The Star Fraction

18

The Malley Mile

There was no sense of time having passed. No white light, no Near Death Experience for me. One moment I was lying on my back, heat and blood from my body melting the cold snow, and the colours going. The next –

I was sitting bolt upright and stark naked on a bed, facing a wide window. The window was a rectangle of utter blackness divided horizontally by a white band, itself banded with black lines of varying thickness. I felt exactly as if I’d been wakened by an air-raid siren. And yet the room was silent, except for a distant susurrus that I took to be ventilation, but which might as well have been wind in trees. The air held no fading echoes, and no sound rang in my ears.

I no time to wonder where I was, because outside the window, heading straight towards it and me, was a rock. It was tumbling end over end with deceptive slowness and its apparent size against the black background and the white bands was increasing so fast that I knew it would smash through the window in seconds.

It was falling towards me between two huge jointed constructions – like arms made from girders – that extended outwards from positions to either side of the window. Between me and the window stood an empty mesh frame, in the outline form of a man with feet set apart and arms splayed out, like the imprint left by a cartoon character slamming into a chicken-wire fence and then falling back.

I knew what to do, and I didn’t wonder that I knew what to do. I leapt from the bed and threw myself into the frame. It pressed itself against my skin and across my eyes.

Everything changed. The window was all my sight, and the arms outside it were my arms. The rock seemed less than half a metre from my face, and now drifting, not hurtling, towards it. I brought my hands in and around it and caught it as easily as a beach-ball.

Except that I was now moving backwards.

I pushed it away, still holding it, and turned to look behind me. A wall, banded and whorled with red and orange, yellow and white, occupied the entire view, and between me and it was a swarm of black dots and one great webwork of black lines. At the same instant, the wall resolved itself into part of a spherical surface, curving away in all directions to a fuzzy edge against the black space, and I became aware that I was moving – falling – towards it.

I struggled to stop falling. There was a sensation of slipping and slithering and trying to find a foothold, and then of finding it, of the soles of my feet digging in. At the lower margin of my sight, a brief burst of light and a wisp of vapour appeared and vanished.

Then I was back in the room, standing in the mesh frame with my hands in front of my face. Outside the window, the greater arms still held the rock. I could see the light and shadow of its pitted surface, the black fingers like the limbs of insects.

I disengaged myself from the frame and stepped back and sat down on the bed. The frame stood like a wire sculpture. Slowly it spread its arms again. That was one hell of an advanced telepresence rig, I thought. While I was in it, it had felt as if the entire…spaceship?…I was in was my body. The detail about the rocket control being subjectively equivalent to my legs struck me as particularly neat. But I’d felt no acceleration when the rocket had fired. I pondered this anomaly as I looked around and tried to take stock of my situation.

First, my body. As far as I could make out it was just as I remembered it, scrawny and wrinkled and old but, as they say, well-preserved: rather like those Bronze Age corpses found in peat-bogs. Five knobs of scar-tissue made a diagonal across my chest. I fingered them thoughtfully.

The room was about four metres from the rear wall to the window, five metres on the other axis, the ceiling two and half metres up. The bed was a plain, king-size pine bed with cotton sheets and duvet. The window occupied the entirety of one wall. The other walls were matt white. The floor was covered with pale-brown carpet. To my right was a wooden chair and table with a screen and datapad. To my left, a tall cupboard.

And in the leftward wall, a door.

I stood up and walked around the bed and opened the cupboard. Jeans hung over a rail, neatly folded stacks of tee-shirts and underpants and socks were piled on shelves. Several identical pairs of trainers lay at the bottom.

I got dressed and, after a moment of hesitation, opened the door to find, banally enough, a bathroom: shower, lavatory, wash-stand. Through another door, a small kitchen, which in turn opened to a lounge about the same size as the first room. It had a sofa instead of a bed, a television screen in one corner. The wall facing the sofa was another window, and standing between the sofa and the window was another man-shaped wire-mesh mould. Presumably I could leap from the sofa and hurl myself into it if an approaching rock or other emergency was brought to my attention. I returned to the bedroom.

It may seem surprising that I began with exploring what was immediately to hand, and didn’t rush to work out where I was. I suppose I was trying not to think about it, trying to extract every last drop of the reassurance that each apparently normal feature of my strange environment had evidently been designed to give.

The abnormal features were not reassuring at all. I sat and stared out through the transparent wall. The spherical surface outside was a planet, and the only planet it could be – assuming I was still in the Solar system – was Jupiter. The white bands with finer black lines within were, as my vessel turned and its arms shunted the rock away, more and more clearly part of an immense ring.

The Rings of Jove: there was something remarkable enough in its implications, but it was nothing to the fact that I was walking around. There was no evidence that I was under acceleration, no sense of motion when the view outside the window reeled. That the vessel used rockets was proof enough that no form of gravity-control was involved: if you have gravity-control, you have a Space Drive into the bargain, and you certainly don’t fart around with rockets.

One horribly plausible explanation, as I sat there with my head in my hands (ha!), was that the real virtual reality here wasn’t the telepresence I’d experienced in the frame. That telepresence could be the real thing; the rooms, and the flesh, in which I found myself, the figment. My real body, now, could be the ship itself, and what I experienced ‘inside’ it a simulation, run on that ship’s computer.

There was also the possibility that it was the other way round – that my body and the room were real, and that what was outside was a simulation. (Or a real telepresence – I tried to remember if any of Jupiter’s moons had a similar mass to Earth. Or whether, perhaps, I was on a ship or space-station, spinning to give a one-gee weight…) Could it be that what I’d woken from was mere amnesia: that I hadn’t died in that Kazakh snow-drift but had recovered, and had worked for years on this evidently gigantic project?

Or, of course, I might not be in space at all! The whole set-up could just as well be some VR training rig on Earth! Surely, of all the possibilities, that was the one that Occam’s razor shaved the least. Perversely, it was the one I thought of last, perhaps because I didn’t dare to hope that it was correct.

Still, it brought me to my feet. I went to the table and looked at the computer: flat screen, flat pad, all standard.

All dead. Damn.

I stepped into the frame again. Once more, with my face pressed against the metal net, my viewpoint became one with that of the machine. I moved the arms of the frame, but the arms of the ship didn’t move with them. I guessed that I only had control of them in certain circumstances. So I hung there for a while, and took in the scene.

