He climbed into the silver rental car, closed the door, and buckled the seat belt. He sat staring out the windshield for a moment, breathing deeply and slowly, his hands on the wheel. He scratched his neck. He took his cell phone out of the holster on his belt and laid it on the console between the seats. He picked it up again, snapped it open and studied the display; then slowly closed it and replaced it in it's place. Reaching over to the passenger seat he flicked open the clasps on the briefcase lying there.

He opened the computer inside the briefcase and tapped on the keyboard to bring the screen to life, then he clicked on the icon of his address book and brought up the card with Memo's contact information. The phone in the console rang with a loud chirp, startling him.

Behind a screen on a high wooden shelf in Memo's kitchen, eight tiny robots are nestled in their charging dock.

Three of them are Prompter series triangulators. Each is a silver cylinder as large as a roll of quarters capped at each end with a tapered nose cone. Three propellers, thin and gently twisted, protrude from the hairline joint. Light sensors of various sizes are arrayed around the cylinder, like spiders eyes only more numerous. Two hair-thin antenna wires angle from the upper prop cone in a horizontally oriented V. They are modified from the production models; smaller and faster, and although their power storage capacity is reduced, they have more accurate navigation circuitry and more robust communication capabilities.

In front of these is a row of five of Echo's more esoteric prototypes, spin-wing Enforcers. These have a chassis the size and shape of a beetle beneath a twisted-surface lifting screw -- a single mylar wing wrapped around a tiny vertical axle. Hinged from the sides of the chassis are three arms, each terminating in a grasping barb. Within the curving framework of the chassis is the motor/battery module, the communication/control circuitry, and the payload. Each of the five carries a different miniature device: one is equipped with a laser, two have explosive charges, one has a glass vial containing a thin yellow liquid and a hypodermic needle, and one is perched on a nest of razor-disks.

A thin red laser shines from a hole in the side of the dock, sweeping the apartment door tirelessly. Periodically, red status lights cycle on the dock, first in front of the Prompters, one, two, three; then in front of the Enforcers, four, five, six, seven, eight. An acknowledging amber light winks on each of the robots in turn. At the end of each test cycle there is a lightning-quick flicker of amber lights as each of the charging robots contact each of the others in turn, and then acknowledge. Status: ok.

Twice an hour, each little flying machine powers up, lifts silently from its charging station, hovers in the air for ten seconds, then settles down again, nestling back into its powerport. And as the terminals click home, they send a signal to the lab across the river: all is well in Memo's kitchen. And as each of these messages arrives, the security computer in the lab cancels the alert that it was scheduled to send to the pager Echo wore hidden by the cuff of his pants on an elastic inside his left ankle.

Drexler picked up the phone and studied the display. California. They want to know more. The phone chirped again. His jaw muscles worked, his fingers itched to flip the phone open. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. It called him like a bird, resonating within him with an elemental, primal beckoning that he yearned to answer. Chirp. Chirp. The noise stopped and the silence brought a wave of relief and then a heightened anxiety.

damn. damn damn and damn. Echo is down. they won't tell me when I can talk to him or how serious it is, they say they just don't know. Memo is fucking AWOL. damn. damn. Echo is down. they won't tell me anything. Echo is down.

The phone beeped at him, voicemail waiting.

i told them everything i know. damn them.

He looked at his phone, squeezed it open, and thumbed the callback button.

"yeah?" Dice's voice answered.

"Dice? Dice? You called me?" Drexler, "what the hell do you want, Dice?"

"Hey, Drexler! How's it going?"

"Listen, Dice, I'm busy. I thought someone else had called me. I'm in the middle of something. I gotta go."

"Whoa, Drexler, take it easy. I'm calling --"

"Call me tomorrow, Dice."

"Listen, Drexler, let me talk for a second, will you? The agenda for the press conference is all fucked up and we're trying to get some goddamn answers before midnight, ok? Where are you now?"

"I'm in Newark, Dice. Newark, New Jersey. At a hospital, Dice. At a hospital that Echo is in, Dice, with his fucking head caved in, and Memo is nowhere to be fucking found, Dice, and I am going to find her and when I do I will call Carla and tell her what the hell is going on. If that is OK with you, Dice."

"Drexler, Drexler, I'm just doing my job, man, don't be that way. We have to put--"

"Listen Dice, I don't answer to you. I don't need this distraction right now. I'll call Carla when I find out more. If you want to know something, talk to her." Drexler flicked the phone closed and ran his fingers through his hair.

On the shelf in Memo's kitchen, the tiny motor in Prompter 3 begins to spin, turning the main propeller to a whirling blur. At it's base, the dock releases the magnetic catch, freeing it to rise into the air. It hovers silently above the dock, rotates full around, cycles through its function check and settles back in place with a soft click. The motor slows and stops, cooling, and the message goes out over the network, all is well in Memo's kitchen.

