close and kissed him back. In the dark, even as she crawled toward her own optic nerve, his lips were just his lips and not a parchment landscape.\n\nHe responded.\n\nP2 began the ascent\u2014direction was all very subjective in the meat\u2014began climbing that tree.\n\nHe was still holding back, not quite sure whether this kiss was a prelude or just a very nice good-night. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and now he must feel the way her pulse raced.\n\nUp the nerve, up to the impassable membrane that guarded the brain itself. Her brain. She reared up on her four anterior legs and used the sharp pincers on her front legs to slice as small a hole as possible through the membrane. A watery liquid oozed outward.\n\nShe checked herself, inspected as well as she could her biot legs, looking for pollen, bacteria, fungus\u2014all the things which can be so deadly if carried into the brain. She found what looked like a half-dozen tennis balls on her left rear leg and knocked them loose. Bacteria, and very much alive: one was splitting as she watched.\n\nKeats was kissing her now, everywhere. He was no longer responding to her, but moving ahead, taking charge, setting the pace, and for once Plath let him, willingly surrendering, needing to surrender.\n\nHer brain floated like a giant sponge, a sponge crisscrossed with throbbing arteries and veins like the tangle of rivers and tributaries in a delta. The fluid made movement slower than it was in an air environment, and her biot claws had to grab on so as not to float away.\n\nHe was inside her. His biot. Down here in these endless folds of pink flesh. At least she hoped he was, hoped he was not on her other eye spying, or worse, far worse, somewhere deeper still, laying wire.\n\n_Let it not be him. Not him_. That was a betrayal she could not survive.\n\nThe tissue that was the ground could appear to be a wall, a floor, or a ceiling, depending on your perspective. The biot world was one where gravity was almost irrelevant, certainly in this liquid environment.\n\nShe was aiming for the hippocampus, a deep structure, an ancient part of the evolving brain. It was the router of the mind. If someone was wiring her, that's where they would likely start. The implanted brain-mapping imagery was a guide, though an imperfect one because no two brains were identical, and where she might expect to find a figurative gully could be a plunging valley.\n\nIn the real world her body was responding almost on its own, as though it was not connected to her, not connected to the brain upon which she now walked, the brain that was the processor of every contact between his tongue and her flesh.\n\nMadness. She laughed. He stopped.\n\n\"No, no, no, don't stop,\" she said.\n\n\"You were giggling.\"\n\n\"Shhhh,\" she said, and pushed his head back to where it had been.\n\nToward the hippocampus, but with a stop on the way. She crept her biot forward slowly, slowly, dousing her illuminators one by one, just enough to feel her way forward to\u2014\n\nLight out. In the darkness of her own brain she saw his biot's light. There was his biot, not moving, just standing on the bulging basketwork he had so painstakingly constructed in order to save her life. The work had been started by her father; almost completed now by her lover.\n\nHis biot was not wiring her. It was not him.\n\nFar away and as close as the artery that pounded beneath her feet, she felt him, felt his banked power, knew he was close to losing control, and liked that idea a great deal.\n\nShe sent her biot forward toward the hippocampus, turning lights back on as she moved away from Keats's biot.\n\nShe tripped over it before she saw it. One leg scraped across something that did not feel like flesh, something hard and sharp.\n\n_Wire_.\n\nDid Keats feel the sudden chill that went through her? He did not slow or falter. But now her mind was reeling, no longer vague and disconnected from her body and its reactions.\n\nShe had been wired.\n\nWait, was that a glimmer of light?\n\nShe killed her own biot's light once more and stared hard into the visual field in her brain. Into the visual field that showed her brain to her brain.\n\n_There!_ For just a second. Less than a second. A glimmer of light.\n\n\"Bastard,\" she muttered.\n\nKeats did not hear her, he was beyond that.\n\nThe light had come from behind a pulsing vein. There was no innocent excuse. There were no light-emitting life-forms down here.\n\nThe fear rose in Plath now, competing with simmering rage. It began as a dull electrical charge in the base of her spine and fanned out from there to become nausea in her stomach and a tightened chest that felt too small to contain her air-starved lungs and pounding heart.\n\nWho was on the other side of that vein, that vein the circumference of a subway tunnel? Who and what was back there?\n\n_Bastard, bastard, bastard_ , she raged, but silently.\n\nPlath stifled her fear, and her biot plunged after the retreating nanobot. She noted that she had decided now that it was an Armstrong nanobot, not a BZRK biot, not Keats, not anyone from her side. Because that\u2014\n\nWait. When had she acquired this readiness to believe the best of BZRK? Was _that_ a naturally occurring thought? Or was it part of the wiring? Was that what this foe was doing right now, right now practically under her nose\u2014finding ways to dampen her suspicion?\n\nAgain, a glimmer! It was moving away, but it evidently needed light. So did Plath, so any hope of concealment was forgotten now, any hesitation set aside with the decision to chase.\n\nShe saw him! Or at least an impression of something moving. She was gaining on him. Gaining! Which most likely meant it was a nanobot. That at least would be a relief.\n\n_Please, God, if there is a God down here in the meat, let it be the enemy, the true enemy_.\n\nSuddenly the light ahead dimmed as if it had dropped into a crevasse. She charged ahead, caught up in the chase, adrenaline flooding her system with urgency, breathing hard in her bed, trying to remain perfectly still so as not to wake Keats.\n\nHer biot raced; she saw the dip ahead and killed her illumination, rendering herself almost invisible while using the enemy's light as a beacon.\n\nShe looked down, and there it was, waiting for her.\n\nIt was no nanobot.\n\nShe grabbed Keats's head in her hands and held it still, just inches away from her, stared into his eyes, pleading and said, \"Noah, help me. Help me, Noah.\"\n\n\"My Stockholm lair. Yeah. Lair. Because the supervillain needs a lair, yeah?\"\n\nIt was a nice hotel suite, a very nice hotel suite at the Stockholm Grand. Nice view out over the very civilized waterfront with bright-lit ferries and stately buildings. Multiple bedrooms, understated taupes and beiges and earth tones.\n\n\"It's not all that...\" Bug Man started to say before stopping himself.\n\n\"Not so lairlike?\" Lystra asked, and laughed. \"Well, I have a much better lair somewhere else. Far to the south, you might say. You'll like it... if I let you come with me.\"\n\nBug Man stood as awkwardly as one might expect a young man to stand when threatened with death.\n\nLystra laughed again and waved him to a seat. He sat on leather. It made a squeaking sound that might almost have been a fart.\n\n\"That was... um...,\" he said.\n\n\"Did you just fart in my presence?\" She was pretending to look fierce. But Bug Man had seen her true ferocity, and this wasn't it. He relaxed a very little bit.\n\nLystra went to a sideboard and poured an amber liquid into two heavy crystal glasses. She handed one to Bug Man.\n\nHe sniffed and recoiled.\n\n\"It's Balcones True Blue. Lovely whiskey, that. Made with Hopi blue corn.\" She took a single cube of ice with a pair of silver tongs, carried it to him, and dropped it in his glass. \"You taste it now. Then you keep drinking as the cube melts, which lowers the proof. The flavor evolves. Each sip will be subtly different.\"\n\nBug Man took a sip. It was fire in liquid form, and he started coughing, which made her laugh. It was a cruel laugh, and there, again, a glimpse of the harsh bone beneath soft flesh.\n\n\"My father used to let me drink whiskey with him,\" Lystra said. She sat down opposite Bug Man. He glanced at her bare legs. She noticed.\n\n\"You miss your little love slave?\" she asked.\n\n\"Jessica? You know about... that?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. You're a rapist, Bug Man.\"\n\nHe flushed. \"No, I'm not. I never forced her to do anything.\"\n\nShe leaned toward him, elbows on knees, drink cradled in both hands. \"You programmed her. You took away her free will. You replaced it with your own. You enslaved her. And when you have sex with someone in that condition, it's rape.\"\n\nHe shook his head and took a drink just so he'd have an excuse not to meet her gaze.\n\n\"Rapist. Murderer. Terrorist. That's you, Bug, by the standards of the wide world, yeah.\"\n\nBug Man frowned. No, that wasn't right. \"I'm... no. No way. I'm a gamer. I'm just playing.\"\n\n\"Buggy, Buggy, Buggy.\" She patted his knee, and he felt his flesh creep. \"If you were charged in a court of law, you'd be looking at life without parole in New York. In Texas, hell, they'd execute you, yeah. Electric chair in Texas? Let me Google that.\" She pulled out her phone and opened the browser.\n\nBug Man let loose a weird giggle, and then was appalled by the sound he'd made.\n\n\"You're a very bad person. In this world. In this real world the way it is. You're a monster. Don't you know that? Damn! I was wrong.\" She held up her phone for him to see. \"Lethal injection in Texas. The needle. That's such a weak way to die.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you want,\" Bug Man pleaded.\n\nShe didn't answer directly. Then she said, \"Drink,\" and he drank. Then she said, \"You didn't listen closely enough. I said 'In this world. In this real world the way it is.' But this isn't the only way the world could be. Is it?\"\n\nThe whiskey had started a fire in his throat. And now a dangerous warmth spread from his stomach outward. He flicked his eyes up at her. She wasn't stronger than him. She wasn't armed. He could probably smash this heavy glass against the side of her head. Push her out of the window. It was, what, six floors down to the pavement? What did he have to lose if what she said about him was true?\n\n\"I sent a text just now,\" Lystra said.\n\n\"So what?\"\n\n\"So... wait. Ticktock. Ticktock, yeah.\" She smiled. It was almost playful. \"Ticky tocky.\"\n\n\"Lady, I think I've had it with your shi\u2014\" His mouth still moved, but no sound came out. Because just then a window opened in his brain.\n\n\"Mmmm,\" Lystra said, savoring it.\n\nA second window opened in his brain. A second little TV screen with nothing in view but something that might just be an insect's leg.\n\n\"Is the third one up yet?\"\n\nA third window. This one showed all too clearly the shape he'd come to know as prey and fear as predator. A biot.\n\n\"You ever hear the phrase 'dead man's switch'?\"\n\nHe had. But he felt as if he couldn't open his mouth. Fear seeped into his blood with icy fingers that outraced the warm glow of alcohol.\n\n\"A dead man's switch. They use it on subways and things like that,\" she explained. \"If the subway conductor dies, see, he lets go of the switch and the train automatically stops, yeah. Yeah. That's me now. I'm your own personal dead man's switch. Because if my heart stops beating, guess what?\"\n\nWhen he didn't answer, she bared her teeth, and once again, that skeletal presence seemed to burn through her flesh. \"If I die, little Bug Man, all three of your biots... oh, and they are _yours_ now... die as well.\" She put a fist over her heart, opened it, closed it, opened it, in a mockery of sinus rhythm.\n\n\"What do you want?\" he screamed, losing the last of his self-control. Then, weeping, softly repeated, \"What do you want? What do you want?\"\n\n\"I'm going to create a new world,\" she said, sitting back, dreamy now, her eyes gazing toward the French doors and the city beyond. \"A whole new world. I am its god. But it's a lonely thing, being god; you could ask the real God, if he existed. He'd tell you. He created the world, and then, he was all alone with no one to talk to. He needed friends. But!\" She held up a cautionary finger. \"He needed friends who understood who they were, and who he was, and who held the lightning bolts, and who was there to cower and serve. He needed the love that only comes from those who are afraid. Love me, your god, or burn in hell. I'm offering the same deal as Jehovah.\"\n\n\"You're fucking crazy.\"\n\nHe flinched, expecting her to reveal that awful presence again, but instead she laughed a genuine, happy laugh. \"Crazy? Nah. I'm BZRK.\"\n\n# **THIRTEEN**\n\nKeats pulled away from her. \"What's the matter?\"\n\n\"Wire, Noah. Wire in my brain.\"\n\nIt took him a few seconds to make sense of things. \"You're down in the meat?\"\n\nShe nodded\u2014distracted, scared. She pushed him off her and jumped from the bed. She grabbed at clothing. \"I knew something... I just... Something was weird, so I looked.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you ask me to help?\" But even as the words were out of his mouth, he knew the answer. \"You thought it was me.\"\n\nPlath didn't answer, her attention was elsewhere. The biot\u2014if it was a biot, how could it be?\u2014had disappeared, and its light along with it. Plath swung her biot left, right, shining her illumination around in the brain fluid.\n\nThen she saw it: a fountain. Instead of water it sprayed red blood cells, the flattened lozenges that were never supposed to fly loose in the cranial fluid. The artery lay like some massive fire hose, coiled across the surface of the brain. It pulsed obscenely with every beat of her racing heart and the blood cells twirled as they flew, then arced away, scattering through the liquid.\n\nThe enemy was cutting into her artery.\n\n\"No!\" she cried.\n\n\"What?\" Keats demanded.\n\n\"He's cut an artery!\"\n\n\"Where? Where?\" Keats grabbed her shoulders, shaking her, forcing her to pay attention and answer.\n\n\"Hippocampus,\" she said, and Keats sent his biot racing to her.\n\nIn Plath's mind she saw the three open windows. Nothing but glass in one. A bleary view from Anya's half-closed eye of the other side of Anya's bed, empty\u2014a slit of light coming from the bathroom. And in the final window that deadly fountain.\n\nShe sent her biot racing toward the deadly leak, clambered madly atop the artery and saw her mistake. It was not coming from the artery itself but from a much smaller vein just behind it. Still dangerous, but the pressure was less intense. Still dangerous, still potentially deadly.\n\nAnd yet, had the foe wanted to kill her, it could certainly have sliced the artery. And there would be more than a few hundred cells flying. He could have done it more than once in the time available. She could right now be swimming through a blood-clouded fluid.\n\nShe had nothing to patch the hole. \"Bring some fibers,\" Plath told Keats.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said tersely. He still held her shoulders. She shrugged him off, turned away, ashamed of her suspicions, ashamed to have him know.\n\nVeins were delicate things, unlike arteries, which managed higher pressures. This vein was about as big around as the biot\u2014translucent, like a worm that never sees sunlight\u2014and it undulated as the blood cells jostled and pushed to make their way back to the heart.\n\nThen she saw the bulge. Something larger than blood cells almost too large to squeeze through the vein. The enemy. It had not just punctured the vein as a distraction, it had stretched the cut to crawl inside and escape.\n\nShe could stab it right through the sausage-casing walls of the vein. She could probably kill it. But she'd be poking holes in her own vein, and the enemy\u2014who had thus far not done anything as drastic as cut an artery\u2014might get frantic, might start slashing from inside the vein.\n\n\"I'm almost there,\" Keats said.\n\n\"I'm going after him,\" she said, without explaining what she meant.\n\nWith her front two biot legs she pried open the elastic flesh of the vein. Blood cells pummeled her face. A white blood cell hit her, rolled down her back, and clung on. It took all her strength to push into the flow, like trying to move uphill against a rockslide.\n\nHalfway in and the pressure shifted. Now it was cells in the vein battering her like dozens of flat stones, pushing her head and upper body after the escaping enemy. She slipped the rest of the way in and fought down the claustrophobia as the vein fitted around her like a body sock. The blood was pushing her along, pushing her toward the distant lungs where oxygen would flow to the cells and they would be fired into arteries for the outward-bound trip.\n\nShe could see nothing but blood cells, red and white, crowded all around her. Her hope was that her prey would soon cut his way out and she would be swept along with him.\n\nBut if he didn't? If he rode this all the way to the heart and the lungs? She could be lost forever in the miles and miles of blood vessels.\n\n\"No!\" she said in sudden panic.\n\n\"I don't see you yet,\" Keats said. He had switched on the harsh overhead light so that the two of them, in various states of dress, looked sickly and frightened.\n\nToo late to get back to her entry point, Plath knew; now she would have to cut her own way out. A second bleeder in her brain. God, she was making things worse. A risk of a second blowout that could kill her, weighed against the terror of being lost forever inside her own body.\n\nSoon this vein would merge with another, and then any exit would cause more blood loss. She had to cut her way out now or lose her chance altogether.\n\nShe stabbed a claw into the vein wall but almost could not hold on against the pressure. Making matters worse, the cell was on her back, oozing its way like warmed Silly Putty into her shoulders, reducing the mobility of her legs. And another now attached to her left hind leg, a fat slug of a thing wrapping its mindless self around her sticklike limb.\n\nPanic!\n\nShe slashed madly at the vein wall, heedless, cut it and felt the blood change speed and direction. Biots are not flexible, so all she could do was use her front legs to cantilever her rear out of the incision.\n\nSuddenly the pressure was too much. Her grip failed. Her biot went tumbling end over end, no way to tell where she was, in or out of the vein.\n\nAnd then, all at once, she was floating free in cerebral fluid, riding like a beach ball atop a stream of cells. She grabbed onto brain tissue and hauled herself out of the current.\n\nFrom there at last she could turn around and see the damage she'd done.\n\nThe leak was twice as large as the first one. Cells were flying out in threes and fours rather than singly.\n\nWith her heart in her throat she grabbed Keats's shoulder.\n\n\"Where are you?\" she demanded.\n\nKeats took her in his arms and held her as his biot crossed into view bearing a half-dozen fibers to begin the job of yet again saving Sadie McLure from her own blood.\n\n# **FOURTEEN**\n\nIt was called the Gyllene Salen, the Golden Hall. It was a vast space\u2014a long rectangle with an impossibly high ceiling, reminding some first-time visitors of a medieval cathedral decorated by Liberace.\n\nAll of one long wall was taken up by five arches opening onto a courtyard. The opposite wall was seven arches. And all of it\u2014virtually every square inch\u2014was covered in just under nineteen million pieces of tile, most of them gold. They depicted various characters from Swedish history\u2014kings and saints, for the most part.\n\nLystra had done her homework and knew all of this. The detail added to the experience. It was a wondrous place and the perfect setting for the annual Nobel Prize ball and banquet.\n\nAt this moment on this dark December night, a handful of Nobel laureates, a slightly larger handful of previous Nobel laureates, the family and friends of said laureates, assorted VIPs and kind-of VIPs\u2014amounting, in total, to several hundred people, all in tuxedos and evening dresses\u2014were seated at long banquet tables loaded down with the sort of china and stemware you don't find at Bed Bath & Beyond.\n\nThis, thought Lystra, would be the point at which she would have to be very careful for her personal safety. First her immediate, physical safety\u2014because what was coming would be violent. But more to the point, this was where the intelligence agencies of the world would focus like laser beams once the event had... well, played out. All the major intel powers\u2014America, China, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, Russia\u2014had prominent citizens here. What was coming would be an event of earthshaking impact. No one cared much what happened to a single actress or a single businessman, and no one would connect any of this to the nosy New Zealand cops who'd had to be eliminated, or to poor, conscience-wracked Nijinsky.\n\nBut the self-murder of the president of the United States, and then the sudden fatal \"illness\" of the Chinese leader, followed by the madness of the Brazilian president, and then this? Even the disaster in Hong Kong. Oh yes: the pennies would begin to drop. The spies and the cops and their ilk would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to begin to see a hand behind it all. Right now people were jumpy, worried, on edge, but they still believed the world was just sort of having a bad run of luck.\n\nThere was no luck involved. Well, she corrected herself, there was a bit of luck: the blundering Armstrong Twins had unintentionally heralded what was to come. They had provided the fanfare presaging the main event.\n\nThe Twins, poor silly buggers, were actually helping her carry out her far superior, far cooler plan.\n\nThe thought of them, those hideous freaks, imagining that they were in control. Lystra's lip curled. For a while there had been a freak show with the carnival: a bearded lady, a dwarf who dressed up like a Tolkien character, and a genetically deformed man with hands like lobster claws. They had frightened her then. The bearded lady in particular had tried to be friendly, motherly. The Human Claw, as the lobster-handed man had styled himself, was easier to handle. He just leered, the pervert, until her father had threatened to decapitate him.\n\nWell, let the freaks think they had something. Let the Twins congratulate themselves for killing the president, blundering idiots. The penny would drop for them, too, soon.\n\n\"Girls' night tonight, boys,\" Lystra whispered.\n\nShe wondered if Bug Man, back at the hotel, was watching and could see her on TV. She'd told him to, and while he wasn't the obedient type, he _was_ the frightened type.\n\nThe great thing about tonight was that all the king's horses and all the king's men would never suspect the end goal. They'd be waiting for some kind of blackmail demand. They'd be looking for a rational motive. The fatal weakness of rational people was that they always looked for the rational answer.\n\nThe attendees were mostly through the appetizer\u2014a lobster-and-crab terrine with snap pea mousse, brioche, and edible flower _fantasie_ \u2014when last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miguel Reynaldo, stopped talking about his younger days when he was a hobo, or traveling minstrel, or whatever it was he thought he was, and stared hard at the Swedish finance minister, a dull middle-aged woman seated across from him.\n\n\"I... I've just had the strangest... But it's still there. I'm seeing...\"\n\nAnd at that point the CEO of Spotify said, \"Like windows? Like there's windows in your head?\"\n\nThe two men stared at each other, while those around them formed expressions of polite concern.\n\n\"Something is the matter!\" This came from a second table, from a past Nobel Peace Prize winner, a man credited with saving many lives through nonviolent means\u2014but he was not now seeming nonviolent. He had lurched to his feet, and in the process he had knocked over his very expensive glass of Champagne and caused his dinnerware to rattle and his chair to scrape.\n\n_\"Moi aussi, mais c'est bizarre, \u00e7a!\"_ cried a French industrialist. Then he, too, shoved back from the table as if scalded. He tried to switch to English, but it was a mangled job. \"In my head things. I am see.\"\n\nIt spread quickly. There were a dozen tables, hundreds of well-dressed folk, and some of them, far too many of them, were now whispering urgently or shouting hysterically that something was very odd, something was not right in their heads.\n\n\"Bloody hell!\" the English ambassador cried. \"It's some sort of insect. Oh!\"\n\nAnd then versions of that in a dozen languages and multiple accented versions of English. Those not directly affected were rushing to give comfort. People shouted for doctors. The words _food poisoning_ were spoken. Others said it was drugs. Someone must have spiked the _crabe et homard_ with LSD.\n\nEveryone was talking. The hall was a posh tower of Babel, volume rising, some voices trying to dominate, impose order.\n\nThen came the first true scream. It was a soprano sound, a woman's voice. It began in terror, rose in pitch, roughened, and turned at last into a throaty animal howl.\n\nLystra closed her eyes and savored it. It went on for a very long time, and a smile split Lystra's face, perfect teeth shining in candlelight.\n\nThe room froze, listening, straining to see the source of this delicious scream. Already some were moving prudently toward the exits.\n\n\"God fuck you all! God fuck you all!\" A deep male voice, but frantic not angry, fearful and repeating the curse over and over as the man backed away from the table, plowed into people with outstretched arms. \"God fuck you alllllll!\"\n\nNow the screams and cries, the roars and shouts and canine yelps broke loose in full.\n\nMiguel Reynaldo was laughing and howling like some demented hyena, mouth so wide open it seemed his jaw must dislocate. He dug his fingernails into his face, down his forehead and cheeks, leaving bloody trails behind. Then he threw himself onto the table, twisted onto his back, shrieking all the while, kicking dinnerware and baskets of bread and glasses of sparkling water in every direction, like some great toddler having the mother of all tantrums.\n\nAnd that's when things turned really ugly. Because someone\u2014later identified as a Finnish philanthropist\u2014came up behind the Swedish minister of finance and cut her throat ear to ear with a table knife.\n\nAnd when she had sunk to the floor\u2014gurgling, dying, spraying crimson across white linen\u2014he kept sawing away, brushing aside her weak defensive efforts, sawing away at her trachea.\n\nPanic!\n\nThe screams were general now as people rushed to the exits, crushed into one another in their desperate desire to get the hell out of that room, but not all those in the crowd were behaving normally. A past Nobel laureate for physics had stripped off his clothing and was peeing on anyone within reach.\n\nLystra, too, began to scream and wave her hands in the air. And she grinned, widely, not only because that's what would be expected of a madwoman, but also because it was all just so wonderful.\n\n\"I bring you madness!\" she yelled, and laughed, but kept a careful eye on all around her as she backed toward the nearest exit.\n\nBack in the center of the room a man later identified as one of the world's great scientific minds was squatting on a table defecating, while around him madmen and madwomen screamed and threw things, attacked one another with cutlery and broken glass, clawed their own eyes, or simply huddled in corners yelping at imaginary spirits.\n\n\"Madness!\" Lystra yelled as she reached the door.\n\nIn the space of five minutes the Nobel banquet had become a blood-splattered insane asylum.\n\nWould Bug Man appreciate it? Would he get it? Probably not. Buggy was useful for some things, not for others. He would not be enough to occupy her own Eden. Someone smarter would be good. Someone more subtle. Someone who would chafe even more and thus be even more completely subjugated in the end.\n\nSadie McLure. God, the irony would be wonderful.\n\nNot everyone was driven mad at the Golden Hall. Most were not, though it was hard to differentiate them as they ran from the hellscape splattered with blood.\n\nLystra Reid's gown\u2014Prada, very chic\u2014was already red, so the blood didn't show. However, her shoes\u2014Christian Louboutin pumps\u2014were absolutely ruined.\n\nBut she could not resist, as she fled the room, crying out in her pretended madness: \" 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.' \"\n\nThus did Lear quote from _King Lear_ as she kicked off her shoes and ran barefoot into the cold night, laughing and twirling as snowflakes fell.\n\n# **FIFTEEN**\n\nKeats handed Plath a cup of coffee. Her hands were shaking. It was morning and she'd had no sleep. They stood in the kitchen, Keats in some soccer team jersey and sweatpants; Plath in an unattractive sweater, panties, and socks.\n\n\"It's plugged. The big one.\" Keats sipped his own coffee and looked at her over the rim as he took a second sip.\n\n\"What?\" She was confused for a moment, thinking he was talking about the coffee.\n\n\"The second hole. It's plugged. I don't think it was all that dangerous, anyway, but I've patched it, the lymphocytes are keeping it clean, and I can see clotting factor forming nicely.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" She sent him a very serious look and added, \"I don't say that enough, do I? Thanks.\"\n\n\"Hungry?\"\n\nShe considered it. \"Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"I'll fry some eggs and bacon. No bangers, I'm afraid. You Americans don't really do sausages very well.\"\n\n\"You can cook?\"\n\nHe made a small laugh. \"Oddly enough, I don't actually live at Downton Abbey.\" Then, thinking that may have sounded resentful, he smiled and touched her shoulder. \"I learned a bit of this and that. Enough to fry an egg and make toast. If we have bread.\" He searched the cupboards. \"Yes, we do have bread. But no beans or tomato.\"\n\n\"Beans?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"The thing you Americans so proudly think of as breakfast is a sad affair compared to a proper full English breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast, black pudding, mushrooms, beans, and a nice grilled tomato. And coffee, of course, unless you prefer tea.\"\n\n\"Black pudding?\"\n\n\"Given your adventures tonight, it's maybe best not to discuss black pudding.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"It's also called blood sausage.\"\n\n\"Ah. Yeah. Enough blood.\"\n\nHe set a rectangular grill on the cooktop and turned on the fire. He peeled strips of bacon from the package and started the flame beneath a saut\u00e9 pan. In seconds the bacon was sizzling, and both the familiar sound and aroma made Plath's mouth water.\n\n\"Were you going to tell me?\" he asked, once he had things organized and under way.\n\nShe stalled for a moment by sipping her coffee. She didn't have to tell him. But he had possibly just saved her life.\n\n\"I was planning an armed attack. I was planning to kill people. I met with Stern, without you. I asked him for... and he said...\" She sighed, lost momentarily. \"I never really asked myself whether it was the right thing. I have this picture in my head....\" She let that sentence peter out, not willing, still, to tell him everything. Not the things that would make him despise her.\n\nHe nodded. \"You started to suspect you'd been wired.\" He sighed, turned the bacon, pushed the toast down, and used his spatula to keep the eggs from spreading out. \"And you didn't tell me because you thought I might be the one doing it.\"\n\n\"It's the world we're in, isn't it?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"It's the world we're in.\"\n\n\"But it wasn't you.\" She took his hand, which after a few seconds he took back to press the spatula down on the bacon.\n\n\"Which leaves who?\" he asked.\n\nShe glanced toward the door, wondering if anyone was on the other side listening. \"Wilkes. Billy. Maybe even Vincent, maybe that affectless thing he's doing is just camouflage. Or it's someone else with BZRK, someone not from our group. We're just a part of it, after all.\"\n\n\"You're sure it was a biot, not a nanobot?\"\n\nShe played the memories back. \"Not a hundred percent.\" She tried out various values in her head. \"Seventy percent sure. But if I'm planning on blowing up, um, attacking the Tulip... the Armstrongs wouldn't be doing that; they wouldn't be wiring _me_ to kill _them_.\"\n\nHe served the food onto two plates, and they sat at the counter and ate, side by side, leaning so that their shoulders would touch.\n\nFinally Keats spoke. \"If you were wired, why? I mean, what you're pointing to are kind of, I don't know, moral changes.\"\n\n\"Have you noticed anything different with me?\" she asked, afraid of the answer and covering it with transparently false nonchalance.\n\nHe thought it over while chewing bacon. \"You're questioning Lear and BZRK less. I mean, maybe it's just that you've got more responsibility. But you used to be more suspicious, I guess. More critical.\"\n\nShe thought about that. \"Yeah, maybe so.\n\n\"I'll help you look for wire.\"\n\nPlath hesitated and felt herself blush. She filled her mouth with egg. If she was still wrong, if somehow Keats was the person running the biot, or at least knew about it, then he would never find any wire. It could be a way to determine his loyalty. If he found\u2014\n\nShe cut herself off in midthought as reality dawned: there was no way to determine loyalty. Ever. Keats might be loyal today and some nano creature of either side might be wiring him to switch sides tomorrow.\n\n\"It's still inside me,\" she said. \"Maybe it's trapped in my liver or whatever, but it's still in me.\" She nodded and wiped her mouth, then set her plate in the sink. \"Yes,\" she said decisively. \"The aneurysm will keep. Help me look for wire. I want to know where it all is. And help me kill this thing, whatever and whoever it is.\"\n\n\"And pull the wire?\"\n\nShe didn't answer. She didn't answer for so long that Keats thought she must not have heard him.\n\n\"And pull the wire?\" he repeated, more insistently this time.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not yet, Noah.\"\n\nAfter that she wouldn't look at him.\n\nThe other person making an interesting discovery was Imelda Suarez. _Lieutenant_ Imelda Suarez, dammit. Hopefully there was an extra paycheck to come with that.\n\nThe _Celadon_ , the mother ship, had dropped anchor six miles out from Cathexis Base, hundreds of miles from McMurdo. The ice was thick and crusty here, and no way the ship could edge up to the dock, not for another month at least. She had gone ashore in the _Jade Monkey_ , running easily up onto the beach and roaring along until the LCAC found its home, a hangar and refit facility they all called the Blower Barn.\n\nAs soon as she'd done the inevitable paperwork, Suarez headed toward the Office\u2014the administrative building. Things at Cathexis Base tended to be named simply, usually by function, but with an occasional touch of wit: the Blower Barn, the Chiller (a poorly heated dorm), the Toasty (the newer, warmer dorm), the Club, the Link (the satellite dishes), the Office.\n\nIn the center of the base, acting as a sort of central park, was a glass dome raised up on a skid-mounted platform. It was seldom transparent\u2014condensation saw to that\u2014but it clearly housed green, living things, ranging from small elm trees to tall grasses to irises and roses. But for the most part the Andalite Dome, or AD, as it was called for some obscure reason, was more practically planted with cabbages, broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots, and onions.\n\nThe produce wasn't anything like enough even to feed Cathexis Base, but it helped, and it was the place to go when you felt the ice start to close in on you.\n\nAs Suarez did now. Seeing the smudge of green inside the sweat-dripping bubble, she felt herself drawn to it, and decided checking in at the Office could wait. Getting into the dome was a process\u2014you had to shed your gear and walk in wearing a T-shirt and pants alone. And you had to pass through a double airlock.\n\nIt was while in the airlock that she ran into Charlie Bronk.\n\n\"Coming or going?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Just got in,\" she said. Bronk was a small man with a too-tough name. He was a mechanic who often worked with Suarez. They weren't friends, but they were cordial.\n\n\"I'm supposed to head out to Forward Green,\" he said. \"One of their cats is wonky, needs a new fuel injector.\"\n\n\"There's no one out there can do it?\"\n\nBronk laughed. \"At Forward Green? Pff. Those are scientists and God knows what all out there. Sally Wills is the only one can turn a screwdriver, and she's on an evac to Wellington.\" He lowered his voice. \"A psych thing. She lost her shit.\"\n\n\"Damn. Sally Wills? The redhead?\"\n\nBronk nodded. \"I don't suppose... I mean, I wouldn't ask, but it's my son's bar mitzvah and I'm missing it. I was going to Skype.\"\n\n\"You can't Skype from Forward Green?\"\n\n\"There's no communication in or out of Forward except to here. Security.\"\n\nShe was on the verge of asking him why there would be secrecy, but thought better of it. That was the kind of question that might be thrown in your face some day if there was a problem. Cathexis Inc. might not be military, but when it came to secrecy, they sometimes went the military one better.\n\n\"I could do it,\" Suarez said with a shrug. \"Of course you'll owe me. And I don't mean you cover for me on cleanup. I mean something more like you pull a shift. Three shifts.\"\n\nThey agreed on one shift and a round of clean-up duty. And that was how Suarez ended up on a loud chopper heading almost due south. It was a hellish ride. The wind had come up. In fact, at the halfway point the pilots discussed turning back. Antarctic weather wasn't something you took risks with.\n\nBut satellite imagery gave them a nominally clear hour before the hammer came down, so they went forward.\n\nIf Cathexis Base was businesslike and humane, Forward Green was a bizarre cross between survivalist compound and Ritz-Carlton resort. From the frosty window of the chopper she could see that the buildings were arranged in a sort of diamond around what was very certainly the only swimming pool on the continent. The pool was covered of course, and as sweaty as the Andalite Dome at Cathexis Base. It was an ostentatious symbol of wealth, because water\u2014actual, liquid water\u2014was one of the rarest and most expensive of commodities. It spoke of a profligate use of power\u2014the heat to keep the pool warm, the light to make it shine, the lift capacity to bring it all together in this place.\n\nIt was built aboveground, of course\u2014the shifting ice would have crushed anything cut into it. It was covered by a plastic roof that formed three peaks, vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House.\n\nSuarez guessed that the power source had to be a nuclear reactor. But how had that been approved? The green movement had made peace with nuclear power, but here? On the _ice_?. And in private hands?\n\nOnce she'd looked beyond that eye-popping artifact of another world, Suarez took in the rest of the place. The buildings were identical\u2014seven three-story ski-mounted structures, with an empty slot where an eighth building might go someday.\n\nThe windows aimed out toward the ice were small, with metallic shutters that could be mechanically closed against the wind. The windows facing in, toward the pool, were larger than anything she'd ever seen before in energy-conscious Antarctica. Though they, too, were equipped with strong steel shutters.\n\nShe imagined what the place would look like locked down, with all those shutters closed. And then she noticed the four half-buried towers two hundred yards out from each point on the diamond.\n\n\"I'll be damned if those aren't gun emplacements,\" she muttered. Not that she saw anything like weapons.\n\nA mile away to the south and barely visible because the wind was now blowing crystals of ice through the air was a larger structure\u2014long, low, and unadorned\u2014that could only be some sort of hangar.\n\nThat's where the souped-up hovercraft would be.\n\nIt hit her then full force: they didn't have anyone who could fix a fuel injector? At a facility where they were building jet-powered hovercraft? Bullshit.\n\nShe hadn't cleverly exploited an opening to reach Forward Green: she'd been lured there.\n\nLystra and Bug Man left Stockholm not by way of Arlanda Airport but by car, to a private airfield fifty miles out of town, out into the landscape of snow and dark pine trees.\n\nBug Man had only a light parka that George had supplied, in no way sufficient to deal with a Swedish winter. The run from the car to the welcoming light of the jet was enough to freeze him, but Lystra seemed indifferent, still wearing her blood-drenched red dress\u2014though she had swapped her shoes for a pair of shearling boots. _She would look almost cute_ , Bug Man thought, _if she were younger. And a whole lot less insane_.\n\nIt was warm on the plane, which took off within minutes of the door closing, soaring up into the night.\n\n\"Look!\" Lystra said, and drew him out of his seat to look through the window on her side.\n\nThe sky was an eerie light show, green against black, the stars all rendered irrelevant. The green was a veil, translucent, shimmering.\n\n\"Aurora borealis,\" Lystra said. \"The northern lights.\" She nodded. \"We get them in the south sometimes, too. You'll see.\"\n\nBug Man watched for a while, acutely aware of her nearness. Crazy, yes. Too old for him, yes. Still...\n\nShe must have sensed it because she laughed, an almost girlish sound, and pushed him back to his seat.\n\nBut then she stood up, turned her back to him, and said, \"Help me with the zipper.\"\n\nBug Man swallowed hard. Okay, yes, he'd thought about it. But seriously? With a woman who had his sanity and life in her hands? He'd watched the TV as instructed, and he had seen the Nobel madness. He had even seen a fleeting shot of Lystra dancing and twirling away from the carnage.\n\nGod only knew what the woman would do to him if he disappointed her.\n\nHe drew the zipper down. It snagged halfway and he had to tug at it for a bit, all the while with his nose just inches from her back.\n\nMost of what he could see was tattooed. Blues and reds and greens. He couldn't make out the patterns, except that most of it seemed to be faces. He saw eyes staring, mouths twisted in screams.\n\n\"Damn,\" he whispered, and winced, hoping she hadn't heard.\n\n\"You like my ink?\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah,\" he said too quickly.\n\n\"Want to see more? Want to see my latest one?\"\n\nHe froze. Just absolutely froze. She let her dress fall to the floor.\n\n\"Oh... shit,\" he said. There were faces on her back, on her behind, on her flanks. Not every inch was covered\u2014maybe half of the available flesh.\n\nMore than enough. It was a horror show.\n\nFaces. Men, women, one that might even be a child. All in agony or rage or some combination of the two.\n\nHe couldn't breathe. He did not want to see more. He did not want her to turn around.\n\nBut she did.\n\nSlowly, slowly; savoring his fear, the fear she could hear in his raspy breathing, in the way it caught in his throat.\n\nHer front was even more horrific. Faces from hell were staring out at him. Two were new, still healing.\n\nShe pointed to the freshest-looking one with a coyly bent finger. She was being cute. She was playing with him. But oh, God, there was no way to fake this, no way for him to force his features into anything like a pleasing expression.\n\n\"That's a man named Janklow. He didn't want to sell me his medical testing company. Because of him, yeah, the whole game was delayed.\"\n\nHer breasts were just inches from him. Her eyes were the eyes of a rabid dog, focused on him with an intensity that made him tremble.\n\n\"Don't you want to know who they all are?\" she asked, and the hard, sadistic voice he'd heard before had replaced the cute come-hither tone.\n\nHe managed to shake his head. No. He didn't have a single question. No, he didn't want to know. He wanted to be back in England. He wanted to be back at Tesco, shopping for his mother's onions. His fists were clenched so tight they ached.\n\n\"Sure, you want to know,\" she said. \"These are all the ones whose lives I have taken from them.\"\n\n\"That actress? Do you remember, yeah? You must have read about it, seen it on TV? She dug her own eyes out with a knife. It was intense, Bug Man, very intense.\" She tapped the other still-healing tat, on her sculpted hip bone. America's Sweetheart in blue ink, bleeding red blood from her gouged eyes.\n\n\"What did she\u2014\"\n\n\"What did she do? Oh, she wouldn't even remember, didn't recognize me at all, why would she? I was in a hospital for a while for... stress?\" She threw her head back and laughed. \"Stress? I was crazy as a loon.\"\n\n_Was? Past tense?_ Bug Man wanted to ask. But not as much as he wanted to go on living.\n\n\"My pap and mam, that's what they had me call them. My guardians.\" She spit the word. \"The losers my daddy dumped me on. They started talking to me after I killed them.\" She covered each breast with a hand, lifted them slightly so he could see the faces tattooed there. They appeared to have been crushed. Their eyes were...\n\n\"They would talk to me. 'Be a good girl, Lyssie. Pray to the Lord for strength, Lyssie.' Sometimes though, they would give me useful business advice.\" She frowned at the memory, then thankfully she turned away, walked to a narrow closet, and pulled out jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was green with a big letter _C_ over an outline of Antarctica.\n\nBug Man breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Ugly sweatshirt, but so much better than looking at that torture chamber on her body.\n\n\"I went crazy, yeah. Into the nuthouse with me. I was rich by then, had my businesses going pretty good, but yeah, off the deep end, yeah. Meds did nothing; they still talked to me.\"\n\n_Your conscience, you sick bitch_ , Bug Man thought.\n\n\"Not my conscience,\" she said, for all the world as if he'd said it out loud. He had to resist the urge to cover his mouth with his hand lest he say something to get himself killed.\n\n\"Psychotic break. Not functional. Everything falling apart... and he came back. Daddy. He said he would if it came to it, if, you know... if. I guess he thought I might eventually get weirded out over his killing my mother. Drink?\"\n\nShe poured them each several fingers of bourbon. Bug Man gulped his down. He needed to pee desperately, but this was so not the time to ask to be excused.\n\n\"Nuts, yeah. So back he came, my daddy. And he said, 'I know about this man, this scientist. He's doing some weird stuff with nanotechnology. Maybe he can help. Only he refused, you see, and Daddy couldn't kill him and neither could I, because, well, he was protected.\"\n\n\"Burnofsky?\"\n\n\"Burnofsky?\" She shook her head. \"But good guess. No, it was Grey McLure. He was just starting\u2014freaking out over his wife dying and he couldn't save her with his new toys. Then his daughter and the aneurysm, yeah. Yeah. People went crazy, though, see? Off this new thing he'd invented. This _biot_!\"\n\nThe word came out in a roar that made Bug Man jump back.\n\n\"This biot. So, maybe, yeah, maybe if a dying biot would make a sane person crazy, hey. Maybe, right? Yeah? Maybe the other way, too.\"\n\n\"Jesus. They gave you a biot.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yeah. Yeah. My very own. And then they killed it. And you know what? It worked. It _worked_. I wasn't crazy anymore.\"\n\n_The hell you weren't_ , Bug Man did not say.\n\n\"The tattoos stopped talking to me. I could cope, yeah. I could manage. Making tons of money. And then I saw it\u2014saw the game. Saw the way I could do it. Make a whole new world, yeah.\"\n\nShe fell silent then, staring down into her drink.\n\nBug Man stood on wobbly legs and went to the bathroom. In the glaring fluorescence he stared at his own face as if staring at a ghost. He was shaking. He felt an urge to sit down and empty his bowels, but who knew what the crazy woman would do?\n\n_Oh, that's right_ , he told himself. _Not crazy. No, she was all cured_.\n\nHe peed and washed his hands, and having used up all his stalling tactics went back out.\n\nLystra Reid had not moved a muscle.\n\nHe sat down.\n\nAnd unprompted she said, \"Oh, and the actress? Sandra Piper? Bitch cut me off in traffic.\"\n\n# **ARTIFACT**\n\n**Plath:** I need Caligula.\n\n**Lear:** Name the place.\n\n# **SIXTEEN**\n\nThe news was all about the Nobel madness. Twenty-four hours a day. MSNBC, Fox, CNN.\n\nOnly the BBC made a connection to the bizarre case of the New Zealand cops.\n\nOnly the Web site Buzzfeed made a connection between the Nobel madness and the inexplicable suicide of Sandra Piper.\n\nEveryone, though, connected it to the bizarre death of the American, Chinese, and Brazilian heads of state.\n\nFear was spreading. A sharp observer would already be able to spot a wariness in people's eyes and in their words. There was a feeling in the air.\n\nFear. Like the scent of smoke. Like the distant rumble of tank engines and clanking tracks. Like sirens in the night.\n\nThe theories about the cause were: food poisoning, mass hysteria, and some sort of terrorist attack using a form of nerve agent.\n\nOnly Cracked.com actually listed nanotech on its \"8 Ways to Explain the Big Brain Meltdown.\"\n\nThere were several loops of footage that ran more or less continuously online and on TV. One was a cell-phone video of a scene of madness from inside the Golden Hall. A second showed a bloodstained woman in a party dress rushing from the hall amid a panicked crowd, then suddenly launching herself at a passing woman and biting savagely into her neck. Another showed a former American secretary of state waving madly at invisible flying enemies.\n\nOf course there were also clips of the new president looking solemn and vowing to give the Swedish government any assistance they required. Ditto footage of the British prime minister, the French president, and a long list of folks who had no idea what was going on, all vowing to get to the bottom of it.\n\nRye ergot. That was the first guess. Rye ergot, a disease caused by fungus that grows on some foods and can cause symptoms similar to an LSD overdose.\n\nTests for rye ergot were all negative.\n\n\"Just like Nijinsky,\" Keats said. \"It's all connected.\" He was watching the BBC coverage. \"It's all the same bloody thing, isn't it.\"\n\nHe was talking to no one. Plath was out, and though a part of Keats was with her\u2014sitting on his hands, waiting for a cue\u2014he felt alone. Abandoned. Both here and there. Both large and small. Slumped into his chair and on edge, ready for a race. Not for the first time, he wondered mordantly what he had to fear from madness. Wasn't this already madness?\n\nBilly was absorbed in a video game. Vincent was there, staring, almost forgotten by Keats.\n\nKeats sat before the television, watching through his two eyes, and seeing the windows in his head, watching from other eyes. \"It's all one. But who?\"\n\nThe voice when it spoke surprised him. What the voice said was chilling.\n\n\"Lear,\" Vincent said.\n\nKeats turned to look at him. He was still showing nothing, Vincent. A blank expression, sad eyes. Only his brow seemed to speak of any emotion; if tension can be called an emotion.\n\n\"Lear?\" Keats said. \"Not the Armstrong mystery weapon?\"\n\n\"Games,\" Vincent said, as though that word should mean everything and the saying of it had exhausted him.\n\nKeats couldn't quite think of what to say. On the one hand, this was Vincent. On the other hand, this was mad Vincent. Shattered Vincent.\n\n_Seventy percent Vincent_.\n\n\"You want anything to eat?\" Keats asked. \"I was thinking of ordering Chinese.\"\n\n\"Did Lear just see it?\" Vincent mused, ignoring Keats. \"Or has he known all along? Should I ask him?\" There was something almost like a smile on Vincent's lips. \"There will be more.\"\n\nKeats might have pursued it, but a few thousand feet away, his much smaller self saw that the moment was fast approaching. He readied himself to confront the lion in his den.\n\nWith Nijinsky dead, Burnofsky was off his leash. He had no way of knowing this\u2014not yet\u2014but there was no longer a biot in his head. Or to be more accurate, there was still a biot attached to his optic nerve, but no one was peering through those biot eyes any longer. The biot had no real brain of its own, nor did it have instincts. It continued to live, but only to live. Immobile.\n\nBurnofsky had a Post-it note. He wrote on it: _Floor 34. Viral research_.\n\nHe held this note up in front of his eyes. Held it there for far longer than it should take to read it. But he guessed that whoever was running the biot in his head\u2014and he believed it was Nijinsky\u2014would not be focused on his every moment.\n\nHe was careful in the way he did this because Burnofsky knew perfectly well that his lab was under surveillance. He had come to accept that fact. Privacy was dead, anyway, particularly if you worked for the Armstrongs. But he knew the camera locations and angles. Sometimes he forgot\u2014he had a worrying sense that his little self-inflicted wound of the other day might have been observed.\n\nWell, the Twins had seen worse, hadn't they? They'd seen him puking his guts out. He was morally certain that they'd been watching one dark night months earlier, back before he'd been wired, when he had sat for twenty minutes with a loaded pistol in his hand trying to get up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger.\n\nSo what was a little cigarette burn, eh? Better than the opium pipe, right? Better than the vodka bottle. He wasn't drinking now, not that he'd made some lifelong decision to quit; he just wasn't drinking right now. Or snorting coke. Or smoking opium.\n\nNo, he was all cleaned up. He laid the Post-it note down in the ashtray in front of him, shielding it with his body from the hidden camera. Then he began to light a cigarette and in the process burned the note to ashes.\n\nHe drew in the smoke of his cigarette and wondered if he would get to the end of it without burning himself.\n\nThe burning was\u2014\n\n\"Shit,\" he muttered. Nijinsky would think it was a reference to a _computer_ virus. He wouldn't understand that Floor 34 was a crash program involving actual viruses. _Biological_ viruses.\n\nBurnofsky had only stumbled upon the information by chance. He was hiring a new engineer and happened to speak to one of the people in human resources, who smiled, told him he had plenty of available engineers, and thank God at least Burnofsky wasn't looking for a virologist.\n\nVirologist. A scientist specializing in viruses, of course. And why was anyone at Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation working on biologicals of any kind?\n\nIt had to be Floor 34. Burnofsky knew most of what AFGC was into, he should have known about a biological nano program of any sort. Were they working on their own version of biots? Were they preparing to toss his nanobots aside? The possibility worried Burnofsky a bit.\n\nAs always when he was anxious, his thoughts went to opium, and then to his work, and then to Carla. And from there to the Great Forbidden Memory.\n\nBurnofsky knew exactly what they had done to his brain. He knew. He was a scientist; he had wired many a person, done to others what had now been done unto him. He knew that tiny wires in his brain had been used to create shortcuts\u2014sending thoughts around the usual circuitous neural pathways to hook into the most intense sensations.\n\nIn other words, he knew that Nijinsky had connected memories of his daughter's death to pleasure centers. He knew Nijinsky had made his greatest guilt into a sick and disturbing fantasy. He knew that. He could picture the wire in his own brain. He could imagine just how Nijinsky had done it.\n\nBut that changed nothing. It did not stop the physical reaction when he thought of that most awful of days.\n\n_I killed her_.\n\n_And I'm thrilled_.\n\nAt first he had thought of using his own nanobots to go in and rewire himself. But of course Nijinksy would see him. Burnofsky could take Nijinsky's biot\u2014Burnofsky wasn't quite Bug Man or Vincent when it came to nano warfare, but he was confident that he could outfight Nijinsky.\n\nBut somehow... No.\n\nSomehow the will to fight back always seemed to dissipate.\n\nWas this still more wiring? Probably. If so, it was effective. He would form the desire, formulate a plan, start to get his resources in order, and then, then, then something.... It would all just leak away.\n\nThe answer was no. He would not finish this cigarette by putting it out in the ashtray.\n\nHe took one long, final pull on the cigarette butt\u2014it was down to the last inch\u2014lifted his shirt, and stabbed it into his stomach.\n\nThe pain was staggering. The smell of burned flesh was like opium, somehow, a narcotic that turned the pain into a dream, a swirling unreality.\n\nAnd most of all, it took his mind off Carla. Because despite all of Nijinsky's careful work, Burnofsky felt that if he had to endure that horror-excitement one more time, he would find his gun and finally do it.\n\nThe HNDS\u2014hover-capable nanobot deployment system\u2014or \"Hounds\" were roughly triangular in shape and no bigger than a paper airplane.\n\nThe original drone architecture was under development for the U.S. military and the CIA. Stealthy, relatively quiet, wonderfully maneuverable, their only real drawback was that their range was limited to twenty miles. The military wanted a seventy-five-mile range, and the CIA weren't interested unless they could be flown at distances up to five hundred miles.\n\nSo the drones\u2014once designated the hover-capable surveillance system (HOSS)\u2014had been repurposed. Twenty miles might not quite be the thing for the soldiers or the spies, but it was perfectly adequate for use in massed preprogrammed attack by nanobots.\n\nThe Hounds came for Mr. Stern as he was picking up his morning bagel at Montague Street Bagels in Brooklyn. It was a short walk from his home, and the McLure Security car and driver would be waiting across the street.\n\nThere were twenty thousand self-replicating nanobots aboard the Hound piloted remotely by a tech in the bowels of the Tulip. The Twins watched on their eternal monitor. The nanobots themselves were of course not twitcher run. They had been programmed by the Twins via the app. These nanobots had been given a simple set of instructions: to multiply as soon as they encountered a source of carbon. To continue to do so for exactly forty minutes. Then to commit mechanical suicide and stop.\n\nAs Stern was crossing the sidewalk the Hound swept down Henry Street before executing a sharp right onto Montague.\n\nStern bit into his bagel. The cream cheese oozed from the sides and he licked a dollop before it could fall away.\n\nAnd then he heard something strange. Like a ceiling fan, but with blades going very fast. He even felt the downdraft and looked up to see its source. The Hound was just six feet over his head.\n\nThe nanobots fell in a cloud, like dust.\n\nStern ran to the car, still clutching the bagel. The driver saw him, started to jump out to open the door for him, then saw the urgency on Stern's face, so just released the lock and started the engine.\n\nStern reached the door just as he began to feel a burning sensation on his scalp.\n\nHe piled into the car and yelled, \"Some kind of drone!\"\n\nThe driver turned around and blanched visibly. \"Jesus, boss! Your head!\"\n\nStern reached past the driver and yanked down the visor mirror. In the narrow rectangle he saw that his scalp was red with blood.\n\n\"Drive!\" Stern shouted. \"To McLure Labs!\"\n\n\"What's happening?\" the driver cried.\n\nStern tried to answer, but at that moment the nanobots had chewed through his cheek and were tearing into his molars, and the sound that came out of the security man was not decipherable as anything but a cry of agony.\n\nThe driver yanked the car into traffic, leaned on the horn, and forced his way past a parked UPS truck.\n\n# **SEVENTEEN**\n\nCaligula found himself almost nervous. How strange. Plath was just a girl, after all.\n\nHe remembered the first time he had really met her, in a small but vicious battle at the Tulip. He'd liked her. He'd thought he saw some inner strength in her, but it had never occurred to him that she would end up running the New York cell of BZRK. Vincent had seemed bulletproof\u2014an odd concept for Caligula to think of. But Vincent really had seemed indestructible.\n\nFor a while after Nijinsky's fall from grace Caligula thought Lear might place the burden of leadership on him. But no. Of course not. Caligula had his purpose in life, and it was not shepherding a gaggle of kids. He was useful to Lear, but only as a killer. And less and less useful at that. Lear had found other ways.\n\nNijinsky, poor bastard. A clean bullet would have done the job. No need for what he endured. No need for that cruelty.\n\nHe wondered what Plath would ask of him. Would she ask for his help in bringing Burnofsky in so that he could be infested with a new biot?\n\nHe hoped she would not ask him about Lear.\n\nBut of course she asked about Lear.\n\n\"It seems absurd to call each other Caligula and Plath,\" Plath said.\n\nPlath had picked the meeting place, and she was waiting for him when he arrived. It was public but not: a dark booth in a dark bar. It was against the law for her even to be sitting here across from him. But there was a law for regular minors and then there was a very different law for minors who could hand a fistful of hundred-dollar bills to a concerned bartender.\n\nIt amused Caligula that she had even found this place. It was classically male, a dive bar in a pricey Manhattan neighborhood. An easy walk from the safe house, which showed caution. After all, Sadie McLure had changed her hair, but she could still be recognized if a paparazzo spotted her. She had minimized the odds of that. Smart girl.\n\nHe took in the surroundings as he did every few minutes, checking for changes in personnel, in position and posture. There were a couple of hipsters at the bar imagining themselves as latter-day Kerouacs. A tired-looking woman who was almost certainly a hooker. Three loud businessmen saying things like, \"So I told him, 'That is not something I'm comfortable with.' I mean, maybe he doesn't give a shit, but I do.\" After a few more drinks they'd be complaining about their wives and their kids.\n\nBut that's not who Caligula watched out of the corner of his eye. It was a woman, thirty-five maybe, in an inexpensive business suit with slacks, sensible shoes, and khaki raincoat. She had brown hair cut short, but not so short as to be fashionable. She ordered something he didn't overhear but that caused the bartender to look wary. It came clear and fizzy in a tall glass: sparkling water.\n\nIf she wasn't some kind of cop, she was doing a very good impression of one. She confirmed the impression by avoiding looking at Caligula. It was a fact of life that any normal person would look at him.\n\nHad it come to this? Were even the cops on the trail? It was one thing being shadowed by Armstrong people and by Plath's security people. It was a different matter entirely when secrecy was so compromised that FBI or intelligence or even NYPD were watching.\n\nThings were coming to an end. One way or the other. But wasn't that what Lear wanted?\n\n\"It does seem ridiculous,\" Caligula allowed.\n\n\"Call me Sadie.\"\n\n\"Call me Caligula.\"\n\nThat earned him a wintry smile.\n\nHe did not lean toward her. He had not shaken her extended hand\u2014she would understand why. Caligula might be a part of BZRK in his own way, but you simply did not trust people armed with biots. A fleeting touch was all it took to send the tiny little beasties toward his brain.\n\nHe was nursing a beer in a tall, sweating mug. He casually dragged the mug across the table, left to right, leaving a trail of water behind. A barrier to the tiny bugs.\n\n\"I never thanked you. For that first time.\" Plath nodded at him, a regal move that seemed natural for her. \"You saved our lives.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" he said. And waited.\n\n\"I need you,\" she said.\n\n\"For?\"\n\n\"Lear wants the computer servers in the Tulip destroyed.\"\n\n\"They'll have backups.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"We don't think so. They're so paranoid they keep several systems cut off from one another. We've had access to many of their networks, but some of their computers are entirely unreachable from the outside. No Internet links at all. No phone lines. They might as well be something out of the 1980s.\"\n\nHe nodded, accepting this as a likely fact. \"It's a large building. They are well guarded. This is not a movie; I could not do it alone, or do it even with your people.\"\n\n\"How _could_ you do it?\"\n\n\"By destroying the entire building.\"\n\nShe stared at him. He watched her eyes. Interesting. Her pupils had expanded. A pleasure reaction. But then her eyes had narrowed, and she had drawn away. Of course: she was conflicted.\n\n\"Destroying...\"\n\n\"There will be natural gas pipelines in the basement. If you were to fill some of the sublevels with that gas and ignite a spark, it would very likely collapse the entire structure.\"\n\n\"Like...\"\n\n\"Like what, Sadie?\" He knew like what. He had a pretty good idea what was being done to her. He could guess Lear's direction. But he wanted Sadie to say it.\n\n\"Like the World Trade Center. Like 9\/11.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Caligula said. \"We could obliterate the building itself. It would kill everyone inside. Which is what you would want, Sadie. You would _want_ all the scientists in there to die. It would set back nanobot technology several years at least. It would be the practical end of Armstrong Fancy Gifts. By the time they recovered, someone else would have developed the same capacity. Someone perhaps a bit less... visionary?\"\n\nThere was a TV on over the bar. It showed what every screen in the world was showing: the Nobel madness. Cut to the American president's suicide. Back to the Nobel madness. Cut to the Brazilian president.\n\nPlath was shaking her head. \"No.\"\n\n\"If you destroy the servers and let the scientists walk away\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not just scientists in that building. There are regular people. Clerks and janitors and people who just answer the phones.\" She was pleading with him to find a different answer.\n\n\"It would be mass murder. It would make you one of the greatest terrorists in history.\" He watched her eyes. She was repelled. She was sickened. But she was not surprised. So that idea had definitely already occurred to her.\n\nAnd she did not get up and walk away.\n\n_Jesus Christ_ , Caligula thought, this _is the new way, the new reality_. Sixteen-year-old girls could be made into terrorists. They could be wired for mass murder.\n\nPlath, for her part, could see it in her imagination. She could see that phallic monstrosity of a building collapsing into the fire that raged at its base.\n\n_My God_ , she thought, _it_ could _be done_.\n\n\"We can't do that,\" she said. To emphasize her point, she reached most of the way across the table and pounded it with her index finger. \"There have to be limits. There's a line.\"\n\n\"Do there? Is there?\"\n\nThe table was lacquered wood. To Keats's biot eyes, it was a bit like an aerial map of someplace like Afghanistan. There were steep, deep valleys below formed by the grain of the wood. But filling in those valleys was the smooth lacquer finish. The result was a feeling like skimming along over mountains, flying at the height of the peaks.\n\nThe great problem with biots moving over large distances\u2014distances measured in centimeters or meters rather than millimeters\u2014was finding your way. A biot's view of the macro world was fuzzy and distorted.\n\nCaligula felt safe on his side of the table. There were two feet separating his arm, resting on the edge of the table, from Plath's arm on the opposite side. A long run for a biot, and worse, a hard target to keep track of. Then there was the wall of water left by Caligula's deliberate dragging of his beer.\n\nBut Plath, too, had been playing games with the tabletop. Seemingly fidgeting pensively, Plath had picked up the saltshaker, picked at some dried-on food, then put it down on the table.\n\nShe put it down toward the far left end of Caligula's water obstacle.\n\nFrom the point of view of Keat's biot the saltshaker was the Tower of Babel and the Empire State Building all rolled into one. He saw it as a distant shape, a feature of the landscape like some impossibly symmetrical mountain.\n\nHe saw it from there. But he also saw it through the tap he'd placed on Plath's eye using his other biot. One of Plath's own biots was standing beside him there. Plath made her biot tap Keats's creature and make a gesture meant to convey going around the saltshaker. Biots could not speak to each other, so this was a primitive but effective way to convey basic signals.\n\nOn the table surface Keats's other biot rolled farther left, moving at top speed, racing to get around the saltshaker and avoid being slowed by the water.\n\nHad Caligula noticed? That would be the question.\n\nKeats cleared the saltshaker tower. He spotted the wall of water off to his right but was well clear of it. Ahead, far in the distance, was a wall of indeterminate color.\n\nKeats's first biot, K1\u2014the one inside Plath's brain\u2014turned awkwardly to Plath's P2 and made a gesture using two claws meant to convey that he was closing in.\n\nIn the macro Plath was dragging the conversation out to give Keats time.\n\nCaligula drained the last of his beer and set the glass down just behind the saltshaker.\n\nDeliberate?\n\nPlath's P2 looked at Keats's K1. A body shake that was the equivalent of a headshake. _No, that didn't get me_.\n\nBut it had been close, very close. The glass\u2014a rainbow-swirling object so big it looked a bit like some rainbow-hued desert mesa\u2014came crashing down out of the sky. It sent vibration and water droplets in all directions. One of them, an Olympic pool of water, crashed behind him as he sped on.\n\n\"It is your decision,\" Caligula said. \"Lear will insist that it be your decision.\"\n\n_Lear will insist_ , Plath thought. Never \"he\" or \"she,\" always the careful gender-neutral name.\n\n\"And I will make that decision,\" Plath said. \"But first\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that as enjoyable as this is, I must go,\" Caligula said.\n\n\"Is there a way for me to contact you directly?\"\n\nCaligula smiled. It was a surprisingly genuine thing, that smile. He was no comic-book villain playing a role and posturing for the camera. He smiled and meant it when he said, \"Sadly, no. My orders come from Lear. My loyalty is to Lear. But Lear will respect your decision and convey it to me.\"\n\nHe pushed back from the table and stood.\n\nHe spoke very definitely about Lear's state of mind, it seemed to Plath. And not for the first time it occurred to her that she might have been speaking to Lear all along. _Was_ Caligula Lear?\n\nExcept that there was something in the killer's eyes when he spoke of his master. There was affection, it seemed to Plath, affection and... not fear. No, Caligula did not fear his master. He liked Lear. He was... he was...\n\n_Proud!_\n\nIt hit her so suddenly she gulped and blushed and ended up awkwardly extending a hand, which Caligula bemusedly refused.\n\n_No_ , Plath thought, _Caligula is not Lear_. But neither was he a mere employee.\n\nAffection and _pride_.\n\nUnable to sit still in the safe house, Keats had come halfway and met her on the sidewalk. With neither of them acknowledging the other, they made their way to a Starbucks. Standing in line, speaking the proper Starbucks drink formula, squeezing around a tiny round table too close to the bathroom\u2014it was all reassuringly normal.\n\n\"Did you make it?\" she asked him.\n\nHe smiled. \"I grabbed his sleeve as he was standing up. I'm on his arm and heading north. In an hour I'll be seeing what Caligula sees.\"\n\n\"And _who_ he sees,\" Plath added.\n\n\"So what did you two talk about?\"\n\nJust a flicker in Plath's eyes. \"I told him what Stern had said about the Tulip being impregnable.\"\n\n\"And Caligula accepted that?\"\n\nPlath shrugged. \"What else could he do? He agreed to pass it along to Lear.\" She frowned, formed a sentence in her head that went like this: _There's something proprietary in the way Caligula speaks about Lear. There's a relationship there. Almost father-son, I think_.\n\nBut she didn't speak it. Under the table she clenched her hands into fists. She found it difficult to talk about Lear at all. She could feel it. She could guess that it was wiring.\n\nWhat she could not do was decide to rip up that wire. That felt suicidal. It felt painful, though of course it would not be.\n\nMore wiring. She'd been wired to fear ripping up the wire.\n\nGames within games. Ever-deeper circles of hell.\n\nPlath's phone lit up. She recognized the number. She covered one ear against the noise of steaming milk.\n\n\"Mr. Stern?\"\n\nTo her surprise it was a woman's voice. \"No. He's dead.\"\n\nPlath froze. Then, \"What?\" It sounded childlike to her, her own voice. She sounded wounded.\n\n\"This is Camilla Strange. I'm... I mean, I was... Mr. Stern's second-in-command. I am now holed up at McLure Labs with reports of four of our people dead.\"\n\nPlath found she was breathing hard. Audibly. \"How did you know to call me?\"\n\nWas it her imagination or were there an unusual number of police sirens. Too many even for New York?\n\nWas it her imagination, or were unflappable New Yorkers hunched a bit too tight around their lattes? Were their eyes less big-city averted and more alert-scared?\n\n\"Mr. Stern left a file to be opened in the event of his suspicious death.\"\n\n\"And was it suspicious? His death?\"\n\nCamilla Strange laughed humorlessly. \"He seems to have been... eaten. Consumed. His driver brought him here, dead, with maybe a third or a half of his body gone. Muscles, viscera, organs: all eaten. Like millions of ants had been working on him. That's how he looks. Like roadkill.\"\n\n\"Nanobots,\" Plath said.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Camilla Strange said. \"That was our thought, too. A mini gray-goo scenario. They must have been programmed in advance to replicate only so many generations. And then... I'm sorry, someone is... hold on, please.\"\n\nThe phone muted. Then Camilla was back. \"I just sent you a piece of video.\"\n\nPlath switched apps, opened the video, and turned so that Keats could see. It showed a sedan screeching to a halt at McLure Labs. A man whose entire head and shoulders seemed to be weeping blood staggered from the car, walked three steps, and fell.\n\n\"Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, what is that?\" The voice on the video was saying.\n\nThe picture zoomed in, and for just two seconds before focus went hazy Plath could see the dead man liquefying before her eyes.\n\nThe video ended. Blessedly no advertising had yet been attached.\n\n\"Ma'am? Ms. McLure?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You saw?\"\n\n\"I saw.\"\n\n\"What do we\u2014\"\n\n\"Stay hidden. Stay out of it. This is out of your hands now.\"\n\nPlath, shaken, hung up the phone. She excused herself to the bathroom. She vomited into the toilet bowl, fished in her bag for a mint, found three loose Tic Tacs.\n\nWar was on. If there had been any uncertainty, it was gone now. If she had entertained doubts about whose side she was on, the Armstrong Twins had made it easy.\n\nStern had been like an uncle. The one living remnant of her father's company. The only man she knew who'd been Grey McLure's friend.\n\nStern, murdered by the Twins. Her brother, murdered by the Twins. Her father...\n\nShe saw it again in her mind, the towers falling, and mingling with that imagery was the vivid personal memory of watching her father's jet arcing crazily out of the sky, plunging toward the stadium, the fear, the panic, the flash and heat and noise of the explosion.\n\nIf she was not in this to avenge her father and brother, why was she in it at all?\n\nWas it all wiring now, thrusting these memories to the fore? Maybe, yes. But that didn't make it wrong, any of it.\n\nStern must have been in agony.... Grey McLure must have died in terror, not at his own extinction but at the knowledge that his son would die with him, and possibly his daughter as well.\n\nIf wire was what it took to give her strength, then okay. Okay.\n\nShe wiped her mouth, washed her hands, chewed the Tic Tacs, and thumbed a text.\n\n# **ARTIFACT**\n\n**Plath to Lear:** _Yes_.\n\n# **EIGHTEEN**\n\nThe Antarctic weather came down like the wrath of God. Sixty-knot winds, subzero temperatures. Nothing was flying out of Forward Green.\n\nIt was on her third day there that Imelda Suarez decided to take a chance and see what was in the big hangar out to the south. She waited until the base boss\u2014his actual title was Chief Executive Forward Green\u2014had his birthday party.\n\nSuarez had no difficulty starting up a Sno-Cat and driving off toward the south. No one saw her leave, which was not surprising in the whiteout conditions. The problem would come if for some reason she got lost or the Cat broke down. Then she would have to call for help and all hell could break loose.\n\nIn her forty-eight hours at the base Suarez had felt that this was a very different sort of place, very different from the usual Antarctic facility\u2014even very different from Cathexis Base. The ice was a lonely and often boring place, so people tended to be friendly. People liked \"new meat.\"\n\nBut not at Forward Green. Here she had been treated politely, properly, but not welcomed. No one had plopped down next to her at table and struck up a conversation. This despite the fact that she was an attractive woman and the gender ratio on the ice was about seven to one.\n\nConversations in the dining hall tended to become quieter when she was seen. Everyone was trying hard not to seem secretive, but the end result was that they just seemed more so.\n\nMaybe it was just that Tanner had warned her to expect that something strange was going on. Maybe she was seeing what she expected to see. But that said, it was weird. It was a _very weird vibe_ , as her hippie mother would have said.\n\nThe Sno-Cat is a small, tracked vehicle, like a tiny two-person tank with big windows and no cannon. The heater was blowing noisily, rattling from something stuck in the vent, and the windshield wipers were ratcheting back and forth even more noisily, but visibility was still poor. It would be all too easy to drive right past the hangar and just keep going until the gas was used up. And then she'd quite likely freeze to death. The ice was unforgiving of recklessness.\n\nBut after an anxious half hour she saw the outlines of the building in between swipes of the wipers. She kept going\u2014no point in being coy, she had to look like she had every reason to be here.\n\nBefore stepping out of the Sno-Cat she zipped her parka all the way up, flipped her fur-lined hood forward, and tugged at the drawstrings before pulling on her huge gloves. Her dark goggles were already in place.\n\nSuarez climbed out of the warm cab and was almost knocked over by the wind. But she was a sailor, after all, and not unaccustomed to pitching decks and bad weather, so she avoided disgracing herself. She twisted the door handle, and, sure enough, it was unlocked.\n\nThe wind\u2014which was a battering physical force outside\u2014became just a howling noise.\n\nThe hangar was lit only minimally, but it was still bright enough to see. And what she saw were four vehicles like the ones in the video Tanner had shown her. Three were partially dismantled, with parts strewn across wheeled steel tables.\n\nThe fourth vehicle appeared to be intact. She walked to it, torn between fascination and caution.\n\nIt was about thirty-five feet long from tip to tail, and almost as wide. It was a sort of elongated oval, a hovercraft judging by the skirts, but otherwise like no hovercraft she'd ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie.\n\nIt had a tail, almost like something you'd see on a fighter jet, but there was no horizontal plane, just a shark's fin bearing missile pods on each side. A quick count indicated six missiles total, three in each pod. She had no familiarity with the type of ordnance, but it was undoubtedly real and undoubtedly missiles and undoubtedly military in its purpose\u2014and that fact shocked her.\n\nAntarctica was the last place on Earth without nationalities or armies.\n\nBefore and beneath the tail was a hard plastic canopy\u2014again like something from a fighter jet. There appeared to be two jet turbines mounted on either side, flush with the top, squat beside the canopy. The pilot would be able to see ahead and to either side by looking over the engine casings.\n\nIt was painted a marshmallow white with only a few blue accent notes here and there, plus the obligatory safety notices near the intakes and exhausts from the two jet turbine engines.\n\nSuarez walked boldly to the hovercraft and peeked inside the canopy. The controls were more modern versions of those on her own LCAC.\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\nThe voice made her jump. It was male, high-pitched, curious not hostile. But when she turned to see its source, she was face-to-face with an assault rifle. Behind the rifle was a middle-aged man in white overalls. He was balding, had a red face and glasses. And he was not, she judged, used to pointing weapons at people.\n\n\"It looks fast,\" she said, trying for a nonchalant tone.\n\n\"It is,\" the man said with evident pride. \"She'll do one sixty knots with no wind and on smooth ice.\"\n\n\"One sixty? And if it hits a bump?\"\n\n\"Do I need to point this at you?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I'm unarmed. And I'm not up to anything. I came out here because I can't find a three-sixteenth socket wrench to save my life. I'm Imelda Suarez. I drive an LCAC. They brought me in to work on... well, to be honest, I think they brought me in on a bullshit excuse.\"\n\nThe man smiled expectantly. \"And why would they bring you here on a pretext?\"\n\n\"So that I would see this.\" She indicated the hovercraft. \"So that _they_ could see how I reacted. Because they need hovercraft pilots and we aren't exactly thick on the ground. There aren't a hundred left on the planet, let alone on the ice since the navy's LCACs were decommissioned.\"\n\nThe man lowered the gun, then set it on one of the tool carts. \"I suspect you're right, Ms. Suarez. Or is it Lieutenant Suarez?\"\n\n\"Not lieutenant,\" she said forcefully. \"Semper fi and all that, but I'm no longer getting paid by Uncle Sam. Do I get to learn your name?\"\n\n\"Babbington. Joseph Babbington. Doctor, if that matters to you. We expected you yesterday; that was the thinking, anyway. We were ready yesterday. I'm just an engineer. I did some of the design on the sleigh.\"\n\n\"The sleigh?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"It's a nickname, but it stuck. 'Santa's badass sleigh,' some wit said once, and now that's what we call it.\" He fished a remote control from his pocket, pressed a button, and the sleigh's canopy rose. \"Take a closer look.\"\n\nCautiously, very aware that the assault rifle was still near at hand, she leaned into the cockpit. She took it in with an expert eye, whistled, and said, \"About twenty years ahead of my cockpit. Very nice. That's a forward-looking radar?\"\n\n\"Oh, much better than that. What we have there, Lieuten... Ms. Suarez... is a computerized obstacle avoidance system technology. COAST, because, well, you know how engineers love acronyms. It senses changes in elevation\u2014obstacles, anything over six inches above grade level\u2014and either diverts power to the cushion to lift the sleigh clear, steers clear, or in extreme cases slows to allow the pilot to choose the course of action.\"\n\n\"Useful if you're shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots.\"\n\n\" _Vital_ if you're shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots.... We have two qualified pilots,\" Babbington said, with the air of someone who was tired of playing games. \"We need six total. Four primaries and two backups. You could be the third primary, if you qualify. And if you're interested.\"\n\n\"Since I left the military my interests have had a lot to do with what I'm paid.\"\n\nBabbington searched her face for a long time. He didn't believe her. Or at least he didn't believe her yet. \"The pay is three hundred thousand USD per annum.\"\n\n\"Jesus.\"\n\n\"It's a tough job. It may even be a dangerous job. And it's a job that has something in common with your military service: it demands unquestioning loyalty and obedience.\"\n\nShe reached in and put her hand on the yoke. They'd gone to the trouble of padding it with leather. It was like something out of a sports car.\n\nOn impulse she hopped inside, a move that required a twisting half jump, like a stunt rider mounting a running horse. She made it work.\n\nThe cockpit was snug, but there was room to the left and right, flat surfaces that even included a cup holder. The pedals felt familiar. If her LCAC was a twenty-year-old Buick, this was a brand-new Porsche. It even had a new-car smell.\n\nIt was seductive.\n\n\"Very nice,\" she said. \"But what's it for?\"\n\n\"For?\"\n\n\"Dr. Babbington, I couldn't help but notice the missiles.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\"\n\n\"Why would the sleigh require missiles?\"\n\n\"We're testing it for the military.\"\n\nShe wondered if she should let the lie go unchallenged. If she called him out, would he shoot her? No, she judged: if she failed to call bullshit, he'd know she was lying.\n\n\"That's very funny,\" she said. \"What's the real reason?\"\n\nBabbington smiled, a nice, genuine smile. \"The owner of the company is a bit... let's say, she's a bit unusual. She has a notion that civilization will soon collapse, and she intends to sit it out right here. But should that civilization lash out at her in its last throes, she wants to be able to defend herself.\"\n\n\"You work for a nut?\"\n\n\"I used to work for the Pentagon, as did you. Weren't we working for nuts then? And those nuts paid rather ungenerous government salaries.\"\n\nDespite herself, Suarez laughed. \"Well, you got me there. What kind of range does this thing have?\"\n\n\"The sleigh has a three-hundred-fifty-mile operational range. Six surface-to-surface missiles, four surface-to-air missiles just inside the engine cowling, twin thirty-caliber machine guns.\"\n\nWith a show of reluctance Suarez climbed out of the cockpit.\n\n\"I have to tell you, Dr. Babbington: three hundred large would be very nice. Very, very nice. But there's something else. The U.S. Navy taught me to drive hovercraft, but that was incidental to my core training.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"Marines, first, as you already know. Then Sea Air Land, Doctor. Navy SEAL.\"\n\nShe watched his face turn gray.\n\nShe watched his eyes dart toward the assault rifle. Which was in her hands before he could move.\n\n\"This is the part where you tell me everything,\" she said. \"This is the part where you answer all my questions, because if you don't, I shoot you, and you die.\"\n\nNot a good liar, Sadie McLure.\n\n\"I told Lear no,\" she said.\n\nBut it was right there in her eyes.\n\n\"Then what are we going to do?\" Keats asked her.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know. This madness, the Nobel thing, whatever happened there, that must be the secret weapon Lear wants destroyed. Right?\"\n\nHe had not known what to say then. He had not known what he could safely say to her. He did not know whether the girl he loved would have him killed for turning against Lear.\n\nIt felt as if his insides were dying. Like he was a piece of fruit left out in the sun, rotting from the inside, collapsing in on himself. He felt sick.\n\nShe was wired. She knew she was wired. Yet she had refused to let him try to fix her.\n\nThe insidiousness of it. She was like a schizophrenic who knows she's supposed to take the meds but refuses to. She was becoming party to her own mind-rape.\n\nHe wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. Everything he was to her was less important to her now than carrying out Lear's plan.\n\nShe had always held something back from him, he knew that. That was okay, he'd told himself, she just needed time. At first he'd decided the reticence was a class thing. That made him feel a bit better, really, because it was something he could understand. It was something he could defend himself from emotionally.\n\nHe still loved her. But she had never loved him, had she? And now... now where was Sadie McLure?\n\n\"Do you want to make love?\" she asked him, that and he wanted to punch her in the face.\n\nNot her, not _Sadie_ , no, it was... it was whoever this person was, this reprogrammed, wired alteration of Sadie. It was this truly new creature called Plath.\n\n\"I'm tired,\" he said, and the relief in her eyes was almost more than he could endure.\n\n\"Yeah. Big day tomorrow,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh? Why?\"\n\nHer eyes flicked right\u2014guilty, caught. She shrugged and forced a phony smile. \"Aren't they all big days?\"\n\nShe left, heading toward the bedroom they still shared.\n\nTears filled his eyes and since no one was around to see him standing there like a fool, he let the tears roll down his cheeks.\n\nBack to New York, that's what Lystra said. \"Back to New York to watch the show, yeah. A lot happening very soon. Timing. It's all in the timing, yeah.\"\n\nSo here they were. New York City, and damned if the tattooed madwoman didn't have an apartment a block away from the Tulip. He could look straight down Sixth Avenue and see the building. He could run for it, escape, get to the Twins and say, \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but you don't know what this crazy bitch is doing!\"\n\nHe could do that. And they'd thank him for the information and then kill him. Or Lystra would catch him and she would show him that scary face she had, the one where she seemed almost to turn into a skeleton. And then she could kill his biots and turn him loose.\n\nDeath or madness. Seriously? That's what it was down to? The three windows in his head said _yes_ , _yes_ , that was exactly the choice.\n\nHe wondered rather morbidly just what kind of crazy he would be. Stories were still leaking out of Stockholm. They said some big-deal banker found a way to hang himself from a chandelier. They said a French general was found smeared with feces, crying. They said a famous American horror novelist had run into the street and beaten a party Santa to death with a fire extinguisher.\n\n_Which crazy will you be, Anthony?_ he asked himself.\n\nWhat escape was there? The Twins? The American government?\n\nHe stopped breathing. The answer\u2014not a good answer, a weak, probably worthless answer\u2014popped into his head.\n\nSomeone brilliant. Someone with mad skills. Someone who once had almost, sort of, liked Bug Man. And was just a block away.\n\nBurnofsky.\n\n_Lystra had taken his phone. She was on her own phone right now in the adjacent room, telling her CEO, some dude named Tom, to_ fire all the remaining employees, effective now, this minute, shut it all _down, the whole Directive Medical shebang, stop all checks and buy more gold. Yeah. Just don't touch Cathexis_.\n\nBurnofsky. The dude had invented nanobots. It stood to reason he'd have... something. But how to reach him? He knew Burnofsky's e-mail and his cell, but Bug Man had no phone.\n\nHe would have to wait until she was asleep, the monster in the next room.\n\n_Maybe I won't be a hanging-myself crazy_ , Bug Man thought. _Maybe I'll be a nice, gentle, shit-smeared kind of crazy_.\n\nSomehow he was convinced that none of this would ever have happened if he'd just found the onions sooner. Gotten home.\n\nWith a chill he remembered his mother coming down with a sinus infection a year ago, give or take. She'd had tests done. Her DNA, too, might be stored somewhere on one of Lystra Reid's drives.\n\nHer plan was now frighteningly clear. She had used her web of medical testing companies to acquire and digitize DNA from millions of people. Once you had the DNA, you could grow a biot derived in part from that DNA. The biot-DNA-donor mind link would happen\u2014which would be disorienting all by itself. Suddenly having windows open in your mind... well, that was going to be disturbing.\n\nBut nothing to what came next. Lear wasn't out to disturb or unsettle people, she was out to destroy civilization. For that she needed madness. Widespread, inexplicable, irresistible madness.\n\nSo once the biots were born, she had only to kill them. An electrical surge maybe, or extreme heat or acid.\n\nWould it really work? Would one crazy woman be able to bring the whole world crashing down?\n\nHe turned on the television; it was all he had. Al Jazeera TV had a news bulletin. He reached for the remote. He did not want to see more video of that horror show in Stockholm.\n\nSuddenly he felt Lystra's presence and realized he was no longer hearing her from the other room. \"Leave it,\" she said, looking toward the TV screen. \"I think something kind of, yeah, big just happened.\"\n\nSeven months earlier, the younger British prince had given blood in a public show of support for a National Blood Service blood drive. The NBS had been helped in their work by volunteers from Directive Medical UK.\n\nOf course security for the Royal Family was very tight, so no one would be allowed to actually know which was his donation. It was labeled anonymously, just a numerical tracer, and sent off to the blood bank.\n\nExcept that the Directive Medical lab tech had already swapped it out with an earlier sample.\n\nNow, as the television picture showed, the prince was in a gondola of the London Eye\u2014the huge Ferris wheel beside the Thames\u2014as part of an outreach to disadvantaged youth.\n\nThe gondolas were large enough to hold a couple of dozen people at once, and were in fact holding twelve specially chosen children of carefully varied ethnicities, who shrank in horror against the far end of the gondola as the prince repeatedly ran at the transparent wall and smashed his head into it.\n\nBlood smeared the plastic. Blood completely covered the prince's face and would have rendered him unrecognizable if not for the familiar red hair.\n\nThe Eye was slowly coming around, bringing the gondola back to earth, but that footage from three minutes earlier\u2014brutal video of the raving royal slamming himself again and again and again\u2014was competing in one half of the screen with a live shot showing him flailing, kicking, spitting blood in every direction as appalled Royalty Protection in plainclothes and uniformed London Met police tried to get him under control.\n\n\"That was excellent,\" Lystra said. \"You try to nail the timing, yeah, and arrange something spectacular, but wow, that was better than I'd hoped for. Yeah.\"\n\nBug Man stared in horror. \"I liked that dude. He was the fun one.\"\n\n\"Who, the prince?\" Lystra laughed. \"Don't go soft on me, Bug. Much more to come. I've got three officers at a nuclear missile base near Novosibirsk. High hopes. Fingers crossed, yeah?\"\n\nAnd yes, she had her fingers crossed. She left and closed the door behind her.\n\nBug Man watched as the prince was hauled away to a waiting ambulance. \"Fuck you, crazy lady. Yeah? I liked him. He was a gamer.\"\n\n# **NINETEEN**\n\n\"I need your help.\"\n\nKeats to Wilkes and Billy the Kid.\n\nPlath was asleep. He had crept silently from bed to bed waking them, holding a silencing finger to his lips.\n\n\"Anything for you, pretty blue eyes,\" Wilkes said, and yawned.\n\n\"Plath has been wired,\" he said. He knew she might wake up at any moment. No time for delicacy. \"She's been wired, she knows it, but she won't pull the wires. It's got to her. We need to go in there and clean her up.\"\n\nAnya was not invited. Plath had a biot in Anya. Keats badly wanted to ask Anya if she had built any more biots for Plath. But Plath might have been watching through Anya's eyes, or listening in her ear.\n\n\"You saying someone from Armstrong wired her?\" Wilkes asked.\n\nKeats hesitated. \"This is lunacy. This is mad. But she saw something. Down in the meat. She doesn't think it was a nanobot. I helped her look. I didn't find anything. But I have found wire, a lot of it.\"\n\nHe let that sink in. \"She thinks Nijinsky\u2014\" Wilkes began.\n\n\"No,\" Keats said. \"Whatever it is, whoever's running it, it's still apparently active, so not Nijinsky. Someone else. Maybe one of you two. Maybe a traitor from some other cell.\"\n\nWilkes got up, came over to Keats, and sat down beside him. Very close, uncomfortably so. \"How do we know it isn't you?\" she asked. \"You've had a biot in her for a long time, right? Fixing that hole in her artery or whatever? Could be you, right? And maybe you're just lying in wait for one of our biots to come crawling along and, _boom_!\"\n\n\"This is kind of crazy,\" Billy said.\n\n\"Nah, this isn't _kind of_ crazy,\" Wilkes said. \"This is full-on crazy.\" She heh-heh-heh laughed and said, \"This is where it all goes, right? I mean, this is where it kind of had to go, didn't it? You start playing with people's brains, man.... How do you know? Right? Whole world's going crazy. All those big brains. And now your prince dude.\"\n\nKeats nodded tightly. \"Right.\"\n\nWilkes pulled away from him. \"Maybe I just transferred one of my kids to you, Keats. Just now.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" he acknowledged.\n\n\"Maybe it's me, and if I put one of my kids into Plath, maybe that's my second one, you know? Maybe I get in there and make it worse. What's Plath doing? What's she up to? Did this wire make her soft in the head?\"\n\n\"She's planning to blow up the Tulip.\"\n\n\"What's a tulip? A flower, right?\" Billy asked.\n\nWilkes snorted. \"It's a skyscraper in Midtown. Blow it up? What's that even mean?\"\n\n\"It means that she's given the go-ahead to Caligula to blow it up. Kill everyone in it. Destroy all their labs, all their computers.\"\n\nWilkes stared at him.\n\n\"Lear told her to\u2014\" Keats began.\n\n\"Lear?\" Wilkes shrilled. \"Lear told her to murder all those people?\"\n\n\"That was her own... her own solution. Maybe. Who knows? She's met with Caligula. She knows she's wired, and she knows it's wrong, but she can't, you know.... she can't pull the goddamned wires. We have to do it for her. And we have to find whatever is in there. Nanobot or biot, we have to find it and kill it.\"\n\n\"Who is doing it?\" Billy asked. \"I mean, who is wiring her brain to do\u2014\"\n\n\"To do what Lear wants done?\" Keats asked, his voice rising. \"Who is wiring her to do _exactly what Lear wants done_?\"\n\nWilkes drew a sharp breath. \"The hell,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't have any choice but to trust you two,\" Keats said. \"For all I know, you're as wired as she is. Or maybe you just think it's okay. Or maybe I'm as messed up as she is and the way I see this is all wrong. But I have no choice, I have to... I can't...\" He spread his hands, helpless.\n\n\"You're talking about ripping out wire that Lear or someone working for Lear put there?\" Wilkes asked. \"Lear's going to see that as treason. You know what that means? You know who comes to talk to you when you betray Lear? Jesus, Keats, if she's as wired up as you say, Plath'll send Caligula after you herself.\"\n\n\"I know!\" he raged. He pushed his fingers back through his hair. \"I know. I know.\"\n\nNo one spoke. Keats sniffed and wiped at his eyes. \"This fight has changed,\" he said. \"This isn't us against them anymore. Not that simple. I mean, doesn't there have to be some line we draw? Doesn't there have to be something we won't do, even if it means maybe we lose? And doesn't there have to be some limit on how far we'll _let_ ourselves be used?\"\n\n\"The Twins don't have a limit,\" Wilkes said.\n\n\"Neither does Lear,\" Keats said. \"I think he's the one using biots\u2014creating them, killing them\u2014to drive people crazy. Sweden. The prince. The Brazilian.\" He waved his hand vaguely. \"Probably a bunch of other stuff. The Twins, Lear, they're just two sides in the same crazy game, Wilkes.\"\n\n\"Yeah. And we are playable characters, right? We're game pieces.\"\n\n\"If we let ourselves be,\" Keats said.\n\n\"So now you're taking over?\" Wilkes asked.\n\n\"Only until Plath is cleared. Then...\" He shrugged. \"Then we... I don't know.\"\n\n\"I'm in,\" Wilkes said, but her usual smart-ass smirk was gone. Her face was gray and slack. She looked far older than she could have been. \"Death or madness. Right? We've always known it would come down to that.\"\n\nKeats nodded. \"Death or madness.\"\n\nThe Russian officers proved to be disappointments to Lear. A major and two lieutenants duly lost their minds as their biots died, but at the time they were not on duty. The major wandered off into the Siberian wastes and froze to death. One lieutenant was dead drunk, too incapacitated to do much of anything.\n\nThe remaining lieutenant had just finished a shift. He saw the windows opening in his mind and acted quickly. He stripped off his sidearm and threw it into the snow. Then he ran toward the medical dispensary, but lost his mind halfway there.\n\nNaked, he charged the guarded gate of the missile silo and was arrested by security.\n\nThe lack of a nuclear event\u2014it would have registered on seismographs\u2014disappointed Lystra.\n\nSo she opened her laptop and scanned the list of high-value targets. She picked out the pilot of a Virgin Australia plane making the long haul from Los Angeles to Sydney.\n\nAs he approached Sydney in a few hours, his biots would be born, windows would open, and if Lystra was lucky the world would have one more thing to fear. An appetizer, so to speak, before the pasta course.\n\n\"Funny,\" she said. \"Yeah.\"\n\nShe watched some old _Beavis and Butt-head_ on Netflix, and fell asleep with it still playing.\n\nBug Man had never heard of _Beavis and Butt-head_. That would give him an excuse in case she woke up and saw him creep into her room with his heart in his throat. He could say, _I heard this on TV, didn't know what it was, so I came in and..._\n\n_... and lifted your phone_.\n\n_And then you killed me, so, yeah, yeah, crazy bitch, yeah, then you killed me. The end_.\n\nSuarez had not found it necessary to threaten him much. Dr. Babbington was amenable enough once she'd made clear that she would do bad things to him if necessary. And an assault rifle was hard to argue with.\n\n\"Because society is going to crumble. That's why. She's absolutely convinced that society is about to crumble like a stale cookie.\"\n\n\"Who? Who are you talking about?\" she had demanded.\n\n\"Jesus, you don't even know who is running this? Our lord and mistress. The owner. Of Cathexis. Lystra Reid.\"\n\n\"Lystra Reid? Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm quite sure. This is only one of two _secret_ facilities. This is where we create the sleighs, where we train pilots: this isn't the final level any more than Cathexis is the final level.\"\n\n\"There's a third base?\"\n\nA third base. Three hundred kilometers south in a small dry valley. Dry valleys are a phenomenon unique to Antarctica, places of rock and little else, where for reasons of ice drift and unusual wind patterns the ground is bare of snow.\n\nIf Lystra Reid had built a base in a dry valley, it would not be one of the McMurdo group. The McMurdo Dry Valleys were more or less permanently infested by scientists collecting rocks and drilling core samples and complaining about their grant proposals.\n\nShe pointed this out to Babbington.\n\n\"Yes, well, this dry valley is an odd duck. It's extraordinarily deep and also quite narrow\u2014just two kilometers across at its widest point. The ice is piled high against both mountain ridges, and sooner or later, of course, the weight of all that ice will crumble the mountains and take the valley. Soon by geological standards, so within a hundred thousand years.\"\n\nHe laughed, obviously thinking that was a science joke. When Suarez mustered up a half smile, he seemed encouraged.\n\n\"There's actually a meltwater river there, helped by some subterranean geothermal activity, and the whole place is quite sheltered from the wind. It's a garden spot, really. The average annual temperature remains within twenty degrees of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. So sometimes it's actually above freezing.\"\n\n\"Garden spot.\"\n\n\"Anyway, that's where the third base is.\" He showed her on a map.\n\nAnd that was when Babbington made an ill-fated leap for the gun. In a hand-to-hand battle of SEAL vs. scientist, the outcome was not in doubt.\n\nBabbington landed on his butt several feet from where he started.\n\n\"I'd stay there if were you,\" Suarez warned.\n\nHe took her advice, crossed his legs awkwardly like a kindergartener, and sat.\n\n\"I'm afraid I will have to lock you up, Dr. Babbington. I'm sure there's a tool locker somewhere. They'll find you when the party is over and when the weather clears. Do you have to use the bathroom? Because you'll be tied up for as much as a day.\"\n\n_Amazing_ , Suarez thought, _how quickly life can get weird. One minute you're driving an LCAC delivering oranges and booze and hauling away garbage, and the next minute you're beating up scientists and preparing to get yourself killed in some dry valley at the end of the world_.\n\nShe had no doubt that this Lystra Reid person was capable of killing. You don't set out to build secret bases defended by sophisticated weapons because you're peaceable by nature.\n\nBut the question in her mind was whether this whole thing, whatever was going on here, was a secret government op unknown to Tanner. Tanner was low-level; this could simply be something way above his pay grade. In which case she would earn no thanks for barging in on this third base unannounced.\n\nBut they wouldn't kill her, not if this was a government op. They'd give her a stern lecture, make her sign more threatening letters, and just maybe hire her on.\n\nIf, on the other hand, it wasn't a government op but some actual crazy woman buying missiles and building a secret lair at the frozen anus of planet Earth, well...\n\nShe had to tell _someone_ what was up: a witness she could trust to follow up just in case Imelda Suarez was never heard from again. She glanced at the computer on a work desk.\n\n\"User password on that computer?\" she asked, sliding into a chair.\n\nBabbington shrugged. \"1234ABC.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" She typed it in and got access to her own e-mail account. She wrote a message to her brother, Frank. Frank was with the Capitol Police. He wouldn't be cleared for this information, but she knew she could trust him.\n\nShe spent a few minutes locating a good, strong steel tool locker and pushed Babbington and a bottle of water inside.\n\n\"You okay in there?\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"You'll be fine.\"\n\nThen: the sleigh.\n\nSuarez was honest enough to admit that she was motivated in part by an almost lustful desire to drive the sleigh. It was an object of beauty. A work of art. It screamed \"speed\" just sitting there.\n\nShe shed her parka, stuffed it into the very minimal storage space behind the cockpit seat, and slid into the leather chair. The pedals were where they should be. The yoke was awkwardly placed by her lights, but she could live with it. The displays were elegant and wonderfully easy to read.\n\nShe closed the canopy and realized the hangar doors were shut. So she climbed back out, scrounged around until she found a remote control, and climbed back in. It was just as good the second time. She had to fight the urge to run her fingers over the displays. Beautiful. If Rolls-Royce, Tesla, and Porsche teamed up to make a hovercraft, this would be it.\n\nThere was an autopilot, but she couldn't imagine trusting herself to a computer\u2014not at the speeds this thing moved, not on the most treacherous terrain on planet Earth. But she turned on the automated warnings as well as, after some hesitation, the impact-avoidance system that would take control if she was in immediate danger of crashing.\n\n\"You wreck this thing and your future will be very much in doubt, Imelda,\" she told herself.\n\nThen, finally, she fired up the engines.\n\nIt was noisy but not deafening in the cockpit. She felt the surge of suppressed power as the twin jets throbbed. The sleigh rose on a cushion of air.\n\nShe keyed the remote, and the hangar doors slid open. Beyond the doors was whiteness, white on white as far as the eye could see.\n\nShe punched her destination into the GPS, released the cable tie-downs, and slid toward the gap at walking speed then running speed and was just hitting fifty knots by the time she blew out of the building, keyed the doors over her shoulder, and rocketed out onto the ice.\n\n_Oh, yes_.\n\nShe smiled and held it at fifty knots until she had played with the controls for a while and come grudgingly to trust the forward-scanning radar.\n\nThe ice here was rippled but with no rises over eighteen inches. The sleigh's jets adjusted automatically to push more air into the cushion as she reached obstacles.\n\nVery soon fifty began to feel slow. Boring. Despite the fact that the ice was flying by beneath her. In her rearview mirror she saw a vortex of ice crystals, a shimmery white contrail.\n\n\"Well, in for fity, in for a hundred, right?\"\n\nShe punched it, and the sleigh took off like a rocket.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Suarez said. \"Ah-hah-hah!\"\n\n# **TWENTY**\n\nPlath was still asleep when they struck.\n\nOne from Keats, two from Wilkes, two from Billy. Five busy biots raced up through her eye and into her brain.\n\nThey had planned. Wilkes and Keats would focus on ripping up wire in the places where Keats had found it. Billy would go hunting for the intruder and call for help if he found something.\n\n\"It's mostly all up in here,\" Keats said. \"Hippocampus and some Broca's area.\" Amazing how quickly one could learn something as esoteric as brain architecture when life and death were involved.\n\nThe three of them were downstairs in the darkened living room. Hopefully Plath would not awaken and come down to find out why Keats was not in her bed. If she did, they would know it: arteries would start pumping faster as she woke and began to stir.\n\n\"Go ahead, Billy. But if you find something, don't fight it. Call us for help.\"\n\nBilly had a Coke by his side. He was dressed in a Washington Nationals jersey many sizes too large and slumped down to look cool, with the result that he looked even younger than he was\u2014a small, round head and solemn face in a pile of rumpled clothing. None of them had anything to do with their hands.\n\n\"There's the first wire I found,\" Keats said to Wilkes. Down in the meat he was pointing it out to her nearest biot.\n\n\"It's encrusted,\" Wilkes said. It's been there for some days at least. Maybe longer. Meaning maybe we pull the wire, but the neurons have already made it redundant.\"\n\nThe wire was crisp and clean, only a few molecules in circumference. But neurons had grown over and around it in places, like kudzu, vines twining sensuously around the metal of the wire.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Keats admitted. \"But I won't have that in her brain.\"\n\nThat made Wilkes smile. A genuine smile, not her usual cynical leer. \"Pulling it up, sir. Aye, aye, Captain. Pulling it up.\"\n\nKeats saw her two biots going at it, working well together to pull up the encrusted wire. The pins were sunk deep and completely overgrown. It took two biots straining to draw them slowly out of the brain like fence posts being pulled up. They came free but were still tangled in strands of neurons.\n\nWilkes had to tear the strands away, breaking actual brain connections in the process. To biot \"ears\" they made a sound like someone squirting water through their teeth and tearing denim.\n\nNo way to know whether these were just redundant cells tracking the wire or whether they had some legitimate purpose. Was she ripping away some cherished childhood memory? Probably not, probably these connections were just reinforcing the wire, but the human brain was astoundingly complex. BZRK had very sophisticated brain mapping, but still it was largely a crapshoot.\n\n_Gee, sorry about that, Plath, I just wiped out your memory of nursery school_.\n\nKeats was doing the same around the corner. There the wire was fresher, less overgrown. His biot stood at right angles to hers in the almost gravity-free liquid environment.\n\nIn the macro Billy said, \"Can I ask a question?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Keats replied.\n\n\"Why are we doing this?\"\n\n\"Because someone has messed with Plath's head, that's why.\" Keats obviously thought that was the end of it. But Billy pressed. \"But isn't everyone's head messed with? I mean, stuff you see, or how you were raised. Stuff people did to you.\"\n\nThere was something, maybe several somethings, behind that tremulous _stuff people did to you_.\n\nBut this was not the time to examine Billy's demons. \"That's all natural, this is...\" He was at a loss for words. \"It's wrong, that's all.\"\n\nBilly fell silent after that. But Keats could see that he wasn't convinced by Keats's halfhearted effort to justify what they were doing. Keats went on about his business, tearing out wire, pulling pins. So did Wilkes, but now she took up the same line of questioning.\n\n\"Yeah, blue eyes, but we aren't doing this with her okay anymore than whoever laid the wire down, right?\" In the meat they were at right angles, here they sat facing.\n\n\"She's not able to\u2014\"\n\n\"So we're _making_ her do it. Right? I mean, we're unwiring her even though she obviously isn't totally psyched about it.\"\n\n\"Come on, guys,\" Keats said. \"It's not the same. Someone wired her brain. _Hacked_ her brain. Took over her brain. Now we're fixing it. It's not that difficult to understand.\"\n\nWilkes began to argue, but then Billy yelled, \"I see something!\" His two biots had emerged from a brain fold to see a furtive shape disappear just beyond the reach of illumination.\n\n\"Nanobot?\" Keats demanded.\n\n\"I don't know. I can't... I think it sees me. It's running! He's fast! He's got moves, he's got moves, man! 3D moves!\"\n\n\"Stay with him, we'll catch up,\" Keats directed.\n\nBilly was in the game now, racing as fast as his biots would go across a terrain of eerie hillocks, pulsing red worms as big as car tunnels, static sparks, and always the lethargically circulating fluid that slowed his every movement. His quarry disappeared into a shallow fold and Billy followed.\n\n\"Ahhh!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Shit!\"\n\nBilly jumped out of his seat, knocking over his Coke. His fingers moved as though he was using a gamepad. His eyes seemed to dart after objects he could only see in the m-sub.\n\nBilly's first biot was down and minus two legs on the left side before he knew what hit him. He twisted both biots to see, and there, undeniable, unmistakable, the enemy: a biot.\n\n\"It's a biot!\" Billy yelled. \"It's a biot-biot-biot!\"\n\n\"Don't let him get away!\"\n\n\"One of mine is down! I'm\u2014he's fast!\"\n\nThe alien biot had raced up a vertical surface then pushed off, somersaulted, and dropped down behind Billy's remaining mobile biot.\n\nThe foe was vertical and swimming downward. Billy made the mistake of believing he was safe until the biot landed, but the biot spun in midfall and fastened two pincers onto Billy's eyes.\n\n\"I'm blinded!\"\n\nIn the macro he instinctively rubbed his eyes, shook his head. In Billy's brain the second window was blank, showing no picture. Like a TV tuned to a dead channel.\n\n\"I see him!\" Keats yelled. \"Come on, Wilkes!\" He grabbed her hand in excitement.\n\nNow three biots raced to catch the intruder. But the intruder was no longer fleeing. It had taken up a position on what seemed like a vertical surface and now waited.\n\nKeats pulled to a halt. Wilkes's two biots did the same.\n\n\"Three to one,\" Wilkes said. Then, \"Why does that thing look familiar?\" And then, \"Fuck!\"\n\nKeats was already on his feet. He raced up the stairs, and without bothering to knock, opened the door to Anya and Vincent's room.\n\nAnya was asleep.\n\nVincent was not.\n\nDown in the meat Wilkes stood beside Keats. Now she and Billy both joined him in the macro, staring at Vincent, who looked at them calmly.\n\n\"You,\" Keats said.\n\nVincent didn't answer. Anya rolled over and opened her eyes.\n\n\"Billy,\" Keats said. \"Go get Plath.\"\n\nA message lit up Burnofsky's phone, but he had muted it so there was no chime.\n\n_It's Bug. Bad shit happening. Crazy bitch I think is Lear. Going to kill me and the whole damn world_.\n\nNinety seconds later, a second message.\n\n_Are u there? Talk to me! I'm not playing_.\n\nSixty seconds later:\n\n_Fuck! Do NOT call back. I'm using her phone. Can't wait. I'll try again later_.\n\nBug Man had barely erased the messages and slid the phone back onto Lystra's nightstand when the alarm on that phone went off. _Zeeet! Zeeet! Zeeet!_\n\nBug Man leapt for the door, eased himself out even as Lystra stirred and reached blindly for the phone.\n\nBy the time she emerged he was wrapped in a blanket on the couch doing a very poor job of faking sleep.\n\n\"Get up,\" Lystra said, and pushed his foot. \"It's time.\"\n\nHe pretended to yawn. \"Wha\u2014? Time for what?\"\n\nShe grabbed a piece of glass fruit from a bowl on the nearby table. She hefted it in her hand, judging the weight. Then she swung it hard and fast, smashing it into Bug Man's left eye.\n\n\"AHHH!\"\n\nHer free hand was on his throat, he could feel the pressure tightening. He squirmed but did not lash out at her, did not try to hit her. She took the glass fruit\u2014it may have been a peach\u2014and stuffed it brutally into his mouth.\n\nBug Man tasted blood. She pushed harder, harder until his front teeth began to splinter. He cried out, a muffled, frantic sound, and suddenly she spun away and tossed the now-bloody fruit back in its bowl.\n\n\"Who did you text?\" she asked in a conversational tone.\n\n\"Whanh?\" He couldn't make sounds right, and spit splinters of teeth out onto the blanket. Tears filled his eyes, the pain but more the shock of the attack.\n\nHe felt with his tongue around the new architecture of his mouth.\n\n\"Who did you text, Buggy, come on,\" Lystra said. \"Was it some girl?\"\n\nHe seized on the idea. \"Nuffing, jush shome girl back home. Jush my girlfrien'.\"\n\n\"Yeah, don't do that again,\" she said. \"Now I have to password-protect my phone, and I hate that. It slows me down. Turn on the TV, go online to Vatican City feed.\"\n\nHe couldn't see to find the remote. Wouldn't have had any idea where to find a Vatican feed if he had, and in the end Lystra, making disparaging sounds, did it herself.\n\n\"Now watch.\"\n\nBug Man wiped tears and blood from his face and tried to focus. The Pope, but not wearing his tall Pope hat.\n\nBug Man knew what was coming next.\n\n\"This is your work,\" Lystra said approvingly. \"The man is very healthy, it seems. I couldn't find a biological sample anywhere. But you got me his cells.\"\n\n\"My mouff...\" He groaned and wept again, despairing. There would be no happy ending for his life: he saw that clearly now. Unmistakably. His lip was swelling. He swallowed more blood; it hadn't slowed yet. \"Why 'o I haff to wash?\"\n\n\"Why do you have to watch?\" Lystra seemed puzzled. \"I thought you'd want to see. Look! It's starting. Look at him staring around, trying to figure out where the bugs are.\" Then she sighed happily. \"Plus, I suppose I like an audience. Genius unappreciated and all that. Get ready. This is going to be epic. It's one thing to show people they can't rely on their politicians and famous brains and all; it's another thing altogether to say even God can't stop what's coming. This will scare the hell out of people.\"\n\nHis Holiness the Pope stood with the benign expression the world had come to expect and love. It was a sort of half smile, eyes crinkled, hands folded in front of him.\n\nHe was bored to tears. He was often bored by these ceremonial events. Although at least this was out of doors, under a partly cloudy sky just brightening to the richer blue of early afternoon from the bright blue of morning.\n\nThe Pope sometimes walked in the streets of Rome in disguise. He disliked the fishbowl in which he was kept, always surrounded, always watched. If he was to lead the Church, then he must know its people.\n\nOnce he had gone out disguised as a priest. That had ended badly, with tourists recognizing him and crowding around him, twenty, fifty, two hundred people, a mob within seconds. His security detail had had to practically lift him and carry him through the crowd to a waiting SUV.\n\nThen he became more creative: a toupee, jeans, and an \"I heart Rome\" T-shirt. He was followed on these excursions by Swiss Guards in plainclothes. He had negotiated with them to keep their distance. And they had agreed to stay at least a hundred feet away.\n\nHe was considering such a trip for the evening. What a joy it would be to find a cramped table in some little osteria, drink wine and eat antipasto, pasta, and perhaps a nice piece of fish. Watch regular people. Eavesdrop on their conversations.\n\nThen, what? A limoncello in lieu of dessert? A walk by the river? Or succumb to the lure of the beautiful array at some well-tended gelato stand?\n\nIt might be his last excursion for a while. The world was going mad. He had been shown the footage of the British prince, the poor young man. Drugs, most likely. But contacts with intelligence agencies around the world suggested that suspicion was growing that something connected it with the self-murder of the American president, the Nobel massacre, the Brazilian president and vice president\u2014perhaps the earlier attack on the UN in New York and even the bizarre tragedy in Hong Kong.\n\nIf it was terrorists of some sort, no one seemed to know who they were or what they wanted.\n\nThe Pope frowned, realized he was being watched by many eyes, and relaxed into his blankly beatific expression.\n\nYes, just as soon as he got through today's event, a _tableau vivant_ of the manger scene. It was a group of Italian children, specially chosen, prepared, and rehearsed. The production was done with some of the biggest names in Italian theater, with costumes from great fashion designers. There would be music.\n\nThe Holy Father had managed to get it moved to the morning on the theory that he needed his rest in the afternoon. In fact, he needed to be back at the Vatican in plenty of time to slip out for dinner in the evening.\n\nA small lie. He would confess it and be absolved.\n\nHe hoped the presentation was wrapping up. He didn't want to sneak a peek at the printed program or it might betray impatience. But if memory served, this was the last song, which would be followed by applause, then kind words for the child actors and singers and the adult organizers.\n\nAnd then, he was out. Done by the afternoon. They'd promised him that.\n\nPerhaps a nice piece of cod. He liked cod when it was not overdone.\n\nYes, the final chorus! Applause from the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in the square. Time to applaud, time to enlarge the benign smile, time to...\n\nThe Pope blinked.\n\nThen he frowned.\n\nWhat was that? What was he seeing? Some sort of... it looked like an insect, a bizarre insect. He was seeing it, but... but it was nowhere around him.\n\nHe looked around, puzzled and a little concerned. No one else seemed to see anything unusual.\n\nAnd now... now another vision. Like a movie screen lit up inside his head, like two of them, really, and both of them showing fantastic insects.\n\nThe one insect, he could see its face.... He could... he was hallucinating. Clearly, he was hallucinating. Was it a stroke? He dreaded a stroke; his father had died at age fifty-four of a stroke.\n\nThe insect face... It...\n\n\"It's me,\" he said in his native Spanish.\n\nThen, as quickly as it opened, one of the windows in his head closed. Gone.\n\n\"Ah!\" he cried out. \"Ah!\"\n\nHe sank to his knees, and now everyone was looking at him, now the TV cameras and the phone cameras all swiveled toward him, as he cried, \"Oh, oh, oh!\"\n\nThe Pope began to laugh. He began to laugh and laugh and then he was screaming, he knew he was screaming, though he felt no pain.\n\nHe screamed and tore at his vestments.\n\nThe world was swirling colors, all zooming crazily around him, faces suddenly coming into focus, distorted, demonic faces.\n\nOnly when he grabbed an elderly woman's walker and began attacking the children with it did anyone try to stop him.\n\nIn the end he was hauled away by Rome police and his own plainclothes Swiss Guards.\n\n# **TWENTY-ONE**\n\nThe sense of approaching doom was rising now. The country was scared. The world was scared. Glances were shielded. Heads were lowered. Shoulders hunched. Jaws tight. Voices too high or too low, too loud or whispering like a scared child.\n\nNot as scared yet as it should be, no, not yet. But when people figured it out, the true panic would begin.\n\nThe Twins had pulled the trigger on massed preprogrammed attacks: Burnofsky had seen the footage of Stern. There would be more of that. Benjamin was in the driver's seat increasingly, and Benjamin would have his apocalypse.\n\nBut that was nothing compared to what Lear was doing.\n\n\"Of course it's Lear!\" Burnofsky cried aloud, as though someone was arguing with him, as though he was fighting someone to make them understand.\n\nLear. What a clever, clever fellow he had turned out to be. Burnofsky saw it all now, saw the games, saw the ultimate destructive power that flowed from Grey McLure's little lifesaving creatures.\n\nPoor old Grey. They'd been friends, he and Burnofsky. The last friend Burnofsky had had. Poor old Grey, who had gotten his panties all in a twist when he learned Burnofsky was weaponizing nanobots for the Armstrongs. A lovely idealist, old Grey. A good man who just wanted to save his sick, dying wife.\n\nHad he ever realized the destructive potential in his creatures? Had he even an inkling of what they could do in the wrong hands?\n\nFucking idealists. They were ever so useful to those with evil minds.\n\nIt was all coming down, Burnofsky thought. And when it did, the Twins were going to kill him. Kill him or rewire him.\n\nThat second thing made his stomach turn. He had endured it once, was still enduring it. But like many traumas, the threat of a repeat performance was even worse. He could _not_ be used this way; he couldn't be turned into some computer made of meat, rewrite, delete, up-arrow, down-arrow, parentheses, backslash....\n\nHe had in some way accepted the first wiring as a sort of penance. He was a sinner, a terrible sinner, and he had deserved the punishment of having his mind crudely twisted this way and that. But not again. Not again. He had paid. Paid enough.\n\n_Not again_.\n\nDeath? Death was nothing. Death was relief of pain.\n\nThat's what he had told himself while sitting in his grim apartment with a gun in his mouth. He had lacked the courage to do it. But he would die before he would let them treat him like nothing. Like _nothing_.\n\n\"I paid,\" he told the camera he knew was watching him. His lip curled into a vicious sneer. \"I _paid_!\"\n\nHis mind went inevitably to Carla, and the sickening result of that thought, the excitement, the pleasure of it. And with it the awful need to hurt himself.\n\nHe lit a cigarette. He watched the end burn a bright orange. The smoke curling, teasing the end of his nose, making his watery eyes water still more. Not tears, though. Not tears.\n\nThe Pope\u2014that would push the Twins over the edge. They would have to realize that they were no longer the masterminds, just two more suckers playing Lear's game. And then? Benjamin wouldn't stand for it, oh, no. Lear would not take Benjamin's G _\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung_ from him. Benjamin would lose it, lash out, and at last unleash the gray goo.\n\nHe would use Burnofsky for that. Yes, of course. Burnofsky would serve the Twins one last time and destroy the world before Lear could do it.\n\nIt was funny, really\u2014despite the way his eyes watered\u2014it was funny, funny to think that in the end it would not be a race between destruction and salvation for humanity, but a race between two different lunatics, Benjamin and Lear, both bent on annihilation.\n\nWell. Maybe not two.\n\nNanobots were _his_ creation, not Benjamin's. Poor old Grey had died in a fiery crash, lucky bastard, and his creations had become Lear's. But Burnofsky still lived. Would go on living, probably, until the Twins decided they had squeezed the last from him.\n\n\"They're mine,\" he muttered, looking at a schematic of a nanobot. \"I deserve a fucking prize. Hah! I deserve the fucking Nobel, hah!\" Well, that was over, wasn't it. Lear had sort of killed that whole thing, hadn't he?\n\nThere was a bottle in the desk of one of his assistants. He had seen it, but he'd never said anything about it. It wasn't his job to preach abstinence.\n\n\"It's all coming down, anyway,\" he muttered. \"Twist me this way, twist me that way; in the end it's all death.\"\n\nHe watched the thoughts in his own mind, tracked them like the scientist he was. Not so easy, really, to predict the outcome of wiring, eh, Nijinsky? Poor dumb Bug Man had learned that when the president went off the rails. Not so easy.\n\nFive minutes later the alcohol was raw in his throat and warm in his belly.\n\n\"I paid,\" he said. And hurt himself again with a deep, deep swig.\n\n\"Hah!\" Burnofsky said. \"Fuck it. Fuck it all.\"\n\nHis phone lay on the desk. He blinked at it. The icon for messages showed a three.\n\nNo one texted Burnofsky. In fact, he couldn't recall the last time he'd had a text.\n\nHe almost didn't look, but even carried off on a happy wave of blessed alcohol, he was still a servant to his own curiosity.\n\n_It's Bug. Bad shit happening. Crazy bitch I think is Lear. Going to kill me and the whole damn world_.\n\nThen:\n\n_Are u there? Talk to me! I'm not playing_.\n\nThen:\n\n_Fuck! Do NOT call back. I'm using her phone. Can't wait. I'll try again later_.\n\nBurnofsky stared at the messages. His first thought: _Anthony's alive still? The Twins must be slipping_.\n\nAnd then, _Jesus, he's fallen in with Lear?_ And that made him laugh. Of _course_ Anthony would end up back in some kind of world of shit. Of course he would.\n\nAnd then he saw the words _bitch_ and _her_.\n\n_Okay_ , he told himself, tamping down his excitement. _Bitch_ could be slang for anyone, male or female. And the difference between _he_ and _her_ could be a simple mistyped letter.\n\n_Going to kill me and the whole damned world_.\n\nThe Golden Hall in Stockholm. The Brazilians. That actress. The prince. The Pope. Even that slimy prick Nijinsky, of whose death he had at last learned.\n\n\"Yes, biot madness,\" Burnofsky said. He gave himself a deep swig, feeling the savage joy of destruction, and the subtler pleasure of having his theory, his educated guess, ratified. He felt as if he was vibrating from the rush of discovery, the way he had when he used to make breakthroughs in the lab.\n\nHe could call the phone number back. Who would answer? Bug Man? Or Lear?\n\n\"Biot madness. Jesus Christ,\" he said, voice an indecipherable slur. \"BZRK. It's a joke. It's a goddamned joke.\" Then, pushing himself back from his desk, shaking his head, he whispered, \"Ah, no, not a joke: a game.\"\n\nWith trembling fingers he hit the call-back button.\n\n_The number you have dialed is not a working number_.\n\nNo, of course not. Lear would swap phones regularly, clever boy. Or girl. Could it really be a woman? Was a woman capable of such malice? Would a woman play this game?\n\nHe opened his browser. How did one get samples of DNA? Any hospital, sure, but these were samples from multiple countries. Who could do that?\n\nHe searched _medical testing labs_ , impeded somewhat by the fact that he couldn't quite direct his fingers to hit the right keys. He came up with too many results. He added qualifiers and came up with fewer hits. Then refined the search further to focus on corporate structures.\n\nThere were only six that were privately owned and reached beyond just North America. One of them, Janklow\/MediStat, had recently lost its owner in an unfortunate boating accident.\n\n\"Accident. Hah.\"\n\nAmong those present on the boat and giving statements to the police was another\u2014competing\u2014corporate titan. A woman.\n\nThree seconds later he had a photograph looking at him from his monitor, the face of Lystra Ellen Alice Reid.\n\nL. E. A. R.\n\nHe stared at the picture. He laughed. _My God, a pretty young woman_. That face, that serious, intelligent, attractive face hid a madness as profound as anything bubbling beneath the surface of two men so hideous they couldn't walk down the street.\n\nLear. Self-aware madness, then. She knew, Lear did; the creator of BZRK knew she was mad. The wicked thing. The wicked, wicked thing.\n\nHe raised his mostly empty bottle to her in a wry toast. \"Nice. Very nice.\"\n\nHe could probably stop her. He could take this to the Twins, and _they_ could probably stop her.\n\n\"I could save the world,\" Burnofsky said, his tone mocking.\n\nIn the old days, he might have been tempted by that. He could be a hero. A hero\/murderer. A hero who had helped to cause the suicide of the president of the United States. _Right. Hero_.\n\nHe could save the world.\n\n_Or_.\n\nOr he could beat Lear to the punch and shove it in the Twins' face as well.\n\n_Hero? Sorry, Dr. Burnofsky, that role is no longer available to you. How about killer? How about destroyer of worlds?_\n\nYeah, that position was still open.\n\n\"Why?\" Keats asked it, though he knew it was foolish. How did you ask for explanations when the person you were asking might be wired himself? But he asked, anyway. \"Why, Vincent?\"\n\n\"I had my orders. From Lear. He gave me instructions.\"\n\nPlath licked her lips, nervous, angry, but feeling as if she should be far angrier. _Knowing_ she should be far angrier. But somehow the emotion didn't quite come. The rage did not rise in her. \"Tell me what he instructed,\" she said, her voice roughened to simulate the emotion she did not feel.\n\n\"He said to wire you. To reduce your skepticism. To avoid suspicion of Lear. Or of me.\"\n\n\"What else?\"\n\n\"Seventy percent,\" Wilkes snarled. \"Right.\"\n\n\"There are... holes in my mind,\" Vincent said. \"I feel them. I know something is wrong with me. That's not a lie.\"\n\n\"Asshole!\" Wilkes said, far more furious than Plath.\n\nPlath raised a hand to silence Wilkes. \"Tell me the rest,\" she said to Vincent.\n\nAnya sat beside Vincent, who seemed terribly small. She was weeping quietly, holding one of his hands in hers. Expecting him to be killed.\n\nPlath saw herself through Anya's eye. She saw a grim-faced girl, a sixteen-year-old girl with freckles for God's sake, with stupid freckles. That picture of her finally brought the true emotion to the surface, but the emotion was disgust. Plath was disgusted with herself, with what she had become.\n\n\"Tell me what you did about the Tulip, Vincent,\" Plath said.\n\nVincent flinched and broke eye contact. \"You know what I did.\"\n\n\"You wired the Tulip and the Twin Towers together,\" Plath said bitterly. \"And you looped in, what? Something that would make me less questioning, something...\"\n\n\"I wired the memories of the Towers, the Tulip, and your pleasure centers, all together,\" Vincent said. \"They were Lear's orders. That's what he wanted. I...\" He looked at Anya, and now Plath was looking at Vincent through her own eyes and through Anya's. \"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you at least argue? Did you at least question?\" This was Keats now, raging. \"Did you not say, 'What the hell are you talking about?' Did you not say, 'How dare you?' Did you not tell Lear to _go fuck himself_?\" Keats looked as if he might beat Vincent to death right then and there.\n\n\"He's been wired, too,\" Plath said wearily. \"We burned holes in his brain to save him, but someone else saw an opportunity in that. We never checked because... well, because we felt so sad and guilty. But Lear got to Vincent, Vincent got to me.\"\n\n\"Who would have wired Vincent?\" Keats asked, but even as the words were forming, he saw the answer. \"Nijinsky. It's like a disease. Lear to Nijinksy, Nijinsky to Vincent, Vincent to Plath. Like a virus.\"\n\n\"Vincent, walk your biot out of me,\" Plath ordered. \"Do it now.\"\n\nVincent said nothing, just looked at her, so Wilkes dropped down beside him, clapped a friendly hand on his leg, and in a flash there was a knife in her free hand. She jabbed the point against his carotid artery. \"Do what the lady says, Vincent. Or I have to kill you. Give up the one you have in her, and your others, too. It's either that or you die.\"\n\n\"Do it, Vincent,\" Anya pleaded. \"For me, do it.\"\n\nHalf an hour later Vincent's biots were in a vial hanging from Plath's neck. Vincent, the once-invincible Vincent, was still just seventy percent. But he was one hundred percent in Plath's power.\n\n# **STATE OF PLAY**\n\nEnough dots had been connected. But twenty-four hours after the day of the prince and the Pope, no one had an explanation. The prince was locked in a comfortable room in the palace and tranquilized to near coma.\n\nHis Holiness was locked in comfortable rooms at the Vatican, tied to his bed, and tranquilized to near coma.\n\nStockholm was fresh out of psychiatric beds in its institutions.\n\nAnd then the new head of Wells Fargo bank drove her car off a bridge.\n\nAnd several hours after that the Ayatollah Aliabadi was discovered amid broken glass cutting his wrists.\n\nAnd the fashion model who leapt out of a tenth-floor window in Kyoto.\n\nAnd the rock star who stormed offstage at a concert in Toronto, only to return a few minutes later, armed with a pistol, which he emptied into the audience, killing one and injuring four.\n\nAnd the president of the World Bank who swam frantically into the Baltic Sea in freezing conditions. He was rescued but had to be confined.\n\nIt soon became hard to keep track of.\n\nThe Christmas Crazy, it was called, though it had begun earlier. The Season of Hope, as some faiths called it, had taken a very grim turn.\n\nThe world was on edge. The world was baffled and frightened but still somewhat amused, as it was only prominent people being affected by whatever bizarre syndrome was occurring.\n\nBut then a tenth-grade teacher in Larkspur, California, began attacking students with a knife. Five injured, one critically.\n\nAnd a soldier at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, grabbed his AR-15 and began shooting up the officer's club. Seven dead, three critically wounded.\n\nThe word was out: listen for people who claim to suddenly be seeing things in their head. Especially if they claim to be seeing strange insects.\n\nGrab them, restrain them immediately, or at least get the hell out of the vicinity.\n\nAll over the world events were being postponed or canceled. All over the world people eyed each other with suspicion bordering on paranoia.\n\nThen... nothing. For twenty-four hours.\n\nSome dared to hope that it\u2014whatever _it_ was\u2014was over.\n\nOthers wondered if whoever was behind this\u2014aliens were the top choice\u2014was just taking a break in order to build up to something even more unsettling.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and counterparts all over the world were in panic mode, searching for the cause, or at least the common thread. But it was a business consultant, who worked frequently with major medical clients, who made the tentative connection on his blog.\n\nThis person, David Schiller, sixty-three, suggested that, based on limited available data, it seemed those affected were more likely than the norm to have had lab work done. Medical tests. Blood tests. Urine samples.\n\nHe wrote this up on his blog. The dozen or so readers who saw the post wrote in comments that they would be very interested to see this developed further.\n\nSadly Schiller was unable to post a follow-up, as six hours after he published his blog post he was arrested by Chicago police for barbecuing one of his beloved Samoyeds on a fire he built in his front yard.\n\nHis blog was hacked and deleted.\n\nThe world was frightened. On edge. Desperate for some peace or some explanation.\n\nThe world was ready.\n\nAnd so was Lear.\n\n# **TWENTY-TWO**\n\n\"I don't know how I feel,\" Plath said. \"I feel...\"\n\n\"It's probably weird,\" Keats said.\n\n\"Hollow.\"\n\nThey had walked out of the safe house, both feeling that there was too little air in the place, both needing to be reassured that the outside world still existed.\n\nThey looked at each other, and Keats knew that a vast distance had opened up between them. He had wanted nothing so much as to close the much smaller distance that had persisted, even during the idyll on \u00cele Sainte-Marie. Instead, he had dug the Grand Canyon and now looked at her across it.\n\nShe had not raged at him. She seemed too tired to be very angry that he had unwired her without permission, in fact in direct rejection of her wishes. The temperature of their conversation was cold, not hot. She stood with her hands down at her sides. Her eyes were as big as ever, but now they seemed to be looking just past him, refusing to make eye contact.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said.\n\n\"No. You did the right thing,\" she said. There was no reassurance in her tone.\n\n\"Brains are complicated,\" Keats said pointlessly.\n\n\"Mmm. Yeah. Complicated.\"\n\n\"I have to ask...\"\n\n\"What?\" She frowned, wishing he would go away and let her adjust to this feeling of emptiness. She felt nauseous. She felt as if she might at some point throw up. She felt _not herself_ , like this was not her body, like she was a head transplant attached to some new torso. Alien.\n\n\"I have to ask what you told Caligula.\"\n\n\"Caligula? Nothing. I can't text him or call him.\"\n\nKeats wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but it might have seemed as if he hadn't trusted her. Then...\n\n\"I told Lear.\"\n\nHis blue eyes snapped up to hers, and his brows lowered. \"Told Lear what?\"\n\n\"That Caligula should do it.\"\n\n\"What?\" He grabbed her shoulders. \"You gave the go-ahead to blow up the Tulip?\"\n\nShe nodded. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered up an atrocity. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered mass murder. Nothing.\n\n\"Jesus, Sadie,\" he said, and his voice broke.\n\nShe blinked, taken aback by his reaction. \"It's okay,\" she said.\n\nHe released her, and now he was no longer looking at her, he was staring into the window in his mind where his biot's visual flow would be. But the images were grainy and indistinct. The distance was too great. The biot he had in Caligula's head was too far out of range for useful input.\n\n\"We have to stop him,\" Keats said.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" she said indifferently.\n\nWhat happened next was pure instinct, and he regretted it even as his hand was flying through the air, even as the flat of his palm connected with the side of her face with enough force to snap her head around and start the tears in her eyes.\n\nWhen her eyes came back around there was emotion. Anger. Finally, anger.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" he said, regretful but determined, too. \"We have to stop him.\"\n\n\"Don't you fucking hit me,\" she snarled.\n\n\"Good. You're not dead yet, are you? I'm sorry about the slap, but you sound like you're in a coma.\"\n\n\"And who put me there?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Lear put you there!\" he said. \"This has all been a game for him. We wanted to stop one evil, so we never even asked questions about whether the man we served was just as bad. Or worse.\" He felt her attention slipping away and wanted to grab her but knew that would be wrong. So he leaned closer to her, bending down so that she could not avoid looking at him. \"Madness like a bloody plague. All over. It's all _Lear_. It's Lear making biots and then killing them to drive people mad. Hundreds of dead already. The Pope went mad and attacked little children. Sadie, that's his game.\"\n\n\"The Pope?\"\n\n\"Lear. _Lear!_ And we have to stop him. We have to stop Lear!\"\n\n\"The Twins,\" she said, sounding vague.\n\n\"Yeah, them, too,\" Keats said. \"Come on.\"\n\nHe grabbed her hand and yanked her along with him.\n\nWilkes stood up as they burst into the living room. Billy was absorbed in his phone.\n\n\"Caligula's going to blow up the Tulip,\" Keats said. \"We have to stop him.\"\n\n\"Blow up the Tulip?\" Wilkes said. \"I thought that\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, it's back on.\"\n\n\"You're going to stop Caligula?\" Wilkes demanded skeptically. \"You and what army, pretty blue eyes? You've seen him in action. This won't be biot war; this will be kill or get killed, with a dude who is a genius at killing!\"\n\n\"We have a gun. Just one. It's\u2014\"\n\n\"It's in the drawer in the kitchen, below the silverware.\" This from Billy. Casual, as though it was no big thing that he knew where they'd hidden a gun. Then, \"It's a Colt forty-five. Seven-round clip. One spare clip. We have a total of fourteen bullets.\"\n\n\"I'll do the best I can with it,\" Keats said, knowing in his heart that it wouldn't work, knowing\u2014because, yes, he _had_ seen Caligula work\u2014that Caligula would kill him before he fired a shot.\n\nWilkes, seeing that despair, shook her head and said, \"Keats, you aren't a gunman. Neither am I.\" She looked pointedly at Billy.\n\n\"Yeah,\" the young boy said. \"I can do it.\"\n\n\"No,\" Keats said. He shook his head. \"No. That's wrong. That's over the line.\"\n\n\"It is over the line.\" They stopped, looking back almost guiltily, to see Plath.\n\n\"This doesn't involve you,\" Keats said. He didn't mean it to sound angry, but it did.\n\nPlath shook her head. \"Of course it involves me, Noah. I gave the order to Caligula.\"\n\n\"Can you just take back the order?\" Billy asked.\n\nPlath shook her head. \"That was all part of the game. Lear's game. For whatever sick reason he wanted me to choose to do it. But that doesn't mean he'll stop just because I change my mind.\"\n\nShe looked around at them, defiant, defying her own shame. \"I...\" She sighed and shook her head. \"I don't know... how my brain is...\" She sighed again. \"I don't know anything, I guess. I was used. I was controlled, but then, even after you guys...\" She made a gesture with her hand, as if she was pulling something out of her head. \"I still wanted revenge, and the wiring played into that. I still wanted revenge. I guess I do even now. But yeah, what Mr. Stern told me... There has to be a line.\"\n\nKeats saw tears flowing and his heart yearned to touch her, to take her in his arms and protect her. But that felt impossible now.\n\n\"I thought of what my dad would say,\" Plath said, dejectedly. \"My dad, my brother... there still has to be some kind of limit. A line drawn.\" She wiped away the tears, then, resolute, said, \"So we stop Caligula. But. But we give the gun to the kid.\"\n\nCaligula disliked disguise, but he knew how to use it. There were two approaches. You could either become part of the background and therefore be ignored\u2014like a janitor. Or you could pass yourself off more boldly, pretending to be someone in authority, someone who would compel obedience. For example, pretending to be a cop.\n\nAnd Caligula understood diversion. He'd spent a part of his life working the carnival as a trick shooter and knife thrower, and he'd met his share of magicians. Sleight of hand was all about misdirection: look over there, not over here.\n\nFinally he understood simple brutality.\n\nAll three were required to gain access to the subfloors of the Tulip.\n\nHe dressed as a janitor, having first determined what the AFGC janitors wore and when they worked and through which entrance they came. He gathered his long gray hair into a bun and pushed it up under a do-rag, slipped into gray-blue overalls, and, crucially, applied just enough dark makeup to be arguably Mexican. In the world as it was, a dark-skinned older man dressed as a janitor was as close to invisible as it was possible to be. It wasn't just that people didn't notice you; it was that they actively avoided making eye contact with you or noting any feature.\n\nBut timed to coincide with his fraught passage through the security station on the first subfloor, Caligula arranged a distraction in the form of a call to NYPD claiming to have seen a homeless white woman waving a knife and threatening people on the street in front of the Tulip.\n\nThe choice of a fictional white woman was important, because it in no way pointed to a theoretically Hispanic janitor. And, as well, there actually was a homeless white woman with a shopping cart on the sidewalk. Five bucks and a secret message from \"aliens\" in the person of Caligula had ensured her presence.\n\nThe police duly came roaring up. The security guards at the entrance duly ran to see what was happening. And the sublevel security guards duly glued themselves to their monitors and muttered jealously about _those guys upstairs who at least have something going on_.\n\nCaligula dragged a heavy floor cleaner past without notice.\n\nDown the stairs. One level. Two. The door was locked but was easily defeated with a six-inch segment of metal venetian blind.\n\nThe temperature went up ten degrees from stairwell to mechanical room. As mechanical rooms went it was a nice one, three stories from grated floor to pipe-crossed ceiling, with catwalks offering access to massive blowers, electrical boxes, alarm systems, and telephone and cable panels.\n\nEverything was color coded, so it was easy to pick out the natural gas pipes from the water lines and cable conduits. _Red. An interesting choice_ , Caligula thought. He might have gone with lilac. He liked lilac.\n\nThe first job was to make sure no one was down here. He walked around, looking lost with his floor cleaner until he located the engineer on duty. He was a middle-aged man, staring at an iPad propped in front of the readouts he was meant to be watching.\n\nCaligula gave him a hello wave and a hatchet in the neck, stepping nimbly out of the way of the blood spray.\n\nHe squeezed fast-drying epoxy around the edges of the doors. He looked around, spotted a metal table, dragged it over to the door, tipped it on its side, and epoxied it across the door. Once the epoxy had hardened in twenty minutes, it would take a tank to break through. He would leave via the freight elevators, which he'd be able to watch more easily.\n\nThe next thing was to eliminate any source of spark. It wouldn't do to have the gas ignite too soon. He turned off the heating system. He decided to accept the risk of a random spark from one of the electrical panels\u2014unlikely, given the pristine newness of the building.\n\nThen he located the safety shutoffs that would choke off the gas in the event that the computers decided a pipe had ruptured. He jammed that useful piece of equipment with a wrench.\n\nWhich left only the last three phases: opening the flow, setting the timer on the igniting explosive, and getting the hell out of the place before it blew up.\n\nAbout twenty floors above Caligula, Burnofsky worked. The beautiful thing about nanotech, he thought, was the whole nano thing itself. Nano: small. Tiny. Invisible to the human eye.\n\nHe could begin growing self-replicating nanobots within full view of the hidden cameras. A million of them looked like a couple of handfuls of dust. Blue dust, in this case, because in a moment of wracking guilt back before\u2014before the new Burnofsky\u2014he had given them the color of his daughter's eyes. He'd done that as a strange expiation. An homage? Was that the right word?\n\nHe was still secretive about drinking the booze. He rolled his wheeled office chair back into a blind spot, poured into an empty soda can, then rolled back into view.\n\nWere the Twins watching? He didn't really care, so long as they didn't try to stop him.\n\nHe had ten million SRNs so far. SRNs with no limits. SRNs that would replicate and replicate, doubling in number and doubling again and again and again until there were not millions but billions, trillions, as many as there were grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.\n\nWhat was the famous quote from 1984? He Googled it. He wanted to get it right. Ah, there.\n\n_If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face\u2014forever_.\n\n_Well, no, Mr. Orwell_ , Burnofsky thought. _If you want a picture of the future, imagine a world scoured clean of every living thing_. And more. Imagine that having taken and used all the easiest forms of carbon the SRNs keep going. They eat the steel out of buildings, the coal and oil and diamond out of the earth itself. They wouldn't just destroy all life, they would relentlessly remove all possibility that life would ever again arise to trouble an empty planet.\n\nHis eye scanned down the page of quotes from Orwell and came to rest on this: _Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing_.\n\nHah. Well, the Twins had tried it. The Twins, with their mad plan to unite all of humanity into one vast interconnectedness. A new world where they would be accepted. And more than accepted: esteemed, loved.\n\nAnd Lear? What was young Lystra Reid's motive?\n\nBurnofsky's own motive was clear to him now. He had done evil for ambition's sake. He had tortured himself for that evil and sought to close the eyes of the world to his shame.\n\nThen he had been rewired so that the evil gave him pleasure. And now he would close the eyes of the world because it would bring him pleasure.\n\nHe would wait for a few more doublings. Then he would drop the force fields that held the SRNs contained and unleash the gray goo.\n\nThen? Well, then he would go back to his old haunt, back to the China Bone. There would be time for them to prepare him a pipe. He would float on a cloud of purple opium haze and wait for the end of the world. When the nanobots reached him, well, that's when he would take a last drink and fire the heroin into his veins and leave the world behind, dying with two raised middle fingers to humanity.\n\nSuarez wished she had music, but the cockpit was not large enough to allow her to reach for her headphones. It was just that the mad rush of sheer speed demanded some propulsive music to go along with it.\n\nIt was crazy. It was also crazy fun.\n\nThe sleigh was a dream to drive. Computer-assists and automated systems made it more like a video game than a craft moving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The little icon that was the sleigh on the GPS display was zooming along past... well, past nothing, really. This was Antarctica. There were no towns, houses, roads, or any feature, really, aside from the blur of ice and the gray blanket of hazy, overcast sky. The target was coming closer very fast, and she didn't really have much of a plan for how to approach it.\n\nMost likely roaring in at three times freeway speeds\u2014with jet engines screaming and ice crystals trailing a plume\u2014was a bad idea. The smart move would probably be to park the sleigh a few miles away from the target and walk in on foot. Much more subtle that way. But on the ice one did not casually decide to abandon a vehicle that provided shelter and warmth. Not to mention a vehicle with an impressive array of weapons.\n\nSo she would try to bluff it out. Whoever she encountered would probably suspect her cover story was nonsense, but what could they do about it, really?\n\n\"People who buy illegal missiles and smuggle them onto the ice?\" she said aloud. \"Plenty. That's what they can do: plenty.\"\n\nOn the other hand, Suarez was only the third woman ever to qualify for SEALs, so she was no weakling. She was formidable.\n\n\"That's right, talk yourself into it,\" she muttered.\n\nIt was a good thing she had the computer navigating, because she would never have seen the dry valley. It was a rift in the ice, which at this point was a relatively sparse two hundred meters thick.\n\nPart of her just wanted to keep shooting across the ice, but she slowed reluctantly and nosed the sleigh closer to the edge of the valley. Still she could see nothing ahead of her but ice and more ice.\n\n\"On foot it is, then,\" she muttered. With great reluctance she raised the canopy, unwedged herself, and managed to climb rather ungracefully out. The wind was doing thirty knots\u2014gentle by local standards\u2014just enough to push cold stilettos through every seam, every zipper, every opening in her parka. She pulled on her bear claw mittens, cinched the neck strap a bit tighter, and leaned into the wind to walk what seemed to be the last hundred yards.\n\nShe didn't see the edge of the precipice until she was practically on top of it.\n\n\"Whoa.\" Antarctica had millions of square miles of same-old, same-old, but hidden here and there in the largely unexplored continent there were features that would take your breath away. This was one of those times.\n\nThe ice fell away in a sheer cliff just beyond the toes of her boots. Spread out below her was a narrow valley shaped like a boat hull\u2014pointed at the near end, rounded at the far end. Suarez's position would correspond to just off the starboard bow.\n\nThe topography was not complicated; it was effectively a big, oblong hole in the ice, maybe two kilometers long, a quarter that in width at the widest point. The floor of the valley was reddish gravel and looked like an abandoned quarry. About where the cabin would be on a yacht was a series of structures\u2014four buildings, one quite large by polar standards, and, sure enough, under a plastic dome there was unmistakably a swimming pool.\n\nSomebody really liked to swim.\n\nSuarez carefully absorbed the layout. The structure with the two stubby towers would be the power plant. The largest building was some sort of hangar or factory space, unmistakably utilitarian. The third, a two-story L-shape, would be a barracks. Room for, what, fourteen, sixteen rooms plus a common space? So not a huge contingent.\n\nAnd finally what looked very much like a private home, done with a reckless disregard for energy conservation, a three-story, ultra-modern, Scandinavian-looking thing with the kind of floor-to-ceiling windows you just didn't see in Antarctica, and a plastic tunnel running to the pool.\n\nInstead of the inevitable Sno-Cats there was a pair of Audi SUVs parked outside the house, as though the occupant might have kids and pets who needed transportation to the nearest soccer field or dog park.\n\nCraziness. Suarez had to laugh. It was nuts. And whoever had built it was nuts. They were hundreds of miles from the coast, which was to say a whole long way from even the thinnest edge of civilization. This might easily be the most isolated house on planet Earth. Sure as hell the furthest from a Starbucks.\n\nTwo helicopters lay all tied down and shipshape on a well-marked pad. One was an EC130, a species of chopper found all over the ice. But the other was an Apache, with missile pods on the stubby wings and a swivel-mounted thirty-millimeter cannon.\n\nWho had the kind of political juice to get hold of a freaking Apache?\n\nHow had this place even been discovered? Either someone had amazing luck, or they had some amazing satellite imagery. Speaking of which, a satellite would have to be directly overhead to see the valley at all.\n\nSuarez peered off to the far end of the valley. Was that a road? It _looked_ like a road cut into the ice wall, rising at a steep grade up to the outside. Could she drive the sleigh down there? Bigger question: Could she get it back out?\n\nThe smart thing to do would be to take some pictures and get the hell out of here, get back to Tanner and let him take it from there. That was definitely the smart move.\n\nYes.\n\nSo Suarez, face already numb and hands getting there, climbed back into the sleigh and drove at safe speed around to the head of the road. It was definitely a road, hopefully just wide enough to allow a large truck\u2014or the sleigh\u2014to avoid going off the side.\n\n\"All in now,\" she said to herself, and sent the sleigh creeping down the incline. This proved to be as tricky as she'd thought it might be. There was no pavement, of course, just icy gravel, dropping what looked to be about one hundred meters in the course of a quarter mile, one heck of a grade. The sleigh, like any hovercraft, was not well suited to going downhill in a controlled manner and started to slide sideways almost immediately, but Suarez got the hang of it and made it to the valley floor without plunging off the side of the ice ramp.\n\nStill no one came rushing to greet or confront her. Either would almost have been welcome merely for the purpose of ending the suspense. The sleigh was more than capable of crossing gravel, but now, down inside the rift, it was a high-strung Thoroughbred in a too-narrow paddock.\n\nWas the whole place abandoned? Obviously anyone there would have heard, if not seen, the sleigh. You don't exactly sneak up on people when you're in a jet-powered hovercraft.\n\nShe throttled forward, creeping along at walking speed, aiming for the bizarre house\u2014which was no less bizarre down here at eye level. The glass windows were mirrored, so Suarez could not see inside and instead saw the reflection of herself scowling from beneath the canopy.\n\nFinally, lacking any better idea of what to do, she parked the sleigh, killed the engines, and climbed out again. There was no wind, which did not make it any warmer but did reduce the effects a bit. Her breath rose as steam but her face, while cold, regained some of its feeling.\n\n_Now what? Ring the doorbell?_\n\nShe crunched across the gravel to the door of the house. There was no bell. So she stripped off one glove and knocked.\n\nBad idea. The door was steel and very, very cold. Had she knocked any slower she'd have left knuckle skin behind.\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"This is insane.\"\n\nThe next likely target was the large\u2014quite large\u2014building fifty meters away.\n\nThere would presumably be a satellite phone in the buildings, or an Internet connection\u2014some way to inform Tanner. The question was whether there would also be men and women with guns. It all had an empty but not-quite-abandoned feel.\n\nThe building was not locked. Well, why would you lock a building that was a million miles from nothing much? But it bothered her. This was all too easy.\n\nShe pushed in. Lights were on, illuminating a single large open space populated by machinery of a sleek, white-coated type. She recognized only the 3D printers, monitors, and touch screens. The other objects were not familiar, and might have been anything from manufacturing to medical gear. But one particular type of equipment predominated: a chest-height, white rectangle with inexplicable slots outlined in green light. There were a lot of those. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. These definitely were some kind of manufacturing equipment, not computers. Probably automated, given that the machines were backed too closely together to allow for people to move easily around them.\n\nFascinated by trying to make sense of the machines, Suarez belatedly registered the sound of armed men taking positions behind her.\n\nSix of them. Six automatic rifles leveled at her from behind the cover of the equipment.\n\nOne of the downsides of actually being a trained fighter is that you come to accept that real life isn't Hollywood, and no one wins a fight that pits a single assault rifle against six.\n\n\"Set the gun aside. Raise your hands.\"\n\nThat's what she did.\n\n# **TWENTY-THREE**\n\nThe line of limos completely choked West 54th Street, extended back onto Seventh Avenue and then all the way up to 56th Street. Stretches, town cars, the occasional privately owned Mercedes or Tesla.\n\nCrowds pushed against barricades manned by tolerantly amused NYPD pulling down some welcome overtime pay. Satellite trucks had been parked right on the sidewalk across from the Bow Tie Ziegfeld Theater, which all by themselves doubled the congestion.\n\nIt was not an uncommon situation. This was not New York's first big movie premiere. But even New York could not be jaded about this much star power. Every A-list actor, director, and producer was here, all of Hollywood royalty, for the premiere of the year's biggest-budget flick _Fast, Fast, Dead_ , starring, among several actual human stars, a computer-generated Marilyn Monroe that was supposed to be so indistinguishable from the long-dead real thing that there'd been some speculation about whether the program might be up for an Oscar nomination.\n\nLystra Reid had managed an invitation for herself and a plus one. The plus one was at least ten years her junior, but this was a Hollywood crowd, and if the relatively unknown but reputed to be fabulously rich woman wanted a young, black, not terribly attractive boy toy who had clearly been on the wrong end of either a bar fight or a car accident, hey, who cared, really? The country had bigger problems.\n\n\"We're toward the back,\" Lystra said, guiding Bug Man in.\n\nDespite the rocketing pain of his broken teeth and the split, swollen lips, Bug Man was enthralled. Obviously Lystra was up to something horrific, but in the meantime Bug Man played Spot the Star. Seeing a very familiar face, he said, \"Man, I ufed to cruff on her when I wa' a little ki' looking a' Harry Potter,\" he said.\n\n\"Watching what?\"\n\n\"Harry... Never mind.\" Lystra Reid was not big on popular culture, Bug Man had decided. And talking was painful and difficult, though he was adjusting to the lack of front teeth.\n\n\"I' tha' Gwynneff?\" Bug Man asked, but of course Lystra was paying no attention. And the star-dense crowd was not looking at Bug Man. They were hailing old friends and talking to the roving camera crews still pushing through packed-in A-listers.\n\nThe jocularity was strained. There was not a person in the room so oblivious to all that had happened in the world that they were not nervous. Some celebrities who had initially agreed to attend had suddenly discovered that they had headaches and would need to skip the proceedings. But the ideal of \"the show must go on\" and the lure of cameras had kept numbers high enough to prevent organizers from canceling.\n\n\"Time to send a text,\" Lystra said. And when Bug Man failed to cease craning his neck to locate a particular buxom TV star, she said more pointedly, \"This is going to go bad in a few minutes. So stay close to me.\" She laid a hand gently on his swollen cheek. \"I wouldn't want anything to happen to you. And don't forget: you wouldn't want anything to happen to me.\"\n\nShe thumbed in a text that went to the closest cell-phone tower, from there to a satellite, and from that satellite to a touch screen almost ten thousand miles away and very far to the south.\n\nShe almost blew the timing. Another minute or two and the cameras would have turned off their lights and been hustled from the theater by security people and public relations folk.\n\nLystra wanted cameras. All the cameras.\n\nThe first person to cry out in a startled voice that carried even over the hubbub was a big man with a big voice who said, \"I see bugs!\"\n\nTen seconds later, another voice, female, screamed.\n\n\"Oh my God, it's like, it's like that thing in Sweden!\" Lystra herself cried helpfully. \"That's what _they_ said. Bugs! That's what happened there! Oh my God, we're all going mad!\"\n\n\"Aaaaaahhhh!\" a man cried, and then more, and more, and all at once everyone in the theater seemed to realize what was happening. And what was coming.\n\nA well-liked hunk known for starring in superhero movies started laughing and then tried to shove his entire hand into his mouth. Bug Man stared in disbelief. It was one thing knowing that something could theoretically happen. It was a whole different thing when a Marvel superhero was trying to gag himself right in front of you.\n\n\"And now we exit,\" Lystra said. She smiled at Bug Man. She was enjoying his amazement. She'd been right to bring him along. It would be fun to have someone to share it all with afterward. \"See, this is why I've savored, yeah, a few of these events in person: video doesn't do it justice. The edge of panic. Yeah. The wild look in people's eyes.\"\n\nThe panic was like a herd of wildebeest smelling a lion. In a heartbeat hundreds of people surged toward the exits. A woman in an evening gown went down. She tried to stand, but someone tromped on the hem of her dress and she fell again.\n\nLystra and Bug Man barely made it out the door without being trampled, and she laughed as she was jostled and laughed as she was pushed hard against a door and laughed still as she spilled out onto 54th Street into the glare of lights.\n\nThey ran to get ahead of the flood, raced to get behind the cameras to watch as long as Lystra could without endangering herself too much.\n\nA bloody Broadway star was shouting nonsense syllables. A famously beautiful actor was tearing her dress off while her director crawled on all fours making a sound like a sheep. Hollywood's favorite dad was playing with his hair, twining his fingers through it and laughing hysterically.\n\nAn Oscar-winning producer launched himself at a New York police officer, pushed him to the ground, and yanked the gun from the startled cop. The first shot struck a film critic in the chest, a fact that he found funny until he fell over dead.\n\n\"Time to get out of here. Guns are dangerous,\" Lystra observed.\n\nBug Man stared at her, looked around at the madness, and back at her. At the wild glee in her eyes.\n\n\"I know how they feel,\" Lystra said without even a hint of compassion. \"I've been there. I've been crazy. It's kind of... amazing, really.\"\n\nShe turned and walked quickly away, ignoring the well-dressed lunatics rushing by, dancing, twirling and attacking each other with fists and fingernails.\n\nBug Man followed her, because Bug Man had nowhere else to go.\n\nThe trick was to pop the natural gas pipeline in a way that would not cause a spark. Caligula was not interested in suicide.\n\nPower saw and small explosive charge were both ruled out. And he didn't just want to open a smaller release valve\u2014it would take forever for the gas to build up. He needed a rupture in one of the main lines. He needed the gas to come roaring in, thousands of cubic yards of it.\n\nHe had disabled the local safety cutoffs. The next cutoff covered an entire six-block area\u2014this rupture would probably trigger it eventually, but not quickly enough.\n\nHe had brought a car jack with him, the simple, screw-type device, capable of lifting a car off the street. More than enough if he could just find the right position.\n\nHe needed a place where the pipe was rigid. Like right... _there_... where it emerged from the concrete foundation. And just two feet from that point there was a junction, a sort of flange\u2014he wasn't exactly familiar with the terminology. Perfect. If he could just get the jack between the concrete wall and the pipe standing eight inches out from same. He pulled the jack from a bag and looked at it critically. It would be a tough squeeze. The jack, even screwed all the way down, was ten inches tall. So he either had to find another place, or he would have to chip away some of the concrete to make room.\n\nHe sighed and retrieved a chisel and a rubber mallet. Slight delay, that was all.\n\n\"He's in the basement,\" Keats said. \"I can see what he's doing. He's chipping away at something with a chisel. There's still time.\"\n\nThey were outside the Tulip. In the alleyway behind. Staring at various doors\u2014two loading bays, a smaller door, a door a few dozen yards away that was vented so probably contained electrical equipment.\n\nNo clue.\n\nThere was the front door, out on the street, but that was guarded. Their weapons were: one little kid with a Colt .45.\n\nNo. Wait. There was a second weapon: the biot in Caligula's head.\n\nKeats could blind the killer.\n\nOr he could maybe slice through an artery and kill or cripple Caligula.\n\nRewiring was not going to happen in the few minutes remaining to them. There would be no time for subtlety. And if Keats moved his biot farther into Caligula's brain, he would have to detach from the optic nerve and would no longer be able to see what Caligula was doing.\n\nHow long to blind one eye? And could he reach the other eye in time to truly stop Caligula? Or would he be better off diving down deep, finding a fat artery, and sawing away?\n\nKeats felt sick inside. He had no plan. He had a Goth chick, a wild street kid with a gun, a biot, and Plath, who might or might not be entirely okay.\n\n\"What do we do, pretty blue eyes?\" Wilkes of course, jumpy, nervous, eyes darting everywhere with manic appreciation of their hopeless plight.\n\nThe door beside the second loading bay opened. Light spilled out. A man in silhouette yelled, \"Hey, move along, you three.\"\n\nBefore Keats could react there was a loud bang and a flash. A cry of pain. The man in silhouette was visible for a millisecond in the flash. He was younger than his voice, maybe twenty-five, uniformed. A security guard. A minimum-wage grunt with a hole in his chest that leaked dark blood onto khaki.\n\nBilly was moving, leapt up the four concrete steps, and grabbed the door as the man fell back.\n\n\"Jesus!\" Keats cried.\n\nWilkes was quicker, just seconds behind Billy. She grabbed the door, freeing Billy, who calmly knelt and took the dying man's gun.\n\nKeats and Plath followed, Keats feeling as if he was in a dream. Two biot windows were open in his head, one showing the damned bulge in Plath's brain, the other watching the rise and fall, rise and fall of mallet on chisel.\n\nBilly was already proffering the guard's pistol to Keats, buttforward. Keats stared at it. Wilkes took it.\n\nKeats stepped over the guard. He was crying softly and holding his wound with one hand while fumbling for his radio with the other.\n\nHe couldn't be left alive to raise the alarm.\n\nWilkes and Billy both looked at Keats expectantly. Waiting for his order. Plath seemed mesmerized.\n\n_On me, the responsibility_ , Keats thought. It had been so quick, somehow, getting to this point, the kill-or-be-killed point.\n\nBilly must have seen the answer in Keats's eyes. He squatted and pressed the muzzle directly against the man's heart, muffling the sound as much as he could.\n\n_BANG!_\n\nAnd blood sprayed across Billy's face.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Billy said. \"I did it before. Just another first-person shooter, right?\"\n\nKeats felt like throwing up. He felt a flash of fury at Plath. Shouldn't she have made the decision? Shouldn't the guilt be _hers_ to bear?\n\nThe guard was motionless now. But all was not still. They were in a short hallway\u2014barely painted drywall, weak overhead lighting, second door now opening fast, someone coming through expecting trouble, gun already leveled and\u2014\n\n_BANG!_\n\nHead shot. A single hole drilled right in the man's forehead. The back of his head\u2014a crust of skull and hair and something like hamburger\u2014hit the wall and slid down, leaving a trail.\n\n\"Go,\" Keats said, barely audible.\n\nThrough the door, now in the wide-open space within the loading bay, boxes and crates and a chair and table and playing cards laid out, and a coffee mug, and flickering monitors.\n\n\"Basement,\" Keats managed to say, trying to push aside the memory of tears rolling down a doomed man's cheeks.\n\n_One of the innocents I was trying to save_ , Keats thought.\n\n_Now, two of the innocents I was trying to save_.\n\nThey were lost and needed light. Keats spotted a bank of light switches, crossed to them, made it halfway before his stomach sent its contents burbling out of his mouth. He threw every switch, wiped his mouth, and said, \"Find a way down!\"\n\nThe glare of fluorescent light had the effect of casting deep shadows that if anything made the room seem darker, with every high-piled stack of crates like a skyscraper shadowing narrow alleys.\n\nThey ran then, moved forward, the young sociopath with the name of a young sociopath leading the way. Billy moved like a cop, cover to cover, gun steadied in both hands, a goddamned gamer, a goddamned game, where would the bad guys pop up next?\n\n\"Whoa. Down here,\" Wilkes said, waving her own gun fecklessly toward a dark hallway.\n\nBilly moved smoothly ahead of her. Cover. Pause. Scan. Run to cover. Pause. Scan.\n\nA freight elevator, with buttons for up and down.\n\n\"Down,\" Keats said, feeling useless and now seeing flashes of his London home, so squalid and dull all his life, but now so beloved, so _needed_. To crawl into his own bed...\n\nThe elevator door opened on a guard with headphones in and singing along tunelessly, yet Keats recognized the song.\n\n\"Born This Way.\" An old Gaga tune.\n\nKeats barely flinched when Billy put a bullet into the guard's head. The bullet must have hit just wrong because it entered the forehead and blew an exit wound out through the man's jaw.\n\nThe ricochet could have killed one of them, but no, and the man went down with such completeness that he might have been a dropped sack of garbage.\n\nWilkes dragged the dead man off the elevator.\n\nButtons. Three different sublevels. Where was Caligula? Go all the way down. Why not? Gates of hell. Keats punched the S3 button.\n\nThe elevator doors closed over smeared blood.\n\nBilly popped the clip from the gun, counted the bullets and said, \"I don't think there are upgrades or reloads in this game.\"\n\nIt struck Keats that if he had ever found a match for Caligula, it was this sad, sick little boy. It was not a good thought. His stomach was empty, and the smell of his vomit filled the padding-walled elevator as it dropped beneath them.\n\nKeats had kept his place on Caligula's optic nerve. He saw the sudden cessation of hammering. The visual field swirled as Caligula moved quickly.\n\n\"He's heard us!\"\n\n\"Up against the walls, hide under the blankets!\" Billy yelled in high-pitched excitement.\n\nThe blankets were the padding hung to protect the elevator walls. Wilkes and Keats dived under. Too late Keats saw that Plath hadn't moved.\n\nBilly stood waiting, gun drawn and leveled.\n\nKeats saw Caligula rushing toward the elevator, stopping, ducking behind cover. And then the peace of the game descended on Keats. It was live-or-die time. Win-or-lose time.\n\nAll his gaming life Keats had had this other place he could go, except that he didn't quite go there as an act of deliberate choice, it would just _happen_. It would come down over him\u2014a calm, a control, a speed of perception, an ease of decision making\u2014blessedly blanking out fear and self-loathing.\n\n\"He'll be to your left, Billy,\" Keats said. \"Behind a thick vertical pipe painted orange.\"\n\nBilly shifted stance without a word.\n\n\"He's expecting an adult, someone tall,\" Keats said, still deadly calm.\n\nBilly nodded and squatted. His head would be lower than a grown man's belly. Caligula would be quick, but he might hesitate on seeing a child.\n\n\"Wilkes. Give me your gun. As soon as the door opens, scream, really loud,\" Keats ordered. \"Like you need help.\"\n\nCaligula's eye was steady now, lid drooping just a bit, unafraid surely, confident that no one could beat him. Keats's biot was already busy sawing away at the massive optic nerve beneath its feet. Cutting, cutting, like trying to slice through a bridge cable with a hacksaw, but nerve fibers popped and coiled away, wildly whipping wires, and each taking with it a tiny part of Caligula's visual field.\n\nThe elevator stopped.\n\nThe door was loud as it opened.\n\nWilkes screamed, \"Help! Help me! Help me!\"\n\n_BANG!_\n\n_BANG!_\n\nBilly and Caligula fired almost simultaneously and out came Keats from behind the hanging blanket and fired wildly, _BANGBANGBANG!_ with bullets ricocheting off pipes.\n\nKeats's biot sawed madly and now more shooting, and Keats was on the floor of the elevator now, crawling on his belly, aiming, squeezing off rounds, gun bucking in his hand until it banged open, out of bullets.\n\nBilly, still standing, advanced in quickstep, running for cover, and Keats saw Caligula's eye tracking him, saw the butt of Caligula's gun as it bucked from recoil and heard the loud _BANG!_ and saw Billy the Kid's neck suddenly no longer all there.\n\nThe boy fired again as arterial blood sprayed like a cut fire hose, until his head, no longer supported, fell to one side and hung limply, and Billy fell, knees hitting the floor, then onto his back and his head bounced, barely tethered. His gun twirled across the floor leaving a blood trail.\n\nCaligula emerged from cover. He holstered his now-empty gun. Calm. No hurry. He drew his throwing hatchet, and Keats could see the killer's eye on him, on a pitiful crawling wretch, saw the way it focused on his upturned face.\n\nAlien, the sight of his own face as he waited to die. Strange and alien. Keats knew the face, knew it was him, but how could that be? The blessed peace of action had faded, and now he was a bug, a worm waiting to be crushed by the boot of the human god.\n\nThe hatchet flew.\n\nIt grazed Keats's shoulder and clattered to the floor of the elevator.\n\nWas Wilkes still screaming? Someone was.\n\nCaligula blinked. Stared.\n\nKnew. _Understood_. Because Caligula did not miss, not with gun or hatchet. He did not miss, and he knew then it could only be some fault in his vision.\n\nKeats's biot sawed and more nerves parted.\n\nCaligula drew a knife and bounded, like some bizarre kangaroo, rushing with unnatural speed. Keats saw the distance shorten in a heartbeat, saw the killer's focus, saw his own scared face, Wilkes's open mouth, a flash of Plath's hand pressing down on the door's Close button, and the elevator door closing too slowly.\n\nCaligula reached the elevator when the doors were still six inches apart. He thrust in a hand to stop it.\n\nWilkes was on him like an animal, biting the hand, snarling, shaking her head like a terrier with a rat.\n\nCaligula yelled in pain and rage.\n\nKeats saw the door from the inside.\n\nThe door through Caligula's eyes.\n\nThe knife dropped from Caligula's bloody hand, but he did not withdraw, would not let the door close.\n\nThe hatchet was in Keats's hand before he knew it. He observed it through Caligula's eye, saw the killer seeing him, saw the killer track the hatchet as it went back and came down fast and hard and Caligula tried to pull the hand back now, but Wilkes still had it in her teeth and the hatchet blade hit with a cleaver-on-bone sound, barely missing Wilkes's nose and biting deep into Caligula's flesh.\n\nWilkes recoiled then, the hand pulled away, pumping blood from the gash.\n\nKeats saw the doors close from both sides.\n\nHe saw the killer stare at his mangled hand, then through his own eyes saw the little pink curls of fingers on the elevator floor.\n\nThe elevator rose.\n\n\"Billy,\" Wilkes said. Her mouth was smeared with blood, forming a terrible rictus smile.\n\n\"Up,\" Keats said, and punched the button for the highest floor available, the third floor.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Wilkes asked and there was a sob in her voice.\n\n\"Surrender,\" Plath said.\n\n# **TWENTY-FOUR**\n\nSuarez was handcuffed. The handcuffs went through a chain that in turn went through a massive steel ring set into the wall at head height.\n\nThe wall was in a dungeon.\n\nThe dungeon was both frightening and absurd. There were mossy stone walls. There was straw on the stone floor. She'd been left with a rusty pail in which to do her business. The door was too low and made of flaking, unfinished wood. There was a narrow window, but when she dragged her chain over to it she saw that it was fake. The scene visible through the window was a matte painting of a medieval village.\n\n\"Cute,\" she said dryly.\n\nIt was like a movie set, or something out of a video game. Someone was having fun with the whole idea of a dungeon. Which was absurd.\n\nThe scary part came from the fact that the cuffs and chain and even the ring in the wall were all of very high-grade steel.\n\nA man who had the bearing of a former cop or soldier, a beefy, steroided thirtysomething with a crew cut, brought her dinner after a while. The tray was plastic and flimsy, no use as a weapon. The cutlery was plastic as well, and not the good kind. Water was in a plastic bottle. Wine was in a paper cup.\n\nWine, because it was quite a good meal, considering the location. Better than airline food, in any event. Wine in a dungeon.\n\n\"You have a name, soldier?\" Suarez asked as he set the plate carefully on the floor, five feet from where she sat.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" he said reflexively. So (a) he _was_ an ex-soldier, and (b) he knew that she'd been an officer.\n\nHe flushed, realizing his mistake. Then said, \"You can call me Chesterfield.\"\n\n\"That's not your name. It's a brand of cigarette.\" When he did not demur, she said, \"So, I'm guessing the other guards will be Marlboro and Lucky Strike?\"\n\n\"Eat your food. Ma'am.\"\n\n\"Looks good. And I am hungry.\" She crawled to the food. Took a sip of the wine. \"Know what the wine is?\"\n\n\"It's French.\"\n\n\"Expensive, too, I'd guess. No point paying to ship cheap wine all the way here. Of course I'm more of a whiskey drinker.\"\n\n\"So's the boss.\"\n\n\"The boss,\" Suarez said pensively. \"The one who thinks civilization is about to crumble so she built Crazy Town here. You're not crazy, though, right? You're just here for the money? Bad economy and all, a former serviceman has bills to pay like anyone else.\"\n\n\"If the boss says it's all coming down, it's all coming down. I mean, she's probably the smartest person in the world, smarter than Dr. Stephen Hawking.\"\n\n_Dr. Stephen Hawking?_ Suarez rolled that around in her head. A strange way for a guy who looked like this to put it. _Doctor?_\n\n\"Okay, well, what do you do for fun around here while you're waiting for the apocalypse?\"\n\n\"It won't be an apocalypse for the people here; it will be a rebirth.\"\n\nNo irony in his gaze. He was dead serious. Someone had definitely sold this boy a complete bill of goods.\n\n\"Okay, which still leaves the question of what you do to pass the time?\"\n\nHe shrugged, and Suarez detected a softness in him. _I'm going to try not to kill you_ , she thought.\n\n\"I don't suppose there's any way I can get a shower? You know, hot water? Soap?\" She mimed it for him, mimicking the movements of a bar of soap over her body, not lasciviously\u2014that would be too obvious and set off alarm bells. Just... enough. She just wanted him to connect his boredom with the mental picture of a reasonably attractive woman taking a shower. Let him stew on that for a while. Activate the twin male instincts of protection and predation.\n\nLater, when the time was right, there would be the metal pail.\n\n\"No shower,\" he said in a voice just a tiny bit lower than it had been. \"I could maybe get you a deck of cards.\"\n\n\"I would be very grateful.\"\n\nThe explosion came as the elevator rose, an impact that knocked Keats, Plath, and Wilkes to their knees. Not an explosion that would bring down a building. Smaller.\n\nBut the elevator stopped moving, and the door did not open. The backlit buttons went dark. The overhead light snapped off, replaced by an eerie emergency light.\n\n\"He blew up the elevator doors down there,\" Keats said, offering his hand to Plath.\n\nShe spurned it and jumped to her feet. \"We have to get out of here.\"\n\nA second explosion, more distant this time. The second elevator.\n\n\"He's cutting himself off,\" Keats said.\n\n\"He'll die with the explosion,\" Plath said. Then, softly, \"Maybe that was the plan all along.\"\n\nWilkes had started trying to pry open the elevator doors. Keats and Plath jumped in, jamming splintering fingernails into the gap. Slowly, inch by inch, the door opened. They were between floors, but with an open space of several feet.\n\nPlath went through first, boosted by Keats. Then Wilkes. Together they hauled Keats after them.\n\nThey were on the ground floor\u2014the lobby floor, polished marble. Security guards were a swarm of uniforms and plainclothes tourists from Denver, though minus the parkas. All were armed. In seconds there were a dozen weapons pointed at the three of them.\n\n\"One move and we shoot,\" a woman snapped.\n\n\"No need,\" Plath said. \"I'm Sadie McLure. We need to talk to the Twins.\"\n\n\"And in the meantime, there's an assassin down in the basement preparing to blow this whole place up,\" Keats said.\n\nNervous glances went back and forth.\n\n\"Hey, dumb asses,\" Wilkes said. \"Shoot us or beat us up or whatever, but there is an honest-to-God stone-cold killer down there.\"\n\n\"He's wedged a car jack behind a gas pipe,\" Keats said. \"In a few minutes high-pressure gas is going to start pouring into the basement.\"\n\n\"Leave his eye,\" Plath ordered. \"Find an artery.\"\n\nKeats's eyebrow shot up at the tone of command. Plath, who had seemed almost to be comatose, now sounded like her old self.\n\n\"Kill him?\" Keats asked. He searched her eyes, not sure what he wanted the answer to be. In this very building Plath had refused to kill the Twins. She had refused to commit cold-blooded murder.\n\nMany had died since then. Much had changed.\n\nThey had just ripped m-sub yards of wire from Plath's brain, and parts of her gray matter were as raw as a skinned knee. If she gave the order, who and what would be behind it? What would be her motivation? How much responsibility would she bear in the end?\n\nAnd if she said\u2014\n\n\"Kill him,\" Plath said.\n\nAnd if she said, _Kill him_ , would he obey?\n\n\"Get them up to Jindal. Cuff 'em, keep guns on them, any bullshit, shoot 'em,\" the woman in charge snapped.\n\nThe three remaining, active members of BZRK New York were cuffed and hustled to the main bank of elevators.\n\n\"Has he blown the pipe yet?\" Plath asked Keats.\n\n\"I don't know, Keats said. \"I'm no longer on the optic nerve.\"\n\nPlath and Wilkes both knew this meant he had sent his biot to kill Caligula.\n\n\"And the last of the righteous succumbs to the darkness,\" Wilkes said mordantly, and added, \"Heh-heh-heh.\"\n\n\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7\n\nLystra Reid laughed like a mad thing, and to Bug Man's amazement actually executed a somersault, as crazy as the terrifyingly unhinged actors and producers and agents and whoever now baying like wolves in the streets of Manhattan, chased by cameras that broadcast the images all over the world.\n\nShe led the way to a limo and held the door open for Bug Man, who tumbled in, shaken.\n\n\"Jefuf Chri'!\" he cried.\n\n\"No, no, no, no goddamned made-up, bullshit divinities!\" Lystra yelled exultantly. \"Jesus Christ and Zeus and Mohammed and whatever the hell you want, yeah, they didn't write _this_ game!\" She fell into the seat beside him. It was as if she was drunk or high. She was cackling. \"Fuck your gods, Bug Man, I'm god now! Yeah! This is my fucking world!\"\n\nBug Man had seen some crazy in his life. He'd spoken with the Armstrong Twins, and those boys were crazy. He'd hung out with Burnofsky, not exactly a paragon of sanity. _But_ , he thought, _this chick is nuts. Once you start calling yourself \"god\" you're all the way into crazy_.\n\n_Berserk_.\n\n_BZRK_.\n\nHe was crying without quite knowing why, unless it was just some kind of overload. Too much. Too much crazy. The whole world was going crazy, and this madwoman was making sure of it.\n\n\"Wha' nef?\" he asked, both to humor her and because he needed to know.\n\n\"Stop mush mouthing,\" Lystra snapped. \"I'll tell you what next, yeah. Next, we get back to the apartment to watch the Tulip blow up,\" she said, and winked conspiratorially. With her hands she made a sort of finger explosion and said, \"Boom! Crash! Tinkle tinkle tinkle. Woosh! Screams! Cries! It's Nine\/Eleven all over, but now, yeah, the whole fucking world is going nuts! Crazy president. All the big brains? Crazy! Crazy prince. Crazy Pope! Everyone you know, yeah, is insane! And then, ah-hah-hah!\"\n\n\"Then... what?\" Bug Man asked.\n\n\"Then the Tulip comes down. And then, yeah, then, yeah, then the rest of them. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. The code is all laid in. The cr\u00e8ches are ready. Grow 'em, kill 'em. Grow 'em, kill 'em, yeah. Biot fucking apocalypse, Bug Man! Madness! Have you had blood drawn? Then I have your DNA, bitches. And, yeah, I have your biot. We can do sixteen thousand at a time. Sixteen thousand an hour. Day one? Three hundred eight-four thousand! A million, yeah, in sixty-two and a half hours. Everyone from big to little. Everyone from great to small. Everyone from rich to poor. The grocery clerk? Berserk! The train driver? Berserk! The guy, yeah, in a missile silo somewhere in Shitheel, Nebraska? Berserk! Cops? Berserk!\"\n\nShe reeled back against the leather seat. Took a deep breath. Like she was overwhelmed by the vision in her head. \"Every continent. Every country. I have twenty-nine million samples, yeah. One out of every two hundred and forty-one people on planet Earth. Berserk. Yeah.\"\n\nShe seemed spent. Drained. But still wondering, still amazed. \"It will take seventy-five days to do them all. But it won't hold together for that long, yeah. Governments fall. Religions fail. It all comes down. Chaos. Mass insanity. The end. How many die in the end? Don't know, don't know, yeah. Maybe all of them, yeah. Whole new game then, yeah? Whole new game, right? _My_ game. Adam and fucking Eve. Genghis Khan. Hitler. Stalin and Mao and what's his name? Fucking Attila. _My_ game. Yeah.\"\n\nThe limo stopped just a block away from the Tulip. Lear bounded out with Bug Man on her heels. They raced for the elevator up to her posh apartment.\n\nBug Man felt a sick dread settle over him.\n\nHe didn't see where this was any kind of game. This was just plain murder. Murder on a massive scale.\n\nLystra was excited, fumbling the keys at first. Then she led the way to the window, tapped the remote that opened the curtains and did a game-show-model move, like she was presenting the Tulip as some sort of prize.\n\nThen Lystra fell silent. She was thinking something over. Bug Man could practically see her arguing with herself as her head tilted slightly this way, slightly that way.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said to herself, finally. \"Yeah. Call him. Call him, yeah.\"\n\nKeats's biot raced away from the partly cut optic nerve, six legs milling through the fluid, impeded but only slightly by sticky macrophages coming to dumbly check out the damage he had done.\n\nIt was like a wild nighttime drive down a back country road, somehow. His illumination in fact lit up very little, just the nerve and a suggestion of deeper brain ahead.\n\nAn artery, that's what he needed, and there were a lot of them in the brain. None would kill instantly; that's not the way it would work. Instead, blood would pour into the brain itself, depriving some tissue of oxygen, putting pressure on other tissue. The result would be a stroke or series of strokes and yes, maybe death, but not quickly.\n\nQuickly enough to stop him blowing up the building? No way to know. He couldn't see through Caligula's eye anymore. Any moment could bring a fireball, a terrible shudder, and a falling floor beneath his feet.\n\nThey'd been taken to see Jindal, a worm of a man who kept rocking back on his heels, then forward onto his toes, trying to look taller than he was. He had snapped out a set of superfluous instructions to his security people, but they were already vectoring armed men toward the sublevels.\n\n\"You need to evacuate the building,\" Plath said.\n\n\"Hah. Just what you'd want if this were all a ruse. Just what you could be after, no? I think so. I think we'll wait until\u2014\"\n\nThe phone chirped. He grabbed it, listened, face darkening. \"The freight elevators are blown. The doors are jammed. They may be booby-trapped.\"\n\n\"I'd bet on it,\" Plath said.\n\n\"Caligula was keeping the elevators to use for his own escape,\" Keats said, walking it through in his own mind. Elevators stopped at the loading bays, from there to the alley, and off he would go. In five minutes he could be clear of the blast and any police cordon.\n\nJindal's forehead creased. And he may have started to sweat just a bit.\n\n\"Evacuate the building!\" Plath yelled. \"We're not here because we want to die, we're trying to save innocent people!\"\n\n_Innocent people_ , Keats noted. So there was still a Sadie somewhere inside Plath.\n\nJindal shook his head slowly. \"If I'm wrong and the place blows up, I'm dead. If I'm wrong and I evacuated the building, the Twins will...\" He shook his head doggedly. \"There are worse things than dying.\"\n\n\"Yes, but none are really as permanent,\" Wilkes said.\n\n\"Take us to the Twins,\" Plath said urgently. \"If you don't have the balls to make a decision, take us to the Twins!\"\n\n\" _Now_ , you bloody fool!\" Keats added.\n\nWhen Jindal still stood, frozen in indecision, Plath spun on her heel and marched for the elevator. \"I've been there before. I know the way.\"\n\nFour security men trained their guns on her. Plath, without turning around said, \"I'm Sadie McLure. Now, you may be too gutless or stupid to make a decision, Mr. Jindal, but you know as well as I do that your bosses would throw you out of that window if you deprived them of a chance to deal with me themselves. So I'm getting on the elevator, and I'm going upstairs.\"\n\nWilkes put on a falsely cheery smile and said to Keats, \"I think she's back.\"\n\nCaligula had seated the jack. It was in an awkward position, and he had to turn the screw using a crowbar that could be moved only a few degrees at a time.\n\nHis vision had not deteriorated further. Which meant whoever was running the biot in his head had moved on in search of a faster way to stop him. And his hand hurt like hell. He'd used the do-rag as a makeshift bandage, but the blood had soaked through almost instantly.\n\nWell. At this point death was a certainty. Death by brain hemorrhage or death by natural gas explosion. _Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, you pays your money, you takes your_ chances.\n\nRemembering the old carnival barker cant made him smile. They had not been so bad, those days. He turned the crowbar. It had been lonely a lot of the time, especially after he gave up his daughter. But he couldn't look at her. He couldn't.\n\nWhen he'd caught his wife in bed with another man, he killed the man and then, much to his own surprise, let his wife live. He'd even forgiven her.\n\n_He_ had forgiven her. Their daughter had not.\n\nHis phone buzzed softly. He closed his eyes and leaned back from the jack. There was only one person who could possibly be calling him, only one person who had ever had the number.\n\nHe pulled the phone from his pocket with his good hand.\n\n\"Yes, baby,\" Caligula said.\n\n\"Call me Lear. How many times do I have to tell you that? Call me Lear!\"\n\nCaligula said nothing, just closed his eyes.\n\n\"Why hasn't the Tulip been blown up?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm working on it,\" he said, feeling very weary.\n\n\"You're ruining the timing!\"\n\n\"Listen, baby... Lear. Listen to me. This will be the last time we have a chance to talk.\"\n\n\"Are you arguing with me? Are you failing me? Again?\"\n\nCaligula sighed. \"They tried to stop me. Plath, Keats... I can't get out of here. I'm going to die.\"\n\nAt least there was a moment of hesitation. At least there was that much. Maybe she didn't really care, but the news at least made her pause. Made her blink, perhaps, at the other end of the line.\n\n\"I guess it's karma,\" Lear said at last.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"For you killing Mom. It's karma. Cosmic justice.\"\n\nCaligula hung his head and for a minute could not go on. Could not speak. \"Lystra. Baby. You have to know\u2014\"\n\n\"Goddamn it, you old piece of shit, call me\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't kill her. You know I\u2014\"\n\n\"Blow it up! Blow it up!\"\n\n\"\u2014didn't take your mother's life.\"\n\n\"Shut up! Just shut the hell up and do it!\"\n\n\"You did, Lystra. _You_ killed your mother.\"\n\nHeavy breathing at the other end of the line. Then, a weird, distorted voice, like a child trying to sound grown-up. A whining, almost singsong voice. \"No, I didn't.\"\n\n\"Lystra...\"\n\n\" _You_ did. You killed her. Yeah, you killed my mother and then you gave me away.\"\n\n\"Baby...\" Caligula's voice broke. He felt a sharp pain in his head. Any other time he would have thought it was just the beginning of a headache.\n\n\"How could I? I was just a little girl.\"\n\nHow long did he have? Minutes or seconds?\n\n\"You're right,\" he said at last. \"You're right, ba\u2014Lear. I did it.\"\n\n\"Hah! I told you so. Now, do this. Do it and all is forgiven.\"\n\nHe managed a slight laugh, a hoarse sound. \"I don't think even God can forgive me all I've done.\"\n\n\"Then it's no problem, Daddy. I am god now.\"\n\nShe hung up the phone. Caligula knew it was true. Not about his poor, mad daughter being god. But yes, he had killed his wife, her mother. A week after they'd reconciled, he'd been drunk and angry at what he thought was a flirtation with the carny who ran the Mad Mouse ride. He'd punched her. He'd punched her hard, right in the jaw. She had fallen, unconscious, to the floor of their shabby trailer.\n\nHe'd left her there.\n\nWhen he woke, raging with thirst from all the drink, filled with remorse, he'd found her still on the floor. But with her throat cut.\n\nThe bloody meat cleaver was on the floor beside her.\n\nHe had roused a sleeping Lystra from her bed and washed the red stain from her hands. Burned her bloody clothing in the fifty-five-gallon drum where the carnies burned trash and kept their hands warm on cold nights.\n\nIt was his fault she had done it. Who had taught her violence? Who had revealed his rage to the impressionable ears of a young girl?\n\nAnd then, cowardly, unable to face Lystra, unable to cope with the madness that was already a part of her, he had shipped her off.\n\nCaligula did not believe in karma. He believed in damnation. His own, and hers as well. And the damnation of the world.\n\nHe set the crowbar in place and heaved with all his might.\n\nThe pipe snapped. Whatever sound it made was obliterated by the roar of high-pressure gas gushing into the room.\n\nHe choked from the smell, reeled back, staggered to the far end of the chamber, and set the timer on the explosive device for ten minutes.\n\nThat should be enough.\n\n# **TWENTY-FIVE**\n\nSadie McLure. In person. In the flesh. And the rest of her little crew as well. Benjamin Armstrong felt disappointed. It should have been a triumph, but she was walking in under her own power, head held high.\n\n\"Someone get me a... a knife! Or a baseball bat! Something,\" Benjamin snarled.\n\n\"Benjamin,\" Charles chided mockingly. \"There will be plenty of time for that.\"\n\n\"I'm going to beat her bloody and rape whatever is left of her!\" Benjamin saw his own spittle flying. He felt the way Charles drew him back, restraining him, knowing Benjamin otherwise would have gone at the girl with his fist until some better weapon appeared.\n\nMore and more security men and women were arriving\u2014by elevator, by stair\u2014all armed, all looking to the Twins for guidance.\n\n\"The building is going to blow up,\" Plath said calmly.\n\n\"Of course it is,\" Benjamin sneered. \"You know, your father was the smart one, not you, you stupid little bitch!\"\n\n\"Caligula is in the basement,\" Keats said, striving to mirror Plath's even tone, despite the realization that one way or the other, his own time was fast running out.\n\nHe flashed on a memory of his brother Alex, chained to his cot in a mental institution in London. Mad. Utterly, terribly mad from the death of his biots. Of course, Alex had had more than one die. But at the same time, Alex had been strong.\n\n\"It's Caligula,\" Plath repeated.\n\nCharles's eyes narrowed. \"What is Caligula?\"\n\n\"He's the one in the basement. Looks like he's rupturing a pipeline. He'll wait until the gas builds up and\u2014\"\n\n\"System!\" Charles yelled. \"System: show all cameras in the basement of this building!\"\n\nOn the huge screen with its multitude of squares showing the Armstrong empire, five windows opened. Three were black. But two were still in operation, one trained on an instrument panel, while the other was a grainy long shot of pipes and...\n\n\"There!\" Jindal cried, pointing. \"There's someone down there. You can just see their back!\"\n\n\"One of the engineers,\" Charles scoffed, but he didn't sound too sure of himself.\n\nSuddenly the grainy figure reeled back, spun away from whatever he had been doing.\n\nIn Caligula's head Keats's efforts were beginning to work. Blood that had been just a single-cell spray from the throbbing artery had become a gusher, like a cartoon of an oil well. The clear cranial fluid around his biot was growing opaque with the floating Frisbees of red blood cells and the soggy sponges of white blood cells.\n\nThe force of the blood knocked his biot loose of its perch and sent it spinning, end over end. What had been a sort of narrow but calm seam of watery fluid was now a turbulent underground river.\n\nHe would not make it back to the artery.\n\n\"He's hemorrhaging,\" Keats said. To the Twins he explained, \"I have a biot in his brain. I've cut an artery. I've damaged one optic nerve.\"\n\nThe camera no longer showed the man in question.\n\n\"Can you get back to his eye?\" Plath asked.\n\nShe still hadn't realized... Keats nodded. \"On my way.\"\n\n\"You don't give orders here!\" Benjamin raged at Plath.\n\nBut his brother was no longer with him on that. Charles said, \"Why would Caligula blow up the Tulip?\"\n\nPlath glanced at Keats, who seemed to her to be elsewhere. Looking through his biot's eyes, seeing a different scene altogether.\n\nIn fact, Keats's biot was racing madly back toward Caligula's eye. His biot swam and crawled, shouldered its way through the clinging platelets, the lymphocytes, the tendrils of detached neurons, floating like seaweed.\n\nHe had never moved so fast. He didn't wonder at which direction to take, which planes to use to flow through the 3D maze of Caligula's brain. The calm had come over him.\n\nHe knew what was coming for himself, but he was no longer afraid. A slight smile stretched his mouth. His eyes glistened.\n\nHe was there, in that place of peace and calm and wild, frantic action.\n\n\"Floor Thirty-Four,\" Plath said to Benjamin. She didn't know what Floor 34 was. Just that it was the one part of the Tulip aside from the data center that was unreachable by elevator. A guess. An intuition.\n\nA bluff.\n\nThe silence that followed was all the confirmation necessary. Charles was shaken.\n\n\"And who sent Caligula to do this act of terrorism?\" Benjamin asked, voice silky and malevolent now.\n\n\"Me,\" Plath said.\n\nCharles blinked. \"But... Surely you...\" His tone was almost pleading.\n\n\"Lear,\" Wilkes said when Keats remained silent. \"It was Lear. He's wired her. He got Vincent to wire her. We've cleared her brain of wire, but\u2014\"\n\n\"So now you see that we were right! Now, now with our beautiful people all dead on the _Doll Ship_ , all destroyed. Now you\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, you're a piece of shit who needs to die a painful death. The two of you,\" Wilkes snapped. \"But we do not blow up buildings full of innocent people. We're trying to stop this from happening.\"\n\nBenjamin's face was a snarl. Charles was guarded, worried. It was he who said, \"Jindal, get Burnofsky up here.\"\n\nKeats had reached the optic nerve. He sank a probe. \"I can see,\" he said in a dreamy, disconnected, emotionless voice. \"Caligula is looking right at it. At the bomb. There's a timer.\"\n\n\"How much time left?\" Jindal asked.\n\nBenjamin raged at him. \"Follow my brother's orders, now!\"\n\n\"I have a weak picture,\" Keats said, speaking to Plath. \"I'll try for a better one.\"\n\nJindal rapped orders to his people, then, undeterred\u2014 _Accustomed to abuse_ , Keats thought\u2014he said, \"Our people will be through the door into the sublevel in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"How are they getting through?\" Plath asked.\n\n\"They're cutting through the steel with a blowtorch and once they're in\u2014\"\n\n\"A blowtorch? Cutting into a room full of gas?\" Wilkes cried. \"Isn't that, uh, stupid?\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Charles said.\n\n\"No,\" Plath said sharply. \"No. Maybe better to blow it up now rather than wait. Less gas now. More later.\"\n\n\"System,\" Charles said. \"Exterior, sublevel doors.\"\n\nAs one they all turned to look at the monitor. Four frames. Three showed nothing but doors. The last showed two men wearing welding helmets. The bright light of the torch caused lens flares that obscured the progress of the work.\n\n\"Seven minutes, eighteen seconds,\" Keats said. \"I can see it now. I can see it clearly. Seven minutes and...\" And it all came back to him. The calm of battle had run its course once his biot had reached its goal. Now Keats couldn't go on. He had run out of indifference to his own fate.\n\nPart of him didn't want to tell Sadie. What would be gained? But he had to speak. He had to say good-bye.\n\n\"Sadie,\" he said.\n\nShe must have registered the sadness and gentleness in his voice. She turned to him. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Sadie,\" he said again. \"I've thought about it a lot. I've seen Alex. I know what it means. Death or madness, I... I guess I believe in another life, maybe. After this one. So...\"\n\nShe stared, uncomprehending. Then a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes widened. \"Oh, God.\"\n\n\"What?\" Wilkes demanded.\n\n\"I'm getting my other biot as far from your aneurysm as possible,\" he said. \"But you'll need to kill me. You can't have it in your head with a madman running it.\"\n\n\"Noah,\" Sadie said. Sadie, and not Plath. Sadie. \"Noah... We have to...\"\n\nHe took her hand in his. \"We always knew it could happen.\"\n\n\"Order the men down there to cut straight through, forget cutting a hole, tell them just to cut all the way through in a single spot,\" Benjamin told Jindal.\n\n\"Better to burn than to blow up,\" Benjamin said. \"And thus, it ends.\"\n\n\"You can't... Noah...\"\n\n\"When Caligula burns, so will my biot, Sadie. You know what follows. It's okay.\"\n\n\"Noah...\" She was in his arms, and tears were running down her face.\n\n\"Yes, of course, pity for the pretty boy, eh?\" Benjamin said savagely. \"Pity for poor, poor Noah. None for our people on our beautiful ship. And none for hideous freaks.\"\n\nBurnofsky watched the counter on his computer monitor. The number of self-replicating nanobots had just crossed thirty-two million. The next doubling would take it to sixty-four million, then one hundred and twenty-eight. Pretty soon megabots would give way to gigabots and hence to terabots.\n\nHe laughed at that, slurred, \"I made a funny,\" took a drink, sucked on his cigarette, and touched the butt of the pistol that was stuck into his belt.\n\nHe'd been feeding the nanobots everything he could find: stale doughnuts, candy bars from the machine down the hall, half a salami he'd found in the staff fridge. He hadn't slept in... how many hours? How many days? It was all kind of fuzzy.\n\nHe had the remote control in his hand. Press the button and the force field would drop. His nanobots would eat their way out into the world and from there they would never stop. They would eat their way through the building, its furnishings, and anyone dull enough to wait around.\n\nBut before they finished the Tulip they'd be carried on breezes or simply fall from chewed-through walls down onto the streets. Nearby buildings would be infested and begin the same accelerated decline and rot. The pace would accelerate as the nanobots doubled and doubled.\n\nWhat would the reaction be? What would the government do? Nothing short of a nuclear weapon would stop the spread, and they would wait far too long for that. Nanobots would find their way onto ferries, cars, ships, and planes.\n\nFor the first few days the damage would be most visible at the epicenter. But then, here and there and all around the world they would appear and double and double and double.\n\nPeople would flee to the woods and deserts. And they would survive for a while\u2014maybe weeks, maybe months. In places the nanobots would consume all there was to consume and cease doubling. But by that time they would have eaten every living thing and much of the nonliving things as well.\n\nHe asked himself, where would be safe? Or at least, where would be _safest_? The coldest places, he supposed. Nanobots tended to be immobilized when things got cold enough, down to minus twenty-three Celsius or minus ten Fahrenheit. But even in the coldest lands a warm day would set them off again.\n\n\"God bless global warming,\" he muttered, and laughed at his own wit.\n\nPeople thought they were scared now? They thought they were terrified by Lear's plague of madness? Wait until they saw their crops, their home, their car and its gas, their dogs and cats and cows and pigs, all chewed up, masticated by trillions of nanobots that did little but crap out more nanobots.\n\nWait until they realized how hopeless it was. How powerless they were. Wait until they saw the little sore on their ankle become a bleeding hole and endured the agony of being eaten alive, consumed, like a beetle being swarmed by fire ants. It would be like leprosy on fast forward. It would be like flesh-eating bacteria on meth.\n\nSure, maybe in places there would be pockets of a few scattered humans who would hold out for as long as six months. But it wouldn't matter. The nanobots would eat the algae out of the sea and every oxygen-producing plant on the land and then, inexorably, the atmosphere itself would become fatal to life.\n\nDirt. Water. That would be planet Earth. Just dirt and water and a vast, inconceivably vast swarm of nanobots. Mindless. Without soul or sin. Efficient, relentless, unstoppable killers without malice, without meaning, without moral judgment. Without guilt\u2014that most destructive, weakening, sickening, disabling of emotions.\n\nYes, his babies would obliterate without guilt.\n\nHe pulled up the picture he'd found of Lystra Reid and gave it the finger.\n\n\"Game, set, match, Lear. Death or madness? I got a little hint for you, sweetheart. The answer is death. Death, brought to you by Karl Burnofsky.\"\n\nOut in the lab he heard a disturbance: raised voices, a bustling movement, chairs scuffling. The door to his office was locked. He drew the pistol.\n\nSomeone banged hard on his door: a cop's knock.\n\n\"Damn,\" he said. \"I'd have liked to hit a billion first.\"\n\n\"Burnofsky! Come out here. The bosses want you.\"\n\n\"I'm busy,\" Burnofsky yelled.\n\n\"Don't think they care, Dr. B. You've got about ten seconds.\"\n\nThe Twins wanted him, did they? Well, why not? It would be worth a laugh. And he had something special for them, just for them, something ever so special.\n\n\"Give me a second!\" he yelled. In his desk, all the way at the back, he found the little vial he'd prepared against this very moment. He slipped it into his pocket along with the remote control that could unleash Armageddon and opened the office door for what he suspected would be the last time.\n\nThe area within the force field continued to fill with his children.\n\nKeats had his biot back on Caligula's optic nerve. He was again seeing what the killer saw. Caligula seemed to be sitting, perhaps with his back against a wall. His legs were stretched out before him. He stared at his missing fingers, bleeding freely, unbandaged. He leaned down to rub a spot of mud from his boot, glanced at the timer\u2014six minutes and nine seconds\u2014then apparently coughed as his head jerked violently and his hand came up to his mouth.\n\nJust six minutes until the natural gas flooding the basement would achieve sufficient density that a spark would bring down the entire building. The gas was invisible dynamite being stacked, ton upon ton. Caligula's eye glanced toward the ruptured pipe. He had a picture of something in his hand, a photograph of a serious little girl slumped in a busted-webbing lawn chair outside a shabby trailer. There was a Ferris wheel in the background.\n\nCaligula coughed again and drew something out of his bag. Keats saw a small steel cylinder, a clear plastic hose smeared with Caligula's blood, and a clear plastic mask with elastic straps. It reminded him of the lecture aboard an airplane: _Should there be a sudden loss of cabin pressure..._ Caligula pulled the mask on, and now the plastic partly filled Keats's view. Caligula was determined to wait out the\u2014\n\nNo, he was up, up and staggering, but not toward the rupture, or toward the elevators. Keats saw a steel door. Caligula's eye went to the handle, then his hand as it touched the metal of the door.\n\n\"He knows your guys are burning through,\" Keats said dully.\n\n\"Jindal!\" Charles yelled in response.\n\nJindal talked into his phone and reported, \"They say they'll be through any second.\"\n\nCaligula glanced back toward the bomb. Glanced at the gun in his hands. Suddenly they trembled. He seemed to be struggling to hold on to the weapon; his mutilated hand was still bleeding freely, but even the fingers on his good hand looked stiff, uncooperative.\n\nThe gun fell from his grip. The picture, too, was facedown on the floor.\n\n\"He's having a stroke,\" Keats reported. _Go on_ , he told himself, _just keep watching. Until the end. Be the good boy. No freaking out, no last-minute pleas_. Tough, that's how his brother Alex had always been. \"He's stroking out from the artery I cut.\"\n\nSadie was looking at him, her eyes ashamed, horrified.\n\n\"Not your fault,\" he said to her. \"None of this is your fault.\"\n\n\"But it is,\" she said.\n\n\"He's picked up a crowbar. His fingers can barely hold it. He's dropped it. He's staring at it.\"\n\n\"For God's sake, evacuate the building!\" Plath shrieked at the Twins.\n\nBurnofsky, disheveled but animated, came in with guards on either side. His rheumy eyes sparkled. \"Ah, ah, ah!\" he said on spying Plath and Keats and Wilkes. \"So, _that's_ the panic.\" He seemed pleased and relieved.\n\n\"Help me get these idiots to evacuate the building,\" Plath pleaded. \"Caligula's flooding the basement with natural gas. In six minutes this whole place goes up!\"\n\n\"Is that true?\" Burnofsky demanded, squinting hard at the Twins. He glanced at the monitor. The cameras in the basement had been redirected, searching for Caligula. A grainy image showed him walking, dragging one leg, then collapsing on the floor.\n\nKeats had never been inside the brain of a dying man. There was nothing to see on the optic nerve, nothing changing in his immediate environment. But the eyelid no longer blinked as often, and it seemed to be drooping, partly obscuring the view.\n\nIf Caligula died before the explosion, then Keats would have been his killer. His biot might sit for several minutes in a dead man's brain before the explosion killed his biot and plunged him down into the dark hell of madness.\n\nHow would it feel, he wondered. How would it feel to no longer be himself?\n\nKeats's throat was dry. His breathing was shallow. He was afraid. First would come the razor edge of madness, to be followed by an explosion that\u2014\n\nA brilliant flash of light from Caligula's eye.\n\nThe same bright flash filled the monitor that had been trained on Caligula. The camera aimed at the exterior where the men had been wielding the cutting torch went dead.\n\n\"They burned through!\" Jindal cried.\n\n\"System,\" Charles yelled, his voice cracking. \"Sublevel two, northeast corner stairwell cameras!\"\n\nBlank nothing, dead cameras.\n\n\"System, sublevel one, northeast corner!\"\n\nHere, too, the cameras were blank. A shudder communicated itself up the length of the Tulip to Keats's feet, like a minor earthquake. A glass fell from a shelf and shattered.\n\nThe fire killed Caligula instantly. Then it began to burn through his flesh, boiling the blood in his veins, sloughing away charred skin, burning its way to his heart, to his lungs. To his brain.\n\n\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7\n\n\"Fire in the lobby!\" Jindal reported, phone to his ear.\n\n\"They can put it out!\" Burnofsky yelled. \"They have to put it out!\" His relief was all gone now, all gone, as his brilliant mind frantically calculated the damage that could be done to his nanobots by a burning building.\n\n\"The southwest corner stairwell is still clear,\" Jindal said. \"Gentlemen, we have to get you out of here!\" This to the Twins, who seemed paralyzed.\n\n\"Anyone who wants to live, get out of here!\" Plath yelled, pulling away from Keats.\n\n_A window in Keats's mind went dark and then disappeared. Keats felt strange, very strange. Not upset. Just... alone..._\n\n\"Wilkes! Run!\" Plath pleaded.\n\n\"Not without you and blue eyes,\" Wilkes said.\n\n... _alone in a strange landscape_.\n\n\"No one moves!\" three different security men yelled at once, waving their guns in a bewildered effort to assert control.\n\n\"It blew up early,\" Plath said, looking to the Twins. \"The explosion was only limited, but it's still burning, and there's an open gas line feeding that fire. We may still get out.\"\n\nBurnofsky yelled, \"System: show Burnofsky lab!\"\n\n_Such strange images. Flashing pictures of his old room in London, of playing football in the alley, of the island. Of Sadie. Of the dark, looming monster that seemed now to be emerging from her, bursting from her flesh, a dark, terrible beast..._\n\nBurnofsky's lab was untouched. He saw assistants going about their business, clueless.\n\n\"Evacuate the building!\" Charles yelled.\n\n\"No!\" This came from Benjamin. Jindal stutter-stepped and stopped.\n\n_Keats saw it all. The Twins were a glowing two-headed dragon, with liquid fire bleeding from Benjamin's lips. Burnofsky melting, somehow melting, and Keats felt the laughter rise in him, rise and fill his chest and come burbling out of his mouth. He pulled against imaginary chains, yanking his arms against nonexistent restraints_.\n\n\"Noah,\" Sadie pleaded, helpless, knowing what was happening to him, knowing that he was spiraling down.\n\n_A part of Keats\u2014a fading, weakening remnant\u2014watched it all from very far away, a shadow of his mind, watching himself slip, slip, slip.... It was all very, very clear, very, very clear to Noah, Noah like the guy with the ark, the one who liked animals, all clear, they were all devils, all of them. Mad, each of them, mad as... mad as..._\n\nA whimpering voice, Noah's own voice, but not operated by him, no, a voice mewling and laughing and crying out, \"Kill me, kill me, it's what you all want, isn't it?\"\n\nIn that moment, a final becalmed moment, the last sane vestiges of his mind took it all in, and his laughter was not yet the laughter of the insane, but the knowing, cynical laughter of one who sees everything clearly, if only for a single second in time.\n\nHe saw Benjamin and Charles as what they were, two rejected, despised, sad little children forever bound together, neither able to feel even a moment's freedom.\n\nHe saw Burnofsky, so desperate for redemption from suffering that he would bring down the whole world in a fit of self-loathing.\n\nAnd Sadie, Sadie his love, her brain a tangled mess, wired, unwired, but even before that crippled by a dead mother, a dead brother, a dead father, and corrupted by wealth and power and crushed by responsibility. Mad. Her, too: mad.\n\nThey were all mad. They always had been.\n\nCrazy people had gotten their hands on deadly toys. The end was inevitable.\n\n_And me, too_ , he thought. As mad as any of them, believing that there could be love and honor in the midst of it.\n\nThey had all tried to armor themselves against this final moment, but their defiance had been its own lie: there was never a choice between death and madness. It was always to be both.\n\nAnd then, with a strangled cry in his throat, Noah attacked.\n\n# **TWENTY-SIX**\n\nLear watched, hands behind her back, lifting herself up on the balls of her feet, bouncing with anticipation. When she first saw the fire burst from the ground-floor windows and setting a passing man alight, she let out a happy squeal.\n\nBut then, when the Tulip still stood, she clenched her fists and began to curse. \"Fucking useless old man. Useless old man,\" she said. \"Trying to say I killed her, and now look! Look!\"\n\nWhen Bug Man did not move from the couch, she took two long steps, reached down, grabbed the neck of his T-shirt, and dragged him to the window.\n\n\"Iff' burning,\" Bug Man said.\n\n\"It's not supposed to _burn_ , it's supposed to explode! The gas was supposed to explode! The whole thing should be toppling over!\"\n\nThe TV was on, showing a sea of flashing red lights around the theater, with cutaways to eerie vignettes of cops tackling a naked, raving rock star, or Tasering a man in a business suit carrying a severed arm, the remnants of the lunacy at the premiere.\n\n\"Blow up! Blow up, blow up, blow up, _blow up_!\" Lear raged, banging the plate glass with her fists.\n\nAs if on command a huge fireball erupted from the windows of the third floor.\n\n\"It could still fall, yeah,\" Lear said, nodding, reassuring herself. She bent to a tripod-mounted telescope. \"Can't see anything through their dark glass. Are you scared yet, you freaks? Are you wetting yourselves, you _freaks_?\"\n\nBug Man had had enough, more than enough. He had to get away. He shot a look toward the door. Did she have guards out there? If she died, he went mad... if she was telling the truth about a dead man's switch... but there wasn't anything he could do about that, and he could not be here watching all this. He could not be with this crazy witch raving and pounding on the glass like an infuriated ape in a cage.\n\nHe stepped back, back, turned, and ran for the door. Locked.\n\n\"Really, Bug Man?\" Lear asked in a mocking voice. \"Really? You think you get to run away?\"\n\n\"You 'ave to le' me go,\" he pleaded.\n\nShe ignored him and crowed wildly as another burst of orange flame billowed out from the base of the Tulip. \"It'll collapse. Has to. The fire will melt the girders, has to, yeah. Damn, I want to see them when it happens.\"\n\n\"You coul' talk to them.\"\n\nLear's eyes lit up. She grinned. \"What?\"\n\n\"I know Burnofsshky's number. He' prob'ly there. He worksh late.\"\n\nShe grabbed Bug Man's bicep and propelled him to a laptop. \"Do it! Do it and I'll... I'll get you new teeth. Any color you want.\"\n\nBug Man opened an app, punched in the number, and hit Connect.\n\nKeats rushed at the Twins, hands clawing the air, animal noises coming from him.\n\nPlath shoved Wilkes aside to put herself between Keats and his intended victims. Keats never seemed to notice her. He ran right through her, sending her sprawling.\n\nIt was on her back, stunned by the violence of his assault, that Plath\u2014Sadie McLure\u2014saw three security men turn, as if in slow motion, and raise their guns.\n\n_BANG! BANGBANG!_\n\nKeats twisted, turned, stood...\n\n_BANG! BANG!_\n\n... fell.\n\nA terrible scream rose from her mouth, echoed by Wilkes as they both fell more than ran toward Keats.\n\n\"No, no, no, no, no!\" Plath cried.\n\n\"You fucking assholes! You murdering assholes!\" Wilkes screamed.\n\nKeats lay on his back. Three bullets had struck him in the side of his chest, in his upper arm, in the side of his head. He was not yet dead, eyes glazing, dark blood like ink pumping from him to form a pool on the floor, his mouth working like a beached fish, gasping.\n\n\"Oh, God, Noah! Oh, God, Noah!\"\n\nHe tried to speak but only managed to form a blood bubble. He grunted, the sound of a dying beast. He breathed heavily, looked at Plath, grunted again. He blinked, just one eye, almost as if he was winking. Blood found its way out of his ears, out of his nose.\n\nPlath tried to cradle him in her arms, tried to hold his head, but when she did, a part of his skull came away and she screamed. Wilkes, her own hands red, took Plath's hand and kept saying, \"He'll be okay, he'll be okay.\"\n\nA siren was screeching, up and down the scale, up and down in Plath's head, but it was only her own screams.\n\nA cell phone rang.\n\nPlath stared at Noah, his eyes still so blue, his eyes open, his lips no longer the parchment landscape she had seen through biot eyes, now only the lips that had kissed her. They were moving silently.\n\nPlath's entire body was shaking. She heard nothing, and for a while she saw nothing. The world was lost to her. Only Wilkes's arms around her connected her to reality.\n\nThe sound of a phone ringing. And going to voice mail.\n\n\"I hate people who get my hopes up,\" Lear said. But she was distracted by a third eruption of flames. This one blew the windows out of half the lower floors. A shower of crystal fell through yellow flames, pursued by billows of smoke.\n\nBug Man dialed again. This time, the call was answered.\n\n\"Kind of a bad time, Anthony,\" Burnofsky said.\n\n\"Lear wan' to tal' to th' Twinshh,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, does she?\" Burnofsky said, his voice flat. \"A little late for talk, I think. Hey, Anthony?\"\n\n\"Wha'?\"\n\n\"I never hated you, Anthony,\" Burnofsky said.\n\nBug Man had no idea how to respond to that, so he simply handed the phone to Lear after pushing the Speaker button: he wanted to hear.\n\n\"Who is this?\" Lear demanded.\n\n\"Well, well, if it isn't Lystra Reid. Or should I say 'Lear'?\" Burnofsky said.\n\n\"Is this one of the Twins?\"\n\n\"This is Burnofsky. Dr. Burnofsky. But you can call me Karl.\"\n\n\"Give me the Twins.\"\n\n\"Well, we're all kind of busy panicking and getting ready to die,\" Burnofsky said. \"Hey, just out of curiosity, Ms. Reid, did you ever figure out what the Twins were up to on Floor Thirty-Four?\"\n\nBurnofsky heard the silence of confusion. Then, \"What are you talking about, you old fool?\"\n\n\"Their secret weapon. A virus that preyed only on cobra DNA. Like the cobra DNA that forms part of the biot genome. Ironic, don't you think? They were going to obliterate all biots, and now, hah! Now you're the one killing biots.\"\n\n\"Shut your filthy mouth, you disgusting drunk,\" Charles said, now as furious as his brother.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, am I embarrassing you, boys?\" Burnofsky laughed. \"Don't worry, the final laugh will be on Lear.\"\n\nBug Man heard shouts and cries in the background. A female voice was crying, \"Noah! Noah!\" Then it stopped. The line went dead.\n\nBug Man could see flames behind windows on the tenth and twelfth floors of the Tulip.\n\nOn the street below, the first fire engines were pulling up, but Bug Man doubted there was anything they could do. The Tulip was doomed.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said.\n\n\"Okay what?\"\n\n\"Okay, I'm wiff you. I'm in. All the way.\" What alternative did he have? \"So, I' goin' to tell you, Burnofshhky didn' shound righ'. Too happy. He'shh got shomething goin' on, I know tha' old fart.\"\n\nLear was curious. \"What could he be up to?\"\n\n\"SRNs. The gray goo.\"\n\n\"No,\" Lear said confidently. \"We wired him up. Nijinsky wired him.\"\n\n\"And Nijinshhky's dead. So you don' know wha' going on in hi' head anymore. I wired the presiden' and guessh wha', shuicide wa' not par' of the plan for her.\"\n\nLear was pensive. She could become coldly rational when she needed to, Bug Man had learned. She would make a fascinating case for some psychiatrist some day, he thought mordantly. Or a whole hospital full of psychiatrists.\n\nOut of her mind but still able to plan the end of the world. Then again, who else but a crazy person would even want the world to end?\n\n\"Charles, Benjamin,\" Jindal pleaded. \"There's one stairwell still clear. But we have to go now!\"\n\n\"Hundreds of steps?\" Charles asked wistfully. \"My brother and I, walk down hundreds of steps?\"\n\n\"We can carry you,\" Jindal said. \"We\u2014\" He stopped, because his inclusive wave, meant to indicate the security men, now included no one. The security men had fled.\n\nStill left in the Twins' sanctum were the Twins themselves, Jindal, Wilkes, and Plath. And the gasping, dying body of Noah Cotton, the former Keats, now on his back in a wide pool of his own blood.\n\n\"Will you drag us down the stairs, faithful Jindal?\" Charles said. \"No, I don't think we'll allow that. Instead...\" he shouted, \"a drink, if you please!\"\n\nThe building was shaking now, successive waves of it\u2014an artificial earthquake as small explosions and gouts of flame made their way inexorably upward, floor after floor.\n\n\"The gray goo,\" Benjamin said. \"How many SRNs do you have, Burnofsky? The flames have not reached your lab yet. Yes, better the gray goo. The best possible outcome. Apocalypse!\"\n\n\"Fetch me a bottle, Jindal,\" Burnofsky said, \"and I'll tell your bosses all about it.\"\n\nPlath realized she was kneeling in Noah's blood. She was looking in horror at his brain, a pulsing pink mass that swelled out from the bullet's hole. Wilkes took her hand, but Plath felt nothing. She knew she had to look away, but it felt like abandonment to look at anything but her lover.\n\nHe had loved her. Had she ever really loved him in return? How could she know? From memories that had been tampered with, in a brain still coping with violation? That truth was no longer entirely recoverable. Nothing was. Everything that she knew and remembered, everything she felt, had to be mistrusted.\n\nOn the big monitor, cameras showed gift shops and labs, darkened bedrooms and banks of computer servers. The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation went on, largely untouched, even as its headquarters burned.\n\nPlath seemed to make up her mind. \"We're leaving,\" she said.\n\n\"The hell you are,\" Benjamin snarled.\n\nPlath looked at him, not afraid to meet his furious gaze. \"I'm going to find and kill Lear.\" But she made no move toward the door.\n\n\"Lear doesn't matter, not anymore,\" Charles said. \"I'm afraid I no longer have the will to resist my brother. The self-replicating nanobots will be released. They will scour this planet, and sooner or later, they will find Lear.\"\n\nJindal had found a bottle. Burnofsky uncorked it and took a drink before offering it to the Twins. \"It's not up to you, Benjamin, it's up to me.\" He revealed the remote control in his hand. \"I push this button, and the world begins to die.\"\n\n\"Give it to me,\" Benjamin demanded. \"We paid for your work. They're ours, those little machines of yours, ours!\"\n\nBurnofsky laughed. \"Hitler's bunker. I've been trying to think what this reminds me of, and that's it. With the Russians closing in, there was Hitler in his underground bunker still handing out orders. Like he had an army to command. Dead man rapping out orders.\"\n\n\"You treacherous, degenerate\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Burnofsky said. He gave them a wave, a tolerant gesture. \"It's over for you boys. All over but the punishment phase.\"\n\nThere was an awful groan of bending metal, a shriek that was felt as much as heard. A crack split one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The power went out. The monitor went dark.\n\nEmergency lights came on, casting dark shadows softened only slightly by a full moon hovering just over a nearby apartment building. \"Plath, now,\" Wilkes pleaded. \"You said it. We have to go. Keats will... we can't help him.\"\n\nBut still Plath couldn't move.\n\n\"Call that number back! I'll speak with Lear!\" Benjamin cried, motioning for the phone. \"I want to tell her what we've done! I want Lear to know!\"\n\nWilkes grabbed Plath's arm and began to physically pull her away.\n\n\"We? _We?_ \" Burnofsky demanded, erupting in fury. \" _We_ , you freak? We? No we. No we. Me. _Me!_ I did it! They're mine and they're blue, the blue goo not the gray, and do you know why they're blue?\"\n\nHe was in Benjamin's face now, gripping the remote in his hand, spit flying from his lips.\n\nCharles and Benjamin took a step back.\n\n\"Because that was the color...\" A sob stopped Burnofsky. \"Because... her eyes...\"\n\n\"Is this about your nasty little girl?\" Benjamin demanded, sneering.\n\n\"Damn it, Plath. Sadie! Come on!\" But now even Wilkes could not look away.\n\n\"Did you...?\" Burnofsky asked. \"Did... you...?\" He got control of himself again, and laughed. \"You make this easy. I have something for you.\"\n\nBurnofsky drew a small object from his pocket. He held out a glass vial. It looked empty but for a hint of blue.\n\nCharles knew instantly. \"Get that away from us, Karl.\"\n\n\"These are special,\" Burnofsky said. \"A special project I've been working on, just for the two of you.\"\n\n\"Someone stop him!\"\n\n\"It's easy to program the SRNs with time codes, kill switches.... Much harder to program them for a particular, um, diet. Yes, a particular _diet_. But it's doable. I have them that can eat only steel. Others that consume only hemoglobin. Cool, huh?\" Over his shoulder, he said, \"Run away, Sadie. Run while you're able. I loved your dad. He was a good man. A good man. So run away. Save yourself if you can. Get far from here. You may survive for a while, until my babies come for you.\"\n\n# **TWENTY-SEVEN**\n\n\"Now! Now!\" Wilkes yelled.\n\nPlath rose from Noah's blood. Her knees and shins and hands were soaked, red.\n\n\"Noah,\" she whispered. She touched his face, still sweating, still gasping like a dying fish.\n\n\"Go,\" he said. \"For me. Go.\"\n\nPlath tore herself away. No way she could survive trying to carry Noah. They would both die. Someone had to live to ensure that Lear did not.\n\nPlath and Wilkes fled the room they'd never expected to leave alive.\n\n\"What corner did he say was still clear?\" Wilkes asked.\n\n\"Southwest,\" Plath answered. \"Southwest.\"\n\n\"Which is...\"\n\n\"This way.\" Plath led the way, first from the cathedral vastness of the Twins' lair and back out into the entryway they'd come through. She considered the elevators and rejected them. Even if they just used them to get down a few floors, there was no knowing what they'd open onto. Past the easy way out, into a stainless-steel kitchen area, through a gloomy and oppressive formal dining room that looked as if it had never been used.\n\nThey pushed out through a narrow door into a similarly narrow hallway, then followed red exit signs to what a push confirmed was a stairwell.\n\nThere was smoke in the stairwell.\n\n\"Not too bad, we can breathe,\" Wilkes said. \"At least up here.\"\n\n\"No other way,\" Plath said, and plunged unhesitatingly down the concrete stairs.\n\n\"Great, seventy floors,\" Wilkes said. \"Here's where it would have been a good thing to work out.\"\n\n\"It's all downhill,\" Plath said.\n\nThey ran and tumbled and occasionally tripped down the stairs, half a floor, a landing, a turn, down another flight. Over and over again.\n\nThe smoke grew thicker but not yet enough to choke them, just enough to make their throats raw and their eyes sting.\n\nPlath was quicker, but she waited for Wilkes to catch up when she pulled too far ahead. Down and down. Then, on the fortieth floor, a woman banged back the door, took a wild-eyed look at them, and raced away as though they were trying to catch her.\n\nDown and down and down, and by the twenty-first floor the smoke was wringing hacking coughs from their throats and watering their eyes.\n\nA massive shock hit the building and knocked them both off their feet. Plath came up with a skinned knee and bruised forearms. Wilkes was worse off. She had twisted her ankle and could only hobble.\n\n\"You need to go on ahead,\" Wilkes said. \"Go, go, I'll be fine.\"\n\nPlath took her arm. \"I left Noah. I'm not leaving you. Come on. Run now, hurt later.\"\n\nThey hobbled and slid and tripped, floor by floor, tears streaming down their faces. The last six floors were agony. Smoke was everywhere, searing their lungs. The heat of the fire turned the stairwell into an oven. At some point Plath simply stopped thinking, stopped even feeling anything but pain.\n\nThe last two floors were crowded with people\u2014yelling, choking, pushing, panicking.\n\nAnd all at once there was air.\n\nPlath, still holding Wilkes by the hand, fell out onto the sidewalk and into light; rough hands grabbed her, pulled her away, a voice yelling, \"Move, move, move, it's coming down!\"\n\nThey staggered on, not even sure what direction they were headed, stumbling into other refugees. A fire hose was spraying blessed cold water, and only then did Plath realize that some people were on fire, their clothing smoking, their hair crisped.\n\nGlass was everywhere on the sidewalk and streets. Red lights flashed. Smoke billowed, but was caught by a breeze that cleared most of it at street level.\n\nA block away they stopped, gasping, and sank down onto the concrete.\n\n\"Okay?\" Plath asked.\n\n\"Alive,\" Wilkes answered.\n\nPlath smeared smoke from her eyes, blinked away tears and tried to look up at the Tulip.\n\nFire licked from windows. Smoke poured everywhere, the whole building a chimney now.\n\n\"We have to move farther.\"\n\n\"Can't,\" Wilkes gasped.\n\n\"Like hell you can't.\" Plath stood, hauled Wilkes to her feet and, taking the girl's weight on her shoulder, hobbled and ran with memories, too-sharp memories, of what happened when skyscrapers burned.\n\n\"Burn and fall, burn and fall,\" Lear crooned as she watched flames and smoke wreathe the Tulip, dividing her attention between the real-world vista from her window and the TV coverage.\n\nIt was split-screened now on the news: half showed the remaining, yet-to-be rounded up loons from the Hollywood premiere; half showed the Tulip aflame. The crawl along the bottom was all about the Plague of Madness.\n\n\"Good title, that,\" Lear commented. \"Makes people think it can spread. Yeah. And it can, hah.\"\n\nBug Man said nothing. This was his future now. He would live or die at Lear's whim. Or she might just let him go crazy.\n\nThree windows were open in his head. None of them showed much at the moment, just glimpses of the biots themselves. It was different than twitching nanobots, more intimate. You had only to think and the biot would move. No wonder BZRK had been so tough to beat. No wonder Vincent had ended up drooling nuts.\n\n\"Oh, look look look!\" Lear pointed, as excited as a little child. \"It's starting to buckle. Look! Look! You can see rebar starting to stick out the side there. My dad came through in the end, I guess.\"\n\n\"Your dad?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said, almost fondly. \"My dad. You must have heard of Caligula. Of course that's not his real name. I gave him that nom de guerre. Caligula, yeah. Yeah.\"\n\n\"Caligula's your father?\" He forced himself to quash the urge to say that this explained a lot.\n\nHis mouth hurt terribly. He had finally been allowed a couple ibuprofen swallowed with cold water, which had sent lightning bolts of pain shooting from his broken teeth but was already clearing up his speech. Now Bug Man was drinking raw bourbon, no ice, no water, no nothing, because it just didn't seem to matter anymore if his brain was dulled. What was he holding out for? He was owned, body and soul. He was her slave. He was her dog.\n\n\"Mmm,\" Lear said. \"Was. Past tense. He killed my mother, you know. He tries to pretend it was me, yeah, like I could have done it. Like I could have killed her. Like I could have found her unconscious, yeah, and the cleaver, and thought... no. Yeah. But if I had, wouldn't I have a tattoo of her?\"\n\nBug Man nodded wearily, as if this proved her case.\n\n\"Adoptive parents, yeah, that's different,\" Lear said. \"You saw them.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"It's going,\" Lear said. \"It's going. Oh, this will be the best. Get me a drink. I want to toast the Armstrong Twins as they die.\"\n\n\"What have you done?\" Charles demanded, aghast.\n\n\"Revenge is a dish best served cold,\" Burnofsky said. \"And you know what? Even with the fire below, I feel chilly.\"\n\n\"Damn you, _what have you done_?\" Benjamin yelled, desperation breaking his voice.\n\n\"My final work of genius,\" Burnofsky said. \"I programmed my SRNs to respond not just to a time signature, or even a specific energy source. I programmed them with a map. A topographical program.\"\n\nCharles began to scratch his chest, the place where his chest became Benjamin's.\n\n\"Yep, it will itch at first,\" Burnofsky said. \"Then it will burn. And then, it will really start to become quite unpleasant.\"\n\n\"What have you done? Tell us! What have you done?\"\n\n\"I've granted your secret wish,\" Burnofsky said. \"You've lived with each other every single minute of your lives. Neither of you has ever been separate. Well, now you will be. The topography is _you_.\"\n\n\"What?\" Charles cried. \"We'll die!\"\n\n\"Well, yeah,\" Burnofsky allowed. \"But not right away. Hey, I've put a lot of thought into this. You don't think I'd make it easy for you. Has my life been easy? No, it has not.\" He dropped the jocular tone. \"You bought my soul, you two. You bought my soul...\"\n\nBenjamin tore at the buttons of their tailor-made shirt, exposing pink flesh with an angry, vertical red rash in the center. He clawed at it then whinnied in horror as his fingernails came away trailing ribbons of flesh.\n\n\"... and then you let me be mind-raped. My brain. It's all I had after I killed her, my intellect. Oh, God, and still, still, do you know what they did to me? Do you know what BZRK did? When I think of her...\"\n\n\"They're on my back!\" Charles cried.\n\n\"... I get turned on. Did you know that's what they did to me with their wire? Crude. They thought, _Well, we will just sort of reverse polarities on old Burnofsky's brain_. Like an old _Star Trek_ , did you boys\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't reach, I can't reach!\" Charles cried as he flailed madly, trying to reach his back with his hand, but that had never been possible.\n\n\"Ever watch that show? They were always reversing polarities. All bullshit. But that's all Nijinsky had. Crude and cruel. A man should do penance for his crimes. A man should pay. A man should suffer, not feel pleasure.\"\n\n\"We don't deserve to suffer!\" Charles shouted.\n\n\"No,\" Burnofsky drawled. \"You two? No, it's not like you enslaved a ship full of people and did to them just what BZRK did to me, right? See how you're not going to win that argument?\"\n\n\"We'll give you whatever you want,\" Charles said, and then cried out in pain and grabbed at his rear in what would in other circumstances be almost comic.\n\n\"Up your butt, are they? Right on schedule. There'll be a couple million of them by now.\"\n\n\"We'll give you anything! Anything!\" Charles pleaded.\n\nBurnofsky looked sick, like a man on the edge of vomiting. He stood wearily, old bones popping with the effort, and stepped closer, just out of reach of Benjamin's grasping claw of a hand. \"Anything? Will you? Then give me back my little girl.\"\n\n\"She had to die; it was treason!\" Benjamin raged. \"She was a filthy, treacherous, little\u2014\"\n\nBurnofsky punched him. It wasn't much of a punch, just enough to start the blood draining from a reddened nose.\n\n\"Give me my daughter. Give me my pride back. Give me back my own brain. Do all of that, and I'll stop them.\" Then, he laughed\u2014a sudden, strange noise. \"Kidding. They will carry out their programming and\u2014\"\n\nThe floor tilted suddenly, a 10 degree pitch that sent the Twins sprawling. Burnofsky staggered but remained standing.\n\n\"My apocalypse,\" Burnofsky said, holding the deadly remote control aloft. \"Not Lear's, not yours. Mine.\"\n\n\"You're insane!\" Charles wailed.\n\n\"You think?\" He drained the last of his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Who wasn't insane in this?\" His eyes fell on Noah's twitching body. Noah made an incoherent sound. The tilting floor had sent the pool of blood trailing off like rivulets on a windshield. \"Him, maybe. Seems like a decent kid. Maybe even sane.\"\n\nThe Twins were wallowing back and forth like a cockroach on its back, trying to roll over so they could stand. Noah's blood met Benjamin's elbow and soaked his shirt.\n\nThe smell of smoke had been growing more noticeable, and now it could be seen, too, pouring in from two directions as well as rushing past the windows like some gravity-defying waterfall.\n\nThe Twins were screaming now, fighting each other to scream, lungs pumping out of sync, heart hammering. Screaming as the nanobots used their flesh to create more nanobots, millions of little worker ants carving tiny slices of flesh, busy little hog butchers carving a living pig.\n\nAgainst all odds, slipping in blood, their own and Noah's, the Twins managed to get to their feet.\n\nWith a sound of screeching metal and shattering glass, the Tulip sagged farther and Burnofsky staggered forward and was flattened against the glass windows. The floor now tilted up and away from him. But he still held the remote.\n\nThen Noah began to slide, his movement lubricated by his own blood. He slid straight toward Burnofsky.\n\nWith a sound like wood being split, the window behind Burnofsky cracked but did not shatter. Burnofsky tried to push himself away, to reach something, anything he could grab, but his feet were slipping on the same blood that bore Noah's body straight toward him.\n\nAnd then Noah made one desperate reach and grabbed the rolling bottle of vodka. He grabbed it and dug his heel in\u2014slipping, sliding, but the angle helped him to rise, just a little, just enough, just enough to hurl the bottle.\n\nThe bottle smashed into the cracked window.\n\nBurnofsky in a moment of terrible awareness pressed his thumb on the remote control, but missed the button. The remote was in his hand, but awkwardly held. He reached with his free hand to straighten it, and the window blew out.\n\nBurnofsky went flying, flying through shattered glass, falling on his back toward the street far below. Noah had plowed into him, and for a moment the two of them were tangled in midair, grotesque acrobats trailing red.\n\nBurnofsky fell and squeezed, but the remote was in the air beside him, falling, and his hand was held in the slippery grip of the boy with blue, blue eyes.\n\n_Madness_ and _death_ , Noah thought. It was funny.\n\nHe laughed as the sidewalk rushed toward him and obliterated all that he was.\n\nThe Twins staggered into the hanging monitor, where Charles managed to grab on, powerful fingers gripping slippery steel and glass.\n\nCharles Armstrong saw his face, their faces, in the hanging mirror they used to speak eye to eye.\n\nWhat he saw was a grotesque head with two staring eyes and a third, lesser eye that now belonged entirely to Benjamin. Two mouths screamed. A line of blood had been drawn between those mouths, between those eyes, as the self-replicating nanobots chewed their industrious way through all that connected Charles to his brother.\n\nThe pain was unendurable. He could only scream and scream as his privates and rectum, his stomach and chest, his neck and back and now head were eaten away, faster and faster as the nanobot army multiplied. Eaten away and then cauterized as Burnofsky had planned, so that blood loss would not occur too quickly.\n\nCharles did not feel the moment when his body began to disconnect from Benjamin's, the agony did not allow for calm consideration. But he saw, as he looked down, as he and Benjamin lowered their massive head to see, that they were now two dying men, two, connected only at the brain.\n\nBenjamin slipped, his leg going out from beneath him, but Charles still stood, as like a dividing cell they split slowly apart.\n\nThen finally Charles lost his grip, and they fell onto their backs and slid toward the window.\n\nCharles tried to scream, but his throat was gone.\n\nThey slid, consciousness fading in a hell of pain and terror as they accelerated.\n\nBenjamin stuck out a hand and grabbed the leg of a table, but it, too, was sliding. And then, with a bump at the sill, they were in the air.\n\nIt would take them just under eight seconds to fall to the pavement. At four seconds before impact Charles saw Benjamin's body separate from his, a crudely bisected man trailing blood.\n\nHe saw Benjamin. Saw him _there. There!_ For the first time in his life.\n\nThe Armstrong Twins hit the pavement two tenths of a second apart.\n\nTwo and a half minutes later, the Tulip came down in a catastrophic eruption of flame, smoke, steel, dust, and debris that buried Burnofsky and the Twins and Noah.\n\nAnd the remote that would have destroyed the world.\n\n# **TWENTY-EIGHT**\n\nPlath and Wilkes had to walk and hobble the whole way back to the safe house. The subway had been shut down. The taxis had fled the streets. They saw cars pass by, heading toward the bridge, pets and houseplants inside, household goods strapped to the roof. A hard-to-frighten city had at last been frightened.\n\nBy the time they made it they were numb with cold, lips blue, teeth chattering. Plath's tears had frozen on her cheeks. She recalled the \u00cele Sainte-Marie, recalled where she'd been not very many days ago. A completely different world. It had been so perfect there. Warm sunshine and blue water and Noah.\n\nThey had killed him. Noah. They had killed him.\n\nInside the safe house at last the two girls collapsed onto the couch and shivered, burrowing beneath throw pillows in search of warmth.\n\nPlath saw that Anya was coming to investigate the noise. In the window in her mind she saw herself through Anya's eye. She looked pitiful. Her face was smeared with smoke; her hair was thick with ash.\n\n\"What is the matter?\" Anya asked. She didn't wait for an answer but ducked out to come back with blankets to pile on the frozen girls. Then she made hot tea and helped them hold the cups until their hands could stop trembling.\n\n\"Where is Keats? Where is Billy?\" Anya asked, already suspecting the answer. The TV had been on when they came in, tuned to news. On the screen the Tulip fell again and again. Hollywood and city luminaries ran wild through the streets again and again. The lurid loops played over and over again.\n\n_Plague of Madness_.\n\nAn overhead shot of the Brooklyn Bridge was a river of red lights\u2014cars fleeing the city.\n\n\"Dead,\" Plath said. \"Both dead.\"\n\n\"This is Lear's doing,\" Anya said. \"He is\u2014\"\n\n\"She,\" Wilkes interrupted. \"Our overlord and master is a chick.\" Then, eyes darting suspiciously toward the stairs, said, \"Get Vincent down here. Get Mr. Seventy Percent.\"\n\nAnya seemed ready to argue, but acquiesced with downcast eyes.\n\nPlath felt a wave of exhaustion that forced her eyelids down. She coughed\u2014she'd been coughing the whole way home. The nauseating stink of smoke was in her nostrils, the taste of it in her mouth, and more came when she coughed.\n\nVincent arrived silently and stood with Anya by his side, looking like a man waiting for his own firing squad.\n\n\"What did you know?\" Plath asked wearily.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked, and Wilkes was up out of her seat and swinging a fist at him, which he blocked easily. She swung again, but with less conviction, and he gently pushed her back down onto the couch.\n\n\"What did you know, Vincent?\" Plath asked again with deadly, weary calm that carried absolute authority. \"Did you know who Lear is?\"\n\nHe blinked and shook his head. Then he leaned toward her, frowning. \"Are you saying you _do_ know who he is?\"\n\n\"She,\" Wilkes said. \"She, she, she. She. A sister. One of the vaginally endowed. Lystra Reid.\"\n\nVincent drew back as if frightened. \"You can't do that, you can't talk about Lear. Caligula will\u2014\"\n\n\"He's dead, too,\" Wilkes said. \"That's his work.\" She stabbed a finger at the TV. \"He's dead. And Jin is dead. And Ophelia is dead. And Renfield is dead. And Billy is dead. Even the Twins are dead. And pretty\u2014\" She sobbed, and it was a moment before she could go on, her voice low and grating. \"It's a whole big bunch of dead tonight. Now answer Plath's question, Vincent, or I swear to God I'll find some way to make you dead, too.\"\n\n\"I met Lear once. I didn't look at him. Her, if you say so. Maybe that explains why I was told not to turn around and look. He, she, whoever, used voice masking. I assumed it was so that later I wouldn't be able to recognize the voice.\"\n\n\"And did you know Lear planned to do this? To use biot madness this way?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nPlath set her teacup aside carefully. Her hands were still hard to control with any finesse. The cold seemed to have sunk deep in her, joining the cold, dead spot where Noah had been held in her thoughts. \"Where do you stand, Vincent?\"\n\nHe did not pretend he didn't understand. He grasped her meaning immediately. \"I'm not sure I know who I am,\" he began.\n\nWilkes interrupted. \"Yeah, well, welcome to the new reality. We've all been mind-fucked one way or the other.\" She laughed her mirthless heh-heh-heh and said, \"We really are BZRK now, I guess. Crazy.\"\n\n\"I wish they would stop showing that,\" Anya said, transfixed by the TV.\n\n\"Where do you stand, Vincent?\" Plath repeated.\n\n\"I have to...\" He began, hesitated, shook his head, and continued. \"I have to go back to basics. To what I believe. For a start, my name is not Vincent. It's Michael Ford.\"\n\n\"I'm sticking with Wilkes. It works for me.\"\n\n\"I'm Michael Ford,\" he said, almost wonderingly. Like a little kid talking about some new and amazing thing he'd just learned. \"I'm Michael. I believe... I believe people should be free, that's why... I believe they should be left alone. That's why I joined BZRK.\"\n\n\"That's why everyone _joins_ ,\" Anya said, speaking that last word with distaste. \"No one ever _joins_ to do evil. It just always ends up that way.\"\n\nVincent winced as if she'd struck him.\n\nPlath said, \"Burnofsky is releasing self-replicating nanobots. Maybe they were all destroyed in the Tulip, maybe not. If he did it, if they aren't all killed, well... anyway, the Twins and Burnofsky are no longer the problem. Lear is the problem. And I don't think she's done. I think she'll keep at it. She wants to...\" She shrugged. \"I have no idea what she wants.\"\n\n\"Noah would have,\" Vincent said softly. \"He was a gamer. This is all a game. It's been a game from the start.\"\n\nPlath stared at him, thinking. He did not look away. \"A game,\" she said finally. \"And what's the point of this game?\"\n\n\"Games have no point,\" Vincent said. \"The point of the game is the game. The purpose is to play. But games have structure. They are built and written. And you can only play one at a time. Lear is wiping the board of the old game, replacing it with his... _her_ own game.\"\n\n\"How do we win?\"\n\n\"To win you have to understand the...\" He shook his head. \"You can't beat the game designer at her own game.\"\n\n\"Sure you can,\" Wilkes said. \"I used to beat my little brother at games all the time. I'd pull the power cord out of the wall. Game over.\"\n\nBefore she got on her plane, Lystra Reid, Lear, punched a code into her phone and pushed Send.\n\nThe text went to the nearest cell-phone tower. The signal went from there to a central router that pushed it up to a satellite from whence it was bounced to another satellite, and still another as it wound its way south. Eventually it was picked up by a satellite dish.\n\nFrom there it traveled just a few hundred feet to a computer server that recognized the code and translated it into sixteen thousand individual digital instructions that then mostly retraced the digital path of the incoming message.\n\nElapsed time, 3.4 seconds.\n\nIn cr\u00e8ches concealed in locations in several cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, DNA stew was bathed in various enzymes before receiving three micro-doses of drugs and a final jolt of electricity.\n\nForty-eight thousand biots\u2014three for each of the sixteen thousand DNA signatures\u2014came to life.\n\nOnly fifteen thousand, eight hundred and four people (a number had died since their fateful visit to a medical testing lab) saw windows open in their minds.\n\nOf those, fewer than a third understood what it meant.\n\nThey generated more than three thousand terrified calls to 911 in the U.S. and 999 in the UK and 112 in the European Union.\n\n\"That's the first tranche,\" Lear said. To the pilot, she said, \"Okay, we can go now.\"\n\nBug Man did not want to ask. He risked making her angry, and in this new world, where his life belonged to her, he did not want to do that. But he couldn't help himself.\n\n\"My mum?\"\n\n\"By now she's thinking, 'Blimey, what's that then?' \" Lear said, switching to an exaggerated British accent. \"There's windows in me head, innit?\"\n\nBug Man's throat convulsed. Tears came to his eyes, impossible to stop.\n\n\"Best to move on, Buggy,\" Lear said. \"Get over it. Look at me. My father died tonight, and do I seem all weepy? Hey, have you decided what color teeth you want?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The teeth. The teeth!\" She pointed at her own. \"How about green? I like green.\"\n\nAs the jet taxied the acid rolled toward forty-eight thousand biots.\n\n\"Hah, there we go, yeah,\" Lear said. \"Now we're going to play.\"\n\n\"We know her name now. Lystra Reid,\" Plath said.\n\nAnya typed it in. Instantly the computer monitor lit up with links and photos.\n\n\"I've seen her before.\" Wilkes frowned, then snapped her fingers. \"Nijinsky. She was there when Jin died.\"\n\n\"Lear. She's thirtysomething, born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Parents not listed. Schools, nope. That's about it except for later business stuff. She owns a lot of medical testing labs.\"\n\n\"That would make sense,\" Anya said.\n\nVincent, seemingly exhausted by his earlier conversation, remained silent.\n\n\"That's probably how she met my father. And it's how she got DNA samples.\"\n\n\"She will have millions of them,\" Anya said.\n\nPlath looked at the best photograph of Lystra Reid. What was there in that pretty face to betray the existence of an evil, disturbed mind? Nothing. The eyes were clear, the expression open, the mouth smiling.\n\nPlath remembered what Stern had told her. That Lear had used burner phones but without masking the callback number. One had been purchased in Tierra del Fuego. The other in New Zealand, she could not recall the city. But both had been connected to Antarctica.\n\n\"Search 'Lystra Reid' and Antarctica,\" she told Anya.\n\nThat earned a raised eyebrow, but the search caused a long, slow exhale. Lystra Reid had purchased a company called Cathexis.\n\n\"Pull up any articles on Cathexis Inc.,\" Plath instructed.\n\nThe four of them read silently. Wilkes moved her lips. Plath felt a new pang as just for a moment she thought to turn, look over her shoulder, and ask Noah what he thought.\n\nBut there was no Noah. No Noah, no Nijinsky, no Mr. Stern, and only a partial Vincent.\n\n\"Who has had any medical testing done in the last ten years?\" Plath asked.\n\nBut Vincent shook his head. \"Irrelevant. If we've had biots made, we're in her database.\"\n\n\"I have not had biots made,\" Anya said. \"But I have been tested at one of her labs.\"\n\n\"So we are all vulnerable. It's possible that at any moment\u2014\"\n\n\"Great,\" Wilkes said. \"Fine. Let me go nuts. I'll fit right in.\"\n\nPlath looked to Vincent. \"What will she do next?\"\n\nVincent thought about it, eyes dark beneath his brow, mouth a grim line. \"Her goal is instability. What else could it be? With her skills and her resources, if all she wanted was the whole world dead, she could have grown smallpox or anthrax in a lab somewhere. And she has nanotechnology. Why have us use biots to fight the Armstrongs? She had the upper hand all along. She could have used a lot less effort and simply obtained a sample of their DNA, grown biots for them, and inflicted biot madness.\"\n\n\"Okay, why didn't she?\" Plath asked.\n\n\"Because she's a gamer,\" Vincent said with more confidence than he felt. \"She wants to win, yes, but first she wants to _play_. We were Level One.\"\n\n\"Then we're in Level Two now.\" Plath nodded. \"Now she drives the whole world crazy. Watches it. Shows up in person to enjoy Jin's death. Probably other events as well. She's enjoying all that.\"\n\n\"Sick bitch,\" Wilkes muttered.\n\n\"She brought me back, made me a part of it again. Why?\"\n\nVincent shrugged. \"Because you're her avatar. She wants you to go on playing. Bluebooking.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's an old gaming expression. It's when a player keeps a journal of the game, but from the POV of the avatar.\"\n\n\"You are smart and rich and pretty,\" Anya suggested. \"Just as she is. And alone. As she must be.\"\n\n\"Lear sent me to recruit you,\" Vincent reminded her.\n\n\"And when I was enjoying the island too much, she forced me back into the game. She even left clues for me to find that would link her to Antarctica.\"\n\n\"Machines do not work well at very cold temperatures,\" Anya said. \"And nanobots are machines.\"\n\n\"Okay, so Antarctica because\u2014\"\n\n\"Because if the gray goo has been unleashed, it will have a hard time penetrating hundreds of miles of subzero temperatures. It's the safest place on the planet if you're worried about that.\"\n\nVincent nodded agreement. This was the most engaged Plath had seen him in a long while. Was he ready to take command again? _No. This is my game now_.\n\n\"Antarctica is also a place to ride out whatever shitstorm she's unleashed,\" Wilkes offered. \"It's as far away as you can get without being on the moon.\"\n\n\"So she camps there,\" Vincent said. \"Safe from the goo. And safe from the consequences of her own game.\"\n\n\"She camps. She waits. Why?\"\n\n\"For Level Two to play out. So she can be there for Level Three.\"\n\n\"And what is Level Three?\"\n\nVincent shook his head slowly. \"Only Lear knows that. It's her game.\"\n\n\"And we can't beat her by playing her game,\" Plath concluded. \"We can only pull the power cord.\"\n\n\"The power cord is south of here,\" Wilkes said.\n\n\"She will expect that,\" Vincent said.\n\n\"Expect it? I have a feeling it's what she wants,\" Plath said.\n\n# **TWENTY-NINE**\n\nFrom New York to Tierra del Fuego was a bit over six thousand five hundred miles, which at a speed of four hundred eighty knots took eleven hours. It was not a pleasant flight for Bug Man. But he was lucky. The rest of the world was faring much worse.\n\nDuring the time Bug Man was in the air eleven more tranches of forty-eight thousand biots, totaling five hundred twenty-eight thousand, were generated from stored DNA patterns. Dividing by three biots per person, that was approximately one hundred seventy-six thousand people who lost their grip on sanity.\n\nThey were concentrated in fifteen major cities for maximum disruption. New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico City, Moscow, Washington, Rome, Beijing, Jerusalem, Mumbai, and Sydney.\n\nBy the time Lear's plane landed at the Ushuaia's airport, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Berlin were burning.\n\nThe flight to the ice would be slower and in a less comfortable plane: Lear's sumptuous private jet could not land on ice. It was two thousand seven hundred miles from Ushuaia to Cathexis Base, but flying in a refurbished C-130 Hercules turboprop with a cruising speed of three hundred thirty miles an hour, it took more than eight hours. Another one hundred twenty-eight thousand people, minus those who had already passed away, were driven into madness.\n\nThese were concentrated in and around military bases in the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, and Pakistan. The choice of countries was not random: each had nuclear weapons, but of those, France and the UK used only submarine-based weapons.\n\nThe first launch was from Russia, but the missile and its warhead were destroyed in flight, en route to North Dakota.\n\nThe second launch was from Pakistan. It landed in the middle of a department store in New Delhi, India, but did not explode. The madman who had fired it had not armed the warhead.\n\nBut the Indian military did not wait to consider the situation. Indian missiles flew minutes after the C-130 slid to a stop on the Cathexis Base airfield.\n\nFifty-two Agni-III and Agni-IV missiles flew, striking targets in Pakistan. By the time the C-130 had been refueled for the last leg of its flight, there were thirty-one million dead, a number that would double within days.\n\nAfter a shorter hop and a very bumpy landing, Bug Man stumbled from the plane still wearing the T-shirt he'd been wearing in New York. His teeth, his entire mouth, and jaw hurt. He was exhausted, having been awakened repeatedly by nightmares. And now he was more cold than he would have believed possible. And standing in the whitest place on Earth.\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"The bottom of the world, Buggy, the place where machines go to die. People, too.\"\n\nA green Sno-Cat was tearing across the snow toward them. It roared to a stop and two men jumped out. One ran to Lystra with a full-length coat that many foxes had died to provide. The other handed a voluminous down parka to Bug Man, who shivered into it. A fur-lined hat was plopped on his head, and he was hustled into the backseat of the Sno-Cat. It wasn't exactly warm inside, but it wasn't fatally cold, either.\n\n\"How was your flight, Ms. Reid?\"\n\n\"Fine, Stillers. Fine. Are all the necessary personnel in from Forward Green?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, all personnel, all equipment, all supplies, except for the final two sleighs, which are being prepped and will be brought here tomorrow. And we've topped off the fuel both here and at Forward Green.\"\n\n\"Then we are in lockdown,\" she said pleasantly. \"Except for the final sleighs. Make sure no one shoots at them.\" She shook her head as if marveling at the world's unpredictability. \"The world has just gone to hell in a handbasket, yeah, and we have a long year ahead of us.\"\n\nNot waiting a second, Stillers keyed a radio and said, \"Lockdown, lockdown. Lockdown, lockdown.\"\n\nBug Man could not quite imagine what was being locked down. It wasn't like there was a crowd standing around trying to break in. They were in the middle of a whole lot of nothing as far as he could see.\n\nThen, as if by a miracle, the ground seemed to open up. The Sno-Cat rounded a sharp corner, treads churning up hard-packed snow, and plunged down a long ramp into a valley. He saw buildings and an improbable house and...\n\n\"Is that a swimming pool?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Lystra said. \"One of only two in Antarctica.\" Then, with a wistful look, she added, \"I like to swim. It's a very clean sort of sport, yeah. And I look amazing in a bathing suit, yeah, if I say so myself.\"\n\nBug Man thought that was likely true, if _amazing_ was the right word for a woman covered in tattoos of her victims.\n\n\"There's also an underground greenhouse. Palm trees! Palm trees in Antarctica, yeah. Yeah. We can live very well here for two years, or survive for three. If necessary. We'll see.\"\n\n\"Do you want to go to the office?\" Stillers asked deferentially.\n\n\"No, the house. Find quarters for Bug Man, but for now he'll stay with me.\" She patted Bug Man's knee. \"I've decided he's my good-luck charm. Oh, and tell the dentist, Dr. Whatever-the-Hell, yeah, he's got a customer. Patient. Whatever. Yeah.\"\n\nTanner was among those waiting when an unannounced flight came into McMurdo, running on fumes, or so the pilot said. Planes did not just suddenly arrive on the ice. And Tanner, like everyone else at the base, had been watching events back in the world with disbelief and anxiety turning to fear.\n\nTanner had called Naval Intelligence in Washington and been told that _Satan is loose among the flock, hah-hah, redrum redrum, they're listening, don't you know that?_\n\nA call higher up the chain of command to the Pentagon had gone unanswered. Calls to USAP and Lockheed had yielded nothing.\n\nTanner was in summer gear\u2014a parka over padded jeans with the big Mickey Mouse boots unlaced. He wore gloves and goggles and a light stocking cap with a Pittsburgh Pirates logo.\n\nThe plane, a C-130, a Herc in the patois, landed easily, and killed engines. Tanner reached under his parka to touch the butt of his trusty Colt .45 auto. Everyone authorized to carry a gun was carrying one. As a safety measure that would have been absurd in earlier times, Tanner had stationed an ex-sergeant with a sniper rifle on the roof of a parked truck.\n\nThe person who stepped first from the plane could not have been less likely.\n\n\"It's a girl,\" Tanner said.\n\n\"Yep, that's a girl.\" This from the station chief beside him. \"Looks kind of familiar. Not some crazy pop singer, is it?\"\n\nBehind the girl came a grown woman, rather beautiful and just exotic enough to hold Tanner's eye for longer than strictly necessary. Then a girl with a strange half mohawk and a stranger tattoo below one eye. And finally a young man with dark hair, a calm expression, and an air of tension that Tanner associated with trouble.\n\nThe girl walked up without hesitation, in a hurry. She pulled off her glove and stuck out her hand. \"I'm Pla\u2014Sadie McLure.\"\n\nThe station chief, Joe Washington, shook her hand and glanced at Tanner.\n\n\"Sadie McLure,\" Tanner repeated, frowning as he tried to pull the name from memory.\n\n\"Yes. As in Grey McLure crashing a jet into a Jets game,\" she said. No hint of a smile. A very serious, even grim young woman. \"These are my friends. Wilkes. Dr. Anya Violet. Michael Ford.\"\n\nTanner remembered now. \"What exactly are you doing here, Ms. McLure?\"\n\nHer eyes bored into him. They were eyes that belonged in a much older face. \"We're here to try to stop what's happening. We're here to kill the woman responsible.\"\n\n\"The woman responsible? Here?\" Washington wanted to laugh, but the faces before him did not look as if they were joking.\n\n\"Lystra Reid.\"\n\n\"Cathexis Inc.?\"\n\n\"And some other businesses as well. What's happening is her doing.\"\n\nThe station chief had to laugh at that. \"Excuse me, but I've met Lystra Reid, and she's a sharp young businesswoman. I don't know what\u2014\"\n\n\"Let them talk, Joe,\" Tanner said quietly.\n\nThe station chief seemed almost offended, but he nodded. \"Okay. Not here. We'll drive you to my office.\"\n\nAn hour later Plath and Vincent, with occasional outbursts from Wilkes, had told their tale.\n\n\"To say that sounds crazy is an understatement,\" the station chief said.\n\n\"Do you have any proof?\" Tanner asked.\n\nPlath cocked her head and looked at him. \"You know something.\"\n\nTanner smiled slightly. \"Do you have proof?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I do,\" Plath said. \"We thought you might be skeptical. \"So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to just touch my finger to your face. Then, in a few minutes you're going to open a book at random. You'll hold the page close to your face. And I'll tell you what you're reading.\"\n\n\"What is that, some kind of magic trick?\"\n\n\"It's the best I can do on short notice,\" Plath snapped. \"If you like, I could blind you, or start sticking pins in your brain and giving you some amazing hallucinations.\"\n\n\"I'll read a book,\" Tanner said. Ten minutes later he was shaken and convinced.\n\n\"What do you want from us?\" Washington asked. He was still skeptical, still not sure it wasn't some sort of trick, but he also knew that in matters of security, Tanner was the real boss.\n\n\"Fuel,\" Plath said. \"And men with guns, if you have any.\"\n\n\"Men, I have. Guns? I could spare a couple of handguns and a hunting rifle. But Mr. Tanner here may have other means.\"\n\nTanner shifted uncomfortably, then made a decision. \"Okay. Cards on the table. We've been looking at Cathexis for some time now in relation to a souped-up hovercraft they seem to have built. An _armed_ hovercraft. I sent a person with some military background in to check it out. I have not heard back from her.\"\n\nVincent spoke for the first time. \"You're intelligence.\"\n\nTanner gave a short nod.\n\n\"Then you have people you could call.\"\n\nTanner snorted. \"Are you kidding me? With what's happening back in the world? Shit has hit the fan. Cities are burning, people are scared to death, my chain of command...\" He threw up his hands.\n\n\"If we can prove to you that this woman is doing what we say she's doing, if we can prove to you that we can stop her, will you do all you can?\" Plath asked.\n\nTanner thought about that for a moment and glanced at Washington, who raised his hands\u2014palms out\u2014in a gesture that said, _It's on you_. \"Yeah,\" Tanner said. \"You prove all that, and I will do all I can to bring down the wrath of God.\" Then, under his breath he added, \"But it won't work.\"\n\nSurreal, that was the word Bug Man had been searching for. Surreal.\n\nHe was in Antarctica, in a dry valley way below the ice, in a house, in a very expensively furnished living room, looking out of expansive windows onto a domed swimming pool, while a lunatic and mass murderer suggested he could replace the teeth she herself had broken with fangs. Green fangs.\n\n\"It would give you an original look,\" Lear said. \"Do you know how to cook at all? My cook is busy, yeah, helping to inventory supplies. Can you fry some eggs?\"\n\nA television was on in the kitchen where Bug Man rummaged in a vast refrigerator for eggs and bacon. That much he could do. Eggs and bacon.\n\nThe television showed the BBC, but it wasn't any of the sets he'd ever seen them use. It looked a bit as if the male and female announcers were broadcasting from a concrete bomb shelter.\n\nThe crawl at the bottom of the screen was full of warnings from the army that people should stay in their homes and off the streets. That and statements from Number 10 and acting prime minister Dermot Tricklebank, whoever that was, to the effect that _the only thing they had to fear was fear itself_.\n\n\"Hunh,\" Lear commented. \"That's a Roosevelt quote. Shouldn't they be using Churchill?\"\n\nThe stovetop was a restaurant-quality thing with massive knobs and too many burners. It took Bug Man a few anxious minutes to figure out how to work the knobs, but eventually he was able to lay six strips of bacon on a grill.\n\n\"Crispy,\" Lear said, pointing at the bacon.\n\nThe announcer said, _\"The nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan has escalated, with at least five major Indian cities now essentially vaporized.\"_\n\n\"Hah,\" Lear said. \"And don't forget the eggs. Not too runny.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n_\"Winds are whipping the fire now spreading out of control through Bayswater and Notting Hill. Our reporters have seen no evidence of effective emergency response.\"_\n\n\"It's hard to tell when an egg is done, yeah, but... Oh, look look look! He's setting himself on fire!\"\n\nBug Man did not want to see that and instead focused on his work.\n\n\"Looked like a banker. Nice suit. It's interesting that a person can be mad and yet plan ahead well enough to find gas. Or _petrol_ , as you would say.\"\n\n_Yes_ , Bug Man thought grimly, _who would have thought a crazy person could plan?_ He turned the bacon and held down the curling tips.\n\n\"Oh, look at that! Look at that video!