 friend of the Tin Man — Slang term for someone who possesses the necessary hardware and software to engage in cybersex.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon

When Men on the Internet built the first fellatio machine, they called their bullet encoding scheme Blow Job Markup Language, or BJML. This inspired a fair amount of mockery from Women on the Internet, as well as two semi-serious attempts to create a female-friendly version of the code: CML, and the functionally equivalent but more cleverly named PTBML, in which PTB stands for "petting the bunny."

All of these encoding schemes were designed for solo playback of prerecorded sex acts, but of course once you got that working, the logical next step was figuring out a way to allow couples—or groups—to have cybersex in real time.

Men on the Internet once more took the lead—and proceeded to bungle the job. The problem was emotional, not technological: They wanted the convenience of quick, no-strings sex with strangers, without the potential downside of discovering that the hot woman they'd hooked up with was actually a guy. (Yes, there were also gay men who feared being tricked into having sex with girls, but let's be serious: It was freaked out straight boys driving this particular bus.)

The obvious solution—getting to know people before you fucked them—didn't fit with the "quick, no-strings" part of the program, so the Men opted for a brute-force approach instead. They created male and female versions of the software, and went to absurd lengths to try to ensure that only people with actual vaginas could use the female version. Saner members of the community pointed out that this was an impossible goal, but it was like trying to convince politicians that there's no such thing as a crypto back door that only good guys can use: The fanatics kept insisting that with enough nerd power, anything is possible.

The Men nerded as hard as they could, but none of the vagina-recognition schemes they came up with was close to foolproof. They did manage to make the software so bloated and cumbersome as to be essentially unusable, even for gay sex—so in that limited sense, they were successful. But the project was a bust.

It was a Berkeley grad named Martha Hollenbeck who wrote the first practical cybersex software. She called her creation PPML: Polymorphous Perverse Markup Language. One version fit all genders, which made sense from a technical perspective. Whether designed for men or women, the vast majority of computerized sex toys are simple vibrators, with the same limited set of functions: Speed up. Slow down. Buzz. Pulse. Hollenbeck wrote a standardized command code that allowed different devices to communicate, and added modular support for more advanced sex toys.

PPML combined an intuitive and newbie-friendly interface with a wealth of customization options. Say you'd decided to give a blow job to someone halfway around the world. If sucking on a sensor-equipped dildo was really your thing, PPML would of course allow you to do that. But you could also use a cyberglove, a game pad, a keyboard, a microphone, or some other input device. Or if you were feeling lazy and just wanted to phone it in, you could activate PPML's "white noise" feature and have it convert any handy string of ones and zeroes—an MP3 of your favorite Stones track, say, or a PDF of the Song of Solomon—into blow job commands.

The software also enabled a unique form of faceting. In the real world, if Alice gives Bob a blow job, Bob receives a blow job. But because PPML used the same code for different sex acts, a receiver in cyberspace could, if they wanted, turn the blow job inside-out, and experience it as an act of penetration. With larger groups of people and a bit of imagination, much wilder combinations were possible: Alice gives a blow job simultaneously to Bob, Carol, Donna, and Edgar; Bob receives a blow job, while Carol, Donna, and Edgar are licked, fisted, and fucked, respectively, and the combined bucking of their hips feeds back to Alice as anal. The accompanying sounds and visuals could be faceted too, of course: While Alice, Carol, and Donna share a prison rape fantasy, Bob sees himself as part of a living, breathing Rubens painting, and Edgar indulges in some hot furry action.

No surprise, this offended some people: Spectacle ensued. And to those inclined to be outraged by PPML, the fact that Martha Hollenbeck was trans just added fuel to the fire. For mainstream pundits, she became a metaphor for whatever they thought was wrong with contemporary cyberculture. Conservative feminists damned her as a not-so-secret agent of the patriarchy. To homophobic Men on the Internet, she was a gay guy in drag, trying to put one over on the vagina detector.

She got a lot of death threats. She stopped appearing in public early on, after San Francisco SWAT responded to a hoax 911 call by driving a tank through the wall of the auditorium where she was speaking. But her software was popular, even among people who publicly wished her dead, and by the time PPML 2.0 was released, it had become a de facto standard, the lingua franca of cybersex.

I was an early adopter, thanks to my girlfriend, Wendy Williams. Wendy was a Zero Day kid, and she was gear queer. Late one night we met up in an empty server room to fool around, and she told me about this new software suite she'd downloaded that she wanted to try out. She asked if I was up for being a guinea pig. I said that I was.

We were stationed in Osaka at the time. We went to a special computer store in Tobita Shinchi, the red light district. While Wendy chatted with the women behind the counter, I stood with my arms folded and tried to project an air of mature sophistication. My attention was drawn to a display case full of vibrators shaped like brightly colored animals. Their English-language names read like the product of an excitable machine translator: SURPRISE FANTASY CAT! TORRID HEDGEHOG! BACK DOOR MONKEY! INEXHAUSTIBLE PRICKLY HORSE!

We spent around forty thousand yen on toys—including a SURPRISE FANTASY CAT!—and went back to base. There was a delay while Wendy configured PPML's encryption. Once she was satisfied that our parents probably couldn't spy on us, we put on the gear and booted up the software.

It was a little strange, but a lot of fun. Which, at that early point in my sexual history, is also how I would have described regular fucking. And though with time and experience my tastes have become more refined, even now, if you ask me which is better, real sex or virtual sex, I'll tell you it's a question of what you're in the mood for.

It was the late New York Times columnist David Brooks who famously observed that "you can't kiss in cyberspace." Like a lot of declarative statements made by old people, this isn't strictly true: If you and your partner are in the same physical space, you can kiss all you like, though you do need to be careful not to smash your headsets together in the heat of passion. At long distance, your tactile options are more limited. There are full-body haptic suits, but they are very expensive and have a tendency to overheat. More likely, the sense of touch will be focused on your genitals, or whatever other part of your anatomy the vibrator is attached to. This strikes some people as cold and emotionless, but it's worth remembering that vibrators are a nineteenth-century invention, and Victorians probably used them while reading steamy love letters. So the concept isn't exactly new.

The store in Tobita Shinchi sold a "smell synthesizer" that looked like a piece of medical fetish gear. I thought about buying it, but I didn't really believe it could mimic Wendy's scent, and I wasn't going to spend fifteen thousand yen to have patchouli blown up my nose. Not even the Japanese make a sex toy that can reproduce taste, so if that's important to you, you'll want to stick to doing it in the flesh.

It's in the realm of sight and sound that cybersex really gets interesting. People have always fantasized during sex, but computers do the heavy lifting for you, and let you keep your eyes wide open. You can look like anyone or anything, anywhere. And the soundtrack can be dynamic, reacting to what you are doing: Marvin Gaye into Led Zeppelin IV into the climax of the 1812 Overture.

Which brings me back to the subject of bullets. You can knock out a no-frills blow job in a couple of minutes, but crafting a polished fantasy with 3D visuals and surround sound is a much bigger undertaking. Thanks to Wendy, I know a lot of programming tricks and shortcuts, and of course PPML has tools that can help, but still, I worked my ass off on Darla's bullet.

One decision I had to make was whether to use my default avatar. Playing yourself in a bullet shows confidence, but it also risks embarrassment if the bullet's recipient decides to share it with the rest of the internet. The alternative is to use a stand-in avatar: Celebrity look-alikes are popular.

In Darla's case, I could think of two strong arguments against using a stand-in. First, she would rightly regard it as a sign that I didn't trust her, which in turn would make it less likely that she'd choose to hook up with me. And second, it might not actually protect me from being publicly humiliated. With PPML, you can also edit bullets that people send you, so even if I did use some other avatar, Darla could always reskin it to look like me before uploading to a revenge porn site.

Since being chicken wouldn't save me, I decided I might as well be bold—at least that would allow me to pick the most flattering version of myself. I set to work, creating a ten-minute scenario that I thought Darla would enjoy, based on various things she'd said and other little hints that she'd dropped. It took me three days to put together, and another couple days to polish. Once I had it just the way I wanted it, I encrypted the bullet and attached it to an email.

Then I paused, before hitting send, and asked myself whether I really wanted to do this. But the question was rhetorical: I'd made up my mind the moment Darla had asked for the bullet. And while I understood I might not be happy with the consequences of my actions, I didn't for an instant believe that I'd be sorry.

"Who would you have picked as a stand-in?" Darla asked me, afterwards. "If you'd decided to pussy out?"

"I don't know. Keanu Reeves, maybe?"

"Keanu Reeves?" She made a gagging expression. "He's older than my grandfather."

"Real Keanu is older than your grandfather. Fantasy Keanu is whatever age you decide to skin him as. I'd have cloned the avatar from Point Break footage if I'd decided to go that way."

"Yeah, well. I'm glad you had the balls to play yourself."

So was I—although, all things considered, I was surprised that it had worked. After I'd sent her the bullet, I didn't hear from Darla for two days, and when she reappeared, she immediately picked another fight with Ray. I arrived in the middle of that, so I wasn't even sure what it was about, but for Ray it was the last straw. "Either she goes, or I do," he told me, before logging out.

It was then that I read Darla the riot act. Or tried to—it's hard to effectively chastise someone when you're waiting to find out if they'll sleep with you. Darla took full advantage of the situation and proceeded to tease the shit out of me, even as I insisted that no, really, I was serious: Whatever I might wish for, if she forced me to choose between her and the business, I'd pick the business. In the end, I did get the point across—or maybe Darla, having had her fill of fun, got tired of hearing me repeat myself. Fine, she said, if Ray's going to be such a huge pussy about it, I'll leave him alone. And Anja. And the customers.