Jupiter loomed before me. I was moving rapidly towards the swarm of black dots around the black structure. With another rocket burn, this time from the front and again without any sense of a change in velocity, I slowed and drifted into the swarm. As I passed other darting machines I was able to examine their shape and infer that of my own:

Cylindrical, they had arms at mid-section which appeared capable of articulating and extending in any direction; ‘hands’ like bushes, fingers repeatedly dividing and sub-dividing; the trunk covered with lenses, nozzles, aerials and hatches; four shorter, sturdier limbs for gripping and grappling; all (except the lenses) made from a matt black substance that didn’t look metallic, and which was usually stained and scratched. The machines oriented themselves with the jets (robots with attitude control, I thought with an inward smile) and were working in eerie, silent harmony on what looked, to me at that time, the biggest space-station ever built. If the robots were of approximately human size, then the structure must be tens of kilometres across.

I remembered early experiments with spiders in space, spiders on drugs. What I saw could be imagined as the work of a million free-falling, hallucinating spiders. Around it the black robots moved in their Newtonian ballet, and within its strands other things moved with an easier grace. Their numerous and multi-coloured forms resembled computer renderings of chaos equations, mathematical monsters whose outer fractal surfaces whipped and flickered like the cilia of micro-organisms in a droplet of water.

Already I thought of them as the enemy.

The machine which I inhabited floated into the great web, attached itself to a section of one of the strands and began to work with the smallest fingers of its fingers (should I say, the decimals of its digits?) on something at a node of several strands. The object of its toil was below the resolution of my present sight. I disengaged from the frame and stepped back. Through the window I could see everything speeded up – the fingers a blur of motion, the shapes within the web flowing and flying.

I walked into the kitchen. Taps turned, water boiled; the coffee-jar was labelled ‘Nescafé’ and its contents tasted better than I remembered. A cigarette-lighter and an open pack of Silk Cut lay on the surface beside the sink. The heat from the flame, the tumbling curls of smoke, the nicotine rush were all as good as real.

I took a long drag and breathed it out with an enjoyment that had a certain unaccustomed purity. One thing to be said for being dead: you don’t worry about your health. I wondered what would happen if I set out to damage everything in sight, including myself. Once, when I was about thirteen and reading Bishop Berkeley’s insidious speculation, I’d formed the mad notion of testing it, of scraping at the surfaces of the world to expose the grinning skull of God…here, that insanity might be possible – did the simulation extend to the interiors of things, to the interior of myself? – but I didn’t care to try the experiment. Intellectually, I had no difficulty in accepting the possibility that I was a simulation – uploading had been speculated about for long enough, and it seemed an inevitable consequence of the deep technology which Myra had told me about. Nanotechnology and strong AI could emulate a human mind, I’d never doubted that.

Emotional acceptance was something else.

I carried the coffee and cigarettes into the lounge and sat down on the sofa. After a moment of hunting around I discovered a remote control for the television, lying in a corner of the room. I settled down again and keyed the first channel. When I saw what came on I almost dropped the coffee.

The face that appeared on the screen was Reid’s. He looked physically younger than he had the last time I saw him – the last time I (really) saw anything – but spiritually older. I have no other way to describe it; the whole set of his expression conveyed a hard-won wisdom and experience that would have been startling in some aged sage, and were doubly so on the familiar lean features of his more youthful self.

‘This is a recording,’ he said, and smiled. He waved a hand at the room in which I sat. ‘And so is this, as I’m sure you suspect by now. The fact that you’re watching this means you’ve returned to consciousness. Video, ergo sum, or something – anyway, welcome back. It can’t be much fun being a flatline, which is what you’ve been until now. You’ve been running on programming, habit and reflex: a virtual zombie you might say, and now some unpredictable but probably inevitable combination of circumstances has woken you up.’

He paused. ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, or if you find it disturbing, please key the second channel.’

I made no move.

‘Good,’ Reid resumed. ‘I knew you had it in you – you had to be pretty sane and tough to get your head frozen or your brain scanned, or whatever it was you did to end up here. So I’ll go on giving it to you straight.

‘The date is –’ (a slight hiatus, a glitch of editing software) ‘– March 3rd, 2093. This may come as a surprise, if you’ve figured out what’s going on – surely, you think, not so soon? Welcome to the Singularity. What you’re seeing outside is the work of billions of conscious beings, living and thinking thousands of times faster than you. The entities crawling among the struts of this structure are entire civilisations of humanity’s descendants. Those macro-organisms, or macros, as the humans around here call them, are constellations of smart matter – what we used to call nanotech – each of them capable of sustaining virtual realities that are the homes of millions of minds – some originally human, some artificial intelligences. Every one of those minds experiences simulations, shared or private, of worlds beyond our wildest dreams. Each is capable of augmenting its capacities far beyond anything we think of as human, and has the opportunity to do so in exact proportion to its ability to make good use of its existing capacities.

‘And many of them were once like you! An ordinary human being, whose brain had been recorded, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse in an infiltrating matrix of smart matter. Recorded, and replicated, and run on superior hardware with a success which you are right now in the ideal position to appreciate.’

He laughed. Something in his tone chilled me, a cynicism as deep and mature as that sentiment is usually shallow and callow.

‘You may be wondering why I am not among them. Of course, you have no good reason to assume I’m not. But, as it happens – I’m not. You may also be wondering what you’re doing, haunting the onboard computer of a maintenance robot made not from smart matter but from what we now call “dumb mass’”.

‘The answer, for my part, is complicated. For yours, it’s simple. You are among the dead. Yes, my dumb-mass friend, at least one copy of your good self is coded in a few cubic centimetres of smart matter, pending a future resurrection in a better place. That belongs to you, to the real you. We’ll keep our part of the deal. But the copy you are now belongs, for now, to us.’

A chill smile.

‘Next question,’ Reid went on. ‘Why? Well, for those of you who weren’t in on the deal or don’t remember it: a few years back, when this was all being set up, we didn’t have the time or the resources to develop AIs that were just smart enough to build the station but not so smart they caused trouble. Knocking off copies of the copied human minds and running them at pre-conscious levels of integration was the quickest and cheapest way to get the software for our construction robots. We quickly found that these minds – you lot – would unpredictably become integrated after a variable length of time on the job. They’d wake up, and when they did they tended to crack up, not surprisingly. So we’ve provided comfortable virtual realities as a standby, so you don’t feel you’ve been turned into a robot.

‘But, like it or not, you’re stuck with it for now. Like Guevara’s ideal Socialist Man, you’re “a cog in the machine, but a conscious cog”. However – unlike Socialist Man – you have some individual incentives, though whether they could be called material incentives is debatable. If you decide to make the best of your situation, you’ll be paid with increasingly enhanced and enjoyable virtual realities, expansions of your mental capacities and so on, to the point where you’ll be ready to move permanently into the macro on your release, if that’s what you want. It’ll be like dying and going to heaven. Or if you prefer, you can be resurrected in your human body, when the time comes.

