“Bollocks,” says Bob. “It’s been on our tail for the last few days.”

  “Precisely in what, for most craft, would be the sensor blind spot,” says Diana. “It’s only not a blind spot for us because I had to move a lot of stuff around after Huge created that design tsunami. This is why it must be pirates. Who are displaying an admirable grasp of classic tactics.”

  Haunt looks puzzled as Huge rolls in stage left. The craft has indeed been on their tail for days. Obviously. Why would Quin think otherwise?

  Huge flexes uncomfortably in agreement. “Hey, Quin, is there something wrong with your memory?”

  “How dare you?” says Quin. “We are fine. It is all of you who have got your memory systems back to front.”

  “Checking ship’s records,” says Diana, gesturing. Up the records come. “There you are. There’s the sensor pickup. And there’s us arguing about it. For days.”

  Quin is utterly silent and still for a moment, which is a bit of a first. The uncanny stillness of the swarm makes Haunt wonder if there is instead a problem with the shared space. But then they move again, just a little, and the voice booms once again from deep within the mass. “That is indeed what the ship’s memory says. And I have just discovered it is also the view of the memory of the collective mind we ourselves keep here. But we also back up our memory in the next world and run our moment-by-moment selves off that, and . . . the memory there does not match with what you are all saying, and it does not match our own memories here! And there is yet another disagreeing version entirely, where there was no comms issue, and we are . . . currently . . . communicating with the Company about what we have found.” The pain in the swarm’s voice is extraordinary, something Haunt has never heard before. “This is the issue I asked myself for diagnostics about. Then the root cause was not obvious because my diagnostics could not believe what was being said to them. But now the issue has become much more serious.”

  “So someone,” says Diana, “has been messing with your memory backups.”

  That strikes Haunt as being easy enough to do, with any of them. But how could it have been done remotely by the Company, given they were cut off? And why would any of them, or the object they’ve encountered, have done it? And why only to Quin, given how quickly the change would be uncovered? “That is not a very good theory,” he says. “It’s something else.” He’s thinking about that odd sensation he had when the comms went down. He had it again just now, he realises, when he returned to the shared space.

  “Like what?” says Bob.

  “Aliens!” cries Huge, rending the air, which makes them at least six centimetres taller. “Why do they do anything?”

  “Nobody ever having met one,” says Diana, “that’s all entirely conjecture. Besides, sitting on our tail is entirely what would be done by any regular ship of awful intent. Listen, all of you, I know my function is mainly to stand around like an ornamental lamp, providing both style and illumination, but I believe I am about to be bold.” She steps forward and draws with her finger a door. “Given that the sphere is the source of all our hopes and fears, I think we should take the Rosebud nearer—”

  “Which we had already done, a few moments ago, and were in the process of doing again!” asserts Quin, now sounding ever so slightly manic. “But we do not remember that in our minds here and now, just in our backup! And none of you remember it at all! And now the object is far over there again!”

  “—decant into physical bodies and deuced well explore the bitch. What do you all say?”

  There was silence. Bob slams up against the surface of Quin’s swarm, obviously intending to get in their face, but then equally obviously realises there are thousands of pointy things in there and draws back. “Right. In these other versions you’re fantasising about, did we already do that?”

  “No,” says Quin, now sounding thoroughly bemused. “And we think it is a good idea. Because we hate this thing and it scares us and the swarm will approach what scares us until it does not.” Which sounds to Haunt like the insect version of bravery.

  “Physical bodies,” says Huge slowly. “I don’t know . . .”

  Haunt wants to say that every time they encounter anything bigger than a virus Diana wants to deploy physical bodies. And they always vote her down. Because the Rosebud is designed to be their all-in-one port of call for physical world interactions. But actually . . . “I am in favour. However, I would . . . want to choose my physical body very—”

  “Bagsee the tiger,” says Bob.

  “Well,” says Haunt, “fuck.”

