Down in the main hold, a wave went through the deck plates, as if matter could experience a stroke too. Light and dark became muddled. The mortsafes bumped together like moored boats. The lid of the K-tank blew off violently and clattered away, revealing the proteome inside, which slopped about like dirty salt water at night. Through its surface burst the occupant of the tank, a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican haircut and a couple of snake tattoos, whose body resembled, from the diaphragm down, a charred and tattered coat. His spine was cabled at neurotypical energy sites. Half-drowned, throwing up with the vertigo of aborted interstellar flight, he stared round in panic at the main hold, the gathered mortsafes. Proteome poured off him, smelling of horse glue; rendered fat; the albumen of a bad egg. Whatever he had been dreaming was gone for good. He wasn’t used to a non-electronic presence in the universe: it was some time since he had been available in this form. He looked down at himself.

‘Jesus, Renoko,’ he complained to the empty air. ‘I’ve got no fucking legs. You didn’t tell me that.’

He fell to plucking the thick rubber cables out of his spine. He tried and failed to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

The condition of the K-tank seemed to impress him. ‘Remind me to come the easy way round next time,’ he said. He addressed the mortsafes. ‘Anyone got any tissues, or like that?’

What did they think of this performance?

They were content with it. They were aliens. They had, by now, spent a claustrophobic fortnight in the Nova Swing main hold with its black and yellow warning stripes, loose tool-cupboard doors, injunctions to work safe with plasma. They understood where they were, and they understood why. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Working for Sandra Shen had required, at the least, hundreds of years of travel from distant places. They had performed vital functions at the demise of her Observatorium & Native Karma Plant. They had abandoned sane environments, left behind homes and families, to be part of the faux-Chinese woman’s engine of change. Like her, they were here to work on behalf of others. They were content with the burnt man because they were content with that.