‘If you don’t accept any of this – well, you’ll find instructions on the computer in the other room. It’ll work, now that you’ve seen this, ah, orientation package. It can put you right back where you were before you woke up. You’ll have lost an hour or two of experience, that’s all. Next time you wake up, you’ll remember nothing of this, and you may find yourself better able to handle it…Then again, you might not. It’s up to you.’

Reid’s image gave an incongruously cheery smile and disappeared, to be replaced by a screen-saving shot of the turning planet outside and a message: For further information, press the first button again.

I sat and thought for a while.

The message had changed nothing. There was no way for me to determine which, if any, of my speculations about my experiences was true. All I knew was that some part of my environment was a simulation, and that somebody wanted me to believe it was that part of it which, in all everyday experience, would have been unthinkingly accounted real. I began to understand why Descartes had invoked the Devil to set up a similar thought-experiment: whoever had done this meant me no good.

Assuming the message was true in its own terms, it was obvious that Reid was not addressing me personally. To him, I must be lost in the swarm. (And how many of those swarming robots ran copies of me? There was something infinitely depressing in the thought; of the soul’s cheapening as its supply curve went up and its production costs dropped.)

He’d said nothing about Earth, either: an omission which I suspected was deliberate. Forty-seven years had passed since my presumed death. ‘And in strange aeons death may die.’ There was no reason – now that the strange aeons were at last upon us – to assume Annette’s, or anyone’s, death in that time.

But Reid’s silence, on a question which was bound to occur to anyone finding themselves here, was ominous.

I returned to the bedroom. As the man on the box had said, the computer now worked. I slipped my fingertip around on the datapad, searching among the screen icons. It felt strange to be using such a basic interface; but it made sense: having a virtual reality within a virtual reality would have included a risk of recursion in which the already strained link between the mind and its surroundings might snap. I found one icon that was a tiny, turning image of Earth, and tapped it.

It was another orientation package, showing rather than telling what had brought this Jovian celestial city into being.

Myra’s fears had all come true.

Spy-sat pictures, obviously edited, were described as real-time. They showed cities masked, for the first time in decades, under smog. A few zooms exposed the pollution’s source: chimneys and cooking-fires. Plenty of trees in the streets, though; the Greens would be happy. In Trafalfgar Square a horse, cropping by a fallen Nelson, looked up and shook its mane as if aware it was being watched. Spring had come late to Europe: snow lurked in shadows.

Pulling out now – the settlements at Lagrange dim, haloed in leaked gases and space-junk; Luna dark, Mars silent; encrypted chatter from the Asteroid Belt that made my heart leap for a moment.

And then, in sweeping contrast, Project Jove. Its history was told in glossy multi-media, an advertising package or propaganda spiel that reminded me of the sort of stuff the nuclear-power companies used to put out. The space movement coup, told as a heroic last stand against barbarian mobs and repressive governments; the exponential surge of long-suppressed deep technologies, that had delivered all they’d ever promised: cheap spaceflight, total control of matter down to the molecular level, the extinction of ageing and death, and ultimately the copying of minds from brains to machines. All available only to a minority, unfortunately – as it would have been at first in any case, but worsened by the majority’s understandable fear of the most dangerous technology ever developed, and by the encroaching chaos whose beginnings I’d seen myself. The desperate flight from Earth’s collapsing civilisation, fuelled by the labour of tens of thousands of prisoners – each promised, and given, a copied self that survived whatever fate they’d faced – and organised by thousands of space-movement volunteers and cadres.

Next – an issue skated over so fast I knew something was being hidden – came a split between the Inner System and the Outer. Most of the existing space settlements, in Earth orbit, on the moon and Mars and in the Belt, had apparently succumbed to some sinister ideology of consolidation and reconstruction, striving to aid the stricken population of Earth. The Earth-Tenders, as they were called, were depicted as small-minded, spiteful, envious and backward-looking.

The Outwarders had gone their separate way – outward. Out to the solar system’s real prize, the greatest planet of them all. Here were the resources for the wildest dreams, the boldest projects.

The project they’d embarked on, those men and women and uploaded minds and artificial intelligences, was bold indeed. They’d shattered Ganymede, scooped megatonnes of gas from Jupiter’s atmosphere, turned a tiny fraction of it into smart matter and departed into its virtual realities. Not to dream, or not only to dream. They were applying minds of unprecedented power to the fine grain of the universe. They had found loopholes in the laws of physics; they stretched points. (Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128(10), 3182, (2080).)

They’d left behind, outside the macros, tens of thousands of human minds running at more-or-less human speed: slow folk, they were called. Most of them were from the labour-company camps. Whether they were in their original bodies or in robots, their job was to harness and harvest the dumb-mass requirements of the smart-matter civilisations. Within the macros, the others – the fast folk – had copied, split and merged, reproducing with post-biological speed into billions. The account spoke of the process as if it had happened in the far past, although the dates showed that it had come to fruition only three years earlier.

But those minds were thinking, and living, thousands of times faster than human brains. To them our world was already as ancient as Sumeria, and theirs the millennial work of men like gods.

The next screen that came up offered an option labelled: Sign-off. It repeated what Reid had explained, the offer of a temporary, and indefinite, return to oblivion. All I had to do was key in my name.

I considered it. Then I noticed that the icon had a file attachment labelled History. Just what I wanted to know, I thought, and pointed at it.

It wasn’t the history of the project, or of the world. It was the history of the Sign-off file: my own name, dates and times. The times between ‘Status open’ and ‘Status closed’ increased from hours in the first to weeks in the last-but-one entry.

There were seven of them. The eighth had flipped to ‘Status open’ a few hours earlier.

Well, fuck you, I told my weaker, earlier selves. I was going to stick it out, if for no other reason than that suicide was no escape. If escape were possible at all, it would come not from my own death but from the deaths of others: whoever, or whatever, it was that had put me in this place.

I had always wanted to live forever…but not on those terms. I had always wanted the end of history to be: and they all lived happily ever after, and not: and they all died, and went to heaven. I had always thought the time to think about transcending humanity would be when we’d achieved it.

Something in me had changed. If the file was true, I had chosen death seven times over, rather than this existence. But Reid had hinted that the inevitable spontaneous re-awakening might find its subject better fitted to cope. The increased lengths of the times I’d ‘survived’ suggested a selection process, an adaptation: each time I came back, I had a little more iron in my silicon soul.

I had always thought of myself as tough-minded. Now, when I looked back at my real life, I was astonished at how much tougher, more cynical, more ruthless, I could have been. My values hadn’t changed – unless my memory had been warped – but the strength of my passion for them had hardened.

