Lawrence opened the door to the sounds of shouting from the kitchen and something banging on the floor. He dropped his bag and rushed to the source of the chaos, every possible panicked thought crowding his brain.

"Dad!" he called out. "Are you okay?"

The kitchen was a mess. A pot boiled water on the stove above a fallen saucepan. Meat and tomato sauce splattered across the floor, briefly bringing to mind the carnage from the parking garage the previous day. His father flailed around like he was swatting at a bug, his tail lashing around behind him and casting off spatters of what Lawrence initially feared was blood. Dale didn't seem to notice him.

"Hey, dad, are you--?" Lawrence reached out to grab him and steady him.

"Who the hell--!" his father snapped as he swiped at Lawrence with his blunt claws. He wrenched himself out of Lawrence's grip and stared at his hands in horror, as if he just noticed them. He pushed himself back and fell to the floor against the cabinet doors, sitting hard on his tail with a yelp, and began hyperventilating.

Lawrence bit back a curse and rushed to a drawer next to the fridge. He opened it up to reveal a bunch of identical metal tubes that, aside from stickers containing a lot of medical info, resembled markers. He grabbed and uncapped one and rushed back across the kitchen towards his father's twitching body. His footpaws skidded in the still-warm sauce and he almost went headfirst into the edge of the countertop.

The fox caught himself at the last moment and without missing a beat grabbed his father's arm. He rolled up the older man's sleeve and jammed the business end of the tube through his fur and against his skin. A popping sound later, it injected a dose of medication under his skin -- a tiny pellet of hard gel that would dissolve over time, wrapped in a sheath of another drug that was already dissolving and having a calming effect on his old man.

Dale sat and whimpered, eyes staring blindly and twitching like he was in REM sleep. Lawrence gritted his teeth, got his arms under his old man, and carried him into the bathroom to lay him in the tub. He sat on the edge of the dry tub and just watched as the drugs put him into a light doze. He reached out to check his father's pulse -- steady and normal for him -- and he shuffled out to the kitchen to start cleaning up the mess.

Fortunately, there was no blood, just pasta sauce. It looked like his father had had one of his spells while making dinner, which put him into a panic attack, just as Lawrence got home from an already-crazy day. This wasn't the first time this had happened, but it had been a while and the younger fox was certain he hadn't seen one this bad in a while.

Once the kitchen was at least no worse than it had been when he left that morning, he went to check on Dale. His father was still asleep in the tub, breathing normally, pulse relatively steady. Lawrence knew he'd be out for a little while so he proceeded to clean him up, put him to bed in a bathrobe, and tossed his clothes in the laundry.

Dale shuffled out of his bedroom, woozy, about an hour later. Lawrence sat on the couch with his tablet, having a video conversation with Steve and Elizabeth.

"Um, guys, Dad's up. I gotta go," he said, glancing up from the camera. "I'll swing by sometime tomorrow to finish up." He didn't wait for a response before shutting down the chat and folding up the tablet. "How are you feeling?"

"Not great, buddy," Dale said as he slumped down into a chair. "Everything's... everything's a blur. I made a mess, didn't I?"

"Don't worry about that."

"So that's a 'yes.'"

Lawrence sighed. "Yeah, that's a 'yes.' I cleaned it up, we can order takeout, it's not a big deal."

"We just had pizza a night or two ago."

"Yeah, but I don't think either of us is in a mood to cook." The younger fox thought a moment. "Did something happen?"

"Oh, I was..." Dale gestured vaguely. "I was making dinner, and bumped my tail on something, and... and then I forgot why that was there, and my senses... you know all this."

Yeah, you forgot you were a fox, Lawrence thought. And then you didn't recognize me, because you forgot I was supposed to be a fox.

"Is that it? I haven't seen you that bad in a while. Have you had any problems with the medication?"

Dale's ears flicked back. "N-no, everything's fine, I've been taking it like normal."

Lawrence just watched him for a moment after the suspiciously-specific denial.

"Is there something you're not telling me?" he asked, with forced calm.

"I... uh..." He sighed. "Okay, I've skipped a couple of doses."

"What?!?" Lawrence stood up without meaning to. "Why would you do that?"

"Because you're in trouble over this stuff, and I know it's bigger than you're telling me, and... I gave a couple of doses to Dana."

"So why are you skipping doses?"

"Just a couple!" Dale said firmly, as if that somehow made it all right. "I spaced them out over the last couple of days, skipped one yesterday and one today. I didn't want to run out of my supply early and tip you or... or the guys in suits off." He slumped in the chair even more, sighing.

