society. Now a modal shift to something other. Complexity squared, or cubed. Where will we be in a thousand years, or six thousand?’
‘Can I shut you up, or is that Sunday’s prerogative as well?’
‘You were raised with better manners than that.’
‘Simple question: are you in my skull whether I want you there or not?’
‘Of course not. I’m not even in your skull – I’m delocalised, running on the aug. You can always override the settings, tune me out. But why would you reject Sunday’s gift?’
‘Because I like being on my own.’
The figment sighed, as if it was quite beneath her dignity to speak of such things. ‘When you want me, I will be here. You only have to speak my name. When you don’t want me, I will go away. It’s as simple as that.’
‘And you won’t be watching the world through my eyes, when I think you’re somewhere else?’
‘That would be unconscionably rude. What I see and hear is only that which the environment permits. I won’t be invading what little privacy you have left.’
‘But you’ll be talking to Sunday as well?’
‘I am one copy; Sunday has another. We were the same until the instant we were duplicated, but I have now seen and experienced things that the other one hasn’t . . . and vice versa, of course. Which makes us two different people, until we are consolidated.’ She cocked an eye to the ceiling, heavenward. ‘Periodically, there’s an exchange of memories and acquired characteristics. Remergence. We won’t ever be quite the same, but we won’t diverge too radically either.’ She moved a hand closer to his, but refrained from touching. ‘Look, don’t take me the wrong way, Geoffrey. I wasn’t sent to torment you, or to make your life a misery. Sunday had the best of intentions.’
‘I’ve heard that before.’
‘You two are so very alike.’ She returned her gaze to the window, a smile lingering on her face. In the time that Geoffrey had been standing on the observation deck, the thread-rider’s relentless descent had brought the Earth closer. The horizon’s curvature, though still pronounced, was not as sharp as when he had arrived at the observation window, and he could begin to discern surface features that had not been visible before. There, not too far from the anchorpoint, was the crisp white vee of a ship’s wake – he could even make out the ship itself, where the white lines converged. It was probably the size of an ocean liner, but it looked like a speck of glitter. He could also distinguish smaller communities – towns, not just cities.
‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Eunice said. ‘Not just the world, but the fact that we’re here, alive, able to see it.’
‘One of us is.’
‘I never thought I’d live to see the snows come back to Kilimanjaro. But things are improving, aren’t they? Green returning to the desert. People reinhabiting cities we thought were abandoned for good. It won’t ever be the same world I was born into. But it’s not hell, either.’
‘We shouldn’t be ungrateful,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If the world hadn’t warmed, we wouldn’t have made our fortune.’
‘Oh, it’s not that simple. Yes, we were there at the right time, with the right ideas. But we didn’t just luck into it. We were clever and adaptable. It’s not as if we depended on some drip-feed of human misery to make our happiness.’
It was true, he supposed – or at least, he was willing to let her believe it. Not that anyone could ever know for sure. You couldn’t rewind the clock of the last hundred and fifty years, let the Earth run forward with different starting conditions. The Cho family had made their money with the self-assembling, self-renewing sea walls – prodigious, damlike structures that grew out of the sea itself, like a living reef. When the oceans had stopped rising, the same technologies enabled the Cho industrialists to diversify into submerged structures and mid-ocean floating city-states. They grew fabulous Byzantine marine palaces, spired and luminous and elegant, and they peopled them with beautiful mermaids and handsome mermen. They were the architects and artisans behind the aqualogies of the United Aquatic Nations.
The Akinyas had done well out of the catastrophe, too. Like elixir to an ailing man, their geothermal taps, solar mirror assemblies and lossless power lines had given the world the gigawatts it needed to come through the fever of the twenty-first century’s worst convulsions. That artifice with deep-mantle engineering, precision mirror alignment and super-conducting physics had provided the basic skill set necessary to forge the Kilimanjaro blowpipe.
Accidents of geography and circumstance, Geoffrey thought. The Akinya and Cho lines had been bright and ambitious to begin with, but brightness and ambition weren’t always sufficient. No matter what Eunice might think, blind luck and ruthlessness had both played their parts.
‘I don’t know if we have blood on our hands,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if we’re blameless either.’
‘No one ever is.’
‘Except you, of course. Sitting in judgement on the rest of the human species from your castle orbiting the Moon. Laughing at us from beyond the grave.’
Her voice turned stern. ‘Being dead isn’t a laughing matter for anyone, Geoffrey. Least of all me.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘Why did I do
‘Bury those things in Pythagoras.’ He shook his head, maddened at his own supine willingness to accept this figment as a living, thinking being. ‘Oh, what’s the point? I might as well interrogate a photograph. Set fire to it and demand it tells me the truth.’
‘As I think Sunday made adequately clear, I cannot lie, or withhold information. But I also can’t tell you anything I don’t know.’
‘So you’re fucking useless, in other words.’
‘I know a lot, Geoffrey. Sunday’s packed a whole lifetime’s worth of public scrutiny in me. And I’d tell you everything, if I could – but that would take another lifetime, and neither of us has
