She listened in to its internal comms for a moment. Well, well, she thought. Now you have some talking to do, you three. She was in no hurry. She smiled to herself and sat down not far from the Deleuze Motel; watched the ocean waves break white on luminous indigo, and let a handful of sand run through her fingers. She wondered if she should call herself Queenie, Aspodoto or Tienes mi Corazon. Roxie. Mexie. Maybe Backstep Cindy.

After a minute or two the acid-clouds parted to reveal stars in subtly different arrangements to the ones she knew.

A minute or two after that, something shot quickly left to right along the front of a breaking wave eighty metres out, then, half-submerged in turbulence, nosed its way up through the swash on to the beach. A corroded bronze pressure tank – tubular, perhaps three metres by one and recently daubed with crude Jaumann absorbers in a resin base – it featured inlaid circuits and a lateral line of deep blue LEDs. A single quartz port glittered at one end. In a universe boiling with algorithms, anything can behave as if it’s alive; harder, the assistant thought, to look intelligent, even when you were. The mortsafe, if that’s what it was, hunted for some moments through twenty or thirty degrees of arc, as if trying to orient itself; then – hovering three or four feet above the beach, swaying with an oiled resilience in every gust of wind – it slipped inland between the dunes, heading towards the Nova Swing.

‘Wait!’ the assistant called.

Her tailoring redlined, but something much closer than the ship had already begun dismantling it. Whoever it was, they were too quick for her. Structured magnetic fields reached in through the doped protein meshes around her brainstem and squeezed firmly for eight or nine milliseconds. They let her stagger away, choking and dancing. She could feel herself kicking up the sand. Seizure-sites propagated across the cortex in cascades. Proprioception went down. Target acquisition went down. Autonomic functions went down. Everything went down. It wasn’t a Preter Coeur kill. It was something EMC. Just before the system folded, IR and active sonar acquired what she thought might be a human figure leaning over her. After that she got: sensation of a door closing: sensation of something frying in the spinothalamic tract: a smell like rendered fat. Just illusions. All she felt as she fell was a kind of shame. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before.