“Still curious huh?” she said.

“I feel like a tourist. Answer me a question?”

“If I can.”

“Well, if these guys don’t practise birth control, there’s got to be an awful lot of them, right. And Earth isn’t exactly a hive of activity these days, so … Why aren’t they running things?”

Ortega and her men swapped a set of unpleasant smiles. “Storage,” said the mohican on my left.

I slapped myself on the back of the neck, and then wondered if the gesture was in use here. It’s the standard site for a cortical stack, after all, but then cultural quirks don’t always work like that.

“Storage. Of course.” I looked around at their faces. “There’s no special exemption for them?”

“Nope.” For some reason, this little exchange seemed to have made us all buddies. They were relaxing. The same mohican went on to elaborate. “Ten years or three months, it’s all the same to them. A death sentence every time. They never come off stack. It’s cute, huh?”

I nodded. “Very tidy. What happens to the bodies?”

The man opposite me made a throwaway gesture. “Sold off, broken down for transplants. Depends on the family.”

I turned away and stared out of the window.

“Something the matter, Kovacs?”

I faced Ortega with a fresh smile gripping my face. It felt as if I was getting quite good at them.

“No, no. I was just thinking. It’s like a different planet.”

That cracked them up.

Suntouch House

October 2nd

Takeshi-san,

When you receive this letter, you will doubtless be somewhat disoriented. I offer my sincere apologies for this, but I have been assured that the training you underwent with the Envoy Corps should enable you to deal with the situation. Similarly, I assure you that I would not have subjected you to any of this had my own situation not been desperate.