“I appreciate the efforts you have made, Petrovitch-san. But I still do not see how this can possibly be.”

There was an envelope on the table in front of Petrovitch. It had his name on it in Cyrillic. It hadn’t been there a moment before.

“Is that for me?”

“Yes. I suggest you open it.”

Petrovitch picked up the envelope and slid his finger under the heavy paper flap. It tore open, and he eased the card out from inside. It was gold-edged, embossed, and had a big red octagon printed beneath bold words. “Yeah. A message from the monitoring software. I’ve gone into ventricular tachycardia.”

“Do you wish to leave and seek medical attention?”

He tapped the card on the table. “There’s nowhere to go. Any hospital that hasn’t been burned down to the ground by now is locked up tighter than the Lubyanka.”

“I have been trying,” said Oshicora, “to work out why you believe you are telling me the truth despite the impossibility of your claims. Now you seem to be prepared to die for what might well be a delusion. Normally, I would judge you to be mentally ill, but I know you. Do you think you have time to convince me otherwise?”

“You know, it’s not meant to be this hard.” Petrovitch poured himself more sake, and proffered the bottle to Oshicora, who politely declined. “But then again, what do I know? I’m lying in a dentist’s chair, in the only building with power in the entire Metrozone, with experimental cybernetics jacked into my brain, talking to a copy of a man who’s ignorant of the fact that he’s been dreaming the destruction of an entire city, while my heart finally fails.” He picked up his drink and threw it back in a single gulp.

“But would you have missed it?”

“Not if I’d have lived to be a hundred. Let me show you how we do things in Russia.” He tossed the cup in his hand, then threw the cup against the bar. It shattered, and shards of china spun away. He got to his feet and slid the emergency card inside his breast pocket.

“Take me,” he said, “to your firewall.”

The scene changed again, instantly and without any sense of motion. They were in an electronics shop, deep in the sideways of Akiba. They were surrounded by densely-packed shelves of components; plastic bins brimming with chips, fans, heat pumps, connectors, cables and cards. At the far end of the aisle, a glass case displayed the very latest hardware.

“Will this do?” asked Oshicora.

“Yeah.” Petrovitch squeezed past and picked up a slim console with a holographic screen and virtual keyboard. He powered it up and watched the commands scroll past in the air. “Gesture recognition too. So, what’s on the other side of the firewall: the Oshicora intranet or a web-accessed network node?”