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bought into a duplication technology, he told me. “There’s a DNA info base in nanomemory, quark based, really something. Then a generator that kicks in when that program runs, comes out of a lot of compression. Well, he reproduces himself, see? This guy actually figured out a way to live forever.”
    “Guy? What do you mean, guy? This is some kind of bacteria.”
    “Yeah, that’s true, right,” Lance said. “There’s a bug in the scalar routine?”
    “Scalar routine?”
    “Formally it’s the function of two vectors, equal to the product of their magnitudes and the cosine of the angle between them? Anyway, if you get the dot point wrong . . .”
    “Lance, what are you talking about?”
    “What went wrong. It’s in the sequence for the scalar routine, what makes him this size. See, the chipset reproduced him all right, but the dot point got shifted. Got his scale wrong by a factor of one thousand. Poor sucker. I did the calculations. He’s one one-thousandth the size of an actual man.”
    So there he was, my rival, who less than an hour ago, in the strange complicated way of human affairs, had interposed himself between me and the consummation of my dreams. Who, I asked myself, stood between me and my dreams now?
    I started to laugh, but I swear I saw a tiny fist raised, shaking, directly at me.
    I sucked in a deep breath. “I’d better contact Mrs. MacPhee immediately,” I said, reaching for the vidphone.
    III.
    That was the beginning of the week you all remember, the week that changed all our lives.
    Later that Monday morning astronomers announced that Virgilius Maro ’s course had unaccountably shifted. The large comet was now headed directly toward the planet Earth.
    Impact was expected in seven days, fourteen hours, and six minutes.
    I see I’ve barely touched upon the catastrophic possibilities impact presented, but I’m sure you remember some of them: how a comet V. Maro ’s size had crashed into the Yucatan at the end of the Cetacean Era and ended the reign of the dinosaurs, how the current human casualty estimate ran into the billions. Alone in the glow of wallscreens and in groups from school auditoriums to cathedrals we contemplated the possibility of a conflagration that would produce rampant volcanism, sulfur clouds, an extended period of darkness, soaring temperatures followed by a new ice age, the extinction of species after species and eliminate most of the world’s biomass. Scientists were scrambling to turn the comet off its course with a thermonuclear explosion in space. NASA ran twenty-four hour shifts, and the Chinese mobilized their “factory-in-space” program to produce a delivery vehicle loaded and launched from the UN Station. Nukes were being readied and shuttled up, but as there were only a few hundred left on the planet, NASA was having logistics problems, and the decision to go with the Ukrainian multiple warheads (the infamous “cabbage bombs”) made everyone nervous. As well, as we all now know, we should have been.
    As for Grateful Dead, Inc., the effect on the firm was paradoxical. With so much potential death on the way, suddenly lots of people wanted to make arrangements. They reasoned, and rightly so, that in the event of impact there would be a run on deathcare services, and that the average consumer would be best accommodated by the world-wide facilities of a full-service chain such as ours.
    Just after the President’s announcement, I finally found Max. He was up in the boardroom, sprawled in his captain’s chair at the end of the long slate table, transfixed on the Obit Channel running full wallscreen on the other side of the room. His little fax dish had pulled in a library of invoices, printed out balance sheets and ledger pages, all heaped around him. On his laptop was loaded a draft page from the upcoming annual report to shareholders.
    “Fuck the business,” I told him. “Go home to your wife and son. Nobody really knows about this, nobody knows