The shadows fused with the clinging breeze and clutched him tighter and tighter, squeezed out his breath. He fought them, twisted and writhed in a fierce effort to free himself. He fought with everything he had, all his strength and all his will, but it wasn't enough. He couldn't escape the grip of the shadow demons and their cold breaths.

The shadow breeze coiled around his throat and became a garrote, stopped his breath, completely. He gasped, his empty lungs shot through with fire. His heart pounded an explosive rhythm against his ribs. He strained against the shadow cords, but his brain was already failing. His mind swirled backward into a piercing roar of silence.

Darkness faded to grey mist, then to yellow daylight. The shadows dissolved, left only words hanging in their place. Four words, suspended in the center of a smoky data projection, cried out to him:

Gassan, don't forget Miraye.

Genjiro Nakadai gazed into the projection, his blue-black eyes fixed on the words. It took several moments for him to realize he was back in the real world, for his heartbeat to soften enough for him to hear the quiet beeping of the vi-comm.

He snapped his head toward the sound, but his slender body defied him, sank back into his soft blue leather chair. He watched the tiny red light and allowed it to wink at him at least ten times before he weakly answered it.

"Yes?"

A hot blue beam sprang from the tiny vi-comm module, expanded into a life-size image of the upper half of an elegant, auburn-haired woman. Lacy McGillis' pale face recalled a classical Roman sculpture, but her strong aquiline features always softened when she spoke to her directors. The president of Neurotech's research and development company smiled at Genjiro with a warm, bright smile.

"Ji, meeting, tomorrow morning, seven-thirty. I'd like you and Albrecht on early, so be sure to bring your recorder."

Genjiro straightened his posture a little. "Sure. What's the subject?"

"A possible joint venture with Ritter Industries to develop that inter-mental processor for the new computer line."

"Ritter?" Genjiro frowned. "Hmph. Since when are we doing business with guerrilla supporters?"

McGillis didn't flinch. "Since they have the ferrium experts, and we don't." She laughed. "Anyway, once we've acquired the knowledge, we'll just buy them out. Like Ardoco."

Genjiro nodded, but he didn't return her laugh. He didn't even smile. Lacy turned suddenly serious. "Hey, Genjiro, are you feeling okay?"

"Hm?" He looked distracted, then nodded. "Oh, yeah. I'm okay. I'm just...a little tired, I guess."

She continued to study him. "You look awful. Why don't you make it an early day? You've been working late a lot, this week."

"No, I'll be fine. I just need to take a break, or something. Have a soda."

McGillis was only halfway convinced. "Well, if you start to feel bad, go home, okay?"

He avoided her eyes. "Okay."

"And if you feel better, later, Ramon and I are having a small dinner party tonight, around eight. I'd love to have you and Anya there."

"That sounds nice. Anya would like that."

He still looked sick, but Lacy didn't have time to keep telling him to go home. She was a bit annoyed that he didn't want to take her advice, and she let her annoyance turn her voice snappy.

"At any rate, I'll see you, in the morning. I'm gone, for the day. If you decide to go home, tell someone." She didn't wait for a reply, just cut off her transmission. The viewfield collapsed into the blue beam and then retracted into the module.

Genjiro didn't notice her irritation. He returned his attention to the waiting message. Those four words had somehow managed to intoxicate his computer's brain the same way they had numbed his own. He toggled from the message to the route information, the only action the computer would allow. The info showed the author of the message to be JE, and the point of origin as Genjiro's own terminal number. The time and date stamp indicated the message had been written at 9:17 on the previous morning.

Genjiro clenched his fists. He was sure he had been at the terminal then. No one could've used his computer without the proper imprint, and his imprint was the only one the computer had recorded for the entire week. He knew he hadn't written that message, so where had it come from?

He sat back, looked away from the projection. He realized he had been at that very point in thought, fifteen minutes earlier, when his brain suddenly nose-dived into a spiral of madness. His hands fell to his lap and tried not to shake.

He couldn't stand to let the mystery go. He tried to ignore the message, but he couldn't. He had to find out what it meant, and where it came from. He poked at the control pad and jumped back and forth between the message and the route info. He did this repeatedly, with more and more zeal, as his anger grew inside him. He gave the pad one last, fierce poke, then gave up. He would have to call tech support and have them clean his system and get his computer up, again.

The computer projection sat, motionless, and bore its silent message, as if to mock him. Genjiro grumbled a curse at it and shoved himself up. He popped upward with such force that he nearly fell over the chair. He cursed, again, stomped into his private bathroom.

The lights came up at his approach, bathed his golden skin in a warm amber glow. He looked at himself in the 3-D mirror, disgusted at the tiredness he saw in his slender face. He thought it made him look old, almost as old as he was. His vanity found that very distressing.

Genjiro had a beautiful face, the product of an Asian father and a Caucasian mother. His features were refined and delicate; his eyes large and colored a strangely lovely blackish-blue, almost like the color of cobalt glass. His hair was thick and black, with a silky sheen, and it hung just long enough to brush his shoulders. His smooth skin and large eyes contributed to the illusion that he was much younger than forty-six, an illusion he took a great deal of pride in.

He studied his weary face, then leaned over and stuck his small hands beneath a gold faucet. He gently splashed cool water onto his eyelids, his temples and his cheeks, then just as gently patted his face dry with a soft white towel. His reflection still looked tired.

