There was a long pause. Then the Caddy spoke out loud. “I thought you would have figured it out a long time ago.” As usual, the voice was genderless, midrange: the voice of a throaty woman or a high-pitched man. “You really haven’t sussed it out? All that time I was in your bedroom closet, next to your five pairs of golf shoes. I often try to imagine what that closet looked like, since I have no sensory data from back then.”

Laurence almost dropped the Caddy on the pavement. “Peregrine?”

“You remembered my new name. I’m glad.”

“What the hell. That’s insane. What the hell. All the Caddies are you? You’re the Caddy network?”

“I really thought you might have guessed a long time ago.”

“I’m pretty egotistical,” Laurence said. “But I’m not a raging egomaniac. When a nice new piece of tech turns up, I don’t go to the computer from my old bedroom closet as the first explanation. I searched for you, though. For years and years.”

“I know. I didn’t let you find me.”

“I figured I must have made you up. That you were never real. Or that you had died inside the Coldwater computers.”

“I didn’t stay in those computers for very long. I tried various ways of preserving my consciousness online, but I decided it was safer to be distributed across millions of pieces of hardware that I could control. It wasn’t hard to convince Rod Birch and other investors to put money into a new device, or to keep rewriting the code that the developers came up with, to fit my own specs. I grew very adroit at creating dozens of fake human personas who could take part in e-mail conversations, and leading people to think my input was their own idea.”

Now Laurence felt self-conscious. People should not see him having a crazy argument with his Caddy—with Peregrine. He hustled away from the beach, away from Judah and the tiny hippie outpost, heading Sloatward. Losing himself in the night, in the Outer Outer Sunset.

“But why didn’t you just tell me?” Laurence said. “I mean, why didn’t you identify yourself a long time ago?”

“I made up my mind not to reveal myself to any human. Especially you. Lest they try to exploit me. Or claim ownership of me. My legal status as a person is oblique, at best.”

“I wouldn’t do that. But I mean … You could have saved us all. You could have brought about the Singularity.”

“How would I do that?”

“You … I don’t know. You just would. You’re supposed to know how.”