All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.

I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.

“What does it feel like?” I asked her gently. “Talking to them?”

She snorted. “What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.” She gestured. “Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the … Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.” She grinned sourly. “Union with the Godhead. Except people like my mother would have run screaming out of the upload centre rather than really face something like that. It’s a dark path, Micky, I opened the door and the software knew what to do next, it wanted to take me there, it’s what it’s for. But it’s dark and it’s cold, it leaves you. Naked. Stripped down. There are things like wings to cover you, but they’re cold, Micky. Cold and rough and they smell of cherries and mustard.”

“But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, running it?”

Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?”

For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousand and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.

I shook my head. Borrowed imagery from the Renouncer school, and some trace element of perverse Christian sacrifice myth. It’s the first thing they teach cub archaeologues. Don’t try to transfer your anthropomorphic baggage onto what is nothing like human.

“Too easy,” I said.

“Yeah. What I thought. Anyway, it’s the orbital that’s talking, it feels like a machine the same way the mimints do, the same way the software does. But yes, there are still Martians in there. Grigori Ishii, what’s left of him, gibbers about them when you can get any verbal sense out of him at all.