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that your name is Mira. Nice to meet you, Mira.”
     “Nice to meet you,” Mira murmured. He’d said a wall collapsed on her. She tried to remember, but nothing came. Nothing about the accident, anyway. The memories that raced up at her were of Jeannette.
     “So. Mira.” Alex clapped his hands together. “Do you want to bullshit, or do you want to get intimate?” The raised eyebrows again, the same as when he made the twins comment.
     “I don’t understand,” Mira said.
     “Weeeell. For example, here’s a question.” He leaned in close, his breath puffing in her ear. “If I revived you, what sorts of things would you do to me?”
     Mira doubted this man was here to revive anyone. “I don’t know. That’s an awfully intimate question. Why don’t we get to know each other first?” She needed time to think. Even just a few minutes of quiet, to make sense of this.
     Alex frowned theatrically. “Come on. Tease me a little.”
     Should she tell Alex she was gay? Surely not. He would lose interest, and maybe report it to whoever owned the facility. But why hadn’t whoever owned the facility known she was gay? Maybe that was to be part of the orientation she’d missed. Whatever the reason, did she want to risk being taken out of circulation, or unplugged and buried?
     Would that be the worst thing?
     “I’m just—” She wanted to say “not in the mood,” but that was not only a cliché but a vast understatement. She was dead. She couldn’t move anything but her face, and that made her feel untethered, as if she were floating, drifting. Hands and feet grounded you. Mira had never realized. “I’m just not very good at this sort of thing.”
     “Well.” Alex put his hands on his thighs, made a production of standing. “This costs quite a bit, and they charge by the minute. So I’ll say good-bye now, and you can go back to being dead.”
     Go back? “Wait!” Mira said. They could bring her back, and then let her die again? She imagined her body, sealed up somewhere, maybe for years, maybe forever. The idea terrified her. Alex paused, waiting. “Okay. I would…” She tried to think of something, but there were so many things running through her mind, so many trains of thought she wanted to follow, none of them involving the pervert leaning over her.
     Were there other ways to get permanently “revived”? Did she have any living relatives she might contact, or maybe a savings account that had been accruing interest for the past eighty years? Had she had any savings when she died? She’d had a house—she remembered that. Jeannette would have inherited it. Or maybe Lynn.
     “Fine, if you’re not going to talk, I’ll just say good-bye,” Alex snapped. “But don’t think anyone else is coming. You’re a level eight-plus.”
     Mira opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but Alex raised a finger to silence her.
     “What that means is your injuries make you one expensive revival, and there are many, many women here, so not even your nine-point-one all-original face and thirty-six-C tits, also original, are going to pry that kind of treasure from any man’s balance.” He stepped back, put his fists on his hips. “Plus, men don’t want women who were frozen sixty years before the facility opened, because they have nothing in common with those women.”
     “Please,” Mira said.
     He reached for something over her head, out of sight.

I: IN THE MINUS EIGHTY
    AD 2133

1
Rob
    The woman across the aisle from Rob yammered on as the micro-T rose above street level, threading through the Perrydot Building, lit offices buzzing past in a colorful blur. He should have taken his Scamp. Public transport was simpler, but he always seemed to share a compartment with someone who didn’t have the courtesy to subvocalize.
     For no reason except that she was annoying the shit out of him, Rob decided to scan her to see how much work she’d had done on her face.
     As his fingers danced