“ Shit. What happened? Was she hurt?”

“No, she was lucky. Her alarm went off – he’d disabled one, but she had a backup – and there was a patrol car nearby at the time. The burglar told the police he’d been paid to frighten her. But he couldn’t name names, of course. It was just a pathetic excuse.”

“Then why should Savimbi take it seriously? And why ‘fifth hand reports’? Surely he would have read the whole story?”

“Violet dropped the charges. She’s an idiot, but that’s the kind of thing she does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But someone in the police must have leaked—”

Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that we’d been doing our best to avoid being overheard.

I moved to fill the silence. “How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine. She’s in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought Craft, though, so she’s not getting much sleep.” Wendy Mosala ran one of Africa’s largest software houses; she’d built it up herself over thirty years, from a one-person operation. “She’s bidding for a license for the Kaspar clonelets – two years in advance of release – and if it all pans out—” She caught herself. “All of which is strictly confidential, okay?”

“Of course.” Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software, currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus and its numerous cousins – which had been created fully-fledged, instantly “adult” by design – Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more anthropomorphically-styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I found it a little disquieting … and I wasn’t sure that I wanted a clonelet – a pared-down copy of the original – sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.

De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.

I said, “Are you ready to start?”

She nodded, and smiled halfheartedly. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’s over.”

I invoked Witness . The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of – rather more flattering – light sources.

I said, “Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in science?”

Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, “I don’t know! Was it your mother who inspired you to come up with that kind of pathetic—” She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. “I’m sorry. Can we start again?”