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list were ex-peacers, but none of the contacts was very recent, and D hadn’t talked with any of them more than twice. The descriptions of the nodal points surrounding the contacts yielded no clues, either, so after studying them to no avail, I again thought of asking Harris about the names. Even though it had probably just come from hearing his message earlier, I decided to follow the impulse. But I would have to make use of Kim’s expertise to prevent any sabotage by the freak. So I put the idea on hold for now and looked at the last three names on the list. They were Saul Rabin, Paul Rabin, and Michael Ares. I asked Kim why, because I had asked for former BASS employees.
    â€œOh, when I was scanning the nodes,” he answered, “I saw that Mr. Anthony had twotted about you, and I thought you might want to see what he said … I mean, thought. That’s why those names are in light blue-green. Speaking of opening your mind up…” He gestured like he was taking a lid off his head.
    While investigating crimes, we often extracted and looked at Twotter files, but I was surprised that anything came up with D, because I had presumed he shared the revulsion that I and many others had to the idea of people broadcasting their thoughts on the net. In fact, I could only remember him agreeing with my negative references to this pastime, which had started years ago with people typing and speaking their thoughts on Twitter and then progressed to this ultimate form of narcissism with the advent of neural interface (pronounced “twoughter,” but spelled the easier way). Kim apparently sensed my bewilderment, and explained.
    â€œHe only twotted one time, and for only a few minutes,” he said, his body going stiff again as he looked at his files. “And he just sent it to a personal account, not the whole network … probably curious to see how it came across. But she never deleted them from her system.”
    â€œShe?” I asked.
    â€œHis last three payments before this were for a high-class escort, a hotel room, and a lot of expensive booze from their room service. Cross-referencing the records from the escort service yields the ID of the woman, and the history of her purchases reveals that she herself did not have implants but owned a pricey external rig, probably one of her prize possessions.” He stopped viewing his files and looked over at me. “My guess is they got liquored up, she discovered that he had never used Twotter and talked him into trying the rig. They decided he would think about his job … maybe random or maybe she wanted to know more about the inner workings of BASS, while his inhibitions were down. Who wouldn’t?”
    â€œSo he agreed to send the twots to her private account so he could view them,” I said. “And then she didn’t erase them … maybe because she has that hooker’s mindset of saving info for blackmail. In case she got into a desperate situation and needed something to leverage.”
    â€œCould be,” he said, raising his eyebrows and nodding.
    â€œCan you delete hers while I take a look at our copy?”
    â€œI think so,” he said, and at my nod, he dived back into the net.
    I tapped and moused my glasses until the text of D’s twot appeared, and chose the audio-accompaniment option. Now I really felt bad about this voyeuristic trip into my friend’s private life, but I also felt compelled to find out his unfettered thinking about the company, and to follow up on the possibility of information pertaining to the case. The Twotter software was designed to filter out completely random, unrelated thoughts and record only those that connected somehow with the previous topic, but it still contained some disorienting parentheses.…
    Okay, think about my job, think about my job … I work for BASS, the BigASS we call it, when we don’t like something, not like yours,