He grinned. “As it happens, yeah. It was set up long before I joined.” He said there was no hierarchy to Slan(t); it was all “bottom-up.” “It’s a self-organizing community. The hardest thing to model online is social interaction—the kind of unconscious feedback we humans give each other face to face, feedback that moderates behavior. So we devised a system where we would moderate each other’s contributions to the clickstream. If you are uncivil, or just plain uninteresting, your scores go down, and everybody sees.”

“A bit like eBay.”

“Like that, yes.”

“Plenty of scope for bullying.”

“But that’s antisocial, too, and there are always plenty of people who would mark the bully down accordingly. It works. It is homeostatic—actually another example of feedback. But this time it’s negative feedback that tends to make a system stable, rather than drive it out of control.” He talked on, describing the Slan(t)ers’ projects.

I felt awkward. This was the kind of conversation we’d had as kids at school, or later as booze-fueled students: excitable, complex, full of ideas, the more outlandish the better. Peter had always been good at that, because he’d learned to be. Whereas other fat kids, it’s said, get a break from bullying by being funny, Peter’s defense was to have wilder ideas than anybody else. But now it wasn’t the same. We weren’t kids anymore.

And there was something else I couldn’t quite read in the way he spoke, this big, clumsy man with folded hands and his habit of adjusting invisible spectacles, talking earnestly. I had the impression of shadows, ranked behind him in the electronic dark, as if Peter was just a front for a whole network of densely interconnected, like-minded obsessives, all working for ends I didn’t understand.

Anyhow Slan(t) sounded like one giant computer game to me. “Interesting.”

“You don’t really think so,” he said. “But that’s okay.”

“But now,” I said, “perhaps we do see the aliens, in the Kuiper Anomaly. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying on TV?”

“That’s obviously a gross signature of something out there. Yes, it’s exciting.” His face was closed. “But I have a feeling that the origin of the Anomaly is going to turn out to be stranger than we think. And besides, it’s not the only bit of evidence we have.”

“It isn’t?”

“Perhaps there are traces out there, if you know how to look. Traces of life, of other minds at work. But they’re fragmentary, difficult for us to recognize and interpret. But I, well, as I told you I have this facility for pattern matching.”

I looked into my coffee cup, wondering how I could get out of the conversation politely.