I ring his doorbell, imagining the break in his data-enriched reveling; a second passes after the buzzing and the eye moves over my face, in a slow pan, taking me in, and the little quivering plastic mesh eye is a friend's eye; I am laughing because I know he is glad to see me from the way it moves and zooms, my eyes, my face, a greeting. I smile up at it and the voice comes perfect and clear over the piezo: “go around the side and take the elevator.”

I know! I want to say, so eager to see this friend, having taken this elevator before, already thinking of the stories and jokes. I am just letting you know, giving you the knowledge that I am here, so that you might have the spare minute to prepare in pleasure for the connection, to open up that reservoir of self which we shared, to prepare your anecdotes.

Ricketing, shaking, the elevator is grafted on the side of the building, a huge building half made of crystals and biological hardening agents stiffened around girders, the half-finished skeleton rising above us sculptural, gray detail in a distance though each of the girders is two of me across - and I am not large or slender. I flip a switch and say a number - 94 - and the ascent begins, slow, and the wind creeps in through the edges of the glass; the whole thing could fall to the ground, you would think, but the important parts are all diamond, even if the steel has gunshot dents in it and the wind creeps in through the window-edges.

So it is well over two minutes - I am waved to as I go by, at least 1000 living here on the floors, and then we reach the top, the edge, and the elevator's inside doors open to the air - the roof, if there had ever been a roof for this building. And coming up a stairway set right into the roof is Cee, handsome in a shirt and slacks, well-proportioned, his hand reaching out to me long before we can touch, and we are in each other's arms, friends and orphans, a whole reach of life and pleasure that tunnels from my brain and into my spine, my nerves all jangling with stories and familiarities.

This unfinished scraper, the rooftop and below-floor taken over by Cee's squatting, dotted with small houses built by other squatters, territory in the sky, was as much home as anywhere, the brown eyes and brown-gray hair (only 26!) of Cee as much like home - home the place where all your fears were first faced, your nervousness bottled up, your memories of touch and comfort and sleep as a virus raged or buildings combusted, as the world chewed through technology after technology. So home was Cee, and I was home to him, as stange as our paths - he a strange, rich man with fingers in a few thousand (million?, given the tools at his disposal) pies, myself wearing a simple blue unhooded robe having come fresh from the north, from a lone government supplied tent, having dedicated myself to the disposal of the dead in the displacement districts.