Rowena had had her body sculpted to resemble one of the impossible fantasy women from the canvases of her faction's namesake reed-pair artist.

Huge cantilevered boobs, a waist so slim it must have involved major organ displacement, and callipygian ass. She wore a tiny metal bra, some faux barbaric jewelry. From a fake gold chain around her waist hung a few wisps of colored silk.

She was such a self-contained, self-immersed, impossible creation that being in the same room with her was like sharing space with an ancient animatronic figure. I tried imagining having her as my mother. It was a major stretch.

"Yes, Officers. How can I help you?"

"It's about your son, Bert. Can we come in?"

"Certainly."

The flat was furnished in High Conan. We sat on embroidered cushions and explained the trouble her son had gotten himself into.

"Well, I feel extremely bad for Bertie. He was always a good boy and showed such promise. Red Sonia knows, I did my best with him! But I don't see how I can help you now."

"He hasn't been in touch with you recently?" "Not for years."

K-mart stood. "Mind if we have a look around?"

Rowena got hastily to her feet. "Unless you have a warrant, I'm afraid that's out of the question."

Nodding toward a closed door, K-mart said, "What's in there?"

"That's my shrine to Dagon. Very innocent, I assure you. But sacred. Now, if you don't mind, Officers, I'd like to be alone--"

K-mart started to rap a string of antisense as he ambled about the room.

"Oh, I was raised Dagonite, but I fell away. Haven't seen a shrine in ages.

You don't mind, do you?"

Before Rowena could stop him, K-mart had pulled the door open.

The Blankie was waiting.

It reared up as tall as a man and twice as bulky, a quivering blue wall of cryptoflesh. Unlike what I knew about the small Blankies, this one radiated an ammoniacal, fecal reek.

Bert had obviously been tweaking its parameters a little.

Before K-mart could get his flashlight up, the Blankie fell forward on him, wrapping him in its straitjacket embrace.

Rowena screamed. I had my own flashlight up, but couldn't shoot for fear of piercing the swaddled K-mart.

Something barreled past me so fast and hard it spun me around. When I recovered, I saw our Bulldog tangling with the Blankie, all fangs and talons.

It zeroed in on a major ganglion, ripping it out in a bloody mess of dendrites.

The Blankie collapsed like an air-mattress that had sprung a leak.

I went to help a slimed K-mart up. Rowena rushed past me into the Blankie's room, shouting, "Bertie, Bertie, I tried to stop them!"

K-mart seemed shaken, but uninjured. "Tara! I smell like the time I fell into the family outhouse back in Kazakhstan!"

Flashlight in hand, I followed Rowena into the room.

But I needed no weapon to deal with little Berrie.

The fearsome mastermind behind the Blankie murder lay in an oversized Bayer cradle usually used for burn victim treatment, naked except for an oversized cloth diaper. In one lax hand was an Allelix sonic injector. From the utterly wiped look on Bertie's face, I could guess that the injector had been loaded with a probably irreversible dose of Neonate Nine or some other retrogressive synapse-disconnecting trope.

Rowena was kneeling by the cradle, weeping. Together, she and her son resembled some kind of tawdry, modern Pieta.

K-mart came up beside me, shaking his head. "Muy hesomagari."

I thought back to my own days as a mel-head. "But we've all got navels that can get twisted, Kaz. Leastwise, those of us born human."

On our way out, I came on the Bulldog chewing up the evidence. In the heat of the moment, its ancient instincts had overwhelmed its training.

I went to kick it, but changed my mind.

THE BAD SPLICE.

Previously unpublished.

As if blindly obedient to one of the weirder plectic neothomist catastrophe figures, my life seemed to be warping itself around strange attractors, spiraling and darting up and down cusps and caustics, pleats and furrows that led to some unpredictable yet inevitable terminal boundary condition.

And the worst part was -- I couldn't tell if on balance I should be scared or glad.