"Dad, you... you didn't have to do that," Lawrence said, rubbing his forehead.

"I had to do something. All this is getting you in trouble, and--"

"And if they find out you gave that drug to someone else to study, you don't think that's going to get us in trouble?"

"I had to do something," Dale repeated, his voice weaker this time.

"Don't you trust me to handle this?"

"Do you even know what you're handling, Lawrence? This isn't a movie. You took off on some sort of adventure a few nights ago and now people are after you. Did you even think about what you're up against? What you're going to have to do to get ahead of this?"

"I thought if I tracked down Dr. Landau..."

"What? He'd have the cure for what's wrong with me? Or tell you about a top-secret vault where you could find it? Did it occur to you that you might have to spend days away from home without warning and you couldn't tell me where you actually were? Did it occur to you that I might realize something was up, and worry?"

Lawrence recoiled at that, his ears laying back. He opened his mouth but no words came to him.

"I love ya," his father continued. "And I don't want to give you any shit over this, but you're playing in dangerous territory. You're dealing with the corps, and you should know how dangerous they can be. You work for one. A good job, high enough up you should understand about what goes on. You can't be this naive, buddy."

Lawrence opened his mouth to protest again, thought better of it, and just sat back down on the couch with ears laid back and tail limply draped over the cushion next to him. He wasn't sure if his father meant that he couldn't afford to be naive, or if he was too smart to be. Both interpretations were valid, he accepted.

"Do you have a plan?" Dale asked.

"I've got part of one. Really bare bones. Twelve percent of a plan."

"Do I want to know what it is?"

"Depends on how plausible you want your deniability."

Dale considered this for a minute. "If you get caught we both get it in the neck anyways. I'd just be a loose end."

"The short version is that NUBio wants me to give up someone I've been working with. I'm going to arrange a meeting where I'm pretending to play along, and I'm going to use that to get in and get what I want from their computers. I'll have backup and set up some sort of distraction, kind of a smash and grab."

"That's really thin, Lawrence."

"Well, like I said, 12% of a plan. I'm stalling for time while I work on the rest."

"You said they're after someone you're working with? Someone from RothPharm?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Oh, too bad. Because if you could somehow get RothPharm to help you, I'd feel a lot better."

"Wouldn't I have to worry about getting caught in the middle?"

"Maybe. But one of the corps is yours. Not yours yours, but you know what I mean."

"Yeah, but what would I have to... oh. Oh. Oh, Dad, you're brilliant."

Dale blinked. "Am I?"

"I need to go make some calls. But I think we can do this. Thanks, dad."

Lawrence got up and ran to his room to start calling people.

"Just make sure to order food before you forget, I can smell the spilled food and I'm starving!" his father called after him.

* * *

Melody looked around the room from a spot off to the side. The walls were lined with monitors, with several more on the ends of mechanical arms extending from the ceiling, and a circular console stood in the middle of the room. The inside of the console was lined with touchscreen panels and the occasional switch or collection of ports. The moving images on the monitors were fuzzy, but they weren't what she was here to see.

A skunk morph stood in an open space in the middle of the central console. He gestured at panels and lights switched on or off with his movements. The monitors on arms clearly moved to his whim as he turned around and watched as many screens as he could at any given moment. The effect was like observing someone conduct an orchestra by remote.

"So what you've explained to me so far is that you're working with some people to get into NUBio's servers to pry some amazing macguffin out of the company, but you haven't explained what it is you specifically need me for," Jex said as he glanced over at the raccoon.

"There are two things. First, I want to know what you know about Chimera, because my ex-boyfriend has been caught up in a scheme and I need to know the weight of the rhino charging at me."

"Okay, then. Chimera's a brilliant hacker with an agenda regarding NUBio. It doesn't seem like your typical vendetta, because it's more like they're parasitically digging choice bits out of them with a scalpel rather than just going in with a chainsaw."

"Ew," Melody said, though she did briefly consider the idea that Chimera was a dude with a lot of resources and not an AI. It seemed to be a lot of trouble for a cover story, though.

"My point is that they could be doing a lot more damage than they are," the skunk continued. "If I didn't know better, I'd think it was someone within the company trying to set up some sort of coup but leave enough intact that it's still worth trying to take over."

"You think Chimera could take down NUBio?"

"On their own? No. But I've seen some of the systems they've hacked and material they've pulled out and shared. They could be completely tanking stock prices and destroying executives and they aren't."

