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She looked into the face of a man with long white hair and a long white beard. An almost gentle, almost saintly, almost patriarchal face, aged and wizened and tough, and almost hard to hate. He was looking around wildly, and from every screen that he saw – and Janis saw – the implacable face of Moh Kohn glared gloating back.

‘You’re dead!’ She heard the words Donovan mouthed, amplified and echoing back at him.

‘Yes, Moh Kohn is dead, Donovan,’ and she did not know if she or the fetch were saying it.

Donovan scrabbled at a databoard. The screens wavered and a sharp pain shot through Janis’s head, a red-hot migraine sword. She stumbled in red mist.

There was a place where the mist thinned, a grey patch like the inside of a brain. She focused on that and thought of the shapes of molecules, the chemistry of memory, the equations of desire, the work of Luria, the regularity of numbers…

And then she came through, and it was all clear again, the cool grey lines on the screens shaping the words they spoke. ‘You have viruses, but I have resistance, and I am alive, and you—’

All the arms moved and the chains swung and the manipulators reached and grasped.

‘—are dead.’

They roamed the rig for seconds on end, as the fetch stripped out its progams, soaked up its secrets. Janis was sure it was her decision to sound the alarm systems, to allow an hour’s delay on the demon programs they left in its arsenals.

They fled through the fat pipe, the narrow space, and then they were out, flying again. The rocky hills turned green, the city blocks lit up one by one, faster and faster until the light could be seen all the way around the earth. She did not think it strange that she could see through the earth.

And now she was sitting again at the desk, as of course she had been all along. The fetch faced her, no longer an outline but a full-colour image, even more shockingly real than the one she usually saw in the glades.

It smiled.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

She took the glades off, and the image was still there – on the desk screen in front of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head, looking at the mocking grin. The face disappeared and was replaced by an image that she hadn’t seen for months, the familiar logo of DoorWays™ – but subtly altered: in tiny print beneath it were the words:

Dissembler 2.0

A New Release

There was a moment when everything changed.

Jordan had the comms room more or less to himself these days. The telepresence exoskeleton from which Mary had worked around the world hung empty and unused. The datagloves gathered dust, and the Glavkom VR kit was good for nothing much but word-processing. As at this moment, when Jordan was laboriously hacking out an article for a newspaper in Beulah City. Even with the new press freedom there, it was hard to convince these people that tolerance was anything but weakness, pluralism anything but chaos; he was trying to put the point across in language they’d understand. “The Repentence of Nineveh”, he was going to call it, alluding to a frequently unnoticed implication of the Book of Jonah.

It was a tricky job, requiring a delicate balance between making clear that he wasn’t writing as a believer himself and showing that he wasn’t mocking anyone’s beliefs, that he thought there was a valid message in the story…He was beginning to think the whole approach was misguided and he’d do better to hit them with Milton and Voltaire and damn the consequences.

‘You’re in the revolution now,’ Cat had told him, and she’d been right. It was all more complicated and contested than he’d ever expected. We are one people. One people and seventy million opinions. And then there were all the thousands of other peoples caught up in the same rapids of the same stream that had swept away the empires of the earth. Thousands of peoples and billions of opinions. Each individual fragment of the opposition had, since the Republic’s victory, split at least once over what to do about or with that victory.

The space movement was divided, too. It wasn