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print. The palace looked huge, elaborate, and quite intimidating. Mia felt as if she’d unwrapped a Christmas gift and found an entire steam locomotive crammed inside it. A multi-ton coal-fired virtual jack-in-the-box.
    She turned toward the center of the room. The top of the wood-grain desk boasted a single framed photograph. Mia made stepping motions in place, and managed toreach the virtual desk without barging through it. She reached out one hand, fishing for the photo. The glove interface was hopelessly bad, full of stutter and overlap.
    This was a very unhappy interface. And small wonder. No doubt this entire virtual environment was being encrypted, decrypted, reencrypted, anonymously routed through satellites and cables, emulated on alien machinery through ill-fitting, out-of-date protocols, then displayed through long-dead graphics standards. Dismembered, piped, compressed, packeted, unpacketed, decompressed, unpiped and re-membered. Worse yet, the place was old. Virtual buildings didn’t age like physical ones, but they aged in subtle pathways of arcane decline, in much the way that their owners did. A little bijou table in the corner had a pronounced case of bit-rot: from a certain angle it lost all surface tint.
    The place wasn’t dead, though. A virtual gecko appeared and sneaked its way along the wall, a sure sign that little health-assuring subroutines were still working their way through the damper, darker spots in the palace’s code.
    Mia got a tentative grip on the photograph. She lifted it from the desktop, and the image burst free from the frame like a hemorrhage, and leapt up onto the fabric wall of the curtain unit, flinging itself all around her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree blast of bright red pixels the size of bloody thumbprints. Mia winced, put the photo back down, and peered at it sidelong through the membrane of her wrist-fan. Objects within hand’s reach seemed a lot better realized graphically than the jittery mess up on the curtain walls.
    The frame held another digital photograph of herself. A different picture this time: the very young Mia Ziemann was sitting on a threadbare red fabric couch in her red terry-cloth bathrobe, reading a paper magazine, her slim bare legs perched on a coffee table. Her hair was wet. The floor was littered with collegiate junk: fast-food packets, disks of recorded music, two unlaced walking shoes. Theyoung Mia was unaware of the photographer. She looked relaxed and comfortable, yet deeply intent on her magazine.
    Another little keepsake of Martin’s. His posthumous message to the palace’s chosen heiress.
    Mia clawed open a drawer of the virtual desk. Empty. She knocked the photo into the empty drawer and shut it.
    She opened another desk drawer. Scissors, paper, pens, tape, pins. She tried repeatedly, but failed to get a decent grip on the virtual scissors. She opened another drawer. A box of colored chalk.
    Mia plucked a stick of pale green chalk from the box, and turned toward the chalkboard on the far wall. She marched in place toward the chalkboard—it reeled disturbingly as she grew nearer—and she reached out, her gloved fingers pinched and the virtual chalk outstretched.
    Clearly this action called for much better gloves than the cheap peel-aways she was wearing. The chalk wobbled in and out of the surface of chalkboard like Dodgson’s Alice having fits in a mirror. After prolonged struggle Mia managed to shakily scrawl a random message, the first thing that had come into her head:
M AYA W AS H ERE
    She added a potato-nosed Kilroy face, and, for good measure, scrawled some childish Miss Kilroy curls on Kilroy’s domed noggin. She accidentally dropped the virtual chalk, which hit the floor with an audible click and vanished. After searching for it hopelessly with her wrist-fans, Mia found herself getting seriously seasick. She unplugged the touchscreen, threw open the wall of the curtain, and stepped outside.
    Swallowing bile, she unstrapped