Soul is not personality, but souls are recognizable, whatever bodies they happen to be incarnated in. I had recognized Sokrates as a fly in the Jurassic, as he had immediately recognized me in my mortal form. Rolling carefully down the steps, owned by space humans who didn’t believe their Workers were sentient, came a Worker with the unmistakable soul of Simmea.

And that’s the end. That’s not, obviously, the last thing that happened, but nothing ever is, life has no end, things always keep on happening, unless the protagonist dies—and I am immortal. My mortal death was no kind of conclusion. But that moment, as I stood with Sokrates looking out over the landing field, is where I want to stop this story. I’ve told you now what I think it best for you to know, so you can learn and benefit from it. It may not be a story of good people doing good things, but all the same I think Plato would approve my didactic purpose here. The overwhelming presumption is that you who read this are human, and that among the confused goals of your mortal life you want to be the best self you can. Know yourself. Bear in mind that others have equal significance.

I ended the first volume with a moral, and the second with a deus ex machina. This third and final volume ends with hope, always the last thing to come out of any box.

Thanks

THANKS

In the cyberpunk books of the eighties, people were fitted with brain/computer interfaces, which seems like a wonderful idea until operating systems are upgraded to the point where your interface won’t. Just like them, I’ve been writing in Protext since 1987, and for the last decade I’ve been feeling like a Jack Womack character. My overwhelming thanks to Lindsey Nilsen, who has now made Protext work in DOSBOX for Linux, ensuring that I can keep writing even as the last DOS computers become one with the dodo. I no longer have to resign myself to descent into oblivion and darkness, or at least not so soon. This book, like everything I write, was written entirely in Protext, which remains the best word processor in the world. And now it runs on netbooks running Ubuntu, which makes me so much more flexible. Thank you, Lindsey.