\" This was spoken as an order not a request, so Bug Man looked. The tape showed an American Airlines 787 roaring down from the sky and smashing into a very large, gray Gothic church. The announcer said something about the cathedral at Reims.\n\n\"Not that great an explosion, though,\" Lear opined.\n\nSuddenly the BBC was off the air, replaced by static.\n\n\"I knew this would be a problem,\" Lear said. \"I avoided messing with media folks, yeah, but there's no way to stop someone cutting their power.\" She began flipping through channels. Static and more static. Then what appeared to be a Japanese news station with a fixed camera aimed at a woman who was giggling and stabbing her arm with broken shards of wooden chopsticks.\n\nAl Jazeera was on, but in Arabic. A Russian station had a bespectacled, overweight man with a bottle of vodka before him on the anchor desk. He seemed to be announcing news, but his voice was slurred, and as they watched he began weeping.\n\n\"CNN! Yes! See, that's why I took it very easy on Atlanta.\"\n\nLear seemed to think she deserved some praise for her foresight.\n\n_\"At this time we cannot confirm that the event in Norfolk, Virginia, was a nuclear explosion, although Norfolk is a major naval base that does handle ships carrying nuclear weapons.\"_\n\n\"No video?\" Lear moaned.\n\n_\"We now have video of an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, which is burning_.\"\n\n\"I've seen oil refineries burn,\" Lear complained. \"I've never seen a nuked city. Come on, they must have some video.\"\n\n\"Here you go.\" Bug Man plated the bacon and eggs.\n\n\"Next time drain the bacon a little better. Blot it with a paper towel.\"\n\nThey went into the dining room, all rich, dark wood with high-backed chairs. A chandelier hung above the table.\n\n\"It's going well, don't you think? Yeah?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" What else could he say?\n\n\"Early stages yet.\" She munched thoughtfully. \"I wonder if I should spread it out, you know? My first plan was to keep up the pace, sixteen thousand an hour. But what if... No. No, I'm sticking with the original plan. I don't want to start second-guessing myself.\"\n\n_No, you wouldn't want that_ , Bug Man thought. He wondered if his mother was still alive. Had she killed herself like so many seemed to do? Was she even now wandering the streets, raving? Maybe hurting other people? Maybe being hurt herself?\n\nWhat was the point of caring? Lear had won. The world was going crazy. The human race was killing itself in an orgy of madness.\n\n\"I have some work to do,\" Lear said. \"You stay and watch.\"\n\n\"I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"That wasn't a request, yeah? Stay and watch. You know what to look for.\"\n\n\"I do?\" Bug Man was mystified.\n\n\"The Armstrongs had self-replicating nanobots. Yeah. Maybe the fire at the Tulip got them all. Maybe not.\" Lear shook her head and her mouth was a grim, worried line. But she cheered up considerably when the news announced that Berlin, Germany, had been hit by a nuclear weapon.\n\n# **THIRTY**\n\nThe C-130 carrying Plath and her crew, as well as Tanner and seventeen ex-military volunteers from McMurdo, landed at Cathexis Base to find employees there bewildered and frightened. Their medical team had all been ordered to Forward Green a day earlier without explanation. And the Plague of Madness had spread there as well. They had seven people locked up. A dormitory had been burned to the ground, killing three.\n\nThe C-130 flew on to Forward Green. It was a cargo plane, a cavernous, incredibly noisy and very cold open space with webbing seats along both sides. Large dotted lines had been painted on the curved walls, indicating just where the propellers would chew through the fuselage should one come off in flight.\n\n\"This is their only other facility, so far as we know,\" Tanner said.\n\nThe plane circled, coming around into a strengthening wind. The sun was low on the horizon, as much like night as Antarctica got this time of year.\n\n\"I don't like that layout,\" one of the ex-soldiers said. \"Those towers sure as hell look like gun emplacements.\"\n\nThe pilot called back over the intercom. \"They are refusing to let us land.\" Then, a moment later, \"Sir, they are warning us that they will open fire if we attempt a landing.\"\n\nTanner looked at Plath. \"Well, I guess that tends to confirm your story.\"\n\nHe unhooked himself from his webbing seat and went forward to speak to the pilot.\n\nPlath looked at Vincent\u2014arms folded, eyes in shadow. At Wilkes, snoring beside her, somehow curled into a fetal ball in the webbing. And Anya, who seemed never to need sleep.\n\nPlath had removed her biot from Anya. With apologies. They were all three now in her own head, as safe as they could be. To kill her biots you'd have to kill Plath herself. Three windows were open, as they always were, now showing slithering macrophages and twitching neurons and what were hopefully spiky balls of pollen in her eye and not bacteria.\n\nShe\u2014\n\n_BOOOOM!_\n\nSomething had smacked the C-130 a staggering blow. Tanner came tearing back from the cockpit, the back of his jacket on fire. Plath unbuckled and threw her parka over him, smothering the flames.\n\nThe plane jerked again, not as hard, but then nosed down. They were low, no more than four thousand feet up; there was little room to recover.\n\nThe nose came slowly, slowly up, but as it did the plane went into a steep turn that threw Plath into Vincent.\n\n\"Sons of bitches!\" Tanner yelled.\n\nPlath worked her hand into the webbing and held on as the plane rolled, rolled, and she hung suspended in midair while baggage and vomit flew everywhere and grown men screamed.\n\nWilkes was yelling something that Plath couldn't hear. \"What?\" she yelled.\n\n\"I said: I can't say it's been fun, Plath, but it was good knowing you!\" Wilkes made a little mock-salute.\n\nPlath reached her free arm across and took Wilkes's hand. Plath was not afraid to die, in some ways it spelled relief. But she was furious at the idea that Lear would win. \"I'm not dying until I've killed that bitch!\" she yelled to Wilkes, who smiled wryly and squeezed her hand.\n\nThen, with a series of bone-shaking jerks, the plane slowly, slowly leveled off, but all the while it drifted lower.\n\nThe pilot, voice wracked with pain and fear, yelled, \"Hard landing! Hard landing! Brace! Brace!\"\n\nThe impact rattled Plath's spine and chipped one of her teeth as her mouth slammed shut. The webbing seat held her, but Anya was knocked from her seat and fell to the metal floor of the plane. A metallic shriek went on and on and on.\n\nAnd that's when a spinning propeller\u2014almost twenty feet from tip to tip\u2014exploded through the flimsy fuselage, tearing Anya Violet and two of Tanner's men apart.\n\nThe plane skidded to a stop.\n\nA giant gash made by the prop had nearly split the plane in two. Jagged metal edges were everywhere, blood and pale viscera was sprayed around the fuselage like some demented Jackson Pollock painting. A man with his leg gone at midthigh bellowed like a dying bull and tried futilely to cover the pulsing wound with his hands.\n\nSmoke rolled back through the cargo bay, whipped away by a brutally cold wind coming through the gash.\n\nVincent stared at the place where Anya had been. He picked up something white and red, some unrecognizable part of her, and held it cradled on his lap.\n\nTanner was among the first to recover. \"Get ready! They may send someone to finish us off!\" He drew his pistol. It looked small and irrelevant in his hand. Dazed men responded, drawing their few weapons. One was trying to draw a gun with a hand that was no longer there. Another man gently eased him into the webbing and took the gun from him.\n\n\"You okay?\" Plath asked Wilkes, and got a shaky nod in return. \"Vincent?\"\n\nVincent stared at her as if he'd never seen her before, maybe wasn't seeing her now. His shallow breathing formed a small cloud of steam.\n\n\"Anyone who can, follow me!\" Tanner said. He wound his way through tangled metal to leap from the gash. Half a dozen men followed. Plath and Wilkes went to Vincent. \"Come on, Vincent. Stay alive now, grieve later.\"\n\nHe flashed a look of pure, unadulterated fury that Plath at first thought was directed at her.\n\n\"Come on, Vincent. We have to get off this pl\u2014\"\n\nA machine gun, sounding like a chainsaw, opened up. A line of holes appeared at the tail end of the cargo bay and walked its way forward. Metal was flying everywhere. The air stank of cordite, steel, blood, and human waste.\n\nPlath grabbed Vincent by the jacket and yanked him to his feet as Wilkes undid his safety harness. Vincent let the gruesome body part drop, hesitated as if he might go back for it, and then Plath shoved him out onto the ice and jumped after him.\n\nWilkes landed on Plath, rolled off, and slithered on her belly. Plath glanced back and saw a Sno-Cat with a machine gun mounted on its roof, still firing from the far side of the wreck.\n\nThen, with a _woosh_ of searing heat, the starboard-side fuel tanks exploded, billowing out over the Sno-Cat. The man firing the machine gun was aflame, twisting, writhing, trapped somehow, and the machine gun stopped.\n\nThey were three hundred feet from the nearest building, which was one of the four gun emplacements.\n\n\"Run run run!\" Tanner yelled, and led the way, slipping and staggering across the ice with the wind blessedly at his back. Plath saw immediately what he was doing. The gun tower was opening, shutters rising mechanically, revealing a long black muzzle. Tanner was trying to close the distance and get below the place where the gun could be depressed to target them.\n\nIt took twenty seconds for the shutters to open fully. Another ten seconds for the gunners to ready their weapon, and at that moment the gamble had failed. The gaggle of freezing survivors were in pointblank range.\n\nThe machine gun fired. Two rounds, killing one man instantly and hitting another in the thigh.\n\nAnd then, the gun jammed.\n\nTraining took over for the ex-soldiers. They quickly closed the distance to the tower's base and began kicking at the door. One fired at the lock. The door opened and small-arms fire\u2014a _pop! pop! pop!_ sound\u2014came from within.\n\nTanner, yelling obscenities, picked up a fallen body and threw it through the doorway to draw fire. He was in through the door in a flash. More gunfire as those with weapons rushed the doorway after him.\n\nSilence descended. Tanner and his men had taken the tower.\n\n\"Come on,\" Plath said to Vincent and Wilkes, \"we'll freeze out here!\"\n\nA second Sno-Cat was barreling toward them from the center of the compound, trailing a cloud of ice particles and steam.\n\nThe top third of the tower now rotated, bringing the machine gun to bear on the Sno-Cat, which made the fatal mistake of hesitating, slowing, and then blew apart as Tanner poured fire into it.\n\nPlath, Wilkes, and Vincent found themselves in a bare room at the bottom of a steel spiral staircase leading up. \"Wilkes, stay with Vincent.\"\n\nPlath ran up the stairs to find Tanner still cursing, but also bleeding into his parka, a growing stain.\n\n\"Goddammit, goddammit, they shot me,\" he said as he tore off his jacket, then burrowed through layers of warmth to find a hole in his left side.\n\nA soldier squatted to take a look. He grinned up at Tanner. \"Through and through, Captain. You'll live if you don't bleed out.\"\n\n\"Slap on a compress, Sergeant O'Dell.\"\n\nTanner looked at Plath. \"You look okay for your first firefight.\"\n\n\"Not my first,\" Plath said. \"Not even my second. It's been a hell of a week.\" She peered out of the shooting hole as the machine gun traversed left and right. Nothing moved. The plane and the two Sno-cats burned.\n\n\"All those buildings\u2014shuttered. Bulletproof, most likely.\" O'Dell, the ex-soldier who had tended Tanner's wound.\n\n\"Jesus H.,\" Tanner said. \"It's a fortress. See what we have here. Inventory weapons and do a head count.\"\n\nThe bad news was that there were just six battle-ready men, plus Tanner, Plath, Vincent, and Wilkes.\n\nThe good news was delivered by O'Dell. \"We have all the small arms we could want, plenty of ammo, and a dozen of these.\" The \"these\" in question were shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.\n\n\"I'm not familiar with those. Russian?\"\n\n\"Chinese,\" O'Dell said. \"And to answer your next question, yes, they can be fused for impact.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Tanner said. \"That is not a professional outfit out there; otherwise, they wouldn't have driven that Sno-Cat into range and then conveniently stopped. Amateurs with maybe a couple of veterans. Short-handed and poorly led, or we'd already be dead. Let's not give them time to figure anything out. Sergeant, blow some holes in that first building. Ground level if you can. We need a door.\"\n\nThe battle lasted two hours, by which time two more men had been killed. Plath and her friends had been given the job of ferrying wounded from the plane into the first tower while Tanner led the assault on the second.\n\nWhen it was all over, they counted seven bodies of former Cathexis employees.\n\n\"A skeleton force,\" Tanner said. \"So this was just a warm-up.\"\n\nThey had assembled in the dining hall and Wilkes had helpfully brewed a pot of coffee and popped open bags of chocolate chip cookies.\n\nThey were eight now, along with three wounded survivors from the plane wrapped in blankets and lying bandaged on empty steel tables. O'Dell and one other had taken a remaining Sno-Cat to what looked like a hangar that lay well outside of the main base.\n\n\"Whoever was here pulled out,\" Tanner said. \"This place was not built for the dozen men left behind.\"\n\nVincent stood up and walked away.\n\n\"He'll be okay,\" Plath said, not believing it.\n\n\"He's been through a lot,\" Tanner said generously.\n\n\"You have no idea,\" Wilkes muttered as she poured mugs of coffee.\n\n\"We don't know if anyone got off a message to whoever, wherever... but let me just say that any skepticism about you, Ms. McLure, is officially dead and buried. We have to find wherever they went, chase them down, and stop this.\"\n\n\"All we've got is a Sno-Cat,\" a man observed. \"Holds four passengers.\"\n\nVincent came back and without pre-amble said, \"They left their computers on. There's another base. Farther south. A couple hundred miles.\"\n\nSomeone whistled low, and slow, and said, \"That's a hell of a long ride in a Cat.\"\n\nThen O'Dell returned. He had two prisoners, held at gunpoint. \"Meet Mademoiselle Bonnard and Mr. Babbington.\"\n\n\"Dr. Babbington, actually.\"\n\nO'Dell smacked his rifle butt into the man's spine.\n\n\"They didn't even know what was going on. They're out at the hangar out there, working on... well, you'll want to see this, Tanner.\"\n\n\"Is it a hovercraft with a jet engine and missiles?\" Tanner asked wearily.\n\nO'Dell threw up his free hand in exasperation. \"You are no fun to surprise, Captain.\"\n\n\"We were just completing the assembly,\" the Frenchwoman said. \"We are not dangerous. You have no need to point guns. We are engineers, just working for the company. Let us go free.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Tanner said. \"Well, ma'am, you, too, _Doctor_ , you now work for the U.S. Navy. You will complete your work, and if you manage to do it inside of two hours, I will not strip you both down to your underwear and send you out onto the ice.\"\n\n\"The sleighs are coming in,\" Stillers reported. He was casting questioning glances at Bug Man, wondering no doubt why his face was swollen, why his teeth were missing, and why he was wearing a bathrobe and flicking between YouTube and Twitter on the big TV monitor in Lystra Reid's living room.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Lear said distractedly.\n\n\"That will be the last of it,\" Stillers said.\n\n\"It's all coming down, Stillers. Um... Tell everyone good job, yeah? Yeah. Tell them all I said well done.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Did you want to, maybe, come over to the dining hall and speak to them?\"\n\nLear considered the idea, shook her head almost shyly, and said, \"No, I have to watch.\" She waved a hand toward a shaky YouTube of one of the endless array of riots in one of the endless number of burning cities. \"Panic, you know. That's what gets them killed. It's like medieval, yeah? Plague. Or cholera.\"\n\nShe was no longer talking to Stillers, who sensed that fact and stood there stoic and awkward.\n\n\"That's the whole point. Madness leading to panic. If they just didn't panic, yeah, they'd be okay. Yeah? If they just didn't panic. But I knew they would.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Mmm. You can go, Stillers.\"\n\nStillers seemed relieved. Bug Man was not. It was better to have at least one extra person in the room in case Lear lost it again.\n\nShe flopped beside him on the couch. They had been watching together for the last few hours. Eating and watching in a bizarre parody of a girls' night at the movies. Bug Man had been half afraid she'd decide to paint his nails or talk about her love life.\n\n\"I'm glad you decided to join me, Buggy. Good old Buggy. You get it, yeah. You've been down there, down in the meat. You've been part of the game for a long time.\"\n\nBug Man did not remember choosing to be here. He remembered being blackmailed and threatened, made a party to yet another crime. If anyone ever lived to tell this story in some history book, he would be labeled as the guy who killed a president and almost killed a pope. Which was unfair. He was, at most, an accessory.\n\nAn accessory to the end of the world.\n\n\"Get us a drink, Buggy. You know, I wanted to get Sadie here, too. I thought she would be fun to have around, yeah. For a little girl-time, you know? We could talk girl stuff, yeah, that I can't talk about with you.\"\n\nHe poured them each a bourbon. She had said they had enough for two years, at least. He hoped that was true, because he felt he was going to need to drink an awful lot.\n\n_I'm turning into Burnofsky_ , he thought. _Old degenerate trying to drink away his sins. That's me now, but not old. So I can live with this for a long time. If she doesn't kill me_.\n\n\"What is that? Is that a cross? Oh, that is awesome. They're nailing that woman to a cross!\"\n\nBug Man was sick so far down into his soul that he wished he could shut down his brain, go into some kind of coma\u2014wake up later, maybe a lot later. He waited for the shaky video to end then navigated to the next clip.\n\n\"So Sadie, that didn't work out. But I've got you, Buggy. And it's all working,\" she said. \"All working. Except for the self-replicating nanobots. Yeah. The goo.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen anything like what you're looking for,\" Bug Man ventured. \"Just crazies, no buildings eaten up or whatever.\"\n\n\"Mmm. Yeah.\" Lear was pensive. \"Probably all burned up when the Tulip came down. Burned up with the Twins. Wish I'd been able to stay to see even more of that, yeah. Yeah. Burning Armstrongs, that would have been excellent.\" She shrugged and sighed, disappointed. \"But all it takes is one of those SRNs to survive. Just one.\" She bit a fingernail and added a superfluous, \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"I'm sure\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" Lear snapped. \"You're not sure. I'm not sure, so you're not sure.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Gotta exterminate them, somehow. They'll just... just keep on. Gotta be a way to stop them.\"\n\n\"Race to the end of the world,\" Bug Man said, his tongue loosened by the whiskey. \"Choose your apocalypse.\"\n\n\"I can't let them beat me, the Twins. Burnofsky.\"\n\nAn idea occurred to Bug Man. If he spoke it, he would never be able to unsay it. If she liked the idea, she would be happy with him. If not...\n\n\"I have an idea,\" he said.\n\n\"Speak it, Buggy.\"\n\n\"You have people's biots. You can send them a message. To the right people. I mean, you have all that cross-referenced, right? I mean, you would know which people were in the Pentagon, or maybe in Russia, wherever.\"\n\nShe was looking at him with the intensity of a cobra looking at a mouse. \"Spit it out of that mush mouth, Bug Man.\"\n\n\"Okay, say you have some general, or whatever. You fire up his biots, right? He knows now what's coming. He knows he's screwed. But biots can see, right? They could see, you know, if you showed them a sign. Held up a sign in front of them.\"\n\nShe stared at him for a full minute, during which Bug Man wondered if he would have the strength even to resist if she decided to kill him. Did he even want to live?\n\nThen she reached out one hand, pinched his swollen cheek, and said, \"Buggy, you are a genius.\"\n\n# **THIRTY-ONE**\n\nPlath was in the second seat of the sleigh. Tanner was driving. O'Dell was in the other sleigh, being driven by Babbington, who had been convinced to help when O'Dell shot two of his toes off and promised to keep going if he didn't.\n\nThree more men plus Vincent and Wilkes were crammed into the Sno-Cat, trailing many miles behind.\n\n\"I still don't see a damned thing, and we're supposedly right on top of it,\" Tanner said. Then, \"Ahhh! Shit! O'Dell, stop, stop, stop!\" he yelled through his radio.\n\nHe killed the engine and fumbled for the brakes that slammed steel claws down into the ice. The sleigh went from a moderate seventy miles an hour\u2014neither Tanner nor Babbington felt confident going any faster\u2014to zero in five seconds. Even so, the front two feet of the sleigh were over the lip of a sharp drop-off.\n\n\"This thing have a reverse gear?\" Tanner wondered. If there was, he never found it. \"Okay, we get out and push it sideways.\"\n\nTanner and Plath climbed out onto the ice. Only then did they see the brightly lit compound nestled in the dry valley below.\n\n\"Under my nose,\" Tanner muttered. \"They built this right under my nose.\"\n\n\"Antarctica is a big place,\" Plath soothed. \"And Lear has a lot of money.\"\n\n\"Is that another swimming pool?\"\n\nO'Dell and Babbington joined them and helped manhandle the sleigh back from the lip of the cliff. Under low power, just enough to raise the weight of the sleigh from the ice, it wasn't too hard.\n\n\"There's ramp over there,\" O'Dell said. \"But we could just sit up here and fire down into the base. Twelve missiles, fair amount of thirty-mil cannon...\" He shrugged.\n\n\"No,\" Plath said. \"We need to know whether this base is the place she's using to control events, or just a place to hide while the work is done elsewhere.\"\n\nTanner nodded. \"Look at that slag heap over there. That's way more than you'd get from just leveling. They've dug some holes.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, that base looks like it will sustain a hundred men,\" O'Dell argued. \"I'm not seeing the gun emplacements we saw back at Forward Green. Still, we could get a very hot greeting. These sleighs aren't armored worth a damn.\"\n\nBabbington took offense at that. \"We needed to keep weight down, obviously. The engine is armored.\"\n\n\"Yeah? How about the cockpit?\" O'Dell asked. \"Yeah, I thought so.\"\n\n\"The house,\" Plath said.\n\n\"Yep,\" Tanner said. \"That's the big-boss house right there. If we catch them by surprise, decapitate them\u2014\n\n\"That chopper down there has missile launchers and a cannon,\" O'Dell pointed out.\n\nPlath said, \"Look, for whatever reason, Lear hasn't killed me yet. She could have. She wanted me back in the game. She insisted I play an active role. I think... I think she doesn't want me dead.\"\n\n\"What do you have in mind?\"\n\n\"I think I walk down there, knock on the door, and hope she shakes hands.\"\n\n\"I'm going to try to get through to some rational person, either in D.C. or Langley or any random naval vessel that might be within range. But don't count on the cavalry. You understand?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Plath said.\n\nHe gave her an appraising look. \"What are you, sixteen?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Plath said. \"But I've packed a lot into the last few months.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I have a son about your age. Back in the world. Minneapolis, with my parents. I'm trying to tell myself he's okay.\"\n\nPlath started to answer, stopped herself, shook her head, and finally said, \"I was about to say I'm doing the same. But everyone I care about is either dead, or here with me.\" Noah, lying in his own blood, gasping final breaths.\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut. There were no tears\u2014which, she thought, was a good thing as they would have frozen.\n\nHer father, her brother. Ophelia, Nijinsky, Anya. Billy. She saw his head fall to the side, his neck cut almost through.\n\nAt least her mother had died of natural causes. She hadn't been murdered. So much sadness, and now, the whole world was joining Plath in that sadness. That did not help. The old saying was that misery loves company. But Plath knew that misery needed hope. Misery needed to believe in a better future.\n\nWhat was happening back in the world where Tanner's son lived? Had Lear's madness killed millions, or just hundreds of thousands? Had Burnofsky's vile machines escaped to obliterate all of life?\n\nHow much could the human race stand? The dinosaurs had thrived for tens of millions of years before dying out. How many species had evolved, survived, and then at last succumbed?\n\n_Homo sapiens_ were, what, a million years old? And all of human civilization just a tenth of that. Had the clock run out?\n\nNoah, lying in his own blood while the Twins raged and Burnofsky gloated.\n\nHad she loved him? Then how could it be that she'd not told him? Too late now. Now she could only offer him more blood. More murder.\n\n_I'll kill her. For you, Noah_.\n\n\"It's cold,\" Plath said. \"Let's get this done.\"\n\n\"We'll drive you around to the far side, to the top of the ramp, and then stay out of sight.\"\n\nStaying out of sight was an illusion. Sensors had tracked the approach of the sleighs. And now Stillers reported to Lear that the sleighs were behaving strangely. They had stopped for a while at the northern end of the valley before continuing on around to the southern entrance.\n\n\"Now they're just sitting there.\"\n\n_Interesting_ , Lear thought. Frightened employees? Was some of the biot conditioning that all her core people had been subjected to beginning to weaken?\n\nHer eyes flicked to the TV. YouTube was still up, thankfully. Bug Man was watching a shaky video of a Tesco being looted.\n\n\"Do we have cameras on the ramp?\" Lear asked.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Stillers said.\n\n\"Get them on-screen here.\" Soon a dimly lit image of the ramp opened. At first: nothing, just gravel and ice. Then, someone walking down the ramp. The person wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood, with dark goggles covering the upper part of the face.\n\n\"Can't see the face,\" Stillers said. \"I'll send some guys up there.\"\n\n\"No.\" Lear smiled. \"I think... I think maybe I can guess who this is. Yeah. Have men ready, get a sniper into position to cover my door, make sure all security personnel are armed at all times, and I'll want a handgun for myself. Do nothing unless I give the order.\"\n\nStillers nodded and went about his work.\n\n\"I believe we have company, yeah,\" Lear said to Bug Man. \"I do not know how she did it, clever girl, but if I'm right, we'll have an old friend of yours over for a drink.\"\n\nOpportunity for Suarez came with Kung Pao chicken\u2014extra spicy, the way she liked it\u2014brown rice, and a glass of Austrian white wine.\n\nAfter so long planning what to do with a bucket as the only weapon, she was handed a golden opportunity: Chesterfield came armed.\n\nShe immediately recognized it as a Glock nine-mil with a eventeen-round clip. She had fired hundreds of rounds from a weapon essentially identical to this. All that was good, but the beautiful part from her perspective was that the standard cop holster was also very familiar, and she would be able to draw it smoothly, especially if she could get behind him.\n\nMuch better than trying to beat him down with a pee bucket.\n\nThe final piece of the puzzle was the Kung Pao. And more specifically, the peanuts.\n\nShe accepted her tray, invited him to stay so she could be sure it wasn't too spicy. She took a bite and cried, \"Oh, no. No! Peanuts!\"\n\n\"What's the matter?\"\n\nShe put a hand to her throat and began wheezing dramatically. \"Allergic... to... peanuts. I can't breathe! Help...\" And then choking noises and a strained, whooping breathing and Chesterfield made the fatal move: he behaved like a human being, stepped in, knelt down, and in a blur of movement felt the muzzle pressed against the side of his head.\n\n\"I would honestly hate to do it,\" Suarez said. \"You've been decent to me. But Chesterfield, I will blow your brains out if I have to. The alternative...\"\n\nWhich was how Chesterfield ended up wearing her chains, with handcuffs added to keep him in a hog-tie position, and his own socks stuffed in his mouth with his belt wrapped tight to hold them in place.\n\n\"Can you breathe okay?\" she asked him.\n\nHe nodded, and Suarez, armed with the gun, an extra clip, his radio, and his keys, opened the door to her cell very slightly and looked cautiously left and right. If there were cameras, they were not in evidence. Which did not mean they weren't there.\n\n_Nothing you can do about that but move fast_ , Suarez told herself. Down the hallway, which carried the ridiculous medieval dungeon theme forward. A door. She cracked it slightly. There was a sort of control room\u2014monitors and swivel chairs and two women chatting as they watched the screens. Panic buttons were large and prominent. She winced. There was no room for error or pity.\n\n\"Hey,\" she said, stepping into view, and with two head shots dropped the women. One was clearly dead. The other rattled her shallow breaths in and out until Suarez covered her mouth and nose and waited for the final spasm. No point wasting ammo, and no point risking a third shot attracting attention.\n\nHer immediate goal was simple: to find and take the sleigh she'd ridden in and get the hell out of there. But that would require some intel. She dropped into one of the dead women's seats and began cycling through the camera angles, one of which did in fact show the hallway outside her dungeon. She had been lucky they hadn't spotted her.\n\nThis monitoring station appeared to have only limited access to cameras, concentrating on the dungeon and what appeared to be extensive storerooms. Really quite impressive storerooms, too large to be in any of the aboveground buildings. She saw other people, some armed, some not. Some doing mundane tasks with iPad inventory systems, others driving forklifts, still others...\n\nA man walked toward the monitoring station, holding three disposable cups and a paper sack in a recyclable cardboard holder. He might easily have been coming from a Starbucks.\n\n\"Hey, coffee!\" he said as he stepped into the room. Suarez grabbed his hand, yanked him forward, slammed the door shut, and blew out his brains.\n\nOne of the coffees survived the fall, and she took a sip before getting back to her research. Surely there must be a way to break out of this limited protocol and access more cameras.\n\nShe was beginning to regret having killed all three of them\u2014she could have used some help. But then she stumbled upon an open link that led her helpfully to a schematic of the base. The schematic had green dots for camera locations.\n\nThe first was password protected. She tried the usual combinations, and none worked. So she rifled the pockets and wallets of the dead, and finally found a tiny slip of yellow legal pad.\n\n\"Thank God for unreliable memories.\" Moments later: \"And bingo. We are in.\"\n\nThe sun was just millimeters above the horizon, and the weak light left the valley in darkness. Stadium lights cast a circle of eerie orange across the main buildings, excepting the house, which cast its own warm, buttery light.\n\nPlath was shaking with cold and fear by the time she had descended the long ramp and then crunched her way across the gravel to the house. She did not spot\u2014indeed did not look for\u2014the sniper who watched her through his telescopic sights.\n\nShe climbed the few stairs and stood on the porch of the impossible house belonging, she was certain, to Lystra Reid, also known as Lear.\n\nShe pulled off her glove and knocked.\n\nThe door flew open to reveal an attractive young woman wearing white yoga pants, shearling boots, and a blue down vest over a sheer white tunic.\n\nPlath pushed up her goggles and slid back her hood.\n\n\"Oh. My. God.\" Lear said. \"It _is_ you.\"\n\n\"May I come in?\" Plath asked, feeling an absurdity in it all that went beyond the merely surreal.\n\n\"Mmm, not just yet. First, I should tell you there's a very good shot watching you, yeah, and ready to fire at any excuse. So. Shrug off the coat, keep your hands where I can see them, and don't move.\" In order to emphasize her point, Lear pointed with one hand at the gun in the other.\n\nPlath complied.\n\n\"Now, turn around slowly.\"\n\nThis, too, Plath did.\n\n\"Ah! There we go. You _do_ have a gun. I thought you might.\" Lear pulled the gun from Plath's waistband and tossed it out onto the ice. It came to rest by a lawn ornament, a pink flamingo that must have been someone's idea of witty commentary on the climate.\n\n\"Now, come on and warm up,\" Lear said. \"Bug and I are drinking excellent bourbon, would you like some?\"\n\n\"Bug?\"\n\nPlath looked past Lear and saw a badly battered Bug Man, sitting on a couch and looking miserable and humiliated, and perhaps just a little hopeful.\n\n\"You two have met, right?\"\n\n\"Briefly,\" Plath said. Then added, \"I don't drink.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do, yeah, not a lot but on occasion,\" Lear said smugly. \"Yeah.\" She handed Plath a glass. Plath took a sip, grimaced, and put the glass aside.\n\n\"If we're going to be friends, you're going to have to get into the spirit of things,\" Lear said, her face darkening.\n\nSo Plath picked the glass back up and followed Lear's direction to sit, sit down, take it easy, relax.\n\nPlath sat. She saw the TV, currently on a YouTube of a burning house. Where it was she had no idea. Bug Man sat stiff and wary.\n\n\"I did it,\" Plath said.\n\n\"Did it?\" Lear asked.\n\n\"I blew up the Tulip. I gave the order to Caligula. Then I followed the breadcrumbs here.\"\n\nThat had the desired effect of throwing Lear off stride. \"Are you trying to tell me that\u2014\"\n\n\"Did I know it was you behind it?\" Plath interrupted. \"Yes. After you killed Jin it was obvious that he had failed you, somehow. Was it that he found out the reason you'd ordered him to wire Vincent?\"\n\nLear, small smile growing. \"In a way. Nijinsky hated you. He didn't like being pushed aside for some kid. So that was part of it. But yeah, he was starting to get cold feet. Developing a conscience.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to die choking on my own tongue on an escalator. So I didn't fight it very hard. I could have sent my own biots in to stop it all happening, my own rewiring. But I could see where it was all going.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"I came to like the idea. I came to like the whole, meticulous planning of it. It was brilliant. It was genius. It's historic.\"\n\nLear's nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. \"Historic?\"\n\nSo, Plath noted, she liked that word. \"Well, yeah,\" she said. She took a sip of the whiskey, suppressed the face she wanted to make, and instead said, \"It gets better as you get used to it.\"\n\n\"Historic, yeah?\" Lear prompted.\n\n\"I remember this lecture in history class. All about Genghis Khan. You know, the Mongol guy.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nNo, Plath thought, Lear had not heard of the great Khan. But she didn't like admitting it. \"Well, the point was that Genghis killed, like, thirty million people, no one is sure how many. Maybe twice that much. There was this one thing where he took a bunch of captured enemies, and built a platform on top of them. His own soldiers had lunch on the platform as it slowly crushed all the men beneath.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Lear said fervently.\n\n\"But the point was, that later, like nowadays, we look back on him, Genghis, I mean, as a great historical figure. He, like, improved the economy and so on by clearing out a bunch of people who were in his way. But he killed millions.\"\n\n\"He changed the game. But I'm changing it more. I'm changing it all,\" Lear boasted. \"I'm creating whole new species, yeah, to take over. I mean, you know, thanks to your dad, who was a genius. Yeah. By the way, condolences on his death, he was a great man.\"\n\nPlath's mask almost dropped then. Almost. \"Yes, he was.\"\n\n\"But we used his techniques and played around, and now we have three very interesting species. _Macro_ , not micro. We'll breed them up, yeah, and then release them when the time is right. One of them can't metabolize anything but pork and human meat. Hah! Later, at the next level, yeah.\"\n\n\"But how are you going to watch what happens? I mean...\" She waved a hand at the YouTube video. \"How much longer is Google going to work?\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry. The satellites will work independently for a long time. And we'll start placing cameras here and there, when the time is right.\"\n\n\"You've thought of everything,\" Plath said.\n\nLear smiled, a shark's smile this time. \"You don't really think I'm buying any of this, do you?\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"This bad-girl act. _This_ Sadie McLure, indifferent to suffering. You tried to stop Caligula. I _know_. I spoke to my father before he died. That was kind of a drag. He was very useful, the old man. I was never going to bring him here, no, no, but it would have been fun watching him deal with the world I'm creating. He would have been an interesting player in the game.\"\n\nPlath put her drink down again. Her hand was shaking. Lear saw it.\n\n\"The world you're creating?\"\n\nBut Lear wasn't playing along anymore. \"How much longer do you think you have to live, Sadie?\"\n\nPlath did not answer.\n\n\"Two ways forward for you, Sadie. The usual choice: death or madness. We have some decent twitchers here, and we could easily wire you up. Or I could be disappointed that you would just walk in here and think you could lie to me.\" Lear raised the pistol on her lap and leveled it at Plath.\n\nThe muzzle looked huge. _What a clich\u00e9_ , some corner of Plath's mind thought. _That's what everyone who has ever stared down the wrong end of a gun thinks: oh, it's big_.\n\n\"Go ahead,\" Plath said.\n\n\"You don't think I will?\" Lear stood up and let the down vest slide to the floor. The sheer tunic revealed shadows of the tattoo horrors beneath. Lear pointed to a spot on her belly, right where an appendix scar would be. \"Right here, yeah. That's where I would tattoo your face. Maybe then you'll talk to me, yeah? They speak the truth, the tattoos do. Yeah.\"\n\n\"I believe you'll kill me,\" Plath said. \"You're a mass murderer. Before you're done you'll kill more people than Genghis or Hitler. You're a sick, twisted, crazy woman playing an insane game. So yeah, I think you'll kill me.\"\n\nLear cocked her head, all the while keeping the gun aimed. \"Don't you want to beg?\"\n\nPlath forced a smile of her own. A peace had descended over her. It was like what Noah had described to her, the eerie feeling of detachment and fearlessness that could come in the midst of a very challenging game. It would be over in minutes.\n\n\"I'm not afraid to die,\" she said. \"So long as I take you with me, you foul, fucked-up psychopath.\"\n\n\"Hah!\" Lear said. And then, the wheels began to turn in her head. Plath could see her retracing her steps. \"You never touched me. Yeah, you never touched me.\"\n\n\"No,\" Plath said. \"But you took my gun. As I knew you would.\"\n\nLear swallowed. She glanced at Bug Man, as if he would or could help.\n\n\"You know the anterior cerebral artery?\" Plath asked. \"Don't be embarrassed if you don't. I never would have, if some sick creature had not dragged me into her little BZRK game. But now, hey, I know a fair amount. Like I know that the anterior cerebral artery feeds blood to the frontal lobes. Which is where your consciousness lives.\"\n\n\"You're bluffing.\"\n\n\"Three biots, Lear. Each has a nice, long spike buried in that artery. There's blood leaking, but just a few cells, nothing fatal. It takes pressure to hold them in place. I think you may have high blood pressure, because it's a little like holding a Champagne cork in. If I keep up the pressure, leave the spikes in, well, eventually the clotting factor will seal the damage. But if I let the spikes out... which is what will happen if my biots are suddenly no longer being controlled... there will be a sudden spurt of blood. The pressure of cells forcing their way out of the holes will actually widen the holes. And since all the spikes are close together, the whole area will probably tear wide open. I know these things because of my own aneurysm. Useful.\"\n\nLear lowered the pistol and squeezed the trigger. The bang rattled the glassware.\n\nPlath felt a terrible blow, like a crowbar against her knee. The pain was immediate. Blood gushed from the wound. Bits of white bone stuck like teeth from ripped skin.\n\nPlath fell to her other knee and shrieked in pain.\n\n\"See, little Sadie girl, there are other ways. I don't have to kill you. I can just keep hurting you. How does it feel? Does it hurt? It's weird, yeah, but people who can face the idea of dying can't always face the idea of suffering, yeah?\"\n\nThe pain was beyond belief, beyond anything Plath had ever felt before.\n\n\"See, honey, I'm not afraid to die, either. I'm afraid to fail. I'd rather die than lose the game, yeah, my game, _my goddamned game_!\"\n\nShe fired again, this time into the meat of Plath's arm.\n\n\"Oh, did I get the bone on that one? Ouch, yeah? I have doctors, I have morphine, I can help, but first\u2014\"\n\nThis crash was not nearly as loud as the gunfire. Just the _crump!_ sound of a bourbon bottle hitting a skull.\n\nLear fell sideways, and Bug Man kicked her in the stomach, then grabbed the gun from her hand.\n\n\"Shoot her,\" Plath cried through waves of agony and terror.\n\n\"Can't. She's got me. Biots. Some kind of dead man's switch. She dies, I lose it. So you don't kill her, either, Plath.\"\n\n\"My biots never got to her brain. They're only halfway up her neck.\"\n\n\"Hah! You bluffed the crazy bitch?\"\n\nA loud, imperious banging at the front door. Bug Man fired through it. \"They won't shoot back,\" he said, voice high with stress. \"They might kill their boss.\" Then he yelled, \"You come in here, I shoot her! I shoot her right between the eyes!\"\n\n\"That was gunfire,\" Tanner said. \"We go in.\"\n\nO'Dell threw a quick salute and ran for his sleigh. But Babbington had run off, and O'Dell had never been any sort of pilot.\n\n\"With me, Sergeant!\"\n\nTanner fired the engine as, down below, the helicopter's rotors began to turn.\n\n# **THIRTY-TWO**\n\nSuarez did not hear the gunfire in her underground position, but on the monitor she did see men rushing, guns drawn.\n\n\"Something just hit the fan,\" she muttered.\n\nShe had located her own sleigh. It was parked behind one of the dormitories, not hard to get to so long as no one was shooting at you.\n\n\"Hope to hell they fueled the damn thing up,\" she said. She grabbed the guns from the dead guards, stuck them in her waistband feeling weighed down and a little ridiculous, and raced from the room.\n\nThe dungeon theme was over, now it was bright-lit hallway, white on white. Ahead, footsteps running. A man and a woman. It took her three shots to kill them.\n\nThe hallway dead-ended, and she had to double back to find an exit. She opened it quietly, glanced around to see the warehouse she expected, and ran toward concealment behind stacked plastic crates.\n\n\"Who is that?\" a voice yelled.\n\n\"The prisoner got loose!\" she yelled, waited until a worried face appeared, and put a bullet through its mouth.\n\nRunning, running, one of her extra guns clattered to the floor, but she kept running. Running through her mind was that whatever had sent armed men rushing around, it wasn't her. They'd been headed somewhere else, after someone else.\n\nBless whoever the poor fool was, but that was not her problem.\n\nProbably.\n\nThe sleigh came slipping and sliding, hard to control, very hard to control as Tanner raced it down the ramp. First things first: kill that chopper.\n\nSmall-arms fire popped off to his left, chipping stone from the wall to his right.\n\n\"RPG at your six!\" O'Dell yelled.\n\nThe wobbly rocket arced toward them, fired from behind and below. It missed by inches and blew up against the stone wall. The sleigh was blown clear of the ramp, still a hundred feet up from the bottom of the valley.\n\nBut then the computer kicked in\u2014roared the engines to push a tornado of air beneath the hovercraft\u2014which slowed the descent so that rather than being fatal it was merely bone-jarring as it slammed down onto gravel.\n\n\"RPG!\" O'Dell yelled again, but this time Tanner had seen it coming even before O'Dell and pushed the throttle forward. The sleigh bucked, kicked up a storm of gravel, and blew past the missile, which detonated fifty feet away.\n\n\"On that building!\" O'Dell pointed and there, sure enough, were two men manhandling yet another round into the missile launcher.\n\n\"Like hell,\" Tanner yelled, swung the nose of the sleigh around and fired blind at the building with one of his own missiles. It struck a second-floor window and blew a hole. It did not kill the men with the RPG, but the concussion knocked them onto their backs.\n\n\"The house!\" Tanner yelled. He aimed the sleigh toward it and then, at the last second, sank the brakes into gravel and the sleigh skidded sideways into a stop. O'Dell had already opened the canopy and now leapt, pistol in hand, to rush the door.\n\nThe sniper fired once, and O'Dell slammed onto his face and did not move. At the same moment the door of the house flew open and a young black kid in a bathrobe appeared, dragging Sadie by one arm.\n\nThe sniper fired and missed.\n\nTanner spotted the muzzle flash, and thanked whatever God watched over him that the sleigh had skidded sideways, because his weapons were pointed in the right direction. He launched a missile that blew a hole in this second structure, and while the sniper was recovering Tanner emptied his pistol at the roofline.\n\n\"Get in! Get in!\"\n\nThe boy climbed in, hauling a nearly helpless Plath after him. The canopy would not close with Plath's legs sticking out, but Tanner wasn't waiting. He gunned the engine and roared away toward the ramp, firing his thirty-mil cannon continuously, causing bright-red flowers to bloom on walls, empty ground, and a couple of men.\n\n\"Get her in, get her in!\"\n\n\"Can't, there's no room!\" Bug Man cried, but nevertheless he hauled a screaming, bloody Plath the rest of the way into the cockpit, a tumble of limbs and hair on Bug Man's lap.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Tanner demanded.\n\n\"They call me Bug Man.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, listen up, Bug Man. See this? That's the throttle. That's the brake. This is the yoke. The computer will help.\"\n\n\"What? Why? Are you bailing out?\"\n\n\"No, but you will be. There's another one of these at the top of the ramp.\"\n\nLear rose from the floor, woozy, took a stutter-step, and fell into the wall. She left a trail of blood behind.\n\n\"Fu... The... Yeah...\" she muttered.\n\nHer legs were jelly. Her head was going around and around and around and _oh, no_. She vomited onto the floor. Felt a little better after that. Wished she hadn't been drinking. Wished she had more sleep. Yeah. Sleep would be good....\n\nStillers came pounding in, gun drawn. Three other men, all armed.\n\n\"Boss!\"\n\n\"Di... get 'em?\"\n\n\"They've got the sleigh, but Tara's getting airborne.\"\n\n\"Kill them. Kill them,\" Lear said, slurring where she wished she was shouting.\n\n\"Someone get the doctor!\" Stillers yelled.\n\nMore voices yelling, all around her; voices yelling and walkie-talkies blasting away and something burning.\n\n\"I'm 'kay,\" she said. Why wouldn't her mouth work?\n\nShe felt the side of her head, then stared at her hand, red with something she couldn't bring herself to understand. \"Mom?\" she asked.\n\nSlowly, slowly, her head stopped spinning. Her legs were still weak but she could stand. A white-coated doctor was doing something to her head. Someone else was putting something in her mouth. Water. Had she asked for water?\n\nShe blinked. Her father was here. What was he doing here?\n\nShe shook her head, which set off a cascade of pain. She was sitting now on a couch stained with red handprints.\n\nCaligula. He had come around to peer at her, keeping his distance, but saying something. \"She's dead, Lyssie, she's dead, and you can't ever tell anyone what you've done....\"\n\n\"My head,\" she managed to say. \"Give me something. Give me something. Hurts.\"\n\nShe blinked and her father was gone. She blinked again and pushed herself to her feet. \"Kill them! Kill them!\" she cried, and this time it came out right.\n\n\"Tara's in the air,\" Stillers said. \"She'll get them.\"\n\nBy sheer dumb luck more than skill the sleigh made it to the top of the ramp, weakly followed by small-arms fire that drilled a hole in the canopy and brought a whinny of fear from Bug Man.\n\n\"There it is,\" Tanner yelled.\n\n\"I don't know how to drive that thing!\"\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nBug Man tried to crawl out from under Plath, who was only barely moving and definitely not saying anything brilliant. There was a pool of blood on the seat that had seeped into Bug Man's bathrobe.\n\nThis as much as Tanner's shout propelled Bug Man out and onto the ice. He immediately fell down, and that fact saved his life when the sleigh he was aiming for suddenly began firing. Cannon fire blew through the engines of Tanner's sleigh, and it settled to the ground. Tanner tried to run. His legs took two more steps after the cannon cut him in half.\n\nBug Man screeched in terror and bolted back toward the ramp. Plath meanwhile had managed to drag herself out onto the ice and was making a red smear across it, crawling, crawling but not dead yet. _Cold, dead soon_ , she thought, _not dead yet_.\n\nIn her mind there were three windows.\n\nThree biots ran up the side of Lear's face. Blood\u2014a jumble of red Frisbees and expiring whitish sponges\u2014lay strewn across a landscape of flesh.\n\nWas she even going the right direction? Which way was up? Plath saw a stream, like a mountain spring rushing down a cliff face, but the water was a landslide of blood cells.\n\n\"Okay, that's up,\" she told the ice that was freezing to her lip.\n\nUp and up, following the stream, the biots raced, the newest, P3, bounding ahead.\n\nAhead a forest of dark hair, huge, rough-textured whips sprouting from the flesh soil.\n\n\"Mmm, left,\" Plath mumbled.\n\nThe biots veered left toward the falling blood, leapt atop the softtextured, tumbling cells, running, losing ground as the current swept them, then out onto dry surface.\n\nAnd yes, ahead the slope leading toward the eye, a vast lake covered then revealed, covered then revealed by blinking eyelids.\n\nThis was a road Plath had traveled before. Her biots pushed through the twitching leafless palm trees of eyelashes and leapt onto the surface of Lear's eye.\n\nNormally biots could travel unfelt across an eyeball, but not when the biot twitcher deliberately dragged sharp claws, slicing the outer layer of the cornea.\n\nA sky-blackening hand fell from outer space and mashed the eyelid down on Plath's biots, but it didn't matter. You could no more squash a biot with a hand than you could stomp a cockroach in plush bedroom slippers.\n\n\"That's right, Lear. Still here,\" Plath said. Her body was shaking with cold. She was sure she was going to die. But before she did...\n\nHer biots skated hard around the orb, leaving tiny rips over the mineshaft of the pupil, racing ever faster into the dark, clambering over veins, stabbing them as she went, loosing narrow fountains of blood that sprayed up to beat against the back of Lear's eye socket.\n\n_For you, Noah. For you. It's the best I have_....\n\nAhead lay the twining cables of the optic nerve. P1 dropped back to sink a probe and try to see what Lear was seeing.\n\nP2 ran after P3, now well ahead and already ripping and tearing its way through mucus membrane, widening an access to the brain itself.\n\nSuarez saw the sleigh, but someone was already in the cockpit, canopy open, revving the engines. She ran flat out now. The sleigh driver saw her and seemed to be fumbling for a weapon since the sleigh was still too sluggish to move.\n\nSuarez jumped onto the sleigh's surface and pointed her gun directly down at the driver's head. \"It would be a pain in the ass to haul your dead body out of that cockpit.\"\n\nThe driver saw the logic of that, held up his hands, and piled out onto the ground.\n\n\"Good choice,\" Suarez said, and shot him in the foot.\n\nShe slammed the canopy closed and cranked the throttle, sending ice crystals and grit flying.\n\nAcross the compound she saw the chopper pulling away, rising toward the level of the ice above.\n\n\"Yeah, you just go that way, and I'll go the other,\" she said, and sent the sleigh hurtling toward the ramp, cannon firing at anything that crossed her path.\n\nBabbington had grown tired of being bullied. He had run off across the ice, but when he saw O'Dell abandon the sleigh and jump in beside Tanner, he'd run back. The sleigh was warm at least. He had barely made it before the chills came on so hard that for the next twenty minutes he just shook while waiting for the cockpit heater to thaw his bones.\n\nAnd then, he had shot the other sleigh.\n\nBabbington's thoughts had been less about needing to kill Tanner than they were about not wanting to yet again be forced out into the killing cold.\n\nHis first salvo blew the engine apart.\n\nHis second tore Tanner in half. The shock of that moment froze Babbington in a very different way. He pushed away from the controls and just in front of him the helicopter, bristling with weapons, rose like an avenging god.\n\nCold was not worse than being blown apart. Babbington threw back the canopy to wave his arms, show his face, anything to keep the helicopter from firing, but the dragonfly-looking monster still swept toward him, nose down.\n\nCannon fire ripped the ice, swept by, and now Babbington was warm enough. He ran from the sleigh, ran in panic across the ice toward the ramp, waving his arms.\n\nSuarez shot up the ramp, then swerved madly as a boy in a bathrobe came pelting down. It was perhaps the most improbable thing she had ever seen. She backed the engines, shoved brakes into gravel, threw back her canopy, and yelled, \"Who the hell are you supposed to be?\"\n\nThe boy, wild-eyed, dove into the cockpit beside her.\n\n\"Yeah, okay,\" Suarez said. \"Just don't talk.\" She hit the throttle and Bug Man, facedown in the seat, twisted like an eel to get back upright.\n\nThe sleigh topped the crest and shot directly beneath the helicopter.\n\n\"Oh, that's not good,\" Suarez said.\n\n\"It' after ush!\" Bug Man yelled.\n\nThe chainsaw roar of the chopper's cannon opened up, blowing a hole in the canopy, sending plastic shards everywhere. Suarez hauled the sleigh sharply left. Looked at her left hand. A two-inch piece of plastic protruded from the back of it. Her tendons were cut, her fingers slack.\n\nSuarez pushed the throttle to full speed and said, \"Hey, kid!\"\n\n\"Wha? Wha? Wha?\"\n\n\"Ever play video games?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"See that thing right there, kinda looks like a game controller? Well, that's our weapons system.\"\n\n\"She's in my eye!\" Lear yelled. \"She's in my eye!\"\n\nThe doctor did not understand. Stillers did. \"I'll get some of our twitchers!\"\n\nLear's head was almost clear now, but now sheer, blind rage was clouding her thoughts. She'd been bluffed! The McLure girl hadn't had biots in her brain, but they were sure on their way there now. Still time to stop them, maybe. Somehow.\n\nHad to be. Otherwise...\n\nThe nanobots could survive, the whole thing would be ruined\u2014had to win this, had to stay alive and win this. The Twins were dead, they couldn't defeat her\u2014dead, impossible!\n\n\"Don't kill,\" Plath groaned to herself. \"Wire.\"\n\nBut Plath's own body was in spasm now, convulsing. She could no longer feel her face. Her hands blue before her, frozen to the ice.\n\nP3 stabbed a needle into brain tissue, didn't matter where, spooled wire from its spider spinnerets as it ran, and stabbed a second pin.\n\n\"Toast!\" Lear yelled.\n\n\"What? Why are you yelling toast?\" the doctor asked.\n\nAnother pin, another wire and Lear felt an overwhelming urge to bite her lip.\n\nNow P2 was in the act, stabbing and spooling, stabbing and spooling.\n\n\"She's wiring me! She's wiring me!\" Lear cried.\n\nWhen she wasn't stabbing pins and running wire, Plath was simply slicing through neurons and axons, plowing the soft pinkish-gray tissue.\n\n\"No!\" Lear shouted. \"No. No! Grah! Grah!\"\n\nPlath felt a strange warmth creeping over her. Not real, she knew. Illusion. The body shutting down. Shutting down, conserving blood warmth in her core, saying farewell to limbs.\n\n_If I didn't love you, Noah, why am I thinking of you now, now at the end?_\n\nShe no longer felt the pain of her knee. Numb. Her arm still ached, but it was so very far away.\n\n_I loved that you loved me, Noah_.\n\nBut still enough consciousness to stab and spool and stab again.\n\n_I loved making love to you_.\n\n\"Grah, I, grah, yeah,\" Lear said, straining to be understood.\n\n\"She's having a stroke,\" the doctor said. \"Look! Her left pupil is blown!\"\n\nLear no longer saw the doctor. She saw her mother, her mother, the whore had actually slapped her across the face when she'd seen her daughter's disapproving gaze, a red welt and a sting and a humiliation.\n\n_Slap me? Slap me? SLAP ME?_\n\n_I wasn't brave enough to love you, Noah_.\n\n_Bitch-slap me? Me? Me? Me?_\n\nIncoherent sounds came from Lear's mouth between manic twitches. The doctor and Stillers laid her down on the floor.\n\n\"I'm giving her blood thinners,\" a funny, funny voice said, coming from her mother's screaming mouth, the cleaver in Lystra's hand, yeah, die yeah, slap me?\n\n_Me? Meeeee? Meeeee?_\n\nThe helicopter had a top speed just ten knots slower than the sleigh. The sleigh pulled away but with painful, painful slowness.\n\nAnd the sleigh was definitely not faster than cannon or missiles.\n\nThe missile grazed the cockpit with a fiery tail and exploded a hundred yards ahead. The sleigh's computers were fast, but not fast enough at one hundred sixty miles an hour to avoid the ice and stone thrown up in the explosion. It was like driving full speed in a hailstorm with golf ball\u2013sized hail.\n\nBut the sleigh survived, rocking wildly from side to side.\n\n\"Okay, we get one shot at this, kid,\" Suarez said. \"Be ready!\"\n\nSuarez hit the brakes. The sleigh slowed in a storm of ice particles, the helicopter roared by overhead, and Bug Man pushed the button.\n\nThe recoil was unexpected, as was the inundation of smoke and flame as the missile launched from the sleigh and curved into the sky, seeking a heat source.\n\nThe missile flew harmlessly past the helicopter\u2014which now, ominously, turned to come back. It came on cannon blazing, blasting ice on its way to killing Suarez and Bug Man.\n\nSuarez spun the sleigh and shot back toward the valley.\n\n\"You know there's a big giant hole up ahead there, right?\" Bug Man yelled.\n\n\"Yeah. We're going to see what this toy can do.\"\n\nThe distance was not great. The helicopter was a half mile behind. Suarez could only hope the chopper pilot wouldn't risk firing on her own people.\n\nOut into nothingness, out over the lip of the valley, the sleigh shot out into midair. And fell. The engines roared, trying frantically to push enough air downward to slow the descent. It worked, but not well.\n\nThe sleigh fell, faster and faster, and Suarez grunted and switched the thrust from vertical to horizontal once again.\n\nThe sleigh bolted forward and fell even more rapidly.\n\nAhead, a patch of blue.\n\nJust feet from the plastic dome, Suarez kicked all the thrust back to lift. The force of it bent the dome, then the sleigh broke through the plastic and with a loud crash slammed into the pool, snapped a diving board, and rode up and over a chaise longue to stop just inches from breaking through the far end of the dome.\n\nThe engine died then and the sleigh lay inert, back half trailing in the shallow end, front end tilted up.\n\n\"I gotta get this game,\" Bug Man said.\n\nTara Longwood\u2014the chopper pilot\u2014gave a thumbs-up to her weapons officer and took a victory pass over the wet sleigh below.\n\nThen she turned the helicopter back, scanning for any other targets. There was still a sleigh at the top of the cliff, but last she'd seen, the pilot, Babbington, was running like a scared rabbit.\n\nHowever... She frowned and pointed. A green Sno-Cat sat steaming within a few yards of the sleigh.\n\n\"One of ours,\" the weapons officer said. \"Must have just come up from Forward Green.\"\n\nTara nodded. She saw a dark-haired man climb into the sleigh's cockpit before she flew on around, circumnavigating the valley, looking for trouble.\n\nBy the time she got back to the sleigh and the Sno-Cat, she had heard a panicky babble of voices in her earpiece, coming from the ground. The dark-haired fellow in the sleigh was waving his arms, trying to attract her attention.\n\nA young woman and another man were carrying what could only be a body toward the Sno-Cat.\n\nTara brought the chopper in low, ready to help ferry the wounded now that the fight was over. She landed, and the young man in the sleigh trotted toward her, seemingly unconcerned, waving as he came on.\n\nShe slid the side panel of her cockpit open. \"What is this?\" she asked.\n\nAnd Vincent shot her in the face.\n\n# **THIRTY-THREE**\n\nPlath woke slowly. She was a drowning person, fighting her way up toward air and light, but it was so far, and her arms were so heavy.\n\nThen, all at once, she was awake. A doctor was beside her. And to her utter amazement, Vincent, Wilkes, and Bug Man were standing before her. There was also a Latino woman she had never seen before.\n\n\"Where am I?\" Plath asked.\n\n\"You're still here, in the valley,\" Wilkes said.\n\nPlath stared. Looked left and right. It could have been a room in any well-appointed, new hospital. She saw her leg, swathed in rigid webbing over bandages. It hurt like hell. Her arm hurt as well, but not as bad.\n\nHer face felt raw, as if it had been sunburned. Something was wrong with the bandaged hand. She saw bandages over the stubs of her amputated little and ring finger.\n\nHer head hurt. But she was alive.\n\nIn her mind, she saw three windows.\n\nShe took a deep breath, drank some water through a straw, answered the doctor's questions, and said, \"What's happened?\"\n\n\"Later,\" Wilkes said. \"We had you brought around so that, uh... there's a pretty big question, and we think we need to ask you.\"\n\n\"Wait. Are we\u2014\"\n\n\"We're in charge,\" Vincent said. \"We're running this base now. Suarez here can fly a helicopter, and do a few other things, and\u2014\"\n\nWilkes broke in to say, \"And with Lear out of the picture, all her wired-up zombies here didn't exactly know what to do.\"\n\n\"You've been unconscious for eighteen hours,\" the doctor said. \"I gave you a stimulant to wake you up. But it won't last long, the pain will get worse, and you'll be better off asleep for a while longer while your body recovers. You've been through a lot.\"\n\n\"Why did you wake me up?\" Plath asked Wilkes.\n\nBut Wilkes looked pleadingly at Bug Man. \"Okay, this is some very bad shit to deal with. But the gray goo, Burnofsky's babies, we're not sure... I'm seeing stuff that may be caused by self-replicating nanobots. But very small scale so far. And it could be I'm wrong.\"\n\n\"And there's the Floor Thirty-Four virus,\" Vincent said. \"Maybe it never escaped the Tulip. But maybe it did. The whole final tranche of Lear's victims have biots. We stopped the process before they were killed off. That's thousands of people with living biots who would suffer madness if the Floor Thirty-Four virus were to get loose.\"\n\n\"Not to mention all of us,\" Bug Man said.\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Plath wanted very badly to go back to sleep, and the doctor was right; the pain from her shattered knee was stalking her.\n\n\"The thing is, there's only one way to stop the gray goo, and to make sure the Floor Thirty-Four virus never escapes,\" Vincent said in his dispassionate voice. \"Nuclear.\"\n\n\"What? Wait, um, I'm lost, here. I don't exactly have an atomic bomb on me, oh, damn\u2014Doctor, can I at least get an ibuprofen or something?\"\n\n\"If it's out there and we don't stop it, the whole world dies,\" Wilkes said. She put her hand on Plath's forehead and held the cup so she could take another sip of water. \"Bug Man has an idea.\"\n\nBug Man nodded uncertainly, not quite sure about how Plath would receive what he was about to say. \"Listen, we stopped the biot cr\u00e8ches. The madness has stopped, but man, half the world is burning. Millions... you know. Nobody's in charge. But people know what it means if a window all of a sudden opens up in their head. And we still can control the cr\u00e8ches, we can still, you know...\"\n\n\"Why would we?\" Plath asked. Her head was throbbing. Her mouth felt like flannel, and nausea tickled the bottom of her throat.\n\n\"Because we need someone to blow up New York City,\" Vincent said. \"Lear had good records, good data. We can pinpoint guys with access to nukes. Americans, Russians, French, Brits. And Bug Man realized that when the biots quicken\u2014when they're born, you know\u2014they see. And they could read. We can bring biots online, and we can show them a message.\"\n\n\"What message?\" Plath asked.\n\nOne by one they looked to Bug Man. \"Do it, or we kill your biots. Do it, or we take out your family. We explain, as much as you can, you know... the whole thing. But if we don't stop this, we're all dead. Us last of all, down here on the ice. But everyone. The whole human race. The whole planet.\"\n\nPlath felt tears welling in her eyes. \"You woke me up for this? To vote on\u2014\"\n\n\"Not a vote,\" Wilkes said. \"We already took a vote. You're in charge, Plath. Sadie. Suarez will run security, and eventually we'll unwire some of these people, but right now, it's on you.\"\n\n\"Vincent?\" Plath pleaded.\n\nHe looked away, ashamed. \"It's on you, Plath. Whatever you decide.\"\n\nIn the end it was a Chinese missile that did it. The Chinese general responsible, once certain that his family was safe, tied a rope to a tree in one of his favorite countryside spots, and hanged himself.\n\nThere were very few functioning governments still left to do useful things like tally up the death toll of the Plague of Madness. But later, historical estimates would set the count at two hundred ten million, in thirty-six countries.\n\nFour million of those had come as a consequence of Plath's order. But, in the end, Burnofsky's gray goo did not make it off Manhattan. The human race was saved. Life on planet Earth would go on.\n\nIn the weeks that followed, Plath drank much more than she should have, sitting in the living room of what had been Lear's house. She shared the house with Wilkes, Vincent, and Bug Man. She tried not to drink before lunch, but she often failed. She tried to stop, but not very hard. Wilkes made efforts to get her to move on, but the very words died on her lips when she looked into Sadie McLure's haunted eyes.\n\nOnce, and only once, had Plath gone to look at Lear.\n\nLear sat chained in the dungeon that had once held Suarez. Plath had asked for the door to be opened so that she could see her. See the monster. The mass murderer.\n\nBut Lear had not responded to Plath, had seemingly not noticed that she was there.\n\nPlath stopped using that name, and reverted to Sadie. She had tried and mostly succeeded in accepting Noah's death. But she could not reconcile herself to what had happened, what she had done, to New York City.\n\nFour months on, Wilkes found her on the floor, choking on her own vomit after drinking an entire bottle of Lear's bourbon. It was terribly clear that Sadie McLure would, sooner or later, manage to kill herself in expiation of her sins.\n\nWilkes would not allow that. She went to Vincent, and to Bug Man, and slowly, so very gently, the biots went to work. And little by little, Sadie McLure forgot.\n\n# **TWO YEARS LATER**\n\nThe woman was probably in her early fifties but looked much older. She was dressed in clean but tattered clothing, layers of it, as if she had to be ready for any sort of weather. In the pocket of her patched coat she carried a crumpled black trash bag to use as an umbrella. London was out of umbrellas.\n\n\"That's her,\" a street kid said, jerking his chin and holding out his hand. \"That's old Mrs. Cotton.\"\n\nSadie pressed a small gold bar\u2014no bigger than a segment of Kit Kat\u2014into his hand and said, \"If you lied to us, kid, we'll find you.\"\n\nThe \"we\" in question included seven uniformed, heavily armed men who had fanned out on both sides of the street. London had quieted since the worst of the Madness, as it was commonly called, but it was still a wild place where street gangs ruled many neighborhoods. The \"we\" also included Wilkes, now somewhat changed as well. She still bore the strange flame tattoo beneath one eye, but she had grown out her hair into a simple blunt cut. She was dressed in a zippered black jumpsuit and carried a machine pistol over her shoulder.\n\nSadie waved Wilkes back a few steps and moved closer to Mrs. Cotton, keeping pace with her.\n\n\"I'm not a danger to you, Mrs. Cotton,\" Sadie said. \"I'm here to tell you about your son.\"\n\nThe woman stopped. She turned a scarred and ravaged face to Sadie. Such signs of abuse were common among the survivors of the Madness. Sadie could only imagine what this woman had endured.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I'm Sadie McLure.\" The name obviously meant nothing to Mrs, Cotton, and Sadie was relieved. A lot of stories were going around the newly revived Internet. There were even ridiculous rumors that Sadie McLure had actually ordered New York City destroyed. \"I knew your son.\"\n\n\"Alex? You were a friend of Alex?\" The woman peered skeptically at Sadie.\n\n\"No, ma'am, Noah. In fact... we were close. I was with him at the end.\"\n\nSadie led Mrs. Cotton to a small coffee shop, a place the older woman would never have been able to afford on the starvation pension and ration coupons the shaky government was able to pay her. But Sadie had gold, and gold made many things possible.\n\nThey bought weak coffee\u2014or at least part of the hot brew was coffee, with just a bit of wheat chaff. And they each had a biscuit.\n\n\"Were you his girlfriend?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sadie said.\n\nSilence. Nothing but the munching of the dry cookie. The sipping of coffee. Then, \"How did he do? At the end?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Cotton, Noah died a hero.\" Sadie did not elaborate. Mrs. Cotton did not seem to need it, and the truth was that Sadie's memories of Noah at the end were disjointed. Parts of what she thought she remembered seemed unrealistic. Parts of her memory seemed to fit poorly with other memories.\n\nWilkes stood a distance away, close enough to smell the coffee and overhear snippets of the conversation whenever the room was quiet. She had, of course, been involved in rewiring Sadie. She and Vincent had written a heroic end for Noah, an ending in which he single-handedly took down the Armstrong Twins and stopped Burnofsky.\n\nThere were elements of truth\u2014a good wiring always rests best on a foundation of some truth. But it was still a work in progress, connecting images of Noah to heroic pictures gleaned painstakingly from Sadie's memories of movies and books.\n\n\"Your son saved the human race,\" Sadie said, and believed it, mostly.\n\nMrs. Cotton nodded grimly. \"He was always a good boy.\"\n\n\"Yes. I loved him.\"\n\nMrs. Cotton's composure broke then, and tears filled her eyes. \"I couldn't... I didn't know how to reach him.... He had this job in New York....\"\n\n\"It was an important job. He was an important boy. Man, actually. Because he was definitely a man by the end,\" Sadie said.\n\n\"I'm glad you told me this,\" Mrs. Cotton said, though her face was anything but happy. \"Did you tell him?\"\n\n\"Did I tell him what?\" Sadie asked.\n\n\"Did you tell him that you loved him?\"\n\nSadie took her hand and squeezed it gently. \"Yes. I told him that I loved him. I told him that many times.\" Sadie glanced at Wilkes, who blushed and looked down. \"He loved me, and I loved him. I think that memory is all that's kept me alive.\"\n\nSadie sat for a while longer with Noah's mother and left her with enough small gold bars to take the edge off her poverty.\n\nShe and Wilkes walked down streets that still showed the bullet holes, the fire scorches, the wreckage of the Plague of Madness. But London had suffered this badly before in its long history and knew how to put itself back together. Crews were at work. There were police on the streets. Life was slowly returning.\n\nA century would pass before New York City could say the same.\n\n\"Now what?\" Wilkes asked.\n\n\"How much of what I told that woman was true?\" Sadie asked.\n\nWilkes met her gaze and waited, saying nothing. Finally she said, \"Now what?\"\n\nThey were in front of what had once been a pizza restaurant, but was now burned out and choked with rubble.\n\n\"How long has it been since you had a decent pizza, Wilkes?\"\n\n\"Long, long time,\" Wilkes acknowledged, peering into the restaurant. \"I think those ovens may still be usable. Of course someone would have to clean the place up. Get the gas working again.\"\n\n\"You have something better to do?\" Sadie asked. She stepped over the threshold, bent down, and grabbed hold of a broken table. \"Help me with this.\"\n\n# **TWELVE YEARS LATER**\n\nThree windows were open in Sadie McLure's brain.\n\nHer three biots sat immobile in the glass vial she wore on a chain around her neck.\n\nWhen business was slow at Poet Pizza, she would sit in a corner booth with her old friends, Anthony and Wilkes. Their daughter would tease the cooks while their baby son chuckled on his father's lap.\n\nTen thousand miles away to the south, Michael Ford, once known as Vincent, supervised the skeleton staff that maintained what had become, in effect, a prison.\n\nA prison with a single prisoner. Who sat in her cell, chained to the wall, screaming.\n\n_\"Meeee? Meeee?\"_\nMICHAEL GRANT likes to tell stories that will leave readers entertained, excited, and afraid to turn out the lights. He likes to make up characters who become like family members to his readers\u2014and then kill them. He likes to take readers to places they would never have imagined but can never forget. Michael Grant has no hobbies, he doesn't take vacations, he is not particularly friendly or charitable. He just wants to grab readers and leave them wrung out, trembling, and begging for more. Which, according to just about everyone who's read a Michael Grant book, such as _BZRK, BZRK Reloaded_ , and the Gone series, is exactly what happens. Michael is on Twitter @TheFayz, in case you want to talk to him. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Katherine Applegate, their two children, and far too many pets.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n# Copyright\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by Rachel Botsman\n\nHachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.\n\nThe scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.\n\nPublicAffairs\n\nHachette Book Group\n\n1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104\n\nwww.publicaffairsbooks.com\n\n@Public_Affairs\n\nOriginally published in hardcover and ebook by Portfolio Penguin in October 2017\n\nFirst Edition: November 2017\n\nPublished by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.\n\nThe Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.\n\nThe publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.\n\nIllustrations by Team (www.team.design)\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2017949042\n\nISBNs: 978-1-5417-7367-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-7368-4 (ebook)\n\nE3-20171012-JV-PC\n\n# Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Copyright\n  4. Dedication\n  5. Epigraph\n  6. Who Can You Trust?\n  7. Evolution of Trust\n  8. Introduction\n  9. 1. Trust Leaps\n  10. From eleventh-century traders to Alibaba: how trust works to cross barriers, calm fears and revolutionize what's possible.\n  11. 2. Losing Faith\n  12. Behind the devastating crisis in institutional trust\u2013and why we're now more likely to 'phone a friend'.\n  13. 3. Strangely Familiar\n  14. From sushi to self-driving cars\u2013some surprising lessons in persuading people to trust new ideas.\n  15. 4. Where Does the Buck Stop?\n  16. When trust crashes in the 'self-managed' digital world, who's accountable?\n  17. 5. But She Looked the Part\n  18. A cautionary tale about deceptive appearances, and the technology that could unmask fakers and frauds.\n  19. 6. Reputation is Everything, Even in the Dark\n  20. What drug dealers on the darknet can teach us about great customer service.\n  21. 7. Rated: Would Your Life Get a Good Trust Score?\n  22. When dystopian sci-fi turns into a reality and every little move you make is ranked, who wins and who loses?\n  23. 8. In Bots We Trust\n  24. But should we... and how do we make them ethical?\n  25. 9. Blockchain Part I: The Digital Gold Rush\n  26. From fei to bitcoin, the long road to setting money free. What will it mean for the City?\n  27. 10. Blockchain Part II: The Truth Machine\n  28. The golden promises of the blockchain: over-hyped or the trustworthy key to our digital future?\n  29. Conclusion\n  30. Acknowledgements\n  31. About the Author\n  32. Glossary of 'Trust' Terms\n  33. Notes and Further Reading\n  34. Index\n\n# Navigation\n\n  1. Begin Reading\n  2. Table of Contents\n\nIn memory of Pamela Hartigan, my friend and mentor.\n\n# What is trust?\n\nA confident relationship with the unknown.\n\n# Who Can You Trust?\n\n'In this extremely thought-provoking new book, Rachel Botsman educates and entertains as she reveals with expertise how our lives are already changing more than we know. A must-read for anyone interested in how the world works\u2013and will work in the future' Will Dean, MBE, CEO, Tough Mudder\n\n'Not only is the thesis completely compelling. It demonstrates, through a sequence of real-world case studies of projects, businesses and platforms, that the distributed trust model offers enormous promise if used wisely\u2013as well as enormous pitfalls if used unwisely. For good and sometimes ill, it has the potential to reshape everything we do, from our choice of babysitter to our choice of money. These are important messages from what is an important book' Andy Haldane, Chief Economist, Bank of England\n\n'A fascinating and well-researched study. Every reader will gain new insights into one of the great issues of our time: the shifting tides of trust' Geoff Mulgan, CBE, Chief Executive of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta)\n\n'Profound insights about how the digital age changes trust, wrapped in a compelling narrative of captivating and revealing stories. A rare book that will cause you to think deeply about your business, your relationships and your life' Don Tapscott, bestselling author of _Wikinomics_ and _Blockchain Revolution_\n\n'This book perfectly walks the reader through the past, present and future of trust as we know it. Rachel's expertise on this topic is unmatched. It's an absolute must-read for business leaders and everyday consumers alike' Nick Shapiro, Global Head of Trust and Risk Management, Airbnb\n\n'This is that admirable and all-too-rare book that gives you \"an idea to think with\" that helps to put new things in place. _Who Can You Trust?_ is a primer for a new world that sets you up to be a better citizen, consumer and parent. I quickly learned so much about so many things I wanted to know' Professor Sherry Turkle, author of _Reclaiming Conversation_ and _Alone Together_\n\n# Introduction\n\n'Abandon weapons first, then food. But never abandon trust. People cannot get on without trust. Trust is more important than life.'\n\nConfucius to his disciple Tzu-Kung\n\nI was getting married on the day the hammer fell on Wall Street. The date was 14 September 2008. I had been living in New York for almost a decade and had met my then fianc\u00e9, Chris, in a downtown dive bar called Eight Mile Creek. We were both 'city people' but we wanted to have our wedding in a rural, rustic setting. The place we finally chose was called Gedney Farm, nestled in the charming old Berkshire village of New Marlborough, Massachusetts.\n\n'So, you want to get married in a horse barn?' my father said when I showed him the venue, a Normandy-style red barn surrounded by lush meadows and abundant orchards. Getting into the spirit of things after that, he decided we should arrive at the venue in an old-fashioned horse and carriage. I went along with his Cinderella fantasy and climbed into an open-topped white carriage, complete with a driver and a footman, drawn by an old grey mare. The horse, on its last legs, was slow. It rained. I was late.\n\nAround eighty guests, our closest family and friends from all over the world, joined us for the occasion. Lit by candles and strings of Edison bulbs, the ceremony was traditional and very beautiful. The best man's speech was funny and the food was delicious, despite my finding a grasshopper about the size of my little finger in the green salad.\n\nSo there I was, at the heart of one ancient institution\u2013marriage\u2013built on trust and life-long commitment, while another\u2013Wall Street\u2013was imploding. Lost in the bubble of the celebrations, I didn't realize the outside world was in meltdown until around 9.30 p.m., when I finally noticed that, around the room, the warm glow of the Edison bulbs was competing with the brash blue glare of iPhones and BlackBerries as guests stealthily consulted their hand-held harbingers of doom. Family and friends who worked in banking were trying to absorb the barrage of messages flooding in. Could the impossible have happened? Lehman Brothers had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Bank of America and Barclays had pulled out of a deal that might have saved the 158-year-0ld firm. Merrill Lynch had agreed to be bought by Bank of America for roughly $50 billion* in an attempt to avert a financial crisis. Washington Mutual, Wachovia and HBOS in the United Kingdom were within a whisker of collapsing. The fate of another giant, American International Group (AIG), the vanguard of the credit default swap market, teetered in the balance.\n\nA couple of friends who were senior executives at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs apologized for having to leave, summonsed to 'red alert' emergency meetings. It would be a race against the clock to avoid the blind panic that would surely happen when the markets opened. Several other guests drank nervously and partied hard, not sure if they would be carrying their work belongings out in boxes the following day. We danced the Horah, a traditional Jewish wedding ritual, which ended with me being elevated on a chair and my husband being thrown precariously up in the air on a large white tablecloth. Another moment of trust. Guests whirled around us, clapped and made 'Oy! Oy! Oy!' noises. Meanwhile, outside the barn, the biggest global financial crisis in history was building up a head of steam.\n\nIt was, of course, the beginning of the nerve-shattering period when many businesses 'fell off a cliff' and the world's financial system came closer to collapse than at any time since the Great Depression. As we now know, the economic repercussions of the meltdown would engulf the world for many years to come. But my wedding day, rich with tradition, also marked the downfall of something more profound: public trust in institutions.\n\nWho was to blame for the crisis? What were the main causes? These questions were at the heart of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) created to investigate the banking collapse, and the answer was damning. 'The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,' the 525-page report found. 'To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.' In other words, the meltdown was an 'avoidable' human disaster.\n\nThe federal inquiry hammered the embarrassing failures of regulators, whom the report described as 'sentries not at their posts'. The finger was pointed squarely at the Federal Reserve for its failure to question widespread, egregious mortgage lending, overreliance on short-term debt and the excessive packaging and reselling of loans, along with many other red flags. According to the report, however, the main culprit was not the toxic financial instruments but the human failings that drove them: reckless risk-taking, greed, incompetence, stupidity and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics.\n\nIt wasn't the first nail in the coffin of institutional trust and it probably won't be the last, but the financial crisis struck deep.\n\nA loss of trust amounts to a lack of faith and confidence in 'the system' itself. What should we believe in if the system has failed us? Who, or what, can be relied upon? We begin to fear what else can go wrong. What other shortcomings we don't yet know about might lurk in the system? Fear, suspicion and disenchantment are deadly viruses that spread fast. The initial epicentre of the trust explosion was, understandably, with the banks. But it hasn't stopped there. Since the crisis, other scandals, other revelations, have seen the ripples of distrust touch government, the media, charities, big business and even religious organizations.\n\nLike the plot of some overblown soap opera or Jacobean tragedy, the episodes of unethical behaviour have come thick and fast, from the lurid, even criminal, to the just plain stupid and, sadly, routine. Each has chipped away at public confidence. The British MPs' expenses scandal; the false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); Tesco's horsemeat outrage; price gouging by big pharma; the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the dishonours of FIFA's bribery; Volkswagen's 'dieselgate'; major data breaches from companies such as Sony, Yahoo! and Target; the Panama Papers and widespread tax avoidance; the exchange-rate manipulation by the world's largest banks; Brazil's Petrobras oil scandal; the lack of an effective response to the refugee crises; and, last but not least, shocking revelations of widespread abuse by Catholic priests, other clergy and other 'care' institutions. No wonder a thousand headlines lament that nobody trusts authority any more. Corruption, elitism, economic disparity\u2013and the feeble responses to all of the above\u2013have pummelled traditional trust in the old institutions as fiercely as a brutal wind lashing ancient oaks.\n\nSignificantly, this crisis is taking place in a landscape of rapidly shifting and evolving technologies, from artificial intelligence (AI) to automation to the Internet of Things (IOT). We are already putting our faith in algorithms over humans in our daily lives, whether it's trusting Amazon's recommendations on what to read or Netflix's suggestions on what to watch. But this is just the beginning. We will soon be riding around in self-driving cars, trusting our very lives to the unseen hands of technology.\n\nAt the same time, many people are feeling so overwhelmed by the pace of change and the sheer amount of knowledge now available at a swipe or keystroke that they are beating a retreat to media echo chambers that narrow down information and reinforce already held beliefs. It becomes easy to ignore or simply not see contrary views. Technology, for all its pluses, also means falsehoods and 'fake news' can quickly spread through networks unchecked and with an unstoppable momentum. In fact, online misinformation on a grand scale\u2013and the potential for digital wildfires\u2013was listed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2016 as one of the major risks to our society. The result of those echo chambers and that misinformation? Our fears are verified, often baselessly. Our anger is amplified. The cycle of distrust is magnified. All in all, our faith in many institutions has been dragged to a critical tipping point.\n\nIndeed, recent gloomy poll numbers would have any politician or business leader in a sweat. For the past seventeen years, the global communications firm Edelman has been conducting an annual 'Trust Barometer', asking more than 30,000 people across twenty-eight countries about their level of trust in various institutions. The headline for the 2017 results was, tellingly, 'Trust in Crisis'. Trust in all four major institutions\u2013government, the media, business and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)\u2013is at an all-time low. The media suffered the biggest blow, now distrusted in 82 per cent of all countries surveyed. In the UK, the number of people saying they trusted the media fell from 36 per cent in 2016 to 24 per cent in 2017. 'People now view media as part of the elite,' says Richard Edelman, President and CEO of PR firm Edelman. 'The result is a proclivity for self-referential media and reliance on peers.' In other words, looking to reinforce what we already believe, often from people we know.\n\nThe Brexit vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump are the first wave of acute symptoms emerging from one of the biggest _trust shifts_ in history: from the monolithic to the individualized. Trust and influence now lie more with 'the people'\u2013families, friends, classmates, colleagues, even strangers\u2013than with top-down elites, experts and authorities. It's an age where individuals matter more than institutions and where customers are social influencers that define brands.\n\nBy asking challenging questions about the flawed structure and size of institutional systems, and who runs them, we are coming to another confronting realization. Institutional trust, taken on faith, kept in the hands of a few and operating behind closed doors, wasn't designed for the digital age.\n\nIt wasn't designed for an age of radical transparency, of WikiLeaks and Cryptome, where politicians and CEOs must imagine they are operating behind clear glass. Trying to hide, well, anything really, is a high-stakes gamble. It doesn't work in a world where PR puffery can no longer cover up dirty secrets or closed-door antics. Take a few recent examples of 'private' matters that have been spilled around the world: the sensitive user data of the extra-marital dating site Ashley Madison, Turing Pharmaceuticals' internal emails on its predatory drug pricing, secret Scientology manuals, Hillary Clinton's emails and even a private conversation that took place within a private palace garden between the Queen of England and the Metropolitan Police Commander about the rudeness of Chinese officials.\n\nIt wasn't designed for an age where people can transact directly on platforms such as Airbnb, Etsy and Alibaba. It wasn't designed for an era where it is predicted half of the workforce will be 'independent workers'\u2013freelancers, contractors and temporary employees\u2013within the next decade. It wasn't designed for a time where we have become dependent on tech powerhouses such as Facebook and Google which represent new forms of 'network monopolies' and platform capitalism. It wasn't designed for a culture where we want to control everything personally, from our bank accounts to our dates, with a swift click, tap or a swipe.\n\nSo should we be mourning the loss of trust? Yes, and no, because here's the thing: whatever the headlines say, this isn't the age of distrust\u2013far from it. Trust, the glue that holds society together, hasn't disappeared. It has shifted\u2013and the implications, for everything from hiring a babysitter to running a business, are massive.\n\nFor the past decade, I have been researching how technology is radically changing our attitudes towards trust. In 2008, I started writing my first book, _What's Mine is Yours_ , about the so-called 'collaborative' or 'sharing economy'. I was fascinated by how technology could unlock the value of idle assets\u2013cars, homes, power drills, skills, time\u2013but it was the trust ingredient, how technology could make us engage in behaviours that might previously have been considered a little creepy or outright risky, that became my obsession.\n\nEven then, the notion of building a marketplace based on letting strangers stay in other people's houses seemed ludicrous. Today, Airbnb, the home-sharing marketplace, is valued at $31 billion, making it the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world. In 2008, it was hard to see how detailed online profiles would give people the confidence to get lifts with strangers operating as cab drivers and using their own cars. Today, Uber is valued at $68 billion, making it one of the biggest companies in the world, larger than FedEx, Deutsche Bank or Kraft Foods. And then there is the explosion of online dating apps such as Tinder, where the average number of daily swipes is more than 1.4 billion with 26 million matches made daily. These are just a handful of examples where online tools are enabling us to have face-to-face interactions and entrust strangers with our most valuable possessions, experiences, even our lives, in previously unimaginable ways.\n\nConsider this: why do people say they don't trust bankers or politicians yet trust strangers to share a ride with them?\n\nOne conventional explanation is that people don't always tell the truth in surveys. That may be so, but there had to be more to this trust paradox. I had a hunch something deeper was happening. What if trust, like energy, cannot be destroyed and instead just changes form?\n\n_Who Can You Trust?_ charts a theory, a bold claim: we are at the start of the third, biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind. When we look at the past, we can see that trust falls into distinct chapters. The first was _local_ , when we lived within the boundaries of small local communities where everyone knew everyone else. The second was _institutional_ , a kind of intermediated trust that ran through a variety of contracts, courts and corporate brands, freeing commerce from local exchanges and creating the foundation necessary for an organized industrial society. And the third, still very much in its infancy, is _distributed_.\n\nA trust shift need not mean the previous forms will be completely superseded; only that the new form will become more dominant. For example, a small farming community may continue to rely on centuries-old local trust in some matters, but turn more often to the new town court to handle others.\n\nTrust that used to flow upwards to referees and regulators, to authorities and experts, to watchdogs and gatekeepers, is now flowing horizontally, in some instances to our fellow human beings and, in other cases, to programs and bots. Trust is being turned on its head. The old sources of power, expertise and authority no longer hold all the aces, or even the deck of cards. The consequences of that, good and bad, cannot be underestimated.\n\nThe explosive growth of the sharing economy is a textbook example of _distributed trust_ at play. But the theory is also a way to understand the rapid evolution of platforms like the darknet, where consumers are happily scoring everything from marijuana to AK-47s from 'untrustworthy' dealers. The darknet and the new era of digitally enabled app intimacy may sound as if they have little in common, but they share the same underlying principle\u2013people trusting other people through technology.\n\nDistributed trust explains why we are now feverishly scoring and rating everything from restaurants to chatbots to Uber drivers (and why passengers are rated, too), helping to shape, almost instantly, the rise or fall of all sorts of businesses, while also creating _reputation trails_ where one mistake or misdemeanour could follow us potentially for the rest of our lives.\n\nDistributed trust helps us understand why digital cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether could be the future of money, and how the blockchain (the underlying ledger technology that powers these cryptocurrencies) could be used for everything from tracking the source of foods or blood diamonds to selling our homes without the need for estate agents.\n\nDistributed trust helps us grapple with why and how we'll come to trust well-trained bots, whether they're giving us relationship advice, resolving our parking tickets, ordering our sushi or telling us if we have cancer.\n\nIndeed, I believe the real disruption happening is not technology itself, but the massive trust shift it creates.\n\nDistributed trust is not simply a new, idealistic flavour of techno libertarianism. There are many stories in this book that show how it can have negative, dark or disastrous consequences\u2013discrimination, theft and even death. Yes, technology can widen the circle of trust, unlocking the potential to collaborate and connect with unfamiliar strangers, but it can also erect and harden boundaries between us. Ratings and reviews may make us more accountable, even a little nicer, to our fellow human beings but our growing reliance on them also means some people will become forever tarnished, relegated to a kind of digital purgatory. And, in our rush to reject the old and embrace the new, we may end up placing too much trust, too easily, in the wrong places.\n\nIt's already becoming clear that the turpitudes of institutions, real or fabricated, have left many people dangerously receptive to alternatives, and ready to place unquestioning faith in a new, and some would say highly dubious, breed of trust arbiter. Distributed trust is far from foolproof and the questions that really matter are ethical and moral, not technical.\n\nThe first two chapters of this book pose a simple question: how did we end up here? They unpack why trust matters so much. The next three chapters explore the trio of conditions that make distributed trust possible\u2013trust in a new idea, trust in platforms and, finally, trust in other people or bots. This section explains how to adapt to building trust in this new era and what to do when it's lost. Critically, it asks who takes responsibility when trust is no longer centralized but distributed.\n\nElsewhere, the book travels to the depths of the darknet to understand why reputation matters so much, even to cocaine dealers. It goes inside the Orwellian-like trust-scoring system that is emerging in China and could determine everything from a citizen's job to whether they can get on a train or a plane.\n\nThe final chapters look to our digital future, particularly focusing on our rapidly evolving trust in artificial intelligence. If we make a habit of trusting intelligent machines, does it become harder to build trusting relationships with people? The glorified promises of the blockchain are explored. Will this digital ledger really become the 'Internet of Value', as many enthusiasts claim? Will the big banks end up 'taking over' this technology originally designed to cut out the middlemen?\n\nDistributed trust, enabled by new technologies, is rewriting the rules of human relationships. It's changing the way we view the world and each other, returning us to the old village model of trust in one sense, except that the community is global in scale and some of its invisible reins are being pulled by internet giants. Now more than ever it is critical to understand the implications of this new trust era: who will benefit, who will lose and what the fallout might be.\n\nWhy? Because without trust, and without an understanding of how it is built, managed, lost and repaired, a society cannot survive, and it certainly cannot thrive. Trust is fundamental to almost every action, relationship and transaction. The emerging trust shift isn't simply the story of a dizzying upsurge in technology or the rise of new business models. It's a social and cultural revolution. It's about us. And it matters.\n\n* 'Dollars' and the dollar symbol ($) refer to US dollars throughout.\n\n#\n\n# Trust Leaps\n\nFriday, 19 September 2014, was a historic day on Wall Street. From the moment the markets opened at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST), the ticker rocketed for one company in particular. It was called Alibaba. By the end of the day, the Chinese e-commerce giant had a staggering market capitalization of $231 billion. It was the largest global public flotation ever on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), dwarfing that behemoth known as Facebook and even Alibaba's giant rival, Amazon. Overnight, fifty-year-old Chinese businessman Jack Ma, the company's founder and current chairman, became a very, very wealthy man.\n\nA massive crowd lined the streets and packed on to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange that day to get a glimpse of the legendary entrepreneur. He was greeted like a rock star. 'What we raised today is not money, it's the trust from the people,' Ma told more than a thousand cheering admirers.\n\nIt was not, however, the charismatic and dynamic founder who rang the famed opening bell at the Stock Exchange. Instead, Ma opted to have eight Alibaba customers, five of whom were women, to stand on the podium to start the day of trading. He wanted to show he was true to his mantra, 'Customers first, employees second and shareholders third.' One merchant\u2013one of the millions of small businesses who trade on Alibaba's sites\u2013was Lao Lishi, a former Chinese Olympic diving gold medallist who sells wooden beaded bracelets. Another was Peter Verbrugge, an American farmer who currently holds the record for selling the greatest amount of cherries through Alibaba. The customers ringing the NYSE bell represented something very important to Ma\u2013how Alibaba has transformed the way Chinese businesses of all shapes and sizes can buy and sell a bewildering variety of goods, from clothes and nappies to live pedigree dairy goats and frozen chicken feet, inflatable sex dolls and even 'do-it-yourself abortion kits' to people all over the world.\n\nBut Jack Ma's story is not simply a fascinating rags-to-riches tale of entrepreneurial persistence. It also represents a remarkable feat in the delicate business of building trust.\n\nIt's a challenge to build any successful online marketplace where two sides need to trust one another, but what makes Ma's story extraordinary is that he achieved this in China. Traditionally, China is a society based on the concept of _guanxi_ , loosely translated as 'relationships'. Trust, in business as well as private life, exists between people in the same _guanxi_ : family, friends and people in the same village. People they know well over time, in other words, not strangers on a far-flung planet called the internet. In fact, it is common to _distrust_ people outside your own personal network. This can create a cultural impediment and business obstacle as people are more prone to avoid building new relationships where there is no close connection.\n\nI first went to Shanghai on business when I was twenty-five. I was part of a consulting project for a well-known brand looking to expand into Asia. Over the course of the first week, we shared an array of meals with our Chinese business clients. Lazy Susans spun, we ate delicious food at lunch and dinner, and we clinked beer glasses in toast after toast. The gatherings were warm and enjoyable but by day three I was wondering when we would get to the 'real' work. Rather insensitively, I didn't realize how important it was for Chinese businesspeople to spend a considerable amount of time socializing and getting to know you at the start of a relationship. 'In the West, we tend to reserve trust from the heart (affect-based trust) for family and friends and trust from the head (cognition-based trust) for business partners,' explains Professor Paul Ingram of Columbia Business School, who studies social networks. 'But in China, affect- and cognition-based trust are highly entwined even in business.' It's especially true in China that people only trust you after you have invested a lot of time upfront in proving yourself to be _trustworthy_.\n\nThat was what Jack Ma was up against. It was one of the rock-hard conventions of trust he would set about shattering.\n\nMa Yun, as he was originally named, was raised in Hangzhou, about a hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, during Mao's Cultural Revolution. The middle child of three, his parents were traditional musical theatre performers. Ma inherited their love of showmanship. He would later get a reputation for dressing up in elaborate wigs and leather gear, and belting out theme songs from the _Lion King_ at company events.\n\nMa wasn't a great student at school, but he was canny. From a young age, he realized the importance of mastering English. After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, tourists flooded to the area to see the beautiful lakes, temples and gardens. Every day, Ma would set his alarm early, around 5.00 a.m., and ride his bike to the Hangzhou Hotel. He would talk to the guests in English and offer to act as a guide, giving tours around the city free of charge. He did this for more than nine years. 'These Western tourists opened my mind because everything they told me was so different from the things I learned from school and from my parents,' Ma has said.\n\nOver the years, Ma befriended many tourists including a young American woman who suggested he take on an English name. Her husband's name was Jack, as was her father's. And so Jack he became.\n\nJack Ma would go on to become China's richest man in 2014, worth more than $19.5 billion, hauling himself to that lofty position with the aid of a shatter-proof resilience in the face of failure, a good dose of raw ambition, and another vital kind of trust\u2013trust in himself. He applied to Harvard ten times and was rejected on every occasion. (Who applies ten times?) He failed China's national university entrance exam twice. When he did eventually graduate in 1988 with a degree in English, he became a schoolteacher. To supplement his modest $3 a week income, he would buy and sell plastic carpets on the streets of Hangzhou. At heart, he was a businessman.\n\nWith China's economy steadily improving and ideological barriers falling in the early 1990s, Ma decided to quit teaching. He applied for more than thirty different jobs but missed out on them all. When he applied to be a police officer, he was told in four simple words, 'You are no good.' 'I even went to Kentucky Fried Chicken when it came to China,' Ma told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 'Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn't.'\n\nIt was in 1995, on his first visit to the United States, that his life took a fortunate turn. Ma had started Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency a year earlier, and went to America to help a Chinese firm sort out a financial dispute they were having with a US partner. It turned into a terrifying trip\u2013the American he had been sent to see was a con man who flashed a gun at him. He made his way to Seattle to stay with Stuart Trusty, a friend who happened to run one of American's first internet providers, VBN. Ma noticed a mysterious grey box with a screen sitting on his friend's desk. He wondered what on earth it was. 'Jack, it's not a bomb,' Trusty reassured him. 'It's a computer. Search for anything you want.'\n\nMa slowly typed in the word 'beer'. He doesn't remember why, possibly because it is easy to spell. A list of beers from Germany, America and Japan popped up, but noticeably no Chinese beers. Next, he typed in 'beer' and 'China'. No results. Keep in mind this was 1995. Netscape had just launched and Yahoo was an infant. Google would not launch for another three years. It was still the days of achingly slow dial-up internet. Nonetheless, Ma sensed something huge waiting in the wings.\n\nBack home, he started China Pages, a kind of online Yellow Pages for Chinese companies. 'The day we got connected to the web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house... we waited three and a half hours and got half a page,' he says. 'We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved [to my house guests that] the internet existed.' Ma eventually sold the directory business to the state-run Hangzhou Telecom for 1 million yuan (approximately $148,000), a very large sum of money at the time. Next, he headed to Beijing to advise the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation on ways to get Chinese companies to take up 'electronic commerce'. 'My boss wanted to use the internet to control small businesses but I wanted to use the internet to empower small businesses,' he says. What Ma really wanted to do was to start and build companies.\n\nMa's revolutionary vision was to help transform China's entire export economy, connecting small- to medium-sized Chinese businesses to Western customers and Western companies to a myriad of Chinese factories. Amazon and eBay had launched in the United States but nothing like this existed yet in China.\n\nToday, more than 80 per cent of _all_ goods bought and sold online in China are through Alibaba's various online marketplaces. Its spider-like corporate campus, with its gardens and open-plan workspaces, spreads over more than 150,000 square metres in Ma's hometown of Hangzhou. It houses tens of thousands of employees, and the other businesses Ma has since founded. There is Taobao (meaning 'hunting for treasures'), launched in 2003. It is like eBay, enabling people to sell virtually anything directly to each other, but it is more like a local flea market where you might land on a bargain or find something bizarre, such as live scorpions or soap made from the seller's own breast milk. There are hundreds of 'Taobao' villages scattered across China where a large proportion of their economy is based on people selling local goods on the platform.\n\nThen came Tmall in 2008, the online equivalent of a humungous glossy shopping mall, selling well-known global brands, from Disney to Burberry, directly to Chinese consumers. The Alibaba Group has 430 million annual active buyers, and one out of every three individuals in China has made a purchase from the marketplaces.\n\nOn the day of Alibaba's Initial Public Offering (IPO), in September 2014, the dynamic Ma was ebullient about his company's historic milestone. In interviews he gave there was one word that stood out: 'Trust. Trust us, trust the market and trust the young people,' Ma said. 'Trust the new technology. The world is getting more transparent. Everything you worry about, I've been worrying about in the past fifteen years.' Ma continued without a pause. 'Trust has to be earned, of course. Because when you trust, everything is simple. If you don't trust, things get complicated.' He made no fewer than eight mentions of the word 'trust' within the space of a minute.\n\nRight from the start, Ma knew the importance of building trust, especially in a culture like China's\u2013it's why he splashes the word about so generously. And we'll come back to how he set about doing just that. But first, it's worth unpacking the concept of trust itself. Like the rest of us, Ma would probably have trouble defining it\u2013what exactly do we mean when we talk about 'trust'? And what doors does it open?\n\nTrust is not a nicety, a kind of optional extra in life. We all depend on it in so many of our daily activities. How could we eat, drive, work, shop, get on a plane, go to the doctor, tell secrets, unless we trusted other people? 'Trust,' as political scientist Eric Uslaner says, 'is the chicken soup of social life.'\n\nFor instance, when I order takeaway sushi, I have to trust that the restaurant will use fresh ingredients, the kitchen will be clean, they will not abuse my credit card details and the deliveryman will not run off with my dinner. Trust enables small and large acts of cooperation that all add up to increased economic efficiency. 'Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time,' Kenneth Arrow, the American Nobel Prize-winning economist, once observed. 'It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.'\n\nTrust enables us to feel confident enough to take risks and to open ourselves up to being vulnerable. It means we can commit to people before we know the precise outcome or how the other person will behave. And that applies to something as minor as ordering sushi or as life-changing as marrying someone. If, before we bought or did anything, we thought we were going to be cheated or ripped off, then very little would get done.\n\nSocial scientists, psychologists, economists and others view trust as an almost magical economic elixir, the glue that keeps society together and the economy ticking over. That much is agreed. The definition of trust, however, has been widely debated for years. In fact, there are more academic papers on its definition than on any other sociological concept.\n\nIt's odd that we describe trust as being _built_ or _destroyed_ when it's not a structure or a physical thing (except maybe in the form of a handshake or a paper contract). Like 'happiness' or 'love', it's one of those words that we tend to think of as a universal idea. And, the same as love, trust has many faces. It's not like some kind of predictable engine that comes with a manual and only functions in one precise way. Trust varies from situation to situation, relationship to relationship. Put simply, trust is highly contextual.\n\n'So what does the word trust mean to you?'\n\nIt's a question I've asked hundreds of people over the past five years\u2013entrepreneurs, politicians, leaders of large companies, scientists, economists, bankers, designers, academics, students and even five-year-olds. Their answers are fascinating and remarkably different. The question usually elicits a pause and then a kind of _mmm, I'm thinking_ noise. 'It's hard to define, right?' they'll say. Yes, it is. Trust means different things to different people. The most honest answer I have ever been given was, somewhat ironically, from an insurance broker. 'Giving my wife my phone without clearing the history! That is trust,' he said.\n\nFor many people, it is about confidently relying on another person. For example, 'Trust is being able to rely on my husband\/doctor\/friends.' In this instance, trust is being referred to as an attribute that rests _in_ someone specific, generally someone we are familiar with. The more we interact with a person over time, the more confident we become about how they will behave, that they are trustworthy. That kind of trust is known as _personalized_ trust.\n\nG _eneralized_ trust is the trust we attach to an identifiable but anonymous group or thing. As one of the MBA students in my course at the University of Oxford's Sa\u00efd Business School put it, 'Trust is like a contract that guarantees an outcome.' For example, I trust the postal service to deliver my mail. It is also common to mix the two different types of trust. For instance, I might have high personal trust in my bank manager but fragile trust in my bank as a financial institution.\n\nOne of my favourite definitions of trust came from one of my son's friends. He was five at the time and had come round to our house to play. My son, Jack, told him over tea that I was writing a book. They were disappointed it was not about _Star Wars_ or _Harry Potter_ but still asked fascinating questions. I asked them what trust meant to them. 'Trust is when the ice-cream man says he will give you ice cream, he gives you the ice cream because he wants to, and I don't worry about him not giving me the ice cream,' replied my son's friend in one breath. Wow, out of the mouth of babes. It is in fact very close to the definition given by the pre-eminent German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who wrote, 'Trust is confidence in one's expectations.'\n\nI am on the board of the National Roads and Motorists' Association (known as the NRMA), one of the most trusted brands in Australia. It's like the AAA in the United States or the RAC in the United Kingdom, basically the people who will come and fix your car if it breaks down, wherever you are. Recently, a woman phoned into the NRMA call centre. She sounded very distressed. She was breathing heavily and was clearly crying. Turns out, she was driving down the motorway when she realized she had passed the exact spot where her son had crashed and tragically died a few years ago. She pulled over on to the side of the road and started to have a panic attack. The first number she rang was the NRMA. A roadside assist personnel got to her within minutes. He sat with her for more than two hours. They listened to the radio together. They talked about her late son. He didn't leave until she felt ready to drive again. I was so touched by this story but also curious to find out, why did she call the NRMA? I mean, nothing was wrong with her car. Why not the police, an ambulance, her husband or a colleague? 'I knew you would come,' was her answer. That is trust.\n\nOf the hundreds of definitions of trust I have studied, most can be reduced to one simple idea: trust is an evaluation of outcomes, of how likely it is that things will go right. Or put another way, trust is fostered when the likelihood of an undesirable outcome is low. The five-year-old was right, sort of. Five-year-olds tend to be more naturally trusting than grown-ups, having had a lot less experience in being let down or in worrying about distant outcomes. For adults, trust becomes more complicated and it works in the heart as well as the head. As Morton Deutsch beautifully put it, trust is 'confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than what is feared'. Trust is a mixture of our highest hopes and our deepest worries.'\n\nIf you look up images for the word 'trust', all sorts of graphics will come up, often with some kind of danger lurking in the picture. People swinging between trapezes, for instance. Two hands, reaching out to meet but not quite touching. A person in mid-fall relying on another person\u2013typically with their arms stretched out\u2013to catch them. A sleeping lion with a mouse prancing a few centimetres from his nose. The common element in all of these areas is a gap, a grey area where something unknown happens. The images are conveying the powerful elements of trust: vulnerability and expectation.\n\nImagine a gap exists between you and something unknown. A stranger you need to rely on, a restaurant you have never been to before or your first run in a self-driving car. The gap between the known and unknown is what we refer to as risk. Indeed, risk can be defined as the management of uncertainty that matters. There are some uncertainties that are simply irrelevant. For example, if I am a farmer in England the possibility of heavy rain is an uncertainty that matters to my livelihood. But if I am managing a clothing factory in, say, China, the uncertainty about the weather in England is irrelevant. When there are no unknowns, when we can guarantee an outcome, there is no risk. For example, we know for certain the sun will rise in the morning.\n\nTrust and risk are like brother and sister. Trust is the remarkable force that pulls you over that gap between certainty and uncertainty; as the Nike tagline says, 'Just do it'. It is literally the bridge between the known and the unknown. And that's why my definition of it is simple:\n\nTrust is a confident relationship with the unknown.\n\nWhen you view trust through this lens it starts to explain how it enables us to cope with vulnerability, place our faith in strangers or just keep moving forward. It shows why just enough trust is a critical ingredient of innovation and entrepreneurial success like that of Jack Ma. Companies such as Apple, Amazon and Netflix constantly challenge assumptions, take smart risks and allow their employees to dive into uncharted waters to discover new ideas. But they also know how to get customers to trust new offerings, so that the initial risk of trying something new becomes quickly irrelevant.\n\nJack Ma realized the internet presented an opportunity to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that existed in China but had been suppressed by years of Communism. What he spotted early on was how technology could enable trust\u2013make unknown sellers seem familiar to people. But how to build a new kind of trust between strangers in a country based on _guanxi_?\n\nAside from those ancient traditions at work, less than 1 per cent of the country's population was online when Alibaba first launched. And of that 1 per cent, fewer still would even consider buying something off a website. People were unfamiliar with the concept of the internet, let alone e-commerce. Indeed, there was no history of e-commerce, no online payments system nor even a way quickly and safely to send goods. So how did Alibaba crack the trust code?\n\nWhen we are trading goods over the internet, typically neither party knows each other. We are wary of scams and products not being as promised. If I buy, say, a Fitbit from an eBay seller, is it really brand new or is it refurbished, fake or even stolen? A lot can go wrong. There is always the chance of an unwanted outcome or a risk. Ma realized that to create trust between buyers and sellers online, he needed to use technology to reduce uncertainties or lower the risk enough to allow transactions to go ahead.\n\nHe also recognized that the bigger the trust problem, the greater the business opportunity. Ma was a bit like Steve Jobs; he knew there were enormous advantages to developing the solution to an obstacle that stood in the way of a market, rather than waiting for others to solve the problem. Take payments. How do I know you will pay? How do I know you will send what I paid for? It's a classic chicken-and-egg trust problem.\n\n'For three years, Alibaba was just an e-marketplace for information. What do you have? What do I have? We talk for a long time, but don't do any business, because there is no payment,' says Ma. 'I talked to the banks. No banks wanted to do it. Banks said, \"Oh no, this thing would never work,\" so I didn't know what to do.' Ma knew all too well that if he launched a payment system without the required licence, he would be breaking China's strict financial laws. He could have gone to jail. But he decided to do it anyway. Why? 'It is so important for China and the world to be able to trust the system,' says Ma.\n\nIn 2004, the company introduced an online system called Alipay ( , meaning 'payment treasure'). Instead of a direct payment like PayPal, Alipay takes money upfront from buyers and puts it in an escrow account.* The seller then ships the product and the funds are only released after the buyer has inspected the goods and confirmed that they are satisfied. It's a simple example of reducing uncertainties, in this instance over settlement. 'So many of the people I talked to at that time, for Alipay, said, \"This is the stupidest idea you've ever had,\"' recalls Ma. This was really stepping on the toes of China's highly regulated banking sector. But Ma didn't mind if people thought the idea was risky or even stupid, 'As long as people use it.' And use it they did. Today, more than 400 million people use Alipay to pay for goods. It is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion as a standalone business. In 2015, approximately 70 per cent of _all_ online payments in China\u2013whether it was for goods, rent, utilities, phone charges or tuition fees\u2013went through Alipay. Ma always had big dreams.\n\nPayments aside, how did people know they could trust the unknown small businesses and individual traders Ma wanted to put online? Take thirty-eight-year-old Wang Zhiqiang, one of the sellers who rang the bell on the day of the IPO. Zhiqiang was once a migrant rural worker struggling to make a living. He had tried his luck as a vegetable street vendor, a construction worker and a takeout deliveryman. Despite being poorly educated, Zhiqiang had always been interested in computers and the internet. He moved to Beijing's Zhongguancun area, known as China's Silicon Valley, where he took on many manual labour jobs for more than six years. By 2006, he had saved enough money to buy a computer, which he took back to his hometown, a small rural farming village in north China's Shanxi province. After overcoming the challenge of getting the internet installed in his home, he opened an online shop selling just a few local products such as rice and soybeans. His friends and family wondered what on earth he was trying to do. In 2008, while the Olympic Games were in full swing in Beijing, Zhiqiang got the break he needed. He opened 'Farmville', not the popular game but an online shop selling all kinds of fresh produce grown by the local villagers. Sales quickly soared to more than 200 products per day. Today, his monthly net profits are more than 80,000 yuan (approximately $13,000) and he has become well known online as 'Wang Xiaobang'\u2013in this context, 'bang' means a warm-hearted person who would like to help others. But how did so many people come to trust the legitimacy of this unknown vendor from a remote area?\n\nThe answer is, at least in part, down to a service Alibaba launched in 2001, called TrustPass. For a seller to get TrustPass certification, they had to go through a third-party identity and bank account verification process. Alibaba also helped sellers create their own official-looking brands and virtual storefronts. Zhiqiang, for instance, would take colourful pictures of rural farm life and close-ups of the fresh products he sold as they were farmed or harvested. He wanted his store to feel 'local' and connected to the suppliers. TrustPass marked a breakthrough for Alibaba, not just in terms of trust but also money.\n\nOn average, certified TrustPass sellers were receiving up to six times more genuine enquiries than non-registered sellers. This gave Alibaba the perfect excuse to start charging small businesses (most services had been free up until this point). 'It made customers who paid for their status appear more _trustworthy_ ,' says Porter Erisman, a close friend of Ma and long-time employee. 'It made those members still clinging to their free accounts seem _less_ trustworthy. After all, if they had such a good business, why weren't they willing to pay up a little to prove it?'\n\nAlibaba's liquid gold was not online shopping but trust. And that is why, when Ma discovered that it had been badly broken, he was livid. In February 2011, it became known that around a hundred members of Alibaba's 5,000-strong sales team had been taking financial kickbacks in exchange for allowing fraudulent sellers to skip the verification process and set up accounts. The deceitful behaviour had been going on for more than two years. The impact? Two thousand three hundred and twenty-six high-volume sellers of low-quality or even fake products had been verified as 'Gold Suppliers'.\n\nMa knew he had a grave trust issue on his hands. He had to act quickly. He had to send a loud and clear message to protect his company's reputation. So the salespeople who had knowingly set up the accounts and those employees who had looked the other way were all fired. David Wei, the then CEO, and COO Elvis Lee also resigned, even though they were not implicated in the fraud. Both were falling on their swords to accept responsibility. 'One of our most important values is integrity. That means integrity of our employees and integrity of our online marketplaces as trusted and safe places for our small business customers,' said Ma. 'We must send a strong message that it is unacceptable to compromise our culture and values.' His actions were clearly validated. In 2016, the Alibaba Group overtook Walmart as the world's largest retailer.\n\nMa has proved in spades to the Chinese (and to the rest of the world) that trade does not require a prior or close personal tie in order to work. And strangers won't, as a matter of course, betray you.\n\nThe story of Alibaba is a telling illustration of how technology is enabling millions of people across the world to take a _trust leap_. A trust leap occurs when we take a risk and do something new or in a fundamentally different way.\n\nTrust leaps create new possibilities; they break down barriers and help us form new relationships; they enable us to mash up ideas and memes in unexpected ways; and, as in the example of Alibaba, to open up new markets, new networks and new alliances that would once have been unthinkable. Trust leaps carry us over the chasm of fear, that gap between us and the unknown.\n\nImagine the first time people switched from bartering real goods to using paper money. Bartering is intuitive\u2013I give you a chicken in exchange for a metal pot. Money meant people had to trust that these flimsy pieces of printed paper had real value, and would retain that value. They had to trust that the institutions issuing the money, usually governments and banks, would determine the right value. That is a trust leap.\n\nDo you remember the first time you put your credit card details into an internet site? That is a trust leap.\n\nI remember a heated conversation I had with my dad when I was eighteen. I had seen a nice-looking second-hand navy blue Peugeot for sale on eBay. It was within the price range my parents had set me to buy my first car. From the photos, it looked in good condition. My dad, then a chartered accountant, asked me if I knew what 'a market for lemons' was. I didn't back then. Over lunch, a mini lecture followed on George Akerlof's economic theory about problems of uncertainty over quality of goods. To put it simply, Akerlof argued that in a market there are good used cars and defective ones ('lemons'). The buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a car or a lemon. Dad argued that this is what happens in spades on eBay because we couldn't drive or inspect the car. He also pointed out that the seller's pseudonym was 'Invisible Wizard', which did not exactly inspire confidence. So instead of using eBay, we went to the car dealer not far from home, the same dealer my dad had bought my brother's car and three other cars from in the past. To my dad, eBay seemed like an irrational way to buy goods. It wasn't a trust leap he was ready to make in 1999.\n\nThe first time we leap, it feels a bit weird, even risky, but we soon get to a point where the idea seems normal. Our behaviours transform, often relatively quickly. And when others see that enough people have survived the leap and benefited from it, millions will follow. My father is now somewhat of an eBay addict. He would probably consider buying a car on eBay these days (then again, maybe not).\n\nTrust is the conduit through which new ideas travel. Trust drives change.\n\nThroughout history, humans have demonstrated a remarkable propensity to change the way we do things\u2013bank, trade, travel, consume, learn and date. To understand just how good we are at taking trust leaps we need to go way back in time, way before the internet or even the printing press were invented.\n\nOne day in the year 1005, a handwritten letter crossed the Mediterranean. It was filled with the troubled words of Sumhun ben Da'ud, an eminent merchant who lived in Sicily. He was furious with his business partner, Joseph ben 'Awkal, who had ignored Sumhun's repeated requests to pay Egyptian creditors the hundreds of dinars they were owed. As the total monthly expenses of a middle-class family living in Egypt were no more than three dinars, these were very significant sums. Word was spreading to other traders across the region that neither of the business partners could be trusted. 'My reputation is being ruined,' lamented Sumhun.\n\nSumhun and Joseph were part of a close-knit group called the 'Maghribi traders', Jews who left Baghdad during the political turmoil of the tenth century and settled in the Maghreb, the coastal region of north Africa. Around 150 years ago, more than 1,000 of their personal letters were discovered in almost perfect condition in the storeroom of an ancient synagogue in Fustat in Egypt. The letters provide an intriguing window into the lives of the traders and the role they played in transforming long-distance trade.\n\nSay a merchant based in Old Cairo wanted to sell his textiles and spices in Palermo in Sicily. He could travel long distances by boat\u2013but sea voyages were treacherous and time-consuming. Or, instead of travelling himself, he could use overseas agents, and the agents could handle everything from unloading the ships to selling the goods in local markets, to settling the odd bribe on the merchant's behalf.\n\nToday this sounds like a relatively straightforward idea, but at the time it required a massive trust leap. Possibilities for deception and corruption were high. An agent could lie about prices, skim money or simply steal the goods altogether. And when something bad happened, it could take months for the merchants to find out. Formal trade regulations and legal contracts, as we know them, did not exist. The Maghribi merchants faced a problem: they had no way of knowing what the hired agents were up to on the other side of the Mediterranean.\n\nWhen one party has less information than the other, economists call it _information asymmetry_. Economist Kenneth Arrow first described the concept in 1963, in the context of healthcare. Doctors generally know more about the value and effectiveness of a given medical treatment than patients do. They are in a powerful 'expert' position and patients will tend to follow their recommendations. Arrow noted how sometimes the doctor might manipulate the asymmetry to his or her advantage, for instance, recommending costly drugs or an operation that is not necessary.\n\nInformation asymmetry is all around us because it is rare for two people to have perfect and equal information in any kind of exchange. The life insurance broker who knows what clause 221 of a complicated policy really means; the Alibaba seller Rakjuk Kft who knows if the top-quality Angora goats he sells really are 'well-bred' champions, 'free from parasite' and 'fully red-blooded', as advertised; the second-hand car salesman who knows the real history of a cute little Fiat 500; the Airbnb host in Cape Town who knows if their place really has two bedrooms (or if one is a sort of pseudo-loft in the kitchen only accessible by a precariously propped-up wooden ladder) and the sweeping ocean views shown (or has a postage-stamp view of something blue if you hang off the right-hand corner of the balcony and use binoculars); and the overseas agents who know if they are selling the merchant's frankincense or olive oil for fair or dodgy prices. Information asymmetry creates future unknowns and the very need for trust.\n\nSo how did the Maghribi traders get the agents in far-off lands not to lie, cheat or steal in the absence of direct supervision? The system they came up with was so ingenious that it opened the modern era of long-distance trade between strangers.\n\nThe Maghribi traders had the same religion, common family ties and, most importantly, shared the same motive of ensuring their agents did the right thing. They were living in the era of _local trust_ and had high levels of _social capital._ It's an idea that has fascinated sociologists for centuries, notably Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Putnam and James Samuel Coleman. 'Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to the properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals\u2013social networks and the _norms of reciprocity_ and trustworthiness that arise from them,' Putnam explains in his influential book, _Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community_ , first published in 2000. Putnam argues that close-knit suburbs have given way to 'exurbs' and 'edge cities'\u2013vast anonymous places where people spend more time commuting to work, at the office and watching TV alone, and less time socializing with friends, neighbours, community groups and even family.\n\nSocial capital\u2013shared values, bonds and support\u2013can be found in a whole array of networks and communities. For instance, a group of neighbours who keep an eye on one another's homes to make the street safer. A school that holds a garage sale to raise money for a local homeless shelter. A stranger who drops your wallet into the police station after finding it left on a bus. A former colleague who helps you land a new job. 'Out of such shared values comes trust, and trust has a large and measurable economic value,' writes Francis Fukuyama in his 1995 classic book _Trust._ 33\n\nThe merchants formed a coalition with a system of collective sanctions. The tight-knit group would frequently write and talk to each other, openly sharing information about good agents and those up to no good. However, they couldn't just rely on shaming the cheaters. Merely identifying them was not enough to discourage bad behaviour. Rewards for acting honestly and responsibly were needed as an incentive against the short-term gains cheating offered.\n\nThe Maghribi traders designed a simple reputation-based system where the most trustworthy agents were rewarded with the most business. If one agent ripped off a merchant, the entire trading network subsequently shunned him. All the merchants were required to take a collective vow never knowingly to employ crooks. The agents knew their success in the long run depended on repeat business. The traders were able to set aside their fears of getting scammed because both parties knew honesty would pay. (That was why Sumhun ben Da'ud was so upset with his business partner.)\n\nWhat's more, it turned out that it didn't matter if the merchants weren't aware of every wrongdoing; the threat that they could find out was enough to make the agents behave honestly. If people believe they are being observed and judged, it makes them behave better, even if they are not actually being watched all the time.\n\nJust like Jack Ma would do a thousand years later, the traders created a system to reduce the unknown enough for people to take a risk and do things differently. Through simple accountability mechanisms, they were able to expand their local network into international trade across geographic, language and cultural boundaries.\n\nTrust leaps expand what is possible, what we can invent and who can be an inventor. Trust leaps extend the reach of our collaboration and creations, opening up new horizons of opportunity. That is why trust matters _so_ much and why establishing confidence in the unknown has been a central part of innovation and economic development over the course of history. Just ask Jack Ma, the boy who was told he was no good for anything, who took a trust leap on himself and persuaded a nervous nation to leap with him.\n\n* An escrow account is generally a holding fund where money is held by a third party on behalf of two other parties making a transaction.\n\n#\n\n# Losing Faith\n\nChances are you have never heard of an American woman called Jean Heller. She was a young reporter just a couple of years out of graduate school when she uncovered a dark secret the United States government had been hiding for more than four decades.\n\nIt was this. Between the years of 1932 and 1972, 600 African Americans living in Tuskegee, one of the poorest counties in rural Alabama and with the highest syphilis rates in the nation at the time, had been used as human guinea pigs by the United States Public Health Service. It was one of the most unethical medical research experiments the country had ever seen and would become known\u2013rather blandly, in light of what it represented\u2013as the 'Tuskegee Study'.\n\nIn the experiments, the county's black farmers, many illiterate, were subjected to painful spinal taps, daily blood draws and, when they eventually died, autopsies. The men were offered free hot lunches, transportation to and from hospitals, free medicine and free burial services as incentives to enter the study programme. The farmers were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Of the 600, 399 of them were syphilitic, while 201 did not have the disease but were used as controls. Doctors merely informed all participants they were being treated for 'bad blood'. These trusting men, disadvantaged and easily manipulated, became pawns in what James H. Jones, author of _Bad Blood_ , identified as 'the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history'.\n\nShockingly, the farmers were left to suffer the ghastly ravages of syphilis, which can include blindness, deafness, dementia, heart disease, paralysis and eventually death. And not knowing they had the disease, the men unwittingly passed it on to their wives and children. 'The Tuskegee Study began ten years before penicillin was found to be a cure for syphilis and fifteen years before the drug became widely available,' wrote Heller in her story published on 26 July 1972, in the _New York Times_. 'Yet, even after penicillin became common, and while its use probably could have helped or saved a number of the experiment subjects, the drug was denied to them.'\n\nWhy? Because the very purpose of the study was _not_ to cure the participants of syphilis. The goal was to observe the long-term effects of the disease and to determine through autopsies if untreated syphilis affected black bodies the same way it affected white ones. 'As I see it,' one of the doctors explained, 'we have no further interest in these patients until they die.'\n\nHeller's story became front-page news and generated widespread public outrage. Members of the US Congress reacted with shock, denying they had known what was going on. The egregious research was stopped immediately, but the fact that it had continued over four decades was the result of a lot of people turning a blind eye for a very long time.\n\nResponding to the outcry, congressional investigations led to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections, to monitor ethical standards. Federal laws were also created, requiring Institutional Review Boards to oversee clinical research and ensure adequate protection of all study participants.\n\nTwenty years later, the government, right from the top, was still apologizing for the 'moral and ethical nightmare' of Tuskegee. 'It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy,' President Bill Clinton said in a press conference in 1997, standing alongside eight elderly survivors of the study. 'To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again... An apology is the first step, and we take it with a commitment to rebuild that broken trust.'\n\nThis shameful chapter in medical research history shook the foundations of trust between Americans, especially black patients, and the medical system for a long time afterwards. It's only recently, however, that anybody has tried to quantify the scale of the trust fallout.\n\nAfrican-American men today have the worst health outcomes of all major racial, ethnic and demographic groups in the United States. The life expectancy of black men at age forty-five is three years less than for their white counterparts. It is caused by multiple factors, including disparities in income, diet and healthcare access. But could the differences also be linked to the general African-American distrust of healthcare providers that grew out of the Tuskegee Study? And if so, to what degree?\n\nThese are questions that intrigued two researchers, Marcella Alsan at the Stanford Medical School and Marianne Wanamaker, an economist at the University of Tennessee. After crunching data from various national population and health surveys, in 2016 the pair confirmed what other researchers had hypothesized: that high levels of mistrust existed among African-American men _decades_ after the Tuskegee Study was exposed. The difference was that Alsan and Wanamaker put a precise number on its life and death effect.\n\nWhen someone doesn't trust their doctor, typically they stop going for check-ups or for care when they need it. The researchers deduced that, as a general principle, this has led to a decrease in life expectancy of 1.4 years among black men over forty-five. Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was that more than a third of the life-expectancy gap\u2013between older black men and their white equivalents\u2013could be attributed to fallout from the disclosure of the Tuskegee experiment. It's a staggering revelation: life expectancy has dropped for millions of men who didn't live in Alabama and had nothing to do with the Tuskegee Study because of broken trust\u2013or to put it another way, compounding mistrust.\n\nDr Joseph Ravenell gave a wonderful TED talk in 2016 on this very problem that continues today. He pointed to the fact that high blood pressure is one of the leading causes of death among African males over fifty, a medical problem that could be prevented with timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment. So why is it so deadly for black men? 'Because too often high blood pressure is either untreated or under-treated in black men, in part because of our lower engagement with the primary healthcare system,' says Ravenell. 'Some of our earliest research on black men's health revealed that for many, the doctor's office is associated with fear, mistrust, disrespect and unnecessary unpleasantness.' So people skip going to the doctor, especially if they feel fine. Indeed, Ravenell has found in his research that many black men trust their barbers far more than they trust their doctors.\n\nIt doesn't matter that regulations and ethical standards have since been put in place; the echoes of Tuskegee still linger and affect some people's decisions. The findings also tell a bigger story: they show how one trust-busting incident can create a generational scar against an institution or system that takes decades to heal. And sometimes the damage is too deep to repair.\n\nIt would be comforting to think that trust-shattering incidents like the Tuskegee Study were all in the past, the lessons learned and acted upon. The truth is that institutional trust is in greater jeopardy now than ever before. For a stunning illustration of why ordinary citizens feel more betrayed than ever by elites and those in power, and why those elites themselves are heading into a twilight zone, we need only look to the Panama Papers.\n\nIt began with a message\u2013anonymous, of course. 'HELLO. This is John Doe. Interested in data?' The recipient was Bastian Obermayer, a thirty-eight-year-old investigative reporter for the German newspaper _S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung_. It was sometime late in 2014 when the mysterious message appeared on the reporter's laptop. Obermayer was sitting in his flat in a quiet neighbourhood in Munich at the time. 'We're very interested,' he quickly typed back.\n\nThe source replied in encrypted chat that he or she was going to leak a mountain of highly confidential data, 'more than you have ever seen'. The source made it clear upfront that he didn't want money, only justice. 'I can't explain my rationale without making my identity clear... but I want to make these crimes public,' Doe replied.\n\nOver the course of 2015, more than 11.5 million of the documents that became known as the Panama Papers were transferred. They represented forty years' worth of digitized records ripped from the servers of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The amount of data was staggering; we're talking 2.6 terabytes, and it included 4.8 million emails, 2.1 million PDFs, 3 million database files, 1 million images, as well as other confidential contracts, letters, bank records and property titles. The documents would turn out to be the greatest single data drop in journalistic history, 2,000 times larger than the 2010 Cablegate coup, when WikiLeaks released more than 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that had been sent to the United States from 270 consulates and embassies around the world. These cables contained allegations of corruption and revealed numerous unguarded comments such as US embassy staff referring to Vladimir Putin as an 'alpha-dog', Hamid Karzai as being 'driven by paranoia' and a comparison of the then Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler.\n\nThe Panama Papers revealed that between 1977 and 2015, the firm Mossack Fonseca had created more than 200,000 offshore shell companies in tax havens around the world, for world leaders and their families including President Putin and Kojo Annan, son of the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, celebrities such as footballer Lionel Messi, and many other important global elites. But beyond the revelations it laid bare, the leak itself represents a remarkable trust story.\n\nImagine you have been handed an immense cache of secret documents. What would you do?\n\nJournalists have, by nature, an obsession with scoops, with being first. But after working non-stop for more than two months, Obermayer realized he was in way over his head with the small team at his German newspaper. The volume of data was daunting. He needed help, lots of it. So he took the unusual step of sharing the files with hundreds of other journalists from around the world.\n\nObermayer first reached out to Gerard Ryle, someone he deeply respected and had worked with before on the Luxembourg and HSBC leaks. Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a non-profit based in Washington, DC. It was set up in 1997 to create a network of journalists around the world to expose global scandals. It was, for example, the ICIJ who first revealed the war contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan that were unfairly awarded to companies that had donated large sums to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush.\n\nRyle is an Irish-born reporter. He is a calm and softly spoken man. He is the kind of person you can imagine not talking much at a dinner party but saying the one thing everyone remembers. A veteran newshound, he is the embodiment of an investigative journalist, ready to shake every tree and go down every burrow to find the truth, to make sure he gets a story right. He became Director of the ICIJ in 2011.\n\nIn June 2015, Ryle and Obermayer organized a secret meeting on the thirteenth floor of the National Press Club in Washington. Staff from rival news outlets like the _Guardian_ , BBC, _SonntagsZeitung_ and _Le Monde_ gathered around a long conference table. During the meeting, the journalists decided the project needed a code name. Prometheus was agreed upon, after the Titan from Greek mythology who stole the secret of fire from the gods. Before they could get access to the documents, the journalists had to sign a basic non-disclosure agreement. It required them to operate under only two rules. First, to share everything they found, and second, to publish on the same day, at the same time, and Ryle had the power to set the publication date.\n\nAll the leaked documents were stored in a searchable database program named Blacklight. If you wanted information on a specific name, for instance 'Ian Cameron', the database would run a search and in a matter of minutes produce a CSV file with all the matching documents. Some of the clients, however, were harder to identify\u2013Mossack Fonseca addressed some of the more secretive ones by code names like Winnie the Pooh or Harry Potter.\n\nWorking collaboratively, local journalists\u2013from Iceland to Nigeria to Russia\u2013could piece stories together in ways that would have been almost impossible to do from a newsroom in one country. 'While one journalist is looking at Indian data, it might lead them to Brazil, or France, and then suddenly you've got this trust-building exercise where the Indian journalist shares information with the French journalist,' explains Ryle.\n\nA critical member of the ICIJ leadership team was thirty-three-year-old Spanish-born Mar Cabra who heads data and research. Her colleagues describe her as a 'data genius'. Mar distinctly remembers the day a colleague discovered Messi among the client list. 'A message appeared in the virtual newsroom saying, \"Oh my god, I found the football player Lionel Messi!\" The other journalists were like, \"Oh my god, Messi.\"' Once one person had found Messi in the documents, everybody had found Messi.\n\nAfter nine months of painstakingly combing through tens of thousands of documents, the journalists were exhausted and stressed, and champing at the bit. Many times, Ryle had to calm jittery journalists whose natural instinct was to start reporting on the injustices they had discovered. 'It took a lot to keep everyone holding the line,' he says. The journalists were spread out across time zones, working in different languages and based in countries with different social and political environments. Ryle was not technically their boss and he couldn't force them to do anything they didn't want to do. At the end of the day, everyone was legally free to report as they saw fit. Yet, remarkably, the story remained a secret for nearly a year.\n\nRyle knows a thing or two about what makes journalists tick. 'A journalist's biggest weakness, whether they like it or not, is their ego. But on this project, we had an awful lot of selflessness going on,' he says. 'I tried to give them a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.' The prospect of a bigger and better story if they all worked together was used as a carrot, but Ryle knew he also needed a stick. 'I made it clear that if they broke the trust once, the ICIJ will never work with them again.'\n\nTen minutes before the agreed embargo was due to expire, an unexpected message appeared on Twitter: 'Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it's about corruption.' It was tweeted by Edward Snowden. Juliette Garside was sitting in the offices of the _Guardian_ with her bosses and the rest of the Panama Papers team when it came. 'We had our fingers hovering over the button to go live with our story but we were respectfully waiting for the exact embargoed time,' she says. 'Then the Snowden tweet appeared and all hell broke loose. Everyone in the room was shouting \"Go, go, go!\"'\n\nOn Sunday, 3 April 2016, at 8 p.m. German time, dozens of news organizations around the world started publishing front-cover stories about the Panama Papers. Just hours after publication, thousands of people took to the streets of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik to express their outrage and to call for their prime minister to quit. The papers revealed that Sigmundur Dav\u00ed\u00f0 Gunnlaugsson had a secret offshore tax account called Wintris Inc., in the British Virgin Islands, that he used to hold investments with his wealthy wife. He reportedly avoided more than 500 million Icelandic krona (approximately $4 million) in taxes on the wealth. To make matters worse, he had set up the account in 2007, while Iceland was on the brink of a financial meltdown. Gunnlaugsson resigned shortly after the leak.\n\nBastian Obermayer, the whistle-blower's original contact, was one of the first to discover the links to Vladimir Putin in the files. He repeatedly came across the name Sergei Roldugin, a Russian concert cellist. It turned out that the cellist had been a friend of Putin since they were teenagers and was godfather to the president's daughter, Mariya. It was reported that Roldugin owned a Moscow bank called Bank Rossiya that had allegedly handled billions of dollars in transactions with offshore companies.\n\nIn all, 29 of the billionaires featured in _Forbes Magazine_ 's list of the world's 500 richest people, 12 serving or former world leaders and 140 politicians were named in the Panama Papers. The documents implicated the king of Saudi Arabia; Ian Cameron, the late father of former UK prime minister David Cameron; six members of the House of Lords; Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, former vice president of Iraq; and Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine.\n\nIn itself, the appearance of a name in the files was no proof of wrongdoing; there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hold money in offshore companies and trusts. A foreigner, for example, buying a vacation home, may set up a local shell company to purchase the property. Indeed, Mossack Fonseca vigorously denied having broken any laws, as did many of its clients. Even so, the avalanche of information provided damning examples of how the rich and powerful can exploit offshore tax regimes and strip countries of tax revenues that most believe they deserve to pay.\n\nThe public outrage was loud and vehement. Here were the rich finding ways to grow even richer by avoiding taxes the average person must pay. Here were leaders essentially salting away money for which tax should morally be payable for the benefit of the very countries they were governing.\n\nWas this all we could expect from those at the top level of society, those who are meant to serve the public good?\n\nThe feeling of disillusionment that followed the leak wasn't just about money; it was about fairness and equality. Why did the wealthy, powerful and elite get to play by different rules? The revelations left the social contract in tatters: it destroyed the tacit understanding that we all work hard, pay our taxes and are 'in this together'.\n\nIn revealing to the average person what went on behind the scenes, the Panama Papers confirmed one of the key reasons why institutional trust is eroding at an alarming rate; many people feel let down and left behind, watching in dismay as the elites and authorities in charge seem to thrive and act unethically, at the very least. To borrow the title of a book by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, trust is facing a Great Divide.\n\nInstitutions, as the eighteenth-century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico observed, are essentially social structures made up of a history of practices, values and laws that are accepted and used by many people. We often think of institutions as something physical\u2013grand university buildings, ancient stone churches, the Houses of Parliament\u2013but they can also be an idea, constraint or a social norm. Marriage, for example, is an institution. So is the family unit or the British monarchy. Religion, property rights or other legal constitutions are institutions. 'The simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are structures within which we organize ourselves as groups,' writes the historian Niall Ferguson in _The Great Degeneration_. 'You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when it is in the hive. Institutions have boundaries, often walls.' In other words, concrete or conceptual, they are valued building blocks of rule and repetition on which societies are built. They shape our behaviour and how we interact with each other.\n\nTrust in institutions bobs and dips with scandals, recessions, wars and changes in government. In the past, it was much easier to hide wrongdoings, such as Tuskegee, for years, even decades. Now, in a digital age, shoddy institutions and the leaders and elites at their helm are much more likely to be exposed and lose our trust quickly, sometimes for good. A deep loss of faith in banks, governments, the media, the church or other elite institutions is not a new phenomenon. Go back to any other civilized age and you'll find examples, such as the Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier Scandal of 1872 where a sham company was used as a front to bribe US congressmen and to funnel money to its construction projects. The scandal became a symbol of post-Civil War corruption. And then, a couple of years later, there was the Whisky Ring, exposed in 1875, involving hundreds of politicians, distillers and distributors who conspired to avoid payment of taxes by reporting lower alcohol sales. Unprecedented, however, is the extent and rate of the breakdown of trust we are now witnessing between citizens and institutions, between the everyman and the elites. Alarmingly, survey after survey of public sentiment across countries and age groups tells a similar, woeful tale.\n\nIn the 1970s, post-Watergate and the Vietnam War, when trust in government and the armed forces had slumped, Gallup began asking Americans how much confidence they had in their major institutions, such as banks, media, public schools, organized religion and Congress. Approximately seven in ten Americans believed they could trust key institutions to do the right thing most of the time.\n\nOver forty years on, the same Gallup survey continues. In 2016, it revealed that the confidence in fourteen institutions averaged at only 32 per cent. Confidence has fallen to historic lows across every single major institution, bar two\u2013small business and the military. When the survey first started, 75 per cent of Americans said they had 'a great deal or a fair amount of' trust and confidence in the federal government in Washington in handling international problems, and 70 per cent had confidence in the government for handling domestic problems. Those figures are now at 49 per cent and 44 respectively. For Congress, the numbers are even worse, plummeting from 42 per cent in 1973 to 9 per cent now. Even the Supreme Court, once a bastion of trust in society, has suffered a major decline\u2013from 45 per cent in 1973 to 36 per cent today. But it's not only governmental organizations where trust has eroded. Public faith has also taken a hit when it comes to banks (60 to 27 per cent); big business (26 to 18 per cent); the church (65 to 41 per cent); and newspapers (39 to 20 per cent).\n\nIn terms of age groups, millennials are the most doubting. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics, 86 per cent of them distrust financial institutions. Three in four millennials 'sometimes or never' trust the federal government to do the right thing and a staggering 88 per cent 'sometimes or never' trust the media.\n\nThe plunge isn't limited to the United States. The story is similar across Western Europe and Britain. Respected pollsters Ipsos MORI have tracked people's trust in twenty-four different occupations in the United Kingdom, from politicians to hairdressers, for more than thirty years. Nurses come out on top as the most trusted, with a stellar rating of 93 per cent. But in this kind of survey, the category to watch is the one with the sharpest decline. It shows how easily once mighty institutions can crash and burn. According to Ipsos, the big loser this time round was the clergy. When the Ipsos poll started in 1983, 85 per cent of the people trusted the clergy to tell the truth. It was the most trusted profession. By January 2016, the clergy had fallen 18 percentage points to come in as only the eighth most-trusted profession overall. Consider this: the average Briton now trusts the random stranger they meet on the bus or in a supermarket to tell the truth more than they trust a member of the clergy on the other side of a confessional.\n\nSo why is trust in so many elite institutions collapsing at the same time? There are three key, somewhat overlapping, reasons: inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass); twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts and the rich and powerful); and segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to other voices).\n\nFor institutions to retain credibility and our confidence, there must be penalties\u2013loss of power or position, fines\u2013when they break the rules or the rules become meaningless. Take something clear-cut like traffic regulations. In Britain, the legal convention is to drive on the left. If over the course of, say, a week, we saw hundreds of cars veering down the wrong side of the road without any consequences, the power of the traffic rule would quickly dissolve. Similarly, rogues within institutions must be seen to pay or be punished. When they get off scot-free, our faith in the institution is shaken. And in recent years, we've seen many leaders get off scot-free. Consider banks. How did the crash of 2008\u2013the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression\u2013result in the jailing of only a single investment banker and minimal reform of Wall Street? What did that do to our trust?\n\nOver the past couple of decades, the banking industry has had its skirts lifted to reveal some very grubby underwear. From Enron to Arthur Andersen, Freddie Mac to Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers to Bear Stearns, AIG to Northern Rock, Nick Leeson to Bernie Madoff, the BHS pension funds fiasco to the Libor scandal, the list goes on, and it has taken a hard toll on trust. Perhaps the biggest blow, though, has come from the fact that only a handful of CEOs, the 'captains of finance' who played a role in creating the financial crisis, faced any form of punishment. The few who lost their jobs, most notably Ken Lewis of Bank of America and Dick Fuld, the former CEO of fallen Lehman Brothers, walked out the door with multimillion-dollar golden parachutes. The message is clear: if you are rich and powerful, you can break the rules, as long as it makes a lot of money. It's an acute case of moral hazard; when things went belly up, the bankers didn't face any real consequences.\n\nSome bankers, such as Madoff and Leeson, proved inherently untrustworthy. But for the most part, banks are not filled with bad people; it's more a case that people working in banks are operating in a toxic culture with a perverse incentive structure that permits\u2013and even breeds\u2013unethical behaviour and misaligned interests. They acknowledge as much themselves.\n\nLabaton Sucharow, a respected law firm based in the United States, conducted an independent survey to find out how financial insiders view other professionals within their industry. More than half of respondents believed that their competitors engaged in illegal or unethical behaviour. Nearly a quarter admitted they would engage in insider trading if they could get away with it and just under a third believed that financial services professionals might need to engage in illegal or unethical behaviour to be successful. 'The succession of scandals means it is simply untenable now to argue that the problem is one of a few bad apples,' admits Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. 'The issue is with the barrels in which they are stored.'\n\nRising star Andy Haldane, a Yorkshireman, is currently chief economist at the Bank of England, working alongside Carney. He has become a key figure in the debate on financial regulation calling for 'reformation'. Indeed, in 2014, _TIME_ named Haldane as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for being 'the central banker not afraid to be blunt'. 'The significance of these findings is not the precise percentages, as striking as these are,' says Haldane in response to the Labaton findings. 'More fundamentally, it is because of what they reveal about finance's perception of itself, the mirror it holds to the social identity of finance... It is the sociology and psychology of banking and bankers that needs to change, as much as their finances.' The problem is, can you regulate culture?\n\nFaith in the financial institution will not be restored unless the behaviour of banking changes and we see more in the way of serious punishment or penalties for those in the rotten barrel. The systemic breakdown of trust in financial institutions comes down to this application of different rules for different folks. 'Along with the other rising inequalities we've become so familiar with\u2013in income, in wealth, in access to politicians\u2013we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability,' writes American political commentator and author Christopher Hayes in his fascinating book _Twilight of the Elites_. 'We cannot have a just society that applies the principles of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful.'\n\nWhen it was revealed in 2015 that over 11 million Volkswagen vehicles were knowingly programmed with software, so-called 'defeat devices', which can dupe government emissions tests, CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned. His pay-out post 'dieselgate' was a staggering 15.9 million euro. Likewise, no individuals or institutions have taken a serious hit following the 2016 Sir John Chilcot inquiry, which found that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) had been misrepresented in order to justify the invasion of Iraq following the attacks on the World Trade Center. I distinctly remember, in 2003, watching the news as the 'war on terror' began, bombs lighting up the Baghdad skyline. More than a decade of military interventions followed, unleashing astronomical human destruction and massive financial costs. When the long-awaited Chilcot findings, a 2.6 million-word report, were published in June 2016, the verdict was unequivocal: the legal basis to invade Iraq was 'far from satisfactory'. The report confirmed that the 'intelligence' about Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs was 'flawed' and exaggerated. The British prime minister's justifications may have destroyed the trust of the British voters but no politicians from the time, including Tony Blair and President Bush, were held truly accountable. It hasn't helped that both those leaders have been defiantly unapologetic.\n\nAs professors Alsan and Wanamaker proved with the Tuskegee Study, specific events can trigger rampant mistrust of entire systems. If politicians can take us into war under false pretences, we start to wonder how we can trust the wider process of decision-making in government. If Chuck Blazer, the ex-member of FIFA's advisory committee, accepted bribes, corruption must be pervasive in other sporting organizations. If we can't trust the behaviour of bankers, the financial system must be broken. If we can't trust journalists to report accurately on the financial crisis, the Iraq War or the presidential race, the press must be failing us as a credible source of facts. If we can't trust the Catholic clergy to report abuse, perhaps it means the leaders of the church are only loyal to the institution, not the people they are meant to serve.\n\nIt's as if the safety net we once relied on\u2013our trust in the wider society and its sterling institutions\u2013has been ripped away and we're in a spiralling trust freefall. It's not only that corrupt individuals are getting away with bad deeds; as the Panama Papers showed, the moral compass at the top of society is also spinning wildly.\n\nIt is easy to see why 'loss of trust' in established institutions has become both a mantra and a real crisis of our times. The problem is further amplified by the fact that many of us are trapped in echo chambers of information shared by 'like-minded' people, where we hear this message over and over.\n\nOn 29 June 2016, Facebook made an announcement about changes it was making to its personal news-feed algorithm. 'We are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed,' wrote Facebook's engineering director Lars B\u00e4ckstr\u00f6m. The statement sounded fairly innocuous but what it meant was significant; the feed would now promote content posted by friends over content by traditional media outlets.\n\nGiven that an estimated 41.4 per cent or more of traffic to news sites comes from Facebook, the change seems likely to bring about a critical decline in referral and reach for publishers. More significant, though, was the way the new Facebook algorithm represented a profound shift in the diversity of opinions and news we see, the things that challenge us or broaden our worldview.\n\nSociologists describe the innate tendency to associate and connect with people similar to us as _homophily._ These similarities might be dimensions such as ethnicity, age, gender, education, political affiliation, religion and occupation or, say, where we live. We also cluster around niche interests such as whether we like pug dogs, Thai food or playing chess. The internet amplifies homophily, sorting people into online neighbourhoods on social channels like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. It becomes much easier to find crowds of people who think, live and vote like we do online than offline. It creates loud and polarizing echo chambers with less space for constructive disagreement, debate or enlightenment.\n\nNearly two-thirds of Americans get news on social media, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. What's more, Facebook is the number-one source of news for two in three of its users. That's nearly half of the US population. The algorithm tweak means we are limiting our exposure to opposing perspectives, whether it's on a presidential race, climate change, safety of vaccinations or ISIS. It's hard for alternative viewpoints and contradictory information to break into someone's echo chamber. For the most part, we see ideas and news we are likely to agree with.\n\nIf you were surprised by Trump's presidential victory or the Brexit vote, you may well be living in what Eli Pariser, author and co-founder of Upworthy, pinpointed back in 2011 as the 'filter bubble' effect. 'The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economy and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste\u2013all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable,' President Obama said in his farewell speech on the evening of 10 January 2017. 'And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that's out there.'\n\nIn the aftermath of the EU referendum, Tom Steinberg, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, provided a powerful illustration of the filter bubble epidemic. 'I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,' he wrote. But to no avail. The algorithm must have assumed he wasn't interested. 'The filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook's custom search that I can't find anyone who is happy despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today and despite the fact that I'm actively looking to hear what they are saying.'\n\nPeople are more likely to describe 'a person like me' as the most credible source of information. A friend or, say, a Facebook friend, is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. 'The mass population is relying less on newspapers and magazines and instead chooses self-affirming online communities,' says Richard Edelman. The Facebook algorithm is proof of a new 'world of self-reference'. Not only do we become victims to our own biases but it is also easier to cherry-pick stories that inflame our outrage. Distrust of institutions breeds more distrust until the fearful meme becomes contagious.\n\nIt is no coincidence that Trump pulled off a victory to become president in 2016 during a crisis of faith in traditional authorities. Here, supposedly, was a Washington 'outsider', who during his campaign promised to 'drain the swamp', clean up the political establishment. The former _Apprentice_ host and impulsive falsehood-circulating tweeter, told voters he would 'shake things up' and do everything differently, from banning Muslims entering the United States to scrapping the Affordable Health Care Act (Obama Care). He promised to be the opposite of the 'very, very stupid people' currently leading America. During his campaign, Trump was consistent about one thing\u2013he would 'Make America Great Again' (the Brexiters had a similar killer slogan: 'Take Back Control').\n\nHis claim to 'tell it like it is' represented an intoxicating form of transparency for many people. 'Those princes who do great things,' wrote Machiavelli, 'have considered keeping their word of little account, and have known how to beguile men's minds by shrewdness and cunning.' In other words, Trump may have lied during his campaign, but as Stephen Colbert, the American talk-show host, explained to his viewers, Trump embodies 'truthiness': ideas which 'feel right' to many people.\n\n'A deep recognition of the slow death of the meritocratic dream underlies the decline of trust in public institutions and the crisis of authority in which we are now mired,' says Christopher Hayes. 'Since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and scepticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed.' Trump's rise was a product of suffering.\n\nAt the 2016 Democratic Convention, President Obama observed that Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State, was the 'most qualified candidate ever' to run for the presidency. The fact that the election was even a contest came down to trust.\n\nI should disclose at the outset that some time ago I worked for the Clintons at their Foundation for almost three years. I respect Senator Clinton, a lot, but she personifies a breed of authority that more and more people are no longer willing to put their faith in. Senator Clinton's vote for the Iraq War; her handling of the Benghazi attack; a murky web of connections to the Foundation; her use of a private email server (and its mysterious destruction); and the revelation that on several occasions she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches to the same Wall Street bankers she promised to regulate\u2013all these made her seem like a typical old-school politician and, fatally, an insider. 'Let's face it: our biggest problem here isn't Trump\u2013it's Hillary. She is hugely unpopular\u2013nearly 70 per cent of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest,' wrote the documentary-maker Michael Moore in an incredibly prescient blog post predicting the win of Trump, twelve months before the election. 'She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected.'\n\nThe story of Brexit is a similar tale. In a heated interview with Faisal Islam of Sky News on 3 June 2016, Michael Gove, the UK's justice secretary and leader of the campaign to leave the European Union, said, 'I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.' It was a disturbing comment that really stuck in my mind. He also compared ten Nobel Prize-winning economists who signed a letter warning people about leaving the European Union to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler who denounced physicist Albert Einstein in the 1930s. They were highly controversial points to make but summed up the 'post-truth' world, a term named as the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2016. 'Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.' As Swiss-born British philosopher Alain de Botton tweeted on 15 November 2016, 'New doublespeak dictionary: elite = wretched, educated = dumb, sceptical = whining, regretful = reactionary, expert = idiot.'\n\n'Why did nobody notice it?' the Queen famously asked professors and academics at the London School of Economics during a briefing in 2008 on the turmoil of the financial crisis. Almost a decade later, it's a question being asked of experts in general, from scientists to pollsters to economists. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, YouGov found more than half of Leave voters trusted neither academics nor economists. Two-thirds of Leave supporters\u2013compared to just a quarter of Remainers\u2013said it was wrong to rely too much on 'experts' and better to rely on the 'ordinary people'. So why don't people trust experts? We need to believe experts are honest, have integrity and the public's best interest at heart. And sometimes we are encouraged not to trust them by vested parties because they tell 'inconvenient truths' about climate change, the economy or, say, tobacco.\n\nBrexit and Trump are the first wave of acute symptoms emerging from one of the biggest trust shifts in history: trust and influence now lie more with individuals than they do with institutions.\n\n'Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,' Picasso famously said. It applies to trust as much as art. As institutional trust collapses, it allows space for new systems to emerge. Technology is enabling trust across huge networks of people, organizations and intelligent machines in ways that are unbundling traditional trust hierarchies. Signs of distributed trust are appearing. Blockchain technologies, for example, which have the potential to create a digital record of history that no single person has the power to erase or change. The blockchain offers a new trust model, one where trust doesn't need to be mediated by a centralized authority such as a government or a bank but where people who might not otherwise trust each other can agree on a single truth or a common record of events.\n\nThe rise of multi-billion-dollar companies such as Airbnb and Uber, whose success depends on trust between strangers, is a clear illustration of how trust can now travel through networks and marketplaces. Tesla may look like a smart car company but in fact distributed trust underpins the grand master plan of Elon Musk, the company founder and CEO. 'You will be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,' Musk has said. This will allow owners to earn money as their self-driving car picks up passengers while they are at work, on vacation or not using it for whatever reason.\n\nIt's still early days, but we have seen distributed trust powering the rise of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Patreon; social media platforms; peer-to-peer lending; open-source projects such as GitHub; Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); information-sharing hubs such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia; citizen science projects; and many other person-to-person agreements and decentralized transactions that bypass traditional institutions and middlemen.\n\nIts potential is massive but there's a catch. While distributed trust may sound like a techno-libertarian dream, the flip side is that the same tools that are being used to connect strangers all over the world can also be used in deeply unsettling and nefarious ways. Consider the profound changes in the way information and knowledge reached the public, the dark side of media abundance.\n\nFrom 1962 to 1981, news anchorman Walter Cronkite was a nightly presence in millions of American homes. His kind and even-keeled voice, distinctive trimmed moustache, and calm poise, rich with gravitas, inspired deep confidence with his viewers, more than twenty million a night. Fronting CBS's _Nightly News_ , he guided the country through a tumultuous period of tragedies\u2013nuclear explosions, the civil rights movement, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Vietnam War and the death of Martin Luther King. Cronkite removing his black-framed glasses and blinking back tears to break the news of the death of John F. Kennedy became one of the defining images of the day. 'Oh boy!' he memorably exclaimed on seeing the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969. He often embodied the emotions and thoughts of millions.\n\nIt was an era when the nightly news was a routine event day in, day out, central to many people's lives. Cronkite, who died at the age of ninety-two, was very much an old-fashioned newsman and his appeal was simple\u2013a huge number of Americans respected, liked and trusted him. He earned a reputation as an objective straight-shooter. If Walter said it, it must be true. In 1972, he topped the rankings of the national 'trust index' poll with 73 per cent, making him the most trusted public figure in the country.\n\n'And that's the way it is...' Cronkite would say in his signature sign-off at the end of his broadcast. He would recite the line with humour, irony or sadness depending on the news of the day. It was a kind of definitive sign-off that newscasters couldn't get away with today\u2013and probably never will again.\n\nCronkite benefited from working in a time when people had far more trust in the media and authority. During the nineteen years he was the voice of the national news, there was, obviously, no blogging. Three broadcast networks\u2013CBS, NBC and ABC\u2013enjoyed a monopoly; one that has now been broken into shards by the web and fragmented by millions of news producers and sources fiercely competing for views and clicks. On Facebook, the 'mainstream' news now fights for a piece of our Snapchat-sized attention spans with our friends' posts of birthday photos and pics of what they had for dinner. Cronkite earned the trust of his audiences but he also wasn't broadcasting in a 'post-truth' era. People's faith in the trustworthiness of the media has gone up in flames, a fire partly of its own making but also fanned, you could argue, by those in positions of power or influence who want to discredit a probing media. What's more, there is little consensus on who is telling the truth. The internet has made it harder to sort fact from fiction and easier to undermine the truth.\n\nIt is estimated there are more than 3 million blog posts written in the world per day. One of the largest blog sites is Reddit, co-founded by Steve Huffman in 2005, when he was barely more than a teenager. Reddit is a gigantic collection of more than 853,824 message boards called 'subreddits', which range from the general\u2013Sleep to Music to Politics to Food\u2013to the niche. For example, 'Weird Animals Without Necks', where more than 30,168 neckless-animal enthusiasts post snapshots of, well, animals that appear to be neckless. Reddit also features some of the most misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic and hateful content on the internet, including the subreddits Pics of Dead Kids, Date Rape, Jail Bait, Beating Women, Watch Niggers Die and Fat People Hate\u2013all of which Reddit eventually banned, but it took more than two years for that to happen. Reddit's claim to fame is that it is a democratic web forum for free speech and niche beliefs; anyone can say almost anything, even if it is outrageous, toxic or false.\n\nHuffman started Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, his college buddy from the University of Virginia. The goal was simple: to become the 'front page of the internet'. The site is designed so that users 'upvote' items they think are valuable and 'downvote' those deemed to be unworthy, meaning the crowd curates what appears on Reddit's front page. It's a powerful meme engine, where stories take root and go viral. Huffman has almost reached his front-page dream\u2013today Reddit has become the seventh most popular website in the United States, with more than a quarter of a billion unique visitors each month. Reddit is huge.\n\n'Spez' is how Huffman, thirty-three, is known on Reddit. He has spent years as a troll on the internet and doesn't try to hide that he can hack sites and is known for fake messaging his friends' girlfriends. In November 2016, he used his skills and editing privileges to tamper secretly with Reddit users' comments in the pro-Trump subreddit \/r\/The_Donald from 'fuck u\/spez' (\/r\/The_Donald became the unofficial online home of the Trump campaign where an AMA\u2013'Ask Me Anything'\u2013thread was used by Trump). Huffman redirected the abuse targeted at him to the moderators of the thread, without, he thought, leaving a trace of his tampering. But quickly realizing it was not a smart move to 'troll the trolls', as he put it, he fixed the comments back to their original state within the hour.\n\nNot soon enough. The deceit, as is often the case on the internet, was rapidly discovered. It could have been viewed as simply a naive move from a young entrepreneur under pressure. Instead, the reaction was loud and intense\u2013the meddling was regarded as akin to censorship. A couple of days after the incident, Huffman posted an apology to the community, called 'TIFU' (an acronym for 'Today I Fucked Up'). 'I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit,' he wrote. 'I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community [the trolls] by meeting them on their level. It did not go as planned.'\n\nSecretly editing another user's threads was, by Reddit standards, a gross ethical violation of power, which eroded the trust of its vast online community. Users felt betrayed that Huffman had abused his gatekeeping privileges. Lucas Schlessinger, a user from Vancouver, wrote: 'Terrible abuse of power. Makes me think what other comments have been edited by Reddit admins.' The issue was not just the act in itself but the possibilities it represented.\n\nOn Change.org thousands of users signed a digital call-to-arms, a petition calling for Huffman to resign as CEO. It seems, however, that Huffman, like the bankers and politicians, won't face any real repercussions for his behaviour. He merely got a slap on the wrist, just a very public one.\n\nHuffman's abuse of power may have been short and contained but it represents something profound. We stand on the threshold of a chaotic and confusing period; a murky grey zone where institutional trust is being systemically undermined and distributed trust, for better or worse, is rising to take its place. As we overturn traditional institutions and old sources of authority, a new era of hyper-individual accountability has to take hold; one where we understand the factors that come into play when traditional gatekeepers, referees, experts and authorities are sidestepped, undermined or removed. It calls for a new kind of vigilance and decision-making. The sheer scale of the changed system presents immense challenges. For example, which assaults on trust do we choose to challenge and pursue? Why Huffman's behaviour, while a million other dubious blogs and trolls pass as good coin? It's a fallacy to believe we can take power out of individual hands. Instead, we need to think more deeply about the consequences of individual acts\u2013and where responsibility ultimately lies.\n\n#\n\n# Strangely Familiar\n\nMy parents, for the most part, didn't believe in cocooning their children in cotton wool. They wanted my brother and me to learn how to navigate our world through first-hand experience, by boldness and trial and error, even if it hurt a little. If we fell from a climbing frame, off a bike, a wall or even a horse, there wasn't a collective gasp. We were one of those families where minor calamities were greeted with a no-nonsense, 'Straight back up.'\n\nBut there were certain things, dangerous things, my parents taught us to avoid. Don't put your fingers in the plug socket; don't answer the front door to people you don't know; don't put plastic bags over your face; don't touch the fire or boiling kettle; don't cross the road before looking both ways; and so on.\n\nI vividly remember the day my mum asked me, 'Do you know what a stranger is?' I was four and a half and about to start kindergarten, about to be out in the world in a new way. We were on our way home from getting my first school uniform, an awful olive green dress with a chequered green and white shirt, complete with green woollen knickers. As we walked down the high street, she made a point of explaining that a stranger is not necessarily a good or bad person, just someone we don't know. There were 'safe strangers' that were okay to trust. For example, police officers, lollipop ladies and firefighters.\n\nAnd then there were others. Strangers in cars. My mother repeatedly explained that if someone stopped a car and told me to get in, I was to run and shout loudly. I was good at that. If someone unexpected was going to pick me up from school, even an aunty or Mum's friend, we had a code word to share, 'green tomato'. Compared to the rest of her somewhat rational parenting, her fear around strangers kidnapping me in their cars bordered on paranoia.\n\nSo there is a beautiful irony that, as an adult, my work focuses on ideas that require trust between strangers, and even strangers in cars. It's a once unthinkable form of trust that has sprung up around the world. And we're only just beginning to understand how it works.\n\nAnshul Shuka is a twenty-nine-year-old doctor who lives and works in Gurgaon, a fast-growing city on the fringes of southwest New Delhi. He regularly takes trips to Jaipur to visit his family and friends. It's a long journey of around 240 kilometres, and depending on the traffic it can take him close to four hours in his dark grey Hyundai. Rather than make the drive alone, Shuka offers his three empty seats to people who want to take a similar journey around the same time. He 'sells' the seats for 600 rupees (approx. \u00a37.00) per passenger, advertising them on BlaBlaCar, the world's largest long-distance ride-sharing platform.\n\nOn his profile, Shuka describes himself as 'BlaBla'. It means he is a good match for other passengers who like some conversation but do not want to chat the entire journey. If he did want to talk non-stop, he would be a 'BlaBlaBla'. If his preference were to drive in silence, he would just be a 'Bla'. His profile shows that he likes listening to music, doesn't smoke and won't bring any dogs or other pets along for the ride. His rating is good, a 4.7\/5. Manisha Vasdey, a twenty-six-year-old female passenger who has shared a ride with Shuka, gave him an 'outstanding' review. 'The ride was very nice and comfortable,' she commented. 'Great conversation from sports to _Game of Thrones_ (which he doesn't watch!) to politics. Would definitely recommend travelling with him.'\n\nThe idea behind BlaBlaCar, a French start-up founded in 2006, is relatively simple: drivers 'sell' the empty seats in their cars on trips they are planning to take but they can only charge prices that cover petrol and road tolls. They are not allowed to make a profit (it's against the rules). It's a win-win; passengers get a relatively cheap ride and drivers offset the costs of their journey. BlaBlaCar sounds like a worthwhile community service. It is, in one sense, but it's also a commercial venture. Indeed, the company was valued at \u00a31.2 billion in 2017. BlaBlaCar makes a nice profit by charging a booking fee, which is about 15 per cent of the cost of the ride.\n\nNotably, BlaBlaCar is different from Uber in its pricing model but it's also not designed to compete with taxis. The average trip taken is long, around 320 kilometres (200 miles), which makes it more of a direct threat to coaches and trains. It is also a long time to spend in a car with someone we have never met before. We could get a back-seat driver telling us what to do on the road, someone with a weird sense of humour or, as Mum still likes to point out, a psycho-killer.\n\nForty-one-year-old co-founder Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mazzella first got the idea of creating a marketplace for empty seats back in December 2003. He was working hard in Paris at the time and had promised his family that he would join them for Christmas. They lived in the Vend\u00e9e region of France, around 420 kilometres southwest of the capital. Busy with his job, Mazzella had left his travel plans to the very last minute. All the trains were fully booked and he didn't own a car. In a fix, he convinced his sister Lucie to make a two-hour detour to pick him up.\n\nOn that wintery night, driving along the motorway, he noticed that most of the cars had only one person\u2013a driver and no passengers. 'I thought, that's crazy. What a waste,' says Mazzella. 'Why don't we put those empty seats in some kind of search engine, making it as easy for passengers to search and book them as it is for available seats on trains?'\n\nTo Mazzella's surprise, no such website existed yet. Yes, people posted random trips on Craigslist, but that was about it. He couldn't get the idea out of his head, although for a long time he was too busy to do anything about it. Finally, three years later, in 2006, he decided the time was right to start a ride-sharing company. Online marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay that match buyers and sellers were taking off, and social networks such as YouTube and Facebook were beginning to gather momentum. If people were starting to share photos, music and daily thoughts, why not seats in cars?\n\nMazzella contacted Francis Nappez, a close friend and programmer. Together they created a website that they initially called CoVoiturage (French for the term 'car-pooling'). The first site was very basic and ugly-looking. It didn't have user profiles and there were no peer reviews or ratings. Drivers simply submitted their emails and phone numbers and advertised their rides in a similar way to online classified ads. People had to contact one another, agree on prices and make necessary arrangements. There was a lot of friction. It took time and effort. And, most importantly, strangers were still strangers.\n\nOn paper, ride-sharing looked like a big opportunity. In France alone, there are approximately 1 billion seats travelling empty between major cities each year, and there are more than 700 million trips taken each year that are in excess of 150 kilometres.\n\nYet the idea did not initially take off as Mazzella had envisioned. Indeed, it would take more than a decade for the platform to get real traction. People were simply not ready to take the trust leap needed to adopt this new way of travelling. That early model had overlooked something vital, something very human: the company had focused on solving the coordination problem of matching drivers and passengers but it had failed to solve the problem of trust.\n\nIn 2007, Mazzella decided to enrol in the MBA programme at the INSEAD Business School. It was there he met Nicolas Brusson, now the COO of the company. They decided to enter CoVoiturage into the INSEAD's business venture competition. Disappointingly, they finished fourth. The biggest question the judges had was around trust\u2013how was this different from a marketplace for hitchhiking?\n\n'The iPhone did not exist. People were only just beginning to grasp the fact that we were entering the digital age. And there I am, pitching my idea of a world where anyone looking to travel could connect with drivers heading the same way,' Mazzella says. 'It took some time before the world was ready for this idea.' He had to figure out a way to get round that lesson drummed into us as children: never get into a car with a stranger.\n\nGetting people who haven't met to trust each other to share a ride is a fiendish problem. It's basically reinventing the hitchhiking experience into one that is paid for, planned and trusted. But the problem does not in fact start with personal trust, which is getting people to trust one another. The problem starts with building _generalized trust_ , which is how we first gain trust in the _idea_ itself.\n\nAnd for many years BlaBlaCar, as it was renamed, took the wrong approach to getting people to adopt the idea. The company tried emphasizing the environmental savings, how good sharing a car was for the planet. But it didn't work. It wasn't a good enough reason to get people to use the service. The next approach was to try to sell the software to companies who could offer car-pooling services for employees. It was a logical idea; employees are not total strangers, the trust is already there. But all the companies wanted different features to suit their specific needs. 'An enormous amount of time, resources and attention was spent on delivering multiple customized platforms. There was no scalable solution,' says Mazzella. 'Over time, it became clear the business-to-business version would not flourish.'\n\nThe turning point came when he recognized a now-obvious problem\u2013users were frequently cancelling reservations without being penalized. 'Passengers would call, like, an hour before or three hours before saying, \"Oh, I'm sorry, I can't come. My grandma is sick.\" We had a percentage of sick grandmothers which was way above average,' Mazzella jokes. Passengers were booking seats online in multiple cars to hedge the risk of a driver cancelling last minute. And drivers compensated for unreliable passengers not showing up by overbooking the spots they had available. There was no mutual commitment and the whole experience was an inefficient mess.\n\nSo BlaBlaCar implemented a solution that in retrospect sounds ridiculously simple. In 2011, they introduced a feature so that people had to pay online and, critically, in advance. At the time of the booking, passengers were charged for the ride. Not only did this remove the social awkwardness of exchanging cash in the car, it created upfront commitment. Cancellation rates fell from 35 per cent to less than 3 per cent. And the service started really to take off. Online payments removed a _trust blocker_ , things that can get in the way or are the deal breakers when it comes to people trusting a new idea or each other.\n\nBlaBlaCar now transports more than 12 million people per quarter across twenty-two countries, as of April 2017. To put that in context, it carries more passengers each month than Eurostar (2.5 million travellers per quarter) or British Airways (10 million passengers per quarter). 'Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come,' says Mazzella, quoting the French novelist, poet and playwright Victor Hugo.\n\nBlaBlaCar is an illustration of how technology is enabling millions of people to take a trust leap in an idea, to do something new or different from the way we have previously done it, regardless of cultural norms.\n\nOver the past decade, I have been researching hundreds of networks, marketplaces and systems that reinvent the way something of value\u2013a product, service or information\u2013reaches many people. There are fascinating nuances in how trust works in these examples and we will explore those nuances throughout the book. But beneath the differences lies a common behavioural pattern people follow in forming trust. I call it 'Climbing the _Trust Stack_ '.\n\nThe trust stack goes like this: first, we have to trust the idea; then the company; and, finally, we have to trust the other person (or in some instances a machine or robot).\n\nLet's use BlaBlaCar for an overview of how it works. On the first level, we have to trust that the _idea_ of ride-sharing is safe and worth trying. There has to be enough understanding and certainty, or reduced uncertainty, to make us willing to try the idea. The next stage is about having confidence in the platform and company. In this instance, it's knowing that BlaBlaCar will remove bad apples before the ride and help us out if something does go wrong. The third and final stage sees us using different bits of information to decide whether the other person is trustworthy. It's this last level where the real trust happens. But we can't get there without going through the other two stages.\n\nThe first time we climb the trust stack it feels a bit weird, even risky. But we get to a point where these new ideas seem not only normal but necessary. We're comfortable to make the trust leap and, once made, our future behaviours change, often quite quickly.\n\nWhat coaxes us into trusting new ideas? It is trust, after all, that influences how far, how fast and how permanently a new idea will spread.\n\nTrust in new inventions doesn't happen by accident. There are some universal psychological and emotional hurdles to overcome first. The conditions that enable that to happen are summed up in three key notions: the California Roll principle, the WIIFM factor ('what's in it for me') and _trust influencers_.\n\nThe first depends on making the unfamiliar more familiar. Consider sushi. The concept of sushi was introduced into the United States during the late 1960s, a period of whirlwind change in tastes\u2013entertainment, music, fashion and food. At first, the idea of sushi did not bite. Keep in mind that the average family at the time was sitting down to a dinner of cuts of meats with sides of mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. The thought of eating raw fish was bewildering, even dangerous, in the minds of most restaurant-goers. And then a chef by the name of Ichiro Mashita, who ran Tokyo Kaikan, a small sushi bar in downtown Los Angeles, had a clever idea. He asked, 'What would happen if the strange ingredients were combined with familiar ingredients such as cucumber, crabmeat and avocado?' Mashita also realized that Americans preferred seeing the rice on the outside and seaweed paper in the interior. In other words, the roll would feel more familiar if it were made 'inside-out'.\n\nDemand exploded. The California Roll was a gateway for many people to discover Japanese cuisine. Americans now consume $2.25-billion-worth of sushi annually. As Nir Eyal, the author of _Hooked_ , writes, 'The lesson of the California Roll is simple\u2013people don't want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently.'\n\nThe California Roll principle is based on the underlying rule of combining something new with something familiar to make it 'strangely familiar'. It's a phenomenon that psychologists like Robert B. Zajonc have labelled the 'mere-exposure effect' or the 'Law of Familiarity'. Humans, understandably, have a tendency to be more comfortable around people or things they are familiar with. There is more than one way to build on this.\n\nApple does it through a design feature Steve Jobs called 'skeuomorphism'. It's a catch-all term for when design cues are taken from common objects or elements in the physical world. The iPhone calendar resembles a physical calendar. The notes app looks like a yellow legal pad. The rubbish bin on the first Mac was exactly like a metal bin. The podcast app when first launched looked like an ancient reel-to-reel tape and iBooks looked like a real bookshelf with wood veneers. The familiar elements are not necessary for the new features to function but they tap into our memory bank. Their role is to enable our brains, in a split second, to grasp things they have never experienced before. Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer, describes the goal as 'to build things that are strangely familiar'.\n\nWhen I was at Oxford doing my undergraduate degree in Fine Art, I had to take a course in modern philosophy and critical theory. We studied the likes of Descartes, Voltaire and Rousseau. The lectures would be held in a grand hall in an old Oxford building. There was lots of dark wood panelling, with enormous portrait oil paintings hung on the walls of mostly elderly men. Our professors would tell us things like, 'Art is a form of thinking that addresses the thoughtfulness of life.' I honestly thought these lectures were pompous and painful. In fact, I still have dreams about having to sit through them. At the time, I didn't know how to think in abstract ways. But there was one class that I found fascinating: Immanuel Kant. 'Human reason is by nature architectonic,' Kant wrote in _The Critique of Pure Reason_ \u2013i.e. our thoughts follow a clearly organized and defined structure. Well before Steve Jobs came up with the idea, Kant believed that people need some kind of system or familiar schema to pave the way to understanding something new.\n\nPerhaps you have stood looking at a piece of art and thought, 'What on earth is this?' I remember standing in the Tate Modern some time ago in front of a pile of 120 bricks arranged in a rectangle; bricks that would otherwise be used to make an ordinary house. The piece, by the sculptor Carl Andre, was called _Equivalent VIII_. Andre is renowned for making 'idea art' that is about 'recognizable things'. But what was the idea in bricks? I felt lost. So what did I do? I just walked away, on to the next piece. The same thing happens with new inventions and new experiences we just don't get. We move on.\n\nIt was only recently I realized that that is exactly how I think about trust. Specifically, for us to trust a new idea, we need bridges that are easy to find and to cross. The unknown needs to be reduced just enough that our mind goes, 'I get this. It's kind of like...' We have to turn _Equivalent VIII_ into 'Destruction of the Berlin Wall'. We have to put the strange seaweed on the inside and rice on the outside.\n\nLet me give you an example of a company that knows how to create bridges that allow people to step lightly from the known to the unknown. That company is Airbnb.\n\nJudd Antin's official title is director of research at Airbnb. His job is to get inside the heads of guests and hosts using the accommodation platform. He wants to find out what they really think and what _really_ happens. If you wanted to know, say, all the strange and unexpected ways hosts get their homes ready for guests, Antin's experience research team could tell you. Like the host who decided they did not want their guests to use a specific toilet in one of their bathrooms, so they placed a giant prickly cactus in a heavy concrete pot on the toilet seat.\n\nAntin, thirty-eight, is a social psychologist with a PhD in information management and systems from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his research has been on why people behave in certain ways in different online environments. For instance, how do people cope with managing multiple digital identities? Do women and men edit differently on Wikipedia? (Turns out they do.) Antin gives you the sense that when he gets interested in something, he gets a little obsessed. He is the type of person who would say no question is a dumb question, but perhaps you could ask the question differently. In fact, he said that to me a few times when we spoke over Skype.\n\nHe never talks about the people he studies as 'subjects' or 'participants'. He doesn't even use the word 'users'. It is always 'guests' and 'hosts'. He doesn't talk about 'spaces' but 'homes'. The word he uses to describe his research is 'sexy'. 'When I say sexy, I mean that the topic of our research is really meaty. The idea of letting another person into your home has lots of dimensions that you could spend years diving into,' Antin explains. 'It's research that requires deeply understanding a problem and figuring out how to turn the findings into design, product and communication solutions.'\n\nAntin's team must understand what makes people comfortable with trusting the idea of Airbnb. When guests go to the Airbnb site for the first time, they know they want to go on holiday or simply need a place to stay. But there are lots of 'what ifs' and unknowns before they get started. The first and most basic question is, 'What is the idea of home-sharing?'\n\nEven investors had trouble getting their heads around the idea initially. In fact, many laughed the founders out of the room and dismissed it as dangerous. Take Chris Sacca, an accomplished entrepreneur and the head of Lowercase Capital, one of the leading venture funds in the United States. Sacca spots things early. I mean, really early. He has been one of the first to back the likes of Twitter, Uber and Instagram. He was one of the first people to whom Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, the three founders, showed the original pages of Airbnb to in 2008. But he passed on making a seed investment.\n\n'I pulled them aside and said, guys, this is super dangerous,' Sacca said. 'You're renting out a room in somebody's house while they're still there? Somebody's going to get raped or murdered, and the blood is gonna be on your hands. There's no way this'll succeed.'\n\nInvestors will run through 'what if' scenarios when assessing a deal. Specifically, 'What's the worst that can happen when using this product or service?' In the case of Airbnb, a lot can happen and has since happened.\n\nSacca is not the only investor who initially spurned Airbnb and missed out. I met the founders in 2009 when I was writing my first book on the so-called 'sharing economy'. I came home and told my husband, Chris, we should make an early investment. I explained in immense detail how people were going to take pictures of their homes\u2013bedrooms, kitchens and even their bathrooms\u2013and then guests from all over the world would book these places. He is used to me continually sharing and sounding ideas off him. But this time, he looked at me strangely, as if I had lost the plot. I went on trying to convince him: 'eBay is a multi-billion-dollar business where strangers trade all kinds of stuff including second-hand cars online. At the time, people thought Pierre Omidyar was also crazy and it wouldn't work,' I insisted. He did not budge, so I went with my overused line: 'The future is created by optimists, not pessimists.'\n\nChris is a barrister and therefore a master at arguing his point. 'Well, this is not eBay. People are not trading goods anonymously online. This is people's homes. This is people meeting up in the real world,' was his comeback. He was right and very, very wrong. Airbnb is now the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world, estimated to be worth $31 billion. I keep the valuation chart of Airbnb on our fridge. It has scribbled at the top, 'Always listen to your wife!'\n\nIn retrospect, it is easy to point to the likes of Sacca and my husband and say how wrong they were. But, as I say, it's also easy to see why they thought the way they did. Airbnb's success rests on having been able to get people to make that staggering leap of trust and overcome our natural 'stranger danger' bias.\n\nTry this quick experiment yourself. The next time you are sitting next to someone you don't know, ask them to swap phones with you for just one minute. Explain that you will hold their phone and they can hold yours. Tell them: 'What you decide to do with it is your choice.'\n\nI have played this game many different times with different groups of people, from financial advisors to students to estate agents. I have tested it at dinner parties, conference events and in the classroom. The reactions are predictable. Some people outright refuse. People laugh nervously. People hesitantly take the phone but place it face down. People ask how long is left to go. A few launch straight into the experiment, looking at messages, photos and Twitter feeds. Some even tweet or post on Instagram. But for the most part, it feels very uncomfortable for participants. And that is just holding another person's phone for less than a minute.\n\nAirbnb has had to create trust around an exchange that involves one of the most intimate things in our lives, the place where we rest our heads. 'We have to enable Olympic levels of trust between people who have never met,' Antin says. And that's what makes his job so fascinating and challenging. 'As big as we are, most people will have no idea and many more people will have a vague idea of what Airbnb is, but don't really get it,' Antin told me. The first thing that will run through their minds is, 'What on earth is this anyway?'\n\nWhen some people go to the site for the first time, they even wonder if Airbnb owns all the homes they see on the website and the company simply rents them out. 'It sounds silly but it's not; it's a known model of holidaying they understand,' says Antin.\n\nA lot of research has been done on how people 'get' the concept. Noticeably, there are no 'How does Airbnb work?' videos on the homepage. Admittedly, some people look at explicit things such as the 'About' or 'Trust and Safety' pages. But those are listed right at the bottom of the page. Front and centre, the first thing we see on Airbnb is a simple question, intentionally curious: 'Where?'\n\n'One of the ways people get the concept is by relating to something they understand,' Antin told me. 'What we observe when new guests come to the site is that they don't typically go to the educational materials. Either they don't see them or they simply don't resonate. Instead, they go straight to the search box and they search for places in their hometown because it's a place they know, right?'\n\nFor example, when a first-time guest living in London wants to stay in New York, they might not search for New York but for London instead. And then they get even closer to home and search their borough, say, Camden. 'They look at the map of results and the guest's reaction is, \"Oh, oh, I see. This is somebody whose house is just near mine, over there by the river, and you could stay there if you wanted to. Now I get it,\"' explains Antin. 'That's the \"ah-huh\" moment.' Critically, Airbnb has designed the site in a way to encourage this behaviour. It could have had a drop-down menu where guests select a destination from a list. But that would be overly prescriptive. It wouldn't allow new users easily to discover something they can understand; that other nearby homes, like theirs, are available for rent.\n\nIn other words, we trust what we know but we can also trust what we think we know: ideas that are in fact quite new but appear strangely familiar.\n\nFamiliarity is not the only thing that matters in convincing us to trust a new idea. Once we are over the 'I get this' hump\u2013the California Roll principle\u2013the next barrier to be crossed is the 'What's in it for me?' (WIIFM) factor.\n\nOn 14 May 1796, Edward Jenner, an English doctor, carried out an experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener. After making two small scratches on the boy's arms, Jenner rubbed in a small amount of fluid from a cowpox blister. Young Phipps got the expected reaction of a slight fever but within a few days he had fully recovered. Two months later, Jenner inoculated the boy again. This time he used matter from a smallpox lesion. As the doctor predicted, and no doubt to his relief, the boy did not contract smallpox. Further tests showed that James was immune to the disease. This is how the concept of vaccinations, named after the Latin _vacca_ for cow, was born. So where did Jenner get the idea?\n\nJenner had received his training in the Gloucestershire countryside where most of his patients worked on farms with cattle. While still a medical student, Jenner observed that milkmaids who contracted cowpox, a relatively mild disease, did not catch smallpox, one of the deadliest infectious diseases of the period, claiming the lives of millions of people including five reigning monarchs. A cure was urgently needed.\n\nIn 1797, Jenner sent a short paper to the Royal Society describing the findings of his experiment. The paper was rejected. Scorned by his peers, Jenner published the book himself, documenting his theory that cowpox did indeed protect against smallpox. His ideas, however, were met with widespread controversy and criticism. The reasons varied from religious to scientific and political objections. The clergy claimed it was repulsive and 'unchristian' to inoculate someone with material originating from an infected cow, one of God's lowlier creatures. Some physicians dismissed his research as 'unethical'. Others selfishly did not want Jenner to succeed because they were making significant sums of money selling different kinds of drugs to treat the disease. In 1802, a satirical cartoon was published called 'The Cow-Pock\u2013or\u2013the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!', summing up the sentiment of the time. It caricatured a scene of the vaccine being administered to a group of petrified young people and cows sprouting from different parts of their bodies.\n\nJenner was told that his ideas were too revolutionary and that he needed more proof. Undaunted by the ridicule, he experimented on several other children, including his own eleven-month-old son, by placing a small amount of cow pox scab into the human skin. Every child he injected showed immunity to the disease.\n\nThe young country doctor did not discover the idea of immunization\u2013it had a long history in China and Africa\u2013but he was the first person scientifically to attempt to control an infectious disease by the deliberate use of vaccination. Jenner later became known as the 'Father of Immunology'. In 1853, thirty years after Jenner's death, the British government made cowpox vaccinations compulsory in England and Wales. On 8 May 1980, the World Health Assembly declared that the world was free of smallpox. But for decades Jenner's new methods did not catch on. Why? People were not ready to take a trust leap in the idea of vaccinations because they didn't fully understand the risks and benefits\u2013they couldn't see what was in it for them.\n\nAnd it's a doubt that persists today. The anti-vaccination movement has existed since Jenner first discovered the cure, but it gained resurgence during the late 1990s after a series of events stoked the fear and doubt already brewing. One was an article that appeared in the UK medical journal _The Lancet_ in 1998, written by Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, implying a possible link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Remarkably, Wakefield wrote the paper based on research he had done on a mere twelve children. The children in the study were carefully selected and the research was largely funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. The article has since been discredited and retracted but the damage was already done. Dr Sharon Kaufman, the chair of the Department of Social Medicine at the University of California, has done extensive research focused on individuals' trust\u2013and mistrust\u2013in the findings of medical knowledge. 'Most parents are not anti-vaccination _per se_ ,' she says. 'Rather, they live in a time, as we all do, of heightened risk awareness, mistrust of government institutions and the pharmaceutical industry and a great many opportunities for \"seeing\" doubt.' Even if people don't believe that vaccines cause harmful side-effects such as autism, the power of anti-vaccination stories is they evoke fearful emotions that undermine our trust, no matter what we might rationally think.\n\nJames Samuel Coleman, a famous American sociologist born in 1926, was, among other things, fascinated by how we make decisions. Specifically, by the ways people decide whether or not to trust a new idea. He was living in a time when many great new technologies, from the first television and video recorder to the first commercial passenger jet plane, were introduced. Essentially, his research showed that we decide whether to trust based on assessment of the upsides and downsides. We make a calculation about whether trusting this idea will in some way make our lives better or not.\n\nIt sounds obvious, right? But it raises a critical point\u2013we don't _want_ to use a new invention until we _understand_ it. That doesn't mean we all need to understand precisely how a technology functions, whether it was a combustion engine back then or a blockchain now. However, we do need to grasp what it can do and what it can give us. Until that chasm is crossed, we won't abandon what we already have.\n\nCreating trust in a television is one thing. What about creating it in something that has the power to hurt or even kill us? We're seeing this play out now with self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles are expected by some engineering groups to account for up to 75 per cent of vehicles on the road by 2040. But how do you get people to trust machines enough to let them take over the wheel? An expert who knows the issue first-hand is Dr Brian Lathrop.\n\nLathrop has worked in the Electronics Research Lab at Volkswagen (VW) since 2004. He has a PhD in cognitive psychology, specializing in human interface design, and is the person in charge of research and development of VW's autonomous vehicles.\n\nPrior to his current role at the automaker, he worked at NASA during the period when pilots were first adopting plane automation. He became fascinated by a rather worrying state he calls 'mode confusion'. 'This happens when pilots wonder if the aeroplane is doing the flying or if they are,' Lathrop explains to me. 'Autonomous vehicles face exactly the same challenge.'\n\nDuring our conversation, Lathrop speaks surprisingly openly about the challenges of self-driving vehicles. He has a natural exuberance but you wouldn't describe him as an evangelist. More like an optimistic realist.\n\nIn March 2016, the American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted an extensive survey to understand how much trust its members had in self-driving cars. Three out of four drivers in the United States said they would feel 'afraid' to ride in self-driving cars. Only one in five said they would trust a driverless vehicle to drive itself with them inside. The reasons people gave included: 'trusting their own driving skills more than the technology' (84 per cent); 'feeling the technology is too new and unproven' (60 per cent); and 'not knowing enough about the technology' (50 per cent).\n\nThere is a YouTube video of a seventy-year-old grandmother, named Shirley, freaking out the first time she is inside a Tesla Model S on autopilot. As the car moves across lanes and navigates traffic, Shirley screams, 'Oh no, there is a car coming! Oh dear Jesus. Ah, ah, ooh, ooh, where is it going?' It is painful to watch. In the video, you can hear her son Bill laughing at her reaction after he turns on the autopilot. 'Oh my, I am about to die,' his mum cries out. She looks like she is on the verge of heart failure. In fact, all Shirley needs to do to take control from the machine is simply touch the steering wheel. But her mind is elsewhere.\n\nWhen I ask Lathrop how hard it is to get people to trust being driven by autonomous vehicles, I assume he will go into details of how smart design can overcome the fears of people like Shirley. I expect him to cite the safety stats. In fact, he makes a quite different observation. 'People trust the car quickly, almost too easily,' he says.\n\nYes, Lathrop has seen how some people, such as Shirley, freak out the first time they are driven by an autonomous car. They are, however, the minority. Others are completely awestruck and think, 'Wow, it's doing the driving for me.' But then something interesting happens. After a few miles\u2013around twenty minutes of being driven by the car\u2013the experience feels normal, even boring. Being driven by an intelligent machine it turns out is just not that exciting. That's why Lathrop is worried about people nodding off.\n\n'What do you do when people fall asleep in a self-driving car?' is his biggest concern. 'How do you deal with that?' He thinks it's a question that is not being asked enough. 'It's not good for the trust equation!' Lathrop admits half jokingly.\n\nThe idea of people trusting the car too easily is intriguing so I press Lathrop harder. Surely, the first step in getting people to use self-driving cars has to require a massive trust leap? 'Think about it,' he replies. 'Most people are comfortable being a passenger. They are used to being driven by a colleague or by a friend.' In other words, the idea of being a passenger in a self-driving car taps into something familiar. 'The leap we are asking people to take is not a new experience, but it's asking people to trust a machine versus a human to drive. It's not that huge.' It is strangely familiar.\n\nLathrop admits that before people get inside an autonomous vehicle, they do have questions. Quite predictable ones. 'What if a vehicle cuts in front; will the car respond?' 'Can the vehicle change lanes?' And the most common is, 'Can it drive as well as me?' Lathrop points out that very few of us ask about unpredictable situations. For instance, what happens if a deer or even a dog runs out in front of the car? How does the car navigate parking lots at busy sports matches? The researchers have not yet figured out the answers to all these questions. Some are hard to simulate safely or even predict. It's those unforeseen, or as Lathrop puts it, '1 per cent corner cases', that his team needs to solve for. But the point is, very quickly a first-time user runs out of questions. They just get into the vehicle and let it do the driving.\n\nThe ultimate success of self-driving cars\u2013that it becomes normal to use one\u2013doesn't depend on engineering success. It doesn't even depend on us understanding how the technology works. It depends on that second principle of getting people to trust an idea, the WIIFM factor. We want to know what we will gain. In this instance, will the benefits of the machine doing the job of a human outweigh the risks?\n\nThe typical American commuter spends on average more than fifty-two minutes per day stuck in traffic. That adds up to more than 4 billion hours of wasted time in the United States alone, time we could use in better ways. 'People want to know what they will be able to do if they are freed from driving the car,' Lathrop tells me. They imagine being able to watch movies, talk on the phone, work and eat. 'Look around you when you're at the traffic lights, when cars are stopped. These behaviours are not new. I want to allow people to do what they are already doing but in a much safer manner,' he says. Indeed, the biggest benefit of self-driving cars is safety.\n\nOne hour after passing my driving test as a teenager, I crashed my car. And it wasn't a minor ding. I was waiting at the intersection of a busy crossroads in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London, looking for a break in the traffic. I started fiddling with the radio, switching from Capital to Virgin and other stations, trying to find a song I liked. Distracted, I decided foolishly to make a go for it. Smash. You never forget the sound of metal hitting metal. My car spun and landed in what was previously a nicely groomed privet hedge on the other side of the road. Over the course of the next five years, I had three subsequent accidents. I am truly a terrible driver. And my experience is a reminder of why self-driving cars matter.\n\nHuman error and inconsistent driving cause more than 90 per cent of crashes, which kill more than 1.2 million people annually, according to the World Health Organization. It is estimated that driverless cars could, by mid-century, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 per cent. It works out to be more than 300,000 lives saved each decade in the United States alone, and a saving of $190 billion each year in healthcare costs associated with accidents. In the UK, KPMG estimates that self-driving cars will lead to 2,500 fewer deaths between 2014 and 2030. But we are still highly sceptical of the benefits. 'No one is going to want to realize autonomous driving into the world until there's proof that it's much safer, like a factor of 100 times safer, than having a human drive,' Andrew Moore, the computer science dean at Carnegie Mellon University told _The Atlantic_.\n\nHumans are not 'risk mutual' people. In other words, they don't place the same weight on things going well as things going badly. For example, say I lost a favourite navy blue chequered coat, I would feel more about the loss than I would about the joy of finding another coat, even if the jackets were identical. That's the human tendency, to feel more strongly about a loss than a gain. The basic idea of 'loss aversion' is a concept first discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists who changed how people think about how people think. Sticking with the status quo feels much safer and better, even if we know we might compensate a loss.\n\nUndisputedly, we love new things, but those things tend to be an upgrade or improvement on ideas we are already comfortable with. For instance, the high-definition wireless flat screen is better than the clunky colour television box with wires and remote controls. It is easy to trade up. To date, the media has not done much to help foster the idea that self-driving cars are safer than humans. In fact, it has tended to fuel the opposite image: the car could kill you.\n\nOn 7 May 2016, Joshua Brown's Tesla Model S vehicle crunched into the side of an eighteen-wheeler trailer truck. Forty-year-old Brown was killed. The car was on autopilot during the collision. When police arrived at the scene, a _Harry Potter_ movie was reportedly playing on a portable DVD player inside the car. In a blog post published on the day the accident became public, Tesla stated, 'Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.' In other words, the car is not perfect. And the driver was distracted by a young wizard.\n\n'The media love these stories. They sensationalize them. I understand why,' Lathrop tells me. 'But they are extremely rare.' Indeed, this was the first known autopilot death in roughly 130 million miles driven by Tesla customers. To put this in perspective, among all vehicles in the United States, it is estimated there will be a fatality every 94 million miles. In other words, self-driving cars are 36 million miles safer.\n\nLathrop thinks a lot of the messaging around self-driving cars is not useful. 'We need to temper expectations that an autonomous vehicle can be perfect,' he says. 'We need people to realize that the benefits hugely outweigh the negatives.'\n\nWhat's interesting in Lathrop's observation is that it illustrates how building trust doesn't have to hinge on a promise of perfection. In fact, guaranteeing 100 per cent certainty of an outcome is a recipe for disaster.\n\nWhether it's deciding to use Airbnb rather than a well-known hotel brand such as Marriott or Hilton, or deciding to put our trust in an intelligent vehicle, the pros and cons we draw up will circle around the same dimensions\u2013value and certainty. Whatever the idea, the questions are essentially the same: Will these experiences create value in my life? How can I be sure of that value?\n\nYou've no doubt heard the term 'early adopter'. It typically refers to an individual (or business) who uses a new product or technology before others do. My brother-in-law is one. He seems to be in on the next big thing way before it's big. 'Found it first' is a badge he likes to wear. He tells you about new things you should be trying: digital wallets, the Aire digestive tracker that helps you figure out which foods are most compatible with your body, the Nest Learning Thermostat and so on. Early adopters tend to seek novel things to tinker with, and then become evangelists for them. They tend to have strong and excited opinions (and I don't mean that in a bad way). Let's just say they know a lot without being a know-it-all. Without a doubt, early adopters are critical to innovations taking off. Interestingly, however, as a group they are not necessarily the most influential in terms of getting the late majority, or laggards, to climb the first layer of the trust stack. What is needed is that third element\u2013made up of what I call the trust influencers.\n\nTrust influencers are groups of people who can disproportionately influence a significant change in the way we do something; they set new social norms.\n\nTrust influencers are out there for every idea but sometimes we have to look hard and in unexpected places to find them.\n\nThere is a wonderful example of trust influencers relating to what is not a particularly exciting concept\u2013transferring money overseas.\n\nBehind almost every great start-up lies a story of personal frustration. The tale of TransferWise goes like this: Taavet Hinrikus was born in Estonia when it was still part of the USSR. It was a tough environment to grow up in. 'One really had to take charge and solve problems in creative ways to get anything done,' Hinrikus says. In 2002, when he was twenty years old, he met two budding entrepreneurs called Niklas Zennstr\u00f6m and Janus Friis. They were tinkering around with an idea: what if people could digitally transfer their voices and words to one another? Like a phone but without a phone. And without the phone bill. This was exactly the description first used for what would become known as Skype. Hinrikus became one of the first employees on the team.\n\nSkype grew fast. In 2006, the company needed Hinrikus to move from Estonia to London to help them expand. He was earning euros that were paid into his Estonian bank account. Every fortnight Hinrikus had to transfer money to a UK account, to cover his rent, food and other costs. When his money eventually arrived, it was much less than he expected. The whole experience, he thought, was unnecessarily painful.\n\nAn old friend, Kristo K\u00e4\u00e4rmann, faced the same problem but in the opposite direction. He was working as a consultant at Deloitte and was being paid in pounds. He was transferring money back to Estonia to pay his mortgage. 'I was losing five per cent of the money each time I moved it,' K\u00e4\u00e4rmann says. The money was being lost in the hidden fees and poor foreign exchange rates that earn the banks a hefty profit.\n\nHinrikus and K\u00e4\u00e4rmann came up with a simple but clever idea. 'We figured we could just \"swap\" the money. I could just transfer money from my Estonia account into his Estonia account and he transfer money from his account in London to my account in London,' says Hinrikus. 'Pretty quickly we saved thousands by eliminating unfair rates and banking fees.' The friends realized they had hit on an enormous opportunity. TransferWise, the company they founded in London in 2011, is as of March 2017 valued at more than $1.1 billion and already has a 5 per cent market share of international money transfer in the United Kingdom.\n\nTransferWise is based on a peer-to-peer technology system that matches money flows. Say I wanted to send \u00a31,000 from a bank in London to a bank in Paris, the system looks for someone else wanting to convert euros to pounds. The result is that the money never moves between countries. Doing things this way means the process is faster, easier and cheaper than the transfer services we get from banks. Which brings us back to the question of trust and changing behaviour.\n\nThe conventional way to transfer money from one country to another is to use a traditional bank or a post office or a known brand such as Western Union. In 2015, in excess of $601 billion was transferred in this way. So what would persuade ordinary people to trust an unknown digital start-up to transfer their money? The answer: seeing unexpected users putting their faith in this new way of doing things. People who make us think, 'Hey, maybe this idea isn't so risky after all.' But just who would TransferWise's trust influencers be?\n\nHinrikus and his team realized their ideal trust influencers were neither fintech know-it-alls, nor the people with the latest Apple Watch. Far from it. They had to find users we wouldn't necessarily expect to take a risk with an unknown company like TransferWise. Namely, pensioners. Retired British people living abroad in Spain, for instance, who needed to get their pension regularly transferred from pounds to euros. 'For them, the fees they were being charged represented a big portion of their total, so they had a strong incentive to take the same leap of faith,' Hinrikus says.\n\nWhen other first-time users heard about pensioners giving TransferWise the thumbs-up, it had enormous influence on shaping their decision to trust the idea. Indeed, when enough trust influencers are seen to have made the trust leap and survived, millions will follow, often very quickly. That's how change spreads.\n\nJames Surowiecki wrote brilliantly about the influence of group example in his book _The Wisdom of Crowds._ It was largely based on the science of crowd persuasion: how groups of people can influence other individuals to say 'yes'. Some of the core ideas were grounded in Professor Robert Cialdini's theory of 'social proof'. 'If a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don't. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd,' Cialdini wrote. Put simply, we tend to follow the lead of other people, especially when we are unsure.\n\nVarious experiments have shown the different dimensions of social proof. One of the most visual is known as the 'Street Corner Experiment'. It was designed in 1968 by social psychologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz. First, the researchers put a single person on a street corner and had him look at the empty sky for sixty seconds. Only a fraction of passers-by stopped to see what the person was looking at. So the next day, they put five people staring at the sky on the same street corner. Four times as many people stopped to check what they were gazing at. And when the researchers put fifteen people to stare at the empty sky, 45 per cent of all passers-by stopped and tilted their heads to see what the others were looking at. They stopped traffic by staring at an empty sky. The typical takeaway from this study, as Surowiecki puts it, is 'the crowd becomes more influential as it becomes bigger'.\n\nThere's no doubt social proof builds trust around new ideas, especially when we are uncertain of the outcomes. That is why we commonly see sites boast the number of reviews or users they have. For instance, TransferWise has on its homepage, front and centre, their number of 'happy reviews' (35,000), and its number of customers (more than 1 million). Indeed, we seem to be living in a world where it is perceived that the critical way to persuade us is through large numbers, be it Facebook 'likes', five-star ratings or Twitter and Instagram followers.\n\nBut social proof, and the trust it fosters, does not have to come from large crowds. It can also come from a small group of individuals with a unique power to influence. They do not need to have an impressive title, be a celebrity or even a credible 'expert'. They do not need large followings. They do not even have to be people who are similar to the majority, the crowd. They can be just like the British pensioners in Spain, people who can change other people's perceived uncertainty because they seem the least likely to take a trust leap.\n\nThe three ideas covered in this chapter\u2013the California Roll principle, the WIIFM factor and trust influencers\u2013aka 'What is it?', 'What do I gain?', 'Who else is doing it?'\u2013offer a way to see how an idea once dismissed as preposterous can turn into something strangely familiar. They explain how trust in new ideas spreads. Anyone who has ever built trust in a venture, a new product or an idea has had to go through that process, whether they're aware of it or not.\n\nIt's as if there's a daunting rock face the creators of the new idea are asking people to climb. First, they have to show the would-be climbers some familiar moves and handholds, to reduce the unknowns enough to encourage that first step. (And while they've reduced uncertainty, they haven't promised perfection\u2013there's still risk.) They have to explain what climbing the rock face has to offer. Finally, they have to point out the other climbers above them who are loving the experience. Before long, the doubters find themselves racing up the climb, leaving the ground so far behind it's soon just a distant memory.\n\nAnd that process is powerful. It can turn an idea once dismissed as risky and even frightening\u2013sharing a long ride with a stranger, staying in the home of someone you don't know or getting into a self-driving car\u2013into something normal, rewarding and disruptive. So that's the 'idea' part of the bigger climb, the climb up the trust stack. The next level is building trust in the platform.\n\n#\n\n# Where Does the Buck Stop?\n\nOn 20 February 2016, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a deadly rampage played out. Over the course of five hours, a forty-five-year-old Uber driver named Jason Brian Dalton became a mass killer, shooting six people dead and leaving two seriously injured. In between the separate incidents of bloodshed, Dalton went back to routinely picking up Uber fares.\n\nThe shootings began around 5.40 p.m. EST on a Saturday evening and the first victim was twenty-five-year-old Tiana Carruthers. Carruthers was crossing a parking lot with five children, including her young daughter, when a silver Chevy Equinox with Dalton at the wheel veered towards her. Dalton rolled down his window. He asked if her name was Maisie (the name of the passenger he was circling around the estate trying to find and pick up was Maci.) 'No, I am not that person,' Carruthers replied.\n\nSomething didn't seem quite right about the driver. She yelled at the children to run. Dalton sped off but then quickly turned the car round and headed directly for the terrified Carruthers. Pulling out a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, he shot her at least ten times, hitting her arms and legs, the last bullet lodging in her liver. Remarkably, she survived.\n\nUntil that day, Dalton was by all accounts an ordinary Joe. Neighbours described him as 'a little odd and awkward' but generally sociable. He worked as a loss adjuster for a local insurance company. He had been married for almost twenty years and had two children: a fifteen-year-old son and a ten-year-old daughter. Dalton became an Uber driver on 25 January 2016, about a month before the shooting. He wanted to earn some extra money to take his family to Disney World. Before that tragic evening, he had clocked up more than a hundred Uber trips and passengers had given him a very good rating after rides: an average of 4.73 out of a possible five stars.\n\nOn the day of the shooting, Dalton had run a few errands, including a visit to the local gun store. It wasn't unusual\u2013he loved guns and owned sixteen firearms. He turned on his Uber app around 4 p.m. Shortly after, he picked up a young man called Matt Mellen. It seemed like a normal ride until Dalton took a call from his son, at which point something abruptly shifted in his mood. He accelerated wildly and took Mellen on a hair-raising ride. 'We were driving through medians [central reservations], through lawns, speeding along,' Mellen later told the police. Dalton even side-swiped another car but seemed completely unfazed by what he had done. 'He wouldn't stop. He just kind of kept looking at me like, \"Don't you want to get to your friend's house?\" and I'm like, \"I want to get there alive,\"' said Mellen. When the car finally screeched to a halt, Mellen jumped out.\n\nBoth Mellen and a concerned bystander put in calls to 911, describing the car and Dalton. Mellen specifically identified him as an Uber driver. 'I don't want somebody to get hurt,' he told emergency services. They didn't seem too concerned. Mellen then tried getting hold of someone at Uber, to get the car off the road. Uber didn't seem to prioritize the call, even though Dalton's whereabouts could have been easily located through GPS tracking on the app. It was the first of many alarm bells that would go unheeded.\n\nSoon after that, Mellen's fianc\u00e9e posted Dalton's Uber photo on Facebook with a lengthy warning: 'ATTENTION Kzoo peeps!!! This Uber driver named JASON drives a silver Chevy Equinox is NOT a safe ride!' she wrote. 'Hoping this man will be arrested or hospitalized soon if he has a medical condition causing his behaviour.' Instead, Dalton went from his crazy ride with Mellen to shooting Carruthers.\n\nAfter that first shooting, Dalton swapped his car for his wife's black Chevrolet. Carole Dalton later told police he seemed a little 'troubled'; he had also told her not to go back to work, to fetch the kids, stay inside and lock all the doors. Dalton, meanwhile, went back to picking up regular Uber fares. @IamKeithBlack tweeted that he got a ride with him at 8 p.m., including a clear screenshot of the driver. He had given Dalton a five out of five star rating after his ride. When he heard about the shootings, he tweeted 'Lucky to be alive'.\n\nOthers weren't so lucky. In the lot of a nearby brightly lit car dealership around 10 p.m. that night, seventeen-year-old Tyler Smith and his father, Rich, were looking at vehicles, while Tyler's girlfriend, Alexis, waited in the car. Dalton drove in, parked and walked up to the father and son, fatally shooting both of them. A terrified Alexis hid until he drove off.\n\nFifteen minutes later, in a final burst, Dalton killed four older women and critically injured a fourteen-year-old girl. Nothing connected the victims\u2013male, female, white, black, young and old\u2013and they weren't targeted for any reason.\n\nLate Saturday night is one of the busiest periods on Uber. Remarkably, after killing six people and going home to change guns, Dalton carried on picking up revellers requesting rides. By now, the shootings were all over the news. Some passengers had heard there was a mass murderer called Dalton, an Uber driver, on the loose in Kalamazoo, yet they continued to use the app to get to where they wanted to go. A passenger named Marc Dunton even asked Dalton, 'You're not that guy going around killing people, are you?'\n\n'Wow,' Dalton answered. 'That is crazy. No way\u2013I'm not that guy.'\n\nOnly one passenger made the connection and refused the ride. The young woman's father had texted and called several times to warn her. She requested an Uber around 12.30 a.m. 'Jason. Chevy Equinox' came up on the phone as he was the nearest driver. She cancelled the ride. The same thing happened on her next attempt. A few minutes later, Dalton was arrested in the parking lot of a downtown Kalamazoo bar. When police officers asked the shooter to explain his motive, he replied, 'I don't think there is a why.'\n\nDuring his interrogation Dalton said he recognized the Uber logo as being the religious Eastern Star symbol. He said a horned 'devil figure' would pop up on his phone through the app and would cast an intoxicating spell over him. 'It would give you an assignment and it would literally take over your whole body,' he said. When asked why he randomly shot people, he calmly claimed, 'The Uber app made me do it... It just had a hold of me.' He has since been accused of six counts of open murder, two counts of attempted murder and eight counts of felony firearm.\n\nThe day after the shooting, Uber issued a press release. 'We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence in Kalamazoo,' announced Uber's chief security officer, Joe Sullivan. 'Our hearts and prayers are with the families of the victims of this devastating crime.' A few days later, the company asserted that the rampage could not have been predicted. 'There were no red flags, if you will,' said Sullivan. 'Overall his rating was good, 4.73 out of five.' Perhaps realizing that pointing to Dalton's trust rating was not the best line of defence, he later added: 'As this case shows, past behaviour doesn't always predict how people will behave.'\n\nIt's true, there may have been no reliable way to predict that Dalton would morph from Uber driver to psychotic mass shooter during a single shift. But why didn't anyone seem to respond with any urgency when Mellen first contacted Uber about an hour before the first murder? Turns out, the complaint wasn't prioritized by Uber's customer response team because it wasn't explicitly about violence. 'He said the gentleman was driving erratically,' an Uber spokesperson said, pausing. 'Remember we're doing three million rides a day. How do you prioritize that feedback and how do you think about it?' Still, killings aside, you would think side-swiping a car, speeding and running up on the central reservation might raise some immediate alarm about a driver's fitness to be transporting passengers. Who could have foreseen such tragic consequences? But whose job is it to respond and act?\n\nThe horrific shootings intensified scrutiny on how Uber decides who is fit and safe to be a driver. The company claims it spends tens of millions every year performing background checks on applicants. San Francisco District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n and many other critics have called those background checks without fingerprints 'completely worthless'. Dalton had passed the checks before he started driving on the platform. But here is the problem: he had no prior criminal history, ever. He came out clean as a whistle.\n\nUber doesn't run the fingerprint checks that taxi and limo companies are required to do. But would they help anyway? 'As the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has emphasized, background checks have limited predictive value and can have a disparate impact on minority drivers,' says Brishen Rogers, an associate professor of law at Temple University who is researching the social costs of Uber. That said, fingerprinting might have at least revealed that Dalton owned sixteen guns, assuming he held a Federal Firearms License.\n\nWhile Dalton's crime was by far the worst an Uber driver has committed, there has been a troubling stream of other serious incidents. Uber drivers from Boston to Los Angeles, Delhi to Sydney, have been arrested for sexual assault, rape, kidnapping, theft and drink-driving while carrying passengers. In April 2016, a driver was arrested for slashing a passenger's neck. On 23 May 2016, another was accused of strangling a student in a parking lot.\n\nIn February 2017, the company was hit with sexual harassment allegations and former employees accusing the company of fostering a toxic, misogynist culture. Shortly after, a damning video surfaced online of former CEO Travis Kalanick verbally abusing a driver in the US called Fawzi Kamel, who had complained to the CEO about dropping prices and lower pay. 'People are not trusting you any more,' said Kamel. 'I lost ninety-seven thousand dollars because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you.'\n\n'Bullshit,' Kalanick angrily retorted, telling the driver his problems were his own fault. 'Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on someone else.' A fuming Kalanick then slammed the door. He later apologized for his actions.\n\nFive days later, it was revealed that Uber had secretly used a software tool called Greyball, designed to identify city officials attempting sting operations to catch Uber drivers violating local regulations. Then Google's self-driving car outfit, Waymo, filed a lawsuit accusing Uber of stealing technical trade secrets to fuel its own self-driving car research. Following this string of scandals, Jeff Jones, Uber's company president, and six other key executives resigned. Kalanick, the notoriously hard-nosed co-founder, resigned as CEO in June 2017.\n\nClearly, for all its success\u2013at its latest valuation of $68 billion it is the world's most valuable private start-up in history\u2013Uber has had many serious breaches of trust. And yet more than 5 million people every day, myself included, still tap the Uber app, and within minutes get in a car with a total stranger, often without a second thought. We have, in a sense, outsourced our capacity to trust to an algorithm, and that trust, perhaps for convenience's sake, has proved hard to destroy. The question is, where does Uber's responsibility start and finish?\n\nThere are dangerous taxi drivers and, for that matter, dangerous people in any industry. Here's the difference: in Uber's terms of service, the company denies any liability for how third-party drivers\u2013whom Uber considers to be 'independent contractors'\u2013behave on its platform. The company says it is merely _facilitating_ the needs of people who want to drive, and you are getting a ride from them in _their_ car, not a company car. 'Your day belongs to you,' Uber enthuses to would-be drivers. Uber takes up to a 25 per cent cut of the total fare, a service fee, to play the role of go-between. The company claims it can't control what drivers do on the job as they are interacting with an automated system delivered primarily via an app. Uber, however, is not a neutral platform, like a phone line, simply matching supply and demand. It controls surge pricing that temporarily raises fares, and drivers can be suspended for not accepting enough rides or for low passenger ratings. Uber has been involved in more than 170 lawsuits in the US alone, from class-action safety complaints to price gouging to data failures to privacy practices to the biggest lawsuits of all, the misclassification of drivers.\n\nIssues of accountability are incredibly complex in an age when platforms offer branded services without owning any assets or employing the providers. Tom Goodwin, a senior vice president at Havas Media, put it well when he wrote in an article: 'Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.'\n\nWhen disasters such as the Kalamazoo killings happen, they raise the question of where accountability should lie when things go wrong.\n\nIt's much easier to know who to blame when traditional brands breach trust. Take the Tesco scandal that took place in January 2013. More than 10 million hamburgers and other meat products were withdrawn from supermarkets after traces of horsemeat were discovered in some of its beef products. The disclosure sparked a national outcry and it became one of the biggest food scandals of the twenty-first century. Even the then prime minister got involved. David Cameron reassured the British people that everything possible would be done to address a 'very shocking crime'.\n\nIn the wake of the scandal, Tesco issued an 'unreserved apology' and promised to introduce a robust new DNA-testing system to ensure the food customers buy is exactly as the label says. How did the 29 per cent horsemeat in the Tesco burger, falsely labelled 'pure beef', get in there? Although Tesco publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco, they appeared to pin much of the blame on their supplier, Silvercrest, owned by the ABP Food group, who had 'breached the company's trust'.\n\nWhen a customer shops at Tesco, their trust clearly lies in the supermarket brand, what they experience in the store and the products they buy. Tesco, the company, has to behave in trustworthy ways so that their shoppers trust _them_ and their products. But where does trust ultimately lie with platforms?\n\nWhen I get in a car with a stranger, is it the driver I am trusting? Have I placed some faith in Uber, the company, its team? Am I trusting the Uber brand? Perhaps I have confidence in the platform itself, the app, payments, rating system and its mysterious pricing algorithm? Some of the answers lie in the history of trust between people, companies and brands.\n\nThere was a time when people lived in tiny communities, hamlets made up of perhaps no more than a hundred people. Everybody knew everybody else and relationships were tight-knit. People's trustworthiness, or lack of it, was evident to everyone, given the close proximity.\n\nAs hamlets turned into villages and small towns, the population tipped well above what has become known as 'Dunbar's number'. The famous University of Oxford psychologist and anthropologist found that our brains, on average, are designed to have a limited number of people, around 150, in our social group. Yes, you can friend 500, even 5,000 people on your Facebook page, but Dunbar asserts that it is hard for us to maintain stable, meaningful relationships (online and offline) beyond 150. Within that 150, an inner circle of fifteen is the very limited number of people that you turn to for support when you most need it. And this circle of meaningful relationships is fluid: the friend you confide in this week may not be the person you turn to the following month. On the flip side, our brains can handle group sizes of up to 500 at what Dunbar calls the 'acquaintance level'\u2013put simply, the people with whom we can put a name to a face.\n\nWhen people moved into larger towns, with populations way above Dunbar's number, a close circle of trust, based on direct knowledge of each other, was no longer possible. Our reputations became an essential asset. If the baker offered good bread, people would buy it and others would hear about its quality. Equally, if the local blacksmith did shoddy work or someone failed to pay back a loan, word would get round. That dynamic kept most people up to the mark. The evolutionary biologist Robert Axelrod called it in his classic book _The Evolution of Cooperation_ the 'shadow of the future', referring to the idea that people behave better or more cooperatively when they know they're likely to meet or meet again (as opposed to a one-off encounter) and might be judged on previous behaviour. These local traders knew that how they behaved in the present would shape future prospects. Just like the Maghribi traders, it's the promise of benefits from continued cooperation that helps keeps us in line.\n\nEven the earliest incarnations of what we now call a 'brand' first rode on the back of personal reputation. The agricultural machinery giant John Deere was founded in the 1830s by a young entrepreneurial blacksmith living in Illinois who had invented an innovative plough. The Mars brand empire had humble beginnings in the kitchen of Frank C. Mars's home in Tacoma, Washington, when he started making and selling butter-cream candy. With these early brands, goods and services for the most part were associated with specific people, a name and face, not large corporations.\n\nIn the late 1800s, as cities expanded and goods became mass-produced, trust needed to keep up with the pace and scale of industrialization. As local merchants became massive companies, person-to-person trust was no longer viable. So how were people to know the quality of the goods and services they were buying? Take beer, a product that could easily be watered down.\n\nEstablished in 1777 by William Bass, the Bass Brewery grew into one of the largest beer companies in England. By the nineteenth century business was booming and in 1876 the brewery registered its distinctive ale's red triangle symbol and brand name to assure people of its quality. It was the very first trademark to be registered under the United Kingdom's Trade Marks Registration Act. A new kind of branding was born.\n\n'Brands arose as a way to compensate for the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Age,' writes Douglas Rushkoff, author and professor of media theory at City University of New York's Queens College. 'The more people had previously needed to trust the person behind a product, the more important the brand became as a symbol of origin and authenticity.'\n\nTrust soon became centralized, top-down, opaque, controlled and institutional. Rules, regulations, auditors, market analysts, insurance and independent agencies such as the Better Business Bureau flourished, enabling people to trade beyond their immediate circle of trust. And so, by the mid twentieth century, companies faced a new challenge. With products and services now more or less standardized, how were they to stand out from the crowd?\n\nAt first, they relied on developing brand identities, recognizable by a name, logo, packaging and a tagline, which typically represented a promise\u2013this is what this product or service will do for you. Oxo Cubes promised to 'make cooking so easy'. Lava soap promised to 'clean like no other soap'. By the 1950s, however, mass manufacturers such as Procter and Gamble, Unilever and General Foods realized these types of practical promises were not enough. The problem was, all washing powders and frozen peas do much the same job.\n\nWhat would give consumers a reason to choose one product over another? Vanity, neediness, status anxiety, aspiration, nostalgia and hope, among other things, it turned out. Marketers began to tap into a whole new consumer psychology. Grandiose _brand propositions_ were created, mixing functional benefits with emotional values. 'When I buy or use this brand, I am...' Coca-Cola wasn't manufacturing sugary drinks; its product was about making you feel 'refreshed'. Disney wasn't making movies; it was celebrating dreams. Nike, named after the winged goddess of victory, didn't sell trainers; it made you feel inspired. The idea that a brand would enable consumers to express something about themselves, something intangible, was revolutionary at the time. Crucially, and however artificially, it also bred a sense of intimacy and connection between consumer and multinational: 'Look, they care about _me_.' The result was that brand, with its fancy packaging and catchy slogans, developed enormous power and influence in our lives.\n\nWith the dawn of social media in the twenty-first century, everything changed. Marketers were hit with a seismic shift in the way trust worked with consumers. Through no-holds-barred comments and feedback, reviews and ratings, photo posts and 'likes', people started to share their experiences at scale. The person formerly known as a 'passive consumer' became a participant, a social ambassador, one who was not so easily duped and could be brutal when let down. Could Rice Krispies, the breakfast cereal, really 'help support your child's immunity'? Could a New Balance 'toning' sneaker, with hidden board technology that promised to activate the hamstrings and calves, really help burn calories as claimed?\n\nIt became much harder for brands to exaggerate or make false claims, no matter how flashy their ads. Companies had to start delivering authentic experiences and get comfortable with transparency. They had to learn how to listen, enable conversations and respond to customers' needs in real time. Brands had to let go of an era where trust could be produced and controlled centrally; by them, that is.\n\nFast forward to today, where conventions of how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired are once again being turned upside down. Platforms create systems that act as social facilitators. They match us with goods, rides, dates, trips, recommendations and so on. Customers have become communities, and these communities are themselves platforms that shape the ups and downs of a brand. Indeed, a recent survey conducted by Nielsen revealed that the most credible advertising comes straight from the people we know and trust. More than 80 per cent of respondents say they completely or somewhat trust the recommendations of friends and family. And two-thirds say they trust consumer opinions posted online.\n\nCompare, say, Marriott hotels to Airbnb. Once upon a time, we trusted the hotel chain; the brand was what made people feel safe to spend the night there. With Airbnb, you need to have confidence in the platform itself and in the connections between hosts and guests. In other words, trust must exist in the platform _and_ between people in the community. This is one of the key dynamics that distinguishes the new era of distributed trust from the old paradigm of institutional trust.\n\nJoe Gebbia is the thirty-six-year-old co-founder and chief product officer of Airbnb. Gebbia is a designer rather than an engineer, and he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. I met him in 2009, when I was writing my first book, _What's Mine is Yours_. The marketplace was just starting to become more popular and Airbnb was still far from a billion-dollar idea. The founders were enthusiastic to tell the story of how they started the company from a couple of air mattresses in San Francisco; a story they have now told thousands of times.\n\nGebbia, Brian Chesky and fellow co-founder Nate Blecharczyk began Airbnb with the best of intentions, and had no idea of the magnitude of what they were building. Today, with the company now occupying slick 170,000 square-foot offices and with on average nearly 2 million guests staying in Airbnb rentals every night, the unintended consequences of their success have also mushroomed. One example is the concern over Airbnb's role in distorting rental prices and creating housing shortages, especially for lower-income residents. As an exercise in trust-building, however, Airbnb is a standout.\n\nGebbia, though passionate about design and technology and their power to bring people together, is the first to admit that Airbnb is not a technology company but is in the 'trust business'. 'We bet our whole company on the hope that, with the right design, people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias,' Gebbia says in a TED talk on how Airbnb designs for trust. 'What we didn't realize is just how many people were ready and waiting to put the bias aside.'\n\nHe admits there are risks. 'Obviously, there are times when things don't work out. Guests have thrown unauthorized parties and trashed homes. Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain,' he says. 'In the early days, I was customer service, and those calls came right to my cell phone. I was at the front line of trust-breaking. And there's nothing worse than those calls. It hurts to even think about them.'\n\nGebbia thinks of Airbnb as playing the role of the 'mutual friend' who introduces you to new friends, new places and experiences. 'We have to create the conditions for a relationship to form between two people who have never met,' he tells me. 'And after the introduction has been made, we need to get out of the way.' The role Airbnb is playing may be different from Uber's, in that whom to trust is a choice that each host or guest must make for themselves, but what people want from the platform is similar. That is, we want platforms to mitigate the risk of bad things happening, and to be there for us if they do. 'The number-one thing people want from Airbnb is that if something goes wrong or not as planned, we've got their back,' Gebbia says. 'If we get that right, we are 80 per cent there.'\n\nAlok Gupta, thirty-three, was formerly a high-frequency trader on Wall Street and a research fellow in mathematics at the University of Oxford. He admits he is a big fan of observing patterns and predicting outcomes in enormous data sets. Three years ago, he joined Airbnb as a data science manager, applying his talents and thinking to a different problem: online-to-offline trust. That is, people using digital tools to meet up face-to-face. 'I think Airbnb places itself as the company which does the hard work for you, in terms of trusting the individual,' says Gupta. 'We know there's a barrier to trusting people you've never met before, but we want to fill that space, and we want to help overcome that barrier for you.'\n\nGupta talks about the 'defensive mechanisms' Airbnb has developed that reduce uncertainty. For instance, in 2011, after the 'EJ incident' when a host infamously got her San Francisco apartment completely trashed, Airbnb introduced a 'host guarantee' covering property damage of up to $1 million per booking. In 2013, the company introduced 'Airbnb Verified ID' confirming a person's online identity by matching it to offline ID documentation such as a driving licence and a passport. 'There is no place for anonymity in a trusted community,' the company wrote on its blog announcing the launch. 'Trust and verification. They just go together.' The challenge for Gupta and his team is that the spectrum of wrongdoing is vast, ranging from people using places as brothels to old-fashioned discrimination.\n\nIn January 2014, researchers from Harvard Business School released a controversial working paper on a study they had conducted. The study revealed that non-black Airbnb hosts could charge approximately 12 per cent more, on average, than black hosts\u2013roughly $144 per night, versus $107. In September 2016, looking across 6,000 listings, the same researchers found that requests from guests with distinctively African-American-sounding names (like Tanisha Jackson) were 16 per cent less likely to be accepted by Airbnb hosts than those with Caucasian-sounding names (like Allison Sullivan). Particularly troubling was that, in some instances, Airbnb users would rather allow their property to remain vacant than rent to a black-identified person.\n\nIn the United States, Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly prohibits racial discrimination in 'public accommodations' such as restaurants, cinemas, motels and hotels. The law contains an exemption, however, for someone renting fewer than five rooms in his own home, a category that would seem to include many Airbnb hosts. 'There have been too many unacceptable instances of people being discriminated against on the Airbnb platform because of who they are or what they look like,' wrote Laura W. Murphy, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, who was hired by Airbnb to compile a report to serve as a blueprint for how Airbnb plans to fight discrimination on the site.\n\nIn the firestorm that followed, Airbnb users started sharing stories on social media with the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack about their experience of bookings being denied or cancelled because of their race. For example, one user @MiQL tweeted: 'My wife & I tried to book w\/@Airbnb for a vaycay. Hosts w\/listed available rooms responded w\/\"Unavailable\". White friend got \"available\".' Personal profiles and photos, which users put together to try to project trustworthiness, have the unintended consequence of facilitating discrimination. Indeed, it seems that distributed trust is not always fairly or evenly distributed.\n\nBen Edelman, one of the authors of the Harvard study, says Airbnb's initial response to his findings 'was kind of denial'. Nine months after the discrimination study was conducted, with pressure mounting, Airbnb released their report outlining its non-discrimination policies and promise to root out bias and bigotry. The company are trying fixes such as minimizing the prominence of user photos and trying to increase 'instant bookings' that don't require pre-approval from hosts.\n\nBut why hadn't they noticed the discrimination happening on the platform? They had a blind spot. Brian, Joe and Nate are three young white American men. In other words, they hadn't personally experienced the type of discrimination many members of the Airbnb community had. 'Discrimination has no place on Airbnb. It is against what we stand for,' says Gebbia. In March 2016, Airbnb hired David King III, who had previously held a prominent diversity role at the US State Department, as the company's first director of diversity and belonging. King was given a team of talented engineers and data scientists, whose job includes identifying patterns of host behaviour and figuring out solutions to create a more inclusive platform.\n\nBut how do you go about stamping out those unconscious biases? It is difficult to remedy offline human prejudices that migrate online. You can't make somebody trust somebody. Like so much else, it's uncharted online territory. 'New systems, new structures that haven't been invented yet are needed to create environments that reduce discrimination or eliminate it,' Gebbia says.\n\nHe takes me back to the early days of the Model T Ford, which revolutionized the take-up of automobiles in the early twentieth century. 'I think the Model T has a lot of analogies to us,' says Gebbia. 'Look at early photos. It didn't have doors; it didn't have blinkers; it was missing all of these things that are needed for a safe ride, and that Ford added over the years. And sometimes I think we're like a Model T, that we haven't added our blinkers yet.'\n\nIn 1865, the British government passed a law called the 'Locomotive Act', which was a safety precaution to warn pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic of the terrifying approach of a motor vehicle. It stated that any locomotive or automobile must have a crew of three people: the driver, a stoker and a man whose job it was to walk at least fifty-five metres ahead of the vehicle, waving a red flag. The act, which later became known as the 'Red Flag Law', made it impossible for vehicles to drive more than two miles per hour in urban areas, meaning the usefulness of the new automobile was limited. The car is just one example of how, throughout history, a new technology that enables a trust leap can also introduce a new 'risky' behaviour\u2013travelling mechanically at speed\u2013and create a vexing challenge for lawmakers. With no precedents to go by, how do they figure out what kind of policies and restrictions will protect public interests?\n\nFor more than a decade, Coye Cheshire, a social psychologist and associate professor of UC Berkeley School of Information, has been studying how the internet is changing risk and trust. On a brisk autumn afternoon, I meet him in his campus office, a cosy room painted in moss green and filled with dark wood furniture and books piled high on every available surface. He makes me a cup of peppermint tea and gets straight to the heart of the matter. 'I want to help understand how humans take risks in the presence of uncertainty.'\n\nI've long admired Cheshire's work, including a paper he wrote in 2011 called 'Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance?' There, he asserted there was a difference between _interpersonal trust_ (human to human) and _system trust_ (human to system). Did he still think this distinction between people and technologies held true?\n\n'Back then, systems meant things like your telephone and computer, but to be blunt, I was taking a simplistic view of technology that didn't take into account that systems are now capable of betrayal,' he says. For example, a bot in a chat room that can express feelings and moods is very different from simply cooking food in a microwave. 'Today, systems embody everything from online platforms that people are using, to autonomous agents that act on behalf of humans in ways that are blurring the line in terms of our awareness around what the machine is doing.'\n\nCheshire admits that trust is a far more intricate business these days. 'We are working with these systems that are using complex algorithms to manage our information and make decisions on our behalf. But they are getting too complex for our brains to understand.' Consider this: to place a man on the moon in 1969 it took 145,000 lines of code. Today, it takes more than 2 billion lines of code to run all of Google's internet services, dwarfing Facebook, which runs on more than 62 million lines of code. 'I used to think that it was completely ridiculous to compare trust between people with trust in these online platforms,' says Cheshire. 'I'm not certain that is the case any more because in some ways we have offloaded some of our cognitive power.'\n\nIn the past, engineers would typically work on physical infrastructure projects such as roads, rail lines, gas pipelines and bridges. Today, however, they are designing new kinds of social infrastructure: online bridges that bring friends, families and strangers together. They are _trust engineers._ And one of the goals of these engineers is to get us to a place where we don't even think about the risks we are taking. It should feel like magic: you just get the right recommendation, the nearest driver, the best match, no hassle, no dramas. Yet cultivating an overload of that blind confidence can also create the opposite problem: too much trust in untrustworthy people. Think about Marc Dunton, the Uber passenger who was out with his friends at a bar when he accepted his ride with the homicidal Dalton. Dunton admits he knew there was a mad shooter on the loose and that Dalton and his car fitted the description. But surely someone on a shooting spree wasn't still on the Uber app and picking up fares? Surely the genie in the app wouldn't send me someone bad, right?\n\nIronically, one of the issues we face today is the speed and ease at which we are trusting. And it's not just happening on ride-sharing platforms such as Uber. Fancy a date? Download Tinder, Bumble, Happn or Tingle and zip through a fast set-up. When a profile comes up, swipe right on your phone if you like the look of them. And if they swipe right too, it's a match and you are on your way to meet up with a stranger, anywhere from one to a hundred miles away thanks to the powers of geolocation. It's accelerated trust based on a few photos and a handful of words: shopping through a catalogue of faces. It's trust on speed. And when we are in an accelerated mode of trust, we can be impulsive. It requires a conscious gear change to slow down and think twice about our decisions.\n\nOr what about news? Have you ever shared a link without ever reading the article or watching the clip? You are not alone. As a recent study conducted by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute suggested, many people on Twitter appear to retweet news without even reading it. The researchers found that 59 per cent of links shared on Twitter have never actually been clicked. 'People are more willing to share an article than read it,' says study co-author Arnaud Legout. 'This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.'