It’s fifteen minutes before midnight and this could have waited until tomorrow. All the corps I’ve been checking out have hermetic circles and goons around their laboratories, and none of my little spies have been able to entice one out far enough to fry them. It’s all been standard security, ordinary precautions, the usual drill. Whoever’s behind Smith and Jones could have easily learned the same without paying me thousands of nuyen.

While passing through the strange juxtaposition of Cambridge colleges and the cheap burger joints run surreptitiously by the university to supplement its engorged bequests and landholding revenues, Serrin suddenly had a flash of spine-chilling awareness. This was rarer now than when he was younger, this depersonalization, this sense of being out of his body as he walked and moved through the world. Of course, the mage was used to astrally perceiving and traveling, of seeing the world as emotions and impulses and the shadows of souls, but what he was experiencing for this eternal second was quite different. At such moments he felt as though he was splintered across all the metaplanes and beyond, at once unreal and perfectly lucid. Time froze into stillness as his legs pounded along the sidewalk. He didn’t even notice the police car with its hawk-eyed trolls sliding slowly along the road past him. Nor did his wayward senses notice the fine drizzle slowly dampening his overcoat.

I’ve been looking at what is, he mused. But what about what isn’t?

Minutes later, he was sitting on the lumpy bed in his hotel room, the trid turned on out of pure habit, but the inspiration was gone. Like a vivid dream recalled only in fragments and whose message confounds the waking mind, the negative stubbornly refused to turn into a positive. He chewed at the shriveled sandwich that was all room service could scrounge up at this time of night.

All right, he thought, mentally conjuring an image of the suits at breakfast those few days past, I’ll play your game. I’ll give you a report so complete it’ll bore you stiff with detail and show you I’ve been a very conscientious dupe. I’ll take all the nuyen you care to deal out. And I’ll take my time finding out what’s really going on here. Just maybe you’ll discover that I’m a stubborn fragger who likes to know the truth.