‘How do I see her?’
‘As a figment. Privacy-locked, so only people I allow to can see her. You’ll need access to our local version of the aug for that. It’s deliberately very basic, but it allows us to ching and interact with figments. Can I go ahead and authorise that?’
‘Be my guest.’
Sunday voked the appropriate commands, giving her brother unrestricted access to the Eunice construct. But even Geoffrey was forbidden from tampering with the construct’s deep architecture; he could tell it things, facts that it would absorb into its knowledge base, but he could not instruct it to forget or conceal something, or to alter a particular behavioural parameter.
Only Sunday could reach in and edit Eunice’s soul.
‘Invoke Eunice Akinya,’ she said under her breath.
Her grandmother assumed reality. She was as solid as day, casting a palpable aug-generated shadow.
Sunday had opted to depict Eunice as she had been upon her last return from deep space, just before the start of her Lunar exile in 2101. A small, lean woman with delicate features, she didn’t look remotely resilient enough to have done half the things credited to her. That said, her genetic toughness was manifest in the fact that she did not look quite old enough to be at the end of her seventh decade. Her hair was short and luminously white. Her eyes were wide and dark, brimming with an intelligence that could be quick and discriminating as well as cruel. She looked always on the point of laughing at something, but if she laughed, it was only ever at her own witticisms. She wore – or at least had been dressed in – clothes that were both historically accurate and also nondescript enough not to appear jarringly old-fashioned: lightweight black trousers, soft-soled running shoes with split toes and geckopad grip patches for weightlessness, a short-sleeved tunic in autumnal reds and golds. No jewellery or ornamentation of any kind, not even a watch.
She was sitting; Sunday had crafted a virtual chair, utilitarian and Quaker-plain. Eunice Akinya leaned forward slightly, hands joined in her lap, her head cocked quizzically to one side. The posture was one of attentiveness, but it also suggested someone with a hundred other plans for the day.
‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said.
‘Good evening, Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘I’m here with Geoffrey. How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you, and I trust Geoffrey is well. Can I help you with something?’ That was Eunice to a tee: small talk was for people who had time on their hands.
‘It’s about a glove,’ Sunday said. ‘Tell her the rest, Geoffrey.’
He glanced at her. ‘Everything?’
‘Absolutely – the more she knows, the more complete she becomes.’
‘Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not in the room.’
‘My apologies, Eunice,’ Sunday answered. She did not, of course, ever refer to her as ‘grandmother’. Even if that had been Eunice’s chosen form of address, Sunday would have found it inappropriate. Eunice was a label, a name pasted onto a bundle of software reflexes that only happened to look like a living human being.
‘I found a glove,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It was in a safe-deposit box of the Central African Bank, in Copernicus City. The box was registered in your name.’
‘What kind of glove?’ Eunice asked, with the sharpness of a fierce cross-examiner.
‘From an old spacesuit. We think maybe it belonged to a Moon suit.’
‘We wondered if it might mean anything,’ Sunday said. ‘Like, was there a glove that had some particular significance to you, something connected to one of your expeditions?’
‘No.’
‘Did you lose a glove, or have something happen in which a glove played a decisive role?’
‘I have already answered that question, Sunday.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘There’s something inside the glove,’ Geoffrey said, ‘stuffed into the fingers. Jogging any memories?’
‘If I have no recollection of the glove, then I am hardly likely to be able to shed any light on its contents, am I?’
‘All right,’ Sunday said, sensing a brick wall. ‘Let’s broaden the enquiry. You used a few spacesuits in your time. Was there one that stands out above all the others? Did one save your life, or something like that?’
‘You’ll have to narrow it down for me, dear. The primary function of spacesuits is to preserve life. That is what they do.’
‘I mean,’ Sunday elaborated patiently, ‘in a significant way. Was there an accident, something like that – a dramatic situation in which a spacesuit played a pivotal, decisive role?’ As accustomed as she was to dealing with the construct – and she’d logged hundreds of hours of conversation – she still had to contain her annoyance and frustration on occasion.
‘There were many “dramatic situations”,’ Eunice said. ‘One might venture to say that my entire career was composed of “dramatic situations”. That’s what happens when you choose to place yourself in hazardous environments, far from the safety net of civilisation.’
‘She only asked,’ Geoffrey said.
‘We’re on the Moon,’ Sunday said, the model of patience ‘Did anything ever happen here?’
‘Many things happened to me on the Moon, dear child. It was no more or less forgiving an environment than anywhere else in the system. Just because Earth’s hanging up there like a big blue marble doesn’t mean it’ll save you if you do something stupid. And I was