Changes had swarmed through my life as thick as harvest thrips on a cloth-tree during the past few months, enough so as to necessitate a few unscheduled sessions with Doctor Varela, my BP advisor. I had thought I hadseen the last of that calm and erudite Behavioral Pragmatist after he had helped me over the rough patch following my departure from the PI biz.

Since joining Boston's branch of the Protein Police, my life had been relatively simple and undemanding, despite the quirks and dangers of my new trade, and I had felt no recent need of beep counseling. But lately all that had changed, leading Doctor Varela to nod and murmur sagely over my condition, consult his snippets, and prescribe a course of Biomet's Angstaway paired with Sciclone's VivaciTee, as well as a general adrenergic booster. The tropes seemed to be working, although I still felt a little off-parm.

But I was managing to cope well with quite a lot, I thought.

It had all started when the Big Brains in charge of the NU's Internal Recon and Security force (of which the Protein Police was a division) had laid down a couple of new ukases.

First, there were to be no more human-human teams. We were just too understaffed to permit such a luxury to continue and would remain so into the foreseeable future. What with the guaranteed prole-dole, the dwindling numbers of pure-gen, fully enfranchised humans, and the seductions of virtuality, criminality, and a million sects, cults, posses, and sets representing an infinite range of hedonism, nihilism, and every ism on the scale, potential candidates for the force were few and far between. (The same was true, of course, in every branch of the NU adminisphere; without kibes, demons, and cocktails, the whole system would have suffered instant apoptosis.) So all the old dual-human partnerships were split up. That meant I lost K-mart Saunders, the most agreeable plug I had ever worked with. In his place, I was to choose between a var or a kibe. Well, since the death of my old var Hamster, I couldn't really work too closely with the splices and remain comfortable. That left the kibe.

The Turing Level Four kibes had just gone into general open-access production. (The Level Fives, naturally, were already up and running, but were reserved exclusively for the use of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and other ruling bodies of the adminisphere, which liked to stay one giant step ahead of the masses they governed. And of course the Level Sixes were not far behind, close to finishing their semi-autonomous evolution.) The Toronto HQ of the Protein Police had just received a month's worth of shipments of Fours from the Bangalore macqui of Segasoft-TogaiMagic, and these had been further distributed across the continent.

The kibe cores themselves looked identical to and had the same dimensions as the old Level Threes, allowing for easy retrofitting: shiny featureless platters about as thick as a stack of a dozen ancient CD's. It was the newly evolved qubitic circuitry inside that raised their functioning to a higher level. As for the chassis that would carry the cores -- well, the force's own crada had come up with several new models specifically designed for law enforcement.

So my new partner became a synthetic, syncretic personality in a mini-frisbee, capable of swapping bodies at will.

On top of this unsettling switch, the Swellheads had insisted that all the humans on the force go in for a somatic upgrade. The mucky-mucks were tired of losing officers to various preventable assaults. Baseline bodies were now considered insufficient to counter the moddies of the baddies. We had to meet them head-on, match them in the arms (and legs and brains) race.

Like most people in all walks of life, I had my share of implants and add-ons and upgrades already: simple things that had helped me in my work, like sharper peripheral vision, stronger bones, voluntary pain shunts. But unlike some bodyartists and puzzlepluses, I had never gone in for radical modifications. What was good enough for grandpooh was good enough for me. Now I was being told that I had to change or be dropped from the force.

Swallowing my trepidations and instinctive dislike of being bossed around (after all, I wasn't an independent contractor anymore), I went into the bodyshop.

