How It All Goes Down
- John Isidore flies home with delicacies he purchased at a black-market grocery store, like a pre-war bottle of Chablis.
- Back at Pris's apartment, Isidore shows his new friend the feast.
- Isidore theorizes that Pris's problem is she doesn't have any friends, but she says she has friends, seven of them in fact. Wait, how many androids were supposed to have escaped the colonies again (nudge, nudge; wink, wink; say no more)?
- She explains that a bounty hunter is after them, but Isidore thinks that would be against the tenets of Mercerism.
- She agrees to have a peach slice and begins to cry. Isidore, who just learned to introduce himself this morning, isn't well equipped to deal with someone crying.
- Pris tells the story of how she and her friends emigrated from Mars and how horrible it is on that ancient, dead planet.
- The one good thing, she explains, is the pre-colonial fiction written about space travel before it was an actual thing. For her, these stories imagine the world the way it should, not as it is.
- A knock comes at the door. Pris asks Isidore to answer it.
- On the other side are Roy and Irmgard, two of Pris's friends from Mars.