Urle disappeared into the code to find relief.

Kell had not elaborated after the last words.

“You have a task before you, and I see I have disturbed you,” he had said. “I will leave you to it.”

Continuing to scan the server, trying to find anything that might be useful, Urle still could not take his mind off what he had been told.

The conversation from earlier about the soul came back to him, and Urle wondered now if Kell was simply sounding him out about his own beliefs in preparation for telling him this. He’d said far more than necessary, more than he normally said in a day to anyone, and he’d had a reason.

Kell was standing completely still, as if a machine that had been shut down, his external sensors said.

A familiar, he thought. He’d realized it was the closest thing he could call him. Far better than a lure . . .

His search pinged for his attention. Putting his thoughts back on it, he saw that he’d found a series of simulations that were not what they seemed. They were dummy shells of programs with no actual activity. Not even much content . . . though taking up huge chunks of memory, as much as the system allowed.

He checked the data, and found that this was just a dummy; a trick meant to allow a program to exceed its allowance by pooling several together.

More than several, he found. Over a hundred allotments, all feeding into . . .

A human simulation.

Not just an approximation of a generic person, either, this was a simulation of a particular person. All of their organic pathways had been painstakingly scanned and digitized . . .

It had started only three weeks ago, and it was running right now.

He could not tell a lot about it from the outside, just that data. Not even who it was.

He considered telling Kell, but then decided against it and entered into the simulation.

In a flash of light, his consciousness was inserted into a new world.

He felt the damp, stagnant air. Saw the neon lights and glittering buildings reaching miles into the dark sky that glittered with stars.

The air was filled with flying vehicles and throngs of people, the majority of them augs.

The gravity was that of Earth’s, and from the singing of crickets, he surmised that this was a simulation of Earth itself. Of no time or space that had ever actually existed.

This was a fantasy land.

Watching people below walking, sometimes acting and reacting in very believable ways, he wondered how he’d find the subject of this simulation-

Then it all froze. The flying cars stopped, the crowds paused, even the crickets stuck on their note.

“How did you get in here?” someone demanded.

He’d heard that voice before.

Urle turned around, and saw a dead man.

He did not look that way, of course, and even though Urle had not even seen himself while experiencing the murder – he still knew, without a fraction of a doubt that this was that man. He’d been him.

The man was nicely dressed. His parts were chromed and the edges smoothed, with blue running lights. One eye was organic, the other a large dark sensor with a single glowing dot.

“I connected to the server,” Urle said, making sure that all of his defenses were up.

He was in a world that this man controlled. The fact that he was here now, that it had all frozen, made it clear that this man was not trapped and fooled into this place. He was its owner.

“You got into the server station?” the man asked, doubtfully. “How did you even find me? It wasn’t chance.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Urle replied, trying to sound calm. He felt a thousand attempts to access his data. All fended off – for now.

The man’s attempts were good, but not as good as Urle’s security. If the man turned off the server, though, and focused all that processing power on him, he could break through, Urle knew.

He kept himself ready to eject, if any sign of the man doing that occurred.

But for now they only regarded each other warily.

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“I’m tracking down a crime,” Urle said. “I’m a private investigator.”

Which was true, but if the man could access much outside his server he’d see that Urle had only been that for all of a few hours. It was public data.

“No crime here,” the man said tersely.

So, Urle thought. He probably didn’t have full external access.

That might mean that, while he owned this world, it was also his prison.

“I’m not interested in your takeover of server space,” Urle said, hoping to keep him calm.

“Nothing illegal of the space I’m using!” the man replied sharply. “I paid for it fairly. It’s mine!”

“Okay . . .” Urle said. There was no way that was true. Even on Gohhi, taking up this much server space was exorbitant. These were not simple machines one could just build from a box of scraps. These were atomic-perfect devices.

No one but the most insanely rich could possibly afford that. And no one was rich enough to maintain such servers for deep time . . .

“You can’t take this from me,” the man said.

“That’s not my goal,” Urle said. “I really only want justice for a man who was murdered.”

The man looked even more skeptical. “Who?” he demanded.

Urle swallowed. “You,” he said.

The man watched him, suspicion still writ on his face, but he sneered.

“You’re a fucking baby if you give a shit about that,” he said.

Urle recoiled. “What?”

“I did what no one else can,” the man bragged. “I shed the skin. I shed it all.”

He raised his arms, and behind him, land that had been just rugged hills suddenly was city. Crowds walked, the flying cars flew again. The crickets carried on their songs.

“Here I am a god.”

Urle watched the man alter the world on a whim, but he did not feel the awe the man hoped to inspire.

