‘Good two hours,’ Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake the night before when he’d first discovered his uncle’s hologram waiting for him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and receptive and got all this over with then, but he’d known he’d end up paying for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they’d gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called it, he still wasn’t going to jump just because they said so. The only concession he’d made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.

So he’d gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough sleep and Uncle Tishlin’s message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract semantics in the module’s AI core, waiting till he got up.

So far all they’d done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be even more of a compliment . . . but that way lay paranoia).

‘I take it you had a good evening,’ Tishlin’s simulation said.

‘Enormous fun.’

Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his uncle’s face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle’s personality now encoded - living, if you wanted to look at it that way - in the module’s AI core. Did whatever was in there - sent here enciphered with the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances - actually feel? Or did it just appear to?

Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven’t bothered about that sort of shit since university.

‘How can you have enormous fun with . . . aliens?’ the hologram asked, eyebrows gathering.

‘Attitude,’ Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.

‘But you can’t drink with them, eat with them, can’t really touch them, or want the same things . . .’ Tishlin said, still frowning.