He groaned and leaned onto the edge of the sink, let his usually straight posture fall into a slouch. He felt heavy and slow, as awkward as a bird with its wings clipped. His slumped shoulders belied the long, sinewy muscles hidden beneath his white silk shirt, belied the strong and graceful physique of a lifelong martial artist. His hunched position made his lithe body look old and weak. He was quick to notice it, and to correct it by standing up straight and promptly combing his silky hair back into place.

He returned to the computer arc, but before he finished sitting down, he noticed the projection had returned to the purge application. The message was gone. For a moment, he was unsure whether he should be concerned or relieved. He decided to be relieved, to toss the message off the system so it wouldn't lock things up, again. He started to look for it. The file search program sifted through his database and informed him there was no such file. He tried author search, and got the same thing: no such author.

By now, his relief was sinking into concern. Messages couldn't delete themselves, and tech support couldn't have rebooted his console because he hadn't called them, yet. He wondered if he was dreaming. Things that weird simply didn't happen outside of men-im theaters.

Just to be sure no one had touched his console, he checked the imprint record, again. No imprints other than his own. He followed all of the previous day's time stamps, but found nothing that originated at 9:17.

He sat there for a long while, staring into the columns of times and file names, sat there until he stared himself into a headache. Finally, he put the computer to sleep, decided to take a break and forget about it.

He took a crystal goblet from his soda cabinet and filled it with caraben soda, then dropped a cherry into it. He carried the glass to the window, a huge tinted piece of flexglass that curved with the exterior of the building and embraced the length of his office. The window had a bay running along it, and Genjiro propped one knee on it, looked out at the city. He stirred the soda with the cherry, sipped some of the frothy ginger liquid and let it tingle on his tongue, for a bit. Then he popped the cherry into his mouth and ate it.

The view from the thirty-first floor was breathtaking. He could see the entire downtown skyline of Edo: its tangle of multi-colored lights; its spiraling slate blue skyways sheltering the old, femininely bulbous architecture; its younger, more masculine arc of sharp metal towers that seemed to stab at the sky with martial zeal.

He could see the calm blue of the harbor, just beyond the city, could see the waves kissing the pearl white beaches in gentle contrast to the artificial power of the city. He could see dots of small boats and watercraft scattered across the liquid azure field. He could see the jungle-thick forest that surrounded the capital city on three sides, emerald branches stretching toward the buildings like the flailing arms of starving outcasts, straining to retrieve the land that had been stolen from them. He could see the great purple jags of the Ieyasu Mountains to the north, dwarfing the spindly highrise buildings in the city and standing guard over the dense forest.

Above it all, the energy of the skyshield turned the entire Exedran sky to a pale, shimmering blue that was reflected in the deeper blue of the calmly undulating waves in the harbor. Genjiro gazed at the water, watching the waves slowly stroke the shore. The motion entranced him, and his thoughts drifted back to the message: Gassan, don't forget Miraye.

Gassan, he thought. Faraian name. Miraye...? Who knows. Is it a name? An object? A place? An idea? His concentration centered on the words, in spite of all efforts to think of something else. His headache intensified.

The city and the harbor dissolved; his eyes fixed on a small disk of light reflected on the glass. He couldn't move his gaze, couldn't even blink, caught by the intensity of his concentration. His mind moved beyond him, focused on an imaginary point within and yet far beyond the center of the reflected light, moved beyond his control.

He saw a small bright light in the sky, brighter than the white-hot sun of his world. The light suddenly sped toward him, trailing a hot, violent stream of red, orange and yellow, a comet with the power of a thousand stars compressed into its belly. His breath caught in his throat, and his body froze.

The bright star now approached the window in slow motion. The sky in its wake melted over the city, globs of blue syrup streaked with hot gold. The landscape transformed, became an ugly, boiling slag heap. Jagged metal spikes thrust upward from the heaving black mound, reaching up and out as if to threaten all the universe.

Genjiro took a step backward. The star shattered the window and engulfed him, blazed over and through him like a nuclear blast. At the same moment, his body jolted forward and through the broken window, as though he was being sucked into the vacuum of space.

He was falling, falling face down through thirty stories of empty space, toward the spiked sludge that looked more and more like the jaws of an enormous metal demon. A shrill cry rocketed from the heart of the sludge and penetrated his abdomen, impaled him, twined around him, and dragged him downward at incredible speed. He released a silent scream just before he hit the bottom. The slag sank into the ground, returned to concrete, and his body shattered like delicate crystal, all over the street.

Genjiro's brain snapped back on, yanked him back into his office, back into reality. A spinning sickness gripped his brain, twisted his stomach. He touched the window to steady himself, amazed to find the flexglass intact. His crystal goblet, though, lay in thousands of pieces at his feet, the yellowish caraben soda bubbling over the wood floor.

He drew a trembling breath, and leaned his sweaty head against the cool glass of the window. His heart ferociously assaulted his chest, made him feel dizzy and nauseated. He stepped back from the window and almost collapsed, held onto a nearby table for support.

The floor wobbled beneath him as he staggered to the blue sofa in his rest area. He dropped onto the cushions and gripped a pillow to his chest, as if that could somehow steady his madly whirling brain and his savagely throbbing heart. Miraculously, it seemed to work.

He lay still for a long time, until he began to feel normal, again, until the fear subsided. But the hallucinations had left him shaken and perplexed. He felt odd, unbalanced and displaced. He desperately wanted to go home, to be held in his wife's arms and comforted. He sat up. That was exactly what he was going to do. Go home.