Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn’t been far enough. He’d still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn’t enough; he’d aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

And he’d almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word … which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

Vive la technolibération! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan – and apocalypse for everyone else.

That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?

I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

And if I’d dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him—

Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

She said, “Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can’t you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what’s going on inside your brain.”

I started to comply – but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she’d discover.

She kissed me again. “No more arguments. If you love me, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.”

She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner – it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prized away layer after layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part—

I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

#

At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn’t really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. “Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out … ” SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.