“No need. Don’t worry about continuity; it’s not your problem. Just keep on talking. And if you’re halfway through an answer and you change your mind – just stop, and start afresh.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight. “My mother. My childhood. My role models .” She opened her eyes and pleaded, “Can’t we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?”

I said patiently, “ I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit – but if the network executives don’t see the required quota of formative childhood influences … they’ll screen you at three a.m. – after a last-minute program change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-resistant skin diseases.” SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their viewers, of course) had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera – a slick paint-by-numbers guide to commodifying human beings … as well as a template for deluding yourself into thinking that you’d explained them. A sort of externalized version of Lamont’s area.

Mosala said, “Three a.m.? You’re serious, aren’t you?” She thought it over. “Okay. If that’s what it comes down to … I can play along.”

“So tell me about your mother.” I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to answer more or less at random, so long as you don’t contradict yourself.

She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. “My mother gave me an education. By which I don’t mean school . She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult’s knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up … the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn’t steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history … anything. I wasn’t pushed in any direction. I was just set free.”

“And your father—?”

“My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four.”

“That must have been traumatic. But … do you think that early loss might have given you the drive, the independence—?”

Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. “ My father was shot in the head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty thousand people whose views he found completely repugnant. And – this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for your timeslot – he was someone I loved, and who I still love; he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clockwork. He was not an absence to be compensated for .”