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She stood up and walked through to the other room. Her feet were bare, her shift was a vapour, but she walked as if she were in high heels and a narrow skirt. I don’t know how she did it, although I was giving it close attention. I followed her as far as the frame, which she passed through like a ghost, and which caught me like a Venus fly-trap catches a fly. Outside, in the black vacuum, her image faded just beyond the brush-tips of my fingers.

‘Work,’ smiled her starry lips. ‘See you soon.’

I clamped on to an I-beam. The familiar sooty taste of polycarbon seeped through my grippers. I reached out for the assembly node and zoomed in on it. The mechanism had warped under excessive heating. Carefully, I unkinked the wave-knot and re-calibrated the junction, then let the pieces snap back together. Sealing the node, I released one gripper, extended it, gripped, released the other and brought it over, then repeated the step several times, like a bird moving along a perch.

At the next node I had to do some instant refining, playing a laser over a chunk of meteoric scrap until the metals in it melted, then reaching out and spinning the glowing mass into the cage-shape I needed, and fitting it into place around the assembly node.

On to the next…

What the fuck am I doing?

I froze, clinging to the beam as the vertiginous question spun my mind around. My vision shifted uncontrollably, the deep star-fields suddenly becoming visible in all their intense immensity, their component points of light appearing and disappearing as the spectrum of my sight ranged up and down the wavelengths.

With an effort of will I steadied myself. The bad moment passed. I looked down again at the node on which I was working, surveying its complex, microscopic mechanisms and recognising them without any memory of having seen them before. I had been working with a journeyman’s offhand assurance, until it had all seemed strange. Evidently I’d been sleepwalking through these processes countless times already, and like an awakened sleepwalker on a ledge, I’d panicked and was in danger of falling.

Nothing for it but to get on with it. There was a mental trick to it, a detached attention that let my hands and instruments work while my mind looked on and intervened where I could see something which my programmed, or conditioned, reflexes overlooked.

After a subjective hour or so of this, an instruction set manifested itself in a corner of my sight. It told me what to do, and where to go. I let go of the beam, jetted a brief burn (…toes thrust…) then, after a soaring leap across a kilometre of emptiness, another flare in the opposite direction (…heel strikes…) and caught the destination girder.

I had just fastened myself to it when a macro rose in the space before me like a whale in front of a dinghy. I clung, panicked and giddy again, to the girder as the glowing surface streamed by, metres away from my facial lenses. When it had passed I still clung, staring at the after-images. I didn’t dare look up.

‘Snap out off it, mate,’ said a harsh but friendly voice. It was a man’s voice, a London accent. I looked around (i.e., I had the sensations of turning my head, but all that happened was that my visual field swept back and forth) and spotted another robot working on a girder about a hundred metres away. It raised an arm and gave a brief wave, then returned to its task.

I began my own, following the instructions, and when I had attention to spare I devoted some to working out how I might talk back. I imagined myself hailing it. I went over that simple act again and again in my mind, like a shy kid in a strange playground. By inspecting myself at the same time I recognised eventually a tiny dish antenna on my hull pointing in the relevant direction whenever I took a look at the other robot and thought about calling to it.

So I looked at it and said, ‘Hi!’ I could feel my lips move as I did so, an unsettling sensation that produced a momentary grotesque image of a machine with a mouth.

‘Got ya, Jay-Dub,