One of Us by Michael Marshall Smith Page A

the same old same old, operating on more or less similar rules.
    Humans are like that. Very literal-minded.
    I reminded myself, as usual, that I ought to visit my grandparents soon. Now was not the time. It seldom was. They retired to the Net six years ago, about two weeks ahead of the Grim Reaper. Bought themselves a scrabby virtual farm way out on the edge of Australasia.Net just before they died, and had themselves transferred. Unfortunately they were ripped off by their Realtor, and the resolution is fucked. It's just polygons and big blocks of color out where they live, and voices sound like they're coming through speakers that had an earlier life in a thrash ambient band. I guess I could phone them from out in the real world, but that gives me the creeps: too much like pretending they're still alive. They are—were, whatever—good people, and I'm glad that in some sense I still have access to them, but there are barriers I suspect shouldn't be breached. We still don't know as much about the mind as we think we do, and there's something a little off about them now, as if the rough edges got lost in the translation. Show me a person without a bit of sand in their nature, and I'll show you someone a little creepy.
    I started to lose speed, which meant that traffic was starting to build—people checking their mail and doing the early morning shopping online. The roads still looked empty, but that's because I like it that way and usually set my gear to filter out all cars except those of people I know.
    Deck hates the Net—won't come in unless he has to. Says he doesn't trust mediated experience. I asked him what magazine he got that out of and he admitted it was something an ex-girlfriend used to say. But I quite like it, enjoy the feeling of going places without actually having to get out of the chair, and of there being some other place you can go to in the flick of a switch. Mainly I use it to access people who refuse to do business in the normal way. Quat, for example, who won't make any transaction over a phone. Doesn't trust them, which is a complete pain in the ass when you need something in a hurry.
    As I drove, my mind worked overtime, trying to predict the angles now that I knew more about the guy that Laura had killed. The bottom line was simple: There was even more reason for me to get her experience back into her head and out of mine—like immediately. If there's one thing that really ticks cops off, it's people whacking one of their own. I didn't know how much difference it would make that I hadn't been the one who actually pulled the trigger, but I suspected that if they got hold of me, they'd choose not to get mired in metaphysical complexities.
    On the plus side, my guess was that the murder case wasn't going to be easy to crack, and that for the time being I remained reasonably safe. The cops' only route to me was through Laura, and something told me that her connection to Ray Hammond wasn't one that was going to leap out at them straight off the bat. The loaned memory of his eyes said Hammond was a man who was good at keeping secrets, and that Laura would be one of them. The wild card was the guys in gray who'd come along at the end of the memory. As I'd told Deck, they didn't strike me as cops—and I was even more sure of that now that I knew who Ray Hammond had been. It was partly their reaction at the scene of the crime and partly just something about them. These guys had nothing on me, and so no action was required, but I'd certainly be keeping them in mind.
    It was possible that the cops would roust Stratten for information on his recent clients. Stratten would have no knowledge of my piece of freelancing, but I had to make sure that I behaved in as normal a way as possible, otherwise his brain might start ticking over. In other words, I needed to give him a call and act nice.
    I ran back over it every which way, and always came back to the same conclusion. If we could just lie low for a while,