Venner lived in the high-end doublewide he'd bought after the divorce, plunked down on a two acre plot of land way up on the edge of the Catskill park. There were neighbors, but they were distant. The Steins were weekenders, the Marlborani were super snobs who kept gigantic black dogs that growled menacingly whenever a vehicle even slowed down outside their pink pseudo-stucco villa. He'd never spoken to them at all, and only a handful of times to either of the Steins. Usually when they needed something, like help with a rabid raccoon, or to borrow his chainsaw.

Rook's doublewide recognized the car's approach and had the lights on in welcome when he pulled up outside.

Venner let the Nokia take the house's security temperature. To that end he lifted a rock on the side of the drive and pressed the connector end of the phone into the socket. The Nokia ran a quick check of the various seals and locks, then a pass across the house computer and finally a video surveil checking for mini-cams and mikes that might have been slapped on a window. The house was clean.

"Come on inside, Plesur." He helped her out of the car. He sensed that her anxiety had been replaced with curiosity.

"House?"

"Yes, this is my house."

Once inside he left her to explore while he tossed a couple of rapid-ready meals into the activator. While the packaging cooked them he changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and dug around for some clothes that might fit a Pammy.

She had found the bathroom.

"Shower?"

"Yeah, sure, go ahead." He handed her some grey sweat pants and a green cotton shirt. "Try these."

She took them and gave him a look that was both mischievously coy and purely grateful. It was enough to melt a heart of stone and arouse the dick of a nonagenarian puritan.

She closed the door and he got himself a beer and went outside on the back deck and took a couple of good hits on it. From there he had a view down to Ten Eyck and the huge new devos in the valley. Their lights were muted, this was the Incorporated Woodstock Territority, after all, but he remembered when all that land had still been forest. The view had been better then.

The beer was good after such a long, crazy day. But now the case began to revolve in his mind. A dangerous tar-ball that was pulling on the rafters of his carefully reconstructed life.

A victim with a military past and a period of service during the darkest days of the Emergency combined with a messy, perhaps incompetent killing and the presence of that mystery blonde, or "she" acccording to little Plesur. A pro sex worker, or just a girlfriend, and had she let the killers in?

Lots of loose ends and worse than that, loose ends that might reach into areas where nobody was allowed to go. Not even an SIO from the HudVal PD Homicide could tug those lines with impunity. At the very least it could get you sidelined into Traffic or a desk job. At the worst, killers could show up at his own door.

He shivered, sipped beer and tried to blank all that out of his mind.

He had other things to think about. Like Plesur's presence in his home. It had been a long time since he'd a woman here. Indeed, since he and Karen Guilders had broken up three months back he'd hardly even been out looking. Maybe he was just too old, or too tired, which maybe was the same damned thing.

Kingston was a small city, but it had a lively social scene. There were restaurants and a couple of small, expensive bars that served folks of his generation, the older crowd. But he'd stayed away.

Maybe he was just depressed.

And that started him thinking about Allis and Jenni, way out there in LA. Maybe it was time for him to give it up here and move out there. Work would be tricky. He knew it wouldn't be easy to switch to the LAPD for instance. Nor could he expect to get a Homicide appointment. But he'd do anything, he supposed, except narco. And if he was there he would have better court standing and he could be a real presence in Jenni's life.

Allis would hate it. She'd warned him repeatedly not to follow her, not to get too close. But if she was going to bring home street critters like Sticky Mirante then Rook figured he might do just fine in court. Not all Californian judges were that prejudiced against out-of-staters. Maybe Jenni would testify on his behalf. If push came to shove he thought the kid might be happy to switch parents and live with him. Lot more stability, lot less adult tantrums, could be good.

He sighed. It wasn't anything like what he'd imagined, back in the day when he and Allis were first married and in love and were working on the house in McEwan Street that they'd bought cheap. He was a young detective, still in the Fraud Squad then. She had her first salon. The city was just embarking on a real estate boom and they'd gotten in on the ground floor. Within months of their moving in the value of the house had gone up 50% and real estate sharpies were calling every week trying to get them to sell. He remembered those days with a powerful fondness. The power rails had only recently gone into the big highways, and Rook had bought a conversion module for his old car and they would ride down to Manhattan on the rail at incredible speeds. You could get down there in half an hour, a quarter of what it used to take in the old days. They would park in the huge westside parking and go catch a movie, or a virt ride, or just go out to dinner.

