He shifted his long body on the sand.

“Yeah, well, the New Hokkaido contingency committee didn’t share your scepticism. Or maybe they were just desperate. Anyway, they came up with something similar based on digitised human freight. They built shell personalities for each committee member, just a surface assembly of basic memory and self—”

“Oh you are fucking kidding me!”

“—and loaded them into widecast datamines, to be deployed inside the Quellist sectors and triggered if they were overrun. No, I’m not kidding you.”

I closed my own eyes.

Oh fuck.

Brasil’s voice ticked onward, remorseless. “Yeah, plan was, in the event of a rout, they’d trigger the mines and leave a few dozen of their own defenders, maybe the vanguard units of the encroaching forces as well, each solidly convinced they were Quellcrist Falconer. Or whoever.”

Sound of waves, and distant cries across the water.

Would you mind holding me while I go under?

I saw her face. I heard the changed voice that wasn’t Sylvie Oshima.

Touch me. Tell me you’re fucking real.

Brasil was still going, but you could hear him winding down. “Quite a smart weapon when you think about it. Widespread confusion, who the fuck do you trust, who do you arrest? Chaos, really. Maybe it buys time for the real Quell to get out. Maybe just. Creates chaos. The final blow. Who knows?”

When I opened my eyes again, he was sitting up and staring out to sea again. The peace and the humour in his face was gone, wiped away like make-up, like seawater dried off in the sun. Out of nowhere, inside the tight muscled surfer physique, he looked suddenly bitter and angry.

“Who told you all that?” I asked him.

He glanced back at me and the ghost of his former smile flickered.

“Someone you need to meet,” he said quietly.

We took his bug, a stripped-down two-seat not much bigger than the single I’d rented but, as it turned out, far faster. Brasil took the trouble to pull on a battered-looking pantherskin crash suit, something else that marked him out as different from all the other idiots cruising up and down the highway in swimwear at speeds that would flay flesh to the bone if they spilled and rolled.

“Yeah, well,” he said, when I mentioned it. “Some chances are worth taking. The rest is just deathwish.”

I picked up my polalloy helmet and moulded it on. My voice came through the speaker tinnily.

“Got to watch that shit, huh?”

He nodded. “All the time.”

He cranked the bug up, settled his own helmet and then kicked us down the highway at an even two hundred kilometres an hour, heading north.