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‘Indeed not. Among the struts of the platform were huge entities that we called macros. They were made of nanomachines, and they were the hardware platform for millions of uploaded minds. People here, now, call them “the fast folk”. They were by then well beyond the human, and they were building a wormhole – the one our ship came through to get here.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Ah,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘A good question. The ones around Jupiter lost interest, shall we say, in the external world. The templates from which they developed, the source-code if you like, we brought with us, as we brought the stored minds and coded bodies of the dead.’

‘Including me?’

‘Well, yes. Your actual body wasn’t coded, as far as I know. There was a tissue-sample, from which you were later – from which I cloned you. Your mind was coded, as I said.’

‘Separately from yours?’ Wilde sounded puzzled.

‘My mind and yours were copied from the same original,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘I woke up in that machine in exactly the same frame of mind as you woke up yesterday, and with exactly the same memories. And in less auspicious circumstances.’

‘My heart,’ said Wilde, ‘absolutely fucking bleeds.’

‘My enormously sophisticated software detects a degree of hostility.’ The machine’s voice was attempting irony, something outside its familiar range.

‘I hope it does,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve just admitted that clones are a separate issue from stored minds. So the presence of anybody here who looks like somebody I used to know, is no indication what-so-fucking-ever that that person is actually here, am I right?’

‘In principle, yes, but –’

‘So your remark about the clone being some reason to hope that Annette was, as you put it, among the dead was a complete lie?’

‘No,’ said the machine. ‘It does mean there’s a chance.’

Wilde shook his head.

‘The more I think about it,’ he said, ‘the more I doubt it. She never believed in cryonics or uploading or any of that shit. If she believed in anything, she believed in the general resurrection at the end of time. The Omega Point.’

‘And all that shit,’ said Jay-Dub.

Wilde laughed. ‘You still think so? Well, I’ll bow to your greater experience.’

The machine shifted slightly. ‘The end of time may be closer than you think, and worse than you can imagine.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’d rather you worked it out for yourself,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Anything I tell you about it would only put further strain on your credulity. But it does add a degree of urgency to our task.’

‘Our task?’ Wilde almost shouted. ‘What do you mean, “our”? The way I see it, I’m not Jon Wilde. I have his memories, and my body is like his was at twenty.’ He lit and drew on another cigarette; smiled through a cough. ‘At twenty, we all feel immortal. But if anyone has a claim to be Wilde, it’s you. You can keep his promises, fight his battles. I’m sure you remember one of those drunken discussions with Reid about cloning bodies and copying personalities; and the conclusion you came to: a copy is not the original, therefore…Reid had some quaintly theological way of putting it, you may recall.’

‘“The resurrected dead on the Day of Judgement are new creations, as innocent as Adam in the Garden.”’

‘Exactly,’ said Wilde. ‘That’s what I am: a new creation. A new man.’ He sent his cigarette-end spinning into the canal and jumped to his feet, stretching his arms wide and looking up at the sky. ‘A New Martian!’

‘You’re Wilde all right,’ said the machine. ‘That’s exactly how he would have reacted.’

The man laughed. ‘You don’t catch me that easily. Similarity, no matter how exact, is not identity. Continuity is.’

‘That may be,’ said the machine. ‘But everything about New Mars is a logical consequence of assuming the opposite.’

Wilde closed his eyes for a moment, then squatted down beside the robot and scratched lines in the dirt and gravel of the quay with a fishbone. He gazed at the resulting doodle as if it were an equation he was struggling to solve.

‘Ah,’ he said. He thought about it some more. ‘Everything?