Seguro has spent too much time in chintzy VR games. As he talks
to me he is mindlessly running his hands over everything on my desk: Can
I move this? this? THIS? Anything he can manipulate seems important to him
and I worry I will lose him to the flood of significance. I snap my fin-
gers.
	"The angle in this market is how weak the current king is," he
says. "I've used his equipment myself. Pretty shoddy." If Seguro has his
way I'd step into the instrumentation business, displacing the fractious,
brutal monopolist who currently lays claim to the whole city, Helium
Caballero. It is said that, thanks to him, nothing in New Boston is any
closer than 2 millimeters to its correct size. Cars crumble on sharp turns.
Machines speak to one another in accents that grow more impenetrable every
time a part is replaced.
	I'm unconvinced. "That I have the money to challenge him doesn't
make me immune to violence. His people could be down here any time he
wanted them to with choloform and a van. The rest is silence."
	Seguro taps The Beast for another kilowatt to power his handheld
display. The smoke makes him cough. "How long before THAT kills you in-
stead, Katrina? Your wiring is terrible."
	"Whatever's burning up in there, it's not an essential piece. The
Beast has smelled like that for two years and I'm not remotely dead."
	My old friend paces while he tries to bring up business plans to
show me. He would rather be at home cooking a three-course dinner for us
in the oven I had smuggled in for him. It came from Maine, where neither
dials nor thermometers lie. It is his device, his interface. When he says
"we can't live like this" he means "I can't..."

	It's true that, were Caballero any less cruel, the path would be
clear for me to become monarch of Boston manufacturing within months.
After giving up on his feckless display contraption he proves it all to
me by hand, one pane of beautiful white writing paper after another laid
in a grid on the unused desk across from mine. Seguro lies down to sleep
on the couch.
	I take out the gift I invited him over to present: a hand-carved
puzzle made from Brazil Nut wood. The interlocking pieces all obscure one
another, so that he will have to figure out how to disassemble it entirely
before he sees that I made it with one element for each year of his life
and a wish in the center for many more. I set it somewhere he'll notice
when he wakes up; for my part, I have other meetings tonight. Other people
would like the use of my finances, and I suppose they will have it.

written for Doug Mayo-Wells in my living room 1/30/02

I wanted the atmosphere from a particular kind of cyberpunk story; the method I chose was to start off with a big red "hey, this is science fiction!" flag and spend the rest of the page backing off from it. Can't tell, this close to the story's writing, whether I got my atmosphere, but I think the staging works. Hopefully the exposition is not oppressive.

This story has no real conflict -- or plot -- other than the question of how and when to disappoint a beloved. I guess I must be getting more confident now if my stories have points to them, eh?

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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