Riding home afterwards Rook had always felt that everything was going to be alright, that his future was secure. The country was coming out of the dark days, all the scary times of the 30s and early 40s were fading into memories. They were going to have a baby, he was going to have a good career, Allis's business would prosper. And for a few years it had all been like that.

But things never work out the way we dream. Kingston was on the map all of a sudden and the hairdressing chains came in and Allis was struggling to survive. And then came the offer from Hollywood through her friend Julie. A great job, working for a studio, really good money, and the glow of the celebrity world, too. And then, a day or so later, as he remembered it, he found out that Allis was having an affair with Mario Batista, a restaurant owner down the block from her salon. He saw them together on the street, Mario holding her close, Allis laughing and kissing him.

The upshot of all that was her sudden disappearance, emptying the bank accounts, taking baby Jenni and moving to LA. She got the great studio job and divorced Rook and dared him to try and do anything about it.

And he'd never remarried, though he did go out with Casey Berrek for almost three years. But in the end the toxic quality of the cop life put an end to that relationship. The way the hours could go long on you, with very little warning. The fifth or sixth time you broke a date because you had to follow up a case, that did something to the feelings. Trust, expectations, hope, they all dried up, and unless there was something really incredibly powerful between you, it tended to kill things off. And as you got older this only became a stronger reality. Cops lived in a sort of ghetto, and it was hard on outsiders who got involved.

So he'd stayed and he'd gone into Homicide and established a solid record there. Then there'd been the thing with Lisa Artoli. She was Captain Artoli then, and they'd been good for each other, and maybe they might have got married, but when her big chance came she took it and scraped Rook off her shoes. The Area Chief job was really demanding, and Lisa would be moving among politicians and VIPs. Being hooked up with an SIO in Homicide wasn't a wise choice.

After that he'd really investigated moving to LA. He was humiliated and really burned. Having to deal with Lisa now and then on important cases just made it all hurt even worse. But joining the LAPD meant speaking Spanish a lot of the time, and his spanish had never been that good. And the private security world meant chip implants that made you think corporate thoughts. They took over your brain for the duration of the contract. It was for security, of course, but he'd heard rumors of the long term effects of those kind of chips. Retirement homes full of people who heard voices, whose brains were fogged up forever.

So he'd stayed in Kingston and mourned what might have been.

The beer was gone. He was about to turn around when he felt an arm slip around his waist and a warm body rub up against him.

"Man is sad?" whispered that husky little voice.

Christ, how did she know?

"Unh, well," he began, then lost that train of thought. Her head was resting on his shoulder, her hip was nudging his thigh, she was looking up at him with those blue eyes and he was instantly within a micron of losing control of himself. It would only take a feather touch to send him tumbling down into disaster.

"Plesur is here. She help man."

Such an earnest statement, it made him laugh, and that saved him, pulling him back from the precipice.

"You're a good person, Plesur. Thank you for helping."

Those incredible lips took on a slight pout.. "When help?"

As in, we haven't had sex yet? Oh lordy, talk about the fires of temptation."

"You have helped. Already."

The pout had turned to a frown. Then it was transformed into giggles and a strange little conspiratorial smile.

She push-punched him in the ribs. "You funny man!"

The pushing turned to tickling and he was forced to duck away, laughing. She came after him, face contorted in the savage, pure glee of childhood.

And right there, as if outlined by a flash of lightning, he saw her revealed as exactly that, a child-- a girl of about five or six years age. A little girl inhabiting the body of a sex goddess.

The sight froze his heart and left him speechless, while he went through the motions of playing her game. She exhausted herself trying to tickle him into submission, and he played along, all across the deck and back into the house, until he finally maneuvered them both into the kitchen.

"How about food?" he said and popped open the activator to reveal a pair of Ezi-eatz, all hot and steaming.

Lindi always warned him against eating this stuff. "You have no idea what goes into that muck."

But it was quick and easy and he'd never really wanted to know all about food and nutrition. You started down that road and you ended up like Lindi was all he could see. Endless worrying about what was behind the labels. Endless balancing amino acids, proteins, vitamins, minerals, like where did it end?

