Home.
    Home was ECIN, Ellendale-Crosby Information Nexus, North Dakota.
    A map showed the amount of illegal hacks made every second in the state.
    It was like the New Years Eve body count (for the corporations) three hundred sixty five days a year.
    Ace loved being home.
    The hacks had increased.

The bed was a madras of pink fungus and Ace lay upon it like a prince upon a pee. Between the reoccurring aches he had flashbacks of Paris, Tokyo and Amsterdam. He found himself possessing such useless knowledge as Orly is the airport in Paris, Naritain in Tokyo and Schiphol in Amsterdam. He knew maglev was the usual techie phrase used to mean a magnetic levitation train, which runs on powerful electrical charges to lift the vehicle above the ground and reduce the gravity to nil. He knew David Eddings had been a celebrated fantasy writer in the twentieth century and had an English degree he...
    Dolly unplugged the black chromed chip from the socket behind Ace's left ear and put it back in her jeans pocket. "You don't need that any more." She threw him a pair of black jeans. Paris label. "Get dressed, cowboy. We're going out."
    Out was work.

Mr. Sin was a skinny man with big teeth and rabbit ears. He had been both born and brought up in a cylindrical fan drum and therefor made pitch whistling noises as he spoke. Ace felt as speaking to a living whistle.
    "We need a fan, Sin," Dolly said.
    The bastárd whistled the signature tune to 60 Minutes. It meant the clock was ticking. Dolly produced a green stack of dead oyabuns and the music stopped. "I have some radio-active isotopes and I need to get rid of these coal-carbon combinations from the maglev. You think you can do it, Sin?"
    Mr. Sin smiled. It made him look even more like a rabbit. "Stand over there, Dolly. On the mark. I'll just turn the fan on." The fan was a huge cylinder which connected direct to Dolly's head. "Geez, Doll. What've you been doing there, had a fire fight? Looks worse then my coffin after Igor's birthday party. It's gonna take some serious blowing. And why all the sand? There's enough sand in there for a whole kindergarten _and_ a cat gang."
    "Okay, Sin, just turn on the fan." The fan worked in milliseconds... Dolly was as lean as a child's butt. Sin had even bothered to blow some free radicals away.
    Next stop was at the bazaar, also known as the super black market. Seven years old children sitting behind stands of softs. Dolly passed the several stands and stepped in front of a skinny, bald kid. An ivory cloth was wrapped around his hip and his upper body was naked. A tattooed pink panther on his left arm and the always reoccurring nameless detective, with the magnifying glass, on the right. The child was hovering a fractal of a yard above the ground lost in some Indian meditation.
    He was a follower of the Pink Panthers, a kindergarten toy and assassination union.
    "Fairy," Dolly said gently. "You're at home, Fairy?" She knocked the child resolutely on the head. A dozen credit sticks stuck out of several sockets on the shaved head. The kid was a hovering software bank looking like pinhead with several software sticks sticking out of his head instead of nails.
    "Dolly?" He sounded surprised.
    "I have a job for Them," said Dolly.
    The chips sticking out of the kid's head began a frenzied blinking. Made him look like a maltreated Christmas tree. "She has a passenger." He pointed Dolly in the face with a dirty index finger. Ace was sitting on Dolly's shoulders.
    "Yes, it's my partner, Fairy."
    "Fairy doesn't like passengers."
    "Okay, Fairy. I have a job for the Pink Panthers."
    "Lalala." Fairy close his ears with his hands and began singing. "I can't hear a word you're saying, lalala."
    "Okay, Ace, beat it. This big baby won't talk to me while you're here." Ace pulled a lever he had found laying around and where teleported to the neon paradigm of the matrix. Pink Panthers... sounded like some day-care center.

