A gargoyle lurked behind every tree. Lithe and noiseless they bounded from trunk to trunk, their scales green and slimy in the gentle mist of rain. They hunted him like a weakened deer, a slow and crippled stag that stumbled through the underbrush with the strong ones, his protectors. But even the strong ones could not hold the gargoyles at bay.

         In time his mind was infiltrated, his thoughts contaminated. Eventually Zakariah was given up a sacrifice to pagan gargoyle gods, and carried aloft by screaming dragons up above the trees to the great black anvils where the dragons danced and threw forks of lightning at their foes. His body rocked and trembled with the sounds of warfare.

         His body heaved and emptied itself, and gargoyles rushed to bring him water and red medicine, bickering and bantering with shrill whoops of malice. They touched him with scaly fingers and iced his temples. A cease-fire held for many days and whispered voices promised life and death, alternately, and each seemed attractive in its turn. Finally Zakariah found refuge in the music, a pleasant hum of music, white music, changeless, still.

         In gargoyle heaven they ministered with sheets of white music and cotton towels, their white wings beating time like a pendulum behind his eyes. They forced gargoyle ichors down his gullet and flashed sparks from their eyes into his brain. A silver snake crawled up from the floor and stabbed his arm with pain, drank dry his rich red blood and left him parched and withered like an Egyptian mummy entombed in still white music.

         He slept fitfully and woke again to white gargoyles with kind faces and red medicine. They led him from eyrie cave to eyrie cave and washed his body and shaved his face and dried him and dressed him. They laid him down in ashes and dust and asked senseless questions about life before death, about day before dawn. He slept again and woke to a world darker and more ominous. He asked for red medicine and was denied. His viscera contracted at the thought. Two white gargoyles shaved his skull. He prepared to die. Perhaps it would be easier this time.

         He remembered his mother dying in this place. He remembered the same white sheets and antiseptic smell, the same clatter of hard heels on hard floors and rolling carts carrying poison. She had died of a heart broken and a soul crushed by life—by foul circumstance and bad karma.

         His father and mother had owned an international import‑export business in the far-east. They were commodity traders, gamblers in expensive suits, a team unmatched in the annals of Chinese corporate finance. In days of renown they built empires of paper currency and lost them again with a bad roll of the dice, a bad technical trade, a change in the weather. Zakariah remembered the strange language of risk and reward—futures and warrants, call options and arbitrage, hedging caps and butterfly spreads; he remembered both the high‑flying parties of celebration and the long dark nights of drunken solace. He remembered both victory and defeat through a young child's eyes.

         In the end, weary and desperate and confused by alcohol, his father lost a forearm to an American conglomerate that he couldn't satisfy, and, fearing for his life, took his baby daughter from her cradle and disappeared into the night. The import‑export company collapsed like crumpled origami and blew away in a cruel wind, leaving behind a single mother and her young son bankrupt and helpless. Zakariah never forgave his father, as he watched his mother slip into psychosis and the careless abuse of prescription drugs. She starved herself to death after years of suffering. Her personality caved in on itself. Emaciated and bewildered, she starved to death convinced that she was overweight and undesirable, convinced that her baby had been sold into slavery to pay for her mistakes, convinced that life itself was not worth the effort.

         In gargoyle heaven she had her reward. In gargoyle heaven all sins were revealed.

         Zakariah woke up on Main Street as if from dream to dream, without warning and without standard preparation. He tensed with alarm as V-space suddenly teemed around him, a million minds in motion. He wondered if he should try to move, if he should dash for escape while he had the chance, if he should jump downlevel and disappear like a rabbit in a hole. Out of habit he made no ripple.

         The street before him pulsed with color and mad rhythm. Human vitality sparked like a kaleidoscope, a random dance of pure thought. V-space was a place where no gargoyle could lay claim. He was home again.

         Are you getting a signal?

         Yes, he made it. Be quiet!

         I don't have it. I can't scan a thing.

         He's the best, doctor. He's invisible. Now finish your job and get out of my brain!