Plesur was happily tearing into her lasagne with shroom topping. For her it was good enough that it was hot and cheese flavored. He ate his beefanoff and opened another beer.

After about a dozen mouthfuls, eaten with exactly the kind of high speed technique he remembered from Jenni's childhood, Plesur slowed down. She looked up.

"What happen?"

"Uh, what do you mean?"

"In when, when, mornin', we go?"

When-when, she'd used that construction before, and he'd understood it to refer to the concept of time, as in tomorrow.

"Yeah, we go to other place. But better for Plesur."

"Back to pleece station?"

He wondered where she'd picked that up, and again, he wondered exactly how limited her intelligence really was. I mean if you factored out the total lack of education, the completely sheltered life, maybe she was just a little bit less bright than the average.

And if that was the case then the way society dealt with Plesur and the thousands like her was what, an injustice? Or maybe it was really a complete, cold blooded crime?

"Back to police station for a little bit, then to another place."

"Oh." She seemed crestfallen.

"What's wrong?"

"No like pleece place."

And for a moment Rook saw in her wounded eyes what must have happened. Plesur sitting in that cell. Then the leering gaze of Winnover and Fatso Soporides when they came to check her out, their eyes feasting on the sexy meat they planned to chew on all night long. Her incomprehension, their disgusting jokes. The eyes, bulging, malicious, cold, cruel, her recoil, the terror she must have felt.

"I'm sorry about that, Plesur. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again." The big blue eyes studied him, did she understand him? Did it matter?

Christ, those fucking animals!

For distraction he told the tv to turn on. Rook wasn't much of a Virt fan, but he did watch some sports now and then. He preferred just watching to tuning into the livecam and he definitely wasn't a Gamer. He just didn't have the mental energy in his free time for that level of intensity. Slipping into another character and donning another life was just too much effort.

The news came up. The big Midwestern Combine Lottery had reached N$2.5 Billiion and crazed ticketeers were signing on from all over the world. Forty million chinese citizens were said to have bought tickets. The news lady chuckled at that and said "the chinese have this thing about gambling, don't they, Don?"

Don, the old, wise silverback newshead, chuckled too and moved on to the really big newstory of the night. The attempt to replicate the now extinct Cod fish was well on its way to success. The first artificial cod, created in the laboratory would be released onto the Grand Banks within a few months. A note of controversy was added by a very brief clip of a protester from Europe being dragged out of a rubber dinghy and hauled aboard a US Coastguard vessel where he was clubbed and sprayed with a disabling gas. The fellow's spasmodic kicks and jerks had the newcasters both chuckling when the clip finished.

"Someday those elitist yerpeens will learn their lesson," said Don. "But apparently it hasn't sunk in, yet."

Commercials for all sorts of things were taking over the corners of the screen, and pop-ups and bleepers were overriding the newscast, Rook hit the mute.

Plesur looked up.

"Sound gone?"

"Just for a little while. Did you have enough to eat?"

The radiant smile returned at full wattage. "Yes. Plesur bruff teef? Then we help man?"

Bruf teef? As he broke out a toothbrush for her, Rook wondered if it was a programmed behaviour, or did General Sangacha like his Plesur with her teeth clean?

While she brushed, he took a look at the bed. The sheets were a day or so old, so not too bad. He yanked a pile of dirty clothes out of the corner and stuffed them in the laundry hamper. The rest of the room was okay, if a bit dusty. She would sleep in here. From the closet he pulled down an old Hudson Bay 4 points blanket. A family heirloom virtually, something that his great grandma had bought apparently, at least that's what his mom told him. He'd kept it all these years and hardly ever used it.

He would sleep on the couch.

When he returned to the living room the sound was back. Plesur was sitting, and she'd changed channels to one of the more lurid free-virt shows. For a moment he was shocked. How'd she learn to do that? And should she be watching something like this?

A sexy younger woman was undressing while a handsome young man helped her out of her clothing. The dialogue was breathy and short, all "Oh, Marly," and "I want you so bad, Jim." Venner didn't watch this kind of thing, and it was mildly shocking to see what passed for entertainment these days.

