El was using it to talk now. Some years ago, when he had begun using the Metatron to manifest himself at conferences and meetings, he’d mapped his own face onto its blank mannikin head and he’d piped his own voice straight through, essentially using the robot as a mobile speakerphone. Since then he had gradually changed his ways. He had turned off the face mapping so that no one could see him, and he’d begun using speech-generation technology. At first the Metatron had spoken in a generic, off-the-shelf voice and accent, but he or his staff had been customizing it. The voice was now recognizable as El’s. It did not sound exactly like El sounded when he was physically sitting across the table from you and pushing air through his vocal cords, but close enough that people who knew him would cock an ear, nod, and admit that it was not bad. Exactly how the speech was being generated was not clear, and had been the topic of many debates held in bars and coffee shops among people who had just finished “talking” to El’s Metatron. Sometimes the voice had a natural cadence suggesting that El was speaking into a microphone and his speech being reprocessed. Other times it sounded like the results of a text-to-speech algorithm. Since those algorithms were pretty good now, there was a considerable gray area between those theories—which was why it made for such good arguments in bars. Most of those arguments could have been settled if someone had actually laid eyes on Elmo Shepherd in the flesh recently. But no one had seen him in over a year, and opinions varied as to what condition he was in. Some said he was already dead. Of those, one faction believed that the speech they were listening to was actually coming from Sinjin Kerr or Enoch Root or perhaps a cabal of token holders sitting in a room together. Another faction held that El’s brain had already been scanned and was running in the cloud as a process that could interface directly with the voice-generation system. Most people, however, assumed that El was still alive.

Making it somewhat spookier was that the Voice of El could emerge from different instruments at different times, depending on how he wanted to manifest himself. In the early going, they’d all come to associate it with his Metatron. He had them planted in cities all over the place, and they were smart enough to take public transit to a FedEx facility and ship themselves wherever they needed to be, sometimes traveling more quickly than human beings with airplane tickets. He used the same voice for old-fashioned phone calls and teleconferences. And it was the voice of his avatar when he manifested himself in virtual or augmented reality.