Grasping his hand in front of the mirror, he wondered how he got here. Not here in this specific apartment, with its specific blue walls and broad open windows through which the sun poured in and onto his grey-white bed-sheets, his partner tussled up within them. Samantha was always surprisingly shy about her body the night after. He saw her roused in the corner of the mirror, staring towards the sunlight. The bnkets wrapped up around her neck, and if she were to drop them, he would see the most beautiful form. It was all, however, a mirage. Her body had been destroyed years ago. All below the neck was machinery, beautiful machinery.

  She caught him staring, and his eyes quickly darted back to his own body.

  "You know I hate it when you stare at me."

  "Sorry."

  "Or yourself."

  "I know, but I can't stop."

  On the way to the office, he drove. He didn't need to, but he had luxury allowances to spare, and this was one of the few indulgences he had. The safety rating on the car was superior, so on routine trips not in the course of his duties, he could take one out in order to drive himself. Samantha took out her inhaler, a grey market thing; it seemed to rex her.

  "That thing is illegal."

  "I know you have to say that, but it still bothers me when you do. If MAINTN had a problem with it, they'd send a drone."

  There was silence. And then a call. The dash picked it up; the screen lit up, and James pressed the button to auto-redirect.

  "It's strange. When it comes to work, you always let the auto take over, even though you don't have to. It's your prerogative, you know."

  "I know."

  The apartment was in a nicer building; it was a nicer apartment. When they got there, there were techs and robots, drones scanning every inch of the pce. He knew Sam thought there was no point to even coming here, but it was permissible. After all, a minimum of three event attendances per season was required. James had surpassed that by far. He liked old detective shows.

  "If there had to be one person to show up, I knew it would be you."

  "I guess."

  "You could've just streamed the holo to your visor."

  "I guess."

  He began to slowly walk around the scene. Sam took another pass at her inhaler; the tech paid no notice. Of course, he was acting. What he was doing was rgely irrelevant. MAINTN had already solved the thing, or at least done so with an acceptable probability rating. Essentially, the only reason they were here was as maintenance personnel, a check to ensure the machine was running correctly, that it hadn't been tampered with; that there wasn't a rge stack of bodies piled in the center of the room, seemingly missed by a hallucinating AI system. Even if there were, he was sure the drones would neatly catalogue and stack every limb, every severed finger neatly piled alongside every severed hand.

  He saw the dead body on the bed, the sheets stained with red, and for a second, he thought of what his own previous body might have looked like, spyed out, dead, whereupon all the living remains they could salvage was the hand. His wrist ached again, and as he cracked and rubbed it, he saw Sam was looking. He made a show of fiddling with his watch. She took another pull.

  "It says suicide."

  "That's right," the tech replied.

  "Have you ever seen a suicide like this?"

  "No, but I didn't do the analysis."

  "Okay, but in your opinion, does this look like a suicide to you? Why didn't he use a pod? Listening to some computer composition that sounds like a sad whale pying a dying violin?"

  The tech gazed at him for a moment like James had just said something quite strange, and then shrugged and went back to his work. James walked closer to the bed to take a closer look. The body had been sshed, surely, in several pces, and there was a gouging wound on his neck. James looked at his phone; his wife wasn't here. She would be informed at the optimal time, he guessed, though who knew how the system determined that.

  His neighbour three doors down wasn't told for six months, and only them by email. She just assumed he left on business. The sun poured onto the bed through a nearly identical gss pane. James wondered if this was some kind of test. There was one difference in the room. A cy sculpture sat atop a pedestal on the wall opposite the window. The sun gave the material a reddish tint. It gave him something to stare at.