Fear...no, not even that, exactly...a certain sadness now that the die was cast. The waiting was the hell of it...He had waited sixty years to resume his old contacts, the wirehead Radical Old of the Republic...Now the wirehead leaders, like him, had worked their way to power in the worlds outside. Sixty years was nothing to a mind on the wires...time meant nothing...fugue states...They still remembered him quite well, their friend, Philip Khouri Constantine...