I was still deciding whether to believe this when Darla grinned and asked me if I wanted to go someplace more private. She gave me the IP address of a mystery website and a password I'd need to get into it. And so now here we were, wherever here was.

It was a barren rock in outer space, the pronounced curve of the horizon making me think of the planetoids in The Little Prince. Someone had built a love nest inside a shallow crater, tucking a four-poster bed and a heart-shaped jacuzzi under a geodesic dome. UV lights in the dome struts made the naked skins of our avatars glow, and when I came, a supernova flared in the sky.

"So I've been thinking more about what I'd want in a dream game," Darla said, stretched out beside me on the bed.

"And?"

"What about something like this?"

"You mean a science-fiction setting?"

"No, genius." Darla turned towards me and propped herself up on an elbow. "I'm talking about fucking."

"There already are games about fucking. There are even games about fucking that won't download malware onto your computer."

"Not about fucking," she said. "With fucking. Like, what if you did a quality MMORPG like Call to Wizardry, and included an option for players to hook up between dungeon runs?" She considered. "Or during dungeon runs?"

It sounded like a terrible idea. But I remembered how our last discussion about game design had ended, and since I wanted this hookup to be more than a one-time deal, I kept my mouth shut and pretended to think it over.

Darla burst out laughing.

"What?" I said.

"What's the name of that mod you use, to keep your eyes focused on the person you're talking to? 'You So Interesting'?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"You should call up the ex-girlfriend who wrote it and ask her to code another one for the rest of your face," Darla said. "Because for someone who wants to get ahead in business, you are way too easy to read."

Wendy had made a similar observation, on more than one occasion; the last time was on the day we broke up. "I don't know if I'd want a mod like that."

"Why not?"

I shrugged. "Because I'm selfish but not a sociopath? Or maybe it's a pride thing."

"What, like, 'Real men should be able to lie without help?'"

"When it really matters, yeah."

"That's a retarded way to think," Darla said, leaning hard on "retarded." But I didn't rise to the bait, and after a moment she sighed and said, "So tell me why my idea about putting fucking in an MMORPG is stupid. It's OK, I promise I won't get pissed. You've got me in a good mood."

That was nice to hear, but I thought I'd better proceed cautiously anyway. "It's not stupid," I said, "just complicated. An Adults Only rating on a game makes everything ten times more difficult. Investment money is a lot harder to come by, and there are lots of companies that won't do business with you. PayPal, for example."

"Fuck PayPal."

"What about Superego? You know, the guys who did the physics engine for Reign in Hell and Camp Blood Killing Spree?"

"Duh, I know who Superego is."

"Do you know about their new terms of service? As part of the settlement for the sexual harassment lawsuit against their CEO, they added a new rider to their standard contract. If you want to license their software, you have to promise you won't use it to make a game that promotes sexism or misogyny."

"Oh, Jesus Christ!" Darla said. "Fucking is not sexist!"

"I agree," I said, putting my hands up. "But it doesn't matter what we think. What matters is what Superego thinks. What their lawyers think, and what their lawyers think the plaintiffs in the settlement will think. That's what an AO rating gets you. You can have the purest heart and the best intentions in the world, and other companies will still treat you like a leper.

"And that's before you finish the game," I continued. "Once you're ready to start marketing, you've got advertising restrictions. A lot of game sites won't review you, and the ones that do will tend to be stupid about it, because nerds and sex."

"Stupid reviews are fine, as long as they mention the sex part," Darla countered. "That's enough to get people interested. And there are other ways to get the word out. I mean, think of the hot takes."

"Yeah, you could probably gin up a controversy. Of course, Spectacle attracts politicians..."

"More free advertising."

"Lawyers to defend you from obscenity charges aren't free. But you're right, that could work as a guerrilla marketing strategy. Once you've got people's attention, though, you need to deliver. And to make up for the extra hassle, the game would need to be really popular."

"Well, why wouldn't it be? MMORPGs are popular. Fucking is insanely popular. And two great tastes..."

"Don't necessarily go together," I said, as gently as I could. "You're thinking chocolate and peanut butter, but what if this is more like chocolate and shrimp? And that leads me to one more point, which is that even people who are into that particular combination don't really need new software. I mean, right now, if you want to spice up your raid on Zuul'titlan with an orgy, all you have to do is find a quiet spot between fights and fire up PPML."

"Yeah, but that takes two different programs."

"Is that a problem, though? It might be, if PPML didn't play well with other VR software—but it does. And if you're into cybersex, you have PPML, so integrating its features directly into an MMORPG doesn't add anything. But if you're not into cybersex, the last thing you want is to give griefers the ability to literally fuck with you."

Despite her promise, Darla had been starting to get pissed off again, but this last remark struck her funny. "I suppose that would be pretty bad for business," she acknowledged. Then, smirking: "Chocolate and shrimp."

"I'm not saying it couldn't work. But there's got to be some kind of synergy, something extra you get from putting the two things together. We can brainstorm it if you like, try to come up with an angle..."

"No, that's OK," she said. "It's just an idea I pulled out of my ass. But you're right, it's dumb."

"We can still talk about it."

"No, it's all right. I told you, you've got me in a good mood." All smiles again, she tilted her head back and gestured at the dome and the dark sky above us. "So what do you think of this?"

"I like the lighting effects," I said, staying focused on her avatar.

"Perv."

"Where are we, anyway?" I asked. "Is this your site, or some secret online club I don't know about?"

"You've got the IP address. Look it up."

I opened a pop-up window. The IP address was registered to a company in southern California called Cumulonimbus. I didn't recognize the name, but guessed it was a reference to cloud storage. "Are you renting space on a server farm in L.A.?"

"It's in Los Angeles, but it's got nothing to do with me. Keep looking."

I ran the company name through BusinessTrak. Cumulonimbus turned out to be a subsidiary. It was a data center, and it did rent out storage space to other companies, but most of its servers were reserved for use by its parent corporation: Tempest.

Darla laughed as she watched me put it together. "This is one of Tempest's servers?" I said. "We're inside... We just..."

"We fucked in their corporate data core," Darla confirmed.

Staring at her under the lights a few moments ago, I'd started to get hard again, but now my erection shriveled away to nothing. I nervously scanned the horizon, imagining an army of blue-gloved EULA cops converging on us from all directions. Though of course that was wishful thinking. Breaking into a private corporate server isn't a EULA violation—it's a felony.

"Relax," Darla said. "We didn't break in. We used a password."

"News flash, it's still burglary if you use a stolen key."

"There's no reason for the sysadmin to think we don't belong here. And even if they did get suspicious, it's not like they can trace... Wait. You are using the PPML proxy server setting, right?"

"Of course I am, but that's not foolproof. If they wanted to backtrace us badly enough, they could—"

"Oh my God!" Darla said, looking suddenly stricken. "What if they're recording us right now? What if they digitize our faces, and then send image-recognition bots to scour the internets?"

"I know you think you're being funny, Darla, but if they wanted to identify us, that's exactly how they'd—"

"Attention, Tempest corporate overlords!" Darla cupped her hands to her mouth as she shouted up at the stars. "JOHN CHU and DARLA JEAN COVINGTON are FUCKING inside your computer!"

She cracked up, clutching her stomach and rolling around on the bed. I decided to be fatalistic. I mean, she was probably right: The fact that we hadn't been booted off the site meant it was unlikely we'd tripped any alarms. And if the system administrator had noticed us, there was nothing we could do about that now.

"Where did you get the password from?" I wanted to know.

"Orville," Darla said, still laughing. "A hacker friend. Don't worry, I'm not fucking him," she added, though in fact that was the last thing I was worried about.

"And what is this?" I asked, scanning the horizon again. "Concept art for a new game?"

"Think TempestCon, two years ago," Darla said. "It'll come to you."

I did, and it did. "Call to Infinity." That was the working title of an MMORPG that was, or would have been, a sci-fi sibling of Call to Wizardry. Tempest had shown a teaser trailer for it at one of their annual conventions, but there'd been no further news about it since then. The consensus in the gaming community was that the project had been canceled, probably because it was a little too similar to Call to Wizardry; most people only have time for one MMORPG in their lives, and it made no sense for Tempest to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a game that would cannibalize their existing player base.

"This isn't just concept art," Darla told me. "It's a virtual studio for level design. This planet is hollow; there's a hatch a few craters over that leads down inside, and they've got all kinds of assembly tools stashed in there. It's what I used to build this dome. I thought you might want to check it out for yourself." She laughed again, watching my face as the words "intellectual property theft" flashed through my brain. "I'm not saying steal the tools—although we could. But you should at least play with them, maybe learn some tricks to use for our game."

"Our game?" I said. "Are we partners now?"

She shrugged. "I know everybody and his brother talks about making a game, but you actually started a business, so I know you're not just hot air. But you'll never do anything cool without someone to kick your ass and get you out of your comfort zone... And I suppose it wouldn't kill me to have someone practical to rein me in now and then. As long as you're not a patronizing dick about it. Of course," she added, "that's assuming we even have a future together."

"Why wouldn't we?"

"Because you already got what you really wanted from me. Now you can cut me from the crew and keep Ray. And not that I even care that much about the job, but you know I'm going to be pissed, right? This time next month, you'll probably be dead to me."

"Jesus, Darla... I don't want to cut anyone from the crew. I want you and Ray to get along."

"Yeah, well, like I said before, there's what you want, and what you can have."

"What I need is for the business to be successful. It takes capital to start a game company."