“I saw you die,” he said plainly. “A memory you left in a part that was then sold to me . . . you hid the data in there, in an executable to show whoever next used the part. You wanted someone to know . . .”

“Then I guess I was weaker than I thought,” the man sneered. “I’ll have to fix that next patch. Don’t you get it? This was always the plan! I gave up everything for this!”

Realization dawned on Urle. “You mean that . . . you traded your body for this server space?”

“My body, my data,” the man said. “I wasn’t going to get to the top in my company, I didn’t give a shit if they got access to the whole corp’s system. Worth a fortune to them, everything to me.”

The man gestured, and a data packet appeared. Urle probed it cautiously, but then saw that it was merely text; biographical data about a man.

His birth name had been Bror Jackson. After becoming an aug he’d gone by JaxIn. He’d been a middle-level executive in one of largest and most profitable companies in Gohhi, who had their hand in everything from aquaponics to real estate to shipping to entertainment.

Three weeks ago, they’d suddenly changed direction, as new leadership had taken over in a merger that seemed a terrible move for the company, subserviating it to one of its largest competitors. It had been a news event, and in the shuffle, JaxIn had disappeared. No one had even bothered to report the disappearance.

And then the body had been taken care of. The flesh incinerated, the parts chopped and resold through storefronts, and the data assimilated.

Over seven hundred trillion credits in value taken over.

“Any one of us would have done it,” JaxIn said, laughing. “I was just the first to actually do it. The little club at the top never would have let me in, so when I realized what I had access to, I jumped.”

“They scanned you in here,” Urle said. “As payment.”

“Yeah. Their only other price was the end of the physical half. But that’s fine with me.”

“It wasn’t fine to you in real life. You’re a copy, but the original died afraid, trying to save himself. He wanted to have justice.”

“It was just business. He was the me who made the original decision – I remember it all. I was willing to die for this.”

Not when it had actually come time to pay up, Urle thought. But he knew that JaxIn would no longer care. It had not been him.

“So you’re here now – for how long?” Urle asked.

“Forever,” the man said. “I rented it in perpetuity. And I have the blackmail material ready in case they try to back out – the records of everything we did if my server ever goes dark.”

Urle severely doubted that. But it hardly mattered because now the deed was done. JaxIn was digital, and he would either have to occupy a huge server or else let himself be cut down into a shallower digital copy of himself.

Which, it was telling that he had not elected to do that, Urle realized. If he’d truly wanted to leave himself behind, why have an exact copy of his neurons? It was so, so much more wasteful this way . . .

Suddenly, Urle felt something around himself. It was not around the manifestation of himself in the digital world, but it had locked his code in, trapped him.

He cursed as he realized the man had been working while he’d been talking. Moving the city had allowed him to scale it back as well, and Urle had let him do it! He hadn’t taken down the whole server, but enough that he’d effectively blockaded Urle’s own consciousness – or at least a dangerous portion of it – into his server.

“I can’t let you go. And frankly you’re going to be hogging my space if I let you stay.”

“If you delete me,” Urle said, “my friend will break the server.”

JaxIn froze. “No way you brought someone else in with you. One person, all right, maybe some are that skilled. But two? No fucking way.”

“He’s a Shoggoth,” Urle told him. “And he doesn’t like technology.”

He saw the man pale. His digital presence shifted, apparently trying to access the outside, to very little effect.

“I’ll show you,” Urle said, showing some of his own memories.

He let the man see Kell ripping the head off Madspark.

“That man tried to kill me. And he’s the one who killed you. Kell knows I’m in here.” That part was a lie, but JaxIn couldn’t know. “And if I’m not out in a little while he will destroy this server.”

JaxIn seemed unsure now. “If you tell people about me they’ll shut me down,” he said in a pale voice.

“I won’t tell anyone about this,” Urle said. “I’ll even help bury you deeper. I’m not out to get you. Honestly . . . I wish you the best. That’s why I’m trying to find out about the group that killed your physical self.”

JaxIn looked truly bothered now, stepping away. “If I tell you anything, they might find out. And they’ll come and delete me no matter what dirt I have.”

“They’re the last link to know you’re here at all,” Urle pointed out. “And given the value they got from you – do you really think that they’re not going to do this with someone else? They can force you to share the servers with another, or partition it against your will. Or they could even just delete most of you to save processing power. You couldn’t stop them – you might not even know if they did.”

JaxIn cursed aloud, a string of furious spacer slang. Urle felt the digital noose around his neck switch off.

“I did my research before agreeing,” JaxIn told him. “I don’t know everything, but I’ll give you what I know.”

“That’s all I ask,” Urle told him. “I’m going to find justice for you. And anyone else they’ve hurt.”