         Zakariah waited with uncommon patience. He tested the pulse of greysuits going by and measured his trajectory to the nearest conduit. He knew he could give the gargoyles the slip Sublevel, but once he flinched he would be committed to the full program. He had no idea how tight the gargoyle beam might be. He might have but nanoseconds to escape their tracers. Once free and stable, he would flip the chessboard and put a feedback trace on them, try to locate their base system and schematics. It was a simple gaming routine, now played for bigger stakes than ever. Somewhere his body was being held hostage.

         No time like no time, he considered, and dove for safety. In a blur of speed he locked onto the conduit and slid downlevel like an electric eel in oil. His first order of priority was a private system check to scrutinize his new wetware. He realized as soon as he began his dive that he had been completely rewired. The response time was impeccable, flexibility optimum, electronics cool and stable—hard, solid, his use of energy a mere drop in a vast ocean of potentiality, uplevel hardware for sure, incredibly expensive. Not a good sign, he noted.

         Safe in the conduit and down several levels without a single tracer online, Zakariah took a moment to inspect his new avatar. Feminine hands with long, silver nails, breasts hanging loose like softballs in front of him, hips flaring out like a lampshade. Holy ghost, he was a woman!

         At Sublevel Zero he kicked off into the market square to test his new persona, reveling in the sheer beauty of his system logistics. Interference, drag and feedback were all immeasurable. Background harmonics were squeaky clean, like ice, like solid superconductors. Mental awareness seemed vast and powerful, superhuman. He wondered if he was legal.

         Zakariah approached a coterie of hawkers on the boulevard. One of them noticed him with a wide eye and whispered, "Regent," to the gang. They scuttled away in different directions.

         "Out slummin', Ma'am?" said a portly hawker off to his right, wearing a leather cap and a velvet leisure jacket. "For a hundred I'll escort you down the lane," he offered with an elbow out graciously. "For five I'll take you to the moon," he whispered as he got closer.

         "Is this fellow bothering you, Ma'am?" said one of two greysuits that appeared out of nowhere.

         "No," Zakariah said.

         The hawker backrolled it to the curb.

         "Do you need any aid finding a conduit?" asked the other greysuit, checking his wrist monitor. "You know we must lock on all regents sublevel," he added apologetically.

         "Of course," Zakariah stammered, feeling a strange sultry voice slip through his lips. "I'll take this conduit here. Sorry to trouble you." He stepped into a zoomtube and keyed a slow and stately climb upward.

         On Main Street, Zakariah activated the nearest subterminal. His feed was locked, classified uplevel Prime, so he checked the background harmonics all the way down to the core until he found the password. His situation seemed utterly ridiculous, impossible. If he was clean, if he was a regent, then the world was his oyster.

         There had to be a catch, a glitch in the screenplay. He tossed in the password and found his pearl. Helena Sharp, white Caucasian, employed by the Eternal Research Institute, unmarried, five ten, one hundred and forty pounds. Eighty-seven years old.

         Zakariah shuddered with disbelief and magnified the holovid. Blue eyes, bouncy brown hair, slender nose, taut cheeks—she looked perhaps forty years tops.

         He grabbed his body. He checked muscle tone in his arms and legs, squeezed his buttocks. Only an Eternal could be so well kept. He was in too deep, he had gone too far. He had entered a political and ethical minefield by impersonating a public figure. He had been set up for a fall.

         He squeezed his breasts and held them up to view.

         "Who are they trying to kid with this babe?" he asked himself out loud.

         He felt the echo of a system monitor sucking his background code, a watcher, a gargoyle, almost subliminal. He lost it immediately, but he knew he was running out of time.

         He checked some financial information on Regent Sharp and came up with a bonus. She was rich beyond calculation—property, investments, a salary that rivaled the gross national product of a whole directorate. She owned several small corporations and controlled several more; she had power, influence—her time was chiseled out to underlings at great expense. What an act, what a life! Was Zakariah now required to hold it all together, to save the ivory palace from crashing down? He wondered how far he could get without a physical appearance.

         "Is this some sort of psycho‑cerebral stim game?" he asked the approaching watcher, and the transmission ended abruptly.