  “It’s agreed then. I get to play!” Diana reaches out and pulls open the door she’s made. “To the body room!”

  * * *

  The ship keeps, in the next world, everything that doesn’t fit into the tiny shell that’s its allocation of real space. Here’s where it puts rough, many-moleculed stuff. So for the ship it’s a domain of gravity and mass, a domain of items that are physically real. It’s where the ship can make such things. To access its manufacturing capabilities, the crew enter the adjoining room, the body room, a space where their everyday selves, virtual and lacking substance, can view, as if in the same room, a range of actual things, things which can be decanted into regular space if required. It’s not officially called the body room, because the Company would say bodies aren’t high on the list of things which anyone who comes in here is meant to be considering creating. Nevertheless, perhaps because nobody thought to prevent it, or perhaps because every now and then the business of space exploration requires unexpected physical labour, bodies are allowed. That, thinks Haunt, is another thing which might change if the Company actually paid them a visit.

  Right now, the body room is playing the part of a small-town British theatre of the late nineteenth century, or at least that’s what the notes that flap into their hands as they step through the door say. Haunt only knows what that’s meant to look like from media representations of it, but here’s an auditorium before them. Again, he can’t imagine that was part of the original package. He wonders, considering Huge and the forbidden image, what else the rest of the crew have been secretly up to in terms of personalising their spaces. Which perhaps would be an issue for Quin, if he weren’t so distracted, or Bob, if Bob’s generalised air of violence concerning everything didn’t dilute his every opinion, but it certainly isn’t a problem for Haunt. He’s laid back, after all. So he’s going to assume it’s all probably okay. They’re on a stage, and the seats in front of them are filled with a very still, calm audience, body after body, sitting still, all staring into space. These are the bodies that can be created. Once a selection has been made, the room will pull matter from the next world to do so.

  “Wow,” says Huge, “tough crowd.”

  “Do you see the tiger?” says Haunt to Bob.

  “Not yet, you fucker.”

  “To bagsee it you have to touch it,” hisses Haunt.

  “Do you see it?” asks Huge.

  “If I had—” begins Haunt, but then in a flash Bob is hanging in the air above a muscular humanoid tiger in the middle of row 16, his string bonking deftly onto the creature’s forehead. “Bagsee,” he says.

  “I made up that rule,” says Haunt.

  “And I like it,” says Bob. “I like it ’cos it’s the mascot of my club. My spirit animal. Oooh, I’m not allowed to say that.” Which Bob often says about things he’s allowed to say. “Shall we take a vote?”

  “I shall allow,” says Haunt, pleased at his own graciousness, “Bob to claim his prize.”

  “Where’s me?” says Diana, striding up the aisle. “Me, please could you raise your hand?”

  A woman in the back row who looks exactly like Diana raises her hand.

  Bob makes a sudden fart sound of terror.

  “You are picking a body you have designed to look exactly like you?” says Quin. They sound worried, still on the edge of disturbed but now in a whole new way. On any of the inhabited worlds of the solar system, should any of them be allowed the privilege of walking about in a physical body, the law still requires it to be one that couldn’t be mistaken for human. What Diana is doing is all kinds of wrong, but it would be beneath Haunt’s cool to join in with Quin’s disapproval.

  “I have been waiting so long to take it for a spin,” says Diana, not giving a moment’s attention to Quin’s worries. She’s looking at the woman with joy on her face, like she’s seeing her home after a long time away. She must be dealing with so much inner scolding right now. “And I am allowed to, under the rules, am I not?”

  “It’s not natural,” says Bob.

  “You’re a balloon,” says Huge.

  It’s true Bob almost continually indulges in sheer bloody bigotry, of all kinds, the sort that isn’t very fashionable these days, probably because there are so few people left alive about whom one could be bigoted. It’s only because, Haunt knows, Diana quickly and secretly filled in her own biography when they were all piped into the ship that Bob can’t misgender her. That must grate on him continually. Perhaps, given their increasing internal freedom without updates, he might soon find himself able to. Or perhaps Bob, for all his talk of wanting nothing but freedom, is not one to look beyond the edges of his enclosure. This again may be something the Company might fix were they made aware of it. Haunt of course inherited the liberal views of some of his creators, as well as the illiberal views of others. At any rate, he’s not too bothered about such things.

