I looked through a glass wall onto the artificial city, taking in the kind of view I might get at the top of a 500-story building. The sky was bright blue with puffy clouds, and birds flew in the distance where a faint rainbow was visible; a rainbow always being visible in such a sky, always appearing in some random direction. The sky was always perfect, just like everything else in Dynamic Reality.

"I'm trying to open my G348 partition right now," I heard Vair say to the customer service amai. "What do you call that?"

"Working... Done. Partition G348 is clear for use."

I hid it as I thought I should, but the male voice irritated me. In the middle of the large round room lined with InTek promotional material, my Vair was talking about technical stuff I couldn't understand with a man-type amai: pleasant, perfect, knowing everything and thinking faster than any human could, and yet seeming perfectly real. His appearance and personality had been tailored to Vair's personal tastes, what the server could make of them, and somehow those tastes never matched my physical profile.

Vair was used to standing across from these overly-handsome amai. I had no reason to think she would run off with a silly computer program, but emotions weren't so logical. A jealous fire burned within me and I wanted to tear that program to pieces or debug it or whatever.