She snorted. "You think you can finance an MMORPG with the money you make as a sherpa?"

I shook my head. "It's not about the profits. It's about the contacts."

Give Darla credit, she got it right away: "You mean like the Kwan brothers? You're going to ask them to invest?"

"They'd be on my short list, yeah. When I'm ready."

"Huh. That's... actually not stupid."

"Gee, thanks." I started to smile, but then this image came into my head, of walking into a meeting with the Kwan brothers with Darla at my side. Easily bored, extremely volatile Darla.

"What is it?" she said. "Your face just did something weird."

"Nothing," I said, thinking, Change the subject. "You and I should meet up in person."

The suggestion caught her off guard. "You couldn't handle me in person."

"I'm willing to risk it. I'll even come to you, if you want."

"Gosh, that's so generous."

"I'm between cars right now," I explained. "But that's OK, I'll rent something and drive up to... what city are you in?"

"Nice try," Darla said. Then: "I'll think about it... If I did decide to meet you, it'd have to be after I get back from my trip."

"Where are you going?"

"Family reunion back east, at my mom's place." She raised an eyebrow. "Cousin Earl will be there."

"You'll have to shoot him in the ass for me. How long will you be gone?"

"I'm not sure. It depends what level of psychodrama Mom and I get into." Then she looked at me, dead serious, and said: "You'd better not disappoint me, if I do let you visit. Me pissed off online is nothing compared to me pissed off in person."

"I won't disappoint you," I said. "Promise."

"All right... So, you want to go check out those software tools?"

I eyed her avatar again. "In a few minutes..."

We stayed on Tempest's server for another four hours. The next day we came back again. And the next.

We were going to go there once more, the night before Darla left on her trip. But earlier that same day I got the call from Janet Margeaux's CAA agent. By the time I met Darla in the Game Lobby that evening, I'd decided to cut her out of the gig and not tell her until afterwards. I was comfortable with that choice—or told myself I was—but it would have felt wrong to have sex with her, with that between us. It's weird, the lines we draw.

Instead of going with her to the Tempest server I told Darla I was tired and asked for a rain check. She was immediately suspicious.

"Rain check? Are you bored with me already?"

When you don't trust yourself to lie effectively, the best way to do it is by telling the truth. "I'm definitely not bored with you, Darla."

"Hmm... Fine then, suit yourself. But if my plane crashes tomorrow, you're going to kick yourself for passing up a last chance with me."

"I will be sad if that happens," I said. Which was also true.

"If my plane doesn't crash," Darla continued, "I might have a surprise for you when I get back."

"Your home address?"

"Maybe. But I meant something bigger. Something you'll like." She paused, studying my expression. "You sure you don't have anything you want to tell me?"

"I'm sure," I said. "Have a safe trip, Darla."


 tort of wrongful seduction — A cause of action in a civil lawsuit in which the plaintiff claims to have been enticed into sex by false pretenses, such as a fraudulent promise of marriage.

 In the tort's earliest incarnation, the right of action belonged to the father of a dishonored woman, and the alleged harm was loss of services to her family. In time, the right to sue was extended to the woman herself, and the harm was recognized to be moral and personal rather than strictly economic. Ironically, this liberalization of the tort undermined it, as changing sexual mores and attitudes about women's honor—as well as the perennial reluctance of juries to take women at their word—made such lawsuits much harder to argue and win. By the end of the twentieth century, the tort of seduction appeared to be extinct. But the 2020s saw a revival of the tort, as another shift in mores inspired a new generation of plaintiffs—men as well as women—to attempt to rewrite the rules of love.

—Merriam-Webster's Law Dictionary

So this guy breaks into your apartment, tases you, and hits you in the face with a bag of money?" Jolene says.

"The tasing came last," I correct her. "Hurt like hell, too."

"It's supposed to. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Once I could stand up again, I was more worried about my rig. The goggles and earphones are OK, I think, but the gloves are a little twitchy. The good news is, I can afford to buy replacements."

Our avatars are in a private chat room in the Game Lobby. In real life, Jolene is outdoors. When I reached her, she was at home, and I asked if she had a yard or patio she could go out to while we talked. I can hear the faint buzz of a lawnmower in the background.

"How much money are we talking about?"

"Four hundred thousand dollars. Two weeks' pay from Ms. Pang. The electricity was her way of saying I need to be nicer about how I ask for it, next time."

"I take it you didn't call the cops."

I shake my head. "What would I have told them?"

"You did call your mom, though."

"Eventually," I say. "First I made sure the guy was really gone, locked the door and moved some furniture in front of it. Then I counted the money. Then I checked that my rig was OK."

"And then you called your mom."

"No, then I went to sleep for a few hours."

"Jesus Christ!"

"I was tired. I was already tired, before, and being electrocuted takes a lot out of you. Anyway, I didn't feel like I was in any immediate danger. If they'd wanted to kill me, they could have."

"It's the money, isn't it?" Jolene says. "You were thinking of not telling your mother about it. That's what you needed to sleep on."

"No, I had to tell Mom about the money. What I needed to sleep on was whether to tell her it was four hundred thousand or just two."

"You're an idiot."

"I know," I say. "But have you ever seen four hundred thousand dollars? Not virtual cash, but real bills you can hold?"

"I've seen people get stupid for a lot less than that," Jolene says. "Stacking the money higher doesn't make it less stupid."

"Well, look, I wouldn't really lie to Mom. I just needed to think about it."

"So when you woke up, you called her?"

"After breakfast, yeah. She wasn't available, but I left a message with her assistant, Ensign Kim."

"OK," Jolene says. "So now you're going to hole up in your place with the door locked until she calls you back, right?"

"No, I decided to get out of there."

"Why?"

"After I spoke to Ensign Kim, I started thinking about what else Ms. Pang's people might have been up to in my apartment. I don't think the guy who broke in last night did anything after he zapped me, but if he had access, who knows how many times he was in there before?"

"Your computer?"

I shrug. "The anti-tamper seals on the case are intact, and as far as infecting the hard drive, I don't think there's anything they could do in person that couldn't be more easily done remotely. But I was looking around the room, and I saw my old Companion Cube up on a shelf. You ever have one of those?"

"No, but I know what they are." A Companion Cube is like a hardware version of Googlebot—an interactive digital assistant that you can query or give commands to. And like all internet-connected devices with microphones, it can be turned into a remote listening device if someone hacks it.

"I got the Cube as part of a game promotion," I tell Jolene. "I never even put batteries in it. But seeing it made me realize, it doesn't matter how secure my computer is if someone has a bug in my apartment. They can just listen to me talking on my headset."

"And this is why I'm out on my lawn? You think my place is bugged too?"

"I don't know. But it's possible."

"Well, I've got good news," Jolene says. "The people I work for, they're paranoid about security. I get my house swept for bugs once a month. Last check was just a few days ago."

"A law firm does that?"

Jolene pretends not to hear the question. "Where are you now?" she asks.

"In a motel. At first I had this crazy idea about going to the Hilton downtown and renting out the penthouse, but I realized that even if they were willing to take cash, they'd want to log my ID and credit card into their system."

"So you went to a no-tell fleabag instead?"

"It's not a fleabag," I say. "It's clean, and they've got high-speed broadband. The neighborhood's remote, but it's safe."

"You hope. How'd you get there?"

"Loaded my gear and the money into a backpack and rode around on BART for a few hours. Changed trains a dozen times. Then I caught a cab."

"Hmm." She frowns. "That might be good enough."

"Can I ask you something, Jolene?"

"What?"

"You told me once that the firm you work for specializes in estate planning. Why would a law firm like that need to sweep an IT person's house for bugs? Are they worried you're going to take the clients' wills home and read them out loud?"

Jolene stares at me, lips pursed. She's annoyed, but not with me—with herself, for breaking character.

Before she can say anything, a pop-up window appears at the bottom of my visual field:

> HE DESIRES A SESSION, TO BEGIN IN 30 MINUTES. ASSEMBLE YOUR CREW. — SMITH

This is followed almost immediately by a second pop-up:

> CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE AVAILABLE. THEN SEE YOUR EMAIL FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME. — PANG

"What is it?" Jolene says.

> THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE NEWS CHYRON reads: MARRIAGE OF NORTH AND SOUTH TO BE CONSUMMATED AT NOON TOMORROW.

Over the airplane's loudspeaker, the pilot announces that we have begun our descent into Pyongyang. It is raining in the capital, with scattered thunder and high winds; there will be turbulence during the landing, so we are advised to remain seated for the duration of the flight. But Mr. Jones ignores the warning. He stands in the aisle, staring at the TV at the front of the passenger cabin, which is now showing scenes from the recent unification summit: While crowds cheer outside South Korea's Blue House, President Sunwoo shakes hands with an elderly Kim Jong-un.

"What year is this supposed to be?" Mr. Jones asks.

"Two thousand and fifty-two," I tell him. Nodding at the TV screen: "The Supreme Leader just celebrated his seventieth birthday."

Mr. Jones tugs experimentally at the skin beneath his chin. "And this game—"

"D.M. Zed."

"—it is from the Republic of Korea?"

"Yes. The company, GangnamSoft, is based in Seoul."

"And the government permits this? A game about reunification?"

"There's been some controversy about the content," I say, which is true enough. "But no calls to ban the game, so far. And the sale preorders have been through the roof."

The first turbulence jolts the plane. I look out the window. It is night, and we are descending into an unbroken bank of moonlit clouds. The photorealistic rendering is almost perfect, but as the plane bounces, a software glitch sends a silver squiggle cascading across the cloud tops.

