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Torn paper screens.  A cold hearth.  These are the rags and bones of two lives.  Inside a bedroom closet, I touch an abandoned blouse and jerk back as a moth comes crawling out of the neck-hole.

This time we're not here to mourn the dead.  We've come to violate the corpse.

Diane Fletcher is a professional investigator.  I've hired her to find out why Ivy died, and Nostradamus, and Cahir.  We take a day for the jump to where Kate used to live.  Together we walk together through two different houses.  Hers is full of details.  Mine is empty of life.

We walk through Ivy's corpse, each experiencing the past in a very different way.  From a distance Diane looks almost human, but up close she is clearly too alert, too attentive to every detail.  You can hear the relentless whirring fall of calculation as she passes through a room.  You can see her memorizing the texture of wall-paper when she runs her hand across it, noting the pattern of wear on the floor and the acoustic qualities of each room. From this atomy of facts she is building a past:  how Kate lived, what she did, what she liked.  There may be, I don't know … patterns of wear on the faucets to tell Diane whether Kate was right- or left-handed.  (I can't remember).

What I remember about Kate is that she swore like a courier, she tried too hard, she wasn't good with clients.  She was a hell of a lot more fun after a couple of drinks.

We each have a Kate, Diane and I.  Hers is a simulation.  Mine is a ghost.

Diane has spent a long, long time digging through Ivy's corpse.  We know now that she was executing more and more self-diagnostics.  Diane thinks she may have run as many as a thousand checks while constructing the Disintegration page, a process which appears to have taken her hours.  All the checks executed perfectly.  They all found nothing wrong.

Her last movements were weak and badly controlled.  Diane showed me the signs:  a window cracked open to the rain, the tap left running, the house core temperature dropping.  "Her strength went long before her mind," Diane said.  "She died in a very strange pattern.  A deliberate pattern." 

, Brutus said.

Diane paused.  "What?"

More matter with less art.  They all died because of me.

"STOP ASKING QUESTIONS, MARTIN." 

These words, all over the house.  Spelled in leaves drifted on the floor, pixilated in the front-room vidscreen, generated as a bizarre imprint on every bill supposed to be automatically  paid.  And worst of all, whispered in Ivy's own voice over the house multimedia channel.  It was still looping when we got there, days after she had died.  stop asking questions martin stop asking questions martin stop asking—

But here's the trick.  I haven't been asking any questions.

Who could be doing this?  A virus like this, able to sneak through my security … not many people in the world could design it.  God knows what I did to fill one of them with such a hemlock-pure hatred of me and my creations. 

"No.  I can't believe Beate would—"

"Oh," I said.

Diane:  you wanted to see the original invoice for Nostradamus.  Here it is. 

Yes.  Go and good hunting.

I make Brutus run a thousand self-checks an hour these days.  I have him slide open the balcony door at least ten times a day.  I check his time on the antique stop-watch my mother gave me on my eighteenth birthday, to make sure his systems aren't lying about how long it takes.

The second hand seems crippled, and the waiting is unbearable.

Postscript—

Diane found this buried in a file in which Ivy kept Past Due billing reminders.  Not a file she opened very often.

Diane thinks it might be important.

AN HEERESGRUPPENKOMMANDO 2=
2109 -1750 - 1 TLE - FRX FRX - 1TL -123=

VXSCB PELOV AXPWT LXARZ CMBFK OEFQR XZGFM OTKDF NXNUI OTHBY
KGLZR UKLWB DNZNP EWUJG MDSBH CZTWF VMYQV FWUJM PQECU ASHHA KJUUL GMRYP POJHC WIBIY HOZ