In the cold and dark over New Venusport, the hulks blinked out one by one. Last to go: the tiny cockleshell containing Bobby and Martha, along with the outbreak of rogue code known as Bella. The little boy, who didn’t remember much, assumed his present condition was a phase everyone went through. Life, enticing and inexplicable by turns, had already demonstrated its weirdness. One thing was certain, Bobby thought: you were out the other side of most things in a year. The women knew better. Since the events in her room Bella had been, in a sense, all three of them. Long before that, she had given up on the idea of knowledge: to her, the sarcophagus was as puzzling as the hallway of a house. Martha, meanwhile, alternating between panic and acceptance, awaited resolution.

. . . Two feet long and not quite rigid, you had no faith a thing like that could penetrate anyone. It was more of a flag than a cock, something to wave at the world. Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Avtomat, the little girl who could crack anything. Frankie Machine and Murder Incorporated. The Markov Property. I get fish, the other says. Don’t go in the summerhouse! I can do something with my mind but for all things catch fire & flowers spring up, nothing else happens. You can keep a cock like that I wouldn’t want it near me. I like their legs better. Little boys, they like my stink but they’re afraid. ‘Is that what you want, hon?’ . . .

As in all bad dreams, there were physical states forbidden to the assistant: in this case anything she had previously understood as movement.

At the same time, generous degrees of freedom opened up in other directions. Through the physics of VF14/2b, her ‘life’ – whatever that had been – now lay open to her at all points and along all axes. She soon found herself looping easily and repeatedly into her own past—

Saudade City on a wet Friday night. In the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, two agents and a wire jockey were servicing a client in the basement. The assistant watched her earlier self leaning in at the basement doorway, attracted by the energy and warmth of the interrogation, experiencing the nearest thing a person like her could feel to a companionable emotion. ‘Boys,’ she heard herself tease the interrogation team, ‘we must do this again!’

She waited for herself to leave and then stepped into the room. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘my name is Pearlant—’ They stared at her puzzledly, their mouths falling open.