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Roz made herself look feLixi in the eyes; such warm, brown, lying eyes. 'Of course everyone knew that,' she said. 'Everyone except for vi!Cari, that is. The poor bastard must have been desperate to clear its name. And why get back at beRut? For what? Vi!Cari wasn't an art critic. If beRut wanted to cover the whole town with paint, what was that to vi!Cari? We know it was a force-bomb, we have an eyewitness. At first I thought the idea was to set beRut up as a patsy but the man is all piss and vinegar. Then I got to thinking about why vi!Cari was out in the storm that night and it all made sense. Knowing it was there meant you could take all the time you wanted to line up the shot, using a controller made from etched silicon that !C-Mel made and programmed for you. A controller that was too primitive to show up on God's general scans.'

'What's etched silicon got to do with anything?'

'Don't give me that innocent schoolboy act, feLixi. Etching silicon is the old-fashioned way of making thinking machines. The windmills' control systems are all made from valves and transistors and it didn't take a genius to patch in a microprocessor just for one night.'

'You can't make smart machines from etched silicon.'

'It didn't have to be smart. It just had to be programmed by someone smart, someone like !C-Mel. Someone who thought they wanted vi!Cari dead as much as you did. You went up the hill, switched on and put thirty thousand amperes right through vi!Cari's brain pan. You figured even if God got suspicious it would go after !C-Mel, not you. You knew God would assume that a ship was far too bright to be manipulated by a mere meatbrain and everyone knows that some VASs are unstable with no war to fight. But then you found out that the Doctor was in town and panicked.

You knew he was a meddler and you couldn't take the risk that God wouldn't put him on the case for its own devious reasons. So you needed someone close to the Doctor you could feed all those false leads you'd been keeping under your hat: beRut, saRa!qava. All the secrets you'd ferreted out with your "listening room" and your contacts in XR(N)IG, the same contacts you used to get the low-down on the Doctor's companions, maybe even the secret stuff about Mutter's Spiral and Earth. So you made sure I was drinking flashback that evening to get me all good and confused and sidled up to me on the stairs. Just to make sure I was receptive you had the extra thumb taken off your hands and your eye colour changed. With all your experience as an agent in the proxy wars you figured I'd be a cinch to manipulate.'

'Yes,' said feLixi suddenly. 'No! It wasn't like that. It was your eyes, Roz. I saw myself reflected in your eyes and I knew you'd understand.'

'Yeah, I understood all right, better than you think. Where I come from, for what you did they'd strip your mind right back down to your birth trauma and rebuild your personality from scratch. In this place I guess they'll just stop inviting you to parties. At least you'll get to find out what it felt like to be vi!Cari.'

Roz watched it sinking into his mind, watched the wheels, spinning in his face and that's when she knew for certain.

'You're not . . .?'

'Yes, feLixi,' she said. 'I'm turning you in or whatever it is you guys do in this place.'

'You can't be serious.'

'I'm real serious, feLixi, you're taking the fall.'

'I thought we had an understanding,' said feLixi, 'but now I see I was just another suspect all along. You might as well be a machine, Roz. You don't have any human feelings at all.'

Roz shrugged. 'Think what you like but I'm not going to play the fool for you.'

'You know it's not like that,' said feLixi.

She was angry now, angry because she was still listening to him. Angry at herself for that tiny bit of hope that he might have a reason she could believe in. 'Have you ever told me the truth, feLixi?' she snapped. 'Have you said anything to me that wasn't just another manipulation? Even this' – she waved the poem under his nose