He opened up the Jason Klaes file and brought up Klaes’s debit card transactions. Only one had struck him earlier as out of the ordinary, though far from suspicious: a truck rental on January 8—two days before Klaes’s death—from G-Force Rentals in Pasadena. He brought up Klaes’s email and entered G-Force in the search. There were two emails from G-Force—the rental and then one on January 9: a billing statement for an eighteen-foot refrigerated truck, total miles driven were 310. Which would have been a round-trip to Big Bear? Santa Barbara? No, it would allow for a little further round trip drive. He opened maps to Pasadena and adjusted the scale. Two inches equals fifty miles. Three inches would take you to Sequoia National Forest, Santa Maria, San Diego.

  Raphael pushed the chair away from the desk. Inside his skull, a vibration. The revving up of the soft-tissue engine.

  Klaes had rented the truck on January 8. Jan Olmstead, the Children’s Love Fund Director, said they couldn’t be sure of the date on which the thief had taken Angie Murie from the San Diego cryogenics facility, where Klaes had witnessed, no, supervised, his godchild’s cold internment.

  Had Klaes taken Angie?

  Angie. The mystery crate. Angie was in Lily’s crate, likely within a cryonic chamber designed by the physicist and powered by life lithium. Had Klaes reanimated the goddaughter? Brought her to life? It was impossible. The medical science for such a miracle did not exist.

  The office door opened.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  His heart dropping, Raphael tapped the black screen, killing the monitor’s light. A figure entered Maglio’s darkened office. Raphael froze as he waited for the damning light. But the figure said, “Shit. Phone,” pivoted, and strode back out through the open door.

  Raphael shut down the computer, rose, and slipped behind the Solarium Tanner. Remembering The Persistence of Memory, he crawled to the barely visible painting, grabbed the frame, and dragged it behind the Solarium. He held his breath as rapid footfalls grew louder. The door opened and the room’s lights came on. Someone walked to Maglio’s desk, pulled out a drawer and fumbled with the contents.

  “There you are,” said a familiar voice. “Geo, Geo. If you must fuck around, please return the portable Personality Pluses to where you got them.”

  The drawer slammed shut. Raphael counted to five and then peered around the tanner as Maisie, her back to him, reached the light switch. In her left hand, she carried a black box not much bigger than a man’s wallet, and from which hung a black tail: an external hard drive with a USB cable.

  Maisie muttered, “Four, seven, eight, two,” pirouetted, and gazed at the blank spot on the wall where the painting had hung. She bent her head to one side and then the other. She straightened. “Wasn’t there something there?”

  Raphael squeezed the painting’s frame. Drop it and run?

  A cell phone rang. Maisie lifted her wrist to her ear, listened, then growled. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it is Hitoshi’s birthday. Fuck the free cake and get your asses back here.” She dropped her arm. “Don’t know which cohort is worse …” She again considered the blank spot.

  From behind the office’s far wall came several cries of “Ms. Sparod, Ms. Sparod.”

  “Hold your water!” shouted Maisie at the wall.

  She took a quick breath, then slowly exhaled. “Umm, maybe not.” She shrugged, darkened the lights, and exited. As the door slid closed, a loud, whiny voice penetrated the opening, Raphael fell back against the tanner.

  “My father? He humiliated me every chance he got. Do you understand, Ms. Sparod? Ms. Sparod?”

  Maisie cried, “Yes, yes, I’m coming.”

  Maglio’s office door sealed shut.

  Raphael waited as her footsteps faded and silence returned. He placed Memory on its hooks, closed the programs, and slipped out of Maglio’s office. Approaching the cross-corridor, he heard more odd voices call out. They came from Research: Mr. Lean’s haunted house. He slipped into the intersecting hall. A shaft of light escaped through the space where the Research door had been left ajar.

  Maisie shouted, “We have to be polite! We have to let each other speak without interruption. To make further progress, you must empathize with your cohort. We must work as a team to ensure that each will reach their potential. Remember, you’ll soon be the public face of Norval Resurrection. You will lead the masses to their glorious future.”

  “When we went to restaurants, my father would make me stand at attention,” said the whiny voice Raphael had heard earlier.

