Some of the chatter settled down as many eyes turned towards him.

‘You have primacy,’ agreed one of the Golem. ‘What do you require of us?’

‘Do nothing,’ said Blegg.

He turned back to the viewing window. The power feed was now nearly in place. He saw the crystal near its point of contact, darkening as something formed there. Then the s-con heads made contact, and the lights dimmed. A webwork of glowing lines spread through the crystal like a million cracks, then they faded to a general glow throughout it. The lights came back on again.

‘Use one of the VR booths,’ said Hourne.

People in the room glanced suspiciously up at the camcom points set in the ceiling, then turned to Blegg to see what he would do.

‘Are you truly Hourne?’ he asked.

‘Yes, and no,’ replied the AI.

Blegg nodded, turned, and walked across the room to step into a VR booth. He fully expected this to be an interesting experience.

- retroact 4 -

Logan passed him a joint. He placed it between the last two fingers of his right hand, cupped both of his hands over his mouth, and drew in the aerated smoke. Tracking the physical reaction through his body always gave his new face an introspective and shocked appearance, so that others always thought him more stoned than he actually was. The ache of rearranging facial muscles had receded to a dim memory—the art almost instinctive now since his time in Korea where displaying a Caucasian face gave him the time to step aside into that other space to avoid American bullets. Skin hue was a whole different problem for his cellular inner vision, but directing his immune system against the melanoma that appeared five years after Hiroshima, while he explored the Australian outback, had granted him the required know-how. Now though, it felt strange to be wearing a Japanese face again.

Studying the young stoned Americans all around him in the firelight, all debating civil rights and cursing their government’s obstinacy in the face of the inevitable triumph of Marxism, Harris—formerly Herman, Hing Cho, Harold and Hiroshi—realized it was time to move on yet again. Though he looked as young as the rest of the group, he was a good twenty years older, but he felt mentally removed from them by a century.

‘Man, you mount your placards on two-by-twos,’ Logan was saying, ‘and maybe nail ‘em to the wood with four inch nails.’