“And mine through yours.”

“Like a ghost.”

“As I willed it, Johnny. Don’t you think it’s time to start facing up to reality?”

“But you’re alive.”

“Sure. You devoted as much memory to me as would have filled the entire hold of Alvin with machinery only a few years ago. You bonephoned as much of me into this book as you did the whole damned Titanic, so why shouldn’t I seem to you like someone who really sees and thinks and feels? Why shouldn’t you start believing that I am as real as anyone who ever lived? You programmed me that way. There’s a kind of chaotic unpredictability in a complex mass of data. Things can happen. It can jump in unpredictable ways.”

“That’s ridiculous. We’re alive!”

“You’re alive. I’m just a VR program of your own creation—your memories personified.”

Jonathan was saddened by the ring of truth in her words. His real mother had been a religious woman, and would never have acknowledged any creator except God.

“What is this, Mom? Don’t you believe in God anymore?”

Edith knew that her son had once believed in God, but she also now had enough awareness of her own origins as an epiphenomenon of a complex program to guess that even if something like God did look after Man, it probably did not take much notice of artificial intelligence. She did, to her own mind, feel real enough to think of asking Jonathan whether he believed that the only difference between them was that she had met and come to know personally her creator; and she wondered, if she asked him, if he could possibly prove to her that he and his entire universe were not part of someone else’s VR program; but she thought better of it. Jonathan was close enough to a breakdown, and while she had always been an inquisitive woman, she was never malicious.

“Ah, now, that’s enough,” Edith said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t answer mine. What are you doing here?”

“I’m finishing my book.”

“Reality check, Johnny. Have you asked yourself who’s going to read it?”

“But I’ve never left a project unfinished. Never in my life.”

“Dedication. Is that what I taught you?”

“Yes.”

“No, I never taught you this. Dedication is one thing. Obsession is something else. I think this is something else. I think this is something you learned from your father.”

She understood exactly how Jonathan felt about his father, and hoped that comparing him to Christopher Wayville might bring her son to his senses. Christopher had been so obsessed by the chance of exploring a distant star that his family became meaningless to him. He had even left to marry another woman solely because she was slated for command of a Valkyrie starship. Then he had left altogether, without ever looking back, on a mission that was to have lasted at least twelve years, but which no one survived. Christopher had known that the first antimatter rockets were notoriously unreliable. He had known all the risks, and yet he took the gamble anyway, so taken was he by the idea of finding something no one had ever seen before.