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Already I thought of them as the enemy.

The machine which I inhabited floated into the great web, attached itself to a section of one of the strands and began to work with the smallest fingers of its fingers (should I say, the decimals of its digits?) on something at a node of several strands. The object of its toil was below the resolution of my present sight. I disengaged from the frame and stepped back. Through the window I could see everything speeded up – the fingers a blur of motion, the shapes within the web flowing and flying.

I walked into the kitchen. Taps turned, water boiled; the coffee-jar was labelled ‘Nescafé’ and its contents tasted better than I remembered. A cigarette-lighter and an open pack of Silk Cut lay on the surface beside the sink. The heat from the flame, the tumbling curls of smoke, the nicotine rush were all as good as real.

I took a long drag and breathed it out with an enjoyment that had a certain unaccustomed purity. One thing to be said for being dead: you don’t worry about your health. I wondered what would happen if I set out to damage everything in sight, including myself. Once, when I was about thirteen and reading Bishop Berkeley’s insidious speculation, I’d formed the mad notion of testing it, of scraping at the surfaces of the world to expose the grinning skull of God…here, that insanity might be possible – did the simulation extend to the interiors of things, to the interior of myself? – but I didn’t care to try the experiment. Intellectually, I had no difficulty in accepting the possibility that I was a simulation – uploading had been speculated about for long enough, and it seemed an inevitable consequence of the deep technology which Myra had told me about. Nanotechnology and strong AI could emulate a human mind, I’d never doubted that.

Emotional acceptance was something else.

I carried the coffee and cigarettes into the lounge and sat down on the sofa. After a moment of hunting around I discovered a remote control for the television, lying in a corner of the room. I settled down again and keyed the first channel. When I saw what came on I almost dropped the coffee.

The face that appeared on the screen was Reid’s. He looked physically younger than he had the last time I saw him – the last time I (really) saw anything – but spiritually older. I have no other way to describe it; the whole set of his expression conveyed a hard-won wisdom and experience that would have been startling in some aged sage, and were doubly so on the familiar lean features of his more youthful self.

‘This is a recording,’ he said, and smiled. He waved a hand at the room in which I sat. ‘And so is this, as I’m sure you suspect by now. The fact that you’re watching this means you’ve returned to consciousness. Video, ergo sum, or something – anyway, welcome back. It can’t be much fun being a flatline, which is what you’ve been until now. You’ve been running on programming, habit and reflex: a virtual zombie you might say, and now some unpredictable but probably inevitable combination of circumstances has woken you up.’

He paused. ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, or if you find it disturbing, please key the second channel.’

I made no move.

‘Good,’ Reid resumed. ‘I knew you had it in you – you had to be pretty sane and tough to get your head frozen or your brain scanned, or whatever it was you did to end up here. So I’ll go on giving it to you straight.

‘The date is –’ (a slight hiatus, a glitch of editing software) ‘– March 3rd, 2093. This may come as a surprise, if you’ve figured out what’s going on – surely, you think, not so soon? Welcome to the Singularity. What you’re seeing outside is the work of billions of conscious beings, living and thinking thousands of times faster than you. The entities crawling among the struts of this structure are entire civilisations of humanity’s descendants. Those macro-organisms, or macros, as the humans around here call them, are constellations of smart matter – what we used to call nanotech – each of