We met in a magfield rail station. Seven years after her death, Rachel sat on the floor amidst a patchwork clutter of knapsacks, blankets, and refugees. She'd grown out her hair again: nearly waist-length, black, shot through with a few long stray grey strands she made no effort to disguise. She looked too thin, but she'd always looked too thin. I watched her for a while, but did not approach until she met my eyes with her own.

"Come here," she beckoned, her tone that of a cross theatre instructor.

"Rachel," I said.

"Well, of course! It's good to see you."

She held out a tiny white hand, and I took it. It was cold, like my own -- but not the thick stony chill of a corpse's hand. Poor circulation, and they were blasting the air conditioning.

"How long have you been here?" I asked her.

"About a month. I'm still deciding where to go."

"Do you know where you are?" It was an odd question, but I couldn't help myself.

"Something like a train station, I think," Rachel's head tipped slightly to one side as she spoke, birdlike. Birds can pick up information from air currents: something to do with the bones of their skull.

"Ah. Yes. Well, -- " I neglected to ask, How did you get here? because I feared intruding, prying too much, making her disappear.

"Well, what?" The cross look again, the sharp accent. She wasn't from anywhere in particular, but her English had always been strange, alien in tone and shape. Faintly British, perhaps, well enunciated, crisp. She had difficulty with slang. I always thought of it as a storybook accent.

"I thought about calling you. Many times," I told her.

"I know. I know you were busy, though, and it doesn't bother me. I had my own life."

"And your dangerous friends," I reminded her. It was an inside joke.

"Yes," Rachel smiled impishly. "Those evil, evil people."

When we were teenagers, Rachel's head was tidier than anyone else's. Her room filled with clutter: clothes and books strewn about as if flung by tornadoes. But she wouldn't touch intoxicants, whether of a chemical or religious nature. She liked stage plays, Tarot cards, unicorn stories. Anything with props whereby old and fantastic notions could playact yet not disrupt the elegant machinery of her thoughts. She spoke of sleep and death, feared loss of light. I think she knew she would die young. There were several months wherein she shut herself up in the house, not eating much, brooding. After this, she spoke with me less often, and drew a new crowd, not evil perhaps, but wild as rain. She cut and lightened her hair, spoke loudly, laughed more, kissed girls. All this I heard secondhand. She wrote in my yearbook, "Perfection isn't necessary."

"What are you doing here?" Rachel asked me.

"Business travel. Tokyo. There's this computer I'm supposed to look at. It's not working right."

"They don't have anyone there who can fix it?" Rachel raised an eyebrow.

"Well, perhaps, but I charge less."

"What kind of computer is it?"

"It's sort of a weather thing," I said lamely. This was a lie.

"Ah." Her eyes misted over for a split second, and I knew she didn't believe me. That was fine. We weren't here to talk about work, anyway.

"How's the writing going?" I asked. A safe question.

"I'm not much for writing these days. I'm observing people, though, and it's very interesting."

"You mean the refugees?"

"Yes, mostly. And the pilots who come through here, and the people who work at the ticket counters."

"They're not really people," I reminded her.

"Perhaps not, but they're very realistic."

"You used to be a good writer."

"I could never spell, though."

"You were better at it than most people."

"I'm going to go check the schedules again," Rachel rose suddenly, as if from a nest, shreds of multicolored cloth falling at her feet. She fluttered lightly over to the other side of the cavernous room, looking nearly infinitesimal beneath the cathedral ceiling. She stopped about a foot away from a vast black wall dotted with multicolored messages made of light.

So for a moment, I was left alone. Not really alone, I suppose; kindergarten-age children blinked up at me expectantly, as if they expected me to read to them in Rachel's absence.

My train was due in two hours. Two hours, I had, to spend in this odd palace. Until this day, I'd considered passing through train stations nothing more than a a necessary drudgery. One of those aspects of life that isn't actually life, but waiting. Things were more interesting now that refugees had claimed most of the larger stations as makeshift shelters. The ticketbots and guards didn't ask the refugees to leave; they weren't interfering with the operation of trains or the meeting of schedules, so they were irrelevant. Commuters just stepped over them, when they bothered coming through this station at all. It wasn't used much these days, I'd heard, but shutting it down and deconstructing would cost more than just maintaining it.

Rachel told me this in high school:

One day when I was little, I heard some younger kids walking by my house. One of them said to the other as they passed, "A witch lives there!" Then later I found pentagrams drawn with chalk on the sidewalk. I couldn't have been more than eleven. I thought it was funny, and it made me think about growing up to be an old lady. I'd be sixty-nine or seventy someday, and I'd still wear my hair long, but it would be iron-grey. I'd wear long black or purple dresses and tend my herb gardens. And children would walk by my house, slow down at the scent of my garden and the sight of me moving shadows about the doorway. They'd quicken their pace and walk past, saying, "A witch lives there."