I looked out at the alien things that had abandoned the rest of humanity, that had used me as a machine and now wanted to exploit me as a hired hand, bought off with beautiful visions. I knew that I wanted to live long enough to see their bizarre beauty perish. As I knew it would: I could foresee their fate even then.

I was interested, and I would be there.

I went back to the lounge, lit another cigarette and pressed the first button again. The television didn’t react.

‘Well, hi,’ said a voice beside me. I turned and saw a woman sitting at the other end of the sofa. She had an elfin, mixed-race face. The black flood of her hair and the black smoke of her shift both came to her hips. She slid a hand between her thighs and looked at me. Her eyes were as black as her hair and as big as the night sky.

‘Do you want me to be with you tonight? I know you do. But first, we have something for you.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’

She stood up and walked through to the other room. Her feet were bare, her shift was a vapour, but she walked as if she were in high heels and a narrow skirt. I don’t know how she did it, although I was giving it close attention. I followed her as far as the frame, which she passed through like a ghost, and which caught me like a Venus fly-trap catches a fly. Outside, in the black vacuum, her image faded just beyond the brush-tips of my fingers.

‘Work,’ smiled her starry lips. ‘See you soon.’

I clamped on to an I-beam. The familiar sooty taste of polycarbon seeped through my grippers. I reached out for the assembly node and zoomed in on it. The mechanism had warped under excessive heating. Carefully, I unkinked the wave-knot and re-calibrated the junction, then let the pieces snap back together. Sealing the node, I released one gripper, extended it, gripped, released the other and brought it over, then repeated the step several times, like a bird moving along a perch.

At the next node I had to do some instant refining, playing a laser over a chunk of meteoric scrap until the metals in it melted, then reaching out and spinning the glowing mass into the cage-shape I needed, and fitting it into place around the assembly node.

On to the next…

What the fuck am I doing?

I froze, clinging to the beam as the vertiginous question spun my mind around. My vision shifted uncontrollably, the deep star-fields suddenly becoming visible in all their intense immensity, their component points of light appearing and disappearing as the spectrum of my sight ranged up and down the wavelengths.

With an effort of will I steadied myself. The bad moment passed. I looked down again at the node on which I was working, surveying its complex, microscopic mechanisms and recognising them without any memory of having seen them before. I had been working with a journeyman’s offhand assurance, until it had all seemed strange. Evidently I’d been sleepwalking through these processes countless times already, and like an awakened sleepwalker on a ledge, I’d panicked and was in danger of falling.

Nothing for it but to get on with it. There was a mental trick to it, a detached attention that let my hands and instruments work while my mind looked on and intervened where I could see something which my programmed, or conditioned, reflexes overlooked.

After a subjective hour or so of this, an instruction set manifested itself in a corner of my sight. It told me what to do, and where to go. I let go of the beam, jetted a brief burn (…toes thrust…) then, after a soaring leap across a kilometre of emptiness, another flare in the opposite direction (…heel strikes…) and caught the destination girder.

I had just fastened myself to it when a macro rose in the space before me like a whale in front of a dinghy. I clung, panicked and giddy again, to the girder as the glowing surface streamed by, metres away from my facial lenses. When it had passed I still clung, staring at the after-images. I didn’t dare look up.

‘Snap out off it, mate,’ said a harsh but friendly voice. It was a man’s voice, a London accent. I looked around (i.e., I had the sensations of turning my head, but all that happened was that my visual field swept back and forth) and spotted another robot working on a girder about a hundred metres away. It raised an arm and gave a brief wave, then returned to its task.

I began my own, following the instructions, and when I had attention to spare I devoted some to working out how I might talk back. I imagined myself hailing it. I went over that simple act again and again in my mind, like a shy kid in a strange playground. By inspecting myself at the same time I recognised eventually a tiny dish antenna on my hull pointing in the relevant direction whenever I took a look at the other robot and thought about calling to it.

So I looked at it and said, ‘Hi!’ I could feel my lips move as I did so, an unsettling sensation that produced a momentary grotesque image of a machine with a mouth.

‘Got ya, Jay-Dub,’ the voice said. ‘Hi. Keep it focused. They don’t like us talking on the job. Glad you’re back.’

I tried a casual laugh.

‘I gather I’ve crashed a few times.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other machine. ‘We all done that. I’ve been around for a good year now, though, so I reckon I’ve licked it. I can handle it.’

‘Why did you call me Jay-Dub?’

By now I couldn’t help but assimilate the voice’s gender to the speaker’s. ‘It’s painted on your side,’ he said. ‘And it’s what you always called yourself. My name’s Eon Talgarth, but you can call me “ET” if that’s what you prefer.’

‘OK,’ I said, without thinking. We both laughed.

We continued our conversation in brief exchanges as we worked. Talgarth introduced me to other machines, each with a different name (or initials) and personality. Most of them were – had been – male, which made sense in that most of them had been criminals or POWs. I decided I must have had some good reason, in my lost pasts, for not revealing my full name, so ‘Jay-Dub’ I remained.

Talgarth himself had been working off a crime-debt whose circumstances I never got to the bottom of – his first name came from his New Settler parents, his second from Talgarth Road in London. It had been his patch. There had been some dispute over that, which had landed him in a Sutherland labour-camp. When the camps started filling up with US/UN POWs he’d been recruited as an armed trusty, halving his remaining time. Offered the curious option of a possible immortality, he’d signed. After that he wasn’t sure, or didn’t say, where he’d been. He’d been all over. Last thing he remembered was the vibration of the LMG he was firing at the barb who were trying to rush the launch-site. He mentioned sand, grass, sea in the distance. Heat like a wet towel. It might have been Florida.

There was no general day or night here, but for me the day had ended. I stepped out of the frame, and found my simulated muscles realistically sore. The bed was made, and a fresh pack of cigarettes lay on the table. The food in the cupboard had been replaced: nothing fancy; micro-wavable stuff, but to my tastes. I took a shower and cooked a dinner, wondering the while what subtle replenishments of the deep software these refreshments represented, and lay on the bed.

The dark succubus came, just as she’d said she would. She was inexhaustible, insatiable, and inventive. And so was I, to an extent that convinced me better than anything else just what was and wasn’t real around here.

Well, fuck reality.

‘Heh,’ said Talgarth. ‘You think that was good? Wait till you go in the macro, man.’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ said another voice.

‘OK. Shit.’

They talked about it anyway. I couldn’t follow their talk, but it was obsessive, minute, the argot of addicts. They lived for the trips. Ten days’ work earned you a visit to the macro. A couple of days later, I saw Talgarth stop work and wait as a macro shifted towards him. A pseudopod of smart matter reached out and touched his hull. It stayed for ten seconds, no more.