  “Rodney, I’ve asked you several times to wait until it’s your turn,” said Maisie.

  “Rodney’s always interrupting,” said a high-pitched voice.

  “If I moved an inch, he’d smack me on the head,” added Rodney.

  “I wish I could—”

  Maisie’s voice rose. “Agnes, that’s enough. Rodney, you and everyone else will have time to reveal the traumas that set you on the life paths you took.”

  “Rodney’s not the only one whose childhood was unfair.”

  “No, of course not, Karen.”

  “Because of my name, people disliked and disfavored me.”

  Maisie continued, “We don’t want to dwell on the negative. We want to draw from the wealth of good experiences you chronicled online. Moments of joy within the data each of you contributed to social media and other online platforms. In tonight’s class, we focus on the highlights of your life on the internet.”

  Raphael stepped back. Was it a company training session for a new sales force?

  “Let’s start with Baron Alsop.”

  “No fair. Why do we always choose from the beginning of the alphabet? Why not the end?”

  “Good point, Mr. Zapata. Next class, that’s what we’ll do. But for tonight, let’s start with Baron. Say hello to your fellow Personality Pluses, Baron.”

  “Hello.”

  “Good. Now tell us about your most joyous moment on the web.”

  “Umm, I posted a schematic showing how to build a bomb with common household cleaners. I got 238 thumbs up. Uh, ups. Thumbs ups?”

  Jesus, thought Raphael, what could that guy sell except IEDs?

  “That’s chicken shit,” said another personality. “I posted a photo of my ex-girlfriend naked and I got 767.”

  “Only naked? Nothing else going on?”

  Several voices chortled.

  Raphael scratched his cheek. These trainees weren’t your typical sales candidates. They sounded more like tough customers. Maybe that was it. Sample customers to pit the sales force against. Hone their skills of persuasion against a nasty sample of the public.

  Maisie cleared her throat. “Both anecdotes are … interesting, but I’m looking for something more indicative of the communal and humanitarian spirit of our online experiences. Perhaps a Hand Up page. Magdalena Azori, you’re next. Did you create a Hand Up page?”

  “I’ll betcha Aaron’s girlfriend had a few hands up.”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  “Please. We want to be supportive here. So, Magdalena, did you ever create a Hand Up?”

  “Oh, yes. I raised $176,000 for a single mom with eleven children and brain cancer.”

  Raphael nodded. So they weren’t all nut jobs. Here was a good Samaritan.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” chirped Maisie.

  “Yeah, that was how I got the dough to skip town and set myself up in Paraguay. Until some asshole burglar got me with a piano string.”

  Raphael fell back a step. That was a scam perpetrated by one of Norval’s possums and—shit—Magdalena was one of the three dead possums who died violently. Or did she? Was it, as Dreemont suggested, a second fake death? But why the hell would Norval bring her back here?

  Maisie continued, “That’s closer, I suppose. We’ll be taking a few more of your favorite online moments, but first, unlike you lucky folk, I need a bathroom break. My bladder is about to explode, and where the hell are my code-happy assistants?”

  Raphael retreated to the main corridor and flattened against the wall. The research door closed with a bang. Maisie emerged from the short corridor and swung right toward the executive restrooms. Raphael counted to ten and slithered around the corner. The Research door was closed, but a cacophony of voices penetrated. He should get the hell out, but he had to verify what he heard.

  Three strides took him to the door. He considered the keypad. The most common code was four digits, which held only ten thousand possibilities. Hold on. Mr. Lean had said the numbers aloud. One, seven, seven, one. But Maisie had said aloud four digits, too. Jesus, half his life was remembering passwords. Had the code—no. Raphael smiled. She was counting the paintings on Maglio’s walls. Did he want to view the denizens of Research? Recollections of his possums drifted into his thoughts: their crimes, their desperation, their flights. Now they were back at Norval, and it sure as hell wasn’t for a reunion.

  From behind the door a pitiful wail. He keyed in the digits, and on the last, the lock clicked. With the lightest touch, the door opened.

  He caught his breath. The room was empty, not a person or possum in sight.

