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“What? No. Can we?”

“Why not? I, for one, would choose nowhere else.”

Just to hear him say that was thrilling. “But what about Simopolis?”

“We’ll bring Simopolis to us,” he said. “We’ll have people in. They can pull up chairs.”

She laughed out loud. “What a silly, silly notion, Mr. Malley!”

“No, really. We’ll be like the bride and groom atop a wedding cake. We’ll be known far and wide. We’ll be famous.”

“We’ll be freaks!”

“Say yes, my love. Say you will.”

They stood close but not touching, thrumming with happiness, balanced on the moment of their creation, when suddenly and without warning the lights dimmed, and Anne’s thoughts flitted away like larks.

Old Ben awoke in the dark. “Anne?” he said and groped for her. It took a moment to realize that he was alone in his media room. It had been a most trying afternoon, and he’d fallen asleep. “What time is it?”

“Eight-oh-three PM,” replied the room.

That meant he’d slept for two hours. Midnight was still four hours away. “Why’s it so cold in here?”

“Central heating is offline,” replied the house.

“Off line?” How was that possible? “When will it be back?”

“That’s unknown. Utilities do not respond to my enquiry.”

“I don’t understand. Explain.”

“There are failures in many outside systems. No explanation is currently available.”

At first, Ben was confused; things just didn’t fail anymore. What about the dynamic redundancies and self-healing routines? But then he remembered that the homeowner’s association to which he belonged contracted out most domicile functions to management agencies, and who knew where they were located? They might be on the Moon for all he knew, and with all those trillions of sims in Simopolis sucking up capacity… It’s begun, he thought, the idiocy of our leaders. “At least turn on the lights,” he said, half expecting even this to fail. But the lights came on, and he went to his bedroom for a sweater. He heard a great amount of commotion through the wall in the apartment next door. It must be one hell of a party, he thought, to exceed the wall’s buffering capacity. Or maybe the wall buffers are offline too?

The main door chimed. He went to the foyer and asked the door who was there. The door projected the outer hallway. There were three men waiting there, young, rough-looking, ill-dressed. Two of them appeared to be clones, jerries.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the jerries said, not looking directly at the door. “We’re here to fix your houseputer.”

“I didn’t call you, and my houseputer isn’t sick,” he said. “It’s the net that’s out.” Then he noticed they carried sledgehammers and screwdrivers, hardly computer tools, and a wild thought crossed his mind. “What are you doing, going around unplugging things?”

The jerry looked confused. “Unplugging, sir?”

“Turning things off?”

“Oh, no sir! Routine maintenance, that’s all.” The men hid their tools behind their backs.

They must think I’m stupid, Ben thought. While he watched, more men and women passed in the hall and hailed the door at the suite opposite his. It wasn’t the glut of sim traffic choking the system, he realized — the system itself was being pulled apart. But why? “Is this going on everywhere?” he said. “This routine maintenance?”

“Oh, yessir. Everywhere. All over town. All over the world, ’sfar as we can tell.”

A coup? By service people? By common clones? It made no sense. Unless, he reasoned, you considered that the lowest creature on the totem pole of life is a clone, and the only thing lower than a clone is a sim. And why would clones agree to accept sims as equals? Manumission Day, indeed. Uppity Day was more like it. “Door,” he commanded, “open.”

“Security protocol rules this an unwanted intrusion,” said the house. “The door must remain locked.”

“I order you to open the door. I overrule your protocol.”

But the door remained stubbornly shut. “Your identity cannot be confirmed with Domicile Central,” said the house. “You lack authority over protocol-level commands.” The door abruptly quit projecting the outside hall.

Ben stood close to the