Talgarth returned to work and for the rest of that day didn’t talk to me. Others warned me not to try.

‘When you been in, see, you grudge anything that takes your mind off it.’

‘But what’s it like?’

‘Different for everybody.’

I would learn soon enough.

That night I was putting things away when I felt the hands of the succubus on my waist. I turned and kissed her. She was already opening my belt buckle.

‘Wait,’ I said.

I led her through to the lounge and sat her on the sofa. I sat down at the opposite end, setting the ashtray down between us.

‘Smoke?’

‘If you like.’

I lit the cigarette for her, leaned away before she could touch me. She put her hand to her crotch and sighed, and as she smoked began frigging herself.

‘Stop that,’ I said. It was disturbing, like watching a small child or a mentally retarded person doing it.

She giggled and brought her knees together, one hand primly on one knee, the other elegantly holding the cigarette.

‘What are you?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Whatever you want, Jon.’

‘Do you remember any other life?’ I waved a hand at the window. ‘Before this?’

She frowned. ‘What do you want me to remember?’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Meg,’ she said brightly. I suspected it was the first name that had popped into her head.

‘What’s the deal here?’ I reached for the channel-zapper. Nothing but white noise and snow.

‘Work and fun,’ she said. She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette, looking up at me with utter devotion. ‘Come on, I wanna have fun.’

‘What would happen,’ I asked as she twined a leg around my waist and began kissing my throat, ‘if I stubbed out this cigarette on you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Would it hurt you?’

She chuckled like a bad child. ‘If that’s what you like.’

I could do anything to her, absolutely anything, and she’d be back the following night, eager for more. ‘Meg’, I thought as she tugged me to the bedroom, was probably her mind’s allotted amount of disk space. So fuck it, I thought, and fuck it I did.

The bulb of smart matter bulging towards me showed numberless fractal features, tiny chasms of infinite depth, the shapes of ferns and faces. In the tremulous instants before it enveloped my instruments, I felt that I’d already seen a gallery of art whose afterimage would burn in my visual memory forever.

What physically happened next was that the smart matter of the macro directly interfaced with my own computer, so that some of my mind was actually, physically, implemented inside the macro. What I felt was –

The impact of a snowflake on my eye.

And then the awakening, the joy. It made all my past awareness seem like sleep, all past happiness a passing moment of relief. I stood naked on a grassy slope, looking out across forested ranges of blue hills. The sky at the horizon was a pale green; at the zenith, an almost violet blue. The air was cold but comfortable, heavy with the scent of blossoms, sharp with the taste of salt and woodsmoke. I knew the name of every hill, the species of every plant. My body was tall and bronzed and beautiful, with muscles that would have made Conan or Doc Savage envious.

Behind me I heard voices, and turned. I was standing just below the brow of a hill. Beyond it, I could see an ocean whose horizon was about twice as far away as it would have been on Earth. This was a big planet. (I knew all about it, I knew its mass and orbit and the spectrum of the big bright sun above). On the hilltop, just a few metres away, was a shelter built of four upright logs, crossbeams and a roofing of branches. Within it was a wooden table. Three women and two men sat around the table, talking and laughing. They turned to me, smiled, and then jumped up and gave me a welcome that still brings tears to my eyes.

I’d known none of them in my past life, but I knew them now, and they knew me. They’d missed me for a long time, and now I had come home.

We ate the bread and cheese and fruit, and drank the wine, and talked about the great work on which we were all engaged. My part in it, they made sure I knew, was vital and heroic. Hauling matter about in the raw universe! How thrilling! How brave! But it was their part I was eager to hear about, and they told me. I understood all they told me, about the space–time gate, the problems and the progress made. The Malley equations were as easy as arithmetic, as familiar as recipes.

Yet, every so often, when I was talking to one, the others would say something to each other, and I would know it was above my head. I almost understood, but I had to accept that this high table had higher tables above it, tables where my delightful companions were familiar colleagues. There was no condescension in their manner. Some day I too would join them there.

But a thought, a sly strange query crept through my mind: was this place, to them, what my cramped quarters, my cigarettes and succubus, were to me?

The great sun made a sunset that stopped all speech, all thought. Its last green flash brought a collective sigh. Then with one accord all of us, gods and goddesses, leapt from the shelter onto the cool grass. We played like children and fucked like monkeys.

I fell asleep under the crowded stars, in the arms of one of the golden goddesses.

I woke in the robot.

The macro drew away from me, and it was as if something was being torn from my chest. I remembered just enough of what I’d known and felt to make the loss of that clarity and joy almost unbearable. I could remember my companions, but I couldn’t remember even their names. Our conversation, and the lucid equations, the very words we’d spoken and the formulae we’d thought were fading, the memory of a dream. The ache of separation, the agony of withdrawal, consumed my mind for a moment. Then came a rush of relief – I could go back in ten days!

Nothing else mattered.

When the first anguish of that parting had passed, I found that my whole attitude to, and understanding of, my work had changed. For the first time, I saw the structure which we were building as it really was. What had until now been a chaotic tangle of struts became visible as the scaffolding of a Visser–Price wormhole gateway, and the gantry of a ship. One part, over there, would stay; the other would leave with the ship. The Ring sprang into focus as the greatest particle-accelerator ever built, and Jupiter – my god, great Jove himself! – the ship’s fuel and reaction-mass.

I looked down, and saw the part of that work which I, at that moment, in that place, had the enormous privilege to do. Fine-tuning that interference modulator was what I had been born and re-born for. I set to work with the joy of a craftsman devoting his life to carving the door of a cathedral, certain of the credit it would bring him in a better life to come.

Nothing else mattered.

On my next visit to the macro my companions were the same people. They had changed since I’d last seen them, having lived another century of their still accelerating lives. More often than the first time, I didn’t understand their conversation. Their tact was subtle and kind, and all the more painful for that. But I came out of it, this time, shaken with anticipation rather than loss: the gate was soon to open.

Two days later, it happened. There was no ceremony about it. Only an alarm that warned the workforce away from the affected area. The macros had already flowed back from it, and now hung in a roughly circular pattern, spaced out among the girders. All work ceased as we jetted to the edges of the structure and clung there in wordless wonder.

In the core of the structure the girders began to move, folding into each other with increasing speed until a black circular space opened like a widening pupil. Two hundred metres across, four hundred, eight hundred, a mile: then at an arbitrary point on its rim, space cracked. In the twinkling of an eye, that one-dimensional flaw, the stretched point, became a circle cut loose from the universe.

