The other side of town was still just outside the hotel’s main entrance; the Mystical Renaissance carnival hadn’t gone away. I headed out onto the street, anyway; I urgently needed a dose of fresh air if I was going to be more than half-conscious for the lecture on ATM software techniques which Mosala was due to attend at nine. The sky was dazzling, and the air was already warm; Stateless seemed unable to decide whether to surrender to a temperate autumn, or hold out for an Indian summer. The sunshine lifted my spirits, slightly, but I still felt crippled, beaten, overwhelmed.

I weaved my way past the stalls and small tents, dodging goldfish-bowl-jugglers and hand-stilt-walkers – impressive acts, mostly; it was only the droning songs of the buskers which really made me feel that I was running a gauntlet. While members of Humble Science! had been showing up at every press conference and doing their best to repeat the tone of Walsh’s encounter with Mosala, MR had remained endearingly innocuous, by comparison. I was beginning to suspect that it was a deliberate strategy: a good cult/bad cult game, to widen their combined appeal. Humble Science! had nothing to lose by extremism; those few members who left in disgust at Walsh’s tactics (to join MR, most likely) would be more than compensated for by an influx from groups like Celtic Wisdom and Saxon Light – northern Europe’s equivalents of PACDF, only more influential. I recalled a scene from one of the Muteba Kazadi biographies I’d skimmed: when asked in reproving tones by a BBC journalist why he’d declined an invitation to take part in a traditional Lunda fertility ceremony, he’d politely suggested that she go home and berate a few cabinet ministers for failing to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge. Ten years later, there were half a dozen MPs who seemed to have taken the suggestion at face value. No cabinet ministers, though. So far.

I paused to watch the MR theater troupe, ready to play spot-the-mutilated-classic. After a few baffling lines of garbled biotech-speak – unplaceable, but weirdly familiar – hairs stood up on the back of my neck. They’d seized on the news of Landers and his viruses, and were acting out their own hastily-scripted version of the story. What’s more, most of their descriptions of Landers’ modified personal biochemistry came straight out of the narration to Junk DNA ; SeeNet’s news editors must have mined the discarded segment of the documentary for some instant technical background when they put together their final release.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this – but the speed with which events thousands of kilometers away had been recycled as an instant parable was unsettling enough; hearing my own words echoed back at me as part of the feedback loop verged on the surreal.