We shook hands. She said, “Of course, I’m not giving a paper, myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But … if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?” She smiled conspiratorially. “People grow so desperate to talk off the nets – knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?”

“I hope so. I’m a journalist – I’m covering the conference for SeeNet.” A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.

Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us – an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux ) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.

When the AV was over, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?”

“I’m not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“I’m a sociologist. Or if you want my full job description: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So … if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event.”

“You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re ‘really just priests and story-tellers’?” I’d meant that as a joke – her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone – but my words came out sounding like an accusation.

She gave me a reproving glare. “I’m not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I’m afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments, now.” Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. “We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible.”

I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.