In the mid-90s, the movie and TV studios had suddenly realized that they were facing a crisis that no one had ever anticipated, although it should have been obvious years in advance. Many of the classics of the cinema—the capital assets of the enormous entertainment industry—were becoming worthless, because fewer and fewer people could bear to watch them. Millions of viewers would switch off in disgust at a western, a James Bond thriller, a Neil Simon comedy, a courtroom drama, for a reason which would have been inconceivable only a generation before. They showed people smoking.

The AIDS epidemic of the ’90s had been partly responsible for this revolution in human behavior. The twentieth century’s Second Plague was appalling enough, but it killed only a few percent of those who died, equally horribly, from the innumerable diseases triggered by tobacco. Donald’s father had been among them, and there was poetic justice in the fact that his son had made several fortunes by “sanitizing” classic movies so that they could be presented to the new public.

Though some were so wreathed in smoke that they were beyond redemption, in a surprising number of cases skillful computer processing could remove offending cylinders from actors” hands or mouths, and banish ashtrays from tabletops. The techniques that had seamlessly welded real and imaginary worlds in such landmark movies as Who Framed Roger Rabbit had countless other applications—not all of them legal. However, unlike the video blackmailers, Donald Craig could claim to be performing a useful social function.

He had met Edith at a screening of his sanitized Casablanca, and she had at once pointed out how it could have been improved. Although the trade joked that he had married Edith for her algorithms, the match had been a success on both the personal and professional levels. For the first few years, at least…

“…This will be a very simple job,” said Edith Craig when the last credits rolled off the monitor. “There are only four scenes in the whole movie that present problems. And what a joy to work in good old black and white!”