by Pat Cadigan

“You heard me, Jules,” said Chaudhuri.

“The whole state?” I asked her. “Or just Kansas City?”

In the tiny phone-screen, Chaudhuri’s anxious expression deepened. “The state, woman, the state. The larger portion of Kansas City proper is actually on the Missouri side of the state line. There is a Kansas City, Kansas, but most people don’t realize that’s not the Kansas City they know and love, and why am I explaining this to you?”

“Why does anyone do anything, Cha Cha? Why would anyone steal Kansas?” I raised my bed to a sitting position but still didn’t put my cam on. “And are you sure it’s stolen and not just misfiled?”

“Oh, it’s been stolen, all right. There’s a note.”

I chuckled to myself. “Don’t tell me—surrender the ruby slippers or the little dog gets it.”

Chaudhuri’s jaw dropped. I didn’t see her move, but there was a definite change in the paranoia-sphere. No doubt she had a van already on the way to my street, just in case. “How do you know about the dog and the ruby slippers? Talk to me. Right now.”

“Don’t panic, Cha Cha. If you’d been born in the U.S., you’d have clicked on that one immediately. Ask anyone.”

“Oh. All the more reason you should get over here. The whole thing’s probably lousy with cultural associations I can’t even see, let alone understand.”

“That’s the problem with streaming ground floor in real time,” I said. “No pop-ups.”

“I’m working on that,” Chaudhuri said mysteriously, surprising the hell out of me. I’d known Meerya Chaudhuri almost all my life (which was why I could get away with calling her Cha Cha), and she refused to be mysterious. Nor did she usually tolerate my referring to real life as streaming ground floor in real time, even though we both knew I only did it to bait her. Apparently this Kansas-is-missing thing was not a drill for real (as opposed to not a drill for purposes of testing). “Now please get up and change out of those ridiculous Hello Kitty pajamas. The car will be there in four minutes. Don’t forget your interface.”

“Four minutes?” I said. “What’s taking you so long, driver can’t remember today’s password? And that’s Hello Ichiban Kitty, as opposed to Hello Classic Kitty or Hello Kitty-san. If you can’t keep your cultural icons straight, how on earth are you going to find a state?”

“Powers of deduction or lucky guess. You know, the usual. Three minutes, now. Fast enough for you?”

Truth be told, I didn’t really have to leave the house to join Chaudhuri’s investigation, but Chaudhuri was unshakably old-skool about that sort of thing, and too bad for anyone who wasn’t. “Ninety percent of life is showing up, Jules,” she would say to me, at least once a day whether I needed to hear it or not. Usually I didn’t, but she was almost always talking for the benefit of someone else in earshot that she thought needed enlightening. Judging from the look on the face of the man standing next to her in the reception area of the World Within headquarters, it was going to be today’s mantra.

I passed through the weapons detector, stopping to give the head security officer a brief but thorough explanation about my left eye along with a retinal ID verification before crossing the vast, echo-ey expanse of ersatz marble to where Chaudhuri and World Within’s most displeased employee of the week were ignoring the furniture. Chaudhuri was, anyway; it was a quirk I found less tolerable than her perfect-attendance fixation. If it was important, Chaudhuri insisted that everyone be on their feet (or the equivalent), whereas I think anyone who shows up is entitled to available seating (or the equivalent).

She grabbed my arm before I could throw myself on the overstuffed white couch behind her and swiveled me around with one smooth motion as if I weren’t a head taller and fifty (maybe) pounds heavier than she was.

“Jules Delle-Chiai, Joe the Baptist,” she said, by way of introduction.

He just managed not to flinch as well as wince. “Joel LeBaptiste,” he enunciated. We didn’t exactly shake hands so much as I accepted a tug on my fingers. It was almost dainty, as if he were afraid of hurting me. Old gentleman, I thought. Then my left eye caught the small pin on his lapel, a tiny platinum 1% indicating his membership in that segment of the full-time work-force aged ninety-five and over. I was impressed—he didn’t look a day over fifty.

“Jules is the one I told you about. She’s my most senior officer in the TechnoCrime division,” Chaudhuri said chattily, herding us toward the elevator bank as if she were taking us to brunch. “Jules, Joe here is the senior manager for the U.S. Midwest division of the World Within Project. Joel,” she added as he opened his mouth to say something (probably “call me Mr. LeBaptiste”).

“Did you discover the theft?” I asked him before he could work up any more irritation.

“No,” he said pointedly. “I was formatting Nevada, which is not as simple as you’d think—”

“Vegas,” Chaudhuri said knowingly, as we stepped into an elevator with too many mirrors for the high-watt lighting.

LeBaptiste barely paused to give her a look. “—when the curator called to tell me Kansas was gone.”