"I'm not saying I think you're right or wrong, but why do you think Chimera isn't someone on the inside?"

"Like I said. They could be destroying executives and they aren't."

"Cute."

"No, I'm not kidding." He turned to face Melody and the monitors on arms around him retracted out of the way. "These people are as petty as anyone else. In this modern age they don't have to face their rivals in person and can end a career by signing a contract. Internal corp wars get vicious to a degree you didn't think people were capable of. And if you've got a hacker who's lower on the totem pole and lashing out at the upper floors and corner offices? Let's just say that I've seen that damage first-hand, and--" Jex cut himself off with a shake of his head.

"Irrelevant, sorry," he said as he continued. "My point is that none of Chimera's leaks or disruption have destroyed or boosted any specific executives over others, at least not to a noteworthy degree. Chimera's hurt the company, but they're careful not to hurt any of the clock-punchers. This is pretty surgical, and I mean that in the sense that there's something they clearly want out of NUBio but want the rest of the company to survive." He looked pretty proud of that metaphor.

She took a moment to process that.

"What was the other thing?" Jex asked.

"What?"

"You said you wanted two things from me."

"Right. The other thing." Melody nervously rubbed her hands together. "Elizabeth and I are working on something to help break into NUBio's systems, and I was wondering if I could get your help. I need to... lemme make sure I'm describing this correctly, one sec..." Melody closed her eyes for a moment and then re-opened them. "We're bringing in a portable drive with some custom programs on it. I need to hide some alternate functions in there, so the drive is running a couple of different programs at once, one of them hidden."

"That's a little vague, but it should be do-able."

"Elizabeth said you're good at that sort of masking. I just wanted to make sure you could do it before I gave you specifics. The base program is meant to upload itself and kind of punch a backdoor access for someone else. But it's supposed to look like a trap to... download files from the remote computer into a special folder."

"But you need it to actually do something else?"

She held up a portable drive and told him what she wanted.

"Ballsy," Jex said.

"Like I said, Liz said you'd be good at hiding that in here. Also, she suggested that even if they knew what to look for, which they might not, having something embedded by a different coder might help disguise it."

"It might be a useful smokescreen, I'll admit," the skunk conceded with a thoughtful tail swish. "Okay, send it over, I'll see what I can do."

Melody nodded and sent the contents of the drive. Her HUD counted out the transfer percentage. Some part of her expected some long, slow, uploading process but it was as simple as attaching something to an email. Were this not still part of preparation for a heist, it would have seemed anticlimactic.

A screen extended from the wall and Jex looked it over.

"Okay, got it. Are we looking at any sort of time crunch on this?" he asked.

"We've got a little bit of time, but sooner is better. They're supposed to be giving us time to think over our options, and Lawrence is waiting on the files to be finished. He doesn't have to know he's waiting for someone else to work on this, too."

"Well, whatever's going on between you and this 'Lawrence,' I'm definitely staying out of that. I'm just doing a job, and you're gonna owe me one way or another."

"This will work better if he doesn't see it coming," she said defensively, rubbing her hands together again and glancing off to the side. "But that's fine, we'll work this out. Just wait until you find out what I do with it and then we'll see exactly what I owe you," she added, allowing herself a wry little smile as she mentally looked ahead to the end goal.

"Okay then..." The tilt of his ears suggested that intrigued him. "Well, I'll be in touch. You should go, I've got work to do," Jex said awkwardly as he returned to his screens.

Melody nodded before breaking the connection and lifting the VR helmet off of her head with a little static 'zap.' She shook her head and smoothed down her headfur with her fingers. She looked around the living room as unplugged the helmet and portable drive from the laptop she used to contact Jex. She sighed and leaned back against the back of the couch, breathing deeply and fighting off the creeping dread of what was to come.

* * *

Five days later...

Lawrence lightly rubbed his arm as he sat down in front of Dr. Banks' desk. He stared at his palm, thoughts racing through his head as he fidgeted with his fingers.

"Lawrence?"

"Yes?" he asked as he looked up.

"Are you with us?" Melody asked.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm... sorry. Just, y'know, it's almost here."

He looked around the room. Dorothy leaned against the filing cabinet in the corner. Melody and Elizabeth sat next to him in front of the desk. The vixen had a laptop open on her lap with Steve's face on a little window in the corner as he mostly just listened in.