         A young nurse brought a tray of food on an antiseptic white tray. Her blonde bangs were cut in a razor sharp line along her eyebrows.

         "Any more red medicine?" he asked hopefully.

         "Are you in pain, Sir?" She surveyed his head closely.

         Zakariah fingered the bandages wrapped above his ears. "No. Do you know who I am?"

         "You're the new runner," the nurse stated by rote. "You're supposed to be the best," she added doubtfully.

         "Is this the ERI?"

         The nurse eyed him askance. She shook her head with playful drama and sighed.

         Zakariah tested dry, broken lips with his tongue.

         "Okay," he drawled. "How long since my surgery?"

         "Eight days," she answered coolly, "...Sir."

         Zakariah winced. Such a long recovery to beta state indicated deep modifications and a corporate price tag he could not possibly afford. "Have I done anything to offend you?" he asked.

         "You called me a gargoyle," she said with false petulance.

         "I'm sorry." Zakariah quirked his lips in apology. "You're an angel of mercy and lovely to behold. I'm sane now, okay?"

         The nurse grinned at his performance. "If you say so."

         "Is this all I get to eat?" A glass of orange juice, a plastic cup of red jam and two pieces of toast stared up at him.

         "I can make you something else." Her smile seemed hopeful, a shapely pink pillow on a pale background.

         "Great. Pancakes and sausage?"

         "Really?"

         "Sure. And let the Viceroy know the new runner's ready for action."

         The nurse's eyes widened with interest.

         Zakariah flashed a candid smile. "So tell me," he added, "before you go, where do they keep all the Eternals?"

         The nurse stiffened. "I am Eternal, Sir."

         "You are?"

         "Yes. I work for the Institute."

         Zakariah stared, momentarily nonplussed, considering the obvious. "Great. Good. Never mind. You can call me Zakariah. I'm not really a sir."

         "You can call me Marjorie, Sir. I'll be back with your breakfast."

         It took two more days to get an appointment with the Viceroy. In the meantime the medics wouldn't let Zakariah anywhere near V-space. He was all wired up with no place to dance, and he ached for Main Street like a bandit.

         His diet improved considerably, and he resumed his daily exercise regimen. His strength returned. Marjorie took the bandages off his head and hung a brand new V-net plug on his earring like a trophy. It itched there waiting for a chance to run.

         An armed escort of three men took Zakariah from the medical building by electric car through a parkland of grass and trees and winding causeways. He saw a few people strolling leisurely and noticed a schoolyard full of kids at play. The guided tour through Shangri-la, Zakariah thought to himself with the cool cynicism of survival. He shivered with anxiety.

         Outside the ERI office tower, a group of protestors marched along the sidewalk with colorful flags and posters—a young crowd, nouveau riche, representing a burgeoning and verbal middle class. A banner read: "Blood for Everyone!" Another small placard said: "No Blood for Guns." His escort took him past the disturbance to a quiet side door. Zakariah carefully noted the entry protocol, a simple card scanner, a weak and outdated system.

         They took an elevator up to the penthouse. The guard at the top, a monolith in a blue security uniform, pointed down the hall with casual ease. "Only door on the right, Sir. I'll be here when you return."

         Zakariah sauntered away, instinctively checking for escape routes, air ducts, skylights. He knocked on the door.

         "Come in, Mr. Davis."

         Zakariah stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

         A woman looked up from the reception desk and stared at him appraisingly.

         Zakariah gaped in alarm. Helena Sharp, unmarried white Caucasian, five ten, one hundred and forty pounds.

         Years of training prevented a panic reaction. His heartbeat remained steady, but he knew he had crossed over into another realm. "I'm here to see the Viceroy," he stated calmly.

         "Hips flared out like a lampshade, huh?" Helena Sharp asked accusingly. She got up and walked from behind her desk. She was wearing a black business skirtsuit with white ruffled blouse, skin‑tone hose and black pumps. She sat on her desk and crossed her legs.

         Zakariah grimaced. His very thoughts had been monitored. Go with the flow, he told himself. Store all data.

