Down the barrel of my gun, caught in my sights: She stood in the middle of the suite, feet spread at hip distance, right arm outstretched, left arm supporting an old six-shooter clutched in her hand, the barrel not trembling an inch. A tight bun of shiny blonde hair curled at the back of her head, a single strand dangling down into her eyes, forcing her to blow up a column of air every so often to clear the view. Wrapped in a brown woolen jacket, collar brought up high around her long neck, caressing a strong jawbone. Long, angular face with soft features somewhat familiar, though unplaceable. Blue jeans tight at the hip, flared at the ankle.

“You’re in my hotel,” I said plainly, taking a step into the room.

She cocked the gun, making a big show of it. The hammer clicked back. “Four months,” she said, and though the voice that came out of her mouth was sonorous and smooth, it sounded off. Edgy. “You?”

“Five months,” I said. I’d been here no more than two.

“You’re lying.”

“So are you.”

And still we held our guns aloft, aimed at each another. My arm, unaccustomed to holding anyone at gunpoint in quite some time, began to tire, the triceps trembling a bit; I couldn’t understand how she was able to keep her pistol so rock steady.

The woman inspected me up and down—more than inspected me—devoured me—her gaze sucking in everything, lingering on my crotch, my chest, and suddenly, uncomfortably, I understood what the feminists had been on about all these years.

Eventually, her stare settled on my neck. On the tattoo. Impossible to miss, impossible to misidentify. But whereas most people’s reactions would be shock, fear, anger, she simply said, “I’m guessing that’s pretty old.”

“You’re guessing right.”

“Still active?”

“Not as such, no.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.” Again, there was something odd about her voice. Not the tone itself, but the way in which she formed her words. They were crisp, clear—perhaps too much so.

More time passed, and I paced my way about the room, keeping my Mauser aloft, my finger on the trigger. With every second, my arm grew wearier, and I had to bring all of my attention into focus to keep from dropping the pistol to my side. “Look,” I said finally, “this is getting tiring—”

“For you, perhaps. You could always put your gun down.”

“And then?”

“Then I’d probably shoot you,” she said. “But I might not.”

I held the gun higher. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I promised.

“How reassuring.”

Thirteen stories down, a jumble of cars had gathered on the street corner, honking and causing a terrible fuss, the cacophony floating up to the penthouse suite, forming a jangle of music for our little scene. An accident is what it looked like, three-car collision in the middle of the road. Ambulances were just making their way to the intersection.

“You steal a lot of artiforgs?” she asked me, taking her first steps in my direction. They were confident, but oddly stiff.

“I never stole a thing.”

“I read some of that manuscript of yours,” she said, and my Jarvik jumped at the violation. I’d assumed she’d just come in, scribbled that little note for me, and taken off; I had no idea she’d been through my things. “I know what you do. What you did. Make yourself out to be a real martyr.”

“I’m just telling it like it was.”

“There’s no law you’ve gotta write your memoirs before you go,” she told me, and as she walked I thought I heard a familiar knee joint popping and clicking.

“But there are a few about concealed weapons. What say we put these down?”

She pursed those pouty lips and took another look at my Mauser. “You first.”

I nodded. “If you tell me your name.”

“Bonnie,” she said after a time. “I hope that suits you.”

It suited me fine. I put down the gun, told her my name, and we got on with things.

Bonnie’s actually been staying in the Tyler Street hotel for a little less than five weeks, and the penthouse has been only one of her domiciles during that time. Upon first arriving, she found a two-room suite on the ninth floor that hadn’t been affected too badly by the fire, or so she thought until she came back from a trip to the bakery to find that half of her stuff had been buried by a crumbling pile of plaster in the master bedroom. From there she moved into a series of standard rooms on varying floors, none of which afforded her the privacy that she desired; either they were too close to the street below or the insulation had burned away, making them hot during the day, cold at night, and loud all the time.

“But I like it up here,” she told me once we’d dispensed with the weapons and taken a seat across from each other on the penthouse floor. She sat down daintily, with a certain degree of care, as if she were made out of heavy porcelain and didn’t want to chip her edges. “I can make a fair amount of noise without worrying whether street traffic is going to hear me, and as for the other hotel residents…Well, you’re not exactly my worst nightmare on the subject.”

