“No.”

Without trying to protest further, she watched him turn and leave; it was only after she heard the whine of the lifting flier that she dropped her head in her hands.

1. Shadow on the Job

I refuse to be intimidated by a spook. Shadith folded her hands in her lap and smiled politely at Digby’s simulacrum.

He’d been fiddling with it again. It was solid now, with the weighty feel of real flesh though it was nothing more than colored light she could walk through if the thought didn’t revolt her. He sat at a real desk (a broad battered stretch of dark wood), in a real chair-an antique leather thing that swiveled and had micromotors installed to make it creak and tilt as if it moved to the shifting of his body. The instrumentation, though, was simulation. He had no need for exterior connections to the kephalos buried deep beneath the building, the kephalos which created the simulacrum and controlled all functions in here. In a sense, he was the kephalos.

Today he was being the academic in conference with the wayward student. He wasn’t wearing the fez with the gilded tassel that he affected sometimes, but had gifted himself with silver-gray hair flowing in thick waves from a noble brow and a severe expression that went well with that beak of a nose.

Odd how recognizable he was in all his incarnations… hm, incarnation was not precisely the right word since whatever flesh he’d once worn must have long ago rotted back to the earth it was born from.

The simulacrum looked up… no. Digby looked up, laughter in his eyes, a sly self-mocking twinkle. He always puts a twist on things, she thought. He knows just how much this isn’t impressing me.

“Hm.” The voice he was using was a rough tenor. “Your little Ghost Yseyl is profoundly insane in terms of her culture. Quite at home in ours, though, perhaps more than you are.” With a twitch of non-lips into an ironic smile, he lifted a simulated sheet off a nonexistent pile, pretended to read it, then looked up.