Except, of course, this Earth’s biodiversity was already colossally reduced before tragedy was averted. The global colony doesn’t know much about the environment, but it knows what it likes. The roaches approach the wilderness of the world like a rich old landowner might landscape his estates. Everything seems to show the wondrous order of nature and yet nothing is truly natural. Not even the bacterial content of the soil is left to chance. These insects are the perfect gardeners, and gardeners are the great tyrants of nature. Every species either fits into the million-piece jigsaw that the roach colony mandates, or else it is destroyed without conscience or remorse. They build a perfect world—perfect for them—and they maintain it perfectly, without error or chance mutation. There are no dinosaurs here, but around the time the first Coelophysis lifts its scaly head in our own past, the world of the roaches has found its final balance. Even a meteor landing will only be a tiresome error in need of correction.

But intelligence? Yes, we concede there is an intelligence at work here, but one that we would never be able to reach out to, fingertip to antennae. The world this colony has built for itself is a closed system that cannot process things from outside, save to excise them. We would be quarantined and done away with, should we ever walk this Earth. And then we would be erased from memory, not fit to be part of the eternal now that has gripped this world for two hundred million years. So, a happy ending, but not one that admits us. A Garden of Eden from which we are forever excluded.

7.

I

Dr. Kay Amal Khan was delightedly incredulous when she heard what had got Lee into this mess.

“A girl?” she crowed. “Really, love?”

They’d been cooped up together for a day. Khan divided her time between working feverishly through dense fields of numbers with a pen and paper, smoking as much out of the window as she could and asking questions. Lee had already gone through her history with Mal, including both the past and the crumbs of the present.

“I envy you, I really do,” said Khan, shaking her head and tapping a cigarette packet that turned out to be empty. “Fuck.”

“I’ll try to grab some when I go get food,” Lee said. She wasn’t entirely sure what her role was in this shabby hotel by King’s Cross. Khan seemed important, though, and doing the fetching and carrying felt like a good way of working off whatever she owed for being rescued.