"You must be Will," the impeccably dressed building manager said. He introduced himself as Harry Crowther. He was wearing a navy smart suit complete with white handkerchief and gold cuffs, and he looked suitably middle-aged and recently combed and styled, although the grooming looked hastily done. Maybe he'd been interrupted from a nap.

"I was expecting someone..." He couldn't seem to come up with an appropriate qualifier. "You know how it is these days. Surfing at five, programming worldwide at fifteen. Burned out at twenty-one. Or retired." He smiled.

Something about his face looked familiar. Bellow volunteered nothing of his former life and what had landed him there; Crowther probably knew most of it anyway. Bellow knew what he looked like: a decade older than he was with wrinkles around the edges of his eyes and lips, hair gone slightly gray at the temples, a dinosaur in the age of limitless beauty and eternal life--at least for the wealthy. Perversely, the women liked him better for it.

"I was pleased to hear you were coming to visit us," the manager said. "I'd thought you would simply jack in from outside."

"I like to get a feel for a place. The people who take care of it. You can learn a lot from the amount of dust on a floor."

"I suppose that's true," Crowther said, as if he had a good idea of what Bellow meant. "We're only so good as our cleaning crew, isn't that right? Attention to detail, in this day and age, is a necessity, isn't it? We're all so busy, life is so crowded, the division of labor becomes all the more important. And one must take responsibility for his area of expertise. There is no time or consideration for a lack of effort."

They walked through the lobby and past the sentry bot. Bellow felt the brief warmth of a retina scan as the squat and spiderlike sentry paused, touched his corneal implants, and then moved on. He blinked into the web and probed gently against the gelatinous Tower firewalls, just enough to gather a list of names. He was already flagged in the security database, and while the news did not really surprise him, it was irritating. He never liked them to know he was coming.

He blinked out, into another hallway. They passed by several large workspaces with crowded holographic terminals and what seemed like hundreds of padded design cubicles full of kids in hotsuits and headgear. The boy from the street flashed him a brief smile and wink as he walked by, as if they shared some private joke.

"Ninety-seven floors," Crowther rattled on. "Medical implants, gene therapy, nanotech, quantum design; we do it all here. Then, of course, the owner-occupied suites on the upper, er, levels. And we are a fully functional programming and broadcasting center. Entertainment and shopping, mostly, but we also run a few business sites. Attendance at our seminars is up twenty percent--I'm sorry, am I boring you? I do go on. It's more than my business, it's my passion. Which is why I'm so concerned about the recent trouble."

"I'd like to see the main server."

"It's in the sub-basement. Access is restricted. I'll have to make a call. Excuse me a moment." He removed a slender holo-screen from his pocket and spoke a few words into it. A stream of dialogue followed from a floating female hologram.

"We're cleared to go," Crowther said.

They took the express to the lower levels. As the doors slid silently open, the sentry bots were there in force, more insistent this time, scanning body crevices and taking DNA samples from a puff of skin cells. They waited while a bot analyzed Bellow's DNA results and scanned for organic explosives and designer drugs, then passed through steel doors and into a giant vibrating cylinder along a polymer-reinforced catwalk that circled the walls. The server hung suspended and humming beneath them like some monstrous sleeping child, capable of a hundred billion functions per millisecond, able to reveal worlds and then destroy them in the blink of an eye, her countless arms of magnetic layered quantum chips and alpha waves reaching out and linking virtual fingers with anyone who paid the subscribers' fee.

Ignoring the manager's surprised shout, Bellow leaned over the rail and placed both palms gently against the vibrating surface.

He slipped beneath the circular room and the smells of hot grease and electric current, or rather deep within it. There was a certain pitch that carried a voice and a presence only he could hear. The language was foreign but soothingly familiar, as if he were a fetus listening in the womb to his mother's muffled conversation. He became a part of the machinery, inserting himself into the hot coils and slippery chips, all the while probing ever deeper, ever closer to that something he sought.

There. Bellow imagined a tremor so slight it was not mechanical but magnetic. Then Crowther's slender, manicured hands were pulling him away from the machine, and he was once again on the catwalk with the manager's yapping, nervous face peering into his own as if searching for signs of mania.

"Are you insane? That's a two hundred foot drop!"

"Take your hands off me."

"I didn't mean any harm." The manager stepped back quickly and sputtered, red-faced, his calm façade cracked wide open. "You surprised me, that's all. I'd heard you were eccentric, had unusual methods, but this is a restricted area with sensitive equipment, you understand. Imagine introducing your child to me, and I slap my hands down on it without so much as a word. It's rather barbaric."

Christ, Bellow thought. He's offended. You had to be careful with these people; they operated within a very rigid social order, and they were fragile. But there was something funny about this man struggling to keep his emotions in check. As if a manager's blind-eyed professionalism would keep the entire vast expanse up and running.

On the way back to the upper levels, Bellow pretended to study his datapad, giving the building manager time to recover himself.

"You're aware that we've had some ... incidents," Crowther said as they walked past the sentry clones. "Assuming our Board of Directors agrees, I'll brief you in full and open access to our files after you accept our binding security documents. These incidents are extremely sensitive, and we trust you won't speak of them to anyone. For now, you only need to know what the newsclips have reported to understand why you have been brought in here."

"A bug in the system. I felt it back there."

The manager looked at him blankly. "I'm sure that's impossible. The, er, bug is simply an electronic glitch."

"Your glitch has killed three people."

"The fact of the matter is that we service millions every day. A scant few of our users have received injuries from an unknown source. I'm not prepared to concede that it's even from our system."

Bellow shrugged. Three New London users had received roughly fifty thousand volts through the brain, according to his information, the last of them just yesterday. But who was he to argue?

They entered the elevator and the pneumatic doors whooshed shut. "There's the matter of my payment."

"I've been authorized to offer you up to two hundred thousand credits. Half up front, half upon completion of the job. You will be put up in our best suite, of course."

"I'd rather stay downtown. Helps me think."

"We'd prefer you keep a low profile. I'd have to authorize it--"

"I don't give a damn what you have to do," Bellow said. "This is what I want: three hundred thousand credits, one hundred thousand up front; money for traveling expenses; and freedom to operate without someone looking over my shoulder every five minutes."

"Is there something I've done to offend you?"

"I don't like building managers. The last one I knew tried to have me lobotomized."

The manager looked offended again and said he would have to make another call. They'll do it, Bellow thought, simply because they had no choice. Murder was not a game, and he was still the best, no matter how long it had been.

He was also the only one desperate or stupid enough to take the job.