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checking under the bed for monsters.”
    Fair enough. But this was worse than anything they’d said before. It was as if Cohen’s death had unleashed their tongues. And in a manner of speaking, she supposed it had; as long as he was alive, they feared his wealth and power enough to avoid actually committing libel. But now that he was dead, they could give full flight to their most paranoid fantasies.
    Cohen had been crazy, they decided. And dangerous. One step away from going rogue. Really, it was a mercy that he’d killed himself before he could spiral out of control and harm others.
    By the end of the first news cycle they had built up a watertight storyline. And they’d turned Cohen into a monster: an unnatural and heartless machine leached of every drop of perspective, humor, warmth, and compassion—everything that made him who he was.
    But then they started talking about Yad Vashem, and it got worse. Much worse. They knew everything. They knew about the decaying Holocaust testimonies housed in the contaminated wilderness of theIsrael-Palestine DMZ. They knew about the last-ditch, desperate upload. They knew every twist and turn and failure of Cohen’s wanderings as he’d tried to find a permanent home for the orphan memories.
    Of course they knew, Li thought bitterly. They were the same people who had refused to lift a finger to help him.
    Now, however, they were filling out a whole second news cycle by turning the vicious monster into a wounded hero. The weight of the testimonies had been too heavy for even Cohen’s broad shoulders. He had killed himself out of survivor’s guilt. And the only wonder was that his friends and family hadn’t cared enough to see it coming.
    Everything they said was true, of course. Every fact, every quote, every data point. The only thing that was false about their story was Cohen himself.
    Li had watched Cohen make that decision. Not in a noble act of self-sacrifice, but in a desperate hurried scramble that left no time for delicate moral balancings. And then she’d watched the crushing weight of those memories settle on him.
    She’d thought it was madness. She’d told him to dump the testimonies into a deep space near-zero Kelvin datatrap and put a nonsentient AI in charge of them. They’d still be there, accessible to anyone who cared to visit them, but Cohen wouldn’t be responsible for them. How could anyone be responsible for
that
? And the idea that Cohen had argued for again and again—that remembering the horror would somehow keep people from doing it again—was so flagrantly opposed to the entire course of human history that, in Li’s opinion, it was little more than a fairy tale.
    So she had said the last time they’d fought about it. And Cohen, true to character, hadn’t argued with her; he’d just turned on his heel, walked out the front door, and disappeared for three weeks. Then he’d come home, without saying one word about it, and settled back into the ordinary stream of their life together as if the fight had never happened. She hadn’t dared mention it again. He had shown her that she could lose him over this. And losing Cohen would have been like losing the sun: not a survivable loss.
    But now she had lost him anyway. And the talking heads talked onas if they didn’t know or care that the world had just ended for her. And Li stood stiff-legged in front of the livewall, trembling with impotent rage and feeling like they were stealing him from her all over again.
    She watched the news spins until she couldn’t take it anymore. And then she fled to the only person who would understand—to the only other surviving piece of Cohen, though she wouldn’t let herself think that way.
    She found Router/​Decomposer in his office on the CalTech campus. CalTech wasn’t in California anymore, of course. But the new campus on the NorAm Arc of Earth’s orbital ring was a faithful facsimile of the original. Dry desert air blew down linoleum-tiled hallways.