Renoko looked like a photograph of Anton  Chekhov, if Chekhov had aged more and come to favour a little white chin-beard. Otherwise his look sucessfully teamed used raincoats with grey worsted trousers five inches too short. His hair – white, swept back to a grubby collar – always seemed full of light. He was small-boned, and intense in manner. His clothes came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘soup’. On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went unwashed. As soon as he and Fat Antoyne had settled themselves in the comparative safety of The East Ural Nature Reserve, he returned to his original subject as if he had never left it:

‘“Everyone their own evolutionary project,” we tell each other here in the Halo. Excuse me, this can only be an element of cultural self-dramatisation, even in times like ours.’ His smile meant he was prepared to forgive that. ‘But if there is a new species,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s up there in those quarantine hulks.’

Fat Antoyne said he didn’t get it.

Renoko smiled. ‘You get it,’ he said.

Leaked navigational nanoware or eleven-dimensional imaging code slips up someone’s anus at night and discovers it can run on a protein substrate. In a similar way, ads, memes, diseases and algorithms escape into the wild. They can run on your neurones, they can run inside your cells. They perform a default conversion. Suddenly the cops are out with the loudhailers, ‘Stay inside! Stay indoors!’ but it’s too late: on your street, in your house, everything collapses suddenly into an unplanned slurry of nanotech, half-tailored viruses and human fats – your husband, your two little girls in their identical dresses, you. ‘Entire planetary populations,’ Renoko said, ‘are converting to this stuff. Is it an end-state?’ He threw up his little hands. ‘No one knows! Is it a new medium? No one is willing to say! It’s as beautiful as water in strong sunlight, yet it stinks like rendered fat, and can absorb an adult human being in forty seconds. The hulks are full of it, the quarantine orbit is full of hulks. Men like you keep it safe.’ Obsolete pipeliners that worked the Carling Line, decommissioned Alcubierre warps the size of planetisimals, anything with a thick hull, especially if it’s easy to reinforce further: Fat Antoyne had a sudden clear image of those pocked relics in the interplanetary darkness – used-up ships mysterious with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs, pinwheeling around on near-chaotic operator-controlled trajectories.

He shook his drink and watched it settle. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I got a six month contract to move some of it around, that’s all.’

‘And how are you enjoying that?’