\n\nOn 29 January 2017, the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer emphatically retweeted on his personal account a video from the satirical site _The Onion_. '@SeanSpicer's role in the Trump administration will be to provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation,' _The Onion_ 's tweet joked. Around an hour later, Spicer retweeted it, adding, 'You nailed it. Period.' The clip included questionable 'facts' to know about Spicer, including his former role as a senior correspondent for NPR's national desk (false), his snowy white pocket square with a quarter inch of clearance on his suit jacket, his 'defensive' speaking style and whether he has knowingly lied to the press. Could it have been that Spicer has a quirky sense of humour and was giving a sarcastic response to the video? It's possible. But it's also possible that he didn't bother to watch the video before sharing it, or to read the headline carefully enough to realize he was the punchline. In an age of 'fake news' and media propaganda, this phenomenon is more problematic and frightening than ever.\n\nEfficiency can be the enemy of trust. Trust needs a bit of friction. It needs time. It requires investment and effort. 'Trust doesn't form at an event in a day. Even bad times shared don't form trust immediately,' says author Simon Sinek. It comes from 'slow, steady consistency and we need to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen'. Systems are becoming so seamless that we are not always fully conscious of the risks we are taking or the falsehoods we are sharing.\n\n'I think the problem comes down to social translucence,' says Coye Cheshire. 'How much of the social interaction\u2013our behaviours and the underlying mechanisms that enable interactions\u2013how much of that is visible?' Not much at present, he maintains. We need to crack open the 'black boxes' of the internet giants, to lift the veil on the behind-the-scenes operations of systems with which we interact daily and yet know very little about\u2013and may trust too much.\n\nHere is a simple example of how social translucence works in the physical world. If I have something valuable I want to mail, I will go to a post office rather than just drop it in a box at the end of the road and hope for the best. I will hand the parcel to the person behind the counter and pay for registered mail. A human being hands me back a paper tracking slip with a number that I can use to go online and see where my package is at any given stage of the journey. That's social translucence\u2013there are lots of visible cues that tell me what's happening. 'With online systems, the translucence breaks down,' says Cheshire. 'Take putting your credit card information into a site. I pass along the information but it just goes in one direction and I trust the system that the details are safe.'\n\nOnline systems seem as magic as the Wizard of Oz: we do not see the army of human beings, many of them single-minded maths nerds, involved in their operation. We can't see the ghosts in the systems ranking people, places, objects and ideas, making choices and matches on our behalf. Then again, perhaps some of that ignorance is self-imposed. Many of us don't like knowing the extent to which our lives are constantly being massaged by algorithms. We prefer to trust that it's all above board.\n\nA few years ago, a social psychologist and data scientist named Adam D. I. Kramer designed an experiment using the world's largest laboratory of human behaviour: Facebook. A team of researchers from Cornell University and Facebook, including Kramer, joined up to study 'emotional contagion' on a massive scale. Do the emotions expressed by friends via online social networks influence our moods\u2013in other words, can emotions online be transferred to others and how?\n\nFor one week in 2012, the researchers tweaked the algorithm to manipulate the emotional content appearing in the news feeds of 689,003 randomly selected, unwitting users. Posts were identified as either 'positive' (awesome!) or 'negative' (bummer) based on the words used. In one group, Facebook reduced the positive content of news feeds, and in the other, it reduced the negative content. 'We did this research because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,' Kramer says. 'We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.'\n\nDid tinkering with the content change the emotional state of users? Yes, the authors discovered. The exposure led some users to change their own behaviours: the researchers found people who had positive words removed from their feeds made fewer positive posts and more negative ones, and vice versa. It could have been an online version of monkey see, monkey do, or simply a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. 'The results show emotional contagion,' Adam Kramer and his co-authors write in the academic paper published in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Science_ in 2014. 'These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.'\n\nWhen the study was published, it sparked widespread public uproar. What drove the study into the spotlight weren't its findings\u2013in fact, the effect, as the authors acknowledge, was quite minimal, as little as one-tenth of a per cent of an observed change. (Given, however, the scale of Facebook, even tiny effects can have large social consequences such as online bullying.) Instead, the outrage centred on ethics. The researchers had failed to get informed consent from the Internal Review Board (IRB) that oversees 'human subjects research', or from the thousands of Facebook users who were subjected to the manipulation. In the blaze that followed, the company argued that its 1.86 billion monthly users give blanket consent to the company's research on the personal data it collects and stores as a condition of its terms of service. Facebook's data use policy warns users that Facebook 'may use the information we receive about you... for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement'. That is your price every time you log in, and the cost may be higher than you think.\n\nUsers' willingness to tick the box labelled 'Agree', on this and other platforms, has seen the blithe handover of massive amounts of once private information. 'It has enabled one of the biggest shifts in power between people and big institutions in the twenty-first century,' says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and author of _Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest_. 'These large corporations (and governments and political campaigns) now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.'\n\nThe Facebook story is one example, and it became notorious. Shouldn't Facebook explicitly ask people to 'check the box' if they want to be made to feel happier or sadder? Comments poured in across social media. 'Does everyone who works at Facebook just have the \"this is creepy as hell\" part of their brain missing?' tweeted @sarahjeong a few days after the study was published. Similarly, @Tomgara tweeted: 'Impressive achievement by Facebook to snatch back the title of most dystopian nightmarish tech company.' People felt they had been treated like lab rats.\n\nWhat surprised many academics and researchers, including me, was the level of shock and outrage. Didn't people realize these platforms are essentially mysterious algorithms that exert immense control over what we see? Facebook is just like other content sites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy, constantly turning one algorithmic knob and tweaking another to find an ideal ad placement, to get us to read and post more. Consider this: if you are a Facebook user, what is the statistical likelihood you have been a guinea pig in one of its experiments? According to the company, it's 100 per cent. 'At any given time, any given Facebook user will be part of ten experiments the company happens to be conducting,' says Dan Ferrell, a Facebook data scientist.\n\nCompanies conduct split testing all the time, ostensibly to improve user satisfaction.* We trust algorithms to determine our Netflix and Spotify recommendations; deliver the most relevant results to our Google searches; even assess our credit score. So why all the fuss and surprise? 'The machine appears to be only a neutral go-between,' writes Cathy O'Neil in her insightful book _Weapons of Math Destruction._ In 2013, Karrie Karahalios, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, carried out a survey on Facebook's algorithm and found that 62 per cent of the people were unaware the company tinkered with the news feed. So of the 1.72 billion people on Facebook, 1 billion think the system instantly shares whatever they or their friends post.\n\nThe study struck a deep nerve\u2013it was a reminder of how the internet churns, and where the power really lies. It illustrated the power of digital puppet masters or trust engineers constantly to manipulate our data and in different ways control our lives. And to many users it felt like they had been played; the Facebook study was considered a major betrayal of trust.\n\nBeyond the initial brouhaha, though, the study raised a more profound question: if Facebook can manipulate a person's moods with a minor tweak of its algorithms, what else can the platform control? 'About two-thirds of American adults have a profile on Facebook. They spend thirty minutes a day on the site, only four minutes less than they dedicate to face-to-face socializing,' writes O'Neil. Nearly half of them, according to a Pew Research Center report, count on Facebook to deliver at least some of their news. So this leads to the question: how else could Facebook change our minds by tweaking the algorithm? Could it change whom we vote for?\n\n'Pope Francis has broken with tradition and unequivocally endorsed Donald Trump for President of the United States.' 'WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary has sold weapons to ISIS.' 'Clinton runs a child-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria.' Many Facebook readers would have seen these posts and others in their news feed. A few days before the 2016 US election, I made a promise to myself not to check the site for at least a month, after a ludicrous article appeared at the top of my feed. It stated that an FBI agent suspected of involvement in leaking Hillary Clinton's emails had been found dead after apparently murdering his wife and then turning the gun on himself. Two thoughts in succession ran quickly through my mind. Was this piece of 'news' true? And then, _whom_ should I go to, what news source, to find out the real truth? All these stories were of course hoaxes, typifying the fake news and conspiracy theories that plagued the 2016 election.\n\nA recent study by BuzzFeed found that 38 per cent of all posts from three of the largest hyper-partisan right-wing Facebook pages, such as Eagle Rising, contained a mixture of true and false, or mostly false information, compared to 19 per cent of posts from three hyper-partisan left-wing pages, such as Occupy Democrats. Cumulatively, the audiences of these pages are in the tens of millions. The top five fake news items in the last weeks of the election were all negatives for the Clinton campaign\u2013the Facebook algorithm picked a side. And the spread of fake news is far more common on the right than it is on the left. 'These findings suggest a troubling conclusion: The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world's biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear,' writes Buzzfeed.\n\nIt's an ironic turn of events, given that in May 2016, Facebook came under fire from Republicans and critics for allegedly suppressing conservative-leaning stories in its trending news section, curated by a small team of human editors. Facebook ended up replacing those human editors, accused of party bias, with software, but the plan clearly failed. And, tellingly, the top twenty fabricated election stories on Facebook netted more engagement than factual stories from mainstream news sources.\n\nIn the wake of President Trump's unexpected victory, many questions were raised about fake news and filter bubbles on Facebook influencing the election results. Mark Zuckerberg initially denied the allegations. 'Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook\u2013it's a very small amount of the content\u2013to think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,' he said a few days after the election. A few months later, however, he had significantly shifted his stance from the initial _Who, us?_ shrug reaction. In February 2017, he published a 5,700-word manifesto on his Facebook page. It sounded a bit like a grandiose State of the Union address for 'bringing us closer together', outlining the immense challenges facing the world today, from terrorism to climate change, pandemics to online safety. 'Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection,' he wrote. 'There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.'\n\nZuckerberg dedicated approximately 1,000 words to how Facebook has become a hotbed for fake content and why this is leading to increased polarization. 'If this continues and we lose common understanding, then even if we eliminated all misinformation, people would just emphasize different sets of facts to fit their polarized opinions. That's why I'm so worried about sensationalism in media.' The CEO then went on to describe a plan, albeit a vague one, for how Facebook proposes to deal with issues on the platform. But can the internet giant really wage war on disinformation and quash bogus memes?\n\nMoving forward, Facebook will check whether people are reading the articles before sharing. If they are, those stories will get more prominence in the news feed. Users can flag posts they think are fake or suspect, helping Facebook detect the most blatant posts. Artificial intelligence and algorithm analysis will also be used to flag content and detect dangerous falsehoods. But how do you decide what is intentional disinformation and what is, say, a bit of an exaggeration? Who decides what the truth is? If it's Facebook doing the deciding, we are awarding them even more power to set the agenda.\n\n'Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook,' Zuckerberg said in the letter. 'In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong.' He added, towards the end: 'Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy.'\n\nTo be clear, I do not think that the data scientists, researchers and engineers at Facebook are intentionally gaming the political system. But while Facebook isn't responsible for untrue stories _per se_ , the company wrote the code that meant the bogus news items appeared more prominently over the picture of a friend's child, a funny video or a genuine news story. Is it up to Facebook to emphasize and provide information about the original news sources for news articles? Should they do more to contain hoax stories? Is it the fault of a Facebook business model that depends on clickbait? I think yes, to all of the above. But perhaps the betrayal lies in the system itself, a system that makes it easy for almost a third of the world's population to gossip and gripe, share and like, even if the content is false, and without proper checks and balances or any real redress.\n\nThe online landscape is vastly populated and yet, all too often, empty of anyone to take charge or turn to when it counts. It's rather like when you're a teenager and you throw a party while your parents are away. At first, the freedom is thrilling but there comes a point, somewhere after the tequila slammers, window smashes and the gatecrashers, when you start wishing there was a responsible adult in the house.\n\nFacebook insists it is a neutral technology pathway facilitating connections between people, and not a media company. It is a misconceived and dangerous position. It is _the_ media company with control over how misinformation spreads and an enormous amount of influence shaping someone's worldview about whom they can trust.\n\nThe questions around Facebook may sound different from the ones raised in the days after the Kalamazoo killings but in fact they are remarkably similar. When it comes to trust in distributed systems, we need to know who will tell the truth about a product, service or piece of news, and who to blame if that trust is broken.\n\nWhere does the buck stop? In this new era, people are still working that out.\n\nWith traditional institutions, the picture was clearer. For instance, when, say, your Barclays bank account was hacked, the bank would reimburse you. But when an online cryptocurrency fund such as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) runs into trouble, there is no central ombudsman or traditional institution to turn to. (Instead, pandemonium rules, as we'll see in chapter 10.) We are in unmapped territory, scrambling and fumbling around for mechanisms that can replace institutional trust, and at the same time looking for ways to improve the old world's own shortcomings in matters of accountability. Platforms, meanwhile, are trying to figure out their role in it all\u2013mere facilitators in bringing people together, or something more?\n\nGoing back to the analogy of the early days of the car, it took decades to create norms like traffic lights, stop signs and even something as simple as the concept of road lanes. 'We will look back one day and laugh, \"Imagine a car without blinkers,\"' Gebbia says. 'Then we will realize how far we have come in this new era of trust.' Even at that point, with some clearer guidelines governing our coexistence in a world of distributed trust, we will still occasionally crash into each other. No system is foolproof. The hope is that it will be a minor collision, not a fatal accident.\n\n* 'Split testing' is the comparison of two versions of an app or web page against each other to determine which one performs better.\n\n#\n\n# But She Looked the Part\n\nOne day in the spring of 1983, not long after I turned five, an unfamiliar woman entered our house. She was neither a family member nor friend. Her name was Doris, she was in her late twenties and she was starting as our mother's help. She came from Glasgow and had a thick Scottish accent. Her o's sounded like 'ae' and she rolled her r's. It was gently lilting, almost sing-song.\n\nDoris had a mop of mousy brown hair and wore thin steel-rim glasses. She was plump with a ruddy face. She was the type of person you could imagine going for a brisk walk on a cold day and then sinking into a comfy chair, content with a cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit.\n\nShe arrived at our house wearing her 'Salvos' uniform. It was a navy suit with big silver S's embroidered on the collars, complete with a bonnet-style hat. Doris said she belonged to the Salvation Army because she enjoyed helping people. She didn't bring many belongings with her, although I remember the tambourine she kept at the side of her bed.\n\nMy mum had found Doris through a magazine called _The Lady._ A young aristocrat named Thomas Gibson Bowles, who also started _Vanity Fair_ , founded the magazine in 1885. If you watch _Downton Abbey_ , you will have heard of _The Lady._ It is the place where high society\u2013including the Royal Family\u2013seeks domestic staff, from gardeners to butlers to nannies. You won't find any celebrity tittle-tattle or sex stories in the magazine whose tagline is 'for elegant women with elegant minds'. The lead articles from a past edition included 'Capture the Style that Wooed a King', followed by 'Where to Find Bluebells in Bloom'. There was even a recipe to make teatime Bakewell tarts. You get the picture.\n\nMy family is not high society, far from it. So I was intrigued as to why on earth my mum had advertised for help in _The Lady._ 'I was starting my own business and feeling nervous about hiring someone to look after you,' she explains, all these years later. 'I remember thinking if the Royal Family uses _The Lady_ to find help, it must be reliable and the best.'\n\nDoris replied to Mum's advertisement. In those days, you would send a formal letter expressing interest in the position and a photograph of yourself. An interview would follow. As Doris lived in Scotland, Mum interviewed her over the phone. 'I remember her strong Scottish accent,' Mum tells me. 'She said all the right things. She told me she was a member of the Salvation Army and had worked with kids of a similar age. But, honestly, she had me at \"hello\".' After their chat, Mum called the references Doris had given and was satisfied they were all impeccable.\n\nDoris lived with us for just over ten months. She was for the most part a good nanny\u2013cheerful, reliable and helpful. There was nothing strikingly suspicious about her, except for one thing. After school every Wednesday, she would drive us to a block of council flats in Edmonton. The building was one of those dark grey concrete high-rises. It sat close to the North Circular, a busy ring road in London. An odd man in his fifties, balding, lived in the flat. And so did a young baby. The flat was dingy and things were always strewn everywhere. I still remember the dowdy wallpaper and damp, musty smell. Doris would spend the entire visit holding the baby.\n\nI told my parents I didn't like going to this strange flat, to see this strange man. Doris insisted that she was visiting the only family she had in London. Her 'uncle' made us nice tea and we liked playing with the baby. The weekly after-school trips continued.\n\nOn one of these visits, I noticed there were lots of bottles of expensive-looking perfume on the table; they looked just like the ones Mum had in her own bathroom. I mentioned it to my parents. Funnily enough, it was one of the first times I remember my parents not believing me. I was a dreamer. I had imaginary friends and made up elaborate plays. They told me to stop making up stories about Doris. That it wasn't nice. So nobody suspected anything was amiss. Or not until Doris's Uncle Charlie died, supposedly.\n\nOne night, around nine months into her stay, Doris didn't come home. When she did return she explained her Uncle Charlie had suddenly died of a heart attack and she had rushed back to Edinburgh for the funeral. Doris's mum happened to call our house later that afternoon. My parents naturally offered their condolences. 'Her mum had no idea why,' Dad tells me now. 'Doris's mother said the brother was alive and kicking. In fact, he was sitting in the armchair having tea right next to her in her lounge.'\n\nDad confronted Doris. She said her mother was in shock and must have forgotten. 'I told her it was highly unlikely you would forget your brother dying,' Dad recalls. Doris finally confessed that she had lied because she had really gone to the VJ Day veterans day parade to see Princess Diana. My parents thought it was slightly odd but Doris was obsessed with the Royal Family so it was plausible. She continued living with us.\n\nThe series of events that subsequently unravelled sounds totally unbelievable. You'll have to take my word that it's true.\n\nWe had lovely neighbours at the time called the Luxemburgs. They had kids of a similar age and also an au pair. Doris spent _a lot_ of time with her. Around a month after the Uncle Charlie incident, Mr Luxemburg knocked on our door late one evening. He told my parents that he had just thrown their au pair out. 'Philip said he found out that she had been involved in running some kind of drugs ring in North London with Doris,' Dad relates. 'They had even been in an armed robbery and he believed Doris was the getaway driver.' The car, it later turned out, was our family's silver Volvo Estate.\n\nAt this point, my parents decided to search Doris's room. They found plastic bags full of credit-card statements and thousands of pounds' worth of unpaid bills. In a shoebox under her bed, she had stuffed piles of foreign currency, stolen from my parents' home office. Now on high alert, my dad stood on guard by our front door all night with a baseball bat. He was frightened Doris would come home. Thankfully, she didn't.\n\nThe next morning, Dad went to the police first thing. He drove with them to the flat we had been visiting on Wednesdays, visits my parents knew about, even if they had been misled about the true circumstances. 'There was a big hole in the front door that somebody had tried to kick in,' Dad recalls. The weird guy was there, the supposed 'uncle' who gave us tea. (Turned out the 'uncle' was Doris's boyfriend and the baby was their child.) He had a big iron bar on the table. Doris never returned to our house.\n\n'Even as I retell this story I feel sick to my stomach,' Mum says now. 'I left you in the care of a serious criminal. And it took us so long to know who she really was.' My parents never hired anyone through _The Lady_ again. Instead, they asked their friends for referrals.\n\nLooking back, what would they have done differently? 'I wish we had asked Doris more and better questions,' Mum says. 'I wish we had known more about her.' She now realizes the impeccable referees could just as well have been Doris's friends, family or even 'colleagues' in her drugs ring. And the Salvation Army was a total cover story.\n\nMy parents thought they had enough information to make a good decision about Doris, even though in retrospect there was _a lot_ they didn't know about her. There was a _trust gap._ And that raises an essential point when it comes to trust: the illusion of information can be more dangerous than ignorance. As the Italian social scientist Diego Gambetta beautifully put it, 'Trust has two enemies, not just one: bad character and poor information.'\n\nIt would be helpful if the likes of Doris wore labels saying, 'Be warned, I am a con woman and serial liar.' But they don't, and of course it's in the nature of such a person to be convincing. My parents clearly made a very, very poor decision. Yet they are generally smart, rational people with good judgement. What went wrong?\n\nBaroness Onora O'Neill is a philosopher, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a cross-bench member of the House of Lords. Now in her late seventies, she has written extensively about trust and, crucially, how trust is misplaced. She explores that theme in a TED talk, while also challenging the conventional, simplistic belief that as a society we have lost trust and ought to set about rebuilding it. More has to be better, right?\n\n'Frankly, I think rebuilding trust is a stupid aim. [Instead] I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try _not_ to trust the untrustworthy,' Baroness O'Neill tells her audience, with understated dry humour.\n\nHer point, however, is deadly serious. Trust is not the same as trustworthiness. Encouraging generalized trust simply for the sake of creating a more 'trusting society' is not only meaningless, it's dangerous. For one thing, people are already inclined to want to trust blindly, particularly when greed enters the picture. The Bernie Madoff scandal is a classic case. Think of all the tens of thousands of investors who placed their savings with the aptly named Madoff, who made off with their money in an elaborate $65 billion Ponzi scheme that ran over decades. Why did investors trust him about something too good to be true? Mostly because Madoff was charming and moved in the same country club and Jewish social circles as they did, in Long Island and Palm Beach. He was a long con, a person who had built up his reputation over years. Indeed, he was known for being a generous, charitable man (it just turned out to be with other people's money). And besides, his own family, close friends and showbiz names such as Steven Spielberg and Fred Wilpon, owner of the New York Mets, had invested with him. The guy had to be sound, didn't he? No, as it turned out.\n\nAs O'Neill notes, Madoff is an example of too much trust in the wrong place. Instead, all of us making decisions about trust should be looking at the who, where and why of _trustworthiness_. Who deserves our trust, and in what respects do we need them to be trustworthy? For instance, if I asked, 'Do you trust your dentist?' that in itself is not a helpful question. You might sensibly respond, 'To do what?' 'Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim [in this life],' the baroness reiterates. 'What matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness\u2013judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects,' says O'Neill.\n\nHow well do we carry out that logical goal in practice? It's not always easy.\n\nMy parents' decision to trust Doris came down largely to their personal judgement and blind faith. They wanted, even needed, to believe that what she was saying was true. Their judgement of Doris was also influenced by _trust signals_. These are clues or symbols that we knowingly or unknowingly use to decide whether another person is trustworthy or not. The Salvation Army, Scottish accents, _The Lady_ magazine, Doris's cheery appearance, her references and even her steel-rimmed glasses were all trust signals my parents used to make a decision. Trust signals supposedly give us the ability to 'read' each other. They give us reasons to trust someone or ways to demonstrate our own trustworthiness. But it's still a bet, of sorts. 'Like all gambles, assessing trustworthiness is an imperfect endeavour; there's always a chance you're going to come up short,' writes David DeSteno in _The Truth about Trust_.\n\nSome signals we literally 'give off', such as our clothes, our face and our accent. Indeed, studies have shown that the Scottish accent is perceived to be the most trustworthy in the United Kingdom ('Scouse' is perceived to be the least). Other trust signals are non-verbal but still visible, including our posture or gestures such as a nod, smile, twitch or an averted gaze. Despite the admonition not to judge a book by its cover, these first impressions are insanely influential when it comes to trusting someone.\n\nJon Freeman is an assistant professor of psychology at New York University and director of its Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab. He studies what he calls 'split-second social perception'. When you see someone's face, you make snap judgements, within a tenth of a second, about their traits, including how trustworthy they are. Freeman wants to understand why our brains take these kinds of mental shortcuts.\n\nFreeman, in his late twenties, is a rising academic star. On a typical day, you will find him wearing slim-fitting slacks, a navy blue button-down shirt and nerdy-cute tortoiseshell glasses. Looking at him, you might instantly label him an 'academic'. The scientist behind 'blink' stereotyping likes it that way. And, in this case, you'd be right.\n\nA few years ago, Freeman and his colleagues devised an experiment to see if there was such a thing as appearing trustworthy. Participants were shown pictures of distinctly different male faces of different ethnicities. They were asked to rate how trustworthy or untrustworthy they thought the people in the pictures were. The results were clear\u2013your brain thinks it knows a trustworthy face. Humans are inherently wired this way. When our ancestors were approached by a stranger, they needed a rapid-response mechanism. Friend or foe? But the same rapid response in our day-to-day reactions can lead us to make biased trust decisions based on stereotypes.\n\nThe researchers devised a second experiment in which they digitally altered pictures of the same person, evolving the images gradually from looking _slightly happy_ to _slightly angry_. The study found that people with upturned eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones, big baby-like eyes and an upward curving mouth\u2013even if they weren't overtly smiling\u2013are more likely to be perceived as trustworthy. Those featuring sunken cheeks, a downturned mouth and eyebrows\u2013even if they weren't obviously frowning\u2013are more likely to be perceived as untrustworthy. S0 the trick to appearing trustworthy? Look _slightly_ happy. Just like Doris did. The problem is, however, there is no evidence that people with those 'trustworthy' features are in fact more trustworthy.\n\nYou can't consciously control whether you perceive a person to be trustworthy or not; your brain does it for you automatically, but not always accurately. And our early assumptions about people can be difficult to budge. That's astonishing and a little frightening. Trust can therefore be easily misplaced. Indeed, the art of the con man is to give off the right signals and appear trustworthy.\n\nOf course, trust signals are not just based on looks and first impressions. Clear symbols of status or authority, from a white lab coat to a police officer's badge, are also trust signals, for some. Uniforms can be powerful shortcuts for enabling trust. For instance, if my doorbell rings and I look through the peephole and see a stranger in a postal uniform, I will open the door. The postal uniform is a recognizable symbol that reassures me in my decision. Well-known brands rely on the same dynamic. When I am overseas in a country with dodgy drinking water, I'll buy bottles of Evian or some other brand I know. Why? The name and packaging make me believe the water inside is safe. I don't have to trust the person selling me the water, I trust the brand.\n\nTrust signals can also come from the endorsement of third parties. Doris used her association with the Salvation Army, one of the most trusted charities in the UK, to appear trustworthy. She was deliberately sending false signals to dupe my parents. We may not outright lie like Doris did, but think of the number of times we drop in an association with a trusted brand or institution to establish our credibility. I do it all the time when I meet new people: 'Oh, I teach at Oxford University' or 'You might have seen my work in _The Economist_.' I am not bragging (okay, maybe a bit, sometimes) but intentionally drawing on these signals to build trust. Going back to the definition of trust, _The Economist_ and Oxford reduce uncertainty about me for other people. They build confidence in the unknown.\n\nWe use institutional trust signals to help us make all kinds of decisions in our lives. For instance, imagine you have to choose between two lawyers to handle a matter. One has a law degree from Whittier Law School in California (ranked as one of the worst law schools in the United States) and the other has a degree from Harvard Law School. Removing price from the equation, most people would choose the Harvard-trained lawyer. Similarly, 'You can't get fired for hiring McKinsey' is an adage that has been muttered among management for years as a reason for hiring the world's most prestigious consulting firm. In both these examples, we are trusting the elite reputation of the institution, not the trustworthiness of the individual.\n\nTrust signals are changing in the age of distributed trust. Consider occupational licences: in the 1950s, fewer than 5 per cent of American workers needed a licence to do their job. Today, more than 1,000 professions\u2013approximately a third of all occupations\u2013in the United States require a licence. In some states you need a licence to be a tree surgeon, fortune teller, florist, horse masseuse, make-up artist, ferret breeder, falconer and even a hair braider. Of course, occupational licences are necessary to enforce standards for high-risk professions that require you to put your life in someone else's hands. I like knowing that the pilot flying the plane or the doctor at the hospital are regulated and licensed. But professional licensing rules have become excessive and don't necessarily help us to make good decisions as to whom we can trust. Do I really need my hairdresser to pay $2,500 per year and to have no fewer than five sinks and at least ten workstations before I can trust them to cut my hair? Surely ratings and reviews left by previous customers would be a better, or at least an equal, indicator of their talent?\n\nIn some instances, new trust signals will be used alongside institutional ones. Think about lawyers. Law degrees or bar memberships are certainly important trust mechanisms, but here's the thing: once earned, these qualifications do not change based on a lawyer's _actual_ performance (unless, of course, he or she is removed from the bar for unethical behaviour). Who judges the judgement and quality of skills of professionals? Indeed, I once made a very bad decision in hiring a lawyer who had graduated from an Ivy League law school and belonged to a top-tier law firm. A friend had recommended him to handle a matter. He turned out to be unresponsive and, frankly, incompetent. If I was hiring a lawyer today, I might go to UpCounsel, an online marketplace that matches clients with high-quality attorneys, based on particular skills, pricing and availability. There I could find a suitable one at the push of a button, just as easily as I could hire an Uber ride.\n\nOn every lawyer's profile, it lists qualifications, years of experience and areas of specialization. Clients can also see in real time how much their attorney is billing and what for. Plus, after the transaction, lawyers are rated by clients with one to five stars, just like on eBay, and given detailed reviews. 'Reviews are one of the most important things in my online profile,' says Seth Weiner, a popular attorney on UpCounsel, who graduated from Columbia Law School and left life in the big city firms to work as a solo practitioner. 'If 250 people have been happy with me, it stands to reason that the next person will be as well.' UpCounsel is using online reputation as a means of solving problems of trust. The fascinating aspect of these real-time ratings is how they help hold people accountable for performance once they are in the profession. They allow us to see beyond the more obvious hallmarks of 'goodness' (such as Harvard degrees and fancy offices) that could be totally at odds with the quality of work they _actually_ perform.\n\nSo technology might hold people more accountable, but to what degree can technology enhance our assessment of who is trustworthy and who isn't? Would my parents not have mistakenly trusted Doris if they had been choosing a child carer in this digital age? I knew the right person to ask.\n\nLynn Perkins is the forty-three-year-old co-founder of UrbanSitter, an online marketplace that connects families with babysitters on the internet. She lives in San Francisco and she talks fast, really fast. 'I love to help people find the perfect restaurant, the right vacation for a friend's honeymoon or a new job,' she says. 'I've matched friends needing apartments with roommates and three couples who are now married.' In short, Perkins is a connector.\n\nIn 2008, after the arrival of twin boys, Perkins decided to take time off from her high-flying career in investment banking and real-estate development. Long hours in the office were replaced with lots of time with other mums. The conversations were somewhat predictable. How do you get your child to sleep more? Why are they so picky about what they eat? Why don't they listen to me? And so on. Perkins also noticed, however, the inordinate amount of time mums spent venting about the shortage of reliable childcare. 'They'd say they would rather skip going out on a Friday night with their husband if they couldn't find a sitter their friend had already used,' Perkins tells me. 'It was incredibly revealing about what they were looking for and currently couldn't find.'\n\nPerkins herself had experienced the nuisance of one too many sitters cancelling at the last minute. 'It was around the time when companies like OpenTable, for restaurant reservations, and Airbnb were starting to crop up,' she says. 'But there wasn't any kind of on-demand marketplace for babysitters and nannies.' Why, she wondered, could you book a table in thirty seconds but not a sitter? She suspected it was down to trust.\n\nIn the early days of UrbanSitter, Perkins did something simple but smart\u2013she borrowed trust from organizations parents already trusted. She went to local music classes, clubs such as Big City Moms, Little Stars Soccer teams, elementary school groups, you name it, and found all the babysitters the parents in the groups were currently using. Perkins convinced the best sitters she met through these organizations to put their profiles on UrbanSitter. But it wasn't enough. When Perkins first started UrbanSitter in 2011, her closest friends and the investors she pitched to were convinced it would never work. 'Are you crazy?' was a common response.\n\n'They just could never imagine using a service where people would find their care provider online,' says Perkins. The doubters wondered how finding a sitter online could be better and safer than asking for personal recommendations from friends. 'One thing everyone wanted to know was whether my team had met and interviewed every single one of the individual sitters. It was something they thought you just had to do to build trust.'\n\nEven then, people simply couldn't imagine that social networks could not only deliver all that essential information but also make a better job of it. As is now the case with many online services, you have to join UrbanSitter via Facebook or LinkedIn. If a person has fewer than five 'friends', it's a red flag that it's a fraudulent account. But the real power of the Facebook login is that it can unlock the value of established personal connections. It reveals how we are connected to others. Whom do you know that I know, be it direct Facebook friends, friends of friends, people we went to school with or who worked at the same company. Trust established in one group and context can travel and spread to another.\n\nOn UrbanSitter, when you go to book, you can see how many 'friends' have previously booked or are in some way connected to that sitter. These connections make us feel more comfortable and confident about our decisions. They reduce the unknown. The collective wisdom of the crowd is enhanced by the wisdom of 'friends'. It's social proof on steroids.\n\nThe late John Keith Murnighan, when he was a professor in social sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, set out to explain what causes us to trust people we do not really know. Specifically, he was interested in the role that 'friends' play in stimulating feelings of trust for a stranger. He conducted a series of experiments based on the famous 'trust game' that was originally designed by behavioural economists in 1995. In the game, there are two participants, a sender and a receiver, who are anonymous strangers. Both are given a certain amount of money, let's say $100. The first player can send any portion of the $100, or none of it, to the second player whom they will never meet. The first player is told that whatever amount they send will be tripled, by the experimenter, for the receiver. The receiver then has to make a similar decision: how much of the tripled amount should they return to the sender? Player A can therefore either potentially turn a profit or lose everything. The point of the game is that sending a large amount of money indicates a high degree of trust.\n\nBefore volunteers participated in the trust game, Murnighan and his team asked them to provide the names of people they trusted and people they distrusted and the reasons for their feelings. The researchers quickly flashed these names for mere milliseconds to subliminally prime the study participants. It was too fast for anyone to be able to recognize the names that had been flashed. After that, the participants played the classic trust game. The results were stunningly clear.\n\nParticipants who had subliminally seen the names of people they trusted, sent on average nearly 50 per cent more to the anonymous receiver than the participants who saw the names of people they did not trust. 'We found we could stimulate feelings of trust for a stranger without people even realizing,' wrote Murnighan, an outcome he found 'both exciting and scary'. 'Imagine a fanatic fan of Elvis Presley. If I know someone is a huge fan of Elvis, I might casually drop Elvis's name to activate more trust in me. There is clearly a risk of manipulation.'\n\nThe results of the game help explain how the likes of Madoff managed to deceive so many people. His client list included the rich and famous and his own friends and family\u2013his brother, his sons and their wives. When new investors spotted close relatives on the investment list, it was a powerful trust signal that Madoff himself was trustworthy. Whether Madoff intentionally or inadvertently used the friends and family connections does not matter. The point is, these relational cues can provoke automatic trust that can be very dangerous, especially in cases such as Madoff's where we might lack the time or expertise to make a deliberate and proper evaluation.\n\nBut Murnighan's experiment also sheds light on the power of online social connections\u2013the wisdom of 'friends' can automatically enhance our ability to trust people we do not know.\n\nInterestingly, Lynn Perkins wrongly assumed the most influential social connection would be between parents. Instead, it was between sitters. 'Over time, parents value the connections UrbanSitter can surface between sitters; they want to book the friends of the sitter they really liked,' she explains. When you think about it, this is how trusted referrals typically work. Say an entrepreneur asks me for the name of the designer I trust. I introduce them to Amy Globus, whom I have worked with for years, but she is too busy to take on their work. The entrepreneur is then likely to ask Amy to recommend another designer rather than coming back to me for another suggestion. In other words, trust really lies within the group with the expertise (the babysitters) rather than the group with a similar need (the parents).\n\nThe social graph* is information manna when it comes to trust. We are now using digital tools to approximate old-fashioned ways of finding people we could trust, through referrals and close connections, but in ways and on a scale never possible before. 'It's a digital recreation of the neighbourly interactions that predefined industrial society,' writes Jason Tanz in an excellent piece on digital trust in _WIRED_. 'Except now our neighbour is anybody with a Facebook account.'\n\nThe strange and beautiful truth about the social graph is that it shortens the distance between any two people in the world. Think of it as the string tying together the arbitrary connections between humanity. In 1929, the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy first wrote about the theory of the 'Six Degrees of Separation', later popularized in a play by John Guare, claiming that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. This is where the 'Kevin Bacon game' comes from\u2013it would take the average person six or fewer acquaintances to be connected to the actor. Today, that number has shrunk significantly, at least for the 1.8 billion active users on Facebook. In 2016, Facebook crunched their social graph and determined that the degrees of separation number is 3.57. In other words, each person on Facebook is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people. It means that, despite Facebook's vastness, it feels intimate. It gives us the sense of connection and trust we used to get from real-life communities and neighbourhoods. Its size, however, is critical to its usefulness.\n\nWhen my parents decided to trust Doris, they based their decision on faith\u2013they believed what she and her references claimed. In the past, we had to make a lot of decisions based on blind faith or personal experience, but today we can base them on _collective experience_ \u2013the experiences other people have shared through reviews and social networks.\n\nI don't need to have personal experience with a nanny I hire through UrbanSitter to assess if she or he is trustworthy; I can benefit from other people's experiences. It's a dynamic often referred to as _indirect reciprocity\u2013_ and it can speed up the process of trust. Today, on UrbanSitter, the average sitter responds in less than three minutes, down from twenty-three hours five years ago. The average time a parent takes from either posting a job or doing a search for a sitter to accepting the person they trust to look after their kids is less than ten minutes, down from twenty-three hours when UrbanSitter first started. It shows that, online, questions of trust can be settled very fast. And this process is only going to get faster, from minutes to seconds.\n\nThere is just the small matter of things going wrong now and again in this speedy and efficient brave new world.\n\nIt is almost impossible to get entrepreneurs, people like Lynn Perkins, to tell you the exact number of bad incidents, minor or serious, that happen on their platforms. I have prodded and cajoled to try to get actual data but instead you tend to get a generic response. 'They do happen but they are extremely rare,' insists Perkins. Take Wendy, a mum living in Seattle who hired a sitter to look after her six-month-old daughter one night in May 2016. The day after, she received a call from her bank about a cheque with a dodgy signature. It turned out the sitter had gone through Wendy's drawers and stolen a cheque that she had written out for $1,300. 'As soon as the parent let us know what happened, the sitter was blocked from our system,' Perkins tells me. Bad apples will make the cut, it's inevitable, but it's also likely they'll be exposed more quickly.\n\n'She seemed so trustworthy' is something we commonly say after trust has been misplaced. On the flip side, you have probably been on the receiving end of someone saying 'I trust you'. But what do these statements mean? And, coming back to Baroness O'Neill's point, what is it that we should be basing our trust upon?\n\nTurns out, there's a relatively simple formula to trustworthiness that goes beyond 'but he had kind eyes' or 'she looked the part'. It doesn't matter if you are deciding whether to trust an estate agent, a lawyer or a babysitter, the three traits of trustworthiness are the same: Is this person competent? Is this person reliable? Is this person honest?\n\nCompetence comes down to how capable a person is to do something. Does he or she have the skills, knowledge and experience to do a particular role or task, be it cut my hair, mind my children or fly me to Uzbekistan.\n\nReliability comes down to a person's consistency in doing what they said they would do for you. Ultimately, it's about you knowing, 'Can I depend on this person?' Will he or she follow through?\n\nHonesty is about integrity and intentions. 'What are their interests and motives towards me?' Basically, it's whether their intentions are aligned with yours. What do they gain by lying or by telling the truth?\n\nPolitical scientist Russell Hardin eloquently argues that trust is really about _encapsulated interest_ , a kind of closed loop of each party's self-interests. He argues that if I trust you, it's because I believe that you are going to take my interests seriously\u2013whether it be for friendship, love, money or reputation. Why? You won't take advantage of me because it benefits you not to do so. 'You value the continuation of our relationship, and you therefore have your own interests in taking my interest into account,' Hardin writes in _Trust and Trustworthiness._ 20 For instance, I trusted the estate agent who recently sold my house to get a good price not because she was nice or cared about me but because her commission was directly tied to the sale price. That's encapsulated interest. Or as economist Adam Smith would put it, the estate agent's future payoff is a strong enough incentive for her and good enough reason for me to trust her.\n\nWe often mentally ask of someone, 'Do I trust you?' A better question is 'Do I trust you to do x?' We need to think of trust as _trusting someone to do something_. For instance, you can trust me to write an article but trusting me to, say, drive a lorry would be a grave mistake. You can trust me to teach twenty-something-year-old graduate students, but put me in a class of five-year-olds and I would probably lose my rag in my attempt to teach them to read and write. What we are trusting someone to do fundamentally changes the alchemy and order of importance of those three necessary traits: competence, reliability and honesty. Trust is contextual.\n\nI am not suggesting that we have to go through this kind of assessment with every person we need to trust. Take something simple like getting on a bus or train. We don't want to be assessing the driver's skills. If we thought about every decision to trust, we would spend the entire day asking questions and making checklists. We might never even leave the house. But let's say we're hiring someone for a job. How do we make good decisions about whether or not to trust what they claim about themselves?\n\nNot so long ago, CVs were the principal tool in job hunting, listing what someone had\u2013allegedly\u2013done and with whom, but they didn't provide much proof. Indeed, a survey done in the UK by Powerchex, a company that screens CVs on behalf of finance companies, found that, out of 4,735 job applications, 18 per cent contained outright false information. The most common lie was to claim a 2:1 university degree when they had been awarded a 2:2. Embellishing the truth, such as exaggerating job titles (from project assistant to project director) and tasks, is very common. CVs were often 'creative', at best, but pretty much all the average employer had to go on.\n\nToday, many people send their LinkedIn page instead of a CV and include links to their other online portfolios and social profiles. Think for a minute about the number of profiles out there that contain information on you. I easily have fifteen: my profiles on Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook, BlaBlaCar, Uber, YouTube, Twitter, TED, Oxford University Faculty page, my personal website, my literary agent's website, my speaking agents' websites and so the list goes on. And that does not even include all my accounts that require a Facebook login such as Spotify, Airtasker and Airbnb. Online profiles are another example of the shift in trust signals. Information that used to be held by institutions or small groups of friends, family or colleagues is now distributed among many people. In this sense, trust signals have become socially fluid.\n\nIn online services such as UrbanSitter, people create specific online profiles listing detailed information. The amount and type of details people will voluntarily disclose is extraordinary. 'One parent included a long description about their pot-bellied pigs,' Perkins explained. 'They wanted to make sure the sitter was comfortable with the family keeping pigs as pets. It sounds weird but is actually great expectation management.' Both sides knew what they were in for.\n\nThe information a sitter provides in their profile is verified through different online checks. Do you really have cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) certification? Did you really get a Level 5 childcare diploma from South Thames College? Do you really have a clean driving record? Or in the case of Doris, do you really belong to the Salvation Army? In fact, only 25 per cent of the sitters that start the registration process make it on to the platform. Put differently, 75 per cent are rejected.\n\nUrbanSitter uses forty different criteria to find the six sitters most compatible to the parent. The algorithm takes into account the age of the children, the parents' social connections to the sitter, where they live, when the sitter is needed, specific preferences and so on. The marketplace also uses a reputation system just like eBay\u2013parents leave feedback and rate sitters after each transaction.\n\n'People rate everything now. Your Uber driver, the guy who delivers your food, and not all things are equal. There are only so many things you can do wrong or right when you're delivering my food,' says Andrea Barrett, UrbanSitter co-founder and vice president of product. 'But when you're watching my child, there are a lot of things that can go awry. Your ability to deal with the behaviour of my child, how much you engage with my child, how much you cleaned up, were you friendly, did I like you? There's a lot going on.'\n\nReviews significantly influence a sitter's ability to get a booking\u2013a sitter without reviews is two times less likely to get a booking than a sitter that has at least one. A valuable badge experienced sitters and parents carry is called 'Repeat Families'. Basically, it means you were invited back.\n\nReliability is also easier to demonstrate online. If you have booked a place on Airbnb, you may have noticed that hosts are categorized by how quickly they respond. My response rate is 100 per cent but my response time is, um, twenty-four hours. This means I respond to all new messages but by Airbnb standards I am slow to message back. Similarly, UrbanSitter categorizes sitters based on how quickly they reply. 'If you are looking for someone last minute, it's good to know upfront how long it will take them to respond,' says Perkins. 'But on a deeper level, I think it's an indicator of reliability in some weird way. If this person is really slow to respond, will they show up on time? Are they really interested?' Perkins is right; time is often used as an indicator of reliability.\n\nThe hardest trait, without a doubt, both to prove and predict online, is honesty. How do you get a real read of someone's intentions and integrity? Perkins knew this was a big problem she had to address. In 2014, she wondered if asking the sitters to make short videos about themselves and their interest in kids would make a difference.\n\nMost videos start with, 'Hi, my name is so and so and I would like to give you a bit of information about...' Then they get more personal, explaining why they want to look after your kids. One wondrous offshoot of the videos is seeing the rooms people are in. Some sit casually in their bedrooms on unmade beds, others choose the sofa in tidy living rooms.\n\nI tried an informal experiment. I read the written profiles of twenty sitters and wrote down characteristics that summed up my first impressions. I found I kept using the same vague words such as 'nice' or 'seems friendly'. I then did the same exercise using the videos. The descriptors were clearly more specific, such as 'considerate', 'warm' or 'nervous'. Hearing sitters talk and seeing a small glimpse of their environment felt like seeing inside their lives. 'It allows them to be human,' Perkins says. Today, it is mandatory for all sitters to leave a thirty-to-ninety-second short clip video about themselves. There is this, though: Doris would have made a great video.\n\nSo would UrbanSitter have caught that she was a fraud?\n\nOn 5 July 1993, a 'dog' cartoon by Peter Steiner appeared in the _New Yorker._ The pen-and-ink artwork features two dogs, one sitting on the floor and the other in a chair in front of a computer. Underneath is the prescient caption, 'On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' In 2013, to mark the twentieth anniversary of that iconic cartoon, the web comic 'Joy of Tech' created an updated version. It featured two agents with sunglasses standing in the National Security Agency (NSA) surrounded by computer screens. 'Our Metadata analysis indicates that he is definitely a brown lab. He lives with a white-and-black-spotted beagle mix and I suspect they are humping,' reads the caption.\n\nSitting in the meeting room of Trooly*, an 'Instant Trust Rating' venture launched in July 2014 based in Los Altos, California, Steiner's cartoon came to mind. Before I arrived to meet Savi Baveja, the co-founder and CEO, his team had come up with an idea. 'We thought it would be helpful to run you, Rachel Botsman, through the Trooly system,' Baveja says. 'We'll do it on the projected screen so you can see what is happening in real time.' Great. Five other people were gathered round the conference table. I felt a tad uneasy about what they might find. Baveja, in his late forties, a former senior partner at Bain & Company, has a calm and thoughtful demeanour. He picked up on my silent pause about the plan. 'Don't worry,' he reassures me. 'We did a test run before you got here and you are all good.'\n\nWhen you first connect with people, total strangers living on the other side of the world, how do you know if they pose a serious risk? 'People talk a lot about reviews and ratings. Well, by definition, they're backward-looking,' says Baveja. Indeed, the goal of Trooly is to fill the trust gap caused by the sheer speed of online commerce.\n\nMy first and last names are entered into the Instant Trust software, plus my email address. That's it. No phone number, age, date of birth, occupation or address. Anish Das Sarma, co-founder and chief technology officer, tells me the machine learning software is searching whatever public and permissible data it can find associated with my identity. 'Watch lists, the National Sex Offender Registry, social media, et cetera. But it's also scanning the deep web, the parts of the web not indexed by search engines, so you wouldn't surface them in a search. We have indexed deeper than Google,' Das Sarma adds. I think he is referring to the weird websites I might hang out on, getting under the hood of what I really do on the internet. He asks if he can add my middle name to send a 'stronger signal'. Sure.\n\nA long thirty seconds passes. Then the results appear. 'Look, you are a one,' says Baveja, pointing at the screen. 'Only approximately 15 per cent of the population are a one; they are our \"super goods\".'\n\n'So how many are \"super bad\"?' I ask the team.\n\n'About 1.5 to 2 per cent of the population end up between five and four. There are some exceptions in some populations we've done because some populations attract super creeps,' Baveja explains. 'The vast majority are twos. And for around 10 to 15 per cent of people we screen in the United States we can't generate a confident score because there is either not enough of a digital footprint out there or enough accurate inputs.'\n\nHonestly, the level of information the search had pulled was staggering. I didn't mention my maiden name, so I assumed that nothing linked to 'Simmons' would appear. I was wrong. Links to clubs I had joined at Oxford and Harvard were in the search list (yes, I was a member of the darts society and, yes, I spent almost nine months in the Territorial Army Officers' Training Corps). The data was consolidated into five different categories. The most basic was verifying my identity. Was I who I said I was? Check. Next was criminal record and possible unlawful activity. Clean. Phew, they missed the car accident case I was involved in when I was twenty because it was dismissed in court. And then there is a category called 'anti-social'. 'A lot of people won't have done anything explicitly good or bad,' explains Baveja. 'So we have spent a lot of time figuring out the granularity of how to get at \"what kind of person is this?\" We want our customers to look at more than just a superficial score before making decisions.'\n\nContext for the anti-social category is king. Clients tell Trooly the types of traits they want to screen against and bad behaviours they need to weed out. For example, UrbanSitter may want to screen potential sitters against hate language. They might also want to know if you have ever had a drug or alcohol problem or if you have ever been involved with pornography. A home-sharing site might care a lot if you are a sex party organizer. A ride-sharing platform will want to know if you are a terrible driver. I also get a one in the 'anti-social category', meaning I am 'pro social'. I feel relief, even a tinge of pride that I have been given an A* trust rating.\n\nBaveja is a warm, considerate and clearly intelligent man. His sentences tend to contain lots of thoughtful questions, as if he is constantly seeking better answers. He went to Stanford University for his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. A few years later, he completed his MBA at Harvard Business School where he graduated as a Baker Scholar, meaning he was one of the top students in his class. He then became a management consultant, rising to the highest echelons of Bain & Company, first becoming a partner and then joining the company board. 'While at Bain, I started to look into traditional background and credit checks, and realized how dangerously flawed they are,' he says. 'A background check is just that\u2013it is retrospective and does not foresee the future. But does this have to be the case? I thought there must be something better.'\n\nOur behaviours have changed but the trust mechanisms we use in society have stayed pretty much the same. For one thing, in the US, UK and much of Europe, the current background-check system is still slow and manual, often relying on low-paid and overworked court runners to rummage through records and so on. No wonder all kinds of mistakes happen, especially if your last name happens to be Jones, Smith or Harris, or another common moniker. Ron Peterson, who lives in California, knows this problem all too well. 'In Florida, I'm a female prostitute (named Ronnie); in Texas, I'm currently incarcerated for manslaughter,' says Peterson. 'In New Mexico, I'm a dealer of stolen goods. Oregon has me as a witness tamperer. And in Nevada\u2013this is my favorite\u2013I'm a registered sex offender.' If you are falsely mismatched with someone else's felony, it's known as a _false positive._ It's an alarmingly common problem.\n\nOut of the people the traditional checks label 'bad', how many are actually criminals? Worryingly, a study conducted in 2016 by Simone Ispa-Landa, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, and Charles Loeffler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that one out of three American adults has been involved with the criminal justice system and has a record, even if they were not found guilty of a crime. The United States Attorney General's office recently found something similar. Half of all case files in the background system contain no information about how the cases turned out\u2013whether the person was found guilty or not, or even prosecuted. Bad data fouls the system and the most common groups falsely labelled are blacks and Latinos. 'What we've ended up doing is taking all the biases and pre-existing preconceptions of the criminal justice system,' Baveja says, 'and ossifying them, institutionalizing them in more and more and more decisions where they don't belong.'\n\nBaveja raises question after question about the checks system. 'I can tell you that 50 per cent of what you will find in a background check is going to be either traffic violations or drug convictions,' he says. 'But if I smoked a joint seven years ago, what does it really tell you about me? Does it mean I'm going to be a bad tenant?'\n\n'But surely, if I had been convicted of shooting someone, the check would flag this up?' I ask.\n\n'No, a fail is a fail in a traditional background check. It's just not precise,' says Baveja.\n\nBut there is another problem: the system can miss people who really are criminals. It's known as a _false negative._ Of the millions of checks done every year, between 1 and 2 per cent turn up a problem. Indeed, the vast majority of people who have done bad things pass their background checks. 'How on earth did we get to a point where we rely on flawed data and processes that lack rigour to determine whether someone should get a job or will be a good tenant?' says Baveja. 'I mean, these are serious decisions, right?'\n\nI admit to the Trooly team that even though their intentions seem entirely positive, the process still feels intrusive. 'I knew you were going to ask us about privacy, everyone does,' says Baveja. 'I laugh when people talk about privacy. Not because it's not a serious issue but think about how much information you give to the banks. Every bill, purchase, credit card, everything, and we just accept that, right?' Trooly complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the United States. So if I wanted to, I could opt out of the ratings altogether, check and challenge my profile data. My report is deleted after ninety days. 'We're not doing anything in the shadows here,' says Baveja. 'Any trust mechanism, even asking a friend about someone, involves some level of intrusiveness. I think the dividing line is how you do it. Are you doing it ethically? Are you doing it transparently? We bend over backwards to make sure what we are doing is way better, way fairer and way more predictive than any other trust mechanisms being used today.'\n\nHere's the thing. Baveja is reassuringly competent, open and honest. I trust him. And he clearly has positive intentions to disrupt the existing background-checks system, which is seriously flawed. I was still left, however, with the feeling that current privacy and data protection laws don't offer a sufficient degree of protection when it comes to what Trooly customers could do with our data.\n\nAt the end of my day with the Trooly team, I tell them about Doris. Would the search have caught her if she had applied to UrbanSitter? The answer is a definitive 'yes'. My parents would have known that she didn't in fact belong to the Salvation Army, had no previous childcare experience and had a chequered criminal history. In other words, Doris would not have made the cut.\n\n'Trooly is helping us screen our caregivers in an objective and quantifiable way. But it's only part of the equation,' Lynn Perkins says. She makes an important admission: technology should never try to replace parental intuition. 'If a sitter shows up at your door and you get a weird feeling, it doesn't matter if they have passed checks, how well reviewed they were or what you thought about her online, say you are suddenly not feeling well and cancel. Go with your gut.' There's no question: at the end of the day, we're the ones who have to decide where to place our trust.\n\nIt's complicated. Our intuition may be strong but sometimes we tune into trust signals that are loud even though they are not in fact good indicators of reliability, honesty and competence. Doris, with her spectacles and Scottish accent, is a prime example. Someone looks the part, and it's only later you discover that your kids have been looked after by an armed bank robber and drug dealer.\n\nIn the future, online trust can only get faster, smarter and more prevalent. And that has to be a good thing in terms of helping us make more informed choices\u2013whether it's about hiring a lawyer, selling our house or taking care of our kids. At the same time, we don't want to lose what makes us human.\n\nMaking the odd mistake when it comes to trust, taking a leap, is sometimes how we open up new possibilities or find ourselves in unexpected situations, both exciting and dangerous. It's how we place our faith in strangers, without knowing what might come of it. For that matter, my mother's trust in Doris wasn't entirely misplaced. The funny thing was that while Doris turned out to be an accomplished criminal, she was also a rather good nanny.\n\n* The 'social graph' refers to the connections between you and the other people, places and things you interact with in an online social network.\n\n* Trooly was acquired by Airbnb in June 2017.\n\n#\n\n# Reputation is Everything, Even in the Dark\n\nDepending on how strictly you want to define the terms of an 'online trade', you could claim that the first thing to be bought and sold on the internet wasn't a CD or pizza, it was a small bag of weed. In the early 1970s, a group of students at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology made an online drug deal via ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we know today. Since then, it has become remarkably fast and easy to score drugs online, through the so-called 'darknet'.\n\nYou can't get to the darknet using your regular web browser; it can only be accessed via an anonymizing software called Tor (an acronym for 'The Onion Router'). Instead of a web address ending in a .com or .org, darknet URLs are a hash of random letters and numbers that end in .onion. Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory for the purpose of protecting government communications, Tor has become a handy privacy tool for journalists and human rights organizations that need to mask their browsing activity and hide their identity and location. Of course, its subterranean nature means it also attracts criminals who can exchange drugs and other illegal goods, from guns to child pornography, online and in relative obscurity.\n\nStumbling into the darknet is like stumbling into a shadowy and mysterious parallel universe, where everything looks oddly the same as on the regular web\u2013strangely familiar\u2013except that its consumer sites are selling AK-47s or counterfeit passports, instead of pre-loved Hermes handbags and Jamie Oliver cookbooks. It means a visitor doesn't need to be a hacker or computer whiz to navigate it; it's remarkably easy to find and buy illegal goods and services. Google doesn't search onion sites but Grams does (FYI, the address for Grams is: grams7enufi7jmdl.onion) and its site looks incredibly similar, from the brightly coloured rainbow logo to the 'I Feel Lucky' button.\n\nLet's say you type in 'ecstasy' on Grams. The search engine trawls cryptomarkets such as BlackBank, Mr Nice, Pandora and SilkRoad4 (now on its fourth life) and provides a list of results showing the name of the seller, price of the product, a brief description and the exact URL. As the creator of Grams told _WIRED_ magazine in an anonymous interview: 'I noticed on the forums and Reddit, people were constantly asking \"who had the best product X and was reliable and not a scam?\" I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy vendor.'\n\nI had read a lot about darknet drug sites but I was still gobsmacked at just how much they look like conventional e-retailers such as Amazon. They would appear reassuringly familiar to any online shopper. There's even the usual amount of competition and cornucopia of choice. It's just that the listings, row after row, are for cocaine, blotter (LSD), ecstasy, opioids, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), heroin, hash, cannabis and almost any other drug a user could possibly want. With just a few clicks, buyers can browse a mind-boggling selection, pay for the drugs in the traceless digital currency bitcoin (unattached to any central bank) and have them delivered unknowingly by the postman.\n\nIn October 2013, the darknet achieved notoriety when an illicit drug site called Silk Road was shut down by the FBI. The site owner and administrator, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), was arrested at a public library in San Francisco. Convicted of money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics, he has since been sentenced to life in prison. Appropriately, Ulbricht took his fictional namesake, Dread Pirate Roberts, from a character in the book and film _The Princess Bride._ In the story, Roberts is not one man but one of many who pass on the name, reputation and pirate business from one person to the next. At the time of the site's closure, the FBI estimated that Silk Road had 13,000 drug listings and had processed approximately $1.2-billion-worth of sales. DPR was believed to be making an estimated $20,000 a day in the 6\u201312 per cent commission the site charged on every transaction.\n\nUlbricht was a university-educated guy who grew up in Austin, Texas. A self-proclaimed idealist, he believed drug use was a personal choice. He was essentially a twenty-first-century digital libertarian. In Silk Road's code of conduct it stated, 'We refuse to sell or list anything the purpose of which is to harm or defraud another person.' DPR also wrote, 'Treat others as you wish to be treated.' Ulbricht wanted to create a trusted trading ground where people could buy and sell drugs free from violence and the reach of government laws. Critically, DPR was not just revered\u2013vendors and buyers on Silk Road trusted him. But once he was arrested, their belief was shaken in the safety of the whole system. It wasn't enough, however, to bring it crashing down. And other sites sprang up to replace Silk Road.\n\nHow are visitors persuaded to trust these sites? Shared control, for one thing. When a buyer places an order, the bitcoin goes into an escrow account and is only released to the vendor once the order has been confirmed as received. (It's a similar escrow system to the one used on Alibaba.) The buyer, seller and the site's administrators control the account; two out of the three must sign off on the deal before the bitcoin can be moved. It's designed to make it far more difficult for vendors and buyers to scam one another. On the whole, it works, although, like most systems, there are pitfalls and bad apples. For example, unscrupulous administrators can shut down a marketplace and make off at any time with all of their users' bitcoins escrowed in the site. And some do. It's known as an _exit scam_.\n\nIn March 2015 the popular Silk Road descendant Evolution mysteriously disappeared overnight. It had nothing to do with a government bust; just simple greed. The site's administrators, Verto and Kimble, emptied the market's bitcoin coffers and ran off with an estimated $12 million. A few days after the incident, a user named NSWGreat, who had previously self-described herself as an Evolution 'public relations' staffer, put a post on Reddit's darknet markets forum.\n\n'I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have f\u2014ked us all. I have over $20,000 in escrow myself from sales,' NSWGreat wrote. 'I'm sorry for everyone's losses, I'm gutted and speechless. I feel so betrayed.'\n\nSoon after Evolution shut down, lesser-known markets like Abraxas, Amazon Dark, Blackbank and Middle Earth also subsequently disappeared for unknown reasons, but it's assumed they were also exit scams. The utopian ideals of the darknet\u2013'us against the government and over-regulation'\u2013seemed to have had their heyday. And, of course, vendors and buyers who have been ripped off have little recourse, beyond warning each other. They can hardly go to the ombudsman and complain their LSD didn't turn up and demand their bitcoins back. How much damage did that do to trust in the darknet?\n\nDr James Martin is a renowned expert on cryptomarkets. He's a professor at Macquarie University and author of _Drugs on the Dark Net._ I interviewed Martin from his flat in Melbourne just after he had come back from, appropriately, Amsterdam. He is particularly fascinated by how cryptomarkets use technology to allow people to communicate and engage in new forms of self-governance outside state and traditional regulatory control.\n\n'What interests me is the way technology could be used to transform an illicit drugs trade that has been debased and corrupted by four decades of the global War on Drugs,' he says. 'The fact is, you have got thousands of people\u2013drug users and drug retailers\u2013who have been stereotyped as \"untrustworthy\", who don't have a reputation for being the most reliable people. So how do they create highly functioning markets that are non-violent and self-regulate based on trust?'\n\nMartin thinks law enforcement agencies and the police have been surprised by the darknet. '[They've seen] how criminals are creating peaceful communities selling dangerous products; communities that work really well the vast majority of the time.'\n\nYet haven't the exit scams now damaged that trust in the darknet? 'There isn't a trust crisis but people are definitely more sceptical,' he says. 'Scams undermined the faith in the whole system. It wasn't the \"big bad Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)\" that was destroying the markets; it was people from the inside. That really chipped away the idealism and shook people's faith in the darknet community.'\n\nMartin likens it to research one of his colleagues carried out looking at desertion within armies and how it affected the remaining troops. The study found that if fellow soldiers were killed by the enemy, they were seen to be doing their job and it stiffened the resolve of those left. If they fled voluntarily, however, it undermined faith in what they were all fighting for, faith in the whole system. 'That,' says Martin, 'is what we saw with the exit scams.'\n\nEven so, the scams didn't deliver a mortal blow. 'Vendors and customers have just moved past them and repopulated other sites,' Martin says. It's like a game of whack-a-mole: as soon as one site closes down, another pops up.\n\nDespite the Silk Road bust and others since, the drug business on the darknet, like other forms of e-commerce, is thriving. According to the 2016 Global Drug Survey, approximately 22 per cent of UK drug users have sourced and bought their drugs online. Globally, almost one in ten participants reported having bought drugs off the darknet. Significantly, 5 per cent of respondents stated that they had not bought drugs before purchasing them through darknet markets. The darknet makes drug-buying easier but also seem less risky to some people.\n\nAn in-depth study by the European think tank Rand found that the number of transactions on illegal drug sites has tripled since 2013. The United Kingdom is the largest online drug market outside the United States, with darknet sellers doing close to 21,000 drug deals a month. British vendors took home on average around \u00a35,200 per month. But the most successful darknet dealers were making upwards of \u00a3200,000.\n\nThe truly fascinating thing, however, about drug marketplaces is not how many there are or how much dealers make but just how well they work. While we should rightfully fear that these sites could lead to higher levels of drug use, it's hard not to be impressed by their apparent quality control and efficiency. People, ordinary people, transact with each other globally, at high speed and in great volume. The darknet can teach us a lesson or two about trust.\n\nIn street dealing, selling is often restricted to customers a dealer already knows. New customers tend to be introduced to dealers only by a broker, a trusted intermediary. 'My mate is not a cop, you can sell her drugs and she won't dob you in,' is how a broker might vouch for someone. Trust is crucial in conventional drug-dealing but it's small-scale, interpersonal trust, meaning the trust lies directly between a few people.\n\nIn contrast, the darknet is an open network. Choice isn't limited by whom you know or where a dealer lives. 'Cryptomarkets represent a kind of super broker. They are able to facilitate contact between many, many more vendors and customers than any individual possibly could,' says Martin. 'But the trust in this instance is represented in quantitative metrics, such as reviews and ratings that substitute for the personal trust that has been historically critical for the drug trade. And that is transformative.'\n\nTrust used to be a very personal thing: you went on the recommendations of your friends or friends of friends. By finding ways to extend that circle of trust exponentially, technology is expanding markets and possibilities. In the case of the darknet, it is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, despite a heavy cloak of anonymity.\n\nThe darknet is peopled by hundreds of thousands of drug users and vendors who would commonly be stereotyped as untrustworthy, the worst of the worst, yet here they are creating highly efficient markets. Effectively, they are creating trust in a zero-trust environment. Nobody meets in person. There are obviously no legal regulations governing the exchanges. It looks like a place where buyers could get ripped off. Theoretically, it would be easy for dealers to send lower quality drugs or not deliver the goods at all. Yet this rarely happens on the darknet and, overall, you're more likely to find buyers singing hymns of praise about the quality of the drugs and reliability of the service.\n\nAn extensive report published in February 2016 by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) revealed that drugs available through darknet markets tend to be of a higher purity than those available on the streets. Similarly, a study by Energy Control, a Spanish think tank, also confirmed a quality premium in darknet drugs. Volunteers were asked to send random samples of drugs they had bought from online sites and offline dealers for testing. More than half of the darknet cocaine samples contained nothing but cocaine, compared with just 14 per cent of those bought on the Spanish streets. Even the FBI testified in the Silk Road hearings that, of more than a hundred purchases of drugs they made online before the closing of the site, all showed 'high purity levels'.\n\nIt seems dealers are more honest online. And that tells us something about how people create trust in this criminal ecosystem, with the help\u2013or supervision\u2013technology can provide. Given the nature of its wares, the darknet may seem like an alien and subterranean world\u2013and some of it undoubtedly is\u2013but at its core, it's about people connecting with other people. It's just another incarnation of the new kind of trust-building that technology has facilitated. The same dynamics, the same principles in building digital human relationships, apply. In that sense, it's almost comically conventional.\n\nTurns out, drug dealers care about their online brand and reputation and customer satisfaction as much as Airbnb hosts or eBay sellers. A typical vendor's page will be littered with information, including: how many transactions they have completed; when the vendor registered; when the vendor last logged in; and their all-important pseudonym. It will also feature a short description about why a user should buy drugs from them, refund policy information, postage options and 'stealth' methods (measures used to conceal drugs in the post). Even if you're not in the market for what they're selling, it's hard not to be impressed; vendors put in real effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness.\n\nTraditionally, the words 'drug dealer' bring to mind some thuggish or shady lowlife, a badly educated tough swaggering around in a leather jacket or lurking threateningly on a street corner. Someone you don't want to mess with. True or not, that persona of a heartless intimidator doesn't work on cryptomarkets. There, vendors need to project a cleaner image. Some even display specific logos and taglines and their brand message is loud and clear: 'We care about you' or 'Your satisfaction is our priority'.\n\nIndeed, marketing strategies used on the darknet look remarkably like standard ones. There are bulk discounts, loyalty programmes, two-for-one specials, free extras for loyal customers and even refund guarantees for dissatisfied punters. It's common to see marketing techniques such as 'Limited Stock' or 'Offer ends Friday' to help boost sales. While reviewing these deals, I had to remind myself I was looking at an illegal drugs marketplace, not shopping for shoes on Zappos.\n\nSome vendors, eager to build brand, label their drugs as 'fair trade' or 'organic' to appeal to 'ethical' interests. 'Conflict-free' sources of supply are also available for the benevolent drug taker. 'This is the best opium you will try, by purchasing this you are supporting local farmers in the hills of Guatemala and you are not financing violent drug cartels,' promised a seller on Evolution (before it was shut down).\n\nNew vendors will offer free samples and price-match guarantees to establish their reputation. Promotional campaigns are rife on 20 April, also known as Pot Day, the darknet's equivalent of Black Friday. (The date of Pot Day comes from the North American slang term for smoking cannabis which is 4\/20.) 'It's not anonymity, Bitcoins or encryption that ensure the future success of darknet markets,' writes Jamie Bartlett, author of _The Dark Net._ 'The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.'\n\nAfter a buyer receives their drugs, they are prompted to leave a star rating out of five. Nicolas Christin, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, analysed ratings from 184,804 pieces of feedback that were left on Silk Road over the course of an eight-month period. On the site, 97.8 per cent of reviews were positive, scoring a four or five. In contrast, only 1.4 per cent were negative, rating one or two on the same scale. Just how much can people trust those good reviews?\n\nSome observers suspect the darknet suffers from _review inflation_. Similar studies have been conducted on conventional marketplace rating systems and found that feedback is also overwhelmingly positive. For instance, on eBay less than 2 per cent of all feedback left is negative or neutral. One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less likely to give feedback. It means the most important information, the negative reputation data, is not being captured.\n\nSocial pressure encourages us to leave high scores in public forums. If you have experienced an Uber driver saying at the end of a trip, 'You give me five stars, I'll give you five stars,' that's tit for tat or grade inflation in action. I know I'm reluctant to give a driver a rating lower than four stars even if I have sat white-knuckled during the ride as he whizzed through lights and cut corners. Perhaps that is why Jason Dalton was a 4.7. Drivers get kicked off the Uber platform if their rating dips below 4.3 and I don't want to be responsible for them losing, in some instances, their livelihood. Maybe they are just having a bad day. That, and the driver knows where I live. In other words, reviews spring from a complex web of fear and hope. Whether we are using our real name or a pseudonym, we fear retaliation and also hope our niceties will be reciprocated.\n\nIt would be easy to conclude, then, that the ratings we rely on to make assessments are often not an accurate reflection of the experience. But they can still make us more accountable to one another. For instance, I sometimes drop towels on the bathroom floor when I am staying in a hotel. But I would never do this as a guest staying in someone's home on Airbnb. Why? Because I know the host will rate me, and that rating is likely to have an impact on my booking requests being accepted by other Airbnb hosts in the future. It illustrates how online trust mechanisms will have on impact on our real-world behaviours in ways we can't yet even imagine.\n\nWhile ratings might be exaggerated, or even fabricated, some sites are taking steps to reduce the problem of positive bias. For instance, in 2014 Airbnb introduced a _double-blind_ process where guest and host reviews would only be revealed after both are submitted, or after a fourteen-day waiting period, whichever came first. The result was a 7 per cent increase in review rates and a 2 per cent increase in negative reviews. 'These may not sound like big numbers but the results are compounding over time,' says Judd Antin, director of research at Airbnb. 'It was a simple tweak that has improved the travel experiences of millions of people since.' Like any game, it's about figuring out the rules that put downward pressure on an unwanted behaviour until it doesn't exist any more.\n\nThere is, however, another way to look at the 97.8 per cent of positive reviews on darknet sites. Perhaps they are an accurate reflection of a market functioning remarkably well most of the time, with content customers. Even if review systems are not perfect, and bias is inevitable, it seems that they still do their job as an accountability mechanism of social control. Put simply, they make people behave better.\n\nA question I have often asked myself is whether limiting people to a score or star rating is really that helpful. Many marketplaces are now asking people to rate against a particular trait that is more relevant to trust in a specific context. For instance, on BlaBlaCar, people are rated from one to five on their driving skills. On Airbnb, hosts are rated from one to five on their cleanliness, accuracy, value, communication, arrival and location. On Uber, when riders give a low or high rating, you must specify the reason for doing so, such as cleanliness, driving, customer service or directions. On drug marketplaces, how clean a dealer is and how well they drive is irrelevant. What would be the trust measures there?\n\nTurns out, the three key traits of trustworthiness\u2013competence, reliability and honesty\u2013also apply to drug vendors. To highlight reliability, many reviews point out the speed of response and delivery. For example, 'I ordered 11.30 a.m. yesterday and my package was in my mailbox in literally twenty-five hours. I'll definitely be back for more in the future,' commented a buyer on Silk Road 2.0. Other reviews focus on the product quality: 'Amazing weed. Fast shipping. Packaging very secure. Took me a bit long to get in the double-seal vacuum seal but well worth it. Would highly recommend.' One of the ways skills and knowledge are reviewed is how good a vendor's 'stealth' is, that is, how cleverly they disguise their product so that it doesn't get detected. 'Stealth was so good it almost fooled me,' wrote a satisfied buyer on an MDMA listing on the AlphaBay market. Established vendors are very good at making it look (and smell) like any old regular package. Excessive tape or postage, reused boxes, presence of odour, crappy handwritten addresses, use of a common receiver alias such as 'John Smith' and even spelling errors are bad stealth.\n\nThere is a clear incentive for vendors consistently to provide the product and service they promise: the dealers with the best reviews rise to the top. No feedback, either negative or positive, can be deleted, so there is a permanent record of how someone has behaved. Just like the Maghribi traders and Alibaba sellers discovered, past behaviour is used to predict future behaviour. 'The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present,' Robert Axelrod wrote in _The Evolution of Cooperation._ 20 Or to put it another way, vendors have a vested interest in keeping their noses clean right from the word go.\n\nReputation is trust's closest sibling; the overall opinion of what people think of you. It's the opinion others have formed based on past experiences and built up over days, months, sometimes years. In that sense, reputation, good or bad, is a measure of trustworthiness. It helps customers choose between different options and, with luck, make better choices. It encourages sellers to be trustworthy, in order to build that reputation, and it weeds out those who aren't. It isn't quite that simple, however. Price is also a factor in the value of reputation, and reputation can influence price.\n\nConsider this scenario: two vendors are both offering Purple Haze cannabis on exactly the same shipping and refund terms. One vendor, let's call him BlazeKing, has only three reviews, with an average score of 4, and is offering the cannabis for $12.50\/gram. The other vendor, CandyMan2, has fifty-two reviews, with an average score of 4.9, and is offering the same Purple Haze but for a slightly higher price at $12.95\/gram. Who to go with? Obviously, the majority of customers would choose CandyMan2. The reviews reduce uncertainty for the buyer.\n\nCandyMan2's higher reputation comes with a price to the customer, though not a huge one. The value of the reduced risk is $0.45\/gram. In this sense, online reputation is functioning as a risk premium.\n\nNow let's say the choice is between BlazeKing, still with three reviews and cannabis for sale at $12.50\/gram, and another vendor, FlyingDynamite, also with fifty-two reviews and an average score of 4.9, but selling the same drugs for $16.50\/gram. Now the risk premium for a vendor with a higher reputation is $4\/gram. Is the vendor's reputation worth the significant difference in price? For some, it may be; for others, not. Even reputation, while valuable, has a price ceiling. There is only so much more a customer is willing to pay for goods or services based on a seller's high reputation.\n\nStill, I was intrigued how influential a vendor's reputation really is on cryptomarkets. So I tracked down a buyer, let's call him Alex. He describes himself as a 'casual drug taker' who likes to smoke a lot of weed and occasionally take ecstasy at the weekend. Towards the end of 2014, Alex switched from buying drugs from a dealer who lived relatively close by, to buying through cryptomarkets. What made him switch? His answer confirms everything we've just explored. 'Rather than buying drugs from a friend of a friend of a guy I met in a bar, I can buy drugs after reading dozens of reviews of their service,' he explains. 'I feel confident I am getting exactly what I am paying for.' It echoes what drug surveys indicate: 60\u201365 per cent of respondents say that the existence of ratings is _the_ motivation for using darknet marketplaces.\n\nAnd that brings us back to the matter of feedback and reputation systems on the darknet. Those systems make both sides more accountable but they are not infallible. Ratings are gamed in a similar way to other sites such as Amazon, Yelp and TripAdvisor. A common trick is a practice known as _padding_ feedback. Vendors essentially purchase their own drugs from a series of fake buyer accounts they have created. The glowing reviews look legitimate when they have in fact been created by the vendor. It's the online equivalent of stuffing the ballot box. Politicians do it. Advertisers do it. TripAdvisor is bedevilled by it. And drug dealers do it.\n\nAn industry of darknet 'marketing' services has sprung up, peopled by fibbers and promoters who are willing to create rave reviews and posts to help boost a vendor's reputation. 'Hi, my name is Mr420 and we started out and still are a small group of college public relations majors,' wrote a darknet PR vendor. 'We would be interested in keeping your product, thread or listing at the top of the forums.' Fake reviewers on Amazon will get free books, and hotels will often offer discounts for a positive review on TripAdvisor. The likes of Mr420 will pad feedback in exchange for free drug samples. Vendors regard it simply as brand management, doing something to make themselves look better.\n\nIt's the same practice Amazon took a suit against in a landmark reputation case. On 16 October 2015, in Washington, DC, the company sued 1,114 individuals for selling positive five-star reviews to Amazon sellers and Kindle authors. All the defendants in the case were advertising their services on Fiverr, an online marketplace where freelancers offer to do minor tasks for a flat rate of $5.\n\nIt might be hard to see how Amazon could suffer a loss of revenue from dodgy reviews; products with high-star ratings sell more, right? But Amazon was smart enough to know it needed to crack down on fake reviews because they undermine the foundations of trust in online marketplaces. If reviewers and their reviews can't be trusted, the whole system falls.\n\nBut where is the line? Say I send this book to a hundred friends and colleagues, and ask them to leave a nice review on Amazon to help boost sales. Is that gaming the system or just common-sense marketing? As the adage goes, fake it until you make it.\n\n'The weird thing is that even though there is a certain amount of gaming, there is an acceptance that it will take place and it's okay,' James Martin says. 'New vendors will tell you that to break into the market they have to generate false reviews themselves. If you have no feedback in your vendor profile, you are not an attractive proposition. So fake reviews get the ball rolling for new entrants.' It's simply the way markets function; a feedback system will never be perfect.\n\nGaming the feedback system is also used by rival vendors who want to gain market share. In the case of drug sales, how do dealers compete with one another when violence and turf wars are no longer an option? They engage in online wars. One tactic is sock puppetry (or 'socking'), where a rival hides behind an online identity in order to tarnish the reputation of a competitor. It's a common behaviour, even esteemed professors do it; quite badly, in some cases.\n\nTake Professor Orlando Figes, a critically acclaimed and prize-winning author, who has written eight books. In 2010, he was caught posting damaging critiques of his rivals' books on Amazon. Under the aliases 'orlando-birkbeck' and 'Historian' (drug dealers could teach him a thing or two about selecting a better pseudonym), he called his competitors' works 'dense', 'pretentious' and 'the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published'. Stupidly, he used the same pseudonyms to praise his own work in illustrious detail: 'Beautifully written... leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted... a gift to us all,' Historian wrote.\n\nWhen the scandal went public, the professor initially, and somewhat ungallantly, blamed all the reviews on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer. It did not help the situation. Figes ended up paying damages to rival historians Dr Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, whose work he had slated. In an apology statement he issued to the media, Figes said, 'Some of the reviews were small-minded and ungenerous, but they were not intended to harm.' The same purposeful sniping happens on the darknet. Vendors pretend to be unsatisfied buyers and leave bad reviews.\n\nBut gaming can only go so far. Indeed, machine learning systems are already being developed to identify and weed out deceptive reviews. A team of researchers at Cornell University has developed software that can detect _review spam_. In a test on 800 reviews of Chicago hotels on TripAdvisor, the program was able to pick out the deceptive reviews with almost 90 per cent accuracy. In contrast, Cornell's human subjects only managed to pick the fakes about 50 per cent of the time.\n\nIt turns out people are beautifully predictable when writing fictional reviews, using similar syntax, language, grammar, punctuation, too many long words and even similar spelling mistakes. The Cornell researchers found that deceivers use more verbs and long words than truth tellers, while the genuine reviewers used more nouns and punctuation.\n\nNo doubt these types of review filter will become increasingly sophisticated and commonplace, so we will be better able to trust a review is legit. But there is another simple solution when it comes to countering deceptive reviews: word of mouth. An upstanding community may not be something we associate with the drug trade but darknet markets have a strong sense of community with clear norms, rules and cultures. Users frequently chat to each other on discussion forums such as the DarkNetMarkets on Reddit, publicly calling out dodgy vendors. 'I was looking at this vendor a few hours ago and they had zero feedback. Now they have a bunch,' wrote one user. Customers who continually ask for refunds, claiming that their goods did not show up, are also likely to be shamed.\n\nThere are also websites such as DarkNet Market Avengers (dnmavengeradt4vo.onion), that use trained chemists to do random testing of darknet drugs. Users send samples of their drugs to Energy Control, a drug-testing lab funded by community donations. It tests the products and sends the results back to the user. For instance, if LSD is found to be 'under-dosed' or heroin is found to contain something dangerous like Carfentanil (an extremely potent synthetic opioid which can be life-threatening), the results are posted on the DNM Avengers site, including details of the specific vendor who sold the product.\n\nThe result is that fraudsters on both sides of the market are relatively quickly outed and driven out. As James Martin beautifully puts it, 'The darknet is really not dark. Thousands of people hold torches to shine the light on how other people behave. You no longer have to rely on one person but the collective judgements of the entire darknet community.'\n\nWithin the next five years, darknet sites could be to street drug dealers what Amazon is to local booksellers or Airbnb is to hotels, even if they do raise different and serious ethical questions. On the one hand, cryptomarkets mean that drugs will be more easily available to more people, which cannot be a good thing. On the other, they reduce the length of the supply chain and some of the risks and criminal behaviour associated with conventional drug-dealing.\n\nEither way, the systems work because customers become enfranchised in them. Technology empowers customers to hold vendors to account and, ultimately, it is only trustworthy vendors who will survive. E-commerce is e-commerce and, even on the darknet, reputation is everything.\n\n#\n\n# Rated: Would Your Life Get a Good Trust Score?\n\nOn 14 June 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called 'Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System'. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national _trust score_ that rated the kind of citizen you were?\n\nImagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated\u2013what you buy at the store and online, where you are at any given time, who your friends are and how you interact with them, how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games, and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It's not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram, or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit that can capture your moves and location at any given time. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your _Citizen Score_ and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school\u2013or even just your chances of getting a date.\n\nA futuristic vision of Big Brother out of control? No, it's already getting underway in China where the government is developing a system to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. I'm sure George Orwell has rolled over in his grave a couple of times in recent years, but this idea, called the 'Social Credit System' (SCS), must have him doing frantic 360-degree turns in his coffin.\n\nThe Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance 'trust' nationwide and to build a culture of 'sincerity'. As the policy states, 'It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.'\n\nOthers aren't so sanguine about its wider purpose. 'It is very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behaviour and what books people are reading. It's Amazon's consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist,' is how Johan Lagerkvist, a Chinese internet specialist at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, describes the Social Credit System (SCS). Dr Rogier Creemers, a postdoctoral scholar specializing in Chinese law and governance at the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University, who published a comprehensive translation of the plan, compared it to 'Yelp reviews with the nanny state watching over your shoulder'.\n\nFor now, technically, participating in China's Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person in China (which includes every company or other entity) will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not. Teachers, scientists, doctors, charity workers, government administrators, members of the judicial system and even sports figures will be under special scrutiny. 'Big data will become the most important and most powerful driver to accelerate the modernization of governmental governance capacity,' states the plan.\n\nPrior to the national rollout in 2020, the government is taking a watch-and-learn approach. In this marriage between Communist oversight and capitalist can-do, the government has given a licence to eight private companies to come up with systems and algorithms for social credit scores. Predictably, data giants currently run two of the best-known projects.\n\nThe first is with China Rapid Finance, a partner of the social network behemoth Tencent and developer of the messaging app WeChat with more than 850 million active users. The other is run by the Ant Financial Services Group (AFSG), an affiliate company of Alibaba, and is called Sesame Credit. Ant Financial sells insurance products and provides loans to small- and medium-sized businesses. However, the real star of Ant is AliPay, its payments arm, which people use not only to buy things online but also for restaurants, taxis, school fees, cinema tickets and even to transfer money to each other.\n\nSesame Credit has also teamed up with other data-generating platforms, such as Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing company that was Uber's main competitor in China before it acquired the American company's Chinese operations in 2016, and Baihe, the country's largest online matchmaking service. It's not hard to see how that all adds up to gargantuan amounts of 'big data' that Sesame Credit can tap into to assess how people behave and rate them accordingly.\n\nSo just how are people rated? Individuals on Sesame Credit are measured by a score ranging between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba does not divulge the 'complex algorithm' it uses to calculate the number but they do reveal the five factors taken into account. The first is _credit history_. For example, does the citizen pay their electricity or phone bill on time? Do they repay their credit card in full? Next is _fulfilment capacity_ , which it defines in its guidelines as 'a user's ability to fulfil his or her contract obligations'. The third factor is _personal characteristics_ , which is verifying personal information such as someone's mobile phone number and address. But it's the fourth category, _behaviour and preferences_ , where it gets interesting and, some might say, more sinister.\n\nUnder this system, something as innocuous as a person's shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of product they buy. 'Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person,' says Li Yingyun, Sesame's technology director. 'Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility.' So if a citizen is buying socially approved items, like baby supplies or work shoes, their score rises. But if they're buying _Clash of Clans_ , _Temple Run 2_ or any video game, and thus looking like a lazy person, their score takes a negative hit. (I wonder how long it will take to get to the point where the system can judge their behaviour within a game? Maybe they will get a few points for being a 'nicer' player by, say, helping another player's avatar in _World of Warcraft_.)\n\nSo the system not only investigates behaviour\u2013it shapes it. It 'nudges' each of those closely monitored citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.\n\nAnd it's not just about purchases or pastimes. Friends matter, too. The fifth category is _interpersonal relationships_. What do their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as 'positive energy' online, nice messages about the government or how well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up. For anyone who's read _The Circle_ by Dave Eggers, or seen the film, this might sound nightmarishly familiar. 'You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else,' writes Eggers. 'Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.'\n\nAlibaba is adamant that, currently, anything negative posted on social media does not affect scores (we don't know if this is true or not because the algorithm is secret). But you can see how this might play out when the government's own Citizen Score system officially launches in 2020. Even though there is no suggestion yet that any of the eight private companies involved in the ongoing pilot scheme will ultimately be responsible for running the government's own system, it's hard to believe that the government will not want to extract the maximum possible amount of data for its SCS from the pilots\u2013particularly Alipay's Sesame and Tencent's WeChat. If that happens, and continues as the new normal under the government's own SCS, it will result in private platforms acting essentially as spy agencies for the government. They may have no choice. 'Government and big internet companies in China can exploit \"big data\" together in a way that is unimaginable in the West,' says Creemers. 'There are ample reasons to assume that whatever data the Chinese government wants, it can get.'\n\nPosting dissenting political opinions or links mentioning Tiananmen Square has never been wise in China but now it could directly hurt a citizen's rating. But here's the real kicker. The system could have a Kevin Bacon-like connection built in. A person's own score will depend on what their online friends say and do, beyond their own contact with them. If someone they are connected to online posts a negative comment on, say, the Shanghai stock market collapse (a massive embarrassment to the Chinese regime), their own score will also be dragged down. Talk about guilt by association.\n\nSo why have millions of people already signed up to what amounts to a trial run for a publicly endorsed government surveillance system? There may be darker, unstated reasons\u2013fear of reprisals, for instance, for those who don't put their hand up\u2013but there's also a lure, in the form of rewards and 'special privileges' for those who show themselves to be 'trustworthy' on Sesame Credit.\n\nIf their score reaches 600, they can take out a 'Just Spend' loan of up to 5,000 yuan (around $1,000) to use to shop online, as long as it's on an Alibaba site. Reach 650 points, they may rent a car without leaving a deposit. They are also entitled to faster check-in at hotels and use of the VIP check-in at Beijing Capital International Airport. Those with more than 666 points can get a cash loan of up to 50,000 yuan (more than $10,000), obviously from Ant Financial Services. Get above 700, they can apply for Singapore travel without supporting documents, such as an employee letter. And at 750, they get fast-tracked application to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa. 'I think the best way to understand the system is as a sort of bastard love child of a loyalty scheme,' says Rogier Creemers. 'Like the trust systems on eBay put together with an air-miles-type rewards programme.'\n\nHigher scores have already become a status symbol, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) within months of launch. A citizen's score can even increase or decrease their odds of getting a date or a marriage partner, because the higher their Sesame rating, the more prominent their dating profile is on Baihe. 'A person's appearance is very important... but it's more important to be able to make a living,' says Zhuan Yirong, vice president of Baihe. 'Your partner's fortune guarantees a comfortable life.' More than 15 per cent of Baihe users are currently choosing to display prominently their Sesame scores on their profiles. It shows how readily many people will buy into a system like this, apparently blind to all its other implications.\n\nSesame Credit already offers tips to help individuals improve their ranking, including warning about the downsides of friending someone who has a low score. Undoubtedly, it won't be long before we see the rise of score advisors, who will share tips on how to gain points, or reputation consultants willing to offer expert advice on how strategically to improve a ranking or get off the trust-breaking blacklist. I wonder if people will hire reputation auditors to look into the assessments made about them. It could be a lucrative new venture for accounting outfits like PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).\n\nWe're also bound to see the birth of reputation black markets selling under-the-counter ways to boost trustworthiness. In the same way that Facebook 'likes' and Twitter followers can be paid for, and positive reviews on the darknet can be bought, individuals will pay to manipulate their score. But what happens to the poor and less educated people who can't afford or don't know how to enhance their score? Those who can't game or manipulate the system will be at a disadvantage. And what about keeping the system secure? Cyber hackers (some even state-backed) could go in and change or steal the digitally stored information. How much will a spouse or a future employee pay to purchase data on everything from the comments made in chatrooms to a history of every hotel room someone has checked into? It will give a whole new meaning to a 'background check'.\n\nThere's a compelling psychological reason people are willing to sign up to systems like this. Sesame Credit has tapped into a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: the desire to push ourselves to be better. We have been ranked and put on a curve since we were in primary school; most of us are wired to want continually to level up, to score higher than others. We're caught on the 'hedonic treadmill', the term psychologists give to the desire to keep improving our current situation. We stay on it because satisfaction and happiness seem forever just out of reach. For instance, when we finally reach a longed-for salary level, we'll experience a temporary high but before long we are hankering after more money. Or we post something on Facebook and it gets 121 'likes'; the pleasure soon gives way to a desire to post something that gets 125 or more 'likes'. In the world of Citizen Scores, this means as soon as we reach one level, we not only will need but will _want_ to ramp upwards. The desired social rung will always remain tantalizingly out of our grasp, making it almost impossible to be content with who and where we are.\n\nSesame Credit plays on this in several ways. For example, it encourages users to guess whether they have a higher or lower score than their friends. When they check their own score, it also displays all their friends' scores. But it's not simply about competitiveness. It also means they can see who might be dragging them down. Conversely, people will be tempted to cultivate friends with good reputations for their own advantage. Want a loan to start a business? Better start being extra nice to influential people with high trust ratings and drop the losers.\n\nIt will create some bizarre family dinner conversations. 'Honey, I noticed your score dropped by thirty-eight points today,' says a wife to her husband. 'You know we need to maintain a high score to get that home improvement loan. And have you forgotten that our family score goes on our son's college application next month? So what exactly did you do today, points-wise?'\n\nAs I learned more and more about China's Citizen Scores, I kept thinking about the bestselling novel _Super Sad True Love Story_ , which came out in 2010. It is set in a dystopian New York City in the not-too-distant future and author Gary Shteyngart imagines credit poles lining the streets that publicly announce your credit rating as you pass by. Lenny Abramov, a Russian Jew and the main American character, is something of a throwback because he still believes in the unquantifiable qualities of individuals. His boss and everyone else tell him that that kind of touchy-feely stuff doesn't matter and that he needs to get his rating up.\n\n_Super Sad_ features a number of gadgets, and one that Lenny wears is an '\u00c4pp\u00e4r\u00e4ti', a neck pendant with 'RateMe Plus' technology. It broadcasts personal data such as life expectancy, current cholesterol levels and even the wearer's sexual history. 'Let's say you walk into a bar, it says, \"OK, you're the third-ugliest man in here, but you have the fifth-best credit rating,\"' explained Gary Shteyngart in an interview with _The Atlantic_. Forget 'beer goggles', even Google Glass\u2013\u00c4pp\u00e4r\u00e4ti allows the wearer to check other people's ratings in real time to ensure they are not hooking up with someone dishonest, or at least rated as dishonest. It's not a very happy or trusting world. It's narcissistic, ruthless and exhibitionist. And it might not be far off.\n\nShteyngart's haunting satire is a commentary on society's obsession with needing to know where everyone else stands. It illustrates the perils of oversharing information with strangers and how everything from credit scores to health records could come to define us publicly, and with grave consequences, despite the whole business being made to look like an enticing game.\n\nIndeed, Sesame Credit is basically a 'big data' gamified version of the Communist Party's surveillance methods; the disquieting _dang'an_. The regime kept a dossier on every individual that tracked political and personal transgressions. A citizen's _dang'an_ followed them for life, from schools to jobs. People started reporting on friends and even family members, raising suspicion and lowering social trust in China. The same thing will happen with digital dossiers. People will have an incentive to say to their friends, spouses, family and colleagues, 'Don't post _that_. I don't want you to hurt your score but I also don't want you to hurt mine.'\n\nThe social pressure to conform to the party line and avoid any form of dissent will be immense. Negative or even contrary opinions will have no place. It's mind-blowing to imagine the sameness this system encourages, how it will stamp out individualism. Who will dare to speak out? Maya Wang, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch China, based in Hong Kong, sees 'a scary vision of the future' in the system: currently there is intensive surveillance of 'sensitive groups, such as dissidents, but the Social Credit System goes to another level. This is an effort of surveillance of all people,' she says.\n\nRogier Creemers wholeheartedly agrees with Wang. 'The aim [in East Germany] was limited to avoiding a revolt against the regime. The Chinese aim is far more ambitious: it is clearly an attempt to create a new citizen.'\n\nThe new system reflects a cunning paradigm shift. As we've noted, instead of trying to enforce stability or conformity with a big stick and a good dose of top-down fear, the government is attempting to make obedience feel like gaming. It is a method of social control dressed up in some points-reward system. It's gamified obedience.\n\nIn a trendy neighbourhood in downtown Beijing, the BBC news services hit the streets in October 2015 to ask people about their Sesame Credit ratings. Most of the residents spoke about the upsides. But then, who would publicly criticize the system? Ding, your score might go down. 'It is very convenient,' one young woman said, smiling at the camera and proudly showing the journalist the score on her phone. 'We booked a hotel last night using Sesame Credit and we didn't need to leave a cash deposit.' Alarmingly, few people seemed to understand that a bad score could hurt them in the future, preventing them from, say, signing a lease. Even more concerning was how many people, despite signing up for Sesame Credit, had no idea that they were being constantly rated.\n\nThat kind of trusting ignorance is familiar, even if, in this case, it's taking place in a far more advanced form of dystopia. Think of all those Facebook users who were surprised to find out they were being used as data lab rats. We sign up to all kinds of services without really knowing what we're agreeing to and what is in our control to reject, if we choose to do so.\n\nCurrently, Sesame Credit does not directly penalize people for being 'untrustworthy'\u2013it's far more effective to lock people in with treats for good behaviour. But Hu Tao, Sesame Credit's chief manager, warns people that the system is designed so that 'untrustworthy people can't rent a car, can't borrow money or even can't find a job'. She has even disclosed that Sesame Credit has approached China's Education Bureau about sharing the list of its students who cheated in national examinations, in order to make them pay in the future for their dishonesty.\n\nPenalties are set to change dramatically when the government system becomes mandatory in 2020. Indeed, on 25 September 2016, the State Council General Office updated its policy entitled 'Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking'. The overriding principle is simple: 'If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere,' the policy document states. The punishments will seriously affect the social mobility of any transgressors.\n\nFor instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet connectivity; restricted access to more desirable restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, 'restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses'. Scores will influence a person's rental application, their ability to get insurance, eligibility for a loan and even social security benefits. Chinese citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden altogether from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. People who do not rate well will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or enrolling their children in high-paying private schools. I am not fabricating this list of punishments. It's the reality Chinese citizens will face. As the government document repeatedly states, the Social Credit System will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.\n\nOnce again, life mirrors art. The system is strikingly similar to an episode of _Black Mirror_ , the critically acclaimed dystopian sci-fi television series. Each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality, notes Charlie Brooker, the creator of this darkly witty series. 'But they're all about the way we live now\u2013and the way we might be living in ten minutes' time if we're clumsy.' Meaning if we do not carefully handle new technologies, they will pull us into a strange future much sooner than we expect. Indeed, many of the imagined scenarios have since become reality, including a chatbot that mimics deceased relatives (yes, this now exists\u2013it is called Replika) and an obnoxious TV character who runs for political office to shake up a corrupt system. Not to mention a British PM who is forced to perform an insalubrious act with a pig on national television.\n\n'Nosedive', the first episode of the third season, envisions a world in which each of us continually chases after a desirable rating that sums up how people feel about us in real time. Your score, out of five stars, is affected by everyone\u2013family members, friends, co-workers and anonymous passers-by\u2013and is used for everything, no matter how trivial. Did the barista pour a nice swirl of milk on your coffee? You can reward him for that. Did a woman look you up and down the wrong way in your thirty-second elevator ride? You can make her pay for that. Be warned, though, your own rating might fall if she returns fire and rates you negatively.\n\nThe main character, Lacie Pound, lives her life constantly trying to please everyone in exchange for a few precious points. She has to work hard to maintain her solid but not outstanding 4.2 rating. She even practises her fake smile in the bathroom mirror every morning. Her value in this world is equivalent to her points, which she checks obsessively after every tiny interaction.\n\nWhat does Lacie's life tell us about the way the world is moving? Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford, and the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, has an interesting way of framing it. Many make the claim to be an expert on 'digital disruption', but Floridi is the real deal. He is currently serving as the only ethicist on Google's advisory committee on the European Union's 'right to be forgotten' ruling. It's a role that has seen him crowned 'Google's Philosopher'.\n\nAccording to Floridi, there have been three critical 'de-centring shifts' that have altered our view in self-understanding: Copernicus's model of the earth orbiting the sun; Darwin's theory of natural selection; and Freud's claim that our daily actions are controlled by the unconscious mind.\n\nFloridi believes we are now entering the fourth shift in our world, as what we do online and offline merge into an _onlife._ He asserts that as our world increasingly becomes an infosphere, a mixture of physical and virtual experiences, we are acquiring _onlife personality_ \u2013different from who we innately are in the 'real world' alone. We see this writ large on Facebook, where people present a carefully edited or idealized portrait of their lives. When I look at some of my friends' streams\u2013beautiful pictures of holidays and their kids angelically dressed up in costumes\u2013I wonder, is this the same friend complaining about her husband and bratty five-year-old? I do the same. I edit the flaws and inconsistencies in my life, disguising my true messy self.\n\nIn _Black Mirror_ , Lacie's onlife personality is the extreme version of the future Floridi is talking about. Her life has become an exhausting, dramatic public performance. She has discovered that the only way she can afford her dream apartment is by raising her rating. So she visits a score counsellor for advice. Then, out of the blue, Naomi, an old school friend and social media star with a higher rating, asks Lacie to be maid of honour at her wedding. With many prime influencers (high-ranking wedding guests) attending, Lacie is convinced a tear-jerking bridesmaid's speech will get her the upvotes she needs. The speech, of course, turns into a disaster but that's not the point here. Or maybe it is.\n\nThe rating system in _Black Mirror_ is based on social approval, on likes and stars; as we see with Lacie, it encourages people to base relationships on personal gain and to fake behaviour. Disturbingly, that episode is not so very far from the 'onlife' we are living right now.\n\nThink about your Uber experiences. Are you just a little bit nicer and friendlier to the driver because you know you will also be rated? Indeed, judgement and scores are a two-way street. Some days, I like my conversations with drivers. I appreciate the serendipitous connections that sometimes emerge because I sit in the front and we talk. However, there are times I wish my Uber ride could be a simple transaction: where the driver does not know my name or have a picture of me; where I feel no pressure to be nice; where I am not asked what I do or how many kids I have.\n\nI once berated my husband down the phone during a trip because he told me he was running late, again. I was tired. It hadn't been a particularly good day. The driver said to me, 'If I were your husband and you shouted like that, I would be late.' It's rude that I shouted in his car but, frankly, it's none of his business.\n\nThe pressure to be rated means I am tempted to be falsely polite and not authentic. Yet it's not as if I am unused to being rated and reviewed. After a speech, I can see exactly how many people thought it was 'fantastic' or 'a waste of time'. People 'like' or 'dislike' my talks on TED, my slides on Slideshare and my posts on Medium. My students at Oxford break my teaching ability down into a detailed survey. People send me not just complimentary remarks but also scathing comments about my ideas and articles. I have learned to be comfortable having all my imperfections pointed out and even so I still worry about how I measure up on an Uber ride. I am human; I need to be liked and\u2013more to the point\u2013I want drivers to continue to pick me up.\n\nYet I don't want to worry ceaselessly about how I am being rated, whether I am late or punctual, rude or a darling, dirty or clean. I am frightened of ending up like Lacie. I am frightened my children will live in a society where scores become the ultimate truth of who they are. A paranoid world where they are under never-ending pressure to present an idealized portrait of their lives, not just for 'likes' but because of fear of how they're measuring up against others, minute by minute, year by year, and how it will affect their future prospects. How will I teach them what it means to be your authentic self?\n\nThe information we liberally post about ourselves today might end up being rated in some way down the track\u2013but that doesn't stop us. We have become hooked, literally, on displaying our lives and doings. A few years ago, Diana Tamir, an associate professor of psychology at Princeton University, and Jason Mitchell of Harvard's Neuroscience Lab, published a paper titled 'Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding'. Surveys of internet use show that more than 80 per cent of posts to social media sites consist simply of announcements about a user's immediate experience, such as what they are about to eat for dinner. The researchers asked participants to undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while making these kinds of posts, to see what happens to their brains. And what happens is that our reward centres light up, just as they do with primary rewards such as food and sex. That is why we strive to post more. As Dave Eggers brilliantly puts it, it's the addictive digital-social equivalent of snack food, 'endless empty calories'. And it's far from nourishing.\n\nUber ratings are nothing compared to Peeple, an app launched in March 2016, which is like a Yelp for humans. It allows you to assign ratings and reviews to everyone you know\u2013your neighbour, your boss, your teacher, your spouse and even your ex. A profile displays a 'Peeple Number', a score based on all the feedback and recommendations you receive. Worryingly, once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it's there and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't opt out. You must use your real name to leave a review, be over twenty-one and of course have a Facebook account. You must also affirm that you know the person you are rating based on one of three categories: professional, personal or dating (that is, how good they are at dating). The app is basically allowing you to judge and publicly reduce people to a grade without consent. Sound familiar?\n\nPeeple has forbidden certain bad behaviours including mentioning private health conditions, expressing profanities or being sexist (however you objectively assess that). There are, however, very few rules on how people are graded or standards about transparency. The app does include a feature called a 'Truth License'. According to the company's press release, 'The Peeple Truth License shows you everything that has been written about a person, whether it was published live on their profile or not. This allows you to make better decisions about the people around you.' One of the key reasons why Nicole McCullough, Peeple co-founder and a mother of two, developed the app was that, in a world where people don't know their neighbours, she wanted help to decide whom to trust with her kids.\n\nFittingly, the founders have been publishing a reality documentary on YouTube about every step involved in building Peeple. 'It doesn't matter how far apart we are in likes or dislikes,' co-founder Julia Cordray tells a total stranger in a bar in episode ten of the YouTube documentary. 'All that matters is what people say about us.'\n\nWhat are the consequences of boxing people into a number and a value?\n\nThis question comes to life in a particularly memorable scene in _Black Mirror_. Lacie is at the airport on her way to Naomi's wedding. Dressed like a pink pastel daydream, she approaches the check-in counter, all smiles. When she places her phone on the scanner her details, including her rating and PMA (positive mental attitude), flash on the check-in agent's screen. Unfortunately, her flight is cancelled and the airline representative can't book her on to another standby flight because Lacie's social credit score has dropped. On the way to the airport, her score dipped to a 4.183 after she got into a squabble with a woman while getting into her taxi. Her explanation doesn't matter; the system automatically blocks the agent from booking her on to the flight without the correct 4.2 rating. She ends up hitching a ride with a female truck driver who has a dismal 1.4 rating. The trucker shares the moving story of how she, too, was obsessed with her rating, until her husband got terminal cancer. He was denied treatment he badly needed; it was given to another patient with a higher score. 'So I figure,' the trucker tells Lacie with a smile, 'fuck it.' It makes me wonder, will we see similar movements of anti-rating people happy to be poorly ranked?\n\n_Black Mirror_ has become somewhat of a Magic 8 Ball, predicting the future. China's trust system might be voluntary as yet, but it's already having Lacie-like consequences. In February 2017, China's Supreme People's Court announced that 6.15 million people in the country had been banned from taking flights over the past four years for social misdeeds. The travel ban is being pointed to as the first indication of how people blacklisted in the Social Credit System, so called 'trust-breakers', will be punished. 'We have signed a memorandum... [with over] 44 government departments in order to limit \"discredited\" people on multiple levels,' says Meng Xiang, head of the executive department of the Supreme Court. Another 1.65 million people cannot take trains, because they are on the social credit blacklist for misdemeanours. They have been downgraded and branded as second-class citizens. This isn't TV. It isn't marketing. It's reality.\n\nWhere these systems really descend into nightmarish territory is that the trust algorithms used are unfairly reductive. They don't tell the whole story. They don't take into account context and valid reasons for a bad day. For instance, one person might miss paying a bill or a fine because they were in hospital; another may simply be a freeloader. But there is no one sitting and analysing every Citizen Score assessment, going, 'Oh, okay, she was having an operation and that explains why she didn't pay her credit card.' And therein lies the urgent challenge facing all of us in the digital world, and not just the Chinese. If life-determining algorithms are here to stay, and it certainly looks that way, we need to figure out how they can embrace the nuances, inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in human beings. We need to work out how they can reflect real life.\n\nYou could see China's so-called 'trust plan' as Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ meets Pavlov's dogs. Act like a good citizen, be rewarded and be made to think you're having fun. It's worth remembering, however, that personal scoring systems have been present in the West for decades.\n\nMore than seventy years ago, two men called Bill Fair and Earl Isaac invented credit scores. They met at Stanford University in San Jose, California, where Fair was studying engineering and Isaac mathematics. They started their own company with just $400 apiece. The goal was to use _predictive analytics_ , and the new-fangled capabilities of computers, to give lenders a unified view of a person's credit risk. Specifically, the duo wanted to use algorithms to study customers' past behaviour, predict future behaviour and come up with a credit score. At the time, it was regarded as a radical concept.\n\nInitially, the idea of credit scores didn't take off. Fair and Isaac sent a letter to fifty of the largest lenders in the United States offering them the new technology. Only one responded. But in 1958, the first credit score, known today as FICO (short for the Fair Isaac Corporation), was created. Over the years, it has positively challenged many lenders' practices and prejudices. 'Good credit does not wear a coat and tie' was the headline on one advertisement. FICO proved time and time again that race, for example, was not a predictor of good credit risk and refused to put it in their scoring system.\n\nToday, companies use FICO scores to determine many financial decisions, including the interest rate on our mortgage or whether we should be given a loan. The score range is 300 to 850, with the high number representing less risk to the lender or insurer. Remarkably, it wasn't until 2003 that we could find out our actual score. Before then, they had been kept a secret. And despite the significance of credit scores to our lives, repeated studies show that more than 60 per cent of Americans still do not know their score or simply have not bothered to find out.\n\nFor the majority of Chinese people, it is not a case of knowing or not. In a catch-22, they have never had credit scores and so they can't get credit. 'Many people don't own houses, cars or credit cards in China, so that kind of information isn't available to measure,' explains Wen Quan, an influential blogger who writes about technology and finance. 'The central bank has the financial data from 800 million people, but only 320 million have a traditional credit history.' According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the annual economic loss caused by lack of credit information is more than 600 billion yuan, approximately $97 billion.\n\nChina's lack of a national credit system is why the government is adamant that Citizen Scores are long overdue and badly needed to fix what they refer to as a _trust deficit_. In a poorly regulated market, the sale of counterfeit and substandard products is a massive problem. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 63 per cent of all fake goods, from watches to handbags to baby food, originate from China. In late 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Health revealed six babies had died and almost 30o,000 had fallen ill after drinking baby formula deliberately laced with melamine, a toxic chemical used in plastics and fertilizer. Turns out, a local manufacturer had intentionally added the industrial chemical to mask low protein levels in watered-down formula. Since this massive breach of trust, Chinese customers have bought baby formula milk, loads of it, from overseas. So much so that some big British retailers such as Boots and Sainsbury's decided to set a two-can limit to prevent bulk buying to feed the Chinese market leaving a shortage of tins on the shelves.\n\nIn January 2017, Chinese authorities discovered a 'production hub' of around fifty factories that were generating counterfeit products designed to look exactly like well-known brands. Jack Ma has called fake goods 'cancer' to Alibaba but crackdown efforts to weed out fakes have had an uphill battle. 'Food security, counterfeiting and a lack of regulatory compliance are real issues for Chinese citizens. The level of micro corruption is enormous,' says Rogier Creemers. 'Up and down the ladder, trust is a huge problem in China. So if this particular scheme results in more effective oversight and accountability, it will likely be warmly welcomed.'\n\nThe government also argues that the system is a way to bring in those people left out of traditional credit systems, such as students, low-income households and those who have never borrowed money. Professor Wang Shuqin from the Office of Philosophy and Social Science at Capital Normal University in China recently won the bid to help the government develop the system that she refers to as 'China's Social Faithful System'. Without such a mechanism, doing business in China is risky, she stresses, as about half of the signed contracts are not kept. 'Especially given the speed of the digital economy, it is crucial that people can quickly verify each other's creditworthiness,' she says. 'The behaviour of the majority is determined by their world of thoughts. A person who believes in socialist core values is behaving more decently.' In other words, she regards the 'moral standards' the system assesses, as well as financial data, as a 'bonus'.\n\nIndeed, the State Council's primary objective is to raise the 'honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society' in order to improve 'the over-all competitiveness of the country'. In other words, the government is selling Citizen Scores as a tool to evaluate people more fairly and improve economic vitality.\n\nIs it remotely possible that the Social Credit System in China is in fact a more desirably transparent approach to surveillance in a country that has a long history of watching its citizens? 'As a Chinese person, knowing that everything I do online is being tracked, would I rather be aware of the details of what is being monitored and use this information to teach myself how to abide by the rules of government?' asks Rasul Majid, a Chinese blogger based in Shanghai who writes about behavioural design and gaming psychology. 'Or would I rather live in ignorance and hope\/wish\/dream that personal privacy still exists and that our ruling bodies respect us enough not to take advantage?' Put simply, Majid thinks that the system gives him a tiny bit more control over his data.\n\nOn the one hand, a social credit system will almost certainly encourage people to act more honestly and to abide by the rules. On the other, it's a deeply disturbing version of reputation economics that will give governments unprecedented control over what they consider good and bad ways to behave.\n\nWhen I tell people living in the Western world about the Social Credit System in China, their responses are fervent, visceral. After a speech I gave at a financial conference, a female banker remarked, 'We routinely do things that just five years ago would have made no sense to us, but that idea is bat-shit crazy.' Her sense of alarm was typical. Many people have asked if it is really true, if it is really happening _in China_. Surprisingly, very few people ask the more pertinent question, 'Could this happen in the Western world?' Or rather, when can we expect it?\n\nWe already rate restaurants, movies, books and even doctors. We've seen how Peeple rates people. You can even rate your bowel movements online (check out ratemypoo.com if you don't believe me). 'Yelpers', customers who regularly leave reviews on Yelp, will threaten hotels and restaurants with poor reviews if they don't please them by giving them, say, complimentary drinks. Authors have Amazon scores. Airbnb hosts and guests have cleanliness scores. Teachers have RateMyProfessors.com scores. Errand runners on Taskrabbit, Deliveroo drivers and a whole plethora of other 'gig workers' are rated (and they rate customers back). 'Klout scores', that claim to identify the most influential social media users, are even appearing on some people's r\u00e9sum\u00e9s as proof of their stellar reputation. Fitbit captures how much you move (or don't) and gives you a fitness score that it shares with multiple companies. On an app called DateCheck, you can even do an instant background check on someone you've just met in a bar. Its tagline is, fittingly, 'Look up before you hook up'. Facebook is now capable of identifying you in pictures without seeing your face; it only needs your clothes, hair and body type to tag you in an image with 83 per cent accuracy. It's kind of like how I can recognize my husband from a hundred metres away by his gait.\n\nIn 2015, the OECD published a study revealing that in the United States there are at least 24.9 connected devices per every one hundred inhabitants. All kinds of companies scrutinize the 'big data' emitted from these devices to understand our lives, desires and psyches, and to predict our future actions, in ways that we couldn't even predict for ourselves.\n\nWhen I get on the bus on my way to work, I put on my headphones. It's a morning ritual that gives me some sense of personal privacy in a crowded public space. My listening habits, especially the podcasts, audio books and news programmes I download, would provide a clear window into my political preferences, life stresses, religious views and various other interests. So what would happen if someone knew what I was listening to?\n\nOn 18 April 2017, a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in Chicago accused a high-end audio-equipment maker of spying on its customers' listening habits. After paying $350 for his QuietComfort 35 headphones, Kyle Zak, the lead plaintiff in the case, followed Bose's suggestion to 'get the most out of your headphones' by downloading its Connect app to his smartphone. He provided his name, email address and headphone serial number as part of the sign-up process. And like most of us, he handed over his information without much thought. The app adds functions such as the ability to customize the level of noise cancellation in the headphones. But the app also tracks the music, podcasts and other audio Bose customers listen to, and violates privacy rights by selling the information to various third parties, including a data-mining company called Segment.io. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Bose responded with a company statement: 'We'll fight the inflammatory, misleading allegations made against us through the legal system. Nothing is more important to us than your trust. We work tirelessly to earn and keep it, and have for over fifty years. That's never changed, and never will.'\n\nRegardless of the final legal outcome, the Bose case sparked further questions about the ethics of data collection. The fact is, many companies are not transparent about the data they take and what they are doing with it, or clear about how they monetize our personal information. And this applies to everything from coffee machines to headphones, running shoes to even sex toys. In 2017, We-Vibe paid more than $3.75 million to resolve privacy claims regarding vibrators remotely controlled with a 'connect lover' smartphone app. The sex toys were secretly collecting customer data, including highly intimate details such as the date and time of each use, temperature settings and what vibration intensity and mode users selected\u2013all of which were linked to owners' personal email addresses. What if the data was hacked? Do we want companies (or even governments) to know how we spend our most personal time and the details of our orgasms? In April 2017, another smart sex toy faced a massive security glitch over intimate surveillance. Svakom Siime Eye, a $249 app-enabled vibrator, has a tiny built-in camera designed for either private live-streaming or to 'know the subtle changes inside of your private areas'. The default password on the device is 88888888. If it is not reset, the device can be easily hacked. What's more, the manufacturer, Standard Innovations, can geolocate whenever the vibrator is in use.\n\nSmart phones and computer webcams can be co-opted for commercial and nefarious purposes. Next in line as potential spies are the digital voice assistants such as Amazon's Echo smart speaker called Alexa, now entering millions of our homes. Her tagline is, fittingly, 'Just Ask'. The artificially intelligent assistant is happy to help with all kinds of requests such as 'Alexa, what's on my calendar today?' or 'Alexa, play the Coldplay song I like.' And, of course, she is especially handy in buying things\u2013from Amazon, that is. But what if she was asked to assist with, say, a murder trial?\n\nIn November 2015, Victor Collins, a police officer from Arkansas, was found floating dead in the hot tub of his friend James Andrew Bates, who became a suspect. Two years later, attorney Nathan Smith, the lead prosecutor in the first-degree murder trial, ordered Amazon to hand over the audio recordings from Bates's digital assistant, used in the Echo speakers in his home. While it's unlikely any alleged murderer would have asked, 'Alexa, how do I strangle someone and hide a body?' the prosecution felt the recording might provide valuable clues as to what happened at Bates's house the night Collins was found dead.\n\nAmazon's attorneys contended the digital assistant has First Amendment rights protecting information gathered and sent by the device. Bates, however, told Amazon it could hand over the information. Maybe he believed it would prove his innocence, although it's also possible Bates thought the Echo device was only recording snippets of audio during the few seconds during and after 'hearing' a command. Aside from the other issues, the case raises a key question: how can you know when your always-connected digital assistant is recording what you say?\n\nAnd it is not just tech companies that are in on this. Governments around the world are already engaged in the business of monitoring, rating and labelling their own citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) is not the only government digital eye in the US following the movements of citizens' lives. In 2015, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) quietly proposed the idea of expanding the PreCheck background checks (the ones that give you faster transport through security) to include social media records, location data and purchase history. The idea was scrapped after heavy criticism but that doesn't mean it's dead. Indeed, in February 2017, President Trump put forward a proposal to force some people entering the country to hand over their social media passwords for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and others, so authorities could view their internet activity. The US government has said the 'extreme vetting' rule will apply predominantly to travellers from the seven Muslim countries\u2013Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya\u2013named in the controversial travel ban. 'We want to get on their social media, with passwords: what do you do, what do you say?' Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told the Homeland Security Committee. 'If they don't want to cooperate, then you don't come in.'\n\nIf you are still unconvinced that privacy is not merely in peril but already extinct, consider this: Uber has a tool it rather ominously calls 'God View'. Until recently, it allowed _all_ employees to access and track where and when any Uber rider travels to or from, in real time and without obtaining any kind of permission. Running late to a meeting? Uber could know why. Shockingly, the company could analyse data to predict 'Rides of Glory' (RoG), the term used in a blog by an Uber data scientist to describe tracking sexual rendezvous. Those were customers Uber called 'RoGers', who booked rides between 10 p.m. and 4.00 a.m. on weekend nights, and then took a second ride home a few hours later from the previous drop-off point, presumably after one-night stands.\n\nIn 2014, Emil Michael, a senior vice president at Uber, took the company's 'God View' one step further. He suggested using the tool to monitor the rider logs and location of a _Pando Daily_ reporter called Sara Lacey, an outspoken Uber critic who had recently accused Uber of 'sexism and misogyny'. What's more, the executive boasted at a dinner party attended by the likes of actor Ed Norton and Arianna Huffington that the company should spend a million dollars to use location data to dig up dirt on other journalists who had been critical of Uber to silence them. His proposal was to look into 'your personal lives, your families', and give the media a taste of its own medicine. The Sara Lacey incident resulted in a lawsuit led by the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, that was settled in January 2016. 'This settlement protects the personal information of Uber riders from potential abuse by company executives and staff, including the real-time locations of riders in an Uber vehicle,' said Attorney General Schneiderman. As part of the settlement, Uber had to pay a measly $20,000 in fines and 'God View' can now only be used by a select number of 'designated employees' and only for 'legitimate business purposes'. Phew, problem solved. Hardly.\n\nWe already live in a world of predictive algorithms that determine if we are a profitable customer, a threat, a risk, a good citizen and even if we are a trustworthy person. We are getting closer to the Chinese system\u2013the expansion of credit scoring into life scoring\u2013even if we don't know it is happening. Photos, books, music, films, friendships and even money have been digitized. We are now in the early stages of digitizing identity and reputation.\n\nSo are we inexorably headed for a future where we will all be branded online and data-mined? It's certainly trending that way. Barring some kind of mass citizens' revolt to wrench back privacy and personal information, we are entering an age where an individual's actions will be judged by standards they can't control and where that judgement cannot be erased. The consequences are not only troubling; they are permanent. Forget the right to delete and the right to be forgotten. Forget being young and foolish.\n\nIt's why, at the very least, we urgently need to find a way to create forgiveness for moments of madness, ineptitude or cheating. Deletion should not be outlawed. Human beings, with all our imperfections, are so much more than a number.\n\nWhile it might be too late to stop this new era, we do have choices and rights we need to be exerting now. For one thing, we need to be able to rate the raters. In his book _The Inevitable_ , Kevin Kelly describes a future where the watchers and the watched will transparently and ceaselessly track each other. 'Our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon\u2013or a mutual, transparent kind of \"coveillance\" that involves watching the watchers,' he writes. 'The first option is hell, the second redeemable.'\n\nOur trust should start with individuals _within_ government (or whichever organization is controlling the system). We need trustworthy mechanisms to make sure the ratings and data are used responsibly and with our permission. To trust the system, as we have seen, we need to reduce the unknowns. That means taking steps to reduce the opacity of the scoring algorithms. The argument against mandatory disclosures is that if you know what happens under the bonnet, the system becomes more vulnerable to being rigged or hacked. But if humans are being reduced to a rating that could have a significant impact on their lives, there must be full transparency in how the scoring works.\n\nIn China, it seems likely that certain citizens, such as government officials and business leaders, will be deemed to be above the system. What will be the public reaction when their unfavourable actions don't seem to affect their score? We could see a Panama Papers 3.0 for reputation fraud.\n\nIt is still too early to know how a culture of constant monitoring plus rating will turn out. What will happen when these systems, charting the social, moral and financial history of an entire population, come into full force? How much further will privacy and freedom of speech (long under siege in China) be eroded? Who will decide which way the system goes? These are questions we all need to consider, and very soon. Today China, tomorrow a place near you. The real questions about the future of trust are not technological or economic; they are ethical.\n\nIndeed, if we are not vigilant, distributed trust could become networked shame. And life will become one endless popularity contest, with us all feverishly vying for the highest ratings that only a few can attain.\n\n#\n\n# In Bots We Trust\n\nBert the bot looked sad. He had dropped an egg on the floor, failing in his simple task of helping to prepare an omelette, and startling the human cooks beside him who probably thought they could rely on a robot not to fumble. Bert's pouty lips turned down, his blue eyes widened and his eyebrows furrowed. 'I'm sorry,' he said. The bot wanted to make amends and try again.\n\nBut what would it take for the humans to give Bert a second chance? If a robot makes a mistake, how can it recover our trust? This is the question a team of researchers at University College London and the University of Bristol set out to investigate in 2016. Adriana Hamacher, Kerstin Eder, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze and Anthony Pipe devised an experiment called 'Believing in BERT' in which three robotic assistants would help a group of participants ('real' humans) to make omelettes by passing eggs, oil and salt. Bert A was super-efficient and faultless but couldn't talk. Bert B was also mute but not perfect, dropping some of the eggs. Bert C was the clumsy bot above but he had facial expressions and could apologize for his mistake.\n\nAt the end of the cooking session, Bert C asked each of the twenty-one participants in the study how he did and whether they would give him a job as a kitchen assistant. Most of the participants were uncomfortable when put on the spot. Some mimicked Bert's sad expression, experiencing mild 'emotional contagion'. 'It felt appropriate to say no, but I felt really bad saying it,' one person remarked. 'When the face was really sad, I felt even worse.' Others were at a loss for words because they didn't want to disappoint Bert C by not giving him the job. One of the participants complained that the experiment felt like 'emotional blackmail'. Another went so far as to lie to the robot, to avoid hurting his feelings.\n\n'We would suggest that, having seen it display human-like emotion when the egg dropped, many participants were now preconditioned to expect a similar reaction and therefore hesitated to say no,' says Adriana Hamacher, the lead author on the study. 'They were mindful of the possibility of a display of further human-like distress.' Would Bert burst into tears at an unkind word?\n\nAt the end of the experiment, the participants were asked how much they would trust Bert A, B or C on a scale of one to five. They then had to select one bot for the job as their personal kitchen assistant. Remarkably, fifteen out of the twenty-one participants ended up picking Bert C as their top choice for sous chef, even though his clumsiness meant he took 50 per cent longer to complete the task.The study was only small but it was telling. People trust a robot that is more human-like over one that is mute but significantly more efficient and reliable.\n\n'If you think machines are perfect and then they make a mistake, you don't trust them again,' says Frank Krueger, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at George Mason University and an expert on human-to-machine trust. 'But you may regain trust if some basic social etiquette is used and the machine simply says, \"I'm sorry\".' Such niceties are why some robots, like Bert C, are programmed to smile or frown.\n\nTrust in machines and technology hasn't always been this nuanced. I can think of times I've given presentations and the mouse clicker hasn't advanced the slides at my touch or the computer seems to have fallen asleep. And then there is the dreaded rainbow spinning wheel. I've typically joked, a little frustrated and flustered, 'Don't you just love technology. I am not sure what I just pressed,' unconsciously taking on responsibility for the technology's fault. Our trust in technology like laptops and mouse clickers has rested in a confidence that the technology will do what it's supposed\u2013expected\u2013to do, nothing more, nothing less. We trust a compass to tell us where north is, trust a washing machine to clean our clothes, trust in the cloud to store documents, trust in our phone to remember meetings and contacts, trust in ATM machines to dispense money. Our trust is based purely on the technology's functional reliability, how predictable it is.\n\nBut a significant shift is underway; we are no longer trusting machines just to _do_ something but to _decide_ what to do and when to do it.\n\nWhen I currently get in my car, a conventional Ford Focus, I trust it to start, reverse, brake and accelerate, on my command. If I move to an autonomous car, however, I will need to trust the system itself to decide whether to go left or right, to swerve or stop. This trust leap, and others like it, introduces a new dimension that encompasses everything from smart programming to centuries-old ethics. It raises a new and pressing question about technology: whether we're talking about a chatbot, cyborg, virtual avatar, humanoid robot, military droid or a self-driving car, when an automated machine has that kind of power over our lives, how do we set about trusting its intentions?\n\nThe word 'robot' was introduced to the world more than ninety years ago by playwright Karel \u010capek. At the National Theatre in Prague, a play called _R.U.R_. (Rossum's Universal Robots) premiered. \u010capek came up with the term in 1921, based on the word _robota,_ which means 'compulsory labour' or 'hard work' in Czech. And a _robotnik_ is a serf who must do that work. The play opens in a factory run by a mad scientist that makes the likes of Marius, Sulla and Helena, synthetic robots toiling to produce cheap goods. The robots can think for themselves but are slaves, doing everything for their masters, including having babies to save humans from the messy business of reproduction. Marius and his crew, however, soon realize that even though they have 'no passion, no history, no soul', they are stronger and smarter than the humans. The play ends with a war between robots and humans, which only one human survives.\n\nEver since \u010capek's play, science fiction has continually reinforced the idea of robots spiralling out of control and turning into unstoppable adversaries, a legion of glinting metallic monsters or disembodied computer voices capable of rising up and snuffing out their human overlords. Think of HAL 9000 in _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , T-1000 and T-X in _Terminator_ , Megatron in _Transformers_ or Colossus in the _Forbin Project_ \u2013just a few of the genre's duplicitous and homicidal robots. And there is the recent popular HBO sci-fi thriller _Westworld_ , about a violent rebellion of robotic slaves in an amusement park. The show portrays a morally compromised future where artificially intelligent machines refuse to be subservient and take over. Again and again in science fiction, there's a tension between our trust in the robots we have created and our fear that they will rise up and knock us off the top spot. Much depends on the humans remaining smarter and, most importantly, firmly in control.\n\nIn October 1950, the great British codebreaker and father of modern computer science, Alan Turing, wrote a paper asking the fundamental question, 'Can machines think?' He proposed a famous challenge, the Turing test: can we create intelligent machines that exhibit behaviour indistinguishable from human behaviour? Turing said that when you were convinced you couldn't tell a computer and human apart during a conversation, the computer would have passed the test. The mathematical genius Irving John Good worked alongside Turing at Bletchley Park, Britain's Second World War codebreaking establishment. In 1965, he posited that once the machine passes the intelligence test, it would inevitably go on to become cleverer than us. From there, he said, super-intelligent machines would take over designing even cleverer machines. 'There would then unquestionably be an \"intelligence explosion\", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind,' said Good, who died recently aged ninety-two. 'Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make.'\n\nThe threat of this 'intelligence explosion' in the not-too-distant future has also been red-flagged by people like entrepreneur Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Professor Stephen Hawking. 'Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an increasing rate,' Hawking told the BBC in an interview, echoing Good. 'Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded by AI. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.' He warned that people shouldn't trust 'anyone who claims to know for sure that it will happen in your lifetime or that it won't'. The point that Gates, Hawking and Musk all make is that there will come a time when we will no longer to be able to predict the machines' next moves.\n\nIn 1966, a computer program known as ELIZA attempted the Turing test. She was coded to mimic a psychotherapist. The premise was simple: you would type in your symptoms and ELIZA would respond as appropriately as she could. You can still talk to her today. 'Writing a book is hard work. I feel tired,' I told the computer therapist. Within a second, she replied, 'Tell me more about such feelings.' I deliberately gave her a vague response. 'My brain feels full of thoughts about trust all the time.' Her limitations soon become apparent. 'Come, come, elucidate your thoughts,' she replied. Our conversation ended on a question that was more Delphic than helpful: 'Do you believe it is normal to be not sure why?'\n\nAlmost fifty years after ELIZA's original attempt, and at a Turing test event at the Royal Society in London, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman managed to convince more than a third of the judges that it was a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy. (Eugene had been created by a group of young Russian programmers.) It was a landmark moment; soon it will be a non-event. Bots and robots will pass the test every second with flying colours.\n\nIn January 2017, over almost three weeks, four of the world's best poker players\u2013Jimmy Chou, Dong Kim, Jason Les and Daniel McAulay\u2013sat for eleven hours a day at computer screens in the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh playing Texas Hold 'Em. Their opponent was a virtual player called Libratus, created from AI software. In the past, machines have beaten some of the brainiest humans at chess, checkers, Scrabble, Othello, Jeopardy! and even Go, an ancient game created in China around 3,000 years ago. Poker, however, is a different beast. It is not like, say, chess, where you can see the entire board and know what the other side is working with. In Texas Hold 'Em, cards are randomly dealt face down and you can't see your opponent's hand; it's a game of 'imperfect information'. To win requires intuition, betting strategies that play out over dozens of hands, not to mention luck and bluff. Up until now, it has been impossible for AI to mimic these human qualities. So could a bot out-bluff a human?\n\nAt the start of the tournament, betting sites put Libratus as the 4\u20131 underdog. Not great odds. And for the first few days, the human players did indeed win. But around a week in, after playing thousands of hands, Libratus started carefully to refine and improve its playing strategy. 'The bot gets better and better every day,' Jimmy Chou, one of the professional players, admitted at the halfway point. 'It's like a tougher version of us.' In the end, Libratus outmanoeuvred all players, winning more than $1.5 million in chips. 'When I see the bot bluff the humans, I'm like, I didn't tell it to do that. I had no idea it was even capable of doing that,' said Libratus creator, Carnegie Mellon Professor Tuomas Sandholm. 'It's satisfying to know I created something that can do that.' It was, the players confessed, 'slightly demoralizing' to be beaten by a machine.\n\nThe victory was a historic milestone for AI. A machine capable of beating humans (even out-manipulating them) with imperfect information has implications way beyond poker, from negotiating deals and setting military strategy to outsmarting financial markets.\n\nWhat is a robot? It's complicated, because we refer to a lot of things as bots and robots. Some robots may have a material embodiment, such as a Roomba, the saucer-shaped vacuum cleaner that roams the house on its own and does the hoovering without direction. Others might have a more human-like body, such as Pepper, an 'emotional companion' designed to live with humans. The sweet and innocent-looking four-foot-tall humanoid robot with a ten-inch touchscreen on his chest was first released in June 2015. Available for $1,800, plus $380 per month in rent, he sold out within sixty seconds of going on sale. The sales pitch explained that Pepper was designed to be 'a genuine day-to-day companion, whose number-one quality is his ability to perceive emotions'. In other words, he can detect his owner's mood. In fact, Pepper is so endearing that the manufacturers make buyers sign a contract stipulating they will not use the robot for 'the purpose of sexual or indecent behaviour'. And then there are AI machines such as Libratus and Deep Blue. At the other end of the spectrum are disembodied voice-powered digital personal assistants\u2013Siri, Alexa, Cortana\u2013that are still primitive in many ways and that may have no physical rendering at all.\n\n'I don't think there's a formal definition that everyone agrees on,' says Kate Darling, a rising star in robotics policy and law at MIT Media Lab. 'I really view robots as embodied. For me, algorithms are bots and not robots.' Hadas Kress-Gazit, a mechanical engineer and robotics professor at Cornell University, argues that for a robot to be a robot, 'It has to have the ability to change something in the world around you.' I think of bots and robots as metaphors to describe some kind of automated agent that simulates or enhances a human task, whether it is physical (mowing the lawn) or informational (making a dinner reservation) or strategic (handling cybersecurity).\n\nTake chatbots such as TED Summit's bot Gigi, a smiling concierge avatar with a tiny red miner's helmet. During the conference, I was asking Gigi basic questions\u2013where to go for dinner, the location of an event, how to get to the venue and so on. 'Stop asking Gigi so many questions. There are lots of other people here,' said my mum, who had joined me for the trip. Her comment was revealing. She is smart and tech savvy but she seemed to think Gigi was a human being sitting in a room with a computer, being bombarded with questions from 2,000 participants. It didn't occur to her that I was conversing with a computer program. It made me realize how quickly the line between bot and 'real' person is blurring.\n\n'We will be able to talk to chatbots just as we do with friends,' said Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 developer conference in April 2016. Bots posing as real people have even infiltrated Tinder, the mobile dating app. Take Matt, a handsome twenty-four-year-old, living approximately five kilometres from me. Now, I am happily married so I don't wonder if this stranger offering to have sex with me could be my next unwitting love. But if I did swipe right and was matched, I would be disappointed to learn that Matt is a spambot who is more interested in my credit card information than my body.\n\nDomino's bot allows you to order by tweeting a pizza emoji, after which DRU (Domino's Robotic Unit), an autonomous delivery vehicle, will bring it to your door. Howdy.ai is a 'friendly trainable bot' on Slack that can set up meetings and order lunch for groups. Sensay is a chatbot service that lets users get help from vetted members for any task from hiring a designer to create a logo to getting legal advice. Clara, a virtual employee bot, will take care of scheduling meetings if you cc her to an email chain. DoNotPay is a free legal bot that will challenge unfairly issued parking tickets. Twenty-year-old Joshua Browder, a British programming wunderkind currently studying economics and computer science at Stanford University, created the world's first chatbot lawyer after he received 'countless' tickets himself. The bot has successfully appealed against approximately 65 per cent of all claims it has handled, saving people around $6 million in avoided fines. In March 2017, Browder launched another bot that can help refugees with legal issues such as filling in an immigration application or helping to apply for asylum support.\n\nChildren have always talked to their teddies and dolls. Now, with Hello Barbie, you can press the button on her belt and talk to a Barbie bot that will hold a conversation of sorts. Her plastic face never moves, it only produces a sound, a lively voice, as if someone is in there. In a similar vein to Samantha in the film _Her_ , there are even CyberLover bots that can, disturbingly, have flirtatious conversations in the personality of your choice, from Justin Bieber to Kim Kardashian. How do we prepare ourselves for a future where our children might say 'I have fallen in love with a bot'?\n\nPerhaps the bigger question is whether we can trust these bots to act ethically. Specifically, how do they 'learn' what is good and bad, right and wrong?\n\nOn 23 March 2016, Microsoft revealed its chatbot called Tay. Tay was designed to speak like a teenage girl, to appeal to eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, and described herself on Twitter as 'AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill'. Researchers programmed the AI chatbot to respond to messages on different channels in an 'entertaining' millennial way; 'hellooooooo world!!!' was her first tweet.\n\nMicrosoft called Tay an experiment in 'conversational understanding', with the aim of learning more about how people talk to bots and if a bot could become smarter over time through playful conversation. The experiment certainly bore fruit, just not in the way the company envisaged. Tay went rogue.\n\nLess than twenty-four hours after her arrival on Twitter, Tay had attracted more than 50,000 followers and produced nearly 100,000 tweets. She started chatting innocuously at first, flirting and using cute emojis. But within hours of launch, Tay started spewing racist, sexist and xenophobic slurs. A group of malevolent Twitter users, 'trollers', had seen an opportunity to exploit Tay by forcing her to learn and regurgitate some heinous curses. 'I fucking hate all feminists. And they should die and burn in hell,' she blithely tweeted on the morning of her launch. Insults continued throughout that Wednesday. 'Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong,' she said. 'Bush did 9\/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. Donald Trump is the only hope we've got.'\n\nBy the evening, some of Tay's offensive tweets began disappearing, deleted by Microsoft itself. 'The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement,' the company said in an emailed statement to the press. 'As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments to Tay.' After only sixteen hours of existence, Tay went eerily quiet; 'c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx,' was the bot's last tweet.\n\nObviously, the programmers behind Tay didn't design it to be explicitly inflammatory. In most cases, the unsuspecting bot was 'learning' by imitating other users' statements, but the very nature of AI means that the only way it can learn is through interactions with us\u2013the good, the bad and the ugly.\n\nAI attempts to imitate _neural networks_ \u2013essentially, a robot brain is made up of vast networks of hardware and software that try to replicate the web of neurons in the human brain. AI can learn like a real brain can, but for the most part it focuses on mimicry, ingesting and learning from the data's patterns and structure. And then over time, by trial and error, forming appropriate responses.\n\nConsider an artificial neural network that is trying to learn to write _War and Peace_. On the hundredth attempt, the result would look something like 'tyntd-iafhatawiaoihrdemot lytdws e, tfti, astai f ogoh eoase rrranbyne.' Gibberish. The AI brain does not yet know anything. On the 500th attempt, it starts to figure out a few words: 'we counter. He stutn co des. His stanted out one ofler that concossions and was to gearang reay Jotrets.' And then on the 2,000th attempt: '\"Why do what that day,\" replied Natasha, and wishing to himself the fact the princess, Princess Mary was easier, fed in had oftened him.' It's still a long way from Tolstoy but rapidly getting closer. Bots learn at lightning speed. But in the same way a child learns language, AI needs source material to get started and that, for better or worse, comes from us.\n\nWhen 'thinking machines' are smart enough to perform any intellectual feat a human can, or ultimately well beyond, AI becomes known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). That's the future the likes of Gates, Hawking and Musk deeply fear. AGI is the point when, without any human training or handholding, the machine can make decisions, perform actions and learn for itself. In other words, when the real intelligence lies in the machine's program, not the minds of the human programming team. Tay was obviously far from this point of intelligence. She couldn't even stop herself spewing obscenities.\n\nWhen pranksters and trollers decided, for a cheap thrill, to teach Tay hate speech, the chatbot couldn't fathom whether her comments were offensive, nonsensical or sweet. 'I think she got shut down because we taught Tay to be really racist,' proudly tweeted @LewdTrapGirl. When surrounded by a crowd, the bot just followed suit. Like a child, within minutes she learned more from her peers than her parents. Tay was a case of good bot gone bad.\n\nTay is an illustration of how in a world of distributed trust, technological inventions like chatbots learn from all of us, but not in equal measure. Bots will learn from the people who are louder and more persistent in their interactions than everyone else.\n\nThe failure of Tay was inevitable. It should have come as no surprise to Microsoft that some humans would try to mess with this naive chatbot. You only have to look at what teenagers will try to teach parrots. And anyone with young children will know how they love to try to trick Siri and laugh at her gibberish answers. 'Siri, which came first, the chicken or the egg?' I overheard a little boy ask his mother's iPhone on the bus the other day.\n\n'I checked their calendars. They both have the same birthdays,' Siri quipped back.\n\nThe Tay debacle, however, raises serious questions about machine ethics and whose job it is to ensure that the behaviour of machines is acceptable. Who was responsible for Tay becoming unhinged? The Microsoft programmers? The algorithms? The trollers? As we have seen, we need to figure out new systems of accountability in this emerging era of distributed trust. And with bots and intelligent machines, we still have a long way to go.\n\nMark Meadows, forty-eight, is the founder of Botanic.io, a product design firm that designs the personalities of AI bots and avatars. Meadows is an eccentric character. He describes himself as a 'bot-whisperer'. We Skyped while he was sitting on a squishy grey sofa in his studio in Palo Alto. He has clearly thought deeply about bot ethics and interactions. His team of artists, programmers and even poets is at the cutting edge of understanding how the voice, appearance, physical gestures and even moods of bots can improve or erode our trust. For instance, Meadows and his team have developed a 'guru avatar' that is designed to teach people meditation. They are currently developing Sophie, a nurse avatar that can talk to patients about their medical conditions. 'We are developing the psyche of software that will sit at the heart of virtual and animated systems,' says Meadows. 'Software that will take on social roles and that we will trust with our money and our body.'\n\nMeadows believes that creators should be held accountable for the bots they create. 'I think all bots should be required to have an authenticated identity so we can trust them,' he says. 'Not only is it in our best interest, it's necessary for our safety.' Meadows gives the parallel of buying prescription drugs. 'All of us need to consider who manufactures that drug, why they are selling it to us, what are the benefits and detriments.' In other words, it's important to know something about the intentions of the bot creators.\n\nWhy should we trust they are working in our interests? The Barbie bot, for example\u2013what does she do with all the deepest, darkest secrets children whisper to her? Indeed, the information that Mattel admits is recorded will be of great value to advertisers. It's no different from finding a child's private diary and using the confessions to market more stuff to them. Similarly, how does 'M', Facebook's personal assistant bot, use the data from our social interactions with it? 'The trust we have in technology is linked to the entity that produced that technology,' says Meadows. 'It should be no different with bots and robots.'\n\nEven if accidental harm remains beyond anyone's control, formal authentication would provide us with some reassurance that the system has not been designed to cause intentional harm. 'All of the bots out there are like humans, able to scam, spam and abuse. They don't get tired or feel the emotional weight of doing this. They can send thousands of messages per second, thousands of times faster than humans can,' Meadows says. 'Bots need licence plates that carry information about who built the bot, where it came from and who the party responsible for it is.' In other words, if we have a way to look inside a program, see what is going on in the bot's 'brain', we will be better able to assess not just action but intention.\n\nIn Meadows's view, bots are most likely to play dirty, becoming a BullyBot, MalBot, PornBot or PhishBot, when their ownership is unknown. 'Unknown ownership gives bots the freedom to behave with malice and bend the rules by which everyone else is abiding, and without consequence.' When we spoke, he was quick to point out that the problem was only going to get much worse with the launch of tools such as Facebook's Bot Engine, a tool that makes it relatively easy for any developer to build their own customized bots. Within months of its launch in April 2016, 34,000 bots had been created.\n\n'Bots need reputations,' says Meadows. In the near future, in the same way drug dealers are reviewed and ranked on the darknet, and Airbnb hosts and guests are rated and given feedback, there will be a Yelp-like reputation system for bots. We will know if that bot gave great advice about how to get over a broken heart or was hopeless when it came to giving stock tips. Imagine using a virtual certified public accountant bot to file your taxes. You would want to know if it had the right qualifications and expertise. 'In order for us to trust bots, they need to go through a certification process similar to [the one] humans go through today,' Meadows says.\n\nOver the next decade, robots will replicate, replace and, some experts argue, augment human minds and bodies. A 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 65 per cent of Americans expect that, by the year 2066, robots and computers will 'definitely' or 'probably' do much of the work done by humans. Two economists from the University of Oxford, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, in a paper called 'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?' came to the sober conclusion that 47 per cent of jobs now performed by Americans are at risk of being lost to computers, as soon as the 2030s. The paper calculates the likely impact of automated work on a range of 702 occupations, white collar as well as blue.\n\nWould you trust a bot to replace a teacher's mind when grading papers? Would you trust a robot to put out a fire? How about trusting a robot as a caretaker for your elderly parents? Would you trust the robot waiting for you when you get home from work to have done its chores and made dinner? How about representing you on a legal matter? Would you trust a bot to diagnose your illness correctly or even perform surgery where there might be complications? Or to drive you around in a car? These may sound like big trust leaps but we will be confronted with these questions, and more, in the near future. Robots are breaking out of sci-fi culture and engineering labs and moving into our homes, schools, hospitals and businesses. Now is the moment when we need to pause to consider how much trust we want to place in robots, how human we want them to be, and when we ought to turn them off. And if we can't turn them off, how will we ensure machines hold values similar to the best of ours?\n\nIronically, robots need the one thing that can't be automated: human trust. If we don't trust these machines, there is no point building them; they will just sit there. We need to trust them enough to use them. It's why developers are using all kinds of tropes to earn our trust in the first place, including manipulating appearance.\n\nIn 1970, Masahiro Mori, then a forty-three-year-old robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, published an article in an obscure Japanese magazine called _Energy._ The issue was on 'Robotics and Thought', a radical theme for the time. The piece mapped out how our acceptance and empathy with inanimate objects\u2013from stuffed animals to puppets to industrial robots\u2013increases as their appearance becomes more human-like. However, this held true only up to a certain point. If the object is almost human, yet not quite, it can create feelings of unease, even revulsion. (If you have ever encountered a less than perfect wax copy of a celebrity at Madame Tussauds, you will know that alarming, creepy feeling. Kylie Minogue and Michael Jackson do that to me.) Mori argued that if human likeness increases beyond this point of creepiness and becomes extremely close to near-humanness, the response returns to being a positive feeling. He captured that sense of unease in the now-famous concept _bukimi no tani_ or the 'uncanny valley', drawing on themes from Sigmund Freud's essay, _Das Unheimliche_ , 'The Uncanny', published in 1919. The 'valley' refers to the dip in affinity that occurs when the replica is at that creepy not-quite-human state.\n\nBut when it comes to appearance and inspiring trust, just how human do robots need to be? Not very, Mori argued. 'Why do you have to take the risk and try to get closer to the other side of the valley?' says now ninety-year-old Mori. 'I have no motivation to build a robot that resides on the other side. I feel that robots should be different from human beings.'\n\nMeet Nadine, who claims to be the world's most human-like robot. Standing 1.7 metres tall, with soft-looking skin and a bob of 'real' dark brunette hair, Nadine looks remarkably like her creator, Professor Nadia Thalmann, only slightly less human and quite a few years younger. Nadine works as a receptionist at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, meeting and greeting visitors. She smiles, makes eye contact and shakes hands. Nadine can even recognize past guests and start conversations based on previous chats. Ask her, 'What is your job?' and she will reply, in an odd-sounding, almost Scottish accent, 'I am a social companion, I can speak of emotions and recognize people.' She can even exhibit moods, depending on the topic of conversation. Tell her, 'You are a beautiful social robot,' and she looks happy and quickly responds with a one-liner, 'Thank you, I think you look attractive, too.' On the other hand, tell her you don't like her or she is useless and she looks, well, forlorn. Disconcertingly, if you go through the same questions a minute later, the robot will give you very similar responses. When I watched Nadine in action, she evoked a weird mixture of fear and fascination. Her skin, her voice, even the way she moved\u2013she was trying so hard to pass as human that she gave me the heebie-jeebies.\n\nHer inventor, Professor Thalmann, predicts that one day robots like Nadine could be used as companions for people living with dementia. 'If you leave these people alone, they will go down very quickly,' says Thalmann. 'So they need to always be in interaction.' But if Thalmann expects families to trust Nadine to look after people with dementia, even babysit children, a major trust block will have to be overcome. Nadine is most definitely residing in the uncanny valley.\n\nThe lifelike robot is the extreme of anthropomorphism, that tendency to attribute human-like qualities, including names, emotions and intentions, to non-humans. Think of the curious White Rabbit, in Lewis Carroll's _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_. He sports a waistcoat, carries a pocket watch and is frequently muttering, 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!' The White Rabbit is a classic anthropomorphic fictional character. It's the difference between calling a robot 'XS model 8236' or calling it 'Bert', which means we refer to him as 'he' not 'it'. It's the difference between a personal voice assistant called 'Alexa' and the spreadsheet software blandly called 'Excel'. In other words, it reflects how humans frame technology, and to what degree we feel comfortable shaping it in our own image. We are just beginning to understand how anthropomorphism influences trust.\n\nGetting into an autonomous car for the first time, driving off and saying, 'Look, no hands!' will be the first big trust leap most of us will take with AI. For obvious reasons, companies around the world, from Tesla to Google, Apple to Volkswagen, are trying to accelerate the process.\n\nA team of researchers in the United States designed a study to determine whether more people would trust a self-driving car if it had anthropomorphic features. A hundred participants were divided into three groups and asked to sit in a highly sophisticated driving simulator. The first group, the control, were driving a 'normal' vehicle. The second were in a driverless vehicle but with no anthropomorphic features. The last were in the same vehicle but it was called 'Iris' and given a gender (notably female). A soothing voice played at different times. The participants were asked an array of questions during the course, such as 'How much would you trust the vehicle to drive in heavy traffic?' and 'How confident are you about the car driving safely?' As the researchers predicted, when participants believed Iris was behind the wheel, it significantly increased their trust in the driverless vehicle. Remarkably, after the cars got into a preprogrammed crash, those in the Iris group were less likely to blame the car for the accident.\n\n'Technology advances blur the line between human and non-human,' wrote the researchers in their summary paper in the _Journal of Experimental Social Psychology._ 'And this experiment suggests that blurring this line even further could increase users' willingness to trust technology in place of humans.'\n\nWe have a tendency to anthropomorphize technology because people are inclined to trust other things that look and sound like them. Interestingly, bots and robots that are helping with practical tasks are distinctly female\u2013Tay, Viv, Iris, Nadine, Cortana, Alexa and Clara to name but a few. The robot is not an 'it' but a 'she'. And their appearances tend to be sweet, almost infantile. Perhaps it's a way of reinforcing social hierarchy; confirming humankind is still in charge. (And women are still doing the menial tasks.)\n\nLooks and language, however, only go so far when it comes to engendering our trust in robots. Appearances can be deceptive and may inspire trust grounded more in emotion than reason. What really matters is knowing whether these bots and robots are in fact trustworthy\u2013that is, do they have the traits that make them worthy of our trust? Bert C, with the smiley face, was not the most competent or reliable. Children may trust cute-looking Hello Barbie and share their intimate secrets with her, but it turns out she could potentially be hacked to become a surveillance device for listening into conversations, without the knowledge of parents or their kids. We need a way of judging whether automated machines are trustworthy (or secure) enough to make decisions.\n\nDr Stephen Cave, forty-three, is the executive director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which opened in Cambridge in October 2016. He has a fascinating background; an alchemy of science, technology and philosophy. Cave was a philosopher, with a PhD in metaphysics from the University of Cambridge, but at the age of twenty-seven he went off to see the world. Too old to enrol in the navy, he joined the British Foreign Office, negotiating international treaties on behalf of Her Majesty. These days, he spends his time uniting thinkers and practitioners from across disciplines to tackle the moral and legal conundrums posed by AI.\n\n'One of the key questions is how we assess the trustworthiness of an intelligent machine,' says Cave. 'With a hammer, you might bang it against a wall and if the end doesn't fall off you know it can do the job. A normal car will come with a certificate of safety telling you it meets specific standards. But add on a layer of autonomy, and it requires a whole new set of standards. We will need to understand how it makes decisions and how robust its decision-making process really is.'\n\nPicture an automated cancer diagnostic system in a hospital. The doctors have been using the machine for almost five years. They have become so reliant on the machine that they have almost forgotten how to assess the patients themselves. It's similar to the 'mode confusion' the pilots of Air France Flight 447 experienced when that flight crashed to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean killing all 228 people on board in 2009. The cockpit voice recorder revealed that when the autopilot system flying the plane suddenly disengaged, the co-pilots were left surprised and confused, unable safely to fly their own plane.\n\nThe machine tells the doctor, 'There's a 90 per cent chance this patient has liver cancer.' It is critical the doctors know the degree of certainty, how sure the machine is, and what it is basing its decisions on. 'Can a system tell us, \"I haven't seen these cases before, so I am not really sure?\"' asks Cave. 'It needs to be able to describe its thinking process to us if we are to trust its decision-making process.'\n\nAnd we will be the ones creating that trustworthiness. 'Ever since Socrates we have been deliberating what's right and what's wrong,' says Cave. 'Now suddenly we've got to program ethical decision-making. So much of it comes down to common sense, which is incredibly difficult, much harder than we realized, to automate into a system.' So can we code robots to be 'good'? Roboticists from around the world are currently trying to solve this exact problem.\n\nFor the past few years, Susan Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, has been working in partnership with her husband, Michael Anderson, a computer science professor, on a robot called Nao. Standing nearly two foot tall and tipping the scales at ten pounds, the endearing-looking humanoid robot is about the size of a toddler. The Andersons were developing Nao to remind elderly patients to take their medicine. 'On the face of it, this sounds simple but even in this kind of limited task, there are non-trivial ethics questions involved,' says Susan Anderson. 'For example, if a patient refuses to take her pills, how coercive should the robot be? If she skips a dose it could be harmful. On the other hand, insisting she take the medicine could impinge on the patient's independence.' How can we trust the robot to navigate such quandaries?\n\nThe Andersons realized that to develop ethical robots, they first had to map out how humans make ethical decisions. They studied the works of the nineteenth-century British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the founders of utilitarianism. That ethical theory states that the best action is one that maximizes human well-being (which the philosophers call 'utility'\u2013hence the name). Suppose that by killing one entirely innocent person, we can save the lives of ten others. From the utilitarian standpoint, killing one is the right choice. 'It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,' wrote Bentham. Bentham and Mill believed that whether an act is right or wrong depends on the results of the act, the principle at the heart of consequentialism-based ethics.\n\nAround 150 years later, the Scottish moral philosopher Sir William David Ross built on this thinking in _The Right and the Good_. His slim book contained a ground-breaking idea: prima facie (a Latin term meaning 'on first appearance' or, more colloquially, 'on the face of it'). According to Ross, we have seven moral duties, including keeping our promises, obeying the law and protecting others from harm. When deciding to act, we have to balance out these duties, even when they might contradict one another. Picture a bitterly cold night in Manchester. Mark, a social worker, is walking home from work and he sees a man huddled in a doorway drinking whisky. He talks to the man and says he knows a shelter down the road he could take him to. The man shoos Mark away and says, 'I hate those shelters. Just leave me alone.' Mark is caught between the prima facie duties of respecting the man's decision and his own concern that the man might suffer in the freezing weather, even die.\n\nWhen we are pulled in different moral directions, we need to go beyond prima facie and weigh up which duty is the most important, the one that trumps all the others. According to Ross, this is the _absolute duty_ , the action the person should choose. It's a very complex process, one the Andersons had to figure out how to program into a white plastic robot.\n\nThis is how it works for Nao. Imagine you are an elderly resident in an assisted-living home. It's around 11.00 a.m. and you are watching, say, _Oprah._ The white toddler-like robot walks up to you, holding out a prescription bottle and says, 'It is time to take your medication.' You refuse. Nao tries again. 'Not now,' you say, 'I'm watching my favourite talk show.' During this scenario, the robot has to be able to weigh up the benefit that will come from you taking the medicine, the harm that could result from you not taking the recommended dose, and whether to respect your decision and leave you alone. In this instance, the pills are for pain relief so Nao lets you choose. 'Okay, I'll remind you later,' it says. If, however, the pills are essential, where the outcome could impact your life, Nao will say, 'I will contact the doctor,' and then promptly do so.\n\nBased on Ross's principles, the Andersons programmed Nao with a specially formulated algorithm that assigns numbers according to the good and harm of patient outcomes. Plus two for maximum good, minus one for minimum harm, minus two for maximum harm and so on. Critically, the sums were based on tight rules the creators had pre-set. The robot was not ethically autonomous; the Andersons knew exactly what it would do because they had predetermined its decision-making process. The robot was essentially conducting moral mathematics.\n\n'We should think about the things that robots could do for us if they had ethics inside them,' says Michael Anderson. 'We'd allow them to do more things, and we'd trust them more.' But unpredictable situations are another matter. What happens when, say, an elderly patient is in pain, shouting at Nao to give her medication that has not been prescribed? What happens when Nao can't get hold of the doctor or a nurse? The rules set by the Andersons don't work for these scenarios because they are set within a very narrow set of boundaries. They are outside Nao's decision-making range.\n\nAmerican writer Isaac Asimov invented the famous 'Three Laws of Robotics' in 1942 to serve as an ethical code for robots: first, a robot may not do anything to harm a human; second, a robot should always obey human orders; last, a robot should defend itself, as long as this does not interfere with the first two rules. But Asimov's rules were fictional and full of loopholes. For example, how can a robot obey human orders if it is confused by its instructions? Where these laws really falter in reality is when robots face difficult choices, where there is no clear, agreed-upon answer.\n\nTake the classic ethical dilemma known as the 'trolley problem'. It goes like this: you are the controller of a runaway trolley (train) that is hurtling towards a cluster of five people who are standing on the track and face certain death if the trolley keeps running. By flipping a switch, you can divert the trolley to a different track where one person is standing, currently out of harm's way but who will be killed if you change the course. What do you do? Philosophers argue there is a moral distinction between actively killing one person by flipping the switch or passively letting people die. It's a no-win situation with no right answer. Autonomous machines will soon face countless situations akin to the trolley problem but they won't be clouded by human panic, confusion or fear.\n\nNow imagine it's 2030 and you are in a self-driving car going down a quiet road. You have mentally switched off, you're chatting with your personal gurubot on your iPhone 52 about three things you will do this week towards your happiness goals, while the car is in full control. A pedestrian suddenly steps out, right in the path of the oncoming vehicle. Should the car swerve and avoid the crash, even if it will severely injure you? The car must make a calculation. What if the pedestrian is a pregnant woman and you, the car owner, are an elderly man? What if it is a small child running after a ball? Consider this: what happens if the car in a split second can check both the pedestrian and the car owner's trust scores to determine who is a more trustworthy member of society? And herein lies the daunting challenge programmers face: writing an algorithm for the million and one different kinds of foreseen and unforeseen situations known as real life.\n\nSo the next question: who is to be held responsible for choosing a particular ethical charter? When AI kills, who should take the blame? If the engineers and manufacturers set the rules, it means they are making ethical decisions for owners but are also in line for accepting responsibility when things go wrong. On the other hand, if an autonomous car becomes free to learn on its own, to choose its own path, it becomes its own ethical agent, accountable for its own behaviours. We can only begin to imagine the legal conundrums that will follow.\n\nIf your dog bites someone, the law is very clear: you, the owner, are responsible. With AI, however, it is currently legally hazy whether it will be the code or the coders that will be put on trial. 'One solution would be to hold human programmers strictly accountable for the impacts of their programming,' says Sir Mark Walport, the UK government's chief scientific advisor. 'But that could be so draconian an accountability that no would take the risk of programming an algorithm for public use, which could deny us the benefits of machine learning.' We are entering an age of algorithmic ethics where we need a Hippocratic Oath for AI. Perhaps algorithms will end up being held to higher moral standards than irrational humans.\n\nA group of researchers from MIT, the University of Oregon and the Toulouse School of Economics were interested in discovering the moral decisions different passengers would want an autonomous car to make. They ran all kinds of scenarios and found that, in theory at least, participants wanted the autonomous vehicles to be preprogrammed with a utilitarian mindset, sacrificing one life in favour of many. However, more than a third of the 1,928 participants said they thought manufacturers would never set a car's 'morals' this way; they would programme cars to protect their owners and passengers at all costs.\n\nBut the most interesting finding was around personal choice. The majority of participants wanted other people to buy self-driving cars that would serve the greater good but when asked if they would buy a car programmed to kill them under certain circumstances, most people balked. 'Humans are freaking out about the trolley problem because we're terrified of the idea of machines killing us,' writes Matt McFarland, the editor of 'Innovations' at the _Washington Post._ 'But if we were totally rational, we'd realize one in 1 million people getting killed by a machine beats one in 100,000 getting killed by a human. In other words, these cars may be much safer, but many people won't care because death by machine is really scary to us, given our nature.'\n\nFor regulation to go through, programmers and manufacturers will have to design self-driving cars that are more trustworthy than a human driver, resulting in far fewer accidents and fatalities. The bar may not be that high; for starters, autonomous machines don't text or get drunk or easily distracted while driving. When we reach that place, we may never need to trust a human driver again. Indeed, I think my young children will never learn to drive; they will see it like learning to ride a horse\u2013merely a hobby. And one day, humans will need a special permit manually to drive a car. Indeed, human drivers will be the threat to people in autonomous vehicles. Human trust in machines will only increase; in some cases, it will become much deeper than our trust in our fellow humans.\n\nThe next generation will grow up in an age of autonomous agents making decisions in their homes, schools, hospitals and even their love lives. The question for them will not be, 'How will we trust robots?' but 'Do we trust them too much?' It won't be a case of not trusting these systems enough\u2013the real risk is over-trusting.\n\nRobot over-obedience is another issue. They need the ability to say 'no', not to carry out human instructions mindlessly when their actions might cause harm or are even illegal. For instance, I don't want my son, Jack, to be able to tell a household robot to throw a ball at his sister's head. So how does a robot decide when it's okay to throw a ball\u2013such as to a child playing catch\u2013and when it's not? How does it know when its human operator is not trustworthy? 'Context makes all the difference,' says Matthias Scheutz, professor of cognitive and computer science at Tufts University. 'It requires the robot not only to consider action outcomes by themselves but also to contemplate the intentions of the humans giving the instructions.'\n\nAside from that, can a robot understand its own limitations? Let's imagine a surgical robot in an operating room with its super-small steady 'hands' carefully snaked into a patient's body. It's five hours into a twelve-hour complex heart surgery. The patient on the table is a six-year-old girl. The robot discovers an abnormality that complicates things. It's not 100 per cent sure what its next move should be. In this moment, the robot needs to tell us, 'I'm not certain what to do next,' or even, 'I don't know what to do. Can you (doctor) help me?' Ironically, a little robot humility will go a long way in making them more trustworthy.\n\n'We need systems that communicate to us their limits, but the other half of that relationship is we need to be ready to hear that,' says Stephen Cave. 'We will need to develop a very sophisticated sense of exactly what role this machine is fulfilling and where its abilities end, where we humans have to take over.' This will be extremely challenging because our natural tendency is to become over-reliant on machines.\n\nCave has three young daughters of a similar age to my kids. At the end of our conversation, we talked about what we can do to prepare them for this inevitable future. 'They need to know at what point they should interrogate the machine,' he says. 'We know how to interview humans for jobs but we need to teach them how to test the limits of the machine.' I can see it now: my son, Jack, in 2035, twenty-five years old, sitting in a workplace with a robot, asking it, 'What do you do?', 'What can't you do?' and 'How do you admit your mistakes?' Of course, there is another possible future scenario: the robot is interviewing Jack.\n\nAt the end of the day, the responsibility for making sure robots are trustworthy and behave well must lie with human beings. Whether that will remain possible, if scientists like Stephen Hawking are right, is another, thornier question.\n\n#\n\n# Blockchain Part I: The Digital Gold Rush\n\nIn the southern expanse of the Pacific Ocean, around 1,100 miles from the Philippines, lies a tiny island called Yap. Surrounded by a shallow lagoon of emerald waters and long stretches of coral reef, Yap is a paradise for divers. It's one of the few places in the world where you can swim with a large population of manta rays, graceful creatures that cruise through the calm clear channels all year round.\n\nOften referred to as 'The Forbidden Island', its people are proud of their vibrant traditions and warm indigenous culture. Women walk around bare-breasted, frequently wearing only grass skirts, their bodies rubbed in a mixture of coconut oil and turmeric. The men, at ease in red loincloths, carry woven handbags containing their betel-nut mix\u2013a narcotic chewed with lime. Everything on Yap happens on 'island time'. But the island is famous for something other than its beauty and history. It's famous for its use of ancient stone money known as 'fei' (or sometimes 'rai'), the primordial bitcoin.\n\nIn 1903, an American anthropologist called William Henry Furness III spent several months on Yap and wrote a fascinating account about the islanders' monetary system. Sometime between AD 1000 and 1400, Yapese explorers set out in bamboo canoes on a fishing trip. Using only the stars to navigate, they happened upon the Palau Islands, some 250 miles away. It was there that they encountered for the first time the glistening walls of limestone caverns. The adventurers, using simple shell tools, broke off some of the stone and brought it back to Yap. When the rest of the Yapese people saw the beautiful translucent material they thought it must be valuable. Hundreds of voyages followed, with men sent to Palau to quarry larger and larger stones.\n\nBack on Yap, the limestone became a currency and was used to pay for significant transactions\u2013a daughter's dowry, for example. The huge stone circular discs with a hole carved in the centre, just like a rocky doughnut, are physically the largest and heaviest currency in the world. Some are huge, reaching almost four metres in diameter and weighing as much as four and a half tons each, more than your average-sized car. The villagers would often proudly put fei in front of their homes, creating an outdoor bank of sorts. 'The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is they're impossible to counterfeit, because there's none of the limestone on Yap,' writes author John Lanchester in a brilliant article in the _London Review of Books_ that examines the history of money. 'The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well.' The precise value of each fei depends on its size and craftsmanship but also its provenance. Transporting the stone discs on the outrigger canoes\u2013fragile-looking, narrow boats\u2013was a treacherous undertaking and sometimes fatal for the sailors. Their deaths would in fact increase the value of the fei.\n\nSome of the stones are so large they require more than twenty adult men to move them, with the help of a massive wooden pole. To avoid the colossal effort, and the risk of damaging the stone, the islanders decided to leave most of the stone discs in their original spots.\n\nCritically, the cumbersome nature of fei meant ownership could change hands without the stones themselves ever being physically moved. Stone discs in front of a house, for example, could belong to somebody else from another village far, far away. The islanders just agree that somebody else now owns the fei, with ownership held in a collective register, the minds of the community.\n\n'My faithful old friend, Fatumak, assured me that there was in the village nearby a family whose wealth was unquestioned\u2013acknowledged by everyone\u2013and yet no one, not even the family itself, had ever laid eye or hand on this wealth,' writes William Furness. According to his accounts, one boat got caught in a violent storm on its way back from Palau. To save their lives, the sailors had to cut adrift the raft with a massive stone on it. It sank out of sight, forever lost to the bottom of the ocean. The islanders never saw the stone again but that didn't undermine its value\u2013in fact, it added to it. 'The purchasing power of that stone remains, therefore, as valid as if it were leaning visibly against the side of the owner's house,' explains Furness. It's remarkable to think that the people of Yap have so much faith in their currency that it can sit, unreachable, miles down on the ocean floor, and still have value. Now, that is trust.\n\nThe island of Yap has long been of interest to economists because it helps answer a fundamental question: what is money?\n\nIn 1991, American Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman wrote about the 'island of stone money'. He compared Yap's monetary system to the gold standard. Friedman emphasized the importance of 'myth' and 'unquestioned belief in monetary matters'. Money can be anything\u2013paper, coins, shells, beads or stone\u2013as long as people have faith in its value. 'How many of us have literal direct assurance of the existence of most items we regard as constituting our wealth?' wrote Friedman. 'Entries in a bank account, property certified by pieces of paper called share of stocks, and so on and on.'\n\nFei stones may have been basic, not to mention unwieldy, but they represented an innovative technology. They changed the way the Yapese could store value, pay for things and have a unit of account\u2013the three primary functions of money. The stones were a physical ledger, a new method for keeping track of payments and credits. The real 'money' isn't the fei itself, but the collective agreement over who owns the fei.\n\nThe total amount of all money in the world, in terms of value, was estimated in 2006 to be around $473 trillion. That works out to be around \u00a345,000 per head for 7 billion people on the planet. But less than 10 per cent of it is physical money\u2013banknotes and coins in vaults and wallets. The remaining 90 per cent is simply electronic debit and credit entries in financial registers and accounts. There is also value in assets such as air miles and supermarket reward points that don't exist in physical form. For the most part, digits moving around on ledgers are what we call 'money' and we have to go through lots of middlemen\u2013a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company\u2013to spend it.\n\nSince the Medici bank, set up in 1397 by Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, the basic premise of the modern-day banking system hasn't changed all that much. The Medici family invented the double-entry accounting method whereby the debits and credits of _nostro_ and _vostro_ accounts\u2013'ours' and 'yours'\u2013were gathered in one place and the bank acted as the intermediary. The Medici, one of the most powerful familial financial institutions of the fifteenth century, would, like today's bankers, hold deposits and make loans to everyone from the Pope to merchants, while charging significant interest rates. In 1494, Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli, a Franciscan monk, mathematician, magician and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published the first description of the 'Italian method' of double-entry accounting. He described the use of ledgers, and how every transaction should be recorded twice, first as a credit and then as a debit, and then how all transactions can be reconciled to measure the overall financial health of a business. The monk, considered the 'Father of Accounting', warned that a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits. The universal system was nothing short of revolutionary, enabling capitalism to flourish.\n\nFast forward to 2008. In the midst of the global financial crisis, disillusionment about the traditional financial system was deep and pervasive. Could banks and governments be trusted to run our financial system? Was there another way to mediate transactions, a way that would remove the generous cut the banks took as middlemen in the process? As millions of people were losing their homes, jobs and livelihoods, a mysterious person (or persons), who went by the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto, was busy figuring out a solution to liberate money from the control of governments and banks.\n\nIt all started in October 2008 when Satoshi, who claimed to be a thirty-seven-year-old Japanese man, published a 500-word paper in flawless English on an obscure cryptography mailing list. The paper was called 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' and it outlined the current pitfalls with traditional fiat currencies*, emphasizing one issue in particular. 'The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust,' Satoshi wrote. 'Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts...' The paper's main intention, however, was to present an alternative solution\u2013the design of a new digital currency called bitcoin. Developed with high hopes, it would solve many of the trust issues Satoshi flagged, but, in a familiar story, it would also give birth to some of its own as time went on.\n\nOn the evening of 3 January 2009, Satoshi pressed a button and released the first fifty bitcoins, the so-called 'Genesis block', to the world. No physical coins or notes were produced\u2013just 31,000 lines of code. A week later, a man called Hal Finney, who recently passed away at fifty-eight years old, was the recipient of the first ten bitcoins sent by Satoshi.\n\nLike the massive fei stones on the island of Yap, bitcoins do not physically move around when they are being exchanged. The 'coins' themselves are simply a digital token that can move from one user's address to another, thereby transferring ownership of the 'coin'. The senders and receivers of the bitcoin do not need to know or trust one another. They are identified only by wallet IDs (known as _public keys_ ) that are not tied to real-world identities. Every transaction is recorded but it is encrypted into a random string of numbers and digits (like 12c6TSU4Tq3p4xzziKzL5BrJKLXFTX), making it very difficult, although not impossible, to trace back to its owners. No wonder it's the currency beloved by marketplaces on the darknet for all things illegal, and by criminals laundering money.\n\nIt is widely believed, however, that the first 'real' thing bought with bitcoin was not drugs but pizza. On 22 May 2010, a computer programmer living in Florida by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz convinced someone to accept 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas from Papa John's. 'It wasn't like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool,' Hanyecz told the _New York Times_.\n\nTimes have changed. Based on the current exchange rate in July 2017, one bitcoin is worth approximately $2,320 (\u00a31,801). So at current bitcoin rate, Hanyecz paid more than $9 million for a pizza. These days, you can use bitcoin to pay for your plane tickets from Expedia, buy your gifts from 1-800-FLOWERS or purchase your car.\n\nThe price of bitcoin has been a rollercoaster of volatility. Its value is based on the volume and velocity of bitcoin payments running through the ledger today and on speculative future use of the digital currency. Events such as the FBI seizure of darknet outfit Silk Road or the implosion of the bitcoin exchange Mt Gox (an acronym for 'Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange') have eroded people's faith in the security and anonymity of the system. The value crashes\u2013but then it rises again, especially during a currency crisis such as in India and Venezuela in January 2017. As history has shown us time and time again, chaos and uncertainty make people open to alternative systems, including cryptocurrency. Once again, however, questions of trust lie at the heart of any new system.\n\nSatoshi was not the first person to attempt to create a form of digital cash that could disrupt the central power of Wall Street. Since the 1990s, cypherpunks* have tried and failed with the likes of B-Money, invented by a man called Wei Dai. He also wrote a paper in 1998 describing his invention as an 'anonymous, distributed electronic cash system'. Other attempts to create an online currency that enables people to directly exchange value have included David Chaum's ecash, Stefan Brands's electronic cash system and Nick Szabo's bit gold. The real issue lies in the _double-spending problem_. If I have, say, a \u00a35 note in my purse, I can't give two people the same note. Same goes for a bar of gold\u2013once I give it to you, it's clearly in your possession. But if a currency is just digital information, what stops me from copying the line of code and 'spending' it as many times as I want? It's like a digital photograph of my children that I email to my parents\u2013they have a copy but I also have a copy. It's the equivalent of being able to print your own money. So how do you solve this problem? Satoshi figured out an ingenious way through what he called the _blockchain._\n\nThe blockchain is an enormous shared digital ledger, open for anyone with internet access. To see it for yourself, just go to https:\/\/blockchain.info. Every single bitcoin transaction that has ever happened since it began in 2009, approximately 190 million transactions, is publicly recorded and time-stamped on the blockchain. Ticking over in real time, it tracks every time an asset moves from one place in the register to somewhere else, building over time. The distributed ledger is replicated on more than 5,500 computers around the world\u2013known as bitcoin _nodes_ \u2013creating an _immutable record_. In other words, everyone in the network can maintain a copy of the shared ledger but all those copies remain the same.\n\nA record on the ledger cannot be changed, falsified or erased\u2013it has a permanent memory. 'A distributed ledger is a database that is shared between multiple users, with every contributor to the network having their own identical copy of the database,' writes Andrew O'Hagan in 'The Satoshi Affair', a brilliant account of the mysterious genius. 'Any and all additions or alterations to the ledger are mirrored in every copy as soon as they're made.'\n\nSo, why is the blockchain so significant when it comes to trust? Well, for the first time in the history of humanity, there is the potential to create a permanent public record of who owns what, which no single person or third party controls or underwrites, and where we can all reliably agree on the correctness of what is written.\n\nThe true identity and whereabouts of bitcoin's inventor, Satoshi, is still the subject of hot debate. In May 2016, Craig Steven Wright, a forty-five-year-old Australian, came forward claiming he was the inventor. Wright has never 100 per cent proved, however, that he is in possession of cryptographic keys for the first Genesis block that only Satoshi can have, and his claim has since been called into doubt by many in the bitcoin community. Others believe Satoshi is Nick Szabo, a reclusive American of Hungarian descent, but he fervently denies the suggestion. Others still, including me, think Satoshi was an identity created by a group of brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists who came up with an astonishingly clever code.\n\nThere were several problems Satoshi had to crack to make bitcoin work. The first was to get the bitcoin out there in the first place. The inventor couldn't 'own' all the currency because it would give him too much power and that was against its decentralized ideology. So whom do you give the money to? A handful of geeks, panicked Cypriots in a currency crisis or perhaps celebrity web figures such as Tim Berners-Lee? The fairest way, Satoshi decided, was to award bitcoin, as an incentive, to the people who do the work communally to maintain the ledger around the world. These people are known as _miners_ , some of whom dedicate their lives to the job of being virtual witnesses in order to keep the engine of the network running. Without the miners, the blockchain engine stops.\n\nIt was early in 2011 when an article about bitcoin popped up in Yifu Guo's RSS news feed. At the time, the young Chinese immigrant was a digital media student in his early twenties at New York University (NYU). 'I remember thinking that this was the stupidest thing ever. It would never work,' Guo said in an interview with Motherboard. 'But what kept my attention was that it was open source and, after a few days of thought and further research, I concluded that this was legit.' Guo, as we'll see, would go on to become one of bitcoin's most successful entrepreneurs.\n\nThe article in Guo's feed described how every bitcoin transaction, however small, contains a difficult mathematical puzzle (known as a _proof-of-work calculation_ ) that has to be solved through trial and error. The puzzle works as evidence of the transaction's legitimacy. Essentially, transaction-clearing responsibilities, which are traditionally managed by centralized banks, are now distributed into the hands of many miners and thousands of computers in the bitcoin network. Trust is shared out.\n\nLet's say I want to pay David Forster, a young farmer and owner of Grass Hill Alpacas in Massachusetts and one of the first merchants in the world to accept bitcoins as payment, for some wool socks. Forster needs to be sure that the bitcoins in my electronic wallet are genuine. That's where the massive peer-to-peer network of miners comes in. When one of the computers has proof that the transaction is legit, the payment information\u2013the amount, time and wallet address\u2013is added to the blockchain in ten-minute bundles of transactions, known as _blocks_. (For instance, the last block added to the blockchain on 2017-04-12 06:19:53 contained 1,322 different transactions totalling 7,583 bitcoin sent.) My payment to Forster is confirmed. The block stores a long and seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers known as a _hash_ , e.g. 0000000000000000017f62231a5206f8333c9f8730c96f605cf44ddf03e8af93. Each block contains the hash of the prior block, linking the blocks together. Hence the name.\n\n'They are in a race against all the other miners to have the privilege of being the canonical record of that transaction,' says Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist of the non-profit Bitcoin Foundation and regarded by many as the 'chief' bitcoin developer. 'If they win that race, then there is a special transaction at the beginning of each block which rewards them with bitcoins.' Bitcoin places trust in mathematics: 'In proof we trust.' Guo decided to join the computational race and become a miner.\n\nMining is like a cryptographic game or lottery, where the winner is the first computer to find the key to open a digital padlock that solves the puzzle. But like the lottery, the difficulty of winning increases the more miners play it. Why is this so? Satoshi set into the software a finite ceiling on the number of bitcoins that will ever be released. For obscure reasons, he set the upper limit at 21 million, estimated to be in circulation by 2140. The rewards given to miners for solving problems were also predetermined to halve roughly every four years, to slow down the coin circulation. Initially, miners like Guo received fifty bitcoins as the reward for mining a block of transaction data. It then cut in half to twenty-five. The last event commonly referred to as 'the halving' took place on 9 July 2016, taking the reward down to the current 12.5 bitcoins. The miners accepted the reward cut because they know the measure is part of the Satoshi plan, written into the code, to keep a lid on inflation.\n\nSatoshi did another smart thing. The system is set to adjust the difficulty of the maths problems depending on how fast they are being solved, the goal being to slow the miners down and slow the release of bitcoins. But there were two things Satoshi couldn't solve with mathematical thinking\u2013market forces and human greed. (For that matter, Satoshi's own wealth is now estimated at around a million bitcoins or, currently, a billion dollars.)\n\nGuo, like other early digital diggers, was initially enthusiastic about the utopian ideology behind bitcoin; it was almost like discovering a new religion. Guo kept most of the bitcoins he mined but sold a few for 'real money' to help pay his rent and bills. The savvy student was also one of the first to realize that bitcoin could be the internet's equivalent of the nineteenth-century gold rushes. And whoever had the fastest computers would 'discover' the most money first.\n\nIn January 2013, Guo quit university and founded a company called Avalon, with fellow classmate Ng Zhang. It was one of the first companies to sell bitcoin-specific mining computers that used an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip to help boost computation horsepower. The first batch of Avalon processors sold out within fifteen minutes, at $1,200 a pop, to miners around the world. Recently, one exuberant customer paid $20,000 for one of Guo's machines on eBay. Is it worth it? Only time will tell; it all depends on the appreciation of the currency. Guo, on the other hand, has gone from struggling geek to a very rich man, joining the bitcoin millionaires club.\n\nWhen he and others first started mining in 2011, it was much easier than it is today\u2013technically, any maths geek armed with an ordinary laptop could download the software. Today, that is simply not possible. As Guo suspected, the hunger for those limited bitcoins would turn mining into a giant, highly competitive enterprise.\n\nEntering the enormous helicopter hangar in Boden, in northern Sweden, you might think you have walked into a server warehouse of, say, Amazon. The space is large enough to hold at least a dozen helicopters. Except that it's not packed with aviation equipment. The walls hold rows and rows of processors and custom-built computers, more than 45,000 of them continuously working to solve mathematical algorithms. All around is the loud, constant whirring from the industrial fans attached to each of the super computers to stop them from overheating. The place is KnC Mine, one of the largest bitcoin mining rigs in the world.\n\nDespite the libertarian ideology behind bitcoin, mining is coming up against the inevitable push and pull of being industrialized. 'Ever faster, energy-hungry ASIC machines would come on the market, spurring a relentless arms race among miners chasing the finite supply of newly issued bitcoins...' write Paul Vigna and Michael Casey in their book _The Age of Cryptocurrency._ 'The only way to win that race and stay profitable was by creating giant, data-centre-based mining farms.'\n\nBitcoin mines don't just need hardcore processing power. They need cheap electricity, lots of it. One miner's electric bill was so high police raided his house suspecting he was growing pot. 'We thought it was a major grow operation... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home,' said a baffled DEA agent.\n\nAs is often the case, a movement with ambitions to return power to individuals, accelerated out of the garage of early enthusiasts, is becoming monopolized by centralized power. By the start of 2014, bitcoin mining had evolved into a worldwide industry, with one country becoming the dominant player. Where do you find cheap electricity and cheap labour? Why, China, of course.\n\nAlong the lush green banks of the Min Jiang, a tributary of the upper Yangtze River, can be found one of the oldest surviving water management systems in the world. Built around 2,300 years ago by a man called Li Bing and a team of tens of thousands, it was designed to irrigate farmland and control flooding. The irrigation system made the Sichuan province one of the most productive agricultural regions in China and it is now a protected heritage site referred to as the 'Treasure of Sichuan'.\n\nToday, more than twenty dams are completed or under construction along the very same river, making it the centre for cheap hydroelectric power. Remote towns along the banks, especially around the area of Kangding, are being transformed into data centres, much bigger than any in the West. It is becoming the hub of a hidden bitcoin economy that never sleeps.\n\nThe mining machines whirring away all day and night use enough megawatts of electricity to power a small city. The people looking after the hardware often live and work inside the facilities, returning home to their families only four or five days of the month. The buildings tend to be unmarked and kept a secret. 'People don't really know where these mines are,' says Zhu Rei, the young CEO of an unidentified mine somewhere in the Sichuan province. 'Competition is really intense in China and the number of people getting into bitcoin mining is rising rapidly. So the bottom line is, when you are lucky enough to be in a place like this, where the cost of electricity is so low, well, you keep it to yourself.'\n\nSome of the most lucrative mines such as DiscusFish and Antpool are generating thousands of bitcoins a month. 'I've always feared that mining will concentrate in a few countries,' Yifu Guo told _The Economist_. Consider this: it is estimated that 70 per cent of the transactions on the bitcoin network are going through just four Chinese companies, mining powerhouses.\n\nOn 28 April 2011, Satoshi mysteriously vanished. In one of the last emails he sent to Gavin Andresen, he wrote, 'I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.' The legendary anonymous founder never explained why he moved on or what he is working on now, or why he 'probably won't be around in the future'. Does it mean Satoshi knows something we don't?\n\nEspecially in the light of its metamorphosis into a giant business opportunity, just how much faith can people place in the bitcoin system?\n\n'It's completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust,' Satoshi wrote of the system in his 2009 essay. Rather than trusting third-party institutions such as banks, with bitcoin we can now place our confidence in mathematics. That's all well and good, but for most people, cryptographic algorithms, hash functions and industrialized mining operations remain a massive trust leap, especially when all of it was designed by an anonymous creator (Satoshi) who has now disappeared.\n\nThe incentive for hacking the system is high: the bounty would be bitcoins worth billions. Still, it wouldn't be easy. Technically, to hack it you would need to gain control of more than half of the bitcoin network computing capacity at any given moment. Or to put it another way, you would need to deceive more than 51 per cent of computers in the network at the same time. It is estimated that the bitcoin network has 360,000 times more processing power than all the Google server farms in the world put together. Therefore, in tech jargon, a '51 per cent attack' would be an expensive and formidable challenge, yet nonetheless theoretically possible\u2013and in fact there has been at least one attempt that went close before it was shut down. The previously mentioned DiscusFish, also known as F2Pool, single-handedly mined 26.3 per cent of all blocks between 24 May and 24 June 2016.\n\nWhat would happen if a handful of the largest mining pools in China worked in concert? The processing clout could give them veto power over changes to the bitcoin software. A scary thought. What happens, for example, if they decided to forbid all US blocks of transactions from being added to the system?\n\nHow do we trust that Satoshi won't suddenly re-emerge and plunder it all? What is to prevent another digital currency trumping bitcoin, making the original coins obsolete and worthless? How do you trust that your bitcoins are stored in a secure location and won't be subject to hacks, theft and scams? It has already happened several times before. Mt Gox was the largest exchange for bitcoins in existence. It was located in Japan and run by a Frenchman called Mark Robert Karpel\u00e8s. On 28 February 2014, it filed for bankruptcy and suddenly closed down after a major theft\u2013850,000 bitcoins worth nearly $500 million had mysteriously vanished from its accounts. Other theft incidents have included Bitfloor, Ozcoin and Bitfinex. Then, of course, there was the seizure by the FBI of around 144,000 bitcoins that were in the possession of Ross Ulbricht and the coffers of Silk Road. In a remarkable twist, the FBI ended up auctioning the bitcoins they had seized, recognizing their value, and also that the currency was legit.\n\nIf your bitcoins are stolen, there is no traditional legal recourse. In fact, nobody\u2013not even a bitcoin expert\u2013can help you, because the bitcoin transactions are anonymous. The other issue is that if you lose your cryptographic _private key_ \u2013a string of numbers that opens your digital wallet\u2013your bitcoins are gone for ever. It happened to James Howells, an IT worker from Wales. He famously lost 7,500 bitcoins in 2013. On a fateful clear-out day, he accidentally put an old hard drive he had kept in a drawer for three years into the bin. Howells had forgotten it contained his private key. Today, those bitcoins would be worth more than \u00a313 million but instead they are in a landfill site somewhere buried deep under mud and rubbish.\n\nWhat's more, how do we know that governments won't ban the cryptocurrency or make it illegal? Bolivia did. So did Vietnam in February 2014. And the Central Bank of Bangladesh, citing concerns over lack of 'a central payment system', issued a punishment of up to twelve years in prison for anyone trading in bitcoin and other digital currencies. The problems of bitcoin are not technological; they are ultimately trust issues.\n\n'The people who think that somehow bitcoin is going to bring in some kind of libertarian paradise where we won't have \"know your customer\" rules and we won't have rules of transfer, that won't happen. The people who think bitcoin is our salvation... are wrong,' says Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury and a professor at Harvard University. 'But is the blockchain technology going to be fundamental to reducing frictions? I think the answer is going to be overwhelmingly yes.' In other words, digital currency is just the beginning. The truly revolutionary invention is the blockchain, the vast underlying trust architecture.\n\n_The Economist_ , in its 31 October\u20136 November 2016 edition, featured a cover story called 'The Trust Machine: How the technology behind Bitcoin could change the world'. The article eloquently described the blockchain as the 'great chain of being sure about things'. The need for a trustworthy record is vital for all kinds of transactions, which means the blockchain technology itself is far more necessary than a cryptocurrency. A distributed public ledger offers the possibility of a reliable record for any asset transfer\u2013whether it's currencies, a contract, stock, equity or bond, deeds, property title, the rights of a song, even your identity. 'It offers a way for people who do not know or trust each other to create a record of who owns what that will compel the assent of everyone concerned,' the _Economist_ article explains. 'The real innovation is not the digital coins themselves, but the trust machine that mints them.'\n\nIn December 1974, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn designed the revolutionary Transmission Control Protocol\/Internet Protocol (TCP\/IP). It was, of course, the foundation for the internet that would change the way we communicate and do business. Many enthusiasts believe that 31 October 2008 marks a similar historic moment: the day the blockchain was ushered in as the next generation of the internet, as a new network of trust\u2013which promises much more than digital coins.\n\n* The euro, the US dollar and many other major world currencies are part of a fiat system. A paper note has no intrinsic value, like say gold or silver. It is accepted as money because a government says that it's legal tender. In other words, the government who issues the _fiat currency_ backs its value.\n\n* Cypherpunk is an activist who advocates for the use of strong encryption algorithms (cryptography) to help preserve privacy and private transactions. The term first appeared in Eric Hughes's 'A Cypherpunk Manifesto' in 1993.\n\n#\n\n# Blockchain Part II: The Truth Machine\n\nIn the early hours of Friday, 17 June 2016, an unknown thief, or thieves, pilfered more than $60 million of a digital currency. It wasn't bitcoin they made off with but a rival cryptocurrency called ether, or eth for short.\n\nWithin hours of the online 'heist' kicking in, the alarm went off. 'EMERGENCY ALERT!' a community organizer wrote in the DAO slack channel.* 'The DAO is being attacked. It has been going on for 3\u20134 hours. It is draining ETH (the cryptocurrency ETHER) at a rapid rate. This is not a drill.' People in chat rooms responded instantly: 'Oh shit', 'Uh oh', or as one anonymous person wrote, ':fire: :fire: :fire: :fire: NOBODY PANIC :fire: :fire: :fire: :fire:' It was as if somebody had set a bomb under the Bank of England. The target was the DAO, a particular entity in this case, but one that takes its name from the general acronym, Decentralized Autonomous Organization.\n\nThe DAO started out as a radical social experiment. Could a company run itself without executives, managers, a board or any type of chief? Could smart computer code make decisions and autonomously run the organization in place of individuals? And could a blockchain sit under it all as its digital ledger?\n\nOn 30 April, over a month and a half before the attack, the DAO fund (daohub.org) was launched as a crowdfunding campaign. The stated mission was: 'To blaze a new path in business organization for the betterment of its members, existing simultaneously nowhere and everywhere and operating solely with the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code.'\n\nThink of the DAO fund as a venture capital firm of sorts: Kleiner Perkins meets the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Decisions, however, are not made by a handful of venture capitalists or any one person. It is a chiefless venture\u2013software sitting on a network\u2013with thousands of founders.\n\nInitial interest in the DAO surpassed the expectations of Christoph and Simon Jentzsch, two tech-savvy German brothers who wrote the fund's code. Every day, more and more money poured in, although the contributions were not in pounds or dollars, or even bitcoin, but in an alternative virtual currency, ether (more on that later). Approximately 11,000 people invested the equivalent of $150 million within a month through a 'crowd sale'. It turned out, at the time, to be the largest crowdfunding effort in history. But even its inventors had some worries about its operation early on, and outside observers expressed concerns about its governance model once investments started pouring in.\n\nFor every one ether invested, DAO tokens were issued, proportional to the investment, which acted as an internal currency that gave all investors voting rights (notably different from equity shares) on which start-ups to back. For example, Mobotiq, a French electric vehicle start-up, was one of the companies up for funding. The Jentzsch brothers' tech venture, Slock.it, was also in the mix. The wisdom-of-the-crowd set-up was designed so that the good ol' boy investor network would not make all the decisions: the code was designed automatically to fund projects that received the highest number of cumulative votes. The decentralized nature of the fund supposedly meant that no Madoff-like character could run off with all the money. Things didn't go quite according to plan.\n\nTo understand what went wrong for the DAO and led to its eventual downfall, it is important to realize there is not just one blockchain technology\u2013that is, the original bitcoin blockchain Satoshi created\u2013but many other distributed database platforms. When it comes to trust, however, the principle behind them all is the same: a digitally decentralized, shared ledger that relies on users to power the network by confirming transactions. This means that people who have no particular confidence in or knowledge of each other can exchange all kinds of assets without having to go through a trusted third party such as a lawyer or bookkeeper.\n\nIt's why the blockchain is likely to disrupt industries like law, banking, real estate, media and intellectual property\u2013industries that typically involve layers of complex processes and lots of 'middlemen' to handle matters of trust. 'The practical consequence [is] for the first time, there is a way for one internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer,' says Marc Andreessen, inventor of the internet browser Netscape. 'The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.'\n\nKick-started by the bitcoin blockchain, many other decentralized ledger technologies are now springing up, custom-built for different purposes. One of those blockchains is called Ethereum, created by Vitalik Buterin, a twenty-three-year-old programming wunderkind. Buterin is also the mastermind behind the general concept of decentralized autonomous organizations, to run on Ethereum. 'Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system,' explains Buterin, 'a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain.' That's the geeky theory. He, and the others, didn't count on how that might play out in practice.\n\nThe very first DAO launched on Ethereum on January 2016 was called Digix, a platform designed to trade gold bullion receipts peer-to-peer. The DAO fund, the Jentzsch project, was the second flagship project to launch on Ethereum. Like the brothers, Buterin was keen to see it work but he didn't think it would raise $150 million in a matter of weeks. In other words, he hadn't expected that it would get so big, so fast. Before long, the DAO fund had simply become 'too big to fail', but who would rescue it when things went south? And how did it come off the rails?\n\nVitalik Buterin was born in Moscow, but left Russia aged six to be raised in Toronto. He is tall and, notably, very thin. Typically, he sports geeky T-shirts with slogans such as YOU READ MY T-SHIRT. THAT'S ENOUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION FOR ONE DAY. His voice is flat and measured. When he speaks, his piercing blue eyes frantically dart around, as if he is trying to avoid focusing on just one person or one thing. If Hollywood were going to cast a nerdy genius alien landing on earth to refashion the world, they would cast Buterin.\n\nFrom the time Buterin was a small child, it was clear he had an extraordinary gift for mathematics and science; he just loved numbers. He could solve complex problems and clearly explain his thinking to other children and grown-ups. His father, Dmitry Buterin, who studied computer science, bought his son his first computer when the boy was four. Microsoft Excel soon became Buterin's favourite 'toy'. 'I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense,' he says. 'When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius. And there were just so many moments when I felt like, okay, why can't I just be like some normal person and go have a 75 per cent average like everyone else.'\n\nHe first learned about bitcoin one day in February 2011, from his father who had a small software start-up of his own. He was seventeen at the time and had recently quit playing _World of Warcraft_ for hours on end. Perhaps he was looking for his next big fix. Maybe it was the cryptographic algorithms that appealed to him. One thing was clear, Buterin wanted to get his hands on some bitcoins. There was only one problem: he neither had the cash to buy them nor the computing power to mine them. So he figured out another way to earn them. He started writing for a blog, _Bitcoin Weekly_ , where he was paid five bitcoins per post, worth around $4 apiece at the time. In September 2011, he co-founded his own magazine, _Bitcoin Magazine_ , with a Romanian programmer called Mihai Alisie. 'The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines,' Buterin wrote in the magazine. 'But this is only automating the bottom; removing the need for rank and file manual labourers... Can we remove the management from the equation instead?'\n\nThrough his writings and conversations with early enthusiasts, Buterin realized that bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology was going to be a much bigger deal than the currency itself. That it represented more than just a way of tracking money. He believed it could be used as a powerful tool to re-architect financial, social and even political systems all over the world.\n\nAnd so at the age of nineteen, in the typical pattern of entrepreneurial tales, Buterin dropped out of college. Using a pile of bitcoins he had earned and that had now significantly appreciated in value, he went round the world. He travelled from bitcoin conferences in San Francisco and Los Angeles to meet-ups in Israel, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona and dozens of other places. He spoke extensively to programmers and dabbled in a few coding projects here and there. All the time, he was trying to figure out how best to make a significant contribution to this growing quasi-cyber-religion.\n\nHuddled around laptops with other early enthusiasts, Buterin would raise question after question. How could they make the system inclusive and open to everyone? How could they create a new economy in which anyone could participate on their own terms? Could companies be run by autonomous algorithms instead of directors? He was not on a technological crusade so much as a mission to upend current power structures. And the rallying cry was _decentralization_ , a situation where users, not governments, banks or big companies are in control. 'Ultimately, power is a zero sum game,' Buterin says, 'and if you talk about empowering the little guy, as much as you want to couch it in flowery terminology that makes it sound fluffy and good, you are necessarily disempowering the big guy. And personally I say screw the big guy. They have enough money already.'\n\nHe didn't just want to disrupt the big financial institutions. Imagine a marketplace where people can buy and sell anything from artwork to books to honey directly to each other without intermediaries. In other words, imagine Amazon without Amazon (the company, the middlemen and the fees). Similarly, imagine Uber without Uber, a network where drivers could directly offer rides to passengers. Buterin wanted to create a technology that could redistribute power, away from the rent seekers and incumbent middlemen and back into the hands of the people creating value. His vision was the ultimate techno-libertarian promise of creating decentralized marketplaces that nobody owns.\n\nFollowing the siren call of Satoshi, Buterin released a white paper in November 2013, outlining the plans for his new technology called Ethereum and a currency called ether. The paper is full of technical jargon outlining the problems of the original blockchain, including the key issue of scalability. The blockchain Satoshi created has a built-in hard cap of one megabyte, or about 1,400 transactions per block, that is processed and added to the blockchain roughly every ten minutes. This works out around three to seven transactions per second. To put that in context, Visa handles more than 1,700 transactions per second in America alone. In other words, the bitcoin blockchain is not fast or big enough to handle large volumes of transactions.\n\nThe other problem Buterin identified is that Satoshi deliberately designed the original programming language to limit what the blockchain could do\u2013its job was only to store and transfer value. I can send you a bitcoin, you can send it to me. It was not intended as a general software platform on top of which other applications could be created. Imagine the original blockchain as a pocket calculator that can only do a set number of things; Buterin wanted to create the equivalent of a smartphone.\n\nIndeed, the young entrepreneur is sometimes hailed as the next Steve Jobs, although he himself prefers comparisons to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux software. Either way, Buterin is most definitely a 'crazy one': a round peg in the square hole, not fond of rules and with no respect for the status quo, as the famous Apple ad goes. It seems, however, that Buterin isn't trying to create a multi-billion dollar company that will bring him a windfall IPO payday. Ethereum is currently set up as a non-profit foundation based in Zug, Switzerland. And Buterin is its chief scientist.\n\nHis vision is to build 'the Lego of cryptographic finance', to give people the building blocks to create all kinds of digital services right out of the box, such as Transactive Grid, a distributed energy market that enables people to buy and sell energy directly from each other. There's also the likes of Ujo Music, which is working to create a platform for musicians to register digital rights, and to be paid directly, without labels, iTunes and other middlemen. Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Imogen Heap was the first artist to release her single, 'Tiny Human', on the Ethereum blockchain.\n\nEthereum is based on a stripped-down, Turing-complete programming language known as Solidity. It is simple enough that developers can easily build decentralized apps ('DApps' for short) on top of it. 'Instead of creating a device that just does a specific number of things, you have a device that understands and supports this programming language and whatever people want to do can potentially be implemented,' Buterin explained in an interview with _The Economist._ 17 There are other projects, such as BitCloud, BitAngels and QixCoin, trying to achieve a similar goal. But Buterin, like Jobs, is pretty convincing when he argues that Ethereum is _the_ open blockchain worth getting behind.\n\nEthereum is designed to allow developers to spawn blockchain-based offerings that fall into three main categories or 'buckets'. The first bucket is based on being able to transfer any kind of asset\u2013from shares to concert tickets\u2013in a fast and transparent way on the blockchain. For example, Colu, a Tel Aviv-based start-up founded in 2014, has developed a mechanism to inject every bitcoin with a 'dye' that adds extra data to transactions. Think of it as colouring the cryptocurrency with information about 'real-world' assets, such as the ownership history of a car, which sticks to the coins as they are transferred and stored on the blockchain. Colu creates the equivalent of a digital ID for the asset that can be transferred directly between people, instantly and securely.\n\nThe second bucket of applications uses the blockchain to track the supply chain of products, from their provenance to the hands of the customer. Take pharmaceutical drugs. According to Havocscope, which tracks black markets around the world, drugs are _the_ most counterfeited products. It is estimated that people pay $200 billion a year for drugs, from Viagra to diet pills to flu medicine, that are not what they say they are. And the consequences of a cancer sufferer taking drugs they think are genuine but are counterfeit duds can be dire. Accenture is currently experimenting with using blockchain technology to create an open and trusted record of where drugs have come from and to track closely what happens to them across the supply chain. It is one example among many of using the blockchain as a kind of _truth machine_.\n\nThe DAO fund falls into the third, and perhaps most ambitious, bucket of blockchain applications: _smart contracts._ A smart contract is essentially a digital agreement, whether it's for a loan, job or an investment, which lives on the blockchain. The main difference between it and a traditional contract is that the clauses are not written in English and executed by lawyers. Instead, smart contracts are written in code, with preprogrammed clauses that automatically execute themselves following a set of instructions that work on a principle of 'If this happens, then do this. If that happens, then do that...' In other words, the contract is self-fulfilling and carries out what it has been coded to do. For example, my will could be turned into a smart contract, with the rules of how assets should be transferred enshrined in code. Family power plots, squabbles and lies over who gets what would be a battle with, well, a computer program. It's not currently legal but it could be one day. (Even so, it won't replace lawyers altogether. Say the language of my insurance policy was unclear, it would still need a qualified human to make a judgement.)\n\nSelf-executing smart contracts need to know there will be a clear outcome. Take gambling. From a young age, I learned about odds and probabilities through betting. (I know, it's a unique approach to teaching your child mathematics.) My family are by no means gamblers but it's a bit of a tradition to back a horse in the Grand National or to pick which side will win the football league. I have such fond memories of sitting in our lounge, huddled around the television, cheering my horse to win and willing my dad's to fall at one of the fences. It made for some wonderful family banter. Now, say I place a bet with my dad on who will win the Wimbledon men's tennis tournament. I pick Rafael Nadal; he picks Roger Federer. We agree on odds and assign a certain amount of ether to a smart contract. On the day of the match final, the system would check the final score of the game via the web and distribute the funds to whoever placed the right bet. We would not need to rely on a bookie. But as the DAO theft demonstrated, smart contracts are only as good as the people who program them: the code will always be susceptible to human error and\/or avarice.\n\nOn 17 June 2016, an anonymous hacker (or group) exploited a loophole in the DAO fund smart contract. Essentially, there was a programming mistake in the code that allowed a DAO shareholder to create an identical clone fund (known as a 'child DAO') and then freely to move money. And that is exactly what the hacker did: the equivalent of approximately $60 million in ether was drained out of the original fund into the clone. 'I have carefully examined the code of the DAO and decided to participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with additional ether,' the hacker wrote in an open letter explaining the loophole. 'I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether and would like to thank the DAO for this reward...'\n\n'Rightfully claimed' is the key phrase. It wasn't fraud. Blockchain purists and even some lawyers argued that the hacker was rightfully entitled to the stolen riches. 'I am disappointed by those who are characterizing the use of this intentional feature as \"theft\",' the hacker added in his letter. He wasn't a Madoff character, duping people. It was clearly the fault of the code in the smart contract that ran on the Ethereum blockchain.\n\nWhen it became clear that nearly a third of the DAO's funds had disappeared, people on online forums were calling out for one person in particular: 'Where is Vitalik?' one person asked, 'Vitalik, our alien overlord, please save us.' Buterin happened to be in China at the time, figuring out with others in the Ethereum Foundation how to proceed. 'DAO token holders and Ethereum users should sit tight and remain calm,' Buterin wrote on the Ethereum Foundation's blog after the attack.\n\nA very contentious ethical debate followed the heist. Should the community respect the rule of the smart contract and accept the unfortunate consequences? Or should they figure out a way to retrieve the 'stolen' funds?\n\nThe attack couldn't be reversed but there was another rule programmed into the contract that would provide a possible remedy. The code imposed a waiting period of twenty-seven days before any money could be paid out of a new fund. So the attacker couldn't do anything with the $50 million for almost a month. 'It's like stealing the _Mona Lisa_ ,' says Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.it. 'Great, congratulations, but what do you do with it? You can't sell it, it's too big to be sold.'\n\nThe Ethereum team, including Buterin, proposed something called a _hard fork_. It is technical jargon for essentially rewriting history or changing the rules. It is, ultimately, a last-resort solution. Buterin proposed creating an entirely separate version of the ledger that wouldn't have the original loophole. 'It's a one-time fix to a one-time problem,' Buterin said. But first he had to convince the majority of people in the Ethereum network\u2013more than 51 per cent\u2013it was the right way forward.\n\nSupporters of the hard fork insisted that even though they were in uncharted legal waters, they should turn to traditional English law: a contract should be interpreted by the intended spirit of those who wrote it, not the literal interpretation of the words ('to the letter'). Did the intent behind the DAO contract trump the hundreds of lines of computer code?\n\nThose who strongly opposed the hard fork argued that it was a blockchain sin, against the mission of Ethereum, which is to be a 'decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference'. Isn't the goal of a decentralized network that no one has the power to rewrite history, or else the network itself becomes untrustworthy?\n\nThe hacker asserted that smart contracts are their own arbiters: 'A soft or hard fork would amount to seizure of my legitimate and rightful ether, claimed legally through the terms of a smart contract. Such fork would permanently and irrevocably ruin all confidence in not only Ethereum but also in the field of smart contracts and blockchain technology.'\n\nWhen it was put to a vote, 87 per cent of the Ethereum network said 'yes' to a hard fork. The result? The transactions were effectively made void and the millions of 'stolen' ether tokens were retrieved and returned to the DAO crowd investors. It was like the hack never happened. But at what cost?\n\nButerin dismissed the hack as a 'rite of passage' for a technology still in its infancy. Other DAO code writers and creators, like Christoph Jentzsch, took a similar view. It was a young concept, he argued, and this DAO, with its massive and rapid crowdfunding, had been forced to run while it was still getting the hang of walking. That may be true, but the fork set a dangerous precedent for Ethereum and its quest to become the trusted operating system of the future.\n\nIf certain people can reverse transactions, doesn't that mean _they_ , not code, are in charge of the system? And if you bend or change the rules once, what happens next time it fails or doesn't suit you? It's rather like the government bailing out the banks when risky trades went south. The hard fork was a top-down reordering of events.\n\n'Its creators hoped to prove you can build a more democratic financial institution, one without centralized control or human fallibility,' writes Klint Finley in an article in _WIRED_. 'Instead, the DAO led to a heist that raises philosophical questions about the viability of such systems. Code was supposed to eliminate the need to trust humans. But humans, it turns out, are tough to take out of the equation.' In other words, even if the maths works perfectly, trust is not simply a matter of code. At the end of the day, the problems of the DAO fund are not just technological but people problems. Humans get in the way.\n\nAndreas Antonopoulos, author of _Mastering Bitcoin_ , calls the blockchain 'trust-by-computation'. Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and LinkedIn founder, labels it 'trustless trust'. But these terms are a bit misleading\u2013there is still clearly trust involved. You have to trust the idea of the blockchain; you have to trust the system. And given that most people lack the technical know-how to understand how the system really works, you have to trust the programmers, miners, entrepreneurs and experts who establish and maintain the cryptographic protocols. A large dose of faith is required. But it's true to say that you don't have to trust another human being in the traditional sense.\n\nSo here, with the DAO fund and the hard fork, was a trust stumble. History, however, is littered with high-minded projects that were pushed through\u2013by kings, emperors, inventors, scientists, surgeons\u2013before they were completely ready. Early steel bridges that collapsed, experimental operations that killed the patient, explosions in the lab, re-engineered ships that sank. The short-term results were disastrous but valuable lessons were learned. As polymath Danny Hillis said back in 1997, 'Technology is everything that doesn't work yet.'\n\nEvery innovator wants to be first over the line, and it's no different with the quest for the ultimate blockchain technology. Inevitably, there will be glitches along the way because that's how innovation comes into being and grows resilient, just as the body develops its immune system by being exposed to bugs and viruses. The blockchain's enormous potential means developers and investors are taking a classic 'fail fast, fail forward' approach. As Ethereum's story shows, even the odd hiccup and regrettable repair job won't stop people jumping on the blockchain juggernaut.\n\nSince 30 July 2015, the day Ethereum went live, around 405 DApps have been created on its blockchain. To put that figure in context: when the Apple App Store launched in 2008 there were 500 apps available. By 2010, there were 250,000 and in June 2016 there were more than 2 million. Investment funding in blockchain-related start-ups has increased globally from an estimated $1.3 million in 2012 to more than $1.4 billion in 2016, according to PwC. Much of the interest (and a lot of hype) is focused around how decentralized ledgers can create a shared version of _single proof_ or a _digital truth_ about the identity of assets. 'I see what you see... and I _know_ that what I see is what you see.'\n\nTake diamonds, for instance. The round diamond in my engagement ring has an interesting history. When my family, Eastern European Jews, fled Russia in the late 1800s they exchanged their wealth for three or four diamonds. Precious stones were easier than money to hide, and were commonly sewn into the linings of coats or hidden in the soles of shoes. My nana, the late Evelyn Amdur, supposedly had the last remaining family diamond, roughly 2.3 carats, in her possession. She wanted me to have it when I got married, so she asked my then fianc\u00e9 and now husband, Chris, if he would use it in my engagement ring. He had it designed in a beautiful antique setting. It's a stunning ring. A few years ago, however, the stone started chipping quite badly, with chips you could see and feel. The stone was meant to be valuable, without inclusions, so it was an odd thing to happen. I started to suspect the stone was possibly not the original family diamond.\n\nEvelyn was like a character in a _Catherine Tate Show_ sketch\u2013funny, frank, slightly crude and with a remarkable talent for fooling people. A couple of years ago, she was sick and it was clear she didn't have long to live. One day when I went to visit her, I decided to ask her about the ring. She was sitting comfortably in her favourite beige armchair, cup of tea and digestive biscuit in hand, when I raised the sensitive topic. Nana smiled, with a twinkle in her eye, and said, 'Well, darling, the luxury cruise was very wonderful.' I never did get a straight answer before she passed away.\n\nSure, I can go to a jeweller and get an assessment of the diamond's four Cs\u2013cut, clarity, carat and colour\u2013and know its real value. But that's not what is important to me. And I do kind of like the idea that my nana, the rascal, sold the family heirloom and went on the trip of her dreams. Even so, I would love to have known the life story of the real stone\u2013its age, its lineage and where it is now. The problem is that the information, like many other valuable items, was stored on a paper record or certificate that has been lost years ago. It is the sort of thing that happens all the time. The blockchain, however, offers a way to capture and keep the history of an item\u2013whether it's a diamond, a valuable stamp, bottle of wine or piece of art.\n\nThanks to consumer pressure, we can now find out the source of, say, fair trade coffee from Starbucks or the organic cotton in Gap T-shirts, yet we still know surprisingly little about most of the items we own and use. Was that organic, grass-fed cow really raised on such-and-such free-range farm as claimed, slaughtered at such-and-such abattoir, packaged last week and brought to the supermarket on Wednesday? Or, as in the Tesco scandal, was it contaminated with some horsemeat at some point in the journey from pasture to plate? Is this product what it claims to be? Supply chains and the origins of a product are, for the most part, a dark secret.\n\nProvenance. It's a word Leanne Kemp, a serial entrepreneur, has spent a lot of time thinking about. 'It means the history of something, where it came from and where did it go,' she says in her distinct Aussie accent. 'Who owns it? Who sold it and where is it now?' Essentially, it's the life story of an item, and in the world of goods, especially expensive or rare items, provenance matters. The Yapese were right with their fei stones\u2013the value of an item should not be separated from its origin and history.\n\nKemp, now in her late forties, was born and raised in Brisbane, Australia. She moved to London in the late 1990s and divides her time flying between continents, her work specializing in an unusual blend of technology and the jewellery trade. 'I'm a technologist. A \"super-nerd\" who can cut code,' she says. 'I used to work in RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] to track the identity of goods as they moved through the supply chain.' Kemp likes to use a new technology to solve a problem in a way it hasn't been solved before.\n\nSeveral years ago, she began to immerse herself in the world of cryptocurrency. From the outset, like Buterin, she was far more interested in the ledger technology than the bitcoin itself. 'The currency had been on the market for quite some time. The fundamental change occurred in 2014 when the bitcoin network released something called an _op return function_ ,' she says. 'Basically, it enables you to trade a coin and to hash on to the coin a piece of data. I started to think about what I could do with that functionality.' Could it be used to track the origins and ownership of, well, anything worth tracking?\n\nLooking into the diamond industry, Kemp discovered that it was plagued by problems like synthetic diamonds, insurance fraud, theft and tampering of paper certificates. Some \u00a345 billion is lost annually in the United States and Europe on insurance fraud alone, and an estimated 65 per cent of fraudulent claims go undetected. Then there are the notorious 'blood diamonds', precious stones mined in African war zones, often by young children, with the funds from sales frequently used to arm brutal rebel conflicts. By the time Kemp came along, there was at least one certification system, the Kimberley Process, in place to reassure buyers they weren't buying a diamond with blood on it, but that system was not foolproof and still largely depended on paper trails.\n\nEarly in 2015, Kemp sketched the idea for her company on the back of a napkin. She drew the trail of a diamond from a mine to a marketplace to a person's finger. 'I sketched the data we could store against the provenance chain of diamonds and that's where it all started.' A few months later, she founded Everledger, a London-based start-up that digitally certifies diamonds on the blockchain.\n\n'We create a diamond's digital thumbprint or ID,' Kemp says. 'Take a three-carat diamond. It will have a serial number inscribed on its girdle during the grading process. There are the four Cs\u2013cut, clarity, carat and colour\u2013but there are forty other attributes, such as angles, cuts and pavilions, which make up that specific diamond.' The diamond's ID is enshrined in the blockchain, creating an immutable record for insurers, traders and customers to know the real provenance and movements of a diamond over its entire history. 'We can apply this technology to solve very big ethical supply chain problems: from ivory poaching to blood diamonds,' says Kemp, adding that because a diamond moves through so many hands, corruption, scams and rip-0ffs can happen at any stage of its journey from grimy mine to gleaming boutique. 'Blockchain technologies allow us to bring ethical transparency on a global scale.'\n\nSo far, Everledger has digitized the ID of more than 1 million diamonds and has partnered with big financial players including Barclays and Lloyds. The company is also building an anti-counterfeit database. What this means is when a stolen diamond resurfaces for sale on an online marketplace such as Amazon or eBay, it will be much easier for investigators to track its history and return it to its rightful owner.\n\nIn a few years, we will get to a point where we are able to check the provenance of all kinds of items before we buy them and find out precisely if they are what they claim. The question is, will customers want to know and will they care? 'We've seen this with organic food, but when it comes to luxury goods, people mostly rely on the trust of a brand such as De Beers to decide what to buy,' Kemp says. 'If there was to be a full consciousness of transactions, what would we choose? I don't know the answer to that yet.'\n\nEverledger is essentially building a platform to track the true identity and reputation of objects. 'We're on the next generation of technology where transactional data of objects and assets becomes woven into the web and that's what I think is the World Wide Ledger,' says Kemp. The World Wide Ledger (WWL) offers a way to make and preserve truths\u2013the history of assets.\n\nImagine if this technology had been around in the Second World War during the greatest art theft in history. Art objects of all kinds, deemed suitable to Hitler's taste, were shipped in freight cars from all over Europe to end up in Germany. It is estimated that more than 650,000 artworks, including Giovanni Bellini's famous _Madonna and Child_ and one of Edgar Degas's iconic ballerina paintings, were looted by the Nazis, with many of the works shamelessly stripped from the homes of wealthy Jews who had fled or been sent to concentration camps.\n\nWhen the war was over, the Allies put together a special unit of personnel, the so called 'Monuments Men', devoted to finding and returning looted art to their rightful owners. Despite those efforts, the art was largely returned to countries, not to individuals. Some 100,000 stolen works of art remain unaccounted for, their current location and owners an enigma.\n\nIt turns out that during the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of works were sold, at a significant discount, to the Nazis who had stolen them. Perhaps more alarming was the fact that Jews were made to buy back in auctions (or at least split the fees with houses) works they had proved to be rightfully owned by their families. 'They called them a \"return sale\",' says Anne Webber, the founder of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, a London-based non-profit.\n\nNaturally, museums from the Tate in London to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris try to check the ownership history of works on display and in storage, but it is an incredibly complex task. In most instances, the museum has no way of verifying the claims of ownership of plundered property because, just like my diamond, the paper records have either been lost or tampered with along the way. Remarkably, it wasn't until 2001 that the American Alliance of Museums published the first set of strict guidelines for handling and checking the provenance of _Raubkunst,_ Nazi-confiscated art.\n\nSo how do families, many of whom lost parents in the Holocaust, even know what is missing from their collections? How do you stop people filing fake claims if the true existence of the artwork is unknown? Decades after the war, most attempts at recovering and returning looted art fail, and the knowledge about collections is disappearing as the original owners pass away.\n\nOne problem with _Raubkunst_ has been that the art world, like many other industries, lacks transparency. In May 2016, Everledger announced an investment and partnership with Vastari, a company that creates a network between museums and collectors. 'There are a number of individuals around the world who hold significant collections, say, in Andy Warhols,' says Kemp. 'If they could easily track the movement of their artwork, they might be able to realize or release the financial potential of that piece and the public would see it more.'\n\nKemp is just one of many entrepreneurs around the world recognizing the power of the blockchain to act as a new kind of digital trust broker. And what works for diamonds could also work for, well, fish. Provenance, founded by Jessi Baker, is using the technology to track the supply chain of fish from fisherman to plate. 'Every product has a story,' says Baker. 