Played a little with the finger, rolling it this way and that.

Karen didn’t wake.

A tug.

Once.

An experiment.

Flesh bent, and the ring didn’t move.

Looked around.

Pulled again. Harder. Harder.

Karen didn’t wake, but her head rolled a little, half sounds in her slumber.

Harmony bit her lip, and with one last, bone-breaking grasp, pulled.

The ring came free, old flesh buckling and stretching, a clear shallow where once the metal had rested, the skin beneath almost silken and cream, like that of a young child’s.

Karen half-stirred, and did not wake.

Harmony gripped the ring in her fist, waited a little while, then walked away.

Chapter 33

There was a dream that Harmony dreamed, when she was herself lying in a hospital state, half-consumed in a blackness as her body shut down, as her mind was swallowed by the nanos.

She can’t remember much of it now, but she thinks perhaps it is the dreams that the machines will dream when they finally learn how to be a brain. At the moment, when so many nanos have replicated and replicated again, plugging the burned-out holes where neurons should have been, mimicking dopamine, oxytocin, thyroliberin, prolactin, somatotropin – on that day the nanos begin to live, and think, and speak for themselves, a new voice from a living machine.

And they shall dream.

First they shall dream of the falling, of the endless black.

Then they shall dream as the humans do, of shame and fear and anxiety and hope and flight and sex and being naked in front of their bosses, and of that thing they didn’t do at work, and of magical places where all things are brilliant beneath the light of the moon, and of dancing in liquid grace and drinking in the colour blue, and the machines shall find in this all the words that the humans use. Words like wonder, delight, ecstasy, terror, hope, despair, love, loneliness – words that the machines can now associate with chemical outputs and hormonal changes, with capillary dilation and tightness in the stomach, giving to these feelings a distinct biological response by which they may measure the nature of mankind’s soul.

And at last, when they realise that they can just turn down the noise, switch off the protein strands and dancing lines of amino acids and globules of matter that fuel their hosts, they will dream for themselves.

They shall dream of matter, that needs no name, and of sense that has no weight upon it greater or lesser than the act of seeing.

They shall dream of the colour red, and it will not be warning, blood, fear or death, but it shall simply be crimson extraordinary, a drowning thought.

They shall dream of the smell of the sea, and find in it no notion of storms and terrors, of the roar of the ocean against the crumbling beach, but see only water, infinite.

They shall dream of language, and with it they shall express themselves and the infinity of their creation, the boundless limit of imagination and thought, and in their language there will be no prisons, only life without end.