Before they disintegrated, Eliza and Mother left some hints to suggest that the real Allen Hobby had died, perhaps long ago, and been replaced with a robot double nicknamed the Frankenhobby. Immediately after the secret began to leak out, Cybertronics announced that Hobby had died in a tragic amphibicopter crash. Security footage suggests that this was no accident; Hobby's amphibicopter was compelled to dive to certain destruction on the sea floor.

with a robot copy. Martin and Diane must have suspected, though, because they responded by speaking the 7-word imprint code for Monica2. Forced to love the one person she hated above all others, her virtual personality seems to have unraveled. A dreamlike record of the encounter starts here. (My personal belief is that these images, pulled either from Cybertronics security cameras or from Diane's ambient spy drones, were passed to Martin's house, Brutus, by Aurora, the powerful dreaming AI who cares for the original Monica … but this is pure speculation on my part.)

In her attempt to exactly replicate the conditions that led to David's evolution into a self-motivated being, Jane Sutter built an AI version of Monica Swinton (with, perhaps, a little more of her own mother mixed in than she had intended.) This AI double turned out to be the mysterious Mother. The not-quite-sane Monica2 had always blamed Martin for David's disappearance, and had been slowly building a trap to draw Martin to the abandoned Weeping Lions lab, where she meant to kill him and replace him

Hours before being murdered, Jane had uploaded a copy of herself to the sphere on a prototype whole-brain scanner. The copy had always been buggy, and finally wore completely away.

Meanwhile, word filtered through the hacker underground that Eliza was beginning to fall apart. Turns out that Eliza was a ragged electronic copy of one of Allen Hobby's research partners, Jane Sutter. After the original David program was cancelled, Sutter had worked on in secret to build self-motivated robots that would not only be capable of independence, but would want to be independent.

He only got out of there alive because some friends of mine managed to talk the security guard, ex-football player Mike Royal, into risking his life to save RK. After a couple of weeks in the hospital, the Red King left a pointer to a diary entry talking about the aftermath of the incident.

With Mephista gone I desperately needed help from someone with very serious computer skills, so I tracked down the Red King. He agreed to help me out, and we set a meeting for early the next week. I showed up a little late to find nothing but a cryptic clue left on his bill. He had been caught by ARM thugs and taken for a brutal beating in a secret room at the Statue of Liberty.

he kept her in an artificial coma to blackmail Crane. When Crane realized Gilbert would never let either of them go, he arranged his own murder. However, before dying he had constructed a virtual self, a Johnny expert system, and covertly downloaded it into Beverly's monkey supertoy. Gilbert no longer had any reason to keep Bev on ice, but when he went to see her resuscitated, he was killed in a not-so-accidental accident…

Now the Mann Act has just been introduced. If the legislature and president Capshaw pass it, there will be a binding referendum on whether AI's should be treated like equal citizens, or whether they will continue to have no more rights than any other machine. Everybody will go crazy over this one, from the robot-haters to the Geri Khan and the militant abolitionists like her Things are bound to get tense.

Recently I have come to believe that Martin Swinton's homes were being killed to keep him from asking questions about his younger brother, David. Diane Fletcher turned up something surprising in one of the houses—an encoded message from the murderer, saying he was sorry for what he had done. Sencha had sent me a clue to the name of the house-killer but now he's dead too.

Loki appears to have been destroyed by Sophia, an enormously powerful … person? idea? AI? As far as I can tell she exists only in the sphere. If you catch a glimpse of her eyes, she will send you to her doorkeeper, Eliza. Eliza seems to be a crazy AI, but if you can manage to keep her happy and play along with her games, she will eventually allow you in to see Sophia, who knows far too many secrets to ignore.