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sheet. You didn’t need to deal with her.”
    “Yeah, I was too busy coding the damn plants to glow at night.” I held up one of the TerraVu satellite shots. The L&B logo stood out black against the faintly glowing fields.
    Kurokawa laughed cynically. “No one wanted that except Barnhard.”
    “Sorry, I’m off topic. I’m grateful for the materials, but this won’t tell me what caused the mutation. Without knowing the nature of the intruder, there’s nothing we can do.”
    “ ‘Intruder’? I like it. Let’s call it that until we know what we’re dealing with. No one expects you to come up with the answer right away. There’s something more important.”
    Kurokawa put the envelope under his arm and steepled his fingers. He peered at me intently.
    “Mamoru, one thing we’ll probably be discussing tomorrow is the investigation team. Sorry, but I need you to clear your schedule for the next month. Can you do that? I’m authorized to offer you at least twice your standard rate. You can push back the work on the SR06 sites in Hangzhou and Wakkanai till we’re through.”
    “A month? You think we’ll be finished that soon?”
    “There’s only a month until the first harvest takes place. If we don’t pinpoint the cause and figure out a solution before then, Mother Mekong’s five-star project will be a failure. SR06 will be discredited and discontinued. L&B itself could be threatened. Prototype SR06 sites are already being constructed in Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. If those go …”
    “Barnhard’s head will be on the block.”
    “This is no time for complacency. Did you forget that your name is in the credits?”
    I felt suddenly dizzy. My avatar would not betray the effect this reminder had on me, but it knocked me back physically.
    “I guess I’d be finished as far as this industry goes.”
    “Let’s do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. My job is on the line too.”
    “Okay. Now I’ve got something for you. I need to salvage some data from the Internet. Know anyone you could recommend?”
    I explained that the intruder was a legacy cultivar with no resistance to red rust blight. As a first step to figuring out how to deal with it, I needed to salvage information buried on the Internet and compare it with the Mother Mekong data.
    “A salvager? I’m sorry, I can’t help you there. All I can suggest is to go to CoWorkingNet and make a backchannel offer. Internet salvage is strictly for freelancers. I don’t mind if you handle it yourself. You’ll be dealing with public information, so just cut an OpenNDA with a reasonable use-by date.”
    A faint shadow fell across the grainy “movie” table. Someone said something I couldn’t make out.
    The waitress was peering over my right shoulder, pitcher in hand. In Private Mode, she would see an alias avatar instead of the “real” me. More water? was probably what she said. The alias waved her away with the practiced gesture of a stage actor. The shadow of its “hand” transited the table.
    “If that’s it, I’d better be going,” said Kurokawa. “If I don’t get some sleep, I might doze through the meeting tomorrow.”
    “Take it easy, Takashi. Get some rest.”
    He stood up, bowed, and disappeared. He must have logged out from within Private Mode. The film grain effect dissipated and the surrounding conversational buzz faded in gently. Kurokawa’s alias was still sitting across from me. Zucca’s selling point was its AR stage. It wouldn’t do to have customers vanishing abruptly.
    The alias gestured invitingly toward the cake cart, stood up, and melted into the foot traffic on the avenue. I had no reason to stay now that the meeting was over, but I decided to write my recruiting ad then and there.
    One month. It wasn’t much.
    I guessed that Thep would collect the second sample carefully. Even if she hurried, I’d be waiting a few days. That would use up a week, more or less. If she was such a hotshot, I figured I