The Dhaka street swarms with people, objects, and all of the existing data about all of these people and objects. Maryam, who of all people should be accustomed to words and numbers floating in front of her eyes, finds herself brushing at her face, as if to wipe away all that accumulated knowledge. It's too much. She turns on first one filter, removing any data uploaded before the last global election, then another that she rigged especially for this trip, muting personal data that is not directly related to her mission. But Maryam is a believer in fate and coincidence and a childhood reader of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and she can't escape the concern that her algorithm might exclude something vitally important. Miserably, she turns the second filter back off again.

A few months ago, a ban on high-emissions vehicles, already the norm in most of the world, was finally enacted for all of micro-democracy. Dhaka included a concentration of particularly recalcitrant centenal governments, and the moment the law took force, the streets emptied out and transportation (particularly of goods) became scarce. The foule responded immediately, taking over the pavement with no regard for the likelihood that cleaner motor vehicles would pick up the slack. Sidewalks, suddenly unnecessary for pedestrians, became valuable real estate, and capsule apartments were built in front of existing buildings, barely leaving access to the entrances. Hovels sprang up in front of the capsule apartments, sometimes sloping off the ill-repaired sidewalks into the street proper. The garbage collection system had been largely diesel-based, and although a team of rickshaw collectors now supplements the ragpickers who never stopped searching for anything worth selling, they are making little headway against the mountains of garbage that lean against walls and spill into the street.

A massive vehicle, retrofitted to scrape past the new standards, is forcing its way through the human-clogged artery that remains between all these obstacles, and its slow progress is pushing Maryam and, it seems, the entire population of the flooded delta of Bangladesh into the walls and the garbage and the shacks and each other.

This is not a context in which Maryam feels particularly comfortable. She grew up in Beirut and Paris and pre-earthquake Lima, and in decidedly comfortable segments of each, and until recently lived in sparsely populated Doha. She itches to deploy her crowdcutter, a translucent shell shaped like a shark fin that would not only give her a literal edge in moving forward but also isolate her from the press of bodies. But she left herself plenty of time to get to the sanatorium, and she doesn't want to attract any more attention than necessary. Anyone could be watching her, following her from feed to feed broadcast by microscopic cameras. But there are a lot of feeds in the world, a lot of people to watch. If no one is paying attention to Maryam, she doesn't want to give them a reason to start. And maybe this crowd is thick enough to get lost in. Cheering somewhat at the thought, she pulls her scarf lower over her forehead and presses on.

* * *

Maryam locates the sanatorium a few streets over. The neighborhood has taken a disorientingly quick shift for the better. It isn't one of the new wealth enclaves, with wide streets and gatehouses for armed guards, but the venerable residences are at least cared for enough to fend off the outgrowth of slums on the sidewalks. Maryam passes through a gate with the code she was given when she made her appointment, and then through a courtyard, hazy in the heat, to find the entrance proper. A plaque — an actual plaque, not projected or painted but engraved — explains the concept of time-capsule therapy and gives a brief history of its development, lists the names of major benefactors (including Information, Maryam notes with surprise; some of her bosses must be worried about aging too), and mentions the date of establishment: 2053. Maryam shivers at the thought of two decades crawling by while those within live frozen in the noughts. She pushes open the heavy door and walks in.

She finds herself in a large turquoise room with multiple closed doors leading off of it: a well-appointed reception center. Maryam had braced herself for the shock of stepping into a period drama, but everything seems normal: the receptionist is blinking through some data at eyeball level, an infotainment projection plays soundlessly in one corner, and the light fixtures in the ceiling are fluoron. Maryam gives her name to the receptionist, a skinny young man with luxuriant hair, and a few minutes later a small woman in her forties wearing a rose-and-green sari comes out to meet her.

"Welcome to the growling noughts," she greets her. "Saleha Rashid. We just have a few procedures we need to go through before you can go on to your appointment."

"Yes," Maryam agrees. "I have some projections that I believe I need transferred?"

"To compatible technology. We can help you there." Saleha leads her to a small office with an old-fashioned computer on a desk next to the workspace. "In fact, it was Taskeen who built the translation protocol, early in her stay here."

Maryam smiles. That bodes well. "Intent on keeping up with events, was she?"

"We don't forbid that, you know. Our clients are not institutionalized, and they are free to communicate with the outside world in any way they wish," Saleha explains as she works with the projection files Maryam tossed her. "We maintain temporal continuity in all the public spaces of the premises, however, which is why we need to check all of your modern devices here."

Maryam divests herself of her personal projector and handheld.

"You can keep your auto-interpreter, since it's not visible, but Taskeen won't be wearing one. Will you need an interpreter? We have several on staff."

"We'll be fine," Maryam says, hoping that's true. Her English is not great and she has no Bengali, but she can't take the risk of an interpreter and prefers not to advertise that her discussion with Taskeen Khan, creator of the Information data pathways and a personal hero, is going to be highly classified.

Saleha hands Maryam a flat device about the size of her thumb with a metal connector at one end. "Your projections are on this, or an approximation of them. You can use it with Taskeen's computer." She studies Maryam. "But before we go I'm afraid you'll have to do something about your clothes as well."

Maryam looks down at herself. She is wearing much what she always wears: a black salwar kameez in pseudo-silk. The kameez is knee-length, with a simple micro-cutout pattern around the collar and cuffs, matching the dupatta she wears over her head.

"You can look like a foreigner, but you must be a foreigner from the turn of the century," Saleha clucks. "The pseudo-silk, the heat reflectors, the micro-cutouts. It's subtle, but believe me, someone from the past would notice. We have alternate clothing available." She opens a large cabinet to display a rack of colors and fabrics. "I'll be right outside. You can, of course, keep anything of your own that isn't visible," she adds as she closes the door behind her.

Maryam flips through the hangers, looking for something muted in the array of flowery fabrics and bright colors. Maybe this is an opportunity to cosplay a bit, even if it is a work meeting. She...