AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

was answered in two rings.
    “Feore. It’s not my problem,” he said.
    “Hello? Bob?”
    “Who … Linda, is that you?”
    “Oh, you remember me. So nice.”
    “Oh, God, the party. I’m so sorry. I wanted to talk to you again.”
    “That’s why you disappeared?”
    “Sorry, I got called to the office on an emergency. I’ve been fighting bears all week.” He let his Irish accent slip into his apology. “You must know how it is.”
    “Get on with it,” Munroe said in her ear.
    “Yeah, I guess I do.”
    “Maybe I can make it up to you? How about dinner sometime?”
    “What’s he saying,” Munroe said. She covered her phone with her hand. “Shut up, Alex.”
    “What’s that? Who’re you talking to?”
    “It’s just my partner,” she said.
    “Alex? Hey say hi for me. I wanted to talk to him …”
    “How about making it up to me right now?” she said, a little annoyed that he wanted to talk to Munroe.
    “Sure, if I can. How?”
    “Alex wants to use your search technology. Can we come over?”
    “The search … no, I mean … I shouldn’t have said anything.”
    “What’s he saying,” Munroe said again. This time, she told him, saying it loud enough for Feore to hear.
    “Sorry, Bob,” she said, getting back to him. “Alex said he needed to get more information to put on his blog.”
    “Blog? No, you can’t … you’re just messing with me, right. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
    She did a pretend conversation with Munroe, begging him not to post the blog. “I don’t know, he sounds pretty determined. I think the only way I can keep him from posting is if you let us come over and use it.”
    “OK, OK, come over. Next week when …”
    “Today,” she said.
    “What! Do you know how busy I am?”
    “I’m sorry, Bob, it has to be today. Look, Alex won’t really write anything whether you show us or not. But it is important. I can’t say lives are at stake, because it only concerns the disembodied, but I thought that’s what the AfterNet was about.”
    Feore remained silent a beat before he answered. “Come on over. You know where it is, don’t you?”
    She looked up from her bench on the 16th Street Mall at the skyscraper that housed the offices of the AfterNet. “I think I can find my way.”
    Yamaguchi waited patiently while the revolving door decided to let her pass. “Please exit the revolving door and welcome to the AfterNet,” the cheerful, recorded female voice told her.
    “Linda, hi,” Feore greeted her as she stepped through the door.
    “Hi, Bob,” she said, as she shook his hand, while looking distractedly around her.
    “He’s over here,” he said, motioning for her to follow. She followed him to another entrance, also a part of the large glass wall that bisected the lobby of the building. Glowing neon outlined the disembodied entrance.
    “The neon doesn’t do anything,” he explained. “It just looks cool. The real deterrent is the coil that runs around the frame.”
    She looked more closely and saw that a twisted band of copper wires, making an eighth of an inch bundle, was embedded in the glass that surrounded the entrance.
    “That?” she asked, pointing. “Doesn’t look very thick.”
    “It doesn’t take very much to stop the dead. A weak negative field prevents unauthorized visitors. You walked through the same field when you entered the Orgasmatron … the security carousel. It detects any disembodied who try to sneak in.”
    “So, there aren’t any dead people in the building?”
    “Oh, no, there’re lots and lots of disembodied employees. But everyone is authorized to be here. That probably results in the lowest dead-to-living ratio on the planet.”
    “I’m here,” Munroe’s voice told her in his ear.
    “He’s here,” she told Feore.
    “I know,” he said, patting the left breast pocket of his leather jacket. “I can hear.” Yamaguchi saw that Feore seemed to be listening to Munroe’s response, but she heard nothing.
    “I still don’t appreciate being blackmailed,” he said, apparently to Munroe.
    She glanced at her terminal and saw the “No user connected” message.
    “I seem to have lost Alex,” she said to Feore.
    “He’s out of your field. My terminal’s got a lot wider field than yours. I hacked mine. Here, Alex, why don’t you go on Linda’s right and I’ll walk beside you.”
    “… made her do it,” she heard Munroe say, as he reacquired the field of her terminal.
    “If you don’t mind,