‘Hindsight can be brilliantly incisive, and never misses the banana skins of existence. Do you want to be punished?’

‘No… what I want is to go back to Masada and find out who is alive and who is dead. I want to retrieve my Shuriken, and see what Mika has to say about the dracomen there—and find out what the EC decision on them is. But, most of all, I want to know how the fuck you got on board this ship. There was no one here last time I looked, and nothing has docked since then.’

‘You well know I don’t answer such questions.’ Earth Central’s leading and most mysterious agent liked to remain inscrutable.

‘You did it on the Occam Razor, and I at first thought you a projection. I touched you and you remained solid, though something happened to you when the Occam went into U-space. But then, is my memory of events true—because you’ve screwed with my mind before.’

‘Your memories are true.’

Cormac nodded contemplatively. ‘I think I know what you are, Blegg. I think I’ve finally figured it out. You’re an avatar of the Earth Central AI—the human face, or interface, which transfers its orders to its agents. Sometimes you’re a projection, sometimes Golem.’ He looked directly at Blegg. ‘All that bullshit about Hiroshima is precisely that: bullshit.’

Blegg grinned. ‘If only things were so simple. You are perhaps eighty years old in personal time, Ian Cormac, but with a mind possessing the plasticity of youth and a brain constantly replacing its dying nerve cells, and your apprehension of the world is at the foot of an exponential curve. Immortality is possible for all of humankind now, and many humans will discover what it means to keep on learning and keep on understanding, though many more will simply stagnate. I myself am many centuries ahead of the race as a whole.’

‘Which still doesn’t explain how you manage to keep popping up like the Cheshire cat.’

‘Abilities can be acquired, given the time. This is something you will come to understand, as you are one of those who will definitely not stagnate.’

‘What abilities had you already acquired that enabled you to survive the blast from an ancient fission weapon at Hiroshima? You were supposedly a child then.’

‘Maybe I didn’t survive it.’

Cormac could now feel something, the edge of something he strove to understand, and he knew that Blegg was slipping away from him. With some sense he had never known before, he reached out for the man and found himself groping after shadows.

Quite calmly he said, ‘You’re an avatar, Blegg—I know it.’

I am the future…

The projection room now contained only Cormac. He sighed and shook his head. One day he would know precisely everything there was to know about Blegg, but that day was not yet close. With cold precision, he compartmentalized speculation. Now Earth Central Security—ECS—had work for him. There was always such work.

When are we heading into U-space? he asked the Jack Ketch AI.

‘There is a hold on all transport at present, but when we are ready to go I will inform you,’ the AI replied.

It was only as he was leaving the projection chamber that Cormac realized he had just used his gridlink—hardware inside his skull that had enabled him a near-direct interface with AI—to communicate, which was impossible. It had been deactivated long ago.

Glittering leviathans bearing limbs capable of crushing boulders, and others capable of stacking grains of sand, reared in high pillars of gearbox-grinding movement, hung from the ceiling like mechanical multi-limbed bats, or squatted on the vast plain of the factory floor. All seemed chaotic lethal movement—a whole machine rather than distinct engines—where it seemed a human would be minced and scoured away in seconds. The sight would, Pendle thought, have driven Henry Ford screaming from the premises, especially had he seen the silver skeletons that were the product of this labour. But it was all utterly efficient: a three-dimensional assembly line designed by AI so that no movement was wasted, no process interrupted, no energy squandered… Unhuman, and becoming more so.

On the whole, Pendle thought, the execs that were the human face of the corporation were at best glorified salesmen, but mostly shareholders creaming the working credit on their options—the closest a large proportion of Earth’s population got to real work. Pendle, however, considered his erstwhile position as creative design consultant in the prognostic body-form section, to be essential. True, Golem contractual rights were now such that imposition of body form was no longer allowed. Directly after uploading to crystal, and before installation in an anthrop chassis, they were now given the choice of form, which meant a loss of over 30 per cent of loaded crystal to AI applications other than to Golem. However, though less than the profit gained per capita for Golem indenture, Cybercorp was still able to reclaim construction costs and a reasonable profit set by Earth Central Economic Control. But then Pendle felt the distinction between the corporation and Earth Central itself was at best only one of nomenclature. Both were part of the same silicon meritocracy—a ruling elite that humans only managed to join by ceasing to be entirely human. Buphal was a prime example.

‘Apensat has got the chassis prepped for installation, we can go down there now,’ Buphal said.

Pendle studied the man. From the left, all you saw were Asiatic features in profile: a beaked nose, brown eyes, and dark eyebrows below plaited hair artfully dotted with grey. He wore monomer coolveralls with ribbed high collar and wrist-sleeves terminating in interface rings for ‘factor gloves and helmet. The material of this garment was silvery and contained squares of mem-fab displaying what at first looked like the view from some craft flying through a strange city. Buphal had told him this was in fact an ophthalmoscope view of some ancient valved electronics he had studied during his youth. But it was when you saw the other side of the old man’s head that you realized just what he was.

Affixed to the side of his skull, behind his ear, was a grey metal disc. From the edges of this, at one o’clock and seven, bus bars curved round and penetrated his skull. At six o’clock, tubes running down to a plug in the side of his neck piped blood as a coolant. In the centre of the disc, like some trophy on its mounting, was an aug the size and shape of a cockleshell but seemingly fashioned of quartz. In Buphal’s right eye, instead of an eyeball and sclera, a glittering square tube penetrated deep into his skull. Pendle knew when Buphal was doing any heavy thinking—the man would start to sweat even though gusts of frigid air would be escaping his coolveralls, for Buphal’s aug was semi-AI crystal matrix, buffered from direct interface by band-controlled optic and aural links. People like him were called haimans: a compound of AI and human. The man was as close to attaining Al/human synergy as was possible without burning out the human element like a faulty fuse.

Buphal leading, they made their way along the viewing gallery to the antique spiral stair leading down to what Cybercorp engineers still called the shop floor. This stair, Pendle recollected, Cybercorp had purchased at great expense from Sigural, the Sri Lankan AI that ran the runcible on Sigiria. Apparently these ancient iron staircases, originally brought to that island from the London Underground sometime premillennial, had no longer been considered safe to convey the five million visitors the rock received every year, even if most of them did come in by runcible.

They walked straight into the lethal blur of machinery and, of course, it flinched away from them, creating a space ten metres in diameter around them, until they reached the second stair taking them down to their destination. Here, on a smaller floor, technicians pursued specialist projects whilst, behind a glass wall alongside them, silver skeletons with ribbed chests open like butterflies marched neatly towards a perpetually cycling clean-lock and to the glare beyond where sentience awaited them. In this room it was sometimes difficult to distinguish specialist project from technician. Even pure humans like Pendle were visually identical to Golem who had donned syntheflesh. Sometimes there were humans so in love with the machine it was difficult so see any humanity left in them. Apensat was a silvery thing with the geisha stoop and glittery limbs of a surgical robot. But he also had normal arms and a face in there under the cowling. He looked like a man a huge polished-chrome beetle was gradually subsuming.