It was during the drive from the City to the outskirts of The Sector that Golam realized the importance of the journey to Prague-23. He was now imagining the emotional discharge he and Cynthia continually shot at each other during those last volatile days of being together right before she disappeared into the virtual mist.

"You can't live forever," she had told him back then, after years of holing up with him in his condo somewhere near the foothills of Cyburbia USA.

"Yes," he had agreed, "and what's mine is yours. But you can't have it all now. We need to keep working together."

And then she left. Not because she didn't love him anymore, but because she had to go out and into the real world of corpo-slave culture and get her life lessons. That's exactly the way she had put it to him and his response was subdued silence.