As she spoke, talking mostly about herself while managing to reveal absolutely nothing personal, Bonnie displayed the same warm carelessness in conversation that had drawn me to the other women in my life. Once she got going, she didn’t much care for pauses in speech, didn’t wait to get my response, didn’t ask if she was boring me or losing me or entertaining me. Still, it wasn’t like she was talking just to talk; she was keenly interested in connecting, and though this was probably due to months of enforced isolation, it was flattering nevertheless.

We talked for two hours about the outside world, about the accident-prone intersection below the building, about the dilapidated condition of our current home, about film and music and art and friends—always about others, though, never about ourselves—before I excused myself to find a working restroom. When I returned to the penthouse, Bonnie was gone.

I have a soft spot for women who take off on me. The more they’re gone, the more I long for their return, and the more excited I become at the prospect of seeing them again. My ideal female is a gypsy circus performer with no roots in any town or country who enjoys making herself vanish inside the magician’s velvet box, dabbles in faking her own death, and has been arrested at least three times for identity fraud, yet somehow repeatedly escapes from the maximum-security penitentiaries in which she’s been imprisoned.

I suppose I could take out a personal ad, but my true ideal woman would never show up for the date.

Beth had a habit of disappearing, as well, but back then, whatever dalliances she was off on were just starter recipes for my overactive imagination. Example: If she wrote me a letter telling me she’d gone down to Tijuana for the weekend, I’d instantly imagine her in the local donkey show, pulling ten guys up on stage at a hundred pesos a pop. If she said she’d gone to visit her mom, I suddenly decided that mom was a code word for “new boyfriend,” and in my mind she wasn’t shopping and girl-talking for those few days, but was facedown on some stranger’s bed, getting it hard from behind.

I wrote postcard after postcard, simple little letters with a glaring subtext. I wanted more letters from her, more correspondence—anything, so long as it was in her handwriting and had her name scribbled at the bottom. I wanted it to come six, seven times a day. I wanted the military to hire an extra carrier just to be able to handle the volume of letters I would receive from my adoring wife. I wanted to cripple the U.S. postal service with the sheer bulk of twenty-pound paper stock. If she was writing letters all day, I figured, she couldn’t be having sex.

And for every ten letters I wrote, one came back in response. So I’d up it to twenty, and to thirty, but the more often I sent one off, the less often Beth returned the gesture. I would venture to say that during the first six months I was in the desert, I wrote and sent approximately three hundred postcards and letters to my loving wife back home in San Diego.

I received eighteen.

One evening, in a sarcastic fit of rage, jealousy, and a fair amount of whiskey sours, I jotted off what was to be my final postcard sans attorney’s fees. I wrote:

I set myself up, of course. The return letter came back quickly this time:

The divorce papers were stapled to the postcard.

But while tank training continued, I was still laboring under the illusion that my notes home to Beth were doing the job of keeping her in line, and my spirits were high each day of practice. It didn’t take long for Tig and the rest of the brass to figure out that I was crack at driving a tank and lousy at ammunition, so they gave me a permanent driving assignment and sent me out with a rotating series of gunners to see who I’d best be suited to work with.

One day, they put Harold in behind me, and though I was glad to have a mate on board, it was tough going from the start.

“Shove left,” he’d call from the back. “I can’t aim with you going right.”

“Can’t go left,” I’d yell, trying to make myself audible over the noise of the six-ton machinery. We weren’t fitted with talkie helmets yet, and even in the field they proved to be more prone to break than to work, so once inside the tanks, shouting was the best method of getting your point across. “There’s a ditch left.”

“Then rotate,” he’d say. “Rotate!”

And more often than not, I’d rotate in the wrong direction, just to show him who was in command.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d been less of a stubborn bastard, Harold would be alive today. If I’d listened to him and actually worked with the guy, the brass might have assigned him to my tank rather than the one that got him dead.

Odds are Harold would have pissed me off enough to drive us all over the edge of the nearest sand dune, anyway.

They sent us back to base camp on weekends, probably because they didn’t want to hear us bitch any more than they had to about sleeping in the control chairs. We’d hook up with our old platoon buddies, take off for twenty-four-hour trips into the Italian countryside, try to get some concept of what the outside world was all about. Of course, we all ended up at the same old places, doing the same old things.

To whatever degree the rest of us were taking to our assignments, Jake Freivald was positively flourishing. He’d gone from a thin, wisecracking NYC wannabe to a staid, filled-out soldier, just as likely to recite basic combat procedure as he would be to tell a dirty joke. Sometimes, he’d do it in the same sentence. The brass had taken notice of his ability and desire and given him extra duty in a recon squad.

