On they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, flowing out of the dark and parting around the research vessel, of which they took little more notice than the void itself. SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, its hull shuddering with the approach of some catastrophic event – the phase change, the leap to the next stable state – aimed itself at the heart of the singularity, which seemed to shift and boil in response with realtime bursts of high-energy photons. The alien engines shuttled faster and faster, producing curious slick pulses that presented to the observer not as light but as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth, a vibration in the walls, a perpetual but perpetually decaying echo effect in the context of things. The fleet paused a second, hung in silhouette, then hurled itself in.

For a moment after they had vanished, the vacuum still seemed inhabited. Then it was nothing again. Imps van Sant stared into the eyepieces of his obsolete instruments. Deep in explicatory failure, he had no way of placing himself with regard to what he had witnessed. Man, he thought. Who were those guys? They seemed full of madness and a direct rejection of anything he might have called humanity. It made him lonelier than ever. He was considering this when empty space whispered at him.

‘Hello?’ it said.

She hung out there, a kilometre long and clean as a herring gull over a windy beach. You looked at her and you could taste salt, ice cream, iodine. Feel for a second fully inside yourself.

‘I can be anything I want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want that. I want to be the one thing I am.’

And when van Sant couldn’t think of an answer:

‘What do you remember best?’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t a regular kid.’ He rummaged through the litter of empty beer cans, broken table tennis balls and repro 1970s wank mags around his pilot chair until he found some real estate brochures. ‘I don’t remember anything, but I want to live somewhere like this.’ Holding up a picture so she could see, a Sandra Shen tableau entitled, Airstream trailers beside the Salton Sea, 2001. ‘Or this,’ he said: picture of two Japanese-looking people fucking in surf. She’s wearing a wedding dress. In the background, mountains. ‘Or I quite like this.’ A wooden house with a pier going out into a lake: three brown pelicans diving for fish. Then his favourite, the ice-cream parlour at Roswell, New Mexico, Old Earth. Pastel neon mints and pinks against lightly etched aluminium columns: a holy twilight in the parking lot.

‘It’s the real McCoy,’ Imps said.

‘I don’t recall anything like that,’ she said. Then, almost immediately: ‘What would you be if you could be one other thing?’

‘One other thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be gone from here.’