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‘Ah,’ said Meg. ‘That’s the root of this idea you’re talking about. Because if people really saw their selves in the machines as…themselves, they’d feel guilty about it. So they don’t!’

‘Smart,’ Reid conceded. ‘But there’s more to it than that…shit, I feel the same way myself sometimes.’ He tilted his head, squinting at us as if to make the illusion of our presence go away. ‘That’s…I guess that’s why I never uploaded, never went into the macros. I knew lots of people who did, and they kept telling me it was wonderful, but I could never get over the suspicion that they were all flatlines.’ His tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘No more capacity for feeling than a weather simulation has for raining.’

‘You must’ve really bought into the old anti-AI arguments,’ I said. To me the whole thing sounded as stupid as solipsism.

‘Maybe,’ Reid wryly acknowledged. ‘Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using computers longer than anybody else alive.’

‘So you don’t think Jon’s human?’ Meg asked. ‘Or me?’

‘Hah!’ Reid said. He jumped up, and ground out his cigarette-butt. ‘Of course I do. I’d just like to meet you both – in real life.’

He climbed into the helicopter and turned to wave.

‘See you soon.’

‘Real soon now,’ I said.

That night I felt Meg’s tears on my shoulder.

‘What is it?’

She rolled away from me a little and caught me in her serious gaze.

‘Do you think like that?’ she asked.

‘Like what?’

‘Like Reid said. Like people do.’

‘Of course not.’ I snorted. ‘It’d be pretty bloody stupid of me to think I’m not thinking.’

‘And what about me?’

‘You?’ I pulled her close again. ‘I don’t think like that about you, either.’

‘You did once.’

‘That was different. I didn’t know any better.’

She laughed, unexpectedly reassured.

‘Neither did I.’

As well as the work on the canal, I was working on a problem which increasingly intrigued me: trying to understand what it was I had learned in my last encounter with the macro. It troubled my mind like a half-remembered dream. It intrigued Meg too; she had never been in the macro, and had an endless interest in anything I could tell her about it. She had a greater affinity than I for the posthuman world; not surprisingly, as she was far more a product of it than I was.

In our virtual valley we built a virtual machine. I would strive to recall some aspect of the puzzle, and Meg would scan our common operating-system for traces of the consequent processing. Then she’d reach in and extract a piece of machine code, and provide it with an interface. We’d then wander around clutching whatever resulted, looking for a place to slot it in. What was really – so to speak – going on was that my chaotic recollections were being put into order. When I experienced the robot’s body as my own (the mesh frame still stood in our front room) I increasingly felt what I’d learned as something I was about to understand, rather than something I almost remembered.

As the months went on, the ziggurat we built loomed over our rustic valley like an oversized electricity pylon. We called it ‘the installation’, and with all our enhanced intelligence we never suspected it might be exactly that.

The great work was done. I stood on the bank and watched a couple of digging-machines break through the crumbling wall of soil that separated the merely damp bottom of the Stone Canal from the city’s already partially flooded canal system. For a moment they were swamped by the surge of water, then, dripping, they hauled themselves out. A ragged cheer went up from the opposite bank, where a small crowd had gathered to watch. I felt a radio ripple of robotic satisfaction from the other construction-machines around me. Then, indifferent again, already signalling their availability for another contract, they stalked or trundled away.

Reid was among the human crowd. He made a short speech, of which I didn’t bother to catch more than snatches. The crowd, no doubt inspired by his proclamation of the historic importance, etc., dispersed. We stared at