“Recon is where it’s at,” he told me one night as we drank cheap red wine. “It’s everything you saw in the movies as a kid, only more.”

“More what?” I asked.

“More everything. More weapons. More tactics. More fun.”

I asked him to give me details, to fill me in on the ins and outs of a job that sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than tank duty, but he was reticent on all matters recon. “Top secret, pal,” he told me, then offered another suck off the wine jug to soothe my spirits.

“Tell ya what,” he said, “if we both get outta here alive, and we’re still talking to each other ten years from now, I’ll tell you anything you want to know about patrols and recon, okay?”

We shook on it.

That was on October 14. Exactly ten years later to the day, I pulled a few strings at the Union to get Jake and myself assigned to run out an entire gastrointestinal system from an ex-football player out in Milwaukee. Workload was heavy that month, and it had been two weeks since we’d seen each other, so we spent the beginning of the job catching up, letting each other in on recent scores and jobs. I was married to Melinda at the time, and Jake liked to get in his jabs about my love life, chastising me for hitching my horse to yet another faltering wagon.

I waited until we’d stabilized the client—six-six, two-eighty, and thank the Lord we brought more than two Tasers with us, because that beast sucked up enough electricity to power the White House Christmas tree—and had already begun the messy extraction process before I let Jake know the importance of this day.

“Been ten years, huh? And you’ve been waiting…” He shook his head, seemingly more amazed that I remembered the date than at the swift passage of time.

“Ten years on the nose,” I said, meanwhile trying my hardest to isolate the football player’s aluminum esophagus catheter; I didn’t want to scuff up the ’forg or bring anything back to the Union that wasn’t their legal property to begin with. “And I’ve been waiting all this time, dreaming up the things you did or didn’t do out in the field. So now you’ve got to tell me—what was recon like?”

Jake put down his scalpel, resting it on the smooth, blank forehead of the prone client. It balanced there like a seesaw, slowly rocking back and forth. “Back then, I thought it was fun. I thought it was dangerous, exciting. Sneaking in and out of locations, isolating targets, identifying enemies. The kind of thing every boy dreams about but never actually gets to do.

“But compared to Union work,” he said flatly, “recon is accountancy.”

So much for illusions. I’ve got a strong history of crumbling expectations, which is why this time around, I’m not counting on anything going down with Bonnie. For one thing, she keeps flaking off on me, and despite my predilection for such things, a woman this chronically invisible can’t be good for any relationship. For another, we’re wholly unsuited to each other. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for the last four weeks; she changes outfits whenever she bathes, which is, naturally, at least ten times as often as I manage to do. She’s got a collection of dresses to match her six different pairs of pantyhose, which she dons at least every other night, despite the fact that, if she’s lucky and does her job right, no one will ever see her. Furthermore, I’m fifteen years her senior, easy, and a man on the run from the Credit Union doesn’t exactly make good husband material. Wendy, my fifth ex, found that out, and quick.

But I wasn’t at all disappointed when Bonnie poked her head into my apartment two hours ago and asked if I’d like to grab some dinner up at her place. “Can you bring a tablecloth?” she asked. “My dining-room set is a little rusty.”

By the time I put on my formal wear—consisting of the one remaining cotton shirt and chinos that had no discernible odor and few bloodstains—and tromped my way up the stairs, tarpaulin under my arm, Bonnie had already lit some well-placed candles, each illuminating a small corner of the room, keeping the rest in enforced twilight. The shadows played across her bright yellow-and-orange sundress, as if daring her to light up the room.

I brought up the tarp, whipping it up and out to spread across the metal table in the center of the room, and a small object flashed through the air, forcing Bonnie to duck as it flew by her head and thunked into the far wall.

“Forgive me,” I said, plucking the scalpel out of the dry-wall and tucking it into my waistband. “I thought I cleaned this thing out.”

While Bonnie used a small Sterno can to heat a pot of noodles she put me on chopping duty. Somehow, somewhere, she’d scored a grocer’s dream—tomatoes, onions, cilantro—and was eager to teach me to make the perfect marinara sauce. For a while, I used a plastic butter knife, the only cutting tool she had, but soon whipped out the scalpel and went to town. Bonnie didn’t say a thing when I resumed chopping away with a furor, but I did catch a few sidelong glances.

When the palate has come to accept Dumpster leftovers stolen from alley cats as an average night’s meal, fresh pasta and marinara sauce becomes nothing less than a gourmet orgasm. I barely spoke as we ate, slurping up noodles without benefit of chewing, sucking down as much nutrition as was possible within the shortest amount of time.

