The man looked at him blankly, face sorrowful yet empty. He frowned. "Who are you?"
"I am the Class Five AI Richards," said Richards.
"Are you? Oh." The man turned back to the daylight, then back as if he'd remembered something important. "I can't find her. I can't get out."
Richards walked around the bed slowly to stand by the balcony door. "Who can't you find, Waldo?"
"My sister, Marita."
"Queen Isabella?"
A ghost of life came into the face of Waldo. "Yes, that's right, Isabella. She used to play at queens as a little girl. She always wanted to be Queen Isabella."
"The Spanish one?"
Waldo nodded and smiled dreamily. "Yes, the Spanish one."
"What happened to you, Waldo? Can you remember?"
Waldo shook his head. "I had something to tell her, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't find her. I don't know. I'm sorry, I get confused."
"This door here, is this the way out?"
Waldo nodded. "But I can't go through." He frowned. "Why?"
Richards was filled with sympathy; he knew why. He'd seen this before. Waldo was a ghost in the machine, an imprint of a living mind left when its owner had died, a fragmented one at that. He saw that the light extended right around Waldo uninterrupted. He had no shadow. That made a lot of sense.
"I don't think you can go back that way, Waldo," he said. Richards crouched low and looked up into the man's face. Waldo was, had been, thirty-five, but he looked boyish; he carried a little too much fat and it smoothed his features. He looked lost. "But do you mind if I try?" said Richards gently.
Waldo looked at him as if he'd not seen him before, then his face cleared. "Yes, yes, of course."
Richards turned to the door. That was as good as a permission, from a human user in a Reality Realm.
He was free.
His mind rapidly reconfigured itself, bursting from his human avatar and layering itself into the complexities of the ragtag Reality 37. He felt the world being torn apart, like the tugs of stitches coming from a healed wound, k52's ravenous, alien code rewriting it into something new, something unrealised, the germ of a possibility.
He peered into it and almost laughed at k52's audacity. He had to talk to Otto. Now.
His perception of the virtuality dissolved into the roar and tumult of the System Wide Grid. The balcony door became a portal, a hole punched secret and secure through the walls surrounding the supposedly inviolate RealWorld Reality Realms; Waldo's back door. He pushed part of himself through it. Tendrils of fact reached out to him, linking him node by node to all corners of human civilisation, from the depths of the deepest terrestrial desert right out to the colony on Titan.
He stepped towards the door. It burned brighter.
"Please!" Waldo spoke, and the room vied in Richards' perceptions with the glorious howl of information space. Richards turned back, felt himself draw in a little, back into the shape and concerns of a man.
"Please," said Waldo. "My sister…"
Richards nodded. He reset his fedora firmly on his head and, with a deep breath of relief, stepped back into the world.
Otto was the last in the room housing the mortal remains of Giacomo Vellini, a real dead end.
Something in the wall of machines crackled.
Something crackled back.
A swift chatter of machine noise bounced back and forth. A panel slid upwards, revealing the slender array of a naked holoemitter, stripped of casing.
It flickered blue light, and painted Otto's partner onto the air.
"Hiya, Otto!" said Richards in that half-smug, mischievous manner he had. "There you are."
"Richards?"
"The one and only," said the hologram, and bowed. "And boy, have we got ourselves into a right old pickle this time." Richards wore his usual simulated human form, but it looked worn and tired, more real somehow. His suit was gone, a rough uniform in its place. His macintosh was shredded, one sleeve wet with blood, the arm within held crooked against the AI's chest.
"What happened to you?" asked Otto.
"I got a new hat," said Richards. "Look, I don't have much time. I've snuck out of Waldo's back door, but k52 will notice soon."
Commander Guan burst into the room, two of his troopers at his back, sidearms raised. They began shouting furiously at once and pointed their guns at the hologram emitter.
"Sheesh! I surrender," said Richards and raised his good arm.
Otto shouted back at the Chinese, placing himself between their guns and Waldo's equipment. "This is my partner! Stand down, stand down!"
"He is an artificial intelligence and an enemy of the People's Republic of China!" responded Guan. He pulled his own gun and levelled it at Otto's forehead.
"Get out of the way, Klein."
"Just make me," he growled.
Richards bellowed in Mandarin. The men turned to look at him. "That's better. I'm not here, this really is just an image projection, not even a full sensing presence. I've got piss-all ability to do anything here, so there's no problem there, is there? It's just a telephone call."
Guan looked at the AI with an intense mix of fear and hatred.
"Seriously, I'll be out of here as soon as I can. I just need to talk to my partner."
"He's been inside the renegade Realm, Guan. Whatever he has to tell me will be of the greatest importance," said Otto. "Or do you want to go back to your superiors as the world is falling down around their ears and tell them it was your fault?"
Guan stared. He barked something, and all three Dragon Fire warriors raised their guns and covered important parts of the machinery in the room.
"You have one minute," said Guan.
"Are you in, um, China, Otto?"
"You can't tell?"
"Things have been complicated. I've no idea where I am, or what day of the week it is."
"Sinosiberia," said Otto.
"Ah," said Richards. "I better get out of here before their attack ware latches onto me."
"Waldo's dead," said Otto. "We were going to use him to get you out."
"I appreciate that, and I know he's dead. There's an echo of him in here."
"Poor bastard," said Otto.
"Maybe, but if there weren't it would have been game over a while ago. I think I can stop k52, but you must not let them destroy the Realm House, you got that?"
"With Waldo dead, they are going to blow up the Realm servers," said Otto.
"Stop them. Do whatever it takes. They using nukes?"
Otto nodded.
"Idiots. Don't let them do it. I think I've got it all figured out, I'll explain everything when I get out, OK?"
"Sure."
"Good." Richards looked round the bunker room, caught sight of Waldo and wrinkled his nose. "Say, is his sister here?"
"Yes," said Otto. "Dirty and skinny, but she's alive."
Richards' hologram grinned. "That's all I need to know. See you soon, partner."
The emitter winked out and he disappeared.
Guan's men raked Waldo's cabinets with gunfire, destroying them and closing the backdoor to the Realms. Guan fixed Otto with flinty eyes.
"They will have my head for this," he said, his singsong growl rendered as powerless English.
With great reluctance, Richards pulled back into the sealed spaces of the Realms. He shut the door and watched it dissolve as its physical components were shattered. Unusual to have something ephemeral and material so closely linked, but it was the only way Waldo could get in and out undetected. Richards sighed as he scoured the remnants of it from the Grid. He had no choice. It could have been an escape route for him if his plan did not work out, but by the same reasoning it could have been an escape route for k52; if the sly bastard had another base unit out in the Real he could be free for years.
Richards could not risk that.
He felt himself contract back into his unwanted avatar. Its biological unpleasantness, its pain and malfunctions pulled themselves over him like a shroud.