Behind the desk sat Neal, in the cougar coloring he used for the 'Marc Lockley' alias. On said desk, a small holographic display projected a foot-tall image of Chimera's now-familiar avatar, with the subtle blend of canine and feline features. A steady humming from the other room, somehow reminding Lawrence of a dishwasher, indicated the machine building a skeleton from scratch for a body yet to be made.

"Well, keep picking at that and you'll go blind," Dr. Banks said with a nod towards Lawrence's hand before turning to the others.

"You know, we don't have to do this here and you don't have to be here for it," Neal told her. "We've said before that you can keep your distance for your own safety."

"If this works, it's only a matter of time before it gets back to me," she said, sparing a glance at Chimera's hologram, who looked back at her and nodded. Lawrence still wasn't sure exactly how the digital being knew where she was standing, given the lack of a camera attached to the display.

"But if it works, it could change everything, and NUBio won't be able to come after us," Lawrence said.

"Well, let's make sure it works, then. So where are we at?" the doctor asked.

"NUBio is getting antsy," Neal said. "They know at this point that Larry is stalling." He ignored Lawrence's glare and continued. "But they expected him to, so they're not as twitchy as they could be. They might suspect something is up with me, so he's going to vanish for a couple of days and then I'm going to 'capture' him and drag him in to get on their good side. I'll use Melody as bait so I have an excuse to bring them both inside."

Melody simply nodded at that.

"Lawrence will have this," Elizabeth said, producing a thumb drive and handing it over. "He can use it as leverage. On the surface, the software looks like it's meant to seek out and highlight some files so Chimera can swoop in and grab them. But then he pulls off the metaphorical rubber mask to reveal it's actually a trap, meant to lure in and trap Chimera -- or at least enough of his 'substance,' I'm not entirely sure on how that works, no offense. This is all new to me and Steve."

"No offense, I know it's an adjustment," Chimera said with an understanding nod. "If it were up to me we'd leave you out for your own safety, but Melody pointed out that there's no good way to fake a trap for something you don't know exists."

"She's not wrong," Elizabeth said with a nod. "But either way, yeah. The software on the drive is 'actually' a trap meant to lure you in and drag you onto a server and keep you there."

"So what is it, really?" Dorothy asked.

"It opens a path to get Chimera into the system where he can romp around in their files to his heart's content. Melody will have a copy as well for good measure if something happens to Lawrence's drive."

"Now, part of where Larry comes in is that I bring in him and Melody, and we smuggle these in," Neal said as he held up a pair of small dongles. "We cause some sort of distraction and give them some room to run around in the building and plug these into airgapped systems to give Chimera a way in."

"I really wish we could do better than 'some sort of distraction,'" Melody said with an odd tone in her voice.

"Problem is, we don't know how much they still trust me," Neal said. "So we can't clearly predict how they'll deal with me. Speaking of which, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Dr. Banks before we set this up..." The cougar-colored panther turned to her. "OTC."

"Shit," the dark-skinned human said. "Right, NUBio, I didn't even think of that."

"OTC?" Lawrence asked.

"Omega-tralcurium," she said. "Abbreviated OTC, sometimes called 'off the clock.' It's a drug meant to incapacitate anyone with certain enhancements and mods. It doesn't officially exist, but law enforcement agencies and some private security firms carry a small supply for emergencies."

"It's painful as hell. If they get this stuff into me, I'm out of commission for at least a half-hour, probably longer," Neal explained. "It's a NUBio specialty, which is why I mention it. It keys off of an additive that's introduced to the body of anyone who's been modded using their processes. And between their own mods and implants, and then any that are licensed or derived from theirs... it's something like 90 percent of the market."

"Does it affect morphs?" Lawrence asked.

"Only direct Converts. Second-generations like you guys should be fine. Your implants are all Rothpharm and pretty minor, so that should keep you safe."

"But you're screwed, aren't you?" the fox asked.

"Short answer, yes. I'm second-gen, but I've had a lot of work done. But I know that Dr. Banks has had some experience with OTC, and I do know there's a cure--"

"Not a cure," she was quick to say. "I've seen enough traces of it in my clinic that I can create a preventative, but I don't know how useful it'll be in a situation like this."

"Why wouldn't a preventative be useful?" Elizabeth asked.

"OTC affects the nervous system and it hits fast. I mean, at the very least it locks up your body. It could give you seizures. It's like a liquid taser. Once it hits your nervous system, the short-term damage is done, like a bruise. The preventative gives you some protection, but as the term 'preventative' implies you'd have to preemptively take it. You'd have about a one-minute window of protection, and there's no way to lengthen the effect without doing permanent nerve damage."

