“That kind of thing.” It wasn’t clear if she was mimicking me or agreeing.

“Would you mind sitting down, it’s making my neck ache talking to you like this.”

I hesitated. It seemed unnecessarily churlish to refuse. I joined her on the surface of the dock, put my back to the weed bale and settled, waiting.

But then she was abruptly quiet. We sat shoulder to shoulder for a while.

It felt oddly companionable.

“You know,” she said finally, “when I was a kid, my father got this assignment on biotech nanobes. You know, the tissue-repair systems, the immune-boosters? It was kind of a review article, looking at the nanotech since landfall and where it was going next. I remember he showed me some footage of the state-of-the-art stuff being put into a baby at birth. And I was horrified.”

A distant smile.

“I can still remember looking at this baby and asking him how it was going to tell all those machines what to do. He tried to explain it to me, told me the baby didn’t have to tell them anything, they already knew what to do. They just had to be powered up.”

I nodded. “Nice analogy. I’m not—”

“Just. Give me a moment, huh? Imagine.” She lifted her hands as if framing something. “Imagine if some motherfucker deliberately didn’t enable most of those nanobes. Or enabled only the ones that dealt with brain and stomach functions, say. All the rest were just dead biotech, or worse still semi-dead, just sitting there consuming nutrients and not doing anything. Or programmed to do the wrong things. To destroy tissue instead of repairing it. To let in the wrong proteins, not to balance out the chemicals. Pretty soon that baby grows up and starts to have health problems. All the dangerous local organisms, the ones that belong here, that Earth’s never seen, they storm aboard and that kid is going to go down with every disease its ancestors on Earth never evolved defences for. So what happens then?”

I grimaced. “You bury it?”

“Well, before that. The doctors will come in and they’ll advise surgery, maybe replacement organs or limbs—”

“Nadia, you really have been gone a long time. Outside of battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—”

“Kovacs, it’s an analogy, alright? The point is, you end up with a body that works badly, that needs constant conscious control from above and outside and why? Not because of some intrinsic failing but because the nanotech just isn’t being used. And that’s us. This society—every society in the Protectorate—is a body where ninety-five per cent of the nanotech has been switched off. People don’t do what they’re supposed to.”

“Which is what?”