Lionel leaves to get his phone fixed at a place where Bank of America® gets a deal in a slummy district a few exits down.
He arrives at the place called Lou's and gives them his phone. Lou says it will take about two hours. Lionel asks what there is to do, and Lou suggests the old eTour building (which is like a museum if museums had virtual reality, except that in the time this story takes place, these have already become passe and the only people who go to them are old people and kids). He sees a woman in the back working on something. Lou shows her the phone and Lionel thinks they are making fun of him and leaves.
Lionel walks over to the eTour building and passes a class going on a field trip. He thinks about being a kid and about his father.
At the eTour, he is attracted to the robotic cashier and tells the reader about his hentai thing and about other people's fetishes. He goes in. The tour starts at around 2000. The class from earlier come sin after him. There are two guys with nice facial hair. The tour then moves to the parthenon in Athens during the early byzantine empire. Lionel talks to the two guys about the acropolis and they school him and make a fool of him, and he mocks their how unmanly their preening is (in his head), and goes to the other side of the Parthenon. A kid has a seizure but the teacher and class just stand around and gawk because the child is part of the virtual tour program. But Lionel feels compassion for the kid and helps him out as his episode ends. But the kid just runs off. Lionel leaves the tour.
Lionel tells the reader about how his father used to include him in when he was working around the house when he was home, and how his father taught him a lot of jargon and how the two of them confused the passing of jargon for communicating with one another.
Lionel picks up his phone. Lou isn't there, so the woman, Amy, gives it to him, and he has a love at first sight moment and is very awkward. He leaves leaving his phone on the counter and she runs out and gives it to him and Lionel invites her to his place to fix his A/C unit that night. She tells him she makes ceramic art, which he doesn't know how to interpret.
Lionel, in his car heading home, scrolls through some stories.
Lionel still scrolls through stories in his apartment and is about to relax, but there's a knock on the door and it's Ned, who Lionel forgot was coming over. Ned tells Lionel about what's been going on in New China and how certain governments, Germany and Hungary in particular, have sold the rights to their statehood, so that any country can, if they pay enough, sort of set up their own state of the same name and populate it with actors or whatever. Lionel asks Ned about his twin brothers. Lionel goes into a very long flashback in his head about one time when Ned and he went to Ned's house during a summer break from college and snuck up on his twin brothers who were editing a movie and who are both congenitally blind. Ned says that they aren't that far away right now.
Ned tells Lionel that a woman at the branch he closed killed herself and that there was a law wherein if one knows that another person is going to harm themselves an doesn't report it, then that is a crime in and of itself, and that while he was gone he received citations for things that he didn't pay. A sort of SWAT team comes in through the door and arrests Ned. Lionel runs after them.
At the street level, Lionel's car was illegally parked and is getting towed, but Amy is just arriving to fix his A/C (which doesn't really need fixing). In a frenzy, he asks her to drive him to jail to help Ned. They pass a middle-aged man whose car is broken down.
A transcript of an address given in the year 2079 about what is causing the turtles to commit suicide or what the turtles are even doing.
In jail, Lionel struggles to communicate to the officer who should have information. The officer informs him, while they're talking, that his computer has just shown that the prisoner Ned Deeply is deceased.
Amy takes him to an abandoned golf course where she goes to calm herself down sometimes and is consoling. Lionel doesn't know how to react/feel.
They leave and on their way back, they pass the man again whose car broke down and offer him a lift. He says he's going to be late for his daughter's recital and thanks them. Once home, Lionel leaves a note for Amy, the same one as from before before. He then leaves.
Like chapter 12, the perspective switches to third person present. An unnamed woman wakes up in her bathtub. Her body is sore, but she is calm and resigned.
Anyway, thank you.