I hadn’t noticed which floor LeBaptiste had pressed for, but it felt as if we were heading for the moon. “You have one curator for each state?” I asked, and then swallowed quickly to unstop my ears so I could hear the answer.

“At the moment, but we need more.”

The elevator glided to a stop, hesitated, and then began to accelerate to the left. Caught by surprise, Chaudhuri and I staggered into each other while LeBaptiste pretended not to enjoy the impromptu slapstick. He was probably a real hoot at parties; I thought about inviting him to one sometime, when he wasn’t upset about Kansas and/or Chaudhuri mangling his name.

“Do you two get along?” I asked, before Chaudhuri could.

LeBaptiste surprised me by looking all but sheepish. “We try. Due to the age difference, however, our work styles are quite different. I have to be the boss, while Dr. Zephaniah has a sense of humour that my grandmother would have described as ‘wicked.’”

“Wicked enough to steal an entire state?” I asked.

LeBaptiste looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t know,” he said as the elevator slid to an easy stop. “Perhaps not. But when I was her age, I might have.”

Chaudhuri’s jaw dropped for the second time that day, a new indoor record. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “I think.”

The man almost smiled. “You don’t have to make up your mind now.”

The employee lounge was an enormous circular room with windows all the way around it. At first glance, you would have figured it was the standard local panorama view architects put in ruinously expensive designs to take the sting out of the price tag. But look again, and you’d see the view was actually a composite of a whole lot of different cities, knit together so neatly and seamlessly that you might not have noticed if you hadn’t happened to look in just the right direction and spotted something that obviously didn’t belong. If I hadn’t noticed Mount St. Helens in the distance, I doubt I’d have picked up on the fact that the windows weren’t exactly windows, even with my left eye over-clocked and the buffer wide open.

I turned to LeBaptiste and gave him a thumbs-up, a weird little retro gesture I’d managed to pick up working another case and for some reason couldn’t shake. His answering smile surprised the hell out of me. “It started out as an informal trophy display—every time a city was completed, we’d copy part of it to the scenics.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Chaudhuri demanded, looking around without seeing anything except that there was no one else there. “Where’s this Dr. Zephaniah?”

“Onsite,” LeBaptiste said, irritated again. “If you talk to her in situ, so to speak—”

“OK, we’ll go to her,” said Chaudhuri and started for the elevators.

“We can talk to her more easily from here,” LeBaptiste called after her. He went over to a grouping of chairs that managed to look both comfortable and orthopedic, arranged so they were all facing a 6-foot liquid kinetic sculpture growing out of the floor. More kitschy-edge than cutting-edge, but it probably balanced off the ivory-tower ambience of the rest of the place and ensured against intellectual implosion and burnout. (Don’t laugh—why do you think so many chess masters end up in trailer courts and bingo parlors?)

“We can talk to her more easily if she is here,” Chaudhuri said. “There’s no substitute for physically present, in person, in the flesh. I don’t care how good the resolution is.”

LeBaptiste reached up and touched the top of the sculpture. The multi-colored innards were replaced by an unframed screen displaying a very anthropomorphized bull’s head.

Chaudhuri blew out a short, unhappy breath. “Fine, I’ll tell her to get in here myself.”

“I’d rather not log out right now,” said the bull. It sounded a lot more pleasant—and female—than it looked.

“You won’t have to, Dr. Zephaniah,” LeBaptiste said quickly, as Chaudhuri opened her mouth. “These are the officers investigating the theft. They can log in with you, if necessary.”

“Well, with Kansas out of the picture, there’s plenty of room for everyone,” the bull said. Definitely female. That was a new one for me, but then I don’t get around as much as I used to. For all I knew there was a large and lively society of transsexual bovines staking out online territory.

Kansas for grazing land, perhaps? Home on the range? My left eye captured the bull’s image and put it in the front-row file. “Why are you a bull?” I asked. “Are you the cattle curator?”

You wouldn’t think a bull’s head, no matter how anthropomorphized, could be expressive enough to look amused; you’d be wrong. “I’m not a bull.” The POV changed to a full-length body-shot. “I’m a Minotaur.”

Actually, she was a female Minotaur whose hobby seemed to be competitive bodybuilding. Described that way, it might sound absurd but it worked in context, which happened to be a labyrinth. I could see it behind her, the walls covered with icons.

“Very un-Kansas-like,” I said before I could think better of it.

“It’s my personal filing system,” said the Minotaur, completely unoffended. “I’ve tried other formats, but I keep coming back to the Minotaur and the labyrinth. What the hell, at least I always know where everything is.” Pause. “Or I used to, anyway.”