I came out sheathed in flexible imbricated skin like a pangolin's, itsplates chamois-soft to the touch yet capable of turning aside sharp edges and low velocity projectiles. Additionally, my new integument from Calypte Biomed would react to the beam of a flashlight by instantly altering its refractive index. (I had once read that the quickest basal reaction in nature was found in the jaws of a certain ant, which could snap closed in a third of a millisecond. Science had considerably bettered that.) I had a paralymphatic system from Olympus Biotech that would aggressively react to micro- and nano-invaders. My arteries were reinforced with CuraTech's neo-goretex, my bones threaded with Innovir's stonefiber. My heart had an onboard Hemazyne assist, as did my lungs. I had Agouron hyperflexure in my fingers, increased haptic and proprioceptive sensitivity, and certain wetware enhancements from BioCryst not available to the general public. Finally, I could on short notice generate several highly damaging antipersonnel cytokines expressible through strategically placed exocrine glands.

In short, I was now one mean and hyperefficient slagger for the forces of goodness and justice.

I was also on a half-dozen new tropes that allowed me to integrate my new body image and sensory inputs.

It was just after this makeover that the final big change in my life occured.

I met Xuly Beth and fell in love.

Xuly Beth Vollbracht had been born in the Mercosur, grown up a gypsy waterbaby. Her parents, Rolf and Valentina, had managed a section of the Hidrovia, roving up and down that extensive artificial waterway, supervising commerce and maintenance, troubleshooting and policing. Educated and trained as a noah for the GEF, Xuly Beth had been stationed at various spots around the world (she had seen parts of APEC, CarriCom, and Scandibaltica), monitoring and remediating oceanic-atmospheric systems, before ending up in the Nova England bioregion.

We met at an official function hosted by the noahs to brief the Protein Police on the latest rogue organisms we could possibly expect to emerge from runaway marine co-evolution. (Safe as silicrobe technology was supposed to be, there were inevitable glitches.) Luckily for me, Xuly Beth was far from repelled by my altered epidermis.

It turned out that one of her first lovers had been a fishboy from the Hidrovia, and the experience had crystallized her taste for odd integuments.

Xuly Beth was the change in my life that tipped the scales toward gladness. It was the first time since my wife walked out on me that I had a functioning pair-bonding. It felt good.

And that feeling alone should have been enough to warn me that something bad was about to fall right on my head like one of Xuly Beth's programmed heavyrains out of the seemingly clear sky.

The first notice I had of trouble was the urgent patterned pinging of my flimsy one morning as I sat at my desk. I was on scheduled fifteen-minute downtime, relaxing in a quasi-meditative state at the focus of which was a little token of her work Xuly Beth had given me. In a clear cylindrical container about as big as a pneumatic-tube message capsule, a self-sustaining miniature silicrobe twister ran its homeodynamic contortions, powered only by sunlight. Its infinite random permutations served as a Taoist exemplar of mind-wiping potency.

But even the Tao could not ultimately contend against the earcon for a Class One transmission. I resumed my mind and voiced the screen on. The face of my immediate superior appeared.

Jo Priestly looked nervous. Not an easy task for a woman who wore the ruff-bordered head and snouty-toothed face of an oversized fringed lizard. (I had seen perps faint during interrogation when she simply smiled.) "The cat's in town," she said.

"The Xuma Puma?" I asked, recalling the petty posse-leader I had more than once tangled with in the old days. "What's to worry?" "I wish it was only the XP. No, I'm talking about the one and only cat that matters. Krazy Kat."

Now I knew why she looked worried. "I assume there's some java following for me to dethread. But maybe you could empeg it for me...."

"You heard about Chicago? How the Kat nearly caused a Second Flood?"

"Sure. But I thought he screwed up. Didn't he leave behind some cells for the first time? All the public sniffers should be programmed by now to respond as soon as he slinks by."

"True, we've got his genome mapped, and that's more than we've ever had before. But it's not good enough. The Kat doesn't have to go out in public to cause mischief. He's got friends, allies, and sympathizers galore. And not just among the other splices either. There're lots of pure-gens who support the CLF -- or at least the nonviolent aspects of their platform. Groups such as the SPCC. The Kat could easily stay holed up and still cause us yotta-shit.