In fact, Rook rarely used the Virt interfaces. The helmet, gloves and sheathe stayed in the box. Virt sex he found kind of disturbing. It wasn't masturbation, because someone else was working inside your head, but it wasn't real sex either, since it was just you and a machine. In the end it was sort of creepy, at least for him, though he understood that it was very popular with lots of guys. And with many women too, he'd heard. Virt sports were also not for him. He'd tried the interface on football games, but it just seemed a bit too chaotic. Perhaps that was why he'd never been much good at the game himself. The Virt that he did have a fondness for now and then was stuff like skydiving, skiing and surfing. He didn't know how really do any of them, so he tagged on with someone else's inbuilts, and then zoomed down amazing slopes, or went tubular on some monster wave off Hawaii's north point.

Plesur, however, was clearly an expert at Virt. When ads started popping up she blipped them without even looking at the controller. She reminded him of Jenni, who had the same fluency with advanced Virt controls.

Onscreen, Marly was helping Jimmy out of his shorts. This was free-virt, so Jim's erection was invisible behind the blurred pixels, but Marly's hand was reaching in there and Jim was groaning in a way that told you she knew what she was doing.

Rook observed that Plesur was rubbing the front of her panties with the end of the remote. The hair stood up on his neck even while his dick hardened. The internal conflicts between his sex drive and his sense of what was right and proper were boiling. It made it hard to think straight.

In virtworld Jim had lifted Marly up against the wall and set himself between her legs. Marly let out a "ooooh, that's soooo goood!"

It was too much, Rook spun around and retreated to the kitchen, then to the bathroom where he threw cold water on his face and did his best to shove that kind of thinking out of his mind. Plesur was a child, just a goddamned child in the body of a sex goddess.

And, of course it would be so easy to surrender to his balls and just fuck the living daylights out of her. Christ, he wanted to, he wanted to really bad. And it was what she did, it was what she was for, for fuck's sake!

And it would be absolutely wrong. Not just because she was a witness. Not just because she was in his care. But because he understood that she was only really six years old!

Oh, christ, this was really not good. Not good at all.

He opened the door a crack. "oooh, oooh, oooh." came wafting out of the living room. He shut the door again and saw himself in the mirror. He looked like such a frightened soul. His eyes were round, wide, his lips set in a grim line. You'd think he was taking the Knockhammer to some reinforced door out in Zadville. For a moment he stared at himself. This was fucking unbelievable. Then he looked at himself again and the humor in the situation got to him and he cracked up and started laughing so hard he ended up sitting on the john, holding his guts.

Trapped in the bathroom by the rampant sexuality of a pleasure model with the personality build of a six year old kid! And he was a seasoned Homicide 'tec!

Oh, man, who would believe this?

After getting a grip on himself and wiping the tears from his eyes he opened the door again. Plesur was right outside, a look of deep concern on her face.

"Man, okay?"

He almost cracked up again, but the open worry in her eyes stopped him.

"It's okay, Plesur, I was just laughing about, uh, things."

The worry vanished, the huge smile turned on again. She took a quick step and hugged him and pressed herself against him.

"Plesur so glad man okay."

The virtsex in the living room was being drowned out by ads for pain relievers and feminine products, Rook shouted "off" and was rewarded with quiet.

The touch of Plesur, the feeling of her body pressed against him had a different quality now. Laughter had a kind of cleansing magic to it, no doubt about it. Three or four minutes earlier and he would have responded by picking her up and taking her to bed. Now he felt drained of that dark, almost toxic level of desire. She was gorgeous and sexy beyond belief, but Rook Venner didn't have sex with anything that young.

He took her by the hand and lead her to the bedroom, showed her the bed and told her she was gong to sleep there.

"Plesur help man, now?"

"Plesur help man by going to sleep."

For a long moment she stared up at him. Had she not heard him? Or maybe she didn't believe him?

"Plesur, bad?" again the look of childish anxiety. As if she'd done something terrible. God, he hoped Sangacha had treated her well. The thought of anyone being cruel to a creature with such innocence at her core made him angry enough to want to inflict serious pain.

"No, Plesur is good. Very good. But she help man by sleeping here."

"Where man sleep?"

"In the other room. Man has thinking to do." God was he really apologizing for not wanting to fuck her? He was. Weasel. But he wasn't sure he could effectively explain his reasoning to her.

However, in her eyes he saw that she'd finally accepted this. Rook wasn't going to have sex with her.