Chaudhuri was staring at me, radiating impatience. “Mr. LeBaptiste is right,” I said. “I can log in and talk to her there.”

“I’ll phone down for a hotsuit,” LeBaptiste said, reaching into his suit coat for his mobile.

“Don’t need one,” I said, tapping my face just under my left eye.

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” LeBaptiste looked as if he wanted to throw up.

A lot of people who don’t think of themselves as even remotely technophobic have that reaction to the ocular interface. I can understand it. Truth to tell, I get a little queasy myself sometimes, even with a year’s worth of experience. I sure wouldn’t want to watch me hook up; if I had to use a mirror to do it, I’m not sure I’d be able to go through with it. In the past, I was the sort of low-techie who couldn’t even learn how to put in contact lenses, and now I was sticking a 9-inch needle in my eye as a matter of routine, all in a day’s work. Of course, the needle was self-guiding and the eye in question was a beautiful little piece of advanced technology, 100% machinery. (OK, I know a lot of the “machinery” is actually organic, but thinking of it as purely artificial means I don’t get hysterical at the sight of that needle.) There’s never a good time to take a bullet in the head, but I was lucky to have done so when VisioTech needed a human tester for a new prototype.

Working without a hotsuit was surprisingly easy to get used to; I had thought it might be a little too immediate, so to speak. Sometimes it was more vivid than I was really comfortable with, but mostly it felt more natural than squeezing into a hotsuit, which is time-consuming, not to mention hot and itchy, no matter how fancy and expensive the model. This would seem to be the main stumbling block to general release—i.e., feeling natural in virtual reality. Apparently most people thought if you didn’t itch, you were likely to fall in and never come out; the shrinks kept asking me if I ever wanted to refuse to disconnect. I kept telling them I didn’t, but I could tell they didn’t believe me. Maybe I shouldn’t have referred to real life as the ground floor. Or maybe I should have just referred them to Chaudhuri so she could let them in on the secret of ninety percent of life.

I’d never logged into the World Within Project before, but it felt about as natural as anything else, virtual or otherwise. But then, it should have—they didn’t call it World Within for nothing. Some people thought it was a ridiculous waste of space, but I rather liked the idea of scanning every aspect of the physical world into data storage. Or trying to, anyway. It was like Socrates’ admonition “Know thyself,” only on the grandest scale possible. Of course, I’m also one of those people who never throws anything away, too, so that’s probably got something to do with it.

If it felt natural to me, however, it almost gave the Minotaur a heart attack. When I materialized beside her in the labyrinth, she actually screamed and backed into the nearest icon-covered wall, not reassured even after I identified myself.

“How did you get here?” she shouted, her voice high and not at all bovine.

“They were supposed to tell you about my direct interface,” I said.

Her breathing was starting to slow. “I mean, how did you get here? Everyone who logs in goes to the central rail station first.”

“The interface lets me bypass all that. Saves time. Did you keep all of Kansas in the labyrinth, or just the parts that needed refinement or vice versa?”

The bull-head looked dubious. “It was all here, several times over.”

“And all the copies are gone?”

“They’re not copies. They’re angles.”

For a moment, I felt as if the air itself had become too complicated to breathe. “For example?” I asked.

“I have Native People’s Kansas as recorded by Native People; Native People’s Kansas observed and recorded by scholars who aren’t Native People; Kansas as a function of the school system, in terms of natural disasters, election years, motor vehicle traffic; and quite a few other things—more than I can list working only from memory.”

I had that funny sinking feeling you get when you realize you’re so far out of your depth you can’t even begin to imagine what it is you don’t understand. “Are all the states like that?” I asked after what felt like a long moment.

“More or less. They don’t all fall the same way—with some of them, the school system doesn’t separate from election years, or it might, but only if you leave the years in blocks of six or eight. What do you know about the theory of associational data storage?”

“Only the very recent stuff. Like, just now.”

The Minotaur’s smile was kind. “It’s the kind of thing that makes Heisenberg sound anal.”

“Not the sort of career where you work out your precision issues?”

She laughed. “It’s probably the most controversial thing about the project. The idea that data storage involves perspective as much as it does media and capacity and other more quantifiable elements is still rejected in some quarters as being this year’s feng shui.”

“I’m not sure I’d buy it myself,” I said. “But then, I’m not sure I’d ever understand it well enough to decide one way or the other.”

“We’re not so much storing data as we are remembering,” she said cheerfully. “Memory is holographic, which means if you have one piece, you have the whole thing. But of course the whole thing is too big to work with, so we break it down into associations—or rather, we let it break itself down—”

Something occurred to me. “So all your Kansas links are dead ends?” I broke in, before she could build up any momentum.

