Agata fell silent. If the system had stretched on unbroken all the way to the reunion, as she’d once imagined – endorsed at referenda again and again – would its persistence have been a true measure of its virtues, or just a self-affirming stasis, as pathological as the innovation block?

She glanced across the room and saw Ramiro talking to his sister; he did look shockingly old beside her, and her children seemed impatient to be somewhere else.

An archivist with a camera separated herself from the crowd and called to everyone to move into position. ‘What position?’ Agata asked. Then she understood.

Serena said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not as if you can get it wrong.’ But as the group squeezed together to fit into the shot, she seemed to be looking around for reference points herself, anxious to conform to her own recollection. What happened, Agata wondered, to the woman or man whose nature demanded of them that they find a different spot or adopt a different posture than the one recorded in the famous image of the Surveyor’s return? That urge would have to have been beaten out of them somehow, or they would have been absent from the picture all along.

Agata turned to face the camera. In her rear gaze she could see people trying out their expressions, as if their imitations could fail to be perfect. As the archivist raised her camera, Agata struggled to hide the shame she could feel beginning to show on her own face. Perhaps it was the proper response to the plight that she’d helped to foist on the mountain, but she didn’t want the whole of the Peerless seeing her reach that conclusion, three years before she’d reached it herself.

‘I’m here to see my brother, Pio,’ Agata told the guard.

The woman held out a photonic patch, connected to the wall by a cable. ‘Form your signature.’ Agata brought the squiggle onto her palm and pressed it against the patch.

‘Valuables?’

Agata handed over the key to her apartment.

‘Do you still have any pockets?’

‘No.’

‘Please resorb all your limbs.’

Agata hesitated, wondering what would happen if she argued, but then she released the guide rope and complied. Her torso drifted slowly towards the floor of the entrance chamber; the guard intervened and caught hold of her with four hands, then she began prodding Agata’s skin with her fingertips, searching for any concealed folds. Agata closed her rear eyes and turned her front gaze towards the ceiling, wondering if the guards had access in advance to the outcomes of these searches. Why should they look too hard, if they knew they’d find nothing? But if there was well-hidden contraband, a tip-off might enable them to find it more easily. Or would that be yet another unlikely loop, self-consistent but hugely improbable?