D.M. Zed is in its final week of beta, and GSoft's programmers are working around the clock to get the last bugs out before the release date. Ms. Pang's email contained the address and password for this playtest server. My instructions are to keep Mr. Jones logged in for as long as possible. Ms. Pang didn't explain why she wants this, but my guess is that the game has an unpatched client-side security flaw that she means to take advantage of.

The view is obscured as we enter the clouds. The turbulence increases; I grip the imaginary arms of my seat and glance around the cabin. Jolene, Anja, and Ray are in the row directly behind me. Our avatars are dressed in United Nations uniforms, with insignia and equipment signifying our different roles. Mr. Jones, who has a big badge on his chest, is an envoy, empowered to give orders to non-player characters and call for help on his satellite phone. Anja is an engineer. Ray is a medic. Jolene is a computer specialist.

I'm security. The 9mm pistol on my hip is our only weapon at the moment, though I already have my eye on a possible upgrade. The rest of the passengers are NPCs; most of them are UN staff and reporters, but seated at the back of the cabin are two soldiers—one North Korean, one South Korean—armed with futuristic assault rifles. I've got dibs on one of those, the moment something happens to its current owner. Which, I predict, will be very soon now.

"Beginning final approach," the pilot says. The cabin lights go out, and the TV image is replaced by static and then a solid blue screen. As we break through the cloud layer, the plane banks sharply to the left, and this combined with the darkness in the cabin draws everyone's attention to the view of Future Pyongyang below us.

The city looks very different than it did in the CIA Factbook. The completed Ryugyong Hotel is surrounded by a forest of lesser towers, all of them as brightly lit as the skyscrapers in a normal metropolis. Across the Potong River on Mansu Hill, more lights ring the three Kim statues, which look like toy soldiers from this altitude.

"Beautiful," Mr. Jones murmurs, leaning across the seats in front of me. He sounds like he might cry.

"Check out the monorail." I indicate a string of lights stretching southwards from the Ryugyong. "That's the cross-DMZ express. Pyongyang to Seoul in under an hour."

"Beautiful," Mr. Jones repeats. But as we circle the city center, we start to see other lights—the flashing lights of emergency and police vehicles racing through the streets—that hint not all is well on the ground. Then, without warning, a massive explosion erupts from the side of the Ryugyong Hotel, provoking gasps from the NPCs. Seconds later, an even larger blast topples the statues on Mansu Hill.

The plane levels out. The cabin lights flicker back on and the TV transmission resumes. The chyron now reads: BREAKING NEWS! ".... reports of violence from Pyongyang as well," the announcer is saying. "It appears the terrorist group Red Wolf has launched a coordinated assault on both capitals."

Mr. Jones looks up at the TV screen before turning to me. "Red Wolf?"

"A radical separatist group opposed to unification," I say, quoting from the official game wiki.

"And our goal is to crush them?"

"One goal, yeah." There's also the matter of the Zed referenced in the game's title, but I opt not to spoil that for him.

"We must get on the ground as quickly as possible," he says.

"I wouldn't worry about it," I say. Though in fact, the plane is no longer descending.

The pilot comes back on the loudspeaker: "Attention, passengers. Owing to the state of emergency in Pyongyang, we must abort our landing and return to Beijing."

"No!" Mr. Jones says, starting towards the cockpit. "I forbid—"

Lightning hits the plane, or maybe it's some sort of energy weapon. There's a blinding flash. The cabin lights go out for good this time, and the TV goes black. The plane's nose dips sharply and a female NPC starts screaming.

Mr. Jones steadies himself in the aisle and faces me, his expression only visible because of the flames streaming from the left-side engine.

"Like I said." I shout to be heard above the screams. "Don't worry about it."

> RIGHT BEFORE THE CRASH, I GET AN INSTANT MESSAGE from Smith: YOU ARE LOGGED IN FROM A NEW IP ADDRESS. WHERE ARE YOU?

The game has seized control of my POV and plastered my face to the window. As lightning illuminates the ground rushing up towards the plane, the sound of my character's panicked breathing fills my ears.

> HOUSE-SITTING FOR A FRIEND, I reply. As I hit send, it occurs to me that Smith may not know what "house-sitting" is.

I hear the pilot's voice, echoing as if down a long tunnel: "Brace! Brace! Brace!" The plane's left wing clips a power pylon. The wing shears off and the plane shudders and starts to roll. Everything goes black.

Out of the darkness, Smith messages:

> WHERE?

> SAN BRUNO. NEAR THE AIRPORT.

> WHAT STREET ADDRESS?

On the way to the motel, I had the cab detour through a nearby residential neighborhood, and picked out a house with a spiked fence and a Great Dane guarding the front yard. I type in the address, adding, BE CAREFUL OF SCOOBY IF YOU COME BY.

> SCOOBY? Smith responds.

The darkness is lifting.

> GAME IS ON. GOT TO GO.

I am standing in a field strewn with burning wreckage. The rain has stopped, but lightning continues to flicker in the sky. My motion control comes back slowly: At first all I can do is stagger drunkenly, while my vision goes in and out of focus. Then things sharpen up and I'm able to look around.

The plane's fuselage broke into three pieces on impact. The front end of the passenger cabin, where we were sitting, stayed mostly intact, but the tail and the rows behind us completely disintegrated—so much for grabbing one of the soldiers' rifles. The detached nose of the plane continued onward, plowing through the perimeter fence of the Kim Jong-il International Airport. It looks like we almost made it to the runway.

Jolene, Ray, and Anja stumble towards me out of the gloom. Mr. Jones appears, leading a pair of shaken-up NPCs. He waves his satellite phone triumphantly. "I have made contact with another UN team," he says. "They say they can transport us to the city center. We are to rendezvous with them in the main terminal." He turns and looks back past the flames at the Pyongyang skyline, and I can tell there's a part of him that would like to just start walking. But the burning jet fuel and fragments of the tail section have formed an impassible barrier.

We go through the hole in the fence and sprint towards the terminal. Nothing else is moving on the airport tarmac, and as we pass a darkened hangar, the female NPC—the same one who was screaming on the plane, I think—starts whimpering with fear. "Be quiet, woman!" Mr. Jones says. Jolene, beside me, mimes sticking a finger down her throat.

As we near the terminal building we hear the sound of automatic weapons fire and see muzzle flashes behind some of the windows. Mr. Jones breaks out his satellite phone again, but before he can call the UN team for an update, there is a loud crack! of a rifle shot and the female NPC goes down. "Sniper!" the other NPC shouts helpfully.

We take cover behind a stalled baggage trailer. The trailer's driver was shot, but survived; we find him sitting with his back against one of the trailer carts, fighting to draw breath. His sucking chest wound serves as a tutorial for Ray's medic skills. Once he's been patched up and can speak, he tells us where the nearest entrance to the terminal is. It's close, but we're going to have to cross an open stretch of tarmac to reach it.

"You," Mr. Jones says, turning to our other NPC. "You go first." The NPC balks, but Mr. Jones pulls rank, tapping his envoy badge for emphasis.

The NPC makes a dash for it. He's barely out of cover when the sniper blows his head off.

"Running will not work," Mr. Jones observes. "What shall we try next?"

I nod at the trailer carts. "Maybe there's something in here we can use."

There is. The center cart contains several tall metal cases on wheels bearing the name and logo of a K-pop band. Anja uses her engineering skills and some scrounged bungee cords to string the cases together into a rolling ballistic shield. We crouch behind it and duck-walk across the tarmac. The sniper fires half a dozen bullets at us, but the shield holds until we are out of his line of sight.

We reach the door into the terminal. The lock is controlled by an electronic keypad; the baggage car driver gave us the code in exchange for a promise to send back help. But when we punch in the number, the keypad emits an angry buzz and a robotic voice informs us that the airport is on emergency lockdown.

Jolene goes to work hacking the mechanism. The door unlocks and Mr. Jones hauls it open. "Wait," I say, and remind him that of all the characters, I'm the only one who hasn't gotten to use my special ability yet.

"Good point," Mr. Jones says. "Lead the way."

I step through the door into a broad stairwell. Sprawled at my feet is the body of another baggage handler; it looks like he broke his neck falling down the stairs. Looking up, I glimpse another corpse on the half-landing above me, with a uniformed figure hunched over it. I hear grunting noises and the sound of tearing flesh.

"What is that?" Mr. Jones says, entering the stairwell behind me. The figure in uniform looks up at the sound and turns towards us. Its face is covered in gore, and in its eagerness to feed, it has bitten its own lips off, leaving its teeth horribly exposed.

"It's Zed," I say. The uniformed zombie growls at us.

I draw my pistol and aim for the head.

WE FIND MORE BODIES INSIDE THE TERMINAL. THE STAIRWELL exits into a passenger waiting area that's been hit by a bomb blast; corpses and severed limbs are draped over the shattered seats. Slumped against the far wall is a flight attendant who is missing the top of his skull; his brain matter is spattered across a floor-to-ceiling poster that shows a grinning Kim Jong-un arm-in-arm with his old pal Dennis Rodman. There's a lot going on here, visually, but the detail that jumps out at me is that Rodman, who broke his back in a skydiving accident while I was still in grade school, is shown standing on two good legs. Like Kim's, his image has been artificially aged—at ninety-one, he looks like a mummy with facial piercings—but he's upright. This could be a nod to political realism on the part of the game designers: Physical handicaps are taboo in the DPRK, and it's unlikely that a friend of the dictator would be portrayed in a wheelchair. On the other hand, this is the future, so maybe the idea is that the medical establishment has finally gotten spinal cord regeneration to work. I notice Anja is staring at the poster too; when she sees me looking at her, she shrugs a shoulder as if to say, It'd be nice if they did figure it out.