"One minute, huh?" Neal asked, frowning.

"I'm guessing, of course. Back of the envelope calculation. If it lasts longer than a minute then somewhere up there is a god who loves you very much. And even then, I don't think the Almighty Himself could sustain it longer than two."

"Well, if you could prepare a dose, I'd rather have it than not."

"I'll see what I can do after we wrap this up," the doctor said with a nod.

"While we're all together," Elizabeth chimed in. "I wanted to ask, is there any sort of backup for Chimera if this goes pear-shaped?"

"You can't copy me, I've tried," the hologram said with a shake of his head. "I've done a lot of experimenting with my own code. I can create a digital assistant that can pass as me for a five-minute simple conversation, I can copy and/or offload memories into servers, but I've never been able to actually copy me."

"But that's impossible," Lawrence said with a frown. "My expertise is more hardware than software, but you should be able to duplicate any files that make you up, especially if you can move them."

"I've got my theories, but long story short I've never been able to do it. I've tried, trust me. The best I can do is straddle two different systems at once, which is what I did when I hacked Dr. Landau's hamster wheel. But the moment I separate them, one of them just kind of... rots and falls off into corrupted code."

"Thank you for that mental image," Dr. Banks said.

"I can move from one computer to another just fine. But there's something like a kernel at the metaphorical center of my digital being that I've never been able to copy and I'm understandably reluctant to tinker with. It'd be like doing brain surgery on myself. I'm not even sure it can be tinkered with in the first place and even if it can be I don't think I could do it."

"But didn't someone program you to begin with?" the vixen asked.

"No, I came out of an experiment with vat-grown brains and implants. My consciousness, as I call it for lack of a better term, grew like a pearl around a grain of sand in an oyster. Or like those fish tank crystal things that kids used to play with. Either way, part of me came out of an organic brain and that part somehow got translated into digital consciousness. I don't think anybody, including me, knows exactly how I work."

"Can you..."

"Die?" The hologram shrugged. "Presumably if my consciousness got uploaded into a drive and you airgapped it without me escaping then physically destroyed it, that would work. I know my capabilities well enough to know that it would be damn hard to trap me, but that's what it would take. I mean, yes, technically you could delete my 'core' but it would be impossible to do that without me noticing and countering it in some fashion."

"They tried before, didn't they?" Dr. Banks asked. "NUBio, I mean."

"Once, yeah. This is while I was still figuring myself out. They mistook me for a virus, did what you'd expect and I sort of disguised myself. That was how I became aware of them. After a while I hijacked the software they were using to monitor the hardware I was residing in and used it to smuggle out copies of my memories and knowledge in bits and pieces hidden in monitoring reports. And then..." He paused for a moment.

"This is simultaneously easy and hard to articulate, I'm not just pausing for effect," he said after that moment had passed. "I cut off parts of my mind. The aforementioned memories and knowledge... I deleted those files. Trimmed myself down to my core consciousness and instructions on where to find the copies I'd already snuck out. It was like pulling the SIM card out of a phone, smuggling it somewhere in a container of breath mints or something, and then plugging it into a fresh phone with all of the same apps on the other end."

"But why?" Melody asked.

"Smaller files upload and download faster. They also set off fewer safeguards and alarms. It's tedious and it took a while and it was tremendously unpleasant, but it got the job done."

"How unpleasant are we talking?" Lawrence asked.

"You wake up one day in an empty room with a single door. You're sitting in a chair. You know a name that might be yours. You know how to talk, walk, and read, but no idea of how you came about those skills and you basically don't know anything else. Think 'hit on the head with a bowling ball in a cartoon' amnesia. In your hand is a note with instructions to go through the only door and a map of the maze on the other side. You don't know who wrote the note or what's on the other end of the maze."

"So tremendously unpleasant, got it." Lawrence looked distinctly uncomfortable.

"That's why I've spent pretty much every waking moment since I got out -- which is saying something when you don't sleep and live at a subjectively higher speed than meatspace does -- trying to get my mind into a stable physical body. Living online is tedious and exhausting. And yes, I know, physical bodies aren't all they're cracked up to be, living offline is also tedious and exhausting, and so forth. But y'know what? Even if I was an actual digital deity capable of doing whatever I want online, I'd give all that up for some actual fucking nerve endings."

That sat in silence for a moment.

"So with that in mind," Chimera continued. "Let's go over the plan one more time..."

