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‘Here you are,’ he said.

He passed me a sliver of plastic, like a microscope slide.

‘Your tissue-sample,’ Reid smiled.

I looked down at the transparent slide, in the robot’s vision. At its centre was an almost invisible speck of skin, sealed in a bubble of nitrogen; and a code chip.

‘So this is the real me,’ I said. ‘What’s on the chip?’

‘Your original memory,’ Reid said. He walked to the other pod, and passed over another slide. ‘Meg’s, you see, has none. Of course, yours is no bloody use any more – couldn’t be revived without the fast folk. But anyway, it’s yours.’

I stored the slides away in a compartment of the shell.

‘As for these blanks…’ Reid said. He tapped a code into each pod’s computer. The fluid in the pods became milky, then murky, as the tiny machinery of dissolution, the nano pirhanas, did their work. Even the blood-cells were torn down to molecules before they could stain the water. It was over in minutes, the pods flushed clean.

‘Thank you,’ I said, leaving.

And fuck you, mate.

We’d earned a fortune building the canal. It was still just possible for a robot, known to have a human mind, to trade on its own behalf. I don’t know if anyone knew I was the last of that kind. We cleaned out the bank-account and bought a land-crawler and a load of gear – tools, machine-tools, comms, nukes, nanotech, VR software, cloning-kits, all the processors we could get. I loaded them on the truck, plugged myself into the cab and set off, through the streets and out of the city on the opposite side from the Stone Canal. Ahead lay the planet’s semi-arid wastes, its dry sea-beds, its relict or extinct life-forms’ dry bones and drier exoskeletons. Behind us, the city’s rising towers shrank behind the horizon.

I switched to a virtual reality module that had me sitting driving, with Meg on the seat by my side. I grinned at her. She had been silent, unconsulted, through all that purposeful activity.

‘What are we going to do, Jon?’ she said.

I took one hand from the wheel and waved, taking in the illusory, grimy realism of the cab. There were cigarette-burns on the dash. ‘You can really get into those seamless virtualities,’ I said. ‘This is better than the flesh, my darling.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said. ‘But what are we going to do?’

‘We’re going to drive around the planet,’ I said. ‘And while we’re at it, we’ll hack through the gates of hell.’

I told her what I meant, and she went along with it. Any woman I ever knew, and any man for that matter, would have pleaded with me to change my mind. Say what you like about succubi, they are loyal little fucks.

Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell. Overhead, the first incoming comets made dots and dashes in the sky.

We rolled around the planet more times than I care to count, and the planet rolled around its star a hundred times before the tower was built: a couple of centuries, Earth reckoning. The canals spread, other settlements grew up. The population grew; slowly, as immortal populations do. We discovered mineral deposits, fossil-beds, coal. We sold the information, and sometimes the materials. Prospectors hitched lifts, paid for in odds and ends of stores and clothes that we bartered with other travellers.

Our bank-account stayed open, and filled up. To replenish our supplies we traded indirectly, through front companies and dodgy intermediaries. We talked to robots often, people seldom. The attitudes Reid had warned us about became not just entrenched in the culture, they became its foundation stone. When it became fashionable, among the frivolously rich, to clone ‘blanks’ from the spare tissue-samples and equip them with robot minds, the distinction between real people and machines was only deepened.

Except among a dissident minority, who called themselves abolitionists. Some preserved the ideas of an ancient anarchist agitator, Jonathan Wilde. His memory, they assured each other, was immortal. We steered well clear of them.

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