Jake Pace is battling a bistro’s worth of robotic mafia goons when the government comes to ask him a favor. The Department of Big Business has a particularly sensitive murder on its hands, and Jake, proprietor of Odd Jobs, Inc., is a sensitive detective. A week ago, Statz Kazee announced to a television audience of 140 million that his next scoop would blow the lid off the international business community. Hours later, he was found shot to death.

Jake Pace is halfway through mixing a batch of cookies when his lawyer arrives with a corpse. The body in the coffin is an android, built in the shape of recently deceased electronics heiress Sylvie Kirkyard and implanted with a chip that holds Sylvie’s memories. Although she was only 27, Sylvie had for a long time feared for her life, and took the precaution of insuring her consciousness with Kirktronics’ patented Brainz, Inc. method.

Jake Pace comes to on the floor of a dungeon, where a robot jailer is killing rats. The last twenty-four hours are a blank; he doesn’t remember anything since he stepped into his skycar, chasing a tip on the Big Bang murders. For weeks the killings have stumped every officer in the government - costing six of them their lives - but a soprano named Palsy Hatchbacker told Jake she knew something that could break open the case.