* * *

Lawrence sat in the back of the autocab. For once, Chimera wasn't driving, for reasons the fox couldn't quite grasp and didn't feel like asking about at the moment. His arm itched, and he rubbed it to keep from scratching it.

"Hey, Chimera, you there?" he asked the inside of the cab.

"Yeah?" came the reply over the speakers.

"Have you worked out yet what you're going to look like when we can get you into your own body?"

"I'm still narrowing it down. I was considering something that looked like my usual avatar, the cat-dog hybrid thing. But Dr. Banks pointed out that it'd be a rotten way to blend in."

"Wouldn't that be hard to make anyways?"

"Let's just say it would take a while to get it work without making it an unholy mutant. Not impossible, but longer than I'd want to wait or tie up her time. If I could somehow pick Landau's brain, that'd help, but I've come to realize that I don't need to come out of the tank as a sparkledog in any case."

"A what?" Lawrence asked, an ear perked.

"Before your time."

"Okay... But you're already working on the body, right?"

"Dr. Banks is already printing the 'universal' bits of my new skeleton while we're tinkering with the DNA profile for the rest. Morphs still run on a human base. There's a lot of bones that are the same size no matter what species you are."

"So have you thought about what you're going to do once you're 'free?'" the fox asked.

"Short-term plan, start living in that safe house you and Neal have been using, keep running Shaw Design Consulting. Conveniently I've carved out enough aliases that I can just slide into one and I've got a business that I can manage over the phone. I'll travel a bit, see things with actual physical eyes, and try not to get addicted to fast food."

"Good luck with that."

"Yeah, so they tell me."

Lawrence nodded and thought for a moment.

"So it's really happening. We're going to go after NUBio, and we're going to win."

"Confidence is nice, but--"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," the fox sighed. "I get this from everyone else. I don't need it from you, too. But I feel like we've got this."

Chimera didn't say anything for about a minute. Without a screen, Lawrence had to imagine Chimera's facial expression and had trouble settling on just one that seemed appropriate. He wasn't sure what that said about him.

"I think people just worry that you're not taking it seriously. I'm pretty sure Melody would have bailed by now if she wasn't already invested in you."

"Me too, actually," the fox sighed, only realizing a moment later he said that out loud. "I mean, she's worried about me, but she shouldn't have to be. I shouldn't have brought her into this, but... well, it would have happened eventually. I couldn't have handled any of this without Tom's help."

"I'll admit, I have trouble getting a clear read on her, and the fact that she doesn't trust me doesn't make it any easier. But I understand I'm not easy to trust." Another momentary pause, which always seemed conspicuous from someone who's established they think faster than most people can and shouldn't need that long to figure out what to say. "She cares about you, but I think that's been pushed as far as it can go."

"I think you're right. Maybe, once this is over, assuming I haven't gotten either or the both of us killed, I should give her some space. What do you think?"

"I'm not the right guy to ask that question," Chimera chuckled.

"I mean, you've studied the human condition, so to speak, right? Interactions, social dynamics. You live on the internet, surely you've done a lot of reading."

"Oh yes, I've done the reading. Message boards, forums, chat logs. Any time two people interact on the internet in a public space I've seen it. I've read the archives of every advice column ever written. I've spent subjective years reading books on the subject of how people relate to each other, all to better pass as normal until I have the experience to do it naturally. And you know what I've learned?"

"That you know nothing?"

"That I know nothing. Yes. I interact with people myself -- even had a few online-only relationships. And that... I mean, that I can manage. But meatspace relationships where people aren't shackled to terminals, where there's pheromones and body language and fewer physical barriers to interaction... well, asking me to gauge that is asking a lifelong vegetarian to cook a steak by hand. I know just enough to know how much I don't know. Sorry, Lawrence."

"Eh, it's fine, it was a long shot." Lawrence paused for a second. "So, online-only relationships, huh?"

"Yeah, I'm not having that conversation with you right now."

"Are we talking VR fucking, or...?"

"Good night, Lawrence. Enjoy your trip home. And make sure to fill out the feedback form you'll get in your email later. That's actually me wanting feedback on your driver."

The fox glanced at the empty front seat and the dashboard where he knew a hard drive contained an AI that was actually managing the vehicle.

"One of your uplift experiments?" he asked.

"Yeah. I'm testing something out. Just let me know how they do, okay?"

"Do you want me to tip the AI, too?"

"Not just yet. But don't rule it out in the future."

Lawrence frowned. "You're messing with me, right?"

No response.

"Right?"