“Where did you get this?” I asked between gulps.

Bonnie said, “There’s a market about six blocks down.”

“And they threw this stuff away? Incredible.”

She fixed me with an odd stare. “Threw it away?”

“Oh,” I said, catching her game. “So you stole the food. Kudos.”

Again, I wasn’t getting through. “No, no,” she insisted. “I went down to the market this afternoon and bought it.”

How could I ever consider a relationship with this woman? We don’t even speak the same language.

It wasn’t until we were finishing up the sponge cake she’d purchased—not stolen but actually purchased, I understood now, from a real store with cash and a checkout line and everything—that I noticed that strange lilt to her voice once again, and couldn’t help but ask her about it.

“It’s a Vocom,” she said.

“What is?”

“My larynx. Vocom Expressor, actually, one of the newer models.”

Now that it had been isolated for me, I could hear the mechanical tone to her words, the way that everything was pronounced perfectly, artificially, with no slurs or tics. Smooth. Vocom’s a grade-A company with an excellent customer-service staff.

And then, as if to prove it to me, Bonnie reached into her pocket and pulled out a small remote control, no bigger than the one for my Jarvik unit, though outfitted with many more buttons and dials. A push here, a spin there, and when she opened her mouth to speak, Bonnie was no longer Bonnie.

“It has a four-scale frequency modulation,” she said in a smooth, meaty bass that thundered from her throat.

“Do you do that often?” I asked.

“Recently,” she squeaked, adjusting the device to a chipmunk trill. “Sounding like someone else comes in handy when you don’t want to be found.”

I’d run out some Vocom systems before, though these jobs were usually given over to the Ghosts, mainly because of the artiforg’s ability to record the last forty-eight hours’ worth of the clients’ speech. Sort of like the black box they put in planes, but the Vocom Expressor only retained the words coming from the client, not from whoever they were conversing with. As a result, transcripts from Vocom boxes tend to be stilted, one-sided affairs, with so-called conversation experts left to decide what the other party had been going on about.

Once, toward the end of my career, I’d been sent in to repo a bladder from a Kenton client who’d overstayed the grace period by a good four months. Now, I’d been told that this guy had maxed out his credit all over town with a host of other manufacturers, but my job was with Kenton, and Kenton only. Even if I cut the guy open and came across an artiforg stomach or lung that I knew to be overdue, it wasn’t my job to take ’em out. There are guys who work like that, freelancers who’ll rip out any old thing and drop it off at the supply house in hopes of getting a cut of the commission, but I worked straight, and if my papers ordered me to lift a Kenton bladder, then a Kenton bladder I would lift.

Some folks don’t move when you open them up; some jerk all over the place. “Dead herring,” “live tuna”—those are the repo terms. This guy was somewhere along the lines of a weakening trout, movement-wise, but he babbled through the whole thing, even though I’d gassed him down proper. Shot him up with an extra hit of Thorazine, then applied the Tasers, and even though his senses were shot, the fool didn’t stop gabbing about how sorry he was, how he’d make everything right again, even as I dug the scalpel deep into his midsection. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t care. I preferred to work in silence, and he was mucking up my day.

The bladder was there, in perfect condition, and as I reached for my tissue clippers, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice echo through the room; as a reflex, my bloody hand dug into my jacket, flipping the Colt I used to carry into firing position even as I spun in a circle, ready to take aim and defend myself however necessary.

The room was empty.

Another cut, back to business, but a second later, a deep, throaty shout blasted into my ears, an anguished cry sped up to quadruple speed while still retaining its low tones. Another spin, another probe with the pistol, and nothing.

Then I isolated. Concentrated. Looked down at the client, locked in on his voice. It was coming from him, all of it, and just to make sure, I flipped the scalpel at his neck, drawing a new river of blood but locating a glint of silver and the Vocom beneath. It wasn’t the Expressor model—those are relatively new on the market—but one of the old Communicator types, non-upgradeable. Just then, I felt something crack beneath my foot, and I looked down to find that I’d been stepping on the Vocom remote operating device all along; I’d been changing the voice as I worked, spooking myself in the process.

And somehow, I’d activated the recall procedure, which explained why the sap never stopped talking—the Vocom was in playback mode, the larynx still reciting its own transcript of some prior conversation. Unable to figure out how to make it stop, I resumed work with this new soundtrack playing at full volume.