         "I may have exaggerated somewhat," he offered. "I was under a bit of pressure at the time."

         Helena nodded. "You performed wonderfully under the circumstances. You eluded all tracers, cracked my encryption in seconds, accessed all my private financial files and bank records. I think you could have cleared me out in a matter of minutes if I hadn't pulled the plug."

         "I was being very cautious," Zakariah said, unsure of his footing.

         "Indeed?"

         "I didn't know it was a game."

         "It wasn't."

         Zakariah clamped his mouth shut.

         "I'm sorry. I know this is a bit difficult for you," Helena began.

         "I'm here to see the Viceroy," Zakariah interrupted.

         "Mr. Davis, please sit down." Helena gestured with her palm to an easy chair beside her desk. "I am the Viceroy."

         She took his arm and pointed him toward the chair. She poured him a glass of nutrient water from a carafe on her desk and handed it to him as he sat looking stunned.

         "I know you're already considering the ramifications of all this. You're very fast," she said. When he didn't respond she walked behind her desk and poured herself a glass of water. She took a sip, stared at Zakariah over the rim, and chewed on her lip thoughtfully.

         She leaned forward with both palms flat on the desktop, safe behind her barrier of polished teak. "I'm not Eternal," she said. "I wish I was. Soon I will be, if all goes well."

         Zakariah sat quietly recording data, piecing it all together.

         "I undergo chemical rejuve regularly. I take Eternal blood once a week. I really am eighty‑seven years old." She paused, allowing Zakariah more time to think.

         "When you squeezed my breasts, I felt it," she said finally.

         Zakariah nodded. "New technology."

         "Synchronous wetware."

         "It had to happen."

         "Do you want it all at once, Mr. Davis?"

         Zakariah focused his eyes on her face. "Call me Zakariah."

         "Thank you. Call me Helena."

         Zakariah took a long drink of nutrient water.

         "What's the run?" he asked.

         "We're going offplanet to the Source. You and I. Together."

         Zakariah nodded and smiled. "You got yourself a runner."

         "Just like that?"

         "I assume you have some guidance on the target."

         "Not a lot. The communications interface may be foreign, perhaps alien. Your special talents will be..." She paused. "...useful."

         Zakariah grinned at her discomfort, exhilarated by the new challenge. "So you want me to hack heaven and bring you back the treasure."

         "You will be well compensated, of course."

         "I don't want your money."

         "I know what you want, Zakariah. And I can't promise it to you." Helena dropped her eyes, not daring to share his personal pain or her own ambition. "If we cooperate, we might have a slim chance of success," she offered, finally meeting his solemn gaze.

         Zakariah pointed a forefinger at her. "You play straight with me. You hold nothing back. I catch you once in a compromise and you're dirty."

         Helena eyed the runner thoughtfully. "Fine," she said. "We have a deal." She stepped from behind her desk and offered her palm up, fingers outstretched.

         Zakariah rose to his feet and matched her hand as in a traditional V-net contract. Her skin felt sweaty, anxious. Zakariah wondered if she could take the pressure.

         "Well, you seem quite healthy, Helena," Dr. Robert Mundazo offered from behind his forest‑green clipboard. His head was shaved, his hands sterile, his white lab coat clean and pressed. "Some indications of chronic stress, some weight gain in the upper body—nothing really to write home about. However, you do seem to be exhibiting an unusual pattern of brainwave activity in the frontal and temporal lobes, no doubt from the extensive rewiring you've recently undergone."

         "Could this be debilitating in any way?" Helena asked the doctor, her Vice-Chairman and good friend of many years. She felt uncomfortable in her clothes again after being probed and measured by cold instruments. She preferred to dress slowly in front of a full‑length mirror and check each layer for proper fit, not throw her clothes on hastily while leaning against a chair in a drafty cubicle.

         He shrugged. "Heaven only knows, Helena. We didn't have this case study in medical school. For what it's worth, your partner exhibits much the same symptoms, along with elevated electrical activity throughout the cerebellum. His corpus callosum looks like a six‑lane freeway."

