Two of them  held a short  meeting  in the Nova Swing main hold.  First  to  arrive  was the  entity  calling itself MP  Renoko. Though presently operating  himself by FTL transmission  from a Faint Dime cashout terminal on the south hemisphere  of New Venusport, Renoko self-identified as human; and when he walked through the wall of the hold, he certainly resembled – down to his white stubble, grubby short raincoat and bare ankles – the same individual who had commissioned  Fat Antoyne, insulted Irene’s sense of business, and argued so fiercely with Ruby Dip about the nature of kitsch. His first act was to inspect the mortsafes, which greeted him with a kind of biddable skittishness.

Renoko patted them like the thoroughbreds they were, whistling in the tuneless but familiar carnie manner.  Occasionally he gave a nod of approval. To the smallest of them, he said with a laugh, ‘I see you’ve been back at the old game!’ Then, opening his arms as if he could embrace all three at once, ‘It’s a real treat to see you together again!’

He busied himself about, using his breath and the sleeve of his raincoat to wipe down a viewport here or buff up a brass detail there. But after a while he sat down suddenly in a corner of the hold. Both his facial expression and his body language collapsed into vacancy. He seemed to be prepared  to wait. The mortsafes settled down again. It would be difficult to reproduce  Renoko’s state of consciousness during this period. He identified as a human being, but he could not be said to be one. Based on a few lines of code last separately aware of itself in the glory days of Sandra Shen’s circus, he was now in all senses an emergent property: not of a single cash register, or indeed a single diner, but of the whole Halo-wide  Faint  Dime  chain  (in  itself a subsidiary  of FUGA-Orthogen),  including its wholesaling and accountancy  software, its transport  and construction  departments,  its human  resources and, especially, their day to day viral loading. The progress of a modified herpes infection through  the staff of a given diner did as much  to generate, maintain  and  express MP Renoko as the progress of a restocking order for ketchup or the decision to press forward with a new outlet. These different kinds of events implied, added up to or gave rise to him. In a sense he was nothing more than  a list of instructions  left behind  by Madame  Shen herself when she abandoned  the Circus. But you can’t accrete fifty years of history without  becoming some sort of identity in your own right. That was a guarantee of sorts, Renoko sometimes believed: though of what he wasn’t sure.