  “Hello?” he called.

  No one answered. He walked deeper into the large space. After seeing no one, he returned to the front of the room and saw what he had inexplicably missed.

  The room was bright with the light of a hundred monitors, arranged in a stack five high and twenty across. On each screen was a full-sized face. Many of the faces were familiar and provoked names and biographies; others were faint memories. However, each was the face of a possum. As he glanced from monitor to monitor, each possum’s eyes met his. If Raphael’s eyes filled with recognition, their eyes revealed only emptiness. He wasn’t sure if they saw him or not, and if they saw him, what did they see? Yet as he moved about the room, the eyes tracked him.

  Were the faces being projected from distant locations? Some kind of zoom meeting? But the truth in his gut, the obvious truth, couldn’t be dismissed. Maisie was training AI possums.

  “Hello,” said Raphael.

  The faces remained immobile. Were they frightened of him? He had hunted them, though they had never seen his face. But, of course, they were only AI versions of the possums. Perhaps they were now wild creatures, instinctively afraid of—of what? He spotted a face that he knew well: Carson Fullers, the politician who faked his own death to only be killed for real in Argentina. His face seemed more animated than the others, more lifelike. A late model AI.

  Raphael stepped close to the monitor. “How are you, Mr. Fullers?”

  “What the fuck’s going on? I was mayor of Junín de Los Andes one moment, and now I’m here.” Fullers looked around the monitor. “What is this place? I’m like stuck here. Staring out at a bunch of assholes and some crazy bitch called Mayflower. I am favored. It’s complicated. Password. Pastword. Pastel. Mayor DeBove, Necesito que esta zona cambie a negocio …They say I’ll be able to walk soon, move around, but I don’t know. All that work I did. Jumping into the open sea and swimming twenty miles just for this? For this? For this? For this? For this? For this —”

  “How could you know this?” Raphael asked of the face on the monitor. “You’re only what you inputted as Carson Fullers.”

  “See Dick,” said Fullers. “See Jane. Por favor siéntate en mi regazo, pequeña perra.”

  Was it all so intertwined that Simon DeBove, the afterlife of Carson Fullers, had melded into the data? Spooky action?

  Raphael lowered the audio on the monitor and backed away.

  “Who are you?” asked one of the faces.

  “Are you an intruder?” asked a second.

  “I think he’s a ghost,” said a third.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” said the second face as the others followed Raphael’s retreat.

  Were AIs with facial recognition programs a new feature of Norval Portals?

  “Christ, can’t I get a drink around here?” asked a baritone voice that seemed familiar. “Where are you?”

  Raphael scanned the faces on the monitors.

  The voice rose again. “Is space-time essentially discrete or continuous? A double, if you please. Could a hypothetical graviton mediating a force produce a consistent theory? Straight up. Or does it emerge as a discrete structure of space-time itself?”

  Raphael’s eyes darted to the face that had spoken. He walked closer to the screen until gazing into the reddened eyes of Jonathan Mirsky.

  “Professor Mirsky,” whispered Raphael.

  Mirsky squinted. “Where’s my server?”

  Could Mirsky’s AI have such insight into his existence?

  “Tell her a double Dewar’s.”

  Oh, that server. “Sure, Jonathan, if I see her.” Raphael glanced toward the other babbling AIs. Should he tell Mirsky the truth? They killed you and transformed your remains into … this. Raphael followed the physicist’s wandering gaze, maybe seeking his lovely pole dancer. “We were friends.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Mirsky met Raphael’s eyes. “Shorty’s, right? I was feeling no pain when I left that joint. I think I’m still hungover. I need a hair of the dog.”

  How many hairs would it take to erase the hangover of death?

  From outside Research, a motor sped up. The elevator?

  Jesus, it knew about Shorty’s. How sophisticated were these things? His pulse quickened as he met AI Mirsky’s eyes. “Jason Klaes was your friend,” said Raphael.

  “Is he around here?” asked Mirsky.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  Something flickered in Mirsky’s eyes.

  From outside Research, came footsteps.

  “Where is Jason? Try to remember.” Was the answer in there, among the buggy code?

