An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend – a dashing young air force pilot – shows up to escort her away. "Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. "Manfred?"

"Uh – what?"

"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?"

Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.

The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.

The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.

On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music biz's position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties.

A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self– propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that doesn't come in the shape of ink on dead trees.

Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious.

The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another attempt at Eurofederalisme , at least until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer trust.

About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters – and the crusties aren't even remotely human.

Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article, it is of no security significance.

The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. "Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days."

"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. "Are you really a CIA stringer?"

Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired."

Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream."

"Your —" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She raises her glass to him. "It is, has, not gone well?"

Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS."

"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this – she did not look like your type." There's a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts.

"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices … isn't it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just how far to trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?"

She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union."

"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the American century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her – European privacy laws are draconian by American standards – but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live – a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take it."