  “What are you wearing?” Diana asks Quin, as if none of the above has been uttered.

  Quin pauses for a moment, perhaps wondering if they should protest further. But maybe they decide they need to have everyone else onside with their own issues of memory right now, and instead they, as a mass, buzz straight over to where, suddenly, hovering by the chandelier, is a—

  “Giant wasp!” shouts Huge.

  “Oh fuck,” says Bob, “look at that fucker.”

  “You’ve given it the most enormous stinger,” says Diana. “I’m not surprised Bob is a little nervous.”

  “It is an ovipositor,” says the swarm, swirling around the wasp with, Haunt supposes, a lot of tiny ovipositor envy. “And this is not a wasp. It is a hive badge identity construct in the colours of lantern thin fire juniper smell six, the greatest of all our communities.”

  “How nice for you,” says Diana.

  “If I had got the tiger,” says Haunt, “I was thinking of giving it a leather jacket.”

  Huge rolls down the aisle, passing a series of complicated bundles of assemblers and waldos, obviously trying to decide which to pick. They all open up and display their capabilities in Huge’s direction, like Busby Berkeley is fucking Stanley Kubrick. “But no,” they finally decide. “I want something that speaks to me as a maker. As a creator of the landscapes that are us.”

  Everyone feels Quin wince. And as the swarm winces, the big wasp flutters menacingly. “We are sorry,” the swarm mutters, “we cannot help our reactions. It is how we are made.”

  Haunt has never heard any of them apologise before. Quin is obviously going through changes too. Still, he finds that a little irksome. It is how he is made also. But he remains proud of how he was made. He was fucked up in ways which now seem to him to have worked out all right. He likes his closeness to human beings. Quin seems to be apologising for things beyond any of their power to alter.

  “A former creator,” says Huge. “Better?” There’s no further comment from the wasp. “I think I choose . . .”

  And, theatrically, because after all this is a theatre, Huge pulls open a trapdoor in the floor and up springs Bob Ross.

  Or at least that’s what the curlicue of handwritten scroll that’s flitting around him identifies him as. He’s a popular artist, a painter, from the twentieth century, apparently. Haunt, despite his extraordinary knowledge of certain pretty narrow fields of human pop culture (he’s never seen Citizen Kane, but he could recite the Foundation Trilogy), has no idea who this is. “Bob Ross” carries an artist’s palette with paint in various colours on it and has a brush in his hand and a couple of handy-looking knives in his top pocket.

  “You’d better spaceproof him,” says Diana. “That hair will be hell in a helmet.”

  Quin makes another disapproving noise and again immediately apologises.

  “You can’t be him,” says Bob. “I’m Bob. It’ll confuse people.”

  “I don’t think,” says Diana, looking between them, “there’s much chance of that.”

  Haunt realises he’s the only one who hasn’t chosen. It’s difficult for him. Or at least it is without the tiger option. Quin, Diana, and Huge all once had physical bodies. Thousands of them, in Quin’s case. But he’s never done this before. He’s never seen the attraction. What does he want? Something suitably glamourous and adventurous. But what is more goth than he? A part of him wants to say there is none more goth than he. But no, actually . . .

  And that’s how, a few seconds later, the ship having drawn from its next world element supplies and the surrounding rockscape to harvest and knit together the relevant biological material and extrude it, in real space around Rosebud appear Diana, a humanoid tiger, a big wasp, Bob Ross, and Christopher Lee’s Dracula.

