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What little has been discovered suggests that he trafficked contraband including aru and other pain caustics."
    The details of my shooting bored me. They changed nothing. They brought Nora no closer. "What does Father want?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
    "We'll cover your health, debrief your date and the aftermath. He may want to strategize. And it's possible he might apologize." Joelene shrugged as if to say the last was unlikely.
    "It's his fault!" I said.
    "It's no one's."
    "He ruined the company."
    "That," she said, stretching the word, "is a different issue."
    "So, it is his fault. RiverGroup should have protected me! That's failure. It was the most important day of my life! The most important moment in history! Just when everything was so perfect!" I put my head in my hands. As much as I detested everything that had happened, I hated to whine like a spoiled child. The clock's numbers twinkled, and now it read fourteen days, five hours, and sixty-three seconds. "Look at that," I said, standing, "he's not coming."
    "Wait," said Joelene as the lights sputtered and blinked. Then it said five seconds. Four seconds. Three seconds. I flopped backward into the chair. An instant later, though, the clock read five minutes and was counting up.
    "This is impossible!"
    The clock numbers flashed, then spun backward again to four seconds. Three seconds. It skipped two and stayed on one for half a minute.
    Just as I gave up and started to stand again, the house lights went black. An announcer's voice boomed, "Straight from the highest profit quarter on record, President, ceo, cfo, coo, cio, cpo, Chief Programmer, and all-around Super Code Bastard, give it up for Hiro Bruce Rivers!"
    As a catastrophically loud drumbeat kicked in, and we covered our ears, orange and blue fireworks exploded across the front of the stage. At the back, a figure rose from the floor before a giant vibrating blue RiverGroup logo. For several beats, he stood there, his head down, his arms flexed, as if posing like a monster wrestler.
    When a throbbing, super-deep bass and a whining singer, who sounded like he was either in a state of ecstasy or dreadful constipation, started, Father came to life. He jogged forward and pumped his fists victoriously. A spotlight came on as a cast-iron phallus-shaped podium rose to meet him at the front of the stage. Horns and guitars blasted, the voices wailed, and I thought I heard the words cunt spaceship.
    Now Father sashayed back and forth with exactly the same moves he'd been doing for years—a combination of pelvis thrusts, head bobs, and a lot of sliding to and fro on his foot-tall, green-glass platform shoes.
    "Slap me! Slap me hard!" he cried as the music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. "That's You're My Cunt Spaceship by TastyLüng," he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the silence. Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness. "Hello?" he asked, as if afraid he was alone. "What the hell? Anyone out there?"
    I was tempted to say nothing, hope he would decide the place was empty, and go away. Instead, I said, "You ruined everything!"
    His eyes darted toward me. "I'd like to fire the whole fucked-up piece of fucking shit company!" First he threw a stack of papers into the air, then hugged the podium and thrust his hips into it. "We're fucked! What do you want me to tell you? It was the weirdest and worst possible thing at the worst possible moment." Papers rained down on his head as he implored, "How we gave a fucking freeboot an identity and let him right in the middle of our fucking press conference, I have no fucking idea!"
    "It's your fault!"
    "Me?" He laughed. "We had everything nailed down—everything completely checked, then out of nowhere—wham! A fucking freeboot with a fashion rifle. And I thought you were dead when you fell over! That was fucking scary. That was shit-in-thong time! And why he shoots