Mr. Jones finishes talking on his sat phone. "This way," he tells us, pointing. "The UN team is in a restaurant across from boarding gate twenty-three. They have just beaten back an assault by the Red Wolves."

The gate is at the other end of the terminal. Along the way we pass more scenes of carnage, all exquisitely rendered; the Red Wolves, and GSoft's art department, have clearly put in a lot of work. "Jesus," I hear Ray say, as he averts his eyes from a particularly gruesome death scene.

Near gate fifteen we find the bodies of several DPRK soldiers. They've been stripped of their weapons, but one of them is carrying a couple spare clips of pistol ammo.

"Tell me about the Zed," Mr. Jones says, as I search the other corpses.

"They're infected with a genetically engineered virus," I tell him. "Later in the game, you find out that the Red Wolves recently infiltrated a bioweapons lab, looking for anthrax. They were caught and killed, but the Zed virus got loose, and one of the members of the tactical response team was infected before the lab could be sterilized. He brought the virus back to Pyongyang and it's been spreading ever since. Tonight's the night the zombie plague reached critical mass, just in time for the Red Wolves' big assault..."

The lights in the terminal go out. I stand up slowly in the darkness, and since there are no NPCs around to state the obvious, I say: "The Red Wolves must have hit the local power station."

The emergency lighting kicks in. The backup lights are dim and strategically positioned to leave large portions of the terminal in shadow.

"Gate twenty-three," Mr. Jones says, sounding more annoyed than frightened. "Let's go."

The ambush happens at gate twenty. A man in civilian clothes steps out of the darkness in front of us; he has a black bandanna with a red wolf's head tied mask-like over his mouth and nose, and he is carrying a submachine gun. I drop to a crouch and raise my pistol, but before I can get off a shot, a zombie emerges from the shadows as well. The Red Wolf screams as the zombie bites him on the shoulder. As the two of them grapple, a gunfight erupts in the near distance behind them, more black-clad figures opening fire on a barricaded restaurant.

"Give me your weapon," Mr. Jones says.

"Remember our ammo is limited," I say, handing him the pistol.

"I know what I am doing," Mr. Jones says. He strikes a gunslinger pose, one eye shut and arm extended. He spends a long moment shifting his aim back and forth. Then he pulls the trigger, twice. The zombie's skull explodes, while the Red Wolf's head snaps sideways. As their bodies hit the floor, the nearby firefight culminates in a massive explosion that rattles the terminal and sends a wall of smoke billowing towards us.

Silence descends. We wait. The smoke has just begun to dissipate when we hear coughing and approaching footsteps. A figure stumbles into view with its arms in the air.

"Halt!" Mr. Jones commands. "Identify yourself!"

"Corporal Chen Li-jun of the United Nations peacekeeping force! Don't shoot, I am unarmed!"

Mr. Jones lowers the pistol and taps his envoy badge. "Report, Corporal Chen."

"The rest of my team is dead, sir! One of the Red Wolves set off a satchel charge."

"Did you say you are unarmed?"

"Yes sir! I am a mechanic, sir, not a fighter."

"What about your security people? Can we use their guns?"

"Their weapons were all destroyed in the explosion, sir. And the terrorists' weapons."

"How inconvenient," Mr. Jones says dryly. He hands me back my pistol and takes the submachine gun from the Red Wolf he killed. It looks like it's in working order; there's only one forty-round clip, but it's full. "This will do for now," he says. "Corporal Chen, I was told you could arrange transport to the city center."

"Yes sir." Corporal Chen explains that there is—or rather, was—a monorail line linking the airport to the central station at the Ryugyong Hotel. The Red Wolves have knocked out a section of the rail near the airport perimeter, but three kilometers to the south there is another station that is still connected, and soldiers and police are reported to be rallying there. "We must find a vehicle and drive there. Then you can take the monorail into the city center."

"No," Mr. Jones says. "I wish to get to the city center as quickly as possible. We will drive there directly."

Corporal Chen blinks and looks momentarily confused. Then he repeats his previous statement word for word, with the exact same intonation.

Mr. Jones sighs in exasperation. "We can try driving straight to the city," I say. "But if we're supposed to take the monorail, a car trip may not be possible."

"Ridiculous," Mr. Jones mutters. Then he says, "Very well. Corporal Chen, get us out of here and find us a vehicle."

"Yes sir! Sir, I must also inform you that there is a Red Wolf sniper on the roof of the terminal..."

"Yes, we know."

"Before we leave, you may wish to go up to the roof and deal with him. It will safeguard our departure, and his weapon could be useful."

"I have no interest in acquiring a sniper rifle," Mr. Jones says. "I am impatient to get to the city. Find us a vehicle." He waits, frowning, to see if the corporal will repeat himself again.

"Yes sir!" Chen says. "This way, sir." He turns and starts moving. Mr. Jones, Jolene, Ray, and I all follow him, but I turn back when I notice Anja isn't with us.

She is standing over the Red Wolf and the zombie Mr. Jones shot. It looks like she's staring at something, but this time there's no poster in her line of vision, and as I get closer I see that her avatar is not just still but completely motionless.

"Anja?" I say, reaching out. My hand doesn't just pass through her, it erases the portion of her avatar that it touches. I wave my arm back and forth, and her entire upper torso disappears, leaving her head hanging frozen in midair. Creepy.

"John Chu!" Mr. Jones calls back to me. "What is the problem?"

"Anja's glitched," I tell him. "She must have disconnected."

"Can she rejoin the game?"

"I don't know."

"We will proceed without her," he says. "If she logs back in, she will have to catch up to us. Now come on!"

As we make our way through the terminal, I send Anja an instant message, asking her what happened. I get no answer. But I do get a message from Ms. Pang. LOOK FOR AN OPPORTUNITY TO ISOLATE MR. JONES, it says.

> WHAT DO YOU MEAN, "ISOLATE"? I write back.

> LOSE THE OTHER MEMBERS OF YOUR PARTY. KILL THEM IF YOU HAVE TO, BUT TRY TO BE SUBTLE. ONCE YOU AND JONES ARE ALONE, KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. WHEN YOU SEE ME COMING, DISTRACT HIM.

> I HAVE QUESTIONS, I write.

> YOU HAVE YOUR MONEY, she replies. NOW DO AS YOU ARE TOLD.

In baggage claim a pitched battle is underway between a Red Wolf, a squad of North Korean soldiers, and a big pack of zombies. The Red Wolf tries to make a fighting retreat along a stalled conveyor belt; he gets grabbed from behind and dragged out of sight, along with his weapon. The zombies swarm the soldiers' position. The squad leader screams something patriotic and sets off a belt of grenades; the blast brings down a big chunk of the ceiling, burying the squad and most of the Zed. While Mr. Jones and I shoot the few zombies that are left, Jolene spies a golf bag among the scattered luggage and arms herself with a nine iron.

Outside, the passenger pickup area is another scene of carnage. In addition to the bodies, there are enough cars to constitute a traffic jam by DPRK standards, but none of them are drivable: They are all shot or smashed up, or on fire. Off to our right, though, in the clear and conspicuously undamaged, is an idling passenger bus. "There is our ride," Corporal Chen says.

"I will drive," says Mr. Jones, but Corporal Chen sprints ahead, and by the time we board he is already behind the wheel. No amount of envoy badge-tapping will convince the corporal to move, so Mr. Jones takes a seat across from him and glares instead.

Jolene, Ray, and I move towards the back of the bus. A zombie pops up and I shoot it in the head. We sit.

"What's up with Anja?" Jolene asks me.

"I don't know. I messaged her, but she's not answering. Maybe her internet is out."

"Lucky girl," Ray says.

"What's your problem?" says Jolene.

"My problem is I don't like seeing people with their faces chewed off. I mean, if it's cartoon gore, OK, but this shit..." He gestures at the downed Zed, whose left eye has come out of its socket and now dangles from a stalk, jiggling with the motion of the bus.

We've cleared the terminal. The road curves to merge with a broader thruway. As Corporal Chen makes the turn, we hear a familiar crack! and the side window behind Mr. Jones shatters. The bullet hits the corporal in the head and his brains spray across the front windshield. "Great," Ray says. As the bus swerves out of control, Mr. Jones tries to grab the wheel. But the crash that follows is scripted—our penalty for declining the sniper side quest.

The bus plows through a guard rail and plunges down a steep embankment. Our characters don't black out this time, but the simulated whiplash as we hit bottom is enough to make even a veteran VR player queasy.

We stumble out of the wreck and regroup by the light of the one surviving headlamp. We've come down onto a two-lane road that runs beneath the thruway. To our left the road is blocked by a jackknifed tractor trailer. To our right is a dark tunnel; a blinking pair of hazard lights is visible at the far end. Our next ride, probably, if we can get to it.

"I'm sure there aren't a million Zed hiding in there," Jolene deadpans. She glances towards the embankment, but without even trying she knows it's impossible to climb back up. We have to go through the tunnel.

Mr. Jones, impatient as ever, is already marching into the darkness. Jolene hefts her nine iron and starts to follow him, but I stop her and say, "You and Ray wait here."

"Excuse me?"

"Just do it," I say. "Please?" She frowns but doesn't argue. Neither does Ray, who I think at this point would be just as happy to get killed off.

I run to catch up with Mr. Jones. We are in the middle of the tunnel when the first Zed come shambling out of the dark. They are few in number and they are slow movers, so it would be easy enough to just dodge around them, but I choose to deliberately fall into the game designers' trap and fire my pistol. The gunshot echoes loudly in the tunnel, and as the echo fades I hear the crash of a metal door slamming open, followed by a chorus of growls.

