Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?" he asks.

"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do you think of our options?"

"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwhisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before – at least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her."

"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.

"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn – then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it."

"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection."

Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?"

She glares. "Drop it!"

"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I do have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it – if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?"

"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber.

Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions – I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.

Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect – in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So dull. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology."

Rita nods. Woman-hating et cetera … The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." Like your son , she doesn't add. Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up takes serious dedication … "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention.

"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about."

"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it."

"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?"

Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?"

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist – the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know."

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants.

"Could be" – left turn – "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" – left turn – "just tell us what they want?"