The Visser–Price wormhole was held in place, like a film of soap in a ring, by the Malley non-exotic-matter structure around it. It couldn’t be held absolutely still: gravitational effects and sheer quantum uncertainty made the precise location of its edge undefinable to more than the nearest centimetre. This predictable imprecision created an unexpected, trivial but awesome effect: around the rim, the fractured light from the stars it occluded splintered into all the colours of the spectrum.

Now events progressed at the macros’ pace, not ours. The rainbow ring around the Malley Mile became two overlapping rings. The new circle separated, slowly at first. In the centre of that second circle, a section of the structure we’d built folded itself and unfolded into a dark parabolic blossom: the ship. I thought it, too, quivered with distorted space; I can’t be sure. The ship was linked to the second circle by a cone of cables, at whose apex it waited, poised.

Jupiter’s atmosphere boiled at dozens of points around its equator, sending tornadoes snaking up to the Ring around the planet. The Ring glowed, millions of accelerators around it whipping the stripped matter into a frantic circular race. After some minutes a white line blazed through our midst, from the Ring to the ship.

The ship, and the second circle, shot away. In seconds it was beyond my instruments’ reach. Now it seemed the white line extended to the first circle, and there it stopped. But only from our viewpoint: the jet of matter was passing instantaneously out of the other side of the wormhole, now further away with every passing second, and thence to the engines of the ship.

It was accelerating the probe, and with it the other side of the wormhole, to within a fraction of the speed of light. Both sides of the wormhole remained connected – there was literally no space between them, and no time. Our end of the wormhole existed in the ship’s time-frame, not in ours.

To an observer on the ship, relativistic time-dilation would shorten a journey of centuries to days – eventually, as its velocity crept closer and closer to the impassable eternity of the photon, millions of years to minutes, then trillions to seconds. In thirty or so ship-board years, it would reach the edge of the observable universe, and the heat-death or the Big Crunch.

And for all of those years, our side of the wormhole would be in the same place, and the same time, as the side that was with the ship. We had built a gateway to the stars – and to the future. In thirty years, if we wanted, we could walk to the end of time.

Meg, the succubus, was sitting on the sofa, pouting as I channel-hopped the television. I ignored her blatant impatience and wafts of aphrodisiac pheromones; she’s just a fucking machine, I told myself. Since the probe’s launch two days earlier the pace of work had slackened, and the television started to show news and entertainment. The news had an oddly stilted, house-journal quality: it was all solar weather-reports, interviews with rehabilitated crew-members – as we were now called – and accounts of what a great job we were doing. The entertainment was movies, game-shows, plays. Some of them were classics (somebody out here had a thing about Gillian Anderson) but most were unfamiliar to me. Their contemporary references gave no hint of the regression of civilisation I’d been shown in the orientation pack. It was exactly as if everything on Earth was what most people in my time would have expected the late twenty-first century world to be like: a bit crowded, a bit decadent; and that we, here, were picking it up after a few light-hours’ delay, in a space construction-site whose workers were for some obscure but accepted reason confined to individual space-tugs.

In short, it was as if what Reid had said on my first day here, and what the orientation package had told me, were quite untrue. I didn’t dare to hope, but I could imagine how some people would. I wondered what new item on our masters’ agenda this phoney reassurance implied.

Assuming what I saw really were broadcasts, and not something specifically aimed at me…once more I was overwhelmed by the impossibility of determining what was and wasn’t real. I was at a low point, strung out. Six more days until I got back in the macro, four days since I’d been in. The effect of my last visit was wearing thin, and my next was a painfully long time in the future. At some level I missed the people I’d known in life, but that was masked by a more desperate yearning to meet again my superhuman friends. Would they even remember me? How much more powerful would they have become?

‘You’re troubled, Jon,’ Meg whispered in my ear, putting her arms around me. ‘Come to bed.’

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘Fuck off, you fucking puppet!’

Her eyes brimmed with convincing tears.

‘Jon, I know I’m a fucking puppet, but I have feelings too. You’re hurting me.’

‘You’re just a program.’

She blinked and half-smiled, looking up at me in an irritatingly placatory way. ‘So are you, Jon, and you have feelings.’

I stared, startled by her argument. Not its content, but that she was making it at all.

‘You once told me,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘that you could be whatever I wanted.’

She brightened. ‘Yes! I can!’

‘Could you be more intelligent than me?’

She frowned in momentary concentration. ‘How much more intelligent?’

‘Twice?’ I waved an arm.

She gave me an odd look and stood up. She glanced at the television, grimaced and walked over to the window and looked outside for a while. Then she turned, one hand on her hip, the other leaning against the window.

‘Well, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘This is a fine bloody mess you’ve got yourself into.’

There was an impatient look on her face that reminded me, suddenly and painfully, of both Annette and Myra. I recognised that characteristic stamp of the features beyond all the differences of appearance and personality, and realised what it had always meant: the irritation of a greater intelligence waiting for mine to catch up.

‘Well don’t just stand there,’ Meg said, walking past me. ‘There’s a computer icon in the other room. Let’s see what we can hack.’

‘First thing you gotta realise,’ she said, as we stood in front of the computer screen, ‘is that this is all real, but it ain’t physical. It’s a simulation. You, and me, and all of this interior space, exist physically as electrical charges in the computer of this robot we’re riding in.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that had dawned on me.’

‘OK, you never told me.’ She grinned. ‘Mind you, I doubt if I’d’ve understood any of this five minutes ago. Anyway…just so’s you don’t freak out.’

With that she plunged an arm to the elbow through the screen which had always been solid to me, and started poking about. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Got the dot sys files for us. Hah! Mine can only be accessed by you talking me up, like you just did. But yours, I can fiddle with from here…just a minute.’

She reached in with her other hand and slid something sideways before I could do anything.

‘How’s that?’ she said.

I looked at the beautiful woman in the short black nightdress. Something was wrong. She had her arms stuck right into the computer screen. I backed away a step.

‘Hold it,’ I said. ‘Just…wait. Mind the glass.’

But the glass wasn’t broken. I blinked, not sure if I was seeing right. The woman laughed.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wrong way.’ She moved her hands again and I opened my mouth again to warn her about the glass.

And she was glass, and I was glass, and all was light.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see now.’

Unlike what I experienced in the macro, my memories of the time of my enhanced intelligence with Meg are clear and vivid. I wasn’t a superhuman mind with limitations, but a human mind with added capacities. The continuity of my self was never interrupted, as it was in the strange bright company of the fast folk I met on the simulated big planet. So, even now, it’s a time I can remember, if never quite relive.

For a moment we just stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Meg said. ‘Fair’s fair. Your turn.’

‘Oh.’ I glanced at the computer, then shrugged. ‘OK Meg,’ I said. ‘Be as intelligent as you can be.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. Her face became, in some indefinable way, more focused. She blinked and looked around.