And don't forget private transportation. The sniffers would miss anyone in a car with positive pressure seals. No, we're going to have to hit the streets if we hope to forestall whatever deviltry the Kat's got in his hat. Bone up, plug. Then get out there and use your nose."

"Kakkoii," I said. "Cool as the socket who climbed into the Sack and made it with the Farside storage ring."

The Chief was a member of the Shaker Revivalists and a doctrinaire gone-gonad. Her membranous veined ruff flushed an agitated crimson, then her face disappeared. Another earcon sounded, and down invisible lines came the petafits on the Kat.

There was so much data it overflowed the flimsy's buffers. I released a couple of my customized speculative agents to work in background mode, setting them loose on what was known of the Kat's MO. Then I settled down for a long raster, grateful that some of my new wetware allowed for dual-track processing.

Krazy Kat had been born some ten years ago in and into frustration. His sire was a mullis who went by the gnomic name of Doctor Radius. At the time, Doc Radius was a freelancer under temp-bond to Vivus-Neopath and had just been assigned to a highly secretive project. V-N had taken an anonymous encrypted contract off the net to develop a new breed of cultivar according to certain specs. The mosaic was to consist of 50 percent felidae of various germlines, 30 percent human, 10 percent viverrine, 10 percent miscellaneous useful nucleotides. Once the juvenile splices were out of the tanks, as yet unengrammed, they were to be shipped in partial stasis -- without human accompaniment -- to an address that turned out to belong to a dummy abe fronting for the city government of Paris.

It turned out that the mayor of that fine city had decided to secede from the EC, after his decision to make smoking mandatory within city limits had been quashed from on high. (Tourism was down, and the mayor felt that if he could reimpose the retro ambiance of the city, the crowds would flock back....) These new splices from V-N, all tooth and nail and cunning, were to be trained and further bred as a corps of mercenary soldiers, the backbone of a Parisian self-defense force with which the mayor could enforce his secession.

Well, needless to say, both the EC and the WTO, among other power centers of the adminisphere, frowned on such a move and chose to express their displeasure most forcefully. (The ex-mayor was due out of stasis in another twenty years.) Upon discovering the plot, before the splices were even shipped, the authorities came down on V-N like a ton of strange matter. The firm was heavily fined, and all the special splices were ordered destroyed.

This did not sit well with Doc Radius. Like any devoted, obsessive, manifestly brain-warped artist, he had come to regard the new splices not as mere work-for-hire, but as his personal, beloved magnum opus. When the destruct order came down, Doc Radius managed to make off with a single fetus.

A secret fetus not on the original workorder, but one he had been tinkering with as a side project, tweaking its parameters to his liking and estheticsense.

This was the seed that was to blossom into Krazy Kat.

Raised in eccentric isolation with only Doc R. for a parental unit, freed of the mandated dietary leashes or proprietary tattoons, Krazy Kat had turned into a dangerous monomaniac. As soon as the Kat was mature enough to reason, after about a year of accelerated and highly illegal trope dosing, he had fixated on the admittedly high-handed and wanton destruction of his fellow fetuses. Only surviving member of his aborted kind, the young Kat had gone on to study the conditions under which splices of all types served and lived amidst human society. What the Kat found apparently sent him over the edge.

(And although I myself was certainly no cocktail-sucker, I had to admit that some of the excesses and abuses documented here and elsewhere were nauseating.) At the age of five, Krazy Kat adopted the name by which the whole world would soon know him and took a vow. He would devote his life to liberating splices everywhere, waging a no-holds-barred campaign to make their "slavery"

obsolete, too costly for human society to sustain.

Thus was born the Cultivar Liberation Front.

