His lips are still moving: Good. “Watch.” I flick it out into the wild and cloudy air beyond the edge of our floating world. “Say good-bye to your backup, Stone.” Even if he sticks in a new one, it’ll take him a while to begin laying down memories again, and months for the older experiences to begin settling into the chip — such as this incident. Until then he won’t be able to pass on his experiences to his sibs. I lower his head to the floor carefully. “If you come after me and I kill you again, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

I take another step back, and there’s a glass door off to my right.

“Get you,” mouths the head, as I flee.

THIS IS NOT a place for the likes of me. I am not a gamer, and the pleasures on offer here are not aimed at those of my sort: I am an artifact of an earlier age, out of place and time, isolated and alone. Angry and frightened, I head for the oxidizing core of the palace. I find a service air lock big enough to admit me, and on the way through it I shower with liquid water, rinsing away my glad rags in a foaming stream. Glittering nails and spiked heels retract, nipples and pubes revert to normal. I keep my long red hair and my face because some aspects of identity are hard to do without, no matter how expensive; but more serviceable wear awaits me in the printer on the other side of the air lock, suited to my status as a lowly freelance worker. When I told the Domina that I was a free woman, I spoke truth, but just barely. My lineage and my sibs are free, but because we are free, we are also poor. One of life’s larger ironies.

* * * * *

I’m not on shift right now, but there’s casual work available if I want it. The cost of living here strains my resources, but it’s better than being stranded on the surface in a domed slum, renting my nervous system out to a carbon sequestration station’s analytics. I should really go looking for a rickshaw to pull, but I’m still edgy from my encounter with the Domina and her thug. So I head down to one of the sublevels under Environment and go looking for Victor.