"Raise the Titanic, or something. I don't know, I'll look around." There has to be something.
    "Can't hurt."
    "They're nice people. Just a sad situation."
    The evening passed pleasantly and rather quietly. Emily left after a while, I don't know to where. I guess she has her own place. I had the distinct impression that my presence was inhibiting some sort of ritual, some conversation that usually took place. Oh, well.
    There's a fold-out bed. I've been up for a while writing, a hanging pulled across to create a semi-private "room," but I think I'm going to try to get some sleep now.

May 29, 1987

I spent the day wandering around Detroit. Saw the Ford museum, which was really neat and has things like Thomas Edison's last breath in a glass jar. That killed most of the day, and then I met up with Trent. We talked casually about business stuff, compared notes. I read a newspaper for the first time in over a week, seems like things are pretty quiet on the national front for the moment.
    I'm putting things off, I know. So much for resolutions.

May 30, 1987

So much for avoiding things.
    Again. Waking up out of increasingly uneasy sleep, subliminally aware that the dimensions of the room around me were not what they should be, the instant of heart-freezing terror resolving into recognition of where I was.
    A feathery rustle on the other side of the room, and I realized I'd woken up my host. Deep breath, exhale slowly.
    "Sorry," I said.
    "S'all right."
    Another breath. "What time is it?"
    "Four thirty."
    It wasn't quite dark; the glow of the city through the skylights was sufficient to cast faint shadows.
    "Oh. Sorry. Time zone's different."
    "That's okay."
    "You can go back to sleep." Between the lingering jet lag and the nightmare, I probably wasn't going to.
    "If you want to talk about it now, it's all right."
    Had he been waiting for me to say something? Probably. I sighed. Closed my eyes. Wondered if I could do this. "Well. I don't want to talk about it. But...."
    "But you know that you need to talk about it?" he finished.
    "Kind of."
    "Okay." He pushed aside the "wall" and settled down on a stool nearby. I resisted the impulse to curl my knees up, sitting in the corner of the foldout while we talked.
    I still didn't want to get right into it. "I actually came out here... well, partially just to see you guys, have a visit, get away from things for a little while, but... also 'cause I wanted to ask for your help with something. It seemed to work pretty well last time."
    "What?"
    "I need to find the others," I told him.
    "You want to check the boxes, and see where they are?"
    "Anything pertinent that might help track them down." Since Poughkeepsie, I'm increasingly worried about the danger they're in, that they have no idea might be coming for them.
    He frowned a little. "I honestly don't know. We tried opening one of the other boxes in your head last time, there was a lot of resonance feedback, trying to carry too many active, conscious-level...."
    "I brought aspirin."
    "I'm more worried about a cerebral hemorrhage than I am a migraine," he informed me seriously.
    That put a slightly different slant on things, the possibility that they might have hardwired in some biological traps to prevent any further tampering.
    It doesn't make any sense to me, why they would go to all the trouble of putting all those identities in there, relatively accessible—at least, compared to the one they'd locked off with Protocol Zed—if they're not to be used for anything; Trent seems to think it has to do with their "mass production" methods, but I don't know.... they created a whole new neurological setup, completely from scratch, to hold all this stuff. It seems to me that there must be some purpose behind it.
    God help me if I ever have a head injury. No one's going to know what's where.
    "Well, it was just an idea," I sighed, reluctantly letting the thought go.
    "Wait a second, mind if I look?"
    "Go ahead." That tickling sensation again, for most of a minute.
    "Okay. I've reconstructed a model of it within my own neural structure. I'll take a look at it over the next few weeks."
    "You can do that?"
    "Yeah."
    "I guess that was a stupid question," I admitted, still surprised.
    He shrugged a wing. "My control over my own thought processes is pretty high. There are things that I can do with myself that I can't do with anybody else. There won't be any biologicals in this, but I'll be able to see where the triggers are, possibly. I just don't want to walk into this casually, I trust you can understand that."
    "Defibrillation really sucks," I agreed cheerfully. "Don't need any more of that."
    His gaze was level and somewhat concerned. "I don't ever want to pry, but I can't help but notice that there have been a couple of nasty system shocks, lately?"
    "Yeah... system shock is one way to put it." I looked away. "I don't know." Pause. What to say, where to start. I really didn't want to go into it at all, but he was right that it needed to be done. Much as I hate to admit it, even now, I can't seem to do this by myself. "They decided I needed to be... reeled in for readjustment, a couple weeks ago." I borrowed Reilly's capital T for "they."
    "That's when you vanished?"
    "Yeah."
    A brief silence fell. I studied the weave of the blanket.
    "Why did they decided they needed to?" he asked eventually.
    "I think because I shot my mouth off to the wrong person." I still can't believe I did something as mind-bogglingly dumb as confiding in that woman.
    "Why not just kill you?"
    "They say I'm too useful. At least, in potential. Apparently my learning curve is a little higher than the rest of them, because of the weird situation they dumped me into." There, this wasn't so bad.

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