The young man raised his head. “They didn’t tell me anything. I found out it was an island because my contact got a voice call on her terminal. They were talking about how DIANIMA was thinking of bringing someone else onto the island. I only caught a few sentences. My contact didn’t speak, but I heard the other voice on the line. That’s all. I might even be wrong about that. Maybe I misheard. Or maybe the call wasn’t even about the same thing.”

“This mind—what was it?”

“All they gave me was a copy of a neural pattern on an isolated terminal. A connectome. The most complicated one I’d ever seen. I tried for a month. I couldn’t find a way in. It was maddening. It was like … I don’t know.”

“Take your time.”

The young man looked at one of the portholes. Nothing to see in it but the reflection of the light in the room, the two figures at the table warped and small in the porthole’s disc. The darkness outside made a mirror that cast the room back at itself. There was a foghorn in the distance, and then another one—a different tone, like an answer.

“The fog is moving in off the Sea of Marmara,” the older man said. “Streaming up the Bosporus, flowing over the hills of the old city. I imagine it will be here in half an hour.”

“Why would you help me?”

“It isn’t help. It’s payment.”

“I don’t have anything to offer you. I’ve already told you what I know—or what I think I know. I didn’t know it was the Stork Society—if that’s who it is—until you told me just now. And I’m not even certain the island is related.”

The boat rocked as a larger wave hit its port side—the wake of one of the autofreighters out in the channel.

“That is for us to determine. Not for you to worry about. Tell me about the mind.”

“I’ve cracked a lot of them, from your simple Muscovite mining zombie on up to some of the Tibetan holon interfaces. The Tibetan ones are hard: you are trying to break into a mediating system, a bridge between a human connectome, which is impenetrable, and another mind.”

“I thought the Tibetan machines were just drones.”

“No—they aren’t. They are something else. They’re like a mind that can be controlled sometimes, but also generates its own responses. All kinds of iterative feedback loops, with this bundle of control neurons linking them. Tricky. But I cracked one of them.”

“You used it to kill the head of a Sino-Philippine fishing conglomerate. Also for the Stork Society?”

“You know about that? How … Okay, it doesn’t matter now. Yes. I did that. I don’t know who it was for. That contact was text-only. But they paid well.”