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    M artin Warshaw was put to rest on the afternoon of the twenty-first, out in the old mass grave in Palo Alto. The day was bright and clear and the sprawling grounds of the former plague site had never looked greener, calmer, or more contemplative. Mia recognized no one at the ceremony. No one took the trouble to recognize her.
    The nineteen elderly people who attended the ceremony were all very much of a type. Hollywood people had never been afraid of the knife. The Beautiful People had always been particularly eager to seize on any artifice of youth. Fifty years ago, people of this sort had beenmedical pioneers. Now they were genuinely and irretrievably old. Their primitive techniques, the biomedical cutting edge during the 2030s and 2040s, were hopelessly dated and crude. Now they truly looked the role of pioneers: very scarred and tired and hardscrabble.
    Attendants opened the hinged white lid of the emulsifier, took the thin shroud from Martin’s wasted, puckered body, and slid him, with reverent care, feetfirst into the seething gel. The scanners set to work, Martin’s final official medical imaging. Gentle ultrasonics shook the body apart, and when the high-speed rotors began to churn, the emulsifier’s ornamental flowerbeds trembled a bit. Autopsy samplers caught up bits of the soup, analyzed genetic damage, surveyed the corpse’s populations of resident bacteria, hunted down and cataloged every subsymptomatic viral infection and prion infestation, and publicly nailed down the cause of death (self-administered neural depressant) with utter cybernetic certainty. All the data was neatly and publicly filed on the net.
    Someone—Mia never discovered who—had asked a Catholic priest to say a few words. The young priest was very eager, and meant well. He was very exalted on entheogens, so filled with fiery inspiration that he was scarcely able to speak. When the priest finished his transcendant rant, he formally blessed the gel. The tiny crowd drifted from the site in twos and threes.
    A necropolitan engraved Martin’s portrait, name, and dates onto the emulsifier’s cream white wall. Martin Warshaw (1999–2095) had become a colored patch the size of the palm of Mia’s hand, neatly ranked beside three hundred and eighty-nine other people, the previous occupants of this device. Mia tarried, gazing across the bright rows of funereal photoengravings. The sweet presence of all these human faces made it seem almost a kindly machine, a machine that meant well.
    Mia summoned a taxi at the edge of the cemetery grounds. While she waited, she spotted a fawn-coloreddog skulking in the oleanders. The dog wore no clothing and displayed no particular signs of intelligence. She stared at the dog as she waited for her taxi, but when she tried to approach him, the dog vanished into the bushes. She felt vaguely foolish once the dog had gone. Large brown dogs were common enough.
    Mia left the taxi at the tube station, ducked under the conduit-riddled Californian earth, and emerged at the Public Telepresence Point at Coit Tower. Telegraph Hill was her favorite site when she was away from San Francisco. Whenever she traveled she’d link back to this site periodically, for a restorative taste of Bay Area urban sensory access. Mia had done telepresence to sites in cities all over the world, but she never fell in love with cities unless she could walk them. San Francisco was one of the world’s great walking cities. That was why she lived in San Francisco. That, and a great deal of habit. She set out on foot.
    On the Embarcadero, Mia sipped a hot frappé in a crowded and noisy tourist café. She wondered glumly what her former husband would have thought of the day’s events. What he might have thought of Warshaw’s final ceremonies. Martin Warshaw had been the only genuine rival that Daniel had ever had. Would there have been some lingering trace of male jealousy there, maybe some slight satisfaction? Mia wondered if her former