"This kid's the problem," Jerry said. "The one at the back with the big ears." Using a mouse he shifted a green circle to encompass the boy's head and then tapped a key. The head expanded to fill the screen.

The two men, one in the traditional jeans and tee-shirt of the gun programmer, the other in austere corporate black, peered at the digitally enhanced image looking down at them from the wall screen. Jerry typed into his keyboard and the face rotated through three sixty degrees. Whoever he was, he was likely long dead.

"Well, we can either leave him out or assign a personality. He looks like a type five to me," Tony Ingham, the project director, said.

"Oh no, no more assigning, please. Not after that episode with Becky Morris in the second grade. I never want to go through something like that again."

"Yeah, we guessed wrong that time. Okay then, we leave him out."

Jerry typed and a new grainy black and white photo appeared on the wall screen. It showed a class of ten year olds - grinning , scowling, dull-eyed - and their young female teacher, Miss Agnes Benning. The kid in the corner of the back row was now gone. "That's it then," said Jerry. "That's all of them."

"Finally," Tony sighed. "Let's take another look at Agnes." An enhanced image appeared on the screen of a prettier, bustier Miss Benning. "Uh huh," he said. Jerry typed and the school teacher's face and figure shifted. "Good," Tony concluded.

"Whew!" Jerry said, rising and stretching. "Home time then." Another fourteen hour day, he was only kept going by the mostly legal pharmaceuticals. This project was eating his life.

"Want a ride home?" Tony said.

"And get shot down by some trigger-happy eco-terrorist? No thanks."

Tony just grinned. Sure it happened, but his rotorjet had the latest missile defence gear and really was perfectly safe. "Okay," he said, "see you tomorrow."

But then he hesitated at the door. "Look, Jerry," he said, "I know you don't much like this work, but you're the best there is and so you'll be doing this while he wants it done."

"And how much longer will that be?" Jerry protested. "With all the stuff they pump into him, he'll live forever."

Tony shrugged. They both knew it didn't matter; Jerry had no where else to go. Jerry's brain, or at least the knowledge it contained - and no one had worked out how to separate the two - was owned by the company.

Jerry watched his project director walk out the door, then closed down all systems. Well, that was fourth grade done, except for the kid in the top corner who was about to be erased from Jensen's life. They hoped. As best they could tell he had no special meaning to Jensen, but you could never be sure…

Jerry closed up the office and took the elevator down to the basement. There he climbed into a company shuttle bus and took a seat. There was one other person in the bus, a woman from personnel who did not look up. Anton, the driver and bodyguard, knew the address.

He heard Anton ask building security for some flares to decoy any heat-seekers, not that they'd seen any of those for a while, then they drove through the armoured doors and out of the city offices of the Jensen Corporation. It was a building that was as much a fortress as a corporate headquarters.

Jerry stared out the laminated perspex and watched the scenery turn uglier as they left the still well maintained business sector. Soon the buildings started looking dilapidated, graffiti everywhere, windows smashed or boarded up, and Anton had to change down regularly to negotiate rusting car hulks or pot holes that grew larger every day. At one point he had to activate the auxiliary track drive to cross a stream of sludge, and Jerry was reminded that the bus was actually a redesigned army APC chassis. And it wasn't just the all terrain capability that was needed, it was also the armour.

The bus carried no corporate logo; no point in attracting attention. As it was the Jensen Corporation was the number one target for eco-terrorists. And why not? Jerry conceded glumly. The Jensen Corporation was not only the biggest in the world, it had, every one knew, led the effort that had initiated and maintained the "business as usual" policy adopted by the G 10 nations, the core of the developed world. Jensen himself, coming out of retirement to face one more challenge, had shepherded through that particular little exercise in power politics. As a result of this policy, no serious attempt had been made to rein in industrial growth in order to halt global warming.

The bus ground over the crest of a hill and ahead and to the right Jerry saw the enormous complex that dominated the eastern part of the city. I looked for all the world just like a modern version of the Great Pyramid, but steel instead of stone. Here was housed Jensen himself. One hundred and five years old last June, Thomas Edison Jensen, Jerry knew, was right at that moment enveloped from head to toe in a virtual reality harness, a state of the art model from Jensen Cybertronics, with almost perfect simulation, and celebrating his seventh birthday.

Who knew how long he'd hang around his seventh year, maybe a few months, maybe only a few days. So the pressure was on for Tony, Jerry and the rest of the project team to get together the material for the VR programs of the rest of his youth. Old photos and films had to be found, any survivors had to be located and interviewed. Much more typically, the children or grandchildren of those Jensen knew as a child had to be looked up and grilled until they had enough to construct a realistic impression of those long past days.

As he stared out at the vast building, Jerry saw a flash and a flat-arced firestreak head towards the pyramid. Some eco-terrorist had launched a missile. Where did they get them from? The Muslims, maybe, they were the only real possibility. With Europe and East Asia in turmoil as their climates crashed, that swathe of land from the Barents Sea to the Arabian Sea held the only economy still capable of making and selling such weaponry. Outside the US , anyway. Something bright, just a flicker, sparked from the vast building and the missile exploded harmlessly in the air. Jensen Defence Systems lasers were the best on the market.

And just as well; there were a lot of disgruntled people out there, a whole generation in fact who saw Thomas Jensen as a stand out symbol of the whole mess.

Meanwhile, Jerry reminded himself as he hunched lower in his seat, thanks mainly to his own hard won programming expertise, Jensen himself lived out his youth again in a clean, hopeful world. A world the rest of them had left far behind.

*

Jerry hit the delete button, watched the red bar light recede from right to left. Just as it disappeared he heard Tony enter the room behind him. "Think it'll make any difference?" he said, not turning around.

Tony stood staring at Jerry's hunched back a moment, then threw his coat onto a chair. "Nope, not really. The company's been running without him for years now. It'll be funny though… I sort of thought he was really gonna live forever."

"The medicos know any more?"

"Nope. Just a massive heart attack. Killed him straight out. Some spark thought it might have been something in the VR, a glitch maybe…" Jerry stopped typing, stared at the screen, not seeing what was there. "I told them it was done by our best man, " - Jerry blinked - "who never made mistakes. But they checked anyway and it was just another one of those fishing on the river idylls you do so well. Caught a big catfish, hardly shocking stuff. Nope, no one knows what happened."

Breathing easy again, Jerry confidently caressed keys. A catfish, big and slimy and tasty; that was the sanitised version. In the other version, the one he'd just deleted, something else came up on that line out of the long, lazy river on that perfect summer's afternoon. He'd got the idea from an old comic, a monstrous creature formed from some bizarre interaction of biology and pollution, nature pushed just too far. Its slavering mass would have come up at the little boy with the old man's heart like retribution itself…

End