It was only after Laks turned the light back off that he got a good look outside the windshield and saw two people standing in front of him, staring up at him from perhaps ten meters away. He had, during the last minute or so, begun to notice a distinctly foul odor. Since his sense of smell was next to useless, he’d assumed it was but a faint whiff of some incredibly disagreeable stench blowing over the truck stop from a nearby hog lot or chemical factory. Perhaps a tanker full of toxic waste had jackknifed. But he now understood that nothing of the sort was true and that the stink in his nostrils was perceptible only to him. It wasn’t real. It was a signal from the early-warning system that had been wired into his skull in Cyberabad. It was trying to let him know that there was something dangerous about his situation. It had started perhaps one minute ago and gotten rapidly worse until the moment he had switched off the light and seen those two people watching him. A man and a woman, both in their late forties or early fifties, white, fat, informally dressed as you’d expect in a truck stop parking lot in the intermountain West. Absolutely normal and unremarkable, in other words, for this time and place.