  “He’s with her,” said Mirsky.

  “Her?”

  “His daughter Angie.”

  Raphael dropped back from the screen. The hairs on his neck felt as rigid as needles. “Angie’s father is Klaes?”

  Jonathan’s eyes lifted as if toward the pole dancer. He sang, “… and sex and sex and sex and sex …”

  The voices outside grew louder, and Raphael backed away from Mirsky. The monitors went silent as the AI faces seemed to track Raphael’s retreat. They were just code and algorithms. Code and algorithms that longed for something.

  When he closed the door behind him, the room’s voices resumed. Another door shut down the hall. He slipped into the larger hallway, pressed against the wall, and hoped to hell Maisie wouldn’t go again to Maglio’s office.

  “Hurry,” called Maisie.

  Still mumbling to herself, Maisie turned into the Research corridor without glancing in Raphael’s direction. As the research door shut behind her, Maisie said, “My assistants are on the way, so now we will divide into small Zoom breakout sessions.”

  Raphael exhaled, pushed from the wall, darted down the hall, and turned a corner, kicking into a bucket. The bucket slid several feet and stopped at a pair of shoes. Raphael’s eyes jumped to a taut, wizened face. The face was attached to a khaki-clad body, a broom in hand.

  “Did you hear them?” asked Mr. Lean. “Bloody ghosts are about—and no man to tell me different.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The following Monday morning in the Norval conference room, once the bargain basement of Yams, Raphael considered the bleak, uncomfortable, and rarely used space. Though the room was cool and damp, at intervals dusty, heated air blew from grimy overhead vents and then stopped as if teasing. At the front of the room, a laptop fed into a projector casting the Norval logo on a large pull-down screen yellow with age. A microphone stood at attention nearby. The first row of fold-out chairs was five yards from the mic, with twenty more rows behind.

  At 8:30 a.m. Dreemont announced the 10:00 a.m. meeting but refused to reveal any details. Maglio required attendance of every Norval employee. No laptops, no notes, all phones powered down. Mandatory Monday Meeting pulsed on the mindfulness screens.

  Surrounded by his fellow workers, Raphael felt isolated. He alone knew they were all working for a criminal organization, and intellectual theft was likely the tip of the iceberg. He hadn’t been assigned to find out if Klaes was alive or dead, but just to dig up Klaes’s advance research on artificial intelligence, to add to what the company had already stolen. He was pissed and depressed. Klaes was dead. The promised images for his painting were mirages; he was stuck in his rectangle, and a laptop fortune teller was warning him to run from an unidentified killer. He had to talk to Pink.

  “Hey, can we get some more of these?” said a high-pitched, anxious voice behind Raphael. He glanced over his shoulder. In the room’s rear, pastries, fruit juices, and coffee spread out across checkered-clothed banquet tables. A few Norval employees browsed the continental breakfast with wavering paper plates, but most of the workforce sat nibbling bagels and sweet-smelling croissants while chatting. Among the lingerers at the breakfast spread, Matt, whose voice had caught Raphael’s attention, seemed bent on stacking his plate to a disastrous height. Near the table stood a new, stern-faced security guard, one of several brought on recently by the firm.

  A minute later, Raphael drew in his legs to allow Matt, balancing the unstable stack of pastries, to take the seat beside him.

  “What’s this about?” asked Matt.

  Raphael shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.” But he was blowing Matt off. This wasn’t the time or place to talk of his questionable deed. But for sure, the meeting was directly related to what he saw in Research.

  Matt waved to Anastasia, his receptionist heartthrob, taking a seat in the third row. She didn’t appear to see him. Matt bit into a cheese Danish.

  “So, how did it work out with Lily Faraday?”

  “She helped me a lot.”

  “Great. Any closer to nailing the mystery of the undeclared?”

  Raphael glanced sideways at Matt; cheese from the Danish smeared his lips. He should tell him about Klaes and what he saw in research, tell him about Carson Fullers, the twice dead possum, Magdalena Azori too. Piano wire. He whispered her name, and his heart skipped a beat. Was Magdalena one of the twice-dead possums Matt had uncovered or had he confused names?