All this information had come to light shortly after Krazy Kat's first unexpected and initially inexplicable terrorist excursion, the slaughter of the board of directors of Hedonics Plus at their yearly meeting in Geneva. In the ensuing worldwide hunt for clues, the Tijuana branch of the Protein Police found Doc Radius's trashed lab, as well as the Doc himself, similarly lifelessly trashed. (At the time I had still been a loner PI, without access to this hush-hush information.) Seemingly, Radius had made the mistake of objecting to all or some of his progeny's plans and had gotten just what all humans deserved in the Kat's eyes. And although the Kat had thoroughly lysed all biomatter samples connected to his person, he had not been able or concerned enough to wipe all the audiovideo material the Doc had lovingly accumulated over the years.

I studied a still shot of the mature Kat: over two meters tall, tailed, one hundred kilos of rippling muscles under a tawny, nonbasal-striped pelt.

His face was a sexy, oddly alluring, highly intelligent mix of panther, civet, and human features, marred only by what I intuited was a permanent sneer calculated to reveal a glint of sharp ivory teeth.

My speculative agents popped to the surface, shattering the Kat's image with their signature metagrafix swirls. They had no insights into what Boston could expect from the Kat, if he were indeed in town. He seemed never to repeat himself, had no favored tactics or, ahem, catspaws, being willing to strike anywhere, anytime, through or at anyone.

I dismissed the snippets and summoned my partner, knowing the kibe would already have assimilated the same data, in a fraction of the time. Waiting for it to arrive, I studied the swirling, captured tornado in its tube. The microweather's patternless patterns seemed to mock the chaos around me. But paradoxically, the border of chaos and stasis was where life flourished....

My partner arrived.

(The Turing Level Four kibes came with a curious legal codicil. Just as any fully enfranchised individual was legally responsible for the actions of his or her immaterial agents and demons, shards and partials, so was any owner of a TL4 ultimately accountable for its words and deeds. Mostly, corporations bore the legal brunt; but among the Protein Police, the burden had devolved to the cops themselves, as a cost-cutting measure. If my TL4 did anything contrasocial, it was my ass on the line. It was a big responsibility, almost like having a prodge. So I called my partner "Sonny.") Today Sonny was wearing a Hexcel Enforcer chassis: a body with an armature of stonefiber bones, buckytube circulatory system, muscles crafted of imipolex and resilin, hide of super-sharkskin, distributed co-ganglia. Looking like a lumbering grey rubbery giant, the chassis boasted a neckless human-like head with mock sensory inputs designed to draw the deadly fire of any perp stupid enough to attempt an assault on such a monster. The realaudiovisual-chemo sensors were concealed at various points around the body, as was assorted weaponry. Slotted safely behind a tough protective abdominal panel was the kibe platter itself.

Sonny spoke in a pleasant tenor voice that seemed to emerge from its armpit.

"I assumed from the data that there was a certain need for overwhelming force in dealing with the renegade splice. Was I in error, Peej?"

"No, not in error. But maybe just a wee bit premature."

After convincing Sonny to change into a relatively inconspicuous, less alarmingly destructive chassis (a BASF mechanical model nicknamed "the Washtub"), we hit the streets.

I had a destination in mind: the offices of the SPCC. Chief Priestly had mentioned them. They were an obvious source of potential coconspirators for the Kat, but I was almost certain that I'd get nothing out of them. But frankly, it was the only lead I had.

Walking through Boston's noisy, hormone-hot streets, breathing the clean exhaust of tuktuks, I tried to do as the Chief had directed and use my putative crime-sensitive nose.

Detouring down an alley off Arlington, I surprised a pack of scavenger kibes trying to break into the Sinochem Humpty Dumpster behind a bodyshop. The pack of owner-less runaway kibes needed certain organics for their maintenance and frequently resorted to theft, as well as begging.

They must have disabled the Dumpster's flee-and-shriek circuits, for it could only rock back and forth in place and hoot dismally as they attempted forced entry into its separation chambers.

Before I could react, Sonny was barreling through the pack, scattering them left and right. A battered, unsteady nutraceutical dispenser marred with letterbomb graffiti toppled over, spinning its wheels uselessly. The rest fled.