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‘Twice?’ I waved an arm.

She gave me an odd look and stood up. She glanced at the television, grimaced and walked over to the window and looked outside for a while. Then she turned, one hand on her hip, the other leaning against the window.

‘Well, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘This is a fine bloody mess you’ve got yourself into.’

There was an impatient look on her face that reminded me, suddenly and painfully, of both Annette and Myra. I recognised that characteristic stamp of the features beyond all the differences of appearance and personality, and realised what it had always meant: the irritation of a greater intelligence waiting for mine to catch up.

‘Well don’t just stand there,’ Meg said, walking past me. ‘There’s a computer icon in the other room. Let’s see what we can hack.’

‘First thing you gotta realise,’ she said, as we stood in front of the computer screen, ‘is that this is all real, but it ain’t physical. It’s a simulation. You, and me, and all of this interior space, exist physically as electrical charges in the computer of this robot we’re riding in.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that had dawned on me.’

‘OK, you never told me.’ She grinned. ‘Mind you, I doubt if I’d’ve understood any of this five minutes ago. Anyway…just so’s you don’t freak out.’

With that she plunged an arm to the elbow through the screen which had always been solid to me, and started poking about. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Got the dot sys files for us. Hah! Mine can only be accessed by you talking me up, like you just did. But yours, I can fiddle with from here…just a minute.’

She reached in with her other hand and slid something sideways before I could do anything.

‘How’s that?’ she said.

I looked at the beautiful woman in the short black nightdress. Something was wrong. She had her arms stuck right into the computer screen. I backed away a step.

‘Hold it,’ I said. ‘Just…wait. Mind the glass.’

But the glass wasn’t broken. I blinked, not sure if I was seeing right. The woman laughed.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wrong way.’ She moved her hands again and I opened my mouth again to warn her about the glass.

And she was glass, and I was glass, and all was light.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see now.’

Unlike what I experienced in the macro, my memories of the time of my enhanced intelligence with Meg are clear and vivid. I wasn’t a superhuman mind with limitations, but a human mind with added capacities. The continuity of my self was never interrupted, as it was in the strange bright company of the fast folk I met on the simulated big planet. So, even now, it’s a time I can remember, if never quite relive.

For a moment we just stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Meg said. ‘Fair’s fair. Your turn.’

‘Oh.’ I glanced at the computer, then shrugged. ‘OK Meg,’ I said. ‘Be as intelligent as you can be.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. Her face became, in some indefinable way, more focused. She blinked and looked around.

‘This is really something, init?’

‘Not really.’

She laughed. ‘Looks all a bit different, though.’

It certainly did. It wasn’t the actual appearance of things that had changed, but everything was as if tagged with an explanation. It was just obvious what the programs underlying the simulations were doing.

‘What’s to stop anybody else doing something like this?’

Meg shrugged. ‘Nothing. You cheated, sort of. But it’s got to do with the way your mind – your natural mind – worked. You gotta have a pretty good mind to handle the intelligence increase. It can’t be just bolted on. If most of the other blokes here figured out how to do it, they’d just be sort of…stoned, or tripping. They’d have to work for it, in its own time. Basically you shouldn’t be here at all.’

While she was talking – perhaps because she was talking – I was seeing what she meant, the underlying logic of her statement being filled in with additional data extracted from the machine’s memory.

The wormhole construction site really was a labour camp, and everything about it was designed to both control and rehabilitate its inmates. It allowed, indeed encouraged, co-operative work, while preventing collusion