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By Root 1158 0

puts it – to tackle the immense task of finding a way to bring about the resurrection of the stored dead. Well, Esteemed Senior, good people, that is a task which I freely admit is beyond my capacities!’ He spread his hands and shrugged. ‘Have I ever prevented anyone else from putting forward a proposal to tackle it? No! Because, as we all know, the real problem is finding a way to contain those whose help we need to raise the dead. The fast folk, those who once were human and whose minds, and motives, developed far beyond human comprehension or control. They are the ones I could awaken, if I wished. They are the ones who could awaken the human dead, who sleep in the same storage-media as they do. And they are the ones who could, in the blink of an eye, turn this planet into the kind of hell that some of us glimpsed, a hundred of our long years ago.’

His gaze focuses on Eon Talgarth, and Dee feels only the slipstream of his passionate plea: ‘Esteemed Senior! I know your memory is not so short! Strike down this claim before it does more harm!’

He looks around once more, and resumes his seat.

Talgarth sips from a glass, and lights a cigarette. He contemplates the smoke for a few moments, then leans forward, elbows on knees. His posture makes a strange contrast to the formality of his attire, and, as if noticing this, he removes his hat.

‘Means he’s talking off the record,’ Ax explains.

‘But we can hear him!’ says Dee.

‘Figure of speech,’ says Jay-Dub, from the virtual cab up front. ‘Ssh.’

Dee, somewhat chastened, looks away for a moment and notices that the crawler is idling at the end of the broad street. The subaltern machines have returned, whether in defeat or success she doesn’t know. Ahead, there’s a grassy park with some fortification in the centre. Above it she detects a cloud of gnat-like flying-machines.

‘Ah, Reid,’ Talgarth is saying, ‘you were always a fine speaker, and I hear what you say. But between you an’ me, if you catch my drift, Wilde has made a valid point about how we could do it off-planet, safe in space, like, and you haven’t answered that, have you?’

Reid raises a hand placatingly to Talgarth, who leans back and replaces his judicial hat. Then Reid turns to the stiffly dressed woman beside him and has a murmuring consultation, from which the camera – as required – cuts away. It pans to Wilde, who’s sitting with –

‘Tamara!’ Dee and Ax exclaim delightedly.

‘Good for her,’ says Jay-Dub.

Back to Reid, who’s just angrily shrugged off the woman’s hand and is walking towards the camera and the mike, followed only by the woman’s open-mouthed dismay.

‘I didn’t want it to come to this,’ Reid says, all conventional courtesy discarded as he speaks to the world, and the court only as an afterthought. ‘But enough is enough. Sure, “we” could do it in space! Tell me, who’s this “we”? If anyone has the capital to spare for a deep-space station and a ring of laser-cannon shielded against any viral programs that could be sneaked into its controls, and a foolproof procedure worked out and hair-trigger, dead-fall nuclear back-ups in place, they can go right ahead! Be my guest! I’ll sell you the fucking dead, and the demons who could raise them. Go ahead! Have another crack at immanentizing the eschaton!

‘Before any entrepreneurs of the apocalypse rush forward, however, let me give you a warning.’

He turns and points a shaking finger at Wilde, who’s observing Reid’s performance with an expression of insolent detachment.

‘Don’t follow any suggestions from this…thing that calls itself Jonathan Wilde! This thing which admits it is a creature of the robot Jay-Dub!’

He pauses and takes a deep breath, and faces Talgarth. ‘Esteemed Senior, I have a heavy responsibility before the people of New Mars. I allowed the robot Jay-Dub to continue in existence, after I had grounds to suspect that it was corrupted by the original fast folk, in the Malley Mile. It has repeatedly, in person and through its golem here – and, for all we know, through manipulation over the years of the so-called abolitionist movement – urged