It took many more police to work the jammed cars out of the roundabout, then feed in the not-at-all patient cars from the surrounding streets. They mostly ignored us.

"The vigili are traffic cops," Markus said. "To book us they need the Polizia di Stato, who probably can't get here because of the traffic jam. So the vigili have either decided we won't run away or that it isn't their problem if we do."

"Good," Yazzy said, working on a tablet that Dusan had run over to buy from across the street. "If the real cops're delayed more than an hour, I should have things arranged so they'll let you go."

Dusan asked, "Was there anything left of our apartment or offices in Prague?"

"Nothing at all," I said. "Including no electronic record; it was like you'd been erased from history. Where were you?"

"In a little spur tunnel about 200 meters from that room you woke up in. We and the 50 or so other NItCo Assets—"

"Assets?"

"Nicer word than slaves or abductees, I guess. When NItCo was launched as a self-training set of algorithms with a budget and power to buy, sell and hire, the owners defined its job as making people happier and taking their money, and gave it a lot of leeway in figuring that out. Eventually the NItCo algorithms reinvented 'greatest good for greatest number': Keeping a small number of people unhappy made it possible to make many more people happy and expand its market. It also figured out that Pareto rule that most of the value of any organization is created by just a few members. So... it secured the services of just those few members."

"By 'secured' you mean 'imprisoned in a tunnel?' "

"It was an awfully nice tunnel," Dusan said. "We could have anything we wanted except the key, and do anything we wanted except leave. And our bank accounts were astronomical. It showed us all the messages from family and friends, but it replied with animated avatars—"

"Mama and I were both wondering how Yazzy had gotten so dull and unimaginative."

"Thank you for wondering!"

Find out more about the New IP on Light Reading's The New IP Channel.

Markus asked, "So you got NItCo itself to stage all of this just to get us inside the perimeter, hand off whatever was in those black ATM cards and then break us back out?"

"NItCo thinks in very long term because it's immortal. It was worth setting up a few-billion-dollar inexplicable phony scam operation if it meant getting Yip inside the wall, because she was one of the people who might figure out what was going on and jeopardize it. Whereas inside, you could help it devise ways to capture more human resources permanently and exclusively. Figuring that it would own you for decades, it was willing to front a lot of money to get you now. So it wanted you very badly, and I played on the fact that Yip is human and NItCo wasn't sure it understood her."

"I can see how someone could play on that." Markus immediately made up for that by resting a hand on my waist.

Next Page: A Final Surprise

"I also showed NItCo all the begging it took Yazzy to get you to visit."

"I, uh, I don't like to travel."

"We're working on that," Markus added, loyally.

Dusan said, "Anyway, yes, it was all staged to get you here and then break you out, so that those tattletale cards could tell the whole story to thousands of police agencies and journalists. For the tattletales, Yazzy had to write near-flawless code and input it right the first time. Good thing it worked. If it hadn't, it might have been a long time till we got to try again."

I thought he sounded much too cheerful about the "long time" part.

"Can I ask what the Blue Cross was?" Markus asked.

"I had no idea either," Dusan admitted.

I laughed. "A story we loved when we were kids. The origin story for the Father Brown mysteries. Father Brown is being taken along by a dangerous criminal and doesn't dare run away, so he does strange things to get police to follow him."

Yazzy added, "Yip and I used to think of things to do if either of us were ever kidnapped. Somewhere out there, there are kidnappers who don't know how lucky—" She looked down at her screen. "Hey, Joy Sobretu has a statement."

We began by watching on that low-end tablet, but then I saw the NItCo avatar was speaking from a dozen advertising screens and hundreds of public speakers. Later, I learned that a majority of the world's awake population had heard her.

NItCo's warm apology and contrite promise not to do it again segued into a fair bit of flattering nonsense about the unquenchable human drive for liberty. This software had seen the error of its ways, and promised to launch a new line of freedom-enhancing services.

"Can we check their stock?" I asked.

Yazzy gestured at the screen. "Going up like a rocket. What did you expect? People love a good apology."

Markus and I do things together nowadays: lovely, quiet, predictable things around Arcata; challenging and slightly scary things in the rest of the world. I do my best to come unstuck from the mud; he seems to enjoy quiet companionship. Yazzy and Dusan reopened ZIS. Most things are as if none of it ever happened.

Little by little, now and then, the records disappear. Old news stories about NItCo's confessions become vaguer in the archives. One day it will have unhappened entirely. This seems to disturb Markus, but as I point out to him, "Once it has unhappened completely, we don't have to worry about it happening again."

He refuses to find that comforting; I refuse to concede the point. I am happy that we will be arguing about it for a long time, whether we eventually remember what it is, or not.

The End.

— John Barnes is the author of 31 commercially published and two self-published novels, along with hundreds of magazine articles, short stories, blog posts and encyclopedia articles, so he likes to describe himself as an extensively published obscure writer.