Even now I had the feeling she held a shape calculated to fit my memories. Perhaps the children she read to saw a grandmotherly figure, whereas I saw someone just poking beyond her twenties. I also saw a friend whom I never should have lost touch with, someone who was supposed to seek me for advice and offer me her own quirky-yet-wise counsel. Seven years lost to preconceptions of what it meant to have been crushed, broken, buried. I wondered how it had possibly taken so long for me to get the message.

"Rachel, can I have a sandwich?" A little kid's voice cut my reverie. Rachel said, Of course, Cynthia!, rummaged for a moment beneath a pile of what looked like bath towels, and pulled out a small square, vaguely metallic box. I assumed it was some kind of refrigeration unit. She opened it, and in it was a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly on wheat bread with no crusts. Rachel clicked a button on the side of the box, and the sandwich raised itself up at an angle. She plucked it out quickly and handed it to Cynthia, who eagerly tore into it, looking refreshingly human. The basket still open, Rachel said a few low toneless words, and drew two fingers gently across a rippled ridge on the side of the box. I stared; I couldn't help it. I knew that somehow there would be another sandwich in the box the next time someone asked for one.

Rachel noticed me staring and smiled, a superior smile like that of a queen attempting humility.

"A witch lives here," I muttered.

She'd heard me. "I don't like describing myself as a witch. I've always got this idea that the real witches will come along one day and say I'm just some kind of...poser." She spoke the last word hesitantly and looked away. It was a high school word, which meant it made her uncomfortable.

"Sue, remember when I went to that little colonial town in Massachusets, the one they used to have all set up with actors in period costumes, and restored houses and stables?"

"I don't think so." Where was she going with this?

"Well, the actors were very well-trained. My dad had these photo-grey lenses in his glasses. We were watching a blacksmith work, and in the darkness of the forge, the lenses were clear. When we stepped out into the sun, the glasses darkened fairly quickly. A girl outside -- I think she was supposed to be the blacksmith's daughter -- screamed when she saw my father's eyes. She pointed at us and yelled, 'Heathens, heathens! They have the devil's magic!' Very melodramatic."

"I see your point."

"I use voice recognition technology and submolecular matter assembly to make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off."

"Wheat bread," I corrected her, and laughed. "I told you, I get it. It just sounds funny coming from you."

"Why do you think all these refugees are so young?" It was a pointed question.

I scanned the room, and sure enough, not one of the urchins playing solemnly on the floor or sitting knees-bent on a bench with a holobook looked any older than eleven or twelve.

"Do the parents just drop them off here?"

"Sometimes. Other times they just show up, like you did. They run away, and nobody stops them."

I thought about my own little hometown, a suburb on the fringes of some generic metropolis. I hadn't heard much about runaways, but then again, I hadn't read the local news in months. What was the point? All the action was elsewhere, in places that hadn't insisted on keeping themselves caught in ancient memetic loops. Get up. Go to work. Have dinner, which is meatloaf and potatoes and canned beans. Retire, get a yacht, die. Women are programmed to have babies. Men will never change. We pass on heirlooms. What is the point? India. Japan. Switzerland -- these countries have, for the most part, broken the circles and patterns of their ancestral infrastructure. Art, architecture, desire: these are intact, but it is in places like Tokyo, not New Amsterdam, where you can buy molecular computers and sandwich assemblers. Children born in what is left of the United States take their first gulp of an air that glistens visibly with media, even if their parents moved to the woods or the desert or joined a church colony. Synthesized viruses. Nano-critters. Pervasive computers. Quantum sunsets.

The dictionaries can no longer keep up with the terminology.

Somewhere in a fantasy, Cynthia Wallace's mother drew the covers up to her chin and bit down hard, feeling push and pull and rip in membranes below. Cynthia yelled that baby yell as the doctor pulled her out by her feet, in the traditional way. Mother brough Cynthia home and dressed her in terrycloth snapsuits, cloth diapers, and later on, ruffles and patent leather. Kneeling in sunbeams to pray, Cynthia knew right and light and love. But in reality, Cynthia slipped out like a lost memory, her mother felt no pain because Cynthia didn't want her to. Cynthia stretched her limbs at birth, walked within an hour, her muscles learning from mere air the ways of movement and balance. Speech came next, a rush of words at two days old. Cynthia's mother recoiled and cried, but Cynthia understood, and this only made it worse. Cynthia lived with her mother until the age of seven, when it became too much, and she packed a knapsack and kissed her mother's cheek as she slept, disappearing into the night like a forgotten dream.