We are close enough now to see that the hazard lights belong to a white airport security jeep that is sitting with its front doors open. On the other side of the road is a sedan that has been flipped onto its roof. The guys in the jeep must have stopped to investigate the wreck, and you can guess what happened next.

Sure enough, as Mr. Jones goes to climb in the jeep, he is ambushed by a Zed in a tattered security uniform. While he's busy shooting it, I step past him and slip behind the wheel. The jeep's keys are in the ignition and the motor starts on the first try. "I will drive," Mr. Jones says, but instead of sliding over I pull the driver's door shut and motion for him to go around. This gets him glaring again, but the rest of the Zed are almost on us.

"What about the other two?" Mr. Jones asks, as he climbs into the passenger seat. I look up at the rearview mirror. The mob of approaching Zed must number in the dozens now, and they are jammed shoulder to shoulder, snarling furiously. I doubt even Darla could break through that with only a golf club for a weapon.

"Don't worry, they'll catch up to us," I say. Then I step on the gas.

> THE ROAD CURVES LEFT AND UP. AS WE REJOIN THE THRUWAY, I brace for more gunshots, but it seems we are out of sniper range.

I get a terse instant message from Jolene:

> WTF???

> LATER, I reply.

The rain comes back with a vengeance. I put on the windshield wipers. Downtown Pyongyang still has power and the skyline remains hazily visible through the deluge, but it doesn't seem to be getting any closer. The blacked out landscape around us, as revealed by intermittent lightning flashes, is a mix of open farmland and concentrated apartment housing. The monorail line is on our right, running roughly parallel to the road, which confirms that we're going in the right direction—not that we actually have a choice. "The rally point can't be far," I tell Mr. Jones, but he only grunts impatiently, so I give the jeep more gas.

I get another instant message:

> INTRUSION DETECTED — SECURICAM/A1

When I was searching my apartment this morning, something I found, in addition to my old Companion Cube, was the nannycam I bought for my previous apartment when I thought one of my roommates was stealing from me. It occurred to me that it might be useful to get footage of Ms. Pang's white guy if he came back, so before I left I set the camera up and programmed the motion sensor to send me alerts.

Keeping one eye on the road, I open a pop-up window and check out the video feed. It's not Ms. Pang's white guy. The three people in my apartment—two men and a woman—are all Asian. I want to say Korean, though they could be Chinese. Agewise I'd guess they're in their late twenties, though the tougher-looking of the two guys could be older.

Thanks to my thousands of hours of experience in first-person shooters, I have a much easier time IDing their guns. The tougher-looking guy is holding a 92 series Beretta semiautomatic, the default handgun for Hong Kong movie gangsters. The woman is armed with a Beretta 21A pocket pistol that has been fitted with a silencer—a common accessory in video games and films, but one that I've never actually seen on a real concealed-carry weapon. Staring at it, I think: WTF???

"Look out!" Mr. Jones says. A makeshift barricade of sandbags and concertina wire stretches across the road in front of us. Even if I weren't distracted, there's not enough time to avoid a collision, so instead of slamming on the brakes I just try to steer through the crash. This works for a few seconds but then the tires blow and we go into an uncontrolled skid.

The jeep comes to a stop with its front bumper and grill wrapped around a lamppost. The motor is dead but the headlights are somehow still working, so I can see the sign hanging askew from the post. MONORAIL STATION 0.6 KM, it reads. I try the ignition and confirm we'll be walking.

We climb out of the jeep and a series of closely timed lightning flashes gives us a sense of our surroundings. We've entered one of the suburban housing complexes, the thruway now a boulevard with rows of identical six-story apartment buildings lining either side. Behind us at the wrecked barricade I spot the remains of a blown-up machine-gun nest with uniformed bodies scattered around it.

Another sniper opens up with an automatic rifle from the other end of the street. I take cover behind the jeep. Mr. Jones ducks down beside me, but not before firing a long burst from his submachine gun.

"Hey," I remind him, "careful with your ammo!"

"Sorry!" he replies, sounding uncharacteristically abashed. Then he says: "The shooter is in a third-floor balcony about forty meters away."

"Stay here." I crawl around to the back of the jeep and peek out carefully. I quickly spot the shooter, and I also see how I'm supposed to deal with him. Parked on the sidewalk almost directly beneath the balcony is a military supply truck. Its tailgate is open, and lying beside it are two more dead soldiers who must have gotten shot as they were about to unload the truck's cargo: big red steel drums with flame icons on their sides.

Why would the North Korean Army be unloading barrels of fuel in the middle of a housing complex during a zombie apocalypse/terrorist uprising? Don't ask me, I just work here. I draw my pistol and wait for the next lightning flash. It's a long shot and my first bullet goes wide, but the second is dead-on, and the fuel is as volatile as nitroglycerin. The whole truck goes up, sending a huge gout of flame up the side of the building; the sniper is caught in it and dies screaming.

I salvage a grenade from one of the dead soldiers by the barricade. Mr. Jones and I proceed along the boulevard, the now-blazing apartment building lighting our way. We go about three hundred meters before our progress is blocked by a pair of buses parked nose-to-nose across the road. In real life this would be a surmountable obstacle, but the game won't allow me to give Mr. Jones's avatar a boost, or let me climb on his shoulders.

We are forced to detour into a small plaza to our left. At the center of the plaza, a life-sized portrait of Kim Jong-un has been placed atop a concrete pedestal. The pedestal is ringed by brightly burning torches, so despite the blackout and the storm, the Supreme Leader is clearly visible, a beacon of Juche strength in the darkness. At his first sight of it, Mr. Jones does a funny little dip, almost like he's genuflecting.

My own attention is focused on the edges of the plaza. I look for an open alley or a breezeway but don't find one; the surrounding buildings form a solid wall, and the doorways are all blocked with piles of sandbags. It's a dead end.

"How do we get to the station?" Mr. Jones asks.

I shake my head. "We don't. Not yet. Something has to happen first."

"I do not understand."

I approach the Kim Jong-un shrine and check out one of the torches. It's cast bronze, about three feet long, the flame fueled by a reservoir in the handle. I lift it from its sconce and swing it experimentally; it should make a decent club.

Growls echo from the direction of the boulevard. Mr. Jones and I turn to see the zombified citizens of Pyongyang emerging from the shadows. Whatever their social rank in life, they are members of the Hostile Class now, starving and eager to feast on our entrails. Mr. Jones tenses up and raises his weapon.

"Single shots to the head," I remind him.

"Yes, I understand," he says, nodding.

There are fifteen Zed in the first wave. Mr. Jones shoots ten of them; I shoot one and use the torch to bash out the brains of the other four. I load a fresh clip into my pistol and do a quick spin around to make sure there aren't more zombies sneaking up behind us.

I spot a lone figure standing on the far side of the shrine, but it's not one of the Zed. It's Ms. Pang. She is dressed all in black with a Red Wolf bandanna tied beneath her chin. She locks eyes with me and puts a finger to her lips.

"More of them!" Mr. Jones cries, still looking towards the boulevard.

The second wave is massive, more Zed than I can count. Mr. Jones is soon out of ammo; I toss him the torch and grab another for myself. We fight the mob hand to hand and are nearly overwhelmed. In desperation I use the grenade, taking out a dozen zombies at once and nearly killing us in the bargain. This buys us a moment's rest but it isn't enough; we can hear more of them coming.

Something big slams into the bus barricade. We hear a monstrous roar, and the growls of the Zed abruptly fall silent. One of the buses slides forward as the new arrival makes an opening for itself. Lightning flashes as it breaks through.

It's some kind of mutant Zed, grown to troll-like proportions. The sight of it makes me regret having used up my grenade, but there's no point crying about that now. I slam my last clip into my pistol and open fire on the monster. I can tell I hit it in the head because I see bits of skull flying off it, but this only seems to piss it off. Then my gun is empty, and the Zed pounds its knuckles on the ground and roars again.

Mr. Jones roars too—a kind of Rebel yell, the loudest sound I've ever heard him make—and charges the beast with his torch. The Zed swipes at him with both fists, but Mr. Jones dodges the blows and brings the torch down like a sledgehammer on the top of the Zed's skull, once, twice, three times. The monster's head comes apart and its body crashes to the ground, even as Mr. Jones continues to pound on it. He hits it until he is certain it's not getting up again, and then he hits it some more.

"Good job," I say, when he's finally finished. I say this not to praise him—although I am pretty impressed—but because Ms. Pang is walking up behind him now, and I want him to look at me instead of her. But he doesn't look at either of us, just stands there catching his breath.

Then Ms. Pang is right on top of him. She raises a hand, and I see blue sparks dancing over her palm and her fingers. This is a fairly cheesy visual effect—the kind of thing an amateur might whip up at home—but whatever computer process it signifies appears to be more sophisticated. Mr. Jones grunts and stiffens up, and his avatar turns one hundred and eighty degrees, rotating as if he were standing on a turntable. Ms. Pang shoves her hand into his face and the sparks wrap around his skull, for a moment seeming to form an almost solid band, like a VR headset made of lightning. Then the sparks go out and she draws her hand back. Mr. Jones's avatar is now frozen, just like Anja's avatar was frozen. Ms. Pang thrusts her hand forward again, and erases Mr. Jones's head.

"Excellent," she says. She turns to me smiling. "Well played, John Chu. You did not disappoint me."

Somehow I don't hear this as good news. "What did you just do?"