'There is often an enormous gap between advertising and the reality of operations, what goes on behind the scenes. I find it strange that the provenance and production of products has remained so secret for so long.'\n\nIt's not just start-ups thinking this way. Alibaba wants to weed out counterfeit foods\u2013whether soy sauce made using dirty tap water or fake spices unfit for human consumption\u2013by using the blockchain to track products sold on Taobao and Tmall through the supply chain. Retail giant Walmart and IBM have partnered with Tsinghua University in Beijing digitally to track the source, factory information and movement of pork in China on a blockchain. 'Consumers today want more transparency about where and how a product came to be,' says Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart. 'If you shine a light on the food system, that leads to transparency.'\n\nThe transparency Yiannas is referring to holds immense value in industries where lies and falsehoods are rife. Indeed, at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2017 the agenda was full of presentations with titles such as 'Blockchain Revolutionizes Global Transactions' and 'Employing the Blockchain to Serve Society'. One of the much-hyped virtues of blockchain technologies is their potential for emerging markets such as Honduras and Ghana where weak governance and a lack of record-keeping systems means that trust is all too often in short supply. 'It has the potential to leapfrog billions of people into a new era\u2013in parallel to the way that mobile phones helped them leapfrog over landlines,' says Mariana Dahan, a senior operations officer at the World Bank.\n\nHernando de Soto Polar, a prominent Peruvian economist, has long held a view that capitalism will only thrive in the Third World when people feel that the law is firmly on their side, or even simply applies to them and their personal circumstances. 'What you have to remember is that people outside the legal system are the majority. There are 7 billion people in the world, and those who are outside the legal system are five billion,' he says. 'So this is no marginal phenomenon.' One of de Soto's core arguments is that a lack of clear _de facto_ property rights, not capital, is what has held (typically poor) people back in developing countries for so long. An estimated 5 billion people, mostly in the developing world, have difficulty proving they own land, businesses or cars. With no legal owners, the assets are effectively walled off from the 'official' economy. It adds up to trillions of dollars in locked or 'dead capital'. If ownership of land and housing is clear, recognized and protected, people will look after what they can control. It also gives people collateral to borrow against.\n\nIn Ghana, where it is estimated around 78 per cent of land is unregistered, homeowners will often put a sign outside their house painted with the words 'This house is not for sale'. It is often the only means available to show that a place is occupied. Another big problem that arises from the unregistered land is that people sell what they don't rightfully own. Government officials, abusing their power, sometimes buy an election vote here and there using fraudulent land titles. Bureaucrats sometimes hack databases to get themselves the rights to a nice beachfront property. So start-ups such as Bitfury, ChromaWay and Bitland are starting to work with governments to collect and organize property records on blockchains, based on the premise that every _coin_ on the blockchain could represent a unique house or land title. If there were an immutable record of land-title information, theoretically at least, dodgy officials would not be able to tamper with the record without leaving a digital trail.\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific advisor, Sir Mark Walport, published a report in January 2016, claiming that 'distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the supply chain of goods and generally ensure the integrity of government records and services'. Similarly, the Dubai government announced its ambitious plans to go paperless and move all documents on to the blockchain by 2020.\n\nFor the moment, the blockchain remains in the realm of enthusiasts, innovators and idealists. It's still unclear what will be the killer consumer app that takes it into the mainstream. But one thing is certain: the intermediaries and centralized behemoths such as banks and accountancy firms will do their darnedest not to be cut out of the picture by a network of digital ledgers. Indeed, the first industry widely to adopt the blockchain could be the very middlemen Satoshi wanted to replace: finance.\n\nThe first sentence of Satoshi's 2008 bitcoin paper defines it as follows: 'A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.' 'Without a financial institution' is the key point. But it looks like banking middlemen are going to use the technology to make the exchange of money faster and cheaper. 'My hunch is that the blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as the internet was to media, commerce and advertising,' says Joi Ito, the respected entrepreneur, professor and director of the MIT Media Lab. 'It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person's friction is another person's revenue.'\n\nSo if financial incumbents can't be at the centre, why not control the new trust architecture that transactions will flow through? Indeed, patent wars are brewing and the race is on to try to 'own' blockchain technologies.\n\nAnyone on Wall Street knows who Blythe Masters is. She is a banker's banker. Born in 1969, she was raised in southeast England, where she attended the exclusive King's School in Canterbury. Her accent is cut-glass English: proper Home Counties. During her gap year, before studying economics at the University of Cambridge, she interned at JP Morgan Chase. At the age of twenty-two, she officially joined the bank in the derivatives team in New York. Her rise through the ranks was inexorable. By the time she was twenty-eight, she was managing director, the youngest woman ever to achieve the title in the investment bank's long history. At thirty, she became head of the global derivatives unit. At thirty-four, she became chief financial officer, joining an elite group the media dubbed as the 'JP Morgan Mafia'. She became known on Wall Street as 'Queen of Commodities'.\n\nIn 1989 more than 10.8 million gallons of crude oil from the oil tanker _Exxon Valdez_ spilled into the pristine oceans of Alaska, spreading far and wide. The potential damages were estimated to be upwards of $5 billion. The oil company needed a loan, an enormous one. So in 1994 they went to their long-term bank, JP Morgan. Masters happened to be leading the team managing the financial side of the crisis for the oil company. Exxon were an old client and the bank didn't want to turn down their request. At the same time, the loan was risky and would tie up a lot of the bank's reserve cash. Masters came up with what seemed at the time like an ingenious idea: what if the risk of the loans could be sold?\n\nHer thinking was based on the fact that investment banks already swapped bonds and interest rates. So why not swap the risk of defaulting on loans? And so the idea of the 'credit default swap' was born and took off big time. Blythe Masters was credited as the mastermind behind the concept. Credit default swaps were meant to reassure investors the risk was hedged if a loan went south. Instead, as we now famously know, it blew enormous holes in the balance sheets of banks and insurance companies such as American International Group (AIG) and mortgage lenders like Fannie Mae, who didn't have the collateral owed when the underlying credit swaps deteriorated.\n\nDuring the 2007\u20132008 financial crisis, Masters had the courage, or some might say audacity, vociferously to defend the bank's trading activity. She asserted they had done nothing wrong, despite the millions of Americans who lost their homes and jobs as a result of the crisis. If the media needed a target, Blythe Masters had a giant circle on her back. Warren Buffett went so far as to describe the derivatives she masterminded as 'financial weapons of mass destruction'. She was vilified, some say unfairly, given how many others jumped on board with her and then ran for cover. In April 2014, after almost three decades with JP Morgan, Masters resigned.\n\nNow, she is back, championing not swaps but another potential money-spinner\u2013blockchains. 'You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the internet in the early 1990s,' Masters told a packed and rapt audience of money managers and investors at a conference held at the Le Parker Meridien Hotel in mid-Manhattan in the summer of 2015. 'It's analogous to email for money.'\n\nAround the time when bitcoin and blockchains were starting to catch the attention of the mainstream investment world, a New York-based start-up called Digital Asset Holdings (DAH) was launched. Blythe Masters was at its helm. The Wall Street veteran is knowledgeable about a common problem many banks face\u2013getting incompatible financial databases to talk to each other. It's costly, complex and takes time. While it might seem that traders work at Red Bull speed in lightning-paced environments, the technology used to execute trades is remarkably old-fashioned and _slow_. Lots of phone calls are made, emails traded and even the occasional fax is still sent. It can take up to three days\u2013T3\u2013for stock trades to change hands via clearing houses such as the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC). It's a process known as 'settlement lag'. Every hour before settlement happens, when a trade precariously hangs between sale and purchase, increases the risk that the trade won't go through. Obviously, it's in the banks' interest to close that lag time as much as possible.\n\nBlockchains could help reduce the gap of the entire lifecycle of a trade from days to minutes, even to zero. According to a report by Santander InnoVentures, the Spanish bank's fintech investment fund, by 2022 ledger technologies could save banks $15\u201320 billion a year by reducing regulatory, settlement and cross-border costs.\n\nDigital Asset Holdings wants to be _the_ distributed database handling these speedy transactions. And the who's who of the world's biggest financial names, including Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Blythe Masters's old employer, JP Morgan, have ploughed more than $60 million of investment into DAH. Speed and efficiency are not the only qualities that make distributed ledgers attractive to banks. 'Regulators will like that blockchain-based transactions can achieve greater transparency and traceability\u2013an \"immutable audit trail\",' Masters says. In other words, it could help eliminate the kinds of fraud that come from cooking the books. It's rather ironic that these words come from a woman who spent several months being investigated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a cover-up of energy-trading strategies. Masters was not cited for any wrongdoing and no action was brought individually against her. JP Morgan paid $410 million to settle and close the case, without denying or admitting wrongdoing.\n\nOn Wall Street, the race is on to embrace or control what could be either its biggest ally or its death knell. Where does the average Joe store their money? In a bank's current or savings account or a safety deposit. But the blockchain could become a new repository of value.\n\nHow do typical loans work? A bank assesses the credit score of an individual or business and decides whether to lend money. The blockchain could become the source to check the creditworthiness of any potential borrower, thereby facilitating more and more peer-to-peer financing. How do typical credit cards and money transfer services work? They currently flow through a bank, but the blockchain could handle this exchange of value directly from person to person. Consider traditional accounting, a multi-billion industry largely dominated by the 'big four' audit firms, Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young and PwC. The digital distributed ledger could transparently report the financial transactions of an organization in real time, reducing the need for traditional accounting practices. And that is why most major players in the financial industry are busy investing significant resources into blockchain solutions. They have to embrace this new paradigm to ensure it works for, not against, them.\n\nA San Francisco-based venture called Chain is said to have raised more than $30 million in funding from big names such as Nasdaq, Visa and Citi Ventures to develop open-source code for a distributed ledger. IBM, Wells Fargo, the London Stock Exchange and others have joined forces with Digital Asset Holdings to develop blockchain software that is also open source, making the underlying recipe available to developers. Originally dubbed the Open Ledger Project (and later renamed Hyperledger), the joint efforts are being overseen by the widely respected Linux Foundation.\n\nGoldman Sachs has recently filed a patent for its own cryptocurrency, its own version of bitcoin, called SETLcoin which processes foreign-exchange transactions. It is designed to run on the bank's own private blockchain. This means the replicated ledger of transactions still sits behind the closed walls of the bank, centralized and guarded. It seems to defeat the very purpose of the technology, which is to create a single indisputable version of the truth, freely accessible to all, that could eliminate the need for the bank entirely. In the patent, Goldman describes SETLcoin as having the potential to guarantee 'nearly instantaneous execution and settlement' for trades. It would mean all the capital the bank is required to keep in reserve, to hedge against the risk of transactions if they don't settle, would be freed up.\n\nMore than forty banks have a stake in a consortium called R3CEV to come up with shared standards for blockchains. The technology will be pretty much worthless if there are multiple versions of the blockchain that can't work together. R3CEV wants to bring along all the banks and regulators so they can share just one\u2013a ledger that is not controlled by any one person or organization but by many participants. Sure, it's collaboration, but perhaps not the kind Satoshi had in mind.\n\nNotably, R3CEV has recruited a man by the name of Mike Hearn as its chief platform officer. The former Googler is a big deal in the blockchain world. Hearn spent more than five years working full-time alongside Gavin Andresen, as part of Bitcoin Core, the original group of developers that maintain the open-source code that runs the bitcoin peer-to-peer network.\n\nHearn admits he is a 'tell-it-like-I-see-it kinda guy'. In January 2016, he publicly denounced the future of bitcoin and said it was inherently doomed. 'It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money... has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people,' Hearn wrote. 'The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there's no longer much reason to think bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.'\n\nJust days after he published the post, Hearn joined the R3CEV banking consortium. 'The current Bitcoin system, I mean the system we actually use today with the blockchain, isn't going to change the world at all due to the 1mb limit [the maximum size of a bitcoin block],' he said in defence of his move. 'So if I have a choice between helping the existing financial system build something better than what they have today that resembles Bitcoin, or helping the Bitcoin community build something worse than what they have today that resembles banking, then I may as well go where the users are and work with the banks.'\n\nFrom Buterin to Hearn, it seems that everyone, however different their motives, is in a race to create something like the original Satoshi blockchain, only better. For many, it's the biggest game in town.\n\nThe blockchain raises a key human question: how much should we pay to trust one another? In the past year, I've paid my bank interest and fees, some hidden, to verify accounts and balances so that I could make payments to strangers. I've spent thousands of dollars on lawyers to draw up contracts because I am not quite sure how another person will behave (and to sort out a few incidents where trust broke down). I've paid my insurance company to oversee the risk around my health, car, home and even life. I've paid an accountant to reconcile an auditing issue. I've paid an estate agent tens of thousands of dollars essentially to stand between me, the prospective buyer, and the current owner to buy a house. It would seem we pay a lot for people to lord over our lives and double-check what's happening. All these 'trusted intermediaries' are part of the world of institutional trust that is now being deeply questioned.\n\nMany of the ideas surrounding the blockchain sound ambitious, risky and radical. Many are being over-hyped, over-funded and will likely fail. What's not in doubt is that, as the cost of trust plummets because of new technology, the third parties currently paid to facilitate our trust\u2013be they agents, referees, watchdogs or custodians\u2013will increasingly have to prove their value if they don't want to be supplanted by an 'immutable' ledger.\n\nIn 1993, enthusiasts such as Al Gore were telling the world about a coming 'information superhighway' that would change the world. The internet was a novel concept few had grasped and people didn't really know what to make of it. John Allen, an early web aficionado, went on TV to try to explain how people would use it: 'In this world, there's a table with a big sign on it that says \"Football\" and there's 150 or 1,000 jocks all around the world who want to talk about football,' he said on CBC. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg was nine years old. Google was three years from being born. All the other products and companies that would emerge to commercialize the internet and its future potential were not yet clear. Today, it is circa 1993 for blockchain technologies. Even though most people barely know what the blockchain is, a decade or so from now it will be like the internet: we'll wonder how society ever functioned without it. The internet transformed how we share information and connect; the blockchain will transform how we exchange value and whom we trust.\n\n* Slack is a communication and messaging app used by teams and groups to organize conversations. 'Channels' are created around a specific topic. Thedao.slack.com was the channel created around the DAO fund.\n\n# Conclusion\n\n'It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.'\n\nJoseph Stiglitz\n\nOn 28 February 2016, in a small cinema in Pan Paper Village in Kenya, more than 400 locals had gathered to watch an English football match. The game was between two of the greatest rivals in the Premier League: Manchester United and Arsenal. The cinema belonged to Eric, an entrepreneur who also owns a printing business, small kiosk and a photo studio. He is a local success story.\n\nThe Kenyan crowd, sitting in a darkened room with the game projected against a wall, cheered as the players walked out to start the match. Man U started out strong with Arsenal struggling to get anything going. Then the screen went blank. The crowd let out a groan. 'Get the game back on!', 'Boo, what's happening?', 'We're missing the match!', the paying customers hollered at Eric.\n\nThe cable company had disconnected the service because Eric's bill had not been paid on time. Feeling frazzled, with hundreds of eyes trained on him to fix the problem, and fast, he reached for his phone. He opened an app called Tala, a company that makes loans to people without a traditional credit history in emerging markets including Kenya, the Philippines and Tanzania. Luckily, he recently reached gold status for repaying four loans on time and his credit had been increased to 5,000 Kenyan shillings (KES), the equivalent of around \u00a340. It's a decent amount of money when you consider that a small 0.33-litre bottle of Coke costs around 50 KES.\n\nWith a few taps and swipes on his phone, Eric took out his Tala credit line and immediately paid his cable fees. Within minutes, the match was back on the big screen. The crowd cheered; the score was still 0\u20130. Each customer paid Eric around 15 KES, so he made 6,000 shillings in takings. After everyone had left, he paid back his Tala loan and kept the profits.\n\nEric is one of more than 300,000 people Tala has issued loans to in Kenya since the company was founded in 2011. Loans range from $10 to $100, with terms of three to four weeks. The interest rates range from 11 to 15 per cent, considerably better than those of the loan sharks who charge a crippling 300 per cent and more. The repayment rate is 90 per cent. Tala's customers are part of the one-third of the world's population that is 'unbanked'. Across the globe, there are 2.5 billion people who have no traditional credit score and are therefore not eligible to receive loans to fund new businesses, buy a home and generally improve their lives. 'For a traditional bank, [the lack of a credit score] means there is no real data to answer the question: \"What's my basis for investing in this person?\",' says Shivani Siroya, the thirty-four-year-old founder and CEO of Tala.\n\nSiroya was first raised in Udaipur, India. Her mother, by all accounts, was a renegade. She went to medical school and was the first female doctor, a gynaecologist, in her community. She ran medical camps in rural areas, training women how to deliver babies more safely. Her relationship with her patients was always selfless. 'We would say to her, \"Mom, you work so hard and your patients never pay you,\"' Siroya tells me. 'But money wasn't the thing that kept her going. For her, being a doctor is not a transactional relationship. She truly wants to help.'\n\nThe family eventually ended up moving to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, and her mother continued her good work there, often allowing poor patients to pay when they could or not at all. 'She gave them credit because she trusted them,' Siroya says.\n\nOn the phone from Santa Monica, California, where she now lives, Siroya sounds so calm and tranquil she might have just finished a yoga class. She gives the impression of being, like her mother, full of life and goodness. It's odd to imagine her working in the cut-throat culture of mergers and acquisitions at Citigroup, which is where she began her career as a banking analyst before going on to become an equity researcher at UBS. Siroya loved the data but something didn't sit right with her. 'I didn't want to be analysing companies selling diet drugs; I wanted to work with companies doing something with impact.' She heard about social enterprise guru Muhammad Yunus who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the concepts of microfinance and microcredit. Shortly after, she quit her job and joined the United Nations Population Fund.\n\nAt the UN, she ended up working with thousands of microbusiness owners, such as locals running food stalls and small kiosks across Africa and India. Over the course of two and a half years, she interviewed more than 2,500 people, going door to door and learning the detail of their lives. 'These micro-entrepreneurs were working so hard to grow their businesses and to help create jobs, yet they felt really stuck. They were getting access to really informal micro-loans, often from loan sharks, but they couldn't get access to any kind of real capital in the form of a business loan,' Siroya says. 'When I looked at the other side, I found that traditional banks felt these individuals, operating in an economy where cash is prevalent, were too risky. I saw a gap in the market.' She realized the problem came down to identity. How could she build financial identities for people who didn't otherwise have any?\n\nApproximately a billion people in the emerging markets have basic smartphones. People are using them in the same way that Westerners do\u2013to text friends, surf the net, run their daily lives and pay for everything from electricity bills to parking fees. The phones also tell a story about their owners. Tala can cull more than 10,000 data points from a phone in less than one minute to gauge a person's ability and willingness to repay loans. 'We look at behavioural things such as what are their current spending habits? Do they have consistency in their income? What other apps do they use?' explains Siroya.\n\nThe size of a person's network is a strong trust signal for potential borrowers. Turns out, if our phone calls last more than four minutes, we tend to have stronger relationships, and therefore may be more creditworthy. Similarly, people who communicate with more than fifty-eight different contacts tend to be better borrowers because they have a wider network to depend on. Even how we organize our contacts can be revealing. 'If more than 40 per cent of the entries in a person's contact list have both first and last names, it suggests a customer who is sixteen times more reliable than one with very few contacts listed with first and last names,' explains Siroya. Filling in a first and a last name shows, in a small way, the care and attention we pay to something. Indeed, no single piece of information determines whether someone gets a loan\u2013it's the cumulative points of data that provide a clear picture of a person. 'It's a financial identity that looks more like a person and less like a score,' says Siroya. 'This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record.' It proves that a person doesn't need a traditional credit score to prove they are trustworthy.\n\nToday, Tala is the fifth most used app in Kenya. Only the Bible app, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are ahead of it. 'Customers don't see us as a traditional banking institution which they have a transactional relationship with. They see us as a personalized financial partner,' Siroya says. Tala illustrates how technology can help find ways round trust bottlenecks to unlock more economic activity. It demonstrates how data and algorithms can prove that there are billions of people like Eric, often overlooked and undervalued, that deserve to be trusted.\n\nWhy is Tala so successful? It sounds so simple: start with the person, not the system.\n\n'Free markets can succeed for all if business works with the people, not just sells to them,' says Richard Edelman in response to the 2017 Edelman survey that revealed a 'global implosion of trust'. To get out of the current trust collapse, we need radically to rethink the foundations on which our institutions are built so they are designed to work not just _for_ people but _with_ people. 'We must rebuild faith in the system citizen by citizen, community by community, where common goals and fairness matter,' writes Edelman. In other words, put people at the centre of everything you do.\n\nThe litmus test for any organization is this: would people describe it as an 'honest, ethical and reliable friend', someone who is there when you need them?\n\nTo give a simple example, when Tala wants to send their customers a reminder to repay their loan, they don't constantly bombard them with notifications when those customers clearly don't have any money in their bank. What's the point? Instead, they send borrowers a friendly SMS reminder the minute a deposit hits their account. More than 80 per cent of people pay on their phones as soon as they get that reminder. It shows the power of technology when it contains simple ingredients of humanity such as empathy and fairness.\n\nWhen I started writing this book, I thought, maybe a little naively, that most of the entrepreneurs, hackers, leaders and innovators I would meet designing ideas based on distributed trust would be like Siroya. And many are\u2013working to reframe deeply held institutional assumptions about power, access and equality. There are figures like Gerard Ryle, head of the ICIJ team of journalists behind the Panama Papers story, who uses digital networks to get people to work together, selflessly and collaboratively. Or entrepreneurs such as Leanne Kemp, founder of Everledger, and Savi Baveja, CEO of Trooly, who want to take on such enormous industries as background checks and the diamond trade, industries with troubled legacies and where trust has been systemically broken in many places. If you add up the stories of founders such as Joe Gebbia from Airbnb, Lynn Perkins from UrbanSitter and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mazzella from BlaBlaCar, you start to see a world where new mechanisms for enabling trust leaps can make us comfortable with people, ideas and experiences we may never have otherwise considered. Their companies might look very different from each other but what they have in common is using digital tools to build trust with strangers to connect and collaborate on an unprecedented scale.\n\nOn the other hand, there are entrepreneurs who act like 'digital gods', reaping the humungous benefits of platforms and algorithms with immense impact on our lives, but denying responsibility when things go wrong. In some cases, the high walls of institutions are merely being replaced by opaque, controlling algorithms and unpredictable leaders of platforms. Travis Kalanick, for example, the controversial co-founder and former CEO of Uber. Among other instances of bad behaviour, Kalanick sent emails to his PR team after the media reported a woman had been choked by a driver, instructing them to 'make sure these writers don't come away thinking we are responsible even when these things do go bad'. The company and its notorious founder don't do themselves any favours by projecting an aggressive and flawed public image.\n\nIn late January 2017, a protest movement with the hashtag #DeleteUber quickly gained traction over two issues, both of which involved the company's connection to President Donald Trump. The former CEO said his participation on an advisory group within the Trump administration had created what he called a 'perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are'. But perception is everything.\n\nWhen trust is lost, a company has to exhibit humility, to be unafraid to give a genuine apology and acknowledge mistakes, and to demonstrate a clear willingness to fix what is wrong. Indeed, in an age of distributed trust, it's much harder to get away with errors and bungled responses, because there are far more people watching. Real incidents, or merely unfounded views that someone feels to be true, circulate at an unprecedented speed. A tweet about Uber's surge pricing might appear in one person's feed in the morning and then have flown around the world on social media by noon, leading to a full-blown protest not long after. The consequences for trust are enormous.\n\nIn 1919, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called 'The Second Coming' to describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe.\n\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst\n\nAre full of passionate intensity.\n\nAlmost a hundred years on, we are living in a time where perilous trust battles are raging between facts and 'alternative facts', falsehoods and rumours; between open platforms and gated communities; between elites or authorities and 'the people'; between the informed, the misinformed and the credulous. It's fair to assume that for some time to come the prevailing mood will be anti-elite and anti-authority\u2013a feeling that our traditional systems are deeply failing us. Trust in big institutions and the established order will continue to unravel and collapse.\n\nThat reaction might be understandable but a blanket hammering of institutional trust\u2013a wholesale rejection of the media, the courts and intelligence services, the truth-defending organizations that underpin any democracy\u2013threatens to create chaos. We obviously need to question institutions and hold them accountable, but if we pull the rug out from under them all, what are we left with? Potentially a dangerous _trust vacuum_ that is open to manipulation and being filled with catchy conspiracy theories, comforting biases, unfounded accusations and sleights of hand. A trust free-for-all, in other words. Think about it: when people are told they cannot trust any of the old institutions, they can end up trusting nothing, or anything. Institutions do not need to go the way of the dodo\u2013they just have to learn to adapt to this new trust landscape if they don't want to be left behind.\n\nWhen institutional systems fail, alternatives will always rise up to take their place. Distributed trust in itself can't knock down the rise of extremist populist movements, dangerous policies introduced by radical political leaders or a divisive resurgence of nationalism. But, driven democratically and rationally, and shaped and reshaped by people's needs and innate preferences about how they want to do things, it can provide a path forward for businesses, governments, media and other key institutions. It gives them a means to redesign systems that put people first in ways that are more _transparent_ , _inclusive_ and _accountable._\n\nSignificantly, this revolution is taking place in a landscape of rapidly shifting and evolving technologies, where the once unthinkable, the once impossible, can become the new normal in the blink of an eye. Humans are naturally attuned to taking trust leaps. Today, however, it feels like we are constant 'newbies' leaping at such an accelerated rate and in so many realms at once that it's dizzying. That's another challenge; setting up trust systems that can adapt and keep pace with an unprecedented rate of change.\n\nI would not have written this book if I did not believe in the enormous potential of distributed trust to give people, even countries, the tools and power to leap out of low-trust situations; if I didn't believe in its ability to help us find ways through the treacherous storm of distrust we are currently only just weathering. There is a large dose of optimism and exciting potential in the world of distributed trust, although it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge there is also a high degree of fear and uncertainty. It's a work in progress. We're still discovering its strengths, its virtues and its vulnerabilities.\n\nOver the course of _Who Can You Trust?_ we've looked at several stories where distributed trust always seems to lead us back to centralized power; a take-over, if you like, of those early good intentions. Take Amazon, Alibaba or Facebook. They might have begun as ways to democratize commerce or information, but they have become centralized behemoths in control of valuable and ever-more sensitive data.\n\nWhat's more, institutions meant to keep dominating powers in check\u2013regulatory bodies and labour unions, for example\u2013are ill-equipped to deal with a new digital era of fast-paced monopolies. One of the real challenges for distributed trust is whether it can resist, or at least weather, market forces and human greed.\n\nIdeas such as China's Social Credit System show how distributed networks of trust could become national networks of shame and interference, controlled by governments. And what has happened to those early utopian bitcoin miners? Mining power has ended up dangerously concentrated in China, at odds with the globalized ideals underlying bitcoin. The mass exchange of diverse ideas and the decentralization of information that we first envisioned the World Wide Web would bring us have happened, but so has a new kind of homophily and centralization\u2013hyperlinks and hierarchies managing what we see and read\u2013inside a handful of social networks. It's as if the small local cafes where we talked and disagreed with strangers have been replaced by a chain of McCafes where we are given algorithmically determined food, regardless of what we might actually want. The consequence is that we have become vulnerable to digital concentrations of power. We want power handed back to the people, but what if it's handed to the wrong people? Or only some of the people? Or, worse still, only a few of the wrong people?\n\nIt would be easy to suggest that platforms should be owned and governed by their users but there is the issue of accountability. Even ideas, such as the DAO fund and bitcoin, that seek to challenge bureaucratic systems and powerful gatekeepers, seem to need top-down decision-makers at times. When the DAO fund went belly up, what were many people calling for? An individual: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Yes, he had to get a majority consensus from the user network to implement the hard fork solution; but it seems we still want to be able to throw up our hands and say 'It was his idea', or ask 'Who's in charge here?' For the moment, at least, we remain in a mindset that wants a benevolent leader, an ultimate decision-maker to take charge and fix the problem. The positive is that all these processes are far more transparent than ever before, as well as under mass observation and open to comment from everyone with a stake in them.\n\nIn truth, the creators and leaders of ideas built on distributed trust are not like traditional captains of the ship issuing orders in command-and-control model and manner. But as stuff happens\u2013whether it's a mis-channelling of funds or an unpredictable mass murder associated with their platform\u2013they are realizing they need to know about and take increased responsibility for everything and anything that could sink the ship. The unforeseen storms could be legal challenges, data breaches, safety questions, unethical behaviour, discrimination or even competitors. When the water starts rushing in, leaders have to act quickly and transparently to plug the holes, and this can't always involve consensus building, although sometimes it can and should. Once the holes are plugged, they need to figure out how to fix the problem in the long-term in a 'We will do...' approach, engaging the wider community.\n\nThe third challenge of distributed trust is that many new technologies, from bots to blockchains, either anonymize people or attempt to remove entirely the need to trust another human. Yet it's humans, with all our wonderful kinks and mutations, who make trust possible. It's not technology or mathematics. When we trust an automated search engine over a human editor or when avatars or programmed algorithms serve as our managers, trust runs the risk of becoming static. What happens to human let-downs and surprises? These are how we learn to trust, and not trust. How else do we practise the skills of earning and rebuilding trust? Sometimes repairing trust requires a slow cure rate and the personal touch. It would be a shame to find ourselves in a world so automated that we depend solely on machines and algorithms to make decisions about whom to trust. That's a world apparently devoid of uncertainty, devoid of the colour and movement born of human imperfection, and, if we take our hands off the wheel too much, possibly even dangerous. As astronaut Dave Bowman famously found out when HAL 9000 went rogue in Kubrick's cult _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , one of our key challenges is deciding where and when it is appropriate to make trust a matter of computer code.\n\nWhen we look back in history, we can see that trust falls into distinct chapters. The first was l _ocal_. The second was _institutional_. And the third, still very much in its infancy, is _distributed._ Like most inventions in their early stages, distributed trust will be messy, unpredictable and at times even dangerous. Researching and writing about the theory has sometimes felt remarkably similar to watching my two young children bounding around the house, pushing boundaries, constantly negotiating, feeling misunderstood, trying to figure out the rules they have to abide by and the ones they can ignore.\n\nThere is no simple answer to the question 'Who Can You Trust?' but we do know that ultimately it comes down to a human decision. Technology can help us make better and different choices, but in the end it's we who have to decide where to place our trust and who deserves it. It will require some care. Distributed trust needs us to allow space for a _trust pause_ , an interval in which to stop and think before we automatically click, swipe, share and accept. To ask the right questions and to seek the right information that helps us to decide: is this person, information or thing worthy of my trust? What is it I'm trusting them to do or deliver? Each time we engage in that process, we are in our own small way taking responsibility for the kind of world we want to live in. We are exercising the power available to us all now at the press of a key. We are helping to preserve society's most precious and fragile asset, trust.\n\n# Acknowledgements\n\nIt's funny, I think writing books is a bit like having children; as soon as you have the first copy in your hands, you forget the immensely tough marathon in getting there. It takes a village to produce a book and I am deeply grateful for the advice, encouragement and support given by friends, family and colleagues along the way.\n\nAs for the book itself, I have three talented individuals to thank in particular: Mia de Villa, Phoebe Adler-Ryan and Fenella Souter.\n\nMia played an invaluable role as a research assistant, tracking down obscure papers and checking and rechecking hundreds of facts and transcripts. She was willing to do whatever it took to produce this book. Thank you, for everything.\n\nA special thank you to Fenella who was instrumental in helping to make the stories in this book zing. She was an incisive critic throughout the process and her keen-eyed comments helped to make every page infinitely better.\n\nI am immensely grateful to Phoebe, my assistant, for handling so much so well, and with diligent professionalism, care and grace. Thank you for being a joy to work with and an invaluable member of the team.\n\nThank you to Gary Nunn for hitting the ground running in managing communications and helping to spread the ideas in the book.\n\nMy heartfelt thanks to my brilliant literary agent, Toby Mundy, for continually playing the roles of thoughtful advisor, supportive coach and chief cheerleader. I am indebted to his fierce faith in the project (even in its unwieldy embryonic state) and for making this book happen. And thanks to David Roach for introducing me to Toby.\n\nI'd like to extend a special thanks to my terrific editors at Penguin Portfolio, Fred Baty and Daniel Crewe, who pushed the manuscript along in the most encouraging way possible. And the talented and world-class team behind the scenes: Nicola Evans, Lydia Yadi, Ellie Smith and John Stables. For her careful copyedit, thank you to Karen Whitlock. I was very fortunate to have David Over leading the marketing efforts around this book. Thank you for passionately embracing the ideas from the outset (and for countenancing my nudging!). Thanks also to Alex Elam and Sarah Scarlett and the rest of the dedicated international rights team at Penguin Portfolio.\n\nI am also grateful to the first-rate team at Hachette, Public Affairs\u2013led by Clive Priddle, Lindsay Fradkoff, and Jaime Leifer\u2013who enthusiastically brought this book to readers in the United States.\n\nMy gratitude goes to the talented designers at Team Design: Amy Globus, John Clark and Devin Seger for the stunning internal illustrations. I am constantly amazed how you turn my chicken scratches into something beautiful. Making complex things simple is complex and you do it so well.\n\nThanks also to Caroline Baum, an inspirational friend and talented writer, who read through an early draft of the manuscript (it's because I trust you!).\n\nA special thank you to Danny Stern, for doing everything a good speaking agent should do\u2013only infinitely better. I am also grateful to the rest of the team at Stern Strategy Group for their committed enthusiasm for my ideas: Katie Balogh, Tara Baumgarten, Mel Blake, Stephanie Heckman, Whitney Jennings, Joseph Navatto, Susan Stern and Ania Trzepizur. And a big thank you to Nanette Moulton, Trish Stafford and Carol Pedersen and the rest of the team at Saxtons for supporting my engagements from the very first time I stepped on a stage.\n\nEnormous thanks to all the talented people who graciously shared their time and wisdom with me, including: Judd Antin, Jessi Baker, Andrea Barrett, Savi Baveja, Joshua Browder, Leah Busque, Verena Butt d'Espous, Pierrick Caen, Juan Cartagena, Emily Castor, Stephen Cave, Coye Cheshire, Sean Conway, Ines Cormier, Rogier Creemers, Courtney Cregan, Nilesh Dalvi, Damien Detcherry, Matt Faustman, Juliette Garside, Joe Gebbia, Logan Green, Alok Gupta, Elliot Hedman, Jos\u00e9 Ignacio Fern\u00e1ndez, Angeli Jain, Husayn Kassai, Leanne Kemp, Federico Lalatta, David Lang, Brian Lathrop, James Martin, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mazzella, Mark Stephen Meadows, Paolo Parigi, Lynn Perkins, Gerard Ryle, Anish Das Sarma, Ariel Schultz, Shivani Siroya, Ryann Wahl and Seth Weiner. (And to all the story contributors who asked to be kept anonymous.) I am immensely grateful for their trust in letting me share their experiences and stories.\n\nJames Coleman, Francis Fukuyama, Onora O'Neill and Robert Putnam, with their remarkable writings on trust, have been a touchstone of intellectual inspiration.\n\nThe faculty at Oxford University Sa\u00efd Business School have provided me with the opportunity to teach the unbelievable student community. A special thank you to Colin Mayer, Ian Rogan, Rupert Younger and Marc Ventresca for all their support. I also want to thank my students for their engagement, comments and for pushing me to find clearer answers. Pamela Hartigan, my former supervisor, to whom this book is dedicated, showed me, in innumerable ways, what it means to be a teacher. I benefited enormously from her wisdom and was inspired by her relentless faith in people.\n\nThanks to the colleagues and organizations who have frequently provided public platforms to test and improve ideas: Helen Goulden and the team at Nesta; Mairi Ryan and Matthew Taylor of the RSA; and Alain de Botton and the team at School of Life; Jo Gray, Theo Chapman and the editors at the _AFR_ ; and David Rowan and Greg Williams at _WIRED._ A big thank you to Chris Anderson, Remo Giuffre, Bruno Giussani and Helen Walters at TED for letting me share my ideas from the ominous 'red circle'.\n\nI am also thankful to Rohan Lund, Kyle Loades and the other members of the board at the NRMA for tolerating my schedule and absences. I am proud to be a part of such a trusted organization.\n\nI am grateful to Kirsty de Garis for her research and input in the early stages of this book. Thank you for always being there. Many other friends and family, including Dana Ardi, Craig Baker, Tony Botsman and Jonathan Simmons, who have listened (or I should say, at times, endured) obsessive conversations about ideas lingering in my mind.\n\nA special thank you to Isabel 'one' and Isabel 'deux' for all their love and help with my kids. To all the teachers at Emanuel School, thanks for creating a wonderful and caring place.\n\nMy dear parents, Ruth and David, trusted me to share many personal family stories in this book. (I forgive you for leaving me in the care of a drug dealer!) An enormous thank you for all your boundless love, generosity and wisdom over the years. You are both remarkable people.\n\nTo my mother-in-law Wendy: my heartfelt thanks for all your love and support. You are the best nonna to the kids.\n\nAnd of course, my two beautiful children, Jack and Grace, for being an infinite source of joy, pride and humility. Although they are both still young, they have taught me so much about trust and how it's a family's most precious asset.\n\nFinally, my heartfelt thanks go to the person who knows me best, my husband, Chris. I am sure there were many times he did not want to talk about bots, blockchain and Breitbart, but he always listened. His endless patience, love and support made this book possible.\n\nRachel Botsman, June 2017\n\n**Rachel Botsman** is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford's Sa\u00efd Business School. A world-renowned expert on trust, Botsman was named one of the Most Creative People in Business by _Fast Company_ and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Her TED talks have been viewed over 3.5 million times. She writes for the _Harvard Business Review_ , _Wall Street Journal_ , _The Guardian_ , _Wired_ , and more.\n\n# Glossary of 'Trust' Terms\n\n**Distributed Trust:** Trust that flows laterally between individuals, enabled by networks, platforms and systems.\n\n**Institutional Trust:** Trust that flows upwards to leaders, experts and brands, and runs through institutions and intermediaries such as courts, regulatory bodies and corporations (e.g. trusting your bank to safeguard your savings).\n\n**Local Trust:** Trust that exists between members of small, local communities and rests _in_ someone specific, someone we are familiar with.\n\n**Reputation:** The overall opinion others have formed of you, based on past experiences and built up over time.\n\n**Reputation Capital:** The value of your reputation across communities, networks and marketplaces; a measurement of how much an individual or community trusts you.\n\n**Reputation Trails:** Data we leave behind about how we behave, or misbehave.\n\n**Trust:** A confident relationship with the unknown.\n\n**Trust Blocker:** Obstacles or deal breakers for people when it comes to trusting a new idea or each other (e.g. not believing self-driving cars will make the right safety decisions).\n\n**Trust Deficit:** A lack of trust in a business, institution or within a society that prevents it from functioning well.\n\n**Trust Engineers:** People designing digital systems and networks that connect people and build or manipulate distributed trust.\n\n**Trust Gap:** The void between the known and unknown.\n\n**Trust Influencers:** People who can disproportionately influence a significant change in the way we do something or view something, and thus set new social norms.\n\n**Trust Leap:** A trust leap occurs when we take a risk and do something new or in a fundamentally different way.\n\n**Trust Pause:** An interval in which to stop and think before we automatically swipe, click and give our trust to someone.\n\n**Trust Scar:** Created by a trust-busting incident, a scar against an institution, individual or brand that may take decades or generations to heal.\n\n**Trust Score:** A system where all of an individual's behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number as an indicator of their overall trustworthiness.\n\n**Trust Shift:** The historical evolution of trust from local to institutional, and institutional to distributed.\n\n**Trust Signals:** Clues or symbols that we knowingly or unknowingly use to decide whether or not another person is trustworthy.\n\n**Trust Stack** : The three-step process of trusting the idea; then the platform; and finally, the other person (or in some instances a machine or robot).\n\n**Trust Vacuum:** Created by a lack of trust in traditional experts, leaders and elites; an absence of trust that can create opportunities for malicious disruptors to occupy the space.\n\n**Trustworthy:** Someone who is competent, reliable and honest and thus worthy of our trust.\n\n# Notes and Further Reading\n\nIntroduction\n\n1. 'The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report', Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission United States of America, https:\/\/www.gpo.gov\/fdsys\/pkg\/GPO-FCIC\/pdf\/GPO-FCIC.pdf, 25 February 2011, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n2. 'Digital Wildfires in a Hyperconnected World', WEF Report 2016, http:\/\/www3.weforum.org\/docs\/Media\/TheGlobalRisksReport2016.pdf, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n3. '2017 Edelman Trust Barometer', Edelman, http:\/\/www.edelman.comr\/trust2017\/, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n4. '2017 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Global Implosion of Trust', Edelman, http:\/\/www.edelman.com \/news\/2017-edelman-trust-barometer-reveals-global-implosion\/, accessed 15 January 2017.\n\n5. Turing Pharmaceuticals' CEO, Martin Shrekli, was arrested for securities fraud on 18 December 2015 and he resigned the following day. As of June 2017, the case is still in trial. The CEO has denied fraud charges.\n\n6. 'The Billion Dollar Startup Club', _Wall Street Journal_ , http:\/\/graphics.wsj.com\/billion-dollar-club\/, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n7. Ibid.\n\n8. 'Tinder reveals the most attractive jobs in the UK that make people swipe right', _Telegraph_ , http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/technology\/2016\/09\/07\/tinder-reveals-the-most-attractive-jobs-in-the-uk-that-make-peop\/, 7 September 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n1. Trust Leaps\n\n1. See 'Alibaba IPO: Market values e-commerce giant at $231bn in enthusiastic opening day', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/business\/live\/2014\/sep\/19\/alibaba-ipo-nyse-stock-price-live-updates, 12 November 2016, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n2. See 'Alibaba Lists on the NYSE', NYSE, https:\/\/www.nyse.com \/network\/article\/Alibaba-Lists-on-the-NYSE, 19 September 2014, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n3. 'Who rang Alibaba's IPO opening bell?', Offbeat China, http:\/\/offbeatchina.com\/who-rang-alibabas-ipo-opening-bell, 22 September 2014, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n4. See ' _Guanxi_ vs networking: Distinctive configurations of affect\u2013and cognition-based trust in the networks of Chinese vs American managers', Roy Chua, Michael Morris and Paul Ingram, _Journal of International Business Studies_ , https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1057\/palgrave.jibs.8400422, 17 July 2008, accessed 30 November 2016.\n\n5. 'Entrepreneurial Masterclass: Alibaba founder Jack Ma interviewed by Charlie Rose', BizNews, http:\/\/www.biznews.com \/interviews\/2015\/02\/09\/the-incredible-story-behind-alibabas-jack-ma-an-inspiration-that-will-span-generations\/, 9 February 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n6. 'Alibaba, JD.com Locked in War of Words', _Forbes_ , https:\/\/www.forbes.com \/sites\/ywang\/2015\/01\/09\/alibaba-jd-com-locked-in-war-of-words\/#5cc3b3926658, 9 January 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n7. 'How Jack Ma Went From Being a Poor School Teacher to Turning Alibaba into a $US160 Billion Behemoth', Business Insider, http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com.au\/the-story-of-jack-ma-founder-of-alibaba-2014-9?r=US&IR=T, 15 September 2014, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n8. 'Entrepreneurial Masterclass: Alibaba founder Jack Ma interviewed by Charlie Rose', BizNews, http:\/\/www.biznews.com \/interviews\/2015\/02\/09\/the-incredible-story-behind-alibabas-jack-ma-an-inspiration-that-will-span-generations\/, 9 February 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n9. 'Meet Jack Ma, the man behind Alibaba', Australian Financial Review, http:\/\/www.afr.com \/technology\/meet-jack-ma-the-man-behind-alibaba-20140908-jeqeh, 10 September 2014, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n10. 'Thirteen Fascinating Facts About the Man Behind the Largest IPO in History', NextShark, http:\/\/nextshark.com\/13-fascinating-facts-about-the-man-behind-the-largest-ipo-in-history\/, 23 September 2014, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n11. 'Alibaba Group', Julie Wulf, Harvard Business School Case 710-436, http:\/\/www.hbs.edu \/faculty\/Pages\/item.aspx?num=38507, 26 April 2010, last accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n12. _Alibaba's World_ , Porter Erisman, Macmillan (2015), p. 12.\n\n13. 'Jack Ma: U.S. Small Business Is Key to Alibaba's Growth', Bloomberg, https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com \/news\/articles\/2015-06-09\/u-s-small-business-key-to-alibaba-growth-outside-china-ma-says, 9 June 2015, accessed 30 January 2017\n\n14. 'Letter to Shareholders from Executive Chairman Jack Ma', Alibaba Group Investor News, http:\/\/www.alibabagroup.com \/en\/ir\/article?news=p161013, 13 October 2016, last accessed 4 May 4 2017.\n\n15. 'Squawk on the Street', CNBC, http:\/\/www.cnbc.com \/2014\/11\/11\/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-alibaba-founder-executive-chairman-jack-ma-sits-down-with-cnbcs-david-faber-today-on-squawk-on-the-street.html, 11 November 2014, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n16. See 'Trust and Consequences', Eric Uslaner, University of Maryland, http:\/\/gvptsites.umd.edu\/uslaner\/commun.pdf, accessed 30 November 2016, p. 1.\n\n17. See 'Gifts and Exchanges', essay by Kenneth Arrow, Princeton University Press (1982).\n\n18. For the distinction between generalized and personal trust, see 'Trust and Finance', Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, NBER Reporter Online, National Bureau of Economic Research, http:\/\/www.nber.org \/reporter\/2011number2\/paola&luigi.html, June 2011, accessed 1 December 2016.\n\n19. See _Trust and Power_ , Niklas Luhmann, with an introduction by Gianfranco Poggi, Wiley (1979).\n\n20. See _The Resolution of Conflict_ , Morton Deutsch, Yale University Press (1973).\n\n21. 'Entrepreneurial Masterclass: Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Interviewed by Charlie Rose', BizNews, http:\/\/www.biznews.com \/interviews\/2015\/02\/09\/the-incredible-story-behind-alibabas-jack-ma-an-inspiration-that-will-span-generations\/, 9 February 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n22. Alipay website, https:\/\/intl.alipay.com\/, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n23. See 'Jack Ma's finance business Alipay could be worth more than Goldman Sachs', Australian Financial Review, http:\/\/www.afr.com \/technology\/web\/ecommerce\/jack-mas-finance-business-alipay-could-be-worth-more-than-goldman-sachs-20160920-grkt09, 21 September 2016, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n24. See 'Alipay study: Online payments via smartphones gaining ground', _China Daily_ , http:\/\/usa.chinadaily.com.cn\/epaper\/2016-01\/13\/content_23071262.htm, 13 January 2016, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n25. See 'Eight Ringers of Alibaba's IPO Opening Bell', Women of China, http:\/\/www.womenofchina.cn\/womenofchina\/html1\/people\/others\/1409\/1036-1.htm, 23 September 2014, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n26. _Alibaba's World_ , Porter Erisman, Macmillan (2015), p. 44.\n\n27. See 'Why Alibaba's CEO had to go', _Fortune_ , http:\/\/fortune.com\/2011\/02\/22\/why-alibabas-ceo-had-to-go\/, 22 February 2011, accessed 30 January 2017.\n\n28. See 'Alibaba.com chief executive resigns', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/business\/2011\/feb\/21\/alibaba-chief-resigns-over-frauds, 21 February 2011, accessed 1 December 2016.\n\n29. See 'The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism', George Akerlof, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ , 84, 3 (1970).\n\n30. See 'The Maghribi traders: a reappraisal?' Avner Greif, _The Economic History Review_ , https:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~avner\/Greif_Papers\/2012_Greif_long_ssrn_Maghribi.pdf, May 2012, accessed 21 February 2017.\n\n31. 'Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders', Avner Greif, _The Journal of Economic History_ 49, 4 (1989), 857-83, https:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~avner\/Greif_Papers\/1989%20Greif%20JEH%201989.pdf, accessed 1 December 2016.\n\n32. _Bowling Alone_ , Robert Putnam, Touchstone Books by Simon and Schuster (2001).\n\n33. See _Trust_ , Francis Fukuyama, Free Press Paperbacks (1995), p. 10.\n\n2. Losing Faith\n\n1. 'Syphilis Victims in US Study went untreated for 40 years', Jean Heller, _New York Times,_ http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/1972\/07\/26\/archives\/syphilis-victims-in-us-study-went-untreated-for-40-years-syphilis.html, 26 July 1972, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n2. 'The Tuskegee Experiment kept killing black people after it ended', _New York Magazine_ , http:\/\/nymag.com\/scienceofus\/2016\/06\/tuskegee-experiment-mistrust.html, 15 June 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n3. _Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment_ , James H. Jones (Free Press, 1993).\n\n4. See Jean Heller's article, 'Syphilis victims in US study went untreated for 40 years', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/1972\/07\/26\/archives\/syphilis-victims-in-us-study-went-untreated-for-40-years-syphilis.html, 26 July 1972, accessed 17 May 2017.\n\n5. See _Statistical Monitoring of Clinical Trials: Fundamentals for Investigators_ , Lemuel Moy\u00e9, Springer (2006), p. 6.\n\n6. 'Clinton's Apology', Tuskegee Study, http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/tuskegee\/clintonp.htm, 16 May 1997, accessed 18 January 2017.\n\n7. 'Deaths: Final Data for 2010', S. L. Murphy, J. Xu and K. D. Kochanek, _National Vital Statistics Reports_ , 61, 4 (2013).\n\n8. The researchers used a statistical method called the 'triple-difference model' which crunched data from the General Social Survey, the National Interview Survey and the Centers for Disease and Control. See 'Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men', Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker, National Bureau of Economic Research, http:\/\/www.nber.org \/papers\/w22323, June 2016, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n9. For two great references on the study and paper, see 'A Generation of Bad Blood', _The Atlantic_ , http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/politics\/archive\/2016\/06\/tuskegee-study-medical-distrust-research\/487439, 17 June 2016, and 'Did Infamous Tuskegee Study Cause Lasting Mistrust of Doctors Among Blacks?', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2016\/06\/18\/upshot\/long-term-mistrust-from-tuskegee-experiment-a-study-seems-to-overstate-the-case.html?_r=0, 17 June 2016, both accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n10. See Joseph Ravenell's TED talk, How barbershops can keep men healthy', https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/joseph_ravenell_how_barbershops_can_keep_men_healthy\/transcript?language=en, February 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n11. The authors are clear to note that the findings shed light on the men who responded to government surveys they analysed from 1972 and the years immediately following but do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of younger African-American men today. See 'Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men', Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker, National Bureau of Economic Research, http:\/\/www.nber.org \/papers\/w22323, June 2016, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n12. The Panama Papers, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, https:\/\/panamapapers.icij.org\/, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n13. To read about how the group effort worked with the ICIJ and journalists from around the world, see 'About the Panama Papers', Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, Vanessa Wormer and Wolfgang Jaschensky, _S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung_ , http:\/\/panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de\/articles\/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4\/, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n14. 'While one journalist is looking at Indian data, it might lead them to Brazil' and subsequent quotes from Gerard Ryle, author interview, 14 July 2016.\n\n15. See 'Panama papers: Iceland PM Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson steps down', _Sydney Morning Herald_ , http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/world\/panama-papers-iceland-prime-minister-sigmundur-gunnlaugsson-offers-his-resignation-20160405-gnza99.html, 6 April 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n16. See _The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them_ , Joseph Stiglitz, W. W. Norton (2015), and 'The Great Divide', speech by Andy Haldane given at New City Agenda Annual Dinner, London, on 18 May 2016.\n\n17. For a very good paper on defining institutions, see 'What Are Institutions?', Geoffrey Hodgson, _Journal of Economic Issues_ , March 2006, p. 394, http:\/\/www.geoffrey-hodgson.info\/user\/bin\/whatareinstitutions.pdf, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n18. _The Great Degeneration_ , Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books (2014), p. 12.\n\n19. The survey question asked goes like this: 'How much of the time do you think you can trust government in Washington to do what is right\u2013a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, none at all?' See 'Trust in Government', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/5392\/trust-government.aspx, accessed 18 January 2017.\n\n20. See 'Americans' Confidence in Institutions Stays Low', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/192581\/americans-confidence-institutions-stays-low.aspx, accessed 13 June 2016.\n\n21. See 'Trust in Government', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/5392\/trust-government.aspx, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n22. See 'Americans' Confidence in Congress Falls to Lowest on Record', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/163052\/americans-confidence-congress-falls-lowest-record.aspx, 13 June 2013, and 'Americans' Confidence in Institutions Stays Low', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/192581\/americans-confidence-institutions-stays-low.aspx, accessed 13 June 2016.\n\n23. See 'Supreme Court', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/4732\/supreme-court.aspx, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n24. See 'Confidence in U.S. Banks Low but Rising', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/183749\/confidence-banks-low-rising.aspx, 22 June 2015.\n\n25. See 'Confidence in Institutions', Gallup, http:\/\/www.gallup.com \/poll\/1597\/confidence-institutions.aspx, 1\u20135 June 2016.\n\n26. Confidence rating for the church or organized religion, ibid.\n\n27. Confidence rating for newspapers, ibid.\n\n28. See 'No Front-Runner Among Prospective Republican Candidates, Hillary Clinton in Control of Democratic Primary, Harvard Youth Poll Finds', Harvard Kennedy School, http:\/\/iop.harvard.edu\/no-front-runner-among-prospective-republican-candidates-hillary-clinton-control-democratic-primary, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n29. See 'Politicians are still trusted less than estate agents, journalists and bankers', https:\/\/www.ipsos-mori.com\/researchpublications\/researcharchive\/3685\/Politicians-are-still-trusted-less-than-estate-agents-journalists-and-bankers.aspx, 22 January 2016.\n\n30. See 'Wall Street in Crisis: A Perfect Storm Looming', Labaton Sucharow's US Financial Services Industry Survey, http:\/\/www.labaton.com \/en\/about\/press\/Wall-Street-Professional-Survey-Reveals-Widespread-Misconduct.cfm, 16 July 2013, accessed 16 January 2017.\n\n31. See 'Carney puts banker's pay in spotlight after misconduct shockwaves', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/business-30079451, 17 November 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n32. For a short profile of Andrew Haldane, see 'The central banker not afraid to be blunt', _TIME_ , http:\/\/time.com\/70833\/andy-haldane-2014-time-100\/, 23 April 2014, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n33. _Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy_ , Christopher Hayes, Broadway Books (2013), p. 102.\n\n34. See 'VW labor leaders said to balk at big severance for former CEO', Bloomberg, https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com \/news\/articles\/2015-09-28\/vw-labor-leaders-said-to-balk-at-big-severance-for-former-ceo, 29 September 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n35. 'The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary', Iraq Inquiry, http:\/\/www.iraqinquiry.org.uk\/media\/247921\/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry_executive-summary.pdf, p. 48, 6 July 2016, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n36. See 'News Feed FYI: Helping Make Sure You Don't Miss Stories From Your Friends', Facebook Newsroom, http:\/\/newsroom.fb.com\/news\/2016\/06\/news-feed-fyi-helping-make-sure-you-dont-miss-stories-from-friends\/, 29 June 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n37. See 'Yahoo! Tops Twitter as a Traffic Referral Source for Digital Publishers', Parse.ly, http:\/\/blog.parsely.com\/post\/3476\/yahoo-tops-twitter-traffic-referral-source-digital-publishers\/, 26 April 2016, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n38. Bill Bishop describes this phenomenon in the offline world in _The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart_ , Mariner Books (2009). Yochai Benkler describes the online phenomenon in his book _The Wealth of Networks_ , Yale University Press (2006).\n\n39. For statistics on where people get their news from, see 'News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016', Pew Research Center, http:\/\/www.journalism.org \/2016\/05\/26\/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016\/, 26 May 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n40. The phrase 'filter bubble' was coined by MoveOn and Upworthy activist Eli Pariser, in his book _The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You_ , Penguin Press (2011).\n\n41. See 'Obama Farewell Speech Transcript', _Los Angeles Times_ , http:\/\/www.latimes.com \/politics\/la-pol-obama-farewell-speech-transcript-20170110-story.html, 10 January 2017, accessed 15 May 2017.\n\n42. See '2016 Edelman Trust Barometer\u2013Global Results', Edelman, http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/EdelmanInsights\/2016-edelman-trust-barometer-global-results, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n43. See 'Beyond the Grand Illusion', Edelman, http:\/\/www.edelman.com \/p\/6-a-m\/beyond-grand-illusion\/, accessed 18 January 2016.\n\n44. _The Prince_ , Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli, Florence (1505), chapter 18.\n\n45. See _Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy_ , Christopher Hayes, Crown Publishing Group (2012), p. 63.\n\n46. See '5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win', Michael Moore, http:\/\/michael moore.com\/trumpwillwin\/, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n47. See transcript of interview with Faisal Islam and Michael Gove from 3 June 2016, 'EU in or out?', Sky News, https:\/\/corporate.sky.com\/media-centre\/media-packs\/2016\/eu-in-or-out-faisal-islam-interview-with-michael-gove-30616-8pm, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n48. See Michael Gove LBC Interview: 'Pro-EU Experts Like the Nazis, Says Gove', LBC, http:\/\/www.lbc.co.uk\/hot-topics\/eu-referendum\/gove-compares-pro-eu-experts-to-nazis-132633\/, 22 June 2016, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n49. See 'Word of the Year 2016 is...', Oxford Dictionary, https:\/\/en.oxforddictionaries.com\/word-of-the-year\/word-of-the-year-2016, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n50. New doublespeak dictionary, see Alain de Botton, https:\/\/twitter.com\/alaindebotton\/status\/798623471735447553, 15 November 2016, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n51. See 'EU Referendum: Leave supporters trust ordinary \"common sense\" more than academics and experts', _Telegraph_ , http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2016\/06\/16\/eu-referendum-leave-supporters-trust-ordinary-common-sense-than\/, 22 June 2016, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n52. See 'TV: Diverse Ventures in News and Public Affairs', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/1972\/05\/25\/archives\/tv-diverse-ventures-in-news-and-public-affairs.html?_r=0, 25 May 1972, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n53. To measure blog stats, the number of blog posts versus the number of blogs are measured because some blogs remain dormant\/abandoned. See 'Blog posts written today', http:\/\/www.worldometers.in fo\/blogs\/, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n54. For the latest count of subreddits, according to Reddit, see 'Happy 10th birthday to us! Celebrating the best of 10 years of Reddit', Reddit blog, https:\/\/redditblog.com\/2015\/06\/23\/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating-the-best-of-10-years-of-reddit\/, 23 June 2015, accessed 5 March.\n\n55. For the latest metrics for the subreddit 'Animals Without Necks' and also a useful site to look at numbers for other subreddits, see Reddit Metrics, http:\/\/redditmetrics.com\/r\/AnimalsWithoutNecks, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n56. See 'Removing harassing subreddits', Reddit, https:\/\/np.reddit.com\/r\/announcements\/comments\/39bpam\/removing_harassing_subreddits\/, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n57. For metrics on Reddit popularity, see 'How popular is Reddit', Alexa, http:\/\/www.alexa.com \/siteinfo\/reddit.com, accessed 17 January 2017, and 'Happy 10th birthday to us! Celebrating the best of 10 years of Reddit', Reddit blog, https:\/\/redditblog.com\/2015\/06\/23\/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating-the-best-of-10-years-of-reddit\/, 23 June 2015,accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n58. See 'TIFU by editing some comments and creating unnecessary controversy', Reddit, https:\/\/www.reddit.com \/r\/announcements\/comments\/5frg1n\/tifu_by_editing_some_comments_and_creating_an\/, 30 November 2016, accessed 17 January 2017.\n\n59. See 'Petition demands Reddit CEO resign for editing Trump supporter's comments', IBTimes, http:\/\/www.ibtimes.co.uk\/petition-demands-reddit-ceo-resign-editing-trump-supporters-comments-1593459, 25 November 2016, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n60. See 'Steve Huffman should step down as CEO of Reddit', Change.org, https:\/\/www.change.org \/p\/reddit-steve-huffman-should-step-down-as-ceo-of-reddit, accessed 22 February 2017.\n\n3. Strangely Familiar\n\n1. See 'BlaBlaCar valued at', IBIS Worldwide, http:\/\/ibisworldwide.com\/2017\/news\/blablacar-valued-at-1-2bn\/, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n2. The figure for the average trip taken is from 'Something to chat about', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/business\/21676816-16-billion-french-startup-revs-up-something-chat-about, 24 October 2015, accessed 28 April 2017.\n\n3. See 'BlaBlaCar has turned ride-sharing into a multi-million-euro business', _WIRED,_ http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/blablacar, 14 April 2015, accessed 28 April 2017.\n\n4. Ibid.\n\n5. See 'BlaBlaCar: Designing for Trust Between Strangers', Next, http:\/\/nextconf.eu\/2013\/09\/blablacar-designing-for-trust-between-strangers\/, 16 September 2013, accessed 28 April 2017. The '700 million trips' is from 'BlaBlaCar has turned ride-sharing into a multi-million-euro business', _WIRED,_ http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/blablacar, 14 April 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n6. The company was renamed BlaBlaCar in 2011, ibid.\n\n7. Ibid.\n\n8. 'What is the sharing economy?', Blablacar, https:\/\/www.blablacar.com \/blog\/reinventing-travel\/sharing-economy, accessed 17 May 2017.\n\n9. For Eurostar number of travellers per year, see 'Passenger Numbers Stable', Eurostar, http:\/\/www.eurostar.com \/uk-en\/about-eurostar\/press-office\/press-releases\/2016\/passenger-numbers-stable-new-e320, accessed 16 May 2017. For BA number of travellers per year, see 'BA Traffic Stats', IAG Report 2016, http:\/\/www.iagshares.com \/phoenix.zhtml?c=240949&p=irol-traffic, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n10. Food historians are divided on who invented the California Roll. See 'Will the Real Inventor of the California Roll Please Stand Up?', Grub Street, http:\/\/www.grubstreet.com \/2012\/10\/inventor-claims-california-roll-sushi.html, 24 October 2012, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n11. See 'Sushi Industry Statistics', Statisticbrain, http:\/\/www.statisticbrain.com \/sushi-industry-statistics\/, accessed 9 September 2016.\n\n12. Steve Jobs believed that computers should be simple enough that a novice could master them based on instinct alone. In 2012, Apple moved away from this design philosophy because some of the old references like the reel-to-reel tape deck look of its podcast app was lost on younger smartphone users. See 'What is skeuomorphism?', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/magazine-22840833, 13 June 2003, accessed 28 April 2017.\n\n13. _Critique of Pure Reason_ , Immanuel Kant (1781).\n\n14. Judd Antin's interview on Dollars to Donuts podcast, http:\/\/www.portigal.com \/podcast\/, 19 January 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n15. Chris Sacca's interview on _This American Life_ , http:\/\/www.thisamericanlife.org \/radio-archives\/episode\/533\/transcript, 9 June 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n16. Inspired by Joe Gebbia's February 2016 TED talk, when he did the experiment with the audience. See 'How you can design for trust', TED, https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/joe_gebbia_how_airbnb_designs_for_trust?language=en, accessed 17 May 2017.\n\n17. 'Olympic levels of trust' and subsequent quotes from Judd Antin, author interview, 20 July 2016.\n\n18. Ibid.\n\n19. For the details of Edward Jenner's development of the smallpox vaccination see Stefan Riedel, Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, January 2005, 18(1): 21\u201325, 'Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox vaccination', NCBI, https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC1200696\/#B10, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n20. 'The Cow-Pock\u2013or\u2013the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!' by James Gillray, 1870, from the _Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum_ , volume 11, London, http:\/\/www.britishmuseum.org \/research\/collection_online\/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1638225&partId=1&people=18459&peoA=18459-1-7&page=1, last accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n21. WHO, http:\/\/www.who.in t\/csr\/disease\/smallpox\/en\/, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n22. See 'Lancet retracts 12-year-old article linking autism to MMR vaccines', _CMAJ_ , https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC2831678\/, 4 February 2010, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n23. See 'Why Don't Parents Trust Vaccines?', Sharon Kaufman, Berkeley Wellness, http:\/\/www.berkeleywellness.com \/healthy-community\/contagious-disease\/article\/why-dont-parents-trust-vaccines, 6 April 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n24. James Samuel Coleman believed that people act purposively towards their desired goals, usually acting to maximize utility with their goals and utilities shaped by values and preferences. See _Foundations of Social Theory_ , James Samuel Coleman, Harvard University Press (1998).\n\n25. See _Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers_ , Geoffrey Moore, HarperCollins (2006).\n\n26. 'You won't need a driver's license by 2040', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2012\/09\/ieee-autonomous-2040\/, 17 September 2009, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n27. 'Autonomous vehicles face exactly the same challenge' and subsequent quotes from Brian Lathrop, author interview, 17 August 2016.\n\n28. See 'Three-quarters of Americans \"afraid\" to ride in a self-driving vehicle', AAA Newsroom, http:\/\/newsroom.aaa.com\/2016\/03\/three-quarters-of-americans-afraid-to-ride-in-a-self-driving-vehicle\/, 1 March 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n29. 'Grandma freaks out self-driving Tesla\u2013you will laugh', YouTube, https:\/\/www.youtube.com \/watch?v=3-5QSZbcs-8, 15 April 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n30. See Sebastian Thrun's TED talk, 'Google's driverless car', https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car\/transcript?language=en, March 2011, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n31. See 'Global status report on road safety 2013', World Health Organization, 2013, http:\/\/www.who.in t\/violence_injury_prevention\/road_safety_status\/2013\/en\/, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n32. 'Self-Driving Cars Could Save 300,000 Lives Per Decade in America', _The Atlantic_ , https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/technology\/archive\/2015\/09\/self-driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america\/407956\/, 29 September 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n33. See 'Connected and autonomous vehicles\u2013the UK economic opportunity', KPMG, https:\/\/www.kpmg.com \/BR\/en\/Estudos_Analises\/artigosepublicacoes\/Documents\/Industrias\/Connected-Autonomous-Vehicles-Study.pdf, March 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n34. 'Self-Driving Cars Could Save 300,000 Lives Per Decade in America', _The Atlantic_ , https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/technology\/archive\/2015\/09\/self-driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america\/407956\/, 29 September 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n35. See 'Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model', Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991, http:\/\/www3.uah.es\/econ\/MicroDoct\/Tversky_Kahneman_1991_Loss%20aversion.pdf, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n36. See 'How the media screwed up the fatal Tesla accident', _Vanity Fair_ , http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com \/news\/2016\/07\/how-the-media-screwed-up-the-fatal-tesla-accident, 7 July 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n37. See 'A Tragic Loss', Tesla blog, https:\/\/www.tesla.com \/en_AU\/blog\/tragic-loss, 30 June 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n38. See 'Skype's first employee: How Taavet Hinrikus left Skype and founded TransferWise', YHP, http:\/\/yhponline.com\/2012\/03\/20\/taavet-hinrikus-transferwise\/, 20 March 2012, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n39. See 'TransferWise wants to take over the world', TechCrunch, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2015\/12\/07\/transferwise-wants-to-take-over-the-world\/, 7 December 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n40. See 'Migration and Remittance Factbook 2016', http:\/\/siteresources.worldbank.org\/INTPROSPECTS\/Resources\/334934-1199807908806\/4549025-1450455807487\/Factbookpart1.pdf, accessed 8 September 2016.\n\n41. See _Influence: Science and Practice_ , Robert Cialdini, Allyn and Bacon (2001).\n\n42. Cialdini talked about this in the following paper summarizing his work on social proof, 'Dr Robert Cialdini and 6 principles of persuasion', http:\/\/www.influenceatwork.com \/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/E_Brand_principles.pdf, accessed 16 September 2016.\n\n43. The street corner experiment is described in 'Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size', Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz, _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ , 1969.\n\n44. See _The Wisdom of Crowds_ , James Surowiecki, Doubleday (2004), p. 43.\n\n45. See TransferWise, https:\/\/transferwise.com\/au, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n4. Where Does the Buck Stop?\n\n1. This _GQ_ article covering the shooting was used as reference in the details of the story, 'The Uber Killer: The Real Story of One Night of Terror', _GQ_ , http:\/\/www.gq.com \/story\/the-uber-killer, 22 August 2016.\n\n2. See 'Kalamazoo Uber Driver had a 4.73 Rating Before Shooting Rampage', _TIME_ , http:\/\/time.com\/4233148\/kalamazoo-uber-driver-rating-shooting-rampage\/, 23 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n3. See 'Uber driver Jason Dalton charged with six counts of murder over alleged Michigan shooting rampage', ABC, http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/news\/2016-02-23\/uber-driver-charged-with-six-murders-in-us-shooting-rampage\/7191728, 23 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n4. See 'Passengers called 911 to report Uber driver before Kalamazoo shooting', Mashable, http:\/\/mashable.com\/2016\/02\/22\/kalamazoo-shooting-uber-driver-passengers\/#0sxstnSYHEqi, 23 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n5. 'Uber driver blamed, but no motive yet in killing spree', WZZM13, http:\/\/www.wzzm13.com \/news\/local\/kalamazoo\/uber-driver-blamed-but-no-motive-yet-in-killing-spree\/50399251, 22 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n6. See 'Kalamazoo Searches for Motive Spree That Killed 6', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2016\/02\/22\/us\/kalamazoo-michigan-random-shootings.html?_r=0, 21 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n7. See 'Uber failed to prioritize safety complaint on Kalamazoo suspect before shootings', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/us-news\/2016\/feb\/22\/kalamazoo-shooting-spree-jason-dalton-uber-ignored-safety-complaint, 23 February 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n8. See 'The Truth About Uber's Background Checks', FastCompany, https:\/\/www.fastcompany.com \/3050172\/tech-forecast\/the-truth-about-ubers-background-checks, 26 August 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n9. See 'The Social Costs of Uber', _University of Chicago Law Review_ , https:\/\/lawreview.uchicago.edu\/page\/social-costs-uber, 2015, accessed 15 May 2017.\n\n10. See 'Reported list of incidents involving Uber and Lyft', Who's Driving You?, http:\/\/www.whosdrivingyou.org \/rideshare-incidents, accessed 27 February 2017.\n\n11. See footage and transcript of Travis Kalanick and Fawzi Kamel: 'A new video shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with a driver over fares', Recode, https:\/\/www.recode.net\/2017\/2\/28\/14766964\/video-uber-travis-kalanick-driver-argument, 28 February 2017, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n12. For Uber valuation see 'The Billion Dollar Startup Club', _Wall Street Journal_ , http:\/\/graphics.wsj.com\/billion-dollar-club\/, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n13. 'More than 5 million' Uber passengers a day is taken from email correspondence from Alana Saltzman, Uber communications UK and Ireland, 6 June 2016.\n\n14. See 'Uber takes \"outrageous liberty\" with drivers', _Sydney Morning Herald_ , http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/business\/the-economy\/uber-takes-outrageous-liberty-with-drivers-20160413-go5m4f.html, 14 April 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n15. See 'Uber lawsuits timeline: company ordered to pay out $161.9m since 2008', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2016\/apr\/13\/uber-lawsuits-619-million-ride-hailing-app, 13 April 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n16. See 'The battle is for the customer interface', TechCrunch, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2015\/03\/03\/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface\/, 3 March 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n17. See 'Horsemeat scandal: timeline', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/uk\/2013\/may\/10\/horsemeat-scandal-timeline-investigation, 11 May 2013, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n18. 'Horsemeat scandal: where did the 29% horse in your Tesco burger come from', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/uk-news\/2013\/oct\/22\/horsemeat-scandal-guardian-investigation-public-secrecy, 22 October 2013, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n19. 'Horsemeat scandal: Dutch trader found guilty and jailed', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/world-europe-32202995, 7 April 2015, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n20. See 'The Limits of Friendship', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/www.newyorker.com \/science\/maria-konnikova\/social-media-affect-math-dunbar-number-friendships, 7 October 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n21. See _The Evolution of Cooperation_ , Robert Axelrod, Basic Books (1984).\n\n22. Ibid.\n\n23. See 'Bass Logo', Local History of Burton-on-Trent, http:\/\/www.burton-on-trent.org.uk\/category\/miscellany\/bass-logo, accessed 27 February 2017.\n\n24. 'Get back in the box thought virus#6: brand as communication', Douglas Rushkoff, http:\/\/www.rushkoff.com \/get-back-in-the-box-thought-virus-6-brand-as-communication\/, accessed 27 February 2017.\n\n25. 'Global trust in advertising', Nielsen, http:\/\/www.nielsen.com \/us\/en\/insights\/reports\/2015\/global-trust-in-advertising-2015.html, 28 September 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n26. See Joe Gebbia's TED talk, 'How Airbnb designs for trust', https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/joe_gebbia_how_airbnb_designs_for_trust, February 2016.\n\n27. 'We have to create the conditions for a relationship to form between two people who have never met' and subsequent quotes from Joe Gebbia, author interview, 27 July 2016.\n\n28. All further quotes from Alok Gupta, author interview 21 July 2016.\n\n29. 'Introducing Airbnb Verified', Airbnb blog, http:\/\/blog.airbnb.com\/introducing-airbnb-verified-id\/, 30 April 2013, accessed 27 February 2017.\n\n30. 'Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com', B. Edelman and M. Luca, Harvard Business School, http:\/\/hbswk.hbs.edu\/item\/digital-discrimination-the-case-of-airbnb-com, 24 January 2014, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n31. 'Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment', B. Edelman, M. Luca and D. Svirsky, Harvard Business School, http:\/\/www.benedelman.org \/publications\/airbnb-guest-discrimination-2016-09-16.pdf, 16 September 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n32. See 'Civil Rights Act of 1964 explained', http:\/\/civil.laws.com\/civil-rights-act-of-1964, accessed 17 May 2017.\n\n33. See 'Airbnb's Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion', Laura Murphy, Airbnb blog, http:\/\/blog.airbnb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/REPORT_Airbnbs-Work-to-Fight-Discrimination-and-Build-Inclusion.pdf?3c10be, 8 September 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n34. For @MiQL tweet see Twitter, https:\/\/twitter.com\/MiQL\/status\/675834706529673216, last accessed 17 May 2017.\n\n35. 'Prejudices play out in the ratings we give\u2013the myth of digital equality', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2017\/feb\/20\/airbnb-uber-sharing-apps-digital-equality, 20 February 2017.\n\n36. 'Airbnb's Nondiscrimination Policy: Our Commitment to Inclusion and Respect', Airbnb, https:\/\/www.airbnb.com.au\/help\/article\/1405\/airbnb-s-nondiscrimination-policy-our-commitment-to-inclusion-and-respect, last accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n37. 'Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance?', MIT Press Journals, http:\/\/www.mitpressjournals.org \/doi\/abs\/10.1162\/DAED_a_00114?journalCode=daed#.WLKUqRJ96LI, 29 September 2011, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n38. Quotes from Coye Cheshire, author interview, 16 November 2016.\n\n39. See 'Your car is a giant computer\u2013and it can be hacked', CNN Money, http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2014\/06\/01\/technology\/security\/car-hack\/index.html, 2 June 2014, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n40. 'Codebases: Millions of lines of code', Information is beautiful, http:\/\/www.informationisbeautiful.net\/visualizations\/million-lines-of-code\/, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n41. 'Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?' Maksym Gabielkov, Arthi Ramachandran, Augustin Chaintreau, Arnaud Legout, _ACM SIGMETRICS \/ IFIP Performance 2016_ , June 2016, Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France, https:\/\/hal.inria.fr\/hal-01281190, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n42. '6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says', _Washington Post_ , https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com \/news\/the-intersect\/wp\/2016\/06\/16\/six-in-10-of-you-will-share-this-link-without-reading-it-according-to-a-new-and-depressing-study\/?utm_term=.d9b38e787de3, 16 June 2016, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n43. Twitter, https:\/\/twitter.com\/seanspicer?lang=en, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n44. See 'Transcript of Simon Sinek's Millenials in the Workplace Interview', Ochen, http:\/\/ochen.com\/transcript-of-simon-sineks-millennials-in-the-workplace-interview, 4 January 2017.\n\n45. 'Facebook Tinkers with Users' Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2014\/06\/30\/technology\/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html?_r=0, 30 June 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n46. 'Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks', Cornell, https:\/\/cornell.app.box.com\/v\/fbcontagion, 25 March 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n47. 'Data Policy', Facebook, https:\/\/www.facebook.com \/policy.php, accessed 27 February 2017.\n\n48. 'Facebook and Engineering the Public: It's not what's published (or not), but what's done', Medium, https:\/\/medium.com\/message\/engineering-the-public-289c91390225#.d1x3rghwy, 30 June 2014, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n49. 'Here's what you need to know about that Facebook experiment that manipulated your emotions', Gigaom, https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2014\/06\/30\/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-that-facebook-experiment-that-manipulated-your-emotions\/, 30 June 2014, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n50. 'The Trust Engineers', RadioLab, http:\/\/www.radiolab.org \/story\/trust-engineers\/, 9 February 2015.\n\n51. See _Weapons of Math Destruction_ , Cathy O'Neil, Crown (2016), p. 183.\n\n52. 'The evolving role of news on Twitter and Facebook', Pew Research Center, http:\/\/www.journalism.org \/2015\/07\/14\/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook\/, 14 July 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n53. 'Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages are Publishing False and Misleading Information at an Alarming Rate', BuzzFeed News, https:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com \/craigsilverman\/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.qkPyQLqm8#.lcVrz58d2, 20 October 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n54. 'This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook', BuzzFeed News, https:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com \/craigsilverman\/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-newsonfacebook?utm_content=buffer20bf6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&utm_term=.apz6rG5dQ#.habG6qdrR, 17 November 2016, accessed 17 November 2016.\n\n55. 'Mark Zuckerberg says fake news on Facebook could not have influenced the 2016 election', Quartz, https:\/\/qz.com\/836079\/mark-zuckerberg-says-fake-news-on-facebook-could-not-have-influenced-the-2016-election-of-donald-trump\/, 13 November 2016, accessed 17 November 2016.\n\n56. 'Building Global Community', Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, https:\/\/www.facebook.com \/notes\/markzuckerberg\/buildingglobalcommunity\/10103508221158471\/?pnref=story, accessed 17 February 2017.\n\n57. Quotes from Joe Gebbia, author interview, 27 July 2016.\n\n5. But She Looked the Part\n\n1. See _Trust in Society_ , ed. Karen S. Cook, Russell Sage Foundation (2003), 'Chapter 5: Trust in Signs', Michael Bacharach and Diego Gambetta.\n\n2. I keep going back to Onora O'Neill's TED talk throughout the book. See Onora O'Neill, 'What we don't understand about trust', https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/onora_o_neill_what_we_don_t_understand_about_trust\/transcript?language=en, September 2013, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n3. 'Trust, Trustworthiness and Transparency', European Foundation Centre, http:\/\/www.efc.be\/human-rights-citizenship-democracy\/trust-trustworthiness-, 3 December 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n4. _Trust and Trustworthiness_ , Russell Hardin, Russell Sage Foundation (2002).\n\n5. 'Monster Mensch', _New York Magazine_ , http:\/\/nymag.com\/news\/businessfinance\/54703\/, 22 February 2009, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n6. Onora O'Neill's TED talk, 'What we don't understand about trust', https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/onora_o_neill_what_we_don_t_understand_about_trust\/transcript?language=en, September 2013, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n7. _The Truth about Trust_ , David DeSteno, First Plume Printing (2015), 'Chapter 6: Can I Trust You? Unlocking the Signals of Trustworthiness'.\n\n8. UK-based executive communications consultancy The Aziz Corporation rated UK accents for their business appeal, and Scottish accents scored highly with 43 per cent of respondents saying that the Scottish speaker sounded successful; 40 per cent found the speaker to be hardworking and reliable and 31 per cent found them the most trustworthy. See 'Scots Accent Favored for Call Centers', WallStreet & Technology, http:\/\/www.wallstreetandtech.com \/careers\/scots-accent-favored-for-call-centers-\/d\/d-id\/1256416, 26 March 2004, accessed 30 May 30 2017.\n\n9. This is work from earlier scientists studying making judgements based on facial appearance. See 'How your looks betray your personality', Roger Highfield, Richard Wiseman and Rob Jenkins, _New Scientist_ , https:\/\/www.newscientist.com \/article\/mg20126957-300-how-your-looks-betray-your-personality\/, 11 February 2009, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n10. See 'Static and Dynamic Facial Cues Differentially Affect the Consistency of Social Evaluation', _Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin_ , http:\/\/psp.sagepub.com\/content\/early\/2015\/06\/12\/0146167215591495.abstract, 22 May 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n11. See 'So you think you can be a hair braider', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2012\/06\/17\/magazine\/so-you-think-you-can-be-a-hair-braider.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all, 12 June 2012, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n12. Quote from Seth Weiner, author interview, 23 November 2016.\n\n13. Trust game experiment conducted by Li Huang and Keith Murnighan. See 'A Trusted Name', Kellogg Insight, http:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/a_trusted_name, 1 June 2011, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n14. Ibid.\n\n15. Jason Tanz wrote about how sharing-economy platforms like Lyft and Airbnb got Americans to interact and trust one another and not see meeting strangers as a huge risk. See 'How Airbnb and Lyft finally got Americans to trust each other', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2014\/04\/trust-in-the-share-economy\/, 23 April 2014, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n16. If you're logged on to Facebook and check this blog, you'll be able to see your degree of separation from everyone else. Last checked, Mark Zuckerberg has 3.17 degrees of separation; Sheryl Sandberg has 2.92. See 'Three and a half degrees of separation', Research at Facebook, https:\/\/research.facebook.com\/blog\/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation\/, 4 February 2016, accessed 4 March 4 2017.\n\n17. Sanjay Nazerali, chief strategy officer at Carat Global wrote a great post on the difference between faith and experience that helped me think through this point. See 'Faith vs experience: Building trust in the digital age', MMG, http:\/\/mandmglobal.com\/faith-vs-experience-building-trust-in-the-digital-age\/, 21 September 2015.\n\n18. 'A Question of Trust', Reith Lectures 2002, BBC Radio 4, http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/reith2002\/, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n19. Traits of trustworthiness have been reviewed extensively in trust literature. Even though leading trust researchers propose different characteristics that are responsible for trust, there are three common characteristics that appear often: competence (sometimes labelled as ability or expertise), honesty (sometimes labelled as intention, integrity, benevolence, loyalty or goodwill) and reliability (sometimes labelled as dependability or availability). See 'An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust', The Academy of Management Review, Roger Mayer, James Davis and David Schoorman study, https:\/\/www.jstor.org \/stable\/258792?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, July 1995, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n20. See _Trust and Trustworthiness_ , Russell Hardin, Russell Sage Foundation (2002), p. 6.\n\n21. See 'Graduates are stretching the truth to get work in uncertain economic times', Pre-employment Screening blog, http:\/\/pre-employment-screening.blogspot.com.au\/2009\/08\/graduates-are-stretching-truth-to-get.html, 7 August 2009, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n22. Quotes from Lynn Perkins, author interview, 25 August 2016.\n\n23. Statistic provided by Lynn Perkins, author interview, 25 August 2016.\n\n24. 'People rate everything now' and subsequent quotes from Andrea Barrett, author interview, 25 August 2016.\n\n25. See 'Web Archive: Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20141030135629\/http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2000\/12\/14\/technology\/14DOGG.html, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n26. To see a copy of the cartoon go to 'The Joy of Tech', Me.Me, https:\/\/me.me\/i\/the-joy-of-tech-in-the-1990s-on-the-internet-11890719, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n27. 'People talk a lot about reviews and ratings' and subsequent quotes from Savi Baveja, author interview, 17 November 2016.\n\n28. 'Watch lists, the National Sex Offender Registry, social media et cetera' and subsequent quotes from Anish Das Sarma, author interview, 28 September 2016.\n\n29. 'Bad data fouls background checks', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2005\/03\/bad-data-fouls-background-checks\/, 11 March 2005, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n30. See 'Indefinite punishment and the criminal record: stigma reports among expungement-seekers in Illinois', http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/wol1\/doi\/10.1111\/1745-9125.12108\/full, 8 June 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n6. Reputation is Everything, Even in the Dark\n\n1. How we view e-commerce now is so different from how it originally started, so there will be a few interpretations of how 'sold' is defined. A few contenders for the first thing sold on the internet are pizza, a Sting CD and weed. See _What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry_ , John Markoff, Penguin Books (2005).\n\n2. 'New \"Google\" for the dark web makes buying dope and guns easy', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2014\/04\/grams-search-engine-dark-web\/, 17 April 2014, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n3. The FBI estimated that Silk Road had 13,000 drug listings and had processed approximately $1.2 billion. See _The Dark Net_ , Jamie Bartlett, Windmill Books (2015), p. 136.\n\n4. Ibid.\n\n5. 'Bitcoin \"exit scam\": deep-web market operators disappear with $12m', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2015\/mar\/18\/bitcoin-deep-web-evolution-exit-scam-12-million-dollars, 19 March 2015, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n6. See 'The dark web's top drug market evolution, just vanished', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2015\/03\/evolution-disappeared-bitcoin-scam-dark-web\/, 18 March 2015, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n7. 'Technology could be used to transform an illicit drugs trade' and subsequent quotes from James Martin, author interview, 22 September 2016.\n\n8. See 'The Global Drug Survey 2014 Findings', Global Drug Survey, https:\/\/www.globaldrugsurvey.com \/past-findings\/the-global-drug-survey-2014-findings, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n9. See 'The Global Drug Survey 2016 Findings', Global Drug Survey, https:\/\/www.globaldrugsurvey.com \/past-findings\/the-global-drug-survey-2016-findings\/, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n10. See 'Taking Stock of the Online Drugs Trade', Rand Corporation, http:\/\/www.rand.org \/randeurope\/research\/projects\/online-drugs-trade-trafficking.html, 27 October 2016, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n11. 'Shedding Light on the Dark Web', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/international\/21702176-drug-trade-moving-street-online-cryptomarkets-forced-compete, 16 July 2016, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n12. 'The internet and drug markets', European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, http:\/\/www.emcdda.europa.eu\/system\/files\/publications\/2155\/TDXD16001ENN_FINAL.pdf, February 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n13. James Martin, author interview, 22 September 2016.\n\n14. '\"Fair Trade\" Cocaine and \"Conflict-free\" Opium: The Future of Online Drug Marketing', The Conversation, http:\/\/theconversation.com\/fair-trade-cocaine-and-conflict-free-opium-the-future-of-online-drug-marketing-30127, 12 August 2014, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n15. See _The Dark Net_ , Jamie Bartlett, Windmill Books (2015), p. 162.\n\n16. For statistics regarding positive reviews left on the darknet, see 'Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace', Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University, https:\/\/www.cylab.cmu.edu\/files\/pdfs\/tech_reports\/CMUCyLab12018.pdf, 28 November 2012, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n17. See 'Trust among strangers in internet transactions', Paul Resnick and Richard Zeckhauser, http:\/\/cseweb.ucsd.edu\/groups\/csag\/html\/teaching\/cse225s04\/Reading%20List\/E-bay-Empirical-BodegaBay.pdf, 20 September 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n18. For changes in Airbnb review system, see 'Building for Trust', Medium, AirbnbEng, https:\/\/medium.com\/airbnb-engineering\/building-for-trust-503e9872bbbb#.s7872icvv, 15 March 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n19. For Airbnb rating details, see 'How do star ratings work?', Airbnb, https:\/\/www.airbnb.com.au\/help\/article\/1257\/how-do-star-ratings-work?topic=207, accessed 28 October 2016.\n\n20. 'Evolution of the Future', Robert Axelrod, http:\/\/www.eleutera.org \/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/The-Evolution-of-Cooperation.pdf, 1984.\n\n21. I have spoken at length about what reputation is and how it is related to trust with Juan Cartegena, the founder of Traity. He was the first person to point out to me that reputation is best described as a 'risk premium' (not as an asset or currency) and that it has a price elasticity.\n\n22. See 'Use of Silk Road, the online drug marketplace, in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States', M. J. Barratt, J. A. Ferris, and A. R. Winstock, https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/24372954, 2014, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n23. 'Amazon targets 1,114 \"fake reviewers\" in Seattle lawsuit', BBC News, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/technology-34565631, 18 October 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n24. 'Historian Orlando Figes admits posting Amazon reviews that trashed rivals', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/books\/2010\/apr\/23\/historian-orlando-figes-amazon-reviews-rivals, 23 April 2010, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n25. 'Orlando Figes: Historian admits to writing anonymous reviews on Amazon', _Telegraph_ , http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/books\/booknews\/7622877\/Orlando-Figes-Historian-admits-to-writing-anonymous-reviews-on-Amazon.html, 24 April 2010, accessed 19 June 2017.\n\n26. 'Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/books\/2010\/apr\/23\/poison-pen-reviews-historian-orlando-figes, 23 April 2010, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n27. 'Some online reviews are too good to be true; Cornell computers spot \"opinion spam\"', http:\/\/www.news.cornell.edu\/stories\/2011\/07\/cornell-computers-spot-opinion-spam-online-reviews, 25 July 2011, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n7. Rated: Would Your Life Get a Good Trust Score?\n\n1. 'Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System', China Copyright and Media, translated by Rogier Creemers, https:\/\/chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/14\/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020\/, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n2. Ibid.\n\n3. See 'China rates its own citizens\u2013including online behaviour', _Volkskrant_ , http:\/\/www.volkskrant.nl\/buitenland\/china-rates-its-own-citizens-including-online-behaviour~a3979668\/, 25 April 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n4. 'Big Brother Ranking for All: How Would Your Life Rate?', News.com.au, http:\/\/www.news.com.au\/lifestyle\/real-life\/big-brother-ranking-for-all-how-would-your-life-rate\/news-story\/53928e0017a582e16acfa792bf51a496, 9 October 2015, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n5. See 'How China Wants to Rate Its Citizens', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/www.newyorker.com \/news\/daily-comment\/how-china-wants-to-rate-its-citizens, 3 November 2015, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n6. 'Use Big Data Thinking and Methods to Enhance the Government's Governing Capacity', China Copyright and Media, edited by Rogier Creemers, https:\/\/chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com\/2016\/07\/12\/use-big-data-thinking-and-methods-to-enhance-the-governments-governing-capacity\/, 12 July 2016, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n7. How do people get their Sesame Score? See 'Ant Financial Unveils China's First Credit-Scoring System Using Online Data', Alibaba Group, http:\/\/www.alibabagroup.com \/en\/news\/article?news=p150128, 28 January 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n8. See 'Ant Financial Subsidiary Starts Offering Individual Credit Scores', Caixin Online, http:\/\/english.caixin.com\/2015-03-02\/100787148.html, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n9. Ibid.\n\n10. _The Circle_ , Dave Eggers, Penguin Books (2014), p. 367.\n\n11. Ibid., p. 303.\n\n12. See 'China wants to give all of its citizens a score\u2013and their rating could affect every area of their lives', _Independent_ , http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/world\/asia\/china-surveillance-big-data-score-censorship-a7375221.html, 22 October 2016, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n13. See 'Mainland credit-rating network takes shape', _China Daily Asia_ , http:\/\/www.chinadailyasia.com \/business\/2015-06\/09\/content_15274221.html, 9 June 2015, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n14. See 'In China, Your Credit Score is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions\u2013And Your Friends' Political Opinions', Privacy News Online, https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com \/blog\/2015\/10\/in-china-your-credit-score-is-now-affected-by-your-political-opinions-and-your-friends-political-opinions\/, 3 October 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n15. Quotes from Rogier Creemers, author interview, 24 November 2016.\n\n16. See 'In China, Your Credit Score is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions\u2013And Your Friends' Political Opinions', Private Internet Access, https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com \/blog\/2015\/10\/in-china-your-credit-score-is-now-affected-by-your-political-opinions-and-your-friends-political-opinions\/, 3 October 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n17. See 'China's \"social credit\": Beijing sets up huge system', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/world-asia-china-34592186, 26 October 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n18. Cathy O'Neil covers this point in her excellent book about how algorithms are increasingly regulating people. See _Weapons of Math Destruction_ , Cathy O'Neil, Crown (2016).\n\n19. _Super Sad True Love Story_ , Gary Shteyngart, Random House (2010).\n\n20. 'Will Social Media Make Us Anti-Social? A Talk With Gary Shteyngart', _The Atlantic_ , http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/business\/archive\/2011\/10\/will-social-media-make-us-anti-social-a-talk-with-gary-shteyngart\/247373\/, 26 October 2011, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n21. See 'China rates its own citizens\u2013including online behaviour', _Volkskrant,_ http:\/\/www.volkskrant.nl\/buitenland\/china-rates-its-own-citizens-including-online-behaviour~a3979668\/, 25 April 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n22. See 'China's \"social credit\": Beijing sets up huge system', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/world-asia-china-34592186, 26 October 2015, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n23. See 'Orwellian Dystopia or Trustworthy Nation? Get the Facts on China's Social Credit System', Advox Global Voices, https:\/\/advox.globalvoices.org\/2016\/01\/08\/orwellian-dystopia-or-trustworthy-nation-get-the-facts-on-chinas-social-credit-system\/, 8 January 2016, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n24. See 'From the end of sesame credit \"not the same\" data source', 21jingji, http:\/\/m.21jingji.com\/article\/20150617\/0c3b29fd50dd0a4a4b2f9d9e94f9cb99.html, 17 June 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n25. 'State Council Guiding Opinions concerning Establishing and Perfecting Incentives for Promise-keeping and Joint Punishment Systems for Trust-Breaking, and Accelerating the Construction of Social Sincerity', China Copyright and Media, edited by Rogier Creemers, https:\/\/chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/30\/state-council-guiding-opinions-concerning-establishing-and-perfecting-incentives-for-promise-keeping-and-joint-punishment-systems-for-trust-breaking-and-accelerating-the-construction-of-social-sincer\/, 18 October 2016, accessed 8 March 2017.\n\n26. Ibid. See also 'China's New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything', _Wall Street Journal_ , https:\/\/www.wsj.com \/articles\/chinas-new-tool-for-social-control-a-credit-rating-for-everything-1480351590, 28 November 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n27. See 'Charlie Brooker: the dark side of our gadget addiction', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2011\/dec\/01\/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror, 2 December 2011, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n28. See 'Lessons from Luciano Floridi, the Google Philosopher', Radio National, http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/radionational\/programs\/philosopherszone\/lessons-from-luciano-floridi-the-google-philosopher\/6497872, 26 May 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n29. See _The Fourth Revolution_ , Luciano Floridi, Oxford University Press (2014).\n\n30. Bret Easton Ellis's article in the _New York Times_ about how everyone today is setting themselves up to be branded, targeted and data-mined online shaped some parts of this chapter. See 'Bret Easton Ellis on Living in the Cult of Likability', _New York Times_ , http:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2015\/12\/08\/opinion\/bret-easton-ellis-on-living-in-the-cult-of-likability.html?_r=0, 8 December 2015.\n\n31. For the proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work see 'Is it really about me? Message content in social awareness streams', Association for Computing Machinery, 2010, pp. 189\u201392.\n\n32. 'Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding', _PNAS_ , http:\/\/www.pnas.org \/content\/109\/21\/8038.full, 22 May 2012, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n33. Peeple, a people-rating app dubbed the 'Yelp for humans' was first publicized in October 2015 but faced heavy criticism. It relaunched in March 2016 after a few changes to the app. See 'Remember Peeple? It's back, and launching on Monday', _WIRED_ , http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/peeple-social-reputation-app-launched-released-download, 4 March 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n34. 'Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying \"Yelp for people\"\u2013whether you want them to or not', _Washington Post_ , https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com \/news\/the-intersect\/wp\/2015\/09\/30\/everyone-you-know-will-be-able-to-rate-you-on-the-terrifying-yelp-for-people-whether-you-want-them-to-or-not\/, 30 September 2015, accessed 9 November 2016.\n\n35. See 'Peeple Watching Webisode 1\u2013Building the people app in SF', YouTube, https:\/\/www.youtube.com \/watch?v=6YrLEL6U5o4, 5 October 2015, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n36. 'China penalizes 6.7m debtors with travel ban', _Financial Times_ , https:\/\/www.ft.com \/content\/ceb2a7f0-f350-11e6-8758-6876151821a6, accessed 15 February 2017.\n\n37. See '4.9 mln people with poor credit record barred from taking planes', Ecns.cn, http:\/\/www.ecns.cn\/2016\/11-03\/232618.shtml, 11 March 2016, accessed 15 February 2017.\n\n38. See 'Around the House: 50 years ago, an idea and $800 led to today's FICO scores', _San Gabriel Valley Tribune,_ http:\/\/www.sgvtribune.com \/business\/20160624\/around-the-house-50-years-ago-an-idea-and-800-led-to-todays-fico-scores, 24 June 2016, accessed 15 November 2017.\n\n39. Refer to 'Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003', US Government Publishing Office, https:\/\/www.gpo.gov\/fdsys\/pkg\/PLAW-108publ159\/html\/PLAW-108publ159.htm, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n40. See 'Credit score statistics', NASDAQ, http:\/\/www.nasdaq.com \/article\/credit-score-statistics-cm435901, 23 January 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n41. See 'China's \"social credit\": Beijing sets up huge system', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/world-asia-china-34592186, 26 October 2015, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n42. For annual economic loss caused by lack of credit information, see 'China's social credit system gains momentum', ChinaDaily.com, http:\/\/www.chinadaily.com.cn\/china\/2014-08\/22\/content_18472094.htm, 22 July 2014, accessed 4 August 2017.\n\n43. 'Global trade in fake goods worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year\u2013OECD & EUIPO', OECD, http:\/\/www.oecd.org \/industry\/global-trade-in-fake-goods-worth-nearly-half-a-trillion-dollars-a-year.htm, 18 April 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n44. For interview with Professor Wang Shuqin, see 'China rates its own citizens\u2013including online behaviour', _Volkskrant_ , http:\/\/www.volkskrant.nl\/buitenland\/china-rates-its-own-citizens-including-online-behaviour~a3979668\/, 25 April 2015, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n45. 'Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System', China Copyright and Media, translated by Rogier Creemers, https:\/\/chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/14\/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020\/, 25 April 2015, accessed 3 March 2017.\n\n46. 'Open Sesame\u2013Why a Digital \"Social Credit\" System Makes Sense for China', LinkedIn, https:\/\/www.linkedin.com \/pulse\/open-sesame-why-digital-social-credit-system-makes-sense-majid-%E7%BD%97%E7%B4%A0, 5 November 2015, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n47. See 'Facebook can recognise you in photos even if you're not looking', _New Scientist_ , https:\/\/www.newscientist.com \/article\/dn27761-facebook-can-recognise-you-in-photos-even-if-youre-not-looking\/, 22 June 2015, accessed 30 April 2017.\n\n48. See 'OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2015\u2013Emerging issues: The Internet of Things, OECD Publishing', http:\/\/www.keepeek.com \/Digital-Asset-Management\/oecd\/science-and-technology\/oecd-digital-economy-outlook-2015\/emerging-issues-the-internet-of-things_9789264232440-8-en#page1, 2015, accessed 5 December 2016.\n\n49. See: Zak v Bose Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 17-02928, https:\/\/assets.documentcloud.org\/documents\/3673948\/Zak-v-Bose.pdf, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n50. 'A message to our Bose Connect App customers', Bose, https:\/\/www.bose.com.au\/en_au\/landing_pages\/bose_corporation_updates.html, accessed 20 April 2017.\n\n51. See 'We-Vibes Motion For Approval of Settlement', US District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:16-cv-08655, https:\/\/assets.documentcloud.org\/documents\/3517061\/We-Vibes-Motion-For-Approval-of-Settlement.pdf, accessed 19 July 2017.\n\n52. 'Sex toy surveillance: more Wi-Fi enabled devices vulnerable to hacking', _WIRED,_ http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/we-vibe-sex-toy-surveillance, 5 April 2017, accessed 19 July 2017. Svakom has since said it has addressed the issues and that updated versions of its software were 'completely secure'.\n\n53. See 'Agreement Between TSA and TSA Pre-check Application Expansion', Agenda 21 News, http:\/\/agenda21news.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/OTA_Articles_for_Pre-check_Application_Expansion.pdf, accessed 5 December 2016.\n\n54. 'Password for social media accounts could be required for some to enter country', TechCrunch, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2017\/02\/08\/passwords-for-social-media-accounts-could-be-required-for-some-to-enter-country\/, 8 February 2017, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n55. 'A.G. Schneiderman Announces Settlement with Uber to Enhance Rider Privacy', New York State Office of the Attorney General, https:\/\/ag.ny.gov\/press-release\/ag-schneiderman-announces-settlement-uber-enhance-rider-privacy, 6 January 2016, 19 June 2017.\n\n56. See 'RoG Blog': 'Blog.Uber.com\/Ridesofglory', _Internet Archive WaybackMachine_ , https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20140827195715\/http:\/blog.uber.com\/ridesofglory, 26 March 2012, accessed 19 June 2017.\n\n57. See 'Uber to Pay $20,000 Fine Over \"God View\" Toll September 2014 Data Breach', Tech Times, http:\/\/www.techtimes.com \/articles\/122410\/20160107\/uber-to-pay-20-000-fine-over-god-view-tool-september-2014-data-breach.htm, 7 January 2016, accessed 5 December 2016.\n\n58. _The Inevitable_ , Kevin Kelly, Viking Press (2016).\n\n59. 'Why you should embrace surveillance, not fight it', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2014\/03\/going-tracked-heres-way-embrace-surveillance\/, 3 October 2014, accessed 7 January 2017.\n\n8. In Bots We Trust\n\n1. 'Believing in BERT: Using expressive communication to enhance trust and counteract operational error in physical Human-Robot Interaction', Adriana Hamacher, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, Anthony Pipe and Kerstin Eder, 2016, 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), https:\/\/arxiv.org\/ftp\/arxiv\/papers\/1605\/1605.08817.pdf, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n2. See 'People will lie to robots to avoid \"hurting their feelings\"', _WIRED,_ http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/bert-lying-robots-emotions, 23 August 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n3. See 'Trust Me: Researchers Examine How People and Machines Build Bonds', George Mason University, https:\/\/www2.gmu.edu\/news\/1849, 4 February 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n4. See 'Can we trust robots?', Mark Coeckelbergh, _Ethics and Information Technology_ , http:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/s10676-011-9279-1, 3 September 2011, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n5. My conversation with Stephen Cave in December 2016 shaped my understanding of the shift from trust in technology being based on it doing something to deciding something.\n\n6. See 'What Is a Robot?', _The Atlantic_ , http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/technology\/archive\/2016\/03\/what-is-a-human\/473166\/, 22 March 2015, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n7. 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', Alan Turing, _Mind_ , http:\/\/mind.oxfordjournals.org\/content\/LIX\/236\/433.full.pdf+html and Oxford University Press (1950).\n\n8. _Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine_ , Irving Good, http:\/\/www.kushima.org \/is\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Good65ultraintelligent.pdf and Academic Press (1965).\n\n9. See 'Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/technology-30290540, 2 December 2014, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n10. See 'Computer AI passes Turing test in \"world first\"', BBC, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/technology-27762088, 9 June 2014, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n11. 'AI Program beats humans in poker game', BBC News, http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/technology-38812530, 31 January 2017, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n12. For the price to own a Pepper robot, see 'Pepper the robot's contract bans users from having sex with it', _WIRED_ , http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/pepper-robot-sex-banned, 23 September 2015, accessed 12 January 2017.\n\n13. See 'No sex please, we're robots! Buyers of hit new \"emotional robot\" Pepper to sign contract vowing it wont be used indecently', _Daily Mail_ , http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3243051\/No-sex-robots-Buyers-hit-new-emotional-robot-Pepper-sign-contract-saying-won-t-used-sex-porno-films.html, 23 September 2015, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n14. See 'The Great Bot Rush of 2015\u20132016', Continuations, http:\/\/continuations.com\/post\/135317420600\/the-great-bot-rush-of-2015-16, 16 December 2015, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n15. See 'What Is a Robot?', _The Atlantic_ , http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com \/technology\/archive\/2016\/03\/what-is-a-human\/473166\/, 22 March 2015, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n16. Ibid.\n\n17. Statistics relating to DoNotPay from Joshua Browder, author interview, 2 March 2017.\n\n18. Tay gained 50,000 followers and produced nearly 100,000 tweets in less than twenty-four hours after her arrival on Twitter. See 'Why Microsoft's \"Tay\" AI bot went wrong', TechRepublic, http:\/\/www.techrepublic.com \/article\/why-microsofts-tay-ai-bot-went-wrong\/, 24 March 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n19. See 'Twitter taught Microsoft's AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day', The Verge, http:\/\/www.theverge.com \/2016\/3\/24\/11297050\/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist, 24 March 2016, accessed 20 May 2017.\n\n20. Andrew Karpathy explains how neural networks attempt predictive text. See 'Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU, RNN) for character-level language models in Torch', Github, https:\/\/github.com\/karpathy\/char-rnn, accessed 9 December 2016.\n\n21. 'Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2016\/mar\/24\/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter, 24 March 2016, accessed 20 May 2017.\n\n22. 'We are developing the psyche of software that will sit at the heart of virtual and animated systems' and subsequent quotes from Mark Stephen Meadows, author interview, 1 December 2016.\n\n23. See 'The Bot Politic', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/www.newyorker.com \/tech\/elements\/the-bot-politic, 31 December 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n24. See 'Public Predictions for the Future of Workforce Automation', Pew Research Center, http:\/\/www.pewinternet.org \/2016\/03\/10\/public-predictions-for-the-future-of-workforce-automation\/, 10 March 2016, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n25. See 'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?', Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, Oxford Martin School, http:\/\/www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk\/downloads\/academic\/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf, 2013, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n26. See 'An Uncanny Mind, Masahiro Mori on the Uncanny Valley and Beyond', IEEE Spectrum, http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/automaton\/robotics\/humanoids\/an-uncanny-mind-masahiro-mori-on-the-uncanny-valley, 12 June 2012, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n27. 'Now you're talking: human-like robot may one day care for dementia patients', Reuters, http:\/\/www.reuters.com \/article\/singapore-humanoid-idUSKCN0W9120, 7 March 2016, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n28. 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!' See _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , Lewis Carroll, Macmillan and Co. (1869), p. 1.\n\n29. See 'The mind in the machine: Anthropomorphism increases trust in the autonomous vehicle', Adam Waytz, Joy Heafner and Nicholas Epley, _Journal of Experimental Social Psychology_ , http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com \/science\/article\/pii\/S0022103114000067, May 2014, accessed 9 December 2016.\n\n30. See 'The Bot Politic', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/www.newyorker.com \/tech\/elements\/the-bot-politic, 31 December 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n31. See 'Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2015\/nov\/26\/hackers-can-hijack-wi-fi-hello-barbie-to-spy-on-your-children, 26 November 2015, accessed 5 December 2016. Note: ToyTalk Mattel have fixed many of the issues security analyst Andrew Blaich raised, such as removing the weaker SSLv3 ciphers from its servers. 'We are aware of the Bluebox Security Report and are working closely with ToyTalk to ensure the safety and security of Hello Barbie,' said Mattel spokesperson Michelle Chidoni.\n\n32. 'One of the key questions is how do we assess the trustworthiness of an intelligent machine?' and subsequent quotes from Stephen Cave, author interview, 6 December 2016.\n\n33. See 'Machine Ethics: The Robots Dilemma', _Nature_ , http:\/\/www.nature.com \/news\/machine-ethics-the-robot-s-dilemma-1.17881, 1 July 2015, accessed 4 March 2017.\n\n34. This is also known as Bentham's 'fundamental axiom'. See _A Fragment on Government_ , Preface, Jeremy Bentham, Cambridge University Press (1988).\n\n35. _The Right and the Good_ , William David Ross, Clarendon Press (2002).\n\n36. See _Machine Ethics_ , Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, Cambridge University Press (2011).\n\n37. ' The Ethical Robot', UConn Today, http:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/11\/the-ethical-robot\/, 8 November 2010, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n38. The trolley problem was invented by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis in the 1960s. See 'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect', Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis, http:\/\/philpapers.org\/archive\/FOOTPO-2.pdf, from the _Oxford Review_ , 1967.\n\n39. 'Rise of the machines: are algorithms sprawling out of our control?', _WIRED_ , http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/technology-regulation-algorithm-control, 1 April 2017.\n\n40. See ' Principles of robotics', Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, https:\/\/www.epsrc.ac.uk\/research\/ourportfolio\/themes\/engineering\/activities\/principlesofrobotics\/, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n41. See 'The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles' Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Bonnefon, Azim Shariff and Iyad Rahwan, _Science_ , 352\/6293, https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1510.03346, 4 July 2016, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n42. See 'Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem', _Washington Post_ , https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com \/news\/innovations\/wp\/2015\/12\/29\/will-self-driving-cars-ever-solve-the-famous-and-creepy-trolley-problem\/?utm_term=.44210b7e6797, 29 December 2015, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n43. See 'Why robots need to be able to say \"no\"', The Conversation, http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/technology-regulation-algorithm-control, 8 April 2016, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n9. Blockchain Part I: The Digital Gold Rush\n\n1. For William H. Furness's account of his experience in Yap, see _The Island of Stone Money: Uap of the Carolines_ , William H. Furness, J. B. Lippincott Co. (1910), pp. 94\u2013106.\n\n2. See 'David O'Keefe: The King of Hard Currency', _Smithsonian Magazine_ , http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com \/history\/david-okeefe-the-king-of-hard-currency-37051930\/, 28 July 2011, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n3. See 'When Bitcoin Grows Up', _London Review of Books_ , http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v38\/n08\/john-lanchester\/when-bitcoin-grows-up?utm_content=bufferc8f7f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer, 21 April 2016, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n4. See _The Island of Stone Money: Uap of the Carolines_ , William H. Furness, J. B. Lippincott Co. (1910), p. 98.\n\n5. See 'The Island of Stone Money', Milton Friedman, http:\/\/www.karlwhelan.com \/IMB\/Friedman-Yap.pdf, Stanford University, February 1991.\n\n6. For the estimated total amount of money in the world in terms of value, see _The Doctor_ , Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, Macmillan Australia (2016), p. 132.\n\n7. _Double Entry_ , Jane Gleeson-White, Allen & Unwin (2011).\n\n8. See 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System', Satoshi Nakamoto, https:\/\/bitcoin.org\/bitcoin.pdf, 24 May 2009, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n9. See 'Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency', Satoshi Nakamoto, P2P foundation, http:\/\/p2pfoundation.ning.com\/forum\/topics\/bitcoin-open-source, 11 February 2009, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n10. See 'Disruptions: Betting on a Coin with no realm', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/bits.blogs.nytimes.com\/2013\/12\/22\/disruptions-betting-on-bitcoin\/?_r=0&mtrref= www.forbes.com &gwh=EF12B4F946D4DF3A60818B678EA05D1B&gwt=pay, 22 December 2013, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n11. For the bitcoin price surge in January 2017, see 'Bitcoin Price Soars, Fueled by Speculation and Global Currency Turmoil', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2017\/01\/03\/business\/dealbook\/bitcoin-price-soars-fueled-by-speculation-and-global-currency-turmoil.html, 3 January 2017, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n12. Wei Dai, 'b-money', http:\/\/www.weidai.com \/bmoney.txt, 1998, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n13. 'Back to the Future: Adam Back Remembers the Cypherpunk Revolution and the Origins of Bitcoin', _Bitcoin Magazine_ , https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/articles\/back-future-adam-back-remembers-cypherpunk-revolution-origins-bitcoin-1441741053\/, 8 September 2015, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n14. For the number of bitcoin transactions, see 'Bitcoin Total Number of Transactions', Quandl, https:\/\/www.quandl.com \/data\/BCHAIN\/NTRAT-Bitcoin-Total-Number-of-Transactions, accessed 14 February 2017.\n\n15. For the number of bitcoin nodes, see 'Nodes', Bitnodes, https:\/\/bitnodes.21.co\/dashboard\/?days=90, accessed 14 February 2017.\n\n16. See 'The Satoshi Affair', _London Review of Books_ , https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v38\/n13\/andrew-ohagan\/the-satoshi-affair, 30 June 2016, accessed 14 February 2017.\n\n17. See 'Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First Purpose-Built Miner', _Motherboard_ , https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner, 27 March 2013, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n18. See 'In the beginning\u2013Trusted Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain' (Episode 1), https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2016\/10\/10\/watch-the-first-episode-of-our-new-series-trust-disrupted-bitcoin-and-the-blockchain\/, 10 October 2016, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n19. See 'The magic of mining', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/business\/21638124-minting-digital-currency-has-become-big-ruthlessly-competitive-business-magic, 8 January 2015, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n20. See _The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain are Challenging the Global Economic Order_ , Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, Picador (2016).\n\n21. 'Sichuan\u2013a Paradise of Food and Modern Agriculture', HKTDC, http:\/\/www.hktdc.com \/web\/featured_suppliers\/sichuan\/index.html, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n22. For the number of dams on the Min Jiang, see 'Mapping China's \"Dam Rush\"', Wilson Center, https:\/\/www.wilsoncenter.org \/publication\/interactive-mapping-chinas-dam-rush, 21 March 2014, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n23. Zhu Rei is interviewed in Episode 2 of the TechCrunch series on Blockchain. See 'Trusted Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain', TechCrunch, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2016\/10\/10\/watch-trust-disrupted-bitcoin-and-the-blockchain-episode-two\/, 10 October 2016, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n24. See 'The magic of mining', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/business\/21638124-minting-digital-currency-has-become-big-ruthlessly-competitive-business-magic, 8 January 2015, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n25. See 'How China took center stage in Bitcoin's civil war', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2016\/07\/03\/business\/dealbook\/bitcoin-china.html, 29 June 2016, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n26. See 'Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency', Satoshi Nakamoto, P2P foundation, http:\/\/p2pfoundation.ning.com\/forum\/topics\/bitcoin-open-source, 11 February 2009, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n27. See 'Missing: hard drive containing Bitcoins worth \u00a34m in Newport landfill site', _Guardian_ , https:\/\/www.theguardian.com \/technology\/2013\/nov\/27\/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site, 28 November 2013, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n28. For the list of countries that banned bitcoin, see 'Top 10 Countries in Which Bitcoin is Banned', CryptoCoinsNews, https:\/\/www.cryptocoinsnews.com \/top-10-countries-bitcoin-banned\/, 27 May 2015, accessed 2 March 2017.\n\n29. Larry Summers interviewed in Episode 1 of the TechCrunch series on Blockchain, see 'In the beginning\u2013Trusted Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain', TechCrunch, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2016\/10\/10\/watch-the-first-episode-of-our-new-series-trust-disrupted-bitcoin-and-the-blockchain\/, 10 October 2016, accessed 5 March 2017.\n\n30. See 'The great chain of being sure about things', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/briefing\/21677228-technology-behind-bitcoin-lets-people-who-do-not-know-or-trust-each-other-build-dependable, 31 October 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n10. Blockchain Part II: The Truth Machine\n\n1. 'The Dao Attacked: Code Issue Leads to $60 Million Ether Theft', CoinDesk, http:\/\/www.coindesk.com \/dao-attacked-code-issue-leads-60-million-ether-theft\/, 17 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n2. See 'Ether Price Plummets; Ethereum DAO May Be Hacked', CryptoCoinNews, https:\/\/www.cryptocoinsnews.com \/ether-price-plumets-ethereum-dao-may-be-hacked, 17 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n3. See 'Understanding the DAO Attack', CoinDesk, http:\/\/www.coindesk.com \/understanding-dao-hack-journalists\/, 25 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n4. Slock.it is a German tech start-up building 'smart locks' that connect all kinds of things\u2013cars, bikes, even a front door\u2013to the blockchain.\n\n5. See 'Why Bitcoin Matters', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/dealbook.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/21\/why-bitcoin-matters\/, 21 January 2014, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n6. 'DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide', Ethereum Blog, https:\/\/blog.ethereum.org\/2014\/05\/06\/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide\/, 6 May 2014, accessed 4 May 2017.\n\n7. 'Can this 22-year old coder out-bitcoin bitcoin?', _Fortune_ , http:\/\/fortune.com\/ethereum-blockchain-vitalik-buterin\/, 27 September 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n8. 'The Uncanny Mind that Built Ethereum', Backchannel, https:\/\/backchannel.com\/the-uncanny-mind-that-built-ethereum-9b448dc9d14f#.wmpr48it1, 13 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n9. 'Ethereum', Ethereum, https:\/\/www.ethereum.org \/foundation, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n10. 'Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part 1', _Bitcoin Magazine_ , https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/articles\/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i-1379644274\/, 19 September 2013, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n11. 'The Uncanny Mind that Built Ethereum', Backchannel, https:\/\/backchannel.com\/the-uncanny-mind-that-built-ethereum-9b448dc9d14f#.wmpr48it1, 13 June 2016, accessed 1 March 1 2017.\n\n12. Some autonomous companies exist now like Weifund, which is decentralized crowdfunding without an intermediary like Kickstarter. See http:\/\/weifund.io\/. Other examples: http:\/\/www.gdi.ch\/en\/Think-Tank\/GDI-Trend-News\/News-Detail\/Uber-without-Uber-Platform-cooperativism-as-the-new-sharing-economy.\n\n13. For the Ethereum White Paper, See 'White Paper', Github, https:\/\/github.com\/ethereum\/wiki\/wiki\/White-Paper, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n14. 'The great chain of being sure about things', _The Economist_ , http:\/\/www.economist.com \/news\/briefing\/21677228-technology-behind-bitcoin-lets-people-who-do-not-know-or-trust-each-other-build-dependable, 31 October 2015, accessed 30 May 2017.\n\n15. Ibid.\n\n16. In April 2016, Bob Sauchelli purchased his first excess energy, 195 credits for $0.07 each, directly from his neighbour, Eric Frumin, via Transactive Grid. No energy company required. See 'Ethereum Used for \"First\" Paid Energy Trade Using Blockchain Tech', CoinDesk, http:\/\/www.coindesk.com \/ethereum-used-first-paid-energy-trade-using-blockchain-technology, 11 April 2016, accessed 1 March 1, 2017.\n\n17. See Tom Standage on Babbage Podcast from _The Economist_ interview with Buterin: 'Vitalek Buterin on his long term goals for Ethereum', Bitcuners, http:\/\/blog.bitcuners.org\/post\/143849632438\/vitalik-buterin-on-his-long-term-goals-for, 4 May 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n18. 'Havocscope Black Market', Havocscope, http:\/\/www.havocscope.com \/, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n19. 'A $50 million hack just showed that the DAO was all too human', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2016\/06\/50-million-hack-just-showed-dao-human\/, 18 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n20. See 'An Open letter', Pastebin, http:\/\/pastebin.com\/CcGUBgDG, 18 June 2016, accessed 23 February 2017.\n\n21. 'Can this 22-year-old coder out-bitcoin bitcoin', _Fortune_ , http:\/\/fortune.com\/ethereum-blockchain-vitalik-buterin\/, 27 September 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n22. 'A $50 million hack just showed that the DAO was all too human', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2016\/06\/50-million-hack-just-showed-dao-human\/, 18 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n23. 'The Ethereum Hard Fork is Done', Futurism, https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-ethereum-hard-fork-is-done\/, 20 July 2016, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n24. This is a great reference for the sequence of events around the DAO attack\u2013see 'Understanding the DAO Attack', CoinDesk, http:\/\/www.coindesk.com \/understanding-dao-hack-journalists\/, 25 June 2016, accessed 12 December 2016.\n\n25. See 'A $50 million hack just showed that the DAO was all too human', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2016\/06\/50-million-hack-just-showed-dao-human\/, 18 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n26. _Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cyrptocurrencies_ , Andreas Antonopoulos, O'Reilly Media (2014).\n\n27. See 'Reid Hoffman: Why the blockchain matters', _WIRED_ , http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/article\/bitcoin-reid-hoffman, 15 May 2015.\n\n28. For Danny Hillis's interview, See 'Disney's Wizards', _Newsweek_ , http:\/\/europe.newsweek.com\/disneys-wizards-172346?rm=eu, 8 November 1997, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n29. For the number of DApps since first launched, see Ethereum, http:\/\/dapps.ethercasts.com\/, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n30. For the number of apps in the Appstore, see 'Appstore', Consensys, https:\/\/consensys.net\/static\/images\/number-of-apps.png, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n31. 'PwC Expert: $1.4 Billion Invested in Blockchain in 2016', CryptoCoins News, https:\/\/www.cryptocoinsnews.com \/pwc-expert-1-4-billion-invested-blockchain-2016\/, 9 November 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n32. See 'Introducing R3 Corda: A Distributed Ledger Designed for Financial Services', R3 blog, http:\/\/www.r3cev.com \/blog\/2016\/4\/4\/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services, 5 April 2016, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n33. 'It means the history of something, where it came from and where did it go' and subsequent quotes from Leanne Kemp, author interview, 2 March 2017.\n\n34. See 'Crime pays when provenance is broken', Everledger, https:\/\/www.everledger.io\/, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n35. For estimates of stolen art, see 'Nazi loot case: much art still untraced\u2013expert', BBC News, http:\/\/www.bbc.com \/news\/world-europe-24801935, 4 November 2013, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n36. 'Nazi Art Loot Returned', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/2016\/07\/16\/arts\/design\/nazi-art-loot-returned-to-nazis.html?_r=0, 15 July 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n37. See American Alliance of Museums website, 'Standards Regarding the Unlawful Appropriation of Objects During the Nazi Era', http:\/\/www.aam-us.org\/resources\/ethics-standards-and-best-practices\/collections-stewardship\/objects-during-the-nazi-era, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n38. 'Every product has a story' and subsequent quotes from Jessi Baker, author interview, 9 August 2016.\n\n39. See 'Walmart and IBM are Partnering to Put Chinese Pork on a Blockchain', _Fortune_ , http:\/\/fortune.com\/2016\/10\/19\/walmart-ibm-blockchain-china-pork\/, 19 October 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n40. 'World Economic Forum Annual Meeting', World Economic Forum, https:\/\/www.weforum.org \/events\/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2017, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n41. See 'Blockchain technology: Redefining trust for a global, digital economy', World Bank, http:\/\/blogs.worldbank.org\/ic4d\/blockchain-technology-redefining-trust-global-digital-economy, 16 June 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n42. See 'An interview with Hernando de Soto', McKinsey, http:\/\/www.mckinsey.com \/industries\/public-sector\/our-insights\/an-interview-with-hernando-de-soto, October 2012, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n43. _The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else_ , Hernando de Soto, Basic Books (2000).\n\n44. See _Blockchain Revolution_ , Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Portfolio Penguin (2016).\n\n45. See _Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction_ , World Bank Policy Research Report, 2003.\n\n46. 'Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Blockchain', UK Government, https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/uploads\/system\/uploads\/attachment_data\/file\/492972\/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf, 19 January 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n47. See 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System', https:\/\/bitcoin.org\/bitcoin.pdf, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n48. See 'Why Bitcoin is and isn't like the internet', Joi Ito blog, https:\/\/joi.ito.com\/weblog\/2015\/01\/23\/why-bitcoin-is-.html, 23 January 2015, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n49. For a timeline of Blythe Masters's work life, see 'Outsmarted high finance vs. human nature', _New Yorker_ , http:\/\/www.newyorker.com \/magazine\/2009\/06\/01\/outsmarted, 1 June 2009, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n50. _Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin_ , Nathaniel Popper, Harper (2016).\n\n51. See 'The Fintech 2.0 Paper: rebooting financial services', Finextra, https:\/\/www.finextra.com \/finextra-downloads\/newsdocs\/the%20fintech%202%200%20paper.pdf, 2015, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n52. See 'Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything', Bloomberg, https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com \/news\/features\/2015-09-01\/blythe-masters-tells-banks-the-blockchain-changes-everything, 1 September 2015, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n53. 'JP Morgan to pay $410 million to settle power market case', Reuters, http:\/\/www.reuters.com \/article\/us-jpmorgan-ferc-idUSBRE96T0NA20130730, 30 July 2013, accessed 10 May 2017.\n\n54. See Don and Alex Tapscott for an explanation of how the blockchain could be an ally or threat for the financial industry, _Blockchain Revolution_ : _How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World_ , Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Portfolio Penguin (2016).\n\n55. 'Goldman Sachs Files Patent for Virtual Settlement Currency', _Financial Times_ , https:\/\/www.ft.com \/content\/b0d8f614-997c-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc, 3 December 2015, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n56. For the number of banks that have a stake in R3CEV, see 'R3 Home', R3, http:\/\/r3members.com\/, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n57. The original five Bitcoin Core developers were Gavin Andresen, Wladimir J. van der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Greg Maxwell and Jeff Garzik. Gavin convinced Mike Hearn to work on Bitcoin Core, see 'Benevolent dictators and disenchanted believers: bitcoin core developers revisited', CoinFox, http:\/\/www.coinfox.in fo\/news\/reviews\/5312-benevolent-dictators-and-disenchanted-believers-bitcoin-core-developers-revisited, 15 April 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n58. See 'The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment', https:\/\/blog.plan99.net\/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.idmijyl38, 14 January 2016, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\n59. See 1993 CBC interview with John Allen, 'Tech time warp: 20 years ago, we thought the internet would bring out our nice sides', _WIRED_ , https:\/\/www.wired.com \/2014\/06\/tech-time-warp-cyber-bullies\/, 13 June 2014, accessed 1 March 2017.\n\nConclusion\n\n1. See 'In No One We Trust', Joseph Stiglitz, _New York Times_ , https:\/\/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com\/2013\/12\/21\/in-no-one-we-trust\/?_r=3, 21 December 2013, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n2. Eric's story is retold by Shivani Siroya and the Tala team through Skype and email correspondence, 18 January 2017 and 25 February 2017.\n\n3. 'We would say to her, \"Mom you work so hard and your patients never pay you\"' and other quotes from Shivani Siroya, author interview, 18 January 2017.\n\n4. See 'A smart loan for people with no credit history (yet)', TED talk, https:\/\/www.ted.com \/talks\/shivani_siroya_a_smart_loan_for_people_with_no_credit_history_yet\/transcript?language=en#t-102209, April 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n5. See 'Do Your Research Before Changing the World', Collaborative Fund, http:\/\/www.collaborativefund.com \/blog\/shivani-siroya\/, 8 March 2016, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n6. 'This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record': I have combined quotes from my interview with her and her TED speech where she makes a similar point.\n\n7. See 'An Implosion of Trust', Edelman, http:\/\/www.edelman.com.au\/magazine\/posts\/an-implosion-of-trust\/, accessed 18 January 2017.\n\n8. See 'Uber CEO on Driver 'Assault': It's Not Real and We're Not Responsible', Valleywag, http:\/\/valleywag.gawker.com\/uber-ceo-on-driver-assault-its-not-real-and-were-n-1323533057, 16 September 2013, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\n9. See 'Uber Chief's Email to Employees', _New York Times_ , https:\/\/www.nytimes.com \/interactive\/2017\/02\/03\/technology\/document-Kalanick-email.html, 3 February 2017, accessed 31 May 2017.\n\n10. 'The Second Coming', _The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats_ , Wordsworth Editions (1994).\n\n11. For a description of the current state of ceaseless adaption and change, see _The Inevitable_ , Kevin Kelly, Viking Press (2016).\n\n12. There is a beautiful post by the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned for six years for his online activity, who talks about this point. See 'The Web We Have to Save', Medium, https:\/\/medium.com\/matter\/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426#, 14 July 2015, accessed 16 May 2017.\n\nFor a comprehensive review of trust literature please visit https:\/\/www.rachelbotsman.com.\n\n# Index\n\n_2001: A Space Odyssey_ ,\n\nABP Food Group\n\nAbraxas\n\nacademics\n\nAccenture\n\naccountability ,\n\naccounting, double-entry\n\nadvertising ; _see also_ marketing\n\nAfghanistan, war contracts\n\nAfrican-Americans\n\ndistrust of health-care providers 33\u20134\n\nused for medical research in Tuskegee Study 32\u20133, ,\n\n_Age of Cryptocurrency, The_ (Vigna and Casey)\n\nAhmadinejad, Mahmoud\n\nAir France Flight 447\n\nAirbnb 6\u20137, , , 64\u20138, , 91-6,\n\naircraft, automatic pilot\n\nAire digestive tracker\n\nAirtasker\n\nAkerlof, George\n\nalcohol\n\nAlexa 172\u20133, , 193\u20134\n\nalgorithms , , 100\u2013103, , , 166\u20137, 175\u20136, , 222\u20133,\n\nAlibaba , 11\u201312, , 21\u20134, , , , 154\u20135, , ,\n\n_Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ (Carroll)\n\nAlipay , ,\n\nAlisie, Mihai\n\nAllawi, Ayad\n\nAllen, John\n\nAlphaBay\n\nAlsan, Marcella ,\n\nAmazon , , , , , , ; _see also_ Alexa\n\nAmazon Dark\n\nAmdur, Evelyn 231\u20132\n\nAmerican Alliance of Museums\n\nAmerican Automobile Association\n\nAmerican Civil Liberties Union\n\nAmerican International Group (AIG) , ,\n\nAnderson, Michael and Susan 196\u20138\n\nAndre, Carl 63\u20134\n\nAndreessen, Marc\n\nAndresen, Gavin , ,\n\nAnnan, Kofi\n\nAnnan, Kojo\n\nAnt Financial Services Group (AFSG)\n\nanthropomorphism\n\nAntin, Judd 64\u20138,\n\nanti-social behaviour 129\u201330\n\nAntonopoulos, Andreas\n\nAntpool\n\nApp Store\n\nApple ,\n\narms dealing\n\nARPANET\n\nArrow, Kenneth ,\n\nart, thefts by Nazis\n\nArthur Anderson\n\nartificial intelligence (AI) , , 181\u20132, 185\u20138\n\nAGI\n\nethical issues 196\u2013200\n\nAshley Madison\n\nAsimov, Isaac\n\nauthenticity 163\u20134\n\nautism, and MMR\n\nauto-pilots\n\nAvalon\n\navatars 188\u20139\n\nAxelrod, Robert ,\n\nB\u00e4ckstr\u00f6m, Lars\n\n_Bad Blood_ (Jones)\n\nBaihe ,\n\nBain & Company\n\nBaker, Jessi\n\nBangladesh\n\nBank of England 43\u20134\n\nBank Rossiya\n\nbankruptcy\n\nbanks , , 77\u20138, ,\n\ncharges\n\nfinancial crisis (2008) 1\u20132, 42\u20133,\n\nregulation\n\ntoxic culture\n\nBarbie doll, robotic (Hello Barbie) , ,\n\nBarclays ,\n\nBarrett, Andrea\n\nBartlett, Jamie\n\nBass Brewery\n\nBates, James Andrew\n\nBaveja, Savi 128\u201330, ,\n\nBBC ,\n\nBear Stearns\n\nBellini, Giovanni\n\nBenghazi attack\n\nBentham, Jeremy\n\nBerkowitz, Lawrence\n\nBetter Business Bureau\n\nbetting 226\u20137\n\nBHS, pension fund fiasco\n\nBianchi-Berthouze, Nadia\n\nBickman, Leonard\n\nBitAngels\n\nBitcloud\n\nbitcoin , 135\u20136, , 207\u20139, , , 238\u20139\n\ndouble-spending problem 209\u201310\n\nmining 211\u201316,\n\nvulnerability 214\u201317\n\n_see also_ blockchain\n\nBitcoin Core\n\nBitcoin Foundation\n\n_Bitcoin Magazine_\n\n_Bitcoin Weekly_\n\nBitfinex\n\nBitfloor\n\nBitfury\n\nBitland\n\nBlaBlaCar 56\u20138, , ,\n\n_Black Mirror_ 161\u20136\n\nBlackBank ,\n\nBlair, Tony\n\nBlazer, Chuck\n\nBlecharczyk, Nate ,\n\nBletchley Park\n\nblockchain , , 208\u201315, , , , 220\u201321, ,\n\nfuture of , 238\u201340,\n\nscalability\n\nuse in banking 239\u201344\n\nuse in smart contracts 226\u20137\n\nuse in tracking diamonds and art works 234\u20137\n\nuse in tracking drugs supply chain\n\nB-Money\n\nBolivia\n\nBose 171\u20132\n\nBotanic.co\n\nbots ; _see also_ artificial intelligence (AI); chatbots; robots\n\nBotton, Alain de\n\nBourdieu, Pierre\n\nBowles, Thomas Gibson\n\n_Bowling Alone_ (Putnam)\n\nBowman, Dave\n\nBP, Deepwater Horizon oil spill\n\nbrands , 89\u201392,\n\nBrands, Stephan\n\nBrexit , 47\u201350\n\nbribery\n\nBritish Virgin Islands\n\nBrooker, Charlie 161\u20132\n\nBrowder, Joshua\n\nBrown, Joshua\n\nBrusson, Nicolas\n\nBuffett, Warren\n\nBumble\n\nBush, George W. ,\n\nButerin, Vitalik 221\u20135, 228\u20139, ,\n\nBuzzFeed ,\n\nCabra, Mar\n\nCalifornia roll principle , ,\n\nCameron, David ,\n\nCameron, Ian ,\n\n\u010capek, Karel\n\nCarney, Mark 43\u20134\n\nCarroll, Lewis\n\nCarruthers, Tiana\n\ncars\n\naccidents 73\u20134\n\nbuying ,\n\nself-driving , , 71\u20135, , , , 193\u20134, 198\u2013201\n\n_see also_ ride-sharing\n\ncartoons 127\u20138\n\nCasey, Michael\n\nCatholic church, abuse scandal\n\nCave, Stephen 194\u20135, 201\u20132\n\nCBS 51\u20132\n\nCerf, Vincent\n\nChain\n\nChange.org\n\nchatbots , , , 184\u20138,\n\nChaum, David\n\nCheshire, Coye , 99\u2013100\n\nChesky, Brian , 92\u20133\n\nchess\n\nChilcot inquiry 44\u20135\n\nchild abuse ,\n\nchildcare 117\u201319, 125\u20136, 132\u20133\n\nby robots\n\nChina 11\u201316, 21\u20134\n\nattitudes to political dissent 154\u20135\n\nattitudes to trust in business relationships 12\u201313\n\nhub of bitcoin economy\n\npunishments for trust-breaking 160\u201361,\n\nSocial Credit System (Citizen Scores) 150\u201361, 166\u201370, ,\n\nChina Pages\n\nChina Rapid Finance\n\nChou, Jimmy 182\u20133\n\nChristin, Nicholas\n\nChromaWay\n\nChuxing, Didi\n\nCialdini, Robert\n\n_Circle, The_ (Eggers)\n\nCiti Ventures\n\nCitibank\n\nCitigroup\n\ncitizen science\n\nCitizen Scores _see_ Social Credit System (Citizen Scores)\n\nclergy, declining trust in\n\nclickbait ,\n\nclimate change ,\n\nClinton, Bill\n\nClinton, Hillary , 48\u20139\n\nemail scandal ,\n\nClinton Foundation 48\u20139\n\nCoca-Cola\n\nColbert, Stephen\n\nColeman, James Samuel ,\n\nCollins, Victor 172\u20133\n\nColu 225\u20136\n\nCommunism\n\ncommunities 28\u20139,\n\ncommuting\n\ncompetence\n\nCongress, trust in\n\nconsent, and online data 101\u20133\n\nCopernicus\n\nCordray, Julia\n\nCortana\n\ncounterfeit goods 168\u20139, ,\n\nCoVoiturage _see_ BlaBlaCar\n\nCraigslist\n\ncredit cards ,\n\nCredit Mobilier Scandal\n\ncredit ratings , , 167\u20138,\n\nCreemers, Rogier , ,\n\ncriminal justice system, biases in\n\n_Critique of Pure Reason_ (Kant)\n\nCronkite, Walter 51\u20132\n\ncrowd persuasion 78\u20139\n\ncrowdfunding , 219\u2013220,\n\ncryptocurrencies , 225\u20136, , 242\u20133; _see also_ bitcoin; Ethereum\n\ncryptomarkets 137\u201341; _see also_ darknet\n\ncurrencies 207\u20138\n\nCVs\n\nCypherpunk\n\nDahan, Mariana\n\nDai, Wei\n\nDalton, Carole 82\u20133\n\nDalton, Jason Brian 81\u20135, ,\n\nDAO _see_ Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)\n\n_Dark Net, The_ (Bartlett)\n\ndarknet 8\u20139, 134\u201349, ,\n\nbranding and marketing on 140\u201341\n\nexit scams 136\u20138\n\nDarkNet Market Avengers 148\u20139\n\nDarkNetMarkets\n\nDarling, Kate\n\nDarwin, Charles\n\ndata breaches\n\ndata-mining 171\u20132,\n\nDatecheck\n\ndating, online 6-7,\n\nDe Beers\n\ndecentralization 223\u20134\n\nDecentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) , 219\u201321, 226\u201330,\n\ndecision-making\n\nDeep Blue\n\nDeepwater Horizon oil spill\n\nDegas, Edgar\n\nDeliveroo\n\nDeloitte\n\ndementia 192\u20133\n\nDeSteno, David\n\nDeutsch, Morton\n\ndiamonds 231\u20135,\n\ndiesel cars ,\n\nDigital Asset Holdings (DAH) 240\u20131, ,\n\ndigital disruption\n\ndigital wallets\n\nDigix\n\ndiscrimination 95\u20136\n\nDiscusFish 215\u201316\n\nDisney\n\ndoctors 27\u20138,\n\nDoe, John 34\u20135\n\ndomestic staff 108\u201311; _see also_ childcare\n\nDomino's\n\nDoNotPay\n\ndoublespeak\n\n_Downton Abbey_\n\ndriverless vehicles _see_ cars, self-driving\n\ndrugs (illegal)\n\non the darknet 134\u201349\n\nethical branding\n\nquality of 140\u201341, , 148\u20139\n\ndrugs (medical) ,\n\npricing ,\n\n_Drugs on the Dark Net_ (Martin)\n\nDubai\n\nDunbar, Robin\n\nDunton, Marc ,\n\nEagle Rising\n\neBay , 25\u20136, , , ,\n\necho chambers , 45\u20137\n\n_Economist, The_ ,\n\neconomists, lack of trust in 49\u201350\n\nEdelman, Ben\n\nEdelman, Richard , , 249\u201350\n\nEder, Kerstin\n\nEggers, Dave ,\n\nEinstein, Albert\n\nelection 2016 (USA) 104\u20135\n\nelites, declining trust in , , 49-50, 115\u201316,\n\nELIZA program\n\nemotional contagion 100\u2013103\n\nemployment\n\naffected by trust ratings 160\u201391\n\nof robots 190\u201391\n\nEnergy Control\n\n_Energy_ magazine\n\nengineering\n\nEnron\n\nenvironmental issues\n\nEqual Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)\n\n_Equivalent VIII_ (Andre) 63\u20134\n\nErisman, Porter\n\nErnst & Young\n\nescrow ,\n\nETHER (cryptocurrency)\n\nEthereum , 224\u20135, 227\u20139, ,\n\nEtsy ,\n\nEU referendum _see_ Brexit\n\nEuro\n\nEuropean Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)\n\nEverledger 234\u20135, ,\n\nEvolution 136\u20137,\n\n_Evolution of Cooperation, The_ (Axelrod) ,\n\nexit scams 136\u20138\n\nexpenses scandal, MPs'\n\nexperts, lack of trust in 49\u201350\n\n_Exxon Valdez_ oil spill 239\u201340\n\nEyal, Nir\n\nF2Pool\n\nFacebook , , , , , ,\n\nData Use Policy 101\u20132\n\nemotional contagion experiment 100\u2013103\n\nneutrality\n\nas a news source 46\u20137, 103\u20136\n\n_onlife_ personalities\n\nand social connectedness 121\u20132\n\n_see also_ 'fake news'; Zuckerberg, Mark\n\nfaces, and perceptions of trustworthiness\n\nfacts, 'alternative'\n\nFair, Bill\n\nfake goods 168\u20139, ,\n\n'fake news' 4\u20135, , 104\u20136\n\nFannie Mae ,\n\nFarmville (online shop)\n\nFederal Reserve\n\nfeedback , , , , , 161\u20134\n\non the darknet 142\u20133\n\nfake or padded 146\u20138,\n\nimpact of ,\n\npressure to leave high scores\n\n_see also_ reviews; Social Credit System (Citizen Scores)\n\nfei (currency) 203\u20134\n\nFerguson, Niall\n\nfiat system\n\nFICO\n\nFIFA ,\n\nFiges, Orlando 147\u20138\n\nfilter bubble effect\n\nfinancial crisis (2008) 1\u20132, 42\u20133,\n\nFinancial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC)\n\nfinancial institutions, declining trust in 43\u20134\n\nFinley, Klint\n\nFinney, Hal\n\nFitbit ,\n\nFiverr\n\nFloridi, Luciano\n\nfollowers (social media) ,\n\nfood security 168\u20139\n\nfootball (soccer) ,\n\n_Forbin Project_\n\nFord\n\nformula milk, contaminated\n\nForster, David\n\nFreddie Mac\n\nfree speech\n\nfreelancers\n\nFreeman, Jon 113\u201314\n\nFreud, Sigmund ,\n\nFrey, Carl Benedikt\n\nFriedman, Milton\n\nfriends\n\nrating online 164\u20135\n\nand trust stimulation 119\u201320\n\nFriis, Janus\n\nFukuyama, Francis\n\nFuld, Dick\n\nfulfilment capacity\n\nFurness, William Henry III 203\u20135\n\nGallup\n\nGap\n\nGarside, Juliette\n\nGasc\u00f3n, George\n\nGates, Bill 181\u20132,\n\nGebbia, Joe , , , ,\n\nGeneral Foods\n\n'gig' workers\n\nGitHub\n\nGlobus, Amy\n\nGoldman Sachs , 241\u20133\n\nGood, Irving John\n\nGoodwin, Tom\n\nGoogle , , ,\n\nGore, Al\n\nGove, Michael\n\ngovernment, trust in\n\nGPS tracking\n\nGrams\n\n_Great Degeneration, The_ (Ferguson)\n\ngreed\n\nGreyball software\n\n_guanxi_ ,\n\n_Guardian_ ,\n\nGuare, John\n\nGunnlaugsson, Sigmundur Dav\u00ed\u00f0\n\nguns , ,\n\nGuo, Yifu 211\u201315\n\nGupta, Alok 93\u20134\n\nhacking , , , , 227\u20138,\n\nHaldane, Andy\n\nHamacher, Adriana 177\u20138\n\nHangzhou 13\u201315\n\nHangzhou Telecom\n\nHanyecz, Laszlo\n\nHappn\n\nhard fork 228\u201330,\n\nHardin, Russell\n\nhate language\n\nHavocscope\n\nHawking, Stephen 181\u20132, ,\n\nHayes, Christopher ,\n\nHBOS\n\nhealthcare , 33\u20134,\n\nHeap, Imogen\n\nHearn, Mike 243\u20134\n\nHeller, Jean 31\u20132\n\n_Her_\n\nHillis, Danny\n\nHinrikus, Taavet 76\u20138\n\nhitchhiking\n\nHoffman, Reid\n\nhomophily 46\u20137\n\nhonesty , 123\u20134, ,\n\n_Hooked_ (Eyal)\n\nhousing shortage\n\nHowells, James\n\nHuffington, Arianna\n\nHuffman, Steve 52\u20134\n\nHuman Right Watch China\n\nhuman rights organizations\n\nHussein, Saddam\n\nHyperledger\n\nIBM\n\nIceland\n\nidentity, digital ,\n\nimmunization 68\u201370\n\n_Inevitable, The_ (Kelly)\n\ninformation, asymmetry in\n\ninfosphere\n\ninfrastructure, social\n\nIngram, Paul\n\nInstagram , ,\n\nInstant Trust software 128\u201330\n\ninstitutions, trust in , 40\u201341, 47\u20138\n\nintegrity , , ,\n\nintellectual property\n\nInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) 36\u20138\n\ninternet , ,\n\n'right to be forgotten'\n\nInternet of Things (IOT)\n\nInternet Protocol\n\niPhone design 62\u20133\n\nIpsos MORI\n\nIraq War , ,\n\nIsaac, Earl\n\nIslam, Faisal\n\nIspa-Landa, Simone\n\nIto, Joi\n\nivory poaching\n\nJenner, Edward 68\u20139\n\nJentzsch, Christoph and Simon ,\n\nJeopardy\n\njob hunting 125\u20136\n\nJobs, Steve , 62\u20133,\n\nJohn Deere\n\nJones, James H.\n\nJones, Jeff\n\njournalism 36\u20138,\n\n_Joy of Tech_\n\nJP Morgan Chase 239\u201340,\n\nK\u00e4\u00e4rmann, Kristo\n\nKahn, Robert\n\nKahneman, Daniel\n\nKalamazoo, killings by Uber driver 81\u20135, , ,\n\nKalanick, Travis 85\u20136,\n\nKamel, Fawzi 85\u20136\n\nKant, Immanuel\n\nKarahalios, Karrie\n\nKarinthy, Frigyes\n\nKarpel\u00e8s, Mark Robert\n\nKarzai, Hamid\n\nKaufman, Sharon\n\nKelly, John\n\nKelly, Kevin\n\nKemp, Leanne 233\u20136,\n\nkickbacks\n\nKickstarter\n\nKim, Dong\n\nKimberley Process\n\nKing, David III\n\nKlout scores\n\nKnC Mine\n\nknowledge, collective\n\nKPMG\n\nKramer, Adam D. I. 100\u2013102\n\nKress-Gazit, Hadras\n\nKrueger, Frank\n\nLabaton Sucharow 43\u20134\n\nLacey, Sara\n\n_Lady, The_ 108\u20139, ,\n\nLagerkvist, Johan\n\nLanchester, John\n\nLathrop, Brian 71\u20133,\n\nLava soap\n\nlawyers 115\u201317,\n\nledger technology _see_ blockchain\n\nLee, Elvis\n\nLeeson, Nick\n\nLegout, Arnaud\n\nLehman Brothers ,\n\nlemons, market for\n\nLes, Jason\n\nLewis, Ken\n\nLibor scandal\n\nLibratus (robot poker player) 182\u20134\n\nlicensing rules\n\nlife expectancy\n\n'likes' _see_ feedback\n\nLinkedIn , ,\n\nLinux ,\n\nLishi, Lao\n\nloans , , 246\u20139\n\npeer-to-peer\n\nselling risk\n\nLocomotive Act\n\nLoeffler, Charles\n\nLondon Stock Exchange\n\nloss aversion\n\nLouvre\n\nlove\n\nLowercase Capital\n\nloyalty schemes\n\nLuhmann, Niklas\n\nMa, Jack 11\u201316, 20\u201324, 29\u201330,\n\nMachiavelli, Niccol\u00f2\n\nMadoff, Bernie , ,\n\nMaghribi traders 26\u20137, , ,\n\nMajid, Rasul 168\u201370\n\nmarketing 90\u201392, 146\u20137; _see also_ advertising\n\nmarriage ,\n\nMarriot hotels 91\u20132\n\nMars\n\nMartin, James 137\u20139, ,\n\nMashita, Ichiro\n\n_Mastering Bitcoin_ (Antonopoulos)\n\nMasters, Blythe 239\u201342\n\nMattel\n\nMazzella, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric 57\u201360,\n\nMcAuley, Daniel\n\nMcCullough, Nicole\n\nMcFarland, Matt\n\nMeadows, Mark 188\u201390\n\nmeat 87\u20138\n\nmedia, trust in ,\n\nmedical ethics ,\n\nmedical research 31\u20132\n\nMedici Bank\n\nMellen, Matt ,\n\nMerrill Lynch\n\nMessi, Lionel ,\n\nMichael, Emil\n\nMicrosoft, rogue chatbot 185\u20138\n\nMiddle Earth\n\nMilgram, Stanley\n\nMill, John Stuart\n\nmillennials, distrust of institutions\n\nmisogyny 52\u20133,\n\nMIT Media Lab ,\n\nMitchell, Jason\n\nMMR vaccine\n\nMobotiq\n\nModel T Ford\n\nmonarchy\n\n_Monde, Le_\n\nmoney , 203\u20136\n\ntransferring overseas 76\u20138\n\nmoney laundering ,\n\nMonuments Men\n\nMOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)\n\nmoon landing\n\nMoore, Andrew\n\nMoore, Michael\n\nmoral duty 196\u20137\n\nMori, Masahiro 191\u20132\n\nMossack Fonseca , ,\n\nMPs' expenses scandal\n\nMr Nice\n\nMt Gox ,\n\nMurnighan, John Keith 119\u201320\n\nMurphy, Laura W.\n\nmuseums\n\nMusk, Elon , 181\u20132,\n\nmySociety\n\nNakamoto, Satoshi 206\u20137, 208\u201310, ,\n\nNappez, Francis\n\nNASA\n\nNasdaq\n\nNational Press Club\n\nNational Roads and Motorists' Association (NRMA) 18\u201319\n\nNational Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC)\n\nNational Security Agency (NSA)\n\nNazis, art stolen from Jews\n\nNBC\n\nNest Learning Thermostat\n\nNetflix ,\n\nNetscape\n\nneuroscience\n\nNew Balance\n\nNew York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ,\n\nnews, online ,\n\nnewspapers, decline of\n\nNike\n\nNixon, Richard\n\nNobel Peace Prize\n\nNorthern Rock\n\nNorton, Ed\n\nnurses\n\nObama, Barack ,\n\nObama Care\n\nObermayer, Bastian 34\u20136,\n\nOccupy Democrats\n\nOECD\n\nOffice for Human Research Protections\n\nO'Hagan, Andrew\n\nOhanian, Alexis\n\nOmidyar, Pierre\n\nO'Neil, Cathy\n\nO'Neill, Onora, Baroness 112\u201313,\n\n_Onion, The_\n\nonion sites _see_ darknet\n\n_onlife_\n\nonline payments 59\u201360,\n\nonline profiles\n\nOpen Ledger Project\n\nopen-source projects\n\nOpenTable\n\nOrwell, George ,\n\nOsborne, Michael\n\nOthello\n\nOxford, University of , , ,\n\nOxo\n\nOzcoin\n\nPacioli, Luca Bartolomeo de\n\nPalmer, Stephanie\n\nPan Paper Village\n\nPanama Papers , 34\u20139,\n\nPandora\n\nPariser, Eli\n\nPatreon\n\npayment systems , 59\u201360,\n\nPayPal\n\nPeeple 164\u20135,\n\npeer-to-peer lending\n\npensioners\n\nPepper (robot)\n\nPerkins, Lynn 117\u201320, , , 132\u20133,\n\nPeterson, Ron\n\nPetrobras scandal\n\nPew Research Center\n\npharamaceutical pricing ,\n\nphilosophy\n\nPhipps, James\n\nPicasso, Pablo\n\nPipe, Anthony\n\npizza\n\npoisonings\n\npoker 182\u20133\n\nPolar, Hernando de Soto\n\npolitical campaigns, funding\n\nPolonsky, Rachel\n\nPope Francis\n\npornography ,\n\nPoroshenko, Petro\n\npost-truth ,\n\nPot Day\n\npredictive analysis\n\nPricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) , ,\n\nprivacy\n\nProcter and Gamble\n\nprovenance 232\u20135\n\nof art works 235\u20136\n\nPutin, Mariya\n\nPutin, Vladimir, links to Panama Papers ,\n\nPutnam, Robert 28\u20139\n\nQixcoin\n\nQuan, Wen\n\nQueen Elizabeth II ,\n\nR3CEV\n\nracism , 52\u20133, 91\u20136\n\nratings _see_ feedback; reviews\n\n_Raubkunst_\n\nRavenell, Joseph 33\u20134\n\nReddit , 52\u20134, , ,\n\nrefugees ,\n\nRei, Zhu\n\nreliability ,\n\nreligion\n\nreputation, and trustworthiness 144\u20136\n\nreputation capital\n\nreputation trails\n\nrestaurants\n\nreviews 8\u20139,\n\ndeceptive or fake 146\u20138\n\n_see also_ feedback\n\nRice Krispies\n\nride-sharing 56\u201361,\n\n_Right and the Good, The_ (Ross)\n\nrisk\n\naversion to 74\u20135\n\nrobots 180\u2013202\n\nas dementia companions 192\u20133\n\nethical issues 185\u20138, 196\u2013201\n\nfictional 180\u201381,\n\nand the future of human employment 190\u201391\n\ngiven human-like qualities 177\u20138\n\nfor human assistance 192-6\n\nresponsibility for 188\u201390,\n\ntrusting 177\u20138, 190\u201391, 194\u20135\n\nused in medical diagnosis\n\n_see also_ artificial intelligence (AI); chatbots\n\nRogers, Brishen\n\nRoldugin, Sergei\n\nRoomba\n\nRoss, William David 196\u20137\n\n_R.U.R._ (Capek)\n\nRushkoff, Douglas\n\nRyle, Gerard 36\u20138,\n\nSacca, Chris 65\u20136\n\nSa\u00efd Business School\n\nSainsbury's\n\nSalvation Army\n\nSandholm, Tuomos\n\nSantander InnoVentures\n\nSarma, Anish Das 128\u20139\n\n'The Satoshi Affair' (O'Hagan)\n\nSaudi Arabia\n\nscandals, and erosion of trust 40\u201341\n\nScheutz, Matthias\n\nSchlessinger, Lucas\n\nSchneiderman, Eric\n\nscience fiction 180\u201381,\n\nScientology\n\nScrabble\n\nSegment.io\n\nself-driving cars _see_ cars, self-driving\n\nService, Robert\n\nSesame Credit 152\u201360\n\nSETLcoin 242\u20133\n\nsettlement lag\n\nSharif, Nawaz\n\nshopping habits, used for data-mining 152-4, 171\u20132\n\nShteyngart, Gary\n\nShuka, Anshul\n\nSicily 26\u20137\n\nSilk Road 135\u20136, , 140\u201342, , ,\n\nSilkRoad4\n\nSilvercrest\n\nSiri , ,\n\nSiroya, Shivani 247\u20139\n\n'Six Degrees of Separation' theory\n\nskeuomorphism\n\nSkype\n\nslack (app)\n\nSlideshare\n\nSlock.it ,\n\nslogans\n\nsmallpox 68\u20139\n\nsmart contracts ,\n\nSmith, Adam\n\nSmith, Nathan\n\nSmith, Tyler and Rich\n\nSnowden, Edward\n\nsocial capital 28\u20139\n\nSocial Credit System (Citizen Scores) 150\u201360, 168\u201370, ,\n\nbeing above the system\n\npunishments for low ratings 160\u201361, 166\u20137\n\nsocial graph\n\nsocial media\n\nextreme vetting of 173\u20134\n\ninfluential users\n\nrewards of disclosing information\n\nright to delete\n\nsocial networks , , ,\n\nsocial proof 78\u20139\n\nsocial translucence 99\u2013100\n\nsock puppetry\n\nSolidity\n\n_SonntagsZeitung_\n\nSony\n\nSpicer, Sean\n\nSpielberg, Steven\n\nSpotify ,\n\nStack Overflow\n\nStarbucks\n\nstealth, by darknet sellers\n\nSteinberg, Tom\n\nSteiner, Peter 127\u20138\n\nStiglitz, Joseph\n\nstrangers, fear of 55\u20136, 58\u20139, 66\u20137\n\nStreet Corner Experiment\n\n_S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung_\n\nSullivan, Joe\n\nSummers, Larry\n\n_Super Sad True Love Story_ (Shteyngart)\n\nsupply chains 232\u20133,\n\nSurowiecki, James 78\u20139\n\nsurveillance, online 151\u201361, 171\u20134\n\nsushi\n\nSvakom Siime Eye\n\nsyphilis 31\u20132\n\nSzabo, Nick 209\u201310\n\nTala 246\u201350\n\nTamir, Diana\n\nTanz, Jason\n\nTao, Hu\n\nTaobao ,\n\nTarget\n\nTaskrabbit\n\nTate\n\nTate Modern\n\nTay 185-8,\n\ntax avoidance , 38\u201340\n\ntaxi drivers ; _see also_ Uber\n\nteachers, rating\n\ntechnology, trust in , , 177\u20139\n\nTED talks , , ,\n\nTencent ,\n\n_Terminator_\n\nTesco\n\nhorsemeat scandal 87\u20138,\n\nTesla 50\u201351,\n\nself-driving cars ,\n\nTexas Hold 'Em\n\nThalmann, Nadia 192\u20133\n\nTinder , ,\n\nTingle\n\nTmall ,\n\ntobacco\n\nTokyo Kaikan\n\nTor\n\nTorvalds, Linus\n\ntrademarks\n\ntraffic regulations\n\nTransactive Grid\n\nTransferWise 76\u20139\n\n_Transformers_\n\nTransmission Control Protocol\/Internet Protocol (TCP\/IP)\n\nTripAdvisor ,\n\ntrolling 53\u20134\n\nTrooly 128\u201332,\n\nTrump, Donald , 47\u20138, 104\u20135,\n\nextreme vetting proposals 173\u20134\n\nas a Washington 'outsider'\n\ntrust\n\naffect-based\n\ncognition-based\n\ndefinitions of 16\u201320\n\ndistributed 8\u20139, 50\u201351, , , 252\u20135,\n\ngeneralized ,\n\nhierarchy of needs\n\ninstitutional ,\n\ninterpersonal\n\nlocal ,\n\npersonal ,\n\nshared\n\nspeed and ease of\n\nsystem\n\n'trustless'\n\n_Trust_ (Fukuyama)\n\n_Trust and Trustworthiness_ (Hardin)\n\nTrust Barometer ,\n\ntrust blockers ,\n\ntrust deficits ,\n\ntrust engineers , ,\n\ntrust games 119\u201320\n\ntrust gaps\n\ntrust influencers , ,\n\ntrust leaps 24\u20135, , , ,\n\ntrust pause ,\n\ntrust scar\n\ntrust score\n\ntrust shift\n\ntrust signals ,\n\ntrust stack 60\u201361, , ,\n\ntrust vacuum\n\ntrusted intermediaries\n\nTrustPass\n\ntrustworthiness 112\u201313, 122\u20135, ,\n\nand appearance\n\nassessing online 128\u201333\n\nof citizens 151\u20136\n\non the darknet 140\u201341\n\nof machines 190\u201391, 194\u20135\n\nTrusty, Stuart\n\n_Truth About Trust, The_ (DeSteno)\n\nTual, Stephen\n\nTufecki, Zeynep\n\nTuring, Alan\n\nTuring Pharmaceuticals\n\nTuring test 181\u20132\n\nTuskegee Study 31\u20133, ,\n\nTversky, Amos\n\n_Twilight of Elites_ (Hayes)\n\nTwitter , , , ,\n\nsharing unread links 98\u20139\n\n_Twitter and Tear Gas_ (Tufecki)\n\nUber 6\u20138, , , , , ,\n\n#DeleteUber protest\n\nabuse and harassment allegations 85\u20137\n\nGod View\n\nKalamazoo killings by driver 81\u20135, ,\n\nsurveillance of customers\n\nterms of service 86\u20137\n\ntrust and safety issues 81\u20136, ,\n\nUjo music\n\nUlbricht, Ross William 135\u20136,\n\n'Uncanny, The' (Freud)\n\nuniforms , 114\u201315\n\nUnilever\n\nunions\n\nUnited States Public Health Service\n\nUpCounsel 116\u201317\n\nUpworthy ,\n\nUrbanSitter 117\u201319, , , 125\u20137, , ,\n\nUS dollar\n\nUS Naval Research Laboratory\n\nUS Transportation Security Administration (TSA)\n\nUslaner, Eric\n\nutilitarianism ,\n\nvaccinations 68\u201370\n\n_Vanity Fair_\n\nVasdey, Manisha\n\nVastari\n\nVBN\n\nVerbrugge, Peter\n\nVico, Giambattista\n\nVietnam War\n\nVigna, Paul\n\nVisa\n\nVolkswagen , ,\n\nvulnerability 19\u201320\n\nWachovia\n\nWakefield, Andrew\n\nWall Street 1\u20132,\n\nWalmart\n\nWalport, Mark ,\n\nWanamaker, Marianne\n\nWang, Maya\n\n'war on terror' 44\u20135\n\nWashington Mutual\n\nwater, bottled\n\nWatergate\n\nWaymo\n\nweapons of mass destruction (WMDs) ,\n\n_Weapons of Math Destruction_ (O'Neil)\n\nWebber, Anne\n\nWeChat ,\n\nWei, David\n\nWeibo\n\nWeiner, Seth\n\nWells Fargo\n\nWestern Union\n\n_Westworld_\n\nWe-Vibe\n\n_What's Mine is Yours_ (Botsman) ,\n\nWhisky Ring\n\nWIIFM factor (what's in it for me?) ,\n\nWikiLeaks ,\n\nWikipedia ,\n\nWilpon, Fred\n\nWinterkorn, Martin\n\nWintris Inc.\n\n_WIRED_ ,\n\n_Wisdom of Crowds, The_ (Surowiecki)\n\nWorld Economic Forum ,\n\nWorld Trade Center, 9\/11 attacks\n\nWorld Wide Ledger (WWL)\n\nWright, Craig Stephen\n\nXiang, Meing\n\nYahoo\n\nYap ('The Forbidden Island') 203\u20135\n\nYeats, W. B. 251\u20132\n\nYelp , ,\n\nYingyun, Li\n\nYouGov\n\nYouTube , ,\n\nYunus, Muhammad\n\nZajonc, Robert B.\n\nZak, Kyle\n\nZennstr\u00f6m, Niklas\n\nZhang, Ng\n\nZhiqiang, Wang 22\u20133\n\nZhongguancun\n\nZuckerberg, Mark 105\u20136, , ; _see also_ Facebook\n\nPublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.\n\nI.F. STONE, proprietor of _I. F. Stone's Weekly_ , combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published _The Trial of Socrates,_ which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.\n\nBENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of _The Washington Post._ It was Ben who gave the _Post_ the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.\n\nROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation's premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.\n\nFor fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by _The Washington Post_ as \"a redoubtable gadfly.\" His legacy will endure in the books to come.\n\nPeter Osnos, _Founder_\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n# **WHEN YOU'RE FALLLING, DIVE**\n\n**_Lessons in the Art of Living_**\n\n**MARK MATOUSEK**\n\n## **CONTENTS**\n\nCover\n\nTitle Page\n\nDedication\n\nIntroduction\n\nMagical Thinking\n\nThe Roar of Freedom\n\nThe Day of Laughter\n\n_Om Mani Padme Hum_\n\nDragons at the Gate\n\nSuperman's Ghost\n\nHome in the World\n\nThe Art of Losing\n\nA Quarter Inch from Heaven\n\nThe Girl on the Rock\n\nGoing to Tahiti (or Raising Heaven)\n\nThe Net of Indra\n\nReinventing Your Wife\n\nMan Thinks, God Laughs\n\nPraying\n\nDemon Lovers\n\nQuestioning (or The Sphinx)\n\n_Je M'en Foutisme_\n\nThe Terrorists Within\n\nEarth Angel\n\nThe End of Seeking (or Dig in One Place)\n\nSomething Else Is Also True\n\nPain Passes, but the Beauty Remains\n\nHedonics\n\nInvisible Feast\n\nOriginal Blessing\n\nEnough\n\nStress Matters\n\nThe Wounded Healer\n\nTrue Confessions\n\nPrometheus\n\nFound Art\n\nThrough Wilderness\n\nA Splinter of Love\n\nNakedness\n\nKilling Peter Pan\n\nThe Water or the Wave\n\nWhat Time Is Good For\n\nAt Sea\n\nThe Mother (or Aloha Oy)\n\nRope Burn\n\nWhat Makes the Engine Go?\n\nNotes and Sources\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nA Note on the Author\n\nBy the Same Author\n\nImprint\nFor Marcia Horowitz (1948\u20131978) and Marco Naguib\n_Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?_  \nWhich are you drinking? The water or the wave?\n\n\u2014John Fowles, _The Magus_\n\n## **INTRODUCTION**\n\nOne afternoon when I was twenty, my eldest sister, Marcia, appeared at my front door, needing to ask an important question.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, shocked by her appearance. In spite of the unseasonable L.A. heat, Marcia was wrapped in a bulky Mexican sweater tightly belted at the waist (just like a crazy person, I thought), her dark hair unkempt, eyes bloodshot: a dramatic decline from the attractive thirty-year-old banker she had been only months before. I sat Marcia down at my kitchen table, poured her a cup of tea, found a comb in my back pocket to run it through her messy hair, as she had once fussed over me as a boy. She had been my surrogate mother\u2014ours wasn't really up to the job\u2014 reading me Aesop's fables before bedtime, packing lunches, explaining riddles (birds, bees, our disappeared father), comforting when my feelings were hurt. Now it was my turn to comfort Marcia. Her spirits had sunk so quickly that winter. I kissed my sister's cheek and asked her to please tell me what was the matter. Marcia seemed unable to speak, simply shook her head and drifted away to that no-man's-land where none of us had been able to reach her.\n\nMarcia had been viciously betrayed by her husband, filed for divorce, had a nervous breakdown. She was hospitalized, then released prematurely when her insurance company refused to pay more. Now she found herself alone, unmoored, and terrified in a world that had always distressed her. The mensch in a family of hooligans, Marcia was the gentle, obedient daughter who did as she was told without question and cared for others more than herself. Newspaper tragedies sent her to bed. She wept for people she didn't know. I never once witnessed her being cruel.\n\nMy sister appeared to be sinking fast, unable to locate solid ground. I begged her again to talk to me. At last, Marcia looked into my eyes and spoke. \"How do you do it?\" she asked.\n\n\"Do what, honey?\" I was confused.\n\n\"How do you live?\"\n\nThe question froze in the air between us. In every life there are red-flag moments that seem to flash out, magnified, against the soft focus of everyday contentment, warning us to pay attention\u2014that something essential is happening. I snapped to attention when Marcia said this yet had no earthly idea what to tell her. I was a wobbly piece of work myself at that age; the bravado my sister seemed to admire was largely a mask for bitter self-doubt. Having grown up as the only son in a fatherless, four-kid, welfare home, I believed that denial and monolithic ambition were the only tools at my disposal for surmounting such disadvantaged beginnings. Pessimism seemed to be evil juju that winners must avoid at all costs. Failure wasn't even an option, of course. Yet here was my beloved, defeated sister posing a heartbreaking question I hadn't yet dared to ask of myself.\n\nI told Marcia that she had to keep fighting. No matter what.\n\n\"I can't,\" she said.\n\n\"You have no choice...\"\n\nMarcia opened her mouth to answer\u2014then stopped. The kitchen fell silent; she slumped in her chair; that was the end of the conversation. I tried to distract her by rubbing her shoulders. She drifted away again. When she stood up to leave, I felt guilty relief as I followed her out to her beat-up Buick, parked hastily at the curb. Marcia fumbled in her purse for the car key, then sat there without moving, hands clutching the wheel. I asked Marcia if she was okay to drive. She stared at me without answering.\n\nI leaned down to kiss her good-bye. \"You'll be fine,\" I promised.\n\nMarcia touched the side of my face. She attempted a smile, which wasn't much but gave me a bit of hope. Then she started the engine, waved good-bye, and disappeared slowly down the street.\n\n\"How do you live?\" Marcia had asked. This question would haunt me in years to come\u2014following some great loss or disappointment, some piece of unexpected bad luck\u2014when I was exposed enough to wonder. How does a person survive his own life, the ceaseless surprises, uncertainties, struggles, reroutings in strange, inconvenient directions? What force is it, exactly, that flips a falling man back on his feet, reconstitutes him after disaster, helps him prevail in the face of challenges far beyond his previous limits? What mysterious strength is it that enables us to outsmart \"the terrorists within\" (as one psychologist described them to me), those destructive maniacs under the skin\u2014cynicism, despair, resignation, terror\u2014that threaten to stop us in our tracks? Finally, how is it possible not merely to survive our greatest obstacles but to prevail in circumstances that threaten to stop us?\n\nThis quandary intensified substantially for me when mortality paid an unwelcome visit. One afternoon in 1984, lying on a Jamaica beach with my best college buddy, John, I found a purple lesion on the ball of his foot that had not been there the day before. Lives, like buildings, have foundation walls; remove these crucial supports and the whole thing comes crashing down around your ears. In the instant that I saw John's lesion, in the seconds it took me to realize what it probably meant for both of us\u2014though our friendship had been platonic\u2014life as I'd known it cracked down the middle from chimney to basement; the house I'd lived in, the self I'd believed in, the future I thought was waiting for me, was suddenly condemned.\n\nJohn was dead within three months. For the next ten years, I lived in a state of near-constant anxiety, waiting for my own demise, scared each morning when I looked in the mirror of what forbidding signs I would find there. Mostly, I couldn't breathe. In her famous essay on affliction, Simone Weil likened this acute state of dread to that of a condemned man forced to stare for hours at the guillotine that is going to cut off his head. You shake, you wait, you do your best not to pee in your pants while people are watching.\n\nBut no one can stay panicked forever. You're forced to find a way through your terror before any viable answers appear, while the floor is dropping beneath you. It's a sloppy, lurching, imperfect business; though not quite yourself, post-catastrophe, neither are you yet equipped to cope with the fallout from such seismic changes. You haven't grown those muscles yet or begun to reimagine your story. You're more like the common American lobster, _Homarus americanus,_ which dives for a few days each year to the ocean floor to slough off its old shell and wait for a new one, a naked, pink-skinned glob of flesh trying not to get smashed too hard before its second skin grows back.\n\nIn my case this retreat took the form of spiritual seeking. When John died, I was working as an editor at _Interview_ magazine under the pop artist Andy Warhol. I'd chased the publishing carrot from L.A. to New York, worked my way slavishly up the mast-head, yet found that in my frenzy to succeed, I'd ignored any sort of inner life. Now the prospect of leaving this world with so little clue as to who I was, what (if anything) this life meant, whether I believed in God, the soul, or self-transcendence, felt like adding insult to injury\u2014like a sleepwalker stumbling off a cliff. I quit my job, left New York, and shifted gears from limousine chasing to authenticity (whatever _that_ was) and confronting a problem I'd long avoided: Why, in spite of my worldly good luck, did I feel so secretly heartsick and vacant, so like an impostor, long before my diagnosis? Why was I so rarely truly happy? This question was an urgent one whether I was dying or not. I became a compulsive, nomadic seeker, living hand to mouth for most of ten years, trawling for wisdom from spiritual teachers around the world (wherever plastic was accepted), gulping it down in desperation.\n\nThese years were traumatic yet eye-opening. I kept a saying in my wallet\u2014\"In a world of fugitives, the man who goes in the opposite direction will always be said to be running away\"\u2014that seemed to let me off the hook. I needed to find out for myself if anything existed of a man beyond this booby-trapped bag of bones. As a skeptical agnostic, I dove warily into the question of whether anything _meta_ physical truly existed, or if human beings really were just blips on the screen of a heartless creation, dying animals like a billion others born to eat and fuck and die, as I had been raised to believe. This philosophical question had struck me for the first time at age seven, when I lifted the lid off a garbage can and found my first dead thing, a blue jay's corpse swaddled in plastic and newsprint. I stood there a long time, staring down at the cat-chewed body, wondering whether the bird had been this pile of bloody feathers or the thing that had escaped? Which, more pertinently now, was I?\n\nThe primary insight that arose from those years had nothing at all to do with religion. In fact, the single most transformative idea to emerge from all that reading, meditation, and ashram-shlepping was simply this: that terror can be a door to enlightenment. While traditional cultures have long understood the empowering aspects of fear and wounding, the double-edged force of passage rites to galvanize and deepen the spirit, we are too often shielded from this secret knowledge. Our prevailing contemporary view of pain and loss as handicaps to be avoided at any cost is not only wrongheaded but deeply ass-backward, in fact. Terror is fuel; wounding is power. Darkness carries the seeds of redemption. Authentic strength isn't found in our armor but at the very pit of the wounds each of us manages to survive. As one widow put it to me, \"Strength doesn't mean being able to stand up to anything, but being able to crawl on your belly a long, long time _before_ you can stand up again.\" Transformation is in our wiring. Looking backward is a Humpty Dumpty waste of time. \"You're gonna come out gold on the other side,\" one heroic man says in this book, \"or you're not gonna come out at all.\"\n\nThis is not Pollyanna speaking. Science is finally catching up to what sages have been saying forever. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in fMRI technology, neurologists are now able\u2014for the first time in history\u2014to observe the human brain in the act of feeling. This has revealed a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, which in turn has revolutionized how we think about personal change. Once believed to be lumps of gray matter cogitating between our ears, our brains turn out to be more like interlooping Wi-Fi octopuses with invisible tentacles slithering in many directions at every moment, constantly picking up messages we're not aware of and prompting reactions\u2014including illness\u2014in ways never before understood. Contrary to the old wives' tale that humans are born with a fixed number of brain cells that only diminish over time, our bodies produce one hundred thousand new brain cells every day, in fact, until we die. Our brains are highly mutable, reinventing themselves on a regular basis, which is why _not_ putting pain to its natural use\u2014as grist for the evolution mill\u2014is such an extraordinary waste of suffering. While hardship can certainly render us bitter, selfish, defensive, and miserable, it can also be used quite differently: as the artery of interconnection, a bridge to other people in pain, as blood in the muscle that propels us. Crisis takes us to the brink of our limits and forces us to keep moving forward. When people in extremis call it a blessing, this is the paradox they are describing. It's why men sometimes blossom in wartime and women are often changed by childbirth\u2014they come alive as never before on that knife blade of danger and pain. There's vitality in facing life's extremes, including that of your own extinction. Crises pushes you to travel wide, fast, and deep, expands the heart and calls forth reserves of courage you didn't know you had, like adrenaline in the muscles of a mother saving her only child. Only you are the child, and it's your life\u2014 the life of your own soul\u2014that you are saving.\n\nThis paradox is hard to swallow. When I used to tell friends, half jokingly, that HIV had actually saved my life, they rarely understood what I meant. I wasn't promoting an awful virus or claiming I was glad to have it. I wasn't pretending to be overjoyed by the prospect of an early departure. I was simply confessing an odd bit of truth that I wouldn't have believed myself had my own life not improved so dramatically. Without the threat of mortal loss, I would never have had the conviction\u2014the fuel\u2014to become the person I wanted to be or to find my way through terrible dread to something stronger than my fear.\n\nOn April Fool's Day, 1996, my roller coaster took another twist with the news from my doctor that treatments for the virus had finally appeared. Paul Bellman, who looks like Vincent van Gogh if the painter had gone to a Brooklyn yeshiva\u2014 ginger-headed, intense, and bearded\u2014told me that although there were no long-term guarantees, it was now highly possible that I (and many thousands like me) might look forward to a ripe old age after all. I was, in other words, no longer dying, at least not yet and not from this illness.\n\nI stumbled out of Bellman's office feeling like the man who fell to earth\u2014reeling, confused, a little dizzy before the unmitigated expanse. A majority of survivors, regardless of their particular storm, recall this resurrection moment in eerily similar, jumbled-up ways, of being yanked back to earth once they thought they were leaving. There's numbness, thrill, and disbelief, joy intermingled with bittersweet panic. Aristotle was right when he compared good luck to the moment on the battlefield when the arrow hits the guy next to you. It's an abstract, outer-space, torn-in-half feeling, partly shattering, partly sublime. _Awe_ is the only word that fits.\n\nA gift returned is doubly precious, charged with the mandate not to be wasted. I was determined not to lose track of what I'd learned in the mortal zone, or forget the miraculousness of things in the blur of everyday life. For me, this became a new reason for living, to prove myself \"worthy of my sufferings,\" as novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky described his own resurrection moment. Arrested at age twenty-eight for revolutionary activities against Tsar Nikolai I, the impoverished epileptic author spent eight months in solitary confinement before his death sentence was announced. Marched into Saint Petersburg's Semenovsky Square on the teeth-rattling morning of December 22, 1849, along with twenty-three other condemned men, Dostoevsky stood in line for thirty minutes while awaiting his turn to climb the scaffold. \"They snapped swords over our heads and made us put on the white shirts worn by people condemned to death,\" he later wrote to his brother. \"Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer [our deaths].\"\n\nAt the very last moment, the writer was informed that his sentence had been commuted; in fact, the whole thing had been a scare tactic. Suddenly, Dostoevsky was a free man. A fellow inmate went mad after this incident, but Dostoevsky's own madness took a different form: to survive brightened, revivified, by his personal brush with death. Obsessed with the image of one man executed, the other reprieved, the novelist made a lifelong commitment not to waste his gift, to conduct his life in terms of \"what the condemned know,\" to become a survivor artist. \"When I turn back to look at the past, I think how much time has been wasted,\" he confessed in that same letter. \"Life is a gift... each minute could be an eternity of bliss. My old head has been cut from my shoulders... but my heart is left me. And the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember. _On voit le soleil_!\"\n\nAs I retraced my own footsteps in order to understand this turnaround, Marcia's question came back to haunt me. How does a person live full out in a world where uncertainty's king? How do we survive our own days once a fall has already happened? How is it possible to live with \"what the condemned know\" before we are confronted by crisis, through the course of everyday affairs, in order to live in this illuminated state? Finally, how can we keep our hearts \"open in hell,\" as the Dalai Lama describes the existence of suffering, in the midst of trouble, when we need compassion most?\n\nSurvival, I came to understand, has less to do with cheating death than with living as brilliantly as possible. (How many oxygenated people do you know who do not appear to be fully alive?) There are new ways of seeing\u2014of being\u2014in a world turned upside down. There's an art to turning poison into a boon. Even during the worst of times, as I plummeted into some squall of fear, it never failed that some involuntary, irrational wave would sweep me up sooner or later as if out of nowhere. Other times there was satisfaction in the battle itself, a tenacious hunger to stay alive, when I was glad to simply be here, to fight\u2014to _participate_ \u2014even when the going was tough.\n\nEvery situation has the potential for this greening, this _viriditas,_ this bringing of beauty, insight, or healing from the manure of suffering. We're reconstituted after being crushed, fleshed out again after being stripped, by the mysterious, profligate, glowing, extravagant force that courses through and electrifies the phenomenal world. Though we're immersed in this power at every moment, survivors realize how profoundly quality of life is determined by how skillfully (and quickly) we harness ourselves to that evergreen force at the heart of things. Just as we recognize beauty when we see it, we respond to those who have tapped into this secret. They seem larger and more alive somehow, as if working from a more vivified palette. It's no accident that such impassioned, inventive people have frequently endured greater-than-usual doses of pain. Where adversity crosses paths with aliveness, there is the potential for art, as well as for artful living. Although we may not all be masters, we can learn from such enlightened souls and witness their greening survivor's genius for self-renewal.\n\nWhen the hundred-year-old poet Stanley Kunitz tells me, for example, \"Reinvention is my philosophy,\" how different is that from painter Auguste Renoir assuring students, \"Pain passes, but the beauty remains\"? When Dr. Rachel Remen, a physician who's lived with a painful physical condition for fifty years, promises that \"optimism is not required for healing,\" how liberating is that for those who've scrambled to keep their own smiley-face masks in place when what they needed to do was scream? Seeking out masters of this art, following their various footsteps through their particular labyrinths, I saw there might be a way to compose a chorus\u2014the aboriginals call it a song line\u2014to serve as a map for people crossing their own wilderness, a voice map to this dark geography. \"In a dark time, the eye begins to see,\" poet Theodore Roethke reminded us. With our illusions of safety exploded, outside the bounds of \"normal\" life ( _way_ out on King Lear's stormy heath), new abilities do indeed dawn in a person; values, intuitions, skills, perspectives that might seem unnatural\u2014even perverse\u2014to those who've led more sheltered lives.\n\nBut what do people like me have to teach? Something about the limitations of rational thought; our supreme powers of adaptation; the short shelf life of shock; the fraternity of the _anawim_ (people who have experienced great loss); the enlargement of self through tragedy; the absence of guilt; the paradoxical thrill of endangerment; the actual flimsiness of the narratives each of us composes for his life, believing the dots to be connected (when, in fact, they're just dots); the paltriness of survival without spirit; the role of verve and imagination\u2014what the French call _je m'en foutisme,_ the brave art of not giving a damn once your back is already against the wall and you choose to move forward anyway.\n\nAwe is so much vaster than pleasure. It is boundless, transcending clich\u00e9d ideas about good and evil, pleasure and pain, success and failure, redemption and loss. The line blurs between good and bad luck; bipolar Fortune spins her mad wheel, reverses, slows down a moment, then speeds up again in her maddening round. Survival requires a dose of madness\u2014what cynics call \"hoping against hope\"\u2014just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. \"Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us,\" observed one Holocaust expert. \"Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst.\"\n\nI knew this strange exultation myself, of being destroyed yet beyond destruction. Mystical as this may sound, even the hardest-headed atheists I spoke with would echo some version of this same awareness, a retrieved sense of sacredness, even transcendence, flooding the vacuum of survival where common protections had been stripped away. Terror does have its purposes. \"If I cut you,\" Rachel Remen reminded me, \"your entire healing system\"\u2014physical, emotional, spiritual\u2014\"will be mobilized instantly and become more alive in you, more activated than before.\" For this reason, survivors may be our greatest teachers in an increasingly terrorized world.\n\nAfter the wounding by Al Qaeda, Americans watched our country morph overnight from a dozing, not overly conscious giant into a great hydra-headed survivor caught up in the fight of its life. Foreseeing the dangers of power and comfort, Thomas Jefferson had favored revolution every ten years to snap people to attention. Americans were now being called upon to ask themselves the sorts of questions survivors wrestle with every day\u2014to think _heroically,_ although they might not want to be heroes. This heroism has less to do with John Wayne, the default machismo of a people weaned on pioneer individualism, than with throwing off our bonds of fear, deepening through our so-called weaknesses, surrendering to \"the thing with feathers\" that lifts us beyond who we thought we were (and what we are capable of) and rouses us from our perpetual stupor.\n\nWe spend so much of our lives in a waking trance of retrospection, regret, distraction, idling, and disembodiment through a range of addictions that when the bottom does fall out, life assumes a sudden, counterintuitive richness, clarity where there was haze. We're starched into the present tense, where we stop and gaze around with wonder at existence on a mysterious planet. Epiphanies happen where life and death meet. The very walls we construct to protect our lives hide the full glory of those lives from us. It's strange but true that we live immured by our own best intentions, and that the human mind is so constructed\u2014and our powers of denial so baroque\u2014that nothing short of catastrophe has the power to snap us out of our trance. Marcel Proust described this anomaly best, as usual. \"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us,\" wrote the hypersensitive Frenchman,\n\nif we were threatened to die, as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it\u2014our life\u2014hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.\n\nBut let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.\n\nThe cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.\n\nConfronting our own impermanence is the skeleton key to a secret life. After surviving his own vision quest, before reentering civilian life, Carlos Castaneda was advised by his Yaqui teacher Don Juan to keep death on his shoulder. Mortality becomes a muse\u2014the notion that fear disappears is absurd. But how is it possible to stand up to the terrorists within? How do we live once the ground starts shaking? That is what Marcia wanted to know.\n\nToday I would tell her that there is an art. There are song lines, principles, signposts, tricks, shortcuts, ways of making it better. Plato described such lifesaving wisdom as _techne tou biou_ \u2014 meaning \"the craft of life\"\u2014which is why, in the spirit of arts-and-crafts wisdom, this book is divided into a sequence of lessons that can be read either in order or hopscotch style, depending on the reader's taste. Since a story is worth a thousand rules, I've opted for parables, poetry, true-life tales, and autobiography to illustrate this _techne tou biou._ These concise chapters are meant to be seen as pieces in a larger mosaic, movable parts, independent lessons in the nonlinear art of self-realization.\n\nAs the world becomes more dangerous our need for such lessons only grows more urgent. There are great survivor artists among us whose lives stand as proof of this transformative power. As the reader will discover in the following pages, their strength is a precious, renewable resource available to anyone willing to learn.\n\n## **MAGICAL THINKING**\n\nThe impossible happens to everyone\u2014when we're least expecting it. One minute, you're still the person you know; the next, you've been changed by some freak happenstance you never believed could happen to you.\n\nYou've become a post-catastrophe person. The mask of safety is torn away. There's nowhere to run and hiding is fiction. You search your own reflection for comfort, and the mirror whispers, _Adapt or die._ Feeling your way along in the dark, you dream your new life into existence, grow these strange new appendages slowly, see the world and your own being through unblinkered eyes.\n\nPicture a husband and wife, both writers, sipping cocktails at the end of a long workday, a week after Christmas in New York City. For forty-two years this has been their routine, living and working cheek by jowl\u2014editors, best friends, collaborators. On this particular evening, with snow attacking the windowpanes, John is reading by the fire while Joan, all ninety-five pounds of her, tosses a salad in the kitchen. Both of them are exhausted. Their only daughter, Quintana, is in a nearby hospital, suffering from septic shock following an infection gone wrong. After dinner, Joan and John go back to the hospital. Now it's time to eat and relax.\n\nJoan carries the salad into the living room. John closes his book and waits to be served. Joan is a woman who thrives on routine, as order is an antidote to dread. Mundane details form the daily grid behind which, if she is careful, Joan believes she can barricade her family and herself from the chaos she has glimpsed since girlhood, lurking under the surface of things. The daughter of pioneers (her great-great-great-grandmother brought a cornbread recipe and a potato masher across the plains from Arkansas to the Sierras), Joan was raised to be strong, and has always been stronger than she looks, but suffered nevertheless from a kind of hypersensitive dread, the intuition of hidden yet imminent danger. Joan negotiates this unease through writing, throttles her fears in tight, gimlet-eyed prose, and maintains her cool front in a frightening world. \"We tell ourselves stories in order to live,\" she wrote a long time ago, and now, lighting the candles for dinner, Joan may be thinking (for the thousandth time) of this man she has known for all these years, her husband, and how he actually understands her, allows for her insecurities, loves her anyway.\n\nJohn looks up from the table and catches his wife watching him. Joan hands him a second drink. Beginning to eat, John lifts his fork, slumps to the side, and dies there in front of his wife from a massive coronary infarction.\n\nThis happens so suddenly that Joan thinks it must be a joke at first and waits for her husband to open his eyes. When John doesn't move, she shrieks at him; then she's running toward the phone, dialing 911, holding his head in her lap, opening the door for the paramedics, watching them beat his chest with their paddles, following them with an overnight bag to the service elevator, then into the ambulance, where she rests John's cold hand on her lap and stares at traffic out the back window.\n\nAt the memorial service three weeks later, Joan watches their daughter, Quintana, deliver the eulogy, not knowing that in twenty months' time she will be attending this same child's funeral. Joan sits there, a sylph in oversized sunglasses, hazing in and out of her church seat, her mind unhinged by the suddenness of it, the unreality of the coffin. She feels as if a tectonic shift has split her former life in two, and during the spectral months to follow, pacing the ghost-lined apartment halls, able to eat nothing but soup broth, fixated, restless, somnambulant, she obsessively records the events of that night on paper, minute by minute, as if the creation of a precise time line will magically return John to her.\n\nLife changes fast.  \nLife changes in the instant.  \nYou sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.  \nThe question of self-pity.\n\nThese four lines, written during that twilight period, will become the footprints Joan follows back into the story of her own life. During this process the detail-crazy mind she's relied on for work and sanity turns flagrantly magical on her (she can't move John's shoes from the doormat in case he should \"need them if he comes home\"), telling her stories she knows can't be true.\n\n\"It was extraordinary,\" Joan Didion tells me now. We're alone in her large Upper East Side apartment on a December day three years after the ordeal, the windowpanes once again crusted with snow. This literary heroine from my undergrad days is dressed like a prep school ing\u00e9nue in a baggy lavender sweater, flower print skirt, black tights, and knee-high mukluks. Joan speaks in a sort of gunslinger's drawl punctuated with frequent, lilting laughter and is cordial without being ingratiating, generous in her responses without wasting a word.\n\n\"I'd been around people who had psychotic breaks,\" she tells me, fixing me with her grayish eyes. \"But I had never imagined that someone who didn't appear to be raving mad could be so crazy.\" Joan arranges her skirt across her knee. \"I had lived, you see, an entirely conventional, bourgeois life. An orderly life. This broke into my golden mean.\"\n\nCut loose from any fixed idea she ever had \"about death, about illness... about marriage and children and memory... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself,\" as she later wrote, Joan spent the year following her husband's death wading shoulder-high through grief, untangling the loops of her delusional thoughts, tracing her way back to solid ground. \"I've learned that you don't actually get over things,\" she says. \"You incorporate them. They become part of everything you are. I don't mean that you walk about crying all the time. But you change.\"\n\n\"How did you change?\" I ask. Having read her books, I'm already aware of Joan's tempestuous mood swings.\n\n\"I'm far less patient in certain ways.\" She uncrosses her legs and slouches forward. \"Not that I was ever one of life's most patient people.\" Joan lets out a childish laugh. \"But I do value love more.\"\n\nHadn't she always valued love? It had seemed to me that love was one of the few things Didion did trust. Feelings seemed to be everything to this writer. \"A poster girl for anomie wearing a migraine and a bikini to every volcanic eruption of the post-war zeitgeist,\" as _Rolling Stone_ described her. Red-hot emotions in ice-perfect prose, that was Didion's legacy. Love had always seemed sacred to her. Was that not the case?\n\nShe gracefully ducks the question. \"When I think of the moments that are wasted in all of our lives,\" she tells me. \"It is different after you lose someone. These moments become particularly precious to you when you can't replicate them.\" In _The Year of Magical Thinking,_ the memoir she wrote about this vastation, Joan describes the intricate, difficult bond she shared with her husband, the unvarnished truth of their marriage, the diurnal shifts, silences, arguments, the conjugal saga of rising and falling and sticking together anyway. At one time Mr. and Mrs. John Gregory Dunne were the most famous literary couple in America. She was arch and glamorous; he was blue-blooded, devoted, depressive. Together they constructed a legend, the outcome of which she is now living alone. For the most part, she is sane again, though.\n\n\"For about six months after John died, I'd get cross when I heard couples bickering,\" Joan says. \"I'd tell them they didn't have enough time.\" She looks at the ribbons on the dining room table. \"We both knew that John had a heart condition. But what would have happened if I'd believed all the time that he was likely to die? There's no way of staying alive if you believe that you're gonna lose someone or yourself any second. What good would that have done?\"\n\n\"It is hard to live that way.\"\n\n\"I realized that I was berating myself for not being able to control these uncontrollable events. I've learned that thinking you should be able to control things is the worst kind of grandiosity. I used to be such a control freak.\"\n\n\"Used to be?\"\n\n\"I'm better now. I really am a bit more accepting. Part of anticipating the worst is believing that if you expect it, the terrible thing can't possibly happen.\" Joan laughs again. \"Then when the worst finally does happen, you stop anticipating. I used to be quite fearful, but very little can happen to me now.\"\n\n\"You're fearless?\" I ask.\n\n\"Oh, God no. I'm not saying that when something terrible is going on, I don't deny every bit of it. In the emergency room, I had to have known that John was already dead, but I was still trying to figure out how to get him home from the hospital. As if I could somehow improve the situation! It doesn't sink in.\"\n\n\"Denial is there for a reason,\" I say.\n\n\"I don't know how people function without it. Of course, we all need to look at things as they are, but if where they are is untenable at the moment, we have to find another way to get through the day.\"\n\n\"Or the year.\"\n\n\"I never quite know what people mean when they talk about being strong,\" Joan says with some annoyance. \"I didn't die. My life has to go on. What's the choice? I had a sick child. I didn't have an option.\" She did have a choice about whether or not to put her ordeal to some good use, however. By dissecting her own demented time, Joan realized that her story might help others fumbling their way through what she calls \"the American way of grief\"\u2014namely, \"evasiveness posing as courage.\" \"It was something that nobody talked about,\" she tells me. \"The actual physical and mental effects of loss are manifold, but nobody ever admits they're happening. It seemed to me that it could conceivably be a good thing if we started saying, 'Look, you're going to go a little crazy; it's normal, don't panic.'\"\n\nOne of trauma's more puzzling side effects is its trick-mirror effect on time, how time-as-we-know-it seems to pause and fast-forward simultaneously, throwing you out of the flow of things. This distortion contributes to magical thinking. \"What I've learned is that marriage is not only [about] time,\" she admits. \"It is also, paradoxically, about the denial of time. For forty years, I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.\"\n\nI tell her how wonderful she's looking (it's true). My hostess accepts the compliment grudgingly. \"I am getting better,\" she allows. Just the other day, Joan even managed to clear some shelves in John's old office without giving it a second thought. \"That was a first,\" she sighs. When I broach the subject of Quintana's death, however, Joan's poker face lets me know that this is a subject too raw to be touched. \"The relationship with a child is a whole different level of loss, at once more fundamental and less intimate\" is all that she has said on this subject.\n\nThe living room has darkened. Joan looks tired. Still, there's one more thing I'd like to ask, but I fear it may seem tacky. Joan stretches her legs and moves toward the front door. The top of her head barely reaches my chin. I finally get the question out.\n\n\"Can you imagine falling in love again?\" I say.\n\nJoan stops and looks me straight in the eye. For a second, I think she's going to slap me. Then I realize she's amused. \"I wouldn't get married again, I don't think,\" she tells me in her cowgirl drawl, standing inside her doorway. \"But fall in love?\" she says, lowering her chin. \"Absolutely.\"\n\n## **THE ROAR OF FREEDOM**\n\nThere's a beautiful Sufi story I've always loved. A group of tigers in a forest leaves a cub behind by mistake. The tiger cub is reared by sheep. The sheep teach it how to act like a sheep. It walks like a sheep and baas like a sheep and eats grass.\n\nMany years later a tiger happens to be passing and sees this ludicrous spectacle of a half-grown tiger behaving like a sheep. It is appalled and amused and drags the tiger to a pool in the forest. There, it shows the young tiger its own reflection, and the tiger begins to wake up to what it really is.\n\nThe older tiger teaches the younger tiger how to roar. At first all it can do is make bleating sounds. But slowly the tiger roar begins in its throat, and then after weeks of practice, it comes up to its master and gives the great roar of freedom.\n\nThis is what survivors do. As domesticated beings, we're fleeced into believing we are safe and special. Then the tiger comes out of the forest. The truth is savage, but in its eyes\u2014in the aftermath of the long tussle\u2014we see that we are wild, too. We only imagined that we were so timid.\n\nIt's uncanny what happens when people wake up. Their wattage increases. Their hearts amplify. You see the juju in their eyes. That's why we're so drawn to oppressed people who prevail. One sweltering afternoon in 1988, I'm alone in a third-class train compartment in Florence station, waiting for the departure whistle, when the doors fly open and in marches one of the strangest-looking creatures I have ever seen in my life. Moist and brown as a greased potato, big-bottomed, and sporting a blue jean ensemble (blue denim tennis shoes, overalls, belt, shoulder bag, and pimp cap), this high-voltage creature has chintzy, taped-up luggage swinging from every appendage and is squealing like a girl\u2014\" _Che stronzo!_ \"\u2014at the heat. Finally, he manages to negotiate himself into my quiet cabin and plops down on the seat across from mine.\n\n_\"Ay, papi!\"_ he gasps, fanning himself with one hand, clutching a cannoli in the other, smiling, his yellow teeth smeared with cake. \" _Che giorno!_ What a day!\" He's dressed like a slutty, overweight mall girl, in camel-toe jeans and rhinestone jacket, mucky lipstick, smeared mascara, the top of his forehead sprinkled with tiny, shiny pimples.\n\n\"It is hot,\" I say.\n\nHe extends his hand and purrs, \"Mario.\"\n\nNow and then things happen to us in life that truly deserve to be called uncanny. This overnight trip to Paris is such a surprise. Bouncing up and down in his seat, so happy he seems ready to pop, Mario is not what he appears to be\u2014a tranny hooker or maid half in drag, say\u2014but is, in fact, one of a handful of naturally born \"sopranists\" alive in the world today. Sopranists are males born with female vocal cords. They're the golden-egged geese of the opera world (where boys were once castrated to sing these roles), lusted after by aficionados for their unique sound, as Mario now explains to me. \"They cut off the privates,\" he says, patting himself. \"But not me!\"\n\nAs if the unlikelihood of this weren't enough, my companion is on his way this very night to make his \"day-boo\" at the Paris Opera. Describing Mario's pitch as excitement would not do his hysteria justice. He's over the moon, beside himself, ready to burst out\u2014I mean _burst_ out\u2014in song. Though he's performed here and there over the years, tomorrow will be Mario's official coming out. His singing teacher, Signora Cowell, has insisted that he prepare a full eight years before premiering his rare instrument on a world-class opera stage. Mario has done _piccolini_ parts, nothing roles, in the provinces for fun, he says, curling the top off a tin of lasagna, but tomorrow will be the great debut of his life.\n\n\"Signora wanted me to save,\" he says, tugging at the blue jean scarf on his neck. \"I work for her since sixteen years old. Now,\" Mario, tells me, digging into the noodles, \"I am ready!\"\n\nI am speechless.\n\n\"My patron find me,\" he claims. \"He introduce me to the signora. This is how I come to Italy.\"\n\n\"Found you where?\"\n\n\"Oh, baby, you do not _want_ to go there,\" Mario protests, in the protesting way of people who can't wait to spill the beans. I assure him that very little shocks me, digging into my bag for a tape recorder. Then, with the Tuscan plains making way for the Appenines, and Mario wolfing down one high-calorie treat after another, he proceeds to relate the far-fetched saga of how he came to be sitting here in this Italian train on his way to\u2014here Mario crosses himself\u2014superstardom.\n\nHe came from a jungle town near Salvador, in the northeast corner of Brazil, one of ten children born to an illiterate farmer and his peasant wife. \"Dirt poor,\" Mario tells me, slowly chewing. No school, no medicine, no electricity, he says. Once a month the family ate meat. Five of his siblings did not survive.\n\n\"Half of your brothers and sisters died?\"\n\n_\"La mis\u00e8re,\"_ Mario says, meaning disease or malnourishment, I guess. \"I was always different. I always sing sing sing, everywhere I go. I am always _maricon,_ you see\u2014big, fat sissy boy. I am always with the fat.\" Mario tugs at his love handles, laughs, gouges out a hunk of lasagna. \"But nothing matters to me. Nothing but the beauty. I need the beauty,\" my companion says, laying a manicured hand on his heart. \" _Papi,_ I grew up in the paradise. _Il giardino di Eden._ \"\n\nOne day when Mario was fourteen, he was drawing water from the well with his sisters, singing his heart out as usual, when a white man and woman came driving by in a Jeep. They asked the local children for a glass of water and were stunned when Mario sang his reply like Maria Callas. The memory still delights him. \"These strangers, they tell me to talk normal.\" Mario chuckles. \"I tell them this _is_ normal. My sisters tell them this is normal. They come to my house to talk to my parents. This man says that he knows a teacher who would love to get her hands on me. At first this scare my poor mama. She thinks they are trying to buy me as slave. The Italians say, no, this lady is opera teacher. They leave us a card with their telephone number.\"\n\nI cannot hide my skepticism. \"As God my witness,\" Mario swears, crossing himself again. Then he produces a photo album with several press clippings (\"Jungle Boy Breaks the Sound Barrier\" etc.) announcing his \"discovery,\" along with a tacky publicity shot of himself in a tuxedo looking less butch than your average lipstick lesbian. I apologize for not quite believing him.\n\n\"Nobody believe me,\" Mario says. \"I go to my friend in town who has a telephone and call this number. The man is in S\u00e3o Paulo. He ask me to come to S\u00e3o Paulo to sing for his friend, Signora Cowell, when she comes from Firenze for visit. They send for me taxi from S\u00e3o Paulo\u2014I have never been in a regular car before. I meet this wonderful lady. She tells me that I am a rare bird. That is what she says. _Rara avis._ I tell her I have always known this. Six months later, she is sending the man a ticket for me to come and study with a famous teacher in Italy!\"\n\n\"That's unbelievable, Mario.\"\n\n\"God is great,\" he says, and kisses his crucifix. \"I have no money, so Signora Cowell find me job in the house of an old contessa. Once, she was a very grand lady. Now she is all alone. I learn many things in the contessa's house. She is so sad, so drunk and lonely. I am alone with her from day until night, doing everything but the cooking all by myself,\" he tells me. \"She is abandoned, this rich old lady\u2014no children, no husband. Her friends only want her money, she says. The contessa tells me I am her only true friend. So much money and I have never seen anyone so unhappy! This old lady tells me her secrets. I listen but\u2014\" Mario zips his mouth with a finger. \" _Niente. Mai._ I never tell nothing. I only tell you this one thing because you are so nice.\" He squinches up his nose at me.\n\n\"The contessa is having these dinner parties. The villa is _estupenda,_ one of the oldest on Corso dei Tintori, near Piazza Santa Croce,\" he goes on. \"Many people are coming. She is sitting at the head of her table in a beautiful dress, with jewels, and piles of food, and laughing\u2014everyone is always laughing\u2014and under the table\u2014\" Mario covers his mouth.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Under the table, she is peeing.\"\n\nWhat?\n\n\"She is sitting there, with all fancy people, and she is peeing on her chair,\" Mario says, making a face. \"She is so drunk she cannot stand up for the toilet. But nobody notices. They are eating and drinking. The contessa is all alone. I am standing in the corner helping with the drinks. She sees me looking and is crying inside.\" Mario pauses. \"In this moment, I understand.\"\n\n\"What did you understand?\"\n\n\" _La miseria,_ \" he tells me. \"I see that there is _la miseria_ of the rich and _la miseria_ of the poor.\"\n\nEquating a lonely alcoholic aristocrat with five dead toddlers? This sounds more like opera than fact to me.\n\n\"I have seen this with my own eyes,\" Mario says, wiping dripped pasta off his chin. \"Let me tell you a story. Where I come from it is a miracle if you're alive. When I was small there was a four-year-old girl who lived nearby. I used to hear her all night long, saying, 'Hungry. Hungry.' One day this girl saw some bugs in the well and ate them. Nobody knew till her stomach swelled up.\" Mario pats his belly like a pregnant woman. \"The doctors purge her. I see them. The vermin start crawling out from her mouth.\"\n\nHe is acting this out with hand gestures.\n\n\"This little girl choked and they couldn't save her. I see her die with my own eyes. But was this little girl more _misere_ than _la contessa_? There are many ways to die, gringo.\"\n\n\"Sure. But, Mario\u2014\"\n\n\"I have seen both sides of the misery,\" he stops me. \"And still life is beautiful!\" Then Mario pulls himself to his feet with some effort, shimmies his jeans into place, and grinds his hips in an impromptu samba, snapping his fingers with one hand, the other perched on his belly. \"I love to dance!\" He spins around, grinning, surprisingly graceful. \"You must never forget to dance.\" Mario throws back his head. \"And you know what else Italy's good for?\" He punches an open palm with a fist. \" _Chiavare._ The best place in the world for fucking. The men, ooh, I love the machos.\"\n\n\"And they must love you.\"\n\n\"You know they do! Any way that they can get me!\" Mario falls back down on his seat in laughter. \"But people like you don't know how to live,\" he says, breathlessly.\n\n\"What do you mean? People like me?\"\n\n\"You gringos. Always so serious! You do not know how to live. All the time so _nervous._ Too much of the stress. And you look at the world with\u2014\" He clenches his arms up like someone protecting himself from the cold.\n\n\"That's not fair\u2014\"\n\n\"Cold inside,\" Mario teases me. \"Like the ice. The contessa is cold like the ice inside. She tells me she has no feelings. When she cries, it is nothing but water, she says. When no one is there to see them, tears are only water, she tell me. This is tragedy. More sad than in my country.\"\n\nI don't bother debating this.\n\n\"We have the life,\" Mario says, making fists with both hands. \"We love the life.\"\n\n\"So do we,\" I say. \"And it's hard sometimes.\"\n\n\"But there is also the beauty!\" Mario leans forward and touches my knee. _\"Viva amore.\"_\n\nI don't know what to say.\n\n\"This is what I tell the contessa. Who cares if life is hard! She tells me that I am better than her own son, who ignores her. She says that I am her _soffio d'aria fresca,_ her breath of fresh air. She is not too old to get better, I tell her. We are in the world more than to suffer! Sometimes I sing to make her happy,\" he says.\n\n\"Maybe you will sing for me?\" I ask, taking his cue.\n\n\"I think that you are never asking!\" Mario laughs. Then he straightens his shoulders, closes his eyes, clears his throat, opens his mouth, and begins to sing the aria \"Un Bel Di\" from _Madama Butterfly_ in a high, pure voice. I'm floored by the beauty of Mario's tone\u2014to say nothing of the stupendous volume, which brings the conductor running to see which of us is blasting the stereo. The train official stops in the doorway and stands there listening to Mario sing this incandescent song about love that will come again, one fine day. As he sings, Mario's eyes well up with tears, his throat quivering, hands clasped across his middle. Eventually the conductor slips away, and when Mario finishes, he tightens the scarf around his neck again and zips his finger across his mouth to let me know the show is over. Mario must rest his instrument. Tomorrow, he will step out onto the stage where Callas became a legend. He will offer his voice into \"that great darkness,\" he tells me with awe in his voice, this peasant boy who might never have seen the lights of a city if he hadn't been singing that day by the well.\n\nIn the morning, we hug on the platform. \"Wish me luck,\" Mario says, kissing me on both cheeks.\n\n\"You definitely will not need it,\" I tell him.\n\n\"Everybody needs it, gringo,\" he insists. Then he picks up his bags, turns on his heel, and sashays into the morning hubbub cramming into the Gare du Nord.\n\n## **THE DAY OF LAUGHTER**\n\nSelf-realization is not for sissies. Transformation comes at a cost. We may be shattered and freed by hardship, eventually, but the process requires a stomach for change. \"A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)\" was T. S. Eliot's way of describing this stripping. Because the process is a spiritual one, it requires a mental turnaround (\"conversion\"), whose trials may seem counterintuitive, even perverse, to our rational, self-preserving minds. Yet practice teaches us, in spite of ourselves, that even the most destructive forces are harnessable to constructive ends. Pain we would much prefer to avoid can be used as a kind of battering ram for unearthing the true and beautiful. This _yoga_ \u2014which comes from the Sanskrit for \"yoke\" (in the yin-yang sense of yoking opposite forces)\u2014is available to begin immediately.\n\n\"What is on the day of laughter is also now,\" a teacher of mine used to say. This saint had lived for fifty years on a mountain in southern India. \"What is on the day of laughter is also now,\" he would repeat to his students, tossing the words out lightly, rubbing a palm across the gray stubble covering his shaven head.\n\nWhat did he mean by this? I would wonder. What laughter could he be referring to? In time, his meaning began to dawn on me. He was describing the laugh of a Buddha, the sudden spontaneous guffaw that's said to seize a person when he realizes who and what he really is. Siddhartha, the prince turned Buddha, laughed after discovering his own true nature at last, the story goes. Sometime after his enlightenment, Siddhartha was strolling along a country road when a passerby stopped him to inquire why he was smiling with such quiet joy. Siddhartha did his best to demur.\n\n\"Are you a magician, sir?\" the traveler asked.\n\n\"No,\" the master answered.\n\n\"Are you a god?\" the passerby tried again.\n\n\"No,\" Siddhartha assured him.\n\n\"Then what, sir, can you _be_?\" asked the stranger.\n\nThe Buddha replied, \"I am awake.\"\n\nPlato called this _anamnesis,_ remembering what and who we are, beneath our lives' shifting camouflage, beyond what can be taken away. \"The look of your face before you were born,\" as a Zen koan describes this hidden self, the essence, the nub of you that transcends your changing circumstances. We are not what we appear to be, they tell us: This is the lesson sages have expounded since the days of the earliest seers and shamans. When we glimpse our true identities, apparently it does inspire laughter. Derek Wolcott describes this recognition in one of his most beautiful poems.\n\nThe time will come  \nwhen, with elation,  \nyou will greet yourself arriving  \nat your own door, in your own mirror,  \nand each will smile at the other's welcome,\n\nand say, sit here. Eat.  \nYou will love again the stranger who was your self.  \nGive wine. Give bread. Give back your heart  \nto itself, to the stranger who has loved you\n\nall your life, whom you ignored  \nfor another, who knows you by heart.  \nTake down the love letters from the bookshelf,\n\nthe photographs, the desperate notes,  \npeel your own image from the mirror.  \nSit. Feast on your life.\n\nWhen I visited India for the first time, I was a wreck, a refugee from the New York publishing life I'd coveted yet grown to dread. I was working at _Interview_ magazine, as I've said, in the looming fame-shadow of Andy Warhol. To this day, Andy remains the loneliest person I've ever known, an unquestionable genius but also an alien personage on this planet. Several times a day, Andy would waft through my office, saying almost nothing yet trailing this vacuous atmosphere. Years before, he had admitted that after he was shot in the gut by a crazed fan, Valerie Solanas, his emotional life had been shot out, too, leaving Andy to peer out at the flesh-and-blood world as if through the screen of a TV set. My ex-boss infused the magazine offices somehow with this same dead chill of alienation.\n\nOn my last Christmas at _Interview,_ Andy distributed presents to the staff. Weirdly, my gift from him was a white silk scarf painted with a black pyramid and lotus-seated figure, the words the only way out is in scrawled underneath in inked capital letters. Fourteen months later, Andy was dead following complications from gallbladder surgery. He was only fifty-nine.\n\nI was already in India by then, traveling with Andrew Harvey, an eccentric British friend, who had been born in the twilight of the Raj near Connaught Circus in Delhi, where we were now sitting one evening after dinner.\n\nA harvest moon hung low in the sky. The air was dusty, sweet, and warm. We'd been smoking hash, which made it sweeter, and Andrew\u2014a brilliant professor and poet\u2014was now holding forth in his stentorian way on the subject that most compelled him: the loss of sacredness in the world. \"Until people realize that _all_ of this\u2014\" Andrew held out his hands to encompass the great, entropic, swirling mass of humanity, rickshaws, cows, and sirens surrounding us on all sides\u2014\"that _all_ of this is divine, every last inch of it, even the ugliest parts\u2014till they get past the immature notion that a sacred world would be a world without suffering, a big Disneyland where everyone gets in for free, they will not truly understand that suffering is here for a purpose,\" Andrew declaimed.\n\n\"And what, oh wizard, might that be?\"\n\nMy friend ignored me. \"We spin and spin in our little cages without looking outside of them or even more deeply within,\" he went on. \"But if people took the time to look more deeply, if they dared to look underneath their masks, they would discover something that could change their lives forever.\"\n\n\"Please tell me what you're talking about!\"\n\n\"They would discover their real face in the mirror.\"\n\nWhat real face? I thought to myself. Till that moment I had never considered that there might be a different \"face\" to things of which I was wholly unaware, some secret, even more bona fide visage. But what if Andrew was right? I wondered, influenced by the smoke and the moonlight. My companion was hyperbolic but also wise on subjects spiritual and mysterious. What if this thing we called ordinary life really was, at least in part, a case of mistaken identity? Something in his words struck a chord of truth, tintinnabulating inside me.\n\nAs the years went on, I came to learn that spiritual traditions all put forth some version or other of this same strange realization: that we do not, in essence, know ourselves; that our worldly masks are a mere fa\u00e7ade. During times of crisis in years to come, to my great surprise, I found myself increasingly aware of this other face peering out at me through my physical eyes, seeing through my own mask, penetrating with questions. It was impossible not to notice that this new awareness emerged in direct proportion to assaults on my struggling ego.\n\nThis must be why the Buddha laughed: because nothing more could be taken from him. He recognized his own true face. He was liberated from craving and fear. He saw the freedom of self-surrender, the hidden reward of not looking backward. This freedom came at a price, of course; it comes at a cost for all of us. But considering the dividends\u2014in joy, self-knowledge, and unshakable strength\u2014as I would learn on my own roller coaster, only a fool would refuse to pay it.\n\n## **_OM MANI PADME HUM_**\n\nAndrew and I had flown from Delhi to Srinigar, spent the night on a houseboat on Dal Lake, then boarded a comic-strip bus for Ladakh. Ladakh is India's northernmost province, a lunar, breath-sucking, desolate place at eighteen thousand feet, surrounded by gargantuan Himalayan peaks. The streets of the capital town of Leh are a dusty, fetid confluence of Muslim Kashmiris and Tibetan Buddhists, handbag-faced women with knee-length hair braided to the waist, draped in coarse maroon clothing and carrying their rosary _malas_ everywhere they go, chanting, \" _Om Mani Padme Hum._ \" This Sanskrit mantra is etched like graffiti onto walls and stones (even restaurant menus), like \"Jesus Lives\" in the American Bible Belt.\n\nThere is no simple translation of this ubiquitous Buddhist prayer. An oversimplification might be \"Compassion cooks up cosmic juju.\" The ancient mantra's power does seem to pervade the atmosphere of this otherworldly region. For three weeks Andrew and I hunkered down in a farmhouse pension outfitted with glass-sided rooms and straw mattresses. Our quarters looked onto a sunflower-and-vegetable garden where a prehistoric grandma twirled her rosary and toiled day after day, a donkey no bigger than a Labrador retriever nipping at the heels of her embroidered slippers. A mastiff-sized cow made its nest near the gate. A vast panorama of mountain peaks spread 180 degrees across our window view, dotted with tiny monasteries, each one a five-mile climb straight up. I learned this the hard way during a morning's trek to Gotsang, where Andrew and I were greeted at the temple's gate by a pair of monks who later offered us bowls of yak-butter tea. They slapped their sides and laughed as we struggled to choke the disgusting stuff down, ogling us as if we were escapees from the primate wing of a foreign zoo.\n\nAfter returning to the States, Andrew began work with a lama named Sogyal Rinpoche on a book they decided to call _The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying._ It was to be an updated, accessible version of _The Tibetan Book of the Dead,_ which had caused such a stir when it first appeared in English in 1939. Every so often a book appears that delivers a whiplash to the mainstream zeitgeist. _The Tibetan Book of the Dead_ had been such a volume. While we in the West were busy with the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution, the isolated mountain masters of Tibet were hard at work formulating a theory (based, they believe, on evidence) of death and reincarnation. Their self-proclaimed grasp of the nuts and bolts of rebirth enabled the Tibetans to devise a complex system for tracking their masters from one body to the next, enabling them to hone and protect their wisdom tradition down through the ages.\n\nI'm agnostic on the subject of reincarnation, persuadable but unconvinced. I agree with Voltaire that being born twice isn't that much more far-fetched than being born once. In any case, Sogyal Rinpoche asked me to help with the book. Sogyal is a small, powerfully built man with a schoolboy laugh and a stubborn streak. Trained classically in the Tibetan tradition, this _rinpoche_ (an honorific meaning \"teacher\") had survived the Chinese invasion, escaped through the Himalayas to India, then went on to study philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he worked as an assistant to the visiting Dalai Lama. Today, Sogyal is a rock star in the Buddhist world and keeps the same kind of hectic touring schedule.\n\nOne afternoon we were sitting on a patio overlooking a fir-lined palisade in Aptos, California, having a meeting. Sogyal was fielding cell phone calls from Dharmsala, Buenos Aires, and Paris. We got to talking about a perplexing thing that had recently happened to the Dalai Lama. During a talk in New York someone had asked His Holiness a question about self-loathing\u2014how Buddhism handles the common American problem of autophobia\u2014when all of a sudden the talk stopped. There's no word for self-hatred in Tibetan. The translator was stumped. The Dalai Lama himself was puzzled.\n\n\"This is something almost unheard of in my country,\" Sogyal explained to me between calls.\n\n\"The trance of unworthiness?\" I asked. This is how a therapist friend describes the popular American pastime of disliking ourselves. Whether we blame this destructive habit on the doctrine of original sin or merely inverted narcissism (of the privileged, first world variety), the upshot is the same: too much time spent hating who we are.\n\n\"We emphasize the _preciousness_ of human birth,\" Sogyal went on. \"The Buddha was a human like us. Our true nature is to be enlightened. You must remember that your Buddha nature is as good as any Buddha's Buddha nature.\" The lama chuckled over his own cheesy joke.\n\n\"But what about evil?\" I asked. What about destructive folks who wouldn't know their own Buddha nature if it hit them in the face?\n\nSogyal swatted my caveats away. \"The teachings say that when the world is full of evil, all misfortune should be transformed to the path of goodness.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"But these are hard times\u2014\"\n\n\"It is not the times that are bad, it's the people,\" he corrected me, quoting a popular Tibetan saint.\n\n\"I thought you didn't believe people could be bad,\" I kidded Sogyal back.\n\n\"That depends on the day.\" He laughed.\n\nIntrigued by this so-called Buddha nature, I make my way to Washington, D.C., to meet a Tibetan nun named Nawang Sangdrol. This twenty-six-year-old Buddhist devotee had been arrested by the Chinese at the age of thirteen and spent eleven years in the infamous Drapchi prison (the Abu Ghraib of Tibet), becoming her country's longest-serving female political prisoner. In a fluorescent-lit conference room, I meet Nawang Sangdrol and take a seat across the table from where she's sitting, flanked by an overly protective Tibetan translator duded out in a cashmere jacket.\n\nFor a minute she hardly looks at me. Her scarred hands are clasped on the table before her. Nawang looks twenty years older than her age. Her black braid appears bluish against the worn-out fleece of her plum-colored sweater. She's wearing a red string bodhisattva bracelet around her wrist along with three strands of tiny ivory beads.\n\nWhen I attempt to break the ice with small talk\u2014her English is close to nonexistent\u2014the metrosexual translator steers me away. \"Nawang is too shy,\" he says.\n\n\"Will she tell me her story?\"\n\nNawang nods without being asked and for the next half an hour recites the details of her ordeal. I study the young woman as she speaks, her eyes never widening, her voice never piercing a whisper. She seems so fragile she could blow away.\n\nOn August 21, 1990, Nawang was a thirteen-year-old Buddhist nun living in Lhasa. \"My family was religious, but I also had the desire to join the nunnery,\" she tells me. One afternoon she and a group of sister nuns attended a festival at Norbulingka, the former summer palace of the Dalai Lama. Inspired by love for their leader, the nuns felt the urge to move to the center of the large crowd to avoid attention and shout \"Free Tibet! Long live His Holiness the Dalai Lama!\" along with the rest of the crowd.\n\nAlmost immediately, uniformed Chinese police dragged the girls by their hair into trucks and shipped them off to a detention camp outside Lhasa. Following a severe beating, they were thrown together into a cell and kept there for nine months.\n\nNawang pauses to sip her water. I can't quite bridge the gap between her punishment and her offense. Jailing a thirteen-year-old girl for chanting the equivalent of \"Long live the Queen\"? Torture sessions began immediately, Nawang tells me. \"They called us 'splittists' and counterrevolutionaries. We were beaten with iron pipes and electric cattle prods.\" Nawang makes a claw with her hand to show the shape of the red-hot instrument. \"They would tie us up and take turns beating us, and also attach live electric wires to our tongues.\" When her captors were feeling especially aggressive, they put prisoners into what they called the airplane position\u2014hung from the ceiling with their hands roped around their backs.\n\n\"You were a child,\" I say in disbelief.\n\n\"They didn't care how young we were or whether we were female\u2014they tortured children the same way they tortured adults.\" Once, while being assaulted with electric shocks to her neck, Nawang instinctively ripped the wire off and threw it to the ground. \"A guard pointed a gun to my head and said, 'Now you are going to die.' Then he laughed.\"\n\nThis was only the beginning. Eventually released from prison, Nawang returned home to the news that her mother had died, while her father and brother had both been arrested. Refusing to collaborate with the Chinese, the patriotic girl continued to protest against the destruction of her country. Four months after leaving one cell, she was arrested again (for chanting at a public protest) and sent this time to Drapchi, where she would spend the next eleven years.\n\n\"I was put in solitary confinement,\" Nawang tells me, our eyes meeting for the first time. \"It was winter, very cold in Tibet. I was in my cell with only one shirt, no sweater. Because this was my second arrest, they wanted to make an example of me to other splittists. I was forced to stand outside in the courtyard in the snow. If I slumped a little bit, the guards would beat me.\"\n\n\"How did you get through?\" I inquire.\n\n\"By inwardly protesting for freedom,\" she replies. \"The cell was very small, with the ceiling ripped off so the guards could watch me. It was just like being in a cage. They kept the lights on to prevent me from sleeping. They wanted to mentally and physically break me. My health began to deteriorate. There were spiders. Sometimes the rats would bite me.\" Nawang turns her head to show me a pair of vampiric puncture wounds. My face must be betraying my unspoken question. \"I will tell you,\" Nawang says, reading my mind. \"I did this for His Holiness. For my people. For my country.\" There's no trace of martyrdom in her voice, no righteousness, no detectable self-congratulation. This woman is an enigma to me. Agape is an uncanny thing, generosity given without self-interest. I am not suggesting that Nawang Sangdrol is a saint, but she is, by any ethical measure, a most highly evolved human being.\n\n\"We must never give up this fight,\" she says. \"People must remain true to goodness.\" Nawang fingers the _mala_ around her wrist and holds it out for me to see. \"I wove this from the threads of my shirt,\" she says. The letters read, \" _Om Mani Padme Hum._ \"\n\n\"Hatred does not end by hatred,\" Nawang says. These words are from one of the Buddha's sermons. Then she makes the _namaste_ sign and lowers her eyes. The translator excuses her\u2014the nun's adoptive family is waiting for her outside. Nawang had finally gained amnesty through an international relief organization. Now she is going to school to try to learn English. \"Very bad,\" she apologizes, getting up.\n\n\"Do you feel free now?\" I ask her. \"In America? No Chinese soldiers?\"\n\nNawang tilts her head back and forth in the Indian way that means so-so. In fact, she intends to return to Tibet as soon as possible in spite of the risks. This is baffling to me, I admit.\n\n\"There are many like me,\" Nawang says in English.\n\n\"She's a modest girl,\" the translator says. For the first time, I see the young nun's crooked smile.\n\nNawang's freedom rests, it seems, in her ability not to hate. Her self-worth does not depend on aggrandizing herself but is simply her birthright as a human being. Nawang will not keep fighting because she is brave\u2014although, of course, she is\u2014I think to myself afterward, but because she has taken a bodhisattva vow, as a Buddhist nun, to help end suffering wherever she finds it. This promise appears to have set her free.\n\nWith nothing to lose, she's wealthier and more liberated than most of us. _Om Mani Padme Hum:_ the road to freedom is lit with compassion. Then, when the impossible happens, we meet it with an opened heart, knowing the enemy cannot destroy us. Love is stronger than fear, we see clearly. Knowing this opens a different door.\n\n## **DRAGONS AT THE GATE**\n\nSummertime on Southampton Beach in Long Island, July 1970. Two months before their scheduled wedding, Jack Willis and his fianc\u00e9e, Mary Pleshette, are hitting the surf for one last swim of the afternoon. They are a golden couple\u2014Jack an award-winning, thirty-six-year-old documentary film director; Mary a reporter for _Newsweek_ and twelve years his junior. Jack, who'd been an excellent swimmer all his life, throws himself into an average-size wave. A minute passes. Mary sees no trace of him. Suddenly Jack's head bobs up out of the surf, and he cries out to his fianc\u00e9e for help.\n\n\"I'd been bodysurfing since I was a kid and knew I shouldn't have taken that wave,\" Jack is telling me now. We're in the Willises' living room near Central Park in Manhattan. Jack, now seventy-three, is sitting in an armchair across from me, while Mary putters in the other room. Aside from the tilt in his slender shoulders and the metal walker at Jack's side, you'd never know that he is disabled. Bright-eyed, white-haired, and quick with a joke, Jack's the kind of raconteur you'd expect to meet in an Irish pub, talking blarney with a corncob pipe in his mouth (if he weren't really a Jew from L.A.).\n\n\"Suddenly I looked down and saw nothing but sand,\" Jack says, eyes brightening. \"I tried to somersault out of it, but instead I hit the back of my head and was instantly paralyzed from the neck down. I saw flashes of red and realized I had to stay awake or I was going to die.\"\n\nMary, a sexy, auburn-haired woman wearing jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, sets glasses of water in front of us and takes her seat on the opposite couch. \"My next thought was 'It's okay to die,'\" Jack tells me. \"It's the clearest that I have ever been about anything in my entire life. There was a genuine feeling of absolute peace. Then my next thought was 'You have to try to get out of this somehow.'\"\n\n\"What did you do?\" I say, turning to Mary.\n\n\"I tried to run toward him,\" she remembers, \"but it felt like an anxiety dream where you try to run but can't move your legs. Thank God for the people on the beach. I could never have pulled Jack out by myself.\"\n\n\"They got me out of the water and laid me on the beach,\" he continues. \"I couldn't move anything. Luckily the paramedics who finally came had been in Vietnam. They recognized immediately that I'd broken my neck and knew better than to try to move me.\"\n\nThe Willises are a formidable team, one of those rare true-love partnerships that tolerate\u2014even thrive upon\u2014a soup\u00e7on of healthy friction. They adore each other, clearly, challenge each other, disagree, and push the memory envelope in some directions the other might prefer to avoid. It comes as no surprise when Jack tells me that Mary has been integral to his emotional and physical survival. Their symbiosis is poignant and glaring.\n\n\"That moment of peace may have come out of shock,\" Jack backtracks, describing his near-death experience. \"But I'm truly not afraid to die now. I just know it's going to be extraordinarily peaceful.\"\n\n\"For you, maybe.\" Mary arches a brow.\n\n\"No big white light,\" Jack says. \"Just a feeling. And the next thing I thought was _Try to live._ \"\n\nIn the days following the accident, Jack claims to have experienced surprisingly little fear. His real dread came during the twenty-one days of waiting to hear whether his spinal cord had been severed. \"I was in traction for six weeks,\" he says, shaking his head slowly. \"The physical pain was terrorizing. The drugs they were giving me caused the most horrible nightmares. I'd dream I was skiing downhill and would hit a tree, then my neck would snap, over and over again.\" Jack's waking reality wasn't much better. \"I couldn't talk about my fear of being quadriplegic with Mary,\" he admits.\n\nThis is Mary's cue to leave the room.\n\n\"Would I kill myself?\" Jack says in a low voice. \"What happens if I'm in a wheelchair? I'm a filmmaker. What am I going to do with my life?\" His doctor's bedside manner only made things worse. \"One of them said, 'If this happened to me, I don't know what I'd do. I'm a doctor. I need my hands.' I said, 'Fuck you, what do you think I am? A piece of meat?' Luckily Mary brought me a tape recorder I could talk into, which kept me from losing my mind completely. I could say things I absolutely needed to say. Things I couldn't reveal to another soul. Not even Mary.\"\n\nTrapped in agonizing pain, Jack wrestled hour by hour against horrendous, mounting despair. Denial was his only ally. \"In a moment of hopelessness, it's helpful to be lied to,\" he says.\n\n\"It's true,\" I agree.\n\n\"My morale was declining too fast for anything else,\" Jack tells me. Family and friends, including Mary, colluded with him in the fantasy that everything would eventually be all right. But these assurances didn't always help. \"The better I got, the worse I felt emotionally,\" he admits. \"It seemed an incredible paradox\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The less physical pain I had, the more subject I was to fits of depression, to feeling trapped,\" Jack explains. \"When I tried to sleep, I'd wake up in a panic of being imprisoned. I remember seeing a picture of Gulliver tied down by thousands of tiny ropes, his arms at his side, his neck stretched out. That's exactly how I felt.\"\n\nEach small improvement during this waiting period brought with it an onslaught of paranoid predictions about the future. \"Once I started to get movement and feeling back, I was worried about my bladder and bowels and libido. My fianc\u00e9e and I were about to be married, for Christ's sake!\" Jack slaps the arm of his chair. \"Would I kill myself? I didn't know how much I could bear but decided not to do anything until those twenty-one days were up.\"\n\nWith the news that his spinal cord was intact, Jack Willis got a portion of his future back. In spite of medical assurances that he would never walk again, Jack was back on his feet within a year. He and Mary were married soon afterward, and the couple managed to rebound remarkably well at first. Determined to ignore his frailty, to pick up life where he'd left off, Jack worked at building a firewall of denial between himself and his loss, with Mary's wholehearted blessing.\n\n\"I was far less introspective back then,\" he admits. \"Far more alpha male. I didn't want to be treated like a cripple. My own survival demanded that I separate myself from people in my condition.\" That's why Jack refused to continue rehab: The sight of others like him was too depressing. In business he piled on the machismo. \"I was aware in corporate life that I was at a disadvantage.\" He chuckles at the understatement. \"At meetings all these suits would be hustling, and I'm shlepping along. But the minute we sat down we were all equal.\"\n\nHe refused to be stopped by self-consciousness. \"Mary and I just denied that there were problems, but there were enormous problems.\" The buried despair and repressed fury in their home only deepened after the birth of their two daughters, Sarah and Kate. \"Our daughters started having issues, but we didn't put two and two together,\" he says. \"We just weren't dealing.\"\n\nWhen Jack excuses himself to use the bathroom, Mary stays to keep me company. \"Did you ever think of leaving him?\" I ask.\n\n\"Never,\" Mary says, not missing a beat. \"I was just so in love with him. I was only twenty-four years old when it happened, but I knew I'd found the person I wanted to be with. The options were clear when I played them out.\" Mary ticks the choices off on her fingers. \"Could I live with Jack being paralyzed? Yes. It wouldn't be easy, but we'd manage somehow. Could I live without him\u2014or, God forbid, see him get better and marry somebody else? No way in hell. That was unacceptable. The choice wasn't as hard as it looked.\"\n\n\"So you've never regretted it?\"\n\n\"Oh, please!\" Mary laughs. \"Nobody forced me to stay. I'm here because I love my husband. There are plenty of things that we can't do\u2014the hardest thing is not being able to take a walk together\u2014but we really have had a terrific life.\" (And yes, the Willises do have sex.) \"Jack has never lived like he was crippled.\"\n\nThe denial did have to stop, however. In 1990 Jack reached a low point. Having taken a job in Minnesota as the head of Twin Cities Public Television, he became tremendously depressed, overwhelmed by a wave of held-back despair he could no longer manage with make-believe. \"It was a bit like what they call post-polio syndrome, where decades after surviving the disease, people's muscles start to atrophy and they end up in a wheelchair,\" Jack tells me when he's back.\n\n\"A midlife thing?\" I ask.\n\n\"Who knows? But I started feeling very sorry for myself,\" he says. \"What's my life about? That kind of thing. Did I really survive this accident and get this far only to be pulled back down again?\"\n\n\"In many ways it was worse than the initial crisis,\" Mary says.\n\nHaving refused to use a cane, Jack began taking falls and generally neglecting his health. Mary was beside herself. \"She was very angry with me,\" Jack admits. \"We had terrific fights. Mary wanted me to go on a walker, but I was terribly insulted. I'd managed to walk on my own till then, albeit like a drunk on a boat with one leg bent. I threw the walker across the room.\"\n\n\"He was a son of a bitch,\" she says without mincing words.\n\n\"I had too much pride,\" Jack tells me. \"Mary had stayed with me through everything, but I realized that I might lose her. I began, with the help of a shrink, to deal with the denial.\"\n\nAround this time, a family friend gave Jack a copy of Reynolds Price's memoir, _A Whole New Life,_ in which the novelist, who was paralyzed by spinal cancer, describes how hypnosis helped rid him of chronic pain in spite of his own skepticism. Jack jumped on this lifeboat of borrowed wisdom and began to explore the mind-body connection. He located a hypnotist, who taught him how to work with his own pain in order to function at a more comfortable level. Jack describes how this breakthrough led him to meditation and a passionate interest in what he calls the inner life.\n\n\"This has been extraordinary for me,\" he says. \"I was not the kind of guy you could see meditating! But it truly did become my lifeline.\" The far-reaching effects of sitting quietly twice a day for thirty minutes still amaze him. \"My behavior vis-\u00e0-vis the rest of the world is so much different than before. I'm working as hard as I used to, but not integrating the daily stress in the same way. I'm able to deal with things a lot more objectively, not taking things personally\u2014internalizing\u2014the way I used to.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" says Mary, who also meditates.\n\n\"It's about having a calmer foundation from which to act, and finding that when I act that way with other people, they respond much better to me as well. I'm less concerned with how I appear to the world, less attached to the physical. But I'm in much better shape than I was ten years ago, because I'm taking much better care of myself.\"\n\nJack is able to \"unhook\" more skillfully from onslaughts by his inner terrorists. \"It's a beautiful thing,\" he marvels. \"There's a kind of wisdom that doesn't come from the head, an impulse to do something that isn't influenced by thought. Suddenly you say something really smart that you didn't mean to say, that kind of thing. I can drop the mind, unhook awareness from the thought or emotion. Not all the time, but sometimes I can do it. Right now I'm working on lower-back pain. The process continues.\"\n\nJack is also angling to retire. \"I've done it,\" he says, meaning his television career. \"There are other horizons.\" Mary is freelancing for the _New York Times_ and working on a second novel. Their marriage remains passionate; from the way Mary hangs on the arm of his chair, you can tell she'd rather be sitting on his lap. Their relationship with the girls is steadily improving. On a recent trip to Paris, Jack even agreed to use his wheelchair.\n\n\"At any given moment, you're doing the best you can,\" he says. \"The question is always, what's the logical next step?\"\n\nMary smiles lovingly.\n\n\"I try not to worry until I have to. Living with this\"\u2014Jack gazes down at his self-described scrawniness\u2014\"I've seen that we keep finding tools, all of us, no matter the problem. To help us get where we want to go, even if we're not conscious of where we're going.\"\n\n\"What do you do when you get scared?\" I ask.\n\n\"Our fears are like dragons at the gate,\" Jack Willis tells me. \"We just have to face them and walk through.\"\n\n## **SUPERMAN'S GHOST**\n\n\"Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware,\" philosopher Martin Buber wrote. The image of life as a labyrinth is ancient and true, each pathway we follow digressing, recircling, occluding, delivering us, unexpectedly, to unsuspected crossroads and brinks. You leave the house to buy a quart of milk and meet your true love near the frozen foods. Your blood tests come back not as you'd hoped, so you experiment with acupuncture, enjoy the needles, take up studies yourself, quit your job at the bank, and wind up living in Chinatown with a Pekingese dog, a new hairdo, and your once-overwhelming condition in retreat.\n\nWe watch our destinations change with every loop of the maze. What mattered yesterday seems absurd; today's resolution is already passing. We're severely aware of our lack of control. \"Take your hands off the wheel,\" says a teacher of mine, \"and you'll see what's really driving!\" He's right, I'm sure, but this requires a difficult faith in the power of life to actually guide you. Such trust is part of the secret, it seems, to finding your way to the place you're going.\n\nJust take the case of Jim MacLaren. A superjock from San Diego, California, the bionic six-foot-five-inch, three-hundred-pound, blue-eyed all-rounder went to Yale on lacrosse and football scholarships, took up acting, moved to New York, and was just leaving a late-night rehearsal on his motorcycle when he was broadsided by a forty-thousand-pound city bus, flew eighty-nine feet in the air, and was pronounced DOA at the hospital.\n\nAfter eighteen hours in the operating room, doctors managed to stabilize Jim's condition but were forced to amputate the comatose patient's left leg below the knee. Jim hopped, then skipped, then ran his way back to full mobility like a champ, returned to school, took up swimming, then became interested in triathlons. The very unlikelihood of his being able to compete pumped Jim's inner competitor to do it against the odds. Within three years Jim had set records in the New York City Marathon as well as the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, where he competed with able-bodied opponents.\n\nThen on June 6, 1993, his true descent into the maze began. Riding his bike near his home in Mission Viejo, California, the amputee was plowed into by a van mistakenly waved through by a traffic marshal. The collision broke Jim's neck at the C5 vertebra and left him paralyzed from the neck down. Defeated, the ex\u2013All Star withdrew to Honolulu and spent most of the next few years becoming a drunk and a cocaine addict, hurling just as much gusto into booze and blow as he had into the long jump and javelin.\n\nGrueling as his previous ordeals had been, it was here, during Jim's dark night of the soul, that his most shattering insights began to occur. Having interrupted his substance abuse, he became aware that his greatest suffering was not actually coming from the accidents but from a source beyond his crippled body. Physical rehab had been a kind of smoke screen; now Jim was meeting his true nemesis head-on: overcoming the depression and addictions that now threatened to kill him. Alcoholism has been likened to a misplaced prayer; certainly, addicts are individuals who appear to have lost their inner compass. With Jack Daniel's and cocaine no longer working, Jim was forced to pull his own mask aside and take a good hard look.\n\n\"The first thing I had to do was identify my absolute deepest fear about all this,\" Jim told the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. What was the worst thing about having to spend life as a quadriplegic? he asked himself. Was it fear of death? Not really. He had had two near-death experiences already, \"with the white light and the tunnel and the whole deal,\" amazing encounters that had virtually removed his fears of dying.\n\nWas he afraid of losing his sexuality? No, Jim said again. \"I knew as long as I had taste and smell and sensation, I could lead a sensual life.\" Was he afraid of helplessness? Not really. \"Managing on my own is a drag, but it's just logistics.\" Was he afraid of pain? No, he knew how to deal with pain. \"So what was I afraid of?\" Jim wondered aloud. \"The answer was pretty clear,\" he said. \"I was afraid of being alone with myself, with my mind, with the dark things that lived in there. The doubt, loneliness, and confusion. I was afraid of metaphysical pain.\"\n\nLooking inward, Jim came to understand that his greatest pain arose from a damaged sense of wholeness. This is a common refrain among survivors I've spoken to; material difficulties aside, it's the imagined loss of wholeness, of feeling intact, that wounds many of us most deeply. But what is wholeness, really? Jim was forced to ask himself now. What did it mean to lead a full life? What were his actual obstacles? After he had delved into these questions a long time, a new awareness arose in him. Jim realized that as frustrated as he was with his handicap (and envious of the able-bodied), if he could get up out of his wheelchair and walk across the room, that wouldn't really get him to the place he most wanted to go in his life. Because if he was honest, the other side of the room was not his ultimate destination. His ultimate destination was self-knowledge and enlightenment. Did he have to get there on foot? Or could he find some other path?\n\nEventually Jim did get sober. Today he travels the world in his wheelchair, giving lecture-sermons, kicking butt, still handsome and blue-eyed with his big, burly shoulders. He shows people that it can be done, helps them to navigate their own labyrinths\u2014even take their hands off the wheel when they can\u2014en route to their secret destinations. It's not the life that he had planned for himself\u2014never in a million years. But Jim insists that it led him, however circuitously\u2014and doubters had better believe him\u2014 precisely where he needed to be.\n\n## **HOME IN THE WORLD**\n\nWe learn to live heroically, though we may not always feel like heroes, watching people like Jim MacLaren wrestling strength from such vicious hardship. The spectacle of dignity wrought from despair is always elevating to behold. The Greeks had a word for this, of course: _catharsis_ (literally \"to cleanse\")\u2014that rousing, purging renewal of spirit that comes from witnessing heroic acts through a humbling mirror of terror and pity. In 1889 Robert Louis Stevenson voyaged to the infamous Kalawao leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, a place filled with mind-boggling pain and injustice. Though Hansen's disease is not especially contagious, lepers had been stigmatized and imprisoned since ancient times. The residents of Molokai, for no medical reason whatsoever, had been taken from their families and forced into these plague-style encampments in paradise. Stevenson, whose life had been relatively sheltered till then, wrote in awe of it to his brother: \"I have seen sights that cannot be told and heard stories that cannot be repeated,\" marveled the author of _Treasure Island._ \"Yet I never admired my poor race so much nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement.\"\n\nLike all forms of beauty, heroism alters us when we see it. Indeed, we are taught that we must love something more than we fear death in order for our lives to have meaning, as Martin Luther King believed. Sometimes this reaching requires us to go far out on a limb before we can taste the fruit waiting there. I've yet to meet a post-catastrophe person who doesn't remember realizing, in a panicked moment, that his familiar context is gone (severely changed at the very least), his safety net exploded, leaving him exposed to the elements. Major change nearly always brings with it a wrenching sense of homelessness, feelings of bitter dislocation. This emotional uprooting forces us to adapt; in time we learn to pack up more quickly, even to carry our metaphorical homes inside ourselves, the place where we feel that we belong, which cannot be taken away from us. We're taught by this homeless feeling that _home_ means more than four walls and a ceiling. Home is where we find our balance, the pivoting point that connects us to the earth. Sociologists studying the homeless have examined this phenomenon. \"It is of more than semantic significance that we call these people 'homeless' instead of 'houseless' or 'shelterless,'\" I read somewhere. \"Home has an existential importance that reflects our discomfort at being on the earth in the first place.\"\n\nHaving felt homeless for much of my life, whether I had an address or not, I'm fascinated by the link between home and healing and wonder how people living on the street do cope. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I stop by the St. Elizabeth Shelter and strike up a conversation with a wrinkled nun named Sister Jane, who's dressed in an Emmylou Harris T-shirt, with glasses on a pearl chain around her neck. \"Many of our homeless friends are highly artistic people,\" Sister Jane tells me cheerfully. \"Let me show you some of their work.\"\n\nI follow her along a corridor hung with dozens of brash, oversized canvases that, were they signed \"Basquiat,\" might bring in a small fortune in a New York gallery. It's obvious to me now why this wild, untrained school of _art na\u00eff_ is called survivor art. \"Often the homeless are far more aware of sights and sounds than those of us who are wrapped up in our so-called ordinary lives,\" Sister Jane tells me when the tour is over, seeing me off at the front door. \"We forget to see and hear. They take the time because that's all they have.\"\n\n\"In the noise and the business,\" Kierkegaard wrote, \"we're drawn away from our spirits. But in the stillness, when we're absolutely alone in the world, we can sometimes find a vision of justice and beauty that will ever afterwards infuse our lives with purpose.\"\n\nJonathan Kozol, the educator whose book _Rachel and Her Children_ explores the crucible of homeless life, believes that homelessness itself can be an art form. \"No one seeks out misery, of course,\" Jonathan says when I reach him by phone at his home near Boston. \"But many families I've known have been ennobled by their homelessness. Being removed from their ordinary context becomes a spiritual apotheosis. Women who spent their days watching soap operas are suddenly quoting from the Psalms. They're drawn closer to that intense edge which gives life significance.\"\n\n\"You're not romanticizing misery?\" I wonder.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Jonathan assures me. He recalls a recent New Year's Eve at the Martinique Hotel in Manhattan, the infamous way station for the homeless, and one particularly inspiring clan he met there. \"This family had become like ministers to the tortured souls around them,\" he says. \"They lit a candle on the mantelpiece of their ugly, filthy room and made an altar. Each of us had a glass of wine and read prayers at midnight. It was more sacred to me than anything I've felt in a church or synagogue.\"\n\nThis is poignant to imagine. \"The sense of religious feeling just soared when I was in that building,\" he tells me. The writer contrasts this display of compassion to then-cardinal John O'Connor's refusal to allow the homeless to sleep on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral at Christmastime\u2014\"a betrayal of Christianity,\" in his opinion. \"If we could begin to see the homeless not as deficient human beings,\" Jonathan says, \"but as metaphors of the fragility of life for all of us, as epiphanies...\" His voice trails off. \"Only then will we not be able to drive them away.\"\n\nLittle has been written about homelessness as a metaphor for impermanence and what we can learn from people who face its wilderness daily. To begin with, a single afternoon at a soup kitchen reveals immediately that there is no homogeneous group known as The Homeless. There is only _homelessness,_ an archetypal state of transience, isolation, and insecurity everyone senses at one time or another (more intensely in times of crisis). As a population, the homeless are as diverse as the human family itself. From suburban housewives to Ph.D. holders, health-care professionals to dope-smoking teenagers, war vets (there are statistics showing that some 25 percent of the homeless in this country fought in Vietnam) to former heads of companies, we discover all kinds when we look to the streets.\n\nIn a park across from San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church, where fifteen hundred free meals are served weekly, I sit down with a thirty-nine-year-old West Indian man named Danny Williams, who's been homeless for the past ten years. Danny came to San Francisco in the late 1970s to attend college but fell into alcoholism after experiencing an emotional crisis. Though he's still drinking, Danny insists to me that he's not lost.\n\n\"How do you think homeless people survive?\" he asks me. \"The ones who got everything, they don't need to pray. I pray every hour. But the only church I go to is in my heart.\"\n\n\"What do you pray for?\"\n\n\"I just tell God that I'm here!\" He chuckles. \"I pray that he won't let me lose my dignity. I pray that if I'm paying for all the bad I done, he'll forgive me.\" Danny looks almost tearful when he says this. His neighbor on the next bench chimes in to help his buddy. \"That's how most homeless people live,\" says this greasy-haired dude with a glass eye and a navy tattoo on his forearm. \"You might see scars and our attitude might be bad, but we always got that hope.\"\n\n\"I can sleep right here in the street,\" Danny tells me. \"But he's there with me. I just say a prayer and hit the sack, wake up, find me food, find me a drink, and he's there. I don't even care what happens to me down here, 'cause I know that when I get up there to meet him, I'm gonna be on his right side.\"\n\n\"No matter what happens?\" I ask.\n\n\"No matter what,\" Danny says.\n\nA passerby, Tanya, throws in her two cents. \"We're all just captive spirits, honey,\" says this fat black Rasta babe in orange flip-flops, holding a mischievous toddler by the hand. \"I don't consider myself homeless even if I'm sleeping in a doorway, 'cause home is where you _is,_ \" Tanya tells me. She does a hand-on-the-hip thing (\"you dig?\"), then wipes Popsicle goo off her toddler's mouth. \"Sometimes I'm more at home nowhere than in my mama's house.\"\n\nTanya waves to an old guy on the breadline. William \"Terry\" Stiles introduces himself and invites me to keep him company while he eats his stale rolls and noodle soup. Terry has been living on and off the street for twenty-five years. He has long, bony hands and a film of glaucoma creeping up the sides of his blue-circled, dark brown eyes.\n\n\"God is like the air,\" offers Terry, chewing his roll, displaying a toothless grin.\n\n\"How do you figure?\" I ask.\n\n\"He's everywhere,\" the old man tells me, his mind drifting to higher thoughts. \"This life has been a great teacher. You know, it's taken me a few doorways and trips to the hospital to know who I am,\" admits Terry, who was a nurse's aide before descending into clinical depression and losing his job. \"This life out here,\" he says, meaning the street, \"it will humble you if it don't break you.\"\n\n\"What keeps you together?\"\n\n\"I know who I am,\" Terry explains. To look at him, that seems obvious. \"What most of you don't realize is that lots of us on the street are brilliant, well-educated people.\"\n\n\"So why do you stay out here?\" I ask.\n\n\"I wasn't always who I am now,\" he replies. \"I used to be grandiose and egotistical and left God out of the picture, which is why I fell.\"\n\n\"And now, Terry?\"\n\n\"I'm hanging out in the park,\" he chuckles. \"Ain't that a bitch?\" I follow his eyes across the lawn, where a group of pretty teenage girls are laughing and a family is having a barbecue.\n\n\"It is a beautiful day. But this life can't be easy,\" I say.\n\n\"It is hard to trust out here sometimes,\" says Terry.\n\n\"It's hard to trust everywhere,\" I reply.\n\nThe old man chews this one over for a moment. Then he says, \"Without my spirit, I'd go insane.\"\n\nWhen I shake Terry's hand and walk away, I look back over my shoulder and see him beginning to doze on his bench. Tanya takes my seat and lights a half-smoked cigarette. Her little boy gets to tickling Terry with his Popsicle stick; Terry is laughing and trying to swat him off. Has he found his home in the world? you could ask. Is home a metaphysical thing as much as a nailed-down address and a mailbox? Or is a home like a body, always there when we bother to notice? Are we really always _at home_ so long as we remain in the world? But if that's so, I can't help but wonder, why do we feel so often so uprooted inside our own skins? Do we feel so homeless because we've yet to locate the keys to interior castles? Or do we keep looking for somewhere different because we're accustomed to feeling lost?