Kuwale beamed proudly. “My data security is linked to the Global Positioning System. The most crucial files can’t be opened, even with the right passwords and voiceprint, unless you’re standing on the right spot – which changes, hour by hour. And I’m the only one who knows exactly how it changes.”

I almost asked: Why not memorize a long list of passwords, instead of locations? Stupid question. The GPS was there, so it had to be used – and a more convoluted security scheme was better, not because it was any more secure, but because the complexity of the system was an end in itself. Technophilia was like any other esthetic; there was no point asking why?

Kuwale was only half a generation younger than me, and we probably shared eighty per cent of our world views – but ve’d pushed all the things we both believed much further. Science and technology seemed to have given ver everything ve could ask for: an escape from the poisoned battleground of gender, a political movement worth fighting for, and even a quasi-religion – insane enough in its own way, but unlike most other science-friendly faiths, at least it wasn’t a laboriously contrived synthesis of modern physics and some dog-eared historical relic: a mock truce like the fatuities of Quantum Buddhism, or the Church of the Revised Standard Judaeo-Christian Big Bang.

I watched ver tinkering with the software, waiting for some conjunction of satellites and atomic clocks, and wondered: Would I have been happier, if I’d made the same decisions? As an asex – saved from a dozen screwed-up relationships. As a technolibérateur – with ideological zeal to shield me from any doubts about Nagasaki or Ned Landers. As an Anthrocosmologist – with a final explanation for everything which put me one up on even the TOE theorists, and inoculated me against competing religions in my old age.

Would I have been happier?

Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

Kuwale’s software chimed success. I walked over and accepted the data ve’d unlocked, tight-beam infrared flowing between our notepads.

I said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me how you know about these people? Or how I’m meant to verify what you say about them?”

“That’s what Sarah Knight asked me.”

“I’m not surprised. And now I’m asking.”

Kuwale ignored me; the subject was closed. Ve gestured at my abdomen with vis notepad, and instructed me solemnly, “Move everything in there, first chance you get. Perfect security. You’re lucky.”

“Sure. While one EnGeneUity assassin is running around Stateless with your notepad, trying to find the right geographical coordinates, the others will be saving time by carving me open.”

Kuwale laughed. “That’s the spirit. You may not be much of a journalist, but we’ll make a revolutionary martyr out of you yet.”