"A good question," says Ms. Pang. "The answer depends on how clever Smith is. But with a bit of good fortune, you will hear about it on the news very shortly. In the meantime—"

The rest of her words are drowned out by a sudden whine of static in my headphones. I start lagging like crazy, my visuals breaking up into a stuttering series of still images shot through with junk pixels. Whatever this is must be affecting my avatar as well, because right before I disconnect I hear a quizzical "John Ch-ch-ch-chu?" break through the static. Then my goggles go dark. The static drops to a hum, then nothing.

I spend a long moment in the silent void waiting to see if the words ACCOUNT TERMINATED will appear. They don't. But even without that confirmation, I can tell I'm down another name.

THERE'S A COMMON SCI-FI MOVIE TROPE WHERE A CHARACTER thinks they've logged out of virtual reality, only to discover later that they've been tricked: They're still in the simulation. It's a believable scenario, because all of us have experienced something like this, in dreams. But when it comes to VR, the technology isn't quite there yet.

As I pull off my headset, I can smell something burning, and since I haven't bought any new Japanese sex toys, I know this must be real life. The Venetian blinds on the motel room window are drawn, but enough light is coming through the slats that I can see my computer on the dresser in front of me; it's not actually on fire, but when I pick it up the case is warm, and the glow of fried components is visible through the air vents on the back.

It's not just my game rig that's dead. The alarm clock and the lamp on the nightstand are both out, and when I flip the wall switch for the overhead lights, nothing happens.

I go to the window and peek out through the slats. It's evening and the sun has just set. The motel parking lot looks empty—no pistol-packing mystery Asians lying in wait. But when I step outside, there's a shoebox sitting on the doormat with my name written on the lid.

As I'm staring at the shoebox, the door to the motel room on my left opens and a shirtless white guy with dreads and a scraggly beard stumbles out. "Hey," he says, throwing me a confused look, "did you just lose power?"

I nod. We both turn and look at the Texaco station across the street, which is lit up and open for business. The streetlight on the corner is still working, too. "Weird," says the white guy.

Not really, I think. I've spent enough time browsing griefer forums to know there are lots of ways to cause a localized blackout, if that's your thing. For example, if you wire a Taser to an extension cord and plug it into a wall socket, you can melt down a building's electrical system as effectively as you can a human nervous system. I doubt that Ms. Pang's enforcer is to blame in this case, but here in America, where electroshock weapons are covered by the second amendment, he's not the only one with access to Tasers.

A phone starts ringing in the shoebox at my feet. The dreadlocked white guy, helpful as any NPC, nods at the box and says, "Sounds like you got a call."

"Thanks," I say. I take the shoebox back into my room and set it on the bed and open it. The smartphone inside is a Xiaomi 2035, a Chinese brand that according to my research is very popular in North Korea. Its screen reads: SMITH CALLING.

I pick it up and answer it. "How did you find me?"

"You have more important things to worry about," Smith says.

"Look, I don't know what just happened, but—"

"Don't you? Your confederate—who I believe to be an agent of the People's Republic of China—just tried to assassinate my boss."

"Assassinate?" I say. "What is this, The Matrix? You can't kill someone by—"

"I knew you were a security risk," Smith says. "My error was assuming that the danger was purely informational. I did not expect a physical threat."

"What physical threat?" Remembering the light show in the game: "Did something happen to Mr. Jones's VR headset?"

"As if you did not already know. You can be sure we will be looking much more closely at our foreign hardware sourcing, going forward."

"Is Jones all right?"

"Yes, he is quite well. Fortunately, we detected your confederate's incursion into our system, and as a precaution I had one of my own agents take over for Mr. Jones in the game. That agent will be honored as a hero."

I step to the window and scan the parking lot again. "Look, I don't know if you're bullshitting me here," I say, "but I don't know anything about a plot against Mr. Jones's life."

"You are not working for the PRC?"

"I was working for someone else. She calls herself Ms. Pang, and she could be PRC. But she wasn't just paying me, she was threatening me."

"Ah," Smith says. "'Carrot and stick,' is that the expression?"

"Yes."

"Well, John Chu, I have no more carrots for you. Your contract with Mr. Jones is terminated. You will receive no more money—but you will perform one last service. Do you see the envelope in the box I left for you?"

Nestled in the bottom of the shoebox is another, smaller box, rectangular and relatively flat. Resting on top of it is a letter-size envelope. The envelope contains a train ticket, a coach seat on tomorrow morning's Amtrak Coast Starlight to Los Angeles. "You want me to go to L.A.? What for?"

"You will find out when you get there."

"I don't think so."

"I do," Smith says. "There is a message with a video attachment on this phone's email app. Open it now and watch it."

The video clip is from the feed of another nannycam that is focused on a long white medical pod. The head of the pod's occupant is enclosed in a special VR helmet, so I cannot see her face, but on the wall behind the pod are several shelves full of trophies, and a big poster of Anja performing at the Pan American Games.

A red light flashes on the side of the medical pod, and a robotic voice begins shouting: "Achtung! Systemfehler!" Within seconds, a woman I recognize as Anja's mother runs into view. She goes to a computer terminal near the foot of the pod, but even as she reaches it, the alarm ceases. Anja's mom snatches up a headset from beside the terminal and puts it on. "Anja?" I hear her say. "Alles OK mit dir?" She pauses to listen and then continues talking; by the time Anja's father appears, she is calmer. "Falscher Alarm," she tells him.

"Do we have an understanding now?" Smith says when I get back on the phone.

"You hacked Anja's iron lung."

"No, John Chu—you did. But so we are clear, if you force me to terminate her life support, there will be no alarm to warn her parents."

"OK," I say. "I understand the rules."

I find myself looking into the shoebox again, at the second box nestled inside it. Something tells me that whatever it contains, I'm not going to like it.

It's as if Smith can read my thoughts.

"Yes," he says. "Open it."


 You can play with your friends in the Realms of Asgarth, but remember to play with them outside Asgarth as well.

—Call to Wizardry loading screen tip

 prohibition — A popular blood sport in which a government attempts to tame desire by passing a series of ineffective and increasingly draconian laws.

—The New Devil's Dictionary

Yesterday must have been protest day in Sacramento. The southbound Coast Starlight is carrying scores of anti-gun activists, and an equal number of anti-abortion protesters. Amtrak, hoping to avoid a riot, has seated the two groups at opposite ends of the train.

I get put in a car with the anti-gun crowd. At twenty-one I am an old man among them: Most are high-school age or even younger. They wear blood-red T-shirts, adorned on the back with the names of places where mass shootings have occurred. On the front of the shirts, above a graphic of a fist smashing an AK-47 into pieces, is the name of their movement: Repeal the 2nd.

Given how my grandparents died, you might assume I'd be all in favor of this, but as usual, I get hung up on the practical shit. When I think about gun control, I think of my aunt Emma, an Army surgeon who served four tours in Iraq. Retired now, she lives on a ranch outside Carson City, Nevada, with her wife, Yoko Hayashi. Aunt Yoko has a sad story about her grandparents, too: They were interned at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during the Second World War. Her grandmother was raped by one of the guards there.

Em and Yoko own a lot of firearms: a shotgun to deal with coyotes and human trespassers; a rifle for hunting; an assortment of pistols for mostly sentimental reasons (they met at a shooting range); and hidden behind a false wall in the bedroom closet, a pair of AR-15s and several thousand rounds of ammunition, their insurance against history repeating itself. Emma is mechanically gifted and Yoko can perform sorcery with a 3D printer, so in the event of a fascist takeover, I imagine they would have no trouble converting the AR-15s to full auto.

This makes them sound like doomsday preppers, which they kind of are, but they are also two of the sweetest people I know, and funny as hell. They are on a very short list of relatives who I enjoy arguing politics with. But good luck trying to change their minds about anything. When I first heard about the secret arsenal in the closet, I suggested to Emma that even machine guns would be useless in a fight against the government: Mom's got drones that could incinerate the entire ranch from fifty thousand feet in the air. Aunt Em replied that America had drones in Iraq, too, but the insurgents still managed to inflict enough pain that we eventually gave up and went home. "Don't get me wrong," she added good-naturedly. "I'm sure your mother could kill me if she wanted to. But I'm not making it a freebie."

Emma and Yoko raise Cavalier King Charles Spaniels for competition. This is relevant because the ATF has a standing policy to shoot any dogs they encounter during a raid. The agency does not discriminate: Even obviously harmless pets are treated as vicious attack animals and put down. My aunts regard their Spaniels as their children, and if a bunch of men and women in black showed up at the ranch and started murdering their babies, it doesn't take a genius to guess what would happen next. I would feel like a huge asshole if I were in any way responsible for that.

None of which changes the fact that America has a gun problem. If I could wave a magic wand and prevent all future Columbines, stop people from shooting each other in domestic disputes, and make it harder to commit suicide on a whim—yeah, sure, I would do that. But there is no magic wand, only the blunt instrument of the law versus the endless adaptability of the human heart in pursuit of what it wants.

Maybe these kids will come up with a strategy to make prohibition work at a reasonable cost in innocent lives. On another day, I might ask them about it, kill some time shooting the breeze on the way down to L.A. But at the moment, I'm dealing with too many distractions to feel like chatting.