         Helena smiled. "He's a special case."

         "And how do you feel about him emotionally?"

         "Emotionally?"

         "Sharing your thoughts, sharing your intimate secrets, that sort of thing." Robert Mundazo's pen poised over his clipboard. His eyes stayed downcast.

         "Are you asking if I'm in love?"

         Dr. Mundazo looked up, tilted his head slightly to the right. "Given your history in the area, I suppose that question is perhaps appropriate, but I was thinking more along the lines of medical and psychological observation."

         "What about my history in the area?"

         Dr. Mundazo grimaced slightly. "Helena, you're a very attractive and desirable woman. Because you look so young, you seem to be followed perpetually by prospective suitors. However, we both know you don't keep male friends for very long."

         "Only until their ingrained notions of female subservience ruin the relationship," Helena declared.

         "Exactly. And in this case?"

         Helena stopped short, considering Zakariah in a new and awkward light. "I think Mr. Davis regards me as an equal, if not an employer. We're not sharing secrets together, Robert, we're working."

         "You will be careful, of course."

         "Are you studying to be a shrink at night school, Doctor?" Helena offered an impish smile as a token of peace.

         Dr. Mundazo responded in kind, putting on a comical air of sarcasm. "We have to be so well‑rounded these days; the holistic approach is in vogue again." He sighed theatrically. "It's so difficult to keep up with the trends in medical fashion."

         "Yes, well, I don't think I'm able to fall in love at this point, Robert. I've had to fight for too long in this man's world to get where I am now. I'm certainly not going to throw it all away like some lovesick coquette. Just put a checkmark beside frigid old maid and let's get on with the interview."

         "Any feelings of nausea, weightlessness, or stomach trouble?" he read from his clipboard with dutiful decorum.

         "Not in real life, but I've certainly had some troubles with my V-net presence."

         "Oh?" The doctor's pen stood poised again.

         "Flying with Zakariah is like riding a roller coaster. One is filled with dread and promise at the same time."

         "Do any of these ill effects continue after you unplug?"

         Helena rotated her eyes up, thinking. Her button‑up collar felt uncomfortable at her neck and her bra strap pressed awkwardly into her back. She wondered if she had twisted it while dressing. "No, I don't believe so. It's sometimes exhilarating afterwards. Nothing I can't handle."

         "How much can you handle, Helena?"

         "A lot." Their eyes met and held, steely and uncompromising.

         "I must caution you professionally, as a physician and friend."

         "Fine."

         Robert Mundazo dropped his clipboard to his side. "The side effects of this new synchronous wetware could be significant. I would like to keep you under close observation. As you know, I am on record as being against the whole procedure. Well, the surgeons have come and done their white magic, and now gone back to their dolphins and baboons. I am left to shoulder the responsibility for a human guinea pig, and I don't like it."

         "I'm sorry, Robert," Helena said, suddenly meek and humble. "I will cooperate fully."

         "Thank you."

         "You understand that this procedure was necessary for my career and for the people of Earth. It's not because my parents are dead or my womb is barren or my apartment is fourth from the corner."

         "I can see that your motivation remains quite strong. Motivation has never been your weak suit in the card game of life."

         "Do you think I am in danger of losing my identity or damning my eternal soul, doctor?"

         "Is that what you worry about?"

         "Yes."

         Dr. Mundazo arched his eyebrows in surprise, then squinted at her in study. He chose his words carefully. "I would think a very strong personality could infiltrate your brain to the degree necessary to alter behavior patterns. You could be controlled without your knowledge or approval, as we are all controlled by various external media and environmental stimulus around us. But inside us, we like to think we have a sanctuary, a private place where no one but God can intervene. Modern technology has taken that away from us. I'm not sure how we as a race will react when every thought and every sin is exposed to public view."

         Helena's blue eyes shone with resolve like hard diamonds. "Unfortunately, we can't turn technology around, Robert. If we delay, we are run over and flattened underfoot. If we resist, we are branded heretics and burned at the metaphorical stake. If we surf the wave, if we ride the crest, at least we're still in the game."