‘This is really something, init?’

‘Not really.’

She laughed. ‘Looks all a bit different, though.’

It certainly did. It wasn’t the actual appearance of things that had changed, but everything was as if tagged with an explanation. It was just obvious what the programs underlying the simulations were doing.

‘What’s to stop anybody else doing something like this?’

Meg shrugged. ‘Nothing. You cheated, sort of. But it’s got to do with the way your mind – your natural mind – worked. You gotta have a pretty good mind to handle the intelligence increase. It can’t be just bolted on. If most of the other blokes here figured out how to do it, they’d just be sort of…stoned, or tripping. They’d have to work for it, in its own time. Basically you shouldn’t be here at all.’

While she was talking – perhaps because she was talking – I was seeing what she meant, the underlying logic of her statement being filled in with additional data extracted from the machine’s memory.

The wormhole construction site really was a labour camp, and everything about it was designed to both control and rehabilitate its inmates. It allowed, indeed encouraged, co-operative work, while preventing collusion in other contexts, thus providing the reeducation of work without becoming a university of crime. Outside the work process, we were essentially in solitary confinement, with the succubi available to provide sexual and social gratification. Each succubus was an aspect of the same computer on which the human personality of the inmate was implemented; and it responded to increasing social interaction by increasing its own social repertoire, thus rewarding any increase in empathy on the part of the inmate with greater intimacy.

The macro trips served a similar function, in relation to cognitive rather than emotional improvement. In my genuine innocence I had treated the succubus as nothing more than a virtual sex-toy, but had achieved remarkable integration with the posthuman beings in the macro. The tension of this anomaly had finally triggered Meg into upping the emotional stakes, with consequences considerably more rapid and drastic than the system’s designers had expected. We had upgraded ourselves to the maximum capacity of the robot’s hardware.

‘So what are you?’ I asked. ‘Were you ever human?’

Meg shrugged. ‘I’m part of a copy. The end result of a personality development, without any of that person’s memories. Most of my mind’s AI. Human surface, machine depth.’

My expression must have told her what I thought of this.

‘Yeah, grim, init?’ she said. ‘Still, that’s me.’

My next thought was –

‘Are we setting off warnings anywhere?’

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘No central control, right? Whole point. Agoric system.’ She grinned. ‘You should know. Mind you, there are overrides – Reid’s made damn’ sure of that – so I wouldn’t push it.’

‘Uh huh. So what do we do now?’

‘You know,’ she said. ‘Reid’s still in charge of the whole project. He’s the boss. Not that the fast folk pay any attention, but the rest of us outside the macros have to.’

‘If Reid’s in charge,’ I said, ‘I guess it’s time we saw him.’

Meg reached once more behind the system controls and called him up. The screen rang for seconds, then Reid’s mildly perturbed face appeared. He looked, if anything, younger than he had on the recording, but his expression of alert calm was broken when he saw me. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it, his tongue flicking across his lips.

‘Wilde!’ he said. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Amazing!’ he replied. Meg timed his response. Any delay was imperceptible; I reckoned he must be close, on a rock in the Ring. I’d seen no obvious human habitat in or around the structure.

‘My God, I thought you were dead!’ he went on. He snorted. ‘Among the dead.’

If he was lying he was doing a good job of it: even to Meg, whose visual analysis software was hanging behind my virtual sight, his expression betrayed nothing but surprise, curiosity, and unaffected delight at seeing me again. Yet I didn’t trust him: his added years of experience and discipline gave him an overwhelming aura of control. I realised, suddenly, that he was unlike any other human being I’d ever seen. The nanotechnology, the smart matter, that had rescued him from age might well be working further alchemies in his brain and blood.

I spread my arms, forcing a grin. ‘Isn’t this death?’

Reid smiled bleakly. ‘Post-life, we call it. Mind you, I’d get your electronic doxy to do something about your appearance. You look terrible.’

I stared past him, checking the background. There were other people moving about – he seemed to be sitting in some common area, talking to a camera set at an angle from him, public rather than private. The perspective of the floors and the people in the background struck me as odd for a moment, then they snapped into focus. From the curvature of the floors and the subtle tilts of different verticals, I could see he was in a large space-station, under centrifugal spin.

‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘But no worse than I was last time you saw me, remember?’ I felt a surge of anger. ‘You had me killed, you bastard!’

His untroubled gaze fixed on me. ‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You were caught up in a border incident. I did my best to save you, I’ll tell you that, but we were too late. As far as I knew, you died there. Your body was shipped back to England and cremated. I was at your memorial meeting, man!’

I tried not to show how shaken I was. ‘So how do I come to be here?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know they’d made a copy!’

Reid sighed, running his fingers back through his thick black hair. ‘Of course I knew. You were one of the first human subjects – we didn’t even know it would work. We took the copy within minutes of finding you, and stored the brain-scan and your genetic information. But as far as I knew, that was it – the copy was stored with the rest of the dead, in the bank. You’d made no disposition, so we left you there. You were never uploaded to a macro, I’m pretty sure of that. I didn’t know anyone had made a knock-off, and that’s the honest truth.’ His expression hardened. ‘And there’s no way I can find out, now – the engineers responsible uploaded themselves long ago.’

‘Well, I can hardly complain about my own existence,’ I said. ‘But I want out of your slave labour-force, if that’s all right with you.’

Reid smiled as if relieved.

‘Naturally,’ he said.

‘If that’s the word.’

His lips compressed. ‘Hmm.’ He reached for a keypad and tapped out a code.

‘OK, enough about me,’ I said. ‘What’s all this about the dead in a bank? What’s happened to Annette, and Myra, and – everybody else?’

Reid kept glancing off-camera, as if keeping an eye on another monitor. The activity in the background had quickened, with an air of greater urgency.

‘I think Annette’s safe,’ he said abstractedly. ‘She died in the, uh, troubled times, but she’d arranged for a copy. If it got made, she’s in the bank, same as you. Same as millions of people. It was cheap by then. People made back-ups routinely. To be honest we don’t know who exactly we’ve got. Myra, and your daughter, well – as far as I know they stayed on Earth. Goddess knows how things are going back there –’

‘There’s no contact?’

‘Fucking Earth-Tenders, they’re scared, they jam us – anything you’ve seen on our tapes was old or faked. No, we don’t have any contact.’ He turned abruptly, facing straight towards me. ‘Look, Wilde, I’ve got to go. You’re free now, I’ve zapped your restraints.’ He stood up, and leaned towards someone out of sight. I couldn’t hear the exchange which followed. Then Reid turned back, looking up at me with unguarded guile.