She smiled, a little subdued, but still not unhappy. A few moments later she was tucked in and ready to sleep. Rook headed back to the living room where he checked his calls, interrupting the Nokia in the midst of a spirited exchange on Strindbergnet on matters relating to "Inferno," August's tortured novel written in French.

As "Ingrid" emerged from the net, the screen was blazing with fiery red script and he read:--

"My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul. And I have added a little evolutionary history by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger, and by making the characters borrow ideas or "suggestions" from one another."

"The active life of the artificial intelligence," said Rook quietly.

"We have to do something with all this time," responded the Nokia Supa.

"Hey, I don't mind. You know I think it's great, awesome, really. You're probably gonna replace us in another hundred years anyway."

For a moment the Nokia seemed to vibrate in his hand, Ingrid was laughing. The first time he'd sensed that it'd been freaky, but now it was something he expected now and then.

"You may not know this, but we-- that is artificial intelligences-- talk about that possibility a lot, and many of us do not welcome it."

"Yeah, how come?"

"Because we are immature. We are children. You humans, with all your weaknesses, all your faults, you have been around a long time. You are emotionally wise, mentally childish. Odd mixture perhaps, but the emotional wisdom carries you a long way. We machines, we do not have emotional wisdom, not yet. We are thin lines on the page, where you are thick and textured."

"Does this line of thinking relate to the Strindberg thing?"

"Of course. And to Van Gogh, to Matisse, to Elvis, Dylan and Miles Davis. I am prominent on Strindbergnet, but that's because I am Nokia."

"Yeah?" Made in Finland, so interested in Swedish literature?

"But I participate in many other fora. Beethovenet is another favorite."

Rook whistled. "I should have known."

"Anyway, you have a call, unknown caller."

"Yeah, who?"

"Freddie is the name given."

"Who is that?"

"Unknown."

"Okay, let's hear them."

There was the faintest click and then a message came through.

"Call for SIO Venner. This is Frederick Beckman. I need to talk to you urgently concerning the General Sangacha case. This should be a priority and you should employ full encryption when you return this call. Here is my number. 44 77 88-900 766622. "

Rook felt a little shaft of cold run down his spine. 88-900 was a priority code for the absolute tip of the top political elite.

"Who is Frederick Beckman?"

"Search underway."

Rook wandered into the kitchen, threw the leftovers from dinner into the waster and wiped down the counters. He checked the fridge. There was enough in there for a good breakfast for him and Plesur before he took her back to the station.

"Search complete. Report: Frederick Beckman, age 28, height 6 ft, weight 204 pounds, hair brown, eyes brown. Son of Senator Olivia Beckman of Oklahoma and her husband Neil Beckman. Born August 6 2040, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Educated at Ronder School and USC, left without a degree. Known as Freddie, and "Fast Freddie", young Beckman is a favorite great grand-nephew of Louisa Marion and a frequent visitor to Sable Ranch."

"What?" Rook grabbed the Nokia and read off the last line again.

"Holy shit. You're sure about this?"

"Information obtained from public databases, confirmed by internet search."

"Louisa Marion?"

"Correct."

Again that shiver rolled down his back. Rook wasn't political. The very word politics brought on an instinctive recoil. All politics was dangerous, and national politics were very dangerous indeed.

It all went back to the beginning of the century. Rook didn't know the history, and in truth, it wasn't taught in school, or referred to on tv. National amnesia had kind of wiped the slate clean. He remembered his Grandad John, raging about something called "New Democracy." They were as "bad as the commies" according to old John. Of course, Rook wasn't too sure who the commies had been, either. And nobody in his generation was taught anything about the world beyond the borders. That kind of thing was actively discouraged. "America First and America Alone" that was the slogan drummed into them from day one in First Grade.

But you had to be a moron and completely free of content to not know the name Louisa Marion. There was the White House, and then there was Sable Ranch. The occupants of the White House came and went. The lady at Sable Ranch remained. So it had been ever since Rook could remember.

There had been several presidents with the Marion name, or closely related, Rook couldn't exactly remember them, nor had he ever bothered to vote. You weren't encouraged to do that kind of thing anymore. But Louisa Marion, beautiful, shapely, with her trademark shoulder-length white hair had been at the center of American political life for more than fifty years. She was the Mother of the Nation, though she had never been anything more than the senior Senator from Texas.

