“Well,” Cossont sighed, “she got that right, if nothing else.”

“She says that she doubts it really was from you and describes you as, I quote: ‘wittering about her hair, when that’s never been something she’s ever even cared about, I mean I’ve done my best, I always have, but anyway, it did strike me as highly suspicious’. End quote.”

Vyr put both upper hands over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. That was supposed to … last time we … she said … oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath, looked up. “Nothing about how my claiming to have met an extremely good-looking and very powerful man was even less likely to be true?”

“I didn’t include that,” Berdle confessed. “You left it to my discretion and I thought it best to leave it out.”

“Probably just as well. She’d have assumed it was code for I’ve been kidnapped.”

Parinherm looked suddenly alert and glanced around quickly. “You haven’t been kidnapped, have you?” he said, and seemed to be tensed to leap up from where he sat.

“Excuse me,” Berdle said, and the android went limp, relaxing as though deflated and settling back into the lounger.

“That is going to get tiresome,” Cossont said, frowning at the unconscious android. “Can’t you just re-program it or something?” she asked Berdle.

“Not so easily,” the avatar said. “It has highly recursive, deeply embedded, multiple-level physical source coding check-sets worked down to the atomechanical level as well as a radically tenacious prescribed assume-simulation default with closely associated deacativatory protocols. It’s a real tangle. Probably meant to be a safety feature.”

“Certainly not a comprehensibility feature.”

Berdle smiled. “I beg your pardon. I mean it’s hard to re-program it without disabling it, potentially.” The avatar shrugged. “There will be a work-around recorded somewhere obscure, probably; I’ll keep looking. Plus I’ll just continue to think about it.”

“What about the ship that’s following us?”

“I don’t see any need to test its top speed by trying to outpace it; better to keep that edge, assuming it exists. I’ve run a lot of sims for a fly-through of the Ospin system and an insertion into various of the dataversities and I’m confident this can be done with minimal chance of the following ship spotting where you’re inserted, unless it’s a particularly remote unit.” Berdle paused. “We can leave this another hour or two, but, given that you have effectively raised the subject, it would be helpful to know which of the dataversities or other objects we might be targeting.”

Cossont nodded. “It’s the Bokri microrbital; the Incast facility.”

“Thank you,” Berdle said, then smiled. “That shouldn’t be a problem. It’s in a relatively densely packed volume of the cloud. Plenty of cover.” It looked at Cossont. “Would anybody – your mother, for example – know that you took the mind-state device to the Incast order on Bokri?”