The Ghost said, ‘I am here to present another option, Jack Raoul.’

Raoul studied the Ghost’s bland, shimmering surface. There was no hope for him, of course. But he felt oddly touched. ‘You’d better come in.’

The Ambassador sailed easily into the apartment, making the walls crumble to pixels where its limbs brushed against them. ‘How is the whisky today?’

Raoul sipped it, savouring its peaty smoke. ‘You know, I’m more than two hundred years old. But I figure that I could live another two hundred and not get this stuff right.’ Still, maybe this would be his lasting legacy, he thought sourly: the best Virtual whisky in all the Third Expansion, savoured and remembered long after the Raoul Accords had been forgotten - which time might not be so far into the future.

‘You are missing Eve,’ said the Ambassador.

The Ghost’s perception had always surprised him. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘In a way this place is all I have left of her. But even here she is just an absence.’

‘You must leave her now,’ said the Ghost. ‘Come with me.’

The abruptness of that startled him. ‘Leave? How? Where are we going?’

‘Jack Raoul, do you trust me?’

Escape was impossible, of course; Coalition security was tight, the Commission omnipresent. But this lunatic Ghost must have come a long way for this stunt, whatever it was. Maybe it was only respectful to go along for the ride.

Anyhow, what did he have to lose? One last adventure, Jack: why not?

He put the whisky glass down on a low table, savouring the weight of the heavy crystal, the gentle clink of its base on the table. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking into his heart. ‘Yes, I guess I do trust you.’ He stood straight. ‘I’m ready.’

Again he had the sensation that somebody was calling his name.

The room crumbled into blocky pixels that washed away like spindrift, and suddenly he was suspended in light.

‘It is important to understand that Raoul’s fully human brain was maintained by normal physiological functions. Think of him as a human being, then, flensed and de-boned, sustained within a shell of alien artifice.

‘The operation was more like a dismantling than a medical procedure. It was rapid.

‘Immediately after the beheading I lifted the head and observed Raoul’s eyes.

‘The lids worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. Then the spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half-closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible. (It will be recalled that Raoul’s “eyes” were quasi-organic Ghost artefacts.)

‘I called in a sharp voice: “Jack Raoul!” I saw the eyelids lift up, without any spasmodic contractions.

‘Raoul’s eyes fixed themselves on mine.’

Raoul looked down at himself. His body gleamed, a silver statue.