An actor playing one of the FBI agents sent to gather Landers’ computer files turned to the audience (all three of us) and proclaimed, “This knowledge could destroy us all! We must avert our gaze!” His companion replied mournfully, “Yes – but this is only one man’s folly! The same sacred mysteries are spelled out in ten million other machines! Until every one of those files is erased … none of us will ever sleep safely!”

My head throbbed and my throat tightened. I couldn’t deny that in the dead of night, confused and in pain, I’d shared this sentiment entirely.

And now?

I walked on. I had no time to waste on Landers, or MR; keeping up with Violet Mosala was already proving near enough to impossible. The whole documentary kept being transmuted into something new before my eyes – and however gloriously unworldly her arcane physics, Mosala was entangled in so many political complications that I was beginning to lose count.

Had Sarah Knight known about Mosala’s plans to emigrate to Stateless? If she had, it would have made the project a thousand times more attractive to her than any deal with the Anthrocosmologists. Would she have kept a selling point like that from SeeNet, though? Maybe, if she’d wanted to take it to another network – but in that case, why wasn’t she here, shouldering me aside, making Violet Mosala: Technolibérateur ? Or maybe Mosala had sworn her to secrecy – and she’d honored that promise, even though it had meant losing the job?

It was driving me insane: even in her absence, Sarah seemed to be one step ahead of me all the way. At the very least, I should have asked her to collaborate; it would have been worth splitting my fee with her, and giving her a co-director’s credit, just to find out what she knew.

A bright red graphic flashed up over my visual field, a small circle at the center of a larger one with cross-hairs. I froze, confused. As I shifted my gaze, the target clung to a face in the crowd. It was a person in a clown suit, handing out MR literature.

Akili Kuwale?

Witness thought it was.

The clown wore a mask of active make-up, currently a chequerboard of green and white. From this distance, ve might have been any gender, including asex; ve was about the right build and height – and vis features weren’t dissimilar, so far as I could tell with squares painted all over them. It wasn’t impossible – but I wasn’t convinced.

I approached. The clown called out, “Get your Daily Archetype ! Get the truth about the dangers of frankenscience!” The accent, even if I couldn’t place it geographically, was unmistakable – and this hawker’s cry sounded every bit as ironic as Kuwale’s observations about Janet Walsh.

I walked up to the clown; ve regarded me impassively. I said, “How much?”