"I wonder how many parents tried to drown these kids at birth?"

"More than you might think." Rachel looked away again.

"Sorry, that was a little morbid," I apologized.

"Not really. Remember, you're talking to someone who has already died." Rachel reminded me. It was the first time she'd directly addressed the fact of her own death. The subject was exposed; it couldn't be put away, at least not yet. And she hadn't disappeared upon mentioning it.

So much to ask. I started with, "What did it feel like?"

"I was driving home, late. I was really too tired to be behind the wheel. My chin kept hitting my chest, and I kept telling myself, 'I should pull over.' But there wasn't anywhere safe to pull over."

She coughed and continued. "Next thing I knew, the car was upside-down. I was rolling down a hill. Everyone has near-misses, where they almost get killed on the freeway, or when their plane goes through turbulence, or an engine shuts down. You get that moment of absolute clarity, the one where your reflexes take over and your entire life becomes this conceptual pinpoint containing everything you've ever experienced, and all your hopes for the future."

"A lot of people I know would just think, 'Oh shit!' at a time like that."

"On a conscious level, perhaps. But the brain knows when it's going to die, or when it's in danger of being destroyed. And it makes a last-ditch attempt to preserve its pattern. I felt my neck snap, Sue, and it was the most incredible feeling. Not in a good way. Incredible in the sense that it shouldn't be possible for humans to feel such things. I was curious afterward. I couldn't move or breathe, but I could still think. My pattern was intact."

"And it's still intact, somehow."

"I suppose you want to know how I came back to life."

"I want to know if you were ever really dead."

"That's the real question, isn't it? What is death? Now we sound like we're back in high school again." Rachel grinned.

"I feel like I'm dreaming," I admitted, and it was true.

"I think I'll leave my miraculous resurrection for you to figure out." Rachel's look was suddenly inscrutable.

"Rachel, can I have a sandwich?" I asked. I was getting peckish, and besides, I got a kick out of watching these things. I'd read about them in trade journals, but never really seen one operating. It surprises some people, the amount of stuff I don't see until well after the public starts using it. They think that since I work with computers, somehow that means I'm an expert on every newfangled device to pop out of the Japanese and Indian and French think-tech-tanks. Not true. There are a lot of things I just don't have time for.

"With or without crusts?" She didn't meet my eyes. I began to wonder if maybe she'd revealed too much for her own comfort, simply because she'd been threading the words together in her mind for so long and I was the first person to come along who might appreciate them. Despite our friendship, it was possible that Rachel had acted impulsively. But she'd get over it.

"So, I wonder if a sandwich knows somehow when it's going to be eaten?" I joked.

Rachel's birdlike dark eyes snapped into a lock with my own. "Crusts or no crusts?" she said deliberately.

"Crusts, please."

I watched Rachel go through the ritual again: the quick finger movements, the muttered incantations. My sandwich popped out obligingly, and Rachel handed it to me. "You're on your own for napkins."

"I'm a tidy eater."

I munched my sandwich. It was pretty good, better than it looked. The peanut butter was an eerie pale color, but tasted real. The bread was properly spongy, full of tiny holes, as it should be. Mostly air. When it comes down to it, everything is porous. Neurons and axons are tiny and ethereal. When it comes down to it, information is as tangible as cloth, or air. Cynthia knew this as soon as she was born. All the children in this room were similarly aware, and perhaps this was why they sought out Rachel and her stories.

What had really happened seven years ago?

As I sat there, chewing, Rachel watched me intermittently while helping two refugees with a puzzle, and glancing now and then at the schedule wall.

"I think I'd better catch my train," I decided out loud. I'd seen enough here, and I had work to do in Tokyo. Rachel wasn't leaving anytime soon, and she certainly wasn't leaving with me. "It was...nice seeing you again. I'm, um glad you're alive."

"Thank you for staying to visit. You're the first old friend I've seen since the funeral."

"What will you do when the refugees all leave?"

"I'll find somewhere to go on my own, I suppose." Rachel shrugged. "Maybe I'll even find myself a nice cottage where I can grow my herb garden."

"Good luck with that," I told Rachel as I stood up. She hugged me briefly, then let go and returned to the puzzle.

The Tokyo-bound train heaved out of its dock with a subaudible whoosh almost as soon as I sat down. Tired. I slept, knowing that when I awoke, the air would taste of patterns.