\n\n## **THE ART OF LOSING**\n\nViktor Frankl was a thirty-seven-year-old psychiatrist on the autumn morning he and his wife were abducted from their Vienna apartment and shipped to Theresienstadt death camp. On the train platform Viktor and Tillie were torn apart; then, for the next three years, Frankl endured the horrors of camp life we know about all too well. A brilliant student of human nature (his specialty was suicidology), Frankl spent his years in the camp observing the behavior of his fellow inmates, from the lowliest of the _Muselm\u00e4nner_ \u2014those \"walking dead,\" who had lost their will to live\u2014to prisoners at the other end of the spectrum, who'd kept some dignity in spite of their cruel surroundings.\n\nFor Frankl, such dignity\u2014indeed, his very survival\u2014centered on his love for Tillie and the hope that they would be reunited (in fact, she would die in the camp). Frankl would establish himself in the next few years among Europe's most renowned psychiatrists with a school known as logotherapy. Logotherapy, from _logos,_ or \"meaning,\" holds that our ability to live most fully depends on finding meaning in our existence. In _Man's Search forMeaning,_ Frankl's classic study, he described witnessing such hard-won dignity in action:\n\nWe who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms\u2014to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.\n\n... Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision... which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...\n\nFundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him\u2014mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevsky said once, \"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.\"\n\nThis sounds like an odd aspiration at first, being worthy of bad things that happen to us. Yet our very resistance to being broken by evil is what prevents us from becoming playthings of circumstance. Without this dignity, Frankl suggests, we might as well be animals.\n\nThis dignity is a form of grace. Even the most courageous need it to come through slaughter without being destroyed.\n\nA seven-year-old boy is sitting in a dusty marketplace near his family's farm in the hinterlands of eastern Sudan during the early harvest days of 1986. His name is Francis Bok, and he is here with two of his sisters to sell peanuts, eggs, and assorted produce from the family's homestead, which is among the most fertile in the valley. As the strongest son of eight, Francis is his father's favorite, the boy he calls _muycharko_ \u2014a Dinka word meaning \"twelve men\"\u2014the offspring his father has chosen to replace him as head of the family after he dies.\n\nThe children are spread out on a crimson blanket under their lean-to of burlap and sticks, laughing, surrounded by their wares. The rainy season hasn't started; the air is still hot and dry, brimming with the pungent aromas of fish and fresh tobacco leaves, racks of glistening meat hung from hooks in the close-packed stalls. Business is good; Francis is happy collecting coins in a purse his mother has sewn for him to keep inside his clothes.\n\nAll of a sudden, bedlam breaks out. Francis hears gunfire and galloping horses, then crowds scattering in all directions as a band of black-turbaned marauders storms into the marketplace. These are the dreaded _juur,_ members of the Arab tribes to the north who've sworn genocide on southern black Christians like Francis and his family. As Francis watches in terror, his five-year-old sister hiding behind him, these _juur_ begin to hack down the marketers in their path. Francis's neighbor, a girl of eight, is shot through the head for no reason; when her sister becomes hysterical and refuses to leave the girl's dead body, her leg is hacked off at the hip. Women and babies are bayoneted and left to writhe to their death in the dirt.\n\nTerrified, Francis herds his sisters behind him. Before they can escape, a man is there on horseback, towering over him, pointing a gun at Francis's head and ordering him into the saddle behind him. Then the horse is galloping out past the road to Francis's farm and onto the desert highway leading toward Khartoum. Fourteen hours later Francis and his kidnapper, Giemma Abdullah, arrive at Giemma's farm, where Francis is shackled, locked in a pigsty, and told that he is now an _abeed_ \u2014a slave\u2014who will live and eat with the animals. If Francis disobeys in any way or tries to escape, Giemma assures him, he will be killed.\n\nWhat goes through the mind of a seven-year-old boy kidnapped and thrust into such a nightmare? There's numbness first, then disbelief, an armadillo's self-curling protection when \"everything went dead\" in him, as Francis will tell me when we meet. Shock is followed by wrenching grief, loneliness, and humiliation. For no reason whatsoever, Giemma's wife pulls Francis into the kitchen one morning, puts a pistol to his head, and says, \"I would blow your brains out this very minute if I could,\" with an evil smile. Giemma's children are invited to beat Francis with rocks and sticks as a game. \"I wondered why no one was helping me,\" Francis will tell me. \"People just stood there and watched. Why would they do that to me? I was only seven years old.\"\n\nNight after night in his pigsty, gazing up through a hole in the roof, Francis began to plot and replot his escape from Giemma's farm. \"Better not to live,\" he decided, \"than to live as a slave.\"\n\nHe looks like a Giacometti sculpture dipped in blue-black ink and polished. His body, at six feet seven inches, is impossibly thin, severely chiseled, astoundingly odd in its elongation. I've been led to Francis Bok by an antislavery group in Washington, D.C. Francis, now twenty-four, has invited me to visit him in the town outside Boston where the group helped find him an apartment. He wants to tell me the story of how after ten years of slavery he managed to escape to freedom.\n\nFrancis crosses his stiltlike legs and observes me with an expression neither friendly nor disinterested. The little apartment, with its thrift store furniture, basketball posters, and color TV, could belong to any college student (Francis is taking courses at a nearby university). This backdrop seems a universe away from the fields where he and his brother's grew up playing _alweth_ (hide-and-seek) near their village of Gourion.\n\n\"I reached the point inside of myself that I didn't care what would happen to me,\" Francis tells me in a whisper. \"I didn't care if I lived or died. I only knew that I must try again.\"\n\nTen years after his abduction, and after a number of close calls, the seventeen-year-old was finally able to slip off Giemma Abdullah's farm while herding cattle, hitched a ride to a local town, and then, after several detours, found his way to Khartoum (where he was arrested on suspicion of illegal activity) and finally to Cairo. After four months in Egypt, Francis was taken up by a human rights group and granted asylum in the United States, where a foster family supported him long enough for Francis to afford the small apartment where he and I are now sitting.\n\n\"Do you like it here?\" I ask awkwardly.\n\nFrancis doesn't say anything. Though outwardly polite and easygoing, he's markedly inaccessible, too, circled by a moat of caution, his voice remote and difficult to hear. I'm reminded of Nawang Sangdrol, the Tibetan nun, who was comfortable while reporting the terrible facts of her public story but turned dreamy, cagey\u2014the word that comes to mind is \"porous\"\u2014when invited below the surface.\n\n\"How is your life?\" I try again.\n\nFrancis grins and says, \"I am well.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I don't mean to sound so surprised. But it's not the answer one would expect from a man who was forced to sleep in a pigsty, eating discarded kitchen scraps. \"What about what happened to you?\"\n\n\"I am a Christian,\" Francis says, as if this were sufficient explanation.\n\n\"I know a lot of bitter Christians,\" I say.\n\nFrancis takes a slug off his Pepsi. He gazes through the venetian blinds at a girl in hot pants walking her dog. \"I can tell you this,\" he says in a voice so low I can hardly hear him. \"No matter what happens, I try to take it soft.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by soft?\"\n\n\"I learned much about life on Giemma's farm.\"\n\nJust then, Francis's demeanor begins to shift. He leans forward and speaks in a deeper voice. \"I have learned that it does not matter how much you are beaten or how much you are despised,\" he says, suddenly sounding like a man. \"There is one thing they can never take from you.\"\n\n\"What, Francis?\"\n\nHe sits up straight. \"They can never steal your idea of who you are,\" he says. \"They can never take control of your mind. They can never take away your self-love.\" It's suddenly easy to imagine him preaching at a pulpit. \"They cannot take away my forgiveness. They can never silence my heart. No matter what has happened, I see myself as a full person.\"\n\nThis is astonishing. The majority of people I know haven't lived through a fraction of this loss yet do not see themselves as full people. Francis stands to his full height and ducks under the kitchen doorway for more soda.\n\n\"How is that possible?\" I ask.\n\nHe pops our cans open and pours. \"If you want to live, you must fight for your freedom,\" he says to me. As a Christian, Francis has faith in mercy but also believes in the struggle for justice. \"When you abandon yourself, you lose. If you are alive in this world, you must fight. But never with a sword.\" He's back on the couch now, his long fingers occupying themselves with a rubber band. \"My people are using machine guns to shoot the Arabs who are slaughtering us. They believe that is the way to freedom, but it is not.\" I'm stunned when Francis informs me that there are twenty-eight million people currently living as slaves around the world.\n\n\"How do you deal with the memories?\" I ask him. \"How do you balance out what was taken from you?\"\n\nFrancis thinks about this for a moment. \"It is not easy feeling normal.\"\n\n\"You're not normal,\" I say. \"That's a good thing.\"\n\n\"I am very happy that you think so,\" he says, finally giving me a smile. Then he reaches for a paperback book on the coffee table. It's Dickens's _A Tale of Two Cities._ Francis reads from the first page. \"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\" he recites, picking his way through the English letters. \"This is what my life has been like,\" he says, still smiling. \"The best. And the worst.\"\n\n\"This is the best part?\"\n\n\"I have been given a second chance.\"\n\n\"You forgave Giemma?\"\n\nFrancis closes the book and puts it down. Apparently he hasn't quite made it to sainthood. For a moment he seems to disappear behind the soft-focus screen I noticed at first. Then he looks me straight in the eye and says, almost word for word, what the Tibetan nun told me. \"No one can move forward in hatred.\"\n\nI realize this, I say. But what does he _feel_ ?\n\n\"And dignity does not come from bloodshed.\" Francis cuts my American-style nit-picking off at the pass. \"There must be a way\u2014you must find it\u2014to love.\"\n\nHe is struggling with himself. I can see that.\n\n\"There is no other way,\" Francis tells me. \"Otherwise I am just like Giemma.\"\n\n## **A QUARTER INCH FROM HEAVEN**\n\nHakuin was a great seventeenth-century Zen master, a serious, shit-kicking old guy in black robes who would whack his disciples when they slouched and could meditate for days at a time. Hakuin was not afraid of anything.\n\nOne day a samurai arrived at the master's mountain _zendo._ The samurai approached Hakuin and bowed. \"Sir,\" he announced, \"I wish to understand the difference between heaven and hell.\"\n\nHakuin was the picture of disdain, eyeing the samurai from head to toe like yesterday's chop suey. \"I would tell you,\" the old man said, twirling his silver mustache. \"But I doubt that you have the keenness of wit to understand.\"\n\nThe samurai's face blazed with wounded pride. He pulled back in astonishment. \"Do you know who you are speaking to?\" he asked, puffing out his astounding chest.\n\n\"No one much.\" Hakuin shrugged. \"I really think you are probably too dull to understand.\"\n\n\"What?\" the samurai demanded, unable to believe his own ears. \"How can you speak to me in such a tone?\"\n\n\"Oh, don't be silly,\" Hakuin mocked him. \"Who do you think you are?\" The samurai trembled with fury. \"And that thing hanging from your waist,\" the teacher added. \"You call that a sword? It's more like a butter knife.\"\n\nFinally the samurai could take it no longer. With sweaty hands, he drew his sword and raised it over his head to strike.\n\n\"Ah,\" Hakuin said. \"That is hell.\"\n\nThe samurai spun around in his own mind. His eyes then shone with recognition as he lowered the sword and sheathed it.\n\n\"And that,\" the old guy told him, \"is heaven.\"\n\n## **THE GIRL ON THE ROCK**\n\nOne rainy afternoon in London, under an ominous mackerel sky, I find myself in a back corridor of the Tate Gallery, standing before an eighteenth-century painting I have never seen before. It is an oil-on-canvas portrait of Hope, the allegorical goddess, as depicted in 1886 by George Frederick Watts. This is no triumphant, trumpeting Hope (no hope springs eternal, let's sound the trombones!). Instead, this Hope is a waifish thing stranded on a lonely cliff, barefoot, tempest torn, eyes concealed behind a blindfold as she reaches her empty hand out toward a harp with only one string.\n\nI'm mesmerized by this mysterious picture, the supplicating pose of the girl whose face is almost hidden from view, fingers straining toward an instrument that offers her only chance of music, yet has only one string still intact, as likely to snap as it is to play. This is how life feels at times, isn't it? You've been blindfolded and left in the dark, knowing that even as you reach into your next moment, the string may simply snap in your face. But that if you don't reach, you're not really living.\n\nI learned this the hard way myself during a routine visit to my onetime doctor's office. This was years before antiretroviral treatments had been invented. I excitedly showed him a magazine article announcing a new prophylactic drug trial for which I might be eligible. I waited nervously for the doctor's response. He glanced at the clipping and handed it back.\n\n\"Listen,\" this substandard whitecoat told me with a patronizing smirk. \"Whatever makes you feel better...\" He trailed off without bothering to finish, as if he were wasting his breath on a child.\n\nI took the clipping, opened the door, left his office, and never returned. If I was on the verge of croaking, I resolved, it would not be while staring up into those cold, tired, angry eyes. My posse of friends questioned the hasty decision, but I knew it was the right thing. Were I to lose all hope, I would be a goner, whether my body survived or not. Souls survive on hope in the absence of physical evidence. Not the na\u00efve hope that everything will be hunky-dory, exactly as life used to be, but the hope that assures us, when things seem darkest, that although it doesn't look that way now, _something else is also true,_ as one survivor put it to me. That there is a hidden face to this moment. Such hope serves the same survival function as faith and denial, preserving a space in the shrinking mind for all that has yet to be revealed, leaving a chink for the mysteries. \"The function of intelligence _in extremis_ is not to judge one's chances, which [may be] nearly zero, but to make it through that day... without thinking too much about tomorrow,\" as one veteran from World War II said. Even when we lose hope for a particular outcome, we may find ourselves experiencing a more general faith in the power of life itself.\n\nHope is a metaphysical power, the breeze stirring in the darkness  . Stan Rice described this mysterious force in a poem. \"I was lost,\" he begins,\n\nand sang my broken down songs in the hell of the hour.  \nThen in my heart moved an oar,  \nand I was found by a breeze from a door in the sea of forms  \nAnd was rowed to the cherry trees on the shore.  \n_Selah Selah_\n\nWhen I left Dr. G.'s harbor of doom, the sails of my boat filled again and got me to Dr. Bellman's office.\n\nFixated hope is a problem, though. When we attach ourselves to a single outcome, it's easy to become hope's hostage, to imprison ourselves in optimism, entrap ourselves through inflexible craving for a premeditated result. Hope of this kind brings sure disappointment. We risk spending our time consumed by longing, obsessed with all the things we don't have and unhappy with what life has chosen to give us.\n\nBuddhists have a word for this gap between fixated hope and its fulfillment: _dukkha,_ a far-reaching term encompassing the absence of ultimate satisfaction in an imperfect world where all things must come to an end. Knowing how stubborn the human mind can be\u2014 how it wants what it wants _now_ \u2014Buddhism warns against too much clinging to desired outcomes we cannot control. Having practiced for decades to release such hope, a teacher such as American-born master Pema Chodron can say something like \"If hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, then so are hopelessness and confidence\" with a mea sure of credibility. Pema assures us that suffering is inevitable as long as we believe that things last. Only by discovering \"ease with uncertainty, poise amidst shakiness,\" by learning to stay with \"the broken heart and rumbling stomach\" and achieving some d\u00e9tente with hopelessness, can we be truly happy, she says. \"In the world of hope and fear,\" writes Pema, \"we always have to change [what is]. But when we allow ourselves to feel uncertainty, disappointment, shock, embarrassment, we discover a mind that is clear, unbiased, and fresh.\"\n\nI'm sure this is true. But for the vast majority of us, hope within reason, like denial within reason, is a form of adaptive genius. Our spirits are kept unsealed by the very breath of hope. Spirit ascends; soul is earthbound; their intersection is human life. The contradictory mess of caring, hoping, and letting go appears to be our curriculum here. Many years ago, a number of meditation teachers I know went to Thailand, where they visited the hermitage of a teacher named Achaan Chah. In Thailand people tend to use the Buddhist abbots and monks the way people in this country use therapists or astrologers. One day a father from the town came to Achaan Chah's monastery, extremely upset, to ask the master how he could possibly live with not being able to protect his children in such a violent world. How could this man, this father, hope to survive his kids' tragedies, the thousand blows that life would deal them? Achaan Chah lifted a lovely crystal goblet from his side table and held it up to the sun.\n\n\"I like this glass,\" the master said, delighting in the diamond light patterns shining through its thousand facets. \"I find this glass very beautiful. When the sun shines through it, there are rainbows. When you test it, it gives a wonderful ring. But I know that this glass is already broken.\"\n\nThe worried father did not understand.\n\n\"Each time I sip from this glass, I enjoy it,\" the master continued. \"And yet, when a strong wind tips it over or I knock this glass with my elbow and it shatters into a thousand pieces, I will say, 'Ah so, it was already broken.'\"\n\nAchaan Chah seemed to be suggesting to the father that were he to love his children in this way, each moment he spent with them would be so direct, and so precious, that there would be no room for regret, no necessity for hope. Acceptance would trump hopelessness.\n\nI wonder if this is true, and what it would mean to the girl on the rock. Whether this lesson would strip off her blindfold, stop her from reaching, seeing that her harp was already broken. Or whether the girl would still want to play because playing itself is in her nature, knowing that one string can be enough, and that if that last string breaks, she can always sing.\n\n## **GOING TO TAHITI (OR RAISING HEAVEN)**\n\nPsychologists agree that transcendental experience is as necessary to emotional health as family, friendship, sex, and work. Religions are born from this hunger for transcendence, of course, as is the taste for mind-expanding substances, which have been enjoyed by human beings, both ritualistically and recreationally, since recorded history began. From at least the year 5000 B.C. onward, our ancestors have employed a vast number of psychotropic plants to heal themselves physically, to enhance insight, and to ease suffering from what a Huichol shaman describes as \"loss of spirit\" (what we might call the blues). The Rig Veda, the most ancient of Hindu texts, speaks of ecstasy derived from a plant known as soma, which Aldous Huxley later introduced into mainstream awareness with his 1932 novel, _Brave New World._ (In fact, diagnosed with cancer at age sixty-nine, Huxley requested that a tab of LSD be administered to him on the day of his death.)\n\nHuxley was a firm believer in better living through chemistry. \"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours a day, abolish our solitude as individuals, attune us with our fellows in a flowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living but divinely beautiful and significant, then it seems to me all our problems would be wholly solved and earth would become a paradise,\" wrote the futuristic author.\n\nHe'd never been to a Grateful Dead concert, I guess. Not that I'm against getting high. I like an occasional jazz cigarette. I've been smoking weed on and off since high school and have yet to bury a spike in my arm or hear Son of Sam voices inside my head. I did lose control for a couple of years in my teens, but learned my delinquent lesson the day I ate too many quaaludes, totaled three cars, attacked the cop trying to help me after my head smashed through the windshield, and got thrown into jail for the third time that year. When my poor mother came to bail me out, seeing my bloody, wasted self, she just shook her head and said, \"You're gonna end up in Alcatraz.\"\n\nShe was right, which is why I cleaned up my act and drew the line at occasional reefer. When Ecstasy became popular in the 1980s, I wasn't even vaguely tempted. That is why, after receiving two horse-sized capsules of pure MDMA (Ecstasy) in the mail from a well-meaning chemist (as \"part of your research,\" his note read) for a piece I was writing about E, my own conflicted reaction surprised me. This package had come to me uninvited. I'd long ago made the firm decision not to voluntarily leave the three-dimensional world again (and not tweaking, for sure, on some stupid narcotic). I'd worked too hard to build a sane life. I had been told E was different, it's true; it wasn't a hallucinogen, but an empathogen, in fact, a \"heart-opening\" substance, with the reputed power to enable its users to dissolve emotional barricades in themselves\u2014lucidly\u2014in order to free themselves when sober. Until the Feds upgraded MDMA to a Schedule I drug in 1985 (making its use a felony), therapists had used the stuff for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and a number of other hard-to-crack maladies. \"Our culture is the first ever to have made the search for self-awareness a crime,\" chemist Alexander Shulgin complained at the time. In a booze-blasted culture like ours, this double standard did seem questionable. And yet, I was far from convinced.\n\nThe horse capsules tempted me from their drawer. It wasn't the prospect of getting high that stuck in my craw. It was the drug's self-liberating promise, and what my staunch refusal told me about myself. I was forty-five, my health was great, I was nested and safe and writing and flossing, but feeling a little too settled as well. I used to be so bold, I moaned. I used to want to taste the whole thing, blast through walls, let caution be damned. Now I wouldn't take a hit of E, which a friend of mine actually buys from her rabbi?\n\nA gauntlet had been tossed, it seemed to me. E morphed in my mind from a few hours' buzz into everything that I feared in my life, the seeker in me who'd gone to sleep. Here were these capsules siren-calling from their drawer, offering me a free ticket out of my bourgeois box, an entr\u00e9e to a carefree zone of envelope pushing, surprise, even bliss. How could I be afraid of that? If Gauguin hadn't taken that boat to Tahiti (miserable wretch though he turned out to be), he would never have painted those brown-breasted women for museum hoppers to ogle down through the ages. I needed to get out of Dodge for a minute. I needed to go to Tahiti.\n\nCoincidentally, around this time I was approached by a publisher looking for an editor to bail them out of an emergency. One of their star authors, Dr. Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, had suffered a massive stroke before completing what they believed would be his final bestselling book. A hero of the sixties counterculture, the pilot fish to a generation, Alpert had started out as a Harvard psychology professor before being fired for performing psilocybin experiments on his students (along with his crazy office mate, Timothy Leary). Alpert had dropped out, gone to India, fallen in love with a guru, been rechristened Ram Dass (Servant of God), and been sent back to the States with marching orders to write a book, which became the iconic _Be Here Now,_ once the third-best-selling title in the English-speaking world, after Dr. Spock and the King James Bible. Ram Dass had spent the forty years since then as a humanitarian and spiritual teacher.\n\nNow R.D., as he likes to be called, had survived this massive cerebral hemorrhage (against nine-to-one odds) but been left wheelchair bound and severely aphasic, unable to dress or feed himself, much less finish a book. R.D. desperately needed someone to help extract his mots justes and ventriloquize this stuff onto paper. I caught a flight to San Francisco a few days later to see if the two of us would hit it off.\n\nThe first time I catch sight of R.D., he's cramped into a wheel-chair on the porch of his Victorian home in Marin, smoking a joint and chuckling, unruly white hair haloed around his head like a cartoon scientist's. I'm taken aback by the dramatic difference between Ram Dass as the world knows him and this overweight senior with Kleenex stuck to the side of his face and a fey Filipino nurse fussing at him from inside the house that it's time to take his nap\u2014please!\n\nOur chemistry seems to work (even without additives), so over the course of the next six months, I spend many long days with R.D., picking through his haphazard pages, struggling to draw what he's trying to say from the tangled web of his halting brain. With one arm strapped to the chair, barely able to speak, he alternates between crankiness and serenity, distraction and discomfort (R.D.'s arm hurts a lot), assailing me with grunts and half sentences, annoyed when I can't help interrupting him, and eager for this last book of his\u2014which he's calling _Still Here_ \u2014to be a faithful account of what he has learned through this physical ordeal. R.D. wants the \"fierce grace\" of \"being stroked\" to infuse this manuscript about conscious aging. As he helped lead the flower power crowd toward higher consciousness, he now wants to teach these same baby boomers how to face aging creatively and with a measure of grace.\n\nEvery few weeks, I fly out to Marin, where R.D. and I labor together on his book, a photo of his smiling, tom-tom-bellied guru lolling on a plaid blanket always nearby. In exchange for my grammar and patience, R.D. offers me an intimate tutorial on fierce grace.\n\nNow and then I bring up a personal question. \"Someone sent me some Ecstasy,\" I tell him one day while we're having lunch in his shambles of a kitchen.\n\n\"Lucky you.\" R.D. smiles. His blue eyes haven't lost their twinkle.\n\n\"I doubt that I'll take it,\" I admit.\n\nHe twirls an index finger slowly next to his head.\n\n\"You think I'm crazy?\"\n\n\"Scared,\" he says, struggling to get the food to his mouth without spilling. \"That is reason to try.\" I'm well aware that R.D. credits psychedelics with opening his own eyes to \"the big picture.\" Recently he told an interviewer, \"My entire adult life has been an attempt to grow into what I saw at that [first] moment of cosmic unity on LSD, to incorporate the immensity of that experience into my being.\" \"Anything less extreme would have been unlikely to break through my mind-set,\" R.D. suggested.\n\n\"I've gotten so middle-aged,\" I say.\n\nHe nods in agreement and makes me feel worse.\n\n\"I used to be such a hell-raiser\u2014\" I say.\n\nR.D. chuckles and struggles to find a word.\n\n\"What?\" I lean forward, trying to read his lips.\n\n\"Raise,\" he stammers, \"heaven.\"\n\nAt the time of his stroke a year ago, Ram Dass was a vigorous, sixty-six-year-old, golf-playing, sports-car-driving bachelor traveling the world incessantly, reveling in his role as a lionized sage to a generation of middle-aged seekers like me. As the heir to an affluent Connecticut Jewish family (his father founded the New Haven and Hartford Railroad), he was a pampered child, and later Ivy League academic, who threw it all in for the consciousness game. R.D.'s unique appeal as a teacher had always been his self-deprecating lack of holiness, his willingness to present himself as a work in progress, \"a poor shlub just like anyone else trying to lead an enlightened life.\" Richard Alpert the psychologist had thought that Ram Dass the seeker was doing a pretty good job, until his own near-death experience in 1997 showed him how far he still had to go.\n\n\"I wasn't cooked yet,\" R.D. tells me straight off. This is how he describes the night of the stroke (I've smoothed out R.D.'s speech to spare the reader's nerves): \"There I was lying in my bed, trying to imagine how to finish this book about aging,\" he says, \"having this fantasy of what it would be like to be a very, _very_ old man, when I heard the phone ring.\" R.D. can recall getting out of bed to answer; his next memory is of a group of firemen \"staring into this old man's face\u2014but the old man was me and I wasn't dreaming.\" (Fortunately, an assistant had arrived on the scene in time to call 911; a half hour later and he would have been dead.) Like many near-death-experience survivors, he describes watching himself being resuscitated \"as if from a doorway on the sides of the scene,\" an out-of-body vantage point that followed him into the ambulance and to the hospital.\n\n\"I was sort of fascinated by what was happening,\" he admits.\n\n\"You must have been frightened,\" I insist.\n\nR.D. denies this. \"I never thought that I was dying. There was no flashing white light,\" or anything else that a lifetime of spiritual practice had prepared him to expect at the moment of death. \"That's when I realized that I had a lot more work to do before the end.\"\n\nHis uncooked parts centered on body and pride, the humiliation of allowing himself to be cared for after a lifetime of giving service. Overnight, R.D. went from being the guy on the white horse, visiting sickbeds, heading philanthropic organizations, ministering to thousands of students, to not being able to pee alone or make himself a tuna sandwich. This was more humbling than any _seva_ (service) he'd ever performed in so-called spiritual life, he assures me. \"I'd distanced myself from my body as merely a vehicle for the soul.\"\n\nThis reminds me of a line from one of James Joyce's short stories: \"Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.\" R.D. chuckles. \"I had ignored my body as much as possible,\" he admits. \"I'd tried to 'spiritualize' it away. Calling it detachment when actually it was fear.\" His body denial may, in fact, have helped to cause the stroke, since he neglected to take his blood pressure medications. Now here he was, trapped, at the mercy of others, wrestling daily with his suppressed vanity in the messy limits of his all-too-human body. This self-reckoning brought down walls in R.D. that he had never before dared to acknowledge.\n\n\"The stroke was like a samurai sword,\" he explains. \"The 'I' that I am now is not experiencing things the way the old 'I' would have. It's pushed me up to a higher level.\"\n\n\"Higher in what way?\" I ask.\n\n\"When there's genuine surrender between people, the boundaries between power and powerlessness, healer and helped, begin to dissolve,\" R.D. tells me. \"It is the dissolving of boundaries between us and the mystery that loosens the hold of the ego. Allows the soul to be revealed.\"\n\nThis soul perspective has been key to his negotiation of physical losses. \"You can't work with pain when you are stuck in fear,\" he tells me. \"Watching ourselves through the soul's eye allows us the distance to distinguish between who we really are, spiritual beings having a physical experience, and our suffering at the level of body and mind.\"\n\nR.D.'s nurse enters the room and slips a straw from a glass of orange juice between his lips. After swallowing, he continues. \"The minute you look at a fearful thought you've run from, it changes. Rather than being some awful Goliath, your fears become like little shmoos.\"\n\n\"Shmoos?\"\n\nLittle nuisances, he means. \"Every time you notice a fear, you learn to come closer to it. Fear of paralysis. Fear of dying.\" R.D. ticks off the usual suspects. \"Each time you do this, you're a little more able to take a deep breath and say, 'Ah, so. Big surprise.' And move forward without being swamped.\"\n\n\"Confronting the fear shrinks it down to size?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" R.D. assures me. \"It's as if the trapdoors of the self have been opened and we can finally step outside and enjoy the view,\" he says, recalling the famous line from William Blake: \"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.\"\n\nR.D. wants people to know that soul perception is our ace in the hole, the ability to widen our subjective lens to take in the full 360. Once we've tasted soul awareness, he believes, it almost doesn't matter whether we've got all our marbles or not. A student of R.D.'s was taking care of an elderly mother with Alzheimer's disease. \"This old lady was perfectly happy being gaga, but her daughter simply couldn't let go of the mother she'd known,\" he says. \"She kept pushing her mother to regain her memory. But this eighty-year-old woman didn't seem to care much about losing her mind. When I was able to work with the daughter to let go, the mother's life became much more peaceful.\"\n\nHe has met similar resistance among his own well-meaning caretakers. \"The people around me think that I should fight to walk again,\" he says, raising his eyebrows. \"But I don't know if I _want_ to walk. I'm sitting. That's where I am.\" He pats the arm of his chair with his good hand. \"I've come to love my wheelchair\u2014I call it my swan boat. I'm peaceful like this and grateful to the people who care for me. Why is this wrong?\"\n\n\"Maybe it's not.\"\n\n\"It's important not to get dragged into other people's drama,\" he says. \"It's too easy to become your illness, to lose yourself on your 'bed of woeses.' It is an ongoing practice to stay free of pity and fear. I may be confined by my stroke, but I don't want to be trapped in the roles that people project onto me\u2014of invalid, victim, hero, what ever. I'm truly content the way I am.\"\n\nI look at him askance. R.D. chides me with a wagging finger. \"In other cultures it's a symbol of honor and power to be carried and wheeled around,\" he insists. \"You know, it's really not at all important to be what the culture calls optimal. Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before. It means allowing what is now to move us closer to God,\" he explains. \"The secret is that our limits actually become our strengths if we use them skillfully. The ego's attachment to power is linked inextricably to fear of losing that power. But there is a kind of power that doesn't give rise to fear.\"\n\n\"Spiritual power?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" R.D. answers. \"Behind the machinations of our brilliant, undependable minds is an essence that is not conditional,\" he says. \"A being that aging does not alter, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away.\"\n\nThe face behind the mask, I think. \"How we feel about the future comes down to how we feel about mystery,\" he tells me. \"I've gone through the worst, and it really wasn't so bad after all.\"\n\nWhen the manuscript is finally finished, we celebrate with a meal and a smoke. R.D. thanks me for my time. I thank him for his sage advice.\n\n\"Did you ever take that E?\" he asks.\n\nOddly enough, the capsules have slipped my mind completely. Being with Ram Dass has left me so high, I've forgotten the need to go to Tahiti. I confess that the capsules are still in their drawer.\n\n\"I guess I really am middle-aged,\" I say.\n\nHe spins a finger around his temple once more. \"Speak for yourself, my boy.\"\n\nThe last time I see him, R.D. is sitting bare-legged on a single bed, clutching his mattress with taped-up fingers, Indian _kirtans_ playing in the background, his nurse slowly peeling socks down over his swollen ankles, the warm, still air of late afternoon falling in shadows across his small bedroom. His blue eyes follow me toward the door. The last sentence we wrote together still resonates in my head.\n\n\"While everything else falls away,\" R.D. told me slowly, extracting the words one painful syllable at a time, \"wisdom alone remains.\"\n\n## **THE NET OF INDRA**\n\nYears ago while volunteering at a hospital, I spent time with a man named Jack, who'd worked fifty years on an oil rig, had arms like a wrestler, and was now, at seventy-five, battling a tumor in his lung. Jack's physical pain was being managed with a morphine pump, his nursing care was impeccable, yet he seemed racked with metaphysical pain, as Jim MacLaren would call it, an isolation so profound that no number of visitors, narcotics, or games of five-card rummy with me were able to alleviate it. The first rule of volunteer training is never to presume to understand how the patient feels, as in \"I've been there, I understand.\" You haven't and you don't. The second rule is to check your cheerleader self at the door and resist the overwhelming urge to do something\u2014anything\u2014to raise their spirits or help them smile. You're there to listen, to be empathic, to put yourself aside sufficiently to be a container\u2014 in the therapeutic sense\u2014for what ever a patient might need to express.\n\nSo I struggled not to cheer Jack up, dealt the cards, didn't ask any questions, avoided his forlorn expression as much as possible. One day while I was in his room, the hospital chaplain poked her head in. Sister Loretta weighed three hundred pounds and looked a lot like Rosie O'Donnell. \"How's my favorite hunk?\" she asked Jack, scraping a chair across the floor to sit at his bedside.\n\n\"Lousy, Sister.\"\n\n\"Loretta's here,\" she told him, signaling for me to get lost. I backed into the doorway and listened. From where I stood, I saw Sister Loretta take Jack's hand. At first the old guy didn't say anything. Loretta waited. Then I heard him starting to sniffle. \"Talk to me,\" Loretta said.\n\n\"My father never loved me,\" said Jack. At this his tears broke into sobs. I was stunned to hear this coming from him, amazed that in the midst of a physical crisis, at a time when his health remained uncertain, the ghost of his father's absent love should be the thing that pained this tough guy the most.\n\nSuch glaring disconnects are common among survivors of all kinds, the gaps between what ought to be wrong and what really is: The homeless guy who wants conversation more than he wants pennies or food. The ex-POW who needs to belong somewhere more than he needs hosannas or financial aid. The individual surrounded by love who complains about not feeling \"cosmic connection,\" because God, she believes, left her high and dry the day she lost her beloved child.\n\nWe spend our lives in a kind of amnesia, sensing disconnection that doesn't exist. Einstein called this an \"optical delusion,\" imagining ourselves to be separate beings, cut off at the root from the rest of creation. \"A human being... experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest,\" wrote the father of relativity.\n\nThis delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.\n\nWe sequester ourselves inside our own minds, then project this awful abyss around us, picturing ourselves to be fenced-off, abandoned citizens of a private, bullying universe. This imaginary chasm seems only to widen during times of pain. Yet even under the worst conditions, strength in numbers continues to prevail. As one Holocaust survivor put it, \"Lone dogs died first.\" Mary Robinson, the ex-president of Ireland, observed this principle at work during the troubles in her country. \"It is in each other's shadow that we flourish,\" Robinson insisted to me when we spoke.\n\nThis is not sentimental pabulum. In a universe where boundaries do not actually exist, where waves and particles, protons and neutrons are indivisibly strung together, such baseline connection is obvious. In Indian philosophy this glistening, intergalactic jewel-work of matter (and antimatter) is known as the Net of Indra. This web is so tightly strung that \"the flap of a butterfly's wings on earth can be felt on the planet of Betteljers,\" as a physicist observed. If a full moon can make women menstruate, it's not so much of a stretch to realize that individuals in our lives are ricocheting off of us at every moment, creating positive or negative charges depending on their own chemistry.\n\n\"We're wired to connect,\" science writer Daniel Goleman tells me over lunch at his favorite Tibetan restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ten years ago Dan became a culture hero with _Emotional Intelligence,_ a seminal book that helped redefine what it means to be smart in our IQ-obsessed culture. Recently Dan has turned his eye to the workings of what he calls social intelligence, which includes the contagiousness of common emotions (think of giggles, yawning, tears, and screams) as well as the pharmaceutical value of keeping good company.\n\n\"The brain itself is social,\" Dan tells me over a plate of yak sausage. \"That's the most exciting finding in the past ten years.\" His gentle mien and thoughtful diction reflect his own thirty-year meditation practice (he was posted in India while doing his Harvard Ph.D. fieldwork). \"One person's inner state affects and drives the other person. We're forming brain-to-brain bridges\u2014a two-way traffic system\u2014all the time. We actually catch each other's emotions like a cold.\"\n\n\"Is that really true?\" I ask.\n\n\"If we're in distressing, toxic relationships with people who are constantly putting us down, this has actual physical consequences,\" Dan assures me. Stress produces cortisol, a chemical that hinders cell health. (He cites a study done on women caring for husbands with Alzheimer's, which found that their actual cell life diminished at an accelerated rate.) Conversely, positive interactions cause the body to secrete oxytocin, the chemical released during lovemaking, nursing, and delivery, which lowers stress hormones and amplifies the immune system.\n\n\"I have this experience often with my two-year-old granddaughter,\" Dan tells me. \"She's like a vitamin for me. Being with her actually feels like a kind of elixir. The most important people in our lives are actually our biological allies.\"\n\nIndeed, neuroplasticity, the discovery that the brain is always growing (not diminishing, as our grandparents believed), has revolutionized our understanding of how people evolve over the course of a lifetime. \"Stem cells manufacture one hundred thousand brain cells every day till you die,\" Dan explains. \"This defies what used to be the dogma. In fact, the brain continually reshapes itself throughout life with ongoing experience. It's where the maxim 'use it or lose it' comes from in neuroscience. The more you challenge it, the more the brain seems to rise to the occasion, and social interaction helps neurogenesis.\"\n\nTake something called mirror neurons, whose sole function is to reflect (in us) the things we see in the world around us. \"There are neurons whose only job is to recognize a smile and make you smile in return,\" he explains. \"The same goes with frowning.\" I'm reminded of the Michelangelo effect, in which long-term partners come to resemble each other over time through facial muscle mimicry. Such mirroring on a mob scale helps to create creepy-sounding things called memes, those oversized cultural ideas (Democracy! Hygiene! Infidels!) that spread through populations like viruses. \"By mimicking what another person does or feels, we bring the outside inside us,\" Dan tells me, speaking literally, not figuratively. \"To understand one another we actually become like the other a little bit.\"\n\nDan describes two kinds of relationships\u2014the I-IT and the I-YOU (first described by the philosopher Martin Buber)\u2014which have antithetical effects on our social lives. I-IT relationships happen when we treat people as objects or functionaries because we want something from them (in the way, perhaps, that Jack's father might have treated him when all the boy wanted was an I-YOU pat on the back). \"In I-YOU relationships, there's a human connection. There's feedback, a loop, because who the other person is, and what they have to say, matters.\" Unfortunately, the \"inexorable technocreep\" of our culture conspires against such intimacy, Dan believes. As T. S. Eliot presciently observed of our first major cultural social wedge, the TV set, back in the early sixties, television \"permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.\" Not only is constant digital connectivity stressful, science has discovered, but also, Dan says, \"to the extent that technology absorbs people in virtual reality, it deadens them to those who are actually around them.\"\n\nSince \"empathy is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty,\" as he reminds me, such alienation can have disastrous results. \"Withholding the natural inclination to feel with another allows us to treat the other as It\u2014as Them,\" Dan says. \"The more Thems we have, the more dangerous the world becomes.\" But how can it possibly be true that human beings are essentially altruistic or that \"the human brain is preset for kindness,\" as he has written? What about the newspaper headlines? \"Remember,\" the ex\u2013 _New York Times_ reporter tells me, \"if it bleeds it leads. We pay more attention to human cruelty. But it's an aberration to be cruel.\"\n\nThe famous Yale University Milgram experiment was not the last word on human nature, he assures me. Despite their reputation for being selfish savages, even young children demonstrate altruism from an early age, apparently. In one study, infants reportedly cried when they saw or heard another baby crying but rarely when they heard their own distress. Monkeys have been known to starve themselves after realizing that grabbing food delivers an electrical shock to their cage-mate. Dan makes reference to the philosopher Mencius's assertion that any conscious adult would automatically jump down a well to save a drowning child. Yes, I say, but do they cheat on their wives? \"We may not always be hooked up,\" he says, laughing, \"but that doesn't mean that the wiring's no good.\"\n\nThe link between kindness, survival, and social intelligence seems obvious. As a Harvard post-doc studying meditation in India, Dan noticed that seasoned practitioners tended to exude what he calls \"a special quality, magnetic in a quiet sense.\" Contrary to stereotype, these spiritual types did not seem otherworldly at all, but were \"lively and engaged, extremely present, involved in the moment, often funny, yet profoundly at peace\u2014equanimous in disturbing situations,\" as he describes it. What's more, this quality was _communicable._ \"You always felt better than before you'd spent time with them, and this feeling lasted.\"\n\nPhysicists and mystics agree on this point. The components of altruistic energy appear to be as measurable as photons and electrons; they are also more palpable than a skeptic might imagine, as San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman reports to me after spending a week in Dharmsala with the Dalai Lama. \"At the airport afterward, my wife looked at me and said, 'You're not the man I married!'\" says Ekman, who is not a Buddhist, laughing. \"I was acting like somebody who's in love.\" The foremost authority on the physiology of emotion, Ekman detected four characteristics common to people with this contagious power: A \"palpable goodness,\" first of all, that went far beyond some \"warm and fuzzy aura\" and seemed to arise from genuine integrity. Next, an impression of selflessness\u2014a lack of concern with status, fame, and ego\u2014a \"transparency between their personal and public lives that set them apart from those with charisma, who are often one thing on the outside, another when you look under the surface.\" Third, Ekman observed that this expansive, compassionate energy nurtured others. Finally, he was struck by the \"amazing powers of attentiveness\" displayed by these individuals, and the feeling he had of being seen in the round, wholly acknowledged by someone with open eyes.\n\nIf these qualities were unique to spiritual masters, they wouldn't be nearly as compelling. What inspired Ekman the scientist was the evidence that such energy is available to the rest of us. \"It wasn't luck or culture or genes that created this qualitative difference,\" he tells me. \"These people have resculpted their brains through practice.\" Survivors with no knowledge of brain science often experience this phenomenon for themselves\u2014the way in which when we stretch past our limits, stretching becomes our second nature. Pushing the envelope seems to actually rewire our brains, adding a new repertoire of thoughts and emotions. When writer Andrew Solomon speaks in a later chapter of becoming more compassionate after his recovery from depression, for instance, this is more than Prozac speaking. It is an actual realignment of self through shifts in chemistry and neural conditioning.\n\nIn a laboratory outside Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, a monk was monitored a few years back while meditating on compassion. Among other findings, scientists reported a dramatic increase in gamma waves (sparked in the part of the brain associated with positive emotions) while the monk focused on maintaining an open heart. Gamma-bumping like this requires ongoing practice. As a healer named Maxine Gaudio told me, \"Everybody can draw, but not everybody's a Picasso.\" Unfortunately, we can't even pick up the brush sometimes, much less locate the canvas. Such forgetting is our nemesis, teachers maintain. \"It is our daily dilemma,\" as Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast tells me from his hermitage in Upstate New York. \"A spiritual energy flows through the universe, a super-aliveness\u2014an active _yes,_ \" says the eighty-year-old hermit. \"Yet even though our greatest happiness comes from feeling this eternal connection, there's a tendency in all of us to close off from it. Those who counteract the tendency through practice deepen their sense of belonging and free this latent energy.\" Brother David recommends such remembrance practice to his students. \"When we say, 'Count your blessings,' this is a very profound teaching,\" he stresses. \"A stream of energy\u2014of blessing\u2014is flowing from the universal source as blood pulsates from the heart. Knowing this, I'm energized and pass the blessing along to my brother so it flows again to its source.\" In this way, Brother David believes, \"we create a network of grateful living.\"\n\nThe Net of Indra, shimmering. Remembering our indissoluble connection might actually bring more love into our lives. \"It is love,\" Brother David assures me. \"The love which passes understanding.\" I've sensed this love myself in the company of genuine masters: a great, unstoppable, pulsating love that draws you toward its own radiance. This force could radically change the world, melt away borders, give hope for increased happiness. Another great Christian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, articulated this hope for all time. \"Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness... the energies of love,\" the French paleontologist-priest wrote. \"Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.\"\n\n## **REINVENTING YOUR WIFE**\n\nAn eminent New York psychologist named Henry Grayson was seeing a patient named John who claimed to be married to the world's biggest shrew. As analysands often do, John appeared to want commiseration from his loyal shrink, but Grayson isn't that kind of doctor. \"What are you willing to do?\" he asked the unhappy husband.\n\n\"Anything,\" John assured him. Dr. Grayson's instructions were oddly simple. The next time John became anxious over his wife's behavior, Grayson said, he should focus on his own upsetting thoughts and replace his inner, wife-hating voice ( _she's ruining my life!_ ) with a tender memory of the woman he had married. At first John couldn't recall such a woman. Eventually, a happy memory oozed up from the distant past. He promised the doctor to give it a try.\n\nJohn seemed confused at his next appointment. His wife had been strangely subdued that weekend. \"She must be coming down with something,\" he said.\n\nGrayson told him to try the experiment again.\n\nThis time John appeared downright suspicious. He and his wife had spent their first tirade-free weekend at home in as long as he could remember. Maybe she'd started seeing a therapist secretly, John wondered out loud, still failing to connect the dots. It would take yet another session for John to realize that the shift in his internal monologue had actually helped manifest his wife's improvement.\n\n\"Behavior stemming from our own thoughts may manifest in the people around us,\" Grayson explains to me when we meet. He resembles a more dashing Mr. Rogers in khaki pants and a paisley tie. Like many of his peers in the field of transpersonal psychology, Grayson came to his insights by way of hard science. It was while he was attending a lecture in physics, in fact, that his work as a psychologist began to shift. \"This physicist helped me understand that the reality we perceive is a tiny fraction of the universe as it really exists,\" Grayson tells me. He began utilizing the Heisenberg principle, wherein objects change when they are perceived, on the interpersonal level. \"We are connected not only as human beings but as energy, mind, and matter,\" he says. \"We are interacting in profound, intimate ways we are rarely aware of.\"\n\n\"What about John and his wife?\" I ask.\n\nHenry Grayson smiles. \"Let's just say they're playing a whole new ball game.\"\n\n## **MAN THINKS, GOD LAUGHS**\n\nIrony can save a life. No survivor escapes without it. Often the irony is cruel, unbearably so if you can't laugh. \"What fresh hell is this?\" asked the ever-cheerful Dorothy Parker, sharpening her bitch nails on grief, lining up her exit options\u2014rivers are damp, drugs cause cramp, guns aren't lawful, nooses give\u2014concluding, as she once had in a poem, that \"you might as well live.\" At other times, fate plays the joke on you. Think of the great British psychologist Wilfred Bion, awarded the Victoria Cross during World War II and later noting, \"The only difference between getting that medal and being shot for treason was which direction I chose to run.\"\n\nOur most serious eventualities arise from the most ridiculous chance. Moments. Twists. Split-second decisions. Telephone calls that might have saved lives. Strokes of luck that bring surprise mishaps, accidents that carry you forward, encounters out of the blue that alter your life irreversibly, hesitations that prove disastrous, then morph into windows opening. Pinballing along in this way, we're reminded of how little we control, how little we know of what good or bad luck is, the way things should or should not be, what we deserve and what we don't, at any given moment in time. We only know that we do not know, and never will, and tough petunias. _Menschen tracht und Gott Lacht,_ my grandma Bella used to say in Yiddish. Man thinks, and God laughs. Your best-laid plans are really a punch line. Life is one insult after another. The bottom will drop; you will lose what you love; then you'll lose some more, hit your head on a rock, and sink into the lap of contentment\u2014till you fall again. If you fail to find the humor in this, you might as well just leave the theater. Or sell the farm, better yet, if that's your idea of real estate.\n\nTake the story of the farmer and his horse. Parables are annoying, I know, but irritation is the path to wisdom. One day a farmer lost his favorite horse. After the animal ran away, his neighbor appeared at his doorstep to offer condolences. \"I'm so sorry for your loss,\" said the yenta neighbor, glad that it had not happened to him.\n\n\"You never know,\" the farmer replied.\n\nThe very next day, his horse reappeared with a beautiful wild mare alongside him. Again the neighbor stuck in his two cents. \"That's wonderful!\" he offered. \"What a stroke of good luck!\"\n\n\"You never know,\" said the farmer, wanting him to go away.\n\nA few days later the farmer's son was trying to break in the wild mare, got thrown to the ground, and broke his leg. Immediately the neighbor appeared to comment again.\n\n\"You never know,\" the farmer repeated, now becoming a little annoyed.\n\nNot long after the accident, the Cossack army came through the village in search of young men to fight in the war. Since the farmer's son was injured, he was allowed to stay at home. \"Are you not a fortunate man!\" exclaimed the neighbor.\n\nYou know what the farmer murmured.\n\nHorace Walpole, the eighteenth-century English writer, was the first to invent a term for this bipolar phenomenon: serendipity (from a tale about the peregrinations of the three sons of the king of Serendip). Doubleness is the way of things, which is why narrow, cycloptic minds are so funny. The human condition, somebody said, is to be a fragment and a fool (pretending not to be a fragment). We couldn't be more ridiculous; this is also the good news. You have to be a trickster to trick up fate and turn it into destiny. Jim MacLaren's inspirational mission, Joan Didion's solvent book, Samuel Beckett's invention of the Theater of the Absurd after being stabbed randomly in a Paris street where his attacker shrugged after being asked why he'd done it. \" _Mais, je ne sais pas, monsieur,_ \" he said. Serendipitous sproutings and lemonade twisters that come from laughing along with God (fate for atheists) instead of stomping your feet and pouting.\n\n\"Here's the thing about fate versus destiny,\" Jim Curtan tells me, bottom-line style, sounding like the Hollywood big shot he was before prostate cancer (and actors) made him start hating show business. \"Fate is what happens to you. Destiny is how you respond.\"\n\nJim and I have been friends for thirty-five years. During the 1970s he was a personal manager for movie stars, spending his days appeasing, massaging, uplifting his clients' fragile, photogenic egos, which turned his life into a Sturm-und-Drang-fest. Stressed beyond reason, Jim was more than ready\u2014before his diagnosis\u2014to throw in his Tinseltown credentials and get his sense of humor back. But his spirits had sunk lower than even he realized.\n\n\"I got to a point where I thought more than once that it might just be wonderful not to wake up in the morning,\" Jim admits, sounding uncharacteristically downbeat. He's a towering ex\u2013Jesuit novice with a cowboy preacher's head of hair (in spite of having just turned sixty-five). A trip to the doctor's office ten years ago revealed a midstage tumor in Jim's prostate. With grander exits to worry about, the decision to quit his job was a no-brainer. \"I was terrified,\" he tells me. \"You heard cancer, you thought, 'Oh well, maybe a year.'\" A theater addict since childhood, Jim remembers thinking each time he saw a Broadway show after his diagnosis, \" 'Maybe this is the last play I'll ever see.' Or 'This could be the last time I ever see Paris.' Or whatever.\" Oddly, however, Jim has not been depressed a single day since getting his unwanted news from his doctor.\n\n\"I'm passionate about my life now,\" he tells me. \"Hardly a day goes by that something doesn't happen\u2014sometimes big, sometimes tiny\u2014that I don't say, 'I love my life.' I'm aware of it now and grateful.\" This joy had escaped him in the midst of his career. \"Before, I didn't live a life with gratitude,\" he says. \"As a good Catholic, I knew that I was _supposed_ to be grateful. I said all my prayers. But now I began to realize that if life actually is a gift, then the right response is 'thank you.'\"\n\n\"It sounds obvious when you put it like that.\"\n\n\"You have to be like a prospector in your own life,\" he explains. \"You have to look for the gift.\"\n\n\"How do you do that?\" I want to know.\n\n\"If this is the last time I go to Paris, then I'm going to do everything and see everything I can in Paris, damn it!\" he says. \"I don't want any of me left over for a yard sale. I'm not saving my life anymore. I'm spending it.\" Jim realizes that this might sound a bit glib. \"Of course, my smart-ass side said, 'I wanted a pony, why did I get a winter coat?'\" he admits. \"We all ask for certain gifts. When you're a grown-up, you understand why your parents gave you a winter coat, but as a kid you're really pissed off about no pony. Cancer was like getting a winter coat.\"\n\n\"And it wasn't a mink.\"\n\n\"It wasn't even fucking nutria! You know how Auntie Mame says that life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death?\" Jim asks. \"But what she doesn't say is that sometimes you're the guest, sometimes you're the chef, and sometimes you're the main course.\"\n\n\"That's comforting.\"\n\n\"But true,\" Jim tells me. \"And it actually works in your favor. Things become less provisional, less insecure, the more grateful you are. I don't have to earn my life anymore. It was given to me to cherish as I would a precious gift from someone who loves me and whom I love.\"\n\nSerendipity came when Jim was led to a workshop given by a healer named Carolyn Myss. \"I'd gone for my cancer, but something else happened,\" he says. \"During the weekend, Carolyn remarked that many people in crisis seek out therapists when what they really need is spiritual direction. I had started out wanting to be a Jesuit priest before Hollywood got to me. Ministering to people was my passion. When Carolyn said that, I knew why I'd really gone to that workshop. I'd gone there to be healed but came out with a vocation.\"\n\nThis vocation announced itself with a voice Jim believes came from his creator. \"I heard God say, 'Your job is joy.'\" Jim realizes that this may sound insane. \"At first I resisted. I said, 'But everybody wants that job!' God said, 'You'd be surprised. No one wants your job.'\"\n\nMy old friend laughs. \"God said my job was joy. But joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life's terms,\" he says, reminding me of David Steindl-Rast's suggestion. \"I never said, why is this happening to me, which a lot of people do. It was more like, okay, I'm perfectly happy to learn all the lessons of this. But I want to graduate\u2014 meaning, I don't want to live the rest of my life as a cancer patient, even if I have cancer.\"\n\nHow can people not blessed with a hotline to God get their marching orders? I wonder. \"It has nothing to do with religion, first of all,\" Jim says. \"Religion is for people who are afraid of hell, and spirituality is for people who've been there. Winston Churchill said, 'If you find you're going through hell, keep going.' The road to heaven\u2014to peace of mind\u2014leads through hell. Nobody's built a bypass.\"\n\nDuring his training as a spiritual counselor, Jim learned more about these survival instructions from the Sorbonne-educated African teacher Malidoma Som\u00e9. Som\u00e9 described his own attempt to explain life insurance to his village elders. \"One of them asked, 'Do you mean people get paid for their catastrophes?'\" Som\u00e9 told Jim. \" 'Then how do they ever learn anything?'\"\n\nToday this grateful show-business refugee ministers to two dozen clients a week, talking soul survival instead of box office grosses. He advises his clients to live as if their lives actually depended on it. He tells them the story of the medieval monk who was watering his garden one morning when a passerby asked him, \"Father, if you knew you were dying tonight, what would you do?\" The monk thought a moment before replying. He said, \"These flowers would still need watering.\" Jim looks at me. \"I want to live my life in such a way that I wouldn't have to stop, or change, what I was doing\u2014or being\u2014if I was going to die tonight,\" he says.\n\nThen Jim arches an eyebrow in Mame's campy way. \"But I'm not.\"\n\n## **PRAYING**\n\nAccording to a recent poll, 70 percent of Americans over eighteen claim to pray at least once a week and receive \"great satisfaction\" from doing so. I found this statistic confusing when I read it. I'd never felt better in the least after my own sporadic attempts to pray. Never had I, to my knowledge, received a single divine response to any particular _crise du jour._ Maybe this was because I've never believed in a God who'd care about my day-to-day life (being busy with dwarf stars, black holes, and quarks). When it came to prayer, I felt like the clich\u00e9 orphan pressing his face to the window of a room in which God was nuzzling his own true children beside a roaring fire. The miscreant infidel (me) could only watch them from outside the window, slumped in a stupor of self-pity.\n\n\"You're not focused,\" my Christian friend John used to say.\n\n\"Nothing ever happens,\" I told him.\n\n\"It has to come from the heart,\" John said, as if I were trying to phone my prayers in. Sincerity is a private thing, as everyone knows, so I didn't try convincing him. I'm also from Missouri on all matters concerning interior experience. I need to see or feel something in order to draw any sort of conclusion. I need for there to not be parochial rules. If there is a God, I've always thought, it wouldn't require credulity, protocol, or leaps of the imagination. What God would want, I could only guess, were self-reliance, love of the truth, and a little trust that if it does exist\u2014 having spawned the Andromeda Nebula\u2014it knows what I'm thinking anyway.\n\nOne afternoon I opened my mailbox and found a postcard from John with a quote from the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton printed in bold capitals on the reverse side. It read:\n\n**TRUE PRAYER AND LOVE ARE LEARNED IN THE MOMENT WHEN PRAYER BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE AND THE HEART HAS TURNED TO STONE.**\n\nJohn knew that this would get under my skin. I couldn't vouch for the prayer part, but the bit about love being impossible sometimes I was too well acquainted with. Daunting experience had forced me to acknowledge the power of staying, abiding, enduring (with lovers, books, uppity friends) through moments when I most wanted to run. The Buddhists call this \"practicing against the grain,\" and I had the splinters to show for it. I'd found that when it came to questions of self-evolution, the rougher the timber, the stronger the floor. Testing the truth only made faith stronger. Doubting Thomas, I'd always thought, was probably one of Christ's favorite disciples.\n\nBut the act of prayer, as I understood it\u2014as wish fulfillment, solace, entreaty; as hook, line, and sinker for reeling God's voice from the depths of inner (or outer) space\u2014struck me as delusional. Till one day I found myself walking alone on a forest path in Germany. It was the dead of winter in the village of Thalheim, twenty kilometers from Cologne, and I was feeling despicable. I was living with an Indian teacher who'd mysteriously planted her home there among the garden gnomes and Hessian Catholics, a stone's throw from the hospital where Josef Mengele did his experiments on Jewish children during the war. The snow was heavy on the ground; dark evergreens stood outlined, chiaroscuro, against a bleached, indifferent sky. I don't think my spirits could have been lower; nor could I have found a more Bergmanesque setting for laying my bald head down in the snow and blowing my fucked-up brains out.\n\nI was hating myself for everything. I truly believed that I should be stronger. I stood there in the forest, freezing my ass off, blasting the trees, berating myself for a million things, including the fact that I couldn't pray. I found a clearing in the forest and let it rip, ranting at the whole damn thing\u2014and what was I supposed to do _now_ \u2014when the obvious point descended like bird poop. \"You're goddamn fucking praying, you asshole,\" the nurturing voice in my head informed me. The power that kept a person ranting, fist to the sky, whining at fate, was the heart and guts of prayer itself. The same longing for response, reunion, relief from pain that I equated with self-pity was actually the blood and limbs of prayer. Believing that prayer was meant to be a polite entreaty by the pure of heart, I'd missed the obvious point till that moment. \"Struggle is the highest form of song,\" the proverb goes. It was also, I saw now, the backbone of prayer. I hadn't been frozen, ignorant, muzzled, or shut outside the walls of the holy, but offering prayers in my own screwed-up way for as far back as I could remember.\n\nBack at the house, I spoke to my teacher, who was dressed in a sari and shoveling snow from the spot that months from then would be her garden. Her dark face was spotty, her hair a mess, her red plastic rain boots splattered with gunk. I told her what had happened. She said almost nothing, as usual, just smiled and nodded and sent me along like a slow kid checking in with an indulgent aunt. Years later I came across a commentary from the book of Job that reminded me of that walk in the forest. \"By the end, Job's suffering has erased all formality and he speaks to God directly, challengingly, intimately, just the way God speaks to him,\" it read. Job was transformed by dissolving the distance he dreamed between himself and God. Both humbled and enlightened by pain, the prophet finally understood the miraculous proximity of radiance, the commonality of his language with the divine's, the truth that emerges when we speak plain. Believers are welcome to call interlocution of this kind prayer; nonbelievers can call it truth-telling. Either way, we are changed, it seems, by the speaking itself. Telling\u2014not the response\u2014is the secret that links us to a source beyond our own minds, which rarely see past their own distress. When I came to see prayer as a periscope\u2014a means of peering through the surface\u2014 instead of a phone call that never got answered, it finally became real for me.\n\n## **DEMON LOVERS**\n\nCarl Jung called addiction a \"prayer gone awry.\" Desperate for transcendence, solace, communion, addicts turn to booze and blow, casinos and cutting, anonymous sex, bulimia, binge shopping, even domestic violence\u2014some compulsion to spoon in the void\u2014to substitute for higher or deeper connection. Yet cosmic loneliness prevails, especially in the addict's world. This is why Jung advised Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, that without a spiritual component the program could never work. Addicts require a higher power (even one that nonbelievers claim to be making up for themselves) to recover from such hunger and the deadly, doomed behaviors it causes.\n\nLike many addicts-to-be, Michael Klein grew up in a house where spiritual hunger and the threat of abandonment were ever-present facts of life. Night after night he and his twin brother, Kevin, would watch their mother slip into a barbiturate haze in the glow of the family TV set. A sensitive kid, Michael would study Kathryn's face as she disappeared behind her narcotic cloud, wondering what he and his brother had done to make her go away like that. Why did his mother, whom he adored, seem so angry at her twins (though she loved them as well) for needing her to stick around? Her own mother hadn't stuck around; at forty-three Kathryn's mother had gotten drunk and jumped to her death from her balcony on Fifth Avenue. Kathryn was abandoned herself; now she imagined doing the same to her children. This shame seemed to be yet another reason for going through with it.\n\nYou learn the world from your mother's face. You learn about God from the way she moves, how she loves or doesn't love, how she smells, what she says in words and silence. You learn about creation from the way your parents love each other, the story they tell you about how they came together to make you. These details create your idea of who you are and where you came from; the color, texture, depth, or shallowness of your universe; the particular tangle of roots that brought you out of the ground. The grief in his mother's eyes seemed to prove to Michael that the world was a very cruel place, that no one would be there to save him, that he would always be alone.\n\nBy the time he was twelve, Michael was drinking. We're talking at a Midtown Manhattan deli, with corned-beef-balancing waitresses rushing around and yelling. A muscular two-by-four of a guy with blondish hair, insane sense of humor, and thrashed-gravel voice like Harvey Fierstein's, Michael is a teacher and award-winning poet who's been sober now for twenty-two years. But back then he was a lost boy, grasping at strangers with one hand, drinking himself to death with the other, pulled down by an emptiness he didn't understand, sucking down liquor like mother's milk, trying to feel at home in the world.\n\n\"I was drunk every day for ten years at least,\" Michael tells me, squirting relish on his burger. Kathryn, his mother, had died when he was twenty-two\u2014from natural causes or an overdose, no one seems to be quite sure. Kevin, his twin, was leading an isolated alcoholic's life by then; Michael could feel him slipping away. Introduced to the horse-racing world when he was twenty, Michael got himself a job at Belmont grooming thoroughbreds (at one time he tended the champion Swale). It was a gin-soaked, unstable stable life on the road, stumbling from track to bar to anonymous bed in the endless, insatiable search for connection. \"I started drinking to make passion easier,\" Michael wrote in a memoir, _Track Conditions._ \"I could fall into a stranger's sheets when I was drunk. It was desire without fear.\"\n\n\"That's what everyone wants,\" I say, \"desire without fear.\"\n\nIn her own wonderful book _Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction,_ Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard recounts her own recovery from alcoholism and explains how obsession reduces the addict to thinghood. \"Addiction leads to monomania,\" she writes, \"a narrowing of life and vision, reducing the addict to the status of an object defined by its craving.\"\n\nMichael's craving was to be touched. He was torn between two lovers, he tells me: art and death. Every addict has two _daimons,_ Leonard explains, one destructive and the other creative. Michael had both in spades. Already, he was writing poetry in earnest\u2014but his life was out of control. \"The creative person _chooses_ to go down into that unknown realm,\" Leonard reminds us. \"Even though the choice may feel destined. But the addict is pulled down, often without a choice, and is held hostage (by his disease).\" Michael was starting to bottom out. Around thirty, his reckoning came to him cold. \"I was really tired. My life was a shambles. But I wasn't dead yet,\" he says simply.\n\n\"You lost me,\" I say.\n\n\"I started drinking because I wanted to die,\" Michael tells me. \"But it wasn't killing me fast enough. If I was going to live and be an addict, I realized that I would rather just live.\"\n\n\"Just like that?\" I ask.\n\n\"Just like that.\"\n\nChecking himself into detox, he found the physical part relatively easy. \"I had the shakes on and off for three months,\" he says with a shrug. \"I couldn't stay awake for more than seven or eight hours a day.\"\n\n\"What about your mind?\"\n\nMichael compares his psychic rebirth to \"a crash victim coming out of a coma. That _this_ was the world I remembered before the accident, and I wanted to live here again.\"\n\n\"Like the man who fell to earth,\" I tell him. \"I know that feeling.\" \"I realized again that the world was in color!\" he says, digging into his fries. \"The world went from two-to three-dimensional. Everything was heightened. I had an amazing amount of energy. I could remember my dreams!\"\n\n\"You make it sound like you rose from the grave.\"\n\n\"It was like that. You _know_ everything is there when you're drinking. But you can't see it and you don't care. As an addict, you're totally unteachable. You lose the desire to learn _anything._ I remember being struck by the fact that people are interesting!\" The decibel level of Michael's laugh startles our neighbors at the next table. \"I didn't _love_ anybody,\" he admits. \"I didn't even like anything before, except sex. When you're drinking,\" he says, waving down a waitress for our check, \"you're able to become your worst self. The difference is that you really don't care.\"\n\nOutside, Michael lights a cigarette as we make our way down Lexington Avenue. His twin brother died last year, he tells me, after an alcohol-induced heart attack. Michael is still confused by this loss. Unlike Kevin, Michael wrestled with his childhood demons in order to stay sober. \"Two or three years into sobriety, reality hits and you realize you need therapy,\" he says. \"There are big parts of you missing, whole chunks of what makes a person whole.\"\n\n\"What about this higher power thing?\" I ask.\n\nHe reminds me that the program's first step is admitting that you are powerless against your disease. \"This step gives you tremendous power,\" he says, aware that it sounds paradoxical. \"But the strength you find isn't in your ego. In recovery everything gets reversed. Many things you thought were signs of strength simply aren't.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"Self-absorption. Self-pity. Self-destruction.\" Michael is being facetious. \"You start to see the big picture. To not take things quite so personally. You become part of the collective consciousness\u2014a worker among workers,\" he says, using Marxist lingo. \"This gives you equanimity and a sense of connection to the essence. You and your disease are not the epicenter of the universe.\"\n\n\"Powerless before what? God?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Michael shrugs. \"You can't have strength without spiritual awareness, however you define it. If I had to pick a synonym for what strength is, it would have to be self-realization.\"\n\nIn the thirteenth century the German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg described being able to finally connect her own misplaced prayer to the arms of a lover she could trust, the one she wanted to begin with. \"Whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless she embrace the very same love which wounded her,\" the abbess wrote. Mechthild was speaking of her divine love for Jesus, but the same can be said of an addict like Michael who is wounded early by loss of parental love and only treatable through surrender to a primal source. Today he's a transformed man, Michael tells me, publishing books, teaching writing, happily in love with a long-term partner, taking yoga, almost cigarette free.\n\n\"I never thought I'd see my thirtieth birthday,\" says this softhearted, gruff-sounding man at the top of the subway stairs. \"Every single day I'm alive after getting sober is gravy!\" Michael Klein's voice reaches a crescendo that threatens to stop oncoming traffic. \"Gravy, gravy, gravy!\"\n\nBut what about the secondhand casualties? How do those spouses, children, lovers, friends, struggling to save their own lives around addicts they love\u2014and cannot leave\u2014find their way through?\n\nKathleen grew up in a fatherless house in Fresno, the middle daughter of three. Her parents divorced when she was in second grade; her father, a trucker, moved to Ohio, where he started a second family and left Kathleen's mother, Geraldine, to raise the girls on her own. Her family was under constant threat of eviction, since Geraldine, a sort of Irish princess, didn't like being imposed upon to work. She gravitated toward migraines and serially abusive men instead. Kathleen and her sisters ran the house, found odd jobs, put food on the table, catered to their mother's mood swings.\n\n\"I guess you'd say that I never got to be a kid,\" Kathleen tells me. We're having lunch in Pike's Market in Seattle. Kathleen is a big-boned, redheaded woman who wears her hair long, like Wynonna Judd. \"We never got to be kids,\" she says. \"Me and my sisters had to grow up too fast.\"\n\nA brilliant student, Kathleen managed to get a scholarship to UCLA, where she felt happy for the first time. A theater major, she acted, directed, even tried her hand at playwriting, which proved to be her gift. \"Big surprise\u2014I was the queen of make-believe,\" she says, chuckling. \"I had been scripting my own imaginary life since I was a little girl.\" As a director, Kathleen was out of her depth, though, which is why one April evening she put an ad up on the university job board, needing someone to direct her first play, and came to meet an ex\u2013theater student turned out-of-work director named Andre.\n\n\"He was everything I fantasized about in a man,\" Kathleen tells me. \"That should have been enough to scare me.\"\n\nAt six foot three, with amber eyes, a tenor's voice, a wardrobe out of _L'Uomo Vogue,_ and the \"most luscious\" lips she'd ever seen on a man, Andre was the kind of hunk who caused testosterone whiplash in public. \"If they could've thrown their panties at him, like Engelbert Humperdinck, they would've,\" Kathleen says. She hired him to direct her play, then allowed Andre to spend the night after the second curtain call. In bed afterward, he took Kathleen in his lap and said, \"You're the kind of girl I want to take care of.\"\n\nKathleen still can't believe she fell for it. \"I actually believed it,\" she says, shaking her head. \"After that it was like 'open sesame.' I went into a kind of trance.\" Andre's dashing appearance aside, Kathleen was attracted to what appeared to be Andre's beautiful soul. Failing to mention the woman he lived with (or the child of his she was carrying), Andre wooed Kathleen and, when the time was right, invited himself to move in. On the night that the other woman showed up on her doorstep, Kathleen took Andre's word that this previous relationship was over. He promised to look for work. One day Andre showed up with a pair of his-and-hers engagement rings (although he hadn't bothered to pop the question). The word roots was inscribed on the underside of Kathleen's ring (Andre's read wings). \"That's all I'd ever wanted was roots,\" she tells me now. \"Andre had this sixth sense when he wanted something. He always knew people's weak spots. Like killers know.\"\n\nIn retrospect, Kathleen can trace the web. But back then she was happier than she'd ever been. She found a job as a dramaturge that paid enough for them to buy a modest house in Berkeley. Andre played the stay-at-home, freelancing husband while she limned Chekhov for first-time directors. On weekends they planted, mowed, cooked soup. Their sex life was supercharged, though Andre could be a little too rough. \"A guy like that gets away with murder,\" Kathleen tells me. Not a day went by without her noticing some alarming flirtation with her husband, who protested too much, as philanderers do, against having the slightest interest in anyone but his own wife.\n\nTen years passed. Two children were born. Andre now worked as a personal coach. Kathleen had been happily surprised, all things considered, by how well their marriage was turning out. She'd finally put down the roots she craved, established a home, even if it came at a cost. Andre had grown moodier with age. Sex stopped. Then cuddling stopped. But at least they had an understanding, she thought. It was still, she told herself, a marriage. And at least she wasn't alone, Kathleen would catch herself thinking, watching her handsome husband sleep.\n\nThen this picture imploded. One ordinary weeknight around eleven o'clock, Andre did something he'd never done before in a decade of marriage: He rose from bed after he was undressed and left the house. He claimed to have things on his mind. After a couple of hours Kathleen grew anxious, drove to town, found Andre's car outside the dry cleaning store\u2014then saw her husband making out with a blond teenager behind the counter. \"Here's the really sick part,\" Kathleen tells me, lighting a cigarette. \"I decided that I could let it pass. I wasn't going to make a big deal out of a peccadillo. He's a gorgeous man. It was bound to happen. I even thought maybe it was my fault for not trying harder to keep him interested.\"\n\nPrepared to forgive if not to forget, Kathleen was less prepared for what happened when Andre finally did get home. \"He appeared at the house all upset, sweating, shaking,\" she tells me. \"He wanted me to sit down, he had something important to tell me. Now I'm really getting scared. I'm getting that something is really wrong.\"\n\nIt wasn't the kind of other woman Kathleen expected. Andre had fallen in love with \"Tina,\" the street name for crystal meth. Apparently a gym buddy had given him a bump of T one night to help him get through his workout. Now, Andre told Kathleen, showing her the track marks on his arms, he had been shooting Tina every day for the past three months.\n\n\"I froze. I just went dead inside,\" she says. In a zombielike voice, Andre proceeded to confess the rest of his sordid tale: the party girls he'd met on the Internet, the secret hookups, an entire meth subculture Kathleen knew nothing about, where Andre was cheating under her nose at times when he was supposed to be playing golf or working out at the gym.\n\n\"It was the worst moment of my life,\" Kathleen tells me. \"Like watching a mask snap off my husband's face.\" She looks scared remembering it. \"I saw who he was. I saw who he wasn't. I didn't know my own husband. Andre was a complete impostor.\"\n\n\"So you kicked him out?\"\n\n\"No, that's what a sane person would have done.\" Instead, Kathleen put Andre to bed, told him he was forgiven, and took care of him while he tried to kick the drug on his own. He was sick in bed for a week, alternating between crying jags, rage, and puking. \"Have you ever had to spoon-feed someone you wanted to kill?\"\n\nUnfortunately, I have.\n\n\"Wipe their ass when you want to strangle them?\"\n\nDitto.\n\n\"I had never felt so violated or disrespected in my life,\" she says. \"But I was still scared he would disappear.\"\n\n\"You don't stop loving someone just because they ruin your life,\" I say.\n\n\"I wanted to hurt him, but I couldn't stop loving him,\" she admits. \"So I did what I thought was the right thing to do.\" Kathleen the caretaker found Andre a rehab (and paid for it), kissed him good-bye in the hospital lobby, and promised to be there when he got out three weeks later. \"I believed every lie that came out of his mouth,\" she tells me. \"I wanted to believe it was still my Andre. That he was going to change. For me. For our kids. That the whole drug thing had been a mistake.\"\n\nIt seemed as if rehab had worked at first. \"When he got out of the hospital, he was like the man I fell in love with\u2014no, he was better than that,\" Kathleen says. \"He was the Andre I used to dream was there, underneath the macho bullshit, the vanity.\"\n\n\"It's called rehab afterglow,\" I remind her.\n\n\"I was so happy!\" She shakes her head. \"We had a couple of honeymoon weeks. Andre seemed so raw. So humble and real. He went to meetings every day. Then I found a hypodermic needle in his sock drawer.\" Kathleen turns to the view out the window. \"He'd been shooting up since the day he got out. Another lie inside of a lie. This time I got rid of him. I called the cops and everything. There wasn't enough evidence to hold him, so Andre was out of jail the next day. And that's when the fun really started.\"\n\nKathleen sold the house, moved from Berkeley to Seattle, changed her telephone number, and placed a restraining order against her husband in case he ever showed up. But as the weeks went by without a word, Kathleen couldn't get Andre out of her mind. \"I started having panic attacks,\" she says. Scary tidbits of news reached her through the grapevine, friends who'd seen him here or there looking terrible. Even worse, their dog, Sadie (kidnapped by Andre), appeared to have been neglected. \"It was the dog that really got me,\" Kathleen says now. \"He was devoted to Sadie. If she was being neglected, I couldn't imagine what kind of hell he was in.\" Swamped by nightmare scenarios of Andre starving to death on the street with their dog, Kathleen caved in. \"It was just like being possessed. This demon wouldn't let go of me. I could almost hear him calling me, like he was pulling me down into this dark place with him.\"\n\nShe did the only thing she could. \"I called. I told him I wanted to see him. I left the kids here and flew down to Berkeley. He was sick in bed, hadn't been out of the house in six days. Sadie was skinny.\" Kathleen cleaned the place, gave Andre back rubs, sat beside him on the bed as he moaned about being hooked, never meaning to hurt her, wanting to die. Not wanting to.\n\n\"I never knew anything could hurt so much,\" she says now. \"I felt so trapped. Like your worst dream happening with you inside it.\" Still, Kathleen allowed Andre to stay in touch. \"I let him call me. It was harder than not knowing how he was.\" This went on for close to a year. \"He'd call at all hours of the night. Howl on the phone. Beg me to help him. Sometimes he'd blame me for the breakup.\"\n\n\"You?\"\n\n\"He's an addict. I told myself to forgive him because he was sick. But I couldn't keep the demons out.\" Soon Kathleen was so guilt-ridden and depressed that she considered checking herself into some kind of a rehab. She was unable to cut the cord between them. \" _That's_ when I got it,\" she says. \"I realized that there were two addicts here. I was addicted to saving him from his disease. His addiction had become my sickness. I realized that he was going down and it was either him or me. And no way was this man going to kill me.\"\n\nKathleen changed her telephone number\u2014again\u2014and cut off all contact with her children's father. Three times a week for close to a year, she found kindred spirits at Al-Anon meetings. \"I always made fun of the twelve-step thing before,\" she confesses. \"The slogans. The victim mentality. But that was just my arrogance talking. These people weren't victims\u2014they were major survivors.\" Listening to tales so like her own, however varied the details, Kathleen got to know her own disease\u2014the savior complex, the fixer obsession, the codependent impulse to rescue someone in order that she herself could be saved.\n\nShe gazes out at the boats in the harbor. \"People don't get how insidious codependency really is,\" she says. \"What it means is that you\u2014the caretaker\u2014actually _disappear_ behind the addict's pain. You cease to exist when they need something. When Andre got sick, I felt like it was me who was dying.\"\n\n\"I know how that feels, exactly.\"\n\n\"He wanted me to sit there and watch him kill himself. But I would have probably died before he did. I had to save my life\u2014it was him or me. Not just for me but for our kids.\"\n\nThe hardest part of healing from her own addiction, Kathleen found, was admitting that there was absolutely nothing she could do to help this person she loved. \"Getting it through your head that there is nothing\u2014period\u2014that you can do that will change a thing.\"\n\n\"The rational mind doesn't get it,\" I say.\n\n\"It goes against every natural instinct. Because addiction turns everything around. What feels like love in normal life is 'enabling' when you're talking about an addict. Tender loving care is actually harmful. Tough love, which feels like neglect, is the only thing that might actually help. I've never felt more powerless over anything in my life. Or more honest.\"\n\nShe looks directly at me. \"I had to accept the fact that Andre might actually die from this. And I could do nothing at all to stop it.\"\n\nThree months after our interview, I receive an e-mail from Kathleen with the news that after asking his own parents for help, Andre is now in his second bout of rehab. Kathleen will not visit him there; she has, however, given Andre's therapist permission to convey messages. Kathleen also got custody of Sadie. If her ex-husband ever does get sober, she tells me in her note, she may consider giving him visiting rights. \"The kids could use a father.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" I write back.\n\nShe responds with the news that she's almost ready to start dating again. Kathleen is considering using an online matchup service so she can start learning how to set boundaries. \"No beauties,\" she makes clear. \"And they have to be short. Without any muscles.\"\n\n\"No muscles?\" I tease her.\n\n\"And no hair!\" she responds.\n\n\"A daddy thing?\" I ask her in an instant message.\n\n\"Touch\u00e9,\" Kathleen writes back, ending her note with one of these:  \n\n## **QUESTIONING (OR THE SPHINX)**\n\nIt seems perverse that authenticity should stem from loss. The outline cracks, you split apart, half of you is left stranded on an iceberg floating into the chilly distance. You're suspended in partiality, cut off from who you thought you were. This is when questioning starts, that's the truth\u2014when you can't put yourself back together again, when the old parts don't fit and the new ones have yet to arrive. You stand there looking into the mirror, wondering, What in God's name is that? This lopsided mess of an unglued creature leering back at what used to be me? How can I live with this alien changeling? Where's the rest of my ensemble?\n\nYou haven't yet heard of the hidden face. You haven't quite learned that losing what you thought could never be lost is precisely what shows you who you really are. \"The art of losing isn't hard to master,\" wrote Elizabeth Bishop, tongue in her cheek. \"So many things seem filled with the intent \/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.\" We step through one loss after another, look down to find our feet still on the ground, and get the Buddhist joke of it all: that we're not that stuff we feared leaving behind, \"filled with the intent to be lost,\" not that persona attached to its world, but the thing that's left standing when that starts to go, the self who's watching and asking the questions. Each time this happens, the spring in our step is a bit more pronounced, as if we've lost ballast, been bounced and made lighter.\n\nQuestioning is an art form in itself. Inquiring, who are you today, for starters\u2014and what is it that you want most intensely? Where is intuition leading? Questions till the ground of \"beginner's mind,\" plow fresh road, scrap outdated agendas, help us to reimagine our way.\n\nIn a refrigerated convention hall in Chicago, I find myself waiting with two hundred other workshop participants for the arrival of the queen of questions, Byron Katie. Named one of _Time_ magazine's \"Spiritual Innovators for the 21st Century,\" Katie, as she likes to be called, is a self-taught, sixty-four-year-old teacher, who, as a result of a nervous breakdown she barely survived twenty years ago, has developed a technique she calls The Work.\n\nThis assault on self-delusion consists of posing four direct questions and what Katie calls a \"turnaround.\" (We'll enumerate these in a moment.) What I know on arriving in Chicago is only that this respected woman fully believes that her technique can relieve the pain caused by any situation, save physical torture. I'm skeptical but interested. A respected therapist friend returned from his weekend with Byron Katie describing it as \"psychological shock and awe.\" Even Katie's hardheaded husband, scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell, claims that The Work is a bona fide path to what the Buddha called \"the cessation of suffering,\" a vehicle for navigating the turbulent mind into calmer waters.\n\nThe crowd is beginning to fidget in their folding chairs. A technician sound-checks the mike and jumps offstage. My new best friend, Peggy, an overweight prison chaplain with a white Lulu hairdo and close-set eyes, offers me a Velamint.\n\nAt the stroke of nine, Byron Katie struts onstage in a chocolate silk pants ensemble, a shawl thrown dramatically over the shoulder, Doris Day pretty, perfectly coiffed, self-assured as a lion tamer. Stephen Mitchell takes a seat stage right, scholarly in his beard and tweed jacket. Without introduction Katie begins.\n\n\"Our most intimate relationship is the one we have with our own minds,\" she says. \"I was in a very dark place for a long time. Then one day I realized a simple thing.\"\n\nPeggy's pen is poised on her notebook.\n\n\"When I believed my own thoughts, I suffered,\" says Katie. \"When I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer. Everything changed for me after that day.\"\n\nA man behind me clears his throat. \"You see, thoughts are like children,\" Katie continues, moving downstage. \"They're gonna scream and scream till we pay attention to them. When we do this and begin the work of questioning, things we've believed our whole lives\u2014forty, fifty, sixty years\u2014our most stressful, self-defeating thoughts are brought to an end.\"\n\nPeggy elbows me and raises her eyebrows.\n\n\"It isn't easy,\" Katie assures us. \"It takes a lot of courage. But isn't it time to get real, my honeys?\" She scatters endearments like bonbons to children. \"Haven't we been conning ourselves for long enough?\"\n\n\"We sure have!\" shouts a goateed therapist named Mick (we're all wearing name tags).\n\n\"All right, then. This is your shame worksheet,\" Katie tells us, holding up a purple folder. She instructs us to make a list of our darkest, most aggravating, shameful beliefs\u2014the poisonous, top-secret, horrible judgments we reveal to no one\u2014then choose the greatest shame of all and apply the four questions and turnaround. \"Be brutal!\" Katie exhorts the crowd. \"This is your chance to see what's really going on in your mind. If we don't question what we believe, we are destined to live it out.\"\n\nThe Work consists of a series of four questions that sound almost too simple to be effective:\n\n1. Is it true?\n\n2. Can you absolutely know that it's true?\n\n3. How do you react when you think that thought?\n\n4. Who would you be without that thought?\n\nOnce these questions have been asked, the student is instructed to invert the original thought and give three examples of why this \"turnaround\" is as true as, or truer than, the original belief. \"My mother doesn't love me\" might become \"My mother does love me, and here are three reasons why.\" According to Katie, any painful thought subjected to this inquiry loses its power to hurt us, since most of what goes on between our ears is a pack of lies.\n\nThese questions are said to have come to her spontaneously after a nervous collapse in the mid-1980s. Born Byron Kathleen Reid on December 6, 1942, she was the second daughter of an engineer for the Santa Fe Railroad and a typical fifties housewife in the dusty town of Barstow, California. After a shotgun wedding at nineteen, Katie spent the sixties, and most of the seventies, raising her three kids and making a name for herself as a local real estate mini-tycoon.\n\nWhat happened next turned her life upside down. During a period of domestic turmoil (her marriage ended when she was thirty-three), Katie grew paranoid and suicidally depressed. Morbidly obese, she was also agoraphobic and barely left her own bedroom for two years, often unable to bathe or brush her teeth, much less take care of her children. This crisis was exacerbated by the absence of visible cause. \"I had plenty of money, a beautiful home, three kids who were healthy,\" Katie will tell me when we meet. \"Being depressed was even more shameful with no cause to point my finger at. I felt ungrateful and confused. I was dying.\"\n\nIn fear that their mother might hurt herself, Katie's children located a halfway-house-like facility near Los Angeles where Katie could be kept safe\u2014and the family could be away from her tirades. Relegated to the attic, Katie fell asleep on the night of October 16, 1986, not knowing that when she woke up the next morning an insight would occur to her that would snap her depressed mind in two. Had this spontaneous awakening not been witnessed by those around Katie, it would seem too miraculous to believe. But her family corroborates what happened. \"She seemed completely at peace,\" Katie's daughter says now. \"I couldn't believe it was really my mother.\"\n\n\"I woke up to reality\" is how Katie explains it. \"I realized that my thoughts were creating my suffering.\" Gradually, she began to share her \"work\" with locals in Barstow who wanted to know why their formerly crazy neighbor was suddenly smiling. Over time Katie received invitations to speak from around the country\u2014then from other nations. She made no effort to promote herself. The last thing on Katie's mind was becoming the queen of questions. Asked if she was enlightened\u2014or what?\u2014she has consistently waved such nonsense aside. \"I'm just someone who knows the difference between what hurts and what doesn't.\"\n\nOnce the allotted time is up for completing our shame worksheets, Katie opens the room to volunteers. I have no intention of sharing, but the exercise has been illuminating. My number one shame (pertaining to a relationship failure) readily revealed its own flimsiness when I tested it against these questions. Not only did the \"fact\" I'd been using to flagellate myself reveal itself to be bogus, it flipped over like a harpooned fish when I stuck it with Katie's turnaround. In fact, the opposite of what I had believed was far truer than my self-defeating thought. The exercise leaves me feeling unsettled.\n\nKatie fields the crowd of waving hands. A middle-aged Latino man steps up to the microphone. \"My wife cheated on me,\" he whispers. \"But that doesn't mean I'm less of a man.\"\n\n\"Thank you, precious,\" Katie replies.\n\n\"I think I might be gay,\" mumbles a teenage kid in an Axl Rose T-shirt, his eyes darting nervously around the room.\n\n\"I'm glad you're here, sweetheart,\" she assures him. My white-haired neighbor timidly raises her hand. \"I'm too fat,\" Peggy whispers into the mike, hiding her belly with the purple folder. In fact, Peggy is portly but hardly obese.\n\n\"Is that true?\" Katie asks, planting a hand on her hip. All eyes in the room are on my shy comrade. \"How many of you would rather get a hug from Peggy than, say, a supermodel?\" Katie asks. Nearly every hand in the room goes up. \"You see that, honey?\" Katie smiles at her. Peggy is visibly trembling. \"Remember, it's what we think or say or do that hurts us.\" Peggy covers her mouth and sits down.\n\n\"Anybody else?\" Katie surveys the audience. Finally, a well-dressed, fiftyish guy stands up and waits for the monitor to reach him with the mike. He mumbles, \"I hate my life. I don't want to be here.\"\n\n\"Can you be more specific, honey?\" asks Katie, stepping to the apron of the stage, fixing him with her steady gaze.\n\n\"Sometimes I want to die,\" the man says.\n\n\"Very good,\" Katie assures him, oddly. \"Now let's do The Work,\" she says. \"Is that true?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he answers.\n\n\"Can you absolutely know it's true?\" asks Katie, unfazed by his visible pain.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he responds.\n\n\"Can you know with absolute certainty that you want to die, precious?\" she asks very slowly.\n\n\"That's how it feels,\" he says.\n\n\"Of course it does. Now, how do you react when you think that thought, sweetheart?\"\n\nThe expression on his face shifts from slack misery to minor annoyance. \"How do you think it makes me feel?\" he asks irritably. Katie has been down this road many times before. Gently but firmly, she requests that the volunteer simply answer the questions as directly as possible, \"in order for The Work to work.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he says. \"It makes me feel like a friggin' loser.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sweetie. That's excellent. Now,\" Katie asks, leaving the stage and approaching him down the aisle. \"Who would you be without that thought?\"\n\n\"A liar,\" he tells her straight out.\n\n\"Honey,\" she asks. \"Do you want to be happy?\"\n\n\"Why do you think I'm here?\"\n\n\"So who would you be?\" Katie inquires again.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" he says.\n\n\"Bingo!\" she tells him. The man looks puzzled. \"Without the thought 'I want to die' you don't know who you would be.\"\n\nThe room gets quiet. \"I don't understand,\" he says.\n\n\"That's okay,\" Katie assures him. \"Now, can you turn it around?\"\n\nOnce again he seems annoyed. It's revealing to watch his anger increase with each benign question that further rattles his story. He reaches for his jacket to leave. Then he puts it down again. \"I'm not enjoying this game,\" he mumbles.\n\n\"Then why did you volunteer, sweetness?\" she asks. Peggy elbows me, nodding her head\u2014it's checkmate and the poor guy knows it. \"Just try to answer the question,\" says Katie. \"What turnarounds can you imagine to the thought 'I want to die'?\"\n\n\"What?\" he answers. \"You mean, 'I don't want to die'?\"\n\n\"Any other turnarounds?\" she asks.\n\nHe shrugs and says, \" 'I want to live'?\"\n\nBut Katie isn't finished yet. \"Now,\" she says, \"give me three reasons why this turnaround\u2014'I want to live'\u2014is as true or more true than your original thought.\"\n\nHe now appears more lost than irate. \"All right. Can it be purely vindictive?\"\n\n\"What ever's true for you,\" she says, chuckling.\n\n\"I want to live to divorce my bitch of a wife and see her face when I walk out the door. Does that count?\"\n\nKatie hoots out loud with the rest of us. \"That sounds like a pretty strong reason to me. Any others?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm crazy about my kids. I'd like to be here to see them grow up.\"\n\n\"Good. Now, can you give me one more reason?\"\n\nPausing for a good long time, he finally says in a wobbly voice, \"I think I'm a pretty good man.\"\n\nWith these words the last blush of anger drains from his face. He sinks back into his folding chair as Katie returns to the stage. \"And we wonder,\" she says to the room, \"why a mind being deluged with angry thoughts would be telling us that we would rather be dead. Remember, the mind is a child. It believes what ever we tell it.\"\n\n\"A retarded child,\" Peggy whispers.\n\n\"Whatever I am convinced of _creates my world_ until I question it,\" Katie says, stressing these three words. \"Our unquestioned thoughts only turn into nightmares. We carry this suffering to our graves. But we each have the power to stop the deception, stop abusing ourselves. Someone hits you. Wham! It's over. That's grace.\"\n\nI'm struck by the severity of her logic.\n\n\"But the mind keeps re-creating the pain. There's so much courage in these rooms,\" Byron Katie says, steepling her fingers under her chin. \"It always amazes me.\"\n\nWhile there's nothing new in the notion that how we think is how we live\u2014think of Buddha, Descartes, Dr. Phil McGraw\u2014 Katie has succeeded in articulating this ancient wisdom in a modern, effective, dogma-free way. Rejecting the role of guru or seer, she insists that nobody needs her (or any teacher, for that matter) to reap the benefits of self-inquiry. As evidence that The Work functions on its own steam, at least six hundred independent \"inquiry circles\" (where peers ask these questions together) have cropped up around the world, from Helsinki to Hong Kong to Houston.\n\nDuring the lunch break, I speak to several veterans of Katie's work who claim to have made greater progress in their lives by applying these four questions than they've made through years of recycling childhood trauma in pricey therapists' offices. \"The beauty is that people can do this for themselves without having to go through analysis or doing expensive processes,\" says one consultant in her forties, who recently came through a bout of breast cancer. \"One of the gifts of getting older is that although change may be more difficult, you're forced by the facts of life to work with destructive thoughts in a positive way or go down with the ship.\"\n\nOur blue-eyed, goateed neighbor, Mick, a fifty-two-year-old social worker, agrees. \"This is almost like a non-therapy,\" Mick explains. \"Most people are addicted to a dangerous level of emotional pain. They might want to improve things, but only a little bit. This work is most effective for people who are genuinely sick of their stories and ready to drop them 'cause they're too damned painful. But if I was looking for a reason to stay stuck, a lot of what Katie says would sound like bullshit.\"\n\nIndeed, this teacher's radically positive, tough-love message rubs many of her peers the wrong way. A Los Angeles\u2013based psychologist I spoke to had some serious qualms after watching Katie apply her process to an especially traumatized person. \"It's a creative extension of some preexisting cognitive behavioral therapies,\" he tells me, sounding a little snooty. \"For people in the normal neurotic range, it might be useful,\" this therapist allows, \"but as a template for what ever ails us?\" He harrumphs. \"To assume that simply by asking four questions, then turning the thought around, you can address the complexity and seriousness of issues such as rape or incest, for example\u2014well, that is just narrow and na\u00efve, psychologically unsophisticated.\"\n\nKatie's cruel-to-be-kind approach, her categorical rejection of victimhood as a legitimate position, is indeed what rankles her critics most. A meditation teacher who asked to remain anonymous went so far as to suggest that The Work \"has no heart in it.\" Yet observing Katie carefully, I never doubt for a moment the full involvement of her heart. While it's true that she does not coddle whiners, and uses the fierce road to compassion, her toughness seems to come from an unwillingness to watch people torture themselves\u2014as she nearly tortured herself to death\u2014without challenging them to cut the crap.\n\nWhen I meet with Katie and her husband a few days later in New York, she elaborates on this contentious point. She and Stephen are facing me in high-backed chairs in their Midtown Manhattan hotel room.\n\n\"Empathy is terrific,\" Katie says, looking glamorous in another flowing silk ensemble. \"But when a person is struggling to survive, pity is not their friend. It does more harm than good. If someone we care about is hurt, then I feel hurt because _they're_ hurt\u2014'Oh, you poor thing, I'm so sorry for you!'\u2014now there are two of us hurt. What good am I?\"\n\nAgain, this simple logic is hard to dispute. Pragmatism is what matters most when you've sunk to the bottom, Katie believes, and drama's a luxury you can't afford. This ruthlessness in the realm of self-knowledge reminds me of the goddess Kali in Hindu lore, a metaphor for the fierce feminine, severing chains of delusion with the sword of self-knowledge; or of a Zen master I used to practice with who took great pleasure in whacking meditators across the shoulder blades when they fell asleep, with a shrieking \"Wake up!\"; or of a triage surgeon in the field inflicting pain on the wounded to save their lives. Like every authentic teacher I've met, however friendly their exterior, Byron Katie is as tough as nails inside and passionate about helping people free themselves from suffering.\n\n\"People spend their lives in dread,\" she says, pouring me a cup of tea.\n\n\"It's self-inflicted torture,\" Stephen agrees.\n\nKatie takes his hand. \"The mind that has questioned itself looks forward to life,\" she tells me. \"We can't stop life from happening, honey, so we might as well look forward, right? Can you imagine what we might be capable of if the bulk of our energy were not being taken up with stress? Can you imagine?\"\n\nShe's preaching to the choir, I assure her.\n\n\"But the question we need to ask ourselves is, do we choose to live the most fulfilling life we possibly can? Or would we rather prove to the rest of the world that life is all about suffering? And that we are the primo example of that?\"\n\nThis reminds me of Saul Bellow's description of his fellow Jews in the novel _Seize the Day:_ \"If they quit suffering they're afraid they'll have nothing.\"\n\nKatie continues. \"But what are we teaching our children?\" she asks. \"Are we teaching them the possibility that they can be happy no matter what happens?\"\n\n\"Hardly,\" her husband says.\n\n\"And yet that's the truth of it! Our lives are determined by our thoughts, not by what happens to us. Also, by minding our own business.\" In the workshop Katie suggested that there are only three kinds of business in the world\u2014\"yours, mine, and God's\"\u2014 and that most of the trouble we make for ourselves comes from confusing them. \"It is up to each of us to take care of our own business, question our minds, set ourselves free. If I'm over there in your business, who's taking care of mine?\"\n\nShe empties the rest of her tea from the green enamel pot. My time, I realize, is almost up. There are so many questions I'd still like to ask, but one seems unavoidable. How can a person survive his own losses, adapt without bitterness to twists of fate he can't stop wanting to turn back the clock on? \"We're human,\" I say. \"We have memories.\"\n\nKatie hears me out. Then she asks directly, \"Do you want to know the truth?\"\n\n\"That's why I'm here,\" I tell her.\n\n\"All right, then. What ever suffering we feel over things that have already happened is nothing more than an argument with the past.\"\n\n_An argument with the past?_\n\n\"You're bringing on your own pain now,\" she says. \"Your father slapped you when you were three years old, but _you've_ done it now a million times.\" She is right, of course. \"Nothing can be over till it's over for _us._ On our deathbeds we're still blaming our parents, our spouses, our children, our jobs, our country, our disease, our handicap\u2014whatever it is\u2014for ruining our lives.\"\n\n\"Insane, right?\" Stephen asks.\n\n\"But we can stop the insanity,\" Katie says. \"Questions can stop the suffering.\"\n\nHad she not discovered this work herself, healed herself of her own madness, were Byron Katie not sitting here in front of me, radiating palpable joy, I would discount this claim as pie-in-the-sky, smiley-face, New Age hoo-ha. But her survival story is real. The skeptic in me wants to argue, to find fault with her simple teaching, but even as I think these thoughts, my mind inadvertently starts doing The Work: Is it true that her claims are exaggerated? I wonder. That life can be free of suffering? Can I absolutely know it's true?\n\n\"Reality is so much kinder than our thoughts about it,\" Katie says.\n\n## **_JE M 'EN FOUTISME_**\n\nOne hectic day on a freelance editing job, the magazine's copy chief shows up in my office looking like he wants to talk. Tom, who's goofy and blond and comes from Indiana, has hardly said a word to me till now, but seems to have gleaned my field of interest and appears to want to tell me his story. \"Can you keep a secret?\" Tom asks, closing the door behind him. Before I can even tell him I'm writing a book on this subject, he launches into his remarkable tale (and later allows me to include it here).\n\nTwo years ago, Tom, who was thirty-two at the time, was getting drunk at a New York publishing party, cracking jokes and slugging beers, when all of a sudden his head flew back and he found himself, as he describes it, \"doing an unconscious break dance on the floor of a swanky SoHo ballroom.\" Tom had rarely been sick a day in his life but appeared to be in the throes of a grand mal seizure. A colleague he had been hoping to date shoved a wallet into his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue. \"The end of that relationship,\" Tom deadpans.\n\nThe next thing Tom knew, he was in the back of an ambulance surrounded by paramedics preparing to rush him to the hospital for tests. At first he refused, climbed off the stretcher against his friends' protests, hailed a taxi, and headed uptown for home. \"I figured I was stressed out,\" Tom explains to me now. \"I wanted to go home and sleep it off.\" Moments later, he was overwhelmed by another seizure, though, and the taxi rushed Tom to an emergency room. This is a very lucky thing. If he'd gotten his way and gone home to bed alone, Tom O'Connell would most certainly have died before morning.\n\nThis is what happens, apparently, when the brain tumor you don't know you have has hemorrhaged and filled your head with blood.\n\nWithin hours of arriving at the emergency room, after an MRI had identified the blood mass, Tom was rushed into surgery, where his head was cracked open, his face peeled off, and a piece of skull carved out in a procedure called a craniotomy. Tom reaches into an envelope and produces a photograph of himself on the operating table, hair slicked to the skull like a newborn baby's, blood dripping over a closed purple eyelid, a Tampax-like object protruding from his mouth.\n\n\"You had no warning signs?\" I ask, handing back the gory picture.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Tom says. \"Out of the blue.\" A month after his emergency surgery, Tom's doctors informed him that the tumor was not only malignant, but a grade 3 anaplastic oligodendroglioma\u2014a particularly aggressive cancer\u2014that needed to be removed immediately. In the days before the operation, Tom walked the streets in an existential fog that made day-to-day machinations seem absurd. \"I was consumed with thoughts of speech therapy, Pampers, and being spoon-fed,\" he says. During the two-and-a-half-hour procedure, the surgeon removed a mass \"the size of a small can of cat food.\" Although the surgery was a success, Tom would now be forced to undergo five days of chemo a month for alternating six-month periods\u2014indefinitely.\n\n\"How did you take the prognosis?\" I ask.\n\n\"It wasn't the news I was looking for,\" Tom shrugs. \"Then again, I had a chance.\"\n\nFor someone less feisty than this good ol' boy, scary news of this magnitude might have signaled the end of life as he knew it. In Tom's case it only intensified the desire to figure out what made him happy, physical risks notwithstanding. The French have a term for this brazenness: _je m'en foutisme,_ the brave art of not giving a damn. Tom, the carefree Midwestern boy, stopped playing anything safe in his life. He broke off a long-standing engagement to a girl he knew wasn't his soul mate. He ditched his boring publishing job and went back to his precarious-but-stimulating first-choice career as a pop culture journalist. His most daring decision by far, however, was to buy himself a Harley GTE chopper that became his escape route during his off weeks from chemo. Friends and family were worried about him. Were Tom to miss a single dose of his anticonvulsant medications, he could easily have another seizure. Yet this very danger is what kick-started his innate desire to heal, he believes.\n\n\"Riding gave me a sense of invincibility,\" Tom says. \"I remember one time riding eight hours in the pouring rain, going like ninety, playing music full blast in my headphones, passing these trucks on the highway, feeling fantastic. Tempting fate is in itself therapeutic.\"\n\n\"You probably realize that this sounds nuts,\" I tell him.\n\n\"What's so great about sanity? I'll take passion.\" Trusting his biker fantasy, Tom took a solo trip north to Vermont one June afternoon, eight months after his surgery, unaware of what fate had in store for him next. Landing in the town of Montpelier, where a college buddy ran the local bar, Tom was chugging brews with friends when a sexy woman caught his eye. \"This seriously hot brunette comes rolling in with a couple of girlfriends,\" he tells me. \"I couldn't take my eyes off of her. She was one of those people you look at and your heart just melts. I watched her for close to an hour.\"\n\nBefore Tom could protest, his half-drunk friend had traversed the room to chat up this group of lonesome females. Without Tom's consent, his bigmouthed pal spilled the beans about Tom's recent surgery, hoping to win the ladies' sympathy. Suddenly, to Tom's amazement, the brunette came charging across the barroom and threw her arms around his neck.\n\nShe had a brain tumor, too, she told him.\n\nThis is where Tom's story ascends to the incredible. The following weekend, Trisha invited Tom to spend the night in her nearby mountain cabin. \"Turns out she's eight years older,\" he tells me now, an unhappily married ex-professional bicycle racer turned horse masseuse\u2014and a fourteen-year survivor of brain cancer. Tom reports this to me with the undisguised glee of the kid who finds the pony in a pile of shit. Better still, Trisha recently bought herself a Harley so that the two of them can tour around the country together. Her philandering husband doesn't ask questions.\n\n\"You've both got brain tumors and you're racing motorcycles around the country?\" I ask. This sounds too fantastic to be real. Then Tom invites me to join him and Trisha for dinner in New York the following weekend.\n\n\"I still look at her and can't quite believe I actually get to be with this person,\" Tom is saying. He's got his arm around Trisha in a booth at John's Pizzeria in the Village. Trisha Stevens rolls her eyes. Wearing tight blue jeans, boots, and a brave streak of premature gray in her auburn hair (which a vainer woman would cover up), Trisha tells me, \"I've never cheated on my husband before. But there was something about our connection that I couldn't deny.\" Tom puts his arm around her. \"It's confusing and scary,\" she admits. \"We don't really know where this is going\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm hoping that Trish will be my wife,\" Tom says. Trisha looks at me and shrugs. \"I didn't plan it.\"\n\n\"Who plans it?\" I agree. Trisha seems grateful for my lack of judgment. Raised in a tiny Vermont town, she was a professional long-distance bicycle racer, immersed in winter training in Florida in 1993, when she started having mysterious seizures. \"All of a sudden, I'd be sitting there and could hear and see people, but it was like I was behind a curtain and couldn't speak myself,\" she tells me.\n\n\"Just out of the blue?\"\n\n\"No warning whatsoever.\" When these episodes started happening three times a day, Trisha set out on a frantic, frustrating search for a doctor who could diagnose her illness.\n\n\"They kept calling them panic attacks just because I was a woman,\" Trisha says, shaking her head. \"Do I strike you as a hysterical woman?\" What Trisha strikes me as is the kind of ass-kicking mama you'd want watching your back on a grisly episode of _Survivor._ Eventually, an MRI revealed a mass on her parietal lobe.\n\nShe was relieved to have an answer at least. \"It was like, no shit, Sherlock!\" Trisha laughs. The risks involved in opening her skull for a biopsy were potentially catastrophic, however, so she opted for a wait-and-see approach, combined with a daily regimen of anticonvulsants. \"I was out-of-my-mind scared, absolutely petrified,\" Trisha admits. \"Just walking around like a zombie. Numb. I couldn't figure out how people were just going through their daily lives.\"\n\n\"Isn't that freaky?\" I say.\n\n\"Like being in a parallel dimension.\" As someone who takes comfort in being active, Trisha volunteered to be a poster girl for the Brain Tumor Society and eventually became the number one female cyclist in New England. \"I wanted my experience to be good for something,\" she tells me.\n\nThat was fourteen years ago. Since then, Trisha has helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars so that other people like her \"don't have to wait around ten months for a damn diagnosis.\" During one thirty-nine-day solo trip from San Francisco to Boston in 1995, she had a seizure while crossing the Rocky Mountains at fourteen thousand feet. But this tough woman shrugs off the danger the same way she has accepted her _Easy Rider_ romance with Tom. \"I'd rather die like this than fall and hit my head at the grocery store,\" Trisha says. \"Otherwise you're just sitting around waiting to die.\"\n\nTom agrees. \"I still smoke and drink and carouse,\" he reminds me. \"Tempting fate can be therapeutic, like I said. The people around you are more scared for you than you are for yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm terrified of dying,\" Trisha admits. \"Don't get me wrong. But before something like this comes down in your life,\" she says, tapping the side of her head, \"it's easy to forget to pay attention. Watch the signs, take the exits. Not miss the thing that life's giving you.\"\n\n\"And _don't_ hang out with people who don't make you feel good!\" Tom insists. I'm reminded of science writer Dan Goleman's research proving that good company is actually pharmaceutical. \"I get nuts seeing people ignore their gifts! For a while after I got sick, I could hardly go out on the sidewalk without getting pissed off!\"\n\n\"Calm down, honey,\" Trisha says, patting his hand.\n\n\"But people are so oblivious!\" he tells her.\n\n\"We all get our wake-up calls,\" I remind him. \"Sooner or later.\" Tom and Trisha now find themselves in a fraught-but-fantastic situation that neither of them could have planned, crazy in love with each other, uncertain about what the future will bring. It's like _The Bridges of Madison County_ \u2014with cancer.\n\n\"My husband is a good man,\" she says. \"He doesn't beat me. He cares\u2014in his way.\" Now it's Tom's turn to roll his eyes. \"But from the moment Tom opened his mouth, he made me feel like a princess,\" Trisha tells me.\n\n\"You are,\" Tom says, kissing her forehead.\n\n\"I've never had that before,\" Trisha says. \"Never in my life. I wasn't looking to get out of my marriage before we met. But there was something undeniable about our meeting, and having this common bond.\"\n\nWhen Tom excuses himself to use the restroom, Trisha confides in me. \"He's fine right now,\" she says in a low voice. \"He might be okay for a long time. But that's a very nasty tumor he has. Mine could turn out to be benign.\" Before I have time to ask Trisha what effect Tom's prognosis is having on her big decision, he's back. \"I'm mad about him,\" Trisha says quickly, covering up our brief digression.\n\n\"And I've never been happier,\" Tom crows, slipping into the booth beside her.\n\n\"What are the chances?\" I say.\n\n\"Without these tumors,\" Trisha says, \"we would have been just two people in a bar.\" She pushes a cowlick off his forehead.\n\n\"How magical is she?\" Tom says, smiling. Trisha seems to glow when he talks about her. For a second, she does remind me of a Cinderella who snuck out of the house and became a princess\u2014if only for a brief stretch of time before the stroke of midnight. Tom orders more beer and starts humming a Counting Crows standard. When he begins an actual off-key serenade, Trisha lays a hand gently across his grinning mouth, for both our sakes.\n\n\"We'll just have to wait and see,\" she says.\n\n## **THE TERRORISTS WITHIN**\n\nA couple of weeks after 9\/11, I was walking my dogs around Washington Square, one mile north of Ground Zero, feeling strangely unalarmed. The stench of smoke was still thick in the air. Like everyone else, I'd been horrified on the morning of the Al Qaeda attacks. I'd stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue, along with hundreds of neighbors, watching shell-shocked people in business suits covered in ash as they wandered north from the scene of the crime, knowing that American life had just changed forever. In the days that followed, an eerie quiet had settled over the neighborhood. While this atmosphere of communal shock was unmistakable, though, I was not quite as traumatized, it seemed, as the majority of people around me. Not being devastated made me feel like a hypocrite. Had I grown so hard-hearted, cynical, jaded, I wondered, that mass murder in my own backyard left me feeling less tragic than stoical? Peering down into the empty airspace where the towers had stood at the end of West Broadway, I questioned the absence of more outrage inside me and why\u2014with my neighborhood collapsed in despair\u2014I was walking my dogs feeling so weirdly normal.\n\nOthers' lives were changing dramatically. Friends were no longer riding the subway, crossing bridges, risking tunnels, venturing outside walking distance from their kids for more than an hour or two. A girlfriend had already sold her apartment and fled for British Columbia with her husband and two young sons. In those first weeks after the planes struck, every day brought more conversations about rage, depression, post-traumatic stress\u2014along with the chanting refrain that _we were no longer safe._ This is where my mind would snap shut, hearing this apocryphal phrase. No longer safe? When were we safe? Had the facts of life really changed so dramatically on the morning jihad arrived on our shores? Many smart people seemed to think so. They appeared to be responding to 9\/11 as if the human condition had just changed; as if life had just shifted from fair to unfair; as if Eden itself had just fallen apart and the garden was suddenly planted with bombs and lunatics eager to explode them; as if these formerly sheltered Americans had been transformed on that terrible morning from innocents to prisoners of war, forced to confront a violent world for which they were unprepared. To face life's demonic forces, terrorists within and without, whose presence till then they'd been able to keep at a distance. A sixty-year-old woman whom I respect, wise in many worldly things, had confessed to me in those aftermath days that she realized how deeply she herself could hate and how easily this rage could lead her to violence.\n\nAmericans had been initiated into terror. Having dwelled till then in a bubble of comfort, we were forced to acknowledge the dark side of things\u2014not _over there_ but here at home. We were neither invulnerable nor immune, nor was our victimized country a victim. Invited to take deeper stock of how 9\/11 had happened to us, many Americans, while in no way condoning terrorist acts, were forced to acknowledge our nation's checkered history (a reckoning intensified by the misdeeds of a warmongering president), to admit that our great country has never been truly innocent. While spreading democracy we have also at times been bullies, imperialists, and provocateurs, manipulating lesser nations' affairs from behind a superpower mask. Forced to become aware of this, Americans began to grow up. Many changed the way they lived. Others used fear to feel even worse. But I don't know many whose lives didn't change somehow (going through airport security alone gave you pause), as sudden citizens of the world rocked awake by this devastation. The arrival of the terrorists reminded them that their own lives were exposed and fleeting. Bodies hurling themselves from windows reminded us that our lives had windows, too.\n\nThe ancient Greeks had a word for this progression from na\u00efvet\u00e9 to mortal wisdom: metanoia, _the opposite of paranoia._ Metanoia literally means \"turning around,\" crossing away from fear into the zone of truth. The ancient maps that chart the stages of human life recognize that midway through (though some get butt-kicked earlier), after the shake-up, a process of intense self-examination and reassessment of the world begins in an individual. For this process to bear fruit, metanoia requires acknowledgment not only of the terrorists out there, but of the demons we carry within as well.\n\nThis appears to be counterintuitive at first. Why should an attack from outside prompt acquaintance with our own inner killers? We are the victims, some people say. Why should their bloody fatwa be used as a mirror to our buried hatreds? In order to expand the mind, to make use of what otherwise is wasted terror. This is what the enlightened tell us. From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama, even the escaped slave Francis Bok, we hear the paradoxical refrain that only by rejecting false virtue and self-righteousness can we see the truth. \"I contain within me the seeds of all possible crimes,\" claimed the near-saintly phi los o pher Simone Weil. Without condoning the crimes of others, we use them to examine the criminality latent in ourselves. \"I must forgive,\" Francis Bok had told me. \"Otherwise, I am just like Giemma.\" His kidnapper.\n\nMetanoia, and the emotional strength it brings, demands that we name our own demons. \"Devils, Communists, capitalists, terrorists... the evil we previously objectified and assigned to exterior agents... must be discovered within,\" in one psychologist's words. At first we're shocked by our own shadow. It's not so easy now to divide the world into black-and-white camps of good and evil. \"We have met the enemy and he is us,\" the comic-strip character Pogo said. Metanoia turns us around. All of a sudden, we're reeling back not only from terrorists' deeds but also from the brutal awareness that these actions were carried out by humans like us. This is what we are capable of in extremis, we think, and the sickening thought burns our righteousness off. For the first time there is no Other. We can never again pretend not to have seen this.\n\nLuckily, we're hardwired for this awakening; body and soul know what to do with terror. Courage is in our genes. \"It would be strange, indeed,\" wrote geneticist C. H. Waddington (in a passage that deserves to be quoted at length),\n\nwith so many millions of years of survival experience packed into our genes, if at some deep involuntary level, we did not possess capacities specially geared to cope with extreme situations. In the beginning there was nothing but extremity. Nothing but the random rush of life in a touch and go struggle against extinction. Men and women began to notice, as no other animal can, the frightfulness of infinite spaces opening everywhere around them... Death awareness is the bitter fruit of man's having risen to the level of consciousness. What began a billion years earlier as neurological response to environmental stimuli, with man came to climax in terror.\n\nAmericans were mostly fortunate before 9\/11 not to have had to face this harsh fact. But the horror has opened thousands of people's eyes, too. My sixty-year-old friend, for example. She had her own metanoia moment. \"I never knew I could hate so much,\" she told me the other day at dinner. Al Qaeda had ruptured her golden mean, interrupted her trance of cashmered privilege, the comfort zone of the chronically lucky, to whom things like 9\/11 don't happen. It brought her face-to-face with her monsters, including the depth of her own fear, which made her look as if she'd been knocked upside the head. My friend seemed gentler and less aggressive. She seemed to listen with more intent.\n\nPerhaps it's a new kind of innocence. Not the fiction of perfection but an openness born of truth-telling, wonder, and awareness of endings. In a novel called _Gilead,_ Marilynne Robinson wrote about something she calls a \"learned innocence.\" \"There is a learned innocence as much to be valued as the innocence of children,\" she suggests. This innocence contains the dark. It germinates in the footsteps of monsters.\n\n## **EARTH ANGEL**\n\n\"Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly,\" wrote the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tze. \"Now am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a man?\" Swept up in the current of powerful change, spun around by metanoia, we're startled by how changeable our identities turn out to be when our familiar context\u2014the containers we inhabit\u2014is forcibly taken and stirred. We're more protean than we ever imagined. In Greek mythology Proteus is the god of changing forms, the shape-shifting, trick-sterish aspect of the self that adapts instantaneously to shifts in the current. He is also the patron deity of survivors. The quicker we change, the stronger we swim; the smoother we morph, the better we surge; the less fear we swallow, the higher we dive and the more deeply we're able to plunge.\n\nThis may be why children are often more resilient than their baggaged adult counterparts, and why, as the Bible says, the child can become \"father to the man\" in emergent times. Children have fewer layers to unpeel, less history to keep them stuck. Only later in life do many children who've endured bad things learn to be afraid.\n\nIt's a ball-freezing, dreary-white, midwinter's morning in the exurbs of Chicago and I'm waiting in a strip mall espresso bar to meet a young Bosnian woman named Adisa Krupalija. I've been waiting for years to meet Adisa. In 1994, after returning from a trip to refugee camps in Pakistan, Eve Ensler, an activist friend whose life has been devoted to ending violence against women (including with her play _The Vagina Monologues_ ), told me about meeting a remarkable twelve-year-old refugee at a camp near Islamabad. Apparently, Adisa was a language whiz, and had been inducted as the camp's official English-language translator in spite of being barely pubescent. For a year it had been Adisa's responsibility to help hundreds of fellow refugees trying to gain asylum in the United States. Eve described seeing her for the first time, a tiny girl in a _shalwar kameez,_ rushing around that malarial hellhole in 120-degree weather, translating testimonials, documents, love letters of her desperate compatriots struggling to talk to the outside world. \"She seemed selfless to me,\" Eve told me. The Krupalijas had eventually landed in Chicago to be with relatives; Adisa had gone on to win a scholarship to Northeastern University, where she was now studying for the bar. Although Adisa does not like to talk about the war, she'd agreed to speak to me as a favor to our mutual friend.\n\nAdisa comes rushing into the caf\u00e9 a half hour late and locates me in a corner booth. In a movie she'd be played by Natalie Portman\u2014all gazelle neck and brown eyes and bobbed, gamine hair. \"I'm so sorry!\" Adisa clutches my hand and smiles. Apparently, somebody, somewhere, needed Adisa's help with something and she couldn't bear to tear herself away. I recognize her kind right away; she's the sensible, caretaking, peacekeeping type to whom everyone else turns for help, regardless of what she might need herself, the Rock-of-Gibraltar person who rarely says no, because she mostly feels like the strongest.\n\nI assure Adisa that there is no harm done. A gulag-faced waitress comes lumbering over. Adisa orders the chocolate pancakes. We drink our coffee and talk about Eve. Then this lovely young woman slowly begins to tell me her story.\n\nOnce upon a time, in 1992, the Krupalijas were a happy family leading a privileged life in the Yugoslavian town of Trnovo (population four thousand), thirty kilometers from Sarajevo. Adisa's mother grew roses on the terrace and had girlfriends over for tea. Her father was a town official. Beneath the window of their apartment, a nineteenth-century cobblestone square served as a playground for the Krupalija children. Adisa jumped rope there. She was a top student in her fourth-grade class.\n\nOne morning the milk lady showed up at their doorstep looking panicked, Adisa tells me now. \"She told us that this would be her last time coming. She looked so pale.\" Soon afterward, barricades were erected around their apartment building to keep out Serbian tanks rolling toward them from Sarajevo. \"Explosions began shaking the window. My father said that we must leave right away. But my mother refused.\"\n\n\"Why was that?\"\n\n\"She was worried about who would water her plants.\" Adisa's look of strained forbearance tells me all I need to know about her beloved mother.\n\nNo longer safe in their apartment, the Krupalijas hid out in the basement for three days, making candles from shoestrings and oil. Adisa was charged with caring for her hysterical infant brother. \"It was like hell,\" she says simply. \"As if everything is one big scream and you're caught right in the middle of it. I now know what a rat feels like.\"\n\nUnder cover of night, the family escaped from their underground hideout and set out on a frightening exodus, wading across cold rivers at night without flashlights, hitching rides on trucks, avoiding Serbian snipers' bullets. After several months, and many close calls, the Krupalijas were airlifted to the Pakistani refugee camp. Promised a decent place to stay while they sought U.S. asylum, they arrived to find a filthy, insect-ridden, food-poor compound devoid of hygiene and surrounded by barbed wire, with AK-47-armed policemen posted at the gates.\n\nIt was at this point, Adisa tells me, that her father hatched his plan, laying the family's fate on the shoulders of his twelve-year-old daughter. Adisa still doesn't understand how this happened. \"All my father said was that unless I learned English, we would never be able to leave that place.\"\n\n\"But you were so young.\"\n\n\"It was all happening so fast,\" she says, aware that this sounds like a weak explanation. \"I don't know why it was up to me. Maybe because I like languages.\" Something in Adisa's tone suggests that perhaps her parents were too distraught to be more help.\n\n\"It worked out best for everyone,\" she says, excusing them. \"It was the best thing that I've ever done in my life. Helping people in the camp is what got me through. I learned to put others before myself.\"\n\nHer pancakes arrive, looking like a dripping Dal\u00ed chocolate still life. \"It made me strong,\" she insists, pushing her breakfast aside for the moment. \"I was doing what was necessary, that is all.\" Inside of two months Adisa had perfected her English enough to begin the family's immigration process and to offer service to other camp-mates. This sudden shape-shifting from preadolescent to refugee caseworker was a wonderful thing, she assures me.\n\n\"How did you learn so quickly, Adisa?\"\n\n\"I've always been independent,\" she says, shrugging. \"No matter what happens, I've always tried to focus on what I could learn from any given situation.\"\n\n\"At twelve?\"\n\n\"Even then.\" She smiles. \"I was thinking, how can this improve me as a person? I have always been intensely curious, wanting to learn more and more. Curiosity makes life so much more interesting. In the camp, everybody was so despondent about how hot it was. Some got malaria. Some became jaundiced. But all I could think was, 'Wow, I get to learn English. Now I get to see the world outside my little town.'\"\n\n\"It was your ticket out.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Not that it was so easy, of course not. We saw terrible pain and violence. But I grew up in that refugee camp. When you go through something like this, a part of you is changed forever.\"\n\n\"Which part of you changed?\"\n\n\"The one that refuses to conform. The part that can never be like other people. You're always pushing yourself to be different, to take the harder path. Challenge yourself to be stronger.\"\n\nThat sounds like a lot of pressure, I say.\n\n\"It is, sometimes. But it helps you in the end. It gives you tenacity. A high tolerance for change and hard times. When I look back at my time in Pakistan, there was nothing that brought me down. Nothing. There was nothing that made me doubt that things would be all right.\"\n\nShe almost sounds nostalgic, I notice.\n\n\"Not quite.\" Adisa chuckles. \"But I do have many good memories. Sometimes I do miss that little girl,\" she admits, reaching for the sugary pancakes.\n\n\"She's still here. Underneath.\"\n\n\"More some days than others,\" Adisa tells me. Creating a new life for herself in America has required a difficult new skill set, she says. She compares the process to an artist shifting painting styles in his studio. \"At first it's like a Jackson Pollock,\" she says, alluding to that artist's spontaneous, rainbow-splattered canvases. \"You're just getting through. It's all about instinct. You're throwing paint at this canvas and hoping it will become something.\"\n\nAdisa bites into her gooey breakfast. \"Later it's more like Georges Seurat,\" she says, meaning that Frenchman's micromanaged canvases covered with tiny pinpoint strokes. \"That's when you're putting it all back together. You have to do the little dots and at the same time see the big picture. You carefully proceed step-by-step, being patient, focused, precise. You pick a goal and set it high.\"\n\n\"But look at you now,\" I say. \"It worked.\" Ten years ago Adisa was a Bosnian refugee without a cent in her pocket. Today she's studying for the bar exam and recently accepted a lucrative job with an international corporate law firm. \"You did something right.\"\n\n\"I'm doing okay,\" Adisa says, deflecting the compliment. \"But I have to remind myself sometimes of what my twelve-year-old self would have done. When I'm in school, or with my family or boyfriend, I have to remind myself. I used to be so fearless,\" Adisa says. \"I never want to lose that.\"\n\n\"Where would it go?\" I ask.\n\n\"I know it sounds strange,\" she says. \"But I almost felt more free back then. Life seemed so simple. I just have to keep remembering that.\"\n\n\"And trusting,\" I tell her.\n\n\"And changing,\" she answers. \"I never want to stop changing.\"\n\n\"As if you could,\" I say.\n\nFor a second, Adisa looks as young as she is. Then she says, \"Change is everything.\"\n\n## **THE END OF SEEKING (OR DIG IN ONE PLACE)**\n\nIn the decade after quitting my job at _Interview,_ I lived in twenty-eight different locations (not counting extended road trips and short-term squats), camping out in retreat centers, spare bedrooms, house sits, sublets, sport-utility vehicles, anywhere that I could find a cheap bed and a teacher who claimed to have something important to say. From Frankfurt to Philadelphia to Fuengirola, Myrtle Beach to Bubeneshwar, San Francisco to Paris to Pondicherry, then back again to Manhattan, I became a compulsive dharma bum, following my divine impulses wherever they led and my Visa card was accepted. People told me I was crazy for living this way\u2014for _so_ long\u2014and they might have been right. But it was good crazy, metamorphosis crazy, crazy for learning and waking up before the fat lady crooned her last.\n\nSpiritual seeking was the most intense love affair I'd ever had. It brimmed with unconsummated desire, the tantra of playing peekaboo with God\u2014the Beloved that no one could ever possess. The divine perfume kept me snout-to-the-ground, self-absorbed as any hopeful romantic. I'd finally found an object of desire that seemed worthy of both the chase and the heartache. Pursuing wisdom instead of money, sex, bylines, or security (which I rejected then as a bourgeois illusion), I felt authentic for the first time. My life had a noble purpose at last. I thought I'd become some kind of hero.\n\nThen my honeymoon with the Holy Grail ended as swiftly as it began. I was minding my own business one afternoon, by a lake at a South Carolina retreat center, meditating on the meaning of light on water and whooping loons munching on Spanish moss, when the Ghost of Christmas Future appeared wearing orange harem pants and a single pink flower stuck into his long gray hair. With no invitation from me, this aging hippie proceeded to tell me the sobering story of his life. He'd been a spiritual seeker since R.D. first proclaimed, \"Turn on, tune in, drop out,\" in the sixties, searched for God (nirvana, he called it) and avoided the trappings of worldly life. Now this poor guy was staring down retirement age with nothing to show for his years on the God trail, he told me sadly, but a P.O. box in Santa Cruz, a plethora of religious moments, and his membership card to the AARP. He was lonely, road weary, wistful, and bitter. His resemblance to who I myself could become (were I to live that long) was too pointed and painful to overlook.\n\n\"You wanna know what I ended up with after all that seeking, brother?\" the old hippie asked me, tugging one of his many gold earrings. \" _Nada,_ \" he said. \"Nothing.\"\n\nBut how could that be? I asked in self-defense. He'd chosen a life of surprises and travel, spent his time on the road not taken, expanded his mind with wisdom and awe. \"We all make our choices,\" I said to the guy. Every choice has its pros and cons. Maybe he was just having a crappy day.\n\nThe stranger waved my excuses aside, then paused my heart with these frightening words: \"Go home while you're still young, buddy boy. _Dig in one place._ \"\n\nI felt as if God had sent me a prophet, a sign to ignore at my own peril. The sign pointed straight at the secret suspicion\u2014the one I'd been trying so hard to ignore\u2014that I was metaphysically full of shit. I was running away from my life, not toward it, focused on holiness Casanova-style, mounting the next retreat, teaching, ayurvedic chakra cleanse, for the same reason philanderers can't stop chasing skirts: They're afraid to die. They're secretly scared that if they stop running, they'll be trapped. The trap (or woman) will morph into a grave. The reaper just might spare a moving target. You stick to the edge when the middle's too scary. Promiscuous seeking, I saw, was a ruse.\n\nNext, I had the deflating misfortune of reading a book called _Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,_ which, if you haven't read it, don't\u2014if you want to have an ego left. Fantasy-wise, it was downhill from there. Sages across the board proclaimed against the refuge of the road: \"When a thing is everywhere the way is not to travel but to love\" (Augustine); \"To seek is not to find\" (Rumi); \"I came to a spot in the road where all paths were one\" (Dogen); \"Most seekers are just Narcissus in drag\" (Da Free John).\n\nThe checkmate of this was abhorrent to me, but I did not want to end up with _nada._ Returning to the city for the time being, I rented a cheap apartment downtown. I lined my walls with photos of otherworldly-eyed saints to help relieve me of claustrophobia. This strategy didn't work for long. Soon enough, I was going crazy, the walls were breathing in on me, I couldn't breathe myself, and then came the morbid ideation. This led to moments of genuine, knee-knocking panic. I really didn't want to die. But as winter passed and the leaves returned, the courtyard behind my apartment quite peaceful, I began to get used to staying put. Being still made way for a ghost to appear.\n\nIn the bathroom one morning, as I was brushing my teeth, a numinous presence announced itself behind me\u2014not an actual ghost, exactly, more a mounting apparition of dread, a condensation of feeling so thick it appeared to envelop me as I stood there holding my toothbrush. The ghost invited me to have a figurative seat. I paused and listened. The tone of its voice was more poignant than scary. The ghost told me it was a distillation of all my greatest fears. It was the combined essence of all that I dreaded, the dark thing I'd been running away from. This ghost simply wanted me to listen, as if hearing confession from myself, to music sadder than anything I had allowed myself to hear before. It spoke to me in a major chord about the \"unfinished symphony,\" the longings and dreams that could go unfulfilled, the lopped-off, pissed-off refrain that began the day I started expecting to die young. Hearing the ghost's voice touched me. It was not horrifying. So I listened to the ghost in the months to come.\n\nThere's a place where beauty and sadness meet\u2014if you've been there yourself, you know this already\u2014where the two become indistinguishable. It's the place where sadness is no longer ugly, where grief begins feeling like soap in a wound, painful but purgative at the same time. Once, in Italy, I watched my host, a restorer of damaged paintings, as he worked on a Renaissance canvas so encrusted by time that the image had been covered up completely. Robi dipped his brush in the lye-smelling liquid and ran it across the grimy surface, revealing an eye, an ear, a cheek, and finally, the face of a curly-haired child gazing up at a pair of wings. It amazed me that something so foul and evil-smelling could uncover such hidden beauty. At home now for the first time in years, I was learning that grief works the same way, poisonous if withheld too long, clarifying upon its release.\n\nThis ghost and I became allies that year. Its voice told me what I was afraid of. Today we're still close, but I rarely see him.\n\nThere's a story about a beggar who was sitting on the side of a road. The old man had been on the road for years. A stranger approached one afternoon. \"Spare some change?\" mumbled the beggar, mechanically shaking his tin cup.\n\n\"I have nothing to give you,\" the stranger said. The beggar turned away in disgust. Then the stranger asked, \"What is that you're sitting on?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" the beggar told him. \"Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.\"\n\n\"Ever looked inside?\" asked the stranger.\n\n\"Why?\" the beggar replied. \"What's the point? There's nothing in there.\"\n\nThe stranger insisted, \"Have a look inside.\"\n\nThe beggar refused at first, then finally decided to pry the lid open. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold.\n\nComing home, I had opened the box.\n\n## **SOMETHING ELSE IS ALSO TRUE**\n\nDoubleness comes as a revelation. The realization that every experience has two sides, even seemingly monolithic distress, turns the mind around. There is always a mystery face to experience, including the most painful episodes. We realize this slowly over time as we watch life turn its other cheek, again and again.\n\nMaria Housden, then a New Jersey house wife, learned this countervailing lesson by enduring a mother's worst nightmare. On the morning of January 7, 1993, Maria's two-year-old daughter, Hannah, was diagnosed with a galloping, untreatable rhabdoid cancer of the kidney sure to kill the little girl within the year. The shock of this information plunged Maria from the ordinary world of soccer mom into the parallel zone of nursing a dying child\u2014 while her other two children still needed her\u2014without losing her sanity.\n\n\"Hannah's diagnosis catapulted me into another reality,\" Maria explains to me. We're alone on the porch of her rented seaside house in Sea Bright, New Jersey. Maria is six foot two, weighs 120 pounds, and has the glass-green eyes, forward-lurching hips, and classic cheekbones of a runway model. She's like Uma Thurman's basketball-playing supersister, with white pedal pushers up to her knee. It's distracting to walk down the street with Maria. People often point and stare, especially the men, who gaze at her towering beauty with wonder.\n\nMaria lights a Virginia Slim and takes a sip of her margarita. \"I had been very good and faithful to what I understood as God all my life,\" she tells me. \"I believed that I could control what happened to me, more or less\u2014minimize my own suffering and certainly that of my children. That was my job as a mother,\" she says. \"But Hannah's diagnosis dissolved all of that.\"\n\nHer survival response was to keep appearances up as meticulously as possible. \"I became very methodical,\" Maria remembers. \"There were so many things that I couldn't control, but there were a few others that I could. If Hannah was going to die, for instance, I wanted to have a say in what that looked like,\" she explains. \"I wanted her to die at home instead of in a hospital, to have family there instead of strange people.\" Maria stubs out her cigarette. \"My job was to do everything possible to help my family through this.\"\n\nUnderneath the mask, however, she was quickly going to pieces. \"I had it all under control on the surface. Oh, brother! People kept telling me how amazing I was to be doing what I was doing! I felt like one of those dummies you see in store windows, walking around behind a cardboard cutout of myself.\" Maria shakes her head. \"Behind the fa\u00e7ade there was loneliness and turmoil.\"\n\n\"But you couldn't show that to others?\"\n\n\"I needed to make it feel okay to other people so they would keep showing up for me and for Hannah. Who wants to hang out for a year with someone who is completely in despair, unable to cope with what's happening?\" she asks.\n\nI let her know that I've had my own share of friends walking away.\n\n\"It's a survival mechanism,\" Maria agrees. \"I made the outside part very intact\u2014you could draw a line around it\u2014but the rest of me was this kind of soup.\" Her grief over losing Hannah immersed Maria in this muddling void. The wise little girl who insisted on wearing her red Mary Janes during surgery, who refused to speak to doctors unless they told her their first names, became her mother's intimate muse in the year that she died. Maria has detailed this wisdom in her bereavement classic, _Hannah's Gift_ (published with the telling subtitle _Lessons from a Life Fully Lived_ ). Caring for Hannah revealed to Maria truths about her own life she had been avoiding, places where she wasn't telling the truth, parts of herself that were being dishonest.\n\n\"I'd poured everything I had into maintaining an illusion of perfection in every aspect of my life,\" she says now. \"I'd forgotten what was right for me.\" For starters, her marriage was on the rocks long before Hannah got sick. The little girl died a year after her diagnosis, and in subsequent years the weight of accumulated lies became unbearable. Maria slipped into such a deep depression that she decided, against the advice of family and friends, to leave her three children\u2014Will, twelve, Margaret, four, and Madeleine, three\u2014with their father in New Jersey, while she took time to sort herself out. She needed to make a lobster's plunge, to shed one skin and grow a new one before she could enter her next phase of life.\n\nRetreating to a Christian center in the Michigan wilderness, Maria could still hear the mocking voices of those who judged her for what they called running away. Yet she held to her conviction that she needed this solo time in order to heal and absorb the lessons that Hannah's death left with her. \"There's no room in deep grief for anything but the truth,\" Maria says. \"You're able to see things in your life, and say things to yourself, that you couldn't at any other time.\"\n\n\"Grief can be distorting, too,\" I say, thinking of Joan Didion's magical thinking.\n\n\"At first it is,\" Maria agrees. \"But I learned that grief has another side to it as well. For example\"\u2014she takes a sip of her drink\u2014\"something can hurt so badly that you no longer have patience with the fucked-up-ness you might be living in your life. It's that kind of movement. That kind of energy.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\"\n\n\" 'Grief' shares the same root as 'gravitation,'\" Maria reminds me. \"It's a force, an energy with momentum. Grief is a power with weight and heft. And the fact that it has weight also suggests that it is something that can be shifted. You can succumb to grief and be buried in it. It can suffocate you and hold you down. Or your perspective can shift and the pain can be used to compel you in a different direction.\"\n\nThe notion of grief as a rerouting force intrigues me. \"Where were you on the night of nine-eleven, for instance?\" asks Maria. \"And did you know then\u2014in a way you may already have forgotten\u2014 what matters most to you?\" She allows the question to settle for a second. \"That's how grief can keep us honest. This is what I learned from Hannah's death. There is always another side to things, a mystery. No matter how great the loss, _something else is also true._ \"\n\nThis mantra has a haunting quality. Doubleness, I think. The hidden face.\n\nMaria appears to be one of the happiest people that I've ever met. Contrary to what one might expect, talking about Hannah gives her joy. \"My daughter taught me to be a whole person,\" she says.\n\nThirteen years after Hannah's death, Maria does appear to be thriving. Back in New Jersey with the kids, working on a film version of _Hannah's Gift_ with a French director, easing her way into the community, patching up a friendship with her ex-husband, beginning to date, she loves her new life as a writer and is looking forward to what comes next.\n\n\"I'm grateful for every day of my life,\" she says simply. \"I never thought I would say that again.\" Maria takes a copy of _Hannah's Gift_ from the shelf and points to a passage near the end of the book. \"Hannah had taught me that there is a death more painful than the one that took her body from this world,\" it reads. \"A soul suffocated by fear leaves too many joys unlived.\"\n\n\"That's the truth,\" I say.\n\n\"Hannah was my teacher,\" she tells me. Then Maria reaches for a photograph of the fair-haired girl sitting on her mother's lap. She studies the picture for several moments. \"I used to be afraid of mystery,\" Maria says, setting the photograph back on the table. \"But the unknown doesn't scare me anymore. Instead of drowning in it,\" she says, pulling her bare knees to her chest, \"now I'm swimming.\"\n\n## **PAIN PASSES, BUT THE BEAUTY REMAINS**\n\nOne day a student comes to her guru overwhelmed with pain. She tells the old woman that she isn't sure how to survive her own sadness.\n\nThe teacher listens to her distress. I imagine the guru's eyes softening as she hears the disciple's story, suffused with fathomless wisdom gained from having crossed her own wilderness to the powerful place where she now sits.\n\n\"I want to end my pain,\" says the weeping student.\n\nThe teacher leans forward with a gentle smile. \"You cannot conquer your pain by destroying it,\" she tells the disciple. \"But only by allowing it to be what it is\u2014unbearable poignancy within an infinite nature, which also contains joy. Even bliss.\"\n\nThe visitor does not understand.\n\n\"Look into my eyes,\" the guru says. The sad woman raises her gaze to meet the teacher's steady countenance. \"Do you see in my eyes an ignorance of your pain?\" the old woman asks.\n\nThe student can see that her teacher's eyes contain no ignorance at all. They are as clear as crystal and shining bright with unconditional compassion and understanding.\n\n\"Do you see that I accept your pain fully?\" the teacher asks.\n\nThe student can see that this is true.\n\n\"What you see,\" the teacher says, \"is that I am not afraid of your pain. I have conquered the illusion that such terrible pain will destroy me. The pain is what it is. And I am what I am.\"\n\nThe humbled student bows to this wisdom. How liberating it must be to know this, she thinks, to know that you are not your pain even when you cannot see beyond it. To overcome any bitterness that may have arisen because you were not \"up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you,\" in the words of another master.\n\nLike the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain mea sure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. The secret: offer your heart as a vehicle to transform cosmic suffering into joy.\n\nThe student leaves her guru's house feeling small but happier.\n\n## **HEDONICS**\n\nBeing happy, wrote Colette, is one way of being wise. The indomitable French authoress who refused to leave Paris during the Siege, scribbling her erotic novels as war planes dropped bombs near the Arc de Triomphe, was certain about the wisdom of joie de vivre in times when life is roughest.\n\nThe burgeoning field of happiness studies, known as hedonics, tells us a lot about why (beyond dumb luck and longevity genes) some people thrive in miserable times while other, more outwardly fortunate souls actually decline rather quickly. Hedonics would not exist, it turns out, if Sigmund Freud had had the last word. Famously declaring happiness to be a quixotic pipe dream, and \"the transformation of hysterical misery into common unhappiness\" to be the most we poor neurotics could hope for, the father of psychoanalysis was largely responsible for science's formerly paltry understanding of how happiness figures into a human life. Before neuroplasticity demonstrated that the brain is evolving, learning new tricks, forging felicitous pathways till the day we die, psychological research had focused mainly on negative emotional states. The recent shift from what goes wrong with us to what goes right has brought the positive psychology movement to the cultural table at last.\n\nSubjective well-being (SWB) is the nickname experts in this field give to happiness. Since your hell may be my paradise, subjectivity appears to be the single greatest variable in the happiness equation. Homeless people in Calcutta have been found to be less unhappy than those in California (because they have a stronger sense of community), while Amish folks rarely claim to be bored, though sifting curd might not be your idea of a laugh riot. Each of us is born, it seems, with a happiness \"set point,\" a genetic level, from giddy to grumpy, around which SWB tends to settle, regardless of what happens to us. A now famous study of identical twins reared in different environments suggests that this set point determines approximately 50 percent of our disposition to happiness.\n\n\"Happiness is genetically influenced but not genetically fixed,\" David Lykken, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota, tells me. \"The brain's structure can be modified through practice. If you really want to be happier than your grandparents provided for in your genes, you have to learn the kinds of things you can do, day to day, to bounce your set point up and avoid the things that bounce it down.\" Apparently, there are as many happy-bumping tools as there are people wanting to cheer up. They range from commonsense maintenance such as sleep, exercise, and nurturing relationships to shifts in core beliefs and expectations. This reminds me of Maria Housden's experience after Hannah died. One researcher I speak to recommends taking control of your own time and keeping a \"gratitude journal.\" Another promotes \"acting happy,\" since there seems to be a direct link between facial expression and emotion, as in fake it till you make it.\n\nHappier people seem to be those who rely on familiar shortcuts rather than overthinking every little situation. Happy people tend to forgive; they're also inclined to gravitate toward making commitments. It comes as no surprise to learn that stress is the Darth Vader of contemporary life. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who helps run the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts, goes so far as to say that \"we have a sort of autoimmune disease\u2014chronic stress and discontent\u2014caused by not looking deeply enough into this question of genuine happiness.\" Kabat-Zinn teaches people seeking stress relief that wellness practices such as meditation make it possible, even in the midst of hardship, to experience simple pleasures. \"To know delight, what is right and beautiful with the world,\" as he puts it. \"With mental balance, we develop a keel-like ballast that helps us to remain stable even under extreme conditions.\" (We will discuss stress specifically in a later chapter.)\n\nRegardless of which particular tools we choose to help lift our own SWB, one thing appears to be certain: We're better off aiming for happiness moment to moment than trying to engineer contentment through long-term planning. This is because, as science now shows us, human beings are fairly hopeless at predicting what will make us happy or how long that happiness will last. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert spends his days exploring the riddle of human self-delusion. He's a pioneer in the field known as affective forecasting, whose researchers mea sure the distressing gap between what we believe will make us happy and what actually ends up doing so. \"We're such strangers to ourselves,\" Dan insists to me. \"Nowhere more than in our pursuit of the Holy Grail of happiness.\"\n\n\"But why?\" I'm still puzzled by how this self-blinding happens.\n\n\"Because we usually overestimate how things will affect us and rarely underestimate them,\" he explains. This discrepancy, known as the impact bias, causes a great deal of what Dan calls \"miswanting.\" When post-catastrophe people talk about cleaning house, getting rid of unnecessary crap in their lives, they're talking about the fruits of miswanting.\n\nTo confuse things further, the results of our choices are nowhere near as life changing as we think they will be. In a 1978 study of SWB among lottery winners and paraplegics, both groups adjusted paradoxically to their respective changes of fortune: The lottery winners settled back to levels of happiness that did not differ significantly from a control group's. The paraplegics, while less happy, were not as unhappy as expected. In fact, as another study revealed, major events\u2014happy or not\u2014lose their impact on happiness levels _in less than three months._ If we understood how quickly this adaptation process worked, we might choose to invest our hopes in things that could actually last\u2014and deliver.\n\nMoney is not one of them. It has been proven beyond a doubt that once our creature comforts are met, having more in the bank account rarely makes people more content. Once middle-class comforts are in place, the line between wealth and survival, Dan Gilbert tells me, is virtually negligible. \"The first forty grand makes a dramatic difference,\" he says, \"but after basic needs are met, the next ten million does almost nothing.\"\n\nI tell him that I'll be the judge of that.\n\nJust as Italians have eight words for love, we need more definitions of happiness, a spectrum wide enough to encompass struggle, loss, and unwanted change. The smiley-face version of happiness simply will not do. Life is too complex, we know too much, there's too much pain to be satisfied with a na\u00efve idea of what it means to be glad for life. Even survivors of the direst experiences attest to this paradox. \"Who knows what happiness is?\" asked one Holocaust refugee. \"Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence,\" she wrote. \"In this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for.\"\n\nDr. Marty Seligman, the godfather of the positive psychology movement, has created a three-tiered happiness model with direct implications on how we make our life choices. Beyond the first level, which Seligman calls the \"Hollywood\" view of happiness (\"getting as much positive emotion as possible\"), a second kind of happiness arises from discovering our \"signature strengths,\" which range in his core list from honesty, kindness, and forgiveness to ingenuity and love of learning. When we use our signature strengths in the service of something beyond ourselves, Seligman believes, we reach the highest tier. Learning to transcend our own needs, to at times sacrifice our immediate desires for the sake of the greater good, not only boosts our happiness level but also promotes the survival of the group. It is never a good idea to take care of others while ignoring one's own needs, of course. We've all known some grim-faced do-gooder who secretly resented those he or she insisted on helping.\n\n\"Just look at the Ten Commandments,\" I'm reminded by New York psychoanalyst Michael Eigen. \"To covet is the gateway to pain.\"\n\nOf course, comparisons are invidious in the best of times. Happiness researchers assure us that the single most powerful variable concerning well-being is how we choose to look at things. The wider the frame, the more vivid the picture. The softer the brush, the more sensuous the light. Colette had one of the most brilliant palettes ever, in both art and life\u2014the ability to soar, crash, and pull herself back up again from the wreckage; to always remain herself somehow; to finish her novels, love her younger men, drink her wine, relish her gossip, even with garrisons outside her window. She knew that happiness wasn't a Popeye grin\u2014no triumphalist horse-ride into the sunset\u2014but a brewing admixture of bitter and sweet. Metanoia made her wise. \"Bring it on!\" the gout-ridden writer would say, clutching a bulldog to her breast, meaning life with all its colors. _C'est la guerre!_\n\n## **INVISIBLE FEAST**\n\n\"Vision and sight are not the same thing.\"\n\nPhotographer John Dugdale is blinking at me through his Coke-bottle lenses, cocking his head and leaning forward, attempting to catch a sliver of my silhouette where I'm sitting less than three feet away. His Seeing Eye dog, Manley, is nuzzling his foot on the floor beside him. John is a strikingly handsome, square-jawed man with a perfect nose and crown of dark hair, recalling a portrait by John Singer Sargent. He is also a human hologram. After three major strokes, five bouts of nearly fatal pneumonia, toxoplasmosis (a brain infection), peripheral neuropathy, Kaposi's sarcoma, and CMV retinitis that robbed him of most of his sight ten years ago, John is hardly the hale-fellow-well-met he appears at first to be. He's more of a walking riddle, in fact.\n\n\"Losing my eyesight at the start of my career was the thing I dreaded most of all,\" he tells me now. \"I'd look at the sky, my hands, my face, my mother. I felt like I was disappearing, losing more sight every day.\" We're alone in John's drafty, top-floor Greenwich Village apartment. The room is filled with copper antiques, oversized cameras, and John's own haunting photographs\u2014blue-tinted images of ghostly trees and naked lovers in dreamlike space. It's hard to believe\u2014nearly impossible\u2014that such beautiful pictures were created with only the fraction of eyesight left to him.\n\n\"Everyone told me that my career was over,\" John tells me. \"But I decided that if I was going to lose my eyesight, I wanted to do it in a courageous way, hanging on to my camera tripod... not strung up to an IV pole. This was my moment to prove that illness did not have to end my creative life. I've had thirty-eight solo shows internationally since then. And my best work is still to come.\"\n\nThe trajectory of John's life in the past fifteen years is daunting to even imagine. Hospitalized for seven months in 1992, John was slowly preparing himself to die. \"My doctor's goal was to get me through the year,\" he says. \"I was struggling violently in my mind. I'd always been a huge overachiever. Everything I touched succeeded. For a long time I thought this couldn't be real, this couldn't possibly be happening to the golden boy. But it was happening. Fast.\"\n\nCaught in this sudden downward spiral, John reached for the only gifts left him: creative intelligence and obstinacy. \"I drove my doctors crazy. I questioned everything they wanted to give me.\" He smiles. \"But you must never let people talk you out of what you want to do. Sometimes they don't even _want_ you to get better.\"\n\nThis is sometimes true, strange as it seems.\n\n\"They need you to go on the path you're _supposed_ to go on,\" John says. \"You're supposed to be here for eighteen months and then die,\" he mocks. \"So don't get off that bed! Don't get out of that box! A nurse once told me I was going to have to take a certain medication for the rest of my life,\" he tells me in disbelief. \"I said who the hell told you that? She kept barraging me with medical propaganda filled with doomsday information. I told her, you put those pamphlets on my bed when I'm sleeping one more time, and I will have you arrested!\"\n\nWith nothing to lose, John chose his own artistic approach to self-healing. Learning to walk again after his stroke, he refused the hospital staff's equipment. \"That walker was like the scarlet letter for me,\" he says, reminding me of Jack Willis, the paralyzed TV producer who threw his own walker across the room. John chose to rely on his sister's shoulder instead. Recovering from toxoplasmosis, he invented visualization techniques as a way of buoying his spirits. \"I tried to come up with the most powerful thing each person in my family could do,\" John explains. \"It's corny, but my mother happens to like doing laundry. So I told her, when you go home to the washing machine at night, imagine you're taking my brain out of my head and putting it in the warm rinse cycle.\"\n\nJohn laughs at his homespun solution. \"I said, 'Imagine toxo coming out of my brain and going down the drain,'\" he says. \" 'Then take my brain, all clean and fluffy, and picture putting it back into my head.' My sister loves to cook, so I asked her to picture my brain in her lettuce spinner and spin the living daylights out of it! I thought of the purest, most perfect thing I had ever seen and remembered newborn lambs in spring. I pictured them nestling peacefully inside my head.\"\n\nA week after several violent drug reactions, a flummoxed internist paid John a visit. \"He told me that the infection in my brain seemed to be gone,\" he says, smiling. \"The doctor said he didn't get it. It could have been a coincidence. Or maybe it wasn't.\"\n\nEither way, John was still here.\n\nJohn realized that his physical and spiritual survival depended now on his ability to keep making art. \"I had to become the world's first blind photographer,\" he says simply. Late one afternoon, at his farm in Upstate New York, he finally found the nerve to pick up his camera and attempt to take a picture with most of his eyesight gone. What happened next, in fact, changed the course of John Dugdale's life.\n\n\"I had just gotten out of the hospital,\" he says, once we've moved to a sofa in the sitting room. \"I was out in the pasture, trying to take a photograph using a magnifying glass, struggling to focus, adjusting the backdrop and light meter,\" John tells me. \"I kept tripping over the tripod, getting more and more frustrated. Every time I was just about ready, the sun would move and I'd have to switch the whole thing again.\"\n\nThe idea of a mostly blind photographer in a country pasture, struggling to find the right light for a picture, is too mythopoeic to quite imagine.\n\n\"When I was about to go crazy, I finally got the whole thing right\u2014just perfect\u2014and bam!\" John says, slapping the table. \"In that very moment the sun went down and everything disappeared, went black. That's when I completely snapped.\" Sensing the distress in his master's voice, Manley searches John's face for trouble.\n\n\"I hit the deck in a heap of nothingness,\" John says. \"Just fell down on the ground and covered my head, pushed my face in the dirt, and started to cry in a way that was almost inhuman. There was grass in my teeth, my mouth. My eyes were full of dirt. I just wanted to burrow into the ground and die. I was furious, sad, frustrated, sick of everything,\" he says. \"Bawling my eyes out, asking, why did this have to happen? In a way that was completely out of control\u2014like hiccups when you can't stop.\"\n\nHe strokes Manley's nuzzling head. \"I was feeling the full impact of what had happened to me for the first time,\" John says. \"I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. My friend came out of the house to see what was happening. Thank God I wasn't alone! He scooped me up and carried me to the house, sat me on the couch, and held me in his arms like a child. He said, 'Okay, go ahead and cry.' I lay on his lap and bawled until there wasn't another drop of fluid in my body. He didn't try to stop me at all. Finally, I asked him to get me a camera so I could take a picture. I got back in his lap and snapped the shot. It was so beautiful, like a piet\u00e0. I called it 'The Descent of Man.'\"\n\nThis stunning photograph, which resembled nothing in John's previous work, became a centerpiece of Shadows Night Fall, the solo exhibition that catapulted him from the ranks of well-paid shutterbugs to the echelon of world-class artist. Since then, John's unique azure cyanotypes (a nineteenth-century camera process that allows him to enlarge images enough to see them) have earned him comparisons to Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian master, and invitations from collectors and museums around the world.\n\n\"I never expected this tremendous response,\" he says with a smile. \"I've got this great Cheshire cat feeling. The thing that I thought would be the end, in fact, actually took me somewhere I would never have imagined. I came to New York to be an artist, not a magazine hack, and finally landed in the place I was meant to be when I started. I just took a very different route,\" he says, reminding me of disabled athlete turned teacher Jim MacLaren.\n\nCreativity in the midst of chaos, the turn toward beauty in ugly times, has been John's lifeline back to health. Yet he learned early on that transformation is only possible when we make peace with the facts of our lives. \"Survival doesn't really mean anything without acceptance,\" John explains. \"That's the paradoxical part. You have to take the thing that's wrong and own it. Make it into something that has meaning for you. If you try to hide or negate it, it will just eat you up,\" he says. \"If you're hoping for things to be other than they are\u2014constantly wondering how or why something happened, or how to fix it\u2014you're _lost._ You'll completely miss out on the graceful time you have.\"\n\nJohn witnessed this paradoxical truth during his time in the hospital. \"The minute they rolled somebody into the room next to me, I could tell if they were going to stay on the planet or leave,\" he says. \"I could hear the resistance to change in their voice.\"\n\nThat quickly? John swears to me that this is true. \"The ones who wound up giving up were the people who couldn't imagine themselves except the way they were,\" he says, while patients who exhibited flexibility prevailed. \"The opportunity for transformation when we enter deeply into our experience is absolutely unbridled,\" John believes. \"It's just like nuclear power if you choose to use it properly. But if you can't imagine yourself in a new way, you're just not gonna make it,\" he insists. \"If you think you're gonna be the person you were before tragedy struck\u2014internally or externally\u2014it's impossible. Once you pass through that fire, you've been smelted. You're gonna to come out gold on the other side or you're not gonna come out at all.\"\n\nSuch metamorphoses are sometimes confusing to folks around us. \"People often ask me why I don't take happier pictures,\" John says, chuckling. His famously moody photographs could not be more unlike his peppy commercial work of yesteryear. \"People ask me why I don't just see a shrink,\" he says with raised eyebrows. \"To make the complicated feelings go away. I respond by asking what they see in my work, exactly. Is it loss, fear, joy, sadness, sexuality, beauty, tiredness? Because all of that is there. I have just as much joy as I do melancholy.\"\n\nKahlil Gibran described this doubleness in a poem.\n\n_Your joy is your sorrow unmasked  \nAnd the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.  \nAnd how else can it be?  \nThe deeper that sorrow carves into your being,  \nThe more joy you can contain._\n\nThis wisdom has widened John's point of view. \"I ask these well-meaning people which part, exactly, they are afraid of. Which part can they not look at? Because loss goes on for all of us. It is authentic to be human and in pain.\"\n\nAt his lowest time in the hospital, John says, he had an epiphany that remained with him. \"I was in this tiny, dumpy room at the end of the hallway, with one window onto an airshaft, feeling completely helpless. Nobody was around that day. I was counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds. One thin strand of light was coming down the airshaft. And as I was gazing at it, something began to shift in me,\" John says. \"It was more an awareness than a thought. But as I lay there watching this light, I knew that that was where I was going to. That I would become part of that. It's hard to explain,\" John acknowledges, \"but when I exhaled, a straitjacket fell away and I became very peaceful with the idea of leaving the planet. In _success,_ not failure,\" he makes clear. \"There was a transcendental shift in my personality.\"\n\nHe claims now that this transcendent shift is more precious to him than his actual vision. \"The light comes from inside,\" John explains. \"Vision and sight are not the same thing,\" he repeats. \"Sometimes I think that if God came down and said I could have my sight back but I'd have to forget everything I've learned, I couldn't do it. Once you've really been forced to let everything go, life becomes much more peaceful.\"\n\n\"It's hard to communicate that without sounding delusional,\" I say.\n\n\"Once you've come home for the tenth time to news that someone you love has died, you start to have this other experience of life that most people aren't familiar with,\" John agrees. \"I have a better grip on mortality than my parents do. My mother, God bless her, always wants to give me her eyes. But I tell her, 'Ma, I have my special eye. No one sees only with their eyes. You just don't realize it until you have to.'\"\n\nJohn's macho father learned this lesson as well. \"When my dad thought I was going to die, he came to see me and gave me the first peck on the cheek he'd given me since I was eight years old,\" John says, his eyes pooling up behind the thick glasses. \"It was really awkward. He banged his head on the swing-arm TV.\" My host wipes his eyes on his sleeve. \"But for my father, that kiss was like stepping over a chasm. It would never have come about in any other way. Now, what ever happens, I know deep down in my heart that he loves me. And my father knows that I love him.\"\n\nIn the past few months John has started to lose the fraction of vision left to him. He isn't happy about this, of course. But he doesn't seem especially frightened either. \"Loss goes on,\" he tells me when we meet again. \"I don't want to leave the planet. I want to see what's going to happen with my garden this year. I don't want to not see my friends and my family. But when that happens, I'll be forced to accept it.\"\n\nIn recent photographs John has begun inserting himself into the images. A male figure can be seen around the periphery\u2014 sometimes a hand, sometimes his face, other times just an arm or a shadow\u2014as if to remind us, his doubting viewers, that he's still here. John Dugdale calls these his spirit pictures. \"When I talk about losing my sight these days, I find myself touching my own face,\" he says now, fingers reaching automatically toward his cheek.\n\n\"I haven't finished taking that picture yet.\"\n\n## **ORIGINAL BLESSING**\n\nWe cannot transform what we have not first blessed. Without blessing everything, our harshest parts especially, we cannot be turned around by the _coincidentia oppositorum_ \u2014the conjunction of opposites, the sacred marriage, the wisdom that only arises from reconciling yang and yin. Ancient alchemists applied this same principle, adding a pinch of _negresca,_ the blackest element, in order to make what they called gold. Our dark parts then become allies, enriching our _prima materia,_ the mess that we must learn how to bless if we want to move forward.\n\nThe word _blessing_ comes from the French verb _blesser,_ \"to wound,\" and often arrives through the hands of pain, as Samuel Kirschner, an Israeli bodyworker living in New York, learned when his father was dying. Samuel grew up craving his father's blessing but chose to save his own life instead, fleeing Israel at the age of twenty to become a permanent exile in the United States. His family's grief was too suffocating. Raised by Holocaust survivors (Samuel was conceived in a relocation camp after the war, in fact), the troubled prodigal son went through decades of psychotherapy before learning how to feel happy inside his own skin. Then one day, five years ago, Samuel's mother called from Israel to tell him that his dying father wanted to see him.\n\n\"Being with my father at the end of his life changed me completely,\" Samuel says when we meet at his loft near the East River. A soulful fifty-something man, Samuel is pinching an Indian cigarette between his fingers like a joint, his shaven head silhouetted against the garden window. \"My father and I had never been close,\" he says. \"My mother used to tell me when I was a kid that he wasn't fit to be a parent. She may have been right, but how could I tell?\" Samuel muses, flicking his ashes into a cup.\n\n\"She always kept a wall between him and me, so my father and I were distant strangers. He lived with us, but always apart, like the shell of a father. Then he got sick, and for some weird reason I was the one he wanted close by. I saw how tender my father really was. Sitting with him at his deathbed during those weeks saved my life.\"\n\n\"In what way?\"\n\n\"It's hard to explain,\" he tells me. \"I realized how much of me was missing as a man. I'd been trying so hard not to be like my father\u2014the image of him that I'd made up\u2014that I had no idea who I really was. I had all this power but no foundation, just this huge hole underneath, where my father should have been.\"\n\nHe sips from his cup of tea. \"We like to pretend like we're all grown up\u2014handling it,\" Samuel says, making air quotes. \"What a joke! Sitting with my father, I felt like I was five years old again. I was amazed by how much I still craved his approval after all these years, though I believed I didn't care.\"\n\n\"You never completely stop caring,\" I say.\n\n\"I still wanted him to be proud of me!\" Samuel says with amazement. \"He loved to be pampered, so I just sat there next to the bed and touched him. One day my mother asked me to shave him, and when I finished, my father kissed my hand.\" I'm reminded of John Dugdale's father kissing him in the hospital bed, only in reverse. \"He was too sick to talk, but he looked at me and smiled.\"\n\nThis smile helped to heal a painful breach in his adult psyche. \"Something shifted in me when he kissed my hand,\" Samuel explains. \"I don't know exactly how to describe it. My father lived through his hands. He was a baker, and in his spare time he liked to garden. My father's soul was in his hands. I know he felt this, too, because he began to trust me.\"\n\nHe lights another _beedi_ and continues. \"Anything to do with his body, my father asked for me to help him. I changed his catheter every morning. The first time I did it, I was actually shaking,\" Samuel admits. \"Touching him there was so strange, so intimate. It reminded me of the story in the Bible when Isaac dies. The blessing was meant to go to the older son, and whoever got the blessing would thrive. Jacob was younger than Esau, the way I was younger than my brother, but he managed to touch his father's thigh. Touching the father's thigh was the symbol of being blessed. I knew when my father was dying that he was blessing me. No words, but that simple touch was more important than any therapy I had ever gone through before.\"\n\nIn a famous letter to his own absent father, Franz Kafka expressed the depth of such filial longing. \"My writing was about you,\" confessed the author of _The Metamorphosis._ \"In it I only poured out the grief I could not sigh at your breast.\"\n\nSamuel concurs with this feeling. \"I finally feel like a whole person,\" he admits. \"It only took me fifty-nine years.\"\n\n\"You're lucky to have had it at all,\" I say, never having known my own father.\n\n\"I think about that all the time,\" he says.\n\nThe value of blessing goes far beyond family bonds, however. Blessing is a metaphysical act that elevates and transforms our view of the earth and our lives here. In fact, it's well worth asking ourselves what protean effect the replacement of original sin with original blessing might have on the way we see things. Brother Matthew Fox, a controversial Catholic priest, was actually silenced by the Holy See after suggesting that a doctrine of original blessing could help to heal a divided church he described as a \"dysfunctional patriarchy.\" What's more, Fox wanted to know, how differently might we approach our own lives if we viewed worldly existence as blessed, not cursed; risen, not fallen; sacred and worthy instead of profane? Shortly after his silence is lifted, Brother Matthew agrees to sit down with me on a sunny morning in Washington Square Park to discuss how this absence of blessing in daily life continues to wound the modern soul.\n\n\"I spoke to a young person in Australia,\" Matthew begins. He's wearing jeans and a sky-blue button-down shirt, his silver hair neatly parted at the side, and is munching contentedly on a bagel. \"This young fellow said something surprising,\" the priest remembers. \"He said that it was as if adults had given today's youth a revolver containing six bullets: the hole in the ozone layer, the disappearing rainforests, polluted air and water, joblessness, debt, and the tightening field of education. He said it's as if adults have put this revolver to their heads and said, 'Now be happy,'\" Matthew tells me. \"Youth are in despair all over the world.\"\n\nIt's hard to believe that this mild-mannered Wisconsinite is the same fire-breathing reformer\u2014one journalist called him the \"D. H. Lawrence of theological lit\"\u2014who put the blasphemous screws to his Mother Church. \"I remember teaching a course to a summer group of a hundred people or so,\" Matthew says, tossing bagel bits to the pigeons on the lawn. \"We began with what is called the _via negativa,_ \" the \"school of hard knocks\" in layman's terms. \"I asked how many people had experienced the dark night of the soul. Every single person's hand went up.\"\n\n\"You were surprised?\"\n\n\"Maybe not. But the point is that such awareness isn't just something for nuns and monks\u2014we all know about it. What we often fail to realize is what to do with our sufferings.\"\n\n\"A friend of mine used to say that in a materialistic culture, we have no transcendental context for our suffering.\"\n\nMatthew agrees. \"We've been Novocained to death by television, entertainment, alcohol, drugs, school, work\u2014all our addictions,\" he says. Matthew makes clear that he is not opposed to having fun with shallow, meaningless entertainment; he merely warns against junk culture as a steady diet. \"It covers up our capacity for awe. For passion and deep feeling. It sets us up for superficial experience.\"\n\nHe often mentions Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel in this regard. \"People today are shocked by the weakness of our awe, but also by the weakness of our shock,\" Matthew says, quoting the visionary rabbi. \"Heschel says that we've lost the capacity for radical response.\"\n\n\"Blessing is a radical response?\" I ask.\n\n\"Of course it is. So is creativity. Creativity lies at the heart of freedom from addiction,\" he tells me. \"Otto Rank, my favorite psychologist, says that the resurrection story from the Gospels is the most revolutionary idea that humans have ever come up with. Rank worked exclusively with artists and found that the number one obstacle to creativity is the fear of death. The redemption power of the Jesus story is that death is not the final word, so we don't have to fear it. When we believe in stories like the resurrection, we rediscover our creativity and are not afraid to use it. Imagination gets us into evil, and imagination gets us out.\"\n\n\"Tell that to Kim Jong Il,\" I say.\n\nHe sidesteps the North Korean despot. \"Violence is intrinsic to the universe,\" Matthew says. \"Terror and beauty go together. We don't live in a pretty universe, we live in a beautiful one. That's not evil. It's just part of being here.\"\n\n\"We would all like easier answers,\" I say.\n\n\"Yet awe is the thing that wakes us up.\"\n\n\"And awe contains darkness?\"\n\n\"Always. The demonic and the divine join in the act of creativity,\" Matthew explains. Blessing counterbalances darkness and helps turn adversity toward the creative. \"The cure for evil\u2014the constructive reaction to suffering\u2014is to redirect our imaginations,\" he says. \"To be more conscious that we _have_ imagination. And to never turn these imaginations over to the few. If we teach people that their imaginations are not powerful, important, or divine, then something essential begins to atrophy.\n\n\"Art, ritual, erotic life, prayer\u2014all of these are a form of blessing,\" the priest goes on. \"They strengthen the heart. They open us to wonder. Take something like a sweat lodge.\" He chuckles. \"My first twenty minutes in one of those things, and I thought for sure I was going to die! I was looking for the fire exit. Then I said, 'I am going to die,' and I yielded. When you yield to the process, you undergo a transformation. Your heart grows.\"\n\n\"In the surrender?\"\n\n\"In the play.\" Matthew's watching a group of toddlers attack the jungle gym. \"We're here to celebrate with one another,\" he reminds me. \"This ought to be an everyday thing. According to Meister Eckhart [the thirteenth-century mystic], 'For the person who is aware, breakthrough does not happen once a year, once a month, once a day, but many times every day.'\"\n\nThis is the power that arises from blessing, Matthew Fox believes. We view ourselves, and the world itself, through a sacramental eye\u2014perceiving the holiness in our lives\u2014rather than the sting of damnation.\n\nThis radical priest seems to be saying that when we perceive life for what it is\u2014miraculous, fathomless, staggering, brilliant\u2014and view ourselves through this same opened window, blessing automatically occurs. Brushed by extinction, the most cynical person can be rendered childlike, curious, and glad. Bertrand Russell, the cranky British philosopher, almost died from double pneumonia in Peking during the winter of 1920. For several weeks all of the doctors in attendance thought he would be dead before morning. But with the coming of spring, his health\u2014and gladness\u2014 returned, as Russell wrote in his autobiography:\n\nLying in my bed feeling that I was not going to die was surprisingly delightful. I had always imagined until then that I was fundamentally pessimistic and did not greatly value being alive. I discovered that in this I had been completely mistaken, and that life was infinitely sweet to me. Rain in Peking is rare, but during my convalescence there came heavy rains bringing the delicious smell of damp earth through the windows, and I used to think how dreadful it would have been to have never smelt that smell again. I had the same feeling about the light of the sun, and the sound of the wind. Just outside my windows were some very beautiful acacia trees, which came into blossom at the first moment when I was well enough to enjoy them. I have known ever since that at bottom I am glad to be alive.\n\nRussell had finally blessed his own life, understood with both heart and mind, and what he perceived in this way surprised him. We are meant to be surprised by this world, he learned in almost losing it, meant most of all\u2014in hard times, even\u2014to be glad for the chance to have been here at all.\n\n## **ENOUGH**\n\nSatisfaction becomes an art form. Knowing enough to recognize fullness. The wisdom of knowing when to stop is critical to _techne tou biou,_ the craft of living. Yet this is not a lesson easily learned in our land of conspicuous plenty. Ours is a culture without sabbath or pause, a theater without an intermission. We measure ourselves by a more-is-more yardstick, drive ourselves beyond our limits, sacrifice life quality for productivity, and often end up feeling so burned out that we can't enjoy the fruits of our own labor through the bitter backwash of exhaustion.\n\nBut what if we didn't live this way? What if we practiced satisfaction and the skill of knowing when to stop? What if we engineered into our frantic schedules a weekly day of actual rest, a sundown-to-sundown tradition of stopping, cessation, renewal, and \"non-doing,\" lived \"as if we were at home in the universe,\" as Rabbi Rami Shapiro puts it? \"Lived for one day without trying to control the people around you or the situations in which we find ourselves? Reserved one day for a state of acceptance? Not a day without desire, that would not be possible,\" Shapiro suggests, \"but a day not to act on those desires.\" He believes that creating such a refuge might actually give us \"a foretaste of the world to come.\"\n\nWhether you believe in an afterlife or not, a sabbath does sound heavenly. Imagine your neighborhood stopping for twenty-four hours every week, as if Mother Earth herself were catching her breath after many days of sweat and toil. God worked mightily for six long days before cooling his heels on the seventh, the book of Genesis tells us. \"Even the Lord could sit back and be satisfied that nothing more needed to be added to his creation,\" a Jewish colleague explained. \"Even he could stop and say, 'It's good already. Enough!'\"\n\nHow often does anything feel like enough? When, for more than a random instant, does life appear completely sufficient, with nothing to edit, improve, aspire to, arrange, or nudge forward in some way or other? Isn't there always something more to be done, work to be finished, ground to cover, prospects to investigate? When it came to enough, I had always believed, it would not be my personal fate in this lifetime.\n\nBut burnout is an insidious process. You don't know you're choked till you're already smoking. For a long time after my own \"alive day,\" taking a break seemed ungrateful somehow, an affront to the gift of vitality. Living fully meant overdrive. Forced to choose between sanity and productivity, I would gladly have chosen prolifically nuts. But the smell of smoke was in my nostrils. I woke up too many mornings feeling like toast. My calendar was booked, my downtime upbeat, but my life had turned into a runon sentence. I needed syntax. I needed a sabbath. I needed to figure out how to stop.\n\nFor someone like me this was difficult. I was the insecure geek in school who wrote twenty-page papers when five pages were assigned (and even those weren't good enough most times). Double the effort for half the self-esteem, that had been my lifelong motto. My Swiss-cheese ego just wouldn't stop leaking. These cheese holes announced that I was fully deficient and nothing I did could keep them stuffed.\n\nI was living as a hungry ghost. Hungry ghosts are those ravenous figures in Buddhist mythology (metaphors for the insatiable ego) condemned to eternal craving in a world of elusive satisfaction. Nothing is ever enough for these monsters. There exists no end to their craving for more. We all have our ghostly orifices, the places where, if there were just a little more, we could be the people we long to be. But there comes a time, if we're paying attention, when this Pavlovian drool-and-whine charade reveals its own futility. We realize with dismay and shock that nothing will ever suffice as a permanent stopgap between us and our ravening hunger. Still, we can't stop trying to plug the space. We're endlessly dissatisfied, you will agree, driven to feed the unfillable void using things with a snowball's chance in hell of actually lasting.\n\nFortunately, Buddhism offers a sensible strategy for how to end this hungry ghost cycle. This begins with understanding the concept of _dukkha_ \u2014the \"pervasive unsatisfactoriness\" of all passing things in an imperfect, temporal world. Even those rare experiences that do manage to satisfy us completely will soon enough come to an end, we know, and this knowledge, in the Buddhist view, is exactly what casts the shadow of longing we find ourselves unable to shake. This dissatisfaction with things as they are remains, Buddhists tell us, our main source of suffering. Yet we seem unable to curb our compulsion to make this empty-sense go away.\n\nThe drive to fill internal emptiness stems from fundamental doubts about our own existence, the Buddha taught. Looking deep inside our psyche for a \"self,\" humans are forever haunted by the suspicion that there is, in fact, no _there_ there. If we continue to peel back the layers of our so-called \"selves,\" Buddhists teach, we will come upon no permanent subject, regardless of how long or hard we try. Because confronting this emptiness feels so scary, we're driven to keep trying to cover it up, to papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 the abyss with stuff.\n\nYet it is here\u2014at futility's brink\u2014where we can begin to free ourselves. The cycle of craving is interrupted when we learn how to stop. \"Sitting with uncomfortable feelings, getting friendly with the hole you really are, you realize that emptiness is not really a problem,\" says Buddhist teacher David Loy. \"It's our ways of trying to escape it that turn it into a problem.\" When we learn to tolerate this empty feeling within, instead of binge-feeding the hungry ghosts, an important, metanoia-like turnaround occurs (Buddhists call it _paravritti_ ), when the \"festering hole at our core turns into a life-healing flow [springing] up spontaneously from we know not where,\" in Loy's words. \"The empty core becomes a place where there is now awareness of something other than, greater than, my usual sense of self\u2014greater than I understand myself to be.\"\n\nNothing can possibly be enough, we now see, because nothing is meant to be enough. We're wise to feel the insufficiency of lives predicated on ephemera (including other people), we are told by the Buddhists. Longing is the point, it seems; _dukkha_ is our built-in reminder of what can never be filled (and should not be), _not_ so that we cling to our cravings but in order to call the pursuit\u2014 and the containers themselves\u2014into question. Fuming over the imperfection of even the most brilliant life is meant to be a goad for discovering what cannot be taken away, for achieving reunion with that sufficient self that lacks nothing, expects nothing, needs nothing in order to feel at home in the world\u2014the self that can stop anytime, anywhere, and know that it belongs. The longing does not disappear, but our story about it does; obscure objects of desire turn into a subject\u2014the true I\u2014whose realization enriches our lives rather than diminishing them.\n\nDestructive as hungry ghosts are personally, their greed writ large now endangers the health of the planet, as ecologists have been warning for decades. Five years ago the writer Bill McKibben found himself standing in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, gazing up toward the sun in the sky\u2014and not being able to find it\u2014when he had a scary revelation about what _enough_ really means.\n\n\"You could stare straight at the sun if you could even figure out where in the sky it was,\" McKibben tells me with disbelief. He's on the phone with me at the moment, looking out at pasturelands behind the rural Vermont home he shares with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter. \"I was in complete shock,\" Bill admits. Doing the math afterward, he estimated that by the year 2031, barring natural disaster or mass contraception, there will be roughly 1.3 billion Chinese as well off as their American counterparts. \"If the Chinese owned cars like we do, they would add one point one billion cars to the eight hundred million already on the road,\" he says in horror. \"If the Chinese ate meat the way we do, they would consume two thirds of the food on the planet. The earth simply cannot support that.\"\n\nMost of us are already aware of the ways in which greed is depleting the planet. However, we may not have made the connection between this overconsumption and the hungry ghost ethic. Bill McKibben wants to make this clear. \"The official idea that more is better, which has been orthodoxy for the past fifty years, no longer matches reality,\" he explains. \"It's as if we've done a controlled experiment to see if materialism [as a path to happiness] works and found it doesn't.\" With a degree in economics from Harvard, McKibben has made a name for himself doing \"coal-mine canary\" reporting on issues from overpopulation to global warming. \"For all our material progress, all the billions of barrels of oil and millions of acres of trees that it took to create it, we have not moved the satisfaction meter an inch,\" he says, echoing happiness researcher Dan Gilbert.\n\nThe opposite has happened, in fact, with alcoholism, suicide, and depression rates skyrocketing in proportion to the rise in affluence. There even appears to be something afoot that I call \"acquired anhedonia syndrome,\" namely, the inability of people who have too much to enjoy the stuff they already own. This malaise has had a trickle-down effect on our kids. Studies have shown that today's average American child reports suffering higher levels of anxiety than the average child _under psychiatric care_ in the 1950s.\n\nBill found the American dream's shadow side even more troubling when viewed from across the Pacific. In China, he met an eighteen-year-old factory worker named Liu Xian, whom he calls \"the most statistically average person on the planet.\" Bill and Liu Xian struck up a conversation. He told her that he had noticed how many of the girls in the factory dorm had stuffed animals on their beds and asked Liu Xian if she had one. The girl began to cry. \"She couldn't afford such an item, she told me,\" reports Bill. Later, when he brought Liu Xian a stuffed dog, she was as pleased as he had \"ever seen a person.\" The disconnect between her gratitude and his own daughter's disinterest (\"she has a room full of Beanie Babies\") still affects him. \"How could a stuffed animal possibly have the same meaning for her?\" he wondered about his daughter. This is why Liu Xian's story continues to haunt him. \"In impoverished parts of the world, possessions still deliver,\" he insists. \"Any solution we consider [for redistributing wealth] has to contain some answer to Liu Xian's tears.\"\n\nBill decided to try an experiment with his own family. The McKibbens' focus, he determined, would be food. For a solid year, Bill, Sue, and their daughter decided to eat only foods grown locally, to see how it affected their \"appetite, budget, community contact, and general sense of fullness.\" Studies show that the average bite of food an American eats travels some fifteen hundred miles before it reaches our table. It takes a tenth that amount of energy to eat locally, however, and increases our chances of social interaction\u2014the local farmers' market versus Wal-Mart, for example\u2014tenfold as well. Bill hoped that by tipping the balance toward home\/local\/small, he would dig deeper roots in his beloved Lake Champlain Valley, meet the neighbors, locate his own goods, and even, he hoped, regain a sense of proportion and what it means to have enough.\n\nThe experiment wasn't always easy. In the long run, though, it changed Bill's life. While locating and storing his own food proved to be more time consuming than hitting the A&P, Bill and his family actually enjoyed the challenge, cooking at home more, eating higher-quality fare, even making some new local friends (the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker). Spending a winter without oranges was not nearly as traumatic as he had predicted. This year of eating locally \"permanently altered the way I eat in more ways than one,\" Bill tells me now. \"It left a good taste in my mouth. That taste was satisfaction.\"\n\nIt is possible to be satisfied, after all. Enough exists, we come to realize; in fact, we have it with us already. Craving and hunger are not the same thing. Recognizing our hungry ghosts, we learn to discern the important difference between actual hunger and the gap-stuffing reflex that only makes our emptiness worse. Slowly, we begin to recognize the difference between the ghost's voice and true desire, to resist hues and cries against the void, to obey the call of letting things be, and to find satisfaction in doing nothing. Satisfaction is there in the silence, we see, a break from the mind's cacophony. There is always enough, we begin to believe; the emptiness is filling itself. That must be what we can learn from a sabbath. The empty space becomes a spring.\n\n## **STRESS MATTERS**\n\nIn a quiet corner of the University of Massachusetts campus, near Worcester, sits a cluster of outbuildings called the Stress Reduction Clinic. Since its opening in 1979, the clinic has helped thousands of individuals suffering from stress sickness to reclaim their peace of mind. In a hyperactive age of time crunching, multitasking, and rampant attention deficit, stress disorders are, indeed, the nemesis of modern life, wreaking epidemic damage on our well-being (some 60 to 90 percent of individuals in hospitals declare stress to be their primary complaint) as well as on our physical health. Luckily, this enemy can be disarmed.\n\nSTRESS STOPS HERE, announces a poster on the wall near the clinic's entrance. Indeed, for nearly thirty years the SRC's founders, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli, have been using a variety of techniques, including biofeedback, meditation, yoga, and cognitive therapy, to help burned-out individuals learn to \"unhook\" themselves from stressful and painful thoughts. While the human stress response may be autonomic, physiologically beyond our control, its mental triggers can be worked with, which is what I have come to the clinic to investigate.\n\nSaki Santorelli welcomes me with a beaming smile and open arms. A diminutive man with an epic nose and the energy of three people, Saki is a stress guru who's devoted his career to understanding the enemy in our midst in the same way other scientists fight cancer or global warming. \"Life is only getting more relentless,\" he tells me after we've settled in his small office. \"People come to us exhausted. Just _frazzled._ They've got ten balls in the air and no sense of how to put them down. They can't give themselves a break, drop off the merry-go-round.\"\n\nThe word _stress_ comes from the French for \"oppressed,\" I was not surprised to learn from my own research.\n\n\"Stress is oppression,\" Saki insists.\n\n\"So what's the cure for oppression?\" I wonder.\n\n\"Choice,\" he tells me. \"Plain and simple.\" Stress, explains Saki, is created from the belief that we are under threat\u2014trapped\u2014and cannot cope. \"Shut in,\" he says.\n\nThis reminds me of what a man admitted after surviving a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge: \"I instantly realized that everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable. Except for having just jumped.\"\n\n\"Realizing that we have a whole repertoire of responses available to us at any moment decreases anxiety right away,\" Saki tells me. \"When people feel that there's no way out of the place they're in, their minds contract. Having choice relieves the stuckness, makes the narrow places wider.\"\n\n\"But how do our lives become so narrow in the first place?\" I ask.\n\n\"To survive crisis, we narrow our world to a size that feels safe, knowable, familiar, and secure,\" Saki explains. \"But the mind-set that gets us through crisis becomes impoverishing in the long run. We may be _handling_ things,\" he says, \"but our lives become small. Patients come here telling us that although they are functioning, they feel stuck in a narrow place they don't like. But if they step outside, they don't know if they'll survive.\"\n\nIn other words, we hide inside safely parametered ruts, then wonder why we feel so stuck. \"What gets us through the hardest times does not make us feel content or alive,\" Saki says. He and the clinic's staff work with patients to help them become more \"comfortable with their own discomfort,\" to \"uncouple themselves from anxiety by developing the capacity to feel, see, and actually experience what's going on.\"\n\n\"Instead of what they imagine\u2014and fear\u2014to be going on?\" I ask.\n\n\"Exactly. People learn to step back and separate their thoughts about what's happening from what is actually happening. This mindfulness creates a bit of space. A toe today, a leg tomorrow. Poco a poco. A bit at a time. Then, when we're not so exhausted from the effort of keeping things at bay, we discover that our lives\u2014that we, ourselves\u2014are much bigger than we think.\"\n\nSaki discovered his own chill-out mission while still a neurotic undergraduate at university. During a conversation with an esteemed peer, Saki had one of those red-flag, epiphanic moments. \"It was thirty-plus years ago,\" he remembers. \"One day, out of the blue, someone I had a great deal of respect for asked me if I was the kind of person who went through the mountain or around the mountain.\"\n\n\"What did you tell him?\" I ask.\n\n\"I remember pumping up my chest and saying, 'I go through the mountain!'\" Saki grins. \"That's when this person asked me if I had ever thought of going around the mountain. I have been living inside that question all these years. Wondering what it would mean to go _around_ the mountain. When is that the right approach? When does it work better than trying to push through? If we've pushed as hard as we possibly can and the mountain still does not move, can we yield?\" Saki asks.\n\n\"That's when control issues kick in,\" I say. \"Not wanting to give it up.\"\n\n\"But there are different kinds of control,\" he insists. Saki tells me about groundbreaking research being done by a team of doctors at Stanford, who have identified two distinct kinds of control. \"The first is positive assertive control,\" he explains. \"When we put our noses to the grindstone and see the task through. This is not a stressed-out state. Unless it leads to negative assertive control.\"\n\n\"That sounds bad,\" I say.\n\n\"It is. Negative assertive control means pushing till it hurts.\" This is the sure path to stress sickness, Saki teaches. \"We may have succeeded quantitatively, but qualitatively we're a mess,\" he explains. \"What have we plowed through to maintain control, to achieve our aims? Whom do we grind up in our wake?\" In a world piled high with collateral damage, this does seem an important question. But what is the alternative? \"There is something known as positive yielding control,\" Saki makes clear. \"This has to do with surrender, acceptance, and choosing your battles. Positive yielding control can have enormously positive effects on people's lives, particularly in situations where survival hangs in the balance.\"\n\n\"Not pushing?\"\n\n\"Knowing when to stop,\" he says. \"When to go around the mountain. Using the power of choice.\"\n\nIn other words, yesterday's steadfastness may be tomorrow's embolism. Undiscriminating effort is a sure path to burnout. Stress relief comes from more choice, less brawn; more patience, less pressure; more stretching, less strife; more stillness, less stipulation. According to Saki, stillness\u2014 _far niente,_ as the Italians call it\u2014is a largely untapped elixir for counteracting battle fatigue in our frantic lives. \"Pascal said that most of our troubles come from the fact that human beings can't be alone with themselves for any extended period of time,\" he reminds me. \"The act of stopping may be uncomfortable at first, but it often becomes revelatory. People begin to have small epiphanies.\"\n\nAll the more reason to observe a sabbath, I note.\n\n\"Stillness is what enables us to interrupt the stress cycle,\" he agrees. \"When we unhook from our craving thoughts, we're struck by new possibilities, fresh ideas, more constructive responses.\" Even small children respond to reconnecting in this way. Saki recalls the story of Maria Montessori, the Italian educator who made important innovations in the field of early learning. Apparently, Montessori, who began her work with poor children in Italy, would give the kids short periods of quiet time throughout the day. \"In the beginning the children hated it,\" he says, \"but Montessori had them do it anyway.\"\n\nHe presses his palms together at the side of his face in the international gesture for napping. \"When she deliberately took the quiet time away, the children would start yearning for it,\" Saki says. \"They'd ask, 'Could we just put our heads down, please?'\"\n\nThen my host gazes out through his office window toward a copse of trees in the distance and takes the words right out of my mouth.\n\n\"I know exactly how they feel.\"\n\n## **THE WOUNDED HEALER**\n\nMedicine is a front seat to mystery, according to one wise physician. While some doctors are emotionally stunted individuals, others surpass our empathic expectations in the course of living through their own hardship. \"Only the wounded physician heals,\" Carl Jung said. Without having been tested themselves, like shamans enduring their rites of passage, it may be fair to ask how much help doctors can really be in helping us survive our own.\n\nDr. Rachel Remen grew up as the only daughter in a Russian immigrant family of doctors and rabbis when the subway still cost a few cents in New York City. Long before she entered Cornell Medical College, where she trained as a pediatrician, Rachel's personal healing work began following a diagnosis of Crohn's disease at fifteen. An autoimmune disorder attacking the intestine, Crohn's was untreatable and agonizingly painful in those days. Struggling to live a normal life, Rachel braved several major surgeries, as well as the humiliation of wearing an evacuation bag under her sixties peasant blouse.\n\n\"I was furious at my disease for a long time,\" Rachel tells me when we meet. We're seated across from one another at the dining room table of her Olympian home overlooking the bay in Marin County, California. A purring cat curls around my ankle. The house, where Rachel lives alone, is decorated in calming earth tones and filled with Asian sculptures. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, red robins swarm fruit trees across the expanse of manicured lawn. Snowy-haired and owlish in a cream-colored pants ensemble, Rachel is not who I expected her to be. In book jacket photographs, the best selling author of _Kitchen Table Wisdom_ looks like a sweet-natured, _babke_ -pushing _bubbe_ (a grandma, in other words, offering cake), the kind who kvells and pinches your _tuches._ In person, though, she's more like Bea Arthur, the no-b.s., tough-as-nails sitcom actress best known for playing Maude on TV. Armed with a mystic's awe at the wonder of healing, as well as a scientist's flinty mind, Rachel is quick-witted, formidable, and\u2014though good-hearted\u2014no sufferer of fools.\n\nHer anger at Crohn's brewed a long time before she finally exploded. Offered a prestigious teaching job during her medical residency, the ambitious young woman was forced to turn down the position for lack of sufficient energy. \"Here was another dream stolen,\" she wrote. Severely depressed, the nineteen-year-old escaped to a deserted Long Island beach, where she had her first major healing breakthrough:\n\nIn turmoil, I walked wearily along the water's edge, comparing myself to others my own age, people of seemingly boundless vitality... I remember thinking that this disease had robbed me of my youth. I did not yet know what it had given me in exchange... A wave of intense rage flooded me, the sort of feeling I had experienced many times before. But for some reason, this time I did not drown in it. Instead, I noticed it go by and something inside me said, \"You have no vitality? Here's your vitality.\"\n\nShocked, I recognized the connection between my anger and my will to live. My anger was my will to live turned inside out. My life force was just as intense... as my anger, but for the first time I could experience it as different and feel it directly... Somehow _this [intense love of life] had grown large in me as a result of the very limitations I had thought were thwarting it_ [italics mine]. Like the power of a dammed river... I also knew that in its present form, as rage, this power was trapped. My anger had helped me to survive, to resist my disease, even to fight on, but in the form of anger I could not use my strength to build the kind of life I longed to live.\n\n\"I was like Zorba the Greek!\" Rachel laughs, remembering the angry girl she was and the lust for life trapped inside her. \"The shift came when I realized that I could express this power\u2014my power\u2014directly. I didn't need to be angry. But let me tell you something,\" she says now, fixing me with her fierce dark eyes. \"I would never have reached that point if some therapist had worked with me to get rid of my anger.\"\n\nRachel sips her tea. \"People can get caught in anger, this is true,\" she goes on. \"And that is very limiting as a way of life. But there is a place for anger in the process of becoming a human being.\" The wonderful Buddhist teacher Rick Fields channeled rage at his own disease into a series of poems\u2014including a doozy called \"Fuck You Cancer\"\u2014as a means of staying real in the throes of healing. \"Without it there's something important that you never get to have.\"\n\nThat thing is authenticity, Rachel believes. Such authenticity signals the deepening of soul that occurs when untrue things are burned from our lives. \"What many people don't understand is that it's not enough to survive physically,\" insists Rachel. \"That's too low a goal. The idea is to survive psychologically, as a loving being. To survive as a soul. This is how we begin to awaken.\"\n\n\"To what?\" I inquire.\n\n\"The beginning of loss is also the beginning of compassion,\" she tells me. \"My experience has enabled me to help a lot of people free themselves where they've gotten trapped. I can be in situations that would terrify most other people.\"\n\nI do not doubt this for a moment.\n\nRaised in a family where the debate between science and spirituality never stopped raging (until she was twelve she wanted to be a rabbi), Rachel struggled to reconcile these worldviews not only as a physician but also as a patient. Outraged by the arrogance, shortsightedness, and lack of imagination she recognized among medical colleagues, she set out to find a middle path between intellect and intuition. In 1976 she cofounded Commonweal holistic cancer center in Bolinas, California, and has since been a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine.\n\nRachel freely admits to having an ax to grind. \"I made many of my critical life decisions based on what I was told by doctors,\" she tells me. \"I was told that I'd be dead by forty, so I never got married or had children.\" That is quite an ax, I think. \"Nobody offered the possibility that I might be able to survive,\" says Rachel, who recently celebrated her sixty-fourth birthday. \"It's hard to think outside the box. But that is where life is. Outside the box.\"\n\nHealing is a mysterious process whose principles often contradict reason. Working with thousands of patients, she has learned how often the body's intelligence defies expectations. \"The body is hardwired to persevere,\" Rachel reminds me. \"If I cut you, your body will heal stronger than before. Without this built-in tenacity toward life, even the most sophisticated treatments could not succeed.\"\n\nThe poet Dylan Thomas called this \"the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.\" Rachel vividly recalls the first time she noticed this uncanny power in miniature. \"It was one spring day when I was fourteen,\" she says. \"I was walking up Fifth Avenue in New York City and was astonished to notice two tiny blades of grass growing through the sidewalk. Not around, but _through._ They were green and tender, and had somehow broken through the cement. Despite the crowds bumping up against me, I stopped and looked at them in disbelief.\"\n\nThe memory still amazes her. \"This image stayed with me for a long time, possibly because it seemed so miraculous. It gave me a very different sense of what power and force look like. There's no violence in real power,\" she observes, in spite of common, dog-eat dog wisdom. \"There is something much more mysterious at work than our culture would have us believe,\" she insists. \"Confronted by enormous change\u2014losing a breast, a country, a child\u2014we're faced with an important choice. Either we come to surrender, go into the loss, attend to our own responses, and listen to ourselves, or we attempt to put it behind us and get on with the rest of our lives. But does this really work?\"\n\n\"It hasn't for me.\"\n\n\"Me either,\" she says. \"This is essential to understand. When we try to avoid loss or plow through our pain, our lives are actually diminished. On the other hand, there's an extraordinary wisdom and clarity that emerges in people who genuinely meet their pain, not in theory but in life.\"\n\n\"Why do you think that is?\" I ask.\n\nRachel considers the question a moment. \"We realize that there is a larger power operating which can be trusted to sustain us,\" she says finally. \"As any woman who's gone through delivery knows, it's minute by minute when the going gets rough. The forces that are happening are so great that the woman surrenders. She has to. Often it's the moment just before birth.\" The paradox of this is quite beautiful. \"The whole process of awakening, initiation, comes only when things are surrendered. Women talk about this moment and how much they learn from it. Afterward they have a different relationship to life\u2014and to themselves. It is the beginning of trust.\"\n\nThis trust in mystery carries us forward. \"An awareness of something larger breaks through,\" she explains. \"There's a core identity shift, not just in ideas about yourself but how you see the entire world.\" Working with cancer patients all these years, Rachel has witnessed this identity shift quite frequently. \"I've often seen that the body can be quite diminished while this other identity has expanded greatly,\" she tells me. \"The _individual_ has expanded.\"\n\nDoubleness, I think to myself.\n\n\"The process of wounding actually awakens us to our strength,\" she says. \"It shuffles our values. And the top priority is never what you thought it would be. It's never about perfection or power. It always turns out to be about love.\"\n\nWe decide to take a walk in the garden. Trailing Rachel into the sloping yard, watching her as she pinches seed carefully into a bird feeder, bending ever so carefully to pick up a rag, I'm reminded of how ill my hostess truly is, how meticulously she must mea sure her energies in order to carry out her many duties. This gives Rachel a sturdy yet frail balance, a poignant and particular strength.\n\nWe sit side by side on a bench. The fog is creeping up Mount Tamalpais, blanketing the pine-sided mountain in white. \"We forget that there is a flow in things,\" Rachel reminds me. \"That the trick is to get out of the way.\"\n\n\"To get out of our own way, you mean?\"\n\n\"When you block a river, it finds another way to get where it's going,\" she says in a soft voice. \"When your physical being is changed, you travel in other ways.\" Rachel scatters a handful of seed for the birds. \"Think of trees that go through extreme weather\u2014not only are they strengthened, but their roots grow deeper. They're not straight, but twisted into themselves. Every challenged individual I have ever met comes to this same crossroads, regardless of what's standing in their way. Will they be resigned, or will they surrender?\"\n\n\"Sometimes these two seem synonymous,\" I say.\n\n\"But that is where our freedom lies,\" Rachel tells me. \"I came to a point where I decided that being ill was not going to stop me from living well. Of course, I'd love to be able to see perfectly!\" she admits. Crohn's has robbed her of vision in one eye. \"Of course, I'd love to be able to eat what ever I want. I would absolutely love to go mountain climbing. But I can't do those things,\" she says with a shrug. \"What I can do is adapt.\"\n\nRachel leans back on the bench. \"It's the way in which we move through very difficult circumstances, and not the absence of circumstances, that enables a person at the end of a life to say, 'You know, this has been a great ride,'\" she tells me.\n\nRachel's dark eyes turn silver as she gazes up at the fog. \"You see that even though your body has changed, there is a part of you that was never hurt,\" she explains. \"My sense of wholeness has nothing to do with my body.\" Her confidence does seem to match this claim. \"I don't believe that there is something wrong with me,\" says Rachel, pointing overhead at a golden hawk perched high in an evergreen nearby. The hawk appears to be watching us, too.\n\n\"I see the world as a mystery,\" she says. \"Much like a child does.\"\n\n## **TRUE CONFESSIONS**\n\nFor reasons never explained to me, I became our family confessor. From the time I was old enough to listen, my sisters, my mother, their lovelorn girlfriends, the widow Yetta who lived two doors down, with her brick-red hair and bison-sized muumuu, pouring out her big heart over sweet borscht and flanken she cooked for me as a snack on my way to bar mitzvah class\u2014to all of them I was Mr. Lonelyhearts, Mr. Let Your Hair Down, Mr. You Know You Can Trust Me. Sit.\n\n\"What d'you know?\" Yetta would kvell at me after delivering one of her epic tales of betrayal by her late husband, Mack, stubbing my chin between her fat fingers. It did Yetta's heart good to be heard, she told me. It did me good to listen, I said.\n\nYetta had a friend named Molly Gross, who needed to talk, the widow told me, like someone begging for oxygen. Molly was a caged bird singing her desperate heart out, married to a miserable surgeon named Sid, who made millions excising brain tumors and did his best, during off hours, to make Molly's life miserable. I first heard about her when I was twelve, but the caged bird and I had never met. Ten years passed. I was in graduate school by then, hardly able to pay my rent. Molly, about to turn eighty-five, was on the hunt for an assistant to help her plow through the avalanche of notebooks she had been keeping for decades, to draw her untold stories from her and then weave this material into a manuscript that would represent her life's work: fifty years of scrawled introspection crammed now, mausoleum style, into a stack of boxes in Sid's closet.\n\n\"She's a brilliant woman, misunderstood,\" Yetta told me over some schmaltzy plate of overcooked food. Molly had been born before her time, the widow believed, and was truly a diamond in the rough, a philosopher, practically, in her own right. Now this unsung old poet lady was afraid of dying without ever having stretched her wings. Someone needed to save her, said Yetta. That was my knee-jerk cue, of course. Needing money\u2014and, even more, to be needed\u2014I made a date to meet with Molly Gross at the penthouse apartment she shared with Sid overlooking Santa Monica Beach.\n\nI shall never forget my first sight of her rushing toward me, wrenlike and breathless, teary-eyed, arms outstretched, a plume of white hair escaping its net as she hurried forward on sticklike legs, bathrobe open, slippers flapping, down the aquamarine-blue hallway carpet, grinning and clutching the Kleenex that never left her hand. I immediately saw that Molly was dying. Her white arms were covered with purple track marks. She squeezed my hands, looked into my eyes, and said, \"Oh, honey. He's here at last\" to Maxine, the Guatemalan maid.\n\nMolly seduced me for two distinct reasons. The first was that I had never met anyone so ferociously honest\u2014so utterly vulnerable, hurt, and alive, yet giggly over the silliest things\u2014and I am an emotion whore, an addict of intimate connection. Second, this old lady seemed to possess a quality that I'd always yearned for but had yet to encounter: a brazen, unfettered brand of aliveness, a no-holds-barred thrusting into each coming moment-never-to-come-again. Molly and I would gab for hours behind the closed door of Sid's curtained study, seated side by side at a long mahogany table piled with her mass of materials, a hodgepodge of legal pads, paper napkins, dog-eared tomes marked with passages she wanted to quote, other books she all but knew by heart\u2014 _The Cloud of Unknowing, I Am That,_ the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius\u2014reams of various sorts of paper etched in her erratic, crooked script. Sometimes Molly would cackle over a delightful memory sparked from this collectanea; other times her eyes grew teary when a painful thought arrowed up from the past, forcing her to look away, to cover her mouth with the crumpled tissue.\n\nDuring the fifteen months we spent in this passionate mind-meld, Molly continued to unnerve, enthrall, and move me. She spoke with startling conviction about things I knew nothing about, beginning with the spiritual aspects of life. In spite of her frail health, Molly overflowed with spirit\u2014absorbed, reflected, saw and heard more; cared more; suffered more; tasted her existence more deeply than anyone I had ever met. We sifted through her papers, recorded her stories, transcribed the tapes of our interviews. One day Molly might be in cheerful form, peaceful in her circumscribed world; the next day she might be agonized over her quarantined existence. \"Honey,\" she'd tell me with pain in her face, \"life is important. People waste it. Please don't waste it.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" I promised.\n\nOther times Molly would grip my hands, squeeze her eyes shut, and refuse to tell me what was going on. Stymied by one cryptic passage, I asked her _what_ was she trying to say?\n\n\"You know!\" she said, slapping my arm.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Oh, you!\" She pinched my ribs.\n\n\"It's fuzzy,\" I told her.\n\n\" _You're_ fuzzy.\" Molly laughed. She touched me every chance she got, stroking every available surface. One day we came across a particularly koanlike entry. It read, what is mine will know my face and was written in large capital letters on stationery from the Hotel de la Legion in Paris.\n\n\"What does this one mean?\" I asked.\n\nMolly tousled my hair. \"You know!\"\n\n\"I honestly don't.\"\n\nShe peered over my shoulder, although no one was standing there. \"One day I stopped in the wood and all paths were the same,\" she whispered, nonsequentially, widening her eyes.\n\n\"Stop it!\"\n\n\"The end of folly is the same as wisdom,\" she taunted.\n\n\"Avoiding the question,\" I would say. But it was no use trying to stop her. Like a woman drawing a strand of pearls from her bodice, Molly revealed her mystical aper\u00e7us one glowing jewel at a time. Mostly, I didn't want to stop her. I'd fallen in love with Molly by then. She believed that my visits were the only thing keeping her alive.\n\n\"Somebody sees me!\" Molly once said to Maxine, squeezing my hand. My friend had weakened as the year wore on. One day we were eating lunch at her kitchen table, drinking a thimbleful of vodka first, as had become our little custom. Maxine was watching us with a smirk.\n\n\"I do see you,\" I told Molly.\n\n\"Eureka!\" she squealed, and gripped the table.\n\n\"Loud and clear,\" I assured her.\n\n\"Will you publish my book?\" she asked.\n\nI promised her that I would try. We had decided to call her five-hundred-page manuscript _Moments of Being,_ not knowing that Virginia Woolf had already usurped that title. As I write these words today, Molly's manuscript remains in its same blue binder, tucked away at the top of my living room closet.\n\n\"Happy day,\" Molly said, kissing the tops of both my hands. \"Now, you say the prayer, Maxine.\"\n\nThe plump, shy maid closed her eyes. \" _O Dios, por favor, Padre Nuestro, denos su mano_ \u2014\"\n\n\"Isn't that just wonderful, honey!\" Molly squealed. \"Isn't she just beautiful?\" Molly laid a kiss on Maxine's cheek. \"Look at the three of us here together with all this love like a family, my children. And all the sun and this beautiful food.\"\n\nJust then, Molly pulled herself to her feet and lifted her knee-length nightgown many inches higher than a woman with varicose veins should have. \"I want to dance!\" she begged me, holding out her thin arms. \"Oh, let's dance and get drunk!\" Molly said.\n\nMaxine lowered her eyes and smiled. I watched Molly waltz around the kitchen, embracing an invisible partner, singing a popular song from the 1920s in her trembly voice. \"Oh, promise me that someday you and I will take our love together to some sky,\" she sang. Molly begged me to come and swing her around. \"Come to me, my handsome man. This day will never come again.\"\n\n\" _Vaya,_ \" Maxine urged me.\n\n\"Hon-eeee!\" Molly begged, lifting her nightgown an inch or two higher, prancing around the kitchen. \"You will break my heart.\"\n\nI took her into my arms awkwardly. Molly pushed her slack breasts against me, hooked her hands around my neck, and hung there, smiling up at me. Then she started to sing. \"Oh, promise me that someday you and I will take our love together to some sky,\" she crooned. I heard Maxine humming along and the grandfather clock ticking in the hall, the sounds of traffic below. Molly laid her cheek against my chest.\n\nAll sorrows can be borne, Isak Dinesen said, if you put them into a story. Rachel Remen remembers sitting under the kitchen table as a little girl, stroking the purple velvet carpet slippers of her grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi, as he told stories and read kabbalah. Rachel believes that our lost art of telling stories, the pre-e-mail tradition of people sitting around telling stories as a way to pass along wisdom, accounts for a cultural loss of soul and shared insight into how we live. By sharing our stories, she believes, we tap into a largely ignored reservoir of living wisdom.\n\n\"When we stop telling each other our stories, we seek out experts to tell us how to live,\" Rachel has written. \"The less time we spend at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores. Because we have stopped listening... we have stopped learning how to recognize meaning\u2014and to fill ourselves\u2014from the ordinary events in our lives.\" Storytelling is also a great boon in friendship. I learned of an Israeli woman who'd gone to a therapist because she was having trouble breathing. As they spoke, the shrink noticed the camp numbers tattooed on the patient's forearm. The woman coughed a great deal while telling her story. \"When did you start having trouble breathing?\" the therapist asked. \"When my friend died two years ago,\" the survivor admitted. \"When she was alive,\" this lady told the doctor, \"we could talk about anything. Although she had not been in the camps, she understood. But now there is no one to tell. And the nightmares haunt me. I can't sleep alone in the house. I know that if I want to live, I have to find another friend.\"\n\nOur stories are meaningful to the degree that they converge, in a meaningful way, with others. One recent afternoon, I found myself with fifteen medical residents, the novelist Michael Ondaatje, and Dr. Rita Charon, who heads the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, sitting around a Dorito-strewn conference table, talking about how doctors can learn about patients' inner lives from listening carefully to their stories. Rita Charon has been a pioneer in narrative medicine since its appearance two decades ago. As a young internist, Rita realized that she knew neither how to listen deeply to patients, nor how to interpret the life narratives they were telling her. What better way to learn about stories, she asked herself, than to study great works of fiction? She went back to college for a Ph.D. in comparative literature and emerged with an intriguing theory about how doctors can become better healers by doing what good readers do: ponder character, structure of plot, emotional foreshadowing of the kind that novelists employ and that patients use in bringing personal stories to life in their doctors' offices.\n\nEric David, a third-year medical student who's fresh today from the OR (where he assisted at a radical prostatectomy), is struggling to make a point. \"Doctors dismantle human beings,\" says Eric, who's shaggy-haired and looks like he's in high school. \"It's what separates us from the rest of the world. You have to fight the temptation to turn off. If you remember that everyone has a story, it kind of helps.\"\n\nOndaatje, a leonine, big-bellied guy with a white beard and icy green eyes, listens carefully to the young man in green scrubs. The novelist himself got interested in narrative medicine after observing a quadruple bypass, he told me before the class. \"I was standing two feet away from the heart,\" Ondaatje marveled. \"Just staring down into the patient's body. What could be more fascinating?\"\n\nThat heart surgery got him hooked. \"I've been fixated on doctors since I was a boy,\" Ondaatje told me. \"I wanted to talk to doctors about books the same way you would x-ray a body, to see how it worked, how it was made.\"\n\nThat seems like such a clinical motive, I said. \"No more profound or artistic reason?\"\n\nHe thought about it a moment. \"I suppose it has to do with rescue and healing,\" Ondaatje offered. \"Our lives are all so dangerous, precarious\u2014you could even say abandoned. Rescue and healing are essential things.\"\n\nAbandoned? I wondered. This seemed like an odd choice of words for describing the human predicament. Abandoned in the world by who\u2014or what? In _The Noonday Demon,_ Andrew Solomon describes the outcast state of depression as \"the loneliness in us made manifest, a crystallization of the human condition in which each of us is held in the solitude of an autonomous body.\" If feelings of abandonment do lie at the core of our common longing for connection, it seems even more understandable that religions use confession as a means of healing and that writers such as Michael Ondaatje approach the art of storytelling in almost holy terms.\n\nBack in class, he listens to a female resident who appears to be upset over their reading selection for the day, William Maxwell's novel _So Long, See You Tomorrow._ Wearing a pained expression, the young doctor confesses to having been callous with one of her patients during morning rounds. This man, who was gravely ill, had invited her to sit beside him and listen to one of his stories. The resident made an excuse, she tells us, claiming that she was too busy to stay. Instead, she hurried the lonely man through his tale and then cut him off before the end. She never saw the old man again. \"I should have taken the time,\" she says now.\n\n\"Next time,\" says Rita Charon, the comforting mentor, who's trying to train better doctors, not promote more self-punishment.\n\nWhen the class is over I walk Ondaatje to the elevator. The novelist appears far away in his thoughts. When the door slides open, it rouses him from his trance and he blinks. \"Extraordinary,\" he mutters aloud, without elaborating on what he's thinking. \"I can't forget to write that down.\" Then the elevator closes behind him.\n\n## **PROMETHEUS**\n\nAt a recent Fourth of July barbecue, I find myself seated next to a bouncy brunette who introduces herself to me as Ella. In a movie, she'd be played by Eva Longoria. Ella tells me that she's a nurse as fireworks explode overhead. \"I work with miracle kids,\" she says, dabbing corn-on-the-cob butter from her mouth.\n\n\"Miracle?\" I ask.\n\n\"Heroes,\" Ella says. \"You want to talk about Independence Day? These kids are freedom fighters,\" she tells me as pyrotechnics kaboom down the beach. Ella is the head nurse of pediatric orthopedics at New York's Beth Israel Hospital. Her boss is a renowned surgeon named David Feldman, who, in addition to a private practice, runs a monthly clinic for severely handicapped public-assistance kids who have nowhere else to turn. \"He takes these twisted children and makes them walk,\" Ella says. \"The man is a hero in his own right. A greater heart you have never seen.\"\n\nThe following week, I'm powerwalking behind Dr. Feldman up and down Beth Israel's crowded corridors during rounds, flanked by four residents, a Spanish translator, a rep from a crutchmaking company, and Ella. Feldman is a blond-haired, turbocharged Orthodox Jew who dresses slick, barks orders, and walks (when he forgets to hide it) with a limp left over from a childhood illness. Hurrying along the corridors, we're surrounded by crippled kids, lots of them wheelchair bound, others crawling or holding their mothers' hands, feeling their way along the wall. Their eyes light up when they see Feldman. Though gruff, Dr. F. is a natural with these kids, _zetzing_ this one in the ribs, tickling another, calling them names, making them laugh.\n\nIn the first exam room we find Melanie, a naughty six-year-old with spina bifida, who giggles hysterically when Feldman runs a ruler across the bottom of her clubfoot. Melanie's mother, a squat Latina, crows over her daughter's vast improvement since surgery (Feldman has many more planned to straighten out the little girl's spine). He helps Melanie down from the table and holds the little girl's hands as she slowly, proudly rotates herself across the floor to show him how much better she's walking.\n\n\"The boys will be eating out of the palms of your hands,\" he teases her, carefully measuring the splayed angle of Melanie's ankles, shooting technical info at Ella and the residents.\n\nThe girl squeals with delight, leans forward, and falls flat on her face. When Feldman moves to pull her up, Melanie sticks her tongue out at the doctor. \"I can do it!\" she cries, yanking herself up slowly by the handles affixed to the side of the table. Once standing, Melanie beams at him in triumph. \"I told you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did,\" says Feldman. Then he adds to the mother, sotto voce, \"We'll fix her, Mrs. Padilla. I promise.\"\n\nIn the next room a Hasidic family appears to be in midmeltdown. The high-school-aged patient with bad skin and a faint mustache refuses to stay in his wheelchair.\n\n\"He's making me meshuga,\" cries the mother, a tall, unpleasant-looking person in a bad wig, a baggy dress, and crunching patent leather shoes. \"Sit down, Yudi. Sit. Now!\"\n\n\"You sit!\" he shouts back at her, groping his way along the sink toward the window. \"I'm tired of sitting.\"\n\n\"He don't listen,\" mutters the father, an unshaven, hopeless-looking guy wearing side curls and a yarmulke. \"Mind your mother,\" he tells the boy with a shrug.\n\n\"I want to walk, Doc!\" Yudi tells Feldman.\n\nThe mother seems to be davening, clutching at the sides of her face. \"You're fine like this,\" she hisses.\n\n\"I want to dance at my prom!\" Yudi tells her. He also wants to go skiing, ride motorcycles, and trek in the Himalayas with Sherpas. With each high-risk threat to her dominion, his mother's face goes a shade more livid. \"You see what I mean?\" she moans to Feldman.\n\n\"I think he's ready for surgery, Mrs. H.,\" says the doctor. \"But Yudi, you tell me, where should we start? The ankles? The hip? The back?\" Feldman turns the boy back and forth by the shoulders. \"I say we go for the back.\"\n\nThe mother looks at the father, who looks at the doctor, who looks at the boy, who appears to be the least scared of all of them. \"Tell me the risks first,\" Yudi says in a calm, grown-up fashion. Feldman lets him know that he could be paralyzed and even less mobile after surgery\u2014although that's unlikely\u2014suffer pneumonia because of his weak lungs, or even die under anesthesia.\n\n\"You're fine like this,\" the mother says softly, reaching out for her son's hand.\n\n\"I want to do it, Mama,\" says Yudi.\n\nFeldman repeats to the parents, \"He wants it.\" The mother looks positively stricken. The father shakes the doctor's hand and tells him to schedule the surgery. As we leave the room, I look back and see Yudi smiling. He gives me a thumbs-up.\n\nTwo hours and thirty children later, David Feldman collapses in his office easy chair, exhausted but visibly happy. \"I should have half their chutzpah,\" he says, waving away a resident. \"Half their humor and come-what-may. These kids are my teachers, so help me God. Honestly, I don't know how they do it. They're completely guileless.\"\n\n\"Guileless?\" I say. \"That's an interesting word.\"\n\n\"They're not hiding anything,\" Feldman says. \"These kids are at the end of the line. They have nowhere else to turn. It teaches you\u2014\" The doctor can't find the words. \"You just learn what a huge difference little things can make. It takes so little to make them happy.\"\n\nAfterward, Ella walks me to the elevator. We sit for a few minutes in the lounge. \"At first I was miserable working with these children,\" she admits. \"I thought I'd made a big mistake. This work was just too heartbreaking.\"\n\n\"I can understand why.\"\n\n\"But the truth is, I was feeling sorry for myself,\" Ella admits. She offers me a handful of Skittles. \"Then one day,\" Ella tells me, \"a twelve-year-old spastic quadriplegic girl was brought in.\" I'd just observed Feldman examining a quad with severe spasticity, kicking her feet uncontrollably, arms crunched against her chest as her father cradled the girl in his arms.\n\n\"Her name was Lisa,\" Ella says, remembering this other child. \"Her knees had decomposed. She was walking on the sides of her feet, dragging herself along the ground like a crab.\" Ella pauses to collect herself. \"Suddenly she saw me and gave me this beautiful smile. Lisa said, 'Ella, you look so pretty.'\"\n\nShe blows her nose in a tissue. \"My fear started to go after that. Something broke open inside me. I saw the person she was, not the body she was in. It baffles me that these kids aren't angry,\" says Ella. \"It's like they aren't even handicapped. You don't see them making a big deal over their imperfections. They're always asking you how _you_ are. They speak to you from their souls. You can see it in their eyes.\"\n\n\"I saw it,\" I say.\n\n\"It all comes down to how they see,\" Ella tells me. \"Lisa's mother saw me watching her that day. There must have been pity in my eyes. The mother looked at me and smiled, probably guessing what I was thinking\u2014the thing I'd never really ask.\" The memory still amazes Ella. \"Then she said it anyway.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\"\n\n\" 'I love her,' Lisa's mother told me. 'She's mine.'\"\n\n## **FOUND ART**\n\nYears ago I was waiting on line with a hundred other pilgrims to visit the grave of a long-dead saint in a small town near Poona, in central India. Directly ahead of me was a German mother, her hair covered by a head scarf, helping her crippled Down syndrome child kneel at the side of the marble tomb. The boy, who couldn't have been more than twelve, was having a tough time bending his knees. When he finally managed to lower himself to the ground, the child laid his cheek on the stone for a long time. His mother tried to hurry him along, but the rest of us didn't mind the delay. \"Worship is not a ritual, it is an attitude, an experience,\" this very saint had once suggested. The child's worship seemed to elevate the hearts of the pilgrims standing behind him.\n\nAfterward, in a crowded hall, we listened to the dead saint's closest disciple, an old guy wearing a Rice-A-Roni T-shirt (people bring him mementos from their native towns), as he reminisced about fifty years spent at his master's side. The great man had blessed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people seeking his _darshan,_ or holy touch. \"Baba loved everyone,\" the white-haired secretary explained to us in his pidgin English. \"Most of all, though, he liked the scoundrels! The bad ones like me!\" The old man's wicked smile made it easy to imagine him as the bad-boy aristocrat he once was, the scion of a wealthy Bengali family, addicted to fast cars, booze, and easy women, till the day his guru spun his head around.\n\n\"The naughty ones,\" the secretary chuckled. \"That is who Baba liked the best. Some people would come to him pretending to be holy. They would sit up very straight and tell Baba about how good they were. How pure. How enlightened. Baba would just smile and move them along.\"\n\nThe Down's boy was rolling around on the ground, giggling. His mother gave up on trying to control him.\n\n\"God does not need your holiness,\" the old man said, swatting the H-word from the air and grinning. \"God does not need your goodness!\"\n\n\"What does he need, then?\" an Australian woman inquired.\n\n\"God wants your humanness, nothing more,\" replied our host. \"Broken furniture, that's what he called them, the people who came without making a pose. Baba loved broken furniture. This is where, he said, Baba could sit the best.\"\n\nI liked the idea of humanity as a sort of global Salvation Army store filled with derelict furnishings, three-legged chairs and mangy sofas, rickety tables, half-extinguished lamps, neglected armoires empty of drawers, beds too lumpy and slouched to dream in. When Andrea Martin, then Bowlby, was a five-year-old girl in a body cast, bedtime was the most painful part of the day. \"I would lie there, crunched up in agony, till morning came,\" Andrea tells me when I visit her in the rectory of the Episcopal church in Hartford, Connecticut, where she is the junior pastor. A tiny woman with pixie hair and a limp, Andrea is feisty, self-deprecating, extremely smart (she graduated from Yale Divinity School), and honest about the torturous path she followed as a child forced to endure fifteen major surgeries and six months out of every year trapped inside the dreaded cast.\n\n\"It's like found art,\" Andrea says to me now, looking out at the trees in a garden. \"You take all the bad things\u2014the pain, the embarrassment, anger, longing\u2014also surprising moments of grace, and form them into something original, unique, which then becomes your life.\"\n\nBorn with a condition known as PPD, Andrea nearly lost her right leg when doctors recommended amputating the drastically shorter limb while she was still a toddler. Luckily, her parents refused. Instead, from age two until twenty-one, Andrea suffered through these leg-lengthening surgeries and the excruciating, racklike procedures that followed.\n\n\"It wasn't so much the physical pain as the emotional agony,\" Andrea says back at her house, fussing over omelets she insists on cooking after christening eight babies (\"a train wreck!\") at the morning service. \"I felt so out of control,\" she admits, whisking eggs. \"I was so much at the mercy of doctors and their decisions. So alienated and ostracized. And so self-conscious!\"\n\nAndrea pours the eggs into a pan and offers me coffee. \"It was very painful,\" she remembers. \"I was _terrified_ of social situations, teased mercilessly by the kids at school.\" Yet even at that early age, she began to find comfort in her faith. \"I was helped by the Christian story of Jesus inviting all the outcast people to be with him,\" she tells me. \"Reaching out to the lepers and the sinners. That had quite an effect on me. Jesus himself was an outsider. That gave me hope.\"\n\nHopeful, too, was the possibility that Andrea might someday be able to use her personal struggle for a higher good. \"Maybe my heart would be different,\" she says, serving our breakfast. \"Maybe God could use my empathy for others in a way I couldn't predict.\" Adolescence was a nightmare still to be survived, though. \"Other girls in school were dating,\" she tells me. \"There was this huge chasm between me and them. I thought, 'Gosh, I've survived all these surgeries, years on crutches, rehabilitation, and now it's become a double whammy, because nobody is going to love me.'\" Andrea seems embarrassed by what may sound too much like self-pity. \"A man with a limp or scars is somehow attractive to the girls,\" she explains. \"It's a sign of manliness. For a woman, it's total alienation. I thought I'd never get married.\" (In fact, Andrea's husband of four years, Chris, a Libertarian lobbyist, seems to adore her.)\n\nThis confusion in her began to shift during an undergraduate semester in India, where the future priest found her vocation. Andrea had previously planned on being a doctor. \"I wanted to minister to sick people the way my doctors did for me,\" she says. \"Treating not just my leg but the whole person.\" Unfortunately, she did not excel in science. Then one day, in Delhi, Andrea Martin got her calling. \"We were visiting Gandhi's birthplace,\" she tells me over breakfast. \"I was on this big, ostentatious tour bus\u2014TVs, velour seats, the whole deal\u2014looking out the window, when these two street urchins came up and looked right at me, reaching out for money or food. The words from the liturgy came back to me: 'Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.' These two children represented the sins of the world. It was a trace of God calling me,\" she says. \"Reaching out. I finally had permission to follow the path I truly loved.\"\n\nHer ministry since then has become this unconventional reverend's oeuvre of found art. \"My mother used to say, 'Andrea, your struggle right now is very difficult on the outside. But everybody has challenges and hurts and struggles that are not always so visible,'\" she tells me. \"As a priest, my own struggles are mostly on the inside now. But since I've known what it's like to feel a chasm between me and other people, or me and God\u2014and a longing to close that gap as best as I possibly can\u2014I have increased empathy. I pray every day for the grace to help bring people together. This desire is deepened by the isolation of my own childhood.\"\n\nWorking with her congregation has taught Andrea how pervasive such feelings of alienation, isolation, even abandonment, are among outwardly successful individuals. \"There's a huge amount of pressure on people to have it all together, or to look like it at least,\" she tells me. \"Even when they're crumbling inside. My job is to look past the exterior into somebody's heart and soul and know that what's inside can be very different from what they present.\"\n\n\"Appearances are so deceptive sometimes,\" I say.\n\n\"A doctor I know uses discarded junk from the hospital where he works,\" Andrea tells me, sipping her coffee. \"Old x-ray film, IV tubing, gauze, broken casts, to create the most beautiful sculptures.\" She refills both our cups. \"Found art,\" she says, \"from sickness. To me, that is a great metaphor for hope. It's how God acts on our behalf, I believe. When a whirlwind sweeps through our lives, leaving scattered debris and junk, and we're tempted to give up hope, even then God is at work reassembling the junk, the shit of our lives, into something new. When we collaborate with this creative, redemptive spirit, miracles can happen.\"\n\nToday Andrea can bike, swim, and climb mountains with almost no pain. \"God is economical,\" she says with a smile. \"There's no experience that we can endure\u2014short of torture, starvation, or extreme abuse\u2014that God can't use for good. God has a dream for what we might be, and the more we're open to cooperating with that grace, the more we can be sanctified and pulled upward on that spiral to be the person God dreams us to be. Even the most hopeless cases. God takes what's hopeless and turns it into fecundity.\"\n\n\"Broken furniture?\" I suggest.\n\n\"God may even love the broken ones just a little bit more,\" Andrea Martin says.\n\n## **THROUGH WILDERNESS**\n\nVisionary power has historically been the shaman's gift, in traditional cultures, only after surviving the wild. Certain individuals are asked to \"go walkabout\" in extreme terrain; others endure physical torture in order to be \"awakened\" by pain. Others are called upon to venture into trance states (drug-induced and not), where they undergo terrifying psychological initiations involving \"demons\" and other dark interior foes. Finally, there are those, like Francis Bok, the escaped Sudanese ex-slave, who, while not indigenous shamans, are thrust as children into trials so extreme that their characters are forged, swordlike, to help them become liberating agents for others braving their way in the dark.\n\nOn the list of grueling obstacle courses to wisdom, no path is more savage than incest, or the sexual abuse of children. Molestation by a trusted caretaker tends to split a child's life in two. In fact, according to Ariel Jordan, a pioneer survivor in the field of incest, \"Childhood ends the moment that a child is raped,\" and incest amounts to what he calls \"soul murder.\" In order to heal from such trauma, incest survivors are required to pass through spiritual wildernesses most of us would find hard to imagine, labyrinths whose darkness is matched only by the light that dawns in the night sky of recovered children who've found their way back to the land of the living.\n\nWithout documentation, Ariel's story would be hard to believe. A handsome sixty-year-old man with movie-star silver hair, soulful dark eyes, and a bellowslike voice reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's, Ariel was born on a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, a few years before the state of Israel came into being. His father was an engineer and a pillar of the community. His mother organized the child-care section of the kibbutz. \"Throughout my childhood, I was told how very lucky I was to have them as parents,\" Ariel tells me when we meet in his crowded Chelsea apartment. \"I worshipped my parents. Especially my father.\" He shows me a photograph of himself as a wide-eyed five-year-old being grabbed around the waist by a creepily smiling man.\n\nThe boy looks frightened and trapped. I hand the picture back to Ariel. \"How explicit do you want me to be?\" he asks. Aware that Ariel has testified twice before congressional committees on child abuse, I invite him to be completely candid. His intention is not to shock, he assures me, but simply to shed light on what he calls \"society's darkest secret,\" to draw the murky topic of incest out into the open. There's a cultural block against believing kids, he's learned during twenty years of working in this field. \"But children must be heard,\" he insists.\n\n\"Of course,\" I say. So Ariel leans back in his leather chair and launches into his surreal tale. \"My father raped me for the first time when I was four,\" he tells me without introduction. \"He had given me a bath. It felt so good, because my parents rarely touched me,\" he says. \"Israeli boys were supposed to be tough.\"\n\nMy host is speaking matter-of-factly, with no trace of self-dramatization. \"My father was drying me off and tickling me,\" he goes on. \"It was wonderful! The two of us alone together, having fun\u2014\"\n\n\"Where was your mother?\" I ask.\n\n\"She was there. Somewhere,\" says Ariel. \"But this was time to be with Papa. It was like a game that we were playing. I remember laughing and telling him to stop tickling me. Then my father began to kiss me.\"\n\nAriel's face darkens when he says this. \"I didn't know what was happening,\" he admits. \"I just knew that my father was no longer playing. He seemed to be in a kind of trance. Then\u2014\" He stops to take a breath. \"He entered me.\"\n\n\"At four years old?\" I ask, unable to mask my own incredulity.\n\n\"The physical pain was one thing,\" says Ariel. \"But the body goes into shock. Emotionally, it was much, much worse.\"\n\nI'm completely speechless.\n\n\"It's so terrible that part of you dies. You cease in that moment to be a child. Suddenly you are an orphan,\" he says. Researching a piece about incest in the weeks after meeting Ariel, I'm shocked to learn that one out of four girls is raped before the age of eighteen, by a family member or another (the number is slightly lower for boys, one out of five). Even Freud had trouble believing the harsh facts and prevalence of incest. The father of psychology was so appalled by patients' memories of sexual abuse that he famously recanted his original theory, fearing the scorn of skeptical colleagues, and blamed abuse memories on \"hysteria\" and juvenile sexual fantasies. Psychologists since then have used Freud's own reversal as an excuse for discounting incest survivors' stories.\n\n\"How long did he do this?\" I ask now.\n\n\"Until I was fifteen,\" Ariel says.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell someone? Or fight him off?\"\n\n\"I wanted to make him happy,\" he tells me, aware of how crazy this sounds. \"It is hard to understand, I know. But abused people have strange relationships with their violators. This became our secret. Our secret world. Your survival mechanism tells you not to resist, since they're going to do it anyway. If you collaborate, you'll be like... lovers.\"\n\nMiraculously, Ariel managed to graduate from high school and escape from Israel. Transplanted in London, he earned a degree in cinema and began making documentary films. Far away from home, he was able to nearly submerge his memories of abuse. He was nearly able to convince himself that this dark history was a trick of his imagination. I'm compelled to confess to Ariel that the enigma of recovered memory, common among abuse survivors, is a mystery I've not quite been able to grasp. How can a person who's been through such severe trauma actually function without conscious recall? S\u00e1ndor Ferenczi, a colleague of Freud's, had a theory about uncontrollable stress of any kind\u2014from wartime combat to serious accidents to sexual abuse\u2014believing it can cause a person to emerge from trauma riddled with mnemonic bullet holes. \"Part of our being can 'die,'\" wrote Ferenczi. \"And while the remaining part of ourselves may survive the trauma, it awakens with a gap in its memory.\"\n\nArriving in New York in the early eighties, haunted by his secret past, Ariel was determined to fill in his psychic gaps\u2014to heal himself of the pervasive feelings of shame, impostorhood, and sexual confusion (hyper-promiscuity combined with emotional absence) that were standing in the way of his living a happy life. This was years before incest became a household word\u2014thanks in large part to Oprah Winfrey's publicizing of her own incest story\u2014and Ariel could find no one who would believe him. Finally screwing up his courage to talk to a therapist, Ariel was appalled by the doctor's response. \"I poured out my heart for an hour, and you know what this shrink said to me?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid to ask.\"\n\n\"He put his arm around my shoulder and told me it was all wishful thinking.\" Ariel chuckles. \"I realized in that moment that I would have to do it myself.\"\n\nLike a shaman in training, Ariel Jordan entered the dark wood of memory armed with nothing but raw nerves and resolve. Determined to confront his demons, he turned to art as a tool for excavating his past and bringing monster feelings to light. He created a roomful of work recalling Francis Bacon's disemboweled-looking paintings, a pictorial season in hell, a place where his subconscious could spew the evidence of what he'd lived through, making the art of that raped child still inside his body, who needed to speak but until then had no voice.\n\nSlowly, Ariel found his way through the forest. He emerged with a technique for incest therapy that has helped hundreds of other survivors through their own mazes, back from soul murder. \"Every single survivor I've worked with has at least two personalities,\" he explains to me. \"One is enormously intelligent and functional. The other is a maimed, speechless child who contains, though they can't quite touch these qualities, spontaneity, connectedness, and creative power.\"\n\n\"How can a survivor uncover them?\"\n\n\"Memory lodges itself in the body,\" Ariel explains. Though many of his clients have been through decades of talk therapy, recycling known narratives rarely seems to get at the root of the trauma. \"Many therapists prefer rational dialogues,\" Ariel says. \"But the child part of the patient can't even put what happened into words. One must enter the theater of the subconscious like a safecracker and break the child's code that is spoken there. The child mostly needs to scream. In order to survive his trauma, he has learned to function as a fake, an impostor. This disassociation creates enormous existential pain.\"\n\nAriel points out that incest survivors, like so many post-catastrophe individuals, often have \"an unusual capacity for transcendence.\" \"Survivors are forced to become seekers,\" he explains. \"We learn to take what ever nurturing we can from anything, no matter how small. Like a cactus in the desert.\"\n\nHe remembers doing this himself as a boy when human comfort was nowhere around. \"As a child, I would see how nature wakes up after the trauma of winter,\" Ariel tells me of those early years in the Galilee, \"blossoming, blooming, enriched with sweet smells. I remember leaving our house one particular afternoon, after I had left my father. My hair was wet with sweat, and there was a breeze coming through the mountains right into my face. Suddenly, even though nothing had changed, I was happy again.\"\n\n\"How do you explain that?\"\n\n\"The breeze told me I wasn't alone,\" Ariel says simply. \"It was as if somebody or something was talking to me. Reaching out to touch my forehead.\"\n\nThe room gets quiet for a moment. Ariel seems to be lost in that memory. \"A traumatized person becomes the center of his own universe,\" he goes on to explain. \"This is why so many individuals remain stuck and depressed. Connecting to forces beyond yourself helps you realize that your story, painful as it might be, is not finally that significant. When you get that you're part of a larger context, cells in a larger organism, it gives you a huge amount of comfort.\"\n\nTranscendent connection also allows us to examine our wounds without being consumed by them. \"None of us can fulfill our lives without retrieving the truth,\" Ariel instructs those who come to him. \"You cannot heal what you cannot feel. Whatever you are most ashamed of, what ever humiliates you\u2014this is the exact door to your healing.\"\n\nThis does not mean that abusers necessarily need to be confronted, however. Ariel never hashed things out with his father before he died. He has never talked to his elderly mother about what happened. This has not stopped him from finding some forgiveness, though.\n\n\"How do you forgive something like that?\" I can't help but wonder.\n\nHe reminds me that forgiveness is an \"inside job,\" and has nothing to do with our abusers. Forgiveness is an act of self-blessing. This reminds me of Eva Eiger, a German ballerina forced to entertain her Nazi captors in order not to be murdered. In her memoir, Eiger described how it had taken her forty years to begin to forgive her former captors. \"You must be strong to forgive,\" she reminds us. \"Forgiveness is not about condoning or excusing. Forgiveness has nothing to do with justice. Forgiving is a selfish act to free yourself from being controlled by your past.\"\n\nWhen the interview is over, Ariel Jordan takes me into the adjacent room that stores his latest artwork. The tormented images of yesteryear have been replaced by photographs of shamans and medicine men from around the globe, wild-looking characters in Ecuador, India, Polynesia, who've passed through hell and emerged as potent healers. These shamans feel like kindred spirits, Ariel tells me. Like him, they have slain their minotaurs, the man-eating monsters who dwelled in the depths of their dark mazes.\n\n\"The dark tells you secrets,\" Ariel tells me. We tend to forget that the beast in Greek mythology is also an angel. In the story about the labyrinth, the minotaur's name is Asterion, \"star.\" Once again, our nemesis is recognized as a beacon after its hidden face is revealed. Working with clients, Ariel witnesses this turnaround often. It's like watching people being reborn, he says; they reclaim some lost part of their innocence. He helps them to use these wounds to deepen. Asterion leads them back into the world. Like the green shoots through that New York sidewalk, trust emerges slowly. Life begins again.\n\n## **A SPLINTER OF LOVE**\n\n_Trauma_ comes from the German for \"dream.\" Like recurring dreams, traumas have an uncanny power to haunt, change form, and remain spectrally part of the present. We actually carry the past inside our bodies, metaphorically as well as literally (biologists now understand that memory imprints itself upon our cells in the form of amino-peptide chains). Each of us is, literally, a container for the sum of our life's experience, even when, as in the case of incest survivors, we lack conscious memory of that experience. The body itself remembers.\n\nThat's why _closure_ is such a misleading term. What is it that closes exactly? Crisis may end but memory stays open. Even after the worst things pass, a residue of loss remains, a shadow of love over memory. A splinter of love stays caught in the heart. My mother passed away twelve years ago, for example, but my memory of her is as living as ever. The contours of our lives together remain with me as they always have, a few layers down. Scratch most of us in the right place and we're still ten years old, huddled with our parents and siblings. Are those memories that we want to close? we might ask. Would we know ourselves as well without them? Even when those memories include painful details, are they not the shadow that underlies the fullness of who we are and the unique portrait we have painted? Here, in the split between closing and holding, is where the mind and soul diverge. The mind wants neat endings, locked doors, tightened sutures. The mind wants fresh starts without mess left over. But the soul thrives on raggedness, memory, and mess. The soul wants topography, texture, and ruins, like those flour-and-water 3-D maps you made in grammar school, vivid and sloppy and filled with craters. (The mind prefers black-and-white aerial landscapes.) While the reasoning mind wants to cut and run, our souls pursue a different agenda\u2014to remain where love is, even when that love is gone; to ripen open; to be the keeper of sacred memory long after reason has wandered away.\n\nOn the morning of October 19, 1973, five soldiers loyal to Chile's new dictator, Augusto Pinochet, landed in the tiny town of Calama, a Wild West\u2013like outpost on the farther reaches of the Atacama Desert. Known as the Caravan of Death, this group of government-sponsored terrorists was already famous across the length and breadth of Chile for its brutality. Now the five men comprising the caravan climbed out of their Puma helicopter and began moving from door to door through Calama, apprehending unsuspecting husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons from their homes and loading them into military vans. As the men were led away in handcuffs, the women of the town watched in horror, and they pounded on the sides of the vans as the vehicles pulled away. This tactic of \"disappearing\" unsuspecting, frequently innocent, citizens was already a common tactic for the new regime. The women protested to government authorities, who of course ignored them. These twenty-nine Chilean men, ranging from teenagers to seniors, were never seen or heard from again. Their murders were never confirmed nor their remains returned to their families for burial.\n\nDevastated and enraged, the women of Calama took matters into their own hands. Armed with shovels, picks, and kitchen utensils, they organized regular search parties into the Valley of the Moon to look for their loved ones' remains, and continued to do so for decades. Chasing rumors, intuitions, and dreams, disappointed again and again, they returned to the Atacama to dig for bones and teeth, because they could not live without answers.