Dice locked the door to his office, then walked to his desk. He removed a small zippered case from a drawer on the right of his desk, unzipped it and withdrew a slender black PDA from within it. He carefully keyed a message, extended a silver antenna, placed the device on the sill of his window where it glinted in the bright California sun. He studied his message and then tapped the stylus on the little screen. When the progress bar was complete he collapsed the antenna, clicked off the PDA and replaced it in its case, and put the case away deep in the drawer. He stood up from his desk and picked up one of the folders there, walked to the door, unlocked it with a deft flick of his fingers, and glided out into the hallway.

On the shelf in Memo's kitchen, the wing atop Enforcer 6 spins with a whisper and the tiny machine rises into the air, pauses and settles back down into its docking berth.

In the bed a curtain away from where Echo lay, Memo stirred in her sleep and her hand closed over her key ring, her fingers habitually rolling the sensor Echo had given her when he installed the security bots in her apartment. Reassured by the soft clicking it made, she drifted back to sleep.

Down below in the parking lot, Drexler started the car and keyed Memo's address into the nav system on his dashboard, checked his mirrors and pulled out into the still-wet pavement of the parking lot. The light at the street was red. He came to a stop behind a dusty green minivan, a Plymouth Voyager. The license plate on the back of the car had bright red letters on a brilliant yellow background, the numbers separated from the letters by a symbol that matched the logo on his business card, a circle with four sets of four radiating lines. The kids in the back of the minivan were bopping to music, rocking the car on it's tired shock absorbers. There was a torn bumper sticker just below the license plate: I AM VGER it said.

His forehead creased at their obliviousness as they bounced in the car, laughing and waving their arms. The smaller boy was making funny faces with his fingers and lips, making his older brother laugh, and Drexler saw that their mom was watching them in the rearview mirror and singing along and laughing. His fingers squeezed the wheel, clenched and released in time with the muscle on the corner of his jaw.

The light changed and the voyagers went straight ahead, Drexler turned left as instructed by the screen on the nav, following the directions of the white line on the screen through a tattered warehouse district, along a concrete service road, his tires kathump-thumping on the cracked pavement next to a thin island that stretched parallel to the road, overgrown with thin and straggling ragged grasses and some kind of prehistoric shrubs, sumac. He came to an intersection and followed the navline down a twisted concrete apron that skirted a dusty Mobil station advertising KOOL cigarettes by the carton. A dented white Cadillac sat in a vacant lot next to a rusty beer truck, cooling in the shade of a Baileys billboard, warped and leaning away from the street, the tapered phone poles that supported it brown and bleached.

Drexler's phone beeped again, reminding him he had un-checked messages. The screen on his dashboard showed a good mile of straight-ahead driving, and he looked ahead and saw a grid of tired two-story row houses punctuated by vacant lots and liquor stores and auto body repair yards full of wrecked toyotas and surrounded by rusty chain link fences topped with barb wire. Here and there a figure moved, dark against the muted colors of the sunbaked vinyl siding. The sun through the windshield felt warm on his hands and the road kathunked under his wheels with a reassuring regular tempo. He liked this car. He could see the city, his destination, on the fracture of the horizon ahead.

Maybe those kids had the right idea, he thought, a lopsided smile stretching across his face. He flipped his phone open and turned it off, then reached up and turned on the radio. He ran his fingers through his hair again and rolled down his window, the moist air in his nostrils clearing his head, blowing the useless cobwebs of doubt and fruitless tail-chasing thoughts that hung there far away.

On the shelf in Memo's kitchen, the red and amber lights cycle.

Drexler rode the highway to the city hard, keeping time to the music with his accelerator foot, tapping his fingers on the wheel, on the door, on the dashboard. He turned the music up loud, country music, and sat back in his seat, handling the car with purpose and assurance, mindful of the moment more than his destination, shifting lanes smoothly, anticipating the patterns of the traffic, gliding through the toll lanes, swinging around the bending curves in the road, maintaining a following distance that protected his progress, sweeping past delivery vans and station wagons, between concrete construction barriers scarred with the black rubber traces of countless strange road mishaps, beneath rusted and flaking steel railroad overpasses, parallel to steaming marshes laced with pipelines and telephone wires, along beside gray and dusty anonymous tractor trailers with chains dangling from their axles, up over plain concrete bridges that spanned twisted coffee-colored rivers, bridges that hummed with the load of ten thousand tires an hour and carried the names of forgotten soldiers... which burden was the greater, he wondered, passing over.

Drexler drove the silver car down into the tiled tunnel with the sides that curved in all three dimensions, down and through, under the big river, under and up into the golden afternoon light that filled the boulevards of the city, and followed the instructions on his dashboard north, then west and south again for a block.

He parked the car and turned off the radio, got out and locked the car. He stretched his legs and stood for a moment looking up at the building across the street, a pile of white bricks utterly devoid of architectural interest silhouetted against the afternoon sky. Memo lived on the thirty-eighth floor, in 38G. Drexler stood on the sidewalk, smelling the air and watching a young woman slowly walk toward him, a thin grayhound prancing on the leash she held in her left hand...

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