It was inevitable that the client would pop up again. There had been a meeting scheduled, after all, and she hadn’t come across as easy to rattle. There were only a half dozen people in the world who could perform an extraction, who could pull a person’s mind out of the virtual space of the Swim, even if they didn’t want to go quietly. It meant this potential client’s options were limited. If she’d gotten all the way down the list of experts to Eliza’s name, it meant she was serious.

McKay’s first action, once safely away, was to ask the Overlay to pull all the woman’s salient details, and the AI had come up empty. Contradictions. No presence meant she was likely covered by one of the Big Three intelligence agencies. Anything involving those guys means you’re back under the microscope again. Having US InfoComm breathing down your neck was no fun, and they were the “good guys” of the lot. If they were involved, you could bet that Euro InTech and the Ministry were keeping tabs as well. It had taken her years of staying under the radar to even be able to leave the US without a check-in or a phone call. McKay wasn’t interested in revisiting that state of affairs if she could help it. Back when she still had all her programming licenses intact, she’d been able to afford the lawyers to save herself. That effort had burned through almost every asset she had saved up. Extractions didn’t pay well enough for her to survive a second round of deep investigation.

Spread-eagled on the hotel bed, Overlay open wide to the Swim, soaking up the aircon and catching up with her billing, McKay felt the woman enter the lobby nearly thirty-five stories below.

Found me already? She reached out with just a corner of her mind to tap into and fiddle with the hotel’s guest registry. She shifted the dates here and there to make it seem as if the woman had just missed her. She knew McKay was in town, and there was only one flight a day to San Francisco. It would be foolish simply to wipe herself from the registry entirely. She’d had a number of interesting clients in the past, a few missed connections, but it was rare that anyone pursued her outside normal channels. Big Three, she reminded herself. A simple extraction isn’t worth tangling with the Big Three again. That allure was still there, though . . . working on something important, something game-changing. They just never tell you that changing the game too much is as bad as not changing it at all. Critical success as failure point.

But that reminder lost some of its power every time she said it. Her natural curiosity, her desire to find a way to fix things, to perfect the system, kept bubbling to the fore.

She closed her eyes and slipped a little further into the Swim of digital space. There were limits to what the computers built into her head could do, but she was going for subtlety. This was information gathering, not online warfare. Yet.

The Client stopped at the front desk, and McKay felt the computer systems giving way. Access probed, guided, caressed, and set free again by someone else’s invisible hand. Oh, interesting. The numbers and connections paraded across her vision made the Client seem surrounded by a hard-edged halo of information. You could tell a lot about any given person by the nature and composition of that halo. In the Client’s case, the halo wasn’t hers; she was borrowing it from someone else. People moved through the world adding to and altering the flow of data, like fish in a river, sometimes moving with the current, sometimes against, but every languid flip of the tail or swipe of a credit card made changes. Someone like McKay, intimate with the flows and currents of information invisibly pervading every square inch of atmosphere, couldn’t help but see that halo streak in from elsewhere, wrap her in a protective cocoon, and return to its source. So who are you supposed to be today?

She took a closer look at the client’s borrowed digital plumage. Normally her business depended on discretion. Normally she limited the scope of her checks on potential clients. Normally she didn’t need to know every detail of the whos, whens, and wherefores of the people involved to do the job. Normally, however, clients stuck more or less to the basic procedures that went with any contractual transaction. But if we’re dealing with something bigger than a teenage tech magnate stuck in a virtual porn site, maybe it’s worth the extra effort.

Extractions were often an awkward business. Seven out of ten times the person whose mind got stuck in the Swim was doing something that, while not necessarily illegal, was often socially embarrassing—either for the person directly involved or at least for the people around them. Even people who understood that an extraction was “optional” were still willing to pay up front for the process, just in case something important had been discovered that they wanted to remember. Since she’d set up shop, she had walked away from only two jobs. One paid far too well, and the family involved was in love with media attention. That type of scrutiny would simply bring her back up onto everybody’s radar and there were still people in the Big Three who thought a bullet to the head was the best way to keep her retired.