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si può goder ." The words came out of a recent memory track; she had just been lying in bed in her own suite in the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, blue smoke drifting overhead, listening to the classic old Sills Traviata . Her favorite; she still couldn't handle the Callas chips. All that screaming was too much like the voices inside her own head.
    The other voice, the computer's, made no reply. The only signal was the resumption of the elevator's progress up the building's face. A few moments later the doors slid open; she stepped out and into what had been her uncle's private domain.
    She had been here before. Once, for a few minutes upon her arrival back in L.A., just long enough to glance around, then turn to her retinue of corporate flunkies and give her orders. To have the entire floor mothballed, just the way it'd been when Eldon Tyrell had been found murdered. Minus his body, of course; that had already been removed, then cremated, the ashes presented to her in some tribalistic changing-of-the-guard ceremony, as she'd stood black-veiled on a raised platform in front of the corporation's assembled employees. She'd carried back to her private quarters the little urn with her uncle's name on it. Every day since then the level of grey dust inside had grown slightly higher with each flick of her cigarette against the urn's open rim. She kept it handy on her bedside table for just that purpose.
    In the great high-ceilinged rooms, the air smelled stale and confined, despite the building's elaborate circulation and filtering systems. Something had been trapped in there that no mechanical breath could expel. Not just the past of a year ago, his death, but the past of many years before, and many small, cumulative deaths. Those had been hers.
    In that familiar bedchamber, she had seen the glow of sacramental ranks of candles on her own skin, turning to ruby a small stain of her own blood. Now the candles were all guttered puddles of wax, black seeds of wick at their centers, a white cascade, glistening frozen upon the sheets' rumpled silk. The imprint of her uncle's back and shoulders was still visible in the pillows stacked against the massive headboard. That had been the place of his late-night meditations, his brain ticking into the hours when only the Vladivostok and Beijing exchanges were active, the distant game boards where he could shift the pawns of cash and holdings into even sharper, more advantageous positions.
    That game went on without him. Another one was over, played out to checkmate. As Sarah walked across the dim bedchamber, her toe had struck a chess piece, the black queen. The other pieces were scattered across the floor; the board had been knocked over by the corpse's fall. She wondered who had won, her uncle or his opponent. Hard to imagine him losing.
    In the faint luminance spilling toward her from the other rooms, something else was visible at her feet. A black continent from a map without boundaries, big enough for an eyeless face to lie against as it had spread wetly past his cooling hands. The stain on the floor had been red then, but less than a year's time had darkened it. She stepped across it, the sharp points of her heels tapping as though on a thin layer of shellac. On the other side, she stopped and looked back at the empty bedchamber. Candle wax, cold sheets, and toppled chess pieces. She liked the room better this way, dead and safe.
    A voice whispered to her, from somewhere above. “Transaction left incomplete. Awaiting further instructions. Do you wish to resume trading?"
    Her uncle's brokerage program, dumb and without initiative, capable only of following the orders it received. Given the late hour of his death, that was what he would've been doing when the replicant, with its brushed-back shock of white hair -- she'd seen pictures -- and crazy smile, had walked into the bedchamber. The brokerage program's soft voice was a painless memory for her, or at least one on the other side of