“Yes,” she said, looking pleased with me for understanding just enough. I’d have gotten there sooner if she’d have used terms like hypercontext and link, but apparently they weren’t in the jargon these days. “Technically. Except for this.” She took me over to a screen set into the packed dirt wall. (No one ever seemed to find the idea of virtual screens as funny as I did.)

It lit up with the image of an old-fashioned ransom note, the kind where each letter has been cut from a newspaper or magazine and glued into words.

DOG & RUBYSLIPPERS NOYBROAD.

“Does this tell you anything?” the Minotaur asked.

“Yeah.” I couldn’t help laughing. “It tells me that all the Oz books put together are culturally no match for one very old Hollywood movie.”

“A movie? Like, in one of those old cinema palace-type places?” The Minotaur was intrigued. “Where did the noybroad come in?”

“Right after Dorothy lands in Munchkinland and everything switches from black-and-white to color.” I smiled at her bewilderment. “It’s not ‘noybroad,’ it’s ‘no y b road’—‘no yellow-brick road.’ Who scanned Kansas in for you?”

The Minotaur sighed. “A cast of thousands. We ask people to volunteer to scan data and send it to us for placement.” The bull-face took on a wary expression. “You think it was one of them?”

“No. Nobody stole it.”

“But it’s gone—”

I nodded, laughing a little. “It sure is. But not because someone stole it. It, uh, left of its own accord.”

The Minotaur’s expression became very bull-like, as if she were thinking about goring me.

“Um, wait here,” I said, just to say anything, and broke the connection. Chaudhuri was in my face before I had the needle clear of my eye.

“Are you demented?” she asked me, furiously.

“No more than your average Midwestern American state,” I said, getting up and going over to the part of the window where I had seen Mount St. Helens. “If you look behind this mountain here, you’ll find your missing state spread out in all its glory.”

If Chaudhuri thought I was crazy, LeBaptiste thought I was dangerous. “That’s an interesting theory,” he said cautiously.

“Associational data storage theory is a lot more interesting, if you can take the complexity,” I replied. “I couldn’t. I’m not sure whether you gave the state too many associations or not enough, or maybe they were just the wrong ones. It simply re-settled itself in your window, where it could be land.”

LeBaptiste looked worriedly at Chaudhuri, whom I could see was no longer homicidally angry with me. “But—it’s a state.”

“No, it’s data,” I said. “The state is out somewhere in the middle of the country, existing regardless of anything it’s ever been associated with. This is something you’ve been adjusting and readjusting, until it didn’t fit where you wanted it to.”

“Are you saying it’s—alive, or has volition or—”

“Oh, hell, no. Actually, it didn’t so much run away as it did just kind of … fall out where you had it and into a place where it fit better.”

“But that’s never happened with any of the other states,” LeBaptiste protested.

“How many complete states do you have so far?”

He thought for a moment. “Twenty-two.”

“I think you’ll see it happen again a few times, and a lot more often after you pass twenty-five. Like I said, complexity. You’re letting the data sort itself into associations. Do that long enough and the data will be giving you its opinion—maybe even advice—as to where and how you should store it.”

“But the note—”

“Fragments left behind, sorted into something a human would read as words. With associations.”

“Associations for who?”

“You,” I said.

Dr. Zephaniah cleared her throat and we all turned to look at her image on the screen. “Sir, Kansas is in the window. Not exactly behind the volcano but visible if you know where to look.”

LeBaptiste was floundering badly, and he didn’t like it. I didn’t blame him. “But those associations are too narrow for an entire state—”

“They aren’t associations for you to make about Kansas,” I told him. “They’re associations Kansas made for you. So it could remember where it put you.”

There was a dizzy moment of deafening silence. LeBaptiste sat down on the nearest chair shakily, clamping his hands on the arms.

“This is simply not possible. Data storage—”

“You’re not storing data anymore,” I said. “You’re storing knowledge.”

“What we know also knows us,” put in Dr. Zephaniah, sounding a lot more thrilled about it than her boss. “This is going to change everything.”

“Changing everything is not the answer,” LeBaptiste snapped. Things escalated quickly enough that Chaudhuri and I managed to leave unnoticed.

We rode the elevator sideways and down without speaking. When the doors opened on the lobby, I stepped out and then turned to see Chaudhuri hesitating, one foot still in the elevator, the other one out.

“Come on, Cha Cha,” I said. “Ground floor.”

She raised one eyebrow at me skeptically. “Are you sure?” T

Acclaimed as “The Queen of Cyberpunk,” Pat Cadigan has written five novels and received Hugo and Nebula nominations for her short stories. Her latest novel, Dervish Is Digital, has just been published. She lives in North London with her husband and son, and their cat Calgary.