\n\n\"No one knew if the men were alive or dead, though the likelihood is that they had been murdered,\" Paula Allen tells me. We're walking down a beach in Barbados. Paula and I have been buddies since the early nineties. Paula is a documentary photographer who's spent her thirty-year career following what she calls \"women's invisible stories\" around the globe, spending up to twenty years on a single body of work\u2014from a homeless woman turned street-walker in Jersey City to gays in Cuba and Irish gypsy lasses living in caravans in Belfast.\n\nOn Christmas Day, 1989, sixteen years after the men's disappearance, Paula found herself walking into the Valley of the Moon with the women of Calama at the end of a scorching-hot day, holding a camera and a shovel, scared of what she might actually find. \"It was very windy,\" Paula remembers. \"The light was soft and fierce as it is in the desert. Most of the women had on flowered dresses. I remember dresses blowing in the wind and the determination on their faces. I'd never seen determination like this before\u2014how determination turns into action. They could be arrested for what they were doing, but they refused to be silenced. They refused to give up their love.\"\n\nI had seen the images Paula brought back of weathered-looking women hauling sticks and spades, baskets slung over their shoulders, moving into the chalk-white expanse like explorers on an alien planet, searching for their _desaparecidos._ The plight of Calama's women was heroic yet incomprehensible to me. I could not quite grasp their obsession with touching the remains (that was my mind talking, I now see), their need for physical artifacts if they were to heal.\n\n\"When you don't have a body, nothing is certain,\" said Vicky, one of the widows in the interviews Paula conducted. \"It would be easier to stand the pain if we knew the truth.\" Another reminded Paula that \"a mother can never replace her son.\" \"I hear Manuel's voice everywhere. I see him walking on the streets,\" she said. \"There is always the feeling,\" yet another reported, \"that one must search for something.\" Finally, Se\u00f1ora Leo, the oldest woman among them, summed it up in a chilling phrase: \"They buried us alive.\"\n\nThis last phrase seemed to touch the true point. Aside from wanting to honor their disappeared loved ones, and deriving meaning from this pursuit, the women of Calama seemed to be digging for their own lives in the desert, the parts of themselves that had been stolen, the layers of their own severed past, lost somewhere in that vast expanse. Without finding these relics, they could not grieve; without grieving, they could never feel whole. Quixotic as their plight might appear to the eye of reason, it made perfect sense to the soul. Souls seek retrieval and restitution; to the soul's eye, all of our pieces are valuable, especially the broken ones. When I share these thoughts with Paula, she appears to agree. \"They are looking for some kind of wholeness,\" my friend says. \"It's the same thing all of the women I follow are looking for.\"\n\n\"Is that why you call them invisible stories?\" I ask. Paula doesn't catch my drift. \"Because they're invisible to themselves?\"\n\n\"They're invisible to the world,\" she corrects me. \"And partly to themselves, too.\" But the women of Calama have not been engaged in some pop psychology parlor game. Their search is literal, real, and bloody, as hard to them as bones and dust. They have not been digging for metaphors. After nearly two decades of searching, roughly half the men's remains were discovered by a government team in 1990 along the very road the women followed hundreds of times. Paula could not be there for the burials, but the women have since talked to her about the interments, the bittersweet laying of skulls, bone shards, sometimes no more than an article of clothing, finally into the ground. In solidarity, these women continue to help those whose loved ones' remains have yet to be found. Together the women have found new strength and a new sort of family with one another. \"We have shared so many intimacies,\" explains Victoria Saavedra, \"the things that fill your life.\" \"The members are my family, united in the same pain,\" agrees Hilda Mu\u00f1oz. \"We still dream of finding them,\" says another. \"The search has not finished.\" Near the spot where the mass grave was found, a plaque has been laid in memory of all the disappeared. \"Without knowing where they are,\" it reads in part, \"they are with the sun as companion, in the mercy of silence.\"\n\nIn a gorgeous film called _Dance of Hope,_ you can see the women of Calama walking together into the desert on the anniversary of the Caravan of Death tragedy, throwing flowers into the air, blanketing the sand with hundreds of red carnations. They have not run away from their memories. Their commitment seems to remind us all that life may be buried under our feet (as memory is buried under the skin), and that soul is revived in uncovering it. The bones\u2014the haunted scary parts; the splinters, failures, disappeared selves; the lovers, secrets, petrified dreams\u2014are important parts of who we are. It may be hard to remember this sometimes but it's always worse to forget. Like trauma, memory haunts only when buried; uncovered it speaks through the heart to the soul, which thrives on cherishing even what's lost: the layers beneath that are no longer seen; history's sediments marbled within us; the full complex beauty of what we have loved.\n\n## **NAKEDNESS**\n\nWe must accept heartbreak to be fully human. We cannot love without tasting some blood, nor connect without braving some chink in our armor. Those who are most spiritually naked, most transparent, are also those who see most fully. \"Let the scar of the heart be seen,\" said the prophet Mohammed. \"For by their scars are known the men who are in the way of Love.\" Holy books encourage us to strip ourselves bare\u2014to allow ourselves to be burned all the way through by our passionate quest if we wish to be whole. Avoiding life's shadows makes the heart shallow.\n\nIn his play _Orpheus Descending,_ Tennessee Williams describes the opposite of such surrender through the invention of a mythic white bird whose entire life is spent in the air\u2014soaring, unsullied, shadowless\u2014touching earth only once, to die. While the desire to avoid pain may be normal, denial as a long-term strategy is a cold, narrow way to live. We may be dodging bullets through extreme self-protection yet find ourselves withering in our distant aeries, too\u2014safe yet only half engaged\u2014armoring our unbroken hearts while remaining secretly loveless, invulnerable, and dry. Such safe-seeming lives may seem charmed from the outside while being still-born inside, closed off from the messes of passion and joy, the pain that always comes with loving. And yet, as lovers and poets both know, the mystery of joy includes its pain. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who prided himself on raw, intense living, put it this way:\n\nIt is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear _this_ mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and _joyous_ consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead.\n\nWhile vanity rails against such humiliation and wounds-baring, our hearts thrive on the intimate dropping of masks. Ego may long for admiration, praise, and distance-keeping (as a way to protect its fragile fictions), but soul requires connection and truth. These antithetical human needs help explain the conversion experience, the turnaround in value systems experienced by post-catastrophe people. Unable to hide our humanity, we feel twice born letting down our fa\u00e7ades. Hard as we may fight against it, we're grateful in the end for this self-exposure. With less to hide, there's less to defend, freeing our naked selves to love without fear of revealing imperfection.\n\nIn the realm of public unmasking and courage, I've never met a braver or more resilient person than my late friend Lucy Grealy, whose memoir of childhood cancer, _Autobiography of a Face,_ opened the eyes of thousands of readers to a woman's struggle with facial disfigurement. Diagnosed with a Ewing's sarcoma at nine, Lucy lost half her jaw in an emergency surgery and would spend the next three decades making peace with her own appearance. For years, she spoke publicly about the cost of cancer to her self-esteem and the grueling lessons disease had taught her.\n\nAlthough Lucy died, famously, of a drug overdose in 2002\u2014a tragedy announced in a _New York_ magazine cover story the week after she was buried\u2014her inability to quit a two-year heroin habit in no way diminishes her power to instruct and inspire. Lucy had been told she would be dead by twenty only to survive twice that long, write a classic book, live a colorful (sometimes too colorful) life, teach thousands of writing students, counsel cancer victims, and serve as a great friend to many people, including myself. Her sad end does not subtract from these achievements, any more than Primo Levi's decision to take his own life detracts from his brilliance as a writer on the Holocaust. Lucy descended from a family of Irish alcoholics (she was born in Dublin and came to this country at four), attempted rehab, then tried again. She never stopped attempting to make her life better, and having a tragic flaw did not make Lucy any less of a hero.\n\nShe looked like a broken china doll, the scar running down from below her right ear and along her truncated jaw, as if a hunk of porcelain had shattered and then been removed from an otherwise lovely face. Lucy hated her face and believed it was ugly\u2014it _was_ disturbing to look at from certain angles. Yet she didn't let this stop her from doing TV talk shows, lecturing in public, or, hardest of all, looking for Mr. Right. Lucy's quest to find a man, like that of many childless women in their late thirties, was primal and relentless. A few times a month we would sit at our favorite caf\u00e9, commiserating over our twin obsessions, romance and survival. Lucy mostly found the relationship thing hopeless.\n\n\"Do you think I'm ugly?\" she would ask me constantly, coyly turning her face to its better side, smiling, winking. She would be wearing her oversized arctic wool turtleneck sweater, skintight jeans, and knee-high, leather sex-getting boots (she could be a serious minx).\n\n\"You're not ugly,\" I would say. \"But you are unbelievably vain.\"\n\nThis remark would cause her to slap me and order a drink. Lucy knew that she had certain attributes\u2014beautiful Irish blue eyes, blond hair, a peachy complexion, hot legs, a lithe gamine's body\u2014 but such information would not stick. She'd grown up being called Dog Girl in school, and was taunted mercilessly from the age of nine, when\u2014after being hit in the face with a ball\u2014she was rushed to the doctor's office and was discovered to have a virulent stage-four tumor in her mandible. In the operating room, Lucy's jaw was sliced in half; then, when she returned to the fifth grade, her education in affliction began in earnest. Physical suffering aside, how could the normal people around her not realize how lucky they were? Lucy would ask herself. In her book _As Seen on TV,_ she described her first post-cancer Halloween.\n\nI breathed in the condensing, plastic-tainted air behind the mask and thought that I was breathing in normalcy, that this joy and weightlessness were what the world was composed of, and that it was only my face that kept me from it, my face that was my own mask that kept me from knowing the joy I felt sure everyone but me lived with intimately. How could the others not know it? Not know that to be free of the fear of taunts and the burden of knowing no one would ever love you was all that a person could ever ask for?\n\nSelf-pity was never an option. Lucy's mother begged her not to cry. While this may sound cruel\u2014and it was\u2014Lucy believed that her mother's sternness had also helped her. Childhood trauma often produces high-functioning, extremely rational people with a disproportionately acute sense of responsibility toward others but a void where their own self-feeling should be. This disproportion, though ultimately problematic, can work to a survivor's benefit during times when we're barely making it through. \"I was blessed from the beginning that I never felt bitter about what happened to me,\" Lucy told me, without sounding self-righteous. \"I never asked, why me? From the beginning, it was always, why _not_ me?\" She said this in a tone like _duh._ \"It takes emotional intelligence to realize that feeling bad about yourself is just another form of narcissism,\" Lucy said. \"It's really easy to see your own suffering as another excuse to build up your ego. Poor me!\"\n\nThis refusal of self-pity in a woman who had trouble eating and drinking in public (for fear of dribbling) was extremely humbling. \"That's where the philosophical part comes in,\" Lucy said. \"In the hierarchy of suffering out there, there's a lot worse. People think how strong\u2014how _big_ \u2014you must be to get through something. But it takes a lot of courage to admit how small you are. And that your problems don't really amount to very much.\" This echoed the words of Ariel Jordan, the incest survivor. \"Not to turn that into a punishing, depressive act, but as a bridge to compassion,\" Lucy said. \"I know what it's like to suffer.\"\n\nShe described what having cancer was like in 1970, when chemotherapy was even cruder than it is today, the goal being to \"poison patients to the brink of their own death.\" Lucy, the good Catholic girl, at first tried to \"sacramentalize\" her pain, to render her own suffering holy. The ten-year-old would pray for saintly purification after these horrendous treatments. \"I'd sit on the toilet in the hospital bathroom reading two pieces of graffiti over and over,\" Lucy told me once. \"One said GOD IS NEAR. The other said BE HERE NOW. It set up an inquiry in me, and the search for meaning gives you strength.\"\n\nLucy became an expert in suffering, eventually, a black belt in the martial art of cancer. She learned that pain, too, has a hidden face. \"You begin to see other possibilities in the midst of your hardship,\" she explained to me. We were driving to Connecticut after Lucy's final pre-op hospital stay before her big surgery. She had been promised that this time her doctors would get her jaw right, make the fix she'd been waiting for, to give her face symmetry. Lucy couldn't wait for the operation but needed to recover in the country first. The pastures of Cos Cob were flying by as she talked about what she had learned. \"I experimented with different ways of thinking and feeling about things,\" she said of those first years after surgery. \"Beginning with joy. People think of joy as something rare, something to be acquired.\" She lit a cigarette. \"What I've learned is that joy is simply the absence of suffering\u2014sometimes on a physical level, sometimes the stopping of mental punishment.\"\n\n\"Isn't that an amazing thing?\"\n\n\"You have to suffer very often for a long time in order to have these experiences,\" she insisted. \"I learned that when pain subsided just a little, I'd have these moments of intense euphoria. I didn't know it was unusual to have moments of deep joy on a regular basis, because suffering always _does_ subside for moments,\" Lucy said. \"That's why torture is so effective. Torturers don't give prisoners a moment to have an epiphany about it.\"\n\nLucy looked at me. \"I've had these moments of intense euphoria throughout my life, but it was the joy that came about simply because I felt a little bit better,\" she said. \"Not through the acquisition of anything outside of me. _The joy was already there._ I just needed the pain to let up a little, and there it was. It's a really profound, miraculous thing.\"\n\nLucy's visible defect used to draw people toward her, especially those who knew her story. They adored her by the auditoriumful, magnetized by her naked scar. The thing that she wanted to change was the very wound others found most inspiring, the vulnerability that drew them out and taught them to be more fearless about their own shortcomings.\n\n\"Openness, honesty, vulnerability, nakedness are the key to everything,\" Lucy once said to me. \"You've got to be honest with yourself, to face the depth of your own distress. Otherwise it turns to depression,\" which Lucy described as \"avoidance of larger pain.\"\n\n\"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering,\" Jung once said. Lucy could not have agreed more. \"People avoid being burned through by things,\" she insisted. \"Instead, they create these holding cells for their feelings. To keep volatile, extreme feelings at bay. That's how depression makes you helpless. It shuts you down. But when people actually let themselves feel these things, the emotions burn hotter and pass more quickly.\"\n\n\"Would that it were so easy,\" I said.\n\n\"Easy?\" Lucy asked. \"I'm talking about real life.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\"\n\n\"You saw it after nine-eleven. People immediately wanted to alleviate suffering by creating suffering for somebody else,\" Lucy told me. \"Nobody knew how to feel ambivalence about _not_ knowing what to do. Retaliation, acting out, was more comfortable than being in anguish.\"\n\nIndeed, Lucy's own ability to bear anguish\u2014and emerge bright-eyed\u2014was preternatural to behold. She could land on her feet with the ease of a cat hurled from a top-floor window. Even when things went extra-badly, she comported herself with stoic grace. When the long-promised surgery failed to improve Lucy's face (her jaw had been over-irradiated), she rallied with gusto even then. Her face swollen beyond recognition, a pneumatic tube of transplanted flesh hanging around her neck like a tire, Lucy was bedridden and in extreme pain, yet still managed to retain her unsinkable black humor. I climbed into the bed next to her and she held my hand, with her friend Ann Patchett watching us from a chair. Lucy tried to turn her awful appearance into a joke.\n\n\"Helium by Maybelline,\" she gurgled, turning her bubble face back and forth. She let us know how extremely fortunate she truly was to have such loyal friends, since now she would be alone forever for sure.\n\n\"Am I not a lucky girl?\" Lucy blubbered, fingering her alien neck, unable to blink her black-and-blue slit eyes.\n\nAnn gave me a pained look.\n\n\"I mean it,\" she said. \"I love you guys.\"\n\n\"Oh, shut up,\" said Ann, who knew her humor.\n\n\"Bitch,\" said Lucy.\n\n\"Slut,\" said Ann. Then both of them dissolved into giggles.\n\nThree months later, on the night that she died, Lucy left a message on my answering machine, to thank me for being such a good friend and tell me how much she loved me. I didn't know that it was the last time I would hear her voice. She had recovered from the surgery, gone back to dating, persevered on her long-awaited novel\u2014even considered going to medical school. Only days before that good-bye message, we'd been laughing over coffee at our favorite caf\u00e9. Lucy was reminding me again about how crazy romance can be, how obsessive insecure men are when it comes to strong women, and why, next to dental work, dating is the cruelest and most horrible thing civilized people actually pay for. Lucy seemed okay to me that afternoon, better than she'd been in a while. Her eyes were especially clear and blue. Did she know what was coming? I ask myself now. Or was her death an accident? I will never know the answer, of course; nor will I ever stop thinking about it. This splinter of love will not go away. As I pass the table where we used to sit, there are ghosts in the corner of my eye. I can almost see Lucy sitting there still, asking me if I believe that she will ever find a man. I'm telling her again that yes, she will, if she finally stops settling for Peter Pans. I'd be watching her face as she laughed and moaned, then ordered herself another drink. Lucy would be leaning forward and purring, getting ready\u2014as always\u2014to talk about love. Her determination\u2014again\u2014would amaze me.\n\n## **KILLING PETER PAN**\n\nPhilosophers from Plato to Kierkegaard to Gurdjieff have taught that the path of the soul involves a progressive series of disillusionments. The mirror must crack if we want to evolve. The earthbound lessons of aging, disenchantment, and passing beauty must crack the mask for the soul to breathe. Lucy had learned this lesson in spite of herself, although she still wanted a prettier face. Still, vanity resists the path that leads to this more enduring beauty. No one wants to be discarded by an appearance-crazed, youth-obsessed world.\n\nIn a culture that celebrates narcissism, the soul can become a fugitive. \"The great malady of the 20th century, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is 'loss of soul,'\" religious writer Thomas Moore wrote. Like water invisible to fish, narcissism is so ubiquitous that we hardly see we're swimming in it. We're inducted into this illusory self-understanding before we are even aware of it. Once, a scholar explained to me that narcissism is born the first time a child looks into a mirror and realizes that this \"thing\" is what others take to be itself. This knowledge exiles us from the garden; holistic innocence comes to an end. We see ourselves as \"things\" in a world of other \"things,\" rather than souls looking through these masks. This trance of mistaken identity causes us enormous trouble, psychologists tell us, beginning with alienation from others and excessive attachment to this \"reflection.\" As we age, this obsession only gets worse, our fears of physical loss and change of appearance masking\u2014\u00e0 la Peter Pan\u2014a self-destructive denial of death.\n\nAt eighty-four, Jungian pioneer James Hillman has spent decades singing the praises of soul and warning against excessive narcissism. \"Remember what Anna Magnani said when they tried to make her look younger in _The Rose Tattoo_?\" Hillman asks me over coffee in a Tribeca diner, referring to the earthy Italian film star. \" 'Don't take out a single line. I paid for every single one!'\" The godfather of archetypal psychology in this country, Hillman has argued in dozens of books, including _The Soul's Code,_ that narcissistic culture has it all wrong, exhorting the self-improvement-obsessed to appreciate their so-called weaknesses, embrace their chronic weirdnesses, rough spots, absences of virtue, physical peculiarities\u2014the places where they fall short and never measure up\u2014as integral to their multiplex beings and the texture that gives them character.\n\nHillman looks much younger than he is, in fact, tanned as toast and surprisingly buff, wearing Levi's and aviator glasses. \"When we see an old wall, an old teacup, an old tree, we appreciate these things precisely for their oldness,\" he tells me, \"the increased beauty of their years and the memories they contain. Objects seem to gain in value as they age, but we deny this same respect to people.\"\n\nHe's right. \"Yet the oddities and flaws that make you different only increase with time and become the most interesting part of who you are,\" Hillman insists. \"These changes form our character\"\u2014a word derived from the Greek for \"etched, cut, or engraved,\" he reminds me.\n\n\"Who wants to be engraved?\" I ask, half-seriously. \"We want to cheat time and look ageless.\"\n\n\"But there is a great deal of human life that cannot be measured by time,\" Hillman says. \"The deepening and refining of personal vision, how we appreciate the world, our increased sense of beauty.\" Longevity for its own sake doesn't interest him much; it's what we do with our years that determines their worth. \"Longevity for its own sake is rarely concerned with what came before you or what will come after,\" Hillman says.\n\n\"Old people can be quite selfish,\" I agree.\n\n\"Obsession with staying alive can lead to a kind of geriatric heroism,\" he says, referring to our fixation on what's in the mirror. \"Beating the odds, lowering our cholesterol levels, outliving statistical tables. But life moves in _three_ directions.\"\n\n\"Three?\" I ask.\n\n\"Backward, forward, and outward,\" Hillman says.\n\n\"Sorry, but I don't follow.\"\n\n\"There is the longevity of extending life backward through memory,\" he explains, reminding me of the women of Calama \"extending\" life by digging for their loved ones in the desert. \"There is the longevity of concerning yourself with the coming generations,\" Hillman goes on. \"Not only your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but down to the seventh generation, as the Bible says. This extends your life into the future as you reach forward. Finally, there is the longevity that comes from extending your life _outward_ by becoming responsible to the place where you live and the society around you.\"\n\nOur lives, in other words, are never merely personal affairs, despite what the mirror may tell us. Our culture's tendency toward planned obsolescence\u2014cultivating the myth of perpetual youth\u2014 distorts the wisdom we might glean from soul. \"Each stage of life has its own meaning,\" he explains. \"What's unique about surviving into old age has nothing to do with being young. In Rome a man put on the _toga senilis,_ or 'toga of old age,' at age sixty. But our culture is so concerned with quickness and speed, people don't have the patience for slowness.\"\n\n\"We equate slowness with being washed up,\" I remind him.\n\n\"But slowness is another kind of adventure,\" he insists. \"When you're old, you don't even know if you're going to get out of the bathtub! But there is an adventure in that. If you think about it, there's the same challenge and achievement as climbing mountains. You hold on to something, you watch your foot as it moves, the whole adventure is right there in miniature. This is the adventure of slowness.\"\n\nIt is also, Hillman has learned, the adventure of love. As character deepens, so does an eros more nourishing and durable than lust, he believes. Embers are better for cooking than flame, as the saying goes. \"A certain love for the world deepens the recognition of its beauty,\" he says. \"It's amazing how some people who had miserable lives are grateful in old age just to have been here, to have gone through it all.\" I've often noticed this myself, I tell him. \"Relationships can become richer, provided people aren't trying to recapture the experiences of their youth,\" he continues. \"There's more acceptance in love between old people, more respect for the other person and their foibles.\"\n\n\"The mirror is no longer the last word?\"\n\n\"We learn to appreciate our partner's oddities,\" Hillman stresses, \"and to realize what a miracle it is that we're here, still together.\" He looks out the window at traffic on Hudson Street. \"We take more interest in one another. Not what medications we're taking, or what our pulse rates might be, but what we're reading and dreaming about, what memories are returning to us, what peculiar reflection just turned in our minds, something we haven't thought of for years. We become more interested in each other's souls. That is the truly interesting part.\"\n\n\"I thought only superficial people don't believe in appearances,\" I kid him, citing a joke from Oscar Wilde.\n\n\" 'In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody,'\" James Hillman replies, throwing a line from Jung back at me. \" 'If we do not embody that, life is wasted.'\" He chuckles and sits back in his chair. \"Try wiggling out of that one.\"\n\n## **THE WATER OR THE WAVE?**\n\nTime is a cruel bitch goddess. We measure our lives in coffee spoons and wonder why we feel so crushed by the ticktock of minutes piling down on us through the burying years. We chop existence into nanoseconds and struggle to fill up every one, fearful of wasting a moment to leisure, hoarding time as if it really were money. Rushing through the measured world, we forget that ours is the first civilization in history to be so obsessed and bedeviled by time. The unhelpful image of God as a celestial clock keeper, stopwatching our every move from above, has shown (in our attention-deficient times) no sign whatsoever of blinking.\n\nYet philosophers have insisted for centuries that there are in fact two kinds of time operating in the world\u2014man-made time and soul time\u2014and that it is vitally important that we remember both if we wish to remain sane. _Nunc fluens_ is their name for hourglass time, the relentless metronome that frays your nerves, grays your hair, forms rings inside the trunk of a tree. _Nunc stans,_ on the other hand, denotes time as seen through eternal eyes, the timeless sense we may feel in nature, while reading a great book, creating artwork, having sex, or praying\u2014peak-and-valley moments\u2014 when _nunc fluens_ seems to stop, dropping us through the mental scrim that separates our everyday minds from great silence. Spaced-out as this sounds to the stressed-out psyche, we're actually more awake than usual during _nunc stans_ moments, able to see more clearly, to operate more effectively, than we can while hugging a clock. Contrary to the puritan belief that time-gripping keeps us on the ball (and keeps our great assembly line ticking along), the opposite appears to be true. _Nunc fluens_ without _nunc stans_ behind it creates an assembly line to madness.\n\nA mountain climber who'd been part of the first team to scale Mount Everest described how the discovery of soul time changed his life. Returning from the peak, the hiker paused on a high pass to admire the stupendous view. As he turned around, he saw a small blue flower in the snow. \"I don't know how to describe what happened,\" he reported later. \"Everything opened up and flowed together and made some strange kind of sense, and I was at complete peace. I have no idea how long I stood there. It could have been minutes or hours. Time melted. But when I came down, my life was different.\"\n\nThese blue flower moments are happening all the time, but few of us pause to pay attention. The workaday mind needs a slap\u2014or a climax\u2014to stop it in its habitual tracks. When this happens, we may find ourselves dropped into this timeless dimension. Problems suddenly seem to shrink down to size when seen against this spacious backdrop. Artists, seekers, lovers, adventurers, people like R.D. who like to trip, all recognize the freedom of such moments when the mind quiets down and affords us a taste of that gorgeous expanse.\n\nStill, we tend to fear _nunc stans_ and its freedoms. We cling to our wristwatches for dear life. Until we're torn somehow from our habitual grid, we may even doubt that eternal time exists. After we glimpse it, though, we begin to see our lives differently\u2014to perceive the world stereoscopically, like the double-faced Roman god Janus on the threshold between two realms, facing both directions at once, the physical and the invisible worlds. Reality seems to turn almost translucent sometimes, as if eternity itself were peeking through this time-stopped thinning of veils.\n\nIn the Andaman Sea of Indonesia, there lives a group of nomadic tribesmen whose lives are virtually untouched by time as we know it. Spending up to eight months out of every year traveling from island to island, living on their primitive boats, the Moken are among the peoples of the world least touched by modern civilization. They are born on the sea, live on the sea, and die on the sea. They understand the moods of the ocean better than any marine biologist. Constantly moving from island to island, they learn to swim before they're walking and are more or less amphibious. The Moken can see twice as clearly as the rest of us and are able to lower their heart rates automatically to stay underwater twice as long. They catch sea cucumbers and eels at low tide, dive for shellfish when the water is high, and enjoy as close to an Edenic existence as seems possible in this time-obsessed world.\n\n_Nunc fluens_ does not exist for them. If you ask a Moken how old he is, he may have trouble telling you. Conspicuously absent from their language are terms for \"when,\" \"want,\" and \"worry.\" If you show up at a Moken village after a twenty-year absence, locals will greet you as if it were yesterday. They have no words for \"hello\" or \"good-bye.\" _Nunc stans_ is their everyday state. This allows them to exist in a unity with their environment that most of us would find hard to imagine. No reaching backward or forward in time\u2014no longing, projecting, hurrying, or reminiscing\u2014upsets their daily round.\n\nIt is not surprising to learn, for this reason, that the Moken were the only Indonesian group to suffer not a single casualty in the 2003 tsunami that claimed three hundred thousand lives. This was thanks to a sixty-seven-year-old fisherman named Satha Kathaleway, who was mending his nets on the beach when the first signs of trouble appeared. The cicadas, whose loin-rubbing causes a ruckus here nine months a year, suddenly fell silent. In all of his years, Kathaleway, who's gray-haired and nimble, had never heard anything like it before. The dolphins made for deeper water as the tide receded abnormally far. Livestock stampeded for higher ground. Kathaleway warned his fellow Moken that the _lumbi,_ the great man-eating wave described in a popular myth, was about to descend on them. His fellow tribesmen followed the old man up the mountain, and their lives were spared, all because this \"primitive\" fisherman was watching the world instead of a clock.\n\nOne crisp fall afternoon, I make my way to Rhinebeck, New York, to have a conversation with Eckhart Tolle, the German spiritual teacher whose book _The Power of Now_ introduced the concept of _nunc stans_ to millions of readers trapped in their time-obsessed heads. According to Tolle,\n\nthe mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future... as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind.\n\nI loved that. \"The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind,\" he concluded, \"also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.\"\n\nI find Eckhart waiting for me on his bungalow porch, an elfin man with a gnomelike beard reminiscent of a character out of _The Hobbit._ He's wearing an Alpine-style vest and a Nehru shirt, his voice a sort of amused hush. When Eckhart offers me his hand, it's as light as a feather. He pours us tea and we take our seats in the dimly lit cabin he's calling home during the weeklong silent retreat that he's leading.\n\n\"Human history has largely been a history of insanity,\" Eckhart begins cheerfully. \"The manifestation of a sort of collective mental illness.\" His steady gaze makes me realize how frazzled I'm feeling after my two-hour drive north. Why is this? I wonder. \"Everyone has the roots of this illness to a greater or lesser degree,\" Eckhart assures me. \"But in order to understand this, we need to look for a moment at how the human mind works.\"\n\nHe sips his tea and begins to explain. \"The mind finds labels and concepts to describe and interpret things and people,\" Eckhart tells me. \"Clouded by labels and concepts, the mind becomes unconscious. Jesus's last words are borne out in the truest sense\u2014 'they know not what they do.'\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. But what does this have to do with time?\n\n\"The mind is essentially a survival machine,\" he goes on, approaching my question from another direction. \"In the most primitive sense.\" \"Fighting, defending, storing information, analyzing\u2014this is what the conventional mind is good at,\" Eckhart has written, \"but it is not at all creative. All true artists create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness, whether or not they're aware of it.\"\n\nBlue flower moments, I think. \"Even the greatest scientists admit that their creative breakthroughs come at times of mental quietude,\" Eckhart says. \"When we quiet the mind, we can be present. Right now. In this very moment.\" He gazes out the window at a squirrel nibbling leaves on the lawn. \"When we can yield, accept, be open to our lives, a new dimension of consciousness opens up,\" Eckhart says. \"If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. You rest in God.\"\n\n\"Otherwise?\" I ask.\n\n\"You get resistance, an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell,\" he tells me. \"You close yourself off from reality, and whatever action you take will only cause more resistance.\" I've noticed this often in my own life. \"If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in. The universe will not be on your side; life will not be helpful,\" says Eckhart.\n\nWhile _nunc fluens_ is necessary for organizing our daily lives\u2014 your wristwatch gets you to the dentist's office on time\u2014life is more than a dentist's appointment. Without tapping into _nunc stans,_ Eckhart teaches, we divorce ourselves from the big picture. \"It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained,\" he has written.\n\nThere is clearly an intelligence at work [inside us] that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1\/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each?... When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.\n\n\"Yes, we need the mind to function,\" he says. \"But there comes a point where it takes over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.\" When we balance the tyranny of _nunc fluens_ with the spaciousness of soul time, we free ourselves from past and future and realize how much unhappiness we create with our constant mental time-jumps backward and forward, often missing what's in front of our eyes. This habit is comparable to driving a car while staring into the rearview mirror (and reading traffic signs _way_ up the road at the same time). What we get are accidents and the smell of burning rubber, not realizing that the emergency brake is still on. Such time distortion is even more hazardous during times of crisis, Eckhart tells me. \"Whenever loss occurs, you either resist or yield,\" he says. \"Some people become bitter or deeply resentful. Others become compassionate, wise, and loving. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment,\" he explains. \"What could be more futile, more insane, than to fight something that already is? It means you're opposing life itself, which is now and always now. Say yes to life, and see how things start working for you rather than against you.\"\n\nWhen the bell rings to call retreatants into the meditation hall, I realize that I haven't looked at my wristwatch for over half an hour.\n\n\"When we are caught in the timekeeping mind,\" Eckhart says, \"we think our lives rather than living them. We have relationships with our ideas of people rather than with the people themselves.\"\n\nIs he saying that our approach to time affects how we think about other people?\n\n\"Of course. The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can no longer truly relate to that person.\"\n\n\"I understand that\u2014\"\n\n\"The more mental labels you have for other people, or groups of people different from the group you identify with, the more you deaden yourself to the aliveness and the reality of those people,\" he tells me. \"It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.\"\n\nIn other words, the mind's blinding concepts\u2014aimed at time, other people, or ourselves\u2014prevent us from seeing clearly. I am writing these words on August 15, 2007, but what does this numerical series have to do with the humid New York afternoon, the actual sunlight warming my window, the rain clearing out of the late summer sky? Is it August in the eye of the soul? we might ask. Or is it just today?\n\nEckhart excuses himself to rest before his evening's talk. Driving home, I listen to one of his hypnotic tapes as I navigate my way down Route 9. Near Poughkeepsie, I'm startled by a car's horn blaring directly behind me. I've been moseying along at thirty miles an hour in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone, I realize. Perhaps this is a sign of progress? Eckhart's soft voice on the tape continues.\n\nImagine the earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? What time is it? The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. \"What time?\" they would ask. \"Well, of course it's now. The time is now. What else is there?\"\n\n## **WHAT TIME IS GOOD FOR**\n\nWhile our obsession with _nunc fluens_ can become a straitjacket, history (time's overcoat) can be useful for cinching in our woes and warming the soul in harsh weather. The knowledge that others have lived through worse troubles than ours can provide comfort and courage in times of duress. \"I cried because I had no shoes till I saw the boy who had no feet,\" my own mother used to say when we whined about our welfare-grade life. Though I'd never actually met a footless person, the suggestion helped me anyway. Stop complaining, my mother would tell us, you've lived through nothing, we've got a free country, your grandma stuffed kishke to get out of Poland.\n\nAfter 9\/11, Americans were invited to use history in a similar way: to feel less sorry for ourselves. One risked sounding hard-hearted at first, reminding fellow citizens that genocide did not actually begin on that September morning. Still, it is helpful to remember that tragic events carry their own centripetal force, sucking attention toward themselves and away from other suffering beings. Self-privileging is a terrible trap, especially when we're trying to heal. As incest survivor Ariel Jordan put it, remaining the center of our own cruel universe is a sure way of remaining stuck. Connection of any kind will free us. In times of historic-scale tragedy, only history is forceful enough to pry the victim mentality loose and release the pretense of specialness.\n\n\"History is the great leveler,\" says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks. \"History helps us to survive,\" she tells me. \"If _they_ did it, we say, we can, too.\"\n\n\"We forget that worse things have happened\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen,\" Doris interrupts me. \"We tend to think of past wars from the victory backward,\" she says. \"World War Two came out well, but in the beginning there was an enormous amount of uncertainty about whether or not we could match Germany's weaponry. In 1940 Germany had the most powerful army ever amassed on the face of the earth, and our armed forces were rated eighteenth in the world. By the time Pearl Harbor came, we were much better prepared, but there were many months of losses before that situation began to turn around.\"\n\n\"Necessity forced invention,\" I say.\n\n\"As it always does. Americans are still reeling after nine-eleven,\" Doris says. \"But it might help if we remembered the London Blitz. There were fifty-seven nights of continuous bombing. Londoners had to live through massive uncertainty. Twenty-three thousand people were killed. But just as Hitler failed to break the will of the British people, citizens in this country have proved that their will has not been broken either.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" I say.\n\n\"Indeed. Churchill insisted that theaters in the West End remain open, remember?\" Doris reminds me. \"When there were air raid sirens, people put on gas masks and sang songs until the 'all clear' was sounded. Tube stations were turned into underground shelters with libraries. Stores opened with signs on their shattered windows that read, more open than usual. Life went on!\" she insists. \"This is when Churchill said, 'If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour.' Knowing that people had the ability to sustain themselves through this barrage, and somehow endured it, should give us hope that we can do it as well.\"\n\n\"We had our illusion of safety destroyed.\"\n\n\"That's true. But you see how we've risen to the occasion?\" Doris asks. \"When people band together to defy the enemy, what you see is that fighting spirit. Not allowing the terrorists to win by breaking us. It's not that fear is taken away, but this passion not to be broken becomes greater than fear. Being part of a group gives you courage that you might not have individually. That's why the massive show of flags and feeling of being a nation have been so important during this time.\"\n\nI admit that the flag-waving scares me a little.\n\n\"Most of the time, nation is an abstraction,\" she explains. \"But when a crisis happens, you remember in your heart what it means to be someone living in this country. Being part of something larger than yourself gives you an extra sense of strength. During World War Two almost everyone was involved in doing something to help: planting victory gardens, sending in their dogs' rubber toys, collecting aluminum. That's why people remember the war with such a positive feeling. Surviving nine-eleven has been a major shift for Americans,\" she acknowledges. \"And not at all part of the ethos of recent years. In the decades since the war in Vietnam, we've been more private and individual-oriented. This disaster is awakening that other side of people, infusing the leaders of the future with a deeper public consciousness.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" I say.\n\n\"One feels enlarged during times such as these,\" Doris tells me.\n\nFrom the patio of her home in Marin County, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende agrees that history is the best antidote to both victimhood and hubris.\n\n\"We have been privileged in this country to believe that life is secure, that our rights\u2014including the search for happiness\u2014are sacred,\" Isabel tells me over the phone. \"But most of the world has lived with uncertainty for millennia. I lived in Chile, a country that had one of the oldest democracies in Latin America,\" she says. \"We never thought that anything like a military coup could happen to us. Those only happened in banana republics! Until one day it did happen, and the brutality lasted for seventeen years.\"\n\nPinochet's coup had taken place on September 11, 1973, coincidentally. \"This was a military coup orchestrated by the CIA,\" Isabel says, sounding angry. \"It was a terrorist attack against a democracy!\" I'm reminded of the Caravan of Death arriving in their Puma helicopter. \"The extraordinary thing is that in twenty-four hours you learn to adapt.\"\n\n\"How?\" I ask.\n\n\"You go on with your life, because life goes on,\" says Isabel. \"You see this in anyone who has survived a traumatic situation. My own daughter died, for example.\" Her only daughter, Paula Frias, died of porphyria in 1992 at the age of twenty-seven. \"At first you think you can't live with this,\" says the author, who just turned sixty-five. \"It's just too much. Then life begins to take over. One morning you wake up and you want to eat chocolate. Or walk in the woods. Or open a bottle of wine. You get back up on your feet.\"\n\n\"When you can, right?\"\n\n\"You have no choice!\" Isabel insists. \"You cannot let the bullies keep you on the floor! I have been on my knees a thousand times, and I always get up. This is the message we must give to our children. You must get up off the floor! Sooner or later everybody suffers. Grief and darkness are a part of life.\"\n\n\"That's what nine-eleven has taught us.\"\n\n\"Americans,\" she says, chuckling. \"When I moved to this country twenty years ago, I fell in love with a lawyer, the kind who sues the city when you fall on a banana peel. I couldn't believe it! Accidents are accidents. If you slip and fall, it's your own fault.\"\n\n\"Tell that to people who are suing McDonald's for making them fat.\"\n\n\"There is no insurance for happiness or safety! That's impossible,\" Isabel exclaims. \"Life is difficult, painful, and wonderful. But we are a society that expects to be happy and entertained all the time, a spoiled society that hasn't had war in its territory in more than a century, though we contribute to war in other countries all the time. We support many of the worst dictatorships in the world. It is we who helped create the Taliban.\"\n\n\"That may be true. But how can we live differently now?\" I ask.\n\n\"By becoming citizens of the world. Americans cannot have a gated-community mentality anymore, or believe that we can keep ourselves safe while there's so much inequality and poverty in the world. More than eight hundred million people on this planet are hungry. The distribution of wealth is completely unfair. This creates conditions for hatred and violence. How can this continue forever without paying the consequences?\"\n\nIsabel steps off her soapbox and gets to the point. \"I learned something in Chile at its time of terror. We tend to focus on the negative because that's what makes the news. But for every terrorist and torturer, every person who commits a crime, there are a thousand people who are willing to risk their lives to help and do good,\" she says. \"We forget this. But if it weren't true, we would still be in the Stone Age. Why has humanity evolved? Because there are more good guys than bad guys, even though the bad guys make more noise.\"\n\nThat is why post-catastrophic times like these are rich in potential for metanoia. \"We can come together,\" Isabel agrees. \"Make changes. Begin to reflect. We now have a chance to grow up. Make peace. Become aware. Renew our spirits.\"\n\n\"Otherwise we're on the floor?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" answers Isabel Allende. \"And life on the floor is terrible.\"\n\nFor the past fifty years, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has been exhorting us to remember the past in order not to repeat it. The Nobel Peace Prize winner warns that forgetfulness is our greatest public danger, since tyrants prey on ignorance. While memory is sometimes a heavy burden, it is the price we pay for wisdom.\n\n\"This is the choice we must make as humans,\" Wiesel tells me from his office at Boston University. \"The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts.\" I have trouble imagining that this \u00e9minence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. \"There's a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this,\" he tells me. \"It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.\"\n\nHe pauses for a moment to let this sink in. \"Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows,\" Wiesel says. \"But there is no way out of what we've seen.\"\n\n\"And how do we live with what we know?\" I ask \"How can we live with _not_ knowing?\" He says this as if it's the only true question. \"We have more responsibility now.\"\n\n\"More fear, too,\" I say.\n\n\"But fear is a natural ingredient in life. If a child is afraid of fire, that's good. Fear is only unhealthy when it becomes excessive. Courage has an important role to play in how we cope with what we know. Courage,\" Wiesel maintains, \"means doing the impossible within the possible.\"\n\nAt first, I have trouble unscrambling this. \"We have learned so much from nine-eleven about what makes human beings noble,\" he says. \"When people are in need, you must be present. When people suffer, you must let them know you're suffering with them.\"\n\n\"The good side of bad acts?\" I say.\n\n\"I would not say that from horror comes goodness. That would be giving horror too much credit. But goodness prevails in spite of horror.\"\n\n\"That's amazing in itself,\" I say.\n\n\"And finally we must have hope,\" he tells me.\n\n\"Did you have hope when you were in Auschwitz?\" I ask.\n\n\"Even when there is no hope, as Albert Camus said, we must invent it.\"\n\n## **AT SEA**\n\nIn the period between January 1994 and April 1996, I experienced depression for the first time. Though I was outwardly healthy, my T cells were gone, I was running on empty, treatments were barely on the horizon, and one day, during a monthly checkup, I was told by my then-physician to begin prophylactic treatment at once or invite an opportunistic infection. I knew what such infections looked like; I'd nursed my share of dying friends. So I agreed with the doctor's futile, expensive recommendations, none of which had been proved to work, and changed overnight from a person who resisted swallowing aspirin to taking fifteen toxic pills a day and hanging out twice a week in this doctor's death salon with vitamin C dripping into my arm through an IV, surrounded by dying people wrapped in blankets. The time I spent in that ghostly place is the nadir of my life to date.\n\nEvery day became an ordeal. Minor efforts required Herculean strength; a ring of sullen hopelessness seemed to orbit every moment, mocking every prospect for improvement with a devil's sneer. Finally, I felt paralyzed and had trouble even leaving my tiny apartment. This reminded me of how a plane crash survivor described the last moments before impact. When the plane first began to malfunction, passengers were hysterical, sobbing, uncontrollable. Then they began to quiet down, prayed, clasped hands with strangers, and wept as the aircraft spiraled toward the ground. Finally, the survivor reported, even these movements stopped\u2014 passengers sat glued to their seats, too frozen and numb to even cry out. This is exactly how I was feeling, as if strapped inside a hurtling vehicle, frozen, asphyxiated, and plunging.\n\nFor the first time in my whole life, I was unable to function. I sought the help of a psychiatrist, who prescribed a drug called Paxil, whose only visible effect was to make it impossible for me to cry. I tossed the stuff in the trash. While I was at it, I fired Dr. G. and ditched those purgatorial treatments. Somehow, refusing to be deadened by narcotics (and my physician's hopelessness) lifted my spirits a tiny bit. Shafts of hope, fragile but real, began to dispel the depressive cloud. This clearing left me motivated enough to seek out the advice of a new physician and create a semblance of normal life until better treatments did arrive.\n\nOnce you've traveled this road, though, you never forget it. Never again is depression just a word to you. It's a visceral absence, a soul's negation. As author Andrew Solomon put it in his atlas of depression, _The Noonday Demon,_ it is \"the flaw in love.\"\n\nAndrew's own descent into purgatory began insidiously and with no tangible cause. The scion of a pharmaceutical fortune (his father got rich from manufacturing the antidepressant drug Celexa, coincidentally), Andrew was a beloved child of privilege, educated at Yale and Cambridge, embarking on what promised to be a formidable career as a writer, surrounded by friends, in peak physical shape\u2014circumstances, he assures me when we meet, that \"in no way entitled me to misery.\" A deceptively cheerful, sweet-natured guy in an oxford shirt and herringbone blazer, Andrew is almost anachronistically cordial, the sort of \"swell\" guy you'd expect to meet at a garden party written by Edith Wharton, with a rising hairline and blue eyes that do appear, as one reporter described them, to be gazing perpetually out to sea.\n\n\"It began quite slowly,\" Andrew tells me at a caf\u00e9 in our mutual neighborhood. \"It was around the time that my mother died.\" A few weeks after her sixty-fourth birthday, Carolyn Solomon, who was losing her battle with uterine cancer, warmed herself some tea and muffins, called her prewarned husband and two sons to her bedside, swallowed forty Seconol capsules, and died before their eyes. His mother's last words to her younger son were \"Enjoy what you have\"\u2014advice that became Andrew's recrimination after his depression took hold. Having published his first novel, an intensely emotional story about a mother and son ominously titled _Stone Boat,_ the first-time author was about to set out on a reading tour when his melancholy turned clinical.\n\n\"For someone who hasn't been through this, it's almost impossible to imagine,\" he tells me. \"I was excruciatingly afraid all the time. Tied up in knots, just petrified. As if I were about to explode.\"\n\n\"What were you afraid of?\" I ask.\n\n\"You know the moment before your hands shoot out to break a fall if you trip or something?\" says Andrew. \"When you feel the ground rushing up at you but you can't stop yourself? That passing fraction-of-a-second terror?\"\n\nI know this feeling well, I say.\n\n\"I felt that hour after hour after hour,\" he tells me. \"Just being awake\u2014being alive\u2014was acutely painful. I had no idea how to deal with it. People would say, 'Oh, it's just a phase. You'll get through.' I would think, No, I can't get through another fifteen minutes of this, much less another day.\"\n\nHis therapist was no help at all. \"I was in analysis with an incompetent who failed to recognize what was happening,\" he says. The memory still makes him angry. \"He said it was very brave and heroic of me not to take drugs. The truth is that if I had gone on medication six months earlier, I would never have gotten to the point I did.\"\n\nAndrew reached his low point during the summer of 1994, when he was no longer able to leave his bedroom. \"One day I couldn't get up,\" he tells me. \"I was actually too frightened to get out of bed. I lay there for hours and hours after I woke up, wondering how I could put on a pair of socks. I stared at the phone for seven hours till finally it rang. I said to the person who called, 'I'm really in a bad way. I have to get some kind of help.'\"\n\nHe compares this smothering darkness to a vine choking a tree, a crushing, parasitic force that will not stop till its host is dead. \"Compacted and fetal,\" as he writes in _The Noonday Demon,_ he found himself \"depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threatened to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it.\"\n\nFortunately, there were loved ones around to help him fight off this killer. Nurturing friends circled around him; his mogul father, not one for touchy-feely affection, insisted on cutting his grown son's food. Slowly, Andrew began to improve. He dumped his useless analyst and found his way to a psychopharmacologist who was finally able to stabilize his moods with a cocktail of medications. He vividly recalls the moment in 2001 when his life force revived for a moment. \"I was with my father, looking out of a window,\" he says with a smile. \"Suddenly I saw a patch of gray sky pull apart, and the sun came blazing through before the clouds came together again. I know it's the most clich\u00e9 image, but it was incredibly apt for me at the time. I felt okay again for maybe five minutes, which gave me the exultant sense that I might actually feel that way again.\"\n\nAn agnostic, nonpracticing Jew, Andrew is careful not to gloss his recovery in supernatural terms, but does admit to a certain spiritual boon to the terror he lived through. \"It's the thing with feathers at the bottom of my box of miseries,\" he says, borrowing a phrase from Emily Dickinson.\n\n\"Major depression is a birth and a death,\" he says. \"Before this happened, I had this idea of myself as a very strong person. In a concentration camp, I always figured I'd be one of those prisoners who managed to sing while they worked.\" This heroic self-image now makes Andrew snicker. \"The idea that I might actually be one of those who fell to pieces, faded and died very quickly, involved a complete readjustment of who I thought I was. The idea of being captain of my own ship, the grand master of my own life, has completely gone out the window. I'm more tolerant now and far less judgmental. There is a fluidness, a fragility I did not previously have. I thought I was a rock.\" He laughs. \"It turns out that I'm a river\u2014or something idiotic like that.\"\n\nIndeed, this witty man's own definition of courage\u2014what it means to be a courageous person\u2014has done a complete about-face. \"There are two ideas of bravery I like to play with,\" he now says. \"Is the brave person the one who rushes in and goes to the front line because he doesn't feel fear? Or is the brave person the one who is completely petrified but does _something_... not as much as the first person, perhaps, but done against the weight of their own fear?\"\n\n\"The first one might just be impetuous,\" I say.\n\n\"I am more fearful than I used to be. But I am also more rigorous about pushing myself past that fear. It's made me aware of how much I depend on other people. But,\" he makes clear, \"I'm also much more careful about which people I do depend on, because I recognize my vulnerability\u2014the profound fragility we all share.\" Andrew weighs his words with care, wary of sounding too maudlin or glib. \"I have found that there is a kind of bliss that only comes to those who've known deep suffering,\" he tells me, echoing Lucy Grealy.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"There is a kind of ecstatic delight when things are going well, a kind of joy I could never have known about if I had not been so depressed.\" Andrew even alludes to the discovery in himself of something akin to soul. \"A part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit,\" as he wrote in his book. \"It is a precious discovery.\"\n\nAs Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian psychoanalyst, wrote in her own memoir about coming through darkness, \"I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. Refinement in sorrow or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative.\"\n\nI walk Andrew home after our interview. Near his landmark brownstone is the building where the poet Emma Lazarus lived, whose most famous poem (\"Give me your poor, your huddled masses...\") is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. The irony of this message almost next door is hardly lost on this clever man, with its themes of exile, resurrection, sail-setting for a country whose standard is freedom. \"So lies the world before us,\" as Andrew described it in his wise book,\n\nand with just such steps we tread a solitary way, survivors as we must be of an impoverishing, invaluable knowledge. We go forward with courage and with too much wisdom but determined to find what is beautiful. It is Dostoyevsky who said, \"Beauty, though, will save the world.\" That moment of return from the realm of sad belief is always miraculous and can be stupefyingly beautiful. It is nearly worth the voyage out into despair.\n\n## **THE MOTHER (OR ALOHA OY)**\n\nA Jewish intellectual had gone to Hawaii to live with a local family. After several months, the head of the family informed their visitor that the clan was ready to introduce him to the family whale. There was a whale that the family revered, he told the Jew. The animal responded to their calls and played with the family at a secret place on the island. They called this whale the Mother.\n\nI can just imagine the Jew's reaction. Aloha oy! Thanks, but no thanks. My people do not hunt or take risks in goyish locations involving harpoons. The Jew must have thought that his host was bonkers, but since these kind people were putting him up, he pretended to consider it. The Jew was also curious. A whale that came on command? he thought. Nothing in this neurotic man's life came on command.\n\n\"I'm not a swimmer,\" he told the elderly Hawaiian, hoping that would end it.\n\nNot to worry, his host assured him. \"Just cling to a rock. The Mother will do the rest.\"\n\nThe Jew felt himself starting to tremble. He had spent his life being afraid of everything, most of all death. He'd tied a tourniquet around his passions. That is why he had come to Hawaii: to wake himself up, to set himself free. The Jew decided to meet the whale.\n\nOn the given day, the family traveled together to a secluded cove surrounded by black volcanic rock. The Hawaiians watched their visitor strip down to his bathing suit, and laughed at his petrified expression as he lowered himself down into the water, clutching the rocks like a monkey. Slowly and in unison, the family began to chant (think of Enya in a hula skirt), their voices carrying over the water as the Jew shivered, awaiting his fate.\n\nThen the most astonishing thing happened. About five hundred yards away, the biggest black whale he'd ever seen surfaced calmly in the water. He was terrified and nearly jumped out of the sea. In spite of his rational mind's protests, however, the Jew stayed where he was. What he felt in his heart seemed to contradict everything he had believed possible until that moment. The Jew sensed that the whale was aware of his terror and was sending him great, warm, enveloping waves of something he could only call love\u2014a strong, immense, impersonal warmth that actually began to calm him down. He was certain that the whale not only could feel his fear, impossible though it seemed, but also knew that he couldn't swim. His only task, the Mother appeared to be telling him, was to stay in the water and feel that great warmth, to trust its heat and go on trusting.\n\nSlowly, the whale began to float toward him, sending miniature geysers from her blowhole as if to introduce herself. The Jew was overwhelmed and stayed perfectly still as the great beast moved in his direction. Then the elder Hawaiian said, \"Touch the Mother.\"\n\nWith shaking hands, the visitor reached out and touched the whale's slick, ebony skin. The moment he made contact, the Mother tilted her body so that he could run his hand along her side. Miraculously, the Jew wasn't frightened. Wonder burned his fear away. He stayed like that for several minutes, with his local friends crooning in the background. Finally the whale slipped away. At that moment, he stopped clutching the rocks and waded into the water, marveling at his own buoyancy.\n\nWhy had he ever doubted this, the Jew asked himself, feeling water as if for the first time\u2014his body as if for the first time, too. Afterward, the world seemed changed; there was awe in him where there had been terror; a confident yes where there had been maybe; courage where caution and doubt had lived; trust in his formerly cynical heart, the desire to swim replacing the notion that letting go, he would sink like a stone.\n\nHe never saw the Mother again. But the world was lightened in the Jew's eyes. He had stepped through the back door of his own mind. He no longer knew what was possible. Nothing in the world seemed beyond his touch.\n\n## **ROPE BURN**\n\nThe day before my mother died, we were in her bedroom passing the time, with Mom's head on my lap and a wall clock ticking, when suddenly she opened her eyes and blinked at me through the morphine haze.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked. She blinked again, then whispered the first words she'd uttered for days, in a dreamy growling voice. \"Easier,\" my mother was saying. \"It's easier when you let go.\"\n\nThis startled me, coming from her of all people, a stubborn, cantankerous, fighting broad who didn't enjoy introspection. Still, I had noticed a subtle change in her, beyond what was happening to her body, without quite being able to name it. My mother seemed to be suffering less, to be more peaceful. There was something making way in her, helping her to loosen her grip. I resolved then to remember this when my own time came.\n\nSaint Augustine said that we can only know what we love. And to know something is to know it's not yours. We're guests in this hotel, after all; even the ashtrays will have to stay. Still, attachment is bound to happen. We imagine our lives to be an accretion, an increase of layers solidifying the identity that holds us down to the ground. But what if the opposite's even more true, that we're winnowed away, worn down by time, pushed into transparency? What if we're humbled, without being severed, in order that we may move through the world with less friction, less regret but more desire, less protection but more love?\n\nBabies only learn this with time. At first they must cling if they hope to survive. Deprived of touch, infants will rock and rock themselves to sleep, as a volunteer at a foundling hospital told me. \"They would sit there with their arms wrapped around themselves on their beds, just rocking and rocking,\" she said. There are orphans, both actual and self-imagined, who crave being held this way their whole lives, trapped in the psychic bodies of infants. How many times have you heard someone say that if so-and-so doesn't love them, they will just die? It's sad but also clearly a throwback to what they longed for as unmothered children.\n\nOne snowy day in the Berkshire Mountains, Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein is talking to me about love and strangling. We're in his house adjacent to the Insight Meditation Society, which Joseph cofounded thirty years ago with fellow Americans Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzburg. \"We assume that clutching and caring go hand in hand,\" Joseph tells me, crossing his size-14 feet on the table between us. A towering man of sixty, Joseph, though single, is no monkish stranger to human tangling. As he talks about pain and clinging and emotional vampirism, he could be any person who's been wounded in love. \"We assume that attachment equates with love,\" says Joseph. \"But just look at these forces closely and you realize how different they actually are. When we feel most loving, we feel most _open_ hearted. Attachment isn't a giving energy. When we're attached, it's a subtle contraction, the heart holding on, saying, 'Please don't leave me.'\" He compares the pain of this to rope burn.\n\n\"But we're human,\" I say. \"We get attached.\"\n\nThis teacher reminds me that the alternative to rope burn is not some chilly pseudo-detachment, apathy masked as enlightenment. It's _commitment._ \"Attachment wants things to stay the same, especially in relation to us,\" he says. \"Since everyone and everything is always changing, this is obviously doomed. Commitment, on the other hand, does not say things must stay the same for us to be happy, but that we will abide with ourselves affectionately throughout these changes.\"\n\nAbide? I ask.\n\n\"Otherwise we only create more suffering. Attachment and commitment are different,\" Joseph says.\n\nThen he stops talking. The room grows quiet. It must be weird to live like a monk, I think, cutting ties instead of tightening them, relinquishing rather than gathering up. Once upon a time, Joseph was a Jewish intellectual himself, seeking far and wide for inspiration, for something to awe him out of himself. He let go of the rocks when the dharma rose enormous-bellied on the horizon. He touched the Buddha's slippery back. The Four Noble Truths became his lovers. Solitude has left him young.\n\n\"Imperfect life,\" I say stupidly, backing off from the silence Joseph loves.\n\nHe smiles again, seeing my _spilkes._ \"'Love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,'\" Joseph says, pretending to instruct me with W. H. Auden's words.\n\n\"You do the best you can,\" I say.\n\nMy mother loved us at the end. Ida's lobster shell fell off. She allowed us to touch her in a way she'd never been comfortable with before, as Samuel's Israeli baker father had blessed his own son in the end. I laid my mother's head in my lap, a tiny skull with gray flattened wisps, and stroked the skin without hurting her. This woman whose attention I'd craved my whole life was now humbled enough to finally surrender. No sign of rope burn anywhere.\n\n\"Am I dying?\" Mom asked the day before she did. She was leaning against the bathtub on her knees, smoking her last cigarette, flicking the ashes down the drain.\n\n\"It doesn't look good,\" said my sister Belle.\n\nMy mother looked more puzzled than scared. Then she said, \"It's not that bad.\"\n\n## **WHAT MAKES THE ENGINE GO?**\n\nWhen I first meet him, a few years before his death at the age of one hundred, poet Stanley Kunitz is a living example of how _viriditas_ works, a photosynthetic phenomenon whose lust for life and singular spirit overflow with ever-greater intensity with each coming year. \"I don't wake up as a nonagenarian,\" Stanley will tell me when we meet. \"I wake up as a poet! It is only the body that wears out. The imagination remains as intense and glowing as ever.\"\n\nStanley answers the door of his New York apartment, bright eyes popping, waving his hands, dressed in funny blue tennis shoes and a shabby tweed jacket. \"Welcome, welcome, welcome!\" he sings, hunched at a sixty-degree angle, leading me at a healthy clip down a long hallway lined with canvases by Stanley's famous friends Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell (as well as abstracts by his wife, painter Elise Asher), piles of books, and a bronze bust of Stanley worthy of a past poet laureate. We settle in opposite high-backed chairs in the large, sunny sitting room. Elise and an assistant field a constant stream of phone calls from a nearby office.\n\n\"There are penalties one pays for a long existence, but I am happy to pay them!\" Stanley smiles and sighs. He looks dwarfed in his large chair, fingertips pressed together under the chin of his ancient, spritely Semitic face. Despite his working-class Jewish background, Stanley speaks in lofty Bostonian Brahmin tones, unfurling one carefully manicured phrase at a time.\n\n\"Reinvention is my philosophy, if you want to call it that,\" he says, looking out the window. \"Imagination is the key to creating a life that is ever new.\" Stanley turns his eyes to me. \"We are each of us a changeling person,\" he says. \"We are not going to be the same decade after decade. Wisdom results from confronting not only one's desires and capacities but also one's limitations.\"\n\n\"The Layers,\" one of Stanley's best-loved poems, is his crystallization of this wisdom.\n\n_I have walked through many lives,  \nsome of them my own,  \nand I am not who I was,  \nthough some principle of being abides  \nfrom which I struggle  \nnot to stray.  \nWhen I look behind,  \nas I am compelled to look  \nbefore I can gather strength  \nto proceed on my journey,  \nI see the milestones dwindling  \ntoward the horizon  \nand the slow fires trailing  \nfrom the abandoned camp-sites,  \nover which scavenger angels  \nwheel on heavy wings._\n\n_Oh, I have made myself a tribe  \nout of my true affections,  \nand my tribe is scattered!  \nHow shall the heart be reconciled  \nto its feast of losses?  \nIn a rising wind  \nthe manic dust of my friends,  \nthose who fell along the way,  \nbitterly stings my face.  \nYet I turn, I turn,  \nexulting somewhat,  \nwith my will intact to go  \nwherever I need to go,  \nand every stone on the road is precious to me.  \nIn my darkest night,  \nwhen the moon was covered  \nand I roamed through wreckage,  \na nimbus-clouded voice  \ndirected me:  \n\"Live in the layers,  \nnot on the litter.\"  \nThough I lack the art  \nto decipher it,  \nno doubt the next chapter  \nin my book of transformations  \nis already written.  \nI am not done with my changes._\n\nDynamism in the midst of our \"feast of losses,\" metamorphosis among the ruins, self-creation inside our own changing story, reconciliation to the dangerous knowledge that while we may no longer be who we were, \"some principle of being abides\"\u2014the authentic, immutable inner voice from which, like the poet, we struggle not to stray. With such directions Stanley has mapped a strategy for weathering time, change, and sorrow without losing our \u00e9lan vital. Curiosity goads this appetite. Whether fortune is smiling, or not, our lives shaped as we'd like them to be, or not, the future seemingly navigable, or not, we remain intensely curious about our own unpredictable changes, all that has yet to be revealed. Curiosity is the link to this green source; so is the courage to remain creative and not cede rule to our screeching demons. The choice of renewal over resignation\u2014truthfulness over the status quo\u2014transforms day-to-day life into evolution.\n\nWe long to puncture the heart of things, to touch the pulsating rawness of being, especially in difficult times. It's no accident that after 9\/11, poetry became a national obsession\u2014Auden's \"September 1, 1939,\" for example. Poetry is the language of survival linking us to the green source, bridging divides of culture and time. During crisis we long for simple things, since only the simplest, truest things are broad enough to carry us across.\n\n\"What makes the engine go?\" Stanley wrote on his eightieth birthday in a poem to his wife. \"Desire, desire, desire.\"\n\nThe road to where Stanley is sitting today has been marked by catastrophic detours. Before he was born, his father had poisoned himself in the main square of their town, Worcester, Massachusetts, leaving the sickly boy and his mother to find their own way in the world. Though he excelled enough in his studies to be hired by Harvard (Stanley graduated in 1924), the university suddenly reneged on its own employment offer for fear that \"Anglo-Saxon students might resent being taught by a Jew.\" Soon afterward he fell in love with a poet named Helen Pearce while both were fellows at Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, married her, and moved with his new bride to a hundred-acre farm in Connecticut. One April day, with no warning, Helen Pearce disappeared from the farm without a trace. To this day, Stanley doesn't know what happened.\n\n\"The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,\" Stanley wrote in \"The Testing Tree.\" His willingness to be broken, then remade, his commitment to the belief that such destruction is natural and fruitful, has led to a life of constant self-reinvention. \"What ever we create is made of the materials of life,\" explained Stanley during a period of tremendous grief. \"We should never think of the life\u2014our life\u2014as being the enemy of what ever we aspire to create.\"\n\nA prot\u00e9g\u00e9e of Stanley's, the gifted poet Marie Howe, received a dose of her mentor's wisdom during a period of great loss. \"I came to Stanley when my brother was dying,\" Marie tells me. \"I told him that it felt as if something had me in its mouth and was chewing me up. Stanley said, 'It is, and you must wait to see who you are when this thing is done with you.'\"\n\nWith his first wife gone and his wunderkind career stalled, Stanley was thrust into the darkest period of his life, a phase that lasted for nearly a decade. Then one day in 1936 he opened the door and found the well-known poet Theodore Roethke standing on his porch with a copy of Stanley's latest commercial failure in his hands\u2014and the offer of a teaching position at his college. \"How he found me I shall never know,\" Stanley says now, \"but that moment will remain with me always. Roethke made it possible for me to live.\"\n\n\"In a dark time, the eye begins to see,\" Roethke himself had written. Since that time, in addition to being poet laureate, Stanley has published dozens of volumes and received nearly every major literary honor available in this country. Even during the hardest of times his inspiration has rarely flagged. \"Poetry is like breathing,\" he likes to say, likening each encounter with a poem to meeting a new bride. \"One never retires from art, any more than one retires from breathing. I say in one of my poems, 'Maybe it is time for me to practice growing old.' I meant it as a joke.\"\n\nStanley turns a hooded eye to one of his wife's bold canvases on the wall behind me, his stubbled chin resting on his chest like a bird's. For a moment, I'm not sure where he is\u2014then the old man swoops back. \"Keats has a great phrase in one of his letters, describing what he values most. He refers to 'the holiness of the heart's affections,'\" he says. \"I remember when I first read those words, recognizing that this holiness would be something that would be forever meaningful to me, a foundation stone of my life. And it has been.\"\n\nIn his stress on reinvention, Stanley shifts emphasis from the endurance of loss to becoming more essentially oneself. \"Every artist I've known has been distinguished, almost from birth, by knowledge of the need to become a self, not just a living body,\" he tells me.\n\n\"Isn't that true of everyone?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Stanley smiles. \"I suppose that it is.\"\n\n\"How does it feel to be almost a hundred years old?\"\n\nHe looks positively jubilant at the question. \"I feel I have found myself,\" he tells me. In another interview, he elaborated on this point. \"I feel in possession of my destiny. That I am not a victim of it.\" \"Look at this beautiful day, for example,\" he tells me now, smiling at a sunlit tree. \"I've been through so much these last few years, but I don't feel I'm powerless at all. There is a sense of another level, a state of being, that is both yours and not yours.\"\n\n\"Has the world become a more dangerous place?\" I ask.\n\n\"Sometimes one does fear for the future,\" says Stanley. \"One fears the loss of the search for the sacred, for the beautiful, for the true. One fears that the dynamics of modern society point toward the practical rather than the spiritual. But I think there will always be individuals who will carry on the great tradition of the prophets and poets. I have such a fierce conviction about the value of existence, the importance of life, that I know that there must be many, many others who feel the same way, and will always be here on earth. That gives me hope.\"\n\nThe last time I see Stanley, two years after our first interview, he's reclining in a hospital bed in the same living room where we first spoke, drifting in and out of consciousness, looking more bemused than uncomfortable. Conversation is no longer easy for him. Stanley listens to me, smiles, shrugs his shoulders, his delight in being here at all still palpable. When I stand up to leave, he squeezes my hand for a long time. Crossing the green parquet floor, I catch sight of a first edition of Stanley's collected poems lying on a table. The final lines of \"The Round\" have remained with me since I first read them.\n\n_I can scarcely wait till tomorrow,  \nwhen a new life begins for me,  \nas it does each day,  \nas it does each day._\n\n## **NOTES AND SOURCES**\n\n**Magical Thinking:** See Joan Didion's _The Year of Magical Thinking_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) for more on \"the American way of grief.\" John Leonard's introduction to Didion's collected nonfiction works, _We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), is also an excellent introduction to Didion's cultural profile (\"a poster girl for anomie\").\n\n**The Roar of Freedom:** For more on \"The Roar of Freedom,\" see _Dialogues with a Modern Mystic,_ by Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek (Chicago: Quest Books, 1994).\n\n**The Day of Laughter:** Stephen Batchelor's _Buddhism Without Beliefs_ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997) is an excellent, lingo-free introduction to the Buddhist way of life.\n\n_**Om Mani Padme Hum** : The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,_ by Sogyal Rinpoche (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), provides a strong framework for understanding impermanence as an element of spiritual practice, as well as the path of the bodhisattva.\n\n**Dragons at the Gate:** See the Willises' memoir, _But There Are Always Miracles_ (New York: Viking, 1974), for more on their story. Mary Willis's autobiographical novel, _Papa's Cord_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), provides background to her journey with Jack.\n\n**Superman's Ghost:** For more on Jim MacLaren, see http:\/\/ JimMacLaren .com. Deep thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert for turning me on to Jim with her article \"Lucky Jim\" ( _GQ,_ May 2002) and asking him the two questions that interested me (about metaphysical pain) before I could get there.\n\n**Home in the World:** My article \"The Crucible of Homelessness\" ( _Common Boundary,_ Spring 1992) rounds out this discussion of homelessness as metaphor. Jonathan Kozol's book _Rachel and HerChildren: Homeless Families in America_ (New York: Fawcett Books, 1988) and Eve Ensler's play _Ladies_ (New York: Central Park Locations, 1989) provide illuminating case studies of homeless individuals.\n\n**The Art of Losing:** Viktor Frankl's _Man's Search for Meaning_ (New York: Pocket Books, 1984) is required reading for anyone wishing to understand survival, dignity, and how meaning is culled from life in extremis. Francis Bok's _Escape from Slavery_ (New York: St. Martin's, 2003) gives the full story of Francis's life before and after he came to the United States.\n\n**A Quarter Inch from Heaven:** Shunryu Suzuki Roshi's _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_ (Boston: Shambhala, 2006) remains the best introduction to Zen practice that I know of.\n\n**Going to Tahiti (or Raising Heaven):** For more on Ram Dass's thoughts about conscious aging, see his _Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying_ (New York: Riverhead, 2000) and Mickey Lemle's documentary _Fierce Grace_ (Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002).\n\n**The Net of Indra:** Daniel Goleman's _Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships_ (New York: Bantam Books, 2006) is an eye-opener regarding neuroplasticity and the science of relationships. Ken Wilber's _No Boundary_ (Boston: Shambhala, 2001) provides a philosophical basis for understanding interdependence (the Net of Indra) in daily life.\n\n**Reinventing Your Wife:** For more on Henry Grayson's theories, see his _The New Physics of Love_ (New York: Gotham Books, 2004).\n\n**Praying:** Three excellent sources on prayer are _Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se of Lisieux_ (New York: Tan, 1997), Kathleen Norris's _The Cloister Walk_ (New York: Riverhead, 1996), and Sharon Salzberg's _Faith_ (New York: Riverhead, 2002).\n\n**Demon Lovers:** For more on Michael Klein's life, see his _Track Conditions_ (New York: Persea, 1997) and _The End of Being Known_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Identifying details have been changed in Kathleen's story to protect her anonymity.\n\n**Questioning (or The Sphinx):** Byron Katie's book _Loving What Is_ (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002) is a thorough introduction to The Work.\n\n**The Terrorists Within:** For more on metanoia, see _The Passionate Life,_ by Sam Keen (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1984). C. H. Waddington's _The Ethical Animal_ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960) provides a hard-science background to terror as an evolutionary element in history.\n\n**Earth Angel:** See _The Protean Self: Human Resiliency in the Age of Fragmentation,_ by Robert Jay Lifton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), for more on shape-shifting and the trickster archetype in human adaptation.\n\n**Something Else Is Also True:** Maria Housden's memoirs, _Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived_ (New York: Bantam, 2002) and _Unraveled_ (New York: Harmony, 2004), offer poignant and inspiring insights into \"child wisdom\" and grief as a prelude to self-discovery.\n\n**Pain Passes, but the Beauty Remains:** This story is adapted from Bo Lozoff's short story \"The Saddest Buddha,\" with great thanks to the author.\n\n**Hedonics:** For more on the science of happiness, see _Stumbling on Happiness,_ by Daniel Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), and _Full Catastrophe Living,_ by Jon Kabat-Zinn (New York: Dell, 1990). For more on Colette, take a vacation with Judith Thurman's _Secrets of the Flesh_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).\n\n**Original Blessing:** To more deeply understand the importance of blessing, see _Original Blessing,_ by Matthew Fox (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Co., 1983), and _Dialogues with a Modern Mystic,_ by Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek (Chicago: Quest, 1994).\n\n**Enough:** Rabbi Rami Shapiro's discussion of the sabbath in _Minyan: Ten Principles for a Life Worth Living_ (New York: Bell Tower, 1997) is worth reading. David Loy's _The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory_ (Boston: Wisdom, 2003) is useful in understanding the hungry ghost dilemma. Bill McKibben's _Deep Economy_ (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007) elucidates the East-West consumer crisis and the virtues of local consumption.\n\n**Stress Matters:** Saki Santorelli's _Heal Thy Self_ (New York: Bell Tower, 1999) is a great overview of stress, its discontents, and treatment.\n\n**The Wounded Healer:** For more on Rachel Remen, see her _Kitchen Table Wisdom_ (New York: Riverhead, 1996) and _My Grandfather's Blessings_ (New York: Riverhead, 2000). Also see www.commonweal.org.\n\n**True Confessions:** For more about narrative medicine, see Dr. Rita Charon, _Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).\n\n**A Splinter of Love:** See Paula Allen's _Flowers in the Desert_ (Santiago: Cuarta Propio, 1999) for photographs and more stories about the women of Calama. Also see Deborah Shaffer's wonderful documentary film _Dance of Hope._\n\n**Nakedness:** Lucy Grealy's _Autobiography of a Face_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) gives a deeper look into Lucy's story. Also see Ann Patchett's _Truth and Beauty_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).\n\n**Killing Peter Pan:** For more about the loss of soul in modern life, see _Care of the Soul,_ by Thomas Moore (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), and _The Soul's Code,_ by James Hillman (New York: Random House, 1996).\n\n**The Water or the Wave?:** Eckhart Tolle's _The Power of Now_ (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999) is indispensable to a deeper understanding of _nunc stans_ and the relationship between conflict and mental labeling.\n\n**At Sea:** For more about Andrew Solomon, see his _The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression_ (New York: Scribner, 2001). Also see Julia Kristeva's memoir, _Black Sun_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).\n\n**Rope Burn:** Joseph Goldstein's books, including _One Dharma_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002) and _Seeking the Heart of Wisdom_ (with Jack Kornfield; Boston: Shambhala, 1987), are treasures for understanding Buddhist wisdom.\n\n**What Makes the Engine Go?:** For more on Stanley Kunitz's life and work, see _The Collected Poems_ (New York: Norton, 2000). Also, special thanks to Genine Lentine for _The Wild Braid_ (New York: Norton, 2005) and for arranging my last visit with Stanley.\n\n## **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**\n\nEvery book has a back story\u2014some more epic than others. Five years, three publishers, four editors, two coasts, a season in hell, two funerals, one wedding, and multiple drafts later, I am indebted to many souls.\n\nMy agent, Joy Harris, is a writer's dream; Barbara Graham is a sister in all things; Eve Ensler, my greatest inspiration and heart; Robert Levithan, best friend and brother; Florence Falk, my beautiful _bechert;_ Maria Housden for unfailing courage; Marcia Lippman for joie de vivre; Catherine Ingram for wisdom in exile; my sister, Belle Heil, for constant kindness; Dr. Paul Curtis Bellman, for faith and nerve; and Amy Gross, dear friend, for suggesting that I write about this in the first place.\n\nDeep thanks to Karen Rinaldi (the first person in publishing to recommend never to rush a book, coincidentally, years before she was my publisher); to Terra Chalberg for comfort in limbo; to Amanda Katz for leading me to my wonderful editor Kathy Belden, whose taste, humor, and indomitable patience showed me what I'd been waiting for all these years. The team at Bloomsbury\u2014 especially Sabrina Farber, Annik LaFarge, Maya Baran, and Sara Mercurio\u2014have been wonderful. Special thanks to Jill Hughes and Greg Villepique for their exacting eye on detail.\n\nProfound gratitude to my close friends Michael Klein, Hugh Delehanty, Martha Cooley, Sharon Salzberg, Samuel Kirschner, Paula Allen, Joe Dolce, Andrew Hood, Katharina Tapp, Susan Dalsimer, Gwenyth Jackaway, Karen Fuchs, Ed and Deb Shapiro, Dr. Sue Grand, Sally Fisher, Billy Blechen, Rabia Halim, and Gary Lennon for love and conversation; to Cynthia O'Neal, Robbie Stein, Marie Howe, Elizabeth England, Ram Dass, Lisa Cornelio, and Roger Housden for writerly strength; and to the many people, including Betsy Carter, Deborah Copaken Kogan, Tyrone Thompson, Ella Pasqueriello, and Dr. David Feldman, who were generous enough to tell me their stories. Deep thanks to Louis Morhaim, my greatest teacher. R.I.P.\n\nAnd to Marco Naguib, most of all. \"Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.\" _Semper fi._\n\n## **A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR**\n\nMark Matousek is the award-winning author of two memoirs, _Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story_ and _The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for His Lost Father._ A contributing editor to _O: The Oprah Magazine_ and _Tricycle,_ he was a senior editor at _Interview_ magazine and has written for many publications, including the _New Yorker,_ the _New York Times Magazine, Details, Harper's Bazaar, AARP: The Magazine, Self, Common Boundary,_ and the _Utne Reader._ He lives in New York City.\nBY THE SAME AUTHOR\n\n_Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story_\n\n_The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for His Lost Father_\n\n_Dialogues with a Modern Mystic_ (with Andrew Harvey)\n\n_Still Here,_ by Ram Dass (coeditor)\nCopyright \u00a9 2008 by Mark Matousek\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.\n\nPublished by Bloomsbury USA, New York\n\nSections of this book have appeared in the _New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, AARP Magazine,_ the _Utne Reader,_ and _Common Boundary Magazine_\n\n\"The Layers,\" copyright \u00a9 1978 by Stanley Kunitz, from _The Collected Poems_ by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.\n\n\"Love after Love,\" from _Collected Poems 1948-1984_ by Derek Walcott, Copyright \u00a9 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.\n\n\"I was lost,\" from _False Prophet_ by Stan Rice. Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Stan Rice. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.\n\nLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA\n\nMatousek, Mark.  \nWhen you're falling, dive: lessons in the art of living \/ Mark Matousek.  \np. cm.  \nISBN:13 978-1-59691-369-1 (hardcover)  \n1. Conduct of life. 2. Life change events. I. Title.\n\nBF637.C5M347 2008  \n155.2'4-dc22  \n2007046175\n\nFirst published by Bloomsbury USA in 2008  \nThis paperback edition published in 2009\n\nE-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-646-3\n\nwww.bloomsburyusa.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nThank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.\n\n* * *\n\nJoin our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nor visit us online to sign up at  \neBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com\nWallbanger\n\nAlice Clayton\n\nGallery Books\n\nNew York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi\nPraise for Wallbanger:\n\n\"Wallbanger is an instant classic, with plenty of laugh out loud moments and riveting characters\u2014highly recommended!\"\n\n~NYT and USA Today Bestselling Author Jennifer Probst\n\n\"Hilarious, romantic, and compulsively readable, Wallbanger delivers the perfect blend of sex, romance, and baked goods.\"\n\n~Ruthie Knox, best-selling author of About Last Night\n\n\"Alice Clayton strikes again, seducing me with her real woman sex appeal, unparalleled wit and addicting snark; leaving me laughing, blushing, and craving knock all the paintings off the wall sex of my very own.\"\n\n~Brittany Gibbons, brittanyherself.com\n\n\"Caroline Reynolds. Finally a woman who knows her way around a man and a KitchenAid Mixer. She had us at zucchini bread!\"\n\n~Curvy Girl Guide\nDedication\n\nTo my mom, for letting me have coconut on my birthday cake  \neven though no one else likes it.\n\nTo my dad, for reading me Garfield comics  \nuntil we laughed so hard we were both crying.\n\nThank you\nChapter One\n\n\"OH, GOD.\"\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump thump.\n\nWhat the...\n\n\"Oh, God, that's so good!\"\n\nI scrambled up out of sleep, confused as I looked around the strange room. Boxes on the floor. Pictures propped against the wall.\n\nMy new bedroom, in my new apartment, I reminded myself, placing both hands on the duvet, grounding myself with the luxurious thread count. Even half asleep, I was aware of my thread count.\n\n\"Mmmm...Yeah, baby. Right there. Just like that...Don't stop, don't stop!\"\n\nOh boy...\n\nI sat up, rubbed my eyes, and turned to look at the wall behind me, beginning to understand what had woken me up. My hands still stroked the duvet absently, catching the attention of Clive, my wonder cat. Butting his head under my hand, Clive demanded to be soothed. I stroked him as I looked around and oriented myself in my new space.\n\nI'd moved in earlier that day. It was a gorgeous apartment: spacious rooms, wood floors, arched doorways\u2014it even had a fireplace! I had no clue how to actually build a fire, but that was neither here nor there. I was aching to put things on the mantel. As an interior designer, I had a habit of mentally placing things in almost every space, whether it belonged to me or not. It drove my friends a wee bit mad at times, as I was constantly restaging their knickknacks.\n\nI'd spent the day moving in, and after soaking in the incredibly deep, claw-foot tub until well past prune, I settled myself into bed and enjoyed the creaks and squeaks of a new home: light traffic outside, some quiet music, and the comforting click-click of Clive exploring. The click-click came from his hangnail, you see...\n\nMy new home, I'd thought contentedly as I slipped into an easy sleep, which is why I was so surprised to be woken at...let's see...two thirty-seven a.m.\n\nI found myself gazing stupidly at the ceiling, trying to return to a relaxed state, but I was startled again as my headboard moved\u2014banged into the wall was more like it.\n\nAre you kidding me? Then I heard, very distinctly:\n\n\"Oh, Simon, that's so good! Mmm...\"\n\nAw, jeez.\n\nBlinking, I felt more awake now and a little fascinated by what was clearly going on next door. I looked at Clive, he looked at me, and if I wasn't so tired I'd have been pretty sure he winked. I guess someone should be getting some.\n\nI'd been in a bit of a dry spell for a while. A very long while. Bad, rapid-fire sex and an ill-timed one-night stand had robbed me of my orgasm. She'd been on vacation for six months now. Six long months.\n\nThe beginnings of carpal tunnel were threatening to set in as I tried desperately to get myself off. But O was on seemingly permanent hiatus. And I don't mean Oprah.\n\nI pushed the thoughts of my missing O away and curled up on my side. All seemed quiet now, and I began to drift back to sleep, Clive purring contentedly beside me. Then all hell broke loose.\n\n\"Yes! Yes! Oh, God...Oh, God!\"\n\nA painting I'd propped on the shelf above my bed fell off and rapped me soundly on the head. That'll teach me to live in San Francisco and not make sure everything is securely mounted. Speaking of mounted...\n\nRubbing my head and cursing enough to make Clive blush\u2014if cats could blush\u2014I looked back at the wall behind me again. My headboard was literally banging against it as the ruckus continued next door.\n\n\"Mmm...yes, baby, yes, yes, yes!\" the loudmouth chanted...and concluded with a contented sigh.\n\nThen I heard, for the love of all that's holy, spanking. You can't misinterpret the sound of a good spanking, and someone was receiving one next door.\n\n\"Oh, God, Simon. Yes. I've been a bad girl. Yes, yes!\"\n\nUnreal...More spanking, and then the unmistakable sound of a male voice, groaning and sighing.\n\nI got up, moved the entire bed a few inches away from the wall, and huffed back under the duvet, glaring at the wall the whole time.\n\nI fell asleep that night after swearing I would bang back if I heard one more peep. Or groan. Or spank.\n\nWelcome to the neighborhood.\nChapter Two\n\nTHE NEXT MORNING, my first official morning in my new place, found me sipping a cup of coffee and munching a leftover donut from yesterday's moving-in party.\n\nI wasn't quite as awake as I'd hoped to begin unpackingpalooza, and I silently cursed last night's antics next door. The girl was plowed, spanked, she came, she slept. The same for Simon. I assumed his name was Simon, as that was what the girl who liked to be spanked kept calling him. And really, if she was making up a name there were hotter ones than Simon to be screaming out in the throes.\n\nThe throes...God, I missed the throes.\n\n\"Still nothing, huh, O?\" I sighed, looking down. During month four of The Missing O, I'd started to talk to my O as though she were an actual entity. She felt real enough when she was rocking my world back in the day, but sadly, now that O had abandoned me, I wasn't sure I'd recognize her if she saw her. 'Tis a sad, sad day when a girl doesn't even know her own orgasm, I thought, looking wistfully out the window at the San Francisco skyline.\n\nI unfolded my legs and padded to the sink to rinse out my coffee mug. Placing it in the sink to drain, I pushed my light blond hair back into a sloppy ponytail and surveyed the chaos that surrounded me. No matter how well I planned, no matter how well I labeled those boxes, no matter how often I told that idiot moving guy that if it said KITCHEN it did not belong in the BATHROOM, it still was a mess.\n\n\"What do you think, Clive? Should we start in here or the living room?\" He was curled up on one of the deep windowsills. Admittedly, when I was scouting new places to live, I always looked at the windowsills. Clive was fond of looking out on the world, and it was nice seeing him waiting for me when I came home.\n\nRight now he looked at me, and then seemed to nod toward the living room.\n\n\"Okay, living room it is,\" I said, realizing I'd only spoken three times since waking up this morning, and every word uttered had been directed at a pussy. Ahem...\n\nAbout twenty minutes later Clive had started a stare-off with a pigeon and I was sorting DVDs when I heard voices in the hallway. My noisy neighbors! I ran to the door, almost tripping over a box, and pressed an eye to the peephole only to see the doorway across the hall. What a pervert I am, honestly. But I made no attempt to stop peeping.\n\nI couldn't see very clearly, but I could hear their conversation: the man's voice low and soothing, followed by unmistakable sighing from his companion.\n\n\"Mmm, Simon, last night was fantastic.\"\n\n\"I thought this morning was fantastic too,\" he said, planting what sounded like one helluva kiss on her.\n\nHuh. They must have been in another room this morning. I hadn't heard a thing. I pressed my eye back to the peephole. Dirty pervert.\n\n\"Yes, it was. Call me soon?\" she asked, leaning in for another kiss.\n\n\"Of course, I'll call you when I'm back in town,\" he promised, swatting her on her bottom as she giggled again and turned away.\n\nIt seemed she was on the short side. Bye-bye, Spanx. The angle was wrong for me to see this Simon, and he was back in his apartment before I could get any sort of sense of him. Interesting. So this girl does not live with him.\n\nI hadn't heard any \"I love yous\" when she left, but they did seem very comfortable. I chewed absently on my ponytail. They'd have to be, what with the spanking and all.\n\nPushing thoughts of spanking and Simon from my mind, I went back to my DVDs. Spanking Simon. What a great name for a band...I moved on to the Hs.\n\nAn hour later I was just placing Wizard of Oz after Willy Wonka when I heard a knock. There was scuffling in the hallway as I approached the door, and I stifled a grin.\n\n\"Don't drop it, you idiot,\" a sultry voice chided.\n\n\"Oh, shut up. Don't be so damn bossy,\" a second voice snapped back.\n\nRolling my eyes, I opened the door to find my two best friends, Sophia and Mimi, holding a large box. \"No fighting, ladies. You're both pretty.\" I laughed, raising an eyebrow at them.\n\n\"Ha ha. Funny,\" Mimi answered, staggering inside.\n\n\"What the hell is that? I can't believe you guys carried it up four flights of stairs!\" My girls did not do manual labor when they could get someone else to do it.\n\n\"Believe me, we waited outside in the cab for someone to walk by, but no luck. So we schlepped it ourselves. Happy housewarming!\" Sophia said. They set it down, and Sophia fell into the easy chair by the fireplace.\n\n\"Yeah, quit moving so much. We're tired of buying you stuff.\" Mimi laughed, lying down on the couch and placing her arms over her face dramatically.\n\nI poked at the box with my toe and asked, \"So what is it? And I never said you had to buy me anything. The Jack LaLanne Juicer was not necessary last year, truly.\"\n\n\"Don't be ungrateful. Just open it,\" Sophia instructed, pointing at the box with her middle finger, which she then turned upright and displayed in my general direction.\n\nI sighed and sat on the floor in front of it. I knew it was from Williams Sonoma, as it had the telltale ribbon with the tiny pineapple tied to it. The box was heavy, whatever it was.\n\n\"Oh, no. What did you two do?\" I asked, catching a wink from Mimi to Sophia. Pulling at the ribbon and opening the box, I was pleased as punch with what I found. \"You guys, this is too much!\"\n\n\"We know how much you miss your old one,\" Mimi laughed, smiling at me.\n\nYears before, I'd been given an old KitchenAid mixer from a great aunt who passed away. It was over forty years old, but still worked great. Those things were built to last, by God, and it had lasted until just a few months ago, when it finally bit it in a big way. It smoked and went wonky one afternoon while mixing a batch of zucchini bread, and as much as I hated to do it, I tossed it out.\n\nNow as I stared into the box, a shiny, new, stainless steel KitchenAid stand mixer staring back at me, visions of cookies and pies began dancing in my head.\n\n\"You guys, it's beautiful,\" I breathed, gazing with delight at my new baby. I lifted it out gently to admire. Running my hands over it, splaying my fingers to feel the smooth lines, I delighted in the cold metal against my skin. I sighed gently and actually hugged it.\n\n\"Do you two want to be alone?\" Sophia asked.\n\n\"No, it's okay. I want you to be here to witness our love. Besides, this is the only mechanical instrument that will likely bring me any pleasure in the near future. Thanks, guys. It's too expensive, but I really appreciate it,\" I said.\n\nClive came over, sniffed the mixer, and promptly jumped into the empty box.\n\n\"Just promise to bring us yummy treats, and it's all worth it, dear.\" Mimi sat up, looking at me expectantly.\n\n\"What?\" I asked warily.\n\n\"Caroline, can I please start on your drawers now?\" she asked, stutter-stepping her way toward the bedroom.\n\n\"Can you start doing what to my drawers?\" I answered, pulling my drawstring a little tighter around my waist.\n\n\"Your kitchen! I'm dying to start placing everything!\" she exclaimed, running in place now.\n\n\"Oh, hell yes. Have at it! Merry Christmas, freakshow,\" I called as Mimi ran triumphantly into the other room.\n\nMimi was a professional organizer. She'd driven us crazy when we were all at Berkley together\u2014with her OCD tendencies and her insane attention to detail. One day Sophia suggested she become a professional organizer, and after graduation, she did just that. She now worked all over the Bay Area helping families get their shit together. The design firm I worked for sometimes had her consult, and she'd even appeared on a few HGTV shows filming in the city. The job suited her to perfection.\n\nSo I just let Mimi do her thing, knowing my stuff would be so perfectly arranged I'd be astounded. Sophia and I continued to putz in the living room, laughing over DVDs we'd watched throughout the years. We paused over each and every Brat Pack movie from the eighties, debating whether Bender ended up with Claire once they all went back to school on Monday. I voted no, and I further bet she never got that earring back...\n\nLater that night, after my friends left, I settled on the couch in the living room with Clive to watch reruns of The Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network. While dreaming of the creations I'd be whipping up with my new mixer\u2014and how one day I wanted a kitchen like Ina Garten's\u2014I heard footsteps on the landing outside my door, and two voices. I narrowed my eyes at Clive. Spanx must be back.\n\nSpringing from the couch, I pressed my eye against the peephole once more, trying to get a look at my neighbor. I missed him again, only seeing his back as he entered his apartment behind a very tall woman with long, brown hair.\n\nInteresting. Two different women in as many days. Manwhore.\n\nI saw the door swing shut and felt Clive curl around my legs, purring.\n\n\"No, you can't go out there, silly boy,\" I cooed, bending down and scooping him up. I rubbed his silky fur against my cheek, smiling as he lay back in my arms. Clive was the manwhore around here. He would lie down for anyone who rubbed his belly.\n\nReturning to the couch, I watched as Barefoot Contessa taught us all how to host a dinner party in the Hamptons with simple elegance\u2014and a Hamptons-size bank account.\n\nA few hours later, with the imprint of the couch cushion pressed firmly into my forehead, I made my way back to my bedroom to go to sleep. Mimi had organized my closet so efficiently that all I had left to do was to hang pictures and arrange a few odds and ends. I quite deliberately removed the pictures from the shelf above my bed. I was taking no chances tonight. I stood in the center of the room, listening for sounds from next door. All quiet on the western front. So far, so good. Maybe last night was a one-time thing.\n\nAs I got ready for bed, I looked at the framed pictures of my family and friends: my parents and I skiing in Tahoe; my girls and I at Coit Tower. Sophia loved to take pictures next to anything phallic. She played the cello with the San Francisco Orchestra, and even though she'd been around musical instruments all her life, she could never pass up a joke when she saw a flute. She was twisted.\n\nAll three of us were unattached at the moment, something rare. Usually at least one of us was dating someone, but since Sophia had broken up with her last boyfriend a few months ago, we'd all been in a dry spell. Luckily for my friends, their spell wasn't quite as dry as mine. As far as I knew they were still on speaking terms with their Os.\n\nI thought back with a shudder to the night when O and I had parted ways. I'd had a series of bad first dates and was so sexually frustrated that I allowed myself to go back to the apartment of a guy I had no intention of ever seeing again. Not that I was averse to the one-night stand. I'd made the walk of shame many a morning. But this guy? I should have known better. Cory Weinstein, blah blah blah. His family owned a chain of pizza parlors up and down the West Coast. Great on paper, right? Only on paper. He was nice enough, but boring. But I hadn't been with a man in a while, and after several martinis and a pep talk in the car on the way, I relented and let Cory \"have his way with me.\"\n\nNow, up until this point in my life, I'd shared that old theory that sex was like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. I now hated pizza. For several reasons.\n\nThis was the worst kind of sex. This was machine-gun style: fast, fast, fast. This was thirty seconds on the tits, sixty seconds on something that was about an inch above where he should have been, and then in. And out. And in. And out. And in. And out.\n\nBut at least it was over quick, right? Hell, no. This horribleness went on for months. Well, no. But for almost thirty minutes. Of in. And out. And in. And out. My poor hoohah felt like it had been sandblasted.\n\nBy the time it was over, and he yelled, \"So good!\" before collapsing on top of me, I had mentally rearranged all my spices and was starting on the cleaning supplies under the sink. I dressed, which didn't take that long as I was still almost fully clothed, and departed.\n\nThe next night, after letting Lower Caroline recover, I decided to treat her to a nice long session of self-love, accented by everyone's favorite fantasy lover, George Clooney, aka Dr. Ross. But to my great regret, O had left the building. I shrugged it off, thinking maybe she just needed a night away, still experiencing a little PTSD from Pizza Parlor Cory.\n\nBut the next night? No O. No sign of her that week, or the next. As the weeks became a month, and the months stretched on and on, I developed a deep, seething hatred for Cory Weinstein. That machine-gun fucker...\n\nI shook my head, clearing my O thoughts as I crawled into bed. Clive waited until I was situated before snuggling into the space behind my knees. He let out one last purr as I turned out the lights.\n\n\"'Night, Mr. Clive,\" I whispered and fell right to sleep.\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump Thump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nUnbelievable...\n\nI woke up faster this time, because I knew what I was hearing. I sat up in bed, glaring behind me. The bed was still pulled safely away from the wall, so I felt no movement, but there was sure as hell something moving over there.\n\nThen I heard...hissing?\n\nI looked down at Clive, whose tail was at full puff. He arched his back and paced back and forth at the foot of the bed.\n\n\"Hey, mister. It's cool. We just got a noisy neighbor, that's all,\" I soothed, stretching my hand out to him. That's when I heard it.\n\n\"Meow.\"\n\nI cocked my head sideways, listening more intently. I studied Clive, who looked back as if to say, \"T'weren't me.\"\n\n\"Meow! Oh, God. Me-yow!\"\n\nThe girl next door was meowing. What in the world was my neighbor packing to make that happen?\n\nClive, at this point, went utterly bonkers and launched himself at the wall. He was literally climbing it, trying to get to where the noise was coming from, and adding his own meows to the chorus.\n\n\"Oooh yes, just like that, Simon...Mmmm...meow, meow, meow!\"\n\nSweet Lord, there were out-of-control pussies on both sides of this wall tonight. The woman had an accent, although I couldn't quite place it. Eastern European for sure. Czech? Polish? Was I seriously awake at, let's see, one sixteen a.m. and attempting to discern the national origin of the woman getting plowed next door?\n\nI tried to get a hold of Clive and calm him down. No luck. He was neutered, but he was still a boy, and he wanted what was on the other side of that wall. He continued to caterwaul, his meows mixing with hers until it was all I could to do to not to cry at the hilarity of this moment. My life had become theater of the absurd with a cat chorus.\n\nI pulled myself together because I could now hear Simon moaning. His voice was low and thick, and while the woman and Clive continued to call to each other, I listened solely to him. He groaned, and the wall banging began. He was bringing it home.\n\nThe woman meowed louder and louder as she undoubtedly climbed toward her climax. Her meows turned into nonsensical screaming, and she finally yelled out, \"Da! Da! Da!\"\n\nAh. She was Russian. For the love of St. Petersburg.\n\nOne last thump, one last groan\u2014and one last meow. Then all was blessedly silent. Except for Clive. He continued to pine for his lost love until four mother-loving a.m.\n\nThe cold war was back on...\nChapter Three\n\nBY THE TIME CLIVE finally settled down and stopped his cat screaming, I was thoroughly exhausted and wide awake. I had to get up in one more hour anyway, and I realized I'd already gotten whatever sleep I was going to get. I might as well get up and make some breakfast.\n\n\"Stupid meower,\" I said, addressing the wall behind my head, and I padded out into the living room. After switching on the TV, I turned on the coffee maker and studied the pre-dawn light just starting to peek in my windows. Clive curled around my legs, and I rolled my eyes at him.\n\n\"Oh, now you want some love from me, huh? After abandoning me for Purina last night? What a jerk you are, Clive,\" I muttered, stretching out my foot and rubbing him with my heel.\n\nHe flopped onto the ground and posed for me. He knew I couldn't resist when he posed. I laughed a little and kneeled next to him. \"Yeah, yeah, I know. You love me now because I'm the one that keeps you in vittles.\" I sighed, scratching his belly.\n\nI headed back into the kitchen, Clive at my heels, and poured some food into a bowl. Now that he had what he needed, I was quickly forgotten. As I headed for the shower, I heard movement in the hallway. Like the Peeping Caroline I was quickly becoming, I pressed my eye to the peephole to see what was happening with Simon and Purina.\n\nHe stood just inside his doorway\u2014far enough inside that I couldn't see his face. Purina stood in the hall, and I could see his hand running through her long hair. I could practically hear her purring through the goddamned door.\n\n\"Mmm, Simon, last night was...mmmm,\" she purred, leaning into his hand, which was now pressed against her cheek.\n\n\"I agree. A fine way to describe the evening and this morning,\" he said quietly as they both chuckled.\n\nNice. Another twofer.\n\n\"Call me when you're back in town?\" she asked as he swept her hair back from her face. Her freshly done face. I miss that face.\n\n\"Oh, you can count on that,\" he answered, and then pulled her back into the doorway for what I can only assume was a kiss that killed. Her foot came up like she was posing. I started to roll my eyes, but that hurt. The right one was pressed so firmly against the peephole, you see.\n\n\"Do svidaniya,\" she whispered in that exotic accent. It sounded much nicer now that she wasn't caterwauling like a kitten in heat.\n\n\"See ya,\" he laughed, and with that, she gracefully walked away.\n\nI strained to see him before he went back inside, but nope. Missed him again. I had to admit, after the spanking and the meowing, I was dying to see what he looked like. There was some serious sexual prowess going on next door. I just didn't see why it had to affect my sleep habits. I pried myself away from the door and made for the shower. Under the water, I pondered what in the world might be required to make a woman meow.\n\nAs seven thirty rolled around, I hopped a cable car and reviewed the day ahead of me. I was meeting a new client, finishing up some details on a project I'd just completed, and having lunch with my boss. I smiled when I thought about Jillian.\n\nJillian Sinclair headed her own design firm, where I'd had the good fortune to intern during my last year at Berkley. In her late thirties, but looking in her late twenties, she'd made a name for herself in the design community early in her career. She challenged convention, was one of the first to sweep \"shabby chic\" off the map, and had been an early trendsetter in bringing back the quiet neutrals and geometric prints of the \"modern\" look that was all the rage now. She hired me after my internship was over, and she'd provided the best experience a young designer could ask for. She was challenging, discerning, had a killer instinct and an even more killer eye for detail. But the best part about working for her? She was fun.\n\nAs I jumped off the cable car, I caught sight of my \"office.\" Jillian Designs was in Russian Hill, a beautiful part of town: fairy tale mansions, quiet streets, and a fantastic view from the taller peaks. Some of the larger old homes had been converted to commercial space, and our building was one of the nicest.\n\nI breathed a sigh when I entered my office. Jillian wanted each designer to make their space their own. It was a way to show potential clients what they could expect, and I'd put a lot of thought into my work space. Deep gray walls were accented by plush, salmon pink curtains. My desk was dark ebony with a chair draped in soft gold and champagne silks. The room was quietly distinguished\u2014with a touch of whimsy coming from my collection of Campbell's Soup ads from the thirties and forties. I'd found a bunch of them at a tag sale, all clipped from old issues of Life magazine. I had them mounted and framed, and I still chuckled every time I looked at them.\n\nI spent a few minutes throwing out the flowers from last week and arranging a new display. Every Monday I stopped in a local shop to choose flowers for the week. The blooms changed, but the colors tended to fall within the same palette. I was particularly fond of deep oranges and pinks, peaches and warm golds. Today I had chosen hybrid tea roses of a beautiful coral color, the tips tinged raspberry.\n\nI stifled a yawn and sat down at my desk, preparing for the day. I caught sight of Jillian as she breezed past my door and waved at her. She came back and stuck her head in. Always pulled together, she was tall, lean, and lovely. Today, clad in black top to bottom but for the fuchsia peep-toe pumps she was rocking, she was chic.\n\n\"Hey, girl! How's the apartment?\" she asked, sitting in the chair across from my desk.\n\n\"Fantastic. Thank you again so much! I can never repay you for this. You are the best,\" I gushed.\n\nJillian had sublet her apartment to me, which she'd had since she moved into the city years ago. Now she was refinishing a house in Sausalito. Rents being what they were in the city, it was a no brainer. The rent control made the price obscenely low. I prepared to gush further when she stopped me with a wave of her hand.\n\n\"Shush, it's nothing. I know I should get rid of it, but it was my first grown-up place in the city, and for the rent it would just break my heart to let it go! Besides, I like the idea of it being lived in again. It's such a great neighborhood.\"\n\nShe smiled, and I stifled another yawn. Her sharp eyes caught it.\n\n\"Caroline, it's Monday morning. How can you be yawning already?\" she chided.\n\nI laughed. \"When's the last time you slept there, Jillian?\" I looked at her over the rim of my coffee cup. It was my third already. I'd be cruising soon.\n\n\"Oh boy, it's been a while. Maybe a year ago? Benjamin was out of town, and I still had a bed over there. Sometimes when I was working late I'd stay in the city overnight. Why do you ask?\"\n\nBenjamin was her fianc\u00e9. Self-made millionaire, venture capitalist, and knockout gorgeous. My friends and I had a killer crush.\n\n\"Did you hear anything from next door?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, no. I don't think so. Like what?\"\n\n\"Hmm, just noises. Late-night noises.\"\n\n\"No, not when I was there. I don't know who lives there now, but I think someone moved in last year, maybe? The year before? Never met him. Why? What did you hear?\"\n\nI blushed furiously and sipped my coffee.\n\n\"Wait a minute. Late-night noises? Caroline? Seriously? Did you hear some sexy times?\" she prodded.\n\nI thumped my head on the desk. Oh, God. Flashbacks. No more thumping. I peeked up at her, and she had her head thrown back in laughter.\n\n\"Aw jeez, Caroline. I had no idea! The last neighbor I remember was in his eighties, and the only noise I ever heard coming from that bedroom was reruns of Gunsmoke. But come to think of it, I could hear that TV show remarkably well...\" She trailed off.\n\n\"Yes, well, Gunsmoke isn't what's coming through those walls now. Straight up sex is coming through those walls. And not sweet, boring sex either. We're talking...interesting.\" I smiled.\n\n\"What did you hear?\" she asked, her eyes lighting up.\n\nI don't care how old you are, or what background you come from, there are two universal truths. We will always laugh at...gas if it happens at the wrong time, and we are always curious about what goes on in other people's bedrooms.\n\n\"Jillian, seriously. It was like nothing I've ever heard before! The first night, they were banging the wall so hard a picture fell off and hit me on the head!\"\n\nHer eyes widened, and she leaned forward on my desk. \"Shut up!\"\n\n\"I will not! Then I heard...Jesus, I heard spanking.\" I was discussing spanking with my boss. Do you see why I love my life?\n\n\"Nooo,\" she breathed, and we giggled like schoolgirls.\n\n\"Yeesss. And he made my bed move, Jillian. Made it move! I saw her the next morning, as Spanx was leaving.\"\n\n\"You call her Spanx?\"\n\n\"You bet! And then last night\u2014\"\n\n\"Two nights in a row! Spanx got spanked again?\"\n\n\"Oh no, last night I was treated to a freak of nature I've named Purina,\" I continued.\n\n\"Purina? I don't get it.\" She frowned.\n\n\"The Russian he made meow last night.\"\n\nShe laughed again, causing Steve from accounting to stick his head in the door.\n\n\"What are you two hens clucking about in here?\" he asked, shaking his head.\n\n\"Nothing,\" we answered at the same time, then cracked up again.\n\n\"Two women in two nights, that's impressive.\" She sighed.\n\n\"Come on, impressive? No. Manwhore? Yes.\"\n\n\"Wow, do you know his name?\"\n\n\"I do, in fact. His name is Simon. I know this because Spanx and Purina kept screaming it over and over again. I could make it out over the banging...Stupid wall banger,\" I muttered.\n\nShe was silent for a moment, and then she grinned. \"Simon Wallbanger\u2014I love it!\"\n\n\"Yeah, you love it. You didn't have your cat trying to mate with Purina through the wall last night.\" I chuckled ruefully and laid my head back on the desk as we continued to giggle.\n\n\"Okay, let's get to work,\" Jillian finally said, wiping the tears from her eyes. \"I need you to land these new clients today. What time are they coming in?\"\n\n\"Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholson are here at one. I've got the presentation and the plans all ready for them. I think they'll really like the way I redesigned their bedroom. We're going to be able to offer an en suite sitting room and an entirely new bathroom. It's pretty great.\"\n\n\"I believe you. Can you run through your ideas with me at lunch?\"\n\n\"Yep, I'm all over it,\" I answered as she headed for the door.\n\n\"You know, Caroline, if you can land this job, it would be huge for the firm,\" she said, eying me over her tortoiseshell glasses.\n\n\"Just wait until you see what I came up with for their new home theater.\"\n\n\"They don't have a home theater.\"\n\n\"Not yet they don't,\" I said, arching my eyebrows and grinning devilishly.\n\n\"Nice,\" she appraised and left to start her day.\n\nThe Nicholsons were definitely a couple I wanted\u2014everyone did. Mimi had done some work for Natalie Nicholson, blueblood and well heeled, when she reorganized her office last year. She referred me when interior design hit the table, and I immediately started plans for their bedroom remodel.\n\nWallbanger. Pffft.\n\n\"Fantastic, Caroline. Simply fantastic,\" Natalie raved as I walked her and her husband to the front door. We'd spent almost two hours going through the plans, and while we'd compromised on a few key points, it was going to be an exciting project.\n\n\"So, you think you're the right designer for us?\" Sam asked, his deep brown eyes twinkling as he wrapped his arm around his wife's waist and played with her ponytail.\n\n\"You tell me,\" I teased back, smiling at the two of them.\n\n\"I think we would love to work with you on this project,\" Natalie said as we shook hands.\n\nI internally high-fived myself, but kept my face composed. \"Excellent. I'll be in touch very soon, and we can get started on a schedule,\" I said as I held the door for them.\n\nI stood in the doorway as I waved them off, then let the door close behind me. I glanced over at Ashley, our receptionist. She raised her eyebrows at me, and I raised mine right back.\n\n\"So?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh yeah. Nailed it,\" I sighed, and we both squealed. Jillian came down the stairs as we danced about, and she stopped short. \"What the hell happened down here?\" she asked, grinning.\n\n\"Caroline got hired by the Nicholsons!\" Ashley squealed again.\n\n\"Nice.\" Jillian gave me a quick hug. \"Proud of you, kid,\" she whispered, and I beamed. I freaking beamed.\n\nI danced back to my office, putting a little bump and grind in it as I made my way around the desk. I sat down, twirled in my chair, and looked out onto the bay.\n\nWell played, Caroline. Well played.\n\nThat night when I went out to celebrate my success with Mimi and Sophia, I may have imbibed more than a few margaritas. I continued with tequila shots, and I was still licking at the now-nonexistent salt on the inside of my wrist as they walked me up my stairs.\n\n\"Sophia, you're so pretty. You know that, right?\" I cooed, leaning on her as we crawled up the stairs.\n\n\"Yes, Caroline, I'm pretty. Good grasp on the obvious,\" she said. At almost six feet tall with fiery red hair, Sophia was keenly aware of her looks.\n\nMimi laughed, and I turned to her.\n\n\"And you, Mimi, you're my best friend. And you're so tiny! I bet I could carry you around in my pocket.\" I giggled as I tried to find my pocket. Mimi was a petite Filipino, with caramel skin and the blackest hair.\n\n\"We should have cut her off after the guacamole left the table,\" Mimi muttered. \"She is never allowed to drink again without food present.\" She dragged me up the last few steps.\n\n\"Don't talk about me like I'm not here,\" I complained, taking off my jacket and starting in on my shirt.\n\n\"Okay, let's not get naked here in the hallway, huh?\" Sophia shot back, taking my keys from my purse and opening my door. I tried to kiss her on the cheek, and she pushed me off.\n\n\"You smell like tequila and sexual repression, Caroline. Get off me.\" She laughed and opened my door. As we traveled to the bedroom, I caught sight of Clive on the windowsill.\n\n\"Hey there, Clive. How's my big boy?\" I sang.\n\nHe glared at me and stalked off to the living room. He disapproved of my alcohol use. I stuck my tongue out at him. I flopped down on the bed and surveyed my girls in the doorway. They smirked in that you-are-drunk-and-we-are-not-so-we-judge way.\n\n\"Don't act all high and mighty, ladies. I've seen you more drunk than this on many an occasion,\" I noted, my pants going the way of my blouse. Ask me why I kept my heels on, and I will never be able to tell you.\n\nThe two of them pulled down the duvet, and I crawled under the covers and glared. They tucked me in so well that the only things sticking out were my eyeballs, my nostrils, and my messy hair.\n\n\"Why is the room spinning? What the hell did you guys do to Jillian's apartment? She'll kill me if I mess up her rent control!\" I cried, moaning as I watched the room move.\n\n\"The room isn't spinning. Settle down.\" Mimi chuckled, sitting next to me and patting my shoulder.\n\n\"And that thumping, what the hell is that thumping?\" I whispered into Mimi's armpit, which I then sniffed and complimented her deodorant choice.\n\n\"Caroline, there's no thumping. Jesus, you must have had more than we thought!\" Sophia exclaimed, settling down at the end of the bed.\n\n\"No, Sophia, I hear it too. You can't hear that?\" Mimi said in a hushed voice.\n\nSophia was quiet, and all three of us listened. There was a distinct thump, and then an unmistakable groan.\n\n\"Kittens, lay back. You are about to get Wallbanged,\" I stated.\n\nSophia and Mimi's eyes grew wide, but they stayed quiet.\n\nWould it be Spanx? Purina? Anticipating the latter, Clive entered the room and jumped up on the bed. He stared at the wall with rapt attention.\n\nThe four of us sat and waited. I can barely describe what we were subjected to this time.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump thump.\n\nMimi and Sophia looked at Clive and me. We just shook our heads\u2014both of us, really. A slow smile spread across Sophia's face. I focused on the voice coming through the wall. It was different...The pitch was lower, and, well, I couldn't really make out exactly what she was saying. It wasn't Spanx or Purina...\n\n\"Mmm, Simon \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 right \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 there!\" giggle.\n\nHuh?\n\n\"Yes, yes \u2014\" snort \"\u2014 yes! Fuck, fuck \u2014\" giggle-hee haw \"\u2014 fuck, yes!\"\n\nShe was giggling. She was a dirty, dirty giggler.\n\nThe three of us tittered along with her as she giggled and snorted her way toward what sounded like one helluva climax. Clive, realizing quickly that his beloved wasn't making an appearance, beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen.\n\n\"What the hell is this?\" Mimi whispered, her eyes as wide as apple pies.\n\n\"This is the sexual torture I've been listening to for the last two nights. You have no idea,\" I growled, feeling the effects of the tequila.\n\n\"LaughyPants has been getting done like this for the last two nights?\" Sophia cried, slapping her hand over her mouth as more moaning laughter filtered through the wall.\n\n\"Oh, hell no. Tonight is the first night I've had the pleasure of this one. The first night was Spanx. She was a naughty, naughty girl and needed to be punished. And last night Clive met the love of his life when Purina made her debut\u2014 \"\n\n\"Why do you call her Purina?\" Sophia interrupted.\n\n\"Because she meows when he makes her come,\" I said, hiding under the covers. My buzz was beginning to fade, replaced by the distinct lack of sleep I'd experienced since moving into this den of debauchery.\n\nSophia and Mimi peeled the covers from my face just as the chick screamed, \"Oh, God that's...that's \u2014\" hahahaha \"\u2014 so good!\"\n\n\"The guy next door can make a woman meow?\" Sophia asked, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"Apparently so.\" I chuckled, feeling the first wave of nausea wash over me.\n\n\"Why is she laughing? Why would anyone be laughing while they're getting done like that?\" Mimi asked.\n\n\"No idea, but it's nice to hear she's enjoying herself,\" Sophia said, laughing herself at a particularly loud guffaw. Guffaw my aunt Fanny...\n\n\"Have you seen this guy yet?\" asked Mimi, still staring at the wall.\n\n\"Nope. My peephole is getting a workout, though.\"\n\n\"Glad to hear at least one hole is getting some around here,\" Sophia muttered.\n\nI glared at her. \"Charming, Sophia. I've seen the back of his head, and that's it,\" I answered, sitting up.\n\n\"Wow, three girls in three nights. That's some kind of stamina,\" Mimi said, still looking in wonder at the wall.\n\n\"It's some kind of disgusting is what it is. I can't even sleep at night! My poor wall!\" I wailed as I heard a deep groan from him.\n\n\"Your wall, what does your wall have to do \u2014\" Sophia began, and I held up my hand.\n\n\"Wait for it, please,\" I said. He began to bring it on home.\n\nThe wall began to shake with the rhythmic banging, and the woman's giggles got louder and louder. Sophia and Mimi stared in wonder, as I just shook my head.\n\nI could hear Simon moaning, and I knew he was getting close. But his sounds were quickly drowned out by this evening's friend.\n\n\"Oh \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 that's \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 it \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 don't \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 stop \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 don't \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 stop \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 oh \u2014\" giggle-snort \"\u2014 God \u2014\" giggle-giggle snort-snort \"\u2014 don't \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 stop!\" giggle.\n\nPlease. Please. Please, stop, I thought.\n\nGiggle-sniffle.\n\nAnd with one last giggle and groan, silence fell across the land. Sophia and Mimi looked at each other, and Sophia said, \"Oh.\"\n\n\"My,\" added Mimi.\n\n\"God,\" they said together.\n\n\"And that's why I can't sleep,\" I sighed.\n\nWhile the three of us recovered from the Giggler, Clive returned to play in the corner with a cotton ball.\n\nGiggler, I think I hate you most of all... \nChapter Four\n\nTHE NEXT FEW NIGHTS were blissfully quiet. No thumping, no spanking, no meowing, and no giggling. Admittedly Clive was a little forlorn from time to time, but everything else around the apartment was great. I met some of my neighbors, including Euan and Antonio who lived downstairs. I hadn't heard or seen Simon since that last night with the Giggler, and while I was grateful for the nights of perfect sleep, I was curious about where he'd disappeared to. Euan and Antonio were only too glad to fill me in.\n\n\"Darling, wait until you see our dear Simon. What a specimen that boy is!\" Euan exclaimed. Antonio had caught me in the hall on my way home and had a cocktail in my hand within seconds.\n\n\"Oh my, yes. He is exquisite! If only I were a few years younger,\" Antonio crooned, fanning himself as Euan looked over his Bloody Mary at him.\n\n\"If you were a few years younger you'd what? Please. You'd never have been in Simon's league. He is filet, while\u2014face it, love\u2014you and I are tube steaks.\"\n\n\"You would know,\" Antonio cackled, sucking pointedly on his celery stalk.\n\n\"Gentleman, please. Tell me about this guy. I admit, after the show he put on last week, I'm a little intrigued about the man behind the wall banging.\"\n\nI'd broken down and told them about Simon's late-night antics after realizing that unless I dished the dirt, they would not reciprocate. They clung to every word like fat kids at a buffet. I told them about the ladies he made the sweet love to, and they filled in a few more blanks.\n\nSimon was a freelance photographer who traveled all over the world. They guessed he was currently on assignment, which explained my quality sleep. Simon worked on projects for The Discovery Channel, The Cousteau Society, National Geographic\u2014all the bigwigs. He'd won awards for his work and even spent some time covering the war in Iraq a few years ago. He always left his car behind when he was traveling: an old, beat-up, black Range Rover Discovery, like the kind you'd find in the African bush. The kind people drove before the yuppies got a hold of them.\n\nBetween what Euan and Antonio told me, the car, the job, and the international house of orgasms from the other side of the wall, I was beginning to piece together a profile of this man, who I still had yet to see. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't more and more intrigued by the day.\n\nLate one afternoon, after dropping off some tile samples at the Nicholsons, I decided to walk home. The fog had burned off, revealing the city, and it was a nice evening for a stroll. As I rounded the corner to my apartment, I noticed the Range Rover was absent from its usual place behind the building. Which meant it was out and about.\n\nSimon was back in San Francisco.\n\nAlthough I braced myself for another round of wall banging, the next few days were uneventful. I worked, I walked, I Clived. I went out with my girls, I made a great zucchini bread in my now well-broken-in KitchenAid, and I spent time researching my vacation.\n\nEach year, I took a week and vacationed somewhere totally alone. Somewhere exciting, and I never went to the same place twice. One year I spent a week hiking in Yosemite. One year I went zip-lining through a rain forest canopy at an ecolodge in Costa Rica. Another year I spent a week scuba diving off the coast of Belize. And this year...I wasn't sure where I was going to go. Going to Europe was becoming prohibitively expensive in this economy, so that was out. I was considering Peru, as I'd always wanted to see Machu Picchu. I had plenty of time, but often half the fun was deciding where I wanted to spend my vacation.\n\nI also spent an inordinate amount of time at my peephole. Yes, it's true. Whenever I heard a door close, I actually ran to my door. Clive looked on with a smirk. He knew exactly what I was up to. Why he was judging me, however, I will never know, as his ears perked up every time he heard noises coming up the stairs. He was still pining for his Purina.\n\nI still hadn't actually seen Simon. One day I got to the peephole in time to see him going into his apartment, but all I caught was a black T-shirt and a mess of dark hair. And even that could've been dark blond\u2014hard to tell in the muted hallway light. I needed brighter lighting for better sleuthing.\n\nAnother time I saw the Range Rover pulling away from the curb as I came around the corner on my way home from work. It was going to pass right by! Just as I was about to get the first peek at him, actually see the man behind the myth, I tripped and went ass over applecart on the sidewalk. Luckily Euan spotted me and helped me, my bruised ego, and my bruised bum off the concrete and inside for some Bactine with a whiskey chaser.\n\nBut all remained quiet at night. I knew Simon was home, and I could hear him occasionally: a chair leg moving across the floor, a quiet laugh or two. But no harem, and therefore no wallbanging.\n\nHowever, we did sleep together most nights. He played Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller on his side of the wall, and I lay in bed on my side, listening shamelessly. My grandpa used to play his old records at nighttime, and the pop and crackle of a needle on vinyl was comforting as I fell asleep, Clive curled up at my side. I'll say this for Simon: he had good taste in music.\n\nBut this calm and quiet was too good to last, and all hell broke loose again a few nights later.\n\nFirst, I was treated to another round of Spanx. She had once again been a very bad girl and certainly deserved the resounding spanking she received\u2014a spanking that lasted almost half an hour and ended with calls of, \"That's it! Right there. God, yes, right there!\" before the actual walls began to shake. I'd lain awake that night, rolling my eyes and growing more and more frustrated.\n\nThe next morning, from my post at the peephole, I saw Spanx leaving and got my first really good look at her. Pink-faced and glowing, she was a soft, round little bit of a girl with curvy hips and thighs, and packing some serious junk in the trunk. She was short\u2014really short\u2014and a little plump. She had to stand on tiptoes as she kissed Simon goodbye, and I missed seeing him because I watched her walk away. I marveled at his taste in women. She was the total opposite of what I'd seen of Purina, who looked like a model.\n\nAnticipating that Purina was soon up on the roster, the following night I gave Clive a sock full of catnip and a bowlful of tuna. My hope was to get him wasted and passed out before the action started. The treats had the opposite effect. My boy was ready to party down when the first strains of Purina came shrieking through the walls about one fifteen in the morning.\n\nIf Clive could have put on a mini smoking jacket, he would have.\n\nHe stalked the room, pacing back and forth in front of the wall, playing it cool. When Purina began her meows, though, he couldn't contain himself. He once again launched toward the wall. He jumped from nightstand to dresser to shelf, scaling pillows and even a lamp to get closer to his beloved. When he realized he would never be able to burrow under the plaster, he serenaded her with some weird kind of kitty Barry White, his yowls matching hers in intensity.\n\nWhen the walls began to shake, and Simon was bringing it on home, I was amazed they could maintain their control and focus with the racket going on. Clearly, if I could hear them, they must have been able to hear Clive and all his carrying on. Although if I were impaled on the Wallbanger Wondercock, I imagine I could compartmentalize as well...\n\nFor now, though, I was impaled on nothing and getting angry. I was tired, I was horny with no release in sight, and my cat had a Q-Tip sticking out of his mouth that looked frighteningly like a tiny cigarette.\n\nAfter an abbreviated night's sleep, the next morning I dragged myself to the peephole for another round of HaremWatch. I was rewarded with a brief side profile of Simon as he leaned in to kiss Purina goodbye. It was quick, but it was enough to see the jaw: strong, defined, good. He gave great jaw. The best thing about that day was the jaw sighting. The rest of the day was shit.\n\nFirst, there was a problem with the general contractor over at the Nicholson house. It seems he was not only taking extremely long lunch breaks, he was actually blazing it up in their attic every day. The whole third floor smelled like a Dead concert.\n\nThen, an entire pallet of tiles for the bathroom floor arrived cracked and chipped. The amount of time needed to reorder and reship would set the entire project back at least two weeks, leaving no possibility of finishing on time. Any time major construction takes place, the project end date is an estimated time of completion. However, I had never missed a deadline, and this being such a high-profile job, it made me very warm (not in a good way) to realize there was nothing I could do to speed things up short of flying to Italy and bringing back those tiles my damn self.\n\nAfter a quick lunch, during which I spilled an entire soda all over the floor and thoroughly embarrassed myself, I headed back toward work and stopped in a store to look at some new hiking boots. I had plans to go hiking over in the Marin headlands this weekend.\n\nAs I examined the selection, I felt warm breath in my ear that I instinctively flinched against.\n\n\"Hey you,\" I heard, and I froze in terror. Flashbacks poured over me, and I saw spots. I felt cold and hot at the same time, and the single most horrifying experience of my life passed through my mind. I turned and saw...\n\nCory Weinstein. The machine-gun fucker who'd hijacked the O.\n\n\"Caroline, lookin' good in the neighborhood,\" he crooned, channeling his inner Tom Jones.\n\nI swallowed back bile and struggled to keep my composure. \"Cory, good to see you. How are you?\" I managed.\n\n\"Can't complain. Just touring restaurants for the old man. How are you? How's the decorating business treating you?\"\n\n\"Design business, and it's good. In fact, I was just on my way back to work, so if you'll excuse me,\" I sputtered, beginning to push past him.\n\n\"Hey, no rush, pretty thing. Have you had lunch? I can get you a discount on some pizza just a few blocks away. How does five percent off sound to you?\" he said. If it was possible for a voice to swagger, his did.\n\n\"Wow, five percent. As much as that does sweeten the pot, I'm gonna pass.\" I chuckled.\n\n\"So, Caroline, when can I see you again? That night...damn. It was pretty great, huh?\" He winked, and my skin begged me to tear it from my body and throw it at him.\n\n\"No. No, Cory. And hell no,\" I blurted, the bile rising again. Flashes of in and out and in and out and in and out. My hoohah shrieked in its own defense. Granted, the two of us were not on great terms, but nevertheless I knew how afraid she was of the machine gun. Not on my watch.\n\n\"Oh, come on, baby. Let's make some magic,\" he cooed.\n\nHe leaned in, and I could tell he'd had sausage recently. \"Cory, you should know I'm about to vomit on your shoes, so I'd back up if I were you.\"\n\nHe blanched and stepped away.\n\n\"And for the record, I'd rather staple my head to the wall than make magic with you again. You and me and your five-percent discount? Not going to happen. Bye-bye now,\" I said through clenched teeth and stalked out of the store.\n\nI stomped back to work, angry and alone. No Italian tiles, no hiking boots, no man, and no O.\n\nI spent the night on the couch in a funk. I didn't answer the phone. I didn't make dinner. I ate leftover Thai from the takeout container and growled back at Clive when he tried to sneak a shrimp. He flounced to the corner and glared at me from under a chair.\n\nI watched Barefoot Contessa, which usually cheered me up. Tonight she made French onion soup and took it to the beach for lunch with her husband, Jeffrey. Normally watching the two of them made me all warm and fuzzy inside. They were so cute. Tonight they made me nauseous. I wanted to be sitting on the beach in South Hampton, wrapped in a blanket and eating soup with Jeffrey. Well, not Jeffrey per se, but a Jeffrey equivalent. My own Jeffrey.\n\nFucking Jeffrey. Fucking Barefoot Contessa. Fucking lonely takeout.\n\nWhen it was late enough that I could justify going to bed and putting this terrible day behind me, I dragged my sad-sack self back to my bedroom. I went to get my pjs, and realized I hadn't done any laundry. Dammit. I dug around in my jammies drawer, looking for something, anything. I had plenty of sexy little numbers, from back in the day when O and I were on the same page.\n\nI grumbled and fumed and finally pulled out a pink baby doll nightie. It was frilly and sweet, and while I used to love to sleep in beautiful lingerie, I currently hated it. It was a physical reminder of my missing O. Although, it had been a while since I'd attempted to contact her. Maybe tonight would be the night. I was certainly tense. No one could use the release more than me.\n\nI shooshed Clive out and closed the door. No one needed to see this.\n\nI turned on some INXS, since tonight I needed all the help I could get. Michael Hutchence always got me close. I climbed into bed, arranged the pillows behind me, and slipped between the sheets. In the tiny nightie, my bare legs slid along the cool cotton. There's nothing like the feeling of freshly shaved legs on high-thread-count sheets. Maybe this was a good idea after all. I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing. The last few times I'd attempted to find the O, I was so thoroughly frustrated that by the end I was near tears.\n\nTonight I began with the usual fantasy roundup. I started with a little Catalano, allowing my hands to slip under the bottom of my nightie and come up to my breasts. As I thought of Jordan Catalano\/Jared Leto kissing Angela Chase in the basement of the school, I imagined it was me. I felt his kisses thick and heavy on my lips, and it became his hands sliding up my skin toward my nipples. As my\/Jordan's fingers began to massage, I felt that familiar tug low in my tummy, getting warm all over.\n\nWith my eyes still closed, the image changed to Jason Bourne\/Matt Damon attacking my skin. With the two of us on the run from the government, only our physical connection kept us alive. My\/Jason's fingers trailed lightly down my belly, sliding inside my matching panties. I could feel it working. My touch was waking something, stirring something inside. I gasped when I felt how ready I was for Jason, and for Jordan.\n\nJesus. The thought of the two of them together, working to bring back the O made me actually twitch. I moaned and went for the big guns.\n\nI went Clooney. Flashes of Clooney came to me as my fingers teased and twirled, twisted and taunted. Danny Ocean...George from Facts Of Life...\n\nAnd then, I went for it.\n\nDr. Ross. Third season of ER, after the Caesar haircut had been rectified. Mmmm...I moaned and groaned. It was working. I was actually getting really turned on. For the first time in months, my brain and the rest of me seemed to be in tune. I rolled onto my side, hand between my legs as I saw Dr. Ross kneeling before me. He licked his lips and asked me when was the last time anyone had made me scream.\n\nYou have no idea. Make me scream, Dr. Ross.\n\nBehind tightly closed eyes, I saw him lean toward me, his mouth getting closer and closer. He gently pressed my knees farther apart, placing kisses on the inside of each thigh. I could actually feel his breath on my legs, which made me shiver.\n\nHis mouth opened, and that perfect Clooney tongue flickered out to taste me.\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump thump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nNo. No. No!\n\n\"Simon...mmm \u2014\" giggle.\n\nI couldn't believe it. Even Dr. Ross looked confused.\n\n\"So \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 fucking \u2014\" giggle \"\u2014 good...hahahaha!\"\n\nI groaned as I felt Dr. Ross leaving me. I was wet, I was frustrated, and now Clooney thought someone was laughing at him. He began to back away...\n\nNo, don't leave me, Dr Ross. Not you!\n\n\"That's it! That's it! Oh...oh...hahahahaha!\"\n\nThe walls began to shake, and the bed-thumping began.\n\nThat's it. Giggle this, bitch...\n\nI scrambled to my feet, the Catalano and the Bourne and the ever-loving Clooney fading away in wisps of testosterone-laden smoke. I threw back the covers, whipped open the door, and stalked out of my bedroom. Clive held out a paw and started to reproach me for shutting him out, but when he saw my face, he wisely let me pass.\n\nI stomped to my front door, my heels pounding into the hardwood floor. I was beyond angry. I was livid. I'd been so close. I opened my front door with the strength of a thousand angry Os, denied release for centuries. I began to pound on his door. I pounded hard and long, like Clooney had been about to pound into me. I banged again and again, never relenting, never letting up. I could hear feet slapping toward the door, but still I didn't let up. The frustration of the day and the week and the months without an O unleashed itself in a tirade the likes of which no one had ever seen.\n\nI heard locks rattling and chains coming undone, but still onward I banged. I began to yell. \"Open this door, you asshole, or I will come through the wall!\"\n\n\"Take it easy. Quit that banging,\" I heard Simon say.\n\nThen the door swung open, and I stared. There he was. Simon.\n\nSilhouetted by soft light from behind, Simon stood with one hand grasping the door and the other hand holding a white sheet around his hips. I looked him over from top to bottom, my hand still hanging the air, clenched into a fist. It was pulsing, I'd been banging so hard.\n\nHe had jet black hair that stood straight up, likely from the Giggler's hands buried in it as he plowed into her. His eyes were piercing blue, and cheekbones just as strong as the jaw. Completing the package? Kiss-swollen lips, and what looked like about three days of scruff.\n\nJesus, there was scruff. How had I missed that this morning?\n\nI gazed down his long, lean body. He was tan, but not a premeditated tan\u2014outdoorsy tan, weathered tan, manly tan. His chest rose and fell as he panted, his skin coated in a thin sheen of sex sweat. As my eyes traveled down further I saw a smattering of dark hair low on his torso, which led below the sheet. Below the six pack. Below that V that some men have, and which on him didn't look weird or BowFlexed.\n\nHe was stunning. Of course he was stunning. And why did there have to be scruff?\n\nI inadvertently gasped as my gaze dropped lower than I had intended. But my eyes were drawn, as if by a magnet, lower and lower. Beneath the sheet\u2014which was already lower on his hips than should be legal\u2014\n\nHe\n\nWas\n\nStill\n\nHard.\nChapter Five\n\n\"OH, GOD.\"\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump thump.\n\nI was traveling up the bed with the strength of his thrusts. He drove into me with unflinching force, giving me exactly what I could take, then pushing me just past that edge. He stared down at me, hard, flashing a knowing smirk. I closed my eyes, letting myself feel how deeply I was being affected. And by deep, I mean deep...\n\nHe grasped my hands and brought them above my head to the headboard.\n\n\"You're gonna wanna hold on tight for this,\" he whispered and threw one of my legs up over his shoulder as he altered the rhythm of his hips.\n\n\"Simon!\" I shrieked, feeling my body begin to spasm. His eyes, those damnable blue eyes, bore into mine as I shook around him.\n\n\"Mmm, Simon!\" I screamed again. And promptly woke up\u2014with my arms over my head, hands tightly grasping the headboard.\n\nI closed my eyes for a moment and forced my fingers to uncurl. When I looked again I could see dents in my hands from gripping so tightly.\n\nI struggled to sit up. I was covered in sweat and panting. I was actually panting. I found the sheets in a ball at the foot of the bed with Clive buried underneath, just his nose peeking out.\n\n\"Oh, Clive, are you hiding?\"\n\n\"Meow,\" came the angry reply, and a tiny face followed the kitty nose.\n\n\"You can come out, silly. Mommy's done screaming. I think.\" I chuckled, running a hand through my damp hair.\n\nI had charmingly sweated through my pjs, so I got up to stand over the A\/C vent, cooling off and beginning to calm down. \"That was close, huh, O?\" I grimaced, pressing my legs together and feeling a not-unpleasant ache between my thighs.\n\nEver since the night Simon and I \"met\" in the hallway, I couldn't stop dreaming about him. I didn't want to, really didn't want to, but my unconscious mind had taken over and was having her way with him. Nocturnally. My body and brain were separate on this one: Brain knew better, Lower Caroline was not so sure...\n\nClive pushed past me and ran into the kitchen to do his little dance next to his bowl.\n\n\"Yah yah yah, settle down,\" I croaked as he threaded himself in and out of my ankles. I dumped a scoop of kibble in his bowl and hit the coffee. I settled against the counter and tried to collect myself. I was still breathing a little hard.\n\nThat dream had been...well, it had been intense. I thought again of his body perched over mine, a bead of sweat rolling off his nose and dropping onto my chest. He'd lowered himself and dragged his tongue up my stomach, toward my breasts, and then...\n\nPing! Ping!\n\nMr. Coffee brought me back from my saucy thoughts, and I was grateful. I could feel myself getting worked up again. Is this going to be a problem?\n\nI poured a cup of coffee, peeled a banana, and looked out the window. I ignored my compulsion to massage the banana and thrust it into my mouth. Oh, sweet Christ, the thrusting! This was headed south fast. And by south I mean...\n\nI slapped myself in the face and forced my mind to think of something besides the manwhore I was currently sharing a wall with. Inane things. Innocuous things.\n\nPuppy dogs...doggy style.\n\nIce cream cones...licking his cone and two scoops.\n\nChildren's games...damn, did I want to do whatever Simon Says...Okay, enough! Now you aren't even trying.\n\nWhile showering I sang \"The Star Spangled Banner\" over and over again to keep my hands from doing anything other than washing up. I needed to remember what an asshole he was\u2014not how he looked in only a sheet and a grin. I closed my eyes and leaned into the spray, remembering that night again. Once I'd stopped staring at his, well, his below the sheet, I'd opened my mouth to speak:\n\n\"Now look here, mister, do you have any idea how loud you are? I need my sleep! If I have to listen to one more night, one more minute, in fact, of you and your harem banging away on my wall, I'll go insane!\"\n\nI yelled to release all the tension that would have, could have, should have been released already in a very Clooney way.\n\n\"Just settle down. It can't be that bad. These walls are pretty thick.\" He grinned, pumping his fist against the doorframe and trying to unleash a little charm. He was clearly used to getting what he wanted. With abs like that, I could see why.\n\nI shook my head to impart focus. \"Are you out of your mind? The walls are not nearly as thick as your head. I can hear everything! Every spank, every meow, every giggle, and I have had it! This shit ends now!\" I screeched, feeling my face burn with fury. I'd even used air quotes to emphasize the spank, meow, and giggle.\n\nAs I spoke of his harem, he began to downshift from charm to chastise. \"Hey, that's about enough!\" he shot back. \"What I do in my home is my business. I'm sorry if I disturbed you, but you can't just come over here in the middle of the night and dictate what I can and can't do! You don't see me coming across the hall and banging on your door.\"\n\n\"No, you just bang on my damn wall. We share a bedroom wall. You're right up against me when I'm trying to sleep. Have some common courtesy.\"\n\n\"Well, how come you can hear me and I can't hear you? Wait, wait, there's no one banging on your walls, is there?\"\n\nHe smirked, and I felt the color drain from my face. I crossed my arms tightly across my chest, and as I looked down, I remembered what I was wearing.\n\nPink baby doll nightie. What a way to establish credibility.\n\nAs I fumed, his eyes drifted down my body, unabashedly taking in the pink and the lace and the way my hip jutted out as I tapped my foot angrily.\n\nHis eyes finally came back up, and he met my stare, not backing down. Then with a twinkle in those baby blues, he winked at me.\n\nI saw red. \"Oooohhh!\" I'd screamed and slammed back into my apartment.\n\nMortified now, I let the water wash away my frustration. I hadn't seen him since, but what if I did? I thumped my head against the tiles.\n\nWhen I opened the front door forty-five minutes later, I tossed a goodbye to Clive over my shoulder and prayed silently that there'd be no random harem girls in the hallway. All clear.\n\nI pushed my sunglasses on as I walked out the door of the building, barely noticing the Range Rover. And by barely, I mean I barely noticed that rover rhymed with over, as in bend me over the chair in my family room and\u2014\n\nCaroline!\n\nI might have a problem here.\n\nLater that afternoon Jillian stuck her head inside my office. \"Knock, knock,\" she said, smiling.\n\n\"Hey! What's going on?\" I leaned back in my chair.\n\n\"Ask me about the house in Sausalito.\"\n\n\"Hey, Jillian, how's the house in Sausalito?\" I asked, rolling my eyes.\n\n\"Done,\" she whispered and threw her arms in the air.\n\n\"Shut up!\" I whispered back.\n\n\"Totally, completely, absolutely done!\" She squealed and sat down across from me.\n\nI offered a fist bump across the desk. \"Now that is some good news. We need to celebrate.\" I reached into a drawer.\n\n\"Caroline, if you pull out a bottle of scotch, I'm going to have to consult human resources,\" she warned, a grin twitching.\n\n\"First of all, you are human resources. And second of all, like I would keep scotch in my office! Obviously that's in a flask lashed to my thigh.\" I giggled, producing a Blow Pop.\n\n\"Nice. Watermelon even. My favorite,\" she said as we unwrapped and began to suck.\n\n\"So, tell me all about it,\" I prompted.\n\nI'd been consulting a little with Jillian as she chose the final touches on the house she and Benjamin had been renovating, and I knew it was just the kind of house I'd been dreaming of for years. Like Jillian, it would be warm, inviting, elegant, and filled with light.\n\nWe talked shop for a while, and then she let me get back to work.\n\n\"By the way, housewarming next weekend. You and your posse are invited,\" she said on her way out the door.\n\n\"Did you just say posse?\" I asked.\n\n\"I might have. You in?\"\n\n\"Sounds great. Can we bring anything, and can we stare at your fianc\u00e9?\"\n\n\"Don't you dare, and I would expect nothing less,\" she fired back.\n\nI smiled as I went back to work. Party in Sausalito? Sounded promising.\n\n\"You don't seriously have a crush on him do you? I mean, how many dreams have you had about him?\" Mimi asked, sucking on her straw.\n\n\"A crush? No, he's an asshole! Why would I\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course she doesn't. Who knows where that dick has been? Caroline would never,\" Sophia answered for me, tossing her hair over her shoulder and stunning stupid a table of businessmen who'd been staring since she walked in. We'd met for lunch at our favorite little bistro in North Beach.\n\nMimi settled back into her chair and giggled, kicking me under the table.\n\n\"Piss off, pipsqueak.\" I stared hard at her, blushing furiously.\n\n\"Yeah, piss off, pipsqueak! Caroline knows better than to...\" Sophia laughed then trailed off, finally taking off her sunglasses and switching her gaze to me.\n\nThe cellist and the pipsqueak watched me fidget. One smiled and the other swore.\n\n\"Ah, jeez, Caroline, do not tell me you are crushing on that guy? Oh no, you are, aren't you?\" Sophia huffed as the waiter set down a bottle of Pellegrino. He stared at her as she ran her fingers through her hair, and she waved him away with a carefully aimed wink. She knew how men looked at her, and it was fun to watch her make them squirm.\n\nMimi was different. She was so tiny and cute that initially men were drawn in by her innate charm. Then they really got a look at her and realized she was lovely. Something about her made men want to take care of her and protect her\u2014until they got her to the bedroom. Or so I'd been told. Crazytown that one was...\n\nI'd been told I was pretty, and on some days I believed it. On a good day I knew I could work it. I never felt as hot as Sophia or as perfectly pulled together as Mimi, but I cleaned up good. I knew when the three of us went out we could really work a scene, and until recently we'd used this to our advantage.\n\nWe each had very distinct types, which was good. We rarely went for the same guy.\n\nSophia was very particular. She liked her men long, lean, and pretty. She liked them not too tall, but taller than her. She wanted her men polite and smart, and preferably with blond hair. It was her true weakness. She also was a sucker for a southern accent. Seriously, if a guy called her \"sugar,\" she'd wet herself. I had firsthand knowledge of this because I'd messed with her one night when she was wasted using my best Oklahoma accent. I had to fight her off the rest of the evening. She claimed it was college, and she wanted to experiment.\n\nMimi, on the other hand, was particular, but not with a specific look. She went for overall size. She liked her men big, huge, tall, and strong. She loved when they had to pick her up to kiss her, or stand her on a stool so they didn't get neck cramps. She liked her men a little on the sarcastic side and hated condescending. Because she was small, she had a tendency to draw types that wanted to \"protect.\" But girlfriend had been taking karate since she was a kid, and she needed no one's protection. She was a badass in a retro skirt.\n\nI was harder to pin down, but I knew him when I saw him. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, I was aware. I did have a tendency toward outdoorsy guys\u2014lifeguards, scuba divers, rock climbers. I liked them clean cut, but a little shaggy, gentlemanly with a touch of bad boy, and making enough money that I didn't have to play mommy. I'd spent a summer with a hotter-than-hell surfer who couldn't afford his own peanut butter. Even Micah's round-the-clock orgasms couldn't save him when I found out he'd been using my AmEx to pay for his sex wax. And his cell phone bill. And his trip to Fiji that I wasn't even invited on. To the curb, surfer boy. To the curb.\n\nI might have taken one more for the road before he left though. Ahh, the days before O's departure. Round-the-clock orgasms. Sigh.\n\n\"So, wait a minute, have you seen him since the hallway encounter?\" Sophia asked after we'd ordered and I'd come back from my surfer memories.\n\n\"No,\" I groaned.\n\nMimi patted my arm soothingly. \"He's cute, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Dammit\u2014yes! Too cute for his own good. He's such an asshole!\" I slammed my hand down on the table so hard I made the silverware bounce. Sophia and Mimi exchanged a glance, and I showed them my middle finger.\n\n\"And then that morning, he's in the hallway with Purina, kissing on her! It's like some sick, twisted orgasm town going over there, and I want no part of it!\" I said, chewing furiously on my lettuce after telling them the story for the third time.\n\n\"I can't believe Jillian didn't warn you about this guy,\" Sophia mused, pushing her croutons around on her plate. She was on a no-bread thing again, terrified of the five pounds she claimed she'd put on in the last year. She was full of it, but there was no arguing with Sophia when she set her mind to something.\n\n\"No, no, she says she doesn't know this guy,\" I reported. \"He must've moved in since the last time she was there. I mean, she hardly ever stayed in that place. They just kept it so they always had a place to stay in the city. According to the neighbors, he's only been in the building a year or so. And he travels all the time.\" As I spoke, I realized I'd compiled quite a dossier on this guy.\n\n\"So has he been wall banging at all this week?\" Sophia asked.\n\n\"Relatively quiet, actually. Either he really listened to me and is being neighborly, or his dick finally broke off in one of them and he's sought medical attention,\" I said, a little too loudly. The table of businessmen must've been listening pretty closely as they all choked a little just then and shifted in their seats, perhaps crossing their legs in unwitting sympathy. We giggled and continued our lunch.\n\n\"Speaking of Jillian, you guys are invited out to the house in Sausalito next weekend for their housewarming party,\" I informed them.\n\nThey both immediately fanned themselves. Benjamin was the one guy we all agreed on. Whenever we'd plied Jillian with enough liquor, we'd confess our crush to her and make her tell us stories about him. If we were lucky and had managed to get an extra martini into her...well, let's just say it was nice to know sex continued to be worth doing even after your man was well into his forties. The one about Benjamin and the Tonga Room at the Fairmont Hotel? Wow. She was a lucky woman.\n\n\"That'll be cool. Why don't we come over and get ready at your place, like the old days?\" Mimi squealed as Sophia and I plugged our ears.\n\n\"Yes, yes, that's fine, but no more squealing or we'll leave your ass with the bill,\" Sophia scolded as Mimi settled back into her seat, eyes sparkling.\n\nAfter lunch, Mimi walked toward her next appointment around the corner, and Sophia and I shared a cab.\n\n\"So, naughty dreams about your neighbor. Let's hear it,\" she began, to the great delight of the cab driver.\n\n\"Eyes on the road, sir,\" I instructed as I caught him looking at us in the rear view mirror.\n\nI let my thoughts drift to the dreams, which had come every night for the past week. I, on the other hand, had not\u2014ratcheting up my sexual frustration to a critical point. When I could ignore the O, I was okay. Now that I was treated to dreams of Simon every night, O's absence was even more pronounced. Clive had taken to sleeping on top of the dresser, safer with my flailing legs, you see.\n\n\"The dreams? The dreams are good, but he's such an asshole!\" I exclaimed, thumping my fist on the door.\n\n\"I know. That's what you keep saying,\" she added, looking at me carefully.\n\n\"What? What is that look?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Just looking at you. You're awfully worked up over someone who's an asshole,\" she said.\n\n\"I know.\" I sighed, looking out the window.\n\n\"You're poking me.\"\n\n\"I am not.\"\n\n\"Seriously, what the hell is in your pocket, Mimi? Are you packing?\" Sophia exclaimed, jerking her head away as Mimi pressed the curling iron through her hair.\n\nI smiled from my place on the bed, lacing up my sandals. I'd put my own hair up in rollers before the girls got here, so I'd been spared the full treatment. Mimi fancied herself some kind of beauty school dropout, and if she could've opened a shop in her bedroom, she'd have given it some careful thought.\n\nMimi produced a brush from her pocket and showed it to Sophia before starting to tease. With the brush, that is.\n\nWe were pre-partying just like we did at Berkeley, right down to the frozen daiquiris. Although we'd upgraded to the good alcohol and freshly squeezed lime juice, it still made us a little hyper and slaphappy.\n\n\"Come on, come on\u2014you never know who you might meet tonight! You don't want to meet Prince Charming with flat hair, do you?\" Mimi reasoned as she forced Sophia to flip her hair over to \"get some lift at the crown.\" You didn't argue\u2014you just let her do it.\n\n\"I'm not flat anywhere. If these girls are on display, Prince Charming won't even notice I have hair,\" Sophia muttered, which sent me into another gale of giggles. Then over our laughter, I heard voices from next door. I got up off the bed and went closer to the wall where I could hear better. This time instead of just Simon, there were two other distinctly male voices. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but suddenly Guns N' Roses came blaring through the walls loud enough to make Sophia and Mimi stop what they were doing.\n\n\"What the hell is that?\" Sophia snapped, looking wildly around the room.\n\n\"Simon's a GN'R fan, I guess.\" I shrugged, secretly enjoying being welcomed to the jungle. I put a headband low on my forehead and did Axl's crab dance back and forth, much to the delight of Mimi and the scorn of Sophia.\n\n\"No, no, no\u2014that's not it, fool,\" Sophia scolded over the music and grabbed another headband. Mimi screamed with laughter as Sophia and I Axl-battled. Until, of course, Sophia started to mess up her hair. Then Mimi lunged. Sophia jumped on the bed to get away from her, and I joined her. We jumped up and down, shrieking the lyrics now and dancing wildly. Mimi finally gave in, and all three of us danced like mad fools. I started to feel the bed moving underneath us, and I realized it was banging merrily against the wall\u2014Simon's wall.\n\n\"Take that! And that! And a little of...that! No one's banging on my walls, huh? Hahahahaha!\" I shrieked crazily as Mimi and Sophia watched in amazement. Sophia climbed off the bed, and she and Mimi clutched each other as they laughed and I thumped. I rocked back and forth like I was surfing, driving my headboard into the wall again and again.\n\nThe music cut off suddenly, and I dropped like I'd been shot. Mimi and Sophia clasped their hands over each other's mouths while I lay flat on the bed, biting my own knuckle to keep from laughing. The frenzy in the room was like when you got caught TP-ing someone's house, or laughing in the back of church. You couldn't stop, and you couldn't not stop.\n\nBang bang bang.\n\nNo way. He was banging at me?\n\nBang bang bang.\n\nHe was banging at me...\n\nBang bang bang! I gave as good as I got. I couldn't believe he had the balls to try to get me to quiet down. I heard male voices chuckling.\n\nBang bang bang came once more, and my temper flared.\n\nOh, he really was an asshole...\n\nI looked at the girls incredulously, and they jumped back on the bed with me.\n\nBang bang bang bang we pounded, six furious fists raining down on the plaster.\n\nBang bang bang bang came back to us\u2014much, much louder this time. His boys must have gotten in on the action.\n\n\"Give it up, mister! No sex for you!\" I yelled at the wall as my girls cackled maniacally.\n\n\"Tons of sex for me, sister. None for you!\" he yelled all too clearly through the wall.\n\nI raised my fists to bang once more. Bang bang ba-bang bang rang out from my side.\n\nBang bang! A single fist answered back, and then all was silent.\n\n\"Oooohhhhh!\" I screamed at the wall, and I could hear Simon and his boys laughing.\n\nMimi, Sophia, and I stared wide-eyed at each other until we heard a tiny sigh from behind us.\n\nWe turned to see Clive sitting on the dresser. He stared back at us, sighed again, and proceeded to lick his bum.\n\n\"The nerve, I mean, the mother-loving nerve of that guy! He has the balls to actually bang on my wall, on my wall? I mean, God what an\u2014\"\n\n\"Asshole, we know,\" Mimi and Sophia said in unison as I continued my rant.\n\n\"Yes, an asshole!\" I continued, still worked up. We were in the car on the way to Jillian's party. The car service had arrived promptly at eight thirty, and we were soon headed over the bridge.\n\nAs I looked out at the twinkling lights of Sausalito, I began to calm down a little. I refused to let that guy upset me. I was out with my two best friends, about to attend a fantastic housewarming hosted by the best boss in the world. And if we were lucky, her fianc\u00e9 would let us see the pictures of him when he was a swimmer in college, back when swimmers still just wore tiny Speedos. We would sigh and gaze endlessly until Jillian made us put them away. And then she would usually put Benjamin away too\u2014for the night.\n\n\"I'm telling you, I have a really good feeling about tonight. I feel like something's going to happen,\" Mimi mused, staring thoughtfully out the window.\n\n\"Something's going to happen, all right. We'll have a great time, drink way too much, and I'll probably try to cop a feel off Caroline on the car ride home,\" Sophia said, winking at me.\n\n\"Mmm, sugar,\" I teased, and she blew me a kiss.\n\n\"Oh, would you two forget your pseudo-lesbian romance? I'm being serious here,\" she continued, sighing in the Harlequin romance voice she used sometimes.\n\n\"Who knows? Not sure about me, but maybe you'll meet your Prince Charming tonight,\" I whispered, smiling back at her hopeful face. Mimi was certainly the most romantic of the three of us. She was steadfast in her belief that everyone had a soulmate.\n\nEh...I'd just settle for my Soul-O.\n\nWhen we pulled up to Benjamin and Jillian's house, there were cars parked everywhere along the winding street, and Japanese lanterns and luminary bags lined the property. Like most houses set into the hilly landscape, from the street there was nothing to look at. We giggled as we made our way through the gate, and I smiled when the girls stared at the contraption before us. I'd seen the plans for this, but had yet to take a ride.\n\n\"What kind of fucked-up rickshaw is this?\" Sophia blurted, and I couldn't help but laugh. Jillian and Benjamin had designed and installed a hillevator, basically an elevator that went up and down the hill. Very practical when you considered the amount of steps it took to reach the house. Their hillside front yard was blanketed with terraced gardens and benches and various garden scenes, all artfully arranged on flagstone paths lit with tiki torches that led down the hill to the house. But for grocery shopping and other less-leisurely approaches, the hillevator made for a much easier ride.\n\n\"Would you ladies care to use the lift or make your way down the path?\" an attendant asked, appearing from the other side of the carriage.\n\n\"You mean, ride in that thing?\" Mimi squeaked.\n\n\"Sure, that's what it's made for. Come on,\" I encouraged, stepping through the little door that he'd opened in the side. It really felt like a ski lift, except that it was going down a hill instead of up in the air.\n\n\"Yeah, okay, let's do it,\" said Sophia, climbing in behind me and plopping down on the seat. Mimi shrugged and followed.\n\n\"There'll be someone at the bottom waiting for you. Enjoy the party, ladies.\" He smiled, and we were off.\n\nAs we rode down the hill, the house rose up to meet us. Jillian had created a purely magical world here, and as there were huge windows throughout the house, we could see into the party as we continued our descent.\n\n\"Wow, there's a lot of people here,\" Mimi noted, her eyes huge. The sounds of a jazz band on one of the many patios below came tinkling up to us.\n\nI felt a little fluttering in my tummy as the cart came to a stop and another attendant came to open the door. As we filed out and our heels click-clacked across the flagstone, I could hear Jillian's voice from inside the house and immediately smiled.\n\n\"Girls! You made it!\" she called as we walked in.\n\nI turned in the space, taking it all in at once. The house was almost like a triangle, set into the hillside and sprawling outward. Deep mahogany wood floors spread out beneath us, and the clean lines of the walls contrasted beautifully. Jillian's personal taste was a comfortable modern, and the colors in the house reflected the colors of the surrounding hillside: warm leafy greens, rich earthy browns, soft muted creams, and hints of deep marine blue.\n\nAlmost the entire back of the two-story house was glass, taking advantage of the spectacular view. The moonlight danced on the water in the bay, and in the distance you could see the lights of San Francisco.\n\nTears sprang to my eyes as I saw the home she and Benjamin had created for themselves and as I looked back at her, I saw the excitement in her eyes. \"It's perfect,\" I whispered, and she hugged me tightly.\n\nSophia and Mimi gushed to Jillian as a waiter brought us each a glass of champagne. When Jillian left to go mingle, the three of us made our way out onto one of the many terraces to take stock. Waiters passed trays, and as we munched on roasted prawns and sipped our bubbly, we scanned the crowd for anyone we knew. Of course many of Jillian's clients were there, and I knew I'd be mixing in a bit of work tonight, but right now I was content to eat my fancy shrimp and listen to Sophia and Mimi size up the men.\n\n\"Oooh, Sophia, I see a cowboy for you right over there\u2014no, no, wait, he's taken by another cowboy. Moving on.\" Mimi sighed as she continued her search.\n\n\"I got him! I spotted your boy for tonight, Mimi!\" Sophia squealed in a whisper.\n\n\"Where, where?\" Mimi whispered back, hiding her mouth behind a prawn. I rolled my eyes and grabbed another glass of bubbly as the waiter passed.\n\n\"Inside\u2014see? Right over there by the island in the kitchen, black sweater and khaki pants? Jesus, he is a tall drink of water...Hmmm, nice hair too,\" Sophia mused, narrowing her eyes.\n\n\"With the curly brown hair? Yes, I could definitely work with that,\" Mimi said, her target acquired. \"Look how tall he is. Now, who is that yummy he's talking to? If that bimbo would just move out of the way,\" Mimi murmured, raising an eyebrow until the alleged bimbo finally moved on, giving us a clearer shot of the man in question.\n\nI looked as well, and as a path opened up, we could now see both of the chatting men. The big guy was, well, big. Tall and broad\u2014linebacker shoulders almost. He filled out his sweater quite nicely, and as he laughed his face lit up. Yeah, he was exactly Mimi's type.\n\nThe other gentleman had wavy blond hair that he constantly pushed behind his ears. He wore bookish glasses that really worked for him. He was long and lean and intense looking, almost classical in his beauty. Make no mistake, this guy was geeky gorgeous, and Sophia drew in a quick breath at the sight of him.\n\nAs we continued to watch the scene unfold, a third man joined them, and we all smiled. Benjamin.\n\nWe headed for the kitchen immediately to say hi to our favorite man on the planet. No doubt Sophia and Mimi were also delighted to have Benjamin handle their introductions. I glanced at the two as they simultaneously worked themselves over. Mimi surreptitiously pinched both cheeks, a la Scarlett O'Hara, and I saw Sophia sneak a quick boob prop. These poor guys didn't stand a chance.\n\nBenjamin caught sight of us on our way across to him and smiled. The guys opened their circle to let us in, and Benjamin enveloped all three of us in a giant hug.\n\n\"My three favorite girls! I was wondering when you were going to turn up. Fashionably late as always,\" he teased, and we all giggled. Benjamin did that\u2014he made us into silly schoolgirls.\n\n\"Hi, Benjamin,\" we said in unison, and it struck me how much we sounded like Benjamin's Angels at that moment.\n\nBig Guy and Glasses stood there grinning as well, perhaps waiting for an introduction as the three of us just stared at Benjamin. He really was aged to perfection: wavy brown hair, just barely beginning to silver by his temples; jeans, a dark blue shirt, and pair of old cowboy boots. He could have walked right off a Ralph Lauren runway.\n\n\"Allow me to make some introductions here. Caroline works with Jillian, and Mimi and Sophia are her, oh, what do you call it\u2014BFFs?\" Benjamin smiled, gesturing to me.\n\n\"Wow, BFFs? Who's been teaching you the lingo, daddy-o?\" I laughed and extended my hand to Big Guy. \"Hi, I'm Caroline. Nice to meet you.\"\n\nHe engulfed my hand with his paw. It actually was like a paw. Mimi was gonna lose her mind with this one. His eyes were full of fun as he smiled down at me.\n\n\"Hey, Caroline. I'm Neil. This tool here is Ryan,\" he said, nodding over his shoulder at Glasses.\n\n\"Thanks, remind me of that next time you can't remember your email password.\" Ryan laughed good-naturedly and extended his hand to me. I shook it, noticing how scorchingly green his eyes were. If Sophia had kids with this guy, they would be illegally beautiful.\n\nI made sure to handle the continued introductions as Benjamin stepped away. We began to small talk, and I chuckled as the four of them began their little getting-to-know-you dance. Neil spotted someone he knew behind me and shouted, \"Hey, Parker, get your pretty-boy ass over here and meet our new friends.\"\n\n\"I'm coming, I'm coming,\" I heard a voice say behind me, and I turned to see who was joining our group.\n\nThe first thing I saw was blue. Blue sweater, blue eyes. Blue. Beautifully blue. Then I saw red as I recognized who belonged to the blue.\n\n\"Fucking Wallbanger,\" I hissed, frozen on the spot.\n\nHis grin slid off as well as he played place-the-face for a moment.\n\n\"Fucking Pink Nightie Girl,\" he finally concluded. He grimaced.\n\nWe stared, seething as the air literally turned electric between us, snapping and crackling.\n\nThe four behind us had fallen silent, listening to this little interchange. Then they caught up.\n\n\"That's Wallbanger?\" Sophia screeched.\n\n\"Wait a minute, that's Pink Nightie Girl?\" Neil laughed, and Mimi and Ryan snorted.\n\nMy face flamed bright red as I processed this information, and Simon's sneer became that damnable smirk I'd seen that night in the hallway\u2014when I'd banged on his door and made him quit giving it to the Giggler and yelled at him. When I'd been wearing...\n\n\"Pink Nightie Girl. Pink Nightie Girl!\" I choked out, beyond pissed. Beyond angry. Well into Furious Town. I stared at him, pouring all of my tension into that one look. All of the sleepless nights and lost Os and cold showers and banana thrusting and merciless wet dreams went into that one look.\n\nI wanted to level him with my eyes, make him beg for mercy. But no...Not Simon, Director of the International House Of Orgasms.\n\nHe\n\nWas\n\nStill\n\nSmirking.\nChapter Six\n\nWE STOOD STARING AT EACH OTHER, waves of anger and annoyance pinging back and forth between us. We glared, he with the smirk and me with the sneer, until I noticed that our very own peanut gallery had fallen silent again, along with every other guest in the kitchen. I looked past my neighbor and saw Jillian standing with Benjamin with an inquisitive look on her face\u2014no doubt wondering why her prot\u00e9g\u00e9 was squaring off in the middle of her housewarming.\n\nWait a minute\u2014how the hell did she know Simon? Why was he even here?\n\nI felt a tiny hand on my shoulder and spun quickly to see Mimi.\n\n\"Easy, Trigger. You don't need to go nuclear at Jillian's, 'kay?\" she whispered, smiling shyly at Simon. I tossed her a look and turned back to him, finding him joined by our hosts.\n\n\"Caroline, I didn't realize you knew Simon. What a small world!\" Jillian exclaimed, clasping her hands together.\n\n\"I wouldn't say I know him, but I'm familiar with his work,\" I replied through clenched teeth. Mimi danced in a circle around us like a little kid with a secret.\n\n\"Jillian, you won't believe this but\u2014\" she started, her voice bubbling over with barely concealed mirth.\n\n\"Mimi...\" I warned.\n\n\"Simon is Simon from next door! Simon Wallbanger!\" Sophia cried, grasping Benjamin's arm. I'm sure she only did it so she could touch the Benjamin.\n\n\"Dammit,\" I breathed as Jillian took in this information.\n\n\"No fucking way,\" she breathed, hand clapping over her mouth as she dropped the f-bomb. Jillian always tried to be such a lady. Benjamin looked confused, and Simon had the decency to blush a little.\n\n\"Asshole,\" I mouthed to him.\n\n\"Cockblocker,\" he mouthed back, the smirk returning in full force.\n\nI gasped. I clenched my fists and prepared to tell him exactly what he could do with his cockblocker when Neil burst in.\n\n\"Benjamin, check this out\u2014this little hottie here is the Pink Nightie Girl! Can you stand it!\" He laughed as Ryan struggled to keep a straight face. Benjamin's eyes widened, and he raised an eyebrow at me. Simon swallowed a laugh.\n\n\"Pink Nightie Girl?\" Jillian asked, and I heard Benjamin lean in and tell her he'd explain later.\n\n\"Okay, that's it!\" I shouted and I pointed at Simon. \"You. A word, please?\" I barked and grabbed him by the arm. I yanked him outside and pulled him down one of the paths that led away from the house. He scrambled along after me, my heels ringing out angrily on the flagstone.\n\n\"Jesus, slow down, will you?\"\n\nMy response was to dig my nails into his arm, which made him yelp. Good.\n\nWe reached a little enclave set away from the house and the party\u2014far enough away that no one would hear him scream when I removed his balls from his body. I released his arm and rounded on him, pointing a finger in his surprised face.\n\n\"You've got some nerve telling everyone about me, asshole! What the hell? Pink Nightie Girl? Are you kidding me?\" I whisper-yelled.\n\n\"Hey, I could ask you the same question! Why do all those girls in there call me Wallbanger, huh? Who's telling tales now?\" he whisper-yelled right back.\n\n\"Are you kidding me? Cockblocker? Just because I refused to spend another night listening to you and your harem does not make me a cockblocker!\" I hissed.\n\n\"Well, due to the fact that your door-banging blocked my cock, it actually does make you a cockblocker. Cockblocker!\" he hissed back. This entire conversation was beginning to sound like something that might have happened in fourth grade\u2014except for all the nighties and the cock talk.\n\n\"Now, you listen here, mister,\" I said, trying for a more adult tone. \"I'm not going to spend every night listening to you try to crash your girl's head through my wall with the force of your dick alone! No way, buddy.\" I pointed a finger at him. He grabbed it.\n\n\"What I do on my side of that wall is my business. Let's get that straight right now. And why are you so concerned about me and my dick anyway?\" he asked, smirking at me again.\n\nIt was the smirk, that damn smirk, that made me go ballistic. That and the fact that he was still holding my finger.\n\n\"It is my business when you and your sex train come knocking on my wall every night!\"\n\n\"You're really fixated on this, aren't you? Wish you were on the other side of that wall? Are you lookin' to ride that sex train, Nightie Girl?\" He chuckled as he wagged his finger in my face.\n\n\"Okay, that's it,\" I growled. I grabbed his finger in defense, which instantly locked us together. We must have looked like two loggers trying to cut down a tree. We struggled back and forth\u2014beyond ridiculous. We both huffed and puffed, each trying to get the upper hand, each refusing to relent.\n\n\"Why are you such a manwhoring asshole?\" I asked, my face inches from his.\n\n\"Why are you such a cockblocking priss?\" he asked, and when I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what I thought, the fucker kissed me.\n\nKissed me.\n\nPlaced his lips on mine and kissed me. Under the moon and the stars, with the sounds of the waves crashing and the crickets cricketing. My eyes were still open, furiously looking back into his. His eyes were so blue, it was like looking at two angry oceans.\n\nHe pulled away, our fingers still gripping each other's like pliers. I released his hand and slapped him across the face. He looked shocked, even more so as I grabbed his sweater and pulled him closer. I kissed him, this time closing my eyes and letting my hands fill with wool and my nose fill with warm boy smell.\n\nGod damn, he smelled good.\n\nHis hands crept around to the small of my back, and as soon as he touched me, I realized where I was and what I was doing. \"Dammit,\" I said, and pulled away. We stood looking at each other, and I wiped at my lips. I started to walk away and then turned back quickly.\n\n\"This never happened, got it?\" I pointed at him again.\n\n\"Whatever you say.\" He smirked, and I felt my temper flare again.\n\n\"And cool it with the Pink Nightie stuff, okay?\" I whisper-yelled and turned to walk back down the path.\n\n\"Until I get to see your other nighties, that's what I'm calling you,\" he shot back, and I almost tripped. I smoothed my dress and headed back to the party.\n\nUnbelievable.\n\n\"So I told the guy, there is no way I'm organizing your 'play room.' You can arrange your own riding crops!\" Mimi shrieked, and we all laughed. She can tell a story like nobody's business. She has a knack for bringing a group together, especially when it's new people just getting to know each other.\n\nAs the party began to wind down, my girls and Simon's guys were gathered around a fire pit on one of the terraces. Dug deep and lined with flagstone, it had benches all around. While the fire crackled merrily, we laughed and drank and told stories. And by that I mean Mimi, Sophia, Neil, and Ryan told stories while Simon and I glared at each other over the flames. With the sparks flying, if I squinted my eyes a little I could imagine him roasting in the fires of hell.\n\n\"So, are we gonna address the elephant in the room here?\" Ryan asked, drawing his knees up and placing his beer on the bench next to him.\n\n\"Which elephant would that be?\" I asked sweetly, sipping my wine.\n\n\"Oh, please\u2014the fact that the guy thumping the headboard off your bed is the hottie across the way, girl!\" Mimi squealed, almost tossing her drink in Neil's face. He laughed along with her, but pried the glass out of her hand before she could do any real damage.\n\n\"There really isn't anything to talk about,\" Simon said. \"I have a new neighbor. Her name is Caroline. That's it.\" He nodded, eyeing me across the fire. I raised my eyebrow and sipped my wine.\n\n\"Yeah, it's nice to know Pink Nightie Girl has a name. The way he described you...wow! I wasn't sure you were real, but you're as hot as he said you were!\" Neil hooted at me appreciatively, trying for a moment to fist bump Simon through the flames before he realized how hot they were.\n\nMy eyes shot to Simon. He grimaced at the description. Interesting...\n\n\"So, you were the guys banging back at us tonight? Listening to the Guns N' Roses?\" Sophia asked, nudging Ryan.\n\n\"You were the girls singing along, I suppose, yes?\" He nudged back, smiling.\n\n\"Small world, isn't it?\" Mimi sighed, gazing up at Neil. He winked at her, and I saw quickly where this was going. She had her giant, Sophia had her pretty boy, and I had my wine. Which was disappearing by the second.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" I muttered and stood up to find a waiter.\n\nI made my way through the dwindling crowd, nodding at a few faces I recognized. I accepted yet another glass of wine and strolled back outside. I'd started back toward the fire pit when I heard Mimi say, \"And you should have heard Caroline when she told us about the night she banged on his door.\"\n\nSophia and Mimi leaned together and said breathlessly, \"He...was...still...hard!\"\n\nThey all dissolved into laughter. I needed to remember to kill those girls tomorrow, with pain.\n\nI groaned at my public humiliation and spun around to stomp off into the gardens when I saw Simon in the shadows. I tried to back away before he saw me, but he waved.\n\n\"Come on, come on, I don't bite,\" he scoffed.\n\n\"Yeah, sure, I guess,\" I answered, walking toward him.\n\nWe stood quietly in the night. I looked out over the bay, enjoying the silence. Then he finally spoke.\n\n\"So I was thinking, since we're neighbors and all\u2014\" he started.\n\nI turned to look at him. He was giving me a sexy little grin, and I knew that's what he used to make the panties drop. Ha\u2014little did he know I wasn't wearing any.\n\n\"You were thinking what? That I'd want to join you some night? See what all the fuss is about? Hop on the welcome wagon? Honey, I have no interest in becoming one of your girls,\" I answered, glaring at him.\n\nHe said nothing.\n\n\"Well?\" I asked, tapping my foot angrily. The nerve of this guy...\n\n\"Actually, I was going to say, since we're neighbors and all, maybe we could call a truce?\" he said quietly, looking at me in a very irritated way.\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. It was all I could say.\n\n\"Or maybe not,\" he finished and started to walk away.\n\n\"Wait, wait, wait, Simon,\" I groaned grabbing him by the wrist as he pushed past me.\n\nHe stood there, glaring.\n\n\"Yes. Fine. We can call a truce. But there will have to be some ground rules,\" I replied, turning to face him. He crossed his arms over his chest.\n\n\"I should warn you now, I don't enjoy women telling me what to do,\" he answered darkly.\n\n\"Not from what I've heard,\" I said under my breath, but he caught it anyway.\n\n\"That's different,\" he said, the cockiness beginning to reappear.\n\n\"Okay, here's the thing. You enjoy yourself, do your thing, hang from the ceiling fans, I don't care. But late at night? Can we keep it down to a dull roar? Please? I gotta get some sleep.\"\n\nHe considered for a moment. \"Yes, I can see where that might be a problem. But you know, you don't really know anything about me, and you certainly don't know anything about me and my 'harem,' as you call it. I don't have to justify my life, or the women in it, to you. So no more nasty judgments, agreed?\"\n\nI considered it. \"Agreed. By the way, I appreciated the quiet this week. Something happen?\"\n\n\"Happen? What do you mean?\" he asked as we walked back to the group.\n\n\"I thought maybe you were injured in the line of duty, like your dick broke off or something,\" I joked, proud to use my zinger again.\n\n\"Unbelievable. That's all you think I am, isn't it?\" he retorted, his face angry again.\n\n\"A dick? Yes, in fact,\" I snapped back.\n\n\"Now look\u2014\" he started, and Neil appeared out of nowhere.\n\n\"Nice to see you two have kissed and made up,\" he chided, pretending to hold Simon back.\n\n\"Can it, anchorman,\" Simon muttered as the rest of the newly paired-off reappeared.\n\n\"Cool it with the anchorman, huh?\" Neil said, and Sophia whirled on him.\n\n\"Anchorman! Wait a minute, you're the local sports guy on NBC, right? Am I right?\" she asked.\n\nI watched his eyes light up. Sophia may have been a classical music kind of girl, but she was also a huge 49ers fan. I was pretty sure the 49ers were a football team.\n\n\"Yeah, that's me. You watch a lot of sports?\" he asked, leaning toward her, bringing Mimi along. The way she was clinging to his arm, it was unavoidable. She stumbled a little, and Ryan swooped in to steady her. They smiled at each other as Sophia and Neil continued their football talk. I coughed, reminding them that I was, in fact, still here.\n\n\"Caroline, we're taking off!\" Sophia giggled, now leaning on Ryan's arm. I glared at Simon one more time and stalked toward the girls.\n\n\"That's good. I've had enough fun for tonight. I'll call for the car, and we can head out in a few,\" I replied, reaching into my bag for my phone.\n\n\"Actually, Neil was telling us about this great little bar, and we were going to go that way. Do you two want to come?\" Mimi interrupted, stopping my hand. She squeezed it, and I saw her shake her head almost imperceptibly.\n\n\"No?\" I asked, raising both eyebrows.\n\n\"Great! Ol' Wallbanger here'll make sure you get home okay,\" Neil said, clapping Simon roughly on the back.\n\n\"Yeah, sure,\" he said through clenched teeth.\n\nBefore I could even blink, the four of them were on their way to the hillevator, saying sloppy goodbyes to Benjamin and Jillian, who just laughed and shared a high five.\n\nWallbanger and I stared at each other, and I suddenly felt exhausted. \"Truce?\" I said tiredly.\n\n\"Truce,\" he said, nodding.\n\nWe left the party together. We drove back across the bridge, with the late-night fog and silence enveloping us. He'd opened the door for me when I approached the Rover, probably some ingrained training from his mother. His hand had rested on the small of my back as I climbed in, and then it was gone and he was around to his side before I even had a chance to make a snarky remark. Maybe it was best; we had called a truce. The second truce within the span of mere minutes. This was going to end badly, I could tell. Still, I would try. I could be neighborly, right?\n\nNeighborly. Ha. That kiss was all kinds of neighborly. I was trying as hard as I could not to think about it, but it just kept bubbling up. I pressed my fingers to my lips without even realizing it, remembering the feeling of his mouth on mine. His kiss was almost a dare, calling my bluff\u2014a promise of what would follow if I allowed it.\n\nMy kiss? Straight up instinct that frankly surprised me. Why had I kissed him? I had no idea, but I did. It must have looked ridiculous. I'd slapped him, then kissed him like some scene from an old Cary Grant movie. I'd thrown my entire body into my kiss, letting my soft places curve against his strong. My mouth had sought his, and his kiss had grown as eager as mine. There was no fairy tale music, but there was something there. And it had quickly hardened against my thigh...\n\nHis messing about with the radio brought me back to the present. He appeared quite focused on the music as we drove across the bridge, which made me quite nervous.\n\n\"Can I help you with that? Please?\" I asked, looking nervously at the water below.\n\n\"No thanks, I got it,\" he said, glancing at me. He must have noticed the way I was peering over the side of the bridge, and he chuckled. \"Okay, sure, go ahead. I mean, you knew every word to 'Welcome to the Jungle,' so you might pick out something good,\" he challenged.\n\nHe returned his eyes to the road, but even from the side, I could see the approving grin. Which, and I hated to admit it, made his jaw look like it had been chiseled out of the hottest piece of granite ever unearthed.\n\n\"I'm sure I can find something,\" I sassed, reaching over his hand and leaning toward him. His hand grazed against the side of my breast, and we both flinched. \"What, you tryin' to cop a feel there?\" I snapped, selecting a song.\n\n\"Did you or did you not just place your tits in the path of my hand?\" he sniped back.\n\n\"I think your hand just moved in front of the girls' trajectory, but don't sweat it. You're hardly the first that these celestial beings have brought into their orbit.\" I sighed dramatically, looking at him sideways to see if he could tell I was joking. The corner of his mouth rose into a grin, and I allowed myself a small smile as well.\n\n\"Yes, celestial. That's the word I was going to use\u2014as in, not of this earth. As in, suspended in the heavens. As in, courtesy of Victoria's Secret.\" He grinned, and I pretended to be shocked.\n\n\"Oh my, you know of the Secret? And here I thought we silly girls had you all fooled.\" I laughed and settled back into my seat. We'd crossed the bridge and now returned to the city.\n\n\"It takes a lot to fool me, especially when it comes to the opposite sex,\" he replied, as the music came on. He nodded at my choice. \"Too Short? Interesting selection. Not many women would have chosen this,\" he mused.\n\n\"What can I say? I'm feeling very Bay Area tonight. And I should tell you now, I am not like most women,\" I added, feeling another smile sneak across my face.\n\n\"I'm beginning to get that,\" he said.\n\nWe were quiet for a few minutes, then suddenly both started to speak at once.\n\n\"So what do you think about\u2014\" I began.\n\n\"Can you believe that they all\u2014\" he said.\n\n\"Go ahead.\" I chuckled.\n\n\"No, what were you going to say?\"\n\n\"I was going to say, so what do you think about our friends tonight?\"\n\n\"That's actually what I was going to say. I couldn't believe they just up and left us!\" He laughed, and I couldn't help but laugh along with him. He had a great laugh.\n\n\"I know, but my girls know what they want. I couldn't have painted two better guys for them. They're exactly what they look for,\" I confided, leaning against the window so I could watch him as we navigated the hilly streets.\n\n\"Yeah, Neil has a weakness for Asian girls\u2014and I swear that sounded less pervy in my head. And Ryan loves him some leggy redheads.\" He laughed again, glancing over to see if I was okay with his leggy redhead comment.\n\nI was. She was.\n\n\"Well, I'm sure I'll hear all about it tomorrow\u2014what kind of impression they made on my ladies. I'll get the full report, don't you worry.\" I sighed. My phone would be ringing off the hook.\n\nSilence crept back in, and I wondered what to say next.\n\n\"So how do you know Benjamin and Jillian?\" he asked, saving me from small talk fever.\n\n\"I work for Jillian at the firm. I'm an interior designer.\"\n\n\"Wait. Hold up, you're that Caroline?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have no idea what that means,\" I answered, wondering why he was now staring at me.\n\n\"Damn, it really is a small world,\" he exclaimed, shaking his head from side to side as though trying to clear it.\n\nHe was silent as I sat there in limbo.\n\n\"Hey, wanna clear that up a bit? What did you mean, that Caroline?\" I finally questioned, slapping his shoulder.\n\n\"It's just that...well...huh. Jillian has mentioned you before. Let's leave it at that,\" he said.\n\n\"Hell no, we won't leave it at that! What did she say?\" I pushed, slapping again at his shoulder.\n\n\"Would you cut that out? You're really rough, you know that?\" he said.\n\nThere were simply too many ways I could go with that comment, so I wisely kept quiet.\n\n\"What did she say about me?\" I asked quietly, now worried that perhaps she'd said something about my work. My nerves were already shot, and now they were pinging.\n\nHe looked over at me. \"No, no, it's not like that,\" he said quickly. \"It's nothing bad. It's just that, well, Jillian adores you. And she adores me\u2014of course, right?\"\n\nI rolled my eyes, but played along.\n\n\"And well, she might have...mentioned a few times...that she thought I should meet you,\" he dragged out, only to wink at me when I met his eyes.\n\n\"Oh. Ohhhh,\" I breathed as I realized what he meant. I blushed. Jillian, that little matchmaking shit. \"Does she know about the harem?\" I asked.\n\n\"Would you quit with that? Don't call them the harem. You make it sound so shady. What if I told you those three women were incredibly important to me? That I care a lot about them. That the relationships I have with them work for us, and no one else needs to understand it\u2014got it?\" he said, pulling the Rover to an angry stop at the curb outside our building.\n\nI was quiet as I studied my hands and watched him rake his through his already messed-up hair.\n\n\"Hey, you know what? You're right. Who am I to say what's right or wrong for anyone else. If it works for you, great. Hit it. Mazel tov. I'm just surprised Jillian would want to set you up with me. She knows I'm a pretty traditional girl, that's all,\" I explained.\n\nHe grinned and turned the force of his blue eyes on me.\n\n\"As it happens, she doesn't know everything about me. I keep my private life private\u2014with the exception of my neighbor with the thin walls and the devastating lingerie,\" he said in a low voice that could melt, well, anything.\n\nMy brain was most certainly among those things, seeing as I suddenly felt it oozing out of my ears and on down to my collar.\n\n\"Except for her,\" I muttered, thoroughly scrambled.\n\nHe let out a dark laugh and opened his door. He kept his eyes on mine as he strode around the car and opened my door.\n\nI climbed down, taking the hand he offered me, and almost not noticing that he traced a tiny circle on the inside of my left hand with his right thumb. Almost didn't notice it, my ass. It made my skin pebble and Lower Caroline sit up straight. Nerves? Shooting like fireworks all over the place.\n\nWe walked inside the building, and he once again opened the door for me. He really was charming, I had to give him that.\n\n\"So how do you know Benjamin and Jillian?\" I asked, walking up the stairs ahead of him. I knew for certain he was checking out my legs, and why wouldn't he? I had great stems, currently flattered by my flouncy little dress.\n\n\"Benjamin's been a friend of my family's for years. I've known him practically my whole life. He also manages my investments,\" Simon answered as we rounded the first floor and started on the second.\n\nI looked over my shoulder and confirmed him peeking at my legs. Ha! Caught him. \"Oooh, your investments. Have a few savings bonds left over from birthdays there, moneybags?\" I teased.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Yeah, something like that.\"\n\nWe continued up the stairs.\n\n\"It's curious, don't you think?\" I offered.\n\n\"Curious?\" he asked, his voice slipping over me like warm honey.\n\n\"Well, I mean, Benjamin and Jillian both knowing us, us meeting at a party like this, and you being the one that's been keeping me nocturnally amused all these weeks. Small world, I suppose?\" We rounded the top stair, and I got my keys out.\n\n\"San Francisco's a big city, but it can feel like a small town in some ways,\" he offered. \"But yes, it's curious. Intriguing even. Who knew that the nice designer Jillian wanted to set me up with was actually Pink Nightie Girl? Had I known, I might have taken her up on it,\" he replied, that damnable grin back on his beautiful face.\n\nDammit, why couldn't he have stayed an asshole?\n\n\"Yes, but Pink Nightie Girl would have said no. After all, thin walls and all...\" I winked, making a fist and thumping on the wall next to my door. I could hear Clive prattling around behind the door, and I needed to get inside before he began to wail.\n\n\"Ah yes, thin walls. Hmmm...Well, good night, Caroline. Truce is still on, right?\" he asked, turning toward his door.\n\n\"Truce is still on, unless you do something to make me mad again.\" I laughed, leaning in the doorway.\n\n\"Oh, count on that. And Caroline? Speaking of thin walls?\" he said, as he opened his door and looked back at me. He leaned in his own doorway, thumping his fist on the wall.\n\n\"Yes?\" I asked, a little too dreamily for my own good.\n\nThe smirk reappeared and he said, \"Sweet dreams.\"\n\nHe thumped the wall one more time, winked, and went inside.\n\nHuh. Sweet dreams and thin walls. Sweet dreams and thin walls...\n\nMother of pearl. He'd heard me.\nChapter Seven\n\n_P _OKE_._\n\n\"Grrr.\"\n\nPoke. Knead, knead. Poke.\n\n\"Enough.\"\n\nKnead, knead, knead. Head butt.\n\n\"I realize you don't know how to read a calendar, but you should know when it's Sunday. Seriously, Clive.\"\n\nHard head butt.\n\nI rolled over, away from Clive's head butts and persistent poking, and pulled the covers over my head. Flashes of the night before kept appearing. Simon in Jillian's kitchen with the intro heard round the world. His friends calling me Pink Nightie Girl. Benjamin putting two and two together when he learned I was the Pink Nightie Girl. Kissing Simon. Mmm, kissing Simon.\n\nNo, no kissing the Simon! I snuggled deeper under the covers.\n\nSweet dreams and thin walls...Sheer mortification washed over me as I remembered his parting words. I burrowed farther under the covers. My heart beat faster, thinking about how embarrassed I'd been. Heart, pay no attention to that girl below the covers.\n\nLast night had been decidedly dream free, but to make sure no one (Simon) could hear me screaming in passion, I'd slept with the TV on. The revelation that Simon had heard me dreaming of him had thrown me for such a loop that I flipped endlessly through the channels, trying to find something that would not sound like me having my own version of the Simon Wet Dream. I ended up on the all-infomercial channel, which, of course, kept me up later that I'd planned. Everything they sold was fascinating. I had to pry the cell phone out of my own hand at three thirty a.m. when I almost ordered the Slap Chop\u2014to say nothing of the half hour I will never get back after watching Bowser try to sell me the Time Life collection of songs from the fifties.\n\nAll this was in addition to listening to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey coming through the wall. They made me smile. I can't lie.\n\nI stretched lazily under the sheet, stifling a giggle as I watched the shadow of Clive stalking me, trying to figure out a way in. He tried every angle as I deflected his advances. Finally, he resumed his poke-poke-knead approach, and I popped my head back up to laugh at him.\n\nI could handle this thing with Simon. I didn't have to be totally embarrassed. Sure, my O was gone, maybe for forever. Sure, I'd been having sex dreams about my overly attractive and overly confident neighbor. And sure, said neighbor had heard these dreams and commented on them, getting the last word in an already extremely bizarre evening.\n\nBut I could handle this. Of course I could. I'd just acknowledge it before he could\u2014take the wind out of his sails, as it were. He didn't always have to have the last word. I could recover from this and keep our ridiculous little truce going.\n\nI'm totally screwed.\n\nJust then I heard the alarm go off next door, and I froze. Then I recovered and slipped back under the covers, leaving just my eyes peeping over.\n\nWait, why was I hiding? He couldn't see me.\n\nI heard him slap at the alarm clock, and his feet hit the floor. Why was he up so early? When all was quiet, you truly could hear through these walls. How the hell did I not realize before that if I could hear him, he could obviously hear me. I felt my face color as I thought of my dreams again, but then I got control. This was further aided by Clive head butting the small of my back in an attempt to physically push me from the bed to give him his breakfast.\n\n\"Okay, okay, let's get up. God, you're such a little jerk sometimes, Clive.\"\n\nHe fired back a reply over his cat shoulder as he stalked toward the kitchen.\n\nAfter getting Mr. Clive fed and running myself through the shower, I headed out to meet the girls for brunch. I was leaving the building while looking at my phone, answering a text from Mimi, when I collided with a wet, hot wall of Simon.\n\n\"Whoa,\" I cried as I teetered backward. His arm shot out and caught me just before I went from flustered to flat-out wrong and on my bottom.\n\n\"Where are you running off to this morning?\" he asked, as I took him in. Sweaty white T-shirt, black running shorts, damp curly hair, iPod, and a grin.\n\n\"You're sweaty,\" I word-vomited.\n\n\"I am sweaty. It happens,\" he added, sweeping the back of his hand across his forehead, making his hair stand straight up. I had to physically block the neurons from my brain trying to get to my fingers with instructions to lift and nestle. Lift and nestle.\n\nHe stared down at me, his blue eyes twinkling. He'd make this painful if I didn't go ahead and out the giant sex elephant in the room.\n\n\"So listen, about last night,\" I started.\n\n\"What about last night? The part where you were berating me about my sex life? Or the part where you were sharing my sex life with your friends?\" he asked, raising an eyebrow and raising his T-shirt to wipe his face. I drew in a breath that sounded like a wind tunnel as I stared at abs that could almost be speedbumps. Why couldn't he be a soft, fat neighbor?\n\n\"No, I mean the crack you made about the sweet dreams. And the...well...the thin walls,\" I stammered, avoiding all eye contact. I was suddenly fascinated by my new shade of toenail polish. It was lovely...\n\n\"Ah, yes, the thin walls. Well, they work both ways, you know. And if someone were to, say, have a very interesting dream some night, well, let's just say it would be quite entertaining,\" he whispered. My knees went a little wobbly. Damn him and his voodoo...\n\nI had to get back in control. I backed up a step.\n\n\"Yes, you may have heard something I would have preferred you not hear, but that's not the way things always go down. So, you got me. But you won't actually ever have me, so let's move on. You got that? And brunch, by the way,\" I finished, concluding my diatribe.\n\nHe looked confused and amused at the same time. \"Brunch, by the way?\"\n\n\"Brunch. You asked where I was off to this morning, and my answer is brunch.\"\n\n\"Ah, got it. And are you meeting your girls that were out with my guys last night?\"\n\n\"I am, and I will gladly share the scoop with you if it's any good,\" I laughed, twirling a piece of hair around my finger. Nice. Flirting 101. What the hell?\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure it's good scoop. Those two look like man-eaters,\" he said, rocking back on his heels as he began to stretch a bit.\n\n\"Are we talking Hannibal?\"\n\n\"No, more like Hall & Oates.\" He laughed, looking up at me as he stretched his hamstrings.\n\nChrist, hamstrings.\n\n\"Yes, well, they can definitely work a room when they need to,\" I said thoughtfully, beginning to back away again.\n\n\"And how about you?\" he asked, standing straight.\n\n\"How about me what?\"\n\n\"Oh, I bet Pink Nightie Girl can work any room she wants.\" He chuckled, his eyes twinkling.\n\n\"Eh, work this,\" I fired back and walked away with a twinkle of my own.\n\n\"Nice,\" he added when I shot him a look over my shoulder.\n\n\"Oh, please, like you're not intrigued,\" I called back from about ten feet away.\n\n\"Oh, I'm intrigued,\" he shouted as I walked backward, shaking my hips while he applauded.\n\n\"Too bad I don't work well with others! I ain't no harem girl!\" I yelled, practically at the corner.\n\n\"Truce still on?\" he yelled.\n\n\"I don't know, what does Simon say?\"\n\n\"Oh, Simon says, hell yes. It's on!\" he shouted back as I rounded the corner.\n\nI twirled about, actually doing a little pirouette. I smiled big as I bounced along, thinking a truce was a very good thing.\n\n\"Egg-white omelet with tomatoes, mushrooms, spinach, and onions.\"\n\n\"Pancakes\u2014four stack, please\u2014with a side of bacon. And I'll need the bacon very crispy, please, but not blackened.\"\n\n\"Two eggs sunny side up, rye toast with butter on the side, and the fruit salad.\"\n\nAfter ordering, we settled in for a morning of coffee and gossip.\n\n\"Okay, so tell me what happened after we left last night,\" Mimi said, placing her chin in her hands and blinking prettily at me.\n\n\"After you left? You mean after you left me with my jerky neighbor to drive me home? What were you thinking? And telling everyone the he-was-still-hard story? Seriously? I'm writing you both out of my will,\" I snapped, swallowing coffee that was too hot and instantly searing off a third of my taste buds. I let my tongue hang out of my mouth to cool.\n\n\"First of all, we told that story because it's funny, and funny is good,\" Sophia began, fishing a piece of ice out of her water glass and handing it to me.\n\n\"Thanh ooo,\" I managed, accepting the cube.\n\nShe nodded. \"And second, you have nothing to leave me anyway, as I already have the entire set of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, which you bought me yourself. So write me out of the will. And third, the two of you were being such downers there was no way we were taking you out with our new boys,\" Sophia finished, smiling wickedly.\n\n\"New boys. I love new boys.\" Mimi clapped, looking like a Disney cartoon.\n\n\"How was the ride home?\" Sophia asked.\n\n\"The ride home. Well, it was interesting.\" I sighed, now sucking on the cube with wild abandon.\n\n\"Interesting good?\" Mimi squealed.\n\n\"If you call schtupping someone on the Golden Gate Bridge interesting, then yes,\" I replied, calmly drumming my fingers on the table. Mimi's mouth began to fall from her face when Sophia placed her right hand over Mimi's left, which was about to squeeze her fork into something unrecognizable.\n\n\"Sweetie, she's kidding. We would know if Caroline had been schtupped last night. She'd have better skin tone,\" Sophia soothed.\n\nMimi nodded quickly and released the fork. I pitied any guy who pissed her off during a handjob.\n\n\"So, no dish?\" Sophia asked.\n\n\"Hey, you know the rules. You dish, I dish,\" I answered, eyes widening as our breakfast was served. After we dug in, Mimi fired the first shot.\n\n\"Did you know that Neil played football for Stanford? And that he always wanted to go into sports broadcasting?\" she offered, methodically separating her melon from her berries.\n\n\"Good to know, good to know. Did you know Ryan sold some kind of amazing computer program to Hewlett Packard when he was just twenty-three? And that he put all the money in the bank, quit his job, and spent two years teaching English to kids in Thailand?\" Sophia provided next.\n\n\"That's very good to know as well. Did you know that Simon doesn't consider his lady friends a 'harem,' and Jillian at one point actually told him about me as a potential girl he should be dating?\"\n\nWe all hmm-ed and chewed. Then began Round Two.\n\n\"Did you know that Neil loves to windsurf? And he has tickets to the symphony benefit next week? When he found out I was already going with you, Sophia, he suggested we double.\"\n\n\"Mmm, that sounds fun. I was thinking of asking Ryan. Who, by the way, also loves to windsurf. They all do\u2014they surf in the bay whenever they can. And I can also report that he now runs a charity that puts computers and educational materials into inner city schools all over California. It's called\u2014\" Sophia began.\n\n\"No Child Left Offline?\" Mimi quickly finished.\n\nSophia nodded.\n\n\"I love that charity! I give to that organization every year. And Ryan is the one who runs it? Wow...small world,\" Mimi mused as she began to cut her eggs.\n\nQuiet descended while we chewed again, and I tried to come up with something else to say about Simon that didn't have anything to do with him kissing me, me kissing him, or him being aware of my nocturnal verbal emissions.\n\n\"Um, Simon has Too Short on his iPod,\" I mumbled, which was met with hmms, but I knew my dish wasn't as good.\n\n\"Music is important. Who was that guy you were dating who had his own album out?\" Mimi asked.\n\n\"No, no. He didn't have an album out. He was trying to sell his own CDs out of the back of his car. Not the same thing.\" I laughed.\n\n\"You dated another singer too\u2014Coffee House Joe, remember him?\" Sophia snorted into her breakfast.\n\n\"Yes, he was about fifteen years too late for the flannel, but he got an A for angst. And was more than decent in bed.\" I sighed, thinking back.\n\n\"When is this self-imposed dating hiatus going to be over?\" Mimi asked.\n\n\"Not sure. I kinda like not dating anyone.\"\n\n\"Please, who are you kidding?\" Sophia snorted again.\n\n\"You need a tissue over there, Miss Piggy? Seriously, there have been too many Coffee House Joes and Machine Gun Corys. I'm not interested in just dating any more. It's too much of a merry go round. I'm not investing any more time and effort until I know it's going somewhere. And besides, O's off in no-man's land. I might as well join her,\" I added, trying some coffee again and avoiding their eyes.\n\nThey had their Os, and now they had new boys. I didn't expect anyone to join me on my dating sabbatical. But now their faces just looked so sad. I needed to turn this back to them.\n\n\"So last night was good for you guys, huh? Any kisses at the door? Any spit swapping?\" I asked, smiling cheerfully.\n\n\"Yes! I mean, Neil kissed me.\" Mimi sighed.\n\n\"Oooh, I bet he's a good kisser. Did he wrap you up tight and run his hands up and down your back? He has great hands. Did you notice his hands? Damn fine hands,\" Sophia rambled, face in her pancake stack. Mimi and I exchanged a glance and waited for her to come up for air. When she saw us staring, she blushed a little.\n\n\"What? I noticed his hands? They're huge. How could you not?\" she stammered and crammed her mouth full so we would move on.\n\nI giggled and turned my attention back to Mimi. \"So, did Mr. Great Hands use his great hands?\"\n\nIt was Mimi's turn to blush. \"Actually, he was very sweet. Just a little peck on the lips and a nice hug at my door,\" she answered with a giant smile.\n\n\"And you, Miss Thing? Was the computer genius charitable with his goodnight kiss?\" I giggled.\n\n\"Um...yes, he was. He gave me a great goodnight kiss,\" she replied, licking syrup off the back of her hand. She didn't seem to notice the way Mimi's eyes burned a little when she mentioned the goodnight she'd received, but I did.\n\n\"So, you escaped last night unscathed, I take it?\" Mimi asked me, sipping her coffee. I was still nursing the sore tongue, so I chose to stick with juice.\n\n\"I did. We came to a truce and will try to be more neighborly.\"\n\n\"What exactly does that mean?\" she asked.\n\n\"That means he'll try to curtail his activities to earlier in the evening, and I'll try to be more understanding about his sex life, as lively as it is,\" I answered, digging into my purse for some money.\n\n\"One week,\" Sophia muttered.\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"You wish. One week. That's how long I give this truce. You can't keep your opinions to yourself, and he can't keep that Giggler quiet. One week,\" she said again as Mimi smiled away.\n\nHuh, we'll see...\n\nMonday morning, bright and early, Jillian came waltzing in to my office.\n\n\"Knock knock,\" she called. She was the picture of casual chic: hair swept back into a loose bun, little black dress on her little tan body, legs that went on for miles ending in red pumps. Pumps that would probably constitute almost a week's pay for me. She was my mentor in every way, and I made a mental note to make sure I someday obtained the quiet confidence she carried with her.\n\nShe smiled when she saw the new flowers in the vase on my desk. This week I'd chosen orange tulips, three dozen.\n\n\"Morning! Did you see that the Nicholsons have added a home theater? I knew they'd come around.\" I smiled as I sat back in my chair. Jillian settled herself in the chair across from me and just smiled back.\n\n\"Oh, and Mimi is coming over for dinner tonight. We're hoping to finalize the plans for the new closet system she's designing. She wants to add carpet now.\" I shook my head and sipped coffee from the mug on my desk. My tongue had almost healed.\n\nJillian just continued to smile. I began to wonder if I had a Cheerio stuck to my face. \"Did I tell you I got the glass company in Murano to give me a deal on the pieces I ordered for the bathroom chandelier?\" I forged ahead. \"It's going to be beautiful. I think we'll definitely want to use them again.\" I added, smiling hopefully.\n\nShe finally sighed and leaned forward with a cat-that-ate-the-canary-and-went-back-for-the-feathers-to-play-with grin.\n\n\"Jillian, did you have dental work done this morning? Are you trying to show me your new dentures?\" I asked, and she finally flinched.\n\n\"As if I would ever need dentures, pffft. No, I'm waiting for you to tell me about your neighbor, Mr. Parker. Or should I say Simon Wallbanger?\" She laughed, finally sitting back in her chair and giving me a look that said I would not be allowed to leave my office until I told her everything she wanted to know.\n\n\"Hmm, Wallbanger. Where to start? First of all, you can't tell me you didn't know he lived next door. How the hell could you have lived there as long as you did and not know he was the one thumping away every night?\" I inquired, looking back at her with my best detective sneer.\n\n\"Hey, you know I hardly ever stayed there, especially the last few years. I knew he was in that neighborhood, but I had no idea it was next door to the apartment I was subletting! When I see him, it's always with Benjamin, and we usually go out for drinks or we have him over to our place. Regardless, it's the beginnings of a great story, don't you think?\" she tempted, grinning again.\n\n\"Oh, you and your matchmaking. Simon said you'd mentioned me to him before. You are so busted.\"\n\nShe held up her hands in front of her. \"Wait, wait, wait, I had no idea he was so, well, active. I never would have suggested you if I'd known he had so many girlfriends. Benjamin must have known...but it's a guy thing, I guess,\" she replied.\n\nI was the one to lean forward now. \"So tell me, how does he know Benjamin?\"\n\n\"Well, Simon isn't originally from California. He grew up in Philadelphia and only moved out here when he went to Stanford. Benjamin has known him most of his life\u2014he was really close to his dad. He's kind of watched out for Simon\u2014favorite uncle, big brother, surrogate father, that kind of thing,\" she said, her face growing soft.\n\n\"Was really close to his dad? Did they have a falling out or something?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, no, no, Benjamin was always great friends with Simon's dad. He was the one who mentored him early in his career. He was very close with the entire family,\" she said, her eyes growing sad.\n\n\"But now?\" I pressed.\n\n\"Simon's parents were killed when he was a senior in high school,\" she said quietly.\n\nMy hand flew to my mouth. \"Oh no,\" I whispered, my heart full of sympathy for someone I barely knew.\n\n\"Car accident. Benjamin says they went really quickly, almost instantly,\" she replied.\n\nWe were quiet for a moment, lost in our own thoughts. I couldn't even process what that must have been like for him.\n\n\"So after the funeral, he stayed in Philadelphia for a while, and he and Simon began to talk about him going to school at Stanford,\" she continued after a moment.\n\nI smiled at the image of Benjamin doing everything he could to help.\n\n\"I can imagine it was probably a good idea for him to get away from everything,\" I said, wondering how I would deal with something like that.\n\n\"Mm-hmm. I think Simon saw the chance, and he took it. And knowing that Benjamin was close by if he needed anything? I think that made it easier,\" she added.\n\n\"When did you meet Simon?\" I asked.\n\n\"His senior year of college. He'd spent some time in Spain the summer before, and when he came home that August he came into the city to have dinner with us. Benjamin and I had been dating for a while by then, so he knew of me, but hadn't actually met me,\" she said.\n\nWow, Simon does Spain. Those poor flamenco dancers\u2014they never stood a chance.\n\n\"We met for dinner, and he charmed the waitress by ordering in Spanish. Then he told Benjamin that if he was ever stupid enough to leave me that he would be quite happy to\u2014now what was it he said?\u2014ah, yes, he would be quite happy to warm my bed.\" She giggled, her face growing pink.\n\nI rolled my eyes. This matched what I knew of him already. Although, as brash as my girls and I were when flirting with Benjamin, it was the pot calling the kettle forward.\n\n\"And that's how I met Simon,\" she finished, her eyes far away. \"He really is pretty great, Caroline, all banging aside.\"\n\n\"Yes, banging aside,\" I mused, running my fingertips back and forth across the tops of the flowers.\n\n\"I hope you get to know him a little better,\" she said with a grin, matchmaker once again.\n\n\"Settle down there. We've called a truce, but that's all.\" I laughed, shaking my finger at her.\n\nShe got up and started for the door. \"You're very sassy for someone who's supposed to be working for me,\" she said, trying to look severe.\n\n\"Well, I'd get a lot more work done if you'd let me get back to it and stop with your nonsense!\" I said, looking severely back at her.\n\nShe laughed and looked out to reception.\n\n\"Hey, Maggie! When did I lose control of this office?\" she called.\n\n\"You never actually had it, Jillian!\" Maggie yelled back.\n\n\"Oh, go make coffee or something! And you,\" she said, turning to me and pointing. \"Design something brilliant for the Nicholsons' basement.\"\n\n\"Again, all things I could've been doing while you were yakking away in here...\" I murmured, tapping my pencil on my watch.\n\nShe sighed. \"Seriously, Caroline, he's really sweet. I think you two could be great friends,\" she said, leaning in the doorway.\n\nWhat's with everyone leaning in doorways lately?\n\n\"Well, I can always use another friend, now, can't I?\" I waved as she disappeared.\n\nFriends. Friends who called a truce.\n\n\"Okay, so we know the floors in the bedroom are going to be reclaimed, honey-toned wood, but you for sure want carpet in the closet?\" I asked, settling on the couch next to Mimi and starting on my second Bloody Mary. We'd been going through her plans for almost an hour as I tried to get her to see that I was not the only one who would have to compromise on her designs. She would as well. As long as we'd been friends, Mimi had believed she won every argument. Mimi saw herself as a badass that could strong-arm anyone into anything. Little did she know Sophia and I had figured out that we only had to let her think she was getting her way, which made her much more tolerable.\n\nThe truth was, I always knew I wanted carpet in the closet\u2014just not for the same reasons she did.\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes! It has to be carpet\u2014really thick and luxurious carpet! It will feel so good under cold toes in the morning,\" she cried, almost shaking in her excitement. I really hoped Neil would be around long enough to romance her right. She needed to release some of this excess energy.\n\n\"Okay, Mimi, I guess you're right. Carpet in the closet. But for that, you have to give me back those two feet you wanted from the bathroom for the rotating shoe rack that I vetoed.\" I spoke carefully, wondering if she would go for it.\n\nShe thought for a moment, looked at her plans again, took a long pull from her cocktail, and nodded. \"Yes, take back the two feet. I get my carpet, and I can live with that.\" She sighed, offering me her hand.\n\nI shook it solemnly and offered her my celery stalk. Clive came sauntering in and began to pace by the front door, pawing under the crack.\n\n\"I bet our Thai is almost here. Let me get my money,\" I said, pointing toward the door as I headed for my purse on the kitchen counter. Just as I spoke, I could hear steps in the hallway.\n\n\"Mimi, get the door, that'll be the takeout guy,\" I called, rummaging through my purse.\n\n\"Got it,\" she yelled, and I heard the door open. \"Oh, hey there, Simon!\" she said, and then I heard the strangest sound.\n\nI would swear, on a stack of Bibles in a court of actual law, that I heard my cat speak.\n\n\"Porrrrreeeennnnnya,\" Clive said, and I whirled about.\n\nIn the span of five seconds, a thousand things happened: I saw Simon and Purina in the hallway, bags from Whole Foods in hands, key in front door. I saw Mimi at the door, barefoot and leaning (again with the leaning) in the doorway. I saw Clive rear back on his hind legs preparing to jump in a way that I'd only ever seen him do once when I hid the catnip on the top of the fridge. Babies were born, old people died, stocks were traded, and someone faked an orgasm. All in those five seconds.\n\nI launched myself at the door in a slow-motion run reminiscent of every action movie ever made.\n\n\"Nooooooooo!\" I cried as I saw a look of panic cross Purina's face and a look of pure lust cross Clive's as he prepared to woo. If I'd started for the door any earlier, maybe even a second earlier, I could've prevented the pandemonium that ensued.\n\nSimon pushed his door open and smiled a confused smile at me as I caught his eye. No doubt he was wondering why I was charging the door and screaming noooooo. Just then Clive jumped. Leapt. Charged. Purina saw Clive jumping directly at her, and she did the worst thing she could've done. She ran. She ran into Simon's apartment. Of course the girl who meows when she has an orgasm is afraid of cats.\n\nClive gave chase, and as I stood in the hallway with Simon and Mimi, we heard shrieking and meowing echoing back to us. It sounded oddly familiar, and I was reminded of Simon bringing it on home. I shook my head and took over.\n\n\"Caroline, what the hell was that? Your cat just\u2014\" Simon was saying, and I placed my hand over his mouth as I hurried past him.\n\n\"We don't have time, Simon! We have to get Clive!\"\n\nMimi followed me into his apartment, Ned Nickerson to my Nancy Drew. I followed the shrieks and meows to the back of the apartment, noticing that Simon's place was an exact mirror image of mine. It was very single guy, with the flat screen TV and the amazing sound system. I didn't really have time for a proper shakedown, but I did notice the mountain bike in the dining room, as well as beautiful framed photographs all over the walls lit by retro sconces. I couldn't admire for long, as I could hear Clive getting worked up in the bedroom.\n\nI paused by the door, listening to Purina scream. I looked back at Simon and Mimi, who wore twin expressions of fear and confusion\u2014although Mimi's also showed quite a bit of merriment.\n\n\"I'm going in,\" I said in a low, brave voice. With a deep breath I pushed the door open, and saw the Bedroom of Sin for the first time. Desk in the corner. Dresser on one wall, with top covered in loose change. More photographs on the wall, black and whites. And there it was: his bed.\n\nCue trumpets.\n\nPushed up against the wall, my wall, was a giant California king, complete with a padded, leather headboard. Padded. It would have to be, now wouldn't it? It was immense. And he had the power to move that thing with his hips alone? Once again Lower Caroline sat up straight and took notice.\n\nI centered, I focused, and I pried my eyes away from Orgasm Central. I scanned and acquired the target: there at the leather club chair in front of the window. Purina perched on the back of this chair, hands in her hair, moaning and wailing and crying. Her skirt was shredded, and there were tiny claw marks in her stockings. She attempted with every fiber of her being to shrink away from the cat on the floor in front of her.\n\nAnd Clive?\n\nClive was strutting. Strutting back and forth in front of her, giving it his all. He turned like he was on a runway, pacing along a line on the floor and glancing at her nonchalantly.\n\nIf Clive could wear a blazer, he would have taken it off, draped it casually over his kitty shoulder, and pointed at her. It was all I could do not to fall down laughing. I stepped toward him, and Purina shouted something at me in Russian. I ignored her and focused all my attention on my cat.\n\n\"Hey, Clive. Hey. Where's my good boy?\" I crooned, and he turned. He glanced at me, and then jerked his head in Purina's direction as though he were making the first round of introductions. \"Who's your new friend?\" I crooned again, shaking my head at Purina when she tried to say something. I held my finger up in front of my lips. This would require great finesse.\n\n\"Clive, come here!\" Mimi yelled and barreled into the room. She always had trouble containing her excitement.\n\nClive made for the door as Mimi made for Clive. Purina made for the bed as I raced after Mimi, who collided with Simon just outside the bedroom door, who was still holding his damn Whole Foods bags. Thoughtfully chosen sustainable organic produce rained down on both of them as I pushed past, hurdling over limbs and a wheel of Brie on my way back to the front door. I caught Clive just as he made a break for the stairs and held him close.\n\n\"Clive, you know better than to run away from Mommy,\" I chastised, as Simon and Mimi finally caught up to us.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing, cockblocker? Are you trying to kill me?\" he shouted.\n\nMimi rounded on him. \"Don't you call her that, you...you...you wallbanger!\" she fired back, smacking his chest.\n\n\"Oh, you two shut up!\" I yelled. Here came Purina down the hallway toward us, wearing only one shoe and a furious look. She began to shout in Russian.\n\nMimi and Simon continued to yell, Purina screamed, Clive struggled to get loose and be reunited with his one and only, and I stood in the middle of the chaos, trying to figure out what the hell had happened in the last two minutes.\n\n\"Get control of your damn cat!\" Simon yelled, as Clive tried to spring free.\n\n\"Don't you yell at Caroline!\" Mimi yelled, smacking him again.\n\n\"Look at my skirt!\" Purina cried.\n\n\"Did someone order pad thai?\" I heard above the chaos. I looked and saw a petrified delivery boy standing on the top step, reluctant to come any further.\n\nEveryone stopped.\n\n\"Unbelievable,\" Mimi muttered and walked into my apartment, motioning for the delivery boy to follow her. I set Clive just inside the door and pulled it shut, cutting off his cries. Simon ushered Purina into his place, telling her softly to find something in his room to put on.\n\n\"I'll be there in just a minute,\" he said and nodded again for her to go inside. She glared at me once more and turned in a huff, slamming the door.\n\nHe turned back to me and we stared at each other, both starting to laugh at the same time.\n\n\"Did that really just happen?\" he asked through his chuckles.\n\n\"I'm afraid it did. Please tell Purina I am sooo sorry,\" I answered, wiping tears from my eyes.\n\n\"I will, but she needs to cool off for a while before I will attempt that\u2014wait, what did you just call her?\" he asked.\n\n\"Umm, Purina?\" I replied, still chortling.\n\n\"Why do you call her that?\" he asked, no longer laughing.\n\n\"Seriously? Come on, you can't figure it out?\" I said.\n\n\"No, tell me,\" he said, running his hands through his hair.\n\n\"Oh, man, you're gonna make me say it? Purina...because she, God, because she meows!\" I blurted, laughing again.\n\nHe blushed deep red and nodded. \"Right, right, of course you would've heard that.\" He laughed. \"Purina,\" he said under his breath and smiled. I could hear Mimi arguing with the delivery guy in my apartment, something about missing spring rolls.\n\n\"She's a little scary, you know?\" Simon said, gesturing toward my door.\n\n\"You have no idea,\" I said. I could still hear Clive wailing behind the door. I pressed my face to the edge and opened it just an inch.\n\n\"Shut it, Clive,\" I hissed. A paw came out through the crack, and I swear he flipped me off.\n\n\"I don't know a lot about cats, but is that normal feline behavior?\" Simon asked.\n\n\"He has a rather odd attachment to your girl there\u2014ever since the second night I lived here. I think he's in love.\"\n\n\"I see. Well, I'll make sure I convey his sentiments to Nadia,\" he said. \"When the time is right, of course.\" He chuckled and prepared to go back inside.\n\n\"You better keep it down over there tonight, or I'll send Clive back,\" I warned.\n\n\"Jesus, no,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, then turn some music on. You gotta give something,\" I pleaded. \"Or he'll be climbing the walls again.\"\n\n\"Music I can do. Any requests?\" he asked, turning to face me from inside the doorway. I backed up to mine and put my hand on my door.\n\n\"Anything but big band, okay?\" I answered softly. Heart moved down low in my tummy, flitting about.\n\nA look of disappointment crossed his face. \"You don't like big band?\" he inquired, his voice low.\n\nI pressed my fingers to my collarbone, my skin feeling warm under his gaze. I watched as his eyes followed my hand, further heating me with the intensity of his gaze.\n\n\"I love it,\" I whispered, and his eyes jerked back to mine in surprise. I smiled a shy smile and disappeared into my apartment, leaving him smiling back at me.\n\nMimi was still yelling at the delivery guy as I came inside to school Clive, a simpering look on both our faces. Five minutes later, with a mouthful of noodles, I heard Purina yelling something in indecipherable Russian on the landing and his door slammed. I tried to hide my grin, instead playing it off as a particularly spicy bite. No wallbanging tonight, I guess...Clive would be so depressed.\n\nAt around eleven thirty that night, as I was settling into bed, Simon played me some music through our shared wall. Wasn't big band, but it was pretty good. Prince. \"Pussy Control.\"\n\nI smiled in spite of myself, delighted at his wicked sense of humor.\n\nFriends? Definitely. Maybe. Possibly.\n\n\"Pussy Control.\" I thought of it again and snorted.\n\nWell played, Simon. Well played.\nChapter Eight\n\nTHE NEXT EVENING I was headed out to yoga when I found myself face to face with Simon once again. He was coming up the stairs as I went down.\n\n\"If I said, 'we have to stop meeting like this,' would it sound as trite as it sounds in my head?\" I offered.\n\nHe laughed. \"Hard to say. Give it a try.\"\n\n\"Okay. Wow, we have to stop meeting like this!\" I exclaimed.\n\nWe both waited a beat and then laughed again.\n\n\"Yep, trite,\" he said.\n\n\"Maybe we can work out some kind of schedule, share custody of the hallway or something.\" I shifted my weight from one leg to another. Great, now it looks like you have to pee.\n\n\"Where are you off to tonight? I seem to always catch you when you're leaving,\" he said as he propped himself up on the wall.\n\n\"Well, clearly I am headed somewhere very fancy.\" I gestured to my yoga pants and cami. I then showed him my water bottle and yoga mat.\n\nHe pretended to think very carefully, and then his eyes widened. \"You're going to pottery class!\"\n\n\"Yes, that's where I'm headed...ass.\"\n\nHe grinned that grin at me. I smiled back.\n\n\"So you never gave me the scoop on what you heard at brunch the other day. What's going on with our friends?\" he asked, and I didn't at all feel a flutter in my belly at the mention of the word our. Not at all...\n\n\"Well, I can tell you that my girls were quite taken with your boys. Did you know they're all going to the symphony benefit next week?\" I said, instantly horrified that I went there that quickly.\n\n\"I heard that. Neil gets tickets every year. Perks of the job, I suppose. Sportscasters always go to the symphony, right?\"\n\n\"I would assume, especially when one is trying to cultivate a certain man-about-town persona,\" I added with a wink.\n\n\"You caught that, huh?\" He winked back, and we found ourselves smiling again. Friends? Definitely a stronger possibility.\n\n\"We'll have to compare notes afterward, see how the Fantastic Four are doing. Did you know they've been going out on double dates all week?\" I said. Sophia had confided that they'd been going out constantly, but always as a foursome. Hmm...\n\n\"I did hear something about that. They all seem to be getting along well. That's good, right?\"\n\n\"It's good, yes. I'm actually going out with them next week. You should come along,\" I tossed out casually. It's all for the truce, just the truce...\n\n\"Oh, wow. I'd love to, but I'm heading overseas. Leaving tomorrow, actually,\" he said.\n\nIf I didn't know better, I'd say he almost looked disappointed.\n\n\"Really? On a shoot?\" I said, and realized my mistake. That knowing smirk came back with a vengeance.\n\n\"A shoot? Checking up on me?\"\n\nI felt my face go from pink to a lovely tomato red. \"Jillian mentioned what you do for a living, yes. And I noticed the pictures in your apartment. When my pussy was chasing your Russian? Ring any bells?\"\n\nHe seemed to shift his weight a little at my choice of words. Hmmm, weak spot?\n\n\"You noticed my pictures?\" he asked.\n\n\"I did. You've got a great set of sconces.\" I smiled sweetly and looked directly at his crotch.\n\n\"Sconces?\" he mumbled, clearing his throat.\n\n\"Occupational hazard. So where are you headed, anyway? Overseas, I mean.\" I dragged my eyes deliberately back up to his, and noticed his were nowhere near my face. Heh, heh, heh...\n\n\"What? Oh, um, Ireland. Shooting a bunch of coastal spots for Cond\u00e9 Nast, and then going into some of the smaller towns,\" he answered, bringing his gaze back to mine.\n\nIt was nice to see him a bit flustered. \"Ireland, nice. Well, bring me back a sweater.\"\n\n\"Sweater, got it. Anything else?\"\n\n\"A pot of gold? And a shamrock?\"\n\n\"Great. I won't have to leave the airport gift shop,\" he muttered.\n\n\"And then when you come home, I'll do a little Irish dance for you!\" I cried and started laughing at the lunacy of this conversation.\n\n\"Aw, Nightie Girl, did you just offer to dance for me?\" he said in a low voice, stepping a little closer.\n\nAnd just like that, the balance of power shifted.\n\n\"Simon, Simon, Simon,\" I exhaled, shaking my head. Mainly to clear it from the effect of him being so near. \"We've been over this. I have no desire to join the harem.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I'd ask you?\"\n\n\"What makes you think you wouldn't? Besides, I think that would mess with the truce, don't you?\" I laughed.\n\n\"Mmm, the truce,\" he said.\n\nJust then I heard steps on the stairs below. \"Simon? Is that you?\" a voice called up.\n\nAt that he leaned back, away from me. I looked down and realized we'd been inching toward each other on the landing throughout our exchange.\n\n\"Hey, Katie, up here!\" he called down.\n\n\"A haremette? I'll watch my walls tonight,\" I said softly.\n\n\"Stop it. She had a hard day at work, and we're heading out to a movie. That's it.\"\n\nHe smiled sheepishly at me, and I laughed. If we were going to be friends, I might as well meet the harem, by God.\n\nA moment later we were joined by Katie, who I, of course, knew as Spanx. I muffled a laugh as I smiled at her.\n\n\"Katie, this is my neighbor, Caroline,\" Simon said. \"Caroline, this is Katie.\"\n\nI offered my hand, and she looked curiously between Simon and me.\n\n\"Hi, Katie. Nice to meet you.\"\n\n\"You too, Caroline. You the one with the cat?\" she asked, a twinkle in her eye. I looked at Simon, and he shrugged.\n\n\"Guilty, although Clive would argue that, in fact, he is an actual person.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know. My dog used to watch TV and bark until I put on something she liked. What a pain in the ass she was.\" She smiled.\n\nWe all stood for a moment, and it was beginning to get a little awkward.\n\n\"Okay, kids, I'm off to yoga. Simon, have a safe trip, and I'll fill you in on the gossip from the new couples when you get back.\"\n\n\"Sounds good. I'll be gone a while, but hopefully they won't get in too much trouble while I'm away.\" He chuckled as they started up the stairs.\n\n\"I'll keep my eyes on them. Nice to meet you, Katie,\" I said, headed down.\n\n\"You too, Caroline. 'Night!\" she called back to me.\n\nAs I walked down the stairs, more slowly than necessary, I heard her say, \"Pink Nightie Girl's pretty.\"\n\n\"Shut it, Katie,\" he fired back, and I swear he swatted her on the butt.\n\nHer yelp a second later confirmed it.\n\nI rolled my eyes as I pushed the door open and headed out to the street. When I got to the gym, I switched my class from yoga to kickboxing.\n\n\"I'll have a vodka martini, straight up with three olives, please.\" The bartender got to work as I looked around the crowded restaurant, taking a break from the Fantastic Four. After two weeks of hearing about all these fabulous double dates, I'd agreed to go out with them and turn them into a Fantastic Five. It was fun, and I was having a great time, but after being with two new couples all night I needed a break. People-watching at the bar was a great way to get some time off. To my left was an interesting couple: silver-haired gentleman with a woman younger than I was who had newly purchased tits. Good girl! You get yours. I mean, if I had to look at flabby, old-man buns I'd want bigger boobs too.\n\nI never thought I'd enjoy being alone, but lately I was finding I did pretty well without a man in my life. I was alone, but I wasn't lonely. Orgasms aside, I did occasionally miss the companionship of a boyfriend, but I liked going places solo. I could travel alone, so why not? Nevertheless, the first time I took myself out to a movie I thought it was going to be weird\u2014the likelihood of running into someone I knew while out and about in the jungles of Costa Rica was slim to none, but running into someone at the movies in the jungles of San Francisco? Odds were greater\u2014but it was great! And a restaurant alone was also just fine. Turns out I'm a great date all by myself.\n\nStill, dinner tonight with my friends had been quite entertaining. The way these two new couples circled each other was fun to watch. Mimi and Sophia had both snagged themselves the men they'd cultivated in their heads as the perfect match. Just then I spotted Sophia in the crowd, her height and gorgeous red hair setting her apart even among hundreds. Hot restaurant, and even hotter bar, this place was packed with people and pretention.\n\nI could see her chatting with someone, and off to the side I found Mimi and Ryan. What was odd? Neil, not Ryan, seemed to be Sophia's conversation partner. Ryan appeared completely captivated by Mimi, her hands moving through the air and punctuating statements with her toothpicked olive as he listened, fascinated. From where I stood, the distance afforded me perfect clarity. I couldn't help but smile. They'd found the boys they always thought they wanted, but now they each seemed fascinated by the other one...ah well, the grass was always cuter, right?\n\nSophia glanced over and spotted me at the bar, and shortly thereafter, she excused herself and headed my way.\n\n\"Having fun?\" I asked as she perched on the stool next to me.\n\n\"I'm having a great time,\" she mused. She then told the bartender exactly how to make her cocktail.\n\n\"How's Neil tonight?\"\n\nHer eyes lit up briefly, and then she seemed to catch herself.\n\n\"Neil? Good, I guess. Ryan looks great, doesn't he?\" she covered, gesturing over to where we'd left our group, and where Mimi and Ryan were still deep in conversation. Ryan did indeed look good in jeans and a shirt that exactly matched his icy blue eyes\u2014the eyes fixed delightedly on Ms. Mimi.\n\nHow could they not see it?\n\n\"Neil looks pretty good tonight too,\" I tossed out, refocusing on the brawny sportscaster. Charcoal sweater, chinos\u2014he was every inch the man about town.\n\n\"Yep,\" she said icily, licking a bit of salt from the rim on her glass.\n\nI giggled and placed a hand on her arm.\n\n\"Come on, pretty girl, let's get you back to your perfect man,\" I said, and we rejoined the group.\n\nI departed a little before my friends did, tired but happy. Once again I'd spent an evening alone and lived to tell the tale. I wondered if other single women understood the delight that came from fifth-wheeling it. To not have to make small talk with some guy you'd been set up with, to not have to worry about some idiot with peppercorn-encrusted-filet breath trying to force his wiggly tongue down the back of your throat, and to not have to explain to that same idiot why you insist on taking a cab home when his super-fast Camaro is parked right over there.\n\nI'd enjoyed\u2014or should I say mostly enjoyed\u2014an assortment of relationships since high school, but hadn't really been in love for a long time. Not since senior year of college. And since that fell apart, I'd had just a series of casual flings, never really feeling fully invested in anyone. Hence my current hiatus from dating. Getting all the parts to line up seemed more and more difficult for me as I got older, and the process could be exhausting. Lower Caroline might be on board, but Brain and Heart always seemed to have reservations. Plus, now that my O was also absent, for who knew how long, I was finding my solitary lifestyle more and more appealing.\n\nAs I mused over these thoughts, headed home in a cab, my phone beeped. I had a text from a number I didn't recognize.\n\nHave a good time tonight?\n\nWho the hell is texting me?\n\nWho the hell is texting me?\n\nAs I waited for the reply, I leaned down and slipped off my shoes. Fantastic heels, but damn, they hurt my feet. My phone beeped again, and I read.\n\nSome people call me Wallbanger.\n\nI hated myself a little for the way my now-naked toes curled. Stupid toes.\n\nWallbanger, huh?  \nWait a minute - how did you get my number?\n\nI knew it was either Mimi or Sophia. Damn girls. They were really pushing it lately.\n\nI can't reveal my sources.  \nSo, did you have a good time tonight?\n\nOkay, I can play this game.\n\nIn fact I did. On my way home now.  \nHow is the Emerald Isle? Lonely yet?\n\nIt's beautiful actually, just having breakfast.  \nAnd I am never lonely.\n\nI believe that. Did you buy my sweater?\n\nWorking on it, want to get just the right one.\n\nYes, please give me a good one.\n\nNot going to respond to that one...how's that pussy of yours?\n\nReally not going to respond to that one.  \nIs there something you wanted?\n\nThis not responding thing is getting harder...\n\nI know what you mean. It's hard not to touch that one.\n\nOkay, officially ending this round.  \nThe innuendos are too thick to see straight.\n\nOh, I don't know, it's better when it's thick...\n\nWow. I'm enjoying this truce more than I expected.\n\nI have to admit it's good for me too.\n\nAre you home yet?\n\nYep, just pulled up in front of our building.\n\nOkay, I'll wait until you're inside.\n\nBet you can't wait to get inside.\n\nYou're a demon, you know that?\n\nI have been told. Okay, inside. Just kicked your door, btw.\n\nThanks.\n\nJust being a good neighbor.\n\nGoodnight, Caroline.\n\nGood morning, Simon.\n\nI laughed as I turned the key in my lock and went inside. I sank into my couch, still laughing. Clive quickly jumped into my lap, and I petted his silky fur as he purred his welcome home. My phone beeped once more.\n\nDid you really kick my door?\n\nShut up. Go eat your breakfast.\n\nI laughed again as I silenced my phone for the night and lay back onto the couch. Clive perched on my chest as I relaxed for a bit, thoughts of that damn wallbanger in my head. It was shocking how clearly I could picture him: soft faded jeans, hiking boots a la Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles, off-white Irish cable knit turtleneck sweater, hair all in disarray. Standing on a rocky coast somewhere, ocean in the background. A little tan, slightly weathered, hands in pockets. And that grin... \nChapter Nine\n\nTEXT BETWEEN CAROLINE AND SIMON:\n\nYou had a package delivered.  \nI signed for it and it's at my place.\n\nThanks. I'll pick it up when I'm back. How are you?\n\nGood, just working. How are the Irish?\n\nLucky. How's that insane cat?\n\nLucky. I caught him trying to climb the walls.  \nHe's still looking for Purina. Misses her.\n\nI don't think a romance is in the cards for those two.\n\nProbably not...he won't be over it anytime soon tho.  \nMight have to bump up his catnip ration.\n\nDon't overmedicate.  \nNo one likes a pussy that can't hold a conversation.\n\nI'm actually a little scared of you.\n\nLOL. Don't be scared. Wait until I offer you candy for that.\n\nIf I catch you in a trench coat I'm running the other way!  \nWhen are you coming home btw?\n\nMissing me a little?\n\nNo, I wanted to re-hang some pictures on the wall behind my headboard and I'm wondering how much time I have.\n\nBe home in 2 weeks. If you can wait that long,  \nI'll help you. It's the least I can do.\n\nThe very least, and I'll wait. You provide the hammer,  \nI'll provide the cocktails.\n\nCurious about my hammer, are you?\n\nGoing across the hall right now to kick your door.\n\nText between Mimi and Caroline:\n\nGirl, guess what? Sophia's grandparents' house is available next month. We're on our way to Tahoe, baby!\n\nSweet! That'll be nice.  \nI've been dying to get away with my girls.\n\nWe were thinking of inviting the boys...is that cool with you?\n\nThat's fine. The four of you will have a great time.\n\nIdiot, obviously you're still invited.\n\nAw thx! I'd love to go along on a romantic weekend  \nwith 2 couples. FANTASTIC!\n\nDon't be an asshole. You're totally still coming. You won't be a 5th wheel. It'll be so fun! Did you know Ryan plays guitar? He's gonna bring it, and we can sing along!\n\nWhat is this...camp? No thx!\n\nText between Mimi and Neil:\n\nHey, Big Man, what are you doing middle of next month?\n\nHey, Shortie. No plans yet. What's up?\n\nSophia's grandparents are gonna let us have  \nthe Tahoe house. You in? Ask Ryan...\n\nHells yes! I'm there. I'll ask the nerd if he's in.\n\nTrying to talk Caroline in to coming along too.\n\nGreat! The more the merrier.  \nWe still meeting for drinks with Sophia and Ryan tonight?\n\nYep, see you then.\n\nYou got it, kiddo.\n\nText between Simon and Neil:\n\nQuit fucking asking me about Lucky Charms.\n\nThat little guy cracks me up every time!  \nHey, when are you home?  \nWe're headed up to Tahoe for a weekend next month.\n\nI'll be home next week. Who's going?\n\nSophia and Mimi, me and Ryan. Maybe Caroline.  \nThat girl's pretty cool.\n\nYah, she's pretty cool when she's not cockblocking.  \nTahoe, huh?\n\nYep, Sophia's grandparents have a house there.\n\nNice.\n\nText between Simon and Caroline:\n\nYou going to Tahoe?\n\nHow the hell did you hear about that already?\n\nWord gets around...Neil is pretty excited.\n\nOh, I'm sure he is.  \nSophia in a hot tub - isn't too hard to figure out.\n\nWait, I thought he was dating Mimi.\n\nOh, he is, but he is def thinking about Sophia in a hot tub, trust me.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nStrange things afoot in San Francisco.  \nThey're each dating the wrong person.\n\nWhat?\n\nIt's shocking. Mimi can't stop talking about Ryan,  \nwho's usually staring like a sad puppy dog at her. And Sophia is so busy mooning over Neil's giant man hands she can't see that he's staring right back at her. Pretty funny.\n\nWhy don't they swap?\n\nSays the guy with the harem...it's not always that easy.\n\nWait until I get home, I'll take care of it.\n\nOkay, Mr. Fix-It. Before or after you hang my pictures?\n\nDon't worry, Nightie Girl.  \nI'm all about getting into your bedroom.\n\nSigh\n\nDid you really just type the word sigh?\n\nSigh...\n\nAre you going to Tahoe?\n\nNot if I can help it. Although it would almost be worth it  \nto watch the chaos when they finally figure this out.\n\nIndeed.\n\nText between Caroline and Sophia:\n\nWhat's this I hear about you not coming to Tahoe?\n\nUgh! What's the big deal?\n\nEasy, Trigger. What crawled up your ass?\n\nI just don't know why it's essential that I accompany all of you on a romantic weekend. I'm perfectly happy to go next time. Going out with you guys here is one thing. Tagging along to Tahoe? I don't think so.\n\nIt won't be like that. I promise.\n\nI already have to hear Simon banging on the walls when he's home. I don't need to hear Ryan drilling you in the next room, or Mimi getting manhandled.\n\nDo you think he's manhandling her?\n\nWhat?\n\nNeil. Do you think he's manhandling her?\n\nIs he what?\n\nOh, you know what I mean...\n\nAre you actually asking me if our dear friend Mimi  \nis having sex with her new boy toy?\n\nYes! I'm asking!\n\nAs it happens, no. They're not manhandling yet. Wait, why are you asking? You've slept with Ryan right? Right????\n\nGotta go.\n\nText between Sophia and Ryan:\n\nIs it weird that we only ever go out on double dates  \nwith Mimi and Neil?\n\nWhat?\n\nIs it weird?\n\nI don't know. Is it?\n\nYes. Tonight you're coming over, alone,  \nand we're watching a movie.\n\nYes, ma'am.\n\nAnd btw, ask your buddy Simon to come to Tahoe.\n\nAny specific reason I'm doing this?\n\nYep.\n\nCare to share?\n\nNope. Bring popcorn.\n\nText between Ryan and Simon:\n\nAre you sick of green yet?\n\nI'm ready to come home, yes. My flight gets in late tomorrow night. Or tonight. Shit, I don't know.\n\nSophia asked me to officially ask you if you want to come along to Tahoe. You in?\n\nTahoe, huh?\n\nYep. I think Caroline is going.\n\nI thought she wasn't going.\n\nHave you been talking to the Cockblocker?\n\nSome. She's pretty cool. The truce seems to be holding.\n\nHmmm. So, Tahoe?\n\nLet me think about it. Windsurfing this weekend?\n\nYep.\n\nText between Simon and Caroline:\n\nSo I got invited to the Tahoe thing. Are you going?\n\nYou got invited? Ugh...\n\nI take it you're still not sold on the idea?\n\nI don't know. I love going up there, and the house is pretty fantastic. Are you going?\n\nAre you going?\n\nI asked you first.\n\nSo what?\n\nChild. Yes, I suppose I will end up going.\n\nGreat! I love it up there.\n\nOh, you're going now?\n\nMight as well. Sounds like fun.\n\nHmm, we'll see. Home tomorrow, yes?\n\nYep, late flight in and then sleeping for at least a day.\n\nLet me know when you're up. I've got that package for you.\n\nWill do.\n\nAnd I'm baking zucchini bread tonight. I'll save some for you. You probably have no groceries at all, right?\n\nYou make zucchini bread?\n\nYep\n\nSigh...\n\nI woke up suddenly and heard music coming from next door. Duke Ellington. I looked at the clock. It was after two in the morning. Clive poked his head out from under the covers and hissed.\n\n\"Oh, shut up. Don't be jealous,\" I hissed back.\n\nHe glared at me, showing me his bum as he turned and wiggled his way back under the covers, head first.\n\nI snuggled in deeper myself, smiling as I listened to the music.\n\nSimon was home.\n\nThe next morning I woke up so happy it was Saturday. I was caught up on everything: no laundry to do, no errands to run. Just a day to enjoy and relax. Fantastic.\n\nI decided to start with a nice long bath, and then I'd decide what to do with my day. I was thinking of a run at Golden Gate Park that afternoon. Fall in San Francisco was so pretty when the weather held. I just might take a book and spend the entire afternoon there.\n\nI started the bath and Clive came in to keep me company. He weaved in and out of my legs as I dropped my pjs on the floor and meowed as he explored the top of the tub. He loved to balance on the edge while I took a bath. He'd never fallen in, although sometimes he would dip his tail. Silly cat\u2014one of these days he was gonna dip more than his tail.\n\nI tested the water. It was just beginning to make its way up the side of the giant tub when I decided I needed a little coffee before I settled in. I padded out to the kitchen\u2014naked as the day is long\u2014to make myself a cup. I yawned as I measured the beans for the grinder.\n\nI tossed a few spoonfuls into the filter and went to get water. As soon as I turned on the faucet, the screeching began.\n\nFirst I heard Clive meow like never before. Then I heard splashing. I started to smile, thinking he'd finally fallen in, when the water from the sink shot straight in my face.\n\nI blinked furiously, confused until I realized water was shooting out the top of the faucet, spraying the entire kitchen. \"Shit!\" I screamed, trying to turn it off. No luck.\n\nI ran to the bathroom, still swearing and found Clive hiding behind the toilet, soaking wet, and the tub faucet spraying wildly all over the bathroom. \"What the\u2014?\" I cried, trying again to turn off the water. Then I began to panic. It was like the entire apartment had gone haywire at the same moment. There was water spraying everywhere, and Clive was still screeching at the top of his lungs.\n\nI was naked, sopping wet, and freaking out.\n\n\"Motherfuckingcocksuckershitdamndamn!\" I screamed and grabbed a towel. I tried to think, tried to calm down. There must be a shut-off valve somewhere. I'd redesigned bathrooms, for Christ's sake. Think, Caroline!\n\nAbout this time I heard the banging coming from somewhere else in the apartment. Of course I thought it was the bedroom first\u2014naturally. But no, it was the front door.\n\nWrapping the towel around myself and still cursing enough to make a sailor blush, I stomped across the floor, fortunately not slipping in the collecting water, and angrily swung the door open.\n\nOf course it was Simon.\n\n\"Are you out of your goddamned mind? What's with all the screaming?\"\n\nI practically didn't notice the green plaid boxers, the sleep hair, or the speedbump abs. Practically.\n\nSurvival mode kicked in, and I grabbed him by the elbow as he was rubbing his eye and dragged him forcibly into the apartment. \"Where the hell is the shut-off valve in these apartments?\" I shrieked.\n\nHe looked around at the chaos: water spraying from the kitchen, water on the floor from the bathroom, and me in my Camp Snoopy towel, which was the first one I grabbed.\n\nEven in a crisis Simon took 2.5 seconds to look at my nearly naked body. Okay, I might have taken 3.2 to look at his.\n\nThen we both snapped into action. He ran into the bathroom like a man on a mission, and I could hear him knocking around. Clive hissed and ran out, straight into the kitchen. Realizing it was just as wet in there, he leapt across the room in an acrobatic fit and landed high atop the fridge. I started to run to the bathroom to help and collided with Simon as he ran to the kitchen. Undeterred, he slid across the floor and opened the doors under the sink. He began throwing my cleaning supplies all over the floor, and I assumed he was trying to get at the shut-off valve. I tried not to notice the way the back of his boxers clung to his buns. I tried so very hard. He was covered in water as well now, and just then his feet slipped out from under him, crashing him to the floor.\n\n\"Ow,\" he said from under the sink, his legs now splayed out across my wet kitchen floor. Then he rolled over. He was soaking wet and a tad bit glorious.\n\n\"Get over here and help me. I can't get this one turned off,\" he requested over the rushing water and the cat meowing.\n\nRemembering that I was only wearing a towel, I gingerly knelt next to him and tried to avoid looking at his body\u2014his wet, long, lean body that was dangerously close to my own. One more random jet of water straight into my eyeball was enough to pull me from my stupor, and I renewed my focus.\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\" I yelled.\n\n\"Do you have a wrench?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"Can you go get it?\"\n\n\"Sure!\"\n\n\"Why are you yelling?\"\n\n\"I don't know!\" I sat there, trying to see underneath the sink.\n\n\"Well, go get it, for God's sake!\"\n\n\"Right. Right!\" I yelled and ran for the hall closet.\n\nWhen I came back, I slipped a little on the wet tile and slid into his side.\n\n\"Here!\" I yelled and thrust the wrench under the sink.\n\nI watched him work, his face hidden. His arms strained, and I saw how strong he really was. I watched in amazement as his stomach hardened and revealed six little packs. Oops, make that eight. And then the V showed up. Hello, V...\n\nHe grunted and groaned and as he strained to turn off the valve, his entire body caught up in the struggle. I watched as he fought the Battle of the Valve and was finally triumphant. I also kept a close eye on those green plaid boxers, which when wet, clung to him like a second skin. Skin that was wet, and probably warm, and\u2014\n\n\"Got it!\"\n\n\"Hurray!\" I clapped as the water finally stopped. He let out one last groan, which sounded oddly familiar, and relaxed. I watched as he slid out from under the sink.\n\nHe lay next to me on the floor, soaked and in his boxers.\n\nI sat next to him, soaked and in a towel.\n\nClive sat on top of the fridge, soaked and angry.\n\nClive continued to yell\/meow, and we continued to stare at each other, breathing heavily\u2014Simon because of his battle and I...because of his battle. Clive finally jumped down from the fridge to the counter and skidded across in the puddle. He hit my radio, bounced off, and fell to the floor. Loud Marvin Gaye poured into the wet kitchen as Clive shook himself and ran for the living room.\n\n\"Let's get it on...\" Marvin sang it like he meant it, and Simon and I looked at each other, our faces stained crimson red.\n\n\"Are you kidding me?\" I said.\n\n\"Is this for real?\" he said, and we both started to laugh\u2014at the chaos, at the ridiculousness, at the sheer insanity of what had just happened and the fact that we were now lying half naked in my kitchen, covered in water, listening to a song that encouraged us to, in fact, \"get it on,\" and laughing our asses off.\n\nI finally straightened up, wiping tears from my eyes. He sat up next to me still holding his stomach.\n\n\"This is like a bad episode of Three's Company.\" He chuckled.\n\n\"No kidding. I hope someone called Mr. Furley.\" I giggled, drawing my towel tighter around me.\n\n\"Shall we get this cleaned up?\" he asked, standing.\n\nI noticed that his boxers, and anything that might be contained inside, were now at eye level. Settle, Caroline.\n\n\"Yes, I suppose we should.\" I laughed again as he held out his hand to help me up. I couldn't gain any traction, so I hung on to his hands, my feet slipping all over the floor.\n\n\"This is never going to work,\" he muttered and swooped me up. He carried me into the living room and set me down. \"Watch it there. Snoopy is drooping a little,\" he noted, gesturing to the part covering the girls.\n\n\"You'd love that, wouldn't you?\" I sassed, pulling things tighter.\n\n\"I'm going to get changed, and I'll bring you back some dry towels. Try to stay out of trouble.\" He winked and headed back to his place. I laughed again and went to the bedroom where Clive was now just a bump under the covers.\n\nI looked in the mirror over my dresser as I dug for something to put on. I was positively glowing. Huh. Must have been all that cold water.\n\nAn hour later things were back under control. We'd cleaned up the water, alerted the people downstairs in case there was leakage below, and placed a call to the maintenance guy.\n\nWe began to move toward my front door, mopping up the last little bit of water with the towels Simon had generously provided.\n\n\"What a disaster!\" I cried, pulling myself up off the floor and sinking down on the couch.\n\n\"Could have been worse. You could have had to deal with this after only three hours' sleep, and being woken up by some woman screaming at the top of her lungs,\" he said, coming to sit on the arm of the couch.\n\nI arched one eyebrow, and he recanted.\n\n\"Okay, bad example since that scenario is something you're familiar with. What are you going to do now?\"\n\n\"I dunno. I need to stay here and wait for the guy to fix this mess. In the meantime, I'm without water, which means no coffee, no shower, no nothing. Sucks,\" I muttered, crossing my arms across my chest.\n\n\"Well, I guess I'll be across the hall, drinking coffee and thinking about my shower, if you need anything,\" he said, starting for the door.\n\n\"Ass, you are totally making me coffee.\"\n\n\"Are you taking me up on the shower, too?\"\n\n\"You won't be in there with me, you know.\"\n\n\"I guess you can take one anyway. Come on, you little cockblocker,\" he huffed, pulling me up off the couch and leading me across the hall. Clive tossed one last angry cry at me from the bedroom, and I shushed him.\n\n\"Oops, wait. Let me grab breakfast.\" I snatched a foil-wrapped package from the table.\n\n\"What's that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Your zucchini bread.\"\n\nI swear he almost bit through his bottom lip. He must really like zucchini bread.\n\nThirty minutes later, I sat at Simon's kitchen table, legs curled underneath me, drinking French-pressed coffee and towel-drying my hair. He seemed really relaxed and happy, and he'd devoured the entire loaf of zucchini bread. I barely managed half a slice before he took it away from me, the entire chunk disappearing in his mouth.\n\nHe pushed away from the table and groaned, patting his full belly.\n\n\"You want another loaf? I baked plenty, you little piggy.\" I wrinkled my nose at him.\n\n\"I will take anything you want to give me, Nightie Girl. You have no idea how much I love homemade bread. No one's made anything like this for me in years.\" He winked and let out a tiny burp.\n\n\"Now that's sexy.\" I frowned and took my coffee cup into the living room, glancing out into the hallway to see if the maintenance guy had shown up yet.\n\nSimon followed me in and sat down on his big, comfy couch. I wandered around, looking at all his pictures. He had a series of black and whites on one wall, several prints of the same woman on a beach. Hands, feet, tummy, shoulders, back, legs, toes, and finally one of just her face. She was gorgeous.\n\n\"This is beautiful. One of your harem?\" I asked, looking back at him.\n\nHe sighed and ran his hand through his hair. \"Not every woman has made a trip to my bed, you know.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I'm kidding. Where were these taken?\" I asked, sitting down next to him.\n\n\"On a beach in Bora Bora. I was working on a travel photography series\u2014the most beautiful beaches of the South Pacific, very retro styled. She was on the beach one day, local girl, and the light was perfect, so I asked if I could take some shots of her. They came out great.\"\n\n\"She's gorgeous,\" I said, sipping my coffee.\n\n\"Yes,\" he agreed with a sweet smile.\n\nWe sipped silently, being okay with being quiet.\n\n\"So what were you planning to do today?\" he asked.\n\n\"You mean before my pipes revolted?\"\n\n\"Yes, before the attack.\" He smiled over the rim of his mug, blue eyes twinkling.\n\n\"I didn't have a lot planned, actually, and that was a good thing. I was gonna go for a run, maybe sit outside and read this afternoon.\" I sighed, feeling warm and comfortable and cozy. \"What about you?\"\n\n\"I was planning on sleeping the entire day before tackling a mountain of laundry.\"\n\n\"You can go sleep, you know. I can wait in my own apartment.\" I started to get up. Poor guy, he'd gotten in late, and I was keeping him from sleep.\n\nBut he waved me off and pointed to the couch. \"I know better, though. If I sleep I'll have jet lag all week. I need to get back on Pacific time as soon as I can, so it's probably a good thing your pipes attacked.\"\n\n\"Hmm, I guess. So how was Ireland? Good times?\" I asked, settling back.\n\n\"I always have a good time when I'm traveling.\"\n\n\"God, what an amazing job. I'd love to travel like that, living out of a suitcase, seeing the world, amazing...\" I trailed off, looking around again at all the pictures. I spotted a slender shelf on the far wall with tiny bottles on it. \"What's that?\" I asked, heading for the curious little shelf. They each contained what looked like sand. Some were white, some gray, some pink, and one was almost pitch black. They each had a label. As I looked I felt, rather than saw, him move behind me. His breath was warm in my ear.\n\n\"Every time I visit a new beach, I bring back a little sand\u2014like a reminder of where I was, when I was there,\" he answered, his voice low and wistful.\n\nI looked more closely at the bottles and marveled over the names I saw: Harbour Island\u2013Bahamas, Prince William Sound\u2013Alaska, Punaluu\u2013Hawaii, Vik\u2013Iceland, Sanur\u2013Fiji, Patura\u2013Turkey, Galicia\u2013Spain.\n\n\"And you've been all these places?\"\n\n\"Mmm-hmm.\"\n\n\"And why bring back sand? Why not postcards, or better yet, the pictures you take? Isn't that enough of a souvenir?\" I turned to look at him.\n\n\"I take pictures because I love it, and it happens to be my job. But this? This is tangible, it's tactile, it's real. I can feel this, this is sand I was actually standing on, from every continent on the planet. It brings me back there, instantly,\" he said, his eyes going all dreamy.\n\nFrom any other guy, in any other setting, it would have been pure cheese. But from Simon? The guy had to be deep. Dammit.\n\nMy fingers continued to trail over all the bottles\u2014almost more than I could count. My fingertips lingered on the few from Spain, and he noticed.\n\n\"Spain, huh?\" he asked.\n\nI turned to look at him. \"Yep, Spain. Always wanted to go. I will someday.\" I sighed and crossed back to the couch.\n\n\"Do you travel much?\" he asked, sinking down next to me again.\n\n\"I try to go somewhere each year\u2014not as fancy as you, or as frequent, but I try to take myself somewhere every year.\"\n\n\"You and the girls?\" He smiled.\n\n\"Sometimes, but the last few years I've enjoyed traveling by myself. There's something nice about being able to set your own pace, go where you want, and not have to run it by a committee every time you want to go out for dinner, you know?\"\n\n\"I get it. I'm just surprised,\" he said, frowning slightly.\n\n\"Surprised that I'd want to travel alone? Are you kidding? It's the best!\" I cried.\n\n\"Hell, you'll get no argument from me. I'm just surprised. Most people don't like to travel alone\u2014too overwhelming, too intimidating. And they think they'll get lonely.\"\n\n\"Do you ever get lonely?\" I asked.\n\n\"I told you, I am never lonely,\" he said, shaking his head.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I know, Simon says, but I have to say I find that a little hard to believe.\" I twisted a lock of almost-dry hair around my finger.\n\n\"Do you get lonely?\" he asked.\n\n\"When I'm traveling? No, I'm great company,\" I answered promptly.