She sees the boys, but they haven’t seen her. There aren’t any passwords, still she hesitates to log in without an invitation, it’s their city after all. They have different priorities here, the cityscapes of Maxine’s DeepArcher are obscurely broken, places of indifference and abuse and unremoved dog shit, and she doesn’t want to track any more of that than she can help into their more merciful city, with its antiquated dyes, its acid green shrubbery and indigo pavements and overdesigned traffic flows. Ziggy has his arm over his brother’s shoulder, and Otis is looking up at him with unhesitating adoration. They are ambling around in this not-yet-corrupted screenscape, at home in it already, unconcerned for their safety, salvation, destiny . . .

Don’t mind me, guys, I’ll just lurk here on the visitors’ page. She makes a note to bring it up, carefully, gently, when they’re all back in meatspace, soy-extenderspace, whatever it is anymore. Because in fact this strange thing has begun to happen. Increasingly she’s finding it harder to tell “real” NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis . . . as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

Out of the ashes and oxidation of this postmagical winter, counterfactual elements have started popping up like li’l goombas. Early one windy morning Maxine’s walking down Broadway when here comes a plastic top from a nine-inch aluminum take-out container, rolling down the block in the wind, on its edge, an edge thin as a predawn dream, keeps trying to fall over but the airflow or something—unless it’s some nerd at a keyboard—keeps it upright for an implausible distance, half a block, a block, waits for the light, then half a block more till it finally rolls off the curb under the wheels of a truck that’s pulling out and gets flattened. Real? Computer-animated?

Same day, after lunch at a hummus joint where you can’t always rule out psychedelic toxins in the tabouli, she happens to be passing the neighborhood Uncle Dizzy’s and here’s the ol’ eponym himself, around the corner with the usual delivery truck thumping it on its side and hollering “Go! Go!” She pauses to stare one eyeblink too long and Dizzy spots her. “Maxi! Just the person I want to see!”

“No Diz, I’m not, really.”

“Here. This is for you. In appreciation.” Holding out a small hinged box with what seems to be a ring inside.

“What’s this, he’s proposing?”

“Just in from the jobber, brand-new. It’s Chinese. Not even sure what I should be charging.”

“Because . . .”

“It’s an invisibility ring.”

“Um, Diz . . .”

“I’m serious, I want you to have it, here, try it on.”

“And . . . it’ll make me invisible.”

“Uncle Dizzy’s personal guarantee.”

Not sure why she’s doing this, she slips on the ring. Dizzy performs a couple of unassisted spins and begins groping in the air. “Where’d she go? Maxi! You there?” so forth. She finds herself skipping around to avoid him.

This is such bullshit. She takes off the ring, hands it back. “Here. Tell you what, you try it.”

“You’re sure . . .” She’s sure. “OK, it was your idea.” He puts on the ring and abruptly vanishes. She spends more time than she really has today looking for him, can’t find him, passersby begin making with the curious stares. She returns to the office, finds the day somehow blighted by this what-is-reality issue, gives up around four, and is down on 72nd Street, soon to be known as midtown, where she runs into Eric coming out of Gray’s Papaya with a teenage accomplice all of whose signifiers scream sublegal.

“Maxi, meet my man Ketone, fake ID portraits a specialty, come on, you can help us look.”

“For what?”

A white van, Eric explains, preferably parked, free of dings, dirt, logos, or lettering. They track up and down a number of blocks, over to CPW and back, before finding a van acceptable to Ketone, who has Eric pose against it, takes out a flash camera, and tells him to smile. He gets about half a dozen shots, and they go over to Broadway and into a low-end luggage store, which puts Maxine’s sensors on full alert, for stashed inside any of these attractive travel bags and trolley cases out on display is sure to be whatever contraband you, and the boys from the precinct, can imagine. After a brief download interval, Ketone comes back with a selection of Eric ID photos. “Which one you like, Maxi?”

“This one here’s nice.”

“Five, ten minutes,” sez Ketone, heading for the printing and laminating setup in the back room.

“Some exploit,” she guesses, “I don’t want to know about?”

Eric gets a little shifty. “In case I have to be out of town in a hurry.” Pause, as if for thought. “Is, things are getting weird?”

“Tell me.” She fills him in on the rolling container top and Uncle Dizzy’s disappearing act. “Just seem to be having some of this, don’t know, virtuality creep lately.”

Eric has noticed it too. “Maybe it’s those Montauk Project folks again. Like, traveling back and forth in time, busy interfering with cause and effect, so whenever we see things begin to break up, pixelate and flicker, bad history nobody saw coming, even weather getting funny, it’s because the special time-ops folks have been out meddling.”

“Sounds good to me. No harder to buy than what’s on the news channels. But we’d never have any way to tell. Anybody comes too close to the truth, they disappear.”

“Maybe what we’ve been living through is just a privileged little window, and now it’s going back to what it always was.”

“You see, ah, trouble down the tracks?”

“Only this strange feeling about the Internet, that it’s over, not the tech bubble, or 11 September, just something fatal in its own history. There all along.”

“You sound like my father, Eric.”

“Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage—

“Gee Eric, li’l judgmental. How about some what the Buddha calls compassion here?”

“Meantime hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys . . . They get us, all right, we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us . . . We’re being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed.”

“So where’s the Undo command?”

Some all but invisible tremor. Maybe he’s laughing to himself. “Could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes.”

“Civil war.”

“OK. Except the slaves don’t even know that’s what they are.”

It isn’t till later, in the unpromising wastelands of January, that Maxine understands this was Eric’s idea of saying so long. Something like it may’ve always been in the cards, though she expected more of a slow virtual slideaway, beneath the overlit pondscum of shopping sites and gossip blogging, down through an uncertain light, slipping behind veil after veil of encryption, deeper into the Deep Web. No, instead just one day, pow—no more L train, no more Joie de Beavre, just abruptly dark and silent, another classic skip, leaving only an uneasy faith that he maybe still exists somewhere on the honorable side of the ledger.

Driscoll as it turns out is still in Williamsburg, still answering e-mails.

“Is my heart broken, thanks for asking, I never knew what was going on anyway. Eric all along had this, can I say alternative destiny? Maybe not, but you must have noticed. Right now I have to deal with more immediate shit like too many roommates around here, hot-water issues, shampoo and conditioner theft, I need to focus on getting far enough ahead to afford a place of my own, if it means changing phase, daylight hours in a cube in a shop someplace across the bridge, so be it. Please don’t move to the burbs or nothing just yet, OK? I may want to drop by if I get a minute.”