Distraction number one is the collar around my neck. To a casual observer it must look like bondage gear, or some sort of science-fiction cosplay: a two-inch-wide band of black plastic ribbon cable, secured by a chunky metal buckle beneath my chin. There's an LED light on the front of the buckle that turned green when I locked the collar in place. If I try to undo the buckle or cut the ribbon cable, or if I fail to follow Smith's instructions to the letter, the light will turn red, and then something very bad will happen to me. Smith wasn't explicit about the nature of the bad thing, but it undoubtedly has something to do with the little glass vial at the back of the collar. The vial is filled with an amber-colored liquid, and sits in a metal bracket attached to the outside of the collar; on the inside of the collar, riding flush against the nape of my neck, is a tiny grommet with a hole a couple of millimeters wide. Feeling it there, I imagine a spring-loaded needle poised to jab me in the spine. That's probably wrong, though: VX, a topical nerve poison, doesn't need to be injected. A single drop on exposed skin is all it takes to kill you.

This makes it hard to get comfortable. The collar chafes, and I can't lean my head back against the seat rest for fear of breaking the glass. I sit up straight, stiff-necked, studying the faces of the people around me.

Distraction number two: Figuring out which of my fellow passengers is a DPRK sleeper agent. Smith told me that he'd have someone on the train keeping an eye on me. I assume the watcher is the same person who delivered the box to the motel.

I doubt it's any of the protesters. They were already on the train when I boarded, and besides, they're mostly white kids. Caucasian teenage North Korean spies seems like a stretch. I can probably also rule out the Sikh family who got on in Oakland. It could be the Asian guy in the business suit: He boarded the same time I did, and he has a pissed off resting expression that reminds me of Smith. But he's Japanese, not Korean, and while that doesn't rule him out, it does make me feel guilty about racially profiling him. Aunt Yoko would be disappointed.

Maybe it's none of these people. The collar buckle is big enough to contain a GPS tracker and a microphone, so there's no reason for the watcher to be in the same car as me. He, or she, could be sitting with the pro-lifers at the front of the train, remotely monitoring my GPS signal. And listening.

Which brings me to distraction number three: Finding a way to call for help. My computer got fried, and I left my cell phone back in my apartment because I was worried about being tracked with it. I have the Xiaomi phone that Smith provided, but for obvious reasons I can't use that. I need to borrow another phone, without asking for it out loud.

The girl in the window seat next to me has an iPhone, but unfortunately she has decided I am some kind of weirdo. She took one look at my collar as I was sitting down and immediately put in earbuds and assumed a defensive posture that says, "I will tase you if you so much as tap me on the shoulder." I could try passing her a note anyway—"I NEED YOUR PHONE. PLEASE DON'T RESPOND VERBALLY."—but I doubt that would end well.

Looking through the gap between the seat backs, I can see that the boy in front of us is using his phone to watch a video. A two-second glimpse of the footage is enough for my nerd brain to identify it as an episode of the original Star Trek. It's the one about the guy named Lazarus who's caught in an eternal feud with an insane twin from an alternate universe. One Lazarus is made of matter, the other of antimatter, and if they ever meet outside a special interdimensional corridor, the resulting explosion will destroy all of existence.

I am thinking about this when the conductor announces that the dining car in the middle of the train is open for lunch. It gives me an idea.

JUST AS SOME PEOPLE ASSUME I MUST BE IN FAVOR OF gun control, there are others, including several members of my own family, who argue that I ought to be in the anti-abortion camp. Their logic is straightforward: As the unplanned child of an ambitious single mother, I am lucky not to have been killed in the womb.

This is true as far as it goes, but I don't think it goes very far. Because I paid attention in sex ed class, I know that a lot of things had to go right in order for me to be born. Not getting aborted is actually pretty far down on the list.

For example: The average male ejaculate contains hundreds of millions of sperm. They are not identical; each carries a random combination of half the man's DNA, further altered by mutation. And their race to fertilize the egg is governed by the rules of chaos theory, in which outcomes are highly dependent on initial conditions—a nerdy way of saying that if your parents had had sex a few minutes earlier or later, they'd have conceived a different child.

This is another case where a magic wand would be useful. I happen to think being alive is great, and if I could I'd happily give the gift of life—a good life—not just to all the kids who got aborted, but to those millions of potential brothers and sisters whose existence was precluded by my own conception.

That's a fantasy, of course. And so is the idea that you could have stopped my mother from getting an abortion, if she'd wanted one. Granted, at the time she became pregnant, she didn't yet have access to Hellfire-equipped drones. But she was already a badass, confident in her own judgment, and she knew how to stand up for herself. If you'd told her she didn't have a choice what to do with her own uterus, she'd have tossed you into a swimming pool—and if that didn't get the point across, she'd have shot you.

When the thing standing between you and your heart's desire is another person with their own wants and needs, the answer is never as simple as just laying down the law. We all understand this when someone else tries to tell us what we can and can't do, but conveniently forget it when it's our turn to give orders. This blind spot is common to people on all parts of the political spectrum, which is one reason why I don't like arguing politics much.

Another thing we all have in common is that we all need to eat. So now, in a bid to save my own precious life, I head for the dining car, the interdimensional corridor where the matter of Repeal the 2nd mixes with the antimatter of Overturn Roe.

The car door opens on the sound of raised voices. Looking down the aisle as I step inside, I see a teenage girl in a blood-red T-shirt going nose-to-nose with an older woman whose blouse is patterned with sonogram images. Standing beside them, trying to play ref, is a nervous looking Amtrak attendant.

The woman and the girl aren't so much arguing as exchanging bumper sticker slogans; you could write their dialog yourself if you really wanted to. The Amtrak attendant's dialog consists of a single phrase, which he repeats over and over again: "Ladies, please!" This is completely ineffectual, but he keeps saying it anyway, like a sorcerer's apprentice trying to get his Charm of Silence to work.

Everyone else in the car is focused on the woman and the girl, waiting to see if they'll go full PvP on each other. The girl's back is to me, so I can't read her expression, but the Overturn Roe woman looks like she's enjoying the verbal sparring too much to start throwing real punches. Which is fine. I don't want anyone to get hurt here, I just need a distraction.

I turn my attention to the nearest tables. I spot what I want almost instantly: A guy sitting alone just ahead and to my left has a phone. It looks like he was scrolling through Twitter when the live-action version broke out behind him. Now he's set the phone down on the table and turned around in his seat to watch the fireworks.

Thinking will only cause trouble here, so I will myself to just act: Grab the phone as if I have every right to take it, turn, and go. But even as I step forward, a teenage boy in a red T-shirt gets up from a table on the other side of the aisle. It looks like he intends to provide backup to the girl, whether or not she actually needs his help. But having gotten to his feet, he just stands there, in my way.

I need to get the phone before it goes to sleep and locks itself. I could probably get away with saying "Excuse me" here, but my sense of urgency inclines me to more forceful methods, and because this is the real world, chest-bumping is allowed. The train car jolts over a rough spot on the tracks and I pretend to lose my footing, shoving the boy forward. He shoots me an angry look over his shoulder, but when he sees I'm not wearing a sonogram shirt, he turns back towards the girl.

I can reach the phone now. I've got my hand on it when the train gives another big jolt. This time it's the boy who stumbles. He falls into me. More worried about losing the phone than my balance, I tip over backwards. When my head hits the floor, the bracket on the back of the collar jams painfully against my spine, and as my teeth click together I swear I hear the crunch of breaking glass.

My body goes numb. This is panic, but it could also be the VX starting its attack on my neurotransmitters. I jerk my head up, reach around to the nape of my neck.

Yes, I know, this is dumb: using my bare hand to check for leaking contact poison. But if the vial is broken, I'm almost certainly doomed; the only real question is how many other people will die with me. Better to find out fast, so I can start agonizing about whether to throw myself heroically from the train.

I touch the bracket. The vial is intact. I feel for cracks in the glass, pressing hard enough as I do this that, if it were cracked, it would probably shatter. But as best I can tell, it's undamaged. The only moisture I feel is the cold sweat on my fingertips. I am still alive.

The boy, who landed on top of me, is trying to get up; my sense of relief is cut short as he elbows me in the balls. I grit my teeth again. As I cup my wounded testicles, I see the phone, lying on the floor within easy reach and still unlocked. I grab it. The boy steps on my hand.

It's OK, I needed to get my blood pumping again after that scare. I wait for the boy to get off me and haul myself to my feet. Then I try to make a quick exit. I get as far as the door at the end of the dining car.

When the door slides open, the surly Japanese guy in the business suit is standing on the other side. He glances at the phone in my hand, then looks me right in the eye, scowling. I start to go numb again, but not before I feel my face compose itself into a perfectly guilty expression.

He doesn't kill me. He stares at me unblinking for a few seconds, then tilts his head and looks past me to where the woman and the girl are still going at it. "What's that all about?" he asks.

Even if I were free to speak, I'm not sure what I'd say to this. I answer with a shrug. Then I duck my head, and make good my escape.


I find a vacant lavatory and lock myself inside. Holding up the phone, I carefully close Twitter and open the dialing app. Then I stare at the screen and realize I don't know what to do next.

Normally I contact Mom through my computer. There's an emergency number I can call if I get into trouble when I'm away from my PC. I'm supposed to have that number memorized, and I do, sort of—it's programmed into my cell phone. I had optimistically assumed that the act of programming it into my cell phone would also imprint it in my brain, but now, try as I might, I cannot recall a single digit.

I don't know Jolene's phone number either. Or Ray's. I do know Darla's, but reaching out to her is one of the few things I can think of that might conceivably make my situation worse.

The answer, when it comes to me, is so blindingly obvious that I feel stupid: Duh, of course. I'm traveling to his city, after all, and not only can he relay a message to Mom, he's got resources of his own that could help me.

I punch in his number, start composing a text.

> DEAR DAD, it begins.