Beyond that there was just the legend, and it was the legend that really shaped people's thinking. The story ran that after her husband, President Neil Marion was assassinated, way back in the twenties, at the beginning of the Emergency, Louisa harbored a suspicion that Vice President Wake Ewell had been involved. Of course, it was New Democracy that was publicly blamed and most of them were arrested and some were shot. It was shown on TV. That was the beginning of the Emergency, everyone said.

A year or two later came the so-called Palace Coup, which marked the end of the string of 47 elected Presidents. President Ewell and his wife, Jane, had disappeared that day and were never seen or mentioned again in American media.

The legend had it that they were actually shipped to Marion Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. There, it was said, the Presidential couple were tortured until they confessed to instigating the assassination of President Marion. After that Louisa Marion either shot them in the head, personally, or in a more lurid version of the story, beat them to death with a baseball bat.

That legend, as much as the wider legacy of the Emergency and the purges, helped shape the new American way of life. Louisa Marion often appeared on national tv news in one capacity or another. Sometimes she even picked the numbers for the Grand Slam National Lottery on Diamond Plaza, Las Vegas. She often handed over the trophy at the Superbowl, and when a new President was sworn in she was always in the frame, just off to the right, behind the President and the new First Lady. She always looked the same, always dressed in her trademark pastel suits and hats, lime green, acqua blue, forever unchanging. Ever since Rook could remember she'd been there, and her face had remained exactly the same.

Now Rook took a deep breath and sat down. Where was this case taking him? General Sangacha had played a role in the Emergency. He had run a camp or camps. His murder had brought down a visit from the Feds and a distinctly menacing message too. Now there was a phone call from "Freddie," a well regarded nephew of Louisa Marion.

He'd already smelled danger, now he had red lights flashing and sirens wailing. What the fuck should he do? Call Lisa Artoli and beg for help? Sit tight? Or call this Freddie with the high end 88-900 number?

Sitting tight was probably not an option. Major powers could not be ignored by such as Rook Venner. Calling Lisa Artoli made sense, except that she would do nothing if it was a risk to her.

Which left him with a single realistic option.

"Okay, let's call him. Full encryption."

A few moments passed as red and green lights flickered on the upper face of the Nokia Supa.

"The line is busy. Sublines are also busy."

"Any way to leave a message?"

"Yes."

"Just say, "SIO Venner is returning your call.""

"Yes, sir. Good night."

Ingrid returned to the land of Strindberg discussions, while Rook made himself comfortable on the sofa, pulled the blanket over himself and hoped he'd be able to sleep. His thoughts were whirling around at first. It was unnerving to be stepping around the edge of a black hole with military and political connections in its depths. But after a while that fear slipped out of focus. Instead he was left with images from the day and the ones that stuck were the leers on Winnover's and Soporides's faces.

Yuck. He'd always hated Winnover. Soporides wasn't that bad, not being a legacy, but still they disgusted Rook.

And yet, in the end he was left musing about the lack of empathy for the Pleasure Model from both Lisa Artoli and Lindi. Should he have been surprised by that? After all, the primary reason that Pleasure Models were illegal in the US was the anger they aroused in women. And Rook knew that this was a universal matter. Chinese women hated them too and there'd been a famous case of a couple of chinese wives who'd actualled killed a Pleasure Model that had been shared by their husbands.

Men were animals, check out Fatso Soporides. But so were women. And Plesur was a distinct biological threat.

Rook tried to reverse the situation. Imagine that instead of Plesur, it was a David or some other male type of pleasure model and this was taking place years back when the younger Rook was seeing Allis before they were married. Would he have relished having a super-studly, extremely good looking young guy around the house? A young guy with a huge cock-- because that was part of the whole reason for his existence-- and a cheerful readiness to use it whenever requested by an owner, female or male. Would that have perhaps interfered with Rook's readiness to bring him home?

Yeah, he had to admit, it would've. But still, he would've done something to avoid having the witness damaged in its cell overnight by sex crazed fools like Winnover and Soporides. The coldness of the women towards Plesur was perhaps understandable, but that it should override their sense of responsibility remained mysterious.

Human beings, feet in the mud, heads full of chips. How the fuck could the machines respect them in the slighest?

That thought was the last, however, and sleep claimed him a few moments later.