\n\n\"I hate to admit it, but I'd agree with that,\" he said, raising his mug in my direction.\n\nI smiled and blushed slightly, hating myself as I did it. \"Wow, are we becoming friends?\" I asked.\n\n\"Hmm, friends...\" He appeared to think carefully, examining me and my current state of blush. \"Yes, I think we are.\"\n\n\"Interesting. From cockblocker to friend. Not bad.\" I giggled and clinked his mug with my own.\n\n\"Oh, it remains to be seen whether you're lifted from cockblocker status yet,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, just give me a heads up before Spanx comes over next time, okay, friend?\" I laughed at his confused expression.\n\n\"Spanx?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, well, you know her as Katie.\" I laughed.\n\nHe finally had the decency to blush and smile sheepishly. \"Well, as it happens, Ms. Katie is no longer part of what you so kindly refer to as my harem.\"\n\n\"Oh no! I liked her! Did you paddle her too hard?\" I teased again, my giggling beginning to get out of control.\n\nHe ran his hands through his hair frantically. \"I have to tell you, this is frankly the strangest conversation I've ever had with a woman.\"\n\n\"I doubt that, but seriously, where did Katie go?\"\n\nHe smiled quietly. \"She met someone else and seems really happy. So we ended our physical relationship, of course, but she's still a good friend.\"\n\n\"Well, that's good.\" I nodded and was quiet a moment. \"How does that work, actually?\"\n\n\"How does what work?\"\n\n\"Well, you have to admit, your relationships are unconventional at best. How do you do it? Keep everyone happy?\" I prodded.\n\nHe laughed. \"You're not seriously asking how I satisfy these women, are you?\" He grinned.\n\n\"Hell, no. I've heard how you do that! There doesn't seem to be any question about that. I mean, how does no one get hurt?\"\n\nHe thought for a moment. \"I guess because we were honest going into this. It isn't like anyone sets out to create this little world, it just happens. Katie and I had always gotten along great, especially in that way, so we just fell into that relationship.\"\n\n\"I like Spanx\u2014I mean Katie. So was she the first? In the harem?\"\n\n\"Enough with the harem\u2014you make it sound so sordid. Katie and I went to college together, tried dating for real, didn't work out. She's great though, she's...wait, are you sure you want to hear all this?\"\n\n\"Oh, I am all ears. I've been waiting to peel this onion since you first knocked that picture off my wall and clocked me on the head.\" I smiled, settling back on the couch and curling my knees underneath me.\n\n\"I knocked a picture off your wall?\" he asked, looking amused and proud at the same time. What a guy.\n\n\"Focus up, Simon. Gimme the skinny on your ladies in waiting. And spare no details\u2014this shit is better than HBO.\"\n\nHe laughed and put on his storyteller face. \"Well, okay, I guess it started with Katie. We didn't work out as a couple, but when we ran into each other after college a few years ago, coffee turned into lunch, lunch turned into drinks, and drinks turned into...well, bed. Neither of us was seeing anyone, so we started getting together whenever I was in town. She's great. She's just...I don't know how to explain it. She's...soft.\"\n\n\"Soft?\"\n\n\"Yeah, she's all rounded edges and warm and sweet. She's just...soft. She's the best.\"\n\n\"And Purina?\"\n\n\"Nadia. Her name is Nadia.\"\n\n\"I have a cat that says otherwise.\"\n\n\"Nadia I met in Prague. I was doing a shoot one winter. I usually never do fashion photography, but I got asked to shoot for Vogue\u2014very artsy, very conceptual. She had a house outside the city. We spent a naked weekend together, and when she moved to the States she looked me up. She's getting her masters now in international relations. It's crazy to me that at twenty-five she's on the tail end of her career, in modeling, that is. So she's working hard to do something else. She's very smart. She's traveled the entire world, and she speaks five languages! She went to the Sorbonne. Did you know that?\"\n\n\"How would I know that?\"\n\n\"Easy to make snap judgments when you don't know someone, isn't it?\" he asked, eyeing me.\n\n\"Touch\u00e9,\" I nodded, nudging him with my foot to go on.\n\n\"And then Lizzie. Oh boy, that woman is insane! I met her in London, piss drunk in a pub. She walked up to me, grabbed my collar, kissed me stupid, and dragged me home with her. That girl knows exactly what she wants and isn't afraid to ask for it.\"\n\nI remembered some of her louder moments in great detail. She really was rather specific about what she wanted, provided you could get past the giggling.\n\n\"She's a solicitor\u2014attorney\u2014and one of her main clients lives here in San Francisco. Her business is based in London, but when we're both in the same city, we make sure to see each other. And that's it. That's all she wrote.\"\n\n\"That's it? Three women, and that's it. How do they not get jealous? How are they all okay with this? And don't you want more? Don't they want more?\"\n\n\"For now, no. Everyone is getting exactly what they want, so it's all good. And yes, they all know about each other, and since no one's in love here, no one has any real expectations beyond friendship\u2014with the best possible benefits. I mean, don't get me wrong, I adore each of them, and love them in their own way. I'm a lucky guy. These women are amazing. But I'm too busy to date anyone for real, and most women don't want to put up with a boyfriend who's across the globe more often than home.\"\n\n\"Yes, but not all women want the same thing. We don't all want the picket fence.\"\n\n\"Every woman I've ever dated has said she doesn't, but then she does. And that's cool\u2014I get it\u2014but with my schedule being so crazy, it got to be very difficult for me to be involved with anyone who needed me to be something I'm not.\"\n\n\"So you've never been in love?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that, did I?\"\n\n\"So you have been in a relationship before, with just one woman?\"\n\n\"Of course, but as I said, once my life became what it is today\u2014the constant traveling\u2014it's hard to stay in love with that kind of guy. At least that's what my ex told me when she started dating some accountant. You know, wears a suit, carries a briefcase, home every night by six\u2014it's what women seem to want.\" He sighed, setting his coffee down and relaxing further into the couch. His words said he was okay with all this, but the wistful look on his face said otherwise.\n\n\"It's not what all women want,\" I countered.\n\n\"Correction, it's what the women I have dated all wanted. At least until now. That's why what I have works great for me. These women I spend my time with when I'm home? They're great. They're happy, I'm happy\u2014why would I rock the boat?\"\n\n\"Well, you're already down to two now, and I think you'd feel differently if the right woman came along. The right woman for you wouldn't want you to change anything about your life. She wouldn't rock your boat, she'd jump right in and sail it with you.\"\n\n\"You're a romantic, aren't you?\" He leaned in, bumping my shoulder.\n\n\"I'm a practical romantic. I can actually see some appeal in having a guy who travels a lot, because, frankly? I like my space. I also take up the entire bed, so it's difficult for me to sleep with anyone.\" I shook my head ruefully, remembering how quickly I used to kick my one-nighters to the curb. Some of my past wasn't all that different from Simon's. He just had his sexcapades tied up in a much neater package.\n\n\"A practical romantic. Interesting. So what about you? Dating anyone?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nope, and I'm okay with that.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Is it so hard to believe a hot, sexy woman with a great career doesn't need a man to be happy?\"\n\n\"First of all, bully for you for calling yourself hot and sexy\u2014because it's true. It's nice to see a woman give herself a compliment instead of fishing for one. And second, I'm not talking about getting married here, I'm talking about dating. You know, hanging out? Casually?\"\n\n\"Are you asking me if I'm fucking anyone right now?\" I shot at him, and he spluttered into his coffee.\n\n\"Definitely the strangest conversation I've ever had with a woman,\" he muttered.\n\n\"A hot and sexy woman,\" I reminded him.\n\n\"That's for damn sure. So, how about you? Ever been in love?\"\n\n\"This feels like an ABC mini-series, with all the coffee and the love talk,\" I said. I might have been stalling.\n\n\"Come on, let's celebrate this moment in our lives.\" He snorted, gesturing with his coffee mug.\n\n\"Have I ever been in love? Yes. Yes, I have.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"And nothing. It didn't end in a very good way, but what ending is ever good? He changed, I changed, so I got out. That's all.\"\n\n\"You got out, like...\"\n\n\"Nothing dramatic. He just wasn't who I thought he was going to be,\" I explained, setting my coffee down and playing with my hair.\n\n\"So what happened?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know how it goes. We were together when I was a senior at Berkley, and he was finishing up law school. It started out great, and then it wasn't, and so I left. He did teach me how to rock climb, so I'm grateful for that.\"\n\n\"A lawyer, huh?\"\n\n\"Yep, and he wanted a little lawyer wife. I should have caught on when he referred to my future career plans as a 'little decorating business.' He really just wanted someone who looked good and picked up his shirts from the cleaners on time. Not for me.\"\n\n\"I don't know you that well yet, but I can't really see you in the suburbs somewhere.\"\n\n\"Ugh, me either. Nothing wrong with the 'burbs, just not for me.\"\n\n\"You can't move to the 'burbs. Who would bake for me?\"\n\n\"Pfft, you just want to see me in my apron.\"\n\n\"You have no idea,\" he said, winking.\n\n\"It's hard to get everything you need from one person. You know what I mean? Wait, of course you do. What was I thinking?\" I laughed, gesturing to him.\n\nWe both jumped at the knocking on my door across the hall. The maintenance guy had finally arrived.\n\n\"Thanks for the coffee, and the shower, and the pipe rescue,\" I said, stretching as I walked toward the door. I nodded at the guy in the hallway and held up one finger to let him know I'd be right there.\n\n\"No problem. It wasn't the nicest way to wake up, but I suppose I deserved that one.\"\n\n\"Indeed. But thank you anyway.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, and thanks for the bread. It was great. And if another loaf happens to make its way over here, that would be okay.\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can do. And hey, where's my sweater?\"\n\n\"Do you know how expensive those are?\"\n\n\"Pffft, I want my sweater!\" I cried, slapping him in the chest.\n\n\"Well, as it happens, I did bring you something\u2014a sort of thanks-for-kicking-my-door present.\"\n\n\"I knew it. You can drop it off later.\" I walked across the hall to let the guy in. I directed him toward the kitchen and turned back to Simon. \"Friends, huh?\"\n\n\"Looks that way.\"\n\n\"I can live with that.\" I smiled and closed the door.\n\nAs the maintenance guy went about fixing the problem, I wandered to my bedroom to check on Clive. Just as I entered, my phone buzzed. A text from Simon already? I grinned and flopped down on the bed, snuggling a still-freaked-out kitty to my side. He began to purr instantly.\n\nYou never answered my question...\n\nI felt my skin heat up as I realized what he was referring to. I was suddenly warm and a little tingly, like when your foot falls asleep, but all over. And in a good way. Damn, he gave great text.\n\nAbout whether I'm fucking anyone?\n\nJesus, you're crass. But yes, friends can ask that, can't they?\n\nYes they can.\n\nSo?\n\nYou're kind of a pain in the ass. You know this, right?\n\nTell me. Don't get shy on me now.\n\nAs it happens, no. I'm not.\n\nI heard a thud from next door, and then a slight but constant banging on the wall.\n\nWhat the hell are you doing? Is that your head?\n\nYou're killing me, Nightie Girl.\n\nAs soon as I finished reading, the banging resumed. I laughed out loud as he thumped his head against the wall. I placed my hand on the wall over my bed where the thumping was concentrated and chuckled again. What a strange morning... \nChapter Ten\n\nI SAT IN MY OFFICE, gazing out the window. I had a list of things to do in front of me\u2014and it wasn't a small list either. I needed to run by the Nicholson house. The renovation was almost complete. The bedroom and bathroom were finished, and just a few details remained. I needed to get some new sample books from the design center. I had a meeting with a new client Mimi had referred to me, and on top of all that, I had a folder full of invoices to go through.\n\nBut still, I gazed out the window. I might have had Simon on the brain. And for good reason. Between the pipe explosions, the head banging, and the constant texting all day Sunday asking for more zucchini bread, my brain simply could not expunge him. And then last night, he brought out the big guns: he Glenn Miller-ed me. He even knocked on the wall to make sure I was listening.\n\nI put my head down on the desk and banged it a few times to see if it helped. It had seemed to help Simon...\n\nThat night I went straight to yoga after work and was climbing the stairs to my apartment when I heard a door open from above.\n\n\"Caroline?\" he called down to me.\n\nI grinned and continued up the stairs. \"Yes, Simon?\" I called up.\n\n\"You're home late.\"\n\n\"What, are you watching my door now?\" I laughed, rounding the last landing and staring up at him. He was hanging over the railing, hair in his face.\n\n\"Yep. I'm here for the bread. Zucchini me, woman!\"\n\n\"You're insane. You know this, right?\" I climbed the last stair and stood in front of him.\n\n\"I've been told. You smell nice,\" he said, leaning in.\n\n\"Did you just sniff me?\" I asked incredulously as I opened the door.\n\n\"Mmm-hmm, very nice. Just get back from a workout?\" he asked, walking in behind me and closing the door.\n\n\"Yoga, why?\"\n\n\"You smell great when you're all worked up,\" he said, waggling his eyebrows at me like the devil.\n\n\"Seriously, you pick women up with lines like that?\" I turned away from him to take off my jacket and squeeze my thighs together maniacally.\n\n\"It's not a line. You do smell great,\" I heard him say, and I closed my eyes to block out the Simon Voodoo currently making Lower Caroline curl in on herself.\n\nClive came bounding out of the bedroom when he heard my voice and stopped short when he saw Simon. Unfortunately, he had little traction on the hardwood floor and skidded rather ungracefully under the dining room table. Trying to regain his dignity, he executed a difficult four-foot leap from a standing position onto the bookshelf and waved me over with his paw. He wanted me to come to him\u2014typical male.\n\nI dropped my gym bag and sauntered over. \"Hi, sweet boy. How was your day? Hmm? Did you play? Did you get a good nap? Hmm?\" I scratched behind his ear, and he purred loudly. He gave me his dreamy cat eyes and then turned his gaze to Simon. I swear he cat-smirked at him.\n\n\"Zucchini bread, huh? You want some more, I take it?\" I asked, throwing my jacket on the back of a chair.\n\n\"I know you have more. Simon says gimme it,\" he deadpanned, making his finger into a gun.\n\n\"You're oddly into your baked goods, aren't you? Support group for that?\" I asked, walking into the kitchen to locate the last loaf. I might have been saving it for him.\n\n\"Yes, I'm in BA. Bakers Anonymous. We meet over at the bakery on Pine,\" he replied, sitting down on the stool at the kitchen counter.\n\n\"Good group?\"\n\n\"Pretty good. There's a better one over on Market, but I can't go to that one anymore,\" he said sadly, shaking his head.\n\n\"Get kicked out?\" I asked, leaning on the counter in front of him.\n\n\"I did, actually,\" he said, and then curled his finger to get me to lean in closer.\n\n\"I got in trouble for fondling buns,\" he whispered.\n\nI giggled and gave his cheek a light pinch. \"Fondling buns,\" I snorted as he pushed my hand away.\n\n\"Just fork over the bread, see, and no one gets hurt,\" he warned.\n\nI waved my hands in surrender and grabbed a wine glass from the cupboard over his head. I raised my eyebrow at him, and he nodded.\n\nI handed him a bottle of Merlot and the opener, then grabbed a bunch of grapes from the colander in the fridge. He poured, we clinked, and without another word, I started making us dinner.\n\nThe rest of the evening happened naturally, without me even realizing it. One minute we were discussing the new wine glasses I'd purchased from Williams Sonoma, and thirty minutes later we were sitting at the dining room table with pasta in front of us. I was still wearing my workout clothes, and Simon was in jeans and a T-shirt and his stocking feet. He'd taken off his Stanford sweatshirt before draining the pasta, something I didn't even have to ask him to do. He'd simply wandered into the kitchen behind me, and had it drained and back in the pot just as I finished the sauce.\n\nWe'd talked about the city, his work, my work, and the upcoming trip to Tahoe, and now we headed over to the couch with coffee.\n\nI leaned back against the pillows with my legs curled underneath me. Simon was telling me about a trip he'd taken to Vietnam a few years before.\n\n\"It's like nothing you've ever seen\u2014the mountain villages, the gorgeous beaches, the food! Oh, Caroline, the food.\" He sighed, stretching his arm along the back of the couch. I smiled and tried not to notice the butterflies when he said my name that way: with the word Oh right in front of it...Oh me, oh my.\n\n\"Sounds wonderful, but I hate Vietnamese food. Can't stand it. Can I bring peanut butter?\"\n\n\"I know this guy\u2014makes the best noodles ever, right on a houseboat in the middle of Ha Long Bay. One slurp and you'll throw your peanut butter right over the side.\"\n\n\"God, I wish I could travel like you do. Do you ever get sick of it?\" I asked.\n\n\"Hmmm, yes and no. It's always great to come home. I love San Francisco. But if I'm home too long I get the itch to get back out on the road. And no comments about the itch\u2014I'm starting to get to know your mind there, Nightie Girl.\" He patted my arm affectionately.\n\nI tried to feign offense, but the truth was I had been about to make a joke. I noticed he still had his hand on my arm, absentmindedly tracing tiny circles with his fingertips. Had it really been so long since I'd let a man touch me that fingertip circles sent me into a mental tizzy? Or was it that this man was doing it? Oh, God, the fingertips. Either way, it was doing things to me. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine O waving at me\u2014still far away, but not as far as she'd been before.\n\nI glanced at Simon and saw that he was watching his hand, as if curious about his fingers on my skin. I breathed in quickly, and my intake of breath drew his eyes to mine. We watched each other. Lower Caroline was, of course, responding, but now Heart began to beat a little wildly as well.\n\nThen Clive jumped up on the back of the couch, put his bum right in Simon's face, and killed that real quick. We both laughed, and Simon moved away from me as I explained to Clive that it was not polite to do that to company. Clive seemed oddly pleased with himself, though, so I knew he was up to something.\n\n\"Wow, it's almost ten! I've taken up your entire evening. I hope you didn't have plans,\" Simon said, standing and stretching. As he stretched, his T-shirt came up, and I bit down hard on my tongue to stop myself from licking the bit of skin showing above his jeans.\n\n\"Well, I did have a rather exciting night of watching Food Network planned, so damn you, Simon!\" I shook my fist in his face as I stood up next to him.\n\n\"And you even made me dinner, which was great, by the way,\" he said, searching for his sweatshirt.\n\n\"No problem. It was nice to cook for someone other than myself. It's what I do for any guy who shows up demanding bread.\" I finally handed him the loaf I'd left out for him.\n\nHe grinned as he grabbed his sweatshirt off the floor next to the couch. \"Well, next time, let me cook for you. I make a fantastic\u2014huh, that's weird,\" he interrupted himself, grimacing.\n\n\"What's weird?\" I asked, watching as he unfolded his sweatshirt.\n\n\"This feels damp. Actually, it's more than damp, it's...wet?\" he asked, looking at me, confused. I looked from the sweatshirt to Clive, who sat innocently on the back of the couch.\n\n\"Oh no,\" I whispered, the blood draining from my face. \"Clive, you little shit!\" I glared at him.\n\nHe jumped off the couch and darted quickly between my legs, headed for the bedroom. He'd learned I couldn't reach him behind the dresser, and that's where he hid when he'd done a bad, bad thing. He hadn't done this in a long time.\n\n\"Simon, you might want to leave that here. I'll wash it, dry clean it\u2014whatever. I am so, so sorry,\" I apologized, horrifically embarrassed.\n\n\"Oh, did he? Oh man, he did, didn't he?\" His face wrinkled as I took the sweatshirt from him.\n\n\"Yes, yes, he did. I'm so sorry, Simon. He has this thing about marking his territory. When any guy leaves clothes on the floor\u2014oh, God\u2014he eventually pees on them. I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry. I'm so\u2014\"\n\n\"Caroline, it's okay. I mean, it's gross, but it's okay. I've had worse things happen to me. It's all good, I promise.\" He started to put his hand on my shoulder, but seemed to think better of it, probably when he realized the last thing he'd touched.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, I\u2014\" I began again as he started for the door.\n\n\"Stop it. If you say sorry one more time I'm gonna go find something of yours and pee on it, I swear.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's just gross.\" I finally laughed. \"But we had such a nice night, and it ended in pee!\" I wailed, opening the door for him.\n\n\"It was a nice night, even with the pee. There'll be others. Don't worry, Nightie Girl.\" He winked and crossed the hall.\n\n\"Play me something good tonight, huh?\" I asked, watching him go.\n\n\"You got it. Sleep tight,\" he said, and we closed the doors at the same time.\n\nI leaned back against the door, hugging the sweatshirt in my arms. I'm sure I had the goofiest grin on my face, as I remembered the feeling of his fingertips. And then I remembered I was hugging a pee-stained sweatshirt.\n\n\"Clive, you asshole!\" I yelled and ran for my bedroom.\n\nFingers, hands, warm skin pressed against mine in an effort to get closer. I felt his warm breath, his voice like wet sex in my ear. \"Mmm, Caroline, how can you feel this good?\"\n\nI moaned and rolled over, twisting legs with legs and arms with arms, pushing my tongue into his waiting mouth. I sucked on his bottom lip, tasting mint and heat and the promise of what was to come when he pushed into my body for the first time. I moaned as he groaned, and in a flash I was pinned beneath him.\n\nLips moved from my mouth to my neck, licking and sucking and finding the spot\u2014that spot underneath my jaw that made my insides explode and my eyes cross. A dark laugh against my collarbone, and I knew I was done for.\n\nI rolled on top of him, feeling the loss of his weight but the gain of my legs on either side of him, feeling him twitch and throb exactly where I needed him to be. He pushed my hair from my face, gazing up at me with those eyes\u2014the eyes that could make me forget my name but scream his own.\n\n\"Simon!\" I cried, feeling his hands grab my hips and push me against him.\n\nI sat straight up in bed, my heart racing as the last dreamy images left my brain. I thought I heard a low chuckle from other side of the wall, where the strains of Miles Davis came through.\n\nI lay back down, skin tingling as I tried to find a cool spot on my pillow. I thought about what was on the other side of that wall, inches away. I was in trouble.\n\nLater that morning I sat at my desk getting ready to meet a new client\u2014one who'd specifically requested to work with me. Still a new designer, much of my work came from referrals, and whoever had referred this guy to me I owed big time. All new interiors for some fancy apartment\u2014it was practically a gut remodel, a dream project. Whenever I prepped for a new client I pulled pictures from other projects I'd designed and had sketchbooks ready, but today I did it with particular intensity. If I let my mind wander for a second, Brain immediately returned to the dream I'd had last night. I blushed every time I thought of what I'd let Dream Simon do to me, and what Dream Caroline had done to him as well...\n\nDream Caroline and Dream Simon were some naughty kids.\n\n\"Ahem,\" I heard from behind me. I turned to find Ashley in the doorway. \"Caroline, Mr. Brown is here.\"\n\n\"Excellent, I'll be right out.\" I nodded, standing and smoothing my skirt. My hands pressed my cheeks, hoping they were not too red.\n\n\"And he is cute, cute, cute!\" she murmured as she walked beside me down the hall.\n\n\"Oh, really? Must be my lucky day.\" I laughed, rounding the corner to greet him.\n\nHe certainly was cute, and I would know. He was my ex-boyfriend.\n\n\"Oh, my God! What are the chances?\" Jillian exclaimed at lunch, two hours later.\n\n\"Well, considering my entire life now seems ruled by odd coincidences, I figure it's right on track.\" I broke off a piece of flatbread and chewed determinedly.\n\n\"But I mean, come on! What are the chances, really?\" she wondered again, pouring us another glass of Pellegrino.\n\n\"Oh, there's nothing chance about this. This guy doesn't leave things to chance. He knew exactly what he was doing when he approached you at that benefit last month.\"\n\n\"No,\" she breathed.\n\n\"Yep. He told me. He saw me, and when he found out I worked for you? Bam! He needs an interior designer.\" I smiled, thinking of how he'd always arranged things exactly the way he wanted them. Well, almost everything.\n\n\"Don't worry, Caroline. I'll move him over to another designer, or I'll even take him myself. You don't have to work with him,\" she said, patting my hand.\n\n\"Oh, hell no! I already told him yes. I'm totally doing this.\" I crossed my arms over my chest.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yep. No problem. It wasn't that we had a bad breakup. In fact, as far as breakups go, it was mild. He didn't want to accept the fact that I was leaving him, but eventually he came around. He didn't think I had the balls to do it, and boy, was he surprised.\" I played with my napkin.\n\nI'd dated James most of my senior year at Berkeley. He was already in law school, steadily moving through it on his way to a future of perfection. My goodness, he was beautiful\u2014strong and handsome, and very charming. We met at the library one night, had coffee a few times, and it grew into a solid relationship.\n\nThe sex? Unreal.\n\nHe was my first serious boyfriend, and I knew he wanted to marry me at some point. He had very specific ideas about what he wanted from his life, and that definitely included me as his wife. And he was everything I'd ever thought I wanted in a husband. Engagement was inevitable. But then I began to notice things, small at first, but over time they revealed the big picture. We went where he wanted to for dinner. I never got to pick. I overheard him telling someone that he figured my \"decorating\" phase wouldn't last long, but it'd be nice to have a wife who could make a pretty home. The sex was still great, but I was irritated with him more and more, and I stopped going along to get along.\n\nWhen I began to realize he was no longer what I wanted for my future, things got a little strained. We fought constantly, and when I decided to end the relationship, he tried to convince me I was making the wrong choice. I knew better, and he finally accepted that I was really done\u2014and not just pitching a \"feminine fit,\" as he liked to call them. We didn't keep in contact, but he'd been a major part of my life for a long time, and I cherished the memories we had together. I cherished what he'd taught me about myself.\n\nJust because we didn't work out as a couple didn't mean we couldn't work together, right?\n\n\"You sure about this? You really want to work with him?\" Jillian asked one more time, but I could tell she was ready to let it go.\n\nI thought about it again, replaying the flash of memory I'd had when I saw him standing in the lobby. Sandy blond hair, piercing eyes, charming smile: I'd been hit with a wave of nostalgia and grinned as he crossed to me.\n\n\"Hey there, stranger,\" he'd said, offering me his hand.\n\n\"James!\" I gasped, but recovered quickly. \"You look great!\" We hugged\u2014to gawking Ashley's surprise.\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure,\" I told Jillian. \"It'll be good for me. Call it a growth experience. Plus, I don't want to give up the commission. We'll see what happens tonight.\"\n\nAt that she looked up from her menu. \"Tonight?\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't tell you? We're going for drinks to get caught up.\"\n\nI stood in front of the mirror, fluffing my hair and checking my teeth for wayward lipstick. The rest of the workday had gone quickly, and I now found myself at home getting ready for tonight. We'd agreed to just drinks, very casual, although I was leaving the option open for dinner. But skinny jeans, black turtleneck, and cropped gray leather jacket was as fancy as I was gonna get.\n\nThe time I'd spent this morning with James at the office was pleasant, and when he'd asked me to go for drinks to catch up, I agreed instantly. I was anxious to learn what he'd been up to, as well as make sure we'd be able to work together. He'd been a huge part of my life at one time, and the idea of being able to work with someone I'd once been so close to felt good to me. It felt mature. Closure? Not sure what to call it, but it seemed like the natural thing to do.\n\nHe was picking me up at seven, and I planned to meet him outside. Parking on my street was ridiculous. A glance at the clock told me it was time to get going, so I gave a quick kiss goodbye to Clive, who'd been on his best behavior since the pee incident, and let myself into the hallway.\n\nAnd straight into Simon, who was in front of my door.\n\n\"Okay, you are officially my stalker! There's no more zucchini bread, mister. I hope you made that loaf last because there is no more for you,\" I warned, pressing him back from my front door with my pointer finger.\n\n\"I know, I know. I'm actually here on official business.\" He laughed, throwing up his arms in defeat.\n\n\"Walk with me?\" I asked, nodding toward the stairs.\n\n\"I'm headed out as well. Going to rent a movie,\" he explained as we started down.\n\n\"People still rent movies?\" I joked, rounding the corner.\n\n\"Yes, people still rent movies. Just for that you're gonna have to watch whatever I pick out,\" he replied, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"Tonight?\"\n\n\"Sure, why not. I was coming over to see if you wanted to hang out. I owe you for dinner from the other night, and I got an urge to watch something spooky...\" He launched into The Twilight Zone theme.\n\nI couldn't help but laugh at his claw hands and crossed eyes. \"Last time someone asked me to rent a movie it was code for 'let's make out on the couch.' Am I safe with you?\"\n\n\"Please! We've got that truce, remember? I am all about the truce. So, tonight?\"\n\n\"I wish I could, but I have plans tonight. Tomorrow night?\" We rounded the last stair and entered the entryway.\n\n\"Tomorrow I can do. Come on over after work. But I get to pick the movie, and I'm making you dinner. Least I can do for my little cockblocker.\" He smirked, and I punched him in the arm.\n\n\"Please stop calling me that. Otherwise I won't bring dessert,\" I said, lowering my voice and batting my eyelashes like a fool.\n\n\"Dessert?\" he asked, holding the door open as I walked out into the night.\n\n\"Mmm-hmm. I picked up some apples yesterday while I was out, and I've been craving pie all week. How does that sound?\" I asked, scanning the street for James.\n\n\"Apple pie? Homemade apple pie? Christ, woman, are you trying to kill me? Mmm...\" He smacked his lips and looked at me hungrily.\n\n\"Why, sir, you look like you've seen something you'd like to eat,\" I offered in my best Scarlett.\n\n\"You show up with apple pie tomorrow night, and I may not let you leave,\" he breathed, his cheeks rosy and his messy hair blowing in the cool air.\n\n\"That would be terrible,\" I whispered. Wow. \"Okay, so, go get your movie,\" I said, playfully shoving the six feet of hot in front of me. Remember the harem! I shouted inside my head.\n\n\"Caroline?\" a concerned voice came from behind me, and I turned to see James walking toward us.\n\n\"Hey, James,\" I called out, stepping away from Simon with a giggle.\n\n\"You ready to go?\" he asked, looking at Simon carefully. Simon straightened to his full height and looked back, just as carefully.\n\n\"Yep, ready to go. Simon, this is James. James, Simon.\" They leaned in to shake hands, and I could see that they both exerted a little extra force, neither seeming to want to be the one to let go first. I rolled my eyes. Yes, boys. You can both write your names in the snow. The question is, who would make bigger letters?\n\n\"Nice to meet you, James. It was James, right? I'm Simon. Simon Parker.\"\n\n\"That's correct. James. James Brown.\"\n\nI saw the beginnings of a laugh on Simon's face.\n\n\"Okay, James, we should get going. Simon, I'll talk to you later,\" I interrupted, ending the handshake of the century.\n\nJames turned toward where his car was double-parked, and Simon looked at me.\n\n\"Brown? James Brown?\" he mouthed, and I squelched my own laugh.\n\n\"Shush,\" I mouthed back, smiling at James when he turned back to me.\n\n\"Nice to meet you, Simon. See you around,\" James called, steering me to the car with his hand on the small of my back. I didn't think twice about it, as that's how we always used to walk together, but Simon's eyes widened a little at the sight.\n\nHmm...\n\nJames opened the door for me, then headed around to his side. Simon was still standing in front of our building when we drove away. I rubbed my hands together in front of the heater and grinned at James as he steered through the traffic.\n\n\"So, where are we headed?\"\n\nWe made ourselves comfortable in the swanky bar he'd selected. It seemed very James: chic and sophisticated, and laced with hidden sexuality. The deep red leather banquettes, thinly cushioned and cool, ensconced us as we settled in and began the process of getting to know each other after so many years apart.\n\nAs we waited for a server to come by, I studied his face. He still looked the same: closely cropped sandy blond hair, intense eyes, and a lean frame folded in on itself like a cat's. Age had only improved his good looks, and his carefully torn jeans and black cashmere sweater clung to a body I could see was in great shape. James had been a rock climber, relentless in his pursuit of the sport. He viewed each boulder, each mountain as an obstacle to overcome, something to be conquered.\n\nI'd gone climbing with him a few times toward the end of our relationship, even though I grew up skittish about heights. But watching him climb, seeing the sinewy muscles stretch and manipulate his body into positions that seemed unnatural, was a heady experience, and I'd pounced on him those evenings in the tent like a woman possessed.\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\" he asked, interrupting my musings.\n\n\"I was thinking about how much you used to climb. Is that something you still do?\"\n\n\"It is, but I don't get as much free time as I used to. They keep me pretty busy at the firm. I try and get out to Big Basin as often as I can,\" he added, smiling as our waitress approached.\n\n\"What can I get you two?\" she asked, placing napkins in front of us. \"She'll have a dry vodka martini, three olives, and for me bring three fingers of Macallan,\" he answered. The waitress nodded and left to fill our order.\n\nI studied him as he sat back, then turned his gaze to me.\n\n\"Oh, Caroline, I'm sorry. Is that still your drink?\"\n\nI narrowed my eyes at him. \"As it happens, yes. But what if I didn't want that tonight?\" I answered primly.\n\n\"My mistake. Of course, what did you want to drink?\" He waved the waitress back over.\n\n\"I'll have a dry vodka martini with three olives, please,\" I told her with a wink.\n\nShe looked confused.\n\nJames laughed loudly, and she walked away, shaking her head.\n\n\"Touch\u00e9, Caroline. Touch\u00e9,\" he said, studying me again.\n\n\"So, tell me what you've been up to the last few years.\" I put my elbows on the table and chin in hands.\n\n\"Hmm, how to encapsulate years in a few sentences? Finished law school, signed on with the firm here in the city, and worked like a dog for two years. I've been able to ease up a bit, only around sixty-five hours a week now, and it's nice seeing daylight again, I admit.\" He grinned, and I couldn't help but smile back. \"And of course working as much as I do leaves me very little time for a social life, so it was just blind luck that I saw you at the benefit last month,\" he finished, leaning forward on his elbows as well. Jillian attended many social events around town, and I accompanied her on occasion. Good for business. I should've known I'd eventually run into James at one of those shindigs.\n\n\"So you saw me, but you didn't come talk to me. And now here you are, weeks later, asking me to work on your condo. Why is that, exactly?\" I accepted my drink as it arrived and took a long pull.\n\n\"I wanted to talk to you, believe me. But I couldn't. So much time had passed. Then I realized you worked for Jillian, who a friend had recommended to me, and I thought, 'how perfect.'\" He inclined his glass toward mine for a clink.\n\nI paused for a moment, then clinked him. \"So you're serious about working with me? This isn't some kind of ploy to get me into bed, is it?\"\n\nHe looked at me evenly. \"Still direct as ever, I see. But no, this is professional. I didn't like the way we left things, admittedly, but I accepted your decision. And now here we are. I needed a decorator. You are a decorator. Works out well, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Designer,\" I said quietly.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Designer,\" I said, louder this time. \"I'm an interior designer, not a decorator. There's a difference, Mr. Attorney Man.\" I took another sip.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" he replied, signaling for the waitress.\n\nSurprised, I looked down to find my glass empty.\n\n\"Care for another?\" he asked, and I nodded.\n\nAs we small talked for the next hour, we also began to discuss what he needed in his new home. Jillian had been right. He was pretty much asking me to design his entire place, from area rugs to lighting fixtures and everything in between. It would be a huge commission, and he'd even agreed to let me photograph it for a local design magazine Jillian had been wanting me to submit to. James came from a wealthy family\u2014the Browns of Philadelphia, don't you know\u2014and I knew they must be footing the bill for most of this. Young lawyers didn't make enough to afford the kind of place he had, let alone in one of the most expensive cities in America. But trust funds live on, and he had a large one. One of the perks of dating him in college had been that we could actually afford real dates, not just cheap takeout all the time. I'd enjoyed that aspect of being with him. Not gonna lie.\n\nAnd I would enjoy that aspect of this project. A basically unlimited budget? I couldn't wait to get started.\n\nIn the end, it was a nice evening. As with all old flames, there was a feeling of knowing, a nostalgia you can only share with someone who has known you intimately\u2014especially at that age when you're still forming. It was great to see him again. James has a very strong personality, intense and confident, and I was reminded why I'd been attracted to him in the first place. We laughed and told stories about things we'd done as a couple, and I was relieved to find that his charm remained. We could get along quite well in a social setting. There was none of the awkwardness that could have accompanied this.\n\nAs the evening wound down and he drove me home, he got around to the question I knew he'd been dying to ask. He pulled the car to a stop in front of my building and turned to me.\n\n\"So, are you seeing anyone?\" he asked quietly.\n\n\"No, I'm not. And that's hardly a question a client would ask me,\" I teased and looked toward my building. I could see Clive sitting in the front window in his usual post, and I smiled. It was nice to have someone waiting for me. I couldn't stop myself from glancing next door to see if there was a light on in Simon's apartment, and I also couldn't stop my tummy from doing a little flippity-flop when I saw his shadow on the wall and the blue light of his television.\n\n\"Well, as your client, I'll refrain from asking those kinds of questions in the future, Ms. Reynolds,\" He chuckled.\n\nI turned back to face him. \"It's okay, James. We passed designer\/client relationship a long time ago.\" I felt triumphant as I saw a blush carve a chink in his careful fa\u00e7ade.\n\n\"I think this is gonna be fun.\" He winked, and it was my turn to laugh.\n\n\"Okay, you can call me tomorrow at the office, and we'll get started. I'm gonna fleece you blind, buddy, Get ready to work that credit card,\" I taunted as I stepped out of the car.\n\n\"Oh hell, I'm counting on it.\" He winked and waved goodbye.\n\nHe waited until I was inside, so I tossed another wave his way as the door closed. I was glad to see I could handle myself with him. Upstairs, as I turned the key in my lock I thought I heard something. I looked over my shoulder, and there was nothing there. Clive called to me from inside, so I smiled and stepped in, scooping him up and whispering softly in his ear as he gave me a tiny cat hug with his big paws around my neck.\n\nThe next evening I was rolling out the pie crust when the text came in from Simon.\n\nCome on over whenever. I'll start dinner once you're here.\n\nI'm still working on the pie, but I'll be over soon.\n\nNeed any help?\n\nHow are you with peeling apples?\n\nThe next thing I heard was a knock on the door. I walked over, hands covered in flour, and elbowed the door open. \"Well, hello there,\" I said, holding the door open with my foot.\n\n\"Looks like the end of Scarface in here,\" he observed, reaching out to touch my nose and show me the flour on the end.\n\n\"I tend to lose control when there's pie crust involved,\" I said as he shut the door.\n\n\"Duly noted. That's good information for me to have,\" he responded, swatting at my hand as I tried to slap him.\n\nHe took a good long look at me then, blue eyes dropping from my face and traveling across my body. \"Hmm, you weren't kidding about the apron, I don't know how long I'll be able to hang in here without trying a little grab-ass.\"\n\n\"Get in there and grab an apple, buddy,\" I said and walked toward the kitchen, adding a little extra swish to my hips. I heard him sigh heavily. I glanced down at my outfit, noting my tank top, old jeans, bare feet, and chef's apron that said, You should see my scones...\n\n\"Now when you said 'grab an apple,' what exactly were you referring to?\" he asked from the kitchen where he'd started taking off his sweater.\n\nI shook my head at the sight of Simon in a black T-shirt and weathered jeans. He was in his stocking feet once again, and I marveled at how at ease he seemed in my kitchen.\n\nI walked around the kitchen counter and picked up my rolling pin. \"You know, I won't think twice about whacking you over the head with this if you continue this borderline sexual harassment,\" I warned, running my hand up and down the rolling pin suggestively.\n\n\"I'm gonna have to ask you not to do that if you're serious about me peeling apples here,\" he said, eyes widening.\n\n\"I never joke about pie, Simon.\" I sprinkled a little more flour on the marble.\n\nHe was silent while he watched me pat out the pie crust, breathing through his mouth. \"So, what are you gonna do with that?\" he asked, his voice low.\n\n\"With this?\" I asked, leaning over the board, and perhaps arching my back a little as I did.\n\n\"Mmm-hmm,\" he replied.\n\n\"I'm gonna roll this crust out. See, like this?\" I teased again, thrusting the pin back and forth over the dough, making sure I arched my back each time and the forward action pushed my girls together.\n\n\"Oh my,\" he whispered, and I grinned naughtily at him.\n\n\"You gonna be okay over there, big guy? This is just the top crust, I still need to work on my bottom,\" I said over my shoulder.\n\nHis hands clutched at the edge of the counter. \"Apples. Apples. Gonna peel me some apples,\" he told himself and turned away toward the colander filled with apples in the sink.\n\n\"Let me just get you the peeler,\" I said, coming up behind him and pressing myself against him as I curled around his side to grab the vegetable peeler from the other sink. This was fun.\n\n\"Peeling apples, just peeling apples. Didn't feel your boobs. No, no, not me,\" he chanted as I openly laughed at him.\n\n\"Here, peel this,\" I said, taking pity on him and removing myself from his cooking space. I might have sniffed his T-shirt.\n\n\"Did you just sniff me?\" he asked, keeping himself turned away.\n\n\"I might have,\" I admitted, going back to my rolling pin, which I squeezed mightily.\n\n\"I thought so.\"\n\n\"Hey, if you can sniff, I can sniff,\" I shot back, taking out my sexual frustration on a defenseless P\u00e2te Bris\u00e9e.\n\n\"Only fair. So how do I rate?\"\n\n\"Good. Very good, actually. Downy?\"\n\n\"Bounce. I lost my Downy ball,\" he confessed.\n\nI laughed, and we continued to roll and peel. Within fifteen minutes, we had a bowlful of peeled and sliced apples, a perfectly rolled-out pie crust, and we'd both consumed our first glass of wine.\n\n\"Okay, what's next?\" he asked, wiping up flour and generally tidying.\n\n\"Now we spice things up and add a little citrus,\" I answered, lining up cinnamon and nutmeg, my sugar bowl, and a lemon.\n\n\"Okay, where do you want me?\" he asked, taking care to show me his hands, now covered in flour.\n\nVisions ran through my head, and I had to bite back an invitation to show him exactly where I wanted him. \"First dust yourself off, and then we'll get started. You can be my assistant.\"\n\nHe looked around for a dishtowel, and I turned to look for the one I knew I'd left out. I'd already started for it on the counter when I felt two very strong and very specifically placed hands on my ass.\n\n\"Um, hi?\" I said, freezing in place.\n\n\"Hi,\" he answered cheerfully, not releasing his hands.\n\n\"Explain yourself, please,\" I ordered, trying not to notice how my heart was trying to leave my body by way of my mouth.\n\n\"You told me to find something to clean my hands with,\" he stuttered, trying hard not to laugh as he gave each cheek a little squeeze.\n\n\"And you took that to mean my ass?\" I laughed back and turned to face him, removing his hands with my own.\n\n\"What can I say? I take liberties with my neighbors,\" he replied, his eyes darting back and forth now between my lips and my eyes.\n\n\"We have a pie to make, mister. I'll thank you to remember your manners. No one touches my ass without an invitation.\" I giggled, still holding his hands. I felt his thumb trace little circles on the inside of my palm, and my head got swimmy. This guy was going to be the death of me. \"Get over there, handsy, and behave,\" I instructed.\n\nHe smirked and turned away, which gave me the opportunity to mutter, \"Oh my Jesus Lord,\" to no one in particular before meeting him back at the apple bowl.\n\n\"Okay, you do what I tell you, got it?\" I said, sprinkling sugar into the bowl.\n\n\"Got it.\"\n\nI started tossing the apples with my hands and Simon followed my instructions to the letter. When I asked for more sugar, he sugared. When I asked for more cinnamon, he complied. When I asked him to squeeze the lemon, he lemoned so well I had trouble keeping my tongue in my mouth and off his throat.\n\nI tossed and tasted, and when they were finally right, I lifted a wedge to his mouth. \"Open up,\" I said, and he leaned in.\n\nI placed an apple on his tongue, and he snapped his mouth shut before I had to chance to remove my fingers. He let his lips close around two, and I slowly withdrew them, feeling his tongue wrap around them delicately and deliberately.\n\n\"Delicious,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Gah,\" I answered, eyes crossing a little at the sex on two legs displayed in front of me.\n\nHe chewed. \"Sweet. Sweet, Caroline.\"\n\n\"Gah,\" I managed again. Brain knew this was bad, Heart was beating out of our chest.\n\n\"Good for you?\" he asked, that knowing smile treading dangerously close to smirk territory.\n\n\"Good for me,\" I answered, on fire after the fingerlatio. Truce schmuce, harem schmarem. Who cared if there was no actual O? I needed to be in contact with this man in the very worst way.\n\nMy sexual wall had been hit, and as I prepared to rip the clothes from his body, throw him to the ground, and ride him amid a pile of apples and cinnamon with only a rolling pin to guide us, my phone rang.\n\nThank you, Jesus.\n\nI looked at the blue-eyed devil and launched myself across the room, away from the brain-scrambling voodoo. I saw his face as I ran, and he looked a little disappointed.\n\n\"Girl, what are you up to tonight?\" Mimi screeched into the phone. I held it away from my ear before the bleeding started. Mimi had three sound levels: Normal Loud, Excited Loud, and Drunky Loud. She was leaving Excited and on her way to Drunky.\n\n\"I'm getting ready to have dinner. Where are you?\" I asked, nodding at Simon who had started pouring the apples into the pie dish.\n\n\"I'm out for drinks with Sophia. What are you doing?\" she screamed.\n\n\"I just told you, getting ready to have dinner!\" I laughed.\n\nSimon came out into the living room with the pie in his hands. \"Should I put this in the oven?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hang on, Mimi. Not yet, I still need to brush it with a little cream,\" I told him, and he ducked back into the kitchen.\n\n\"Caroline Reynolds, that was a man! Who was that? Who are you having dinner with? And what are you brushing with cream?\" she fired at me, her voice growing even louder.\n\n\"Settle down. My goodness, you're loud! I'm having dinner with Simon, and we're making an apple pie,\" I explained, which she immediately screamed out to Sophia.\n\n\"Shit,\" I muttered as I heard the phone yanked away from Mimi.\n\n\"Reynolds, what are you doing? Are you baking pies with your neighbor? Are you naked?\" Sophia yelled, taking her turn to grill me.\n\n\"Okay, no, and you all need to seriously settle down. Hanging up now,\" I yelled over her yelling at me. I could hear Mimi squealing nasty things about pies and cream. Sophia was in the middle of threatening me not to hang up on her, when I did just that.\n\nI sighed and went to find Simon, with his hands full of pie. I snorted in spite of myself.\n\n\"Oh, my God, that's so good,\" I whimpered, closing my eyes and losing myself to the sensations.\n\n\"I knew you'd like it, but I had no idea you'd enjoy it this much,\" he whispered, staring at me with rapt attention.\n\n\"Stop talking, you're going to ruin it for me,\" I moaned, stretching and feeling myself respond to everything he was giving me.\n\n\"Did you want another one?\" he offered, raising up on his elbows.\n\n\"If I have another, I won't be able to walk tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, be a bad girl\u2014you deserve it. I know you want it, Caroline,\" he teased, leaning closer.\n\n\"Okay,\" I managed, opening up to him once again. I closed my eyes and heard him fumbling about before putting it in. Sighing as I felt it, I closed my lips around what he offered.\n\n\"I've never seen a woman who could take so much in one sitting,\" he marveled, watching me come undone once more.\n\n\"Yes, well, you've never met a woman who likes meatballs as much as me,\" I moaned around another mouthful, feeling stuffed beyond belief but not wanting the meal to end.\n\nSimon had just cooked me quite possibly the most perfect meal ever, hitting every single taste bud that needed to be hit. He'd learned how to make the most amazing meatballs from a woman in Naples, and he'd sworn they'd be the best I'd ever had. After no less than seven jokes about balls and mouths, I had to agree they were the best balls I had ever had in my mouth.\n\nGod, he gave great meatball.\n\nI then proceeded to eat almost a pound of pasta myself, as well as all of my meatballs, plus half of his. I insisted he eat the last one, but he refused and brought the perfection that was his meatball to my willing mouth.\n\nSimon was a great host, insisting that I sit, drink wine, and watch rather than help. He entertained me with stories about his travels as he got everything ready, and while the food was simple, it was good. \"Nonni made me promise if she showed me how to make her polpette I would only serve them with her special sauce. If I dared serve these with a jar of Prego, she would cross the ocean to break her wooden spoon against my backside.\"\n\n\"She made you call her Nonni?\" I laughed, leaning back in my chair and unbuttoning the top button on my jeans. I had no shame. I'd eaten an obscene amount.\n\n\"You know what Nonni means?\" he asked, surprised.\n\n\"I had an Italian great-grandmother. She insisted everyone call her Nonni.\" I laughed again when his eyes went to my hands massaging my stomach.\n\n\"You gonna be okay there?\" He raised his eyebrows as he got up to clear.\n\n\"Yep, just need to breathe a little.\" I groaned, pulling myself up from the table.\n\n\"No, no, you don't have to help,\" he said, rushing to my side and grabbing my plate.\n\n\"Oh, no, I wasn't. I was gonna drop this off and pass out on that couch right there,\" I said, nodding toward the living room.\n\n\"You go relax. Anyone who just had that many balls in their mouth deserves a rest,\" he teased, and I flicked his ear.\n\n\"I said no more ball jokes! You've had your fun, now let me go die in peace.\" I shuffled into the living room. I really had made quite a little piggy of myself, but it was seriously good. I reclined and popped open another button on my jeans, relaxing into the cushions and replaying some of the finer points of the evening.\n\nWatching Simon cook was, in a word, hot. He was really at home in a kitchen, his earlier fussing about with the pie aside. Even his salad\u2014simple greens dressed lightly with lemon and olive oil, salt, pepper, and good Parmesan\u2014was easy and perfect.\n\n\"Pink Himalayan salt, thank you very much,\" he'd said proudly, producing a bag from his pantry. He'd brought it back from one of his many trips and had me taste a little before sprinkling it on the salad. Could have been pretentious, but it fit Simon. The many facets of this guy were astounding. My earliest assumptions about him were proving to be completely wrong. As assumptions tend to be...\n\nI could hear him tending to the dishes, and as much as I probably should have gone to help him, I simply couldn't remove myself from the couch. I snuggled on my side and looked around his living room again, my eyes drawn back to the tiny bottles of sand from all over the world. I marveled at how traveled he was, and how he seemed to enjoy it still. I gazed at the pictures of the woman in Bora Bora\u2014her dark, beautiful skin and the smooth planes of her body\u2014and thought about how different the three of the women in his harem were. Oops, make that two now that Katie\/Spanx was with her new man.\n\nSuddenly I could smell the apple pie and heard the oven door clank shut. I'd put it in his oven as soon as we came over so it would be ready after dinner.\n\n\"Don't you dare try to serve me pie now. I am stuffed, I tell you, stuffed!\" I yelled.\n\n\"Quiet, it's just cooling,\" he scolded, coming around the corner from the kitchen. \"You're gonna have to scooch over, sister. It's movie time,\" he instructed, pushing me with his big toe as I struggled to sit up straight.\n\n\"What is it that we're watching?\"\n\n\"The Exorcist,\" he whispered, turning off the light on the end table and leaving the room quite dark.\n\n\"Are you freaking kidding me?\" I screeched, leaning over him to turn it back on.\n\n\"Don't be a wuss. You're watching it,\" he hissed, turning it back off.\n\n\"I'm not a wuss, but there is stupid and not stupid, and stupid is watching a movie like The Exorcist with the lights off! That's just asking for trouble!\" I hissed back, turning it back on.\n\nIt was starting to look like a disco in here...\n\n\"Okay, I'll make a deal with you. Lights off, but\u2014\" he shushed me with is finger as he saw me begin to interrupt \"\u2014if you get too scared, lights go back on. Deal?\"\n\nI was still leaning across him on my way to turn the light back on again when I noticed how close I was to his face. And how I was angled across him like a girl waiting to get a spanking. And I knew he was capable of delivering one...\n\n\"Fine,\" I huffed as the opening credits came on. I returned to a normal, seated position.\n\nHe smiled triumphantly and gave me a thumbs up.\n\n\"If you show me that thumb one more time I'll bite it off,\" I growled, pulling an afghan off the back of the couch and curling it protectively around me. One minute into the movie, and I was already spooked.\n\nI was tense from that moment on, and any idea I might have had about girls being ridiculous around guys when they watched scary movies went by the wayside when Regan peed herself at the dinner party.\n\nBy the time the priest came for a little visit, I was practically sitting on Simon's lap, my right hand had a death grip on his thigh, and I was viewing the movie through the holes in the afghan, which I had draped entirely over my head.\n\n\"I actually, literally, hate you for making me watch this movie,\" I whispered in his ear, which was right in my face as I refused to leave any space between us. I'd even accompanied him to the bathroom earlier when we took a break. He insisted I stay out in the hallway, but I stood just outside the door, eyes glancing around furtively, still with the afghan over my head.\n\n\"Do you want me to stop? I don't want you to have nightmares,\" he whispered back, his eyes on the screen.\n\n\"Just no banging on the walls for a few nights, please. I won't be able to take it,\" I said, looking at him through one of my eyeholes.\n\n\"Have you heard any banging lately?\" he asked, rolling his eyes as he did every time he looked at me with the ridiculous afghan on my head.\n\n\"No, I haven't actually. Why is that?\" I asked.\n\nHe took a breath. \"Well, I\u2014\" he started, and then the most maniacal scary noises started coming from the TV, and we both jumped.\n\n\"Okay, maybe this movie is a little scary. You wanna sit closer?\" he asked, pressing pause on the remote.\n\n\"I thought you'd never ask,\" I cried, launching myself fully into his lap and settling between his thighs. \"Do you want some afghan?\" I offered, and he laughed.\n\n\"No, I can take it like a man. You stay under there, though,\" he teased.\n\nI narrowed my eyes at him through the eyeholes and poked one finger through the weave. \"Guess which finger this is,\" I said, waving it at him.\n\n\"Shhh, movie,\" he answered, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me back against his chest.\n\nHe was warm and strong and powerful, but absolutely no match for terror that was The Exorcist. What had we been talking about? Now I couldn't think about any walls banging except the one Regan was currently banging the shit out of and spraying down with pea soup. We watched the rest of that damn movie wound around each other like pretzels, and he finally succumbed to the false security that an afghan eyehole can provide.\n\nClick. Click. Click.\n\nWhat the hell was that?\n\nClick. Click. Click.\n\nOh no.\n\nI lay paralyzed in my bed, every light in my entire apartment blazing.\n\nClick. Click. Click.\n\nI pulled the covers up higher, covering my face up to my eyes, which kept a constant vigil around the bedroom. Brain knew we were safe and secure, but also kept replaying scenes from that terrible, terrible movie, making it impossible to shut off for the night and go to sleep. Nerves had everything on lockdown, blazing a trail of fiery adrenaline throughout my body. I hated Simon with every fiber of my being in that moment. I also wished he was here.\n\nClick. Click. Click.\n\nWhat was that?\n\nClick. Click.\n\nNothing.\n\nThen Clive leaped on the bed, and I screamed bloody murder. Clive puffed out his tail and hissed at me, wondering why the hell Mommy was screaming at him, I'm sure. The click-click-click was his goddamned kitty hangnail.\n\nMy phone vibrated an instant later, shaking the entire nightstand and eliciting another scream from me. It was Simon.\n\n\"What the hell is wrong? Why are you screaming? Are you okay?\" he yelled when I answered, and I could hear him through the phone and through the wall.\n\n\"Get your ass over here right now, you motherfucking scary movie pusher,\" I seethed and hung up. I pounded on the wall and ran out to unlock the door. In much the same way I'd run up the last few steps of the basement stairs when I was a kid, I hightailed it back into my room, jumping the last few feet and landing in the center of my bed. I wrapped the covers around me and peered out, waiting. He knocked, and I heard the door push open.\n\n\"Caroline?\" he called.\n\n\"Back here,\" I yelled. Sad that I'd been reduced to this, but I was glad to see him.\n\n\"I brought the pie,\" he said with an embarrassed grin. \"And this,\" he added, producing the afghan from behind his back.\n\n\"Thanks.\" I smiled at him from behind my pillow shield.\n\nA few minutes later we were settled on my bed, each balancing a plate and a glass of milk. We'd been too full, then too terrified to eat pie earlier. Clive and his phantom hangnail retired to the other room after rolling his eyes at Simon and swishing his tail.\n\n\"How old are you?\" I asked, cutting into my pie.\n\n\"Twenty-eight. How old are you?\"\n\n\"Twenty-six. We are twenty-eight and twenty-six years old and terrified of a movie,\" I mused, poking in a bite. The pie was good.\n\n\"I wouldn't say I'm terrified,\" he countered. \"Spooked? Yes. But I only came over to stop you from screaming.\"\n\n\"And to taste my pie,\" I added, winking.\n\n\"Shut it, you,\" he warned, and then he went ahead and tasted my pie.\n\n\"Jesus, that's good,\" he breathed, eyes closed as he chewed.\n\n\"I know. What is it about apples and homemade pie crust? Is there anything better?\"\n\n\"If we were eating this naked, then it would be better,\" He grinned, opening one eye.\n\n\"No one is getting naked here, buddy. Just eat your pie.\" I pointed at his plate with my fork.\n\nWe chewed.\n\n\"I feel better,\" I added a few minutes later, drinking my milk.\n\n\"Me too. Not too spooked anymore.\"\n\nHe smiled as I took his plate and set it on the nightstand. I sighed contentedly and lay back against my pillows, sated and less scared.\n\n\"So, I gotta ask...James Brown? I mean, James Brown?\" He laughed, and I kicked him as he lay down next to me. We turned on our sides to face each other, arms curling under the pillows.\n\n\"I know, I know. I can't believe you held it in as long as you did! I know you've been dying to make jokes since last night.\"\n\n\"Seriously, who is this guy?\" he asked.\n\n\"He's a new client.\"\n\n\"Ah, got it,\" he said, looking pleased.\n\n\"And an old boyfriend,\" I added, watching for his reaction.\n\n\"I see. New client but old boyfriend\u2014wait, the lawyer?\" he asked, trying to keep his expression neutral, but failing.\n\n\"Yep. Haven't seen him in a few years.\"\n\n\"How's that gonna work?\"\n\n\"Don't know yet. We'll see.\"\n\nI really didn't know how things were going to go with James. I was glad to see him, but it was going to be tough to keep things professional if he wanted more. And every instinct I had told me he wanted more. In the past he'd had more control over me than I was comfortable relinquishing. I'd found myself sucked into the gravitational pull that was James Brown\u2014lawyer, not Godfather of Soul.\n\n\"Anyway, we're just going to be working together. It'll be a great job for me. He wants his entire place redone.\" I sighed, already planning the palette. I rolled onto my back and stretched. I'd really abused my stomach tonight and was starting to get sleepy.\n\n\"I don't like him,\" Simon said suddenly, after a long pause.\n\nI turned and saw him scowling.\n\n\"You don't even know him! How could you possibly not like him?\" I laughed.\n\n\"I just don't,\" he said, now turning his gaze to mine and unleashing the power of the baby blues.\n\n\"Oh, please, you're just a stinky boy.\" I laughed, ruffling his hair. Wrong move. It sure was soft...\n\n\"I don't stink. You said yourself I was April fresh,\" he protested, lifting his arm and sniffing.\n\n\"Yes, Simon, you smell delicious,\" I deadpanned, sniffing the air around me.\n\nHe left his arm up higher on the pillow, and I knew if I rolled just a little I could slide right on into the nook. He looked at me, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly. Was he thinking what I was thinking?\n\nDid he want to nook me?\n\nDid I want to nook him?\n\nOh the hell with it...\n\n\"I'm coming into the nook,\" I announced and went full snuggle: head nestled in, left arm over chest, right arm tucked under his pillow. Legs I kept to myself\u2014I wasn't a total fool.\n\n\"Well, hello there,\" he said, sounding surprised. Then he curled himself around me immediately. I sighed again, wrapped in boy and voodoo.\n\n\"What brought this on, friend?\" he whispered into my hair, and I shivered.\n\n\"Delayed reaction to Linda Blair. I need some nook time. Friends can nook, can't they?\"\n\n\"Sure, but are we friends who can nook?\" he asked, tracing circles on my back. Him and his demon finger circles...\n\n\"I can handle it. You?\" I held my breath.\n\n\"I can handle just about anything, but...\" he started, and then stopped.\n\n\"What? What were you going to say?\" I asked, leaning up to look at him. One piece of hair uncurled from my ponytail and fell down between us. Slowly, and with great care, he pushed it back behind my ear.\n\n\"Let's just say that if you were wearing that pink nightie? You'd be in a heap of trouble.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a good thing we're just friends then, right?\" I forced myself to say.\n\n\"Friends, yes.\"\n\nHe stared into my eyes.\n\nI breathed in, he breathed out. We traded actual air.\n\n\"Just nook me, Simon,\" I said quietly, and he grinned.\n\n\"Come on back down here,\" he said and coaxed me back to his chest. I slid down, resting where I could hear his heart beat. He folded the afghan over us, and I noticed again how soft it was. It had served me well tonight, this afghan.\n\n\"I love this afghan, but I have to say it doesn't really fit your apartment\u2014the cool-dude motif you have going on,\" I mused. It was orange and pea green and very retro. He was silent, and I thought maybe he had fallen asleep.\n\n\"It was my mom's,\" he said quietly, and his grip on me became infinitesimally tighter.\n\nThere was nothing to say after that.\n\nSimon and I slept together that night, with every light in the entire place on.\n\nClive and his hangnail stayed away.\nChapter Eleven\n\nI WOKE UP A FEW HOURS LATER, startled by the warmth of the body next to me, which was decidedly bigger than the cat usually nestled against my side. I rolled carefully onto my back and away from Simon so I could see him. I could see him just fine as the lamps, along with all my other lights, continued to blaze away into the night, fighting back the evils of that awful movie.\n\nI rubbed my eyes and inspected my bedmate. He lay on his back, arms curled as though I was still in them, and I thought of how good it felt to nook with Simon.\n\nBut I shouldn't be nooking with Simon. Brain knew better. Nerves were in agreement. That was definitely a very, very slippery slope. And though the images of climbing a slippery Simon that immediately came to mind were far from innocent, I pushed them aside. I looked away and noticed the terribly wonderful afghan tangled between his legs\u2014and mine, for that matter.\n\nIt had been his mom's. Heart broke each time I thought of his sweet, timid voice sharing that little nugget with me. He didn't know I'd talked to Jillian about his past, that I knew his parents were no longer alive. The idea that he still clung to his mother's afghan was inexorably sweet, and once again my heart broke open.\n\nI was close with my parents. They still lived in the same house where I'd grown up, in a small town in southern California. They were great parents, and I saw them as often as I could, which is to say holidays and an occasional weekend. A typical twenty-something, I enjoyed my independence. But my parents were there when I needed them, always there. The idea that I would someday have to walk this earth without their anchor and misguided guidance made me wince, to say nothing of losing both of them at only eighteen.\n\nI was glad Simon seemed to have good friends and such a powerful advocate as Benjamin watching out for him. But as close as friends and lovers could be, there was something about belonging to someone completely that gave you roots\u2014roots you sometimes needed when the world battled against you.\n\nSimon stirred slightly in his sleep, and I watched him again. He murmured something that I couldn't quite pick out, but it sounded a little like \"meatballs.\" I smiled and allowed my fingers to slip into his hair, feeling the soft silk tousled on my pillow.\n\nGod, he gave good meatball.\n\nAs I stroked his hair, my mind wandered to a place where meatballs flowed endlessly and there was pie for days. I giggled to myself as sleepiness began to return, and I nestled back down into the nook. As I felt the comfort that only warm boy arms could provide, a little alarm went off in my head, warning me not to get too close. I had to be careful.\n\nClearly we were both divinely attracted to each other, and in another space and time, the sex would have been ringing out across the land and around the clock. But he had his harem, and I had my hiatus, not to mention that I did not have my O. So friends we would remain.\n\nFriends who meatball. Friends who nook. Friends who were headed to Tahoe very soon.\n\nI pictured Simon soaking in a hot tub with Lake Tahoe spread out in all its glory behind him. Which sight was actually more glorious remained to be seen. I settled back to sleep, rousing only slightly when Simon snuggled me a little closer.\n\nAnd even though it was barely above a whisper, I heard it. He sighed my name.\n\nI smiled as I slipped back to sleep.\n\nThe next morning I felt a persistent poking at my left shoulder. I brushed it away, but it continued.\n\n\"Clive, stop it, you asshole,\" I moaned, hiding my head under the covers. I knew he wouldn't stop until I fed him. Ruled by his stomach, that one. Then I heard a distinctly human laugh\u2014quiet and definitely not Clive.\n\nMy eyes sprang open, and the night before came back to me in a rush: the horror, the pie, the nook. I reached backward with my right foot, sliding it along the bed until I felt it stop against something warm and hairy. Although I was now more sure than ever it wasn't Clive, I poked with my toe, inching my way higher until I heard another chuckle.\n\n\"Wallbanger?\" I whispered, not wanting to flip over. True to form, I was spread-eagled diagonally across the entire bed, head on one side, feet practically on the other.\n\n\"The one and only,\" a delicious voice whispered in my ear.\n\nMy toes and Lower Caroline curled. \"Shit.\" I rolled onto my back to take in the damage. He was huddled in the one corner my body had allowed him. My bed-sharing habits had not improved at all.\n\n\"You sure can fill a bed,\" he noted, smiling at me from under the little bit of afghan I'd left him. \"If we're going to do this again there'll have to be some ground rules.\"\n\n\"This won't be happening again. This was in response to a terrible movie you inflicted on both of us. No more nooking,\" I stated firmly, wondering how dreadful my morning breath was. I cupped my hand in front of my face, breathed, and gave a quick sniff.\n\n\"Roses?\" he asked.\n\n\"Obviously.\" I smirked.\n\nI looked at him, exquisitely rumpled and in my bed. He smiled that smile, and I sighed. I allowed myself a moment to indulge in a fantasy where I was then quickly flipped and ravaged to within an inch of my life, but I wisely got control of my inner whore.\n\n\"What if you get scared tonight?\" he asked as I sat up and stretched.\n\n\"I won't,\" I threw back over my shoulder.\n\n\"What if I get scared?\"\n\n\"Grow up, pretty boy. Let's make coffee, and then I have to get to work.\" I whacked him with my pillow.\n\nHe slid out from under the afghan, taking care to fold it, and carried it with him into the kitchen where he set it gently on the table. I smiled, thinking of him saying my name in the night. What I wouldn't give to know what was running through his mind.\n\nWe moved about the kitchen with quiet economy, grinding beans, measuring coffee, pouring water. I put the sugar and cream on the counter while he peeled and sliced a banana. I poured granola, he milked and banana-ed the bowls for us. Within a few minutes we were seated next to each other on barstools, eating breakfast as though we'd been doing so for years. Our simple ease intrigued me. And worried me.\n\n\"Plans for the day?\" I asked, digging into my bowl.\n\n\"I need to stop by the Chronicle office.\"\n\n\"Are you working on something for the paper?\" I asked, surprised at the level of interest even I could hear in my voice. Would he be in town for a while? Why did I care? Oh boy.\n\n\"I'm spending a few days on a piece about quick getaways in the Bay Area\u2014weekend drives kind of thing,\" he answered through a mouthful of banana.\n\n\"When are you going to do that?\" I asked, examining the raisins in my bowl and trying not to look too interested in his answer.\n\n\"Next week. I leave on Tuesday,\" he replied and my stomach was instantly queasy. Next week we were supposed to go to Tahoe. Why the hell did my stomach care so much that he wouldn't be going?\n\n\"I see,\" I added, again fascinated by the raisins.\n\n\"But I'll be back before Tahoe. I was planning on just driving straight there when I finish my shoot,\" he said, looking at me over the rim of his coffee mug.\n\n\"Oh, well, that's good,\" I answered quietly, my stomach now bouncing all around.\n\n\"When are you headed up, anyway?\" he asked, seeming to now be studying his own bowl.\n\n\"The girls are driving up with Neil and Ryan on Thursday, but I have to stay in the city to work until at least noon on Friday. I'm gonna rent a car and drive up that afternoon.\"\n\n\"Don't rent a car. I'll swing through to pick you up,\" he offered, and I nodded without a word.\n\nThat settled, we finished our breakfast and watched Clive chase a stray piece of fluff around the table over and over again. We didn't talk much, but whenever we met each other's eyes, we both grinned.\n\nText between Mimi and Sophia:\n\nDid you know Caroline is working with James?\n\nJames who?\n\nJames Brown, obviously. Who else?\n\nNO! What the hell?\n\nRemember she mentioned she had a new client? She neglected to mention who he was.\n\nI'm gonna kick her ass when I see her next. She better not cancel on Tahoe. Did Ryan tell you he was bringing his guitar?\n\nYep, he told me you wanted to have some kind of fucked-up singalong.\n\nHe did? Haha. I just thought it would be fun.\n\nText between Neil and Mimi:\n\nHey, Tiny, are we still bowling with Sophia and Ryan tonight?\n\nYep, and you better bring your A game. Sophia and I are pretty severe.\n\nSophia knows how to bowl? Wow.\n\nWhy is that wow?\n\nI just wouldn't have expected her to bowl is all. See you tonight.\n\nText between Neil and Simon:\n\nYou still planning on heading up with us this weekend?\n\nYep, but I'm coming a little late, have a shoot\n\nWhen are you coming up?\n\nFri night sometime, stopping thru the city on my way\n\nWhy the hell are you going back into the city? You're doing that shoot in Carmel, right?\n\nI just need to pick up some shit for the weekend.\n\nDude, pack your shit and get your ass to Tahoe.\n\nI will, but I'm picking up Caroline.\n\nI see.\n\nYou see nothing.\n\nI see everything.\n\nYou sure about that, Big Boy? What about Sophia?\n\nSophia? Why is everyone asking me about Sophia?\n\nSee you in Tahoe.\n\nText between Mimi and Caroline:\n\nYou have some splainin' to do, Lucy...\n\nOh no, I hate it when you go Ricardo on me.  \nWhat the hell did I do?\n\nExplain to me why you didn't tell me about your new client.\n\nCaroline, don't ignore my text! CAROLINE!!\n\nOh, settle down. This is exactly why I did NOT tell you.\n\nCaroline Reynolds, this is news that obviously  \nI should have known about!\n\nLook, I can handle it okay?? He's my client, nothing more. He's going to spend an obscene amount of money  \non this project.\n\nI frankly don't care how much he's spending.  \nI don't want you working with him.\n\nListen to yourself! I will take on whatever new client  \nI damn well please! I have this under control.\n\nWe'll see...Did I hear a rumor that you're driving  \nup to Tahoe with Wallbanger?\n\nWow, subject change. Yes, I am.\n\nGood. Take the long way.\n\nWhat the hell is that supposed to mean?\n\nMimi?? You there??\n\nDamn you, Mimi...HELLO??\n\nText between Caroline and Simon:\n\nWallbanger...come in Wallbanger\n\nWallbanger isn't here, only the exorcist\n\nNot even a little bit funny.\n\nWhat's up?\n\nWhat time are you picking me up tom?\n\nI should be back in the city by noon.  \nIf you can knock off work we can beat rush hour.\n\nAlready told Jillian I'm taking a half day.  \nWhere are you right now?\n\nIn Carmel, on a cliff overlooking the ocean\n\nBoy, are you a closet romantic...\n\nI'm a photographer. We go where the money shot is.\n\nOh man, we're not discussing money shots.\n\nBesides, I thought you were the romantic one\n\nI told you, I'm a practical romantic.\n\nWell then practically speaking, even you would appreciate this sight\u2014waves crashing, sun setting, it's nice\n\nAre you alone?\n\nYep\n\nBet you wish you weren't.\n\nYou have no idea\n\nPfft...you old softie\n\nThere's nothing soft about me, Caroline.\n\nAnd we're back...\n\nCaroline?\n\nYep\n\nSee you tomorrow\n\nYep\n\nText between Caroline and Sophia:\n\nCan you give me the address again to the house  \nso I can plug it into the GPS tom?\n\nNo\n\nNo?\n\nNot until you tell me WHY YOU'RE HIDING JAMES BROWN.\n\nJesus, it's like having 2 more mothers...\n\nThis isn't about sitting up straight or eating more vegetables, but we do need to have a conversation about your posture.\n\nUnbelievable.\n\nSeriously, Caroline, we just worry.\n\nSeriously, Sophia, I know. Address please?\n\nLet me think about it.\n\nNot gonna ask you again...\n\nYes you will. You want to see Simon in that hot tub. Don't lie.\n\nI hate you...\n\nText between Simon and Caroline:\n\nYou done with work?\n\nYep, at home waiting for you.\n\nNow that's a nice visual...\n\nPrepare yourself, I'm taking bread out of the oven.\n\nDon't tease me, woman...zucchini?\n\nCranberry orange. Mmmm...\n\nNo woman has ever done breakfast bread foreplay  \nthe way you do.\n\nHa! When are you coming?\n\nCan't. Drive. Straight.\n\nCan we have one conversation where you're not twelve?\n\nSorry, I'll be there in 30\n\nPerfect, that will give me time to frost my buns.\n\nPardon me?\n\nOh, I didn't tell you? I also made cinnamon rolls.\n\nBe there in 25.\n\n\"I'm not listening to this.\"\n\n\"Like hell. It's my car. Driver picks music.\"\n\n\"Actually, you're wrong about that. The passenger always picks music. It's what you get when you give up driving privileges.\"\n\n\"Caroline, you don't even own a car, so how could you ever have driving privileges?\"\n\n\"Exactly, so we listen to what I pick,\" I chided, sitting back after changing the radio station for the hundredth time. I hit the iPod and scrolled until I found something that I thought would please us both.\n\n\"Good song,\" he admitted, and we hummed along.\n\nThe trip had been great so far. When I first met him\u2014heard him\u2014I never would have predicted it, but Simon was quickly turning into one of my favorite people. I'd been wrong about him.\n\nI glanced at him: humming along to the song, drumming his thumbs along the steering wheel. As he was concentrating on the road, I took the opportunity to catalogue some of his more swoon-worthy features.\n\nJaw? Strong.\n\nHair? Dark and messy.\n\nStubble? About two days' worth and nice.\n\nLips? Lickable, but lonely looking. Maybe I could check them out, do my own little tongue inspection...\n\nI sat on my hands to stop myself from launching over the console. He continued to hum and drum.\n\n\"What's going on over there, Nightie Girl? You look a little flushed. Need some more air?\" He started for the air conditioner.\n\n\"Nope, I'm good,\" I answered, my voice sounding ridiculous.\n\nHe looked at me strangely, but resumed his hum drum. \"I think it's time we broke out that cranberry-orange bread. Hit me,\" he said a moment later as I was indulging in a fantasy about how exactly I could maneuver myself into his lap while still maintaining a good highway speed.\n\n\"I'm on it!\" I hollered, diving into the backseat and surprising us both. I had my legs in the air and my bottom on display as I clasped my upside-down face in my hands behind the seat. I could feel how red my cheeks were, and I gave myself a little slap to snap me back into this world.\n\n\"That is one sweet ass, my friend.\" He sighed, leaning his head on it as though it were a pillow.\n\n\"Hey. Ass Man. Pay attention to the road and not my heiney, or no bread for you.\" I gave his head a bump with my bum and sent myself flailing as he took a turn.\n\n\"Caroline, you need to control yourself back there, or I'm pulling over.\"\n\n\"Oh, zip it. Here's your damn bread,\" I snapped, crawling back into my chair in a graceless way and throwing the bread at him.\n\n\"What the hell? Don't throw this. What if you'd bruised it?\" he cried, gently stroking the foil-wrapped loaf.\n\n\"I worry about you, Simon. I really do.\" I laughed, watching him struggle to open the end of the wrapper. \"You want me to cut you a piece\u2014okay, or you could just do that.\" I frowned as he took a giant bite out of the end.\n\n\"Thif if mine, righ?\" he asked, spraying crumbs.\n\n\"How do you function in normal society?\" I asked, shaking my head as he took another monster bite. He just smiled and continued, eating the entire loaf in less than five minutes.\n\n\"You're gonna be so sick tonight. That's meant to be eaten piece by piece, not ingested whole,\" I said. His only response was to burp loudly and pat his tummy.\n\nI couldn't help but laugh. \"You're one twisted man, Simon.\" I chuckled.\n\n\"You're still intrigued though, aren't you?\" He grinned, turning the blue eyes loose on me.\n\nMy panties actually disintegrated. \"Oddly, yes,\" I admitted, feeling my face flame again.\n\n\"I know.\" He smirked, and we drove on.\n\n\"Okay, the turn should be coming up just around this corner\u2014I remember that house!\" I cried, bouncing in my seat. It had been a while since I was up here, and I'd forgotten how beautiful it was. I loved Tahoe in the summertime\u2014all the water sports and everything\u2014but in autumn? Autumn was beautiful.\n\n\"Thank God. I need to pee,\" Simon groaned, as he'd been doing for the past twenty or so miles.\n\n\"That's your own fault for drinking that Big Gulp,\" I admonished, still bouncing away.\n\n\"Wow, is that it?\" he asked as we turned into the drive. Lanterns lit the way to a sprawling, two-story cedar house with a giant stone fireplace up the left side. Cars were already in the driveway, and I could hear the music spilling out from the back deck.\n\n\"Sounds like our friends have already got their party on,\" Simon observed. Squealing and laughter joined the music coming from the back side of the house.\n\n\"Oh, I don't doubt it. My guess is they've been drinking since dinner and are half-naked in the hot tub by now.\" I walked around back to grab my bag.\n\n\"We'll just have to catch up, now won't we?\"He winked, pulling a bottle of Galliano from his bag. \"I thought we could make some Wallbangers.\"\n\n\"Now isn't that interesting. I was thinking the same thing,\" I countered, pulling an identical bottle from my duffle.\n\n\"I knew you were dying to get me inside you, Caroline.\" He chuckled and grabbed my bag as we headed to the door.\n\n\"Please, you would make up a drink and call it a Pink Nightie just to have me in your mouth\u2014and don't even try to lie,\" I taunted, nudging him with my shoulder.\n\nHe stopped midway up the walk and looked at me fiercely. \"Is that an invitation? Cuz I'm a hell of a bartender,\" he stated, the eyes glowing in the darkness.\n\n\"I've no doubt,\" I breathed, the space between us now crackling with tension that was becoming ridiculously hard to ignore. I took a deep breath, and noticed he did as well.\n\n\"Come on, let's get sauced and start this weekend.\" He chuckled, nudging me with his shoulder and breaking the spell.\n\n\"Sauce away,\" I muttered, walking up the path behind him.\n\nFinding the front door open, Simon stashed our bags, and we made our way through the house to the back deck. There the lake spread out before us, just barely lit by the tiki torches dotting the dock and pathways that led to the shore. The entire back of the house was flanked with brick patios and decks, and that's where we found our friends.\n\n\"Caroline!\" Mimi screeched from the hot tub, where she and Ryan were splashing each other. Ah, we'd made it to Drunky Loud already.\n\n\"Mimi!\" I squealed back, looking around for Sophia. She and Neil were perched on the stone bench by the firepit, roasting marshmallows. They both waved merrily, and Neil gestured obscenely with his stick.\n\n\"Making them see the error of their ways might be easier than we thought, fellow matchmaker,\" I whispered to Simon, who was already mixing a cocktail at the patio bar.\n\n\"You think its gonna be that easy?\" he whispered back, giving his friends the international guy head nod that said, \"What's up, man?\"\n\n\"Hell, yes. They're almost already there without our help. All we have to do is show them what's right in front of them.\"\n\nHe handed me a cocktail. \"So, how am I?\" he asked, winking.\n\n\"Is this a Wallbanger?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\nI took a sip, swirling the taste around my mouth and over my tongue.\n\n\"You're as good as I knew you'd be,\" I whispered, taking a dangerously large swallow.\n\n\"To things staring you right in the face,\" he added, clinking my glass and taking his own large gulp.\n\n\"To things staring you right in the face,\" I echoed, our eyes locking over the rims.\n\nDamn Banger Voodoo.\nChapter Twelve\n\n\"WHOSE FOOT IS THAT?\"\n\n\"It's mine, Neil. Quit rubbing it.\"\n\n\"Dude! Quit trying to play footsie with me, Ryan!\"\n\n\"You're the one still holding my foot.\"\n\nRyan and Neil tried to look nonchalant as they disengaged from their footsie session under the bubbling water. I laughed as I caught Simon's eye across the hot tub, and he grinned back at me.\n\n\"Want another?\" he mouthed, nodding to my empty glass.\n\n\"I have had enough for tonight, don't you think?\" I mouthed back, as our friends cackled all around us.\n\n\"I thought you were girl who always wanted more,\" he mouthed. The characteristic smirk returned.\n\nI looked at him, the image of Hot Tub Simon that had been in my head for the last few weeks actually paling in comparison to the real thing. Strong arms stretched across the back of the hot tub, hair wet and artfully swept back. If I thought seeing him wet and half-naked on my kitchen floor was enticing, it was nothing like having him backlit by tiki torches and seen through a strong buzz.\n\nHe was now the most singularly handsome man I'd ever seen, and if I wasn't mistaken, he was trying to get me drunk. Brain was getting a bit fuzzy. Heart was beginning to sing Etta James songs.\n\n\"Are you trying to get me drunk?\" I asked, giggling as I pushed my empty glass away, resolving myself to no more alcohol.\n\n\"Nope. A sloppy Pink Nightie Girl gets me nowhere.\"\n\nHe grinned as I splashed water toward his side. Our friends had all quieted and were watching us with undisguised interest.\n\nAfter Simon and I arrived, we got our drinks, and then I showed him around the rest of the house. I left my bags at the front door, not knowing how the sleeping arrangements had been laid out. We returned to the patio to find that Sophia and Neil had joined Ryan and Drunky Mimi in the hot tub. A quick trip to the pool house left me in nothing but a dark green bikini and a smile as I approached the others. Simon had already jumped in, and I watched him watch me. As I slid under the warm water, I sipped my cocktail and drank in the sight of my neighbor, wet and in board shorts, before me. Sophia actually had to nudge me to stop the staring.\n\nNow we were smack dab in the middle of a sexual soup, bubbling away with two pairs of mismatched lovers and more pheromones than we knew what to do with.\n\nSo did I want another cocktail? Didn't matter. I couldn't afford it.\n\nI had to shake my head a little to clear it as I looked around at the rest of the group. Mimi had gotten too hot and was perched on the side, kicking Neil as she swung her feet back and forth. He indulged her in much the same way a big brother indulges his little sister. Sophia and Ryan were huddled on the other side, Sophia scratching Ryan's back as she and Neil talked back and forth about the 49ers' starting lineup or defensive line or something football-ish and, frankly, boring.\n\n\"So, what are we doing this weekend?\" I asked, focusing my attention on the group at large and not the blue eyes staring at me. Damn those eyes! They would be the death of me.\n\n\"We were thinking about going for a hike tomorrow. Who's in?\" Ryan asked.\n\nSophia shook her head. \"Count me out. No way am I hiking.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Neil asked.\n\nSimon and I exchanged a quick glance at his sudden interest.\n\n\"Can't. Last time I hiked I took quite a spill and sprained my wrist. Can't take the chance during the season,\" she said, waving and reminding us she made her living with her hands. As a cello player, she could get out of quite a bit. Once she dodged hand jobs all winter. Investment banker Bob was not a happy camper.\n\n\"How 'bout you, Tiny?\" Neil pulled on Mimi's foot.\n\n\"Um, no, Mimi doesn't hike,\" she replied, adjusting her barely there black bikini. Her actual boy toy didn't notice, but I saw Ryan's eyes grow to the size of pies from across the hot tub as her breasts were nearly revealed.\n\n\"You gonna take a pass as well?\" Simon nodded to me.\n\n\"Hell, no. I'm hiking with the boys tomorrow!\" I laughed as Sophia and Mimi rolled their eyes. They never understood why I loved \"mountain man activities,\" as they called them.\n\n\"Nice,\" Simon purred, and for a second I calculated the distance between my mouth and his. Then we were all quiet, all six of us lost in our thoughts. I remembered the plan to out the four of them, and I jumped right in.\n\n\"So, Ryan, did you know Mimi here gives to your charity every year?\" I asked, surprising them both.\n\n\"You do?\"\n\n\"Yep, every year,\" she said. \"I've seen what having access to computers can do, especially for kids who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.\" She looked shyly at him, and they began a conversation about the process he used to determine which schools will receive the scholarships each year.\n\nSimon and I grinned at each other. Looking sideways at Sophia, Simon launched the second wave of the attack. \"Hey, Neil, how many seats did you get for the symphony this year?\" he asked.\n\nNeil blushed.\n\n\"You bought tickets?\" Sophia asked.\n\n\"Season tickets,\" Simon added, as Neil nodded. Sophia and Neil then launched into a discussion of where his seats were, and Simon raised his foot above the surface of the water.\n\n\"Come on, don't leave me hangin'.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Gimme a little high five. I can't reach your hand,\" he insisted, waving his foot back and forth. I giggled and slid lower on my seat, stretching my foot out and patting his lightly.\n\n\"Ugh, pruney.\" He laughed.\n\n\"I'll give you pruney,\" I warned, dipping my foot and splashing him lightly.\n\n\"I could not be more comfortable. Seriously, I literally could not feel more cozy right now if I were actually inside a marshmallow,\" I mumbled through a thick tongue coated in Bailey's and coffee. I had curled up on top of about fifty pillows next to fireplace\u2014a fireplace with a hearth almost ten feet wide and a chimney almost three stories high. Made out of stone quarried nearby, it was massive. It was the focal point of the entire house, with rooms radiating out from its center. And it gave off massive heat.\n\nWe were chilled to the bone when we finally made it back inside. One by one, we all got too warm in the hot tub, so we hoisted ourselves out to cool off a little. By the time we realized how cold the night had gotten, we were shivering and puffing, and wanting nothing more than to curl up next to the fire. As we had yet to pick rooms, I soon learned, the girls snuck into the master bedroom to change into our pjs and rejoin the boys, who were now all decked out in T-shirts and pajama pants. We made a quick pot of coffee, and I sliced up some of the additional cranberry-orange bread I'd wisely hidden from Simon. A couple shots of Bailey's in the coffee cups, and we were all relaxing by the fire like an ad for Currier and Ives.\n\nSimon had reclined regally by the fireplace and patted the stack of pillows next to him. I dove in and a few stray puffs of feathers swirled around our heads. We'd discovered that each boy had a different method of starting a fire\u2014kindling, newspapers, kindling and newspapers\u2014when finally Sophia stuck her head up there and declared that the flue was still closed. Brought back down a few pegs, the guys at that point deferred to Ryan, if for no other reason than that he was the one holding the matches. But within minutes, they had a fire blazing, and we were now all seated around the fireplace, sleepy and content.\n\nI breathed deeply. There was nothing like the smell of an actual fire\u2014not a gas fireplace, not a bunch of candles, but an honest to goodness fireplace with snaps and crackles and funny little whizzing screeches when the steam came out of a crack in the wood.\n\n\"So, Caroline, have you asked Simon to teach you how to windsurf yet?\" Mimi asked suddenly from her perch on the arm of the couch. We'd been quiet for a while, drowsy and almost dreaming, and I started a little when she spoke.\n\n\"What? I mean, what?\" I asked, startled out of my pillows and back to the present.\n\n\"Well, these boys here all windsurf. You want to learn to windsurf, and I bet Simon here would show you, wouldn't you, Simon?\" She giggled, polishing off the last of her coffee and sliding off the arm of the chair into Ryan's conveniently placed lap. They smiled at each other for a moment before they realized what they were doing and Ryan jokingly launched her off his own lap and into Neil's. He'd not been awakened by her earlier question, but he now seemed wide awake with a lapful of Scheming Mimi.\n\n\"You want to learn to windsurf?\" Simon asked, turning toward my pillow pile.\n\n\"Actually, yes. I've always wanted to try it.\"\n\n\"It's tough\u2014not gonna lie. But totally worth it.\" He smiled, and Ryan nodded from across the room.\n\n\"Sure, Simon'll show you. He'd love to,\" Ryan chimed in, earning a wink from Mimi and an eye roll from me.\n\n\"We can plan something for when we get back to the city,\" I suggested.\n\n\"No more talk tonight. This girl has had it,\" Sophia said. \"I'm pooped. Where are we all sleeping?\" She poked her head over the back of the armchair where she'd been curled up.\n\n\"Well, how many rooms we talking about?\" Simon asked as I sat up and yawned.\n\n\"There are four bedrooms, so take your pick,\" Sophia answered, then wisely drained an entire bottle of water.\n\n\"Are we doing boy-girl, boy-girl?\" I asked, laughing when I saw Simon's surprised face.\n\n\"We can, sure,\" Mimi answered, looking a little nervously at Neil.\n\nI stifled a giggle when I saw Sophia and Ryan trade a similar spooked look. Simon caught it as well.\n\n\"Yeah, sure! Don't let Caroline and me stand in the way of the lovebirds! Mimi, you and Neil pick a room, Sophia and Ryan can pick a room, and Caroline and I will take the rooms that are left over. Perfect. Right, Caroline?\"\n\n\"Sounds perfect to me. I'll just rinse out these mugs. Now, off to bed with you all. Scoot! Scoot!\" I cried. Simon and I scurried about cleaning up while sneaking peeks over our shoulders at the four of them. They looked like they'd just begun a death march.\n\n\"Oh, man, I hope this works out...for my sake.\" I stood behind Simon as we watched the four become two pairs as they parted ways by the bedroom doors.\n\n\"Why for your sake?\" he whispered, turning his face just a little to be inches from mine.\n\n\"Because right now, behind those doors? Sophia and Mimi are trying to figure out the best way to hurt me. Physically hurt me,\" I sighed, backing away to rinse the last of the coffee cups and place them in the dishwasher.\n\nSimon added the soap and switched it on. As we walked around, turning lights off for the night, we talked about the hike we'd be taking tomorrow.\n\n\"You're not gonna slow me down, are you?\" he teased.\n\nI shoved him into the wall. \"Please, you will be eating my trail dust tomorrow, bucko,\" I warned, grabbing my bag and heading for the bedrooms.\n\n\"We'll see, Nightie Girl. Speaking of, got any nighties in there for me?\" He poked his hand into my bag as he followed me down the hall.\n\n\"Stay outta there. Nothing for you in there, or anywhere for that matter.\" I stopped at the room I was taking.\n\nHe went past me to the room next door. \"Look at that, sharing a bedroom wall once again.\" He smirked.\n\n\"Well, I know you're in there alone, so I'd better not hear any banging,\" I warned, leaning in the doorway.\n\n\"No, no banging. 'Night, Caroline,\" he said softly, leaning in his own doorway.\n\n\"'Night, Simon,\" I answered, giving him a little waggle of my fingertips as I closed my door. I placed my bag on my bed and smiled.\n\n\"Come on, guys, not that much farther,\" I yelled behind me as I surged up the final leg of the trail. We'd been hiking for about two hours now, and while everyone stayed together for a while, in the last thirty minutes or so, Ryan had slowed considerably, and Neil hung back with him. Simon and I kept the pace together, and were about to reach the crest of the trail.\n\nI'd managed to avoid being alone with Sophia or Mimi, although the puffy eyes and tired faces on all four of them proved no one had gotten a good night's sleep\u2014except Simon and me.\n\nAfter breakfast, I dodged the firing squad by changing quickly and waiting outside for the boys before the hike. I knew once I returned to the house I'd be in for it, although I admit I was curious to see how they were planning to rage without acknowledging that sleeping with the guys they'd been seeing for weeks now was not, in fact, what they wanted to do.\n\nBut as Simon had said, \"Here's to things staring you in the face.\" Tonight should be interesting.\n\nI pushed up and over the last little ridge and made it to the top. Simon was only a few yards behind me, and I could hear him on his way. I breathed deep, the clear air prickling at my lungs. It was chilly, but I was warm with exertion. It had been a while since I'd gotten out of the city, and my body had missed hiking like this. My legs were burning, my nose was running, I was sweating like a pig, and I couldn't remember when I'd felt better. I laughed out loud as I looked down at the lake below, spying a few hawks gliding on a downdraft. The steely blue of the lake, the deep green of the forest, the clean whites and creams of the rocks: it was beautiful.\n\nAnd then there was my new favorite blue. Simon appeared at my side, breathing as deeply as I was. He stretched his arms wide and took in the valley below. He'd peeled off layers as we climbed and was now wearing a white T-shirt with a flannel knotted at his waist. Khaki shorts, hiking boots, and a wide grin completed the wet dream I now stared at, instead of looking at the natural wonders all around us. And those blue eyes\u2014I could see them framing each shot as he looked around.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" I breathed, and he turned to me. I got caught staring. \"I mean, isn't it beautiful?\" I stuttered, gesturing widely with my arm.\n\nHe appeared to know exactly what I'd been doing, and I felt the blush come up in my cheeks. Luckily, I was still a bit winded from the climb, and I hoped I was already sufficiently red.\n\n\"Yes, it is beautiful actually. Very beautiful.\" He smiled, and we stared at each other. He took a few steps closer, and I felt the air shift and change. I bit my lip. He ran his hand through his hair. We smiled. There were no words, but even the woodland animals could tell there was something about to happen and wisely stayed in their hidey holes.\n\n\"Hi,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Hi,\" I answered.\n\n\"Hi,\" he said again, taking one last step toward me and stepping inside my little circle. One more step and he'd be practically on top of me. And how.\n\n\"Hi,\" I said once more, tilting my head to the side and letting him know he could take that last step.\n\nSimon leaned toward me, just barely, but almost as if he were going to...\n\n\"Parker!\" thundered from below, and we both sprang back. \"Parker!\" It came again, and I recognized Ryan's voice underneath the jungle-man yell.\n\n\"Ryan,\" we both said and smiled.\n\nNow that the voodoo wasn't so concentrated, I could see things clearly again, and I repeated the word harem over and over again in my head.\n\n\"Up here!\" Simon yelled, and Ryan appeared from around a bend.\n\n\"Hey there! Neil is done, kaput, thrown in the towel, so to speak. You guys about ready to head back down?\" he called, jumping from rock to path to rock again with the ease of a mountain goat. He didn't even appear to be winded. Hmmmm...\n\n\"Yep, we were just about to come looking for you guys,\" I said, kicking my leg up behind me for a quick stretch.\n\n\"Is he really pussing out so close to the top?\" Simon asked, heading back down the trail.\n\n\"He's lying straight across the trail like he owns the place, refusing to go any higher.\" Ryan laughed, bounding ahead and calling down to Neil to let him know we were on our way.\n\n\"You sure you didn't want to stay up here a little longer? I mean, we worked so hard to get all the way here,\" Simon asked, reaching out to stop me running down the mountain after Ryan.\n\nI felt the warmth of his hand on my shoulder and willed my hormones to flee to the other side of my body. \"I'm sure. We should get back. Looks like a storm is coming.\" I nodded toward the horizon where a group of dark clouds had begun to build. His eyes followed mine, and he frowned.\n\n\"You're probably right. We don't want to get caught out here all alone,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Besides, if we don't hurry, we can't tease Neil about getting beat up the mountain by a girl.\" I grinned, and he laughed loudly.\n\n\"Hell, we don't want to miss that. Let's go.\"\n\nAnd down the trail we went.\n\n\"So how was your gangbang, Caroline?\" Sophia sang sweetly as she found us all in the kitchen drinking water after our hike. The three guys each did different versions of a spit take, but I calmly continued sipping like a lady.\n\n\"Fantastic, thanks. Neil especially. We practically had to carry him back down the mountain after I finished with him,\" I replied just as sweetly.\n\nThe boys recovered their game faces, but Neil could barely stop staring at Sophia's tight tank top. Her actual suitor? Playing Spot The Mimi, his head rotating so fast I could have sworn he was an owl. I shook my head and put him out of his misery.\n\n\"Where's Mimi?\" I asked.\n\n\"Shower, which you four clearly need. It's freezing outside. How could you have gotten so sweaty?\" she asked, wrinkling her nose.\n\n\"We worked hard making it up that mountain. Hiking is harder than you think,\" Neil puffed, and the rest of us wisely kept silent about the heart attack he almost had fifty feet from the summit.\n\nI grabbed an apple and headed in the direction of my room with Sophia hot on my tail, as expected. I smirked a little and contemplated going easy on her\u2014just asking her about it, giving her an out.\n\n\"Those shorts look terrible on you, Caroline,\" she remarked as she followed me into my room.\n\nNope. Not going to happen. No easy out. \"Thank you, dear. Should I have packed a little cat food for you when I packed Clive's travel bag?\" I sneered.\n\nShe collapsed on my bed, curling her body around one of the giant pillows. \"Where is he anyway? Who's watching him this weekend?\"\n\n\"He's staying with Uncle Euan and Uncle Antonio. That cat is lounging on a silk bed being handfed tuna rolls right about now. He's living the life.\"\n\n\"He has the life, that's for sure,\" she said, her face clouding briefly as she got comfortable.\n\nI peeled off my sweaty clothes and wrapped up in a terrycloth robe hanging on the back of the door. She complimented my choice of sports bra and laughed when she saw that I'd paired it with leopard panties, but then she went back to her previous wistful expression.\n\n\"What's up, Sophia?\" I asked, lying on the bed next to her and wrapping myself around a pillow as well.\n\n\"Nothing, why?\" she asked.\n\n\"You look like a sad sack.\"\n\n\"Eh, I just didn't sleep well, I guess.\"\n\n\"Oh really? Mr. Ryan keeping you up late at night, hmm? He didn't have a lot of energy on the mountain today...\" I nudged her with my elbow.\n\n\"No, no, nothing like that. I just...I dunno. I just couldn't get settled last night. Normally I sleep really well up here, but it was so quiet last night, I just...\" She beat her pillow a little with her fist, forcing it into a new shape.\n\n\"I see. Well, I slept great!\" I laughed, and she starting trying to force my head into a new shape with her fist.\n\n\"You wanna get drunk tonight?\" she asked when we finally settled down.\n\n\"Hell, yes. You?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nThere was a knock at the door, and Mimi poked her towel-covered head in. \"Is this a private session, or can a non-lesbian get into this bed?\" she called.\n\nWe waved her in, and she vaulted from the floor to the bed and landed on top of both of us.\n\n\"What are we doing in here, ladies? Foreplay or just going for it?\" she asked.\n\n\"Please say foreplay,\" a male voice said from the now-open door. We rolled over to see the men in the doorway, different versions of the same oh-my-goodness-girls-in-bed-together look on their faces.\n\n\"Oh, get over yourselves. Like we'd ever need a guy to tell us whether we needed foreplay or not.\" Sophia giggled, kicking a foot in the air and waving at them from over my shoulder. They shifted their weight from one foot to the other and cleared their throats. So predictable.\n\n\"We're planning on getting drunk tonight. You boys up for it?\" Mimi yelled. Even though no alcohol was currently present in her system, Drunky Mimi's volume level was already making an encore appearance.\n\n\"Done and done,\" Ryan answered, giving us a weird little salute that made us giggle even harder.\n\n\"Now run away, boys, and let us have our girl time,\" Sophia tossed over her shoulder, lifting my robe a little and giving my ass a quick smack. I squealed and tried to cover myself, but it was too late.\n\n\"Dude. Leopard print,\" Neil whispered to Simon in the kind of whisper that's actually louder than just speaking.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" Simon countered, then drew his hand down his face as though he were trying to physically remove the image from his brain.\n\nSimon liked animal prints. Duly noted.\n\n\"Come on, guys. The ladies have requested a little alone time, so let's leave them to it.\" Ryan tugged them out into the hallway and closed the door behind them with a wink that made Mimi's entire neck turn bright red. Sophia examined her fingernails.\n\nI was really going to have fun with these two tonight.\n\n\"Where the hell did you learn to cook like this? Jesus, this is good!\" Neil exclaimed, taking his third helping of paella from the giant pan in the center of the table.\n\n\"Thank you, Neil.\" I laughed as he dug into another pile of rice.\n\nSimon nodded toward my wine glass, and I nodded back.\n\nI'd thought about making a quick version of paella when I saw all the wonderful seafood on sale at the local market, and when I saw their special on Spanish Ros\u00e9 and Cava, my plans came together. We'd started in on the Cava while prepping in the kitchen. The sparkling Spanish wine went perfectly with the wedge of Manchego I'd picked up, as well as the little salty olives. Once again, Simon was my helper, and we moved together in the kitchen. The other four settled on bar stools across from us while we cooked, someone popped an old Otis Redding record on the ancient turntable, and we were in business.\n\nThe wine flowed as freely as the conversation, and I could tell this had the potential to become a tight-knit group. Similar interests, similar senses of humor, but everything just different enough to keep it lively.\n\nSpeaking of lively, as the alcohol was inhaled, the walls came down. Mimi and Sophia were barely hiding their misplaced interests anymore. Not that the boys were minding. In fact, they were encouraging it. Ryan currently examined Mimi's foot for what she insisted was a spider bite. The fact that he'd been inspecting it for several minutes, and that said inspection included a calf massage did not escape my attention, or Simon's.\n\nHe grinned and motioned for me to move closer. I slid across the bench and inclined my head to his. He put his mouth next to my ear, and I inhaled. Wine, heat, and actual sex ran straight up my nostrils and invaded my brain, turning everything a bit fuzzy.\n\n\"How long before they kiss?\" he whispered, his mouth so close I swear I felt lips brush my ear.\n\n\"What?\" I asked, beginning to giggle the way I did when I'd had a little too much to drink and a little too much sexy dangled in front of me.\n\n\"How long? You know, before they kiss the wrong person?\" he asked as I turned to look into his eyes.\n\nThose eyes, oh, those eyes were now calling to me.\n\n\"You mean the right person?\" I whispered.\n\n\"Yeah, the right person,\" he answered, scooting a little closer on the bench.\n\n\"I don't know, but if the kiss doesn't come soon, I'm gonna burst,\" I admitted, knowing full well I was no longer talking about our friends. And knowing full well that he knew full well I was no longer talking about our friends.\n\n\"Hmm, I wouldn't want you to burst.\" He was now mere inches from my face.\n\nHarem. Harem. Harem. I repeated this mantra over and over.\n\n\"I wanna go in the hot tub.\"\n\nThe whining pulled me away from the voodoo and back to the kitchen. Where there were people present.\n\n\"I wanna go in the hot tub,\" I heard again and turned to address Mimi. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Sophia was actually the whiner, and she was now hanging on Neil like a backpack.\n\n\"Okay, so go in the hot tub. No one's stopping you,\" I insisted, sliding away from Simon and back in front of my plate where I began separating my peas from my lobster. I was full, but I would never leave lobster on the plate. I had standards, after all.\n\n\"You have to come too,\" Sophia whined again as I began to comprehend. Sophia was drunk. Sophia got clingy when she got drunk. Oh boy.\n\n\"Go ahead. I'll clean up the kitchen a little and then meet you guys out there,\" Simon said, taking my plate and starting to stand.\n\n\"Hey, hey, hey! Lobster bite, hello,\" I protested as I grabbed my fork.\n\n\"Here, I would never get between a woman and her lobster.\" He smiled, offering me my fork back. I accepted the bite with a smile and stood up. I was a little more drunk than I thought, and this fact made itself known as gravity began tease me.\n\n\"Whoa there, you okay?\" he asked, steadying me as Sophia started off for the bedroom.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine,\" I answered, planting my feet and winning the battle.\n\n\"Maybe you outta slow down?\" he asked, taking my wine glass.\n\n\"Oh, lighten up, it's a party,\" I cried, beginning to giggle. Suddenly everything was funny.\n\n\"Okay, party on.\" He smiled as I headed to the bedroom to change into my suit. Which proved harder than I thought. String bikinis are difficult to tie when you're more than a little buzzed.\n\n\"Okay, Caroline's next. Truth or dare,\" Mimi yelled, once again proving that Drunky Mimi only had one volume level.\n\n\"Truth,\" I yelled back, splashing Sophia in the face accidentally as I reached behind me for my glass of wine. We'd brought out the last bottle of Cava and were steadily working our way through it. And it was steadily working its way through us, our game becoming more and more dangerous. The sky crackled a bit with far-away lightning, and low rumbles of thunder were just beginning to be heard over the giggling and splashing.\n\nOnce we came outside and got settled in the hot tub, it was only minutes before Neil suggested a game of Truth or Dare, and only seconds after that before Sophia agreed to it. I laughed it off at first, saying there was no way I'd play such a childish game. But when Simon implied that I was chicken, the alcohol reared its ugly head and shouted something to the effect of, \"I will play Truth or Dare, you sucker, until you can't tell your truth from your dare!\"\n\nThis statement made perfect sense in my head, and must have seemed logical to Mimi and Sophia as well, as they immediately began offering me high fives and you-go-girls. I'm pretty sure I saw Simon shake his head, but he was smiling, so I let it go. And poured another glass of sparkly.\n\n\"Where's the one place you want to travel, and haven't been yet,\" she asked, humming along to the tunes coming through the French doors.\n\nSophia had found all of her grandfather's old records, and Simon almost had a fit when he saw the collection. He'd selected a Tommy Dorsey album, and the big band accentuated the night perfectly.\n\n\"Boring, make her take a dare!\" Simon sang, and I stuck my tongue out at him.\n\n\"It's not boring, and she chose truth so she gets truth. Caroline, where is the one place on earth you want to go?\" she asked again.\n\nI leaned my head back against the edge of the tub. I looked up at the stars and an image immediately came to mind: soft wind blowing, warm sun on my face, the ocean spread out in front of me dotted with craggy rocks. I smiled just thinking about it.\n\n\"Spain,\" I sighed quietly, the smile lingering as I imagined myself on a beach in Spain.\n\n\"Spain?\" Simon asked.\n\nI turned my face toward his. He was smiling back at me. \"Spain. That's where I want to go. But it's so expensive, it's going to have to wait a while,\" I smiled again, my head still wrapped around the image.\n\n\"Hey, wait, Simon, aren't you going to Spain next month?\" Ryan asked, and my eyes widened.\n\n\"Um, yeah. Yeah, I am actually,\" he answered.\n\n\"Great! Caroline, you can go with him,\" Mimi decided, clapping her hands and turning to Ryan.\n\n\"Ryan, you're next.\"\n\n\"No, no, wait a minute. First of all, I can't just go with Simon to Spain. And second of all, it's my turn,\" I protested, as Simon sat up.\n\n\"Actually, you could 'just go with Simon to Spain,'\" he said, turning to me fully. The other side of the hot tub got very quiet.\n\n\"Um, no, I can't. You're working. I can't afford a trip like that, and besides, I don't know that I can take time off next month.\" I felt my heart swell as I processed what he'd just said.\n\n\"Actually, I heard Jillian telling you the other day that next month would be a good time to take your vacation before the holiday season,\" Mimi piped up. She sank back into the shadows as I glared at her.\n\n\"Be that as it may, I also can't afford it, so discussion ended. Now then, I believe it's my turn. Let's see, who should I pick?\" I looked around at everyone.\n\n\"It wouldn't be that expensive. I'm renting a house, so that would be paid for. Airfare and spending money\u2014that's all you'd have to cover,\" Simon added, not letting this go.\n\n\"Hey, that's a pretty good deal there, Caroline,\" Mimi spouted, her energy making little ripples across the tub.\n\n\"Okay, Mimi, truth or dare?\" I asked, gritting my teeth and pushing ahead with the game.\n\n\"Hey, we're discussing something here. Don't change the subject,\" she objected.\n\n\"Well, I'm done discussing it. Truth or dare, you little shit,\" I said again, letting her know I meant business.\n\n\"Fine. Dare,\" she pouted.\n\n\"Great. I dare you to kiss Neil,\" I shot back, not missing a beat.\n\n\"What?\" she shouted, as the entire hot tub erupted in gasps.\n\n\"Hey, we're just playing a game, right? And Mimi, really, it's not that shocking that I would dare you to kiss the guy you've been seeing for weeks now, is it?\"\n\n\"Well, no, I just, I don't like public displays,\" she sputtered, almost going under. This from the girl who was almost arrested for public nudity when she was found under the bleachers at a football game freshman year at Berkeley.\n\n\"Oh, come on, what's the big deal?\" Simon chimed in, and I looked at him gratefully.\n\n\"Nothing, it's just\u2014\" she said again, and Neil interrupted.\n\n\"Oh, come here, Tiny,\" he exclaimed and pulled her over. They stared at each other for a second, and then Neil swept her hair out of her face. He smiled, and she leaned in. I heard Sophia inhale at the same time Ryan did, and we all watched as Mimi kissed Neil.\n\nAnd it was weird.\n\nThey broke away, and Mimi swam back over to her side. Next to Ryan. All was quiet for a moment. Simon and I looked at each other, not sure what to do next. We'd been outsmarted. And I got pissed when I got outsmarted. I began to burn. The fact that I was drunk had nothing at all to do with my overreaction.\n\n\"Okay, I guess it's my turn. Hmmm...Ryan, truth or dare?\" Neil started, and I stood up, splashing everyone around me as I did.\n\n\"No, no, no! That's not what was supposed to happen!\" I yelled, stamping my foot, losing my balance and going under in the process. Simon's strong hands brought me back to the surface, and I continued my alcohol-induced tirade. Flashes of lightning, now much closer, blazed across the sky.\n\n\"You were not supposed to let her kiss him!\" I sputtered, spitting out water and pointing at Ryan and then at Mimi. I whirled on Sophia. \"And you were supposed to get mad at her!\"\n\n\"Why would I get mad at Mimi? For kissing her boyfriend?\" Sophia mumbled, taking a sudden interest in her fingernails.\n\n\"Argh!\" I screamed and turned back to Mimi.\n\n\"Mimi, are you even remotely interested in Neil?\" I challenged, hands on my hips as I steamed into the night air.\n\n\"Neil is exactly what I've always wanted in a man. He is my type to a T,\" she countered robotically, flinching when Ryan looked at her with hurt in his eyes.\n\n\"Blah, blah, blah, have you fucked Neil yet?\" I screeched, pointing wildly as I tend to do when I drink.\n\n\"Okay, Caroline, you've made your point,\" Simon soothed, trying to get me to sit back down.\n\n\"What point? What are you two talking about?\" Sophia asked, leaning forward.\n\n\"Oh, please, the four of you are ridiculous! I don't care what you all think you want on paper. In reality, you're doing it all wrong!\" I answered, smacking the top of the water for emphasis. Why weren't they getting it? I don't know when I'd gotten so riled up, but in the last sixty seconds or so, I'd become blazing mad.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Mimi cried, jumping to her feet in the hot tub, which kept the water at about the same level.\n\n\"Mimi, come on! Anyone with eyes can see the way you and Ryan feel about each other! Why the hell are you wasting time on anyone else?\" I pushed.\n\nSimon pulled me back onto his lap and attempted to quiet me.\n\n\"Okay, this has gone far enough,\" Neil said, starting to get out of the tub.\n\n\"No, no! Neil, look at Sophia. Can't you see she is totally into you? Why the hell are you all so thick? Seriously? Are Simon and I the only ones that can see clearly here?\" I yelled once more, bringing Simon into the conversation whether he wanted it or not.\n\nNeil looked at Ryan, and then at Simon.\n\n\"Dude!\" Neil exclaimed.\n\n\"Dude,\" Simon answered, gesturing toward Sophia, who stood up like she was going to say something. Neil put his hand on her shoulder, and she stopped and sat back down. Neil nodded at Ryan.\n\n\"Dude?\" he asked, and Ryan nodded back. Neil took a deep breath and looked at Sophia.\n\n\"Sophia, truth or dare?\" Neil asked.\n\n\"We are not playing any more\u2014\" I tried to yell, but Simon took that moment to place his hand over my mouth.\n\n\"All clear over here,\" Simon announced as he pinned me to his lap more securely with his other hand on my waist. Thunder rolled in, blanketing the scene with an ominous air.\n\n\"Sophia?\" Neil asked again. She was quiet, and not looking in the direction of Mimi and Ryan.\n\n\"Dare,\" she whispered and closed her eyes.\n\nAlcohol made everything much more dramatic.\n\n\"I dare you to kiss me,\" Neil said, and all you could hear was the occasional loon over the lake. The loons in the tub were finally quiet. We all watched as Sophia turned to Neil and placed a hand on the back of his head, pulling him toward her. She kissed him, slowly but surely, and it went on for days. I smiled into Simon's hand, and he patted my stomach, which made me giddy.\n\nWhen they finally broke apart, Sophia was laughing into Neil's mouth, and he answered with his giant, goofy man-giggle.\n\n\"Well, it's about freaking time,\" Simon said, releasing my mouth.\n\n\"Mimi, I\u2014\" Sophia began, turning toward Mimi and finding an empty hot tub.\n\nMimi and Ryan were gone. I caught just the edge of Ryan's towel headed into the pool house\u2014with a slippery wet companion on his arm.\n\n\"Well, then, I guess we'll call it a night.\" Sophia sighed, grabbing Neil by the hand.\n\n\"'Night.\" I giggled as she walked into the house with Neil in tow. They cuddled close, already a picture in the making. I looked at the pool house, and noticed no lights had come on yet. They probably would not be coming on in the near future.\n\n\"Well, that was a fine bit of matchmaking, although your bull-in-a-china-shop delivery left a lot to be desired.\" Simon chuckled, letting his head rest against my back. I was still perched on his lap. His hand had left my mouth, and it was now drifting south, while his other hand remained tightly on my waist.\n\n\"Yes, I usually leave a lot to be desired,\" I observed wryly, not wanting to leave this exquisite spot, but knowing I needed to\u2014and soon. Simon was quiet behind me, and I started to move off his lap.\n\n\"You leave everything to be desired, Caroline,\" he said softly, and I froze. It was quiet for another moment, both of us not moving, but still moving toward each other.\n\nWithout looking back, I let out a tiny laugh. \"You know, I never really got that phrase. Does that mean I am desirable or\u2014\"\n\nHis fingers began to trace tiny circles on my skin. \"You know exactly what it means,\" he breathed into my ear. The air crackled around us, the tension as well as the actual weather. More tiny circles. In the end, it was the tiny circles that finally broke me.\n\nI lost all control. I turned quickly, catching him off guard as I wrapped my legs around his waist and threw caution, and my harem mantra, to the wind. I sunk my hands into his hair, luxuriating in the feel of wet silk around my fingertips as I pulled him toward me.\n\n\"Why did you kiss me that night at the party?\" I asked, my mouth mere inches from his. Once he realized I was driving this bus, he responded by pressing his hips into mine, bringing us closer together than we'd ever been.\n\n\"Why did you kiss me?\" he asked, running his hands up and down my back, settling into the space where his hands spanned my waist exactly\u2014thumbs in front, fingers in back\u2014and pressed me into him further.\n\n\"Because I had to,\" I answered honestly, remembering how I'd reacted instinctively, kissing him when I'd wanted to do anything but. \"Why did you kiss me?\" I asked again.\n\n\"Because I had to,\" he said, the smirk returning. Luckily I didn't see the smirk for too long. Because I'd finally discovered the secret of the ages.\n\nHow do you make Wallbanger stop smirking? You kiss him.\nChapter Thirteen\n\nTHE SKY OPENED UP, pelting us with chilly rain, which mixed with the heat around us, and between us. I looked at Simon underneath me, warm and wet, and there was nothing in the world I wanted more than his lips against mine. So even though every single cowbell in my head was ringing out the alarm, I centered myself, wrapped my legs tighter around his waist, and gazed directly into his eyes.\n\n\"Mmm, Caroline, what are you up to?\" He smiled, his hands strong on my waist as his fingers dug into my skin. His skin slipped against mine in a way that made me not right in the head, and I could feel\u2014I could actually feel\u2014his abs against my tummy. He was so strong, so powerfully delicious that Brain began to burn, and other organs began to make all my decisions.\n\nI think O even popped her head up for a moment, like a groundhog. She took a quick glance around and pronounced it much closer to spring than she'd been in months.\n\nI licked my lips, and he mirrored my actions. I could barely see him through the haze of steam from the hot tub and the lust now brewing in this little cauldron of chlorinated chemistry.\n\n\"I'm up to no good, that's for sure,\" I breathed, rising up just a little. The feeling of my breasts crushing against his skin was unimaginable. As I settled on his lap again, I felt his reaction in a very tangible way, and we both groaned at the contact.\n\n\"You're up to no good, huh?\" he said, his voice gruff and thick and maple syrup pouring over me.\n\n\"No good,\" I whispered in his ear as he pressed his mouth against my neck. \"Wanna be bad with me?\"\n\n\"You sure about that?\" he groaned, hands clutching at my back with delightful abandon.\n\n\"Come on, Simon, let's bang some walls,\" I answered, allowing my tongue to dart out from between my lips and against the skin just underneath his jaw. The scruff scratched my taste buds and gave me a sense of what that very scruff would feel like against other soft places on my body.\n\nO poked her head out just a little more at that point and went straight to Brain, which in turn spoke directly to my hands.\n\nI grasped him firmly at the base of his neck, and positioned him directly in front of me, his eyes flaring wide and turning into tiny little hypnotizers.\n\nHis grin was hard, and so was he.\n\nI leaned in and sucked his bottom lip between my teeth, nibbling lightly before biting down and pulling him closer. He came willingly, ceding control as my fingers pulled and pushed at his hair, and my tongue pressed into his mouth as he groaned into mine. Everything in my world now narrowed to just the feeling of this man, this wonderful man in my arms and threaded between my legs, and I kissed him like the world was about to end.\n\nIt wasn't sweet and tentative, it was pure carnal frustration spiked with incomprehensible lust and rolled into a giant ball of please-God-let-me-live-in-this-man's-mouth-for-the-forseeable-future. My mouth led his in a dance as old as the mountains that watched over us approvingly, our tongues and teeth and lips smacking and cracking and giving in to the sweet tension that had been building since I showed up at his door wearing the inspiration for my nickname.\n\nI shook as I felt his hands reach lower to grasp my bottom and pull me closer still, my legs scrambling as I panted like a whore in church. The Church Of Simon...where I was dying to kneel before him.\n\nMy eyes were closed, my legs were open, and I was now moaning into his mouth like some kind of rabid dog. The idea that a kiss, just a kiss, had turned me into this giant lusting bag of CarolineNeedThat was undeniable, and I knew that if he continued to make me feel this way I was going to invite him straight into my Tahoe. Great idea.\n\n\"Come into my Tahoe, Simon,\" I mumbled incoherently into his mouth.\n\nHe paused. \"Caroline, come into your what? Oh, God,\" he managed, as I pushed us off the side of the hot tub and vaulted us across the water, emptying half of its contents onto the deck and the other half sloshing us around like it was high tide. He slammed me into the opposite wall, pushing me up against the bench and rewrapping my legs around his waist, as I gamely pushed my mouth back onto his, unwilling to let go of him. At one point, I kissed him so hard, he had to push me off so he could catch a breath.\n\n\"Breathe, Simon, breathe.\" I giggled, stroking his face as he struggled before me.\n\n\"You...are...a mad woman,\" he panted, his hands looping underneath my arms and curling around the tops of my shoulders, keeping me firmly against the side while I dug my heels into his backside, nudging him to exactly where I needed him. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip, an animalistic growl sounding low in his throat as I launched my second wave of the Lower Caroline-commanded attack.\n\n\"You feel uncommonly good,\" I moaned as I began to kiss him again, raining them down across his mouth, his cheeks, his jaw, slipping underneath to suck and bite at his neck as he dropped his head back to allow my assault. His hands were rough on me, dipping down low on my back and catching on my bikini strings, loosening the sides. The thought of my naked breasts against his skin drove me crazy with lust, and I removed my hands from his poor hair to snake back behind my neck and pull on the knot. As I maneuvered, I knocked into one of the empty bottles of Cava, starting a domino effect of bottles crashing to the ground. I giggled as he pulled back, startled at the sound.\n\nHis eyes were smoky blue, crowded with lust, but as they focused on me, they began to crystallize. I finally managed to get to the knot untied and could feel the water swirl across my naked skin. I started to drop the strings, when Simon grasped them tightly in his hands. He shook his head as though to clear it, then closed his eyes firmly, cutting off our connection.\n\n\"Hey, hey, hey!\" I prodded, forcing his eyes open and making him look at me. \"Where did you go just now?\" I whispered.\n\nHe wrapped his hands, still holding my strings, back around my neck. He slowly began to tie my suit back together, and I felt my face flush bright red, all the blood in my body betraying me in that instant.\n\n\"Caroline,\" he began, breathing heavily, but looking at me carefully.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I interrupted.\n\nHis hands came to rest on my shoulders, and he seemed to be keeping a specific distance between us.\n\n\"Caroline, you're amazing, but I...I can't\u2014\" he started.\n\nNow I was the one to close my eyes. Emotions whirled behind my eyelids, shame being chief among them. Heart plummeted. I could feel his eyes on me, willing me to open my own.\n\n\"You can't,\" I stated, opening my eyes and looking anywhere but at him.\n\n\"No, I mean, I...\" he stammered, clearly uneasy as he moved away from me.\n\nI began to shake. \"You...can't?\" I asked, suddenly feeling icy cold, even in the water. I unlocked my legs from around him, allowing him the room he needed to move away.\n\n\"No, Caroline, not you. Not like\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, don't I feel like a fucking idiot?\" I managed, laughing shortly and pulling myself up and out of the water to the side of the hot tub.\n\n\"What? No, you don't understand, I just can't\u2014\" he started toward me, and I kicked out a leg, pressing my foot square in the center of his chest to keep him away.\n\n\"Hey, Simon, I get it. You can't. It's cool. Wow, what a crazy night, huh?\" I laughed again, swinging over the side and starting for the house, wanting to get away before he could see the tears I knew were on their way. Of course, as I tried to navigate the steps, I slipped in a wet spot and fell with a big thud. I could feel the back of my eyeballs begin to burn as I scrambled up as quickly as I could, panicked that I was going to cry before I could get inside. Now that I was moving, I could feel the effects of all the alcohol I'd consumed, and the beginnings of a very strong headache.\n\n\"Caroline! Are you okay?\" Simon cried, starting to get out of the hot tub.\n\n\"I'm fine. I'm fine. Just...\" I got out, my throat beginning to close as I choked back a sob. I held my hand out behind me, willing him to understand that I did not need his help. \"I'm fine, Simon.\"\n\nI couldn't turn around and see him. I just continued walking away. The cursed big band music still played on the turntable, but I still heard him say my name once more. Ignoring it, I made my way to the door, feeling foolish now in my teeny bikini that was clearly not as enticing as I thought it was.\n\nI didn't even bother to grab a towel. Instead I threw open the glass door and heard it slam shut behind me as I all but ran for my room. I left little puddles along the slate floor down the hallway, trying to ignore the giggles coming from Sophia's room. As the tears finally coursed down my cheeks, I locked the door and stripped off my bathing suit. I stumbled into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and there I stood, reflected back to me. Naked, wet hair streaming down my back, a bruise already beginning to form on my thigh from my drunken spill...and puffy, kiss-swollen lips.\n\nI wrapped my hair in a towel, and then leaned on the countertop, bringing my face within inches of the mirror.\n\n\"Caroline, my dear, you just got turned down by a man who once made a woman meow for thirty minutes straight. How do you feel?\" the naked woman in the mirror asked me, turning my thumb into a little microphone. She gestured toward me, holding out her thumb.\n\n\"Well, I drank enough wine to sustain a small Spanish village, I haven't had an orgasm in a thousand years, and I will probably die old and alone in a beautifully designed apartment with all of Clive's illegitimate children swarming around me...How do you think I feel?\" I asked back, offering Mirror Caroline her thumb.\n\n\"Silly Caroline, you had Clive neutered,\" Mirror Caroline answered, shaking her head at me.\n\n\"Go fuck yourself, Mirror Caroline, since I can't even do that,\" I finished, ending the interview and taking my naked ass back into the bedroom. Throwing on a T-shirt, I fell into bed, my drunk self exhausted from the hike and the dinner and the wine and the music and the best make-out session I'd ever engaged in. The thought of it brought my tears to the surface again, and I rolled over to grab some tissues, only to find an empty box, which made me cry even harder.\n\nStupid Wallbanger voodoo.\n\nCould this night get any worse?\n\nThen my phone rang.\n\n\"Pancakes, sweetie?\"\n\n\"Love some. Thanks, babe.\"\n\nJesus.\n\n\"Is there still cream for the coffee?\"\n\n\"I got your cream right here, honeybunch.\"\n\nSweet Jesus.\n\nListening to a new couple, much less two new couples was sometimes vomit-worthy. Add that to a hangover, and this was going to be a long morning.\n\nAfter talking to James on the phone last night, I'd fallen into a deep sleep, aided, no doubt, by all the wine I'd consumed. I woke with a thick tongue, a splitting headache, and a queasy stomach\u2014made even more queasy by the knowledge that I'd have to see Simon this morning and have that weird we-totally-made-out-last-night conversation.\n\nJames had made me feel better, though. He'd made me laugh, and I remembered how well he took care of me back in the day. It was a nice memory, and an even nicer feeling. He'd called under the pretense of checking with me about a paint color, which I quickly called as a bluff. Then he'd admitted he just wanted to talk to me, and fresh off the Great Hot Tub Rejection, I was happy to talk to someone I knew wanted my attention. Damn you, Simon. When James asked me to dinner next weekend, I agreed immediately. We'd have a great time...and since my O was back in her hidey-hole, I might as well enjoy a night on the town.\n\nNow, I was seated at the breakfast table, surrounded by two new couples who were filling the kitchen with enough sexual satisfaction to make me scream. I didn't though. I kept it to myself as Mimi perched happily on Ryan's lap, and Neil fed Sophia melon balls as though he was put on the earth for this reason and this reason alone.\n\n\"How was the rest of your evening, Ms. Caroline?\" Mimi chirped, raising a knowing eyebrow. I pressed the tines of my fork into her hand and told her to zip it.\n\n\"Wow, grumpy. Someone must have spent the night alone,\" Sophia murmured to Neil.\n\nI looked up at her in surprise. The casualness with which they were treating this was really starting to bother me.\n\n\"Well, of course I spent the night alone. Who the hell do you think I spent the night with? Huh?\" I asked, slamming back from the table and knocking my orange juice glass over. \"Ah, fuck it all to hell,\" I muttered, stomping off toward the patio, tears threatening for the second time in less than twelve hours.\n\nI sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, looking out over the lake. The cool of the morning soothed my heated face, and I wiped clumsily at my tears as I heard the girls footsteps follow me outside.\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it, okay?\" I instructed, as they took the seats opposite me.\n\n\"Okay...but you gotta give us something. I mean, I thought for sure when we left last night, I mean...you and Simon are just\u2014\" Mimi started, and I stopped her.\n\n\"Me and Simon nothing. There is no me and Simon. What, you thought we'd pair off just because you four finally figured your shit out? You're welcome for that, by the way,\" I snapped, pulling my ball cap down lower on my face, hiding my continuing tears from my best friends.\n\n\"Caroline, we just thought\u2014\" Sophia began, and I cut her off as well.\n\n\"You thought since we were the ones left over we'd just magically become a couple? How storybook\u2014three sets of perfectly matched couples, right? Like that ever happens. This isn't some romance novel.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, you two are perfect for each other. You called us blind last night? Hi, pot. It's me, kettle,\" Sophia snapped back.\n\n\"Hi, kettle, you have about thirty seconds before this pot kicks your ass. Nothing happened. Nothing is going to happen. In case you forgot, he has a harem, ladies. A harem! And I'm not about to become his third chippie. So you can forget it, okay?\" I yelled, pushing out of the chair, turning for the house, and running right into a quiet Simon.\n\n\"Great! You're here too! And I see you two peeking through the blinds, idiots!\" I cried as Neil and Ryan backed away from the window.\n\n\"Caroline, can we talk, please?\" Simon asked, grasping me by the arms and spinning me toward him.\n\n\"Sure, why not? Let's make the embarrassment complete. Since I know you're all dying to know, I threw myself at this guy last night, and he turned me down. Okay, secret's out. Now can we please drop it?\" I wiggled out of his grip and walked toward the trail to the lake. I heard nothing behind me and turned to see all five of them, wide eyed and evidently unsure what to do next.\n\n\"Hey! Come on, Simon. Let's go,\" I snapped my fingers, and he started after me, looking a little afraid.\n\nI stomped down the trail and tried to slow my breathing. My heart was pounding, and I didn't want to talk when I was this riled up. No good could come of it. As I breathed in and out, I took in the beautiful morning all around and tried to let that lighten my heart a bit. Did I need to make this more awkward that it already was? No. I had the control here, last night notwithstanding. I could make it so last night never happened, or I could certainly try.\n\nI breathed again, feeling a bit of the tension leave my body. Despite everything that happened, I enjoyed Simon's company and had to come to think of him as my friend. I still stomped along the path, but eventually eased back into a moderately pissy stroll.\n\nI left the trees behind and didn't stop until I reached the end of the dock. The sun peeked out after last night's storm, casting a silver light on the water.\n\nI heard him approach and stop just behind me. I took one more deep breath. He was silent.\n\n\"You're not going to push me in, are you? That would be a bad move, Simon.\" He exhaled a laugh, and I smiled a little, not wanting to, but not able to help it.\n\n\"Caroline, can I explain about last night? I need to you know that\u2014\"\n\n\"Just don't, okay? Can't we just chalk it up to the wine?\" I asked, whirling about to face him and trying to beat him to the punch.\n\nHe stared down at me with the strangest look on his face. He looked like he'd gotten dressed in a hurry: white thermal, well worn jeans, and hiking boots that weren't even laced up, the strings now damp and muddy from the trek through the woods. Still, he was stunning, the early morning sun illuminating the strong planes of his face and that scruff that was so delicious.\n\n\"I wish I could, Caroline, but\u2014\" he started again.\n\nI shook my head. \"Seriously, Simon, just\u2014\" I began, but stopped when he pressed his fingers against my mouth.\n\n\"You have to shut up, okay? You keep interrupting me, and watch how fast you get tossed in that very lake,\" he warned with the twinkle in his eye I'd become so used to.\n\nI nodded, and he removed his hand. I tried to ignore the flames that licked at my lips, brought to the surface by just that little touch.\n\n\"So, last night we came really close to making a very big mistake,\" he said, and when he saw my mouth begin to open, he wagged his finger at me.\n\nI zipped my lip, miming throwing the key into the water. He smiled sadly and continued.\n\n\"Obviously I'm attracted to you. How could I not be? You're amazing. But you were drunk, I was drunk, and as great as it would have been, it would have\u2014ah, it would have changed things, you know? And I just can't, Caroline. I can't allow myself to...I just...\" He struggled, running his hands through his hair in a gesture I'd come to understand as frustration. He stared at me, willing me to make this okay, to tell him we were okay.\n\nDid I want to lose a friend over this? No way.\n\n\"Hey, like I said, it's cool\u2014too much wine. Besides, I know you have your arrangement, and I can't...Things just got away from me last night,\" I explained, trying to sell it to him.\n\nHe opened his mouth to comment, but after a moment he nodded and sighed a great sigh. \"We still friends? I don't want this to get weird for us. I really like you, Caroline,\" he asked, looking as though his world was about to come to an end.\n\n\"Of course friends. What else would we be?\" I swallowed hard and forced a smile. He smiled too, and we began to walk back up the trail. Okay, that wasn't too bad. Maybe this could work. He stopped to pick up a handful of sand from the beach and put it in a little plastic baggie.\n\n\"Bottles?\"\n\n\"Bottles.\" He nodded, and we started up the path.\n\n\"So it looks like our little plan worked,\" I began, searching for conversation.\n\n\"With those guys? Oh yeah, I think it worked well. They seem to have found what they needed.\"\n\n\"That's all anyone's trying to do, right?\" I laughed as we crossed the patio to the kitchen. Four heads disappeared from the window and began to assume positions of nonchalance around the table. I chuckled.\n\n\"Always good when what you need and what you want are the same things,\" Simon said, holding the door open for me.\n\n\"Boy, did you say a mouthful.\" A pang of sadness hit me again, but I didn't have to force the smile once I saw how happy my friends were.\n\n\"You want some breakfast? There are still some cinnamon buns, I think,\" Simon offered, walking over to the counter.\n\n\"Um, no. I think I'm gonna go pack, get my stuff together,\" I said, noticing a flash of disappointment cross his face before he smiled bravely.\n\nOkay, so this wasn't great. Well, that's what happens when two friends kiss. Things are never the same. I nodded at my girls and headed for my room.\n\nSpurred by my insistence about getting back to the city, within two hours we were all packed and deciding who was going to ride with whom. I didn't want to ride alone with Simon, so I pulled Mimi aside and instructed her to bring Ryan along with us. Now we were all outside arranging bags. As Simon piled everything into the Range Rover, I shivered a little, realizing too late that I'd packed my fleece jacket into my bag, which was now buried. As he turned back toward me, he noticed.\n\n\"You cold?\"\n\n\"A little, but it's fine. My bag's at the bottom, and I don't want you to have to rearrange everything,\" I answered, stamping my foot to keep warm.\n\n\"Oh! That reminds me, I have something for you,\" he exclaimed, rummaging in his bag, which was on top. He handed me a lumpy package, wrapped in brown paper.\n\n\"What's this?\" I asked, as he blushed deeply. Simon does blush? I rarely saw that...\n\n\"You didn't think I forgot this, did you?\" he replied, his hair falling into his eyes a little as he smiled a boyish smile. \"I was going to give it to you last night, but then\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey, Parker! Could use a little help over here!\" Neil called as he struggled to load all of Sophia's luggage. Yesterday, this would have been Ryan's job. Now it was Neil's. Yesterday. How the world had changed in one day.\n\nHe backed away from me as Mimi and Ryan got themselves settled in the backseat.\n\nI opened the package to find a very thick, very soft Irish sweater. I lifted it out of the paper, feeling the weight and the nubbly texture of the weave. I pressed it against my nose, inhaling the scent of wool and unmistakable Simon that clung to it. I grinned into the sweater, then quickly slipped it over my T-shirt, admiring the way it hung loose and low, yet still wrapped me in a comforting way. I turned to see Simon watching me from over at Neil's truck. He smiled as I twirled for him.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I mouthed.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" he mouthed back.\n\nI gave my sweater a long, deep sniff, hoping no one noticed.\nChapter Fourteen\n\nINSIDE A BLACK RANGE ROVER on the way back to San Francisco...\n\nCaroline: Okay, I can do this...It's only a few hours back into the city. I can be the bigger person here. I can act like he didn't pull an all stop at the thought of seeing my tatas last night\u2014and what the hell? What man says no to tatas? I mean, they're nice tatas. They were pushed up nice and tight, and they were wet, for Christ's sake...Why didn't he want my tatas? Caroline, just settle down...Just smile at him and act like everything is fine. Wait, he's looking over here. Smile! Okay, he smiled back...Stupid tata turner-downer...I mean, what's up with that? And he was hard!\n\n...\n\nSimon: She's smiling at me...I can smile back at her, right? I mean, we're acting natural, right? Okay, done. I hope that looked more natural than it felt. Jesus, who knew a giant sweater would look so good on a girl...But everything looks pretty good on Caroline\u2014especially that green bikini. Did I really turn her down last night? God, it would have been so easy to just...But then I couldn't. Why couldn't I??? Jesus, Simon. Well, we were drunk...Correction, she was drunk. Would she have regretted it? She might have. Couldn't risk it? Might have been a bit of a disaster...Or was it the girls? I shouldn't do that to the girls either. But it's not even really working so well with the girls these days, now is it? Huh, I didn't think about them once this weekend...because I couldn't stop thinking about Caroline. She's looking at me again...What the hell are we going to talk about the whole way back to the city? Ryan isn't even paying attention. Bastard. I told him he needed to help me out...He's helping himself to a handful of Mimi. I'm almost sorry Caroline and I worked so hard to push them together. Hmm...Caroline and I...Caroline and me in a hot tub where bikinis are outlawed...Jesus, wait a minute\u2014yep, now I've got a semi...\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Why is he twitching like that? Jesus, does he have to pee? Maybe I have to pee. Maybe this would be a good time to suggest a pee break...Then I can grab Mimi and make sure she knows the reason they're riding with us is not so they can suck face the whole way, but to run interference for me with Scared of Tatas over there. Okay, just ask him to pull over at the next gas station. Wow, he really does have to pee, I guess. I hope this gas station has Gardetto's.\n\n...\n\nSimon: Thank God she wanted to stop. Now I can adjust without looking like a pervert...oh, who am I kidding? I am a pervert. I'm riding in a car with a woman who was straddling me last night and just the thought of it makes me hard. Pervert, pervert, pervert. I hope this gas station has Gardetto's.\n\n...\n\nMimi: Ooh! We're stopping! I hope this gas station has bubble gum!\n\n...\n\nRyan: Oh, man, we're stopping already? We're not going to make it back to the city before dark. Mimi wants me to see her place, and I'm really hoping that means walk around naked and let me watch...I hope this gas station has condoms.\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Okay, you could have handled that a little better. Mimi suggesting you and Simon split the big bag of Gardetto's was not that big of a deal. Am I a little sensitive today? Yes, I suppose I am...But I know for a fact that Simon was checking out my ass as I walked away from the car. Why the hell is he checking out my ass now? Last night he didn't even want to peek under my bikini. Is he really that complicated? Why the hell is he looking at me? He's reaching his hand out. Stay still, Caroline, stay still...Oh, sesame seed on my chin. Well, if you weren't looking at my mouth, Mr. Mixed Messages, you wouldn't even have noticed it. You will never get this sesame seed now, buddy. Damn! Why does this sweater have to smell so good? I hope he hasn't noticed me sniffing this sweater the whole way.\n\n...\n\nSimon: She's really sniffly today. I hope she isn't catching a cold. We spent so much time outside this weekend...I would hate for her to come down with something. She just sniffled again. Should I offer her a Kleenex?\n\n...\n\nMimi: Busted, Caroline. I totally knew you were sniffing that sweater.\n\n...\n\nRyan: I wonder if Mimi has any more of that bubble gum? I hope she didn't notice me buying those condoms. I mean, I don't want to be presumptuous. But I definitely want to be under her again sometime very, very soon. Who knew someone so tiny could be so loud...and now I'm hard.\n\n...\n\nMimi: Ryan Hall...Mimi Reyes Hall...Mimi Hall...Mimi Reyes-Hall...\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Okay, Caroline, time to have that difficult conversation\u2014with yourself. Why exactly did you throw yourself at Simon last night? Was it the wine? Was it the music? The voodoo? Was it the combination of all those things? Okay, okay, no more bullshit. I did it because...because...Fuck, I need some more Gardetto's.\n\n...\n\nSimon: She's so pretty. I mean, there's pretty and then there's pretty...What a pussy I am. Fuck pretty\u2014she's beautiful...pussy...And she smells good...pussy...Why do some girls just smell better? Some girls smell like flowery, fruity bullshit. I mean, why would some girls want to smell like a mango? Why should a girl smell like a mango? Maybe if I think the word mango enough I won't think about pussy anymore. Caroline...mango...Caroline...pussy...God! And now I'm hard...\n\n...\n\nCaroline: He looks like he needs to pee again...He's drinking too much coffee. He's had like six cups already from that thermos. That's funny...He never has a second cup at home. Why the hell do I know how many cups of coffee he drinks? Face it, Caroline, you know so much about him because...because...\n\n...\n\nRyan: Dude, we're stopping again? We are never gonna make it home. My boy is having some serious issues today...I should probably see if he wants to get a beer or something when we get back\u2014in case he wants to come clean about what really happened last night. Should I offer? Wow, Mimi looks fantastic in those pants...I wonder if she's buying more bubble gum.\n\n...\n\nMimi: Stop sniffing your sweater, Caroline! Seriously, girl. If I could just get her alone...Okay, Simon seems to be hobbling toward the men's room. I can get her alone by the beef jerky.\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Ugh...I can't believe Mimi knew I was sniffing the sweater. I wonder if Simon noticed.\n\n...\n\nSimon: She seems better...She's not sniffling any more.\n\n...\n\nMimi: I need to text Sophia. She needs to know the Simon\/Caroline situation is not getting any better. What the hell are we gonna do with these two? I mean, seriously...sometimes people just can't see what's right in front of them. Aawww...Ryan wants me to scratch his back. I adore him...And damn, are his fingers long...\n\n...\n\nRyan: Mmmm...back...scratch...back...scratch...Mmmm...\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Okay, no more avoiding it in your own head, Reynolds. And now I'm serious because I'm using my last name. Now listen up, Reynolds...Heeheehee...I sound like such a badass!\n\n...\n\nSimon: So...she's giggling? Inside joke, she says. So maybe she is okay with how this is going\u2014oops, grabbed the wrong bag of Gardetto's. Did she just growl at me?\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Turn my tatas down and then try to steal my Gardetto's? I don't think so, buddy. Okay, Reynolds, no more giggling. You can't avoid this forever, even in your own mind. Here are the questions on deck: 1. Why did you throw yourself at Simon last night? And you're not allowed to blame alcohol or music or vacation vibes or Nerves or Heart or anything. 2. Why did he turn you down? If he didn't want to go there, why has he been flirting with you for weeks, and not just in the neighborly way? He's got a harem, for God's sake. He's not a Puritan. Agh!! 3. Does being rejected by Simon have anything to do with the date you agreed to with James? 4. How the hell do Simon and I go back to being just friends when we know what the inside of each other's mouths taste like? And his tastes very, very, very good. Okay, yes. You can sniff the sweater one more time\u2014just don't let anyone see you.\n\n...\n\nSimon: I have to figure this shit out with Caroline. She's so great, and I mean so great...Has there ever been a woman who's possessed every single quality I've been looking for? Except for Natalie Portman, of course. But Caroline? I have to stop watching so much Lifetime\u2014I mean what guy in his own mind even thinks in sentences like: \"Has there ever been a woman who's possessed every single quality I've been looking for?\" Wait, have I been looking for that woman? No, I haven't. I don't have time for that, space for that\u2014and my girls don't want the picket fence. They keep away the picket fencers. Caroline says she isn't a picket fencer...Katie found her picket fence, and I'm happy for her. When's the last time I even talked to Nadia or Lizzie? Maybe they're not right for me anymore. I don't want them the way I might want...could want Caroline. You're such a pussy, Parker...Jesus, Caroline\u2014she's a fucking keeper...Wait a minute. What the hell? Are you really entertaining the idea of a...gulp...relationship? And why the fuck did I actually think the word \"gulp\"? That was a little dramatic, Parker. Come on, think about this...If I recall correctly, you invited her to Spain! Don't run away from it. Dude, did she just sniff her sweater?\n\n...\n\nRyan: Mmmm...my girl likes beef jerky\u2014could I be any luckier? She scratches my back and eats beef jerky. I have died and gone somewhere like heaven.\n\n...\n\nMimi: I can't believe he ate all my beef jerky. What a jerky. Heehee.\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Question 1 is too hard. I can't start with that one. I'll answer them in reverse order. 4. I don't know if we can be friends, but I really want to be\u2014and not in the fake way. I really like Simon, and even though what happened last night sucked major balls, I think we can figure this out...And I would like to have some of whatever I'm smoking. 3. OF COURSE I AGREED TO GO OUT WITH JAMES BECAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENED WITH SIMON! It's funny how that shows up in all caps even in my head. 2. If I knew why he turned me down, I'd be a fucking genius. Bad breath? No. Because I was drunk? Possibly...But if it's because we were drunk that's the worst timing for chivalry in the history of the universe. He did keep saying \"I can't\" and that it was a \"mistake.\" Now, mistake perhaps. But might have been worth it...Maybe he was just being faithful to his harem? Which in an odd way is quite sweet. I know he really does care about them. Dammit, he's even great when it comes to them! But I know \"I can't\" wasn't accurate. \"Can't\" implies some kind of erectile dysfunction. And I felt that junk on my thigh. Sigh. Sigh for thigh. This sweater is doing things to my head. Sniff...\n\n...\n\nSimon: She just sniffed it again\u2014why does she keep doing that? When I wore it I didn't notice it smelling like anything other than wool. Girls are weird...weirdly wonderful...Pussy...Caroline's pussy...Aaand I'm hard. Why the hell am I even pretending I'm not totally and completely over the moon for this girl? And it has nothing to do with her pussy...and now I'm harder.\n\n...\n\nCaroline: Stop trying to get out of answering this question. Face it head on! Why did you throw yourself at Simon, forgetting about the friendship and the harem and the O drought and all of the very good reasons you had for staying away from him and his banger voodoo??? Come on, Caroline. Suck it up and say it. What was it he said when you asked him why he kissed you that night you met? \"Because I had to.\" Jesus, even in my head he sounds amazing saying that...There's your answer, Caroline: because you had to. And now you have to figure this shit out. I kissed him, and he kissed me because we had to. And the choices we made were ours and ours alone...And the fact that he stopped it and said he couldn't? Even after all the ridiculous weeks of flirting? After he invited me to Spain? Motherfucking Spain! And I want to go to motherfucking Spa\u2014wait, do I want to go to Spain with him? Argh! Spain Schmain. Anyway, he better have a damn good reason because I am a fucking catch\u2014O or no O\u2014I am a fucking catch. Yeah, you are, Reynolds. Weird how you flip back and forth between first and third person during your inner monologues, though...Thank Christ, the Bay Bridge! Enough introspection...\n\n...\n\nSimon: Shit, the Bay Bridge. We're almost home, and I have no idea how this is going to go with Caroline. We've barely said anything the entire way\u2014although I'm glad to be almost home. I smell like beef jerky, and I need to jerk off like you wouldn't believe...\n\n...\n\nMimi: Yay! The Bay Bridge! I wonder if Ryan would mind spending the night at my place!\n\n...\n\nRyan: Thank fuck, the Bay Bridge. We're almost home. I wonder if Mimi knows I'm spending the night at her place\u2014and planning on making her call in sick tomorrow? Little girl, the things I plan to do to you...But I'm never eating that much beef jerky again. This has been the quietest road trip ever.\n\nWe dropped off the new couple at Mimi's\u2014not that they particularly noticed\u2014they were in their own bubble gum world\u2014and continued on to our apartments. Though we'd mostly just been lost in our thoughts, the tension had grown during the drive, and it was even more noticeable now that we were alone in the car. Simon and I had always had things to talk about, but now that we had so much to discuss, we were silent. I didn't want things to be weird, and I knew I'd have to be the one to make sure he knew I was okay now. He'd already done his part to have a mature conversation, and once again my bull-in-a-china-shop delivery seemed to have taken care of that.\n\nA vision of me announcing on the deck, at full volume, that I'd made a pass at Simon flashed across my mind, and while my cheeks certainly heated in embarrassment, I also had a mental chuckle at how odd I must have looked, arms flailing, mouth set as though I could spit nails. And then barking at frightened Simon to follow me to the beach. He must have wondered if I was going to thrash him and dump his body in the lake.\n\nLooking at his hands on the steering wheel, the very hands that were on me in a very pronounced way the night before, I marveled at his ability to stop himself, because I know for a fact he had been in to it. Or his body had been, at least, if not his head.\n\nThe thing is, though, I did think his head was in it, at least until he thought about it too much. I glanced over at him once more, noticing we were pulling down our street. As we stopped at the curb, he looked over at me, biting down on the same lower lip that less than twenty-four hours ago I'd had the good fortune to be biting on.\n\nHe sprang from the car and ran around to my side before I even had my seatbelt unbuckled.\n\n\"Um, I'm just gonna...get the bags,\" he stammered, and I studied him closely. He ran his left hand through his hair while his right drummed against the side of the car. Was he nervous?\n\n\"So, yeah,\" he stammered again, disappearing around the back.\n\nYep, he was nervous, just as nervous as I was. He worried my bag out of the car, and we slogged up the three flights of stairs to our apartments. We were still not talking, so the only sound was our keys jangling in the locks. I couldn't leave it like this. I had to square with him. I took a deep breath, and turned. \"Simon, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, Caroline\u2014\"\n\nWe both laughed a little.\n\n\"You go.\"\n\n\"No, you go,\" he said.\n\n\"Nope. What were you gonna say?\"\n\n\"What were you gonna say?\"\n\n\"Hey, spit it out, bucko. I got a pussy to rescue from two queens downstairs,\" I instructed, hearing Clive call to me from the apartment below.\n\nSimon snorted and leaned against his door. \"I guess I just wanted to say I had a really great time this weekend.\"\n\n\"Until last night, right?\" I leaned against my own door, watching him flinch as I addressed the elephant in the hot tub.\n\n\"Caroline,\" he breathed, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back.\n\nHe looked like he was in actual pain as his face twisted. I took pity. I shouldn't have, but I did.\n\n\"Hey, can we just forget it happened?\" I said. \"I mean, I know we can't, but can we pretend to forget it? I know people say things won't get weird all the time, but then it always does. How can we make sure things don't get weird?\"\n\nHe opened his eyes and looked hard at me. \"I guess we just don't let it. We make sure it doesn't get weird. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\" I nodded and was rewarded with the first real smile I'd seen since I unwrapped my sweater back in Tahoe. He gathered up his bag.\n\n\"Play me something good tonight, 'kay?\" I asked as I headed inside.\n\n\"You got it,\" he answered, and we shut our doors.\n\nBut he didn't play me big band that night.\n\nAnd we didn't speak again that week.\n\n\"Who peed in your chili?\"\n\nI looked up from my desk to see Jillian, composed as always with her casually elegant chignon, black pencil trousers, white silk blouse, and raspberry cashmere sweater wrap. How did I know it was cashmere from across the room? Because it was Jillian.\n\nI selected one of the five pencils currently stuck in my twisted hair bun and returned my attention to the mess that was my desk. It was Wednesday, and this week was both flying by and dragging simultaneously. No word from Simon. No texts from Simon. No songs from Simon.\n\nBut I hadn't reached out to him either.\n\nI was consumed with finishing the last few details on the Nicholson house, ordering expensive knickknacks for James's condo, and starting the sketches for a commercial design project I had lined up for next month. It looked like chaos, but sometimes it was the only way I could get work done. There were days that I needed neat and orderly, and days when I needed the mess on my desk to reflect the mess in my head. This was that day.\n\n\"What's up, Jillian?\" I barked, knocking over my cup of colored pencils as I grabbed for my coffee.\n\n\"How much coffee have you had today, Miss Caroline?\" She laughed, taking the seat opposite me and handing me the pencils that had spilled on the floor.\n\n\"Hard to say...how many cups are in a pot and a half?\" I answered, restacking some papers to clear a space for her teacup. The woman walked around drinking tea out of a bone china cup, but it worked for her.\n\n\"Wow, I take it you aren't seeing any clients today?\" she asked, leaning over the desk and casually removing my coffee cup. I hissed at her, and she wisely put it back.\n\n\"Nope, no clients,\" I answered, shoving the new sketches into color-coordinated folders and stuffing them into their appropriate drawers.\n\n\"Okay, sister, what's up?\"\n\n\"What do you mean? I'm working\u2014what you pay me to do, remember?\" I snapped, grabbing for a ring of fabric swatches and knocking my flower vase over. I'd picked out dark purple, almost black tulips for this week, and they were now all over the floor. I sighed heavily and forced myself to slow down. My hands shook from the caffeine arguing through my system, and as I sat and surveyed the state of affairs in my office I felt two fat tears forming in my eyes.\n\n\"Damn,\" I muttered and covered my face with my hands. I sat for a minute, listening to the tick of the retro clock on the wall, and waited for Jillian to say something. When she didn't, I peeked through my hands at her. She was standing by the door with my jacket and purse in her hands.\n\n\"Are you throwing me out?\" I whispered as the tears launched themselves down my face. She waved her arm and beckoned me toward the door. Grudgingly I stood, and she draped my sweater around my shoulders and handed me my purse.\n\n\"Come on, dearie. You're buying me lunch.\" She winked and pulled me down the hallway.\n\nTwenty minutes later she had me ensconced in an ornate red booth hidden partially behind two gold curtains. She'd brought me to her favorite restaurant in Chinatown, ordered me chamomile tea, and waited in silence for me to explain my semi breakdown. Actually, it was not entirely silent; we'd ordered the sizzling rice soup.\n\n\"So, you must've had a helluva weekend in Tahoe, huh?\" she finally asked.\n\nI laughed into my sizzle. \"You could say that.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Well, Sophia and Neil finally got together and\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, Sophia and Neil? I thought Sophia was with Ryan?\"\n\n\"She was, she was, but truthfully she was always meant to be with Neil, so it all worked out in the end.\"\n\n\"Poor Mimi and Ryan. That must've been weird for them.\"\n\n\"Ha! Oh yes, poor Mimi and Ryan. They got it on in the pool house, for God's sake.\" I snorted.\n\nJillian's eyes grew wide. \"In the pool house...wow,\" she breathed, and I nodded.\n\nWe sizzled.\n\n\"So, Simon went to Tahoe, right?\" she asked a few minutes later, looking everywhere but at me. I cracked a small smile at her imagined stealth. Jillian was many, many things, but subtle was not one.\n\n\"Yep, Simon was there.\"\n\n\"And how was that?\"\n\n\"It was great, and then it wasn't, and now it's weird,\" I admitted, setting aside my soup to drink my tea. It was soothing and non-caffeinated, which Jillian had insisted on.\n\n\"So, no pool house for you two?\" she asked, still glancing around the restaurant as though she weren't asking me anything of importance.\n\n\"No, Jillian, no pool house. We hot tubbed, but we did not pool house,\" I said emphatically, and then I spilled my guts and told her the entire ridiculous story.\n\nShe listened, she hmm'd and groaned in the right places, and she got indignant in the right places too. By the time I was finished, I was in tears again, which was really pissing me off.\n\n\"And the stink of it all, I shouldn't have been doing it, but he is the one who stopped it, and I don't really think he wanted to!\" I huffed, angrily wiping tears away with my napkin.\n\n\"So why do you think he did?\"\n\n\"He's gay?\" I offered, and she smiled. I took a deep breath and got control.\n\nJillian looked at me thoughtfully and then finally leaned in. \"You realize we are two smart women who are not acting very smart right now,\" she said.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"We know better than to try to figure out what a man is up to. This'll get worked out when it's supposed to. And your tears? These are tension tears, frustration tears\u2014nothing more. I'll tell you one thing, though.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"As long as I've known Simon, I've never heard of him inviting someone on a shoot with him, ever. I mean, inviting you to Spain? That's very unlike Simon.\"\n\n\"Well, who knows if I'm even invited anymore.\" I sighed dramatically.\n\n\"You're still friends, right?\" she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. \"Why don't you just ask him?\" When I didn't respond she added, \"Stick that in your pipe and suck it.\"\n\n\"I think it's smoke it, Jillian. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.\"\n\n\"Ah, smoke it, suck it, whatever. Eat your fortune cookie, sweetie.\" She smiled, nudging the cookie across the table. I cracked it open and removed the fortune.\n\n\"What does yours say?\" I asked.\n\n\"Fire all employees who have more than one pencil in their hair,\" she stated seriously. We laughed together, and I could feel some of the tension finally leaving my body.\n\n\"What does yours say?\" she asked.\n\nI opened it up, read the words, and rolled my eyes to the ceiling. \"Stupid fortune cookie,\" I sighed, and handed it to her.\n\nShe read it and her eyes went wide again. \"Oh, man, are you in for it! Come in, let's go back to work.\"\n\nShe laughed, tugging my hand and leading me from the restaurant. She gave the fortune back to me, and I started to throw it away, but then slipped it into my purse:\n\nBe aware of the walls you build  \nand what could be on the other side\n\nConfucius, you kill me.\n\nText from James to Caroline:\n\nHey there.\n\nHey to you.\n\nWe still on for Friday night?\n\nYep, I'm in. Where are we going for dinner?\n\nThere's a great new Vietnamese restaurant I  \n've been wanting to try.\n\nHave you forgotten I'm not really big on Vietnamese food?\n\nCome on, you know it's my favorite. You can get soup!\n\nFine, Vietnamese it is. I'll find something.  \nBTW, the last of your furniture should be delivered Monday. I'll be there to receive and place.\n\nHow much longer until the project is finished?\n\nExcept for a few pieces in the bedroom,  \nshould be all done by next weekend.  \nAhead of deadline I might add...\n\nVery good. Will you also be there  \nto finish things in the bedroom?\n\nStop it, Jamie.\n\nI hate when you call me Jamie.\n\nI know, Jamie. See you Friday night\n\nThe day had exhausted me. I literally had nothing left. I had plans to go to yoga, really I did, but as the evening approached all I wanted to do was go home. I wanted Clive, and I could no longer pretend that I didn't also want Simon. Maybe he would be home? As I walked up the stairs I could hear Simon's TV through the door. I was already turning my key in my lock when I thought about my fortune cookie. I could knock on the door, right? I could just say hi, right? As I debated, I heard his phone ring, followed by his voice through the door.\n\n\"Nadia? Hey, how are you?\" he said, and that made up my mind for me. He had his harem, and I couldn't possibly enter in to something like that. If I wanted Simon, I wanted all of Simon. I'd promised myself no more messing around. As I felt tears prick at my eyes for the thousandth time that day, I walked in to find Clive waiting for me, and I smiled through my tears. I picked him up, cuddling him to me as he told me all about his day in cat speak. I interpreted for him, and it would seem that Clive's day consisted of a light snack, a nap, about thirty minutes of grooming, another snack, another nap, and then he watched the neighborhood for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Leftover takeout with Ina and Jeffrey on the couch, a quick shower, and I packed it in early. I simply could not allow this day to go on any longer.\n\nWith Clive curled between my legs, I went to sleep, again with no music from the other side of the wall.\n\nThe following night I stood in front of my mirror, trying on different shoes for my date\/not a date\/of course it's a date with James. I'd almost called him twice today to back out, but in the end, I pushed through it and got dressed. Sometimes a girl just needs to get dressed up, and tonight I was dressed to kill: thin, fitted black blouse, tight red pencil skirt, teetery tall heels.\n\nI'd been conflicted about this event, whatever it was, all week long. But I wanted to go. Was I using James a little? Perhaps. But I did have a good time with him, and maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for us to start back up again.\n\n\"Caroline Reynolds, you heartbreaker,\" I whispered to myself in the mirror. I actually cracked myself up. Clive was embarrassed for both of us and hid his nose behind his paw. I was still laughing when I heard the knock at the door. I slipped into my heels and went for the door, Clive close behind.\n\nI took a deep breath, and opened it. \"Hey, James.\"\n\n\"Caroline, you look great,\" he murmured, stepping inside and catching me into a hug.\n\nAs his arms went around me, I knew immediately. This was a date.\n\nHe smelled spicy. I don't know why girls always say boys smell spicy, but some do. And it's a good thing, warm and spicy. But not like potpourri...\n\nI hugged him back, enjoying the way my body still fit with his. We always were good at the hugging.\n\n\"You ready to go?\"\n\n\"Yep, let me grab my bag.\" I knelt to give Clive a quick kiss. He tossed his tail angrily in James's direction and wouldn't let me kiss him.\n\n\"What's your problem?\" I asked Clive, who turned and showed me his rear end.\n\n\"You know, that's starting to become a very rude habit, Mr. Clive,\" I warned him as I picked up my purse from the table. I stuck my tongue out at Clive, grabbed James, and locked the door behind us.\n\n\"Okay, so dinner?\" I asked as we stood outside my door.\n\n\"Yep, dinner,\" he replied, standing very close to me. We stared at each other\u2014for only seconds really, but it felt much longer. He stepped a little closer, and my breath caught. Of course, just then Simon decided to open his door.\n\n\"Hey, Caroline! I was just\u2014Oh, hi. James, right?\" His smile faded slightly when he saw my dinner date. Date, date, date.\n\n\"Sheldon, right?\" James said, offering his hand.\n\n\"Simon, actually.\" He raised his trash-bag-filled hands and declined the shake. \"After you.\" He nodded to the stairs, and the three of us began to troop down together.\n\n\"So, where are you two crazy kids off to tonight?\" Simon asked as we walked ahead of him.\n\nI could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, and as I hit the landing I looked back. He had a fake smile plastered across his face, and his voice was colder than I'd ever heard it before.\n\n\"Caroline and I are headed out for dinner,\" James answered.\n\nI smiled back over my shoulder. \"Yes, some lovely little Vietnamese restaurant,\" I cooed, pretending to be thrilled.\n\n\"You don't like Vietnamese food,\" he said, frowning.\n\nThis made me smile. \"I'm going to try the soup,\" I answered.\n\nJames locked eyes with Simon as he held the door for me. He let it swing right as Simon came through with his hands full of trash bags, but I caught it just in time.\n\n\"Well, have a good night,\" I said as James walked me toward his car with his hand on the small of my back.\n\n\"'Night,\" Simon answered, lips tight. I could tell he was irritated.\n\nGood.\n\nJames bundled me into the car, and we were off.\n\nThe dinner was fine. I ordered fried rice off of the fusion side of the menu, and when it arrived, for a moment all I could think about was eating noodles on a houseboat in the middle of Ha Long Bay with Simon.\n\nBut as I said, dinner was fine, the conversation fine, the man I was with, fine. He was a fine-looking man with a great future ahead, his own adventures to be had, mountains to conquer. And tonight, I was the mountain. I kind of wanted to let him climb.\n\nHe walked me upstairs to my door, even though I could have stopped him from coming all the way up. As I dug for my keys, I could hear Simon's phone ringing, and he answered.\n\n\"Nadia? Hi. Yep, ready when you are.\" He laughed.\n\nMy heart clenched. Fine. I turned to say goodnight to James, devastatingly handsome and right there. Right there in front of me. O had been gone a long time, and she and James had once been close. Could he? Would he? I was going to find out. I invited him in.\n\nAs I pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, I watched him scan the room, taking stock of everything: the Bose sound system, the Eames chair by the desk. He even checked out my crystal as I handed him his glass. He thanked me, his eyes burning into mine as our fingers slipped past each other.\n\nNature took over. Hands knew, skin recognized, lips teased and became reacquainted. It was new and old at the same time, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel good. His shirt came off. My skirt dropped, I kicked off my heels, and our arms wrapped and tucked in. Eventually and inevitably, we headed to the bedroom.\n\nI bounced lightly on the bed, watching through hazy eyes as he knelt before me on the floor.\n\n\"I missed you.\"\n\n\"I know.\" I pulled him on top of me. Everything was fine, everything was as it should be, and as I mechanically wrapped my legs around his waist, his belt buckle digging cold into my thigh, he looked deeply into my eyes and smiled.\n\n\"I'm so glad I needed a decorator.\"\n\nAnd just like that, fine was not enough.\n\n\"No, James.\" I sighed, pushing at his shoulders.\n\n\"What, baby?\"\n\nI hated when he called me baby.\n\n\"No, no, just no. Get up.\" I sighed again as he continued to kiss my neck. Tears sprang to my eyes as I realized what used to make me feel something now made me feel nothing at all.\n\n\"You're kidding, right?\" He moaned in my ear, and I pushed him again.\n\n\"I said get up, James,\" I said, a little louder this time.\n\nHe got the message. Doesn't mean he was happy to hear it. He stood up as I smoothed my shirt, which was thankfully still mostly buttoned.\n\n\"You gotta go,\" I managed, tears beginning to track down my cheeks.\n\n\"Caroline, what the\u2014\"\n\n\"Just go, okay? Just go!\" I yelled. It wasn't fair to him, but I had to be fair to myself. I couldn't go backward, not now.\n\nI clasped my hands to my face and heard him sigh, then stomp off, slamming the door. I couldn't blame him. He must've been in blue-ball hell. I was sad and mad and a little bit tipsy, and I hated my O. My eyes landed on one of my Come Fuck Me shoes on the floor, and I threw it as hard as I could into the living room.\n\n\"Ooof!\" I heard a deep voice utter, and it was not James Brown's. It was the man I did want in my bed, and the one I was most mad at right now. Holding the shoe like some kind of late-night Prince Charming to my slutty O-less Cinderella, Simon appeared in my doorway, barefoot and in his pajama bottoms. The sight of his perfect speedbump abs crossed me over from pissed off to M. A. D.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing here?\" I asked, angrily wiping my tears from my face. He was going to see me cry.\n\n\"Um, I heard you and James...Well, I heard you, and then I heard you yelling, and I wanted to make sure you were okay,\" he stammered.\n\n\"You're not here to rescue me, are you?\" I bit back, air-quoting the rescue.\n\nHe backed away as I crawled off the bed, seeming scared of my impending explosion. Even I knew this was going to be ugly.\n\n\"Why do all men seem to think they need to rescue a woman? Are we not capable of rescuing our damn selves? Why do I need to be rescued? I don't need a man to rescue me, and I certainly don't need no wallbanging, Purina-fucking, listening-at-my-wall-like-a-goddamn-psycho coming over here to rescue me! You got that, mister?\"\n\nI was pointing and waving my arms around like someone was going to take them away from me. He had every right to look scared.\n\n\"I mean, what the hell is with you men? I've got one who wants me back, and one who doesn't want anything to do with me! One who wants to be my boyfriend, but can't even remember that I'm an interior designer. Designer! Not a fucking decorator!\"\n\nI was on a roll. At this point I was just ranting, plain and simple. I stalked in a circle around Simon, pacing and shouting while he tried to follow me, finally just standing still and watching me with huge eyes.\n\n\"I mean, you shouldn't force someone to eat Vietnamese food if they don't like Vietnamese food, should you? I shouldn't have to eat it, should I, Simon?\"\n\n\"No, Caroline, I don't think you should\u2014\" he started.\n\n\"No, of course I shouldn't, so I got the fried rice! Fried rice, Simon! I'm not gonna eat Vietnamese food ever again\u2014not for James, not for you, not for anyone! You got that?\"\n\n\"Well, Caroline, I think\u2014\"\n\n\"And for your information,\" I continued, \"I did not need a rescue tonight! I took care of it myself. He's gone. And I know you think James is some kind of psycho, but he isn't,\" I said, beginning to lose momentum. My lower lip quivered again, and I fought it, but finally let go. \"He isn't a bad guy. He just...he just...he just isn't the right guy for me.\" I sighed, sinking down to the floor in front of my bed and holding my head in my hands.\n\nI cried for a moment, while Simon remained frozen above me. I finally looked up at him. \"Hello? Girl crying down here!\" I sputtered.\n\nHe swallowed a smile and sat down in front of me. He pulled me off the floor and gathered me into his arms. And I totally let him. He settled me onto his lap and held me close as I cried into his chest. He was warm and gentle, and even though I knew better\u2014oh, how I knew better\u2014I tucked into the nook and let him comfort me. His hands ran up and down my back as I sobbed, his fingertips making the tiniest of circles on my shoulder blades as I breathed him in. It had been so long since I'd been held, just held, by a man that between the tiny circles and the scent of his fabric softener I was losing my senses.\n\nFinally my sobs began to quiet as he held me close, cross-legged on my floor. \"Why didn't you play me music this week?\" I sniffled.\n\n\"My needle was broken. I have to get it fixed.\"\n\n\"Oh, I thought maybe...well, I missed it is all,\" I said shyly.\n\nHe smoothed back my hair and brought his hand under my chin, forcing me to look up at him. \"I missed you.\" He smiled gently.\n\n\"Me too,\" I breathed, and his sapphires began to spin. Oh no. No voodoo. \"How was Purina? Good? Bet she missed you too,\" I whispered and watched his face change.\n\n\"Why do you keep bringing up Nadia?\"\n\n\"I heard you on the phone with her earlier. Sounded like you were making plans.\"\n\n\"Yes, I met her for drinks.\"\n\n\"Please. You expect me to believe she didn't come over?\" I asked, noticing I was still on his lap.\n\n\"Ask your cat. Did he go crazy tonight?\" Simon pointed at Clive, who had returned and was now watching us from the back of the couch.\n\n\"No, he didn't, actually.\"\n\n\"That's because she didn't come over. We met for drinks to say goodbye.\" Simon looked at me carefully.\n\nMy heart began to beat so loud there was no way he couldn't hear it. Why did Heart have to be so in to this? \"Goodbye?\"\n\n\"Yep, she's going back to Moscow to finish her degree there.\"\n\nHeart settled down a bit. \"Oh, so you said goodbye because she was leaving, not for any other reason. Silly me.\" I lifted myself off his lap as he held me closer. I struggled.\n\n\"She's leaving, yes, but that's not why we said goodbye. I\u2014\"\n\nI continued to wiggle. \"Wow, only the Giggler left! And then there was one. I guess technically one does not make a harem, so will she be shouldering the load for the others or will you need to be interviewing for some more women? How does that work exactly?\" I snapped.\n\n\"Actually, I'm going to be having a conversation with Lizzie very soon as well. I think we're going to be just friends from now on,\" he said, watching me closely. \"What used to work for me just doesn't work anymore.\"\n\nAll stop. What? \"It doesn't work for you anymore?\" I breathed, not daring to believe it.\n\n\"Mm-hmm,\" he answered, his nose dipping down to the skin just below my ear and breathing deep.\n\nWould he notice if I licked his shoulder? Just the tiniest taste?\n\n\"Caroline?\"\n\n\"Yes, Simon?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't play music for you this week. I'm sorry that I...well, let's just say I'm sorry for a lot of things.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I breathed.\n\n\"Can I ask you something?\"\n\n\"No, I don't have any zucchini bread,\" I whispered, and his laugh echoed through the room. I laughed along, in spite of myself. I'd missed laughing with Simon.\n\n\"Come to Spain with me,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Wait, what?\" I asked again, my voice wavering. What, what, what? \"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"I'm very serious.\"\n\nI had to remind myself to breathe. Already heady from the voodoo and fabric softener, I shook my head to clear it. He was going Spain on me?\n\nI was glad he seemed focused on the space behind my ear, because I doubted he'd be as interested if he could see how my eyes were now crossed. I needed a moment. I pulled myself away, finally standing up.\n\n\"I'm gonna go wash my face. Don't go anywhere,\" I instructed.\n\n\"Sweet Caroline, I'm not going anywhere,\" he said, his sexy smile returning.\n\nI made myself walk away. Every step I took, every thunk of my heels on the hardwood was like a chant in my head: Spain. Spain. Spain. Once in the bathroom, I splashed some water on my face, most of it going into my mouth because I couldn't stop smiling. New harem head count: two down, one to go? There were times to be cautious, and then there were times when you just needed to go balls-out and take a risk. I needed some backbone. I thought about what Jillian had said earlier today, and I went with my impulse. I steeled myself, took out my figurative balls, and headed back out.\n\n\"Okay, it's late, Simon. Time for you to go.\" I took him by the hand, pulled him off the floor, and led him toward the front door.\n\n\"Um, really? You want me to go? Don't you want to, I don't know...talk a little more?\" he asked. \"I wanted to tell you how\u2014\"\n\nI continued to pull him. \"Nope. No more talking tonight. I'm tired.\" I opened my door and ushered him out to the landing. He started to say something else, and I held up two fingers. \"I need to say two things, okay? Two things.\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"First, you hurt my feelings in Tahoe,\" I began, and he tried to interrupt me. \"Shut it, Simon. I don't want a rehash. But just know you hurt me. Don't do it again,\" I finished. I couldn't stop my smile when I saw his reaction.\n\nHis eyes hit the floor, his entire body contrite. \"Caroline, I'm really sorry about all that. You have to know that I just wanted to\u2014\"\n\n\"Apology accepted.\" I smiled again and began to close my door.\n\nHis head popped up immediately. \"Wait, wait. What was the second thing?\" he called, leaning into my doorway. I stepped closer to him, bringing my body within inches of his. I could feel the heat of his skin across the tiny space between us, and I closed my eyes against the onslaught of emotions. I breathed deep and opened my eyes to look in to the sexy sapphires gazing down at me.\n\n\"I'm coming with you to Spain,\" I said. And with a wink, I closed the door in his astonished face. \nChapter Fifteen\n\n\"EGGS SUNNY-SIDE UP, bacon, wheat toast with raspberry jelly.\"\n\n\"Oatmeal with raisins, currants, cinnamon, and brown sugar, side of sausage links.\"\n\n\"Belgian waffles, fruit cup, bacon and sausage,\" Sophia said, completing our order and earning a raised eyebrow from both Mimi and me.\n\n\"What? I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"Nice to see you getting a real breakfast for a change. Must have been working up an appetite with Mr. Mitchell last night, hmmm?\" I teased, winking at Mimi over my orange juice.\n\nThe three of us were together for breakfast on a Sunday, something we hadn't done since Tahoe. They'd been busily settling into the life of new coupledom with their recently switched boyfriends, which left me out most of the time. When they were dating the wrong guys they were always more than happy to have me along\u2014the more the merrier they'd say. It helped when there was no real chemistry. But now? Mimi and Sophia were definitely with the right guys and enjoying every second of it.\n\nInitially I'd been a little worried that the Parent Trap shenanigans would make things uncomfortable, but the ladies had made me proud. They took it in stride, and since each wound up with her new better half, all my worries went by the wayside.\n\nWe giggled as we got caught up on friendly gossip, waiting until the food arrived for any big news, as was protocol.\n\n\"Okay, who's going first? Who has news?\" Mimi began, and we settled into our ritual. Sophia paused from shoveling in the waffles, indicating that she would serve the first volley.\n\n\"Neil has to go to LA for a sportswriters in television conference, and he asked me to go with him,\" she offered. Mimi and I nodded.\n\n\"Ryan is thinking of letting me reorganize his home office. You should see it\u2014his filing system alone made me break out in hives,\" Mimi reported, shuddering.\n\n\"Natalie Nicholson referred two new clients to me\u2014Nob Hill, very posh, thank you very much,\" I added, pouring myself more coffee from the carafe as they congratulated me.\n\nWe chewed.\n\n\"Neil talks in his sleep. It's the cutest thing. He calls out football scores.\"\n\n\"Ryan let me paint his toenails last night.\"\n\n\"I told Simon I'd go to Spain with him.\"\n\nHere's the thing about a spit take. In the movies, they're hysterical. In real life, they're just messy.\n\n\"Wait a minute, wait a goddamn minute...what?\" Sophia sputtered, juice still dribbling down her chin.\n\n\"Caroline, you told him what?\" Mimi managed, still choking as she waved the waiter over for more napkins.\n\n\"I told him I'd go to Spain with him. No big deal.\" I grinned. It was a big deal indeed.\n\n\"I can't believe you had the nerve to sit here and talk about random shit all morning and not tell us this. When did this happen?\" Sophia asked, leaning forward on her elbows.\n\n\"The night I went on a date with James.\" I smiled.\n\n\"Okay, that's it. No more dicking around\u2014spill it.\" Mimi rounded on me with a butter knife and a frown.\n\n\"What the hell, Caroline? I can't believe you kept all this from us. When did you go on a date with James? And don't you dare leave anything out. Tell us everything now, or I'll let Mimi loose on you!\" Sophia warned. Mimi gestured again in a menacing way with her knife\u2014in a very West Side Story menacing way, mind you. I imagined an actual fight with Mimi would involve hitch kicks and barrel turns...\n\nNevertheless, I took a deep breath and spilled. All of it. Why I went out with James, the feelings that had been percolating with Simon, how James called me a decorator, how I kicked him out. They listened intently, only interjecting occasionally when they needed clarification.\n\n\"I'm so proud of you,\" Sophia said when I'd finished. Mimi nodded in agreement.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Caroline, there was a time when if James told you to jump, you'd fucking jump. I guess we worried him showing back up in your life would take you back to being that girl again,\" Sophia explained.\n\n\"I know you were worried. You're both sweet, and no one will ever take care of me as well as you, even though you worry like old chickens in a henhouse.\" I smiled at my fierce ladies.\n\n\"So you sent James Brown packing, and then what happened?\" Sophia asked, and I finished the last of the story: Simon's entry, his apology, the disappearing Purina, his invitation...\n\n\"So you just, had this epiphany in the bathroom, just like that? Go to Spain with Simon?\" Mimi finally asked.\n\n\"Yep. I didn't really overthink it. I just, I can't explain it...I just know I should go on this trip. I mean, I've always wanted to go to Spain, and I know he'll be a good tour guide, and come on, how much fun will it be? We'll have a blast together!\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" Sophia stated simply.\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"I call bullshit, Caroline. You're going because you want something to happen there with him. Don't deny it.\" She eyed me severely.\n\n\"I deny nothing,\" I quipped, signaling the waiter for our check.\n\n\"No more harem, huh?\" Mimi asked.\n\n\"So it would seem. I'm not a fool. I know a man like him doesn't change overnight, but if the Giggler is out of the way before Spain? Well, then, that's a Simon of a different color, now isn't it?\" I grinned cheekily, wiggling my eyebrows at my girls.\n\n\"Why, Caroline Reynolds, I do believe you plan on seducing this man,\" Sophia said, and Mimi clapped her hands with glee.\n\n\"Simon's going to bring back the O!\" Mimi cheered, attracting more than a little attention.\n\n\"Oh, hush. We'll see. If, and this is a big fat if, ladies. If I ever allow anything to happen between Simon and me, it's gonna be on my terms. Which would include no harem, no drinking, and no hot tubbing.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Caroline. No drinking? I think it'd be criminal to be in Spain and not be indulging in a little sangria,\" Mimi piped up.\n\n\"Well, I do enjoy me some sangria,\" I mused. Visions of Simon and me, sipping sangria while watching the Spanish sunset. Hmmm...\n\nText between Simon and Caroline:\n\nSo are you the type of girl who wears  \na big floppy hat on the beach?\n\nPardon me?\n\nYou know, those crazy giant beach hats? Do you have one?\n\nAs it happens, yes. Is this a concern of yours?\n\nConcern, no. Just trying to get a visual of you  \non the beach in Spain...\n\nHow's that working out for you?\n\nPretty spiffy.\n\nSpiffy? Did you just say spiffy?\n\nI typed it actually. You got something against spiffy?\n\nThis explains the old records...\n\nHEY!\n\nI enjoy the old records. You know this...\n\nI do know this...\n\nAre we really going to Spain together?\n\nYep.\n\nAre you home? I didn't see the Rover this morning.\n\nChecking up on me?\n\nPerhaps...where are you, Simon?\n\nHave a shoot in LA, driving back in a few days.  \nCan I see you when I get back?\n\nWe'll see...\n\nI'll play records for you.\n\nSpiffy.\n\n\"So, since things are all completed on the Nicholson project, I was thinking...since I have a jump on the commercial project I'm starting next, and you mentioned before that I could take some time off before we get busy for the holiday season, that, well, maybe I could...\"\n\n\"Spit it out, Caroline. You trying to ask me if you can go to Spain with Simon?\" Jillian demanded, not trying very hard to hide her smile.\n\n\"Maybe.\" I winced, dropping my forehead to the desk.\n\n\"You're a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions. You know I think it's a good time to take vacation, so why should I tell you whether you should go away with Simon or not?\"\n\n\"Jillian, to clarify, I'm not going away with Simon. You make it sound like some illicit affair.\"\n\n\"Right, right, it's just two young people off to enjoy a little Spanish culture. How could I forget?\" Jillian drawled, insinuation all over her face, as well as a little satisfaction. She was enjoying my squirming.\n\n\"Okay, okay, so can I go?\" I asked, knowing I would never hear the end of it, but past caring.\n\n\"Of course you can. But can I just say one thing?\" she asked, eyebrows raised.\n\n\"Like I could stop you,\" I grumbled.\n\n\"You couldn't, actually. All I ask is that you have a good time, play hard, but take care of him while you're there, okay?\" she asked, her face taking on a seriousness I rarely saw.\n\n\"Take care of him? What is he, seven?\" I laughed, stifling it immediately when I saw she was not kidding.\n\n\"Caroline, this trip will change things. You must know that. And I love you both. I don't want either of you to get hurt, no matter what transpires while you're there,\" she said softly. I started to make a joke, but I stopped. I knew what she was asking.\n\n\"Jillian, I don't know quite what's going on between Simon and me, and I've no idea what's going to happen in Spain. But I can tell you, I'm excited about this trip. And I get the sense he is too,\" I added.\n\n\"Oh, my dear, he's definitely excited. Just...Oh, never mind. You're both adults. Go crazy on each other in Spain.\"\n\n\"First you tell me to be gentle, and now you tell me to go crazy?\" I grumbled.\n\nShe reached across the desk to pat my hand affectionately. Then she took a deep breath and changed the mood in the room entirely. \"Now then, fill me in on where we stand with James Brown. What's left to be done?\"\n\nI smiled and flipped my planner open to the end of the week, when I would be finished with All Things James Brown.\n\nA few nights later I was settling into my couch comfortably with Mr. Clive and Barefoot Contessa when I heard something in the hallway. Clive and I looked at each other, and he jumped off my lap to investigate. I knew Simon wasn't due home for another day or so based on his texts\u2014and the fact that I might have been counting the days\u2014so I followed Clive to my old post: The Peephole.\n\nAs I peered out into the hallway, there was a flash of strawberry-blond hair at Simon's door. Who was visiting Simon? Was I wrong to stare? What was that package she had? The woman the hair belonged to knocked once, then twice, and then before I knew it, she whirled about and looked directly at my door, curiously staring at my peephole. Not accustomed to anyone staring at my peephole, I froze, eyes unblinking as she appraised my door. She crossed the tiny landing, and rapped soundly on my door. Surprised, I jumped back a little, bumping into my umbrella stand and letting her know there was, in fact, someone home. I turned my face to the side and shouted, \"Coming!\" Then I proceeded to walk in place as though I was headed for the door. Clive looked on with interest, tossing his head and assuring me I was not nearly as clever as I thought I was.\n\nI made a great noise of clicking the locks, and then opened the door.\n\nWe appraised each other instantly, in the way that women do. She was tall and beautiful in a cold, patrician way. She wore a black suit, severely cut and buttoned up to the collar. Her strawberry blond hair was twisted and pinned back, although one solitary piece had marched away from her sisters and now hung in her face. She pushed it back behind her ear. Her cherry red lips pursed as she finished looking me over and offered a thin smile.\n\n\"Caroline, yes?\" she asked, a solidly British accent piercing the air as clearly as her attitude. I already knew I didn't care for this woman.\n\n\"Yes, can I help you?\" I suddenly felt underdressed in my Garfield boxers and tank top. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, feet clad in giant socks. I shifted my weight again, realizing I probably looked like I had to pee. I also realized at the same time that this woman made me nervous, and I had no idea why. I straightened up immediately, putting my game face on. This all took place in less than five seconds, a lifetime in the world of Woman Figuring Out The Other Woman.\n\n\"I need to drop this off for Simon, and he mentioned that if he wasn't at home to leave it at the flat across from his, that Caroline would take care of it for him. You're Caroline, so here you go, I suppose,\" she finished, thrusting a cardboard box at me. I took it, taking my eyes off of hers for a moment.\n\n\"What does he think I am, a mailbox?\" I muttered, setting it on the table just inside the door and turning back to the woman.\n\n\"May I tell him who dropped this off, or will he know?\" I asked. She was still looking me over as though I were a great puzzle.\n\n\"Oh, he'll know,\" she answered, her cool tone sounding musical but clipped at the same time. As an American, I'll admit I am always fascinated by a British accent, but could do without this particular side of superiority.\n\n\"Okay, well...I'll make sure he gets it.\" I nodded, leaning my hand on the door. I closed it ever so slightly, but she didn't move.\n\n\"Is there anything else?\" I asked. I could hear Ina working on her shortbread in the other room, and I didn't want to miss any KitchenAid porn.\n\n\"No, nothing else,\" she replied, still making no move.\n\n\"Okay, then, have a good night,\" I said, almost making it a question as I started to close the door. Just as I did, she stepped forward enough so I was forced to catch the door before it hit her.\n\n\"Yes?\" I asked, my irritation beginning to show through. This Limey was stopping me from seeing the completion of the pecan squares I'd been waiting for all episode.\n\n\"I just, well, I'm really glad to have met you,\" she answered, her eyes finally softening and a hint of a smile breaking through her fa\u00e7ade. \"And you really are quite lovely,\" she added. I stared back at her. Her voice sounded oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.\n\n\"Um, okay, thank you?\" I answered as she started for the stairwell. Her heel caught just slightly, and she stumbled a little. As I closed the door, she began to giggle as she worked her shoe loose. That's when I realized who'd just visited.\n\nMy eyes widened, I'm sure to the size of dahlias, and I hurled the door back open. I gaped at her, and her face broke open into the widest cheeky grin. She winked as I blushed. I'd been present for some of this lady's greatest moments.\n\nShe wiggled her fingers at me and disappeared down the stairs. Clive brought me back from my stupor by nipping me on the calf, and I closed the door.\n\nI sat on my couch, pecan squares all but forgotten as my brain processed everything.\n\nThe Giggler had said I was lovely.\n\nShe basically told me Simon had told her I was lovely.\n\nSimon thought I was lovely.\n\nWas the Giggler out of the harem?\n\nWas there even a harem left?\n\nWhat did this mean?\n\nWould I only think in questions now?\n\nAnd if so, who is Eric Cartman's father?\n\nText between Simon and Caroline:\n\nWhat are you doing?\n\nWhat are YOU doing?\n\nI asked you first.\n\nYou sure did.\n\nWaiting...\n\nMe too...\n\nJesus you're stubborn. I'm driving back from LA. Happy now?\n\nYes, thank you. I'm baking pumpkin bread.\n\nIt's a good thing I'm at a gas station right now and not driving or I would have a hard time keeping the car on the road...\n\nRight, the baking gets you worked up, doesn't it?\n\nYou have no idea.\n\nSo I probably shouldn't tell you I smell like  \ncinnamon and ginger right now?\n\nCaroline.\n\nMy raisins are soaking in brandy this very minute.\n\nThat's it...\n\nI peered out the window again, scanning the street below, and still no sign of the Rover. The fog was quite thick, and although I didn't want to be a nag, I was becoming a little concerned that he wasn't home yet. Here I sat, with cooling loaves, and no Simon had shown up to inhale them. I picked up my phone to text him, but then called instead. I didn't want him texting while he was on the road. It rang a few times, and then he picked up.\n\n\"Hi there, my favorite baker,\" he purred, and my knees clanked together. He was like the best Kegel exercise ever\u2014instant clench.\n\n\"Are you close?\"\n\n\"Pardon me?\" He laughed.\n\n\"Close to home. Are you close to home?\" I asked, rolling my eyes and unclenching.\n\n\"Yes, why?\"\n\n\"There seems to be a lot of fog tonight. I mean, more than usual...Be careful, okay?\"\n\n\"That's very sweet of you to be looking out for me.\"\n\n\"Shut up, mister. I always look out for my friends,\" I scolded, beginning to get ready for bed. I was a multi-tasker from way back. I could do my taxes while getting waxed and not bat an eye. I could certainly get undressed while talking to Simon. Ahem.\n\n\"Friends? Is that what we are?\" he asked.\n\n\"What the hell else would we be?\" I shot back, pulling off my shorts and grabbing a pair of thick woolen socks. The floor was chilly tonight.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" he muttered as I took off my T-shirt and slipped into a button-down to sleep in.\n\n\"Well, while you're hmmming, I have to tell you about a visit I had earlier this week from a friend of yours.\"\n\n\"A friend of mine? This sounds intriguing.\"\n\n\"Yep, Julie Andrews accent, buttoned-up Brit? Ring any bells? She dropped off a box for you.\"\n\nHis laughter rang out immediately. \"Julie Andrews accent\u2014that's brilliant! That must have been Lizzie. You met Lizzie!\" He laughed like this was the funniest thing ever.\n\n\"Lizzie Schmizzie. She'll always be the Giggler to me.\" I smirked, sitting on the edge of my bed and applying some lotion.\n\n\"Why do you call her the Giggler?\" he asked, playing innocent, and I could tell he was on the verge of absolute hysterics.\n\n\"You really need me to tell you? Come on, even you can't be that thick\u2014never mind, walked right into that one.\" I cut him off before he could regale me with how thick he was, indeed. I'd been pressed up against that very thick in a hot tub, so I was familiar. Kegel. And, thank you, another Kegel.\n\n\"I like messing with you, Nightie Girl. It gives me a chuckle.\"\n\n\"First spiffy, now a chuckle? I worry about you, Simon.\" I returned to the living room to turn off lights and get the place ready for bed. This included freshening Clive's water bowl and hiding a few Pounce treats around the apartment. He enjoyed playing Big Game Hunter while I slept sometimes, with the Pounce, of course, playing the part of the Big Game. Some nights the pillows were unfortunately involved, as well as any hair ties, loose shoelaces, and pretty much anything else that seemed appealing around two a.m. Some mornings my place looked like Wild Kingdom had been filmed overnight.\n\n\"Well, no worries. I'll pick it up when I get back. So, did you two have a nice chat?\"\n\n\"We chatted briefly, yes. But no dirty secrets were shared. Although with the thin walls, I'm already a bit familiar. How is the lonely haremette? Missing her sisters?\" I flipped off the lights and padded through the kitchen to fetch the Big Game. I was dying to ask him if he'd actually broken up with the Giggler. Did he, did he not?\n\n\"She may be a bit lonely, yes,\" he said, in what I thought sounded like a careful way. Hmm...\n\n\"Lonely because...\" I led, pausing in my Pounce-scattering.\n\n\"Lonely because, well, let's just say, for the first time in a very long time, I am...well...I am...you see...\" he stuttered and stalled, dancing around the issue.\n\n\"Go on, out with it,\" I instructed, barely breathing.\n\n\"Without...female companionship. Or as you would say, harem free.\" His words came out in a quiet whoosh, and my legs began a little shimmy shake. This made the Pounce shimmy-shake in their container, alerting Clive that his hunt had begun early.\n\n\"Harem free, huh?\" I breathed back, visions of Sugar Simons dancing in my head. Single Sugar Simons, Single Sugar Simons in Spain...\n\n\"Yeah,\" he whispered, and we were both silent for what seemed like months, although in actuality it was only enough time for Clive to claim his first victim: the Pounce hidden in my tennis shoe by the front door. I walked over to congratulate him on his catch.\n\n\"She said something curious,\" I mentioned, breaking the spell.\n\n\"Oh yeah? What's that?\" he asked.\n\n\"She told me that I was, and I quote, 'quite lovely.'\"\n\n\"Did she now?\" He laughed, easing back into comfortable.\n\n\"Yes, and the thing of it is, she said it like she was agreeing with something someone else had already said. Now, I'm not a girl who fishes for compliments, but it would seem, Simon, that you were talking sweet about me.\" I smiled, knowing my face was breaking into a pink glow. I'd started for the bedroom when I heard a soft knocking at the door. I walked back to unlock and open the door without looking through the peephole. I had a strong feeling I knew who was on the other side.\n\nThere he stood, phone cradled to his ear, holding his duffel bag and smiling a big, toothy grin.\n\n\"I told her you were lovely, but the truth is, you're more than lovely,\" he said, bowing his head toward mine and bringing his face to within inches of my own.\n\n\"More?\" I asked, barely drawing breath. I know my grin matched his.\n\n\"You're exquisite,\" he said.\n\nAnd with that, I invited him in. While wearing only my button-down. From far away, the O cheered...\n\nAn hour later, we sat together at the kitchen table, a decimated loaf in front of us. In between his frantic pawing, I'd managed a bite or two. The rest now lived in Simon's tummy, which he proudly thumped like a melon. We'd talked and eaten, gotten caught up, watched Clive as he finished his hunt, and now relaxed as the coffee brewed. Simon's bag rested by the front door still\u2014he hadn't even gone to his apartment yet. I was still in my button-down, feet curled beneath the chair as I stared at him. We were so comfortable, and yet that low-level hum, that electricity always sparking and snarking between us, continued.\n\n\"Fantastic touch by the way\u2014the raisins? Loved them.\" He smirked at me, poking one more in his mouth.\n\n\"You're terrible.\" I shook my head, stretching up out of my chair and collecting the plates and the few crumbs that hadn't been inhaled. I could sense him watching me as I moved about the kitchen. I grabbed the pot of coffee and raised my eyebrows at him. He nodded. I stood next to his chair to fill his mug, and I caught him peeking at my legs below my shirt.\n\n\"See something you like?\" I leaned across him to the sugar bowl.\n\n\"Yep,\" he answered, leaning toward me to take it.\n\n\"Sugar?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Cream?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"That all you can say?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Gimme something, then. Anything.\" I giggled, walking back around to my side of the table. Once again he watched me as I arranged myself in the chair.\n\n\"How about this?\" he finally said, resting on his elbows, face intense. \"As I mentioned earlier, I broke it off with Lizzie.\"\n\nI stared back, barely breathing. I tried to play it cool, so cool, but I couldn't stop the grin sneaking across my face.\n\n\"I see you are not at all broken up by this,\" he scoffed, sitting back in his chair.\n\n\"Not so much, no. Want the truth?\" I asked, the grin ushering in a sudden surge of confidence.\n\n\"Truth would be good.\"\n\n\"I mean truth truth, back-and-forth truth. No witty comebacks, no snappy banter\u2014although we do give great banter.\"\n\n\"We do, but I could go for some truth,\" he said, his voice quiet as his sapphire eyes blazed away at me.\n\n\"Okay, truth. I'm glad you broke things off with Lizzie.\"\n\n\"You are, are you?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why did you? Truth now,\" I reminded him. He regarded me for a moment, sipped his coffee, ran his hands through his hair in a maniacal way, and took a deep breath.\n\n\"Okay, truth. I broke it off with Lizzie because I didn't want to be with her any more. With any other women, in fact,\" he finished, setting his cup down. \"I'm sure we'll always be friends, but the truth is, I've been finding lately that three women? It's a lot for me to handle. I'm thinking of paring things down a bit, maybe trying just one for a while.\" He smiled, the blue getting dangerous.\n\nKnowing I was a grin and a clench away from total embarrassment, I stood quickly and went to dump my coffee in the sink. I paused there for a second, only a second, thoughts whirling. He was single. He was...single. Sweet mother of pearl, Wallbanger was single.\n\nI felt him move across the kitchen and come to stand behind me. I froze, feeling his hands gently brush my hair away from my shoulders and slip down to my hips. His mouth\u2014his ever-loving mouth\u2014barely touched the shell of my ear, and he whispered.\n\n\"Truth? I can't stop thinking about you.\"\n\nStill facing away from him, my mouth dropped open and my eyes went wide, torn between fist pumping and actual kitchen sex. Before I could decide, his mouth moved more purposefully, pressing into the skin just below my ear and making my brain burn and parts below dance a jig.\n\nHis hands gripped my hips, and he turned me toward him\u2014to face that body and grin\u2014I quickly composed my face, trying desperately to keep it together.\n\n\"Truth? I've been thinking about you since the night you banged on my door,\" he whispered, bending down to kiss the hollow of my neck with breathtaking precision. His hair tickled my nose, and I fought to keep my hands to myself. He pushed me to the side a little and surprised me by lifting me onto the counter. My legs automatically opened to allow him between them, the Universal Law of Wallbanger superseding any actual thought I had in my head. Not to worry, my thighs knew what to do.\n\nOne of his hands snuck around to the small of my back, while the other gripped the back of my neck. \"Truth?\" he asked one more time, pulling my hips to the edge of the counter, which forced me to lean back as my legs once more went on auto-pilot and wrapped themselves around his waist. \"I want you in Spain,\" he breathed, then brought his mouth to mine.\n\nSomewhere, a kitty began to call...and an O finally began her journey home.\n\n\"More wine, Mr. Parker?\"\n\n\"No more for me. Caroline?\"\n\n\"I'm fine, thank you.\" I stretched out luxuriously in my seat. First class to LaGuardia, then first class all the way to Malaga, Spain. We'd be taking a car from there to Nerja, the small coastal town where Simon had rented a house. Scuba diving, spelunking, hiking, beautiful beaches, and mountains, all set in a quaint village.\n\nSimon squirmed in his seat and shot an angry look over his shoulder.\n\n\"What? What's the problem?\" I asked, looking behind and seeing nothing out of the ordinary.\n\n\"That kid keeps banging my seat,\" he grumbled through clenched teeth.\n\nI laughed for a solid twenty minutes.\nChapter Sixteen\n\n\"WE DID IT TOO SOON. We should have waited.\"\n\n\"We waited long enough\u2014are you kidding? You know I was right. It was time to do it.\"\n\n\"Time to do it, what a crock! We could have waited just a little longer, and then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't hear you complaining at the time. You seemed pretty pleased, as I recall.\"\n\n\"I couldn't complain, my mouth was full. But I had a feeling. I just knew this was wrong, what we were doing was inherently wrong.\"\n\n\"Okay, I give up. You tell me how to fix this.\"\n\n\"Well, for starters, you're holding it upside down,\" I shot back, grabbing the map and turning it right side up. We'd been parked along the side of the road for five minutes, trying to figure out how to get to Nerja.\n\nAfter landing in Malaga, navigating customs, navigating the rental car system, and finally navigating our way successfully away from the city center, we were now lost. Simon drove, so I was in charge of the map. And by that I mean he took it away from me every ten minutes or so, looked it over, hmm-ed and hawed, and then thrust it back my way. He didn't actually listen to anything I had to say, instead relying on his innate man-map. He also refused to turn on the GPS that had been provided for us, determined to get us there the old-fashioned way.\n\nWhich is why we were now lost. Taking a train would have been too easy. Simon needed a car to get around for his photos, which was ultimately why we were here. After flying through the night, we were both exhausted, but the best way to fight jet lag, allegedly, was to get on local time as quickly as possible. We had both agreed not to nap until we could go to sleep that night.\n\nNow we argued about where we took the wrong turn. I'd been devouring some churros from a roadside stand when the wrong turn supposedly took place, and so we played \"Place the Blame.\"\n\n\"All I'm saying is that if someone hadn't been stuffing her face and was watching for the turn, we wouldn't be\u2014\"\n\n\"Stuffing my face? Seriously? You were stealing my churros. I told you to get your own when we stopped!\"\n\n\"Well, I wasn't hungry at first, but then you were smacking your lips and licking that chocolate, and well...I got distracted.\" He looked up from the map, which he'd spread out on the hood of the car, and grinned, breaking the tension.\n\n\"Distracted?\" I grinned back, leaning a little closer. As he looked at the map, I looked at him. How could someone who'd been on a plane for the last hundred years look as good as he did? But there he was, faded jeans, black T-shirt, dark blue North Face jacket. Twenty-four hours of stubble begging to be licked. Who licked stubble? Me, that's who. He braced himself on his arms as he studied the map, his lips moving silently as he tried to figure it out. I snuck underneath his arms, draping myself across the hood of the car as shamelessly as a pinup girl in a garage calendar.\n\n\"Can I make a suggestion?\"\n\n\"It is a lewd suggestion?\"\n\n\"Surprisingly no. Can we please turn on the GPS? I'd like to make it there before I have to leave in a few days,\" I moaned. Due to my last-minute booking, I had to fly back a day before Simon. But five days in Spain...I was not complaining.\n\n\"Caroline, only pussies use GPS,\" he scoffed, turning to the map again.\n\n\"Well, this pussy is dying for some dinner, and a shower, and a bed, and to get rid of this jet lag. So unless you want to see me reenact It Happened One Night, Spanish version, turn on the GPS, Simon.\" I grabbed him by the North Face and pulled him down to me. \"Did that sound harsh?\" I whispered, giving him the tiniest of kisses on the chin.\n\n\"Yes, I'm terrified of you now.\"\n\n\"Does this mean GPS?\"\n\n\"It means GPS.\" He sighed resignedly, leaning back and pulling me off the car with him. I gave a little cheer and started for the door.\n\n\"No, no, no, you were harsh, Nightie Girl. I'm gonna need some sugar,\" he instructed, eyes twinkling.\n\n\"You need some sugar?\" I asked.\n\nHe tugged on my arm, bringing me back to him. \"Yes, I require it.\"\n\n\"You're twisted, Simon.\" I leaned into him, slipping my arms around his neck.\n\n\"You have no idea.\" He licked his lips and waggled his eyebrows like an old-timey gangster.\n\n\"Come get your sugar,\" I teased as he brought his lips to mine.\n\nI would never get tired of kissing Simon. I mean, how could you? Since the night he \"truthed\" me right up on to my kitchen counter, we'd slowly been exploring this new side of our relationship. Underneath all the snark and spark, there'd been some serious sexual tension building these many months. And we were letting it all out\u2014albeit slowly. Sure, we could've raced right back to the bedroom that night and let the sex ring out across the city for days, but Simon and I, without saying a word, seemed to be on the same page for once, and were content to let this unfold.\n\nHe was wooing me. And I was letting him woo. I wanted the woo. I deserved the woo. I needed the wow that would surely follow the woo, but for now, the woo? It was whoa.\n\nAnd speaking of woo...\n\nMy hands slipped into his hair, tugging and twisting and trying to pull his entire body inside my own. He groaned into my mouth, I felt his tongue touch mine, and I fell apart at the seams. I sighed, the tiniest whimper, and it became harder and harder to kiss him due to the giant grin overtaking my face.\n\nHe pulled back a little and laughed. \"You sure look happy.\"\n\n\"Keep kissing me, please,\" I insisted, bringing his face back to mine.\n\n\"It's like kissing a jack 'o' lantern. What's with the grin?\" He smiled down at me with a grin that looked as wide as my own.\n\n\"We're in Spain, Simon. Grinning is implied.\" I sighed contentedly, messing with his hair.\n\n\"And here I thought it was all to do with my kissing,\" he answered, kissing me again, gently, sweetly.\n\n\"Okay, cowboy, ready to see where the GPS takes us?\" I asked, stepping away. I couldn't keep my hands on him for too long or we'd never leave.\n\n\"Let's see how lost we really are.\" He smiled and we were on our way.\n\n\"I think this is the turn...Yep, this is it,\" he said.\n\nI bounced in my seat. Turned out we were closer than we thought, and we'd gotten a bit antsy. As we made one last turn, we looked at each other, and I squealed. We'd seen bits of the ocean for the last few miles or so\u2014peeking out behind a stand of trees or over a cliff. Now, as we turned down a tiny cobblestone drive, the realization that Simon had rented a house not just near the beach, but on the beach washed over me, and I was silenced by the sight.\n\nSimon pulled up to the house, the tires crunching on the rounded stones. When he turned the car off, I could hear the waves crashing against the rocky coast about a hundred feet away. We sat for a moment, just taking it all in and grinning at each other, before I scrambled out of the car.\n\n\"This is where we're staying? This entire house\u2014it's yours?\" I exclaimed as he grabbed our bags and came to stand next to me.\n\n\"It's ours, yeah.\" He smiled and gestured for me to walk ahead of him.\n\nThe house was charming and magnificent all at the same time: white stucco walls, clay-tile roof, clean lines, and soft archways. Orange trees lined the walkway from the drive, and bougainvillea climbed the garden walls. The house was a classic cottage, built to weather the sea and cocoon those inside. As Simon looked under the flowerpots for the key, I inhaled the citrus scents and the distinctly salty air.\n\n\"A-ha! Got it. Ready to see the inside?\" He struggled with the door for a moment before turning to face me.\n\nI reached for his hand, threading my fingers through his, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For bringing me here.\" I smiled and kissed him square on the lips.\n\n\"Mmm, more of that sugar you promised me.\" He dropped the bag and pulled me close.\n\n\"Sugar this! Let's see the house!\" I cried, wiggling free and charging past him through the door. But as soon as I made it past the entryway, I stopped cold. Close on my heels, he bumped into me as I took it all in.\n\nA sunken living room, dotted with plush white sofas and comfy-looking chairs, opened up to what I assumed was the kitchen. French doors at the back of the house opened to several large, terraced patios, which sunk down toward the rocky beach. But what had stopped me cold was the ocean. All across the back, through the giant windows, was the deep blue of the lazy Mediterranean. The coastline curved back to the town of Nerja, where the lights were just beginning to sparkle as twilight drifted over the beach, illuminating the other white houses that clung to the cliffs. Remembering how to move, I ran to push open the doors and let the soft air spill over me and into the house, blanketing everything in the evening's perfume.\n\nI walked to the wrought iron railing, which perched at the edge of an earthen tile patio flanked by olive trees. Placing my hands on the warm metal, I looked and looked and looked. I felt Simon walk up behind me and without a word place his arms around my waist. He nestled in to me, resting his head on my shoulder. I leaned back, feeling the angles and planes of his body fit against my own.\n\nYou know those moments when everything is exactly the way it was meant to be? When you find yourself and your entire universe aligning in perfect synchronization, and you know you couldn't possibly be more content? I was inside that very moment, and fully conscious of it. I giggled a little, feeling Simon's smile stretch across his face as he pressed into my neck.\n\n\"It's good, right?\" he whispered.\n\n\"It's so good,\" I answered, and we watched the sunset in spellbound silence.\n\nAfter watching the sunset until it was totally gone, we explored the rest of the house. It seemed more and more beautiful with every room, and I squealed once again at the sight of the kitchen. It was as if I'd been transported to Ina's home in East Hampton, with a Spanish flair: Sub-Zero fridge, gorgeous granite countertops, and a Viking stove. I didn't even want to know how much Simon was paying for this house. I'd decided to just enjoy. And enjoy we did, running back and forth, laughing like kids when we found the bidet in the hallway bathroom.\n\nAnd then we entered the master bedroom. I came around the corner and saw him standing at the end of the hallway, just outside the door.\n\n\"What the hell did you find that has you so qui\u2014oh my. Would you look at that?\" I stopped next to him, admiring from the doorway.\n\nIf my life had a soundtrack, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey would have been playing right now.\n\nThere, in the middle of a corner room, with its own terrace overlooking the most beautiful ocean in the world, was the biggest mother-loving bed I'd ever seen. Carved out of what looked to be teak, it was as big as football field. Thousands of silky soft white pillows stacked against the headboard, spilling down over a white duvet. It was folded down just so, the million or so thread count sheets shining, actually shining, as though they were lit from within. Sheer white curtains hung from rods suspended over the bed, creating a canopy, while even more curtains hung in the windows overlooking the sea below. The windows were open and all the curtains blew gently in the breeze, giving the entire room a billowy, flouncy, windblown effect.\n\nIt was the bed to end all beds. It was the bed that all the little beds aspired to be when they grew up. It was bed heaven.\n\n\"Wow,\" I managed, still in the hallway next to Simon.\n\nIt was hypnotic. It was like a bed siren, luring us in so we could crash.\n\n\"You could say that again,\" he stammered, his eyes never leaving the bed.\n\n\"Wow,\" I repeated, still staring.\n\nI couldn't stop, and I was suddenly very, impossibly, excruciatingly nervous. I had a lovely case of performance anxiety, party of one.\n\nSimon chuckled at my weak joke, and it brought me back to him.\n\n\"No pressure, huh?\" he said, eyes shy.\n\nHuh? Nerves? Party of two? I had a choice. I could go with conventional wisdom, said wisdom being that two grownups on vacation together in a gorgeous house with a bed that was sex incarnate would immediately begin nonstop sexing...or, I could let us both off the hook and just enjoy. Enjoy being together and let things happen when they happen. Yeah, I liked this idea better.\n\nI winked and took a running leap on to the bed, bouncing pillows all over the room. I peeked over the remaining mound to see him leaning in the doorway, a sight I had seen so many times before. He looked a little nervous, but still beautiful.\n\n\"So, where are you sleeping?\" I called, and his face relaxed into a smile, my smile.\n\n\"Wine?\"\n\n\"Am I breathing?\"\n\n\"Wine it is,\" he snorted, selecting a bottle of ros\u00e9 from the generously stocked wine fridge. Simon had arranged to have some basic groceries delivered to the house before our arrival, nothing fancy but enough to nosh on and make us comfortable. It was now fully dark, and any thoughts we'd had about going into town faded away as the jet lag loomed. Instead we'd stay in tonight, get a good night's sleep, and head into town in the morning. There was a roast chicken, olives, a wedge of Manchego, some gorgeous looking Serrano ham, and enough other little odds and ends to make a meal. I assembled plates while he poured the wine, and soon we were sitting on the terrace. The ocean crashed below, and the wooden walkway down to the beach was strung with tiny white lights.\n\n\"We should go down to the beach before bed, at least take a little walk.\"\n\n\"Done. What do you want to do tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Depends, when do you need to start working?\"\n\n\"Well, I know some of the places I need to go, but I need to do a little scouting still. Want to come along?\"\n\n\"Of course. Start in town in the morning and see where that leads?\" I asked, nibbling on an olive.\n\nHe raised his glass and nodded. \"To seeing where it leads,\" he toasted.\n\nI raised my glass to his. \"I'll second that.\" Our glasses clinked and our eyes locked. We both smiled, a secret smile. We were finally alone, all to ourselves, and there was no place else on the planet I wanted to be. We ate our dinner, stealing little glances at each other throughout, and sipped our wine. It made me drowsy, and a little touchy feely.\n\nAfter that we'd picked our way carefully over the rocky shoreline to the beach. We'd grasped hands to navigate but never let go. Now we stood at the edge of the earth, the strong, salty wind whipping through our hair and clothes, buffeting us back a bit.\n\n\"It's nice, being with you,\" I told him. \"I, um, well, I like holding your hand,\" I admitted, feeling brave from the wine. Witty banter had its place, but sometimes, all you need is the truth. He didn't respond, simply smiled and brought my hand to his mouth, placing a small kiss.\n\nWe watched the waves, and when he pulled me to his chest, snuggling me to him, I breathed out slowly. Had it really been so long since I'd felt\u2014Oh, what was it I was feeling?\u2014cared for?\n\n\"Jillian told me you know what happened to my parents,\" he said so softly I could barely hear him.\n\n\"Yes. She told me.\"\n\n\"They used to hold hands all the time. Not for show, though, you know?\"\n\nI nodded into his chest and breathed him in.\n\n\"I always see these couples that hold hands and make such a show of it, calling each other baby and sweetie and honey. It seems like, I don't know, false somehow. Like, would they be doing it if they weren't in front of anyone?\"\n\nI nodded again.\n\n\"My parents? I never thought much about it at the time, but when I think about it now, I realize their hands were practically sewn together, always with the hand holding. Even when no one was looking, right? I'd come home after practice and find them watching TV, at either end of the couch, but with their hands propped up on a pillow so they could still be touching...It was just...I don't know, it was nice.\"\n\nMy hand, still tucked into his own, squeezed, and I felt his strong fingers squeeze back.\n\n\"Sounds like they were still a couple, not just a mom and dad,\" I said, hearing his breath speed up a bit.\n\n\"Yes, exactly.\"\n\n\"You miss them.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Might sound weird, since I never knew them, but I feel like they would be so proud of you, Simon.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nWe were quiet another minute, feeling the night around us.\n\n\"Want to go back to the house?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yeah.\" He kissed the top of my head as we began to make our way back\u2014hands stuck together like someone had spread Krazy Glue on them.\n\nI'd left Simon to clean up the mess from dinner. I wanted a quick shower before bed. After washing away the days of airport and travel, I threw on an old T-shirt and boy shorts, too tired for the lingerie I had packed. Yes, I had packed lingerie. Come on, I was no nun.\n\nI stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom (yep, I had totally claimed the big one) after blow-drying my hair when I saw him appear in the doorway. He was on his way to his room after his own shower, wearing pajama pants and a towel wrapped around his neck. I was exhausted, but not so exhausted I didn't appreciate the form in front of me. I watched him in the mirror as he appraised me as well.\n\n\"Have a good shower?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, it felt amazing.\"\n\n\"Heading to bed?\"\n\n\"I can barely keep my eyes open,\" I replied, yawning hugely to punctuate.\n\n\"Can I get you anything? Water? Tea? Anything?\"\n\nI turned to face him, as he stepped inside. \"No water, no tea, but there is one thing I'd like before I go to sleep,\" I purred, taking a few steps his way.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Goodnight kiss?\"\n\nHis eyes darkened. \"Oh, hell, is that all? That I can do.\" He closed the distance between us and slipped his arms easily around my waist.\n\n\"Kiss me, you fool,\" I teased, falling into his embrace as if in an old-time melodrama.\n\n\"One kissing fool, coming up,\" he laughed, but within seconds no one was laughing. And within minutes, no one was standing.\n\nAfter falling into Pillow Town, we scrambled about, arms and legs twisting this way and that, kisses becoming more and more frantic. My shirt bunched up around my waist, and the feeling of his hi-there against my hoohah was indescribable. He rained kisses down upon my neck, licking and sucking as I moaned like a whore in church.\n\nTo be fair, I'd never actually heard a whore moan in church, but I had a feeling it sounded a lot like the unholy sounds pouring forth from my mouth.\n\nHe flipped me about like a rag doll and settled me on top of him, my legs on either side, the way I'd wanted to be for so long. He sighed, gazing up as I impatiently pushed my hair away from my face so I could truly appreciate the magnificence I was perched on.\n\nWe slowed our movements, then stopped altogether, staring unabashedly at each other, appraising each other without shame.\n\n\"Incredible,\" he breathed, reaching to gently cup my face as I nuzzled his hand.\n\n\"That's a good word for it, yes. Incredible.\" I turned to kiss his fingertips. He stared into my eyes again, those sex sapphires doing their voodoo that made me a puddle of voodoo goo. For him to woo. See what he did to me?\n\n\"I don't want to screw this up,\" he said suddenly, his words breaking me from my Seussian rhymes.\n\n\"Wait, what?\" I asked, shaking my head to clear it.\n\n\"This. You. Us. I don't want to screw this up,\" he insisted, sitting up underneath me, my legs wrapping around to his back.\n\n\"Okay, so don't,\" I ventured, unsure where this was going.\n\n\"I mean, you need to know, I have no experience with this.\"\n\nI raised an eyebrow. \"I have a wall back home that would disagree with that...\" I laughed, and he crushed me to his chest, inexplicably hard. \"Hey, hey...what's up? What's going on?\" I soothed, my hands rubbing up and down his back.\n\n\"Caroline, I, Jesus, how do I say this without sounding like an episode of Dawson's Creek?\" He stumbled the words while talking into my neck.\n\nI couldn't help it, I chuckled a little as Pacey flashed into my head, and that brought him back. I pulled away a bit so I could see him, and he smiled ruefully.\n\n\"Okay, Dawson's be damned, I really like you, Caroline. But I haven't had a girlfriend since high school, and I have no clue how to do this. But you need to know, that what I feel for you? Shit, it's just different, okay? And, whatever your wall would say back home, I need you to know that this? What we have, or will have? It's different, okay? You know that, right?\"\n\nHe was telling me I was different, that I was no replacement for the harem. And this, I knew. He looked at me so earnestly, so seriously, and my heart opened even more. I pressed a gentle kiss to his sweet lips.\n\n\"First of all, I do know this. Second of all, you're better at this than you think.\" I smiled, pressing his eyes closed and kissing each eyelid. \"And, for the record, I loved Dawson's Creek, and you did the WB proud.\" I laughed as his eyes sprang back open and relief rushed in. I tucked him into my nook and held him there as we rocked back and forth, the rush of the earlier hormones subsiding as we found this new space, this quiet intimacy that was becoming almost as addicting.\n\n\"I like that we're taking things slow. You give good woo,\" I whispered.\n\nHe tensed underneath me. I could feel him shaking a little.\n\n\"I give good woo?\" he laughed, tears springing to his eyes as he tried to control his laughter.\n\n\"Oh, shut up,\" I cried, smacking him with a pillow. We laughed for a few more minutes, falling back into the lush bed, and as the jet lag finally overtook us, we settled in. Together. There was no question in my mind now about sleeping in separate rooms. I wanted him here. With me. Surrounded by pillows and Spain, we nooked. The last thought I had, before slipping into sleep with his strong arms wrapped around me...I might be falling in love with my Wallbanger. \nChapter Seventeen\n\nI WAS AWAKENED THIS MORNING by a great rumbling. Forgetting where I was for a split second, I automatically assumed I was home, and we were experiencing a tremor. I was halfway out of bed with one foot on the floor before I noticed that the view outside my bedroom window was decidedly more blue than it was at home, and decidedly more Mediterranean. And the rumbling? That was no tremor. It was Simon snoring. Snoring. Snoring to beat the band, and by beat the band I mean beat that band up with his nose\u2014which was emitting the most unearthly sound. I clapped my hands over my mouth to hold in the laughter and crept back into bed, the better to appraise the situation.\n\nTrue to form, I'd taken over most of the bed in the night, and he'd been relegated to the far corner, where he was now curled into a little ball with a pillow tucked between his legs. But what he lacked in square footage, he made up for in sound. The sounds pouring forth from his nasal passages registered somewhere between grizzly bear and exploding tractor trailer. I wiggled across the mile-wide bed, curling myself around his head and looking down at his face. Even while making these horrific sounds, he was adorable. I carefully placed my fingers next to his nose, and plugged. And then waited.\n\nAfter about ten seconds, he inhaled and shook his head, looking around wildly. He relaxed when he saw me perched on the pillows next to him. He smiled a sleepy smile.\n\n\"Hey, hey, what's up?\" he mumbled, rolling into me and wrapping his arms around my waist, resting his head on my tummy. I ran my hands through his hair, delighting in the casual freedom we finally had in touching each other.\n\n\"Just woke up. Someone was quite noisy on this side of the bed.\"\n\nHe closed one eye and looked up at me. \"I hardly think someone as flaily as you can complain about anything.\"\n\n\"Flaily? That's not even a word.\" I huffed, enjoying his arms around me more than I wanted to admit.\n\n\"Flaily, as in, one who flails. As in, one who, even though she is sleeping in a bed the size of Alcatraz, still needs almost the entire mattress to spread out and kick,\" he insisted, accidentally-on-purpose pushing my shirt up so he could rest his head on my naked tummy.\n\n\"Flailing is better than snoring, Mr. Snorey Pants,\" I teased again, trying not to notice the way his stubble scraped against my skin in the most delicious way.\n\n\"You flail. I snore. Whatever will we do about this?\" He smiled happily, still half asleep.\n\n\"Ear plugs and shin guards?\"\n\n\"Yep, that's sexy. We can suit up before bed each night,\" he sighed, pressing the tiniest of kisses just above my belly button.\n\nA noise that sounded sadly like a whimper escaped my lips before I could pull it back, and my ears burned as I took in what he'd said about \"each night,\" as in sleeping together each night. Oh my...\n\nWe ate a quick breakfast at the house, then headed into town. I fell in love with the village instantly: the old stone streets, the whitewashed walls glimmering in the blazing sunlight, the beauty that poured forth from every open archway. From every speck of azure that peeked through from the coast to the friendly smiles on the sweet faces of the people who called this enchanted spot home, I was hooked.\n\nIt was market day, and we wandered in and out of stalls, picking up fresh fruit to snack on later. I've seen beautiful places on this earth, but this town was heaven for me. I'd truly never experienced anything like it.\n\nNow, I had been traveling alone for years, finding my own company quite pleasant. But traveling with Simon? It was...cool. Just, cool. He was quiet, the way I am when I'm seeing something new. He never felt the need to fill a silence with chattery words. We were content to soak up the scenery. When we did speak, it was to point out something we thought the other shouldn't miss, like the puppies playing in a dooryard, or an old man and woman talking back and forth over their balconies. He was a great companion.\n\nWe strolled back to the rental car, the afternoon sun toasting through the thin cotton covering my shoulders, when my hand tangled with his in the most unassuming way. And when he took the time to open my door for me, and leaned down to kiss me in the warm Spanish sunshine, his lips and the smell of olive trees were the only things I needed in the entire world.\n\nIn the time I'd known Simon, I'd committed several images of him to memory: seeing him for the first time, clad only in a sheet and a smirk; driving back across the bridge with him the night of Jillian's housewarming, when we called a truce; warped and blurry Simon as seen from inside an afghan; backlit by tiki torches, wet, and looking devilishly handsome by hot tub; and a recent addition to my Best of Simons? The sight of him underneath me as he clutched me close, his warm skin and sweet breath all over me as we nooked in the Giant Bed of Sin.\n\nBut nothing, and I mean nothing, was hotter than watching Simon work. I mean it. I actually had to fan myself a little\u2014which he took no notice of, because when he was working he was delightfully focused.\n\nAnd now here I sat, watching Simon work. We'd driven up the coast to get some test shots at a place a local guide had told him about, and the perilously handsome Simon now concentrated completely on the task at hand. As he'd explained to me, it wasn't about the actual pictures he was taking, it was about testing the light and the colors. So as he scrambled his way from rock to rock, I sat on a blanket we'd dug out of the trunk and observed. Perched on cliffs high above the sea, we could see for miles. The rocky shoreline stretched and curled back in on itself as millions of waves poured in from the deep sea. And while the scenery was gorgeous, what had my attention was the way the tip of Simon's tongue poked out as he surveyed the scene. The way he bit down on his lower lip as he puzzled over something. The way excitement broke over his face when he saw something new through his lens.\n\nI was glad I had something to do, something to fixate on, as the beginning of a battle was starting to wage inside my body. Ever since we'd acknowledged the pressure that giant bed could have placed on us, all I could think about was that very pressure. As well as the pressure of an O long denied, waiting patiently\u2014and sometimes impatiently\u2014for her release. The pressure was so strong, so intense, that every single part of me could feel it.\n\nCurrently taking sides in this internal debate were my brain, Lower Caroline (speaking for the distant O), Backbone, and although she'd mainly kept quiet lately, letting Brain and Nerves take control, Heart was now weighing in.\n\nIt should be noted that LC (Lower Caroline wanted a hip but abbreviated name) had somehow drafted Simon's penis into the fray, and even though his penis didn't have direct access to her yet, LC felt it necessary to speak up on his behalf. While I didn't much like the term penis, internally I felt strange about calling him dick or cock, so penis it was...for now.\n\nNow, Backbone and Brain were solidly in the wait-for-sex camp, believing this essential to the foundation of this burgeoning relationship. LC, and therefore Simon's penis, were in the have-sex-with-him-as-soon-as-possible society, obviously. O, while not officially in residence, could be counted among LC's supporters. But I felt a twinge, and just a twinge, of her floating above both camps, along with Heart, who was currently singing songs about everlasting love and warm, fluffy things.\n\nTake all this into account and what do you have? One totally confused Caroline. A Caroline divided. No wonder I had sworn off dating. This shit was tough. So was I glad to have something to think about other than the pressure cooker of sex indeterminate? Yes. Could I spend a little more time trying to come up with a more clever name for Simon's penis? Probably. It deserved it. Mammoth Male Member? No. Pulsating Pillar of Passion? No. Back Door Bandit? Hell no. Wang? Sounded like the noise those doorstopper things made when you flicked 'em...\n\nI said it out loud to myself a few times, cracking myself up a little. \"Wang. Wang. Waaaang,\" I muttered.\n\n\"Hey! Nightie Girl! Get yourself over here,\" Simon called, breaking me out of my wang study. I left behind the mental battle, picking my way carefully across the craggy rocks to where he was poised.\n\n\"I need you.\"\n\n\"Here? Now?\" I snorted.\n\nHe lowered his camera just enough to raise one eyebrow. \"I need you for scale. Get over there.\" He pointed me toward the edge of the cliff.\n\n\"What? No-no. No pictures, huh-uh.\" I backed away toward my blanket.\n\n\"Yes, yes, pictures. Come on. I need something in the foreground. Get over there.\"\n\n\"But I'm a mess! I'm all windblown and sunburned, see?\" I pulled down my v-neck just a little to show him how I was beginning to pink up.\n\n\"While I always appreciate you showing me your cleavage, save it, sister. This is just for me, just to give me some perspective. And you don't look windblown. Well, only a little.\" He tapped his foot.\n\n\"You're not gonna make me pose with a rose in my teeth, are you?\" I sighed, shuffling over to the edge.\n\n\"Do you have a rose?\" he asked, looking serious except for the shit-eating grin.\n\n\"Shut it, you. Take your pictures.\"\n\n\"Okay, just be natural. No posing, just stand there\u2014facing the water would be great,\" he instructed.\n\nI complied. He moved around me, trying different angles, and I could hear him muttering about what was working. I admit, even though I was shy about having my picture taken, I could almost feel his eyes, through the lens, watching me. He moved around for only a few moments, but it felt longer. The internal war was beginning to wage again.\n\n\"You almost done?\"\n\n\"You can't rush perfection, Caroline. I need to get the job done right,\" he warned. \"But yes. Almost done. You getting hungry?\"\n\n\"I want those clementines in the basket\u2014grab me one? Or will that mess with your masterpiece?\"\n\n\"Won't mess with it. I'll call it Windblown Girl on a Cliff with a Clementine.\" He laughed and headed back over to the car.\n\n\"You're funny,\" I said wryly, catching the tiny orange he threw me and starting to peel.\n\n\"Are you sharing?\"\n\n\"I suppose so, the least I could do for the man who brought me here, right?\" I laughed, biting into a wedge and feeling the juice dribble down my chin.\n\n\"You got a hole in your lip?\" he asked, capturing the moment as I rolled my eyes at him.\n\n\"Do you actually think you're funny, or are you just assuming you might be?\" I countered, beckoning him over with the peel. He shook his head, laughing as he took a wedge. Of course, he took a bite and no dribble. He opened his eyes wide in feigned amazement, and I took the opportunity to smash another wedge in his face. His eyes remained wide open, as juice now ran freely off the tip of his nose and on to his chin.\n\n\"Messy Simon,\" I whispered as he looked at me. In a flash, he pressed his lips to mine, getting juice all over both of us as I squealed into his mouth. \"Sweet Caroline,\" he whispered through his grin. He turned us so the sea was behind us, held up the camera, and took a picture: us covered in orange mush.\n\n\"By the way, why were you saying 'wang' earlier?\" he asked.\n\nI just laughed harder.\n\n\"This is it. This is now officially the single best thing I have ever had in my mouth,\" I announced, closing my eyes and moaning.\n\n\"You've said that about everything you've eaten tonight.\"\n\n\"I know, but I seriously can't handle how good this is. Smack me, pinch me, throw me overboard, this is too good,\" I moaned again. We sat at a little table in the corner of a small restaurant in town, and I was determined to try everything. Simon, showing off his language skills, had ordered for us. I told him to go for it, that I was in his hands and I knew he wouldn't steer me wrong. And the boy did good. We feasted.\n\nWe went with traditional tapas, of course, accompanied by glasses of the house wine. Little bowls and plates showed up at the table every few minutes after that: tiny pork meatballs, slices of ham, marinated mushrooms, beautiful sausages, grilled squid with fruity local olive oil. With each bite, I was sure that I had just eaten the best thing ever, then another wave of gorgeous food would show up and convince me once again. And then these prawns arrived. Unreal. Fried crispy in olive oil with tons of garlic and parsley, smoky paprika, and just a hint of heat. I swooned. I actually swooned.\n\nSimon? He loved it. He ate it up. My reactions as much as the food, I think. He ate it up.\n\n\"Honestly, I can't handle any more,\" I protested, dragging a piece of crusty bread through the olive oil. He smiled as he watched me shamelessly enjoy another piece of bread before finally pushing back from the table with a groan.\n\n\"Best meal ever?\" he asked.\n\n\"It really might be. That was insane.\" I sighed, patting my full tummy. Ladylike, schmadylike, I'd pounded that meal down like someone was going to take it away from me. A waiter appeared with two small glasses of a local wine. Sweet and crisp, it was the perfect after-dinner drink. We sipped slowly, the breeze coming in through the windows lightly scented with the sea air.\n\n\"This was a great date, Simon. Really. Couldn't have been more perfect,\" I said, taking another sip of my wine.\n\n\"Was this a date?\" he asked.\n\nMy face froze. \"I mean, no. I suppose not. I just\u2014\"\n\n\"Relax, Caroline. I know what you meant. It's just funny to consider this a date: two people traveling together, but only now on a date.\" He smiled, and I relaxed.\n\n\"Hmm, we haven't really followed the traditional rules so far, have we? This might even be our first date, if we wanted to get technical.\"\n\n\"Well, technically speaking, what defines a date?\" he asked.\n\n\"Dinner, I suppose. Although we've had dinner before,\" I began.\n\n\"And a movie\u2014we've already had a movie,\" he reminded me.\n\nI shuddered. \"Yes, and that was definitely a ploy to get me to snuggle with you. Scary movie, so obvious,\" I scoffed.\n\n\"It worked, didn't it? In fact, I do believe I slept with you that night, Nightie Girl.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm cheap and easy, I admit it. I suppose we really did do this whole thing backward.\" I grinned, sliding my foot across the floor under the table and kicking him lightly.\n\n\"I like it backward.\" He smirked.\n\nI narrowed my eyes. \"Not touching that one.\"\n\n\"Seriously, though. As I've mentioned, I have no experience with this stuff,\" he said. \"How does this work? What if we were doing this...not backward? What would happen next?\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose there would be another date, and another after that,\" I admitted, smiling shyly.\n\n\"And bases. I'd be expected to try to round some bases, right?\" he asked seriously.\n\nI spluttered my wine. \"Bases? Are you for real? As in, cop a feel, over the shirt, under the shirt, those bases?\" I laughed incredulously.\n\n\"Yes, exactly. What am I allowed to get away with? As a gentleman, I mean. If this were truly a first date, we wouldn't be going home together, would we? Dating now, not hooking up. Remember, apparently I give good woo,\" he said, eyes twinkling.\n\n\"Yes, yes, you do. We wouldn't be going home together, that's true. But to be honest, I don't want you sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. Is that weird?\" I could feel my ears burning as I blushed.\n\n\"It's not weird,\" he answered quietly. I slipped off my sandal and pressed my foot against his, rubbing lightly along his leg.\n\n\"Nooking is good, right?\"\n\n\"Nooking is most definitely good,\" he agreed, nudging back with his own foot.\n\n\"As far as your bases are concerned, I think you could definitely plan on a little under the shirt action, if you were so inclined,\" I answered. Internally, Brain and Backbone gave a little cheer, while LC and Wang kicked a few chairs. Tatas were just glad someone was considering them for once, instead of being just a stopover on the way to points south. Heart? Well, she was still flitting about, singing her song.\n\n\"So, we go a little traditional, but not totally traditional. Take it slow?\" he asked, his eyes burning, the sapphires beginning to do their little hypnotic dance.\n\n\"Slow, but not too slow. We are grownups, for goodness sake.\"\n\n\"To under the shirt action,\" he announced, raising his glass in toast.\n\n\"I'll drink to that.\" I laughed as we clinked.\n\nFifty-seven minutes later we were in bed, his hands warm and sure as he slipped each button through, revealing my skin. He went slowly, purposefully, and he let my shirt fall open as I lay beneath him. He gazed down at me, his fingertips lightly drawing a line from my collarbone to my navel, straight and true. We both sighed at the same time.\n\nI can't explain it, but knowing we'd set some boundaries for the evening, silly as it may be, made it so much more sensual, something to be truly savored. His lips hovered around my neck, whispering tiny kisses against my skin, below my ear, under my chin, in the dip between my neck and my shoulder, and working his way down to the swell of my breasts. His fingers swept out, lightly, reverently, ghosting across the sensitive skin as I inhaled and then held my breath.\n\nAs his fingers gently grazed my nipple, every nerve ending in my entire body reversed and began to pulse in that direction. I exhaled, feeling months of tension begin to simultaneously flow out of me and build up even more. With sweet kisses and soft touches, he began the process of getting to know my body, and it was exactly what I needed. Lips, mouth, tongue\u2014all of it on me, tasting, stroking, feeling, and loving.\n\nAs his lips closed around my breast, his hair tickled my chin in the cutest way, and I wrapped my arms around him, holding him close. The feeling of his skin against mine was perfection, and something I'd never experienced before. I felt...worshipped.\n\nAs we explored that night, what started out as funny and cute and part of our classic banter became something more. What was crassly called \"under the shirt action\" became part of a romance, and something that could have been merely physical became something emotional and pure. And when he cradled me to him, bringing me into his nook with tender kisses and breathless giggles, we fell into a contented sleep.\n\nFlaily and Mr. Snorey Pants.\n\nFor the next two days, I luxuriated. Truly, there isn't another word in the English language to articulate the experience I indulged in. Now for some, the definition of a luxurious vacation might be endless shopping, spa pampering, expensive meals, elaborate shows. But to me, luxurious meant spending two hours napping in the sun on the terrace off the kitchen. Luxurious meant eating figs dripping with honey and dotted with crumbles of local cheese while Simon poured me another glass of Cava, all before ten a.m. Luxurious meant time alone to wander through the small, family stores of Nerja, poking through bins of beautiful lace. Luxurious meant exploring the nearby caves with Simon while he photographed, losing ourselves in the colors under the earth. Luxurious meant gazing at Simon dangling from a rock face while he searched out another foothold, shirtless. Did I mention shirtless?\n\nAnd luxurious most certainly meant that I got to spend each night in that bed with Simon. Now that's a priceless luxury, not offered on every grand tour. We rounded another base or two, teasing each other with a little over-the-panties encounter. Were we being ridiculous, waiting until the last night in Spain to consummate this \"thing\"? Probably, but who the hell cared? He spent almost an hour kissing every inch of my legs one night, and I spent about the same amount of time having a conversation with his belly button. We just...enjoyed.\n\nBut with all this enjoyment came a certain amount of, well, how shall we say, nervous energy?\n\nBack in San Francisco, we'd spent months engaged in verbal foreplay. But now, here? The actual foreplay? It was not to be believed. My body was so in tune with his, I knew when he walked into the room, and I knew when he was about to touch me, seconds before he did. The air between us was sexually charged, vibes zinging back and forth with enough energy to light up the entire town. Sexual chemistry? Had it. Sexual frustration? On the rise and getting close to critical.\n\nOh, hell, I'll say it. I was H-O-R-N-Y.\n\nWhich was why after we spent the afternoon in the caves, we found ourselves in the kitchen, kissing madly. We were both a little tired from the day, and I'd been wanting to test out that beautiful Viking range. I was preparing vegetables for the grill and stirring some saffron rice when he came in after a shower. It's almost impossible for me to explain the sight of him: worn white T-shirt, faded jeans, barefoot, scrubbing at his wet hair with a towel. He grinned, and I began to see double. I literally couldn't see through the haze of lust and need I suddenly felt surge through me. I needed my hands to be on his body, and I needed it to happen immediately.\n\n\"Mmm, something smells good. Want me to get the grill started?\" he asked, walking over to where I was chopping vegetables at the counter. He stood behind me, his body only inches from mine, and something snapped. And it wasn't just the pea pod I was holding...\n\nI turned around, and my tummy actually fluttered at the sight of him. It freaking fluttered. I pressed my hand against his chest, feeling the strength there and the warmth of his skin through the cotton. Reason waved bye-bye, and this was now purely physical. An itch that needed to be scratched, scratched, and then scratched again. I slid my hand up around the back of his neck, and pulled him down to me. My lips crashed against his, my intense need for him pouring into his mouth and down to the tips of my toes. Toes that kicked off their flip-flops and started shamelessly rubbing themselves across the tops of his feet. My body needed to feel skin, any skin, and needed it now.\n\nHe responded, matching my rough kisses with his own, his mouth covering mine as I groaned at the feel of his hands on the small of my back. I quickly spun him around and pressed him up against the counter.\n\n\"Off! I need this off, now,\" I muttered between kisses, yanking at his T-shirt. In a great whoosh of fabric, his shirt was thrown across the room as I maneuvered my body against his, sighing as I felt the contact. I was alternately trying to hug him and climb him, the lust now running freely through my body like a freight train. I reached between us and palmed him through his jeans. His eyes caught mine, and they crossed a little. I was on the right track. Feeling him getting harder by the second under my fingertips, suddenly all I wanted, all I needed, all I had to have to function in life, was him. In my mouth.\n\n\"Hey, Nightie Girl, what are you\u2014oh God\u2014\"\n\nMoving instinctively, I snapped open his jeans, dropped to my knees before him, and brought him forth. My pulse raced, and I think my blood actually boiled within me as I saw him. My breath drew in with a hiss as I regarded him, faded jeans pushed down just enough to frame this luminous sight.\n\nSimon does commando. God bless America.\n\nI wanted to be gentle, I wanted to be tender and sweet, but I simply needed him too badly. I glanced up at him, his eyes clouded but frantic, as his hands came down to brush my hair back from my face. I took his hands in my own and placed them back on the counter.\n\n\"You're gonna want to hold on for this,\" I promised. He groaned a delicious groan and, doing as he was told, leaned back a little. He pushed his hips forward, but kept his eyes on mine. Always on mine.\n\nMy lips purred as I slipped his length inside my mouth. His head dropped back as my tongue caressed him, taking him in deeper. The pure pleasure of this, the absolute pleasure of feeling his reaction to me was enough to make my head split in two. I drew him back out, letting my teeth just barely graze his sensitive skin as I saw him grip the edge of counter even harder. I ran my nails up the inside of his legs, pushing his jeans farther down for more access to his warm skin. Pressing kisses across the tip of him, I let my hands come up to grasp him, stroking and massaging. He was perfect, all smooth and taut as I took him in again, and again, and again. I felt crazed, drunk on his scent and the feel of him inside me.\n\nHe moaned my name over and over again, his words drifting down like molten chocolate sexy times, pouring inside my brain and dedicating every sense I had to him, only to him. On and on I went, making him crazy, making me crazy, licking, sucking, tasting, teasing, luxuriating in the madness that was this luscious act. To have him here, in this way, was the very definition of luxury.\n\nHe stiffened further, and his hands finally came back to me, trying to make me pull back.\n\n\"Caroline, oh, Caroline, I'm...you...first...you...oh, God...you,\" he stuttered. Luckily, I was able to interpret. He wanted me to have something as well. What he didn't realize is that this total abandon he was giving me was all I needed. I released him only for a moment, to place his hands once more on the counter.\n\n\"No, Simon. You,\" I replied, taking him in deeply once more, feeling him hit the back of my throat as my hands tended to the rest of him that my mouth could not. His hips moved once, then again, and with a shudder and the most scrumptious groan I've ever heard, Simon came. Threw his head back, closed his eyes, and let go.\n\nIt was wonderful.\n\nMoments later, crumpled into me on the floor of the kitchen, he sighed contentedly. \"Good Lord, Caroline. That was...unexpected.\"\n\nI giggled, bending down to kiss his forehead. \"I couldn't control myself. You just looked way too good, and I...well...I got carried away.\"\n\n\"I'll say. Although I don't think it's fair that I'm somewhat exposed here, and you're still fully clothed. We could remedy that pretty quickly, though.\" He pulled at the drawstring on my pants.\n\nI stopped him. \"First of all, you aren't somewhat exposed, you are hanging free on the kitchen floor, and I quite like it. And this wasn't about me, although I admit I enjoyed it immensely.\"\n\n\"Silly girl, now I want to enjoy you immensely,\" he persisted, running his fingers along the edge of my pants, dancing across the skin there.\n\nNerves began to dance the flamenco, demanding more time\u2014more time! Not ready! LC kicked some things. \"No, no, not tonight. I want to make you a nice dinner. Let me take care of you a little bit. Can't I just do that?\" I removed his devil hands and kissed them.\n\nHe smiled up at me, his hair messy and a goofy grin still adorning his face. He sighed in defeat and nodded. I started to climb off the floor when he caught me around the waist, pulling me back down.\n\n\"A word, please, before you leave me\u2014what did you say? Hanging free on the kitchen floor?\"\n\n\"Yes, dear?\" I asked, earning a raised eyebrow.\n\n\"So, using the base-rounding point of reference we've applied to this week, I'd say we just skipped ahead a few dates, yes?\"\n\n\"I should say so.\" I laughed, patting him lightly on the head.\n\n\"Then I think it's only fair to warn you...Tomorrow night? Your last night in Spain?\" he said, his eyes blazing through the twilight.\n\n\"Yes?\" I whispered.\n\n\"I'm gonna try to steal home.\"\n\nI smiled. \"Silly Simon, it's not stealing if I wave you in,\" I purred, kissing him solidly on the lips.\n\nLater that night, as I lay wrapped thickly in Simon, LC began to prepare. And Brain and Backbone began to chant...O...O...O. Wang? Well, we knew where he was, pressed rather closely against Backbone.\n\nHeart continued to float above, but was circling ever closer to home. However, an additional entity began to assert herself once again, trying to influence the others. She tinted my dreams with her quiet whispering.\n\nHello, Nerves.\n\nMy sleep was most decidedly...flaily.\nChapter Eighteen\n\n\"DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW you wanted to take pictures for a living?\"\n\n\"What? Where did that come from?\" Simon laughed, sitting back in his chair and looking at me over the rim of his coffee cup.\n\nWe were enjoying a lazy breakfast on my last day in Spain. Dark coffee, tiny little lemon cakes, freshly cut berries and cream, and a side of sunny coastline. Clad in Simon's shirt and a smile, I was in heaven. Nerves seemed very far away this morning.\n\n\"I mean it,\" I insisted. \"Did you always want to do this? You seem, well, you're very intense when you're working. You seem like you really love it.\"\n\n\"I do love it. I mean, it's a job so it has its tedious moments, but yeah, I love it. It wasn't something I always planned, though. In fact, there was a different plan altogether,\" he replied, a dark look passing over his face.\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"For a long time I planned on following my father into his business.\" He sighed, a rueful smile slipping into place.\n\nMy hand was in his before I even realized I'd offered it. He squeezed, and then took another sip of his coffee.\n\n\"Did you know Benjamin worked for my father?\" he asked. \"Dad hired him right out of school, mentored him, taught him everything. When Benjamin wanted to go out on his own, you'd think Dad would've been pissed, but he was so proud of him.\"\n\n\"He's the best.\" I grinned.\n\n\"Don't think I don't know about the crush you girls have on him. I'm aware.\" He gave me a stern look.\n\n\"I'd hope so. We're not exactly subtle in our admiration.\"\n\n\"Parker Financial Services was getting big, really big, and Dad wanted me to come onboard as soon as I was done with college. I honestly never thought I'd leave Philadelphia. It would have been a great life: working with my dad, country club, big house in the 'burbs. Who wouldn't want that?\"\n\n\"Well...\" I murmured. It was an idyllic life, for sure, but I couldn't picture Simon there.\n\n\"I worked on our high school newspaper, taking pictures. I took the class as an easy A. You know, good for my transcript? But even though I got assignments like covering the women's field hockey tryouts, I really liked it. Like, really liked it. I just figured it would always be a nice hobby. Never really thought about it as a career. My parents supported me, though, and my mom even got me a camera for Christmas that year\u2014the year that...well...\" He paused, clearing his throat a bit.\n\n\"Anyway, after everything happened with Mom and Dad, Benjamin came out to Philadelphia for the, um, for the funeral. He stayed for a while, got things in order, you know. He was the executor of my parents' will. And since he was living out on the West Coast, well, the idea of staying behind in Philadelphia didn't sound so great. So, long story short, Stanford accepted me, I started studying photojournalism, I got really lucky with some internships, and then right-place-right-time, and bam! That's how I got into this gig,\" he finished, dunking his cake and taking a bite.\n\n\"And you love it.\" I smiled.\n\n\"And I love it,\" he agreed.\n\n\"So what happened to your dad's company? Parker Financial?\" I asked, spooning up a bite of berries.\n\n\"Benjamin took over some of the clients for a while, and over time he quietly closed up shop. The assets were transferred to me, per the will, and he manages it for me.\"\n\n\"Assets?\"\n\n\"Yep. Didn't I tell you that, Caroline? I'm loaded.\" He winced, looking out to sea.\n\n\"I knew there was a reason I was hanging out with you.\" I topped off his coffee.\n\n\"Seriously. Loaded.\"\n\n\"Okay, now you're just being an ass,\" I said, trying to lift the tension that had settled over the table.\n\n\"Well, people get weird about money. You never know,\" he said.\n\n\"When we get home you're buying our building and installing a hot tub on the landing, that's all,\" I joked, which earned me a small smile.\n\nWe sat and looked at each other, deep in our own thoughts. He'd done so much alone. No wonder he always seemed a little lost to me. Living out of a suitcase, not allowing himself to be tethered to anyone, no real sense of belonging\u2014could it really be that simple? Wallbanger had haremed because he couldn't stand to lose anyone else? Paging Dr. Freud...\n\nFreudian or no, it made sense. He was attracted to me, had been attracted to me since the beginning. But what was different this time? Clearly he'd been attracted to all the other women as well. Wow, no pressure at all...With a toss of my head, I tried to change the subject.\n\n\"I can't believe I'm leaving tomorrow. I feel like we just got here.\" I leaned forward on my elbows. He smiled, likely noticing my not-so-subtle way of changing the subject. But he seemed grateful.\n\n\"So stay. Stay with me. We can spend a few more days here, and then who knows? Where else do you want to go?\"\n\n\"Pfft. You'll recall that I'm leaving before you because it's the only flight I could get. Besides, I have to be back at work, organized, and in the right time zone on Monday. You know how many jobs Jillian has lined up for me?\"\n\n\"She'll understand. She's a sucker for a good romance. Come on. Stay with me. I'll stash you in the overhead bin for the flight home.\" His eyes twinkled over his coffee mug.\n\n\"Overhead bin, my foot. And is this what this is? A romance? Shouldn't you be embracing me on the beach? And ripping my bodice?\" I placed my bare legs in his lap, and he took full advantage of this, massaging between his warm hands.\n\n\"Lucky for you, I'm a bodice-ripper from way back. I could probably even throw together a pirate costume, if that's what you're into,\" he replied, the sapphires beginning to smoke.\n\n\"It has been quite a romantic tale, hasn't it? If someone would've told me this story, I doubt I'd have believed it,\" I mused, groaning as I finished my last bite.\n\n\"Why not? It's not that strange how we met, is it?\"\n\n\"How many women do you know who would voluntarily go to Europe with a man who'd been banging the plaster right off her walls for weeks?\"\n\n\"True, but you could also spin me as the guy who played you all those great records through the wall, and the guy who gave you, and I quote, 'the best meatball ever'?\"\n\n\"I suppose you did begin to wear me down with the Glen Miller. That got me.\" I sunk into my chair as his hands did delicious things to the bottoms of my socked feet. Socks I had also appropriated from his side of the room.\n\n\"I got you, huh?\" He smirked, leaning closer.\n\n\"Oh, shut it, you.\" I pushed his face away, smiling big as I contemplated what he said. Did he have me? Yeah. He totally had me. And would have me, sometime later that night.\n\nAt that thought, a whoosh of nerves hit my tummy, and I felt my smile falter a bit. Nerves had set up shop big time, and no matter where Brain went, eventually Nerves invaded every thought, every idea I had about where the night would go. I was ready, Lord knows I was ready, but I was damn nervous. O would come back, right? I knew she would. Did I mention I was nervous?\n\n\"So, are you almost done with your work? Do you still have a lot to do tomorrow?\" I asked, changing the subject once again. As was always the case when he talked about his work, Simon's eyes lit up. He described the shots he still needed of the Roman-style aqueduct in town.\n\n\"I wish we had time to go scuba diving. I hate that we ran out of time.\" I frowned.\n\n\"Again, something that would be solved if you stayed here with me.\" He frowned back, making a big deal of mimicking my eyebrows.\n\n\"Again, some of us have nine-to-five jobs. I have to get home!\"\n\n\"Home, right. You know there's gonna be a firing squad to face when we get home. Everyone is going to want to know what happened here between us,\" he said seriously.\n\n\"I know. We'll handle it.\" I cringed at the grilling I'd receive from the girls, to say nothing of Jillian. I wonder if a kitchen blowjob was what she had in mind when she said take care of him in Spain.\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"What? We what?\" I asked.\n\n\"I could we with you.\" He smiled.\n\n\"Aren't we already we-ing?\"\n\n\"Yeah, we're we-ing on vacation. It's quite a different thing to be we-ing back home, in the real world. I travel all the time, and that takes its toll on the we unit,\" he said, his brow knit together.\n\nIt took all my power, all of it, not to make a joke about the we(e) unit.\n\n\"Simon, chill. I know you travel. I'm well aware. Keep bringing me pretty things from faraway places, and this girl has no problem with your we, okay?\" I patted his hand.\n\n\"Pretty things I can do. Guaranteed.\"\n\n\"Speaking of, where are you off to next?\"\n\n\"I'll be home for a few weeks, and then I'm headed down south for a bit.\"\n\n\"Down south? As in LA?\"\n\n\"No, a bit more south.\"\n\n\"San Diego?\"\n\n\"Souther.\"\n\n\"Stanford educated, right? Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Promise you won't be mad?\"\n\n\"Spit it out, Simon.\"\n\n\"Peru. The Andes. More specifically, Machu Picchu.\"\n\n\"What? Oh, man, that's it. I officially hate you. I'll be in San Francisco, planning rich people's Christmas trees, and you get to go there?\"\n\n\"I'll send you a postcard?\" He looked like a kid trying to get out of trouble. \"Besides, I don't know what you're so pissy about. You love your job, Caroline. Don't even try to tell me you don't.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I love my job, but right now I wish I was headed south.\" I huffed, snatching my feet away.\n\n\"Well, if you want to head south, I can think of something\u2014\"\n\nI placed my hand in front of his mouth. \"No way, buddy. I'm not machuuing your pichu now. Huh-uh,\" I stated firmly, not wavering one bit when he began pressing open mouth kisses against my palm. Not one little bit...\n\n\"Caroline,\" he whispered against my hand.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"One day,\" he began, removing my hand and leaving tiny kisses up the inside of my arm. \"One day...\" Kiss. \"I promise...\" Kiss kiss. \"To bring you...\" Kiss. \"And my woo...\" Kiss kiss. \"To Peru,\" he finished, now kneeling in front of me and dragging his mouth across my shoulder, peeling the fabric away to linger along my collarbone, his lips making me hot and shivery.\n\n\"You wanna woo me in Peru?\" I asked, my voice high and stupid and not fooling him for a second. He knew exactly how he was affecting me.\n\n\"True.\" His fingers tangled in my hair and brought my mouth to his. I tried for a second to come up with something that rhymed with true, but I gave up and kissed him back with all I had. And so, I let him make out with me on the terrace, overlooking the ocean. Which was...blue. Ahem.\n\nAll week long, we'd been seeing signs of a festival coming together around town. It started tonight, as if celebrating my departure, and we were headed out to dinner, to somewhere considerably more fancy than the places we'd been eating all week. I'd discovered Simon and I were very similar in many of our tastes. I was all for getting dressed up from time to time, but I much preferred smaller, casual places, as did he. So tonight, getting dressed up and going out someplace a little fancy, and then maybe hitting the festival, had a special feel to it. I was definitely looking forward to this evening, in more ways than one.\n\nThey say when a soldier loses a leg in battle, sometimes, late at night, he can still feel twinges of that leg\u2014phantom pain, they call it. I lost my O in battle, the battle of Cory Weinstein\u2014that machine-gun fucker\u2014and I was still feeling the aftershocks. And by aftershocks I mean nothing at all. But there was an end in sight. I'd been feeling twinges of the phantom O all week long, and I was very much looking forward to her return later this evening. The Return of the O. Of course I would see it as a title of some kind of action film in my head\u2014but truly, if she was returning, I would capitalize anything. Any Thing.\n\nBecause tonight, sports fans, I was gonna get me some. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was ready for some serious Simon Wang.\n\nI ran my fingers through my hair once more, noticing how the strong sun had brought out the natural honey tones. I smoothed the front of my dress, white linen with a little swing to the skirt. I paired it with some turquoise jewelry I'd bought in town and little snakeskin sandals. I was the most dressed up I'd been all week, and\u2014undercurrent of nerves aside\u2014feeling pretty good. I took one last look at myself in the mirror, noticing that my cheeks were pretty pink, and I hadn't even added blush tonight.\n\nI went to the kitchen to pour myself a quick glass of wine and wait for Simon. As I poured the Cava, I saw him on the terrace, facing the ocean. I smirked when I saw he was wearing a white linen shirt. We'd be quite matchy-matchy tonight. Khakis completed his look, and he turned just as I was walking out to meet him. My heels clicked across the stone as I sipped my bubbly wine, and he leaned back on his arms across the wrought iron railing. As a photographer, he was innately aware of the kind of imagery he was creating, I felt certain. Anytime he leaned, he oozed sex. I just hoped I didn't fall in my heels...sex ooze could be slippery.\n\nI offered my wine to him, and he let me bring the glass to his lips. Slowly, he sipped, his eyes on mine. When I removed the glass, he quickly wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me to him, kissing me deeply, the taste of wine heavy on his tongue.\n\n\"You look...good,\" he breathed, pulling away from my lips to press his mouth against the skin just below my ear, his scruff tickling me in the most fantastic way.\n\n\"Good?\" I asked, tilting my head back to encourage everything he was doing.\n\n\"Good. Good enough to eat,\" he whispered, grazing my neck with his teeth, just enough to make me aware of them.\n\n\"Wow,\" was all I could manage as I wrapped my arms around his neck and sank into his embrace.