Hiro was gone, off the air entirely. I’d seen him at the debriefing that afternoon; as usual, our eyes didn’t meet. It didn’t matter. I knew he’d be back. It had been business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it’s never easy. It’s hard when you feel the Fear for the first time, but I’ve always known it was there, waiting. They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer. We’ll probably never know what she met out there; we’ll probably never know the details of the transaction. We might be sorry if we ever found out. We aren’t the only hinterland tribe, the only ones looking for scraps.