"Hey," I said.

"Fucking 'Hey'?" Paula asked with a laugh in her voice, "Hey to you too."

There were a few heartbeats of silence.

"I'm worried about you," Paula said softly, "And that's not supposed to happen. You're supposed to pine after me for some unknown reason- probably my huge tits," she whispered the last and I actually grinned, "while I tell you soberly that my hooker-brain can never love again. We cry and rage and lament and then we go back to work and do what we can with what we've got."

"Apparently Samurai have like groupies, so I might never pine after you again," I said.

"First I do think you need to clear the tubes out. Just get a good three-day fuck session on with someone you'd never see again. I honestly think it would do you some good. Second you will always love me, and I will love you, in the way I can. There is no shame in that. It is, for lack of a classier word, beautiful. Third, I don't actually think you're built for the pump-and-dump so don't go hooking up with any of those groupies. Fourth, you had me- have me- very worried about you. Sara said you're depressed."

"Did she?"

"She explained how you were acting, which is depressed, but she doesn't believe that because you have what she's only ever dreamed of having and she can't wrap her mind around the fact that someone could win the lotto and be depressed about it."

I wanted to lie, but I could just image her fat face staring at me and I smiled again.

"I am I think," I said slowly the smile fading, "and the worst part is I know I won the fucking lotto, so how the hell do I complain about it?"

"You fucking call me, you idiot of a man," she all but screamed into the phone, "You don't talk to a teenager about it, you talk to me."

"Jealous?" I asked. Then added, "She's like twenty-one-ish?"

"You have a planet sized AI in your head use it. Twenty-two. And I would actually be envious," she said seriously, "if you were talking to her and not to me. I'd get over it, or at least I'd be thick skinned enough not to mention it, but I'd be envious. But in the end you made the correct decision and called me, so all is right with the world."

"Why didn't we ever become more than this?" I asked.

There was a pause before she answered.

"People only have so much energy I think. We each had enough to survive, but not enough to survive and change enough to make room for another person. When it came down to it we both chose, over and over in the way that let us survive."

"Triage," I said slowly.

"In a way," she said, "But I never lied to you Freddy. I don't think I have it in me to fully trust anyone ever again. I can't be-"

"Shit I know," I said quickly, "I was just lamenting that this isn't a different office building or when I got kicked out of my apartment or when those pimps came after you. This is really..." I trailed off.

"It's the death of something," she said putting it into words.

"Yeah," I said, "it feels like someone has just died and that I know I should mourn, that I should cry, but that I can't seen the point in it. There is that gap between knowing I should be sad, and actually being sad."

"That's the trauma and fucked-up-ed-ness of living how we do," she said with a bit of street accent bleeding into her words. Again I smiled.

"Who took my office?" I asked.

"That's the question? Your apartment was torn apart by corpos looking for where you might have run off to, we've had more than a hundred people on our floor every single day, and you want to know who got your office?"

"It was you?"

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Greg took it," she said seriously.

"Greg?"

"He's got people working on the floor around the clock. There are showers, a bath, a sauna, a much bigger office with air conditioning-"

"Now I know you are lying," I interrupted.

"No," she said almost quietly, "They are pulling out all the stops so that when you come back you can live on this floor. The whole building is very behind the idea of having a Samurai living in the building."

Silence stretched until it clicked.

"I am coming back," I said, "I just don't know when. I'm not- I think this is going to be one of those things you just don't get over. Like a parent's death, you just learn to cope-"

"Wait! You just learn to cope with being a Samurai. A person who can just pop a pill and wake up all thin and beautiful? A person who won't ever skip a meal or-"

"I get it," I said.

Silence stretched again, but it was the comfortable silence that often stretched between us as we worked from our separate homes late into the night.

"You're not going to sleep with Sara," she said in her mama-bear voice. The one she used when she was protecting any sex-workers.

"Jesus," I said.

"He won't protect you from my wrath," she said, but there was still some seriousness in her voice.

"I'm not saying it's not something I have to worry about- her affections let's call it, but I don't think it's something anyone has to worry about. I think she had this idea of Samurai as Saints or whatever, and then her old boring boss becomes one. I don't think she looks at me and sees the rock star. Instead she sees the dad whose grunge rock band somehow made it big."

"She's in danger with you. You know that right? She won't come home. Says helping you, guiding you, is her calling, her small way to help humanity. She kept talking but it got more cultish and fever dream from there."

"You don't give her enough credit," I said seriously, "We'd have all died down there, Vanguard AI or not, without her leadership. And to think- I mean she actually thought she was the Samurai for a time. To be raised in that way and have that taken from you. She is a remarkable young woman."

"I'm serious about the not fucking her," Paula said. This time there was humor in her words.

Even though I could scratch through the gloves I hit the odd button thing that relaxed the glove before pulling it off my left hand. Then I scratched at the nub of my thumb.

"I fucked my hand up pretty good, and for some reason I can't bring myself to fix it. I have the points I just- it just feels- I don't know."

"Let me see," she said. It took a moment but I held my hand up to take the pic and then sent it to her. The tiny nub of my thumb was centered in the picture.

"Jesus, I told you not to send any more dick pics!" she yelled loudly enough I knew she was doing it so other people in the office could hear.

"It's fucking tiny," she said.

"Oh," she continued, "You could be a vlogger and review restaurants and give them like one and quarter thumbs up."

We cracked jokes back and forth for a while until it stalled naturally.

"Freddie," she said softly, "I won't admit to having said this, but you're the best person for the job. More so than even Sara. Things bother you. The fact that you can't help everyone bothers you. Do you know how rare that is? And I think I get a bit of the fear you must be carrying. Now you have power. Power to change things. Power to fix things. Before you were just a guy doing the very best he could, but without tools, or money, or means to do more. Now-"

She paused long enough that I thought she was waiting on me, but she spoke up again.

"If it was me Freddie," she almost whispered, "I'd kill a lot of people. Bad people sure. But I have a list in my head, I think most people do. No one formalizes it but you pick a person at random and they have a list. I'm not sure you do, and if you do I know the idea of it tears you up inside. You've got power now. Real power, and you know that means real change. And with real change comes loss, and theft, and grift. There is no way to make the world better and keep your hands clean Freddie. No one in power is going to give it up, not even to a Samurai. And I think that's why they picked you. If you have to take a life, it's gonna eat at you, where as the rest of us would sleep fine. What I'm getting at is that you're the best of us in all the ways that matter. So when you're feeling down or overwhelmed you call me, I'll do what I can, just like Sara is doing what she can. And if you ever feel like you aren't good enough, call and I'll tell you how wrong you are."

"Jesus I never considered that shit," I said.

"Liar," she said. And in that moment I knew she was right. I knew I had a list of sorts, but mine started with court cases. Not all of them were innocent, but there were more than a few that were used up and discarded by corps who didn't even learn their names.

I knew what it was going to take, or at least I feared what it would take to make things right for those people. It was one thing to try your best with everything you had and fail, and another thing entirely to know you weren't using all the tools at your disposal to correct an injustice.

"I think I have some files to go through," I said to Paula.

"Love you," she said.

"Love you too," I responded in kind.

"Max," I said dropping the glove at my feet and pulling the other one off, "buy me the nano regen shit to fix my hand. Then pull up my court cases and files. I want a list of judges displayed and where they are in real time and contacts for the CEOs of the companies on record. See too if you can dig up any internal memos or emails or whatever about any of my cases."

I was turning the injector thing over in my hands and then just pressed it into the elbow of my arm. It was much larger than the class one inhaler kind, and took a moment to discharge it's payload. The flesh around my wrist began to itch, but I was already skimming the information Max had pulled up.