Rourke said, “You know, I envy you your job. With VA, I’m forced to concentrate on a narrow area of change. But you’ll have a bird’s eye view of everything.”

“Of what? You mean advances in biotechnology?”

“Biotech, imaging, AI … the lot. The whole battle for the H-words.”

“The H-words?”

He smiled cryptically. “The little one and the big one. That’s what this century is going to be remembered for. A battle for two words. Two definitions.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” We were passing through a miniature forest in the middle of the quadrangle; dense and exotic, as wayward and brooding as any surrealist’s painted jungle.

Rourke turned to me. “What’s the most patronizing thing you can offer to do for people you disagree with, or don’t understand?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Heal them. That’s the first H-word. Health. ”

“Ah.”

“Medical technology is about to go supernova. In case you hadn’t noticed. So what’s all that power going to be used for? The maintenance – or creation – of ‘health.’ But what’s ‘health’? Forget the obvious shit that everyone agrees on. Once every last virus and parasite and oncogene has been blasted out of existence, what’s the ultimate goal of ‘healing’? All of us playing our preordained parts in some Edenite ‘natural order’” – he stopped to gesture ironically at the orchids and lilies blossoming around us – “and being restored to the one condition our biology is optimized for: hunting and gathering, and dying at thirty or forty? Is that it? Or … opening up every technically possible mode of existence? Whoever claims the authority to define the boundary between health and disease claims … everything.”

I said, “You’re right: the word’s insidious, the meaning’s open-ended – and it will probably always be contentious.” I couldn’t argue with patronizing , either; Mystical Renaissance were forever offering to “heal” the world’s people of their “psychic numbing”, and transform us all into “perfectly balanced” human beings. In other words: perfect copies of themselves, with all the same beliefs, all the same priorities, and all the same neuroses and superstitions.

“So what’s the other H-word? The big one?”

He tipped his head and looked at me slyly. “You really can’t guess? Here’s a clue, then. What’s the most intellectually lazy way you can think of, to try to win an argument?”

“You’re going to have to spell it out for me. I’m no good at riddles.”

“You say that your opponent lacks humanity .”

I’d fallen silent, suddenly ashamed – or at least embarrassed – wondering just how deeply I’d offended him with some of the things I’d said the day before. The trouble with meeting people again after interviewing them was that they often spent the intervening time thinking through the whole conversation, in minute detail – and concluding that they’d come out badly.