There were four aliens now, then five…and they kept on coming.

They seemed to be popping out of nowhere — but that too was a necessary fiction. Even if the AI were trying its damnedest to show me the truth, the most it could do was register presence as soon as it became detectable. If the alien ships — or could they possibly be creatures? — really were popping out of some kind of hyperspace, this was all that the AI could show me.

If, on the other hand, the aliens were merely coming to the attention of Child of Fortune’s sensors, having moved unobtrusively by perfectly orthodox means to where they were first apprehended, all the AI could show me was what it was showing me. There was no way to determine where they were actually coming from, or how they were avoiding detection until they became manifest.

The aliens could certainly move. I had no idea how fast we were going, but I figured that we had to be accelerating at one gee or more. We were already way past the velocity at which we could make sharp turns, no matter how expert our cocoons might be at preventing momentum from crushing us to pulp — but the attackers didn’t seem to be laboring under that kind of inconvenience. They were hurling themselves all over the sky, like icons in a combat game.

It was all absurd, and plainly so.

It was absurd to suppose that a fleet of alien space fighters was bursting out of some kind of space warp. It was absurd to suppose that they were shooting at us, and hitting us, without actually smashing us into little bits of molten slag. It was absurd to suppose that aliens, or anybody else, would go to such lengths merely to harass or destroy a man whose messianic status was entirely a matter of human estimation. Or me. Or even Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.

But melodrama has its own attractions, its own button-pushing power over those emotions that even the cleverest IT can’t muffle.

It’s not just us, I thought, as more squiddy things popped into existence, swarming across the whole vast starfield. It’s the whole damn system. We just happened to be out here. They’re invading the whole solar system. They’re going to annihilate the entire population. It’s finally happened. After a thousand years of cultivating a false sense of security, it’s finally happened, in the very same week that I finally get out of jail.

It was the last — and, admittedly, least — improbability that derailed the train of thought.

It’s an illusion, I told myself. It isn’t even a good illusion. It’s a practical joke. Someone’s playing with me, treating me with contempt. Niamh Horne’s playing me for a sucker, and she’s playing Adam Zimmerman too. But I don’t believe it, and neither will he, if he’s got any sense.

I thought I owed it to myself not to be taken in. I owed it to myself as a man of the twenty-second century and a designer of virtual experiences not to be a gullible fool. Adam Zimmerman had grown up in the twentieth century, when TV was flat, and came in a box. If all of this had been set up to fool someone, he was the one, and he was the one on whom it might just work — but I had higher standards.

It’s all fake, I told myself, sternly. That much is definite.

The hope that it was all an illusion, all a third-rate VE space opera, was further encouraged by the fact that I couldn’t feel any effects of the shots that were supposedly striking home against the hull of the Titanian ship.

I suspected that I ought not to read too much into that item of negative evidence. I knew that it was always the requirements of melodrama rather than respect for realism that had led the programmers of old to make the bridgeheads of hypothetical spaceships shudder and lurch when the vessels were supposedly hit by exotic ammunition — but I allowed myself to be encouraged anyway. I needed every scrap of “proof” I could find to bolster my conviction that I was notan easy man to take for a ride.

I watched the formations of the attacking entities shift and change, looking more and more like cyborg octopodes built for exotic combat, but I couldn’t tell whether the changes were a result of their maneuvers or a mere matter of altered perspective caused by Child of Fortune’s own evasive action. I wasn’t aware of any momentum effects in my own body, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either, given that the elastic inner surface of the pod was so firmly bonded to my own smartsuit. There was no way to tell how fast the Titanian ship was moving…if it was moving at all.

“Are we shooting back?” I asked the AI.

“No,” said the mechanical voice, obviously not feeling the least need to apologize or explain.

“Can we get away from them?” I asked.

“No,” was the discomfiting reply.

“Will they destroy us?”

I took the consequent silence as an I don’t know, but the image suddenly shifted as if to supply an answer of sorts. I saw that out of the entire alien school, only four of the attackers now seemed to be concentrating all their attentions on us — but the fourth was not like the other three.

If the three I’d already seen were run-of-the-mill calamari, the fourth was a record-breaking giant. In the absence of any benchmarks, and knowing full well that the AI’s external eyes were using all kinds of vision-enhancing tricks even if they were being scrupulously honest, it was difficult to judge exactly howgigantic it might be, but appearances suggested that this was the mother squid, the queen of all the other squids — and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my own dutiful mothership wasn’t pitching and shuddering under the impact of unfriendly fire was that we weren’t actually being shot atat all, in the strictest sense of the term.

We were being pushed.

We were, I suddenly realized, being herdedtoward the giant — and the giant was already opening her vast tentacles, spreading them like the petals of a world-sized flower to expose an avid maw.

But it had to be fake — didn’t it?

It was all third-rate space opera, as cartoonish as the garden on Excelsior…or the continents and cities of the Gaean restoration.

It’s just a show, I told myself, insistently, as Child of Fortunehurtled helplessly into that awesome pit. It’s all just pretend, to cover up Niamh Horne’s snatch plan, to put one over on poor Adam Zimmerman. But that short-lived conviction had already begun to fade into uncertainty again — and the fear that had always been fear, even while I had insisted on construing it as ire, was working away at the base of my brain.

Some scenarios, I thought, are surely so preposterous that no one would bother to pretendthem, even before an audience as ill prepared for contemporary life as Adam Zimmerman. Some lies are so unbelievable that their very absurdity defies scepticism.

While I was trying to weigh that paradox, the Titanian ship was falling into that huge dark mouth. Child of Fortunestill urged on by the three spitting babies, which still drifted into the periphery of the visual field on occasion, their whips of virtual light licking out again and again.

The tentacles within the array were moving, groping as if in parody of the microworld’s similarly hungry mouth-parts.

If this is real, I thought, it has nothing to do with Adam Zimmerman. If this is real, it has to be the start of something much bigger and much weirder. Humankind won’t have to wait for the Afterlife; something else is taking over.

There was no way to tell how big that mouth was. For all I knew, it could swallow planets as easily as spaceships. It seemed incredible — but I couldn’t be sure that my standards of credibility were still applicable.

“Are we shooting back yet?” I asked.

“I am unarmed,” said the AI, in a sudden burst of confidentiality. I could almost have imagined that it was as over-awed by possibility as I was, and that intimidation was making it plaintive.