South Hemisphere, New Venusport. She tracked herself down to the circus ground, where the empty motels shone with light rain in an offshore wind. There was no hurry, but as soon as she heard her prior self call out that way, the seagull cry of ‘Wait!’, that was the moment. Jump up out of the sand. Reach in through the doped protein meshes around the brainstem. Squeeze. Step away. Let those Kv12.2 expression issues do the work – seizure sites propagating across the cortex in cascades, autonomic functions going down one by one. It was supposed to keep her immobile long enough to talk. ‘Listen, honey, listen to me: don’t jump!’ She tried to get her own attention, instead she triggered a built-in EMC shutdown; someone was going to feel some shame over that in the morning.

It was the same wherever she went—

Toni Reno gaped and sweated as she came at him from out of time – Toni thought he was state of the art, but he proved to be wrong about that. Poor George the gene tailor in his little shop, both attracted and terrified by the engineered kairomones in her sweat, overcame his fear at last, clutched gratefully at her tits and dropped dead at her feet in the dark. Only a week or two before that, tissue had burst out of Enka Mercury’s armpit like dirty kapok. The assistant just had no luck with these people, and, in a way, even less with herself. She was present in the past: she had a real presence there. But as a communications strategy, communication could never work: not for a person like her. She just wasn’t built for it. No one seemed to understand that she was there to speak to them, that she really had something to say. She couldn’t control her anger at the people who had built her, she couldn’t control her anger at what Gaines had done to her, she couldn’t control her anger at herself. Her victims, meanwhile, couldn’t control their fear. It was a toxic mixture. To these soft targets – ambushed with a thorough, deft, cat-like thoughtlessness then left dismembered, eviscerated, dangling in the tailored but chaotic spacetime eddies of VF14/2b – she brought only the lifetime frustration of the manufactured thing. She was trying to warn everyone in her past about what was coming: but in the end her predictable contribution could only be a corpse and a patch of grainy, dark-bluish air in which the shadows fell at wrong angles because ordinary physics didn’t apply. All she achieved was to become the object of her own investigation, the mystery she could never solve.