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He’d contracted with FEMA to service millions of potential fatalities, but he’d so far underbid the competition that our losses would be greater than our net worth if we had to deliver from even a glancing blow of the comet. Meanwhile the virtual studios were holotaping IMMORTALITY NOW! segments on double shifts throughout the country.
    The actual work continued to stall. The dead continued to go unburied in coolers. The great room, the walks with my students, the lectures on setting features, the insertions of the Mona Lisa® smiles, these were out of my life now. Some heroic funerals were being conducted: we did our part, sending our maglev Fleetwoods out undermanned, deploying mobile embalming centers, express shipping corpses around the country on chartered flights if it was too difficult for surviving family to travel.
    You don’t need me to tell you that the story of those times was an epic adventure which all of us helped write. I’ll confine myself to finishing the inside story of the comet, since that was what changed your life too.
    As you’ve probably surmised, Lance was counting on a fix of the comet’s path but not getting results. And, as you remember from that week, on the morning of the great launch, the unmanned shuttle carrying the Ukrainian warheads to the “factory in space” blew up all but a dozen of the backup nukes on the pad. Then there was the problem with the guidance system on the back-up shuttle, which knocked the “factory-in-space” out of orbit and eventually back down to earth. Thankfully no one was hurt. The Chinese still say that problem with the guidance system was caused by broad band radio noise pulsing somewhere out of the Caribbean. Lance denies it.
    I remember hearing about the collision between the backup shuttle and the Chinese “factory-in-space” at Espagio’s—one of the few restaurants left open—where I’d gone for lunch with Unix. I took a call from Max immediately afterwards.
    Max said, “Do you want the good news or bad news first?”
    “The bad news I just heard for myself. According to NASA we’ve got just one more chance, with just one more nuke and that old launch vehicle from Vandenberg. They’re cutting it close—going straight for the comet. I’m worried.”
    “Then let me cheer you up. Inferno sales are through the roof. We’ve got clients wallowing around in frozen garbage in the circle of the gluttons, women biting one another, employees getting their bosses sunk in shit. What a good idea.”
    I’d seen for myself, watched a famous criminal, the Organ Bandit, writhing happily in flames in the Circle of Thieves. The punishment was only staged, but his eternal celebrity promised to be real.
    “One more thing,” Max said. “We’ve made our greatest placement ever. Lance found out they had room for half a kilo more payload on that last emergency attempt to blow the comet off course. So we bought the spot in the nose cone.”
    “And what in the name of God are we going to do with that?”
    “We’ll be sending up a cremate. It’s like burial at sea, but much grander.”
    “Who could have the vanity . . . ?”
    “That judge,” Max told me, “what’s his name? MacPhee.”
    * * *
    I recall it was Thursday night of that week when society started becoming really unglued—lawlessness swept the beaches, looting raged on Rodeo Drive, anarchy on the freeways. Public safety followed public transport into frightened hibernation. But the weather turned gorgeous—the air crystal clear and the stars shining brightly that night when the whole power grid went down, the stars of the Milky Way lighting the bowl of the sky with celestial jewelry.
    I braved the streets to Westwood on Friday.
    Keiko was fortified at the mansion, spending her last days with the judge. Max had arranged for a cortege of armored hearses to transport the judge up the coast to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the launch when the time came.
    When I looped back through