The nightmares were getting worse. Once had become once a month, then weekly, then daily. Now the mix of violence, risk assessment, troop deployment, and death were intruding on her waking hours. No abstract patterns on the inside of her eyelids, no, just training schedules, enemy communication analysis, and the inevitable firefights and screaming and lines of corpses shredded by automatic fire and roadside bombs. Double-blinking brought up her optical desktop. She chose an app and some files with a few flicks of her eyes, and a transparent map overlaid the squat grey building in front of her, tinting it yellow. Federal Census Bureau, read the filename in the upper left, read the imposing block letter above the door.

Harvey might have been a boring boyfriend and a mediocre hacker, but he was a top-notch paranoiac. When his hack-spiders crawled across something that implicated the US Census Bureau, he dropped it on her doorstep and disappeared.

Its not going to solve the problem, but a general goes to war with the troops she has. She idly wondered where that thought came from as she revved her bike, checked her pistol, and peeled out toward the front door.