As the final physical fragments of the mind came together, Skellor decided that his own orders must not be disobeyed in any manner, so he proceeded to wipe the program intended to reassemble the virtual fragments of the Golem’s mind. But he couldn’t. As soon as he attempted to wipe the program, the mind began to break in other places, in a way that would make it unusable. Annoyingly, what could make Crane whole and sane and autonomous was also preventing him from sliding into true oblivion. Remove it, and the mind would fall apart. Skellor realized he could erase everything and start again, but doing that would result in the loss of the Mr Crane he wanted. This he found aesthetically displeasing. To possess godlike powers, Skellor felt, meant he should please the poetic as well as the pragmatic part of his soul.

With the mind now cupped before him like an offering to this brass god, Skellor stood and approached Crane’s body. There was a Jain substructure inside the Golem: it supplied the power lost by two broken micro-piles, and was mopping up spilt radioactives. It would also repair him, just as similar mycelia had repaired the calloraptor creatures Skellor sent after Ian Cormac on Masada. Mr Crane, dangerous though he used to be, would now be formidable.

Skellor reached out and pressed the lozenge into its recess inside the Golem. It snicked into place, light flickering around it as the structure inside him made optic connections. The Jain substructure, taking on a brassy hue from its surroundings, reached out like sharp fingers and drew closed the ceramal torso as if it was made of rubber. The superconducting grid then rolled across and joined, then finally brass melted and flowed across the surface. After a moment Mr Crane—not Skellor—opened those black eyes.

‘Welcome back to your life,’ Skellor told the Golem.

‘Mr Pendle…’ began Agent Bryonik, leaning back, his fingers interlaced beneath his chin.

‘Is this entirely necessary?’ Pendle interrupted, waving a hand at their surroundings.

Bryonik wondered what his problem was: this was genuinely in the style of a premillennial police interrogation cell, with a scarred and coffee-stained plastic table, magnetic tape recorders, strip lights…

Pendle went on, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve sat in rooms like this?’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘Precisely seven hundred and twenty-three.’

‘There are worse alternatives.’

‘And do you know how many times that has been said to me?’

Bryonik grimaced, and through his gridlink accessed Penal Storage to change the VR format. He didn’t like being predictable, so rather than go for the Caribbean island, bright shirts, and drinks with umbrellas in them, he cobbled his own scenario. Now the two men stood in the uppermost viewing gallery of the Eiffel Tower. Pendle eyed the bank of screens to one side, showing a steel-recrystalizing robot as it slowly traversed one of the ancient structural members.

‘This is a new one,’ commented Pendle. ‘In my time the damned thing had fallen down. When did they put it back up?’

‘About seven years after you died.’

Pendle’s case had a certain historical significance — one of a defining variety of crimes committed around the same period. Prior to then it would have been called what—assault?

‘Thirteen years ago, then.’

Bryonik raised an eyebrow.

‘You know I’m real-timed. Believe me, I’ve been counting the years in here.’

‘How long have you got?’

Pendle shrugged. ‘It varies. I’ll never be loaded to a Golem chassis while there’s someone more deserving, and that’s the way it always seems to be. I could be in here until the sun goes out.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘I can experience all the virtual worlds imaginable, but one thing I can never do is forget that none of it is real. It’s a kind of hell.’

‘Will you tell me about your crime?’ Bryonik asked.

‘No,’ said Pendle, stepping to the window and gazing down. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you want with me. You’re not a student, you’re ECS down to the virtual chainglass shiv in your virtual boot.’

‘Again, it’s probably somewhere you’ve been before. Your memplant was loaded to main storage before we discovered you had sabotaged five Golem minds. Your history being non-technical and all your employment the same, it took a while to establish that you designed a program capable of all that it did. Luckily, we recovered the five before they killed anyone. The idea of five Golem Twenty-four schizoid psychopaths wandering around the Polity gets people in a cold sweat even now.’

‘Good enough summation—though I’d dispute “psychopath”. Sociopath is probably nearer the mark.’

Agent Bryonik held out his hand and an old memcrystal storage box appeared in it. ‘The deal brokered for you was that you told us everything. That’s how you escaped direct mind-to-mind AI interrogation.’

Pendle grinned nastily. ‘It’s how the AIs avoided it too. Knowing I’d designed that program, none of them really wanted to get inside my head—might have been dangerous for them. Even now, I’m in isolated storage. At least other souls-in-waiting get a social life.’

‘You lied, Pendle.’ Bryonik opened the box to reveal the eight empty compartments inside.

Pendle eyed the box. ‘I told you people back then: three crystals were destroyed in the process.’

‘The prototype Golem Twenty-five… You were at that launch for more than the free drinks and a chance of throwing elephant shit at Corp execs. We know that now.’

‘I was nothing to do with the attack.’

Bryonik was sure he could see a touch of panic in Pendle’s expression—understandable. If Pendle was found to have been involved in that act of terror, in which eighteen people had died unrecoverably, no deal could prevent him from being utterly erased.

‘The Golem was seen on the out-Polity planet Huma—the location, for the last twenty years, of a lot of illegal arms trading. Was the idea to break the Golem for Separatist reprogramming? This is something that has occurred since then.’ Bryonik could now see that Pendle really was scared. He might call his confinement in VR storage hell, but it seemed he preferred it to death.

‘Look, I wasn’t connected to the Separatist cause at all.’

‘As far as we could work out, you never had any training in designing sanity-smashing programs for AI.’

‘Okay, I admit it, I fucked up their prototype, but do you think, if I’d anything to do with the Separatists, I’d have been there to get nerve-gassed too?’

Bryonik decided to let Pendle sweat a little more, even though the man possessed neither pores nor skin. ‘Seems a good cover to me. And it’s surprising that you were memplanted. Not many there were—it was new technology then, and not wholly trusted.’ Bryonik shrugged. ‘All you sacrificed was your body.’

‘Honestly, agent, the program I loaded would not have broken the Golem to a reprogramming level. It would have been schizoid and maybe a touch sociopathic, and would have just become more difficult for them to handle. I never intended to make killers! You have to understand that innate Golem intelligence would have prevented any Golem, just for their self-preservation, from taking that path.’

Bryonik raised a hand. ‘Okay, calm down. We know you weren’t in with the Jovians. We just wanted you to admit you screwed with that particular Golem.’

‘Good.’ Pendle nodded to himself. ‘Good…You say it was on Huma?’

‘Yes, there, as far as we can gather, it received what is called by those in the know as an in-Kline. A memcording of the killer Serban Kline is looped into a Golem’s mind until there’s not a great deal left. Reprogrammed and remotely controlled, it makes a handy killing machine, though not a particularly efficient one. Mostly captured Golem are mind-cored and the chassis used as a telefactor.’