She pulled herself closer again, reached up behind his head and drew him down into a kiss. It was long and passionate, her body pressing against his, and he felt himself responding. Drily analytical, another part of himself noted that he was wasting time. With a flash of irritation, he sent that part off to roam cyberspace – to make preparations and keep watch for that other thing out there. The kiss finished, they now approached one of the taxis, which opened its doors for them, and they climbed in the back.

‘Staff Embarkation,’ he instructed, and the vehicle pulled out on to the road.

He sat in the back with Hannah pressed up against him, her head on his shoulder and the smell of her hair in his nostrils. He connected up again, becoming more of himself once more, feeling a brief bitter ache as he recognized that to be more human he needed to be actually less complete, the human him just being a part of the whole. His inner vision of himself seemed to be one of interfaces: some central entity sitting neither in cyberspace nor in that grey fatty tissue inside his skull, its senses operating through the fleshy gene transporter within this taxi, within cyberspace and the silicon, wires, optics and electromagnetic signals that were its medium, touching the physical world through those surrounding cams and sensors he chose. Did he know what love was before Smith sent him to the incinerator? Was human love possible for him now that it seemed he was no longer really human?

Humming contentedly to itself, the taxi pulled out on to a two-lane highway, away from the park, then joined a six-lane highway where massive trucks loomed about them like mobile buildings. Saul studied these, wondering just what the hell they were carrying; again aware that such massive movement could not be accounted for by standard operations, as of a year ago. Then, with a feeling of unease, he observed that some of these vehicles were troop transporters, and when the taxi swerved into another lane to let two Inspectorate cruisers race by, he sat upright. Surely this could be a reaction to Malden’s revolution, because Minsk would be considered a prime target?

‘What is it?’ Hannah asked, noticing his reaction.

‘Lot of security activity.’

Just a brief modem connection revealed how local network security had escalated. Something had got them really bothered here, some major penetration, yet it wasn’t him. However, this made it increasingly likely that his own interference in the mainframe would be quickly detected. His head started to throb as he tracked diagnostic traffic and and tracer programs.

‘We’ve got trouble,’ he added.