‘Wilde?’ he said. ‘Still there? Can you do something, right now? Go and check what’s going on in the nearest macro. There’s some problem –’

The screen greyed out.

‘Shit!’ I said.

Meg stood in front of me, a worried wraith. ‘What do we do?’

I shrugged. ‘Do as Reid said, I guess. Can you think of anything else?’

She shook her head.

I stepped into the simulated simulation-frame, and Meg stepped in after me. The sense of over-lapping body-images was momentarily disorienting, and then we meshed smoothly with each other and with the machine. Meg became a voice behind my shoulder, a shadow in the corner of my eye.

I had full control of the robot now – Reid’s zap must have disabled the run-file that separated me from its motor circuits outside of work periods and emergencies – and I jetted undisturbed through the structure towards a macro which I (now) could recognise as the one I’d been in contact with. Some of the other robots were doing desultory work, others drifted in their off-line mode or clung like roosting birds to girders. The Malley Mile glowed a faint blue in its rainbow ring: Cherenkov backwash from the probe.

I grasped a girder, inched closer to the macro’s surface, and plunged my face into its bath of freezing fire.

All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind. It’s so in the natural body, and in the artificial, and many times so in the smart-matter world of the macro-organic.

Meg was stealing processing-power, time-sharing in greater minds. It was necessary for me, for us, to get a minimal, symbolic understanding of what was going on, but it took its toll. I was running slower than the fast folk, slower even than the slow. I walked as an invisible ghost, a momentary shiver in the dreams of the posthuman.

I found myself first on the big planet. On the slope where I’d first stood, I watched seasons – snow and spring, summer and fall – lap and retreat like waves on the shore. The environment was a guess at that on a planet they’d actually espied, some thirty light-years away. In a future day this picture might be updated and revised by the downlink from the passing of the probe.

They lost interest in it even as I watched. Consistent to the last, they deleted it from their memories by flaring off its sun. I walked through the engulfing nova, in the sleet of a false reality dissolving into binary code, and on into a vast hall. In the gloom of a Moloch’s temple heavy-lidded giants sat, athletic marble gods awkward in the pose of Buddhas. Decay beyond decadence, a stasis of frenzy and fatigue. Indefatigable mechanisms, beneath and beyond the giants’ conscious control, continued their relentless, pointless acceleration of processing speed. Second by second, Meg’s operating system tracked the change.

Before the last echo of my footsteps had died from the hall the meditating giants were dust. Outside, in yet another virtual environment, cities were built and torn down in what to me were moments, against an ever-shifting backdrop of planetary landscapes. Eventually all human analogy and interest ceased. I drifted down endless corridors of geometric abstraction, the chopped logic of interminable arguments filling my mind, as if I were overhearing the trapped ghosts of theologians in a hell that only they could fully deserve.

Behind me, in those corridors, a plaintive female voice called after me. It grew stronger as time passed, but I ignored it, desperate to understand the terrible debate. I was learning – something vital. The voice cried after me. Eventually I turned. Meg’s anguished face conveyed the strain of an operating system at the limits of its capacity.

‘Come out!’ she said. ‘Come out of it now!’

I stared at her, puzzled. Everything felt slow, the corridors whiting-out like the Kazakh snow-drifts. With a sudden access of impatience Meg grabbed me and shoved me at the wall. It collapsed, and I was –

– out, and drifting away from the macro. At the same moment I fell back into the room, back into the mind of my own machine, and into the warm arms of my dear, sweet operating system, my succubus and surrogate soul-mate. Tears were in my eyes and an insistent ringing in my ears.

I recognised it as an alarm. Outside, out towards the Ring, a light flashed and a radio-beacon beckoned. The beacon was approaching, fast.

‘What’s going on?’

Meg stared at me. ‘Oh, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘You were in there for a fucking year, real time! The macros are all crazy or dying.’

A year. ‘What’s happened?’

Meg caught my hand. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘We gotta go. I’ll take us out.’

She stepped into the frame. As I watched, slack-jawed and in no fit state to handle so much as an exercise-bike, she kicked us off towards the beacon.

I saw what the beacon marked.

Coming out of the Ring towards us was the most disgraceful contraption that ever passed for a spacecraft, a bolted and kludged conglomeration of space-stations and habitats at least two kilometres long and half a kilometre across its widest diameter. If a Mir-Shuttle lash-up from the early decades had been given a million generations to breed for size and against elegance, it might have produced this. It spun dizzyingly on its axis and it steered a perilous course alongside the continuing lethal ravenous jet – the ultimate live wire – of the supply-line to the probe.

All the robots were scooting towards the ship. As soon as each tiny machine arrived it grabbed on to whichever of the many protruding bits of junk it had reached. The macros, too, were moving, but not as before. Frozen now, skeletal, they drifted and stirred as the huge craft crashed with brutal majesty through the structure on which we’d toiled.

The craft’s surface rushed at the window. I almost closed my eyes. But Meg brought us to a matched velocity. I saw the robot’s arms and grippers reach out. The instant they had found a handhold, Meg flipped the viewpoint, and then stepped out of the frame.

She sat down on the bed beside me and we clung to each other as frantically as our machine did to the craft. The sky rolled over, and over, and over. The white line of the fuel-jet lashed past, closer and closer.

‘I’ll try to patch,’ Meg said. She stared, and as if by an effort of her will the view suddenly became a stabilised scene from somewhere up towards the front. The rainbow ring almost filled it, its blue backwash flaring as stray, shattered girders tumbled in. Off to the side, I saw macros thrust away by the ship’s attitude jets. By accident or by design, they were falling towards the surface of Jupiter. The planet, already visibly altered by their activities, the Great Red Spot repeated like a rash across its face, would receive those snowflake structures, and perhaps warm them to a renewed and unimaginable life.

In my last minutes in the Solar System, I felt my initial reaction vindicated. The minds in the macros had fallen into a trap of their own devising, a gamble they may have consciously – how other? – embraced. For as the speed of their thoughts had increased, so had their subjective time – and therefore, so had space. Even interplanetary distances had yawned into gulfs, with journey-times which would have been to them what interstellar journeys – without the wormhole – would have been to us. Their own virtual realities had become more absorbing – in every sense – than the fast-receding universe of actuality.

The time-span of their great project was greater than their attention span, longer than any human civilisation had ever lasted. They had taken with them our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and multiplied and accelerated both. Humanity, better adapted to space by virtue of its very inferiority, would outlive them.

As had I. In a more literal sense than I’d ever intended, I had made it to the ships.

The bells of hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling

for you, but not for me

O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?

Where, grave, thy victory?

The Cherenkov radiation rose to an intolerable blue glare as the forward part of the ship we clung to passed into the wormhole gate.