Summary: A sequel to Recursion. In a world where exact copies of people in virtual-reality environments can be made easily, copies of a psychopathic personality perform sadistic virtual murders of copies of certain women. Copies of a sort of law enforcer / social worker, together with copies of one of the victims, eventually track down the psychopath and arrest him. However, this isn't a straightforward crime story; behind the scenes, there is a complicated and murky interaction involving the principals in the interstellar war adumbrated in Recursion.

A second, independent plot, set seventeen years earlier (in 2223), involves an analyst of artificial intelligences whose wife is in a coma, perhaps as a result of thinking too carefully about the mechanics of her own thought processes. He is persuaded or coerced into accepting an assignment to investigate a series of mystifying failures of high-powered artificial-intelligence systems on a remote planet. His predicament is complicated by his decision, initially plausible, to take his infant son along on the trip; it gradually becomes apparent that the assignment is actually dangerous, and that the reason for the coercion was precisely to bring the infant into danger.