Projected  into  the  carefully deodorised  air  of Uptown  Six’s human quarters, feeds from fifteen planets showed, in quick succession, all the signs of modern  conflict: street demonstrations, agitated financial markets, rows of top-shelf EMC hardware hulking around in parking orbits up and down the Beach. Within an hour  all sides were broadcasting  atrocity-footage as fast as it could be manufactured.  Psychodrama  raged. Everyone claimed the minority position. Everyone described their grievance as longer-standing  and more asymmetric than  the enemy’s. Iconic buildings fell in towers of smoke. Sleeping genes, inserted  into entire populations three or four generations in advance, expressed themselves as plagues of ideological change. Up and  down  the Beach, innocent  CEOs, brand  managers  and  celebrities found themselves  kidnapped  then  subjected  to  sexual assault,  at  the hands of provocateurs who had no idea why they had begun to act so illiberally. By noon, exhausted attack ads fluttered up and down the streets of every Halo capital. Gaines studied these indicators with a kind of appalled impatience. Away from the media war not a shot had been fired. Except here. After a minute he said absently:

‘Leave them alone, Carlo.’

‘Hey, I didn’t start it.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, OK, too late, Rig. Sorry I already killed them. Sorry I did it to keep you safe and all you do is to give me shit feelings about that. And Rig – no, listen to me, listen to me, Rig – this is something that happened two and half minutes ago? Can you hear yourself? Obsessing about something that happened  two and half minutes ago? I’m sorry I killed them, because I know they were probably nice people, but excuse me they were trying to kill us first.’

Uptown Six inserted itself into a stationary eddy in the radiation signature of a trio of neutron  stars, and, judging itself to be safely hidden  for the next thirty-two  minutes  and forty-eight  seconds or so, upped Carlo’s dosage of atypical antipsychotics; medicating him, in addition, for a twenty minute nap. In the ensuing silence Gaines switched off the news channels and concentrated  on the images he was receiving from his major project. What he saw, he couldn’t believe. He opened an FTL pipe.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said.

For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse,  new  universes  awaited,  furled  up  like tiny  dimensions inside each abandoned  technology. Back-engineering became the order  of the day. Everyone could find something  to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found,  you could find something  bigger. At the other  end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins,  nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.