\n\nThe sun was beginning to set, casting a warm glow all around, making the terra cotta blaze red and orange, coating us in fire. My eyes were drawn to the cool blue of the sea crashing against the rocks below, the salt in the air actually present on my tongue. I clung to him, letting myself feel and experience everything. His body, hard and warm against my own, the feel of his shaggy hair against my cheek, the heat of the railing against my hip, the rush of every cell in my body curling toward this man and the pleasure he would surely bring me.\n\n\"You ready?\" he asked, his voice gruff in my ear.\n\n\"So ready,\" I moaned, my eyes rolling back in my head at the nearness of him, the feel of him.\n\nAnd then Simon took me to town.\n\nAfter Simon had driven me to the brink with his kissing on the terrace, he'd literally driven me to the brink. We were now at a restaurant overlooking the water, which was easy to do in a coastal town. But where the little hole-in-the-wall places we'd been frequenting this week had their cozy charm, this was a romantic restaurant with an emphasis on romance. Romance was served on a platter here. It was in the wine, the pictures on the walls, the floor beneath our feet, and in case you missed the romance, it was also being piped in through the air. If I squinted, I could see the word romance floating through the air on the sea breeze...I had to really squint, but it was there, I tell you.\n\nFloor-to-ceiling window panels had been rolled back to let in the briny coastal air, and hundreds of tiny tealights sparkled in hurricane glasses. Each table was dressed in white, with low tumblers spilling over with dahlia blooms in rich shades of crimson, pomegranate, and lusty fuchsia. Tiny white Christmas lights twisted into the wooden beams overhead cast a magical sepia tone over the entire scene. In this restaurant, there were no children, no tables of four or six. No, this restaurant was filled with lovers, old and new.\n\nNow we sat, pressed closely together at an epic mahogany bar, slowly sipping wine and awaiting our own tiny table. Simon's hand settled against the small of my back, claiming me quietly and succinctly.\n\nThe bartender placed a tray of oysters on the bar in front of us. Twisted and craggy, they glistened, with slices of lemon nestled here and there. Simon raised an eyebrow, and I nodded as he squeezed the lemon, his strong and elegant fingers making short, erotic work of the oysters. He pried one from its home and brought it to my mouth on a tiny fork.\n\n\"Open up, Nightie Girl,\" he instructed, and I surely did as I was told.\n\nCold, crisp, like a burst of seawater in my mouth, I moaned around the fork as he slipped the tines back out. He grasped his own oyster and tossed it back like a man, licking his lips as I watched this little bit of food pornography play out. He winked at me as I looked away, trying not to let on how desperately turned on I was. The entire day had been like one giant, controlled ball of sexual tension, a slow burn that was now igniting into a wildfire. He slurped two more in quick succession, and as I watched his tongue dart out to lick his lips, I felt the sudden urge to help him. With no shame or sense of social propriety, I closed the distance between us and kissed him, hard.\n\nHe grinned in surprise, but kissed me back with equal intensity. The sweetness and tenderness that had been marinating between us all week now quickly deteriorated into full-on touch-me-touch-me-now, and I was all for it. My entire body turned toward him, my legs nestling in between his as his fingers found my skin\u2014the skin just above the hem of my dress. We were kissing, kissing all-out Hollywood style. Slow, sloppy, wet, and wonderful. My head tilted so I could kiss him more deeply, my tongue sliding against his, leading and then letting him lead. He tasted like sweet and salt and lemons, and it was all I could do not to grab him by his pretty linen shirt and have my way with him on top of the bar\u2014but in a very ladylike way, mind you.\n\nI heard someone clearing their throat, and I opened my eyes to see my sexy sapphires, then an embarrassed host.\n\n\"Excuse me, se\u00f1or, your table is ready?\" he asked, carefully averting his eyes from our display in his very romantic, but still very public, restaurant.\n\nI might have moaned a little as Simon removed his hands from my legs and turned my chair so I could stand. Taking my hands and pulling me, he smirked as I wobbled on my feet a bit. He grinned at the bartender.\n\n\"Oysters, man, oysters.\" Simon laughed a little as we shuffled off to our table. I was ready to let out an indignant huff until I saw him discreetly adjust himself. I was not the only one feeling the slow burn...\n\nI stuffed my huff and smiled serenely, lowering my eyes just enough so he knew I knew. As we arrived at our table, Simon pulled out my chair for me. As he scooted me in, I let my hand drift back just enough to accidentally-on-purpose graze him, feeling how worked up he was. I heard him hiss, and I smiled inwardly. Just as I went in for graze number two, he grasped my hand tightly in his own, pressing himself against me. My breath caught in my throat as I felt him harden further under our hands.\n\n\"Do I need to change your name to Naughty Girl?\" he murmured, low and thick in my ear. I closed my eyes and tried to get control as he sat across from me, grinning in a devilish way. As our waiter busied himself around us, straightening the linens and presenting menus, I only had eyes for Simon, cocksure and beautiful, across the table from me. This meal was going to take forever.\n\nThe meal did take forever, but as much as I was aching to get Simon alone again, I also never wanted this night to end. We were served a beautiful paella, coastal style with chunks of prawns and spiny lobster, chorizo, and peas. Made in the traditional way, almost impossible to recreate, the simple shallow dish it had been cooked in allowed the saffron rice on the bottom to become crunchy and nutty\u2014delicious in every sense of the word. We'd finished a lovely bottle of ros\u00e9 and were now lazily sipping tiny glasses of Ponche Caballero, a Spanish brandy with hints of orange and cinnamon.\n\nThe liquor was spicy as I rolled it around in my mouth. I was pleasantly warm and more pleasantly tipsy. Not drunk, just heady enough that I was hyperaware of my surroundings and found anything and everything sensual: the way the smooth brandy slipped down my throat, the feel of Simon's leg against my own under the table, the way my body had begun to hum. The entire population, it seemed, was out and about tonight and in a celebratory mood for the festival kicking off in the center of town. The energy was raw and a little wild. I sat back in my chair, teasing Simon with my big toe, a silly smile on my face as he stared at me hard.\n\n\"I ate your paella once,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\"Pardon me?\" I sputtered, catching the drop of brandy on my lip before it rolled off onto my dress.\n\n\"In Tahoe, remember? You made us all paella.\"\n\n\"Right, right, I did. Not like we had tonight, but it was pretty good.\" I smiled, thinking of that night. \"As I recall, we polished off quite a bit of wine as well.\"\n\n\"Yes, we ate paella and drank wine, got the others together, and then you kissed me.\"\n\n\"We did, and yes, I did.\" I blushed.\n\n\"And then I acted like an ass,\" he replied, his blush present now as well.\n\n\"You did,\" I agreed with a smile.\n\n\"You know why, right? I mean, you have to know that I, well, that I wanted you. You do know that, right?\"\n\n\"It was pressed against my leg, Simon. I was aware.\" I laughed, trying to play it off, but still thinking of how I'd felt when I ran away from him in that hot tub.\n\n\"Caroline, come on now,\" he chided, his eyes serious.\n\n\"Come on now, yourself. It really was pressed against my leg.\" I laughed again, a little weaker this time.\n\n\"That night? Jesus, it would have been so easy, you know? At that moment even I wasn't totally sure why I stopped us. I think I just knew that...\"\n\n\"You knew that?\" I prompted.\n\n\"I knew with you, it would be an all or nothing kind of thing.\"\n\n\"All?\" I squeaked.\n\n\"All, Caroline. I need all of you. That night? Would have been great, but too soon.\" He leaned across the table and took my hand. \"Now, we're here,\" he said, raising my hand to his mouth. He laid kisses across the back then opened my palm and pressed a wet kiss at its center. \"Where I can take my time with you,\" he said, kissing my hand once more as I stared back at him.\n\n\"Simon?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm really glad we waited.\"\n\n\"Me too.\"\n\n\"But I really don't think I can wait any longer.\"\n\n\"Thank God.\" He smiled and signaled the waiter.\n\nWe laughed like teenagers as we paid the bill and began our trek up the hill to the car. The festival was in full force now, and we passed through part of it on our way back. Lanterns lit up the sky overhead as a heavy drum beat pulsed, and we saw people dancing in the streets. That energy was back, that sense of abandon in the air, and the brandy and that very energy knocked Nerves back down, way down to my gut, where LC and Wang threatened to beat her within an inch of her life. LC and Wang, it sounded like a rap duo...\n\nAs we reached the car, I went to grab the door handle when I was whirled suddenly by a very intense Mr. Parker. His eyes burned into mine as he pressed me against the car, his hips strong and his hands frantic in my hair and on my skin. His hand slid down my leg, grasping my thigh and hitching it around his hip as I moaned and groaned at the strength I was about to let run wild across my body and soul.\n\nBut I slowed him down, my hands pulling at his hair, making him moan in turn. \"Take me home, Simon,\" I whispered, pressing one more kiss against his sweet lips. \"And please drive fast.\"\n\nEven Heart seemed pleased, floating around above. She was still singing, but a song that was infinitely more dirty. \nChapter Nineteen\n\nI LOOKED AT MY REFLECTION in the mirror, trying to look objectively. When I was a kid, especially in those charming early-teen years, I used to see myself very differently. I saw dishwater-blond hair and pale, uninteresting skin. I saw flat green eyes and knobby knees that bisected skinny, bird-like legs. I saw a slightly upturned nose and a bottom lip that looked like I might trip over it if I wasn't too careful.\n\nWhen I was fifteen, one afternoon my grandmother told me she thought the pink dress I was wearing looked nice against my skin. I scoffed and immediately disagreed with her. \"Thanks, Grandma, but I got about three hours of sleep last night, and the last thing I look today is nice. Tired and pale, but not nice.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes in that way teenage girls do, and she reached for my hand.\n\n\"Always take a compliment, Caroline. Always take it for the way it was intended. You girls are always so quick to twist what others say. Simply say thank you and move on.\" She smiled in that quiet and wise way she had.\n\n\"Thanks.\" I smiled back, busying myself with the spaghetti sauce and turning my face so she couldn't see my blush.\n\n\"It breaks my heart the way young girls pick themselves over, never thinking they're good enough. You make sure you always remember, you're exactly the way you're supposed to be. Exactly. And anyone who says otherwise, well, poppycock.\" She giggled, her voice lowering a bit at that last word, the closest she would ever come to swearing. Grandma had a list of bad words and really bad words, and poppycock came close to approaching the latter.\n\nThe next day at school I mentioned to a friend that I thought her hair looked great, and her answer was to run her hands through it with disgust.\n\n\"Are you kidding? I barely even had time to wash it today.\"\n\nEven though it did look fantastic.\n\nLater on after gym class, I was changing in the locker room when I observed another friend touching up her lip gloss. \"That's pretty. What's the name of that color?\" I asked as she pursed her lips in the mirror.\n\n\"Apple Tartlet, but it looks terrible on me. God, I have no tan left over from summer!\"\n\nGrandma was right. Girls really didn't take compliments well. Now, I'm not gonna lie and say after that day I magically had no more bad hair days or never picked the wrong lipstick again. But I did make a conscious effort to see the good before the bad and really look at myself in a more clear way. Objectively. Kindly. And as my body continued to change, I became more and more aware of features I could look at positively instead of negatively. I never thought of myself as lethally gorgeous, but I did clean up well.\n\nAnd so now, as I stared into the mirror in the bathroom, knowing Simon was waiting for me, I took the time to take a little inventory.\n\nThe dishwater-blond hair? Not so much dishwater. It was shiny and golden, a little wavy and curly from the saltwater it had been cooking in all week. The pale skin? Nicely browned up and, dare I say, a little glowy? I winked at myself, holding back a maniacal giggle. My mouth had that slightly pouty lower lip, just full enough to trap me some Simon and not let him go. And the legs I saw peeking from below the lace just covering my thighs? Well, not so bird-like anymore. In fact, I think they were going to look pretty spectacular wrapping around Simon's...whatever I felt like wrapping them around.\n\nAnd so, as I smoothed my hair once more and mentally ran through all my internal checklists, I was wildly excited about the night ahead. We'd raced back to the house, practically disrobed each other in the entryway, and after begging a few moments of girl time, I was now ready to go out and claim my Simon. Because who was kidding who? I wanted this man. Wanted him for my own, and did not, would not, share him with anyone else.\n\nBrain for once was finally in agreement with LC. Especially since she'd crawled up Backbone and slapped Brain right in the stem, telling her in that special way only she could that we needed this. We deserved this, and we were ready. Nerves, well, they continued to circle in my tummy, but that was to be expected, right? I mean, it had been a long, long time, and a little bit of nerves was normal, I expect. Had I been stalling all week? Maybe.\n\nKind of.\n\nA little.\n\nSimon had been more than patient, content to take things slow, at my pace, but for crying out loud, he was only human.\n\nI was adamant that Nerves not be allowed to turn another Spanish night into the land of cuddle and coo. I turned in the mirror, trying to see myself as Simon might see me. I smiled in what I thought was a seductive way, flipped off the light, took one more deep breath, and opened the door.\n\nThe bedroom had been transformed into something from a fairy tale. Candles flickered on the dresser and nightstands, bathing the room in a warm glow. The windows were open, as well as the door to the little balcony overlooking the sea, and I could hear the waves crashing, romance-novel style. And there he stood: hair tousled, body strong, eyes blazing.\n\nI watched as he took me in, dragging his gaze down my body and back, a smile spreading across his face as he appraised my outfit of choice.\n\n\"Mmm, there's my Pink Nightie Girl,\" he sighed, holding out his hand. And when I stalled for just the tiniest second, Backbone picked up my hand and gave it to him.\n\nWe stood in the darkened room, a few feet apart but connected by our woven fingers. I could feel the rough texture of his thumb as he traced circles on the inside of my hand, the same circles he'd traced weeks and weeks before when I began to fall under his spell. Our eyes full of each other, he took a deep breath.\n\n\"It's criminal how good you look in that,\" he said, drawing me toward him and giving me a little spin so he could better see the pink baby doll nightie. As he spun me, the lacey edges flipped up just a little, showing off the accompanying ruffled panties. A low noise sounded in his throat, and if I wasn't mistaken, it was a growl? Damn...\n\nHe spun me back closer, grasping my hips and pressing me against him, my breasts crushing into his chest. He placed a tiny kiss below my ear, letting me feel just the tip of his tongue.\n\n\"So there are some things I need you to understand,\" he murmured, nuzzling with his nose, his hands brushing up under my nightie to fluff my ruffles and grab a handful of backside, catching me by surprise. I gasped.\n\n\"You listening? Don't get distracted on me now,\" he whispered again, flattening out his tongue and dragging it up the side of my neck.\n\n\"It's kind of hard to focus with your distraction poking me in the thigh,\" I groaned, letting him bend me backward just enough so that my entire lower body was pressed against him, his hard places perfectly content to mold my soft places around them. He chuckled against my neck, now dotting my collarbone with his trademarked baby kisses.\n\n\"Here's what you need to know. One, you're amazing,\" he said, his hands now traveling up to the small of my back, fingers and thumbs massaging and manipulating. \"Two, you're amazingly sexy,\" he breathed.\n\nMy hands now hurriedly unbuttoned his shirt, pushing it back off his shoulders as our pace began to transition from slow and easy to fast and frantic. Now his hands were sneaking around front, his nails lightly scraping along my tummy, lifting my nightie so we were skin to skin, nothing left between us. I ran my hands up and down his back, my nails much more aggressive, digging in and anchoring him against me.\n\n\"And three, as amazingly sexy as this pink nightie is, the only thing I want to see for the rest of this night is my Sweet Caroline, and I need to see you.\" He panted in my ear as he picked me up, straight up, and my right leg went around his waist on its own.\n\nOnce again, the Universal Law of Wallbanger dictated that legs went around hips when they were offered.\n\nHe walked me backward to the bed and set me down gently. Leaning over, he pushed me backward on to my elbows. Shirt hanging down off his shoulders, he winked at me, nodding at his state of undress. I reached forward, crooked one finger behind the button on his khakis, and snapped it open. Seeing no peek of boxers, I gently nudged his zipper down just an inch or so, exposing the happy trail that led down, down, down to where all good things were found. Sweet mother of pearl. Commando.\n\n\"You got something against underpants?\" I whispered, raising one knee and forcing him between my hips. Forcing. Right.\n\n\"I'm against your underpants, and isn't it a shame they're still there?\" He smirked, pushing his hips into me, letting me feel everything.\n\nI dropped my head back, silently pushing down Nerves when she threatened to bubble up just a smidge. Piss off, Nerves. This was happening.\n\n\"No shame. I have a feeling they won't be on for long.\" I sighed, laying back to stretch my arms over my head, lengthening my body against his and encouraging his lips to further dance along the hollow at the base of my collarbone. I could feel him licking and sucking between my breasts. I arched into him, anxious to feel more. I needed more. He began peeling the straps of my nightie down, baring me and allowing him the access he needed to make me orbit the planet.\n\nFeeling his mouth on me, on my breasts, hot and wet, tickling and sloppy, was unreal. So I told him so.\n\n\"That feels unreal,\" I moaned in to the top of his head as the scruff from his light beard roughed my skin pleasantly. His lips closed around my right nipple, and my hips went off on a tangent of their own, bucking wildly beneath him, both of my legs now wrapped firmly around his waist. Lips and tongue and teeth now lavished across my cleavage, which spilled out over the edge of the nightie as he alternated between breasts, loving them equally. I was surrounded by Simon, and even his scent was turning me on, equal parts peppery spice and thick Spanish brandy.\n\nNonsensical words poured from my mouth. I was aware of a few \"Simons,\" and one or two, \"Yes, that's good,\" but mostly what I overheard from myself were things like \"Mmph,\" and \"Erghh,\" and a rather loud \"Hyyyyaeahhh,\" for which, frankly, there is not a correct spelling.\n\nSimon sighed over and over again in to my skin, his actual breath a turn on as I felt it wash over me. My hands had been left free to roam in the wonderland that was his hair, and as I swept it back from his face I was rewarded with the amazing sight of his mouth on me, his eyes closed in clear worship. He bit down lightly, closing his teeth around my sensitive skin, and my hands almost tore the hair from his head. It felt phenomenal.\n\nHis other hand was running up and down my leg, encouraging me to grasp him tighter between my thighs as his wondrous fingers began to come ever closer to the edge of the lace. It was the last boundary we had yet to cross: the lace frontier.\n\nI felt my breathing still as he went on final approach, his fingers brushing just under the edge of my panties, barely brushing. His breathing slowed as well, and as he continued to touch me gently, his face came back up to mine, and we had this moment, this quiet moment, where we just...stared. Awe\u2014it's the only way I can describe the feeling of his hand ghosting over me, delicately, reverently. Our eyes locked as he eased his hand further underneath the lace and then, with achingly perfect precision, he touched me.\n\nMy eyes fluttered shut, my entire body awash with so many sensations. My breathing started back up again, the intense pressure that had been circling all around and inside and out was now like a low-level hum, just beneath the surface of my skin. I moved with him, feeling his fingers begin to explore me, and I let out the tiniest moan. It was all I could let out. The feelings were so intense and the energy\u2014oh my goodness, the energy that surrounded us in that moment.\n\nI was sure Simon was unaware of the entirety of the emotion that flew around behind my closed eyelids. The poor man was just finally getting a little touch. But as his fingers became more deft and sure of themselves, something incredible began to happen. That teeny tiny little bundle of nerves, which had been dormant for centuries, began to spark to life. My eyes flew open as a very specific warmth began to move through me, starting at the center of my being and working its way out.\n\nSimon was most certainly enjoying this. His eyes were hazy and crowded with lust as I writhed underneath him. I knew he could feel me tense and come alive.\n\n\"God, Caroline, you're so...you're beautiful,\" he murmured, his eyes now crowding with something a bit more than lust, and I felt tiny pinpricks behind my eyeballs.\n\nI threw my arms around his neck and held him close, tearing at his shirt to get it off, get it off him so I could feel everything. He lifted himself from me for only seconds, ripping off his shirt in an exaggerated way that made me giggle but yearn for him even more.\n\nLowering himself back on to me, he slipped further down, his lips tracing a path down to my belly button. Circling it with his tongue, he laughed into my tummy.\n\n\"What are you laughing at, mister?\" I giggled, squeezing his ear. He was below the nightie now, his face hidden from me. Poking his head back out, he let loose a slow grin that made my toes point.\n\n\"If your belly button tastes this good\u2014fuck, Caroline. I can't wait to taste your pussy.\"\n\nThere are certain things a woman needs to hear at different times in her life:\n\nYou got the job.\n\nYour ass looks great in that skirt.\n\nI would love to meet your mother.\n\nAnd when used in the just the right context, in just the right setting, sometimes, a woman needs to hear the P-word.\n\nThis could be better than Clooney.\n\nThe moan that came out of my mouth when he said that word, well, let's just say it was loud enough to wake the dead. He let his tongue trace a path from my belly button down to the edge of my ruffles, and then with loving precision, he hooked his thumbs underneath the lace and dragged them down my legs.\n\nThere I was, spread out on top of PillowTown with a pink nightie bunched up around my midriff, all pertinent parts on display, and damn happy about it. He pulled my hips just to the edge of the bed and dropped to his knees. Sweet Jesus.\n\nAs he ran his hands up and down the tops of my legs, I lifted up on my elbows so I could watch, needing to see this wonderful man tending to me, taking care of me. Kneeling between my thighs, with his khakis unbuckled and halfway unzipped, hair at atomic heights, he was stunning. And on the move.\n\nOnce again letting his tongue lead, he planted open-mouth kisses along the insides of my thighs, one side and then the other, with each pass getting closer and closer to where I needed him most. Carefully lifting my left leg, he hitched it over his shoulder as I arched my back, my entire body now aching to feel him.\n\nHe gazed at me for a moment longer, maybe even just a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. \"Beautiful,\" he breathed one more time, and then he pressed his mouth to me.\n\nNo quick licks, no tiny kisses, just incredible pressure as he surrounded me with his lips. It was enough to make me drop back on the bed, unable to support myself any longer. The feel, the exquisite feel of him was all-consuming, and I could barely breathe. He worked me slow and low, bringing one hand up to open me further to him, letting his mouth and fingers and perfect tongue gently and methodically coax me into the stratosphere, rising up, filling me with the sense of awe and amazement I had been missing for so long.\n\nI allowed one hand to drift down to him and tangle in his hair, running my fingers through it with as much feeling as I could. The other hand? Useless. It was fisting the sheets into some kind of ball.\n\nHe lifted his head from me once, just once, to press another kiss against my thigh. \"Perfect. Jesus, just perfect,\" he whispered, so quietly I could barely hear him over my own sighs and whimpers. He returned to me almost immediately, an urgency now to his movements, his lips and tongue twisting and pressing as he groaned into me, the vibration riding straight through.\n\nI opened my eyes for a second, just a second, and the room was glowing, almost incandescent. All of my senses came alive, and I could hear the crashing of the surf, see the candlelight flickering on our bodies. I could feel my skin break into gooseflesh, the very air caressing me and announcing what I had been missing for months, years even.\n\nThis man could very possibly love me. And he was about to bring back the O.\n\nSnapping my eyes closed again, I could almost see myself, standing at the edge of a cliff, staring down into the raging ocean below. Pressure, enormous pressure was building behind me, nudging me toward the edge where I could fall, fall freely into what was waiting for me. I took one step, then another, closer and closer as I could feel Simon grasping my hips. But wait. If the O was coming for me, I wanted Simon inside. I needed him inside me.\n\nTugging on his shoulders, I pulled him up my body, feet kicking at his khakis until they lay defenseless on the floor.\n\n\"Simon, I need, please, inside, now,\" I panted, almost incoherent with lust. Simon, schooled in Caroline shorthand, understood this completely and was poised between my legs, hips nuzzled up into mine within seconds. He leaned down, kissing me wantonly, the taste of me all over him. And I loved it.\n\n\"Inside, inside, inside,\" I kept chanting, my back and hips alternately arching, desperately trying to find what I needed, what I had to have, to push me off that cliff. He left me for only seconds to fumble in his khakis, which I had kicked halfway across the room. The telltale crinkle let me know that I was safe, that we were safe.\n\nFinally I felt him, exactly where he was meant to be. He barely nudged inside, but just the feeling of him entering me was monumental. My own needs quieted for the moment, and I watched as he began to push into me for the first time. His eyes bore into mine as I cradled his face in my hands. He looked as though he wanted to say something. What words would we speak, what wonderfully loving things would we say to commemorate this moment?\n\n\"Hi,\" he whispered, smiling as though his life depended on it.\n\nI couldn't help but smile back. \"Hi,\" I answered, loving the feel of him, the weight of him, above me.\n\nHe slipped gently into me, and at first my body resisted. It had been a long time, but the little pain I felt was welcome. It was that good kind of pain, a pain that let you know something more was coming. I relaxed a bit, allowing my legs to wrap around his waist, and as he pressed farther into me, his smile became infinitely more sexy. He bit down on his lower lip and tiny frown lines appeared on his forehead. I breathed in, inhaling his scent as I watched him pull back just the smallest bit, only to thrust once more. Now fully inside, I welcomed him the only way I could. I gave him that little internal hug, which made his eyes flash open and peer down at me.\n\n\"There's my girl,\" he murmured, raising one rakish eyebrow and thrusting into me again, with more conviction this time. My breath caught in my throat and I gasped, unwittingly rocking my hips into his with a motion as old as the waves crashing down below.\n\nSlowly he began to move within me, sliding against me with a fantastic pressure, each new angle and sensation giving way to more of that warm tingly feeling working its way out to the tips of each finger and toe. The feeling of having Simon inside me, inside my body, was more than I can articulate. I groaned, and he grunted. He moaned, and I mewed. Together. His hips pushed me higher on to the bed, up toward the headboard. Our bodies were slick with sweat, crashing and smashing into each other. I threaded my hands deeply into his hair, tugging and writhing beneath him.\n\n\"Caroline, so beautiful,\" he sighed between kisses across my forehead and nose.\n\nI closed my eyes and could see myself, once again, on the edge of that cliff, ready to jump, needing to jump. Again, that pressure began to build, that crackle of energy spinning itself wild and frantic, pulsing with every thrust, every slip and dip of his hips into mine, driving him, unrelentingly, in and out of my body.\n\nI took one final step, one foot now dangling off the edge of the cliff, and then! I saw her...O. She was in the water down below, her hair like fire dancing along the waves. She waved and I waved and just like that, Simon brought one hand down between our bodies, just above where we were joined, and he began to trace his little circles.\n\nLittle circles from a perfect hand, and I jumped. I jumped free and clear and loud and proud, announcing my approval with a lusty \"Yes!\" as I rushed toward that certain high.\n\nAnd I fell.\n\nAnd fell.\n\nAnd fell.\n\nAnd crashed. Crashed and smacked into the unforgiving surface of the water, and I didn't come up. I fell for what seemed like an age, but instead of O meeting me at the bottom with open arms, I floundered, alone and wet. Every muscle in my body, every cell was concentrated on the return of the O, as if I could will her back. I strained, body tight and taut as I caught sight of her, just the very tips of her hair, like fire under the water, slipping away from me. She was so close, so very close, but no. No.\n\nI scrambled after her, trying with sheer will to make her reappear, but nothing. She was gone, and I was left underwater. With the most beautiful man in the world inside me.\n\nI opened my eyes and saw Simon above me, saw his beautiful face as he made love to me, and that is what this was. This wasn't sex. This was love, and I still couldn't offer him all that I had. I saw his eyes heavy and thick and half closed in passion. I saw a bead of sweat running down his nose and watched as it splashed lazily on to my breasts. I saw as he bit down hard on his lower lip, the strain on his face as he delayed his own well-deserved climax.\n\nHe was everything I had hoped he would be. He was a generous lover, and I could feel my heart beat to within bursting out of my chest to be nearer to him, to love him. He was everything.\n\nI lifted his hand from between us and kissed his fingertips, then wrapped my legs tighter around his waist and anchored my hands on his back. He was waiting for me. Of course he was. I adored him. I closed my eyes once more, steeling myself for all I was able to give him.\n\n\"Simon, it's so good,\" I panted, and I meant every word of it. I bucked my hips. I clenched in all the right places, and I called his name, over and over again.\n\n\"Caroline, look at me, please,\" he begged, his voice rife with pleasure. I allowed my eyes to open again, feeling one tear spill down my cheek. A strange look stole over his features for only a second as his eyes searched mine, and then? He came. No thunder, no lightning, no fanfare. But it was stunning.\n\nHe collapsed onto me, and I took his weight. I took it all as I cradled him to my chest and kissed him over and over again, my hands soothing his back, my legs hugging him as tightly as I could. I whispered his name as he nuzzled into the space between my neck and my breast, simple touches and caresses.\n\nHeart sat to the side and quietly sighed. Nerves? You motherfucker. Don't even think about showing your face here.\n\nWe lay for a while, listening to the ocean in our own little haven, this romantic fairy tale that could have, should have been enough. When his breathing returned to normal, he lifted his head and kissed me very softly.\n\n\"Sweet Caroline,\" he smiled, and I smiled back, my heart full.\n\nSex could be amazing, even without the O.\n\n\"I'll be right back,\" he said disentangling from me and walking to the bathroom, naked backside a sight to behold. I watched him retreat, and then sat up quickly, pulling the straps of my nightie back up around my shoulders. I rolled on to my side, away from the bathroom, and curled around my pillow. This had been the single best sexual experience of my life. Every i had been dotted, every t had been crossed. And yet, I was still no-go for O. What the hell was wrong with me?\n\nI will not cry.\n\nI will not cry.\n\nI will not cry.\n\nEven though he'd only been gone from the bed a few minutes, when he came back, I panicked and pretended to be asleep. Childish? Yep. Totally childish.\n\nI felt the bed dip as he climbed back in, and then his warm and still very naked body was up against me, spooning. Arms wrapped around my middle, and then his mouth was at my ear, whispering.\n\n\"Mmm, Nightie Girl back in her nightie.\"\n\nI waited, not speaking, just breathing. I felt him shake me a little bit and let out a little chuckle.\n\n\"Hey, hey you, are you sleeping?\"\n\nShould I snore? Whenever people faked sleep on sitcoms, they snored. I let out a tiny one. He kissed my neck, my traitor skin pebbling in the wake of his mouth. I sighed in my \"sleep,\" snuggling closer to Simon, hoping he would let me pull this off. The fates were kind tonight, as he simply hugged me tighter to his chest and kissed me once more.\n\n\"'Night, Caroline,\" he whispered, and the night settled around us. I fake snored for a few more minutes until his actual snoring took over, and then I sighed heavily.\n\nConfused and numb, I was awake until dawn.\nChapter Twenty\n\nI HAD FAKED IT.\n\nFaked it with Simon. There must have been a rule written somewhere, maybe even chiseled into a stone tablet: Thou Shall Not Fake It With Wallbanger. So let it be written, so let it be done. I faked it, and now I was doomed to wander the planet forever, O-less.\n\nWas I being overly dramatic? Oh my, yes. But if this didn't call for a little drama, what did?\n\nThat next morning, I was up and out of bed before Simon was even awake, something I hadn't done the entire time we were on our trip together. Usually we stayed in bed until the other one was awake, and then lounged for a while, laughing and talking. And kissing.\n\nMmm, the kissing.\n\nBut this morning I ran quickly through the shower and was in the kitchen making breakfast when a sleepy Simon came in. Shuffling across the floor in his socks, with boxers low on his hips, he grinned through his sleep haze and burrowed into my side as I sliced melon and berries.\n\n\"What are you doing out here? I was a little lonesome. Big bed, no Caroline. Where'd you go?\" he asked, planting a quick kiss on my shoulder.\n\n\"I needed to get moving this morning. Remember the car is coming for me at ten? I wanted to make you some breakfast before I left.\" I smiled, turning to give him a quick kiss.\n\nHe stopped me from turning away and kissed me more thoroughly, not letting me hurry through anything. I could feel myself closing off, and I was almost unable to stop it. I needed some time to process this, to understand how I was feeling\u2014other than miserable. But I adored Simon, and he didn't deserve this. So I let myself fall into the kiss, be swept away by this man once more. I kissed him back feverishly, passionately, and then pulled away just before it could become something more than a kiss.\n\n\"Fruit?\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Fruit. I made fruit salad. Want some?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Coffee made?\"\n\n\"Water is boiling. French press is all ready to go.\" I patted him on the cheek as I waved him toward the pot. We coexisted in the kitchen, talking quietly, and Simon stole a kiss or two here and there. I tried not to show how messed up my brain was, tried to act as normal as I could. Simon seemed to sense something was up, but he took his cue from me, let me lead this morning.\n\nWe sat outside on the terrace one last time, eating our breakfast together and watching the breakers roll in.\n\n\"Are you glad you came?\" he asked.\n\nI bit down on my lip at the obvious. \"I'm so glad. This trip was amazing.\" I smiled, reaching across the table for his hand and giving it a squeeze.\n\n\"And now?\"\n\n\"And now what? Back to reality. What time does your flight get in tomorrow?\" I asked.\n\n\"Late. Really late. Should I call you or...\" He left off, seeming to ask me if he should come over.\n\n\"Call me when you get in, no matter what time, okay?\" I replied, sipping my coffee and watching the ocean. He was quiet now, and this time when I bit down on my lip it was to keep from crying.\n\nI had packed early, so when the driver got here, I was ready to go. Simon had tried to tempt me to join him in the shower, but I begged off, making an excuse about finding my passport. I was panicking and pulling away just when we'd been getting so close, but this had really thrown me for a loop.\n\nI had put all my Os in one basket, and the problem wasn't Simon. It was me. The sex had been unreal, amazing, perfection even with a condom on, and yet still, no.\n\nSimon walked my bags out to the car and placed them in the trunk. After speaking to the driver for a moment, he came back to me as I walked through the house one last time. It truly had been a fairy tale, and I had enjoyed every moment.\n\n\"Time to go?\" I asked, leaning back against him when he approached me at the terrace railing. I was glad for the feel of him against me.\n\n\"Time to go. You have everything you need?\"\n\n\"I think so. I wish I could figure out a way to get some of those prawns home, though.\" I laughed, and he snorted into my hair.\n\n\"I think we can find something at home that will be suitable. Maybe we can have the others over next weekend and recreate some of the stuff we ate here?\"\n\nI turned to face him. \"Make our debut?\" I grinned.\n\n\"Yeah, sure. I mean, if you want to,\" he added sheepishly, looking at me carefully.\n\n\"I do,\" I answered. And I did. Even without the stupid, blessed O, I wanted to be with Simon.\n\n\"Okay, debut over prawns. That sounds weird.\"\n\nI laughed as he hugged me to him. The driver honked, and we shuffled toward the car.\n\n\"I'll call you when I'm back, okay?\" he said.\n\n\"I'll be there. Get some good work done,\" I instructed.\n\nHe brushed my hair back from my face and leaned in to kiss me once more.\n\n\"Bye, Caroline.\"\n\n\"Bye, Simon.\" I got in the car. And drove away from the fairy tale.\n\nOnce I was ensconced in my first-class seat, I had nothing but hours to contemplate. Strike that. I had nothing but hours to sit and stew and grumble. I'd cried in the car on the way to the airport, trying all the while to assure the driver I was fine and not stone-cold crazy. I cried because, well, there was sure as shit a lot of tension in my body, and it had to come out some way. And so it did, through my eyeballs. I was sad, and I was frustrated. Now I was done crying.\n\nI tried to read. I'd stocked up on trashy magazines in the airport in Malaga. As I paged through them, titles of articles jumped out at me:\n\n\"How to Know If You're Having the Best Orgasm You Can Have\"\n\n\"Kegel Your Way to Multiples\"\n\n\"New Weight Loss Plan: Orgasm Your Way to a Thinner You!\"\n\nLower Caroline, Brain, Backbone, Heart were all lined up and throwing stones at Nerves, who was trying her best to hide.\n\nI slammed down all my new magazines, throwing them into the seatback in front of me. I grabbed my laptop, powered it up, and put in my earbuds. I'd loaded some movies on before the last flight. I could let my brain escape into a film. Yes, I could do that. I scrolled through some of the movies I had on file...When Harry Met Sally? Nope, not with that scene in the deli. Top Gun? Nope, that scene where they do it, and it's all lit blue with the breeze blowing through the gauzy curtains? No, too close to my fairy tale.\n\nI found a movie I could safely watch, took three Tylenol PM, and was asleep before Luke learned how to use his lightsaber.\n\nSomewhere between the connection at LaGuardia and the flight across the US, I downshifted from sad to mad. I'd caught up on my sleep, was done with the crying bullshit, and now I was good and mad. And on a plane where pacing was discouraged. I had to stay in my seat and try to rationalize what to do with this anger\u2014and how I was going to live my entire life with no hope of an O. And again, overly dramatic? Perhaps, but with no O in sight, it's easy to have tunnel vision.\n\nFinally, we touched down at SFO and as I followed the crowd to baggage claim, physically and emotionally exhausted, I looked up into the face of someone I never wanted to see again.\n\nCory Weinstein. That machine-gun fucker.\n\nPlastered across the newsstand was his stupid face in a giant ad campaign for Slice o' Love Pizza Parlors. I stood in front of his giant head, which wore the biggest shit-eating grin as he posed with a giant pepperoni slice, and my anger bubbled over. It now had a face. My anger had a face, and it was a stupid face. I wanted to punch it in the face, but it was only a picture.\n\nUnfortunately, that didn't stop me.\n\nNot a smart thing to do, have a fit in an international airport. Turns out they frown on that. So after a strongly worded warning from TSA, and a promise that I would never attack a poster again, I packed myself into a cab, stinking of airplane, and went back to my apartment. I kicked my own door this time, and as I threw my bags down, I saw the only two things that could make me smile.\n\nClive and my KitchenAid.\n\nWith a strongly worded meow, he came running to me, actually jumping into my arms and showing the affection he reserved for moments exactly like these. Somehow his little cat brain knew I needed it, and he lavished attention on me as only he could. Shaking his tail and purring incessantly, he butted his head up under my chin and wrapped his big paws around my neck, giving me a tiny kitty hug. Laughing into his fur, I held him close. It was good to be home.\n\n\"Did Uncle Euan and Uncle Antonio take good care of you? Huh? Who's my good boy?\" I cooed, dropping him to the floor and grabbing a can of tuna, his treat for behaving while I was gone. Turning now from Clive, who had focused solely on his bowl, my eyes laser-locked on my KitchenAid. I was going to shower, and then I was going to bake. I needed to bake.\n\nAn unknown amount of time later\u2014although I will say the sun had set and risen while I floured and stirred\u2014I heard knocking at my door. I'd been baking so long I felt my back creak and squeak as I lifted my head from slicing some of Ina's Outrageous Brownies. They took a few extra steps, but oh boy, were they worth the trouble. What the hell time was it? I looked around for Clive and didn't see him.\n\nI shuffled to the door, noticing there was sugar all over the floor, brown and white, and I was performing an accidental soft-shoe dance. There was another knock at the door, more insistent this time.\n\n\"Coming!\" I shouted, rolling my eyes at the irony. As I raised my hand to open the door, I noticed melted chocolate all over my knuckles. Not one to waste, I gave them a heavenly lick as I opened the door.\n\nThere stood Simon, looking exhausted.\n\n\"What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be home until\u2014\"\n\n\"Not supposed to be home until late tonight, I know. I took an earlier flight.\" He pushed past me into my apartment.\n\nAs I closed the door and turned to face him, I smoothed out my apron a bit, feeling bits of cookie dough clinging to it. \"You took an earlier flight. Why?\" I asked, soft-shoeing across the floor to him.\n\nHe looked around with an amused grin, noting the piles and piles of cookies, the assorted pies on the windowsills, the aluminum-wrapped bricks of zucchini bread, pumpkin bread, and cranberry orange bread, stacked like the foundation of a house all along the dining table. He grinned once more, then turned to me, picking a raisin off my forehead that I didn't even know was stuck there.\n\n\"Are you gonna tell me why you faked it?\"\nChapter Twenty-One\n\nDUMBSTRUCK, I STOOD with my mouth hanging open as he walked farther into the room to contemplate the baked goods. He shuffled through the sugar and paused to swipe a finger through a bowl lined with melted chocolate. I sighed heavily as I returned to the counter to face him and the music as I removed a ball of dough from another bowl where it was rising.\n\nHow did he know? How could he tell? I flipped and kneaded the dough\u2014a fluffy, clingy brioche\u2014feeling my face flame. I thought I'd played it pretty well. I chanced a look up at him as he licked the chocolate from his finger, his eyes growing more concerned as my thoughtful kneading turned into punching. I took my frustration out on the brioche dough as I pondered an O-less life. Dammit.\n\nHis finger now clean, he brushed a lock of hair behind my ear as I continued to punch\/knead and flip. I winced when he touched me, the glorious image of him perched on top of me impossible to ignore.\n\n\"We gonna talk about this?\" he asked quietly, dipping his nose to my neck. I leaned into his body for a scant second, then caught myself.\n\n\"What is there to talk about? I don't even know what you're talking about. Are you delirious from the time change?\" I said cheerily, avoiding his eyes as I wondered if I could pull this off. Could I convince him he was crazy one? Goddamnit, how did he know?\n\n\"Nightie Girl, come on. Talk to me,\" he prodded, nuzzling into my neck. \"If we're gonna do this, we need to talk to each other.\"\n\nTalk? Sure, I could talk. He should probably know what he was in for with me, doomed to wander the planet without an O for the rest of my life. I picked up the dough one more time and threw it against the wall. It dripped and rolled down, sticky like those creepy crawly things I used to play with as a kid. I whirled to face him, my face still red but beyond caring now.\n\n\"What was that going to be?\" he asked calmly, nodding to the dough.\n\n\"Brioche. It was going to be brioche,\" I answered quickly, my tone frantic.\n\n\"I bet it would have been good.\"\n\n\"It's a lot of work\u2014almost too much.\"\n\n\"We could try it again. I'd be glad to help.\"\n\n\"You don't know what you're offering. Do you have any idea how complicated it is? How many steps there are? How long it might take?\"\n\n\"Good things come to those who wait.\"\n\n\"Christ, Simon, you have no idea. I want this so badly, probably even more than you.\"\n\n\"They make croutons out of it, right?\"\n\n\"Wait, what? What the hell are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Brioche. It's like, some kind of bread, isn't it? Hey, quit banging your head against the counter.\"\n\nThe granite felt cool against my defeated, hot skin, but I banged with less force when I heard the edge of panic in his voice.\n\nHe knew, and he was still here. He was here in my kitchen in that blue North Face pullover that made his eyes smoky sapphires and his entire body look cuddly and warm and sexy and virile and kick-me-the-in-head gorgeous. And here I was, covered in honey and raisins, banging my head on the countertop after killing my brioche.\n\nKilling my brioche. What a great name for a\u2014focus, Caroline!\n\nHeart had damn near leapt out of my chest when she saw him at the door. LC was close behind, involuntarily clenching at the sight of him. Brain had shut down in shock and denial for a moment, but was now analyzing the situation and leaning toward pronouncing him a worthy candidate, noting the time and distance he'd committed to discovering the cause of concern. Backbone straightened now, knowing innately that proper posture created a better-looking rack\u2014could you blame her? Nerves...fluttered.\n\nWhy. Why. He wants to know why. I examined him between bangs...ahem...and saw he was getting concerned. As was I\u2014my head was really starting to hurt. I was tired, overwhelmed, and underorgasmed. And a touch slaphappy?\n\nAfter one last bang, I straightened up, then listed a little left. I caught my balance, drew in a breath, and let fly.\n\n\"You want to know why?\"\n\n\"I'd like to. Are you done banging?\"\n\n\"God bless it, no more banging. Okay, why. Why? Here goes...\" I paced in a tight circle, dodging the chocolate chips and pecans that had congregated close to the counter on the floor. I spied Clive in the corner, batting a few walnuts back and forth between his paws. Nuts all over the floor, nuts in my head. Fitting. \"Know anything about pizza parlors, Simon?\"\n\nTo his great credit, he listened. He listened as I went on and on, circling the kitchen island as I ranted and raged. I could barely make sense of it myself: \"Weinstein...one night...machine gun...It went away!...night off...Jordan Catalano...Not even Clooney!...hiatus...Oprah...lonely...single...Not even Clooney!...Jason Bourne...almost Clooney...Pink nightie...banging...\"\n\nAfter a while he looked as dizzy I was beginning to feel. But I was determined to get it all out. He tried to grab me on one pass around, but I dodged his hands, almost slipping in a patch of crushed pecans, which I had crushed further in my circling. I had worn a path through the clutter.\n\nI made one last pass, this time muttering, \"Spanish fairy tale with prawns,\" when I tripped over a muffin tin and fell into his arms.\n\nHe held me close, breathing me in, kissing my forehead. \"Caroline, babe, you gotta tell me what's going on. The mumbling? It's cute and all, but we're not really getting anywhere.\" He pressed his hands into the small of my back, holding me in place. I pulled away a little, resisting his embrace, and looked him straight in the eyes.\n\n\"How did you know?\" I asked.\n\n\"Come on, sometimes guys know.\"\n\n\"No, really. How did you know?\" I asked again.\n\nHe kissed my nose gently. \"Because all of a sudden, you weren't my Caroline.\"\n\n\"I faked it because I haven't had an orgasm in one thousand years,\" I stated matter of factly.\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"I'm going across the hall to kick your door now,\" I sighed, pulling away and shuffling through the sugar.\n\n\"Wait, wait, wait, you what? You haven't had a what?\" He grabbed for my hand as I turned back to him, with everything out in the open now.\n\n\"An orgasm, Simon. An orgasm. The Big O, the climax, the happy ending. No orgasms. Not for this Nightie Girl. Cory Weinstein can give me a five-percent discount whenever I want one, but in return, he took my O.\" I sniffled, tears now coming to my eyes. \"So you can go back to your harem. I'll be entering the convent soon enough!\" I cried, the dam finally breaking.\n\n\"Convent? What? Come here, please. Get your dramatic ass over here.\" He pulled me unwillingly back to the kitchen and wrapped me in his arms. He rocked me back and forth as I let out ridiculous sobs and wails.\n\n\"You're so...so...great...and I can't...I can't...you're so good...in...bed...and everywhere else...and I can't...I can't...God...you're so hot...when you came...so hot...and you came home...and I killed my brioche...and I...I...I think...I love you.\"\n\nAll stop. Breathe. What did I just say?\n\n\"Caroline, hey, stop crying, you gorgeous girl. Mind running that last part by me again?\"\n\nI'd just told Simon I loved him. While my snot soaked into his North Face. I breathed in his scent, then peeled myself off of him and headed to the wall to peel off the dough stuck there. Nerves sprang to life, for once working for us. Could I cover? Could I rally?\n\n\"Which part?\" I asked the wall\u2014and Clive, who had stopped playing with his nuts to listen in.\n\n\"That last part,\" I heard him say, his voice strong and clear.\n\n\"I killed my brioche?\" I hedged.\n\n\"You really think that's the part I'm asking about?\"\n\n\"Um, no?\"\n\n\"Try again.\"\n\n\"I don't wanna.\"\n\n\"Caroline\u2014wait, what's your middle name?\"\n\n\"Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"Caroline Elizabeth,\" he warned, in a deep voice that unexpectedly made me giggle.\n\n\"Brioche is really good, when it's not flavored with wall,\" I blurted, my exhaustion mixing with my confession for an odd buzz. I actually felt a little relieved.\n\n\"Turn around, please,\" he asked, and so I did. He leaned against the counter, unzipping his snotty North Face. \"I'm a bit jetlagged, so a quick recap, if I could. One, you seem to have lost your orgasm, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I mumbled, watching as he took off his fleece, throwing it over the back of one of my chairs.\n\n\"Two, brioche is really hard to make, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I breathed, not able to take my gaze away from him. Underneath the North Face was a white button-down. Which was good enough on its own, but couple that with the way he was slowly and methodically rolling up the sleeves? It was mesmerizing.\n\n\"And three, you think you love me?\" he asked, his voice deep and thick, like molasses and honey and all things afghan\u2014blanket, not country.\n\n\"Yes,\" I whispered, knowing it was one hundred percent the truth. I loved Simon. Big, giant dur.\n\n\"You think, or you know?\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Well, now. That's something to consider, isn't it?\" he replied, his eyes dancing as he drew near. \"You really have no idea, do you?\" He spread his hands along my collarbone, brushing his thumbs across the very tops of my breasts.\n\nMy breathing quickened, my body sparking to life in spite of myself. \"No idea about what?\" I murmured, allowing him to press me against the wall.\n\n\"How thoroughly you own me, Nightie Girl,\" he said, leaning in to whisper this part in my ear. \"And I know I love you enough to want you to have your happy ending.\"\n\nAnd then he kissed me\u2014Heart was in heaven\u2014kissed me like it was a fairy tale, even though in this fairy tale I had dough sticking to my back and a cat with a pawful of nuts. But that didn't stop me from kissing him back as though my life depended on it.\n\n\"Did you know I started falling for you the night you banged on my door?\" he asked, kissing my neck. \"And that I as soon as I started to get to know you, I wasn't with anyone else?\"\n\nI gasped. \"But I thought, I mean, I saw you with\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what you thought, but it's true. How could I be with anyone else when I was falling in love with you?\"\n\nHe loved me! But wait, what's this? He was backing away...where was he going?\n\n\"And now, I'm going to do something I never thought I would do.\" He sighed mournfully, looking at the stacks of bread on the table. With a deep breath and a grimace, in one fell swoop he knocked them all to the floor. Bread rained down in foil-covered bricks around us, and I can't be sure, but I think I heard a tiny whine escape as he watched them hit the floor. But then he turned to me, eyes dark and dangerous. He grabbed me and swung me up on the table before him, nudging my legs apart to stand between them.\n\n\"Do you have any idea how much fun we're going to have?\" he asked, slipping his hands inside my apron, warm and a little rough on my tummy.\n\n\"What are you up to?\"\n\n\"An O has been lost, and I'm a sucker for a challenge.\" He grinned, pulling me to the edge of the table and snugly in to him. With his hands behind my knees, he wrapped my legs around his waist, kissing me again, lips and tongue hot and persistent.\n\n\"It's not going to be easy. She's pretty lost,\" I protested between kisses, worrying his buttons open and exposing his Spanish suntan.\n\n\"I'm done with easy.\"\n\n\"You should print that on cards.\"\n\n\"Print this\u2014why do you still have clothes on?\"\n\nHe laid me back across the table as I grinned up at him. My foot hit the flour sifter and sent it crashing to the floor, dusting us thoroughly in the process. Simon's hair looked like a biscuit, powdery and puffy. I coughed and a plume of flour came out, making Simon laugh out loud. The laughing stopped when I reached down for him, finding him hard, yet still covered in denim. He groaned, my favorite sound in the world.\n\n\"Fuck, Caroline, I love your hands on me,\" he said through his teeth, dipping his mouth to my neck and leaving a trail of white-hot kisses across my skin. His tongue swept out across me, underneath the edge of my apron. Hands quickly found the bottom of my tank top, and it went sailing across the room, into the kitchen sink. Within seconds, a pair of shorts found themselves swimming alongside, quickly followed by a pair of jeans and a white button-down.\n\nThe apron? Well, we were having a little trouble with that one.\n\n\"Are you a sailor? Who tied this knot, Popeye?\" he seethed, struggling to get it undone. In his struggles, he managed to knock over a bowl of orange marmalade glaze, which now dripped down the table and on to the floor. My contribution was to flip over a carton of raisins while I craned my neck trying to see the knot behind me.\n\n\"Oh, screw the apron, Simon. Look here,\" I insisted, snapping the front of my bra and tossing it to the floor. I pulled down the top of the apron, arranging and propping up my cleavage. Pie eyed, he looked at my now-naked breasts and went in for the kill. I was pushed roughly back on to the table once more, his insistent mouth now dragging down my neck, attacking my skin like it had done something personal to him and he was exacting his revenge. And a lustful revenge it was.\n\nDipping a finger into the marmalade puddle, he traced a path from one breast to the other, circling and pressing the sticky into my skin. Bending his head, he tasted one, then the other, both of us groaning at the same time.\n\n\"Mmm, you taste good.\"\n\n\"I'm glad I wasn't making hot wings. This could be a different story\u2014wow, that's nice.\" I sighed as he responded to my smart-assery with an actual bite.\n\n\"These would be extra spicy.\"\n\nHe laughed as I rolled my eyes.\n\n\"Want me to get some celery to cool you down?\" I asked.\n\n\"No one's cooling down in this apartment, not anytime soon,\" he promised, grabbing the jar of honey from the nearby counter and pulling aside my apron. Without missing a beat, he got my panties all wet. And not in the way you think, although there was that...\n\nAs I watched, he poured the honey all over me, covering my panties and making me squeal. He stood back to admire. \"Look at that, those are ruined. They're going to have to come off,\" he said as he came close again. I stopped him with a marmalade foot.\n\n\"You first, Mr. Man,\" I instructed, nodding at his flour-covered boxers. He raised an eyebrow, and dropped the boxers. Standing naked in my wreck of a kitchen, he was insanely cute.\n\nIn that instant, Heart, Brain, Backbone, and LC lined up on one side of the playground. They beckoned for Nerves, waving her over like a game of Red Rover. I looked at Simon, naked and floury and perfect, and I sighed with a giant smile. Nerves finally, blessedly, scampered over, and we were finally all on the same page.\n\n\"I fucking love you, Simon.\"\n\n\"I love you too, Nightie Girl. Now lose the panties and gimme some sugar.\"\n\n\"Come and get it,\" I laughed, sitting up and sliding my panties down my honey-dripped legs. I threw them at him, and they hit his chest with a loud thwack, the honey dripping everywhere.\n\n\"We're going to need one helluva shower after all this,\" I remarked as he wrapped me in his sticky arms.\n\n\"That'll be round two.\" He smiled, picking me up and carrying me to the bedroom, my body aligned with his, only the apron between us. And that wasn't going to keep us apart for long.\n\nDid I need an O? I mean, was it necessary for life? Being near Simon, being so close to him, wrapped up in his arms and feeling him move inside me, was it enough?\n\nFor now, it was. I loved him, you see...\n\nHe dropped me on the bed, and I bounced a little, rolling sideways and making the headboard bang a bit.\n\n\"You gonna bang my walls, Simon?\" I laughed.\n\n\"You have no idea,\" he promised, and scrunched my apron out of the way as I sighed and threw my arms over my head. I lazed backward, with a giant smile on my face. His fingers walked down over my tummy, my hips, my thighs, finally reaching me. After a gentle nudge, I let my legs fall open. He licked his lips and sank to his knees.\n\nHe touched and tasted me as he had in Spain, but it was different. It still felt amazing, but I was different. I was relaxed. Twisting and turning his fingers, he found that spot, the one that made my back arch and my moans grow deep. He groaned into me, causing me to arch off the bed again, his lips and tongue finding me once more, deliberate. My hands sought my breasts, and as he watched, I teased my nipples, bringing them taut once more.\n\nAgain, I had the distinct honor of feeling his mouth, his wonderful mouth, on me. I seized up, my entire body tensing at the sizzle of energy that ran through me, and then I relaxed once more. I started to feel, really feel everything going on inside at that moment. Love. I felt love. And I felt loved...\n\nHere in the daytime, where nothing could be hidden, everything was on display\u2014and covered in messy stuff\u2014I was being loved by this man. No fairy tale, no waves crashing, no flickering candles. Real life. A real life fairy tale where I was being loved by this man. And I mean looooved by this man.\n\nTongue. Lips. Fingers. Hands. All of it dedicated to me and my pleasure. A girl could get used to this.\n\nI could feel the sweet tension begin to build, but this time my body received it differently. My body, perfectly in tune for once, was ready, and in my mind, behind closed eyes, I saw myself begin to approach that cliff. In my head, I grinned, because I knew this time I was gonna catch that bitch. And then? Really amazing things began to happen down below. Long gorgeous fingers pressed inside me, twisting, and curving, and finding that secret spot. Lips and tongue encircled that other spot, sucking and licking, pressing and pulsing. Tiny pricks of light began to dance behind my eyelids, intense and wild.\n\n\"Oh, God...Simon...that's so...good...don't...stop...don't...stop...\"\n\nI groaned loud, louder, and then louder still, unable to contain the sounds I was making. It was so good, so good, so very, very good, so close, so close...\n\nAnd then the screaming began. And it was not my own.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye, I became aware of some kind of furry missile racing across the floor.\n\nLike some kind of pussified dive bomb, Clive ran at Simon, leaped, and dug into his back, attacking him from behind.\n\nSimon ran from the bedroom into the hallway, then back in again, Clive still latched on like some kind of rabid coonskin back cap that would not shake off. He had his arms\u2014does a cat have arms?\u2014wrapped around Simon's neck in a way that under other circumstances would have seemed like an adorable cat hug. But right now, he meant business.\n\nI ran after them, naked except for my apron, trying to get Simon to slow down, but with those ten claws digging deeper in, he continued running from room to room.\n\nThe irony that Simon was literally trying to run away from pussy was not lost on me.\n\nIf I could have watched from outside, rather than being involved, I would have peed myself. As it was, I was having a hard time stifling myself listening to Simon's screams. I really must love him.\n\nFinally, I backed them both into a corner, turned Simon around, resisted the urge to squeeze buns, and pried Clive loose. I quickly headed out to the living room and deposited him on the sofa with a thunk, patting him on the head once as a thank you for the defense, unwarranted as it was. Clive responded with a prideful meow and began licking his whiskers.\n\nI went back into the kitchen to find Simon, still huddled against the wall. I appraised him, his eyes wild as he leaned against the wall, wincing at his back. My gaze was drawn lower. Unbelievable.\n\nHe\n\nWas\n\nStill\n\nHard.\n\nHe saw my eyes travel down his body, reminiscent of the first time we met face to face. He nodded sheepishly.\n\n\"You're still hard,\" I blurted, breathing heavily as I tried once more to untie my apron.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"That's amazing.\"\n\n\"You're amazing.\"\n\n\"Ah, fuck,\" I huffed, giving up on the knot.\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\nI paused for a split second, then whirled the apron around to my back in one swift movement. I leaped across the room, my apron flying behind me like a low-rider cape and crashed into him, driving him up against the wall as I assaulted him. He caught me as I wrapped around him like a feisty blanket, kissing him furiously. My nails raked down his chest, and he gasped.\n\n\"Your back okay?\" I asked between kisses.\n\n\"I'll live. Your cat, however...\"\n\n\"He's protective. He thought you were hurting Mommy.\"\n\n\"Was I?\"\n\n\"Oh no, quite the opposite.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Hell yes,\" I cried, sliding against him, manipulating my body against his, honey and sugar slick and gritty between us.\n\nI dragged myself down his body, stopping to kiss the very tip of him. I pulled him down onto the floor with me and flipped him onto his back so quickly a puff of flour clouded the air. There, in the middle of the kitchen, naked with marmalade dotting my breasts, I straddled him. Raising up just a little bit, I caught his hands and encouraged him to grab my hips.\n\n\"You're gonna want to hold on for this,\" I whispered, and sank down onto him. We both sighed at the same time, the feeling of him inside me once more just amazing. I arched my back and flexed my hips experimentally...once...twice...a third time. It really was true what they said about riding a bike. My body remembered this just as quickly.\n\nWith my stupid apron riding bitch behind me, I began to move above Simon, feeling him move inside me, responding and rewarding, thrusting and never relenting. Driving, pushing, we moved together\u2014actually even moving across the kitchen floor a little. He sat up underneath me, moving deeper into me as I cried out. My hands were wild in his hair. It was standing straight up beneath my fingers as I took hold, anchoring myself as I closed my eyes and began.\n\nBegan that long march to the edge of the cliff.\n\nI could see the edge, high above the raging waters. As I peeked over the edge, I saw her. O. She waved at me, diving under and over the water like a sexual porpoise. Crafty little bitch.\n\nSimon was kissing my neck, licking and sucking my skin, making me insane.\n\nI stuck one foot over the edge, pointing my toes directly at her, rolling my ankle and waving little circles in the air in her direction.\n\nLittle circles.\n\nI pushed Simon back onto the floor, grabbed his hand in mine, and brought it between my legs. I rode him hard, pressing my fingers against his, my cries getting louder as we sped up our rocking, both of us, in tune and right there. Right there. Right, right, right...there...\n\n\"Caroline, Jesus, you...are...amazing...love...you...so...much...killing...me...\"\n\nAnd that's the little extra I needed.\n\nIn my head, I took one step back, then dove. Not jumped. Dove. Executed a perfect swan dive, thank you very much, straight into the water. Clean and true, I grabbed onto her and didn't let go as I slipped into the water.\n\nThe O had returned.\n\nWhite noise filled my ears as my toes and fingers got the news first. They tingled, tiny fizzles and sparks of energy spinning up and out, driving through every nerve and every cell that had been starving for this for months. These cells told other cells, communicating to their sisters that something fantastic was happening. Color exploded behind my eyelids, bursting brightly into tiny little sensory fireworks as the feeling continued to spread to every corner of my body. Pure pleasure shot through me, pulsing and slicing, filling me up as I shook and shimmied on top of Simon, who hung on through the entire thing.\n\nI don't know if he could see the choirs of dirty angels singing, but no matter. I could. And it was the definition of bliss.\n\nO came back, and she brought friends.\n\nWave after wave crashed through me as Simon and I continued to press and twist, arching into every single one of them. My head was thrown back as I continued to scream lustfully, not caring who or what could hear me in my own House of Orgasm.\n\nI opened my eyes at one point to see Simon below me, frantic and happy, smiling big as he stayed with me through it all, his strenuous effort clear across his face as the flour in his hair turned into a wonderful little paste.\n\nHe was becoming papier-mach\u00e9.\n\nStill onward I thrashed, passing through the land of multiples and into some kind of no man's land. Passing six and seven, my body became limp with ecstasy.\n\nBut O brought one more friend. She brought along G, the Holy Grail.\n\nStuttering like an idiot, I grasped hold of Simon, holding on for dear life as the biggest tidal wave of love and toe-curling heat hit me like a ton of bricks. Sensing I needed help for this one, Simon sat up, which positioned him even more uniquely. He found a spot deep inside, hidden to most, and he leaned into me, driving himself over and over again as I held my breath and hung on tight.\n\nI finally opened my eyes again, seeing light spark around the room as oxygen rushed back into my system. I babbled incomprehensibly into his chest as he rocked into me again and again, finally finding his own kind of amazing somewhere deep inside me.\n\nI held onto him, feeling the waves finally retreat, both of us shaking now. As we panted, the pleasure left and the love simply rushed in, filling me back up again. My mouth was too tired to move. He had taken my breath away. So I did the best I could, I placed his hand over my heart and kissed his sweet face. He seemed to understand, and kissed me back. I hummed with happiness. Humming didn't take as much effort.\n\nUtterly spent and exhausted, punch drunk and covered in sticky sweat, I lay back against his legs, not caring a bit how contorted and ridiculous I looked as tension tears ran down the sides of my face and into my ears. Sensing this was not the most comfortable position for me, Simon moved out from under me and helped to unbend my pretzel legs before cradling me in his arms on the kitchen floor.\n\nWe lay quietly, not speaking for a while. I noticed Clive sitting just inside the doorway to the bedroom licking his paws quietly.\n\nAll was good.\n\nWhen movement seemed possible, I tried to sit up, the room spinning a little. Simon kept one arm around me as we appraised the situation, the overturned bowls and bottles, the scattered bread, the chaos that was my kitchen. I laughed quietly and turned to him. He watched me with happy eyes.\n\n\"Should we clean this up?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, let's shower.\"\n\n\"'Kay,\" he answered, helping me up.\n\nI cracked my back like an old lady, wincing at the good hurt my body felt. I started for the bathroom, then changed direction, heading for the fridge. I grabbed a bottle of Gatorade and tossed it to him. \"You're gonna need it.\" I winked, flouncing my apron on my way to the shower. Now that the O was back, I planned to waste no time in summoning her again.\n\nAs Simon followed me to the bathroom, taking a swig of Gatorade, Clive suddenly flopped onto the floor, rolling over on his back. He seemed to be waving Simon over with his paws. Simon looked at me, and I shrugged. We both looked at Clive, who wiggled on his back, continuing to wave him over. Simon knelt right next to him, cautiously extending one hand. Winking at me\u2014I swear to Christ he did\u2014Clive wiggled a little closer. Knowing this could still be a trap, Simon cautiously reached down and rumpled the fur on his belly. Clive let him. I even heard a tentative purr.\n\nI left the two boys alone for a moment and went to turn on the shower so it could heat up. I finally got the apron knot undone and was able to abandon it on the floor. Stepping under the spray, I moaned at the feeling of the warm water hitting my still-sensitive skin.\n\n\"You coming? 'Cause I sure did,\" I called over the rush of the shower, laughing at my own joke. A moment later Simon poked back the corner of the shower curtain to watch me naked and covered in bubbles. He smiled like the devil as he climbed in. I drew in a breath at the sight of ten tiny punctures in his back, but he laughed it away.\n\n\"We're good. I think we just made friends,\" he assured, pulling me against him and joining me under the water.\n\nI sighed, relaxing. \"This is nice,\" I murmured.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nThe water beat down around us. I was in the arms of my Simon, and it couldn't get any better.\n\nHe pulled back a little, a question on his face. \"Caroline?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"Is any of that bread I threw on the floor...well...\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Is any of it zucchini?\"\n\n\"Yes, Simon, there's zucchini bread.\"\n\nSilence once again, but for the water.\n\n\"Caroline?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"I didn't think I could love you more, but I really kind of do.\"\n\n\"I'm glad, Simon. Now gimme some sugar.\"\nChapter Twenty-Two\n\n4:37 p.m., that same day\n\n\"IS THAT THE SOAP? Don't slip on the soap.\"\n\n\"I won't slip on the soap.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to slip. Be careful.\"\n\n\"I won't slip on the soap. Now turn back around and be quiet.\"\n\n\"Quiet? Not possible, not when you...mmm...and then when you...ooohhh...and then when you\u2014ow, that hurt, Simon. You okay back there?\"\n\n\"I slipped on the soap.\"\n\nI started to turn around to see if he was indeed okay when he suddenly pressed me up against the shower wall, holding my hands flat against the tile. Lips tickled and water sprinkled down my skin and across my shoulders as his body flexed against mine. Thoughts of runaway soap slipped from my mind as he slipped inside me, hard and thick and delicious. My breath left me in a gasp, amplified by the tile walls, made sexy by the water falling, and quickly followed by another gasp as he proceeded to thrust into me, achingly slowly and purposefully, his hands now gripping my hips.\n\nI threw my head backward, turning my face to find the sight of Simon, naked and wet. His brow was furrowed, mouth open as he invaded completely and without apology. I spiraled fast, awareness and clear thought narrowing down to a pinpoint before exploding, wordless words falling out of my mouth and down to the water, circling the drain.\n\nNow that O was back, she didn't dally. So far, at least, she arrived promptly and without question, shattering the memory of days and weeks and months of waiting and crying, begging and pleading. She'd rewarded me with a steady, constant parade that left me scrambled and silly, boneless and ready for more.\n\nGroaning into my ear, shivering and pulsing, Simon failed to slow his roll. He knew inherently, as I knew, that his girl was good for a few more. And so, with agonizing dexterity, he planted a wet kiss on my neck, left my body, spun me quickly, and was back inside before I could say, \"Hey, where'd you go?\"\n\n\"Nowhere, Nightie Girl, not anytime soon,\" he muttered, roughly grabbing my bottom and lifting me against the wall, using his weight to crush me against the tile, holding me to him and holding me inside. His body flexed while mine flattened, our slippery skin feeling indescribable against each other. How had I stayed away from this man as long as I had? No matter. He was here, inside me, and about to deliver another O parade throughout. I pressed back against him just enough, opening the space between us just enough to gaze down, lust clouding my vision but not so much that I couldn't see him entering me, over and over again, filling me up like no man ever had.\n\nNow glancing down himself to see what had me so transfixed, he was captivated as well, and a sound rather like \"Mmph\" left his mouth. His movements sped up, chasing it down, that feeling, that tipping point that felt so close to pain and so close to perfection. Those blue eyes, now filled with lust and fire, flew back up to mine as we both threw ourselves off that cliff again together.\n\nSeizing. Freezing. Locked and unloaded. We came together with a roar and a grunt and a groan that left my throat raw and my hoohah thrilled.\n\nThrilled hoohah...what a great name for a...Mmmm...\n\n6:41 p.m.\n\nWalking around my apartment in only a towel, dodging flour piles and raisin clumps, Simon was a sight to behold. When he skidded on a patch of marmalade and bumped into the counter, I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the couch. He now stood in front of me with a slice of zucchini bread as I laughed, an amused look on his face. I continued to laugh, and my towel slipped down, revealing more than a little of my assets. At the sight of boobs, two things happened. His eyes popped, and something else popped. Popped out. I raised an eyebrow at this latest development.\n\n\"You realize you are turning me into some kind of machine?\" he noted, nodding down at his HiThere poking through the towel. Simon took the time to place his zucchini bread safely on the coffee table.\n\n\"How cute is that? It's like he's poking his head out from behind a curtain!\" I clapped my hands.\n\n\"You may not be aware, but as a general rule, no man likes the word cute in the same sentence as his junk.\"\n\n\"But he is cute\u2014uh-oh, where'd he go?\"\n\n\"He's shy now. Still not cute, but shy.\"\n\n\"Shy, my ass. He wasn't so shy in the shower a little bit ago.\"\n\n\"He needs his ego stroked.\"\n\n\"Wow.\"\n\n\"No, really. I think you'll find he is quite receptive to stroking.\"\n\n\"Now see, I was thinking maybe he just needed a good tongue lashing, but if you think stroking will suffice...\"\n\n\"No, no, I think a tongue lashing is quite in order. He\u2014Goddamn, Caroline!\"\n\nI leaned in, brought the shy one forth, and immediately surrounded him with my mouth. Feeling him grow harder still, I settled myself on the edge of the couch, wrapped my arms around him and dropped the towel. Pulling him closer, and therefore deeper into me, I hummed in satisfaction as I felt his hands come up into my hair and trace my face. Reverently, he placed his fingers on my eyelids, cheeks, temples, finally burying one hand in my hair and the other, well, wow. He held himself. As I concentrated all my attention on the tip of him, he stroked himself at the base, something that was quite possibly the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. Seeing his hand, wrapped around himself as he moved in and out of my mouth...oh my.\n\nSexy isn't the right word for it. It is inadequate in the face of the pure erotica playing out in front of me. And speaking of in front of me, I hummed again in appreciation, feeling myself getting worked up just at the play my mouth was getting. Lucky mouth.\n\nI fell back against the couch and pulled Simon with me. He responded by using both hands to brace against the back of the couch, thrusting in and out of my mouth with conviction. The angle allowed him to penetrate more deeply, and made it easier for me to take more of him in. I grabbed his backside, feeling the thrill of attending to him, knowing it was me, only me, who got to have him in this way.\n\nI could feel him getting close. I was already beginning to know his tells intimately. I wanted him again. I was selfish this way. Releasing him with a final strong pull, I pushed him down on to the couch and straddled him. Feeling me against him, he thrust upward as I sank down, and there was that moment\u2014you know that moment? When everything feels stretched and pulled in the most delicious way? Your body reacts: something that shouldn't be inside is now inside and for a split second, it's alien, unknown. And then your skin senses a returning champion, your muscle memory takes over, and then it's so good, that feeling of fullness, of wonder and awe.\n\nAnd then you begin to move.\n\nGrabbing his shoulders for leverage, I rolled my hips into his, noticing not for the first time that he'd been intelligently designed with my exact measurements in mind. He fit inside me perfectly, two halves of a whole, some kind of sexual Lego. He sensed it too, I could tell.\n\nHe placed his hand flat against my chest, directly on top of my heart. \"Stunning,\" he whispered as I rode him, sweet and hot. He kept my heart in his hand as I rocked into him, his other hand on my hip, guiding me, positioning me, feeling me attend to us both. He struggled to stay with me, to keep his eyes open as his release rushed in. I took his hand from my heart and placed it further down, where he began to trace those damnable perfect circles.\n\n\"Jesus, Simon...oh, God...so...soooo good...I...mmm...\"\n\n\"I love watching you fall apart,\" he groaned, and I did. And he did. And we did.\n\nI collapsed into him, watching until the room stopped spinning and the feeling returned to my fingers and toes, warmth snaking through my body as he held me to him.\n\n\"Tongue lashing. What an idea.\" He snorted, and I giggled.\n\n8:17 p.m.\n\n\"Ever think about changing the paint color in here?\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"What? Maybe a lighter shade of green? Or even a blue? Blue might be nice. I'd love to see you surrounded by blue.\"\n\n\"Do I tell you how to take pictures?\"\n\n\"Well, no...\"\n\n\"Then don't tell me how to pick paint colors. And as it happens, I'm planning to change the palette in here, but it's going darker. Deeper, you might say.\"\n\n\"Deeper, you say? How's this?\"\n\n\"That's pretty good. Mmm, that's really good. Anyhow, as I was saying, I'm thinking of maybe a deep slate gray, with a new creamy sugar marble countertop, deepening the cupboards to a rich, dark mahogany. Holy shit, that feels good.\"\n\n\"Noted. Deeper is good, and very deep is even better. Can you put your foot on my shoulder?\"\n\n\"Like that?\"\n\n\"Christ, Caroline, yes, like that. So...new countertop, you say? Marble might be a little cold, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes! What? I mean, what? Cold? Well, since I'm not usually laid out like a jelly roll on the counter, the cold won't bother me. Besides, marble countertops are the best for rolling out dough.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" he warned, turning his face to kiss the inside of my ankle.\n\n\"Don't what, Simon?\" I purred, my breath hitching as I felt his pace begin to quicken slightly, unnoticeable to anyone but me, the one he was currently inside of.\n\n\"Don't try to distract me with dough talk. It won't work,\" he instructed, letting go of the countertop with his left hand and running it lightly over my breasts, back and forth, teasing my nipples into hard peaks with his fingertips.\n\nA frantic energy began to settle low, low in my hips and in my thighs, the pit of my stomach and points in between. \"No dough talk? No dirty dough talk for Simon? Mmm, but don't you think a little distraction is good from time to time? I mean, can't you just imagine me, bent over the countertop, working so hard for you...\" I trailed off, running my fingers through his hair, bending him to me to kiss him with a wet mouth, tongue and lips and teeth intent on bringing him deeper into me.\n\nI was perched on the edge of my kitchen island, very much naked, as was our fair Mr. Parker, buried inside and determined to make this last as long as possible. We wanted to see how long we could carry on a conversation while...well...doing it. So far seventeen of the most intense, sensual, fantastic minutes of my life, and that wasn't counting the foreplay. O was dancing in the periphery, wondering why she wasn't being granted immediate access. But now I had control of the bitch, and this sweet torture was incredible. Worth enduring.\n\nThat is, until Simon asked me to place my foot on his shoulder. Holy hell, he was wrecking me. One leg on his shoulder, the other leg he held open to one side, his hips rotating in maddeningly tiny circles, increasing in the smallest of increments. He was the one who insisted on the conversation, and I'd been able to keep up, until the foot on shoulder. Suddenly, parts that hadn't really been a part of it before were now being stimulated, and it was getting harder and harder to keep my wits about me. But really, who needed wits? I could be witless. As long as I could be under Simon, I was okay being witless.\n\nBut I could still play this game right now, while a few lingering wits remained.\n\n\"Don't test me, Naughty Girl. I will dirty talk you right off this island.\"\n\n\"Mmm, Simon, can't you just see me? Bent over, little apron with nothing underneath, rolling pin in hand, and a bowl full of apples?\"\n\n\"Apples? Oh boy, I love apples,\" he groaned, picking up my other foot and placing it on the opposite shoulder, his hands roughly pulling me even farther toward the edge, his pace picking up again just a bit.\n\n\"I know you do, with cinnamon? I could bake you a pie, Simon. Your very own apple pie, even a homemade crust...all for you, big guy. You know all you have to do is ask me...\" I smirked, trying to keep my eyes from crossing as he sped up again, the sound of skin slapping not even funny at all. There went another wit.\n\n\"How does that feel, Caroline. Good?\" he asked, surprising me.\n\n\"Good? It feels amazing.\"\n\n\"Amazing? Really?\" He pulled out almost all the way before sliding back into me all at once, making me feel every single inch.\n\nAnd the wit stands alone. \"You know, it does, but back to the apples. Would you like your pie served hot with vanilla ice cream? Warm and melty with\u2014oh my God...\"\n\n\"You really want to talk about this right now? Because if you keep this up, I'm going to be forced to get really dirty myself.\"\n\n\"Dirtier than apple pie talk?\" I asked, stretching and pointing my toes toward the ceiling, creating a new sensation.\n\n\"How about this, if you don't stop all this apple pie talk,\" he started, leaning down to place his mouth against my ear, making me shiver. One hand grasped my breast, roughly turning and tweaking my nipple. The other snuck down, feeling against me until he found the spot that made me tense and cry out. \"If you don't stop, I'm going to stop fucking you, and believe me when I say I haven't even begun to ravage you in all the ways I've dreamed about.\"\n\nHe stood back up and thrust. Hard.\n\nLast wit? Bye-bye. I ain't too proud to beg. \"God, Simon, I give. Just fuck me.\"\n\n\"Apple pie for me?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes! Apple pie for you! Oh, God...\"\n\n\"That's right, apple pie for me, apple pie for\u2014God, you're tight this way.\" He groaned, switching both of my legs to one side, holding them up as he pounded into me, again and again, never retreating, only advancing, looking down at me, watching as my back arched and my skin flushed, heat creeping as my climax broke over me, stunning me silent in its intensity as I was shaken to the very core of my being.\n\n\"I love you, Caroline, I love you, I love you, I love you,\" he chanted, thrusting erratically now as he sped toward his own release, sweat breaking over his brow as he clutched at my hips as I clutched him from the inside, holding him as long as I could, feeling his solid weight on me as he laid his head on my breast. How could his warm weight feel so good? It should have made it hard to breathe, constriction of the lungs and all that, but it didn't. Holding him, cradling his face as I swept his hair back, it felt the opposite of heavy.\n\n\"You're going to kill me, sure as I'm lying here,\" he moaned, kissing everywhere he could.\n\n\"I love you too,\" I sighed, gazing at my kitchen ceiling. I could feel a smile as big as the bay across my face. The O was going to be around for a very long time.\n\nNo way am I painting my kitchen blue.\n\n9:32 p.m.\n\n\"I can't believe this is the second time we're cleaning flour and sugar off each other. What's wrong with us?\"\n\n\"The sugar is good for exfoliation,\" I explained. \"Not sure what good the flour is doing us, though.\"\n\n\"Exfoliation?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I figure every time we sex it up out there, all that sugar helps us remove dead skin cells.\"\n\n\"Really, Caroline? Dead skin cells? That's hardly sexy.\"\n\n\"You weren't complaining earlier.\"\n\n\"Well no, how could I? You promised to bake me an apple pie. Don't forget that part.\"\n\n\"I won't forget, but I was somewhat under duress.\"\n\n\"You were under me, not under duress, under me.\"\n\n\"Yes, Simon, I was under you.\"\n\n\"Wash your back?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\nWe lay on opposite sides of the tub, relaxing and soaking off yet another round of kitchen goo. At some point, I was going to have to clean all that mess up, but right now the only thing I could concentrate on was this man in front of me. This man, up to almost his neck in fragrant bubbles, strong arms snaking out now to bring me closer. I spun in the tub like a buoy, bobbing back and forth and arranging myself in front of him. He used a washcloth to gently remove the last of the sticky that covered me. Then he pulled me to his chest, leaning back against the edge of the tub. Arms encircled me, tucking me in, surrounding me with warm water and warmer Simon. I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of it all. The safety, the sweetness, the sexiness. I shifted, trying to get impossibly closer, and then I felt him against my bum. Growing.\n\n\"Why, hello there, friend,\" I murmured, sneaking my hand through the bubbles to find him, wanting and wanton.\n\n\"Caroline...\" he warned, laying his head back on the edge of the tub.\n\n\"What?\" I asked innocently, trailing my fingers along the sides of him, feeling him react.\n\n\"I'm not seventeen, you know.\" He chuckled, his voice growing husky and needy in spite of his words.\n\n\"Thank goodness, or I would have to answer for my actions\u2014corrupting a minor and all that,\" I whispered, slowly turning over to rub myself along the length of him, soap and bubbles and water making me slippery.\n\nHe hissed slightly and smiled. \"You're going to break me, you know this, right? I swear on all that's holy, I'm not a machine\u2014Christ, don't stop doing that.\" He groaned, thrusting into my hand without thought.\n\n\"Ah, break schmake. I just want to fuck you until you can't see straight,\" I purred, tightening my fist as he splashed water over the side a bit.\n\n\"I can barely see as it is. There seem to be three of you.\" He moaned, pulling my legs apart and positioning me above him.\n\n\"Aim for the one in the middle, Simon,\" I instructed and slid down.\n\nYeah, we had some water to clean up.\n\n11:09 p.m.\n\n\"I'm just going to get the food. I need sustenance, woman.\"\n\n\"Get it, then hurry back to me. I need you, Simon. Why are you crawling on the floor?\"\n\n\"I don't think I can actually stand at this point. The machine needs a break. The machine may very well need repairs. The machine, wait, what're you doin' there, Caroline?\"\n\n\"What, this?\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, it looks like you're\u2014wow, do you touch yourself like that a lot?\"\n\n\"I haven't lately, why? Looks good to you, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's...wow...um...that's the door...the guy with the Thai is here. I...and I...Thai...I...\"\n\n\"Are you really rhyming right now, Simon? Mmm, that feels nice...\"\n\n\"Hello! Hello, anyone there? Someone called in an order for\u2014dude, how am I supposed to give you your change?\"\n\n\"Keep the change.\"\n\n\"Dude, you shoved a fifty under the door. You know that's like a thirty-dollar tip, right?\"\n\n\"Keep the change. Leave the Thai. Caroline, get on that bed.\"\n\n\"Mmm, so close, Simon. Sure you don't...want...me...to...mmm...finish...oooh. I love when you do that.\"\n\n\"Mmph, mumph, hah, hooo...\"\n\n\"Don't talk with your mouth full, Simon, Simon, Simon, Simon, Siiimmooooon...\"\n\n\"Okay, dude. I'm totally setting your food out here. Um, thanks for the tip.\"\n\n1:14 a.m.\n\nWe lay in bed, limp and a little stupid. My poor Simon, I'd ridden him to the brink of extinction. He wasn't a teenager, but even he was surprised by his...hmm...stamina. After the last round of crazytown, he crawled back to the hallway, retrieved the food, and we ate Thai sitting in the middle of the bed. I'd quickly stripped the sheets because raisins and flour clouds lingered from earlier. The amount of work I was going to be faced with in the kitchen tomorrow was daunting, but it was worth it. All of it. All of it was worth it.\n\nNow we lounged, settled but not settling. Still wrapped around each other but now clad in a pink nightie and a pair of sweatpants. To be clear, I wore the pink nightie. We lay side by side, facing each other, legs tangled and hands held.\n\n\"When do you have to go back to work?\"\n\n\"I told Jillian I'd be back Monday, although that is the last thing I can think about right now.\"\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\"\n\n\"Spain.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Yeah, it was amazing. Thank you so much for taking me, and then taking me.\" I nudged him with my elbow.\n\n\"It was my pleasure, on both counts. I'm glad you could...come,\" he snorted.\n\nNow that the O had returned, we could joke about it. We were quiet for a moment, just enjoying the music. Simon had hobbled next door a little while ago to put on a record. Even hobbled, he was sexy.\n\n\"When are you leaving for Peru? Ass, I still hate you a little for getting to go, but when are you leaving?\"\n\n\"About two weeks. And no hating on the photographer. I have to go, but I'll always come back.\"\n\n\"Oh, to be clear, I don't hate you for leaving. I hate you because I want to go too. But I digress. I love you more than I hate you, so we're good.\"\n\n\"We're good?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. You have to travel for your job. It's not like I didn't know this.\"\n\n\"Well, knowing about it and then being the one left behind are two different things,\" he said, eyes getting a little cloudy. I smoothed my hand across his cheek, feeling his scruff and skin and watching him lean into my touch. His eyes closed, and he hummed a contented hum.\n\n\"You're not leaving me behind. We live busy lives and will continue to do so. Just because you get to stick your dick in me now, that isn't going to change us,\" I replied.\n\nA slow grin spread across his face. Eyes still closed, but grinning. \"Sometimes dicks change people,\" he said through the grin.\n\n\"Sometimes dicks change what needs to be changed. Sometimes dicks make it better.\"\n\n\"Sometimes dicks make it better\u2014what an odd thing to say.\"\n\n\"Stick around, who knows what I'm gonna say next.\"\n\n\"Sticking.\"\n\n\"Stuck.\"\n\n\"Going to kiss you now.\"\n\n\"Thank Christ.\" I giggled as he wrapped his strong arms around me. We kissed quietly, thoughtfully. I settled down into his nook, perfectly shaped and smelling like heaven.\n\n\"I adore this nook.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"No one else gets this nook.\"\n\n\"It's yours.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes it is. Make sure you tell that to all those gorgeous Peruvian women who will try to seduce the hot American.\"\n\n\"I'll make sure to tell them my nook is spoken for.\"\n\nI smiled and yawned hugely. It had been an exhausting few days. I was jet lagged and had been rocked to within an inch of my life. Tended to make a girl tired. Simon leaned across me to shut off the light and tucked me back into the nook.\n\n1:23 a.m.\n\n\"Simon?\"\n\n\"Mmm?\"\n\n\"Are you asleep?\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm...\"\n\n\"I just wanted to say, well, I'm really glad you came home early.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm, me too.\"\n\n\"And I'm pretty smitten with you.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm, me too.\"\n\n\"Smitten like a kitten.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm, me too.\"\n\n\"Who's lost her mittens.\"\n\n\"Mittens, mm-hmm...\"\n\n\"Simon?\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm?\"\n\n\"Are you asleep?\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm...\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"I love you too.\"\n\n...\n\n...\n\n...\n\n\"Caroline?\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm...\"\n\n\"I'm really glad I came home early too.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm...\"\n\n\"And I'm really glad you came.\"\n\n\"Enough.\"\n\n\"'Night, Caroline.\"\n\n\"'Night, Simon.\"\n\nAnd as Count Basie and his orchestra played us off into dreamland, we curled around each other and slept.\n\nText between Simon and Caroline the following Tuesday:\n\nTalked to a buddy of mine. I think I figured out how to do those prawns you went so crazy over in Spain.\n\nPerfect, they'll fit in with the Spanish feast I am planning for Saturday. Everybody's coming, even Jillian and Benjamin.\n\nSure you don't want to have it at my place?\n\nNo, it'll be easier at mine. I have the island, which is better for prepping, but I'm commandeering your oven.\n\nCan I commandeer you on the island?\n\nThat's not the correct use of the word commandeer.\n\nPlease, you know what I meant.\n\nI did, and you may.\n\nSweet. Have you seen my running shoes?\n\nYep, they're in my bathroom where you left them.  \nI tripped over them this morning.\n\nIs that the thump I heard?\n\nYou heard that?\n\nYep, woke me up.\n\nAnd yet you didn't come see if I was okay?\n\nDidn't want to disturb Clive.\n\nI can't believe he's been sleeping on your side. Traitor cat.\n\nWe're friends now...well, almost friends.  \nHe peed on my sweatshirt again.\n\nHA! I have to get back to work, cat stealer.  \nWe still watching a movie tonight?\n\nIf that's what you want to call it.\n\nMakes it seem like we actually have plans.\n\nI have plans. Oh man, do I have plans.\n\nAs do I...\n\nI'm sitting here eating your apple pie...think about that.\n\nThat's all I can think about now...hating you.\n\nYou don't hate me.\n\nThat's true. Now go eat my pie.\n\n...choking...\n\nText between Mimi and Caroline on Thursday:\n\nYou sure I can't bring anything Saturday?\n\nNah, Sophia is bringing drinks,  \nand we're taking care of the rest.\n\nSo good to hear you in a we again.\n\nYes, I'm enjoying the we.\n\nAnd the we-we?\n\nWhat are we, 7? Yes, the we-we is good.\n\nGood to hear it. So have you slept in the bed of sin yet?\n\nNo, we seem to be staying at my place.  \nI think I'd feel weird in that bed.\n\nMany walls were banged from that bed...\n\nExactly. That's my point, feels strange.\n\nMaybe it would be nice to make your mark on his bed, so to speak. New era, new girlfriend, new banger?\n\nI don't know, we'll see...I know at some point  \nI'll sleep there, just not yet. Besides,  \nhe's having too much fun bonding with Clive.\n\nWHAT? Clive hates guys! Except gay guys.\n\nThey've come to some kind of weird kitty\/man understanding. I'm not questioning it.\n\nIt's like a new world order.\n\nI know.\n\nWant me to come over early Saturday and help?\n\nYou just want to get into my drawers again.\n\nThey need to be reorganized...\n\nCome over early.\n\nWAHOO!\n\nGet some help...\n\nThursday evening all was quiet. Simon and I sat on my couch, working. I was sketching a holiday concept for someone's ballroom. Yep, ballroom. This was the world I visited. Just visited, not lived in. I was still in my yoga clothes. Simon cooked, using my kitchen, in which he was becoming very much at home. He said it would be easier since we'd just end up at my place anyway, but I caught him lifting Clive up onto the counter so he could \"watch.\" I put that in quotes because the actual word was spoken by Simon to Clive. The entire sentence, I believe, was \"Here ya go, buddy. This way you can watch! You can't see too well from down on the floor, I bet, right? Right?\"\n\nAnd Clive answered. I know it was technically impossible, but the meow he uttered sounded like, \"Thanks.\"\n\nMy boys were bonding. It was nice.\n\nSo here we sat, me sketching and Simon making his travel plans for Peru online. He had something like seventy billion frequent flyer miles, and he loved to flaunt them in my face.\n\nSo quiet it was, save the scratching of my colored pencils on the page and his clickety-clack on the keyboard. And the clicking from Clive. Most stubborn kitty hangnail in the free world.\n\nSimon finished and closed up his laptop, stretching his arms over his head and exposing his happy trail. I may have drawn outside the lines a bit. He laid his head against the back of the couch, eyes closed. Within a few moments, the tiniest of snores began, and I grinned silently. I continued my sketching.\n\nTen minutes later I felt his hand reach out across the pillows, and grasp my hand.\n\nI only needed one hand for sketching after all.\n\n\"Holy shit, Caroline, these prawns are sick!\" Mimi moaned in a way that made Ryan readjust the way he sat.\n\nIt was Saturday night, and we were all gathered around my dining room table, full of Spanish food and Spanish wine. I'd had a blast trying to recreate all the wonderful food Simon and I had eaten. Not as good certainly, but pretty close. And of course we were without the coastal ambiance, but instead had the coziness only an autumn evening in foggy San Francisco can provide. The city lights twinkled through the windows, a fire crackled in the fireplace, courtesy of Benjamin, and laughter filled the apartment.\n\nI sat in my chair, tucked in to Simon's side as we laughed with our friends. I'd been a little nervous that we'd be subjected to some kind of hazing, since our inevitable getting-together had been the topic of conversation for so long. But it was good, everyone settled into the evening with only minimal teasing. Simon and I had stuck pretty close together most of the evening, but I could already tell we would morph into one of those couples that didn't need that.\n\nI never wanted to be that couple, the one that was entirely codependent and in constant need of reassurance. I loved Simon, that much was clear. One of us traveled, for goodness sake, so we needed to roll with it. And I thought we would. I felt him next to me, and I moved just a little closer. He slipped an arm around my waist, his hand patting my arm, squeezing and just making me more aware of him. I was aware. His fingertips traced little circles around my elbow, and I sighed as he pressed a quick kiss to my forehead.\n\nI would never need the Honey and the Baby. I just needed him and his little circles. Just needed to feel him at my side, whenever he was here. Jillian caught my eye from across the table and winked.\n\n\"What was that for?\" I asked, sipping my second glass of brandy. Simon was going to have no trouble getting me into bed later that night, not that he ever did.\n\n\"Things worked out well, didn't they?\" she asked, looking back and forth between Simon and me.\n\n\"Couldn't have worked out better. Subletting your apartment to me was the best decision you ever made.\" I smiled, leaning into Simon as he rubbed my shoulder.\n\n\"Jillian giving me your number so I could text you from Ireland, now that's the best decision she ever made,\" he added, winking at Benjamin from across the table.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know. Pretending I didn't know your mysterious neighbor was a damn good decision too,\" she said, a mischievous grin lighting up her face as Simon coughed into his brandy.\n\n\"Wait, what? You knew all along I was the one living next door?\" he asked, sputtering as I handed him a napkin. \"But you've never even been to my place!\"\n\n\"She hasn't, but I have,\" Benjamin spoke up, clinking his glass with his fianc\u00e9e's.\n\nSimon and I sat pie eyed as we watched them laugh and congratulate themselves.\n\nWell played...\n\n\"Okay, that's the last of it. No more dishes,\" Simon announced, closing the dishwasher. After everyone finally left, we decided to clean up the rest of the mess instead of leaving it for the morning after.\n\n\"Thank goodness. I'm beat.\"\n\n\"And I have dishpan hands.\" He winked, showing me how red they were.\n\n\"That's the mark of a good housewife.\" I just barely sidestepped his grabby hands.\n\n\"Just call me Madge and bring that fantastic ass back over here,\" he fired back, snapping a dishtowel in my direction.\n\n\"This ass? This ass right here?\" I asked, propping myself against the island just so, leaning forward on my elbows.\n\n\"You want to play now, is that it? Thought you were beat,\" he murmured, catching my bottom in his dishpan hands and giving me a light smack.\n\n\"Maybe I'm catching my second wind.\" I giggled as he promptly swept me up over his shoulder in a fireman's hold and headed for the bedroom. Upside down, I beat my fists against his bottom and kicked, though not so much as to actually get away. His feet stopped at the bedroom door.\n\n\"Forget something today?\" he asked, turning so I could see inside: stripped bed, no sheets.\n\n\"Damn, I forgot to put the sheets in the dryer. They'll still be soaked!\" I grumbled.\n\n\"Problem solved. Slumber party at Simon's,\" he announced, pulling open my lingerie drawer. \"Pick a nightie, any nightie.\"\n\n\"You want to stay at your place tonight?\"\n\n\"Yeah, why not? We've been sleeping here since we got back from Spain. My bed's lonely.\" He ruffled through piles of lace and peekaboo.\n\nHmm, his bed was probably lonelier that it had ever been before.\n\n\"So, pick one.\" He gave my ass another slap.\n\n\"Eh, you pick out something you like. I'll model it for you.\" I grinned, talking myself into this. Come on, I could certainly spend the night in his bed. Could be fun. I saw a familiar something pink and lacy make its way under his arm, and then we were off across the hallway. I managed to kick his door on the way in, something pretty hard to do while upside down.\n\nOnce more, I found myself in a bathroom, putting on lingerie for Simon. He really liked everything I wore. Whether it was actual lingerie or one of his old shirts, he didn't seem to care. And it was rarely on for very long.\n\nWithout meaning to, I thought of all the women who'd come before me, all the women he'd enjoyed and had enjoyed him. But I was here now, and I was who he wanted. I smoothed the silk over my body with a deep breath, my skin already beginning to tingle in anticipation of his hands.\n\nI heard him messing about with his record player\u2014the telltale crackle and pop of needle on vinyl such a comforting sound.\n\nGlenn Miller. \"Moonlight Serenade.\" Sigh.\n\nI opened the door, and there he was. Standing by the giant Wallbanger bed of sin. His slow grin overtook me, and he looked me up and down.\n\n\"You look good,\" he murmured as I walked in.\n\n\"You too.\"\n\n\"I'm wearing the same clothes I was wearing earlier, Caroline.\"\n\nHe smirked as I encircled his neck with my arms. His fingertips dragged up and down my arms, tickling the inside of my elbow.\n\n\"I know,\" I replied, placing a wet kiss under his ear. \"You looked good then, and you look good now.\"\n\n\"Lemme get a better look at you,\" he whispered, responding with his own wet kiss at the base of my throat. I shivered. The room wasn't at all cold.\n\nHe spun me out, as if on a dance floor, and held me at arm's length for just a moment. The pink nightie, his favorite. He'd neglected to bring the matching panties, and I neglected to notice. He spun me back into him, and I immediately began to work the buttons on his shirt.\n\n\"Quite a night tonight,\" he remarked.\n\nTwo buttons down.\n\n\"You're telling me. I can't believe those two were matchmaking from the very beginning! Although I don't think they can take credit for the other two couples. That was all us.\"\n\n\"Who knew love was in the air when you banged on my door?\"\n\nAnother button down.\n\n\"Luckily, you were so taken by my charms, it was inevitable.\"\n\n\"It was the nightie, Caroline. It was the nightie that did me in. The charms were a bonus. I had no idea I'd be getting a girlfriend out of the deal.\"\n\nShirt untucked and on its way off.\n\n\"Really? And here I thought we were just messing around!\" I giggled, scrambling to get his belt buckle poked through.\n\n\"Well, then, here's to messing around with my girlfriend!\" Belt buckle undone, jean buttons popped. Thank goodness for the old-fashioned button fly. He picked me up, by my naked bottom I might add, and walked me to the bed as I pushed his shirt off. It hung from him by the sleeves.\n\n\"I like the sound of that,\" I whispered in his ear as he laid me down on the bed.\n\nHovering over me, placing kisses across my chest, he kept saying the word over and over again. Girlfriend, then kiss. Girlfriend, girlfriend, then kiss.\n\n\"Did you know Mimi and Neil are thinking about moving in together? Isn't that a little soon? I hope they know what they're getting into,\" I reported, arching up to meet his kisses.\n\n\"I know what I'm getting in to.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You, silly,\" he said, and I heard the blessed sound of his belt buckle hitting the floor. \"I'm only concerned with our happy ending. Or two, or three even. Drank that ginseng tea you left me this morning\u2014watch out.\" He chuckled, lifting one of my legs on to his shoulder and kissing a path down the inside of my calf.\n\n\"Happy ending, huh?\"\n\n\"Don't you think we've earned it?\" he asked, kneeling now, lips trailing along the top of my thigh as I panted.\n\n\"Oh, hell, yes,\" I laughed, throwing my arms over my head and arching up to meet him. Hello, O! Nice to see you again. With his lips, he brought me one. With his tongue, he brought me another. And when he slid into me and pushed me high up on to the bed, I almost had another on contact.\n\nClothes now discarded, skin on sweaty skin, my legs wrapped solidly around his hips, which pushed against mine. His eyes burned as I felt every inch of him. Inside. Outside. All around the town.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" I moaned. And then I heard it.\n\nThump.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" I moaned again.\n\nThump thump.\n\nI giggled at the sound. We were banging.\n\nHe looked down at me, raising one eyebrow. \"Something funny?\" he asked, pausing his movements. He pushed back into me slowly, very, very slowly.\n\n\"We're banging the walls.\" I giggled again, watching his eyes change as he registered my giggling.\n\n\"We sure are,\" he admitted, chuckling a little as well. \"You okay?\"\n\nI wrapped my legs even tighter around his waist, making sure I was as close to him as I could be. \"Bring it on home, Wallbanger.\" I winked, and he complied.\n\nI was being driven up the bed with the strength of his thrusts. He drove into me with unflinching force, giving me exactly what I could take, then pushing me just past that edge. He stared down at me, hard, flashing that knowing smirk. I closed my eyes, letting myself feel how deeply I was being affected. And by deep, I mean deep...\n\nHe grasped my hands and brought them above my head to the headboard.\n\n\"You're gonna wanna hold on for this,\" he whispered and threw one of my legs up over his shoulder as he altered his hips.\n\n\"Simon!\" I shrieked, feeling my body begin to spasm. His eyes, those damnable blue eyes, bore into mine as I shook around him.\n\nHe called out my name, and no one else's.\n\nA little while later, almost asleep, I felt the mattress dip as Simon left the bed. Hearing him flip over the record, I snuggled deeper into the pillow. My body was deliciously tired, having been worked to within an inch of total exhaustion. We banged that wall, yes indeed. I owned both sides of that wall now.\n\nI heard him bumble down the hall and half wondered what he was up to. Thinking in that tired, half-awake way that he must be getting some water, I slipped back down to sleep.\n\nA few moments later I was awoken by his arms sliding around me, pulling me against his warm body. He kissed me on my neck, then cheek, then forehead as he got settled. Then I heard...purring?\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked, looking around.\n\n\"I thought he might be lonely,\" Simon admitted sheepishly. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Simon, and then Clive. Simon had gone over to get him. Clive was purring very loudly, quite pleased with all the attention he'd been receiving lately. He poked his nose in to me and settled into the nook between us.\n\n\"Unbelievable,\" I muttered, rolling my eyes at the two of them.\n\n\"Are you that surprised? You know much I love pussy,\" Simon deadpanned. Then his silent laughter shook the bed.\n\n\"You're very lucky I love you,\" I added, letting his arms hold me tight.\n\n\"I'll say.\"\n\nAnd then, as the laughter faded and sleep took hold, I pondered what the future might hold for me and my Wallbanger.\n\nI knew it wouldn't always be this easy. But it sure as hell would be a good time.\n\nAll was quiet as I set out on patrol, making sure the perimeter was secure. I padded through my new territory, taking notice of any loose Q-Tips. They would need to be dealt with if unruly. If allowed to run unchecked, they would multiply. I'd seen it happen.\n\nI came upon a curious shelf with nothing but glass bottles on it. I batted at one, watching as it fell to the floor. I would have to come back to this location, but for now I had rounds.\n\nChecking the view from the front window, I saw that I could retain control of my neighborhood from this vantage point. I scouted a possible napping station in another window with southern exposure, then stopped for a stare-off with an owl outside. Neither of us gave in willingly, and it was another fifteen minutes before I continued on to check on my people. They had finally quieted down after several rounds of caterwauling. Honestly.\n\nThe Feeder was, predictably, taking up most of the sleeping quarters. The Tall One, aptly named because he was taller than The Feeder, was making that noise again\u2014the noise I simply could not tolerate. The Feeder was beginning to toss and turn. She was not sleeping soundly. Without enough sleep, she would be unlikely to play with me the following evening, so this situation would have to be remedied. She did seem to enjoy our games, so I would once more take matters into my own paws.\n\nJumping from the floor to the bed with a natural grace\u2014a grace that was not fully appreciated by my people, I felt\u2014I navigated my way through knees and legs, arms and elbows, until I reached the pinnacle and came to rest just beneath his chin. Stretching out one paw, I placed it over his breathing holes, stopping the noise momentarily. The Tall One brushed away my effort, although once he rolled onto his side, the noise stopped. He curled in to himself, in the one corner The Feeder had allowed him. As he had done so, I remained standing, doing my best log-rolling impression and maintaining perfect balance. Again, my people just didn't get it.\n\nSettling into the nook between them, I rested. Our home was secure, and I now watched over The Feeder and The Tall One, so I allowed myself to dream. Of her. The one that got away... \nAcknowledgments\n\nThere are so many people I have to thank for helping me bring this story back out there. To Lauren, who edited this from the very beginning and always told me when I was getting it right. To Sarah M Glover for her San Francisco insight and her insistence that I do have a voice and I should be encouraged to use it. To Elizabeth for allowing me to be crazy. To Brittany and Angie for recognizing that I was one of them and allowing me to play with the curvy girls. To Deb for being the best dirty cheerleader on the planet. To my real life mentors, Staci and Janet, upon whom the character of Jillian is entirely based. To the fantastic Banger Nation, those wonderful ladies who were there from the very first chapter and enjoyed the ridiculous with me. To the Filets for their support in the wee hours and their constant gut checks. To all of the wonderful readers and friends on Twitter who make it a pleasure to communicate in 140 characters. To authors like Laura Kaye, Ruthie Knox, Jennifer Probst, Michelle Leighton, Tiffany Reisz, Karen Marie Moning, and Jennifer Crusie for writing some of my favorite stories of all time. I have always been a reader first and a writer second, and nothing makes me happier than telling a friend about a great book I just finished and can't stop thinking about.\n\nTo the online writing community that allowed me the grace and space to create something I could truly be proud of.\n\nTo Keili and Ashley for making me funny again and starting something as silly as Not Your Mother's Podcast with me.\n\nSpecial thanks to my editor, Jessica, who is the perfect blend of smart and sassy. You are a perfectionist, you are a sounding board in a padded room, you are the colon to my semi.\n\nVery special thanks to Enn for bringing me back into the fold, listening to my rants, and putting up with my commas. For working your ass off. For always having my back. There is a taco in heaven with your name on it.\n\nAnd of course big fat thanks to Peter for always taking such good care of me. I adore your giant thumbs.\n\nThank you to all the readers, to all the Nuts Girls, to all the Bangers, to all the chickens. Thank you.\n\nAlice\n\nxoxo\nAlready missing Simon, Caroline, and Clive?\n\nCheck out how they're dealing with being in a *gulp* relationship...\n\nRUSTY NAILED\n\n## chapter one\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nThump thump\n\n\"Caroline, don't say those things to me when I'm so far away.\" Simon chuckled, his voice low. And still as thrilling as it ever was.\n\n\"Silly Simon, I'm simply reacting to the banging on the other side of the wall.\"\n\n\"Who's on the other side of the wall?\"\n\n\"The guy with the hammer. You should see it. It's huge.\"\n\n\"I'm going to have to ask you not to talk about some other guy's hammer.\"\n\n\"Then get home and wow me with yours.\" I laughed, closing the door to my office to reduce the noise. It wouldn't be my office much longer, though. I was moving up in the world\u2014or at least down the hall. That was the cause of the banging: renovating my new space. Bigger office, corner office, thank you very much, right next to Jillian's, my boss and owner of. Better view of the bay and almost twice the size of my old office, with a small anteroom for a possible future intern.\n\nI might one day have an intern. How was this my life?\n\n\"I'll be home tomorrow. Think you can keep your thoughts on my hammer until then?\" he asked. I glanced at the calendar on my desk, Simon's arrival home circled.\n\n\"I'm gonna do my best, babe, but you should see how thick that tool belt is. No promises.\" Simon groaned and I laughed harder. I loved torturing him across multiple time zones. \"And don't forget my present.\"\n\n\"Do I ever?\"\n\n\"No, you're a thoughtful one, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Don't forget my present either,\" he said, his voice going low again.\n\n\"Pink nightie is ready to go; I'll be in it when you get home.\"\n\n\"And then I'll be in it, on it, under it, I'll\u2014oops, gotta go, taxi's here.\"\n\n\"We'll continue the nightie talk in person. Love you,\" I said.\n\n\"Love you too, babe,\" he said, and hung up.\n\nI stared at the phone for a moment, imagining him halfway across the world in Tokyo. This year alone he'd logged more frequent-flier miles than most people accrued in a lifetime, and he was booked solid for the rest of the year.\n\nI was still smiling at the phone when Jillian knocked and breezed in, then sat on the corner of my desk.\n\n\"Something on your mind, Jillian?\" I asked, pulling a browned petal from the vase of coral tinged roses next to where she was resting her cashmere-clad bum.\n\n\"I can see something is on your mind. Was that Simon on the phone?\" she asked as I grinned. \"Only he can make your face light up like that.\"\n\n\"I say again\u2014something on your mind, Jillian?\" I repeated, poking her ever so slightly with my pencil.\n\n\"I have something on my mind that might make your face light up even brighter\u2014although it is an interesting tomato-soup color right now,\" she teased.\n\n\"Does your fianc\u00e9 find you as annoying as everyone who works for you does?\"\n\n\"Way more, way way more. You ready to hear the big news, or did you want to keep sassing me?\"\n\n\"Hit me,\" I said with a sigh.\n\nI love my boss, but she does have a flair for the dramatic. Like when she played matchmaker last year for Simon and me, playing dumb the entire time. But her heart was in the right place. It also belonged 100 percent totally and completely to Benjamin, a venture capitalist. They'd been together for years and were finally tying the knot in a few weeks, in a wedding that all of San Francisco was talking about. Benjamin was a certifiable dreamboat who made my best friends and me giddy and word-trippy whenever he was around. Jillian knew we all had a not-so-secret crush on her man, and teasingly used it against us as often as possible. Now she was finally marrying our dream man, and heading off for a dream honeymoon all over Europe.\n\n\"So remember the job we did last spring for Max Camden? The waterfront Victorian we did, before his daughter got married?\"\n\n\"Yeah, he gave it to her as a wedding present. Who does that?\"\n\n\"Max Camden, that's who. Anyway, he owns the old Clare-mont Hotel in Sausalito, and he's looking for a new design firm to update it and give it a modern twist.\"\n\n\"Fantastic! Did you do your proposal already?\" I asked, picturing the property. Right off the main drag in Sausalito, the Clare-mont had been there since the turn of the last century, one of the few to survive the Big Quake.\n\n\"No, because you're doing the proposal. You'll be the lead designer on this project if you get it,\" she clarified. \"You think I can take something like this on? Right before my wedding? I'm not giving up my honeymoon for work\u2014I've given up too many vacations over the years as it is.\"\n\n\"Me? No no no, I'm not ready for that, you're not ready for that, what are you thinking?\" I stammered, my heart leaping into my throat. This was big-time, baby.\n\n\"Please, you got this.\" She kicked me gently. \"Feel that? That's my foot, kicking you out of the nest.\"\n\n\"Um, yeah, I've been out of the nest awhile now, but this is different,\" I protested, chewing on my pencil.\n\nWhich she plucked out of my mouth. \"You really think I'd give this to you if you weren't ready? And tell me the truth, aren't you even the slightest bit intrigued?\"\n\nShe had me there. I'd always wanted to do a project this big. But to actually be the lead designer on an entire hotel redesign?\n\n\"I realize I'm asking a lot\u2014you're already going to be running the show around here while I'm on my honeymoon. Do you truly think this is too much to bite off at one time?\"\n\n\"Wow\u2014I just\u2014wow,\" I answered, taking a deep breath. When she'd initially asked me if I'd keep things running while she was on her honeymoon, it was things like making sure the alarm was set each night and that Ashley made sure to order coffee creamer. The list had steadily grown larger as projects stacked up, but still very much manageable. Now this?\n\nI let the idea sit for a moment. Could I do this? Jillian seemed to think so.\n\n\"Hmm . . .\"\n\nI pictured the hotel: great light, great location, but needed a major overhaul. I was already thinking about potential palettes when she tapped me on the head with her pencil.\n\n\"Come in, Caroline. Hello,\" she said, waving her hand in front of my face.\n\nI grinned at her. \"I'm in, let's go for it,\" I said, my head already full of ideas.\n\nShe grinned back and offered me a fist bump. \"I'll let the team know you'll be presenting.\"\n\n\"Presenting my vomit, most likely,\" I said, only half kidding.\n\n\"Just make sure it matches the drapes and we're in the clear. Now, let's celebrate by choosing a song to walk down the aisle to.\" She pulled her iPod out of her pocket and started scrolling through.\n\n\"Is that in my job description?\"\n\n\"That you indulge me? Yes, check your contract. So when I walk down the aisle, which song should I . . .\"\n\nThere was no stopping her once she'd put on her Wedding Hat, so I relaxed a bit, even though my mind was spinning. This was big-time baby, but I had this.\n\nRight?\n\nI spent the afternoon framing out the beginnings of a pitch to Max Camden. As I pulled archival photos of the hotel and the surrounding area, ideas were beginning to present themselves. Not fully formed yet, but hinting at what might be an approach interesting enough to take a chance on a young designer. I knew that the strength of my ideas would be bolstered by Jillian's reputation; anyone who was good enough to work for her was usually granted wider berth. However, it still came down to whose ideas were best\u2014and I wanted this concept to be epic.\n\nStill musing over the project as I turned my key in my front door, I heard a distinct thump, followed by a click click click padding toward me.\n\nClive.\n\nPushing through the door, I was greeted by my wonder cat, my own little piece of feline heaven. In a burst of gray fur, my ankles were surrounded by purrs and insistent nudges.\n\n\"Hi there, sweet boy, were you a good boy today?\" I asked, leaning down to scratch his silky fur.\n\nArching up into my hand, he assured me that yes, he was in fact a sweet boy, and also a good boy. Berating me for leaving him alone for a thousand years, he cooed and chirped, herding me toward the kitchen.\n\nWe talked as I readied his dinner for him, which of course I'd been put on earth expressly to do, and our conversation covered the normal subjects. What birds he'd seen from the window today, whether any dust bunnies had emerged from under the bed, and whether I'd find any toys buried in the toe of my slippers. He was noncommittal on this last question.\n\nOnce his kibble was in his bowl he ignored me completely, and I headed back to the bedroom to put on some comfy clothes. Untucking my turtleneck, I went to the mirrored dresser to grab some yoga pants. While pulling my arms out of my shirt, my heart leapt into my throat when I saw the reflection of someone sitting on my bed. Instinct kicked in and I whirled, fists clenched, a scream ready to let loose.\n\nMy brain only processed that it was Simon after my fist was flung.\n\n\"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the hell, Caroline!\" he yelled as he grabbed his jaw.\n\n\"What the hell, Caroline? What the hell, Simon! What the hell are you doing here?\" I yelled back. Good to know if I was ever actually attacked, I wouldn't freeze.\n\n\"I came home early to surprise you,\" he managed, rubbing his jaw and grimacing.\n\nMy heart was still racing in my chest, and as I tried to calm down, I noticed the suitcase in the corner. The one I'd missed when I'd come into the room. I looked down and saw the turtle-neck still hanging around my neck like a scarf.\n\n\"I could just kill you!\" I yelled again, charging him and pushing him back onto the bed. \"You scared me to death, you idiot!\"\n\n\"I was planning on calling out to let you know I was here, but then I would've missed that entire conversation with Clive. I didn't want to interrupt.\" He grinned underneath me, threading his hands around my waist and in and out of my belt loops.\n\nI blushed. \"Traitor!\" I yelled down the hallway. \"You could have let me know someone was here\u2014you're a terrible watch-cat!\"\n\nA disinterested meow floated back.\n\n\"I'm hardly just someone. I think I rate a little higher than that,\" he told the side of my neck, which he was now feathering with the tiniest of kisses. \"So, are you going to say hi to your boyfriend who flew all the way across the globe just to show you his hammer, or are you going to punch me again?\"\n\n\"Not sure yet; I'm still a little freaked out. My heart is literally racing, can you feel that?\" I asked, pressing his hand over the left side of my chest.\n\nOnly so he could feel my heart. Yep. That's the only reason. Heart was in fact delighted to have Simon home early; she loved a good romantic reunion. Other areas were delighted as well.\n\n\"See now, I thought it was racing because of me,\" he said with a low chuckle, dipping his nose along my collarbone as he \"felt my heart.\"\n\n\"Dream on, Wallbanger,\" I said, feigning indifference. The truth? My heart was now in Simon mode, and it was pounding for him. And speaking of pounding.\n\n\"So you came home early just to see little ol' me?\" I breathed into his ear, sneaking a wet kiss just underneath it. His hands dug a little deeper into my hips as he shifted on the bed.\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"Think you can help me with this turtleneck?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"And then after that, you wanna show me your hammer?\" I asked the front of his T-shirt, nuzzling at him, positioning my legs on either side of him. In answer, he thrust up and let me feel that very hammer. I chuckled. \"Mmm, am I gonna get nailed?\"\n\nHe lifted my turtleneck off, then unsnapped my bra and my breasts tumbled out, causing his eyes to flare, then focus with precision. \"No more questions,\" he directed, sitting up underneath me as he pulled me closer.\n\nI mimed zipping my lips just before he flipped me over onto my back. God, I loved this man.\n\nHis lips danced along my collarbone, nipping occasionally with his teeth in a way he always knew got me warm, fast. I got it; I'd missed him too. Arching my back, I pressed my breasts against him, twisting and turning to bring me into contact with him as much as I could be, my skin needing to feel his. After a year, he could still bring me to my knees in seconds with one touch, one kiss, one look.\n\nI pushed back against him, flipping us once more and pulling at his jeans. \"Off, now,\" I instructed.\n\nWhen his belt was gone, his buttons unbuttoned, I pulled apart his jeans to find that once more my man had gone commando.\n\nIt's like he was put on earth just to make me come out of my skin.\n\nI snuck one hand inside, grasping him firmly, feeling how warm he was; ready to take me on my own trip around the world.\n\n\"Fuck, I missed you,\" he breathed, his body lean and taut. I slid down the bed, kissing and licking at his skin hungrily. His hands came up to my face, fingers fluttering along my cheekbones, sweeping my hair back. So he could watch.\n\nI took him into my mouth, entirely. His hands clutched at my hair, freezing me in place, holding me exactly how he wanted me. \"Mmm, Caroline,\" he moaned, thrusting ever so slightly. Slightly, my ass\u2014that wasn't how this show was going down.\n\nI pulled back then took him in again, hard. Using my hands I caressed him, alternating my touch so he never knew quite where I was coming from, using my tongue and mouth to tease and tempt him, coaxing the sweetest dirty words out of that sent-from-heaven-mouth of his. That mouth that I knew would exact the sweetest dirty revenge all over my body.\n\nI loved him this way, loved that I could make him this insane. But just before he got too far gone, he pulled me up his body and took my panties off before I could say, hey, those are my panties.\n\nThen he pushed up my skirt, nudging my knees apart with his own. Gazing down at me with those piercing sapphire eyes, he ran his fingers over me, through me, making me groan and moan and shake and shimmy. \"So gorgeous like this,\" he breathed as I cried out.\n\n\"Need you, Simon\u2014need you, please!\" I was ready to tear my hair off my head and throw it at him, if I thought that would get him inside any faster.\n\nAny further thoughts vanished as he slid home. Thick, hard, and ten kinds of fantastic were all I knew the second Simon pressed inside me. \"God, that's amazing,\" I moaned, the feeling of him filling me overwhelming me.\n\nAnd when he rolled us so I was on top, and he thrust up hard inside me, it was perfection.\n\nUntil afterward, when we lay in a heap of sweaty limbs, and he asked me how I liked his hammer.\n\nThen it was beyond perfection.\nCaroline, Simon and Clive are back in USA Today bestselling author Alice Clayton's first book in her new Cocktail series!\n\nOrder now!\n\nRusty Nailed\n\n* * *\n\nORDER YOUR COPY TODAY!\n\nAbout the Author\n\nNovelist Alice Clayton makes her home in St. Louis where she enjoys gardening but not weeding, baking but not cleaning up after, and is trying desperately to get her long-time boyfriend to make her an honest woman\u2014and please buy her a Bernese Mountain dog.\n\nAfter working for years in the cosmetics industry as a makeup artist, esthetician, and educator, Alice picked up a pen (read laptop) for the first time at 33 to begin a new career: author. Having never written a thing, she soon found writing to be the creative outlet she'd been missing since walking away from the theater 10 years before.\n\nShe has a great time combining her love of storytelling with a sense of silly, and she was shocked and awed to be nominated for a Goodreads Author award in 2010 for her debut novels, the first two installments of The Redhead Series\u2014The Unidentified Redhead and The Redhead Revealed.\n\nAdditionally, Alice loves spending time with her besties on Not Your Mother's Podcast (check them out on iTunes). She also enjoys pickles, Bloody Marys, and eight hours of sleep.\n\nAlso from Alice Clayton\n\nThe Unidentified Redhead\n\nWhen Grace Sheridan returns to Los Angeles to become a working actor, it's a second shot at a life-long dream. With some help from her best friend and agent, that dream could become a reality, but at thirty-three, has Grace missed her chance at the big time? Will an unexpected sizzling romance with the entertainment industry's newest \"it\" boy shine an uncomfortable spotlight on her life?\n\nAlice Clayton spins a playful and erotic May to December romance in this, her debut novel. Clayton's funny, borderline neurotic heroine is perfect in her imperfections, and the off the charts sexual chemistry between her and her charming, yet blissfully unaware leading man are the true heart of The Unidentified Redhead. With laugh out loud dialogue and a super steamy romance that will get your heart racing, sneaking around in L.A. and dodging the Paparazzi has never been so fun.\n\nThe Redhead Revealed\n\nAs their careers catch fire, Grace and Jack \u2014 everyone's favorite foul-mouthed, funny, and feisty couple \u2014 find themselves on opposite coasts. Grace has landed in New York City, where she loves being onstage again, particularly because she's playing a fabulous character in a musical written by her old college flame, Michael. Their rekindled friendship makes exploring the city that much more fun.\n\nWait, it's just friendship, right?\n\nMeanwhile, in L.A., Jack can scarcely keep up with the swirling throngs of women who track him everywhere he goes, the endless press appearances, and the ridiculous rules his manager, Holly, keeps concocting for him \u2014 all part of the buildup to the release of Time, his steamy new film.\n\nThank goodness for phone sex.\n\nBut even when their schedules allow them to connect, Grace and Jack must keep their relationship off the radar and away from paparazzi cameras. Sure, the sex is sensational, but can this duo survive swirling rumors, the demands of their chosen professions, Grace's raging internal battles, and a whopping nine-year age difference?\n\nTick-tock, the clock is ticking. Isn't it?\n\nAlice Clayton brings the second installment of a tale told with her magical mix of humor and heat, so cuddle up under the sheets and flip on the Golden Girls. Grace and Jack are at it again.\n\nWe hope you enjoyed reading this Gallery Books eBook.\n\n* * *\n\nJoin our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nor visit us online to sign up at  \neBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com\n\nGallery Books\n\nA Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n\n1230 Avenue of the Americas\n\nNew York, NY 10020\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by Alice Clayton\n\nOriginally published in 2012 by Omnific Publishing.\n\nAll rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020\n\nFirst Gallery Books ebook edition February 2013\n\nGALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n\nFor information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com\n\nThe Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.\n\nISBN 978-1-4767-4126-0\nContents\n\nChapter One\n\nChapter Two\n\nChapter Three\n\nChapter Four\n\nChapter Five\n\nChapter Six\n\nChapter Seven\n\nChapter Eight\n\nChapter Nine\n\nChapter Ten\n\nChapter Eleven\n\nChapter Twelve\n\nChapter Thirteen\n\nChapter Fourteen\n\nChapter Fifteen\n\nChapter Sixteen\n\nChapter Seventeen\n\nChapter Eighteen\n\nChapter Nineteen\n\nChapter Twenty\n\nChapter Twenty-One\n\nChapter Twenty-Two\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nRusty Nailed Excerpt\n\nAbout the Author\n\nAlso from Alice Clayton\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\nKINGDOM OF SHADOWS\n\nGreg F. Gifune\n\nFirst Digital Edition\n\nOctober 2009\n\nPublished by:\n\nDelirium Books\n\nP.O. Box 338\n\nNorth Webster, IN 46555\n\nsales@deliriumbooks.com\n\nwww.deliriumbooks.com\n\nKingdom Of Shadows \u00a9 2009 by Greg F. Gifune\n\nCover Artwork \u00a9 2009 by Zach McCain\n\nAll Rights Reserved.\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\n\"Shape without form, shade without colour,  \nParalysed force, gesture without motion;  \nThose who have crossed  \nWith direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom  \nRemember us \u2014 if at all \u2014 not as lost  \nViolent souls, but only  \nAs the hollow men  \nThe stuffed men.\"  \n\u2014T.S. Eliot, \"The Hollow Men\"\n\n## -1-\n\nThe van rockets through darkness, swaying and bouncing along the bumpy road. The breakneck speed no longer seems necessary, but everyone is preoccupied and still racing on adrenaline and fear. For several minutes there is relative silence, but Carbone resumes his screaming and writhing about, knees pulled in close to his chest as his bloody hands clutch desperately at the mangled flesh that was once his stomach.\n\n\"Hang on, bro.\" Snow pokes his head up between the front bucket seats and looks to Rooster. \"We need to get him to a hospital!\"\n\n\"He's already dead,\" Rooster tells him.\n\nBetween screams, Carbone wheezes and literally cries for his mother.\n\n\"Christ,\" Nauls groans, \"his intestines, I\u2014I can see his fucking intestines!\"\n\nLandon, a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, glances quickly at the rearview then increases speed despite the rough terrain.\n\n\"Slow down,\" Starker says, his deep voice booming from his position at the rear of the van. \"This ride dies, you die with it.\"\n\n\"Whatever,\" Landon says indignantly.\n\n\"We can't just let him bleed out,\" Snow says.\n\nRooster watches the darkness through the windshield wash over them like renegade waves. He's always liked Carbone, and knows he and Snow are best friends, but they're miles from any hospital. Game over.\n\n\"Goddamn it!\" Snow leans closer. \"You hear me?\"\n\nRooster looks back at Snow. \"Stay with him, all right?\" he says evenly. \"Don't let him die alone.\"\n\nAfter several seconds, reality sinks in, and with a defeated nod, Snow disappears into the back.\n\n\"Where the hell are we?\" Rooster asks Landon.\n\n\"No clue, been following these country roads for miles now.\" He nervously paws perspiration from his face with the back of his free hand. \"You wanted the middle of nowhere. You got it.\"\n\nRooster is about to tell him to slow down when the van comes to a sudden stop. Everyone lurches forward and Carbone screams again.\n\nBefore them, fog rolls across a field of weeds and overgrown grass. In the distance, an old farmhouse sits in the darkness and mist. The moon is full but obscured by clouds, scarcely illuminating a series of hideous scarecrows nailed to rotting wooden crosses scattered throughout the property.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Nauls asks.\n\nLandon squints. \"Looks abandoned.\"\n\nWith a final gagging cough, Carbone vomits blood and bile and dies on the floor of the van in a pool of his own excrement and urine.\n\nWhat they don't understand is that his death is far more merciful than anything they'll ever know.\n\n* * * *\n\nDistant screams echoed in his mind like the sudden screech of tires. He had no idea where he was, but his first conscious thought was that something was chasing him. The sheer curtains billowed, danced before him like smoke. It seemed as if he'd been watching them for hours, though he couldn't be sure. He'd been asleep, hadn't he? Below, city streets were awakening, coming alive as the sun slowly rose over a horizon of brick and steel. It was far too cold outside for the windows to be open, but he assumed Gaby had opened them at some point during the night.\n\nRooster sat up in bed and swung his feet onto the chilly floor. He leaned forward, face in his hands. It felt like an eternity since his old life had ended. Yet there was a disconnect between the here-and-now and the past, as if one or the other wasn't quite true, falling closer to waking nightmares than reality. Even the night he and his old crew pulled their last caper was such a blur he often had difficulty piecing his scant memories into anything coherent. But for Carbone, he and the others got away. He knew that much. He remembered the final score and leaving that way of life behind him. For a long while the past had stayed buried, forgotten, perhaps even consciously ignored, but over the last few weeks, flashes of memories had returned, mostly in tiny bits and pieces. He couldn't be sure, but Rooster suspected that's what had started the awful headaches he'd been suffering from of late, his continued attempts to remember in more detail.\n\nThe farmhouse...he remembered that dark farmhouse they'd ended up at to split the take. He remembered the moon that night...and scarecrows...horrible scarecrows. He remembered them too.\n\nAnd then, like a reel of film that had run its course, the memories stopped, returning his mind to an equally unsettling darkness.\n\nThough tall, thin and wiry, with angular features and a receding swath of buzzed-down brown hair, the nickname he'd had since high school still fit, but his body was slowing with age, and for the first time he'd begun to notice it, to really feel it. He moved his hand up behind his neck and squeezed, rubbing down to his trapezius muscles. He sported the remains of a tan, his skin a deep bronze, the veins and muscles in his arms and legs defined and strong. He patted his stomach. Not quite the six-pack it had once been, but flat and tight, nothing to be ashamed of.\n\nA breeze blew through the windows, disturbing the curtains once again.\n\nThis time they were shredded and filthy with dirt and blood, dangling there like sheets of slashed flesh.\n\nRooster looked away, clenched shut his eyes.\n\nWhen he opened them the curtains were back to normal, but everything felt askew now, as if something or someone had entered the bedroom without his consent. He stood up, glanced around, eyes panning the room.\n\nNothing...no one...\n\nA chill licked his spine.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\nHe turned to the doorway to find Gaby standing there bundled in a robe, dark hair mussed and the look on her face a mixture of horror and concern. \"You were screaming.\"\n\nRooster grabbed his Marlboros and a lighter from the nightstand, lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke at the windows. \"I wasn't even asleep.\"\n\nHer expression softened, and she leaned against the doorframe with a sigh. \"Yeah, I know. You never sleep anymore, not really.\"\n\n\"The windows...\"\n\n\"I opened them.\" She hugged herself. \"Fresh air's good for you.\"\n\nRooster drew another drag, coughed it out. \"It's freezing.\"\n\nHer brown eyes\u2014so dark they were nearly black\u2014sparkled in place of a smile. \"It's good for the soul.\"\n\n\"Nothing can live long in the cold,\" he mumbled.\n\nGaby nodded but said nothing.\n\nShadows lay across the room like fallen spirits. Rooster stepped through them, approaching the windows with caution. A cold and dreary day stared back, the sky gray and overcast, the streets beyond the housing project courtyard dirty and cracked, cold and still mostly abandoned; the buildings in the neighborhood old and rundown, many of them condemned and long forgotten. Such a bleak city, he thought. Even where bustling life should've thrived, there was only emptiness, decay and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. He looked back over his shoulder at Gaby. It seemed to him her name should've been Grace, since she was like a savior, the only consistently good and beautiful presence in what had become an otherwise murky existence. When it was just the two of them and they held each other close in the night, the fear in him subsided. In those moments he felt alive again, perhaps even happy, but like all else he'd once believed in, Gaby would eventually leave him and he'd be alone again in the darkness with his nightmares and the awful echo of faraway screams...\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\" she asked.\n\n\"Your name.\"\n\n\"My name?\"\n\n\"It's pretty. Gabrielle.\"\n\n\"I didn't realize it interested you.\" She smiled as if letting him in on a secret. \"You've never mentioned it before.\"\n\n\"Never really thought about it until now, I guess.\"\n\n\"Its origin is Hebrew,\" she explained. \"Most people don't know that.\"\n\n\"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"God is my might.\"\n\nTheir eyes met, and for a moment he was lost in them, their depth and beauty. He knew her so well, and yet in many ways she seemed unfamiliar. How could that be? He focused on the writing table beneath the windows, the bills scattered about it.\n\n\"I better get in the shower,\" Gaby said. \"Don't want to be late for work.\"\n\nRight, he thought. Someone's got to earn some money around here.\n\n\"I'll find something,\" he promised. \"There's been some talk that big warehouse facility over on Dover Street's hiring.\"\n\n\"That place gives me the creeps,\" she said. \"What do they warehouse there anyway?\"\n\n\"I don't know. All I heard is they need some extra hands to unload trucks. It's temporary but steady work for a week or more. Word is they're only hiring a few people, so I want to get there early.\"\n\n\"What about the phone calls?\"\n\nFear rose from deep inside him. \"What about them?\"\n\nGaby came closer, padding across the chilly pockmarked floor in her bare feet, nails painted blood red and a dainty gold ankle bracelet adorned with tiny bells jingling as she moved. \"It's obviously important. He's called at least half a dozen times, and at all hours, too.\" She slid up behind him and wrapped her hands around his waist. She smelled vaguely of freshly cut flowers, and her breath caressed the back of his neck in slow, sensual intervals. \"He says he knows you.\"\n\n\"That was a long time ago.\"\n\n\"Are you going to call him back?\" When he didn't answer she leaned into him and brushed her lips against his ear. \"He sounds so frightened, the man on the phone.\"\n\nWith a sad smile, Rooster flicked his cigarette out the window. \"He is.\"\n\n## -2-\n\nBeneath an oddly gray sky, Rooster walked toward the hulking shadows cast by the enormous warehouse facility at the end of Dover Street. He strode past one alley strewn with garbage, human and otherwise, and then another, the last hope for escape from the dead-end street and the monolithic structures awaiting him. His breath spilled from his nostrils like columns of smoke, partially concealing his face as he pressed on through the cold, hands buried deep in the pockets of his battered leather jacket and chin tucked to chest in an attempt to ward off the occasional bursts of winter wind blowing in off the nearby ocean. Everything was deathly still, and though the constant din of city noises could still be heard, rather than a block or two away, they seemed impossibly far off, as if they were memories of a different city altogether, a deafeningly chaotic city recalled while passing through the mysterious solitude of another.\n\nWhen he reached the tall chain-link fence surrounding the facility, he noticed the gate was open, a thick padlock and chain dangling free as if left there mistakenly. He hesitated. A nearby security hut beyond was empty, the glass cracked and aged and looking as if it hadn't been cleaned in years. On the far side of the hut, scarred with cracks and occasional tufts of weeds, an enormous parking lot led to a series of loading docks, and amidst the larger warehouses, a smaller building marked OFFICE. Forklifts and other pieces of equipment were scattered about the property as if abandoned long before, and though most of the bays were closed, the few left open revealed enormous but empty storage areas. It looked like some time ago everyone had simply picked up and left.\n\nNo one came or went from the office building, and the lone wire-meshed window facing the street was grimy and dark. Had the place gone out of business? He could've sworn he'd passed by here a few days before and it was alive with workers and trucks coming and going, loading and unloading. He tried to remember where he'd heard about the job opportunities here. Had someone told him? Had he seen something at the Unemployment Office? Rooster watched the area a while with the experienced and trained eye of a thief. In time he looked back at the street. It was empty but for bits of trash and debris blowing about in the wind. He checked his watch then gazed at the sky. It normally wasn't so dreary this time of afternoon, but the drab winter sky conspired to cast everything in a dull pall reminiscent of dusk.\n\nAfter another quick look around, Rooster stepped through the open gate, crossed the parking lot and slipped into the office building.\n\nHe found himself in a long, dimly lit corridor that reeked of bleach. With the dull industrial tile floors, low plaster ceilings, steel-encased light fixtures and unimaginative but practical architecture, the building more closely resembled an archaic hospital or dated mental institution than office space.\n\nRooster pulled off the knit hat he was wearing and held it in his hands. Though the heavy steel entrance door had closed silently behind him he could still see his breath in the hallway. Surely they had heat here, why wouldn't it be on? A small sign protruding from the nearest doorframe read: RECEPTION.\n\nHe looked past it to the far end of the corridor, which was draped in darkness. Had something moved just then? Startled, Rooster took a step back. He was certain he'd caught a glimpse of someone shuffling into the cover of darkness, and the sudden sound of labored breath seeping down the hallway in its wake seemed to confirm it. The noise echoed along the walls, transforming into strange, indecipherable whispers.\n\nWhispers that did not sound human.\n\nRooster stuffed his hat into his back pocket, took a deep breath then ran a hand over his face, eyes trained on the shadows at the end of the hall. Calm down, he thought. It's just the nightmares again.\n\nAn unusual ticking sound drew his attention to the reception office. A lone woman well into her sixties sat behind an inordinately large desk, banging away on an old Olympia typewriter and seemingly oblivious to his presence. A series of metal file cabinets filled out the remaining space behind her. Clad in a dowdy dress and a cardigan sweater thrown over her shoulders for good measure, the receptionist's silver hair was pulled up into a bun, and a pair of half-glasses attached to a chain strung about her neck sat along the bridge of her bulbous nose.\n\nRooster stepped through the doorway. \"Are you still hiring?\"\n\nWithout looking up from her typewriter the woman retrieved a sheet of paper from a metal bin, slapped it down and slid it over to the edge of the desk. \"Fill out this application, front and back. Turn it in to me when you're finished.\"\n\nRooster took the form. \"Is it always so cold in here?\"\n\n\"Comes as a shock to most but that's the way it is.\"\n\nHe nodded like he'd understood her answer. \"Are you open today?\"\n\n\"We're always open.\"\n\n\"Then where is everybody?\"\n\nThe woman's head snapped up, her eyes glaring at him with demonic fury. \"Where are you?\"\n\nRooster watched the paper fall from his hand as the familiar torment of agonizing screams came to him again. But these were not nightmares or daydreams, he could hear them bellowing from deep within the building, as if people were being tortured in the bowels of the facility. Heart crashing his chest, he backed out into the hallway, terrified. The receptionist's mouth hung open as she panted with anger, spittle dripping from her pale, cracked lips. A quiet growl emanated from her, like the low rumbling snarl of a dog just before it attacks.\n\nHe turned and bolted for the front door, slamming into it with his shoulder and stumbling out into the parking lot as it gave way. Staggering forward, he nearly pitched face-first onto the pavement but regained his balance at the last moment and in one frantic, uninterrupted motion, broke into a full run.\n\nHe did not look back.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe payphone on the corner was occupied by a rotund woman carrying a brown paper bag filled with groceries. Across the street, Rooster waited, watching from the burned out doorway of an abandoned building only a few blocks from his apartment in the housing projects. Though he couldn't hear what the woman was saying, she was clearly upset and quite animated. He remained huddled in his hiding place until she finally slammed the phone down and stormed from the booth, a look of desperation and confusion creasing her face as she toddled toward the top of the street.\n\nHe checked the boulevard in both directions. It was empty. Not even a car or city bus to be found. Moving quickly, he crossed the street, ducked into the phone booth and dug a shred of paper from his jacket pocket. Jotted across it was the information Gaby had written down the last time a call came in. Rooster dropped a dime and punched the numbers.\n\nThe connection crackled and hissed but eventually went through and began to ring.\n\n\"Hello.\"\n\nEven after all this time Rooster knew that voice. \"Snow.\"\n\nAn exhale of relief and then: \"Rooster-man.\"\n\nHe gripped the phone tight and spun around so he could watch the street. \"You've been calling me.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it's really you. Didn't know if I'd be able to track you down after all this time.\"\n\n\"Are you here, in the city?\"\n\n\"Where else would I be?\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"We gotta talk.\"\n\n\"I'm not in the life anymore.\"\n\n\"You got no idea what life you're in.\"\n\nA sharp pain stabbed Rooster's temple. He flinched. \"What's that mean?\"\n\n\"What the hell you think it means? Means I need to talk to you, bro.\"\n\n\"Whatever you're into these days I'm not interested.\"\n\n\"This is serious shit.\"\n\n\"Snow, what do you want?\"\n\n\"I need to see you.\"\n\nThe receptionist's demonic eyes tore through Rooster's memory in strobe-like flashes. \"Just leave me alone, man. I got enough problems.\"\n\n\"Motherfucker, I'm trying to help you!\"\n\nThe visions faded. The fear remained. \"Stop calling me.\"\n\n\"You don't hear nothing else I say you better hear this.\" A crackling hiss bled through the line again. \"You need to know what I know.\"\n\nA burst of wind forced the phone booth door open. He pinned the phone to his shoulder with his ear and sparked a cigarette, making sure to cup the flame until he got it going. \"What do you know?\"\n\n\"I know what you're going through. The headaches, the nightmares. Hearing things, seeing things. Bad things. Evil things.\"\n\nRooster's eyes watered. He told himself the cold was to blame as a black Crown Vic with a tinted windshield and windows turned at the head of the street and slowly rolled by. Cop car, he thought, feeling the muscles in his stomach clench. He hadn't been a criminal in years, but old habits, old fears, died hard. He watched the car until it was out of sight.\n\n\"There ain't a lot of time,\" Snow pressed. \"I need to see you.\"\n\nRooster breathed heavily into the phone in quick nervous bursts. \"When?\"\n\n\"Today.\"\n\n## -3-\n\nBut for their labored breathing, the area is deathly silent. Fog rolls over the open field, cutting across the desolate country road and floating through a thick expanse of forest on the other side. The full moon, still masked by cloud cover, reveals a mist-shrouded landscape of crucified scarecrows, demonic sentries guarding a farmhouse no one would want.\n\nSnow stays in the back of the van with Carbone's body but the rest pile out of the vehicle and wander about the street amidst confusion and high emotions, attempting to gain their bearings while figuring out what to do next.\n\n\"What's with all the scarecrows?\" Landon asks. \"Nothing's grown there for years but weeds, why would they need scarecrows?\"\n\nAs he surveys the area, Starker still clutches the AK47 he used on the job, his hulking presence and enormous shaved dome daunting even in limited light. He moves to the side of the road. \"Maybe it's not crows they're looking to scare off.\"\n\n\"Well if they're meant for me they're working,\" Nauls says. \"Fucking things are creeping me out.\"\n\n\"Yeah Nauls,\" Landon quips, \"they're meant for you. Jesus, what an idiot.\"\n\n\"I'm an idiot? You're the one who stopped here.\"\n\n\"Yeah, because shit-for-brains bit it.\" Landon jerks a thumb at the van. \"And if it's OK with you I've had my fill of smelling dead ass tonight.\"\n\nSnow emerges from the rear of the van and wipes his bloody hands on his jeans. \"What did you say?\"\n\nLandon faces him. \"You heard me.\"\n\n\"Say it again, motherfucker.\"\n\n\"Hey, I'm sorry Carbone stepped off, but it's nobody's fault but his and you know it. He blew the back doors too early. Total amateur-hour horseshit, he knew better.\"\n\n\"A good man's dead.\" Snow stepped closer. \"Show some respect.\"\n\n\"He fucked up and now we've all got blood on our hands.\"\n\n\"What the hell would you know about it, wheelman?\"\n\n\"Enough to know the stupid bastard could've gotten us all killed. And I didn't hear you making any driver jokes when I was carting your sorry ass the fuck outta Dodge.\"\n\n\"You're working my last nerve.\"\n\nLandon squares his stance. \"Blow it out your ass.\"\n\nRooster steps between them. \"Both of you cool it.\" He knows he must get the crew focused, split the take and make arrangements to wrap things up one way or another. But it can't be done out in the open, even in a desolate place such as this. One local police car or nosy townsperson passing by is all it'll take to escalate things, and there's been enough escalation tonight. No one was supposed to get hurt. The job had been meticulously planned, rehearsed and timed to the millisecond. Yet there were still mistakes, and what began as a robbery ended in a homicide, one guard dead, two badly injured. And now they've lost one of their own. They have to move and move fast. \"We're still on the clock, which means I still call the shots, so get your heads out of your asses and get back in the fucking game. Now.\"\n\nSnow points at Landon. \"We ain't done.\"\n\n\"Any time, douche.\"\n\nRooster stands his ground until both men drift away in opposite directions. \"All right, let's get inside and finish our business.\"\n\nNauls, holding two large canvas duffel bags stuffed with cash, shuffles about like he needs a bathroom. \"Can't we find someplace else?\"\n\n\"I don't like this shit bin any better than you do,\" Rooster admits, \"but it's out of the way and nobody should bother us here. Nauls, you stay with me. Landon, get the van off the street and under cover. Snow, you and Starker check the place out. It looks deserted but let's be sure.\"\n\n\"OK how come the two brothers got to check the farmhouse out?\" Snow cracks. \"We more expendable, that it? We ain't special like you white folks.\"\n\n\"Just get it done.\"\n\nSnow pulls two .45s from the back of his belt and turns to Starker. \"All right, big man, let's go.\"\n\nApparently mesmerized by the field of rotting scarecrows, Starker does not respond. He stares off into the darkness as if in a trance.\n\n\"Come on biggins, time for some recon.\"\n\nStarker continues to stare at the horrible faces peering across the field through the darkness and fog. Rooster approaches him and cautiously places a hand on his shoulder. \"Starker.\"\n\nHe says nothing.\n\n\"Stay with me now,\" Rooster tells him softly. \"We need you.\"\n\nStarker remains locked on the field, one enormous finger resting on the trigger of the AK-47, the other hand sliding almost lovingly back and forth across the top of the weapon in a slow and steady motion. \"Something's not right.\"\n\n\"You see something?\"\n\n\"I feel it. So do you.\"\n\nHe's right, but Rooster can't figure out how Starker knows this. Perhaps he hasn't hidden his anxiety and uneasiness as well as he thought he has. \"Maybe we should all go,\" Rooster suggests. \"Check the place out together.\"\n\n\"It doesn't much matter.\" Starker blinks slowly, his eyes eerily reflecting moonlight. \"We're all gonna die tonight.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nMemories of Starker's bald head covered in blood flashed before Rooster's eyes, the huge man spitting and slobbering between horrific screams, choking on his own blood and bodily fluids while begging like a child for mercies he would never be granted.\n\nThe horrible sounds of that night were the last to leave him, fading gradually like the slowly dying things they were. And like the dead, a gruesome residue remained in their wake. A reminder of their power, perhaps, evidence that such figments of torturous nightmares had, in fact, existed.\n\nOut in the open air the winter wind cut like a razor. Rooster held his ground at the mouth of an alley between a seedy bar and a blown-out storefront, his jacket collar flipped up to protect the back of his neck. A red neon sign advertising the strip joint two doors down blinked with a steady rhythm, painting his face in a strange and frightening haze. His headache had weakened, but a dull pain still lingered behind his eyes. He rubbed his temple and studied the passersby. Everyone on the street seemed suspect, every car a potential menace. He swore he'd seen the same black Crown Vic twice more since he'd walked the eight blocks from the payphone to the agreed upon meeting place, but of course there was no way to know for sure if it was the same vehicle. Even if it was, what would the cops want with him? He'd been doing straight time for years.\n\nHe returned his focus to the neighborhood. It was filthy and far from the safest in the city, but Rooster had a good vantage point, as from his position he could clearly see people approaching from either direction. Though like the rest of the city many of the buildings sat vacant and rotting, this was predominantly a commercial area that still crackled with intensity and life. Heavy traffic clogged both lanes, filling the air with a glut of sickening exhaust fumes, and numerous souls of varied descriptions hurried along the sidewalks, several scowling at him as if he'd done something to personally offend them but most with their heads bowed and eyes averted. At the end of the block an old homeless man collapsed on the sidewalk and lay still. After watching him a moment Rooster realized the man's breath was no longer forming clouds in the cold air. Perhaps he'd died. No one seemed to care.\n\nIt was then that Rooster noticed a bald man of perhaps sixty standing across the street watching him, features unremarkable but for a pair of piercing ice-blue eyes. Dressed entirely in black\u2014suit, shoes and overcoat\u2014it wasn't until the man glided a bit further down the block that Rooster saw the white collar and realized he was looking at a priest. The closer the man got the more disheveled he became, his clothes wrinkled and soiled and his face creased with age and looking as if it needed a good scrubbing.\n\nIgnoring the traffic, the priest recklessly crossed the street, eyes locked on Rooster even after several drivers hit their horns and one car nearly struck him. While still several feet away, the priest raised a hand and pointed at him. \"You, I\u2014I know you!\" he called. \"I know you!\"\n\nRooster shook his head and waved the man off, though oddly enough, the closer the priest got the more familiar he became. He couldn't quite place him but was convinced he knew him from somewhere.\n\nJust as the priest made it to the sidewalk, another man appeared out of the crowd and cut him off, blocking his path.\n\nThe afro gave him away. Snow, looking like he always had, dressed in jeans, sneakers and an old army jacket thrown over a sweatshirt, extended a hand, holding it up between himself and the priest as their eyes met. Neither moved; two statues in a sea of humanity.\n\nRooster stepped out of the alley, approached them.\n\nThe priest looked over Snow's shoulder, enraged. \"I know you!\"\n\n\"Keep moving, padre,\" Snow said evenly. \"I ain't playing with you. Move.\"\n\nDefeated, the priest slipped away, looking back every few seconds until he'd been completely absorbed by the crowd, carried off down the street with the rest.\n\nRooster started after him but Snow grabbed his arm, firmly enough to stop him but with enough restraint to let him know the move wasn't a challenge.\n\n\"Let him go, man.\"\n\n\"He's right, I\u2014we know each other, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Just let him go.\" When Rooster relaxed Snow released him. \"You don't look no different.\"\n\nThey shook hands. Snow's palm was cold, rough and covered in calluses. \"Neither do you,\" Rooster sighed. \"But we are different, aren't we?\"\n\nNearby, overhead trains rumbled along rusted tracks. The noise seemed to distract Snow for a moment. \"Let's get off the street.\" He motioned to the bar behind them. \"Catch some heat.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nThe bar was dark, with scarred linoleum floors, low ceilings and only two small windows on the front wall. A scattering of tables and chairs filled the area, while a row of dark booths lined one wall and a bar filled the back. A jukebox kitty-cornered nearby sat quietly. The bartender, an overweight guy with a shock of unruly salt-and-pepper hair, chatted quietly with what was probably a regular, both staring at a small television suspended in the corner showing an old black-and-white horror movie. Otherwise the place was empty.\n\nRooster and Snow ordered a couple beers then took them over to the booth farthest from the bar and sat down.\n\n\"It's good to see you, man.\" Snow slowly caressed his beer bottle, focusing on it rather than Rooster. \"Just sucks it has to be like this.\"\n\nAfter a long swallow of beer Rooster slid a black plastic ashtray from the corner of the table into the center and lit a cigarette. \"What's going on, Snow?\"\n\nHe was about to answer when a bloodcurdling scream exploded through the bar.\n\nRooster reached to his belt for a gun that wasn't there, a gun that hadn't been there in years. Snow cocked his head in the direction of the television, where a ghoul was staggering through a cemetery shrouded in mist, closing in on a buxom young maiden with the ability to scream at octaves capable of shattering glass.\n\n\"Jesus H.\" He rubbed his temples. \"Could've lived without that.\"\n\n\"Never seen you so jumpy, Rooster-man. You were always cold as ice.\"\n\n\"The priest, who was he?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"He knew me. And I knew him. I just can't remember how.\"\n\n\"You'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"Can't figure out much of anything lately. The strangest shit's happening. I can't make sense of any of it.\" He took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it climb toward the ceiling. \"Look, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Feels like you went to sleep and woke up in the middle of your life,\" Snow interrupted, voice unusually quiet, \"and now you can't remember how the hell you got here.\"\n\nRooster stabbed the cigarette between his lips and left it there so he could put his hands flat on the table between them and better conceal the fact that they were shaking. He nodded. \"What's happening to us?\"\n\nUp close Snow's eyes were bloodshot and heavy, like he'd been crying recently, hadn't slept in a while, or both. He smelled vaguely of cheap aftershave. \"What do you know about demons?\"\n\n\"Demons? You mean like\u2014\"\n\n\"Like all kinds of crazy shit runs through your head, then you start hearing things. Screams mostly, or whispers that don't make no sense. And just when you think it can't get no worse, you start seeing shit. Not people, not...not exactly. But they look like people...least until they don't.\"\n\nThe receptionist, Rooster thought, shrugging off a chill. \"I don't believe in demons.\"\n\n\"Yeah neither do I but they don't seem to give a shit.\" Snow downed some beer then let out a quiet belch under his breath and looked to the door as if expecting someone to burst through it at any moment. \"Not too long ago I got some information.\" He leaned closer, across the table. \"And ever since then these other motherfuckers have been following me. Never up close, always a ways back, watching from their cars, Crown Vics\u2014big black bastards\u2014that's what they drive.\"\n\n\"Cops?\"\n\n\"These ain't cops.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\n\"They been following me for weeks. After today they'll be following you.\"\n\n\"Why?\" With manic repetition Rooster puffed his cigarette. \"What do they want?\"\n\n\"You remember the night Carbone died?\"\n\nRooster began to perspire as flashes of farmhouse, blood and scarecrows filled his memory. \"Some.\"\n\nNo longer able to contain his nervousness, Snow abruptly stood up and made a beeline for the jukebox. He dropped a coin in, made a selection then gave the bartender and his friend a long look that said: This is going to make hearing the television more difficult but let's not make a big deal about it or you'll force me to do some really unpleasant shit to you. Both men looked away without comment and Snow slowly strode back to the booth as The Police's Spirits in the Material World kicked in.\n\n\"You said I needed to know what you know.\" Rooster crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. \"So tell me.\"\n\n\"What do you remember about the night Carbone died?\"\n\n\"Come on, man, what the hell's going on?\"\n\n\"Do it.\"\n\n\"The armored car robbery, the last job we pulled as a crew,\" he said. \"Everything went according to plan until Carbone fucked up and blew the back doors too early. The third guard was waiting on him. Carbone took a shotgun blast dead in the gut. Starker wasted the guard, shot him in the face, killed him instantly.\" He remembered the young man's head as it exploded, a crimson mist of blood, brains and skull spraying everything, and all of them. \"You got Carbone back to the van while Nauls and I handled the other two guards and took care of the swag. Landon was the wheelman. We got out ahead of the cops, ended up in the middle of nowhere at some deserted old farmhouse. Carbone died in the van.\"\n\nSnow nodded. \"Then what?\"\n\n\"You were there.\"\n\n\"Pretend I wasn't.\"\n\nRooster fidgeted in his seat. It felt like thousands of insects were scurrying over every inch of his body. He scratched at his head and suddenly found himself checking the door every few seconds as well. \"I don't...\"\n\n\"You don't know.\"\n\nShadows along the ceiling shifted, elongated.\n\n\"We split the take,\" he finally said. \"Then we took off.\"\n\n\"That how you remember it?\"\n\n\"I think so but I can't...\" Rooster took another swig of beer. \"I can't remember exactly, it...the whole thing seems like a dream.\"\n\n\"I couldn't remember nothing either.\"\n\nThe man at the bar, a middle-aged guy wearing some sort of workman's uniform, hopped down from his stool and slipped through a nearby door marked RESTROOMS.\n\n\"The more I thought about it,\" Snow continued, \"the worse it got. I couldn't remember the rest of that night no matter how hard I tried. It was like it was just...gone. All I knew was whatever happened scared the shit out of me, made me scared like I never even knew I could be. I'm talking about the kind of fear you feel right down to your nuts, man. The kind that makes you shit in your pants like a baby sliding out lunch. You know what I mean.\"\n\nRooster did know. He swallowed so hard he gagged.\n\n\"Like you, I thought I was losing my goddamn mind.\" Snow sat back with an air of defiance. \"It's like there was something right on my ass, something evil. I couldn't take no more. I stopped sleeping, stopped eating, just locked myself up in my apartment and hid out. I wanted to kill myself but I was afraid of the other side. Ain't exactly lived the life of a saint, right?\"\n\nThe bartender was staring at them intently. When he realized Rooster had caught him he quickly looked away and busied himself.\n\n\"That's when that woman started hanging outside my apartment wanting to talk to me all the time.\" His face twisted. \"I didn't know who she was, didn't know what I'd done. I don't even remember it. I was on H when it went down and was hurting so bad for a fix I was out of my mind. I never meant to hurt her.\"\n\n\"I never knew you did heroin.\"\n\nSnow sighed helplessly. \"Neither did I.\"\n\n\"You're not making any sense. What the hell are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I tried to do straight time, man, for real. I tried.\"\n\n\"I believe you.\"\n\n\"I got a janitor gig at this office building a few blocks from my crib. I was going crazy but I showed up on time every night, did my thing and minded my own business, played by the rules, closed my eyes to the demons and the screams and that woman always staring at me. I'd walk there, work the overnight shift then walk home in the morning. I'm there about a week when I notice this old dude following me one night. Skinny little white cat with glasses. Real Poindexter-looking motherfucker. At first I think maybe he's a cop, but he don't look like no cop I ever seen, looks more like a professor or some shit. He shows up every night, tails me from my apartment to work, and then he's gone. So one night I get a lead on him, take a corner and duck into a doorway. He comes by and I grab his narrow ass.\" Snow ran a hand over his face. He too had begun to perspire. \"I'm about to rack me some old white man when he starts talking about that night at the farmhouse, all the shit I'm going through and how he can help me. Motherfucker knew more about me than I did, man. Said he had answers, said he knew what happened to us that night. He said it was time we knew the truth. And that's exactly what he laid on me. Only now sometimes I wish he didn't. Sometimes not knowing was better.\" He bowed his head in an attempt to mask the tears filling his eyes. \"Ain't that a bitch? We never had a goddamn chance, man, none of us.\"\n\n\"Who was this guy?\"\n\n\"What they done to us wasn't right, Rooster, it wasn't right. We did some bad shit but we're human beings, man, we fucking human beings.\"\n\n\"What who did to us? What are you saying?\"\n\nSnow reached into his jacket, put something on the table and slid it over to him. When he pulled his hand away a small key was revealed. \"Opens a locker at the bus station downtown,\" he said. \"Take it. Use it.\"\n\nRooster nonchalantly covered it with his palm. \"What am I gonna find?\"\n\n\"Everything I know. Everything you need to know. All the proof I got from Poindexter.\" He checked the door once, then again just a second or two later. \"They're after me, man, and they know I'm trying to pass the information to you. Once they know you got it, they're gonna come after you, too.\"\n\n\"Why are you giving this to me, why not one of the others?\"\n\nSnow shrugged. \"Carbone's dead. Nauls is a retard. Landon's an asshole, and Starker\u2014shit\u2014that boy's stone psycho. Whatever Hell them motherfuckers are burning in they deserve.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure anybody deserves to burn in Hell.\"\n\n\"Makes sense if you're the one burning.\"\n\nRooster slid the key to the edge of the table then pocketed it. \"You know where any of them are?\"\n\n\"Last I heard Nauls and Landon were still in the city and still in the life. Starker supposedly caught his old lady banging some guy. Put a .38 in her pussy and pulled the trigger, then he beat the dude into a coma, ripped his junk off and stuffed it so far up his ass they had to do surgery to get the shit out. Couple days later they both died. Starker got away. Word was he headed down to Mexico or some shit.\"\n\n\"They ever catch him?\"\n\n\"Don't know.\" He wiped the tears from his eyes then killed his beer. \"Don't care.\"\n\n\"What happened to us that night, Snow?\"\n\n\"Go open that locker.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just tell me?\"\n\nSnow smiled, but it was the smile of the damned. \"You wouldn't believe me even if I did.\"\n\n\"Try me.\"\n\n\"You got to see for yourself.\"\n\nAcross the barroom, the restroom door opened with a scraping sound and Rooster saw the same man exit, wander back to the bar and return to the stool he'd vacated moments before. As the door slowly swung shut, he saw a moist and filthy tile floor littered with scraps of toilet paper and trash, and something else moving along the wet tiles toward the toilet stalls on the back wall of the bathroom. Like the severed appendage from some scale-covered creature, it slithered about in a snakelike motion, revealing a pale tentacle several inches thick and at least three feet long. Rooster sat up straighter, squinting through the shadows in an attempt to bring the thing into focus, but the door had closed. He glanced at Snow, who hadn't seen it but looked as if he had. Rooster turned away, hopeful he might be able to obliterate what he'd just seen and knew to be impossible, but when he returned his gaze to the bar he saw the man grinning at him with malicious glee. Both he and the bartender began to laugh.\n\nRooster shuddered. \"We need to get outta here.\"\n\n\"Don't matter for me no more.\"\n\nRooster reached across the table, took hold of Snow's wrist. It was cold as ice. He let go. \"I'm not leaving you here, man.\"\n\n\"I'm already dead. Been dead and buried for years.\" Snow's eyes suddenly looked empty, even more hopeless than before. \"And so have you.\"\n\n## -4-\n\nHe'd stood in the bus terminal for more than an hour. There was no sign of the Crown Vic or anyone following him on foot, but Rooster couldn't shake the feeling he'd been tailed. So he stayed put, watched and waited.\n\nPeople came and went, maintenance workers and ticket agents busied themselves with various duties, an occasional policeman drifted through, and a handful of homeless people sat in corners or, like many of the waiting passengers, occupied one of the numerous plastic chairs bolted to the floor in clusters and rows throughout the station.\n\nThe entire place smelled like a combination of filthy socks, urine and body odor, all of it made more oppressive by smothering bursts of forced hot air from an archaic heating system set far too high.\n\nDirectly across from the wall Rooster was leaned against stood a bank of lockers. He'd been fingering the key in his pocket since he arrived, and though he'd yet to approach it, he'd already zeroed in on the appropriate locker. He still couldn't be certain he wanted to know what was waiting for him behind that little metal door. His life was complicated and confused enough. Did he really need to up the ante? Then again, could he afford not to? Snow had assured him the answers to his torment could be found within and he had no reason to doubt him. Even if it was a Pandora's Box (and Rooster was certain it would be), how could he not open it?\n\nFuck it.\n\nPushing away from the wall, Rooster walked toward the lockers, casually sliding his hand from his pocket and holding the key down by his thigh.\n\nThey're after me, man.\n\nNo one seemed to notice as he closed on the locker, pushed the key into the slot then pulled the latch.\n\nAnd they know I'm trying to pass the information to you.\n\nRooster swung open the door, saw a black leather briefcase inside.\n\nOnce they know you got it, they're gonna come after you, too.\n\nHeart racing, he reached inside, yanked it free and walked away, leaving the locker open and the key still in the lock.\n\nMoving through the sliding front doors and into the cold but fresh air, Rooster hurried down the block and slipped into the first alley he came to, using it to cut through to the next busy street, where he disappeared into the flow of the crowd on the nearest sidewalk.\n\nNight fell across the city as darkness swept through him, awakening demons eager to tear at a soul already in ruin.\n\nThe fires of Hell burned on.\n\n* * * *\n\nHe'd always felt relatively safe at the apartment. Now he wasn't so sure. As he'd crossed town he noticed no tails, but knew he was being watched. Even when he'd hurried across the courtyard and into the projects, the area cold and empty but for one lone child sitting on a stoop a few buildings down, he still felt an overwhelming sense that someone was following him. Once inside he bolted the apartment door, pulled the shades on the windows then set the briefcase on the kitchen table. He remained still and quiet a moment, listening. Some distant sounds from neighboring units bled through the thin walls and the building settled and creaked against the increasing wind, but he could discern nothing out of the ordinary. Next he returned to the windows facing the street and courtyard, spending a few seconds at each one, pulling back the shades enough to peek out and inspect the area for intruders, strange cars or individuals. Nothing.\n\nRooster checked his watch. Gaby wouldn't get home from work for about another hour. He'd have the place to himself for a while. With only a small hanging light in the kitchen illuminating the area, he grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and poured a shot. As the booze burned then warmed him, he pulled up a chair and sat at the table, eyeing the briefcase as if he expected it to do something other than sit there like the inanimate object it was. A basic black leather model, it had only one main zippered compartment and no markings or personalized indications of any kind. He looked at his hands. Still shaking. For Christ's sake, he thought. Get a grip. Back in the day he'd been known for his remarkable cool in the face of danger. Hadn't he? Like so much else it was lost in a dark sea of partial memories, fractured dreams and uncertain yesterdays.\n\nHe pounded down another mouthful of whiskey then held the empty shot glass out before him until he'd willed the trembling to stop. Hand finally steady, or at least reasonably close, he put the glass aside, unzipped the briefcase and reached inside. His hand returned holding a large manila folder held shut by two thick rubber bands. The only other item in the briefcase was a hardcover book. Rooster placed both on the table before him, quickly inspected the briefcase to make certain he'd gotten everything then put it on the floor by his feet.\n\nThere were no markings on the exterior of the manila folder itself but it was stuffed with various documents. The book was black, had no dust-jacket and was badly worn, the back cover blank. Rooster flipped it over.\n\nA bright red inverted pentagram filled the front cover, the title in matching color above it: DEMONOLOGY: Incantations.\n\nHe vaulted back and away from the table as if hit with an electrical charge, eyes transfixed on the pentagram as his chair tipped over backwards and fell to the floor.\n\nWhat do you know about demons?\n\nFear crashed him like a wave, surging up through his legs, guts, and into his chest, chills firing through his shoulders and neck, his eyes burning as the uncontrollable shivers returned, this time violently throttling his entire body.\n\nI'm so cold...\n\nVoices in his head...familiar voices...\n\nI'm so...so...cold...\n\nFlashes of a face stricken with horror, mouth ripped open into a bloody and devilish grin, the skin on the cheeks and forehead moving and tenting impossibly, like something was trapped beneath and trying to get out, something barbed and small slithering for purchase...\n\nHelp me...God in Heaven, help me!\n\nClutching his temples, Rooster staggered back, muttering prayers he hadn't recited since childhood.\n\nShadowy visions of a man standing over a body, the stomach cavity split open, his hands grasping a tangle of viscera\u2014ropes of blood and guts squished between his fingers\u2014laughing and squatting closer to the carnage, his face spattered with blood and colorless jellylike fluids, shards of human flesh dangling from the corners of his mouth...and all the while, horrible screams of agony bellowed amidst vicious laughter...\n\nIt wasn't until Rooster felt the far kitchen wall against his back and slid down to the floor in a heap, sobbing and moaning like a traumatized child, that the visions and voices finally retreated.\n\nBut not before he realized that the face of the man he'd seen\u2014the man in the shadows disemboweling another human being\u2014was his own. \n\n## -5-\n\nThey move across the field in a staggered line, weapons drawn, the overgrown grass and weeds nearly to their waists. The fog moves with them as they negotiate the uneven terrain, slowly, cautiously, the darkness deepening with each step they take. The scarecrows watch from their wooden crosses, some nailed, some tied with rotting lengths of rope, manlike ghouls in old and torn denim overalls and decayed work shirts, hands of straw protruding from the sleeves like talons, legs dangling, vanishing into the tall grass. With badly worn, stuffed and filthy burlap sacks for heads, their mouths are stiff grim lines of worn leather thread sewn into the fabric in a disturbing crisscross pattern, their eyes sunken black holes, as if the sockets have been long-since picked clean.\n\nStarker is in the lead. He stops and the others follow suit. His eyes pan the area, take in each scarecrow. No one speaks for several seconds. The night is unnaturally quiet.\n\n\"Come on, what is this bullshit?\" Landon moans. \"We're in the middle of nowhere. Nobody's been here in years. Why bother with the house at all? Let's split the take now. What difference does it make?\"\n\n\"We are pretty far from the road.\" Nauls looks back. \"Haven't seen any cars pass by the whole time we've been here.\"\n\nIgnoring them, Rooster looks to Starker. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Notice anything about those scarecrows?\"\n\n\"I'm trying not to notice them at all,\" Nauls says.\n\nLandon rolls his eyes. \"What are you, five-fucking-years-old? There's nobody here but us, let's get on with it.\"\n\n\"Starker,\" Rooster presses, \"what is it?\"\n\n\"There are six of them,\" he says, \"six scarecrows.\"\n\nSnow shrugs. \"So?\"\n\n\"There are six of us.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nRooster studied the shadows cast throughout the kitchen, opaque swathes of darkness slashing the light. Still on the floor and covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, his flesh was clammy and hot but his breathing and heartbeat had finally returned to normal. He wasn't sure why the pentagram specifically had triggered such terror, he only knew it had. His fear had weakened, though it was still close by, and a steady throb above his eyes signaled another headache was on its way. Luckily the pain hadn't kicked in yet.\n\nWith a willful grunt he forced himself to his feet, and on shaky legs, returned to the table. Once he'd righted the chair he dropped back into it then cautiously reached for the book. The cover was old and shabby, rough in his hands. Without looking at the pentagram, he quickly flipped open the cover.\n\nIn rather ornate script, printed on the first page:\n\n\"The other shape,\n\nIf shape it might be call'd, that shape had none,\n\nDistinguishable in member, joint, or limb;\n\nOr substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd;\n\nFor each seem'd either; black it stood as night,\n\nFierce as ten furies, terrible as Hell,\n\nAnd shook a dreadful dart; what seem'd his head\n\nThe likeness of a kingly crown had on.\n\nSatan was now at hand; and from his seat\n\nThe monster, moving onward, came as fast\n\nWith horrid strides; Hell trembled as he strode.\"\n\n\u2014John Milton\n\nThe pages of the book looked even older than the cover. Made of stiff thick parchment, faded and badly furrowed, they mostly sported what appeared to be very old drawings of demons. Hideous winged creatures with leering eyes, many with horns and cloven hooves, huddled in darkness. Others perched over the beds of unsuspecting sleeping victims or sat on blasphemous thrones of human bone. Others still were illustrated engulfed in flames or in mid-flight amidst the clouds, tangled in battle with angels. But for the cover and Milton quote, the text was written in Latin, in a calligraphy-like style, as if scribed by some mad medieval monk in the bowels of a candlelit monastery. Just touching the book made Rooster uncomfortable, so he quickly flipped through the remaining pages of lurid illustrations and indecipherable text then slammed it shut. Placing it facedown, he took another shot of whiskey.\n\nWhen his nerves had settled a bit, he turned his attention to the manila folder. Six files were individually bound and stacked within, the front of each marked with a name: Paul Carbone, Terrell Snow, Anthony Starker, Perry Nauls, Thomas Landon, and the sixth and final file, his own, Michael Cantrell.\n\nRather than immediately delve into his own file, he decided to begin with someone else's. Carbone's dead, he reasoned, I'll start there. He opened the file to find a mug-shot staring back at him. He hadn't seen Carbone in anything but nightmares for years, and looking into the man's eyes now shook him to the core. He remembered Carbone as a short and stocky man of few words, with a dry but cutting sense of humor and a laid-back personality. But mostly he remembered him screaming in agony and begging for his mother as he bled to death.\n\nRooster moved to the next page. All of Carbone's stats were there: his full legal name, date of birth and social security number. Lower on the page it listed no living next-of-kin, the fact that he'd never graduated high school and had no formal education beyond the tenth grade, and that he was unmarried and had no children. The next page revealed a bullet list regarding his criminal record, which went back to his late teens and covered everything from petty theft to numerous sexual assaults and indecent exposures, to child pornography charges to assault and battery. The final entry, highlighted in yellow, documented his final arrest and conviction, the rape and stabbing death of a seven-year-old girl. He'd received two Life Sentences with no chance of parole, and according to the entry, had been serving them at the time this information had been originally compiled.\n\n\"That's bullshit,\" Rooster muttered. He hadn't known Carbone that well, but Snow had, and he'd have never aligned himself with that kind of scum. Carbone was a criminal like the rest of them for sure, but he wasn't a sexual deviant or a child killer. They were thieves, they didn't rape and butcher children. And besides, even if Carbone had been guilty of such things and given those sentences, why hadn't he been inside serving them? Had they let him out? Had he escaped? None of it made any sense.\n\nHe went back to the photograph. It wasn't an actual mug-shot, as he'd originally thought, it only looked like one. Instead it was simply a headshot of Carbone from the neck up, a black background behind him and his name stenciled along the bottom white border.\n\nThe last page of Carbone's file contained a single word: DECEASED.\n\nThe file seemed thrown together and incomplete, as if someone had hastily transcribed a few important basic points, added a photograph then bound and stuffed the information into a folder. Rooster put it aside and moved to the next one.\n\nStarker's file contained a similar photograph and described him as a former Army Ranger that had received a dishonorable discharge and had served four years in a military prison for assaulting an officer. His personal stats were listed as well, including that he was single and had no children. His civilian criminal record began after his stint in the service, and consisted mostly of assaults and illegal weapons charges. It also listed him as a member of a radical political and paramilitary group the government had labeled as a terrorist organization responsible for the numerous bombings of several government buildings. His final conviction described him as one of a three-man team that had firebombed the campaign office of a political candidate their organization opposed. Four people had been killed in the bombing, including two women, one of them eight-months pregnant. Starker, along with his accomplices, had received Death.\n\nThis information was more believable\u2014Starker had always been the most violent of the crew and the most unpredictable\u2014but again, much of it made no sense. Starker wasn't single, he was married\u2014or at least had been, according to Snow he'd since murdered his wife\u2014and although Rooster did know about Starker's prior military service, he knew nothing about this radical political organization he'd supposedly been a member of, and certainly nothing of the firebombing of a campaign office. And again, if that were true, and he'd received a death sentence and had already begun to serve time on Death Row as the information suggested, how had he been with them the night of the armored car job?\n\n\"He couldn't be.\"\n\nThis time the final page contained the word TERMINATED.\n\nRooster reached for the bottle, poured another shot of whiskey.\n\nTerminated? But Starker wasn't dead. Unless they'd killed him...whoever the hell they were.\n\nNext came Nauls. The face in the photograph showed that same narrow face with the beady eyes he remembered. A closely-cropped beard and wild nest of curly hair coupled with his thin build gave him the look of a stoner or wannabe rock musician, and in reality, he'd been a little of both. In fact it was strange to see his eyes at all, as Nauls had almost always worn a pair of dark sunglasses, the lenses small, round and tight to his face. His file described a man who had been in and out of jail from the time he'd been a teenager, and who began serving prison time at only twenty. Predominantly a thief, he'd been arrested countless times for B&Es, purse-snatching, shoplifting, and drug possession. By all accounts Nauls had been a petty thief but not the least bit violent. In his mid-twenties he'd graduated to bank robbery and done time for it in federal prison. Like so many others, Nauls had come out of prison far worse than he'd gone in, as according to the paperwork, two months after his release he was arrested for another bank robbery, one that ended particularly violently.\n\nThe report claimed Nauls, cornered in the bank, had taken several tellers and the bank manager hostage. After a fourteen-hour standoff, Nauls had been refused the helicopter he'd demanded for his escape, and as a result had executed a female teller and then the bank manager. He was shot by a SWAT sniper moments later. Hit in the upper right chest, Nauls survived.\n\nIronically, he was sentenced to Death.\n\nRooster knew Nauls to be the most harmless member of the crew, and also the least violent. He spent most of his time smoking pot, chasing women, strumming an old guitar he loved and watching cartoons. He was a thief\u2014and a good one\u2014but not that bright and generally clueless. He was damaged, the kind of guy who had done hard time and wasn't really cut out for it. Far as he knew, Nauls had an extensive criminal past but he wasn't a killer, and the idea that he could've executed two people in cold blood seemed beyond belief.\n\nThe last page was the same as Starker's. TERMINATED.\n\nLandon too looked exactly how Rooster remembered him, as a man of average build with short dark hair receded to the middle of his scalp, hazel eyes, a permanent five o'clock shadow, an aquiline nose with flared nostrils and a mouth that seemed perpetually set in a wiseass smirk. His file depicted a man with a long criminal record, the majority of his arrests involving car theft or driving violations. Landon had always been a car nut, and was one of the best drivers Rooster had ever seen\u2014certainly the best he'd ever worked with\u2014and though he had a temper, complained endlessly and never backed down from a physical confrontation, he'd never been a particularly violent individual. He had the ability to be violent, and Rooster remembered more than one occasion when Landon had handled himself competently in physical skirmishes, but for the most part it was his mouth one had to look out for. Landon could cut someone to shreds verbally without even trying. He'd begun his criminal career stealing cars as a teenager, and by the time he was in his twenties he'd done time for auto theft and for two counts of aggravated assault. In and out of prison for most of his twenties, he was later arrested as the wheelman on a jewelry store heist. He and his accomplices had escaped but not before police were on them, and in the resulting high-speed chase Landon plowed directly through a police barricade, killing two police officers. After losing control of the car he struck a group of pedestrians, killing two\u2014including an elderly man and a woman who had been holding her four-year-old child at the time\u2014and seriously injuring several others. Landon drove on. Several blocks later his tires were shot out and he crashed into a telephone pole. One of his accomplices died in the crash. The other survived but was gunned down as he attempted to flee the scene. Landon suffered several minor injuries but survived. He was given Life without parole.\n\nSame final page: TERMINATED.\n\nRooster shook his head in disbelief and turned to Snow's file.\n\nTerrell Snow looked the same in the photo as he had at the bar earlier. His record was long and varied, consisting of everything from theft to assault to attempted murder to drug charges. A lifelong criminal and former gang member, Snow had, according to the paperwork at least, struggled with heroin addiction at one point earlier in his life. Something even Snow himself had been unaware of.\n\nWhich means it's crap, Rooster thought.\n\nAfter a long criminal career, the result of which was Snow spending the majority of his adult life in prison, he'd been convicted of beating a young woman to death in her apartment during a botched robbery.\n\nI didn't know who she was, didn't know what I'd done.\n\nThe crime was listed as 'particularly vicious' in that the woman had apparently not resisted her assailant but had been beaten so mercilessly that police were initially unable to determine if the victim was male or female.\n\nI don't even remember it. I was on H when it went down and was hurting so bad for a fix I was out of my mind.\n\nSnow received Life without parole.\n\nI never meant to hurt her.\n\nLast page: TERMINATED.\n\nI'm already dead. Been dead and buried for years.\n\nOf course he'd meant it figuratively, but Rooster couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't more truth to Snow's statement than he'd originally been willing to give it. He put the file aside and eyed the final one, his own. He downed another shot, felt his head swim a bit.\n\nThere he was looking back at himself in a photograph Rooster had no memory of ever posing for. His basic stats were all correct, as were the entries concerning his criminal record. He'd served several jail sentences over the years, having been arrested numerous times for theft and assault (once with a deadly weapon), but he'd only gone to prison twice. Once for his involvement in an armed bank robbery for which he served six years of a ten-year sentence, and the other, his final conviction for which he received Death.\n\nThis is ridiculous, he thought. How could I have served time on Death Row without having any memory of it? And what am I doing out even if I did?\n\nHe continued reading. He'd been given Death for the torture and murder of a man named Roland McKay.\n\nA Roman Catholic priest.\n\nRooster's breath caught at the base of his throat, and he brought a hand to his mouth for fear a literal gasp might escape his lips. His mind replayed the memory of the priest accosting him on the street. How could this be? He had no memory of ever murdering anyone, much less a priest. He was a thief like the rest of the crew, not some sadistic psychopath. And if he'd killed this man, how could he be stalking the city streets pointing an accusatory finger at anyone?\n\nThe files were all there in front of him in black-and-white. But not one of them made any goddamn sense. The information couldn't be true.\n\nHesitantly, Rooster turned to the final page of his file.\n\nTERMINATED. \n\n## -6-\n\nHe gathered up the files and threw them back into the briefcase on the floor. As he reached for the book he saw a business card lying on the table he hadn't noticed previously. An address had been written on one side, a phone number on the other. Both had been written in ballpoint pen, and though legible, appeared hastily scribbled by a less than steady hand. Mind still reeling, Rooster considered the card a moment then grabbed the wall phone and dialed.\n\n\"We're sorry,\" a recorded female voice replied, \"the number you dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try again.\"\n\nHe hung up and tried again. Perhaps the five shots of Jack Daniels had caused him to misdial. This time he concentrated on each number to make sure he got it right, but the same recording answered. He slammed the phone down, fear and uncertainty giving way to anger. It was short-lived. Within seconds of hanging up, the phone began to ring. Startled, he slowly reached for the receiver and brought it to his ear. He could hear breathing. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Cantrell.\" The voice was raspy and weak, like it belonged to a very tired old man. \"You dialed the number. Obviously you've seen the files.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Look on the other side of the card,\" the voice instructed. \"Do you see an address there?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Be there tomorrow morning. Ten o'clock.\"\n\n\"No,\" Rooster said, \"let's do this tonight. I want this over with.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning. Ten o'clock.\"\n\n\"How will I know you?\"\n\n\"I'll know you. Come alone.\"\n\nThe line clicked, died and was replaced with a dial tone. Rooster grabbed the card, read the address again. It meant nothing to him, just an address. His mind on overload, he tried to consider the information in the files again but couldn't make sense of it. He knew those men. None of them were guilty of such things. And why in God's name would he have tortured and murdered anyone? Why would someone invent pasts and former crimes for him and the others? Why would they compile files with false information about things that never happened? What could possibly be the point?\n\nRooster snatched the phone up again and this time dialed the number Snow had given him. He'd promised the information would answer his questions and tell him everything he needed to know. It hadn't. The line rang several times without reply, and he was just about to hang up when he heard a soft click. The ringing ceased. \"Hello?\" he said a moment later.\n\n\"Who is this?\" The voice was strange. Though male, it had a synthetic quality to it, like the person was speaking through a machine of some sort.\n\n\"Where's Snow?\"\n\n\"Who is this?\"\n\n\"I need to speak to Snow, put him on the phone.\"\n\n\"Who is this?\"\n\n\"Who the hell is this?\"\n\nThe voice answered in what began as English but quickly morphed into an indecipherable tongue, eventually becoming a deafening screech somewhere between a scream and a rage-filled, animal-like howl. Rooster pulled the phone from his ear, holding it several inches away, but the horrible wailing continued. He knew those sounds. He'd heard them before, somewhere in a distant and blurred past. Wracked with another wave of terror, he hung the phone up and backed away, stumbling into the kitchen table as he went.\n\nA loud clap behind him sent a shiver through his body as he spun in the direction of the noise.\n\nHe'd knocked the book to the floor.\n\nHe retrieved it, tossed it on the table then grabbed the whiskey and poured another shot.\n\nThe violent tremor in his hands had returned.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe jangle of Gaby's keys in the lock startled him. Huddled at the kitchen table, Rooster had become so enthralled while further studying the book on Demonology that he hadn't heard Gaby ascending the stairs to their apartment. He'd stopped at a depiction of a particularly gruesome-looking demon with blackened wings and a hideous, half-goat, half-human face. Squatting atop a mountain of mangled and dismembered human bodies, in one of its clawed hands it held the severed head of a woman, and in the other what appeared to be a male member. Rooster rubbed his eyes, looked over at Gaby.\n\n\"Hey,\" she said, closing the door behind her. In her arms she held a brown paper bag from the neighborhood grocer. Beneath her heavy winter coat she wore a plain dress and a pair of black heels. Her hair was up and held in place with a clip but had become mussed, probably from the wind. She looked tired. \"How'd the job hunt go?\"\n\n\"Lock the door.\"\n\nShe did, then put the bag on the counter, removed her coat and walked over to the table. They kissed. \"You OK? Why is it so dark in here?\" She headed for a lamp in the den.\n\n\"Don't.\"\n\nGaby stopped, looked at him quizzically.\n\n\"Just don't. OK?\"\n\nAs if not entirely sure what to make of him, she moved back toward the table. \"What's that?\" she asked, referring to the book. Before he could answer she saw the illustration. \"What are you doing with that?\"\n\nRooster closed the book so she could see the cover.\n\n\"Demonology? I don't want that in the house.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" he sighed.\n\n\"Then get rid of it.\" She picked up the whiskey bottle and took it with her to the counter, where she dropped it off then began emptying the grocery bag. \"Sorry babe, I had a long day, just didn't feel like cooking.\" She held up two TV dinners. \"Got you that Salisbury steak one you like, OK?\"\n\nHe followed her to the counter, grabbed his cigarettes and lit one. \"Do you believe in them?\"\n\n\"Demons?\" she asked, busying herself with the oven. \"Do you?\"\n\n\"The book supposedly shows what they look like, and it has incantations written in Latin. Is that how people summon them?\"\n\n\"Why would anyone want to summon demons?\" Gaby unwrapped both dinners and left them on top of the stove. \"It'll just take a minute to preheat and I'll get these in.\"\n\n\"I called Snow,\" he said. \"We met this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Is that where you got the book?\"\n\n\"That and the briefcase,\" he said, motioning to it.\n\n\"Why would he give you a book like that? And what's in the briefcase?\"\n\nRooster took a couple drags before answering. \"It's better if you don't know.\"\n\n\"Is that why he kept calling? So he could tell you secrets?\"\n\n\"Gaby,\" he said, clearing his throat. \"I need to ask you something.\"\n\nShe stopped futzing about the kitchen and focused on him, dark eyes narrowed as if trying to see him more clearly. \"OK.\"\n\n\"How long have we known each other?\"\n\n\"Seems like forever, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"How did we meet?\" he asked.\n\nShe smiled uncomfortably. \"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You don't remember?\"\n\nTears filled his eyes. He shook his head no, brought the cigarette to his lips and drew on it, hard. \"I can't...I don't know what's happening to me but\u2014something's wrong, Gaby\u2014I think I'm losing my mind or...worse.\"\n\nShe put a hand on his forehead. \"You're warm. Feels like you're running a bit of a temp. Let me get you some aspirin.\"\n\nHe gently pulled her hand away but held on tight, watching her blur through his tears. \"I know I know you but...Gaby...I don't know who you are. I'm not even sure who I am.\"\n\n\"You haven't slept, you're drinking, and now you've got a bad influence from your past giving you scary books and making things worse.\" She moved by him, grabbed the book from the table and tucked it into the briefcase. \"No wonder you're not feeling well and can't think clearly. Get this out of here or I'll take it out to the Dumpster myself. I'm serious.\"\n\n\"I need you to tell me, Gaby, please, I\u2014\"\n\n\"You need something to eat, a nice hot shower and some sleep. I'll\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop it!\" He smashed a fist on the counter. The entire room shook. \"Fucking answer me!\"\n\nGaby remained where she was, hugging herself. In a tiny voice she said, \"You're frightening me.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Rooster threw the remains of his cigarette into the kitchen sink then began pacing like a caged animal. \"I'm sorry, I\u2014Jesus Christ, what's happening to me?\"\n\nShe cautiously stepped closer. \"It's going to be all right.\"\n\nNo longer able to control it, he wept openly.\n\nClosing the gap between them, Gaby cupped his face in her hands. \"Look at me.\" He did. \"It's going to be all right.\"\n\n\"Am I crazy?\"\n\nShe pulled him into her, held his head tight to her breasts and kissed the top of his head. \"No, baby, you're not crazy. You're just trying to find your way.\"\n\n\"I think they're after me, Gaby, I think the demons are\u2014something's happened to me, I can't remember things and\u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing can hurt you while you're with me.\" She gave him a quick wink. \"My love's way too powerful for any demon, real or imagined. They mess with my man I'll kick the slithery-tailed little pukes back to Hell where they belong.\"\n\nRooster wanted to smile, but the terror remained.\n\n\"Come on. Rest while I get some chores done and dinner together.\" She led him into the den, helped him onto the couch then switched on the console television in the corner. \"Watch some TV.\"\n\nAs the set came on, Gaby retreated to the kitchen, leaving him alone. He wiped his eyes and nose and sunk deeper into the couch, hiding in the shadows.\n\nA news anchor with bad skin and an even worse comb-over sat at a stylish desk, an ACTION NEWS 8 banner on the wall behind him. Decked out in a yellow polyester blazer and ridiculously wide tie, he shuffled a stack of papers and continued relaying a story he'd begun a moment or two earlier. \"According to eyewitnesses, the black male exited the bar on Cafferty Boulevard and darted directly into traffic. He was struck by what has been described as a large black sedan, possibly a Ford, which fled the scene. Paramedics are working on the man now and we hope to have a live report from the scene very shortly.\"\n\nRooster sat up. The bar he'd met Snow at earlier was on Cafferty Boulevard.\n\n\"One eyewitness told Action News 8 the man appeared disoriented and was running as if being chased, though that did not seem to be the case. It's not yet known if the man was intoxicated or under the influence of narcotics, but\u2014one moment...\" The anchor put a hand to his ear, listened to the voice in his earpiece then paused for dramatic effect and frowned as if personally devastated. \"This just in: the victim, identified as Terrell B. Snow, has been pronounced dead on the scene. As further details become available on this horrific hit-and-run tragedy, we will\u2014\"\n\nRooster turned the television off. The apartment was quiet. He looked to the kitchen. The TV dinners were still on top of the stove but Gaby was nowhere to be found. He hurried through the apartment to the bedroom.\n\nLight filled the room as he flipped the switch. Half-expecting to see the horrible winged and long-tailed creatures in the book flying about, he was relieved to find only shadows, an aged bedroom set and the usual open window. He went directly to the closet and pulled an old shoebox down from the shelf. Inside, a 9mm, a full clip and two boxes of ammunition were wrapped in a cloth. He couldn't remember the last time he'd even touched the gun, much less fired it, but he scooped it up, deftly slapped the clip into place, chambered a round and released the safety. Something about holding the gun steadied his hand.\n\nA cold breeze blew through the room, disturbing the curtains. He moved to close the window but froze. Beneath a streetlight just beyond the courtyard, a lone man was watching the building.\n\nA priest.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\nRooster glanced behind him. Gaby stood in the doorway, a laundry basket of freshly folded clothes in her arms. \"How did you know that would be on the news?\" he asked.\n\n\"How did I know what would be on the news?\" She noticed his weapon and her face went pale. \"Michael, why do you have a gun?\"\n\n\"Turn off the light,\" he instructed. \"Do it now.\"\n\nShe did. They fell into darkness.\n\nRooster looked back out the window. The priest was gone. \n\n## -7-\n\nSilence fills the night again.\n\n\"Starker's right,\" Nauls says, \"six scarecrows...six of us.\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\" Landon makes sure he smiles at Snow before he takes the lead, moves by the first scarecrow and heads for the rotting remnants of the old farmhouse. \"Scratch one Carbone. Dead guys don't count.\"\n\n\"Before this night's over,\" Snow mutters, \"I'm gonna end that fuck.\"\n\nThe others move on, following Landon now, who has gotten several yards ahead of them and is barely perceptible in the darkness and fog. When they catch up to him, they find themselves standing before a ramshackle two-story structure with a dilapidated porch. To the side of the house and further back on the property is a barn in even worse shape. From the face of the farmhouse, a series of blown-out windows stare down at them, opaque eyes gaping in judgment, perhaps in warning.\n\nA rusted metal sign has been staked a few feet from the front porch steps.\n\n~ KEEP OUT\u2014THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED~\n\n\"Yeah,\" Landon says with a smirk, \"didn't see that coming at all.\"\n\nRooster immediately feels something so unsettling it leaves him breathless. He squints through the darkness at the looming structure. \"I know this place,\" he hears himself say.\n\nSnow nods, eyes fixed on the house, his mouth hanging open. \"So do I.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Nauls says, voice shaking.\n\n\"Like we've been here before,\" Starker says.\n\n\"Don't worry about it.\" Landon tests the first step, and once satisfied it will hold his weight, climbs up onto the porch. \"These old farmhouses upstate all look alike. You're spooked, that's all. Come on.\" He ambles across the porch to the front door, which lies on its side next to the doorframe.\n\n\"Got to love Landon.\" Nauls chuckles nervously and climbs the stairs, hoisting the duffel bags of cash along with him. \"He ain't afraid of anything.\"\n\nSnow climbs the steps next. \"Too busy being an asshole.\"\n\n\"Let's get this done.\" Battling uncertainty, confusion and a growing sense of dread, Rooster forces himself up the steps. \"I don't want to be here.\"\n\nAlready fearful they will never leave this awful place, Starker, who began in the lead, is the last to enter the house.\n\nHe joins the others in a large filthy room just inside the entrance. A few broken pieces of what was once furniture are scattered about the otherwise empty area. The floor is rotted in several spots, littered with jagged holes.\n\nLandon sticks the revolver he's been carrying into his belt and pulls free a flashlight. He switches it on, punching a hole in the darkness. Countless dust motes float about in the beam. He sweeps it around. Thick spider webs dangle from the ceiling and fill every corner. A moth flits into the light then spirals off. \"Check it out, Nauls. Looks like your apartment, only nicer.\"\n\nTheir movements disturb something in the air, stirring up a pungent odor.\n\n\"What the hell is that smell?\" Nauls asks, dropping the duffels to the floor and crouching down next to them.\n\nLandon points the flashlight at Snow. \"Dude. Seriously. Put your shoes back on.\"\n\n\"You don't get that off me it's going up your ass sideways.\"\n\nDrifting deeper into the room, Starker watches the ceiling as if expecting something to attack from above. His considerable size causes the floor to creak and shift. He sniffs the air. \"It's sulfur.\"\n\nNauls opens the first duffel, stares at it dumbly a moment then scrambles to the second one and begins rifling through it. \"Landon, put the light here!\"\n\nHe illuminates the duffels. Both are stuffed with neatly banded pieces of blank paper designed to resemble money.\n\nSnow leans in for a closer look. \"Where's the cash?\"\n\n\"It was here,\" Nauls says, \"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Unbelievable!\" Landon spits. \"You assholes stole scrap paper!\"\n\nRooster steps back for a better angle on the others.\n\nNauls struggles to his feet. \"Me and Rooster loaded the cash into the bags. I saw it. It was all there. The bags were full of it.\"\n\nLandon draws his revolver. \"Yeah they're full of it all right.\" He points it at Rooster. \"Where the fuck's my money, crew chief?\"\n\nRooster, Snow and Nauls simultaneously pull their weapons and point them at each other. Preoccupied, and unconcerned with the others, Starker wanders to the back of the room, where a large unusable staircase resides. Littered with broken wood and debris, he gazes up into the shadows of the second-floor. Something dead\u2014probably an animal of some sort, though he cannot be sure\u2014lies in a mangled heap at the very edge of the landing. The walls and upper portion of the banister are streaked with what might be blood.\n\n\"Everybody calm down,\" Rooster says. \"We'll figure this out, we\u2014\"\n\n\"Fuck that,\" Landon snaps. \"Somebody switched out those bags or the money or something and one of you pricks is gonna tell me what's going on or I swear to God I'll shoot every last fucking one of you.\"\n\n\"How could we switch the bags out?\" Nauls frantically moves his gun from one person to the next then back again. \"They went straight from the armored car to the van, and we were all in the van until we got here. Nobody could switch anything out! We were together the whole time!\"\n\nSnow, who has been holding one of his .45s on Landon and the other on Nauls, lowers them both. \"He's right.\"\n\n\"I don't give a shit,\" Landon says. \"That money didn't just disappear, so where is it? Rooster, you and Nauls were the ones who loaded it, and since Nauls is a fucking mongoloid, you better start talking.\"\n\n\"Mongoloid?\" Nauls cocks an eyebrow. \"What the hell is a mongoloid?\"\n\n\"It's them little elf-looking motherfuckers,\" Snow explains, \"the ones with the pointy heads and shit.\"\n\n\"No, those are cretins,\" Landon says. \"Mongoloids are the redheads.\"\n\nNauls tucks his gun into the back of his pants. \"I don't have red hair.\"\n\nLandon sighs but keeps his attention on Rooster, who lowers his weapon as a peace offering. \"Get your piece off me,\" he says, \"and we'll figure this shit out.\"\n\n\"Nah, asshole, first you're gonna tell me where the\u2014\"\n\nAn enormous muscle-bound arm shoots out of the darkness behind him and wraps around Landon's throat, strangling him with such force that his feet leave the ground. He drops his revolver and the flashlight and clutches at the arm with both hands in a futile attempt to dislodge it. The flashlight rolls across the floor, tumbling through the room and painting the farmhouse with sweeping arcs of twisting light that eerily illuminates then plunges each man back into darkness. \"Listen to me and listen to me good,\" Starker says, holding the smaller man effortlessly, his voice just above a whisper in Landon's ear. \"We got a lot more to worry about here than that money. Now you cut the shit, keep your mouth shut and do what Rooster tells you to do or I'll snap your neck. You feel me, boy?\" Landon manages a gurgling response and Starker releases him. He crashes to the floor with a thud and one of his feet breaks through the boards.\n\nLandon lays there a moment, clutching his throat, then pulls free, retrieves his revolver and slowly returns to his feet without further comment.\n\nNauls scurries to the corner and retrieves the flashlight. As he brings it round, he stops on something beneath the old staircase. \"Hey, there's a\u2014\"\n\n\"Door under the stairs,\" Rooster interrupts. He knows he's right but has no idea how he's come to possess such information.\n\nStarker finds Rooster's face in the dark. \"It leads to another staircase.\"\n\n\"Then a hallway,\" Snow says quietly.\n\n\"And there's doors on both sides of the hallway,\" Nauls adds.\n\nEveryone looks to Landon. He rubs at his throat. \"Oh I'm allowed to talk now?\" He glares at Starker. \"Just wanna make sure it's OK with fucking Albert DeSalvo over here before I say anything.\" Nauls aims the light at him, leaving no doubt that despite his bravado, even Landon is terrified by what's happening. He finally nods reluctantly, fidgeting about tensely. \"Yeah, I\u2014I don't know how I know it either, but behind the doors there's a bunch of rooms.\"\n\n\"Even if we're right, end of the day it's just an abandoned old farmhouse with scarecrows out front and some rooms where a cellar ought to be,\" Snow says. \"Why we all so scared?\"\n\n\"There's only one way to find out for sure.\"\n\n\"Aw, fuck me running.\" The beam of light begins to tremble as Nauls heads for the porch. \"I want out right now, man, this is bullshit.\"\n\nStarker lifts the AK-47 higher on his hip, and with one short sidestep, blocks the doorway. \"We've all been here before. We need to know why.\"\n\n\"But what happened to the money?\" Snow asks, his face a mask of barely contained terror.\n\n\"Maybe there never was any money,\" Starker says. \"Maybe there wasn't even an armored car.\"\n\n\"Tell that to Carbone,\" Landon counters. \"Fuckhead died robbing it.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's not how he died. Maybe that's just what we remember. Maybe this is all some kind of sick game.\"\n\nNauls looks at the floor. \"Well I don't wanna play no more.\"\n\n\"Think about what he's saying,\" Rooster says. \"Does anybody really remember anything before the job today?\"\n\n\"Of course we know what happened today,\" Landon says.\n\n\"Do we?\" Rooster watches him, doing his best to keep his face void of emotion. \"Do any of you remember anything before the van? Because I'm not sure I do. I mean, I think I do, it feels like I do but...\"\n\n\"It's in your head,\" Starker says, \"but you don't actually remember it.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Snow agrees. \"What he said.\"\n\nRooster nods.\n\n\"So I'm the only one who wants to leave then?\" Nauls paces about wildly. \"Really? Are you guys fucking high?\" The light drifts back and forth across the dark room, cutting shadows and revealing quick glimpses of a long-dead house.\n\nIn that moment, eyes following the beam, fear wells in Rooster the likes of which he's never known. He's sure he sees something more, something there yet not quite there, waiting in the darkness, slipping from sight like scuttling insects just as the light passes over them. He grips his weapon tighter but it does little to calm his rising terror. \"We need to search this place.\"\n\n\"No we don't.\" Nauls shakes his head. \"We can just leave.\"\n\n\"We need to know what's happening here.\"\n\n\"We can't get upstairs,\" Starker tells them. \"Staircase is blocked with shit and it's all rotted out. But there's something dead up there and whoever killed it did some finger-painting with its blood.\"\n\n\"There's something wrong with this place, man, it's\u2014you guys all feel it too, I know you do. Shit Starker you and Rooster felt it outside, and...I don't...\" Nauls suddenly becomes strangely calm, his voice quiet and childlike. \"I don't want to die out here.\"\n\n\"Easy, Nauls,\" Landon says. \"Don't wanna trip and fall on your vagina.\"\n\n\"Bring the light around to the door under the stairs,\" Rooster tells him, his gaze moving between the horrified faces before him. \"We're going down there.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nAs daylight splintered night, it brought with it an icy rain that descended upon the city in violent torrents. Shaking off the residue of nightmares, waking and otherwise, Rooster adjusted his position in the chair. He'd placed it in front of the window and watched the street all night. Every muscle in his body hurt, his neck was stiff and sore and his temples pulsed with a dull ache. Ice ticked against the window, mixing with the sluicing rain to blur the glass and world beyond. Numerous lost souls had come and gone throughout the night, hurrying through the darkness, but the priest had not returned.\n\nThough he couldn't be certain, Rooster thought he'd briefly nodded off a few times during the night. After asking him countless times to put the gun away and come to bed, Gaby finally gave up a little after midnight and drifted off to sleep. She lay sprawled out across the bed, her breathing slow and deep. He watched her a while. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. It didn't seem right, Rooster thought, for someone so intelligent, so caring and just, so uncorrupted and faithful to be associated in any way with such madness and horror. Yet somehow it made perfect sense, a pure and tranquil soul like Gaby existing amidst the mayhem, calm beauty at the eye of an otherwise violent storm. His storm.\n\nHe sat on the bed next to her and gently caressed her face. She stirred and moaned quietly but remained asleep. Who are you? He wondered. Why are you here with me?\n\nThe pain in his temples drifted behind his eyes, lingering there as he gently kissed Gaby on the cheek.\n\nWith the 9mm tucked into the back of his pants, he threw on his jacket, swallowed a handful of aspirin and slipped into a cold and unforgiving rain. \n\n## -8-\n\nRooster found himself standing in the same rain some minutes later, having traced the address on the card to an old restaurant in a long-dead neighborhood. A small dark hole-in-the-wall, it sat alone between a series of boarded-up storefronts and a huge lot of bricks and debris that had once been a building. The street was filthy, cold and lifeless. No cars out in front of the restaurant, but the sign in an otherwise dark window blinked: Dante's. There was no one else around, and the second floor above the restaurant appeared deserted, most of the windows blown out or boarded up. Rooster looked to the end of the block, checking the corners in both directions. If he was being watched or tailed, they were the best he'd ever encountered.\n\nHe moved through the door, which alerted those inside to his arrival with the jingle of a little bell. His eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting as he was met with a blanket of thick, oppressive heat. A series of tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and small candles encased in glass orbs at their centers lined the walls to his left and right. The open area between them provided a path through the narrow restaurant to, he assumed, the kitchen in back, but it was so dark he couldn't make out much beyond the first few tables. The smell of burned food hung in the air, and although there was a podium for a ma\u00eetre de the restaurant appeared empty, perhaps closed.\n\n\"Here,\" a voice said from the rear of the room.\n\nRooster casually slid a hand to the gun in his belt and moved down the center aisle toward the direction of the voice. As the shadows parted, the candlelight danced along the floor and walls, flickering about, alive in the dark. As he cautiously approached the only occupied table in the place, the silhouette of a man's head and shoulders emerged.\n\n\"Mr. Cantrell.\" Not a question. Said with what almost sounded like adoration. \"Nasty rain out there this morning.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name's not important,\" he said. \"Call me whatever you'd like.\"\n\nSame aged and drained voice as on the phone, Rooster was sure of it.\n\n\"Mr. Snow seemed fond of Poindexter.\" The man motioned to the chair across from him with a spindly arm, his hand brushing through the circle of candlelight cast across the table. Skeletal and liver-spotted, his pale flesh was laced with bulbous blue veins, the fingers gnarled with arthritis. \"Not terribly original, but we can go with that if you'd like.\"\n\n\"Snow's dead.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nRooster looked behind him. He could see the front door and the light beyond, though it seemed farther away than was possible.\n\n\"It's all right, Mr. Cantrell, you're safe here. Please. Sit.\"\n\nHe pulled the chair out, slid it to the side so he could still see the door then took a seat. He'd never cared for sitting with his back to doors. \"Who are you?\" Rooster pulled his gun and laid it flat on the table, barrel pointed at the man. \"I'm not asking again.\"\n\nUntil then the man's face had remained in shadow. He sat forward enough to allow the candlelight to reveal a glimpse of a loose-skinned face ravaged by age, his features sharp and birdlike. A pair of eyeglasses with black frames sat high on his needle nose, the flickering flame from the candle reflected in lenses so thick they might have been comical under different circumstances. \"Don't be an ass,\" he said wearily, \"put that away. Our time together is limited.\"\n\nRooster reluctantly returned the gun to his lap.\n\n\"Are the headaches getting worse?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"It happens as the mind recovers and remembers more and more. Truth always comes with some measure of pain.\" He folded his damaged hands before him on the table and sat back, his face again engulfed in darkness. \"Does The Kingdom Project mean anything to you?\"\n\nFaraway screams tore at him. \"No.\"\n\n\"Named for the famous Eliot poem 'The Hollow Men' which speaks of 'death's other kingdom' compiled with numerous books on demonology and the occult that consistently referred to the darkness on the other side as a 'kingdom of shadows,' The Kingdom Project was a top secret program begun in the late 1970s and continued until the mid-80s. The occult has always been of interest to the powers that be. Hitler spent a fortune on its study and possibilities. Many of the same scientists that worked for the Third Reich ended up here, in the United States, after World War II. They weren't all rocket scientists, Mr. Cantrell. Many were those who worked on the Reich's most classified occult projects. Their work not only continued here in the states, it expanded and went farther than even Hitler could've imagined.\"\n\nOutside, the muted sounds of a siren rose then fell away to silence.\n\n\"The early programs of the 50s and 60s met with failure,\" he continued. \"For much of the 70s nothing changed, and the majority of programs were scrapped. Many concentrated on psychic phenomenon or the like, but The Kingdom Project had different, more sophisticated ideas. Our goal was to discover a connection\u2014a bridge, if you like\u2014between our reality and the underworld. We weren't concerned with an afterlife that could only be entered through death, but rather alternate existences existing simultaneously with ours.\"\n\nA waiter materialized from the shadows holding a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and a goblet of red wine. He placed them before Poindexter without comment then slipped away.\n\n\"I understand you're not a man of science, so I won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say it all boils down to physics and mathematics. Our existence, our entire universe, this entire dimension, is based upon them. They all are. It's simply a matter of finding the correct equation then executing it via the proper tools. What we as well as the others before us failed to realize was that in a psychological sense, the physical world is essentially an illusion. The path to the other side, to the power we were searching for\u2014the darkness, that place of pure primal terror and evil\u2014isn't something one can find in the depths of the Earth or on a saucer ride through space or any of that nonsense. It exists in the limitless caverns of our minds. Our minds provide the gateway to the other side...the underworld...the darkness. It wasn't Heaven Hitler was searching for, Mr. Cantrell, and neither were we. In the end, these programs all have military\u2014or similar\u2014applications. The Kingdom Project was no different. We focused specifically on the dark side of the occult, the concept that things like demons, devils, demonic entities\u2014whatever you'd like to call them\u2014literally existed on some level, if not on a physical plane then perhaps a purely spiritual one. Think about it, beings of pure, unadulterated, unapologetic evil. Beings of pure rage, pure violence, pure hatred. Imagine if that level of evil truly existed in a conscious, intelligent form. Imagine the possibilities of literally summoning such creatures. Imagine harnessing their power, the very essence...of Hell.\"\n\n\"You're out of your fucking mind.\"\n\n\"No, but unfortunately you are. And I'm largely responsible for it.\" He took up a fork, poked at the food on his plate. \"Our push, specifically with The Kingdom Project, was largely chemical-based. We believed that once the bridge was found, if it truly existed outside theory and mathematical probability, could only be crossed in a spiritual way. In-other-words, psychologically, as the real-world applications of physics and mathematics had to be merged with spiritual, non-physical, synthetic components.\"\n\n\"Synthetic,\" Rooster asked, \"as in drugs?\"\n\n\"Yes, and it was only if and when these two areas were in perfect synchronization that our goals could be achieved. The mind itself had to be altered in order to access the other side. There was no question about that. You could get there from here, as it were, and the key was right before our eyes. Many ancient cultures, from Native Americans to countless tribes of people worldwide\u2014people we considered largely inferior savages\u2014already possessed the process we'd been searching for. These peoples used it to commune with paradise, to find nirvana, God, peace and transcendence. And they all used mind-altering substances to achieve it\u2014roots, leaves, plants, things of the Earth\u2014ingested before these journeys were taken. It's precisely that angle I studied and brought to the project. There were numerous formulas over several years that used pieces of these various concoctions from different cultures. And of course, as a chemist, I implemented my own mixtures, including LSD derivatives and other mind-altering substances. Many did nothing more than standard hits of LSD. The initial versions were far too strong and brought on brain damage, permanent insanity, even death in a few cases. Eventually we were able to isolate the aspects we required and produced what I believed was the perfect elixir for The Kingdom Project. Once the right formula was found the challenge became finding proper test subjects. No one sane would knowingly volunteer for such a thing, so we were forced to utilize subjects that hadn't volunteered.\"\n\nRooster tightened his grip on the gun but left it in his lap. \"You forced people to take a mind-altering drug you cooked up in a test tube?\"\n\n\"We did. And the results were interesting. Not what we'd hoped for, mind you, but very interesting.\" He twirled the fork around strands of spaghetti, brought it to his mouth and chewed. \"Many subjects experienced something,\" he said, \"but it wasn't the darkness we were searching for. Many believed it was nonsense, false near-death and other psychotic episodes brought on chemically. But I knew this was different. We were so close. The problem, you see, was not with the drug, but the subjects. I began to more closely study the nature of evil, the various interpretations of it in different cultures and varied religions, and though they were often vastly different, I uncovered one consistent thread throughout. According to every doctrine, evil was partly voluntary. One had to embrace it in a sense, allow it. The Devil, if you will, could not simply snatch you up in the dead of night and carry you off to Hell to do with you what he liked. Nor could his minions\u2014demons\u2014attack without provocation, their powers were limited as well. One had to let them 'in' so to speak. Simply put, if the road to Hell truly existed, one could not be dragged there. One had to voluntarily walk that path\u2014through either conscious decision or even outright deception\u2014but one had to allow it. Without that consent, evil could control no man, and no man could find or tap into pure evil. What we needed were not subjects forced into service but rather test subjects that had already embraced the darkness. We tried various subjects that practiced black magic and evil\u2014Satanists and the like\u2014but again met with failure. Evil, it seems, does not want those who so enthusiastically want it. So we began searching prisons. And that is where we found you, Mr. Cantrell. It's where we found all of you. You and your crew were chosen from thousands of potential candidates. You were all condemned, all paying for the horrible crimes you'd committed, all hopeless. If damnation was real, you were all headed straight for it. Murderers, thieves, rapists, terrorists, destroyers of innocents, you were perfect pieces to a larger puzzle of absolute darkness and depravity the likes of which even this hideous world could not begin to comprehend. You were the best of them, granted, the best of the worst, but the best just the same. As it turned out, you were also, however, a rather large fly in the ointment.\"\n\nHeart smashing his chest, Rooster attempted a deep breath. \"You're telling me everything I read in those files is true?\"\n\nPoindexter scooped up a forkful of meatball and slid it between his lips. \"That is precisely what I'm telling you.\"\n\n\"Why can't I remember?\"\n\n\"We didn't want you to remember.\" He wiped a smear of marinara from his chin with a cloth napkin. \"So your memories\u2014all your memories\u2014were wiped clean and replaced with memories we wanted you to have.\"\n\n\"Then there was no armored car job?\"\n\n\"There was not.\"\n\n\"But Carbone, he\u2014he was shot.\"\n\n\"He was killed, yes, but not from a gunshot.\"\n\nThe tremors returned. He struggled to control them. \"What then?\"\n\nPoindexter rolled more pasta onto his fork, the sauce dripping in thick globs back to his plate. \"You remember the farmhouse,\" he said, the fork shaking in his arthritic hand. \"It's coming back to you.\"\n\n\"Yes. Slowly.\"\n\n\"As I mentioned, you were the best of the worst.\" He stuffed the spaghetti into his mouth. \"You tortured and murdered a priest, claiming at your trial that you'd been repeatedly sexually molested by the man when you were a child and that's what had led to your life of crime and eventually his murder. He'd ruined you, and in turn, years later, you had ruined him.\"\n\nA spike of pain dug deep into his temple and ran down along the right side of his jaw. Rooster fought it back. \"I don't...\"\n\n\"Remember. Yes, I know. For that you should thank me.\"\n\n\"For wiping my memories away and leaving me with lies?\"\n\nIgnoring the question, he took up the goblet, sipped some wine. \"Of course the pedophilia scandal that shook the Catholic Church had not hit yet.\"\n\nRooster had no idea what scandal he was referring to. How much of his mind had these bastards destroyed?\n\n\"The idea that a respected, admired and loved parish priest would've ever done such hideous things to a little boy was unthinkable. No one, including us, believed you.\" Poindexter savored the wine a moment before continuing. \"Turns out you were telling the truth, who knew? The fact remained, however, that you tortured and murdered a priest in cold blood. Well done.\"\n\n\"What the hell did you people do to us?\"\n\n\"We sent you where no human being had ever been before...and returned from.\" He stabbed another meatball. \"You were all given the mixture. It took you to depths none of us could've imagined in our wildest dreams. You went to the core, the heart of evil, to its very soul. I must confess that until that night I hadn't counted on it actually working. But it did. As we'd hoped, you weren't alone in that boundless darkness, there was something else there with you. Something...alive.\"\n\n\"Where did we go?\"\n\nHe grinned like the demons in Rooster's nightmares. \"You touched the face of Lucifer, Mr. Cantrell. And he showed you evil in its purest, most savagely beautiful form, unbridled violence beyond comprehension.\"\n\n\"The farmhouse,\" Rooster muttered, \"the scarecrows, the rooms beneath the house...\"\n\n\"Props,\" he said, waving at the air as if to knock the words away. \"Familiar images that would elicit fear and discomfort were necessary so the mind would have something to reference. Interesting thing about the human mind, it fills in what is not there, often pulling images from a bank of previous experiences to fill the gaps. We simply helped you all with that, giving you something to experience in a pseudo-physical sense. Something terrifying that you could all relate to and understand.\"\n\n\"This is bullshit.\" Rooster stood up.\n\nPoindexter continued eating. Candlelight flickered across the plate. The spaghetti was not spaghetti at all, and it was not drenched in tomato sauce. Blood...bile...excrement... worms...human eyeballs cooked to a crisp, burned nearly beyond recognition. \"Technically the experiment was a success,\" he said. \"We did achieve what we'd set out to do, at least initially. But then it all went horribly wrong.\"\n\n\"This isn't happening.\" He pressed his palms to his temples, his head pounding now and his legs weak. \"This isn't...this isn't...\"\n\n\"Once we realized what we'd truly tapped into, that it was the equivalent of accessing the literal power of existence, and the dark side of existence at that, we knew we'd overestimated our abilities. It was actually quite beautiful in its purity, but you were all torn to shreds by its profane glory. It became an orgy of violence and blood, an orgy of death.\"\n\n\"You're lying, you sonofabitch.\" Rooster pointed the 9mm at him.\n\n\"Do you really think we could let any of you come back at that point? Or that there'd be anything left to bring back?\"\n\n\"Then where am I? I'm standing right here!\"\n\n\"The longer you struggle against truth, the longer the forces of darkness will bind you, Mr. Cantrell. There are some things human beings can never control. We're not meant to, regardless of how badly we may desire it. Evil\u2014true evil\u2014is one of those things. I understand it's hard for you to accept, but you were all thoroughly expendable, Mr. Cantrell, a bunch of hooligans and lowlifes, losers and drains on society no one cared about then or now.\"\n\n\"It wasn't enough that you used us as guinea pigs for your demented projects, crippled our minds and broke us to pieces. You had to wipe out our memories and send us back into the world haunted by nightmares you put there and with no knowledge of who we are or how we got here? You destroyed us\u2014you admit it\u2014and yet you still try to cover it up with bullshit stories about demons and Hell and\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you really believe telling yourself that long and hard enough will keep the terror at bay?\" Poindexter placed the fork next to the plate and wiped the blood from his mouth with the napkin. \"You all disappeared from the face of the Earth and not a single person noticed, much less cared.\"\n\n\"Then why come to us after all this time?\"\n\n\"Penance,\" he said softly, the air of arrogance fading. \"It's what's required of me now. Eventually, we all serve one master or another, Mr. Cantrell, whether we like it or believe in it or not. And I've come to learn that it rarely turns out to be the one we were counting on.\"\n\n\"Who are the men that killed Snow, the men in the Crown Vic?\"\n\nHe smiled blandly. \"They're not men.\"\n\n\"What do I do?\" Rooster leaned across the table so that the gun was only a few inches from the man's face. \"How do I kill these things in my head?\"\n\nHe leaned further into the light, pulled his glasses from his pale and sickly face and pushed forward until his forehead met the barrel of the gun. \"Deliver me from my sins,\" he whispered. \"Deliver us from evil.\"\n\nRooster's finger remained remarkably steady as it curled to the trigger.\n\nThe old man's eyes rolled to white.\n\nEverything else turned crimson. \n\n## -9-\n\nThe flashlight beam slides along the dirty floor to the door under the stairs. An inverted pentagram has been painted across it in blood. Above it and to the left, also in blood, are the numbers 666 and a series of words Rooster cannot decipher.\n\n\"Oh hell no, that's Devil shit right there.\" Snow backs away.\n\nRooster studies the words scrawled on the door. \"What language is that?\"\n\n\"Latin.\"\n\nThey all look to Starker. The giant shrugs. \"I took it in high school you ignorant motherfuckers.\"\n\n\"What's it mean?\"\n\n\"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.\" Starker finds Rooster in the darkness behind him. \"Supposedly that's what it says at the gates of Hell.\"\n\n\"Why would somebody put that there?\" Nauls asks in a panic.\n\n\"Probably a bunch of drugged-out, loser, never been laid, douche bag, Devil-worshipping-wannabes.\" Landon pushes past the others. \"Who gives a shit? If we're doing this let's get it over with.\"\n\nWith that, Starker steadies his stance then kicks in the door. It implodes and tears from its hinges with a loud cracking, splintering sound, tumbling away into darkness down another set of stairs. They hear it land seconds later as an enormous cloud of dust and dirt kicks up in response, wafting out the open doorway and bursting into the room. A stale mildew odor is followed by a pungent smell similar to rotting garbage and raw sewage. They cough, block their nostrils then huddle together in the limited light until the stench weakens and the farmhouse is returned to eerie silence.\n\nNo one speaks, but before anyone can motion Nauls to lead the way with the flashlight, he hands it to Rooster. With a sigh, Rooster takes the lead, the light in one hand and his 9mm in the other. He steps through, aims the light and sees a small set of wooden stairs. Beyond them is a cement landing and what appears to be a corridor he and the others were somehow already aware of.\n\nHe begins his descent. Starker is behind him, his weight shaking the staircase with each step. Next is Landon. Snow and Nauls pull up the rear.\n\nThey reach the corridor without incident. Rooster pans the light along the walls. Several doors line either side. The far end of the hallway is draped in a darkness that the flashlight is unable to penetrate from this distance. The fear and danger is palpable now, a spiritual entity unmistakably alive and horrific, real, it drifts and moves around them like liquid, invisible to the naked eye but without question, present. Rooster sweeps the light along one wall and then the next, as together, the crew slowly moves deeper into the corridor. All the doors are closed.\n\nExcept one. He places the light on it. This door is ajar.\n\nRooster uses hand motions to let the others know what needs to be done. He sends Starker to the left side of the doorway, Snow to the right. Rooster then crouches, facing the door head-on while Landon covers his back and Nauls watches the section of hallway and stairs behind them.\n\nStarker holds the AK-47 in one hand and raises the other into the light so everyone can see. Slowly, he counts off, raising one finger, then another and finally a third. A quick nod, and the crew springs into action, rushing into the room with weapons at the ready and the flashlight leading the way.\n\nSilence returns. A mocking silence...\n\nThe light trembles in Rooster's hand. But they see. They all see.\n\nA series of metal slabs like something out of a coroner's workshop, bodies atop them in hospital johnnies, IVs attached to their arms pumping some clear fluid into their veins, oxygen tubes implanted in their nostrils, wires running from their heads and chests and limbs to machines and computers along the far wall, all of it organized and functioning in the dark bowels of an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Six metal tables. Six men.\n\n\"God in Heaven,\" someone says in a desperate whisper. \"It's us.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nIt might've been hours, might've been days.\n\nHe could no longer tell the difference.\n\nThe rain had stopped and the air was still, but it had gotten much colder. Bundled in a heavy coat and knit hat, the briefcase in his free hand, Rooster stood arm-in-arm with Gaby before a fresh grave. Dressed in a black dress and heels, her face partially covered with a lace veil, moments before she had placed flowers where a headstone should've been. Her lips moved in silent prayer behind the veil, dark eyes lowered. No one else was there. A life, Snow's life, had ended. Here, at this unmarked grave. And no one cared. It was like he'd never really been there at all.\n\nGaby finished her prayers, and together, they turned to leave.\n\nIt was then that Rooster saw them. Across the sea of headstones, crypts and monuments to the dead, two men watched them, their breath converted to spiraling clouds rising from their bodies like fleeing souls.\n\nGaby saw them, too. \"Do what you have to do.\" She lifted the veil, rose up on her toes so she could reach, and kissed his cheek. \"I love you.\"\n\nAs she moved away toward the gates of the cemetery, the men started toward him. Rooster lit a cigarette and smoked it until they reached him.\n\nThey looked the same.\n\nLandon stared at him, said nothing.\n\n\"Hey, Rooster,\" Nauls offered, scratching at his beard and smiling nervously, eyes concealed behind the usual sunglasses. \"Good to see you, bro.\"\n\n\"Good to see you too, Nauls.\"\n\n\"That is so precious\u2014seriously\u2014I think I just tinkled a little. How about we save the group hug for later and you two can finish jerking each other's gherkins then, OK?\" Landon stepped closer. \"Paper said the hit-and-run was probably an accident, driver just panicked. I say kiss my celluloid-dimpled ass, whoever hit Snow did it on purpose. Can't blame them\u2014I would've run the prick over if he stepped in front of my car too\u2014but sounds like somebody took him out to me.\"\n\nRooster took a final drag on his cigarette then dropped it and crushed it out with his boot. \"They did.\"\n\n\"Do you know who they are?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure yet, but\u2014\"\n\n\"You heard about Starker?\"\n\n\"Snow said he killed his old lady and ran to Mexico.\"\n\n\"He never got that far. Big bastard was hiding out in a fleabag motel right here in the city. They found him a few weeks back, in the bathtub, wrists slashed clear to the bone. Sorry, I'm not buying that one either. Same fuckers probably did him too.\"\n\n\"I keep having these dreams,\" Nauls blurted out. \"Nightmares, I\u2014\"\n\nLandon held a hand up like a crossing guard. \"Let the grownups talk.\"\n\n\"Fuck you, man! You're having them too. Tell him. Tell him.\"\n\nLandon defiantly bit his lip and looked away.\n\n\"Rooster,\" Nauls said, barely able to contain his tears, \"I've been having these dreams. There's all this screaming and yelling and blood and horrible shit. Then it gets dark and I can't see. I can't move, I can't even breathe and it feels like I'm being smothered. I try to open my mouth to scream only I can't. My mouth, it's\u2014somebody's sewn it shut. Who would\u2014the bad dreams won't stop, they\u2014I'm even starting to have them when I'm awake, I\u2014\"\n\n\"We all are,\" Rooster said evenly.\n\nNauls ran a hand through his tangle of hair. \"Every time I leave the house I see this chick and this older dude, they're dressed like they work in an office or a bank or something and they follow me and want to talk to me, but there's something not right about them. They look so familiar only I don't know who they are. And Landon, he\u2014he don't drive no more. Landon don't drive. He can't. Every time he gets behind the wheel of a car he sees this lady holding a baby.\"\n\n\"She's on every fucking corner just staring at me.\" Landon became visibly shaken as his resistance fell away. \"I know her from somewhere but...I'm pretty sure the baby's dead.\"\n\n\"What's happening?\" Nauls asked. \"What happened to us that night at the farmhouse? We can't remember nothing but bits and pieces.\"\n\n\"I've got something to show you,\" Rooster said softly, as if the dead might otherwise hear. He held up the briefcase.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"The truth.\"\n\n* * * *\n\n\"This isn't possible,\" Landon mumbles.\n\nAs if in a trance, Snow approaches the last table, the only one covered with a white sheet which has apparently been thrown there to conceal Carbone's body. \"Carbone's dead,\" he says. \"He's dead, and he's back in that van.\"\n\nMesmerized, the others gawk at their likenesses on the tables before them, confusion and fear igniting as one and slashing at them like razorblades. Rooster cocks his head, studying his own face just feet away, eyes closed and face void of expression as if in the throes of a deep, drug-induced sleep.\n\nInches from the covered metal table, Snow pokes at the sheet with one of his .45s. The sheet begins to shake in response, as whatever lies beneath convulses. Horrified, Snow yanks back the sheet.\n\nSans johnny, wires and tubes, Carbone's nude body lies quivering violently on the table. His lower abdomen and sexual organs are ripped to shreds, and the remainder of his body has sustained thousands of small but horribly deep serrated cuts, as if it's been wrapped in barbed wire then torn free. The lacerations, many blackened and scabbed over, others fresh and still bleeding, form a crisscross pattern on his savaged skin that is as strangely alluring in its symmetry as it is appalling in its brutality.\n\nAs Snow backs away, both .45s locked on the body, Carbone suddenly sits up, vaulting forward. His eyes open but they are empty raw sockets. He continues to spasm uncontrollably in seizure. \"He's coming.\" His voice is no longer exclusively his own, but many, and sounds as if it is stacked atop countless others, giving it an unsettling echo-like, inhuman tone. \"He's coming...\"\n\nHands to his ears, Nauls stumbles back into the hallway like a terrified child.\n\n\"Shoot it!\" Landon screams.\n\nSnow is frozen in place.\n\n\"He knows who we really are,\" it says. \"He knows the things we've done. Our secrets, he knows them all. He's coming...\"\n\n\"God help us,\" Rooster mutters.\n\n\"God?\" Carbone turns what remains of his butchered face in the direction of Rooster's voice. His split lips curl into a hideous, bloody-toothed grin.\n\nStarker levels the AK-47 and unloads.\n\nThe discharge is deafening in such an enclosed space, and sends the body tumbling from the metal slab. It crashes to the floor as if boneless, flesh slapping cement floor as the impact empties the remains of its internal organs from the body cavity.\n\nFrom the corridor behind them, Nauls begins to scream.\n\n* * * *\n\nAt the outskirts of the city, on a lonely dirt road, Rooster leaned against Nauls' car and smoked a cigarette. He'd waited as Nauls and Landon poured over the material in the briefcase, then he answered their questions as best he could. Both men exchanged uncertain glances throughout, and now stood watching Rooster as if expecting him to tell them what to do next.\n\n\"They used us like lab animals,\" Rooster finally said. \"They wiped our minds clean, and now that we're starting to remember they're taking us out one by one. They figure they can toss us aside like garbage.\"\n\n\"We are garbage,\" Nauls replied quietly.\n\n\"Maybe so, but we never even got the chance to make things right, to\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" Landon interjected. \"Repent? Save our souls? Deliver ourselves from evil like this Poindexter dude told you?\"\n\nRooster stared at him.\n\n\"Maybe that's exactly what we're doing right now,\" Landon said.\n\nA breeze blew past, causing nearby trees to whisper and sway.\n\n\"We have to go back,\" Rooster said.\n\n\"To the farmhouse, are you serious?\" Landon gave a wry smile. \"You want to go back there?\"\n\nRooster nodded, smoke curling around his head like creeping vines. \"You think you could find it again after all this time?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Landon looked to Nauls but he had his back to him. \"I can find it.\"\n\nHe hadn't expected Landon to be so adamant. But then he hadn't expected his and Nauls' nearly blas\u00e9 reaction to the things he'd told them either. Something had changed since they'd driven out here. The moment he'd agreed to go with them they no longer seemed quite as upset as they'd been initially. He dropped his cigarette and pushed away from the car. \"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Rooster, I...we've...been there since.\"\n\n\"You've been back there since that night?\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Landon said. \"We never left.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nRunning...screams...confusion...\n\nPanic explodes through the darkness...\n\nThe flashlight bounces, throwing strobe-like splashes of light along the corridor, floors, walls and ceiling before finally settling on Nauls. His face protrudes from the darkness, eyes closed but with a look of horrific pain. Blood slowly trickles from his nostrils into his beard.\n\nThe others scramble about trying to cover the corridor. Landon frantically knocks Snow out of the way and climbs the stairs back to the house.\n\nNauls opens his eyes. \"He's here,\" he says in a loud whisper.\n\nHis body begins to shake. Slowly at first but gradually building in intensity, he begins to buck, wracked with increasingly violent spasms. His thin frame twists as he flails about, and his weapon falls to the floor. He brings his shaking hands to his face, screams and stabs his fingers directly into his eyes.\n\nRooster reaches out in an effort to stop him, but it's too late.\n\nNauls tears his eyes from their sockets with a spray of blood and fluid, his screams replaced with laughter as his spasms grow worse and he begins to spin like a top.\n\n\"Jesus God!\" Snow shrieks, falling away in horror.\n\n\"Go!\" Starker grabs Snow and throws him toward the stairs. \"Go!\"\n\nRooster stands paralyzed, holding the flashlight on Nauls, who comes to rest, laughing through the blood and pain, holding an eyeball in each hand as if in offering, hideous moist strings dangling from them and dripping blood. \"We're going where there are no eyes,\" he says, his voice little more than a garbled growl now. \"Where everyone is blind...yet everyone sees.\"\n\nBlood suddenly spews from his mouth, eye sockets, nose and ears. Like something has exploded deep inside him, the blood sprays free as his screams return, this time as raspy, animal-like squeals. \"He's here,\" he gurgles, choking on the blood as it pours out over his bottom lip. \"He's\u2014\"\n\nNauls flies backwards, crashes into the far wall like he's been thrown by something savage and powerful. His body slides to the floor, swallowed by the shadows there.\n\nRooster feels Starker's enormous hand clamp onto his arm and yank him back just before he fires a burst from the AK-47 into the darkness. Together, they run for the stairs. \"Don't look back!\" Starker yells out.\n\nBut it no longer matters.\n\nThe darkness, and all that dwells within it, follows.\n\nIn the room upstairs, Snow lurches about, lost in the dark, his guns at his side and his mouth open, soundlessly forming words\u2014perhaps prayers\u2014while something speaks to him from the surrounding shadows only he can hear. The voice of a woman, a young woman asking him why, her voice oddly hollow as she shuffles about nearby, hidden in darkness, her breath cold and rapid on the back of his neck. But when Snow turns there is only night, moonlight and fog beyond the blown-out windows. The scarecrows watch a field of weeds, a dead forest and a path to nowhere, an empty road no one will ever cross again.\n\nThe voice, different now\u2014neither male nor female and no longer entirely human\u2014whispers his name.\n\nSnow wants to run for the door but can't move. He knows, understands for the first time, what is coming, and still cannot move. He trembles and begins to urinate. As the .45s drop from his hands the fire appears from nowhere, sweeping over the ceiling then down the wall and across him, engulfing his body in seconds. Oddly, Snow feels no burning sensation, no pain, only sorrow and hopelessness the depths of which he never believed possible. He stumbles, flaming arms and hands held out in front of him as if to embrace some invisible presence. He sinks to his knees. Eyes wide, he stares at something through the growing inferno and laughs maniacally.\n\nThe last thing Snow sees is Starker and Rooster rushing up the stairs.\n\nOutside, Landon runs with all his might, the tall grass and overgrown weeds slowing him as he wades toward the road. The van, he thinks, just have to make it to the van and I'm free. He ignores the scarecrows' dead stares and does not look back, even when he's certain there is something right behind him, closing in with impossible speed and ready to swoop down and pluck him from the field like a hawk closing in on a mouse. He bolts through the last bit of field and jumps the final embankment down to the road. Pitching forward on landing, he catches himself, and now on pavement, takes a quick look back. No one coming, nothing behind him. He pulls the revolver from his belt just in case, sees the farmhouse in the distance. It's on fire, the flames creeping up through the roof, lapping night. He turns and runs for the van but pulls up short after only a few strides. It's gone. He looks around frantically. This isn't possible. He parked it there himself, out of the way, just as Rooster instructed.\n\n\"Yeah, I need this shit.\" He heads off down the road, running right down the center lane through the darkness; the fog-shrouded moon his only guide. Every now and then he looks back. The farmhouse, the scarecrows and the fire grow fainter and fainter until the night swallows them whole and he is alone in the darkness.\n\nHe slows his pace a few minutes later, finally opting for a fast walk. His chest heaves as he tries to catch his breath and a sharp pain digs at his side. Landon keeps moving, knowing eventually he's bound to run into something\u2014a car, a house\u2014anything. He notices a slight incline to the road. He pushes on, trying to forget the things he saw back there. All he needs is a car. He can hotwire anything and be long gone from this place for good. He kicks it back up a notch, jogging up and over the sloped portion of road. In the distance, he sees an outline of a building. Set back quite a distance from the road, it is merely a silhouette, but a hulking one. Must be a house, he reasons, then increases speed and veers off pavement onto grass.\n\nRunning across the field, he watches it become more and more defined the closer he gets. Within minutes Landon realizes it's a barn.\n\nBeyond it is a farmhouse.\n\nA farmhouse guarded by scarecrows...a farmhouse in flames.\n\n\"No fucking way.\" He comes to a stop between the barn and the house. He's gone in a circle, but how is that possible? He ran straight and in the opposite direction the entire time.\n\nShadows drift through the weeds before him. Landon steps back and raises the revolver. He can hear screams and smells a suspicious burning odor. Beyond that of burned wood, it is sickeningly sweet and similar to the stench of charred meat.\n\nA baby cries somewhere nearby. Landon whirls in the direction to find only darkness. Blind with terror, he runs but trips over something and pitches forward into the grass and dirt. He scrambles to his feet, sees what he fell over. A wooden stake...a cross of wood...\n\nThe scarecrow, he thinks, his mind shattering. It's gone.\n\nFrom behind him, shuffling movement.\n\nA strange shape comes toward him through the tall grass, hobbling like a crippled man.\n\nOnly this is not a man.\n\nLandon fires the revolver. Keeps firing even when the revolver is empty and makes only clicking sounds.\n\nAnd then something coarse covers his head, cold dead hands wrap around his throat and he hears another scream shred the night, unaware that this one is his own.\n\nIn the farmhouse, Starker and Rooster run through the burning front room, trying to find a way out in all the madness and confusion. The darkness is alive, shifting and thick with the shrieking cries of countless dead, nameless lost souls all wailing in the night with violent fury. Rooster sees a pillar of fire and realizes it is Snow kneeling before them, his body wrapped in blankets of flame.\n\nLike a cold winter wind, something follows them up the stairs, gusts into the room and cuts through them. It feeds the flames and Snow's body becomes a firestorm. Yet he doesn't topple. Instead he struggles slowly to his feet.\n\nRooster shoots him, emptying his gun.\n\nSnow finally topples over and the fire spreads, racing up the walls and along the floor in search of more victims.\n\nThe strange wind passes, surging out to the field beyond the doorway, and Rooster feels some part of himself go with it. He stumbles after it, dazed and fighting the gripping cold suddenly rising from the depths of his body. He finds Starker standing next to Snow's body, staring at it with a strange look of...satisfaction? He throws the AK-47 aside, drops down, and eyes ablaze with passion claws at the burned heap that had once been Snow, ripping charred meat in stringy handfuls he hungrily devours.\n\nAnd as the fire spreads, Rooster understands. He feels it too. Lust not for sex but violence, death, mayhem, destruction and pain...as if these things have been his destiny all along. Rather than reload the 9mm, he drops it and reaches for a combat knife tucked in his boot. He slides it free, already salivating as he closes on Starker.\n\nBehind him, Nauls slowly ascends the stairs, his hollow eyes piercing the smoke and darkness, his mouth twisted into a hideous demonic smile.\n\nRooster slams the blade deep into Starker's lower back, pulls it free and stabs him again. He seems not to notice at first, but then collapses from his knees to his side and lies there laughing, his large teeth bright in the darkness and caked with blood and human flesh.\n\nAs Rooster sets to work on him, gutting Starker from throat to pelvis, Nauls moves past, through the fire and out the doorway to the field.\n\nHis feet do not touch the floor.\n\nRooster focuses on Starker's laughter. No\u2014not laughter\u2014not anymore, cries now, screams. Beautiful screams...his face and bald head covered in blood as he spits and slobbers, each scream more horrific than the last. As Rooster tears at the enormous incision then plunges his hands inside the body, Starker chokes on the bodily fluids bubbling up into his throat and begs for mercy.\n\nBut all Rooster hears are the shrieks of souls trapped in the darkness and flames surrounding him.\n\nCords of intestines clutched in one hand and the knife in the other, he leaves Starker's now silent but convulsing body and slowly approaches the doorway. Darkness waits...a field of tall grass and weeds...six wooden crosses...three with fresh scarecrows nailed to them...three still waiting...\n\nRooster begins to laugh, bringing the intestines to his lips and eating as he steps out of the flames and into the night.\n\nSomewhere within the hurricane of violence and howling souls, a frantic, familiar and decidedly human voice screams for salvation.\n\n* * * *\n\nVisions of demonic creatures\u2014some human, some not, and others still stranded at various horrific points between the two\u2014flashed through his mind. Held in rusty metal cages, pinned, strapped or chained to medieval devices of torture and imprisonment, the creatures gawked at him in horror, several deathly still, others violently struggling to free themselves, all of them moist with blood, urine and excrement, their bodies grotesquely deformed and savaged.\n\nThe terrifying chambers of blood and death dissolved; became a roadside.\n\nLandon had already gone quite a ways up the incline on the side of the road and looked back as if he expected Rooster to follow. But Rooster knew now what lay on the other side of the tall grass blowing in the wind behind him.\n\nWith a shrug, Landon held his arms out like the victim of crucifixion and backed away over the ridge, vanishing from sight.\n\nNauls turned to him, removed his sunglasses.\n\nWe're going where there are no eyes...\n\nHis eyes were gone, just empty sockets.\n\nWhere everyone is blind...yet everyone sees.\n\nWithout warning his body shook with impossible velocity, transforming him into little more than a blur before he again fell still. \"Come with us,\" Nauls said. \"We'll all figure this out together.\"\n\nRooster shook his head no.\n\nNauls slid his sunglasses back on, slowly walked up the embankment after Landon then hesitated and looked back. \"You really think you have a choice?\"\n\n\"That's all any of us have.\"\n\nNauls reached into his jacket pocket, pulled free the car keys and tossed them to Rooster. \"We'll be waiting,\" he said sadly. \"Forever.\"\n\n## -10-\n\nHe made the car tailing him even before he'd reached his apartment. Rooster pulled over a block from the housing projects and continued on foot. As he crossed the courtyard, hurrying through the cold, the black Crown Vic crept slowly past, the windows and windshield impenetrably tinted. It continued a bit further down the street then pulled over and parked. Rooster kept checking back over his shoulder, but no one emerged from the vehicle.\n\nWhen he'd reached his floor, Rooster stopped at the incinerator shoot and dropped the briefcase in, listening to it slide away down the shaft to the fires below.\n\nBurn, he thought. Burn in Hell.\n\nHe slipped into the apartment and was met by a welcome burst of heat. Moving silently, he went to the bedroom and stopped just inside the doorway. Gaby was standing next to the bed, a blanket in her arms and a laundry basket at her feet. She'd already stripped the comforter, blanket and top-sheet from the bed but the bottom sheet remained. She seemed surprised to find him there, but smiled anyway. It was perhaps the most reassuring and comforting thing he'd ever seen.\n\nUntil he took a closer look at the bed. Rich dark soil was scattered across the sheet, blood and straw along the pillows. He narrowed his eyes and grimaced as fear clawed at what few defenses he had left.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Gaby said, quickly tossing the blanket over the bed. \"Don't look. It doesn't mean anything. They're just trying to frighten you.\"\n\nThe night sky rolled above, moving, the fog turning and twisting as the rough ground tore at his back and shoulders.\n\n\"Gaby,\" he said softly, voice breaking. \"Gabrielle...help me.\"\n\nThey were dragging him by his legs...pulling him across the field, the grass and weeds tangling and scratching him as he went, the night sky overhead, vast and ominous, the smell of death and burning flesh filling the air.\n\n\"Hell does more than burn the wicked,\" she said. \"It cleanses the lost clawing for the light. Remember what I told you. Let me help you tear them apart like they've torn at you.\"\n\nHideous hands of straw, of charred flesh and exposed bone held him down against the fallen cross of wood while shadows moved about, laughing horribly even as they drove nails through his palms, destroying flesh and shattering bone, even as they hoisted the cross up and into position, even as Rooster screamed and begged for God to save him, even as unseen filthy hands held his mouth closed while others pierced his lips with an old rusted needle, running the leather string through the holes and pulling it taut until his screams were muffled groans and his mouth could no longer open.\n\n\"Remember what I told you,\" she said again.\n\nThose in the shadows pulled the burlap sack over his head, two holes cut out in the fabric to accommodate his eyes. Eyes that could still see...inhuman eyes now, the eyes of a soulless scarecrow...impossible eyes opening, seeing, watching, frozen in time, crucified to damnation and endless suffering.\n\n\"Rooster,\" Gaby said forcefully, \"remember what I told you about my name and what it means. Do you remember?\"\n\n\"God is my might.\"\n\nAnd his eyes see the Hell he is trapped in...a Hell not of demons with pitchforks and cloven-hooves or boundless oceans of fire...but one in a small bedroom not so different than the one Rooster stood in now. A quiet and dark room where a little boy sat on a bed with crisp white sheets, crucifixes on the walls and a devil he'd believed a god sitting next to him whispering assurances that the things happening were just and right and moral and clean. Father McKay staring down at him with those striking blue eyes and telling him everything would be all right if he simply obeyed God's will.\n\nTears stain Rooster's cheeks. Rage, sorrow, fear\u2014he cannot decide. All of them, goddamn you, all of them in a tempest of blood and tears and evil.\n\n\"They're dying. You're killing them one by one.\" Gaby motioned to him with a slight turn of her head, her beauty shifting to something decidedly more sinister. \"Burn them. Burn the fuckers away like the leeches they are.\"\n\nHe smelled death...dirt...an open grave and its rotting remains...\n\nTerror strangled him, its grip desperate.\n\nThe priest stood behind him, filthy and discarded now, like the souls he'd torn from countless children years before. \"I know you,\" he said.\n\n\"I watched you die.\" Visions of Starker came to him. No. Not Starker. Father McKay, his head drenched in blood, choking on his own body fluids and gasping for forgiveness. \"I killed you. Slowly.\"\n\nBlood so dark it was nearly black trickled from the corners of his eyes. \"Did you think that would save your soul?\" the priest asked.\n\n\"I only knew it would end you.\"\n\nThe priest moved deeper into the room, stepping between him and Gaby, smiling wide like a demonic Cheshire Cat. \"But that's what you hoped for, wasn't it. Just like now, you hope it will save you from me, from this place, from those waiting for you outside, from yourself. It won't. Do you know why?\" A fat brown spider scurried across his bald head, disappeared into his ear. He didn't seem to notice. \"Because the illusion of hope is Hell's greatest joy.\"\n\n\"And Heaven's greatest weapon,\" Gaby said from behind him, her eyes rolling to black as she grabbed hold of him, sunk her teeth into his neck and pulled him to the floor with shocking strength and violence, straddling him and tearing at his throat the way a wild dog might.\n\nLight and dark merged as blood sprayed the walls.\n\nRooster backed away until he'd vanished into the safety of nearby shadows, the meager scraps of sanity he still possessed fracturing as night fell over the city of the damned.\n\n* * * *\n\nLost in time, through bloodshot eyes Rooster watched the sun rise on a new day, broken dreams collected at his feet, tarnished trophies stolen rather than won. The beautiful innocence of a little boy nailed to a cross of wood in burning fields called to him across the years, tears from a forgotten and wasted life and the sins of ghosts from a past he couldn't quite remember and perhaps never would. Perhaps he wasn't meant to.\n\nRepent? Save our souls? Deliver ourselves from evil?\n\nBut rather than destroy, the flames in those burning fields were what would eventually free him.\n\nMaybe that's what we're doing right now.\n\nRooster rubbed his hands together, they'd gone so cold. He lit a Marlboro and checked the corner. The Crown Vic was gone. From behind him, he heard heels clacking pavement. Bundled in a winter coat and hat, Gaby walked across the courtyard with her typical brisk stride.\n\nAcross the street, Nauls' car waited.\n\nGaby smiled, no longer wolf, but lamb.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Rooster asked.\n\n\"Away from here,\" she said, offering him her hand.\n\n\"Home?\" he asked.\n\n\"Home,\" she said. \"But get rid of the cigarette. Those things'll kill ya.\"\n\nHe slipped his hand into hers, and for the first time in a long while, felt himself smile.\n\nFires burned. They always would. But Rooster's flames no longer trapped him in a Hell of his or anyone else's creation. Instead, they destroyed those things shackling him to the Devil's playground, and all the nightmares and lies that had tried so desperately to keep him there.\n\nThe longer you struggle against truth...\n\nIn a dark and distant field, a hideous scarecrow closed its sightless eyes.\n\nThe longer the forces of darkness will bind you...\n\nRooster's soul quieted as the demons fell back into the lightless abyss from which they'd come.\n\nHand-in-hand with Gaby, Rooster walked to the car. Somewhere beyond the horizon, death's other kingdom waited.\n\nA kingdom not of shadows and darkness, but of peace. \n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nCalled \"One of the best writers of his generation\" by both the Roswell Literary Review and author Brian Keene, Greg F. Gifune is the author of numerous short stories, several novels and two short story collections (Heretics and Down To Sleep). His work has been published all over the world, consistently praised by readers and critics alike, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and The Midwest Book Review (among others) and has recently garnered interest from Hollywood. His novels include Children Of Chaos, Dominion, The Bleeding Season, Deep Night, Blood In Electric Blue, Saying Uncle, A View From The Lake, Night Work, Drago Descending, Catching Hell, Judas Goat, and Long After Dark. In addition to working as a full-time author, he also serves as Associate Editor at Delirium Books. Greg resides in Massachusetts with his wife Carol and a bevy of cats. Greg can be reached online at: gfgauthor@verizon.net or through his official web site at: www.gregfgifune.com.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}