He had prolonged the typical useful life of a q-bit by factors of eight and ten. They cleared the rubbish from around the credenza at the back of the room and sat down in front of one of the big flatscreen displays. The female cat prowled about with her tail in the air, or sat on Kearney’s shoulder purring into his ear. Test results evolved one after the other like puffs of synaptic activity in decoherence-free space. “It’s not a quantum computer,” Tate said, after Kearney had congratulated him, “but I think we’re ahead of Kielpinski’s team, as of now. Do you see why I need you here? I don’t want Gordon selling us down the river just when we can ask anybody for anything.” He reached out to tap the keyboard. Kearney stopped him.

“What about the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“The glitch in the model, whatever it was.”

“Ah,” said Tate, “that. Well, I did what I could with it.” He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney’s shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney’s shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.

“What do you make of it?” said Tate. “Kearney?”

Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:

“It’s probably an artefact, then.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Tate. “There’s no point going any further with it.” He laughed. “Except maybe to amuse the cat.” When Kearney didn’t rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:

“Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.”

“Sprake,” said Kearney.

“That’s what I said.”

Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.

“Did he take anything?” He indicated the monitor. “He didn’t see this?”

Tate laughed.