After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and—especially—navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

K-tech was born.

“So?” said Seria Mau. “This is not news.”

She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. “None of this is news to my life,” she said. “You know?”

“I know,” said Billy Anker. He went on:

“EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, ’We don’t make the wars,’ and then have ‘ terrorists’ killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.” He grinned. “But here’s the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip’s generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they’re adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can’t build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.

“Do you understand? We don’t have a technology here. We have alien artefacts: a resource mined until it ran out.” He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. “This may have been one of the last of them,” he said. “And we don’t even know what it was for.”

“Hey, Billy Anker,” she said. “I know what it’s for.”

He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.

“K-tech has run out,” he repeated.

“If that’s a good thing, why are you so pissed off?”

Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr. Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.

“Because I found a whole planet of it,” he said.