Agnes, bundled up against the biting chill of a Wisconsin winter, was content to tune out his words, content to sit by and watch – and, otherwise, to think. This was January of 2045, over four years after the eruption of Yellowstone, and the worlds of mankind were stabilizing, if not healing, and Agnes, and others, had time to rest. And such moments as this gave her time to get used to herself. To being herself again, seven years after her own peculiar reincarnation. She hardly even recalled her given name, these days. She had been ‘Sister Agnes’ for as long as she could remember, and right now was certain that she still was Sister Agnes.

Not that theological doubts often troubled her. Sister Agnes could hardly complain about her new incarnation wrought by Lobsang, to be quick once more in this miraculous artificial body, into which her memories had been downloaded. Of course, to have undergone any kind of reincarnation was somewhat upsetting to a decent Catholic girl, for there was no room for that in the orthodox theology. However, she’d always concentrated on the old maxim that the best course was to do the good that was in front of her, and to put such doubts aside. Maybe God had a new mission for her, in this new form made possible by the advance of technology. Why should He not use such tools? And after all, being alive and apparently healthy was surely much better than being dead.

Meanwhile, what were you to make of Lobsang? In this temporal world he was something like any sensible vision of God, a God of technology, reproducing himself into more and more complex iterations, a being whose consciousness could fly anywhere and everywhere in the electronic world, who could even split himself so that he could be in multiple places at the same time. A being who was aware, as no simple human ever could be. Agnes liked the word ‘apprehend’. It was a good word that meant, to her, to understand completely. And it seemed to her that Lobsang was trying to apprehend the whole world, the whole universe, and trying to understand the role of the human race in that universe.

Despite all that, Lobsang appeared to be sane, ferociously so in fact – a sanity that burned! As for his character, Lobsang had done some very good work – especially given, of course, that he had the capacity to do a large amount of harm, should he choose. And as far as she could see, whatever a theologian might say, he had a soul, or at least a near perfect facsimile. If he was like a god, then he was a benign god.

But Agnes had to admit that Lobsang shared something at least with Jehovah: they were both male and proud. Lobsang loved an audience. He was clever, no doubt about it, extremely clever, but he wanted the cleverness to be seen. So he sought sidekicks, people like Joshua Valienté, like Agnes; he needed to let his light shine on their wondering faces.

And yet this new age, after the volcano, was difficult for Lobsang too. Not physically, as it was for the rest of a hungry and displaced mankind, but in some other, more subtle way. Spiritually, perhaps.

Agnes wasn’t sure of the cause. Perhaps it was because he had been unable to do anything to avert the Yellowstone disaster. Even Lobsang could only see Yellowstone through the eyes of the geologists, and they had been distracted by the odd phenomenon of disturbances at the stepwise copies of Yellowstone across a swathe of Low Earths – none of which had amounted to much, compared with the eventual Datum eruption. That probably didn’t assuage the guilt of one who thought of himself as a kind of shepherd of mankind, however, an agent ‘who does the bits God left out’, as he once said to her.

Or perhaps it was that the catastrophe that had afflicted Datum Earth, and particularly Datum America, had inevitably knocked a hole in the infrastructure of gel-based stores and optical fibre networks and satellite links that sustained Lobsang himself.

Or, again, perhaps Lobsang himself was actually ageing, in his own way. After all, nobody knew what would happen to an artificial intelligence as it grew older, as its substrate turned into a thing of layers of increasingly elderly technologies, both hardware and software – ‘accreting like a coral reef’, as Lobsang had once put it – and as its own inner complexity grew ever more tangled. It was an experiment nobody had ever run before.

No wonder then that Lobsang sometimes rambled, almost like a confused and disappointed old man. Well, Agnes was used to confused and disappointed old men; there were plenty of them in the hierarchy of the Church.

Maybe this was why she herself was here. Lobsang had brought her back from the grave to be a kind of adversary, a balance to his ambition. Yes, once upon a time she would undoubtedly have called herself his adversary, even if her role had always been basically constructive. Now, though, she was – well, what? A friend? Yes, of course, but also his confidante and moral compass – the latter being difficult because her own compass had a tendency to spin like a weathercock in a twister.

How was she supposed to have any kind of relationship with such a being? Well, she didn’t know, but she seemed to be finding a way. She had a great deal of confidence in herself. She was resilient. She would cope. She always had.

‘Consider this,’ he was saying now. ‘Humanity got to the moon, and you can’t say that wasn’t a remarkable thing. After all, what other creature has got off the planet? And then, what did Homo sapiens do? Came home again! Bringing a few boxes of rocks, and a smug feeling of being master of the universe . . .’

‘Yes, dear,’ she said automatically.

‘You could argue that such a species deserves to be supplanted by a better breed.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Nearly done. I’ve got some tea in the flasks. Earl Grey or Lady Grey? . . . What are you laughing at?’

Agnes tried to look solemn. ‘At you. For segueing from arguing that humanity deserves extinction to politely asking me whether I would like something so cheerful and normal as a cup of tea! Look – I understand everything you have been saying. Humanity is pretty shallow. It took a trip to the moon for most people even to understand what the Earth really was: round, finite, precious and endangered. We can’t organize ourselves for toffee. But isn’t humanity showing more common sense, even at this late hour? Look how well we’re coping with the Yellowstone disaster – well, so it seems to me.’

‘Hmm. Maybe. Though I’ve seen some hints that we may have had some help . . .’

She dismissed that. ‘Oh, don’t be enigmatic, Lobsang, it’s an irritating habit. And don’t assume that we can’t change – change and grow. Believe me, I’ve seen some fine adults grow out of difficult children; there’s potential in everybody. And, frankly, for all the nonsense you spout about how we’re doomed to be supplanted, I don’t see the new model around anywhere. What happens when they do show up? Should we listen for the sound of jackboots?’

‘Dear Agnes, I know that you exaggerate for effect, a ploy which rarely helps matters. No, not jackboots. Something more – helpful. Well, as I hinted so enigmatically. Imagine something subtler – slow and careful and insidious but not necessarily sinister, and yes, better organized than Homo sapiens could ever be . . .’

But his voice tailed off, and his expression changed, as if he was responding to some distant call.

You had to get used to that happening. He’d told her all about parallel processing, a concept she hadn’t heard of before her reincarnation. This meant running more than one task at once, or breaking down one big job into smaller jobs to be handled simultaneously. Not that she was particularly impressed. After all, she had been doing that all her life, thinking about making dinner while also blowing noses and teaching disturbed children how to hold a conversation and composing yet another angry letter to the bishop, with the occasional prayer thrown in the mix. Who didn’t have to work that way, every day of a busy life?