By the time I had the bladder tucked away in its protective Styrofoam container and ready for shipment back to the Kenton supply house, the client was certainly dead; all breathing patterns had ceased, his limbs were finally still, and I was unable to detect a pulse. But the Vocom, hardy artiforg that it was, continued its chant.

“Baby, you know I love you,” the dead man yelled as I made my way out the front door. “Come on back, I swear I’ll never hurt you again.”

That’s one of the things I had sworn to Melinda when she left me, that I would never hurt her again, that I would guard her against pain and suffering and the ravages of dealing with a chronically absent and absentminded husband, even though I knew that it was a promise I could never live up to. I’ve always done that with promises: One side of my brain does the swearing, the other secretly crosses its frontal lobes.

Of course, I didn’t know until that night twenty years later how badly I would break my oath to Melinda. Even then, there was no way for me to know.

Bonnie had mentioned that the Vocom wasn’t her only artiforg, and in my desire to learn what I could about my fellow tenant, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a fellow Jarvik host, too. But before I could convince her to let loose about the rest of her implantations, Bonnie’s brow furrowed, and I noticed her neck arc slightly to one side, like a dog keying in on a far-off howl. She hushed me up quick with a delicate finger to my lips and tiptoed over to the penthouse window.

Keeping my eyes locked on the street beneath, I followed right behind. Didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but stood still out of deference to her intuition. All but one streetlight had been busted long ago, darkness brought to the city streets courtesy of your friendly local hoodlums, and shadows crawled the pavement, obscuring anything I was meant to see.

Don’t look, Bonnie mouthed to me, stepping back from the window. Listen.

And listen I did. Straining myself into silence, trying to project myself to the street below. In the distance, a mutt barking. A husband, yelling at his wife that if she screwed half as good as she cooked he’d sleep at home more often. A car, screeching as it sped through the intersection, cornering on the sides of its tires.

Nothing, I mouthed back.

Reaching out, Bonnie grabbed hold of my ear—her fingers were cold, long frozen sticks grabbing my flesh—and twisted the lobe back and forth. “Are these natural?” she whispered, and I nodded emphatically.

“Oh,” she said, her voice low and compassionate, as if she was pitying me my unenhanced state. Digging into her jacket pocket, Bonnie fumbled around, metal clanging against metal, and soon came up with a compact pair of headphones: one wire, two pads.

Forcibly turning my head toward hers, she pulled me close and placed the instrument across my scalp and over my ears, fitting the speakers into my ear canals. Now all external noises were cut off, only my breathing amplified, and I nodded back at Bonnie as she nodded at me. The headset wire dangled impotently to the floor, electric lead scraping against the ground.

I took a glance back down toward the street—was there movement? Was it human?—and moments later, my hearing returned. Only this time there was depth to it. Range. Sounds I hadn’t heard before, heard ever, made their way into my mind, filling my ears with noise. In that house with the yelling parents was a young child begging for them to stop fighting, for Daddy to quit yelling at Mommy already; the dog in the distance was barking at a softly mewling kitten.

I turned to find the wire from the headset around my ears leading up and into Bonnie’s ear canal, dug in tight like a snake wiggling into its hole. As I stepped closer, I noticed that her lobe had cracked open a notch, the metallic edges glinting in the moonlight, and a panel near the eardrum had slid aside to allow for the wire’s insertion. A Vocom corporate logo beamed out in a brilliant gold leaf just inside the socket.

“Artiforg ear?” I guessed, my voice doubling back to me through what was now Bonnie’s hearing—my hearing—our shared hearing.

“Both of them,” she said, and the words had a peculiar echo tone, sounding to me like I was the one doing the talking. “Now shush up and listen.”

As I concentrated on the street below, Bonnie fiddled with the control panel inside her lobe, amplifying the ambient sounds by meager increments, filtering out the chaff. These speakers packed a wallop for their size; one slip of her fingers and she could blow my natural hearing out of commission, but the lady was careful, and soon we were past the dogs and the families and the cars below and focusing in on roach burps and mice titters.

And as we amplified and screened, amplified and screened, the workaday noises of the city were filtered out, until only one sound rode high above the rest: a high-pitched hum, warbling, shaky, underscored by a rhythmic, persistent ping. The music of electronics, and I recognized that sound from years of utilizing the only machine capable of making that noise, the tool that all Bio-Repo men cherished and all deadbeat clients feared:

We were being scanned.