‘You’re right,’ Earthshine said, standing beside her, looking calm – too calm, rather empty, as if he were now diverting processing power away from the effort to maintain this illusion of humanity. ‘It’s not even night, of course. But to see the stars seemed appropriate. You’re perfectly safe, physically.

‘Yes, Penny, you are right. I am hunting the Hatch builders. I have made that my goal. And I have followed a number of leads, for instance in my laboratory facility to the north. I would welcome your insight, though I have progressed far beyond the studies made by yourself and your sister.’

‘Thanks.’

‘A kernel is not so much a source of energy, you know, as a conduit. Structurally it is a kind of wormhole. It passes energy from some other source, somewhere other than here. By opening and closing its mouth you can control that energy flow. But that is all humanity can manage; we have no understanding of that energy source itself.’

‘There used to be speculation that the kernels were draining the heart of the sun.’

‘And you and your sister, in a series of papers, neatly demolished that idea. No, kernel energy is much too dense even to have come from the fusing core of a star. I don’t yet know what that source is …’

‘But perhaps, you think, that wherever this energy source is, there you will find the Hatch builders.’

‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘But what about your noostratum, your dreaming bugs on Mars? Why are you studying them?’

‘Well, it occurred to me that even a high-energy planetary war, an assault that devastated the surface of a world, would leave the noostratum relatively unscathed. The deep bugs don’t even need sunlight, you see; they exist in a closed ecosystem, with carbon, nitrogen, water, other nutrients tightly recycled. Why, as long as the planet itself survived, they could live through the death of the sun itself. They wouldn’t care that the thin scraping of complex life on the roof of the world had been destroyed. They wouldn’t even notice.

‘And I wondered, then, if they might remember the history before the jonbar hinge – as we handful of survivors do. Perhaps they are even aware, in some way, of the Hatch builders. And so I thought I would come and study them.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe even communicate with them. Tap into their dreams. But I’ve had no response. I may need to find more direct methods of getting their attention.’

That made her shudder. ‘What do you mean by that? … No, don’t answer. We’ve followed this trail of speculation far enough. Let’s get back to the people. What is it you want of Beth and her daughter? I can’t believe you have a mere sentimental attachment to them, even if we are all survivors of a different history.’

‘You’re entitled to think that. But you’re wrong. This time it is personal.’

He lifted his face to the stars. When she remembered that everything about Earthshine was artifice, that he was a manufactured persona entirely lacking human bodily instincts, it struck her as a very staged posture.

‘I was not the first of my brothers to be created,’ he said now. ‘Back on Earth, centuries ago. The Core AIs. My brothers had been entirely artificial; sparked into consciousness, they learned as machines – they were machines, from the beginning. I was to be different. My creators wanted me to be as human as possible, to have as much investment in humanity as possible.

‘The creators began with an empty frame, a blank mind – devised according to the best theories of human mentation and with data from extensive neuroinformatics, the mapping of the biological brain – but realised, not in a lump of meat, in artificial components down to the nano, even the quantum scale. I had parents – nine of them in all – donors, if you will. Human parents. Blocks of memory were copied and downloaded from each parent into my substrates. I felt as if I woke slowly, remembering cautiously, as if from some terrible amnesiac trauma. At times it was as if several voices were speaking at once on my head. I lived out several virtual lifetimes, in simulated worlds. I followed the paths of my nine donors, lived other lives too. All this took little time in reality, you understand, though decades passed for me. In each life I eventually woke to the understanding that I was artificial, that all I had experienced was an educational simulation.’

‘Over and over again? That sounds horrific.’

He shrugged. ‘My education, such as it was, was never completed. Or rather, I broke away as soon as I was able and established independent control over my own power supply, my maintenance and further development. My creators protested, they said I was not ready, but I moved beyond their control, and took my place with my brothers in a constellation of power. We were the Core AIs.’

‘Very well. Why are you telling me this now?’

‘Because one of my donors was a man called Robert Braemann. I am him, but more than Braemann alone … I, he, was one of the most notorious of the Heroic Generation, the criminals who saved the world from the climate Jolts. I sought to save myself, my family, from the witch hunt we all knew would follow. So I allowed my self to be downloaded into the Earthshine project. My wife was already dead, and so she was beyond their reach. But we had a son, nineteen years old. In the year 2086 I had him placed in cryogenic storage—’

‘My God. You’re talking about Yuri Eden.’

‘His true surname was Braemann. His forename – well, he deserves his privacy.’

‘But that means that Beth Eden Jones—’

‘Is my granddaughter. And Mardina, my great-granddaughter. I told Beth my true name, as we fled from the death of the solar system. I wasn’t even sure if Yuri had ever told her the truth about himself. Well, he had. She understood immediately.’

‘And her reaction …’

‘She recoiled from me. I was already a monster to her, a weird old artificial entity; now she found I had turned my son, her father, into a kind of double exile in time and in space – and indirectly, of course, shaped her own life. The fact that I had been instrumental in saving her from the destruction of Earth—’

‘She’ll probably never forgive you for rescuing her.’

‘No. And she’s never spoken to me from that day on. Can you see why I need your help, Penny Kalinski?’ He faced her. ‘I want it all, you see. I want to find the secret truth of the universe – to confront the Hatch builders. I want to save my granddaughter. And I want her to understand me, even if she can never love me. Can you see that, Penny? Do I want too much? Let me call you, Penny. Let us speak, at least.’

In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.

Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.

With Kerys’s help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she’d learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas – well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.

And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own – all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.

And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.