It was raining in Istanbul. It was two days past the night when they had spoken to Fairy and they had gotten their hands on what they where aiming for. The Trixie at Time construct. The living relics of the mad clocker personage, raised on a hydrochloric acid solution and digitised onto a circuit board.
    Dolly had played the burglar with Ace periodically resting on her shoulders by the help of the swimswim transmitter which allowed him to teleportable swim between his deck and Dolly's shoulders by pulling a console lever and bypassing some of the chief elements in life, such as St*r Tr*k is only a TV show and the scene where the crew are teleported from the ship to the surface of a planet and back is merely a camera trick and not a real event. Obviously Ace had been playing hooky the day they thought it in school. In the heat of the night Ace's constant swimming had become a too hard burden for Dolly and she had broken both her legs, five ribs and even some of the ribs of the staff guarding the Trixie at Time construct. She was now resting, wrapped into tons of skin-tape in different colors, making an appearance of a fly collided with the rainbow and cocooned by a spider with furiously gaudily colored weave. When Ace had told her to brake a leg before the run, he hadn't expected her to take it literary.
    The leader of the Pink Panthers, Wolf Tendertoy, a pink boy in his early eighths, had said something strange before penetrating his second security guard with a dumdum bullet the form of a grinning pink panther. Teddy-cute. Ace had asked him what he meant but the young criminal had either ignored the question or not herd it being asked. Ace had later found out Teddy-cute was an AI, Arctic Intelligence, owned by the Antarctic colony, Messiah's Cashpool. They thought North Pole was an ancient treasury of God and whoever would live there when the Day arrived would be eternally wealthy. So they spent their lives in ascetic justice, convinced they one day would inherit the wealth of heaven. To bad no one had told them Antarctic was the south pole and not the north.
    Any way, they where in Istanbul and it was raining. Dolly was resting on some pink fungus enjoying a tooth massage. It reminded Ace of Julie and the demonic faces of the chanterelles slowly made their appearing. He plugged in the Trixie at Time construct and jacked in.
    "Time for some tea," the construct exclaimed. A big-nosed plump man in an oversized virtual cylindrical hat began pouring tea into transparent cups outlined by green neon.
    "Hey, Trixie. Remember me, Ace?"
    "Hallo, lad. Care for some tea?" the construct said sweeping by Ace with the speed of light. He always had been a sucker for tea.
    "So you don't remember me, Trix?" Ace had been working some with Trixie back in Siberia. The prison camp during the cold war. The construct hadn't been late to a single alignment, had a digital watch implanted on what would be equivalent to its retinal. That's how it got its nickname, Trixie at Time.
    "Nope," Trixie said emptying the cups at the empty seats. "But you, lad, are welcome any way."
    "I was thinking, Trix." Ace didn't finish his sentence as the construct took on a pondering face, then began slowly walking towards him. Face down as in deep thoughts. Suddenly it leaped feet in the air when noticing Ace's presence. "Geez, lad, you shouldn't scare like that. Didn't notice you entering. I'm Trixie, who are you?"
    "I'm Ace, your friend from Siberia, remember?"
    "Whatever. Care for some tea, Ace?" The construct began its usual procedure of pouring and drinking tea. It was like speaking to Ace's senile grandfather. The phone rang and Ace unplugged the construct and jacked out.
    He answered from the bed without even touching the phone. He was getting good at the telepathy stuff. In a year or two he would perhaps temporally reside on the shoulders of the present president of the United States instead of Dolly's. It was Ermitage calling. The person.
    "Congratulations, you got the Trixie at Time construct."
    "Sure, just don't know what we'll use it for. The bastard's gone as senile as my granddaddy."
    "Haven't we all, lad? By the way, who am I talking to?" Ace was getting bad feelings about this. Perhaps it was contagious. "Just kidding," Ermitage said losing the British accent. "There'll come a man named Terrysebastianjimmyjulian to your room in about five minutes. He'll tell you what you're going to do next." He hung up.
    "I can see in the light as well," Dolly said from the pink fungus. She looked a little less as a cocooned fly now. "That's good, babe," Ace said. "There'll be a dude called Geoffrey something up here in a minute. Perhaps you'd better get rid of that cocoon."
    "Terrysebastianjimmyjulian," Dolly corrected him. "Worked with him a couple of years ago. A real slimebag."

Terrysebastianjimmyjulian crawled in with a bag of slime on his right shoulder. When Dolly had said slimebag, Ace hadn't expected that to be literary. A golden chain of twenty four carat gold peeped out of the slime on his chest. Obviously it was profitable being a slimebag here, as anywhere.
    As he spoke he mixed eight different languages into one. A module on his chest, among the gold and slime, translated it into English. They were supposed to get a guy called Dieter River Era. Real slime as well as the man whose name began with an T. Dolly had his profile in her knees as the limousine was driving them to the-soon-to-be-crime-scene. Mr. Sin had showed up dressed in a black suit and Dolly was still laughing at the sight of him, seven blocks down the road. This was the first time Ace had seen a bunny in a suit, as well.
    "Give me that," Mr. Sin said and pulled the Go-To out of her hands. "You're killing me, Sin," Dolly exclaimed as his rabbit ears flapped from the motion of the vehicle. "Did mummy wish you to be a penguin today?" Ace exclaimed between violent laughter and Dolly fell on the floor, kicking with her legs in the side of the vehicle. "Shall we visit a restaurant? Perhaps they'll serve him, "Dolly said still laughing. "As rabbit stew," Ace added which brought another volley of laughter.
    Mr. Sin ignored them as well he could. "Says here River Era is some kind of master of illusions, Terry, he said addressing the only person in the vehicle who wasn't laughing. Terrysebastianjimmyjulian said something interpretable in reply, which the module translated into something which got dolly laughing even more violent and sent even Ace onto the floor of the vehicle, high-fiveing Terry for his words .
    Mr. Sin gave up. If he was going to be the laughing stock of the day at least he wasn't going to give them any fun.

River Era was in the middle of a show as the company got to the night-club. He was frying an egg with bananas and garlic. They sat down around a circular table.
    The waiter refused to serve dolls at the club, so Dolly cut him up with alarming ease. Seemed she had some retractable nail-files or something. The owner of the club stopped by wishing them a pleasant night, so she cut him up as well, while she was still at it. Ace still remembered the young boy with his mouth full of shark transplantations. Ugliness seemed to be trendy this week. Terry said something involving the word doll and she performed a remote yubitsume on him from the other side of the table. Ace was impressed. Reminded him of his own youth. He used to be serial killer. Ran around naked with a chromed butter knife. Masked like Batman. Killing people. They called him the naked dude. Some of the faces still haunted him, though not as much as the chanterelles of course.
    River Era was finishing his second egg up at the stage and all of the sudden he was gone, right in front of their eyes. Dolly pronounced a number of four-letter words, all of them involving the letters F, U, C and K. For a second everything stopped. Then the panic began.
    Dolly was the first one too rise and produce her one-hand cannon from a leathered jeans pocket. Terry passed her, two tables down the road and took the lead, leaving a trace of slime as he ran. Mr. Sin jumped over Terry in a rabbitlike fashion. Dolly shot Mr. Sin in the back, scattering blood and brain tissue all over the place, then leaped over his had-been body stepping on a fat lady laying on the floor. The fat lady sang and it all stopped. He got away.
    "You killed him," Ermitage said crouching over a mixture of slime, blood and gray cells which used to go by the name Terrysebastianjimmyjulian.
    "Real nice," Dolly said ignoring Ermitage, "you where all watching the show, without paying any attention to what the chef was actually doing. Perhaps you wanna go to some fancy French restaurant and have an omelette?"
    A minute later the company was on a plane to Paris on their way to chef Bon Bon, with an aeut Mirage waiting on a reserved table.

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