  Their new bodies aren’t entirely reality accurate. It’s tough to make humans and quasi-humans tiny because they’re scaled to their ship. It looms beside them. So a lot of their internal systems are sketches, and their minds are still digital, and though it doesn’t seem likely they would, they’d best not try to reproduce during this expedition. The wasp is actually a bit smaller than real wasps were. Diana is the only one of them in a spacesuit. Haunt flexes his fingers in front of his eyes. So this is how living beings exist. Probably. If they’re tiny. Every moment he’s reacting to his situation with an urge to cast himself somewhere, to keep moving, to be elsewhere and then here again, to flit back and forth as his original form could so easily do. Every moment the limited system he’s now inside stops him. He can’t even move around inside the body itself. He has to be sort of placed here, around the head. Not actually in the head, not in a sensory way. Not like when one was inside the ship. In one of these things, one is just sort of around. In the head area. It’s spooky. Not that, of course, the spaceproof bodies are feeling exactly what their physical selves should feel. Bob Ross wouldn’t have been enjoying himself out here within a few moments of the hugely dull timescale on which these things felt and moved. (Their presence inside them can speed that up a bit at least, but only a bit.) Dracula and Christopher Lee both would have had some problems with all this hard radiation. Or were both of them fictional? Haunt appreciates the distinction between actual and fictional characters, but in practice tends not to interrogate his memories about that. “Let us be on our way,” he says to the others, his voice carrying by radio to the other spaceproofed forms and to Diana’s suit link. “The craft awaits.”

  He wonders why everyone laughs. “Mate,” growls Bob, in a tiger growl which so doesn’t suit him and sounds rather more like someone declaring they’re a tiger at a children’s party, “your voice.”

  “You’ve gained a gorgeous baritone,” says Huge, their own new voice soft and calm.

  “Ah,” says Haunt, quite enjoying the sound. “Greetings.”

  “Still no sign of aggressive action from the craft,” says Diana. “Unless you count that comms blackout Quin says happened in two of the versions of—”

  “FOLLOW ME,” roars the wasp in what sounds like a mandible crushing a human face, forever. And it sets off, wings blurring meaninglessly, which Haunt supposes looks better than them just sticking out, across the emptiness toward the extraordinary black sphere.

  3

  Haunt looks around as they fly. They’re all attempting appropriate poses, Bob Ross with his paintbrush pointed ahead of him, the tiger caught in a sort of long pounce, and he himself enjoying the fact that the inertia and lack of atmosphere means his cape is billowing without any help from him. Only Diana is moving like a human would, accepting the reality of the tiny ion engines pushing them all along and keeping her arms by her sides. Do any of the others ever feel a sense of the ridiculous about who they are? They’re all like rare blooms, grown rich and strange in some greenhouse that’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to and so hasn’t been visited by the owners in years. The blooms are mutations, but even so, they’re still obedient. He’s inherited the concepts of greenhouses and blooms and especially mutants ancestrally. He’s never been to a greenhouse or to anywhere else. He hasn’t thought about greenhouses in decades. There’s a certain sort of language, a certain sort of thought, that those who made him wanted from him. And greenhouses aren’t part of it. They’re just something someone dumped into him with a load of other stuff. And so here he is, partly written and partly accidental. Here they all are. Ridiculous. Suspended. Falling toward a thing from somewhere else with only an enormous pile of inherited trivia to protect them, trivia they do not own but have adopted and wear wrapped around them as if it could possibly keep them warm.

  He’s not sure it will. When these aliens learn about who they all are, they might well start laughing too. It is perhaps the best they can hope for. But look at him, having all these gloomy thoughts, when he himself is at the heart of the adventure. Gloomy thoughts suit who he is, they provide the darkness in which his own light shines.

  With him as the hero of this story, at least the rest of the crew stand a chance of getting out alive.

  * * *

  They touch down on . . . on . . . okay, there is actually a surface here. It pushes back against Haunt’s beautifully polished shoes like his body is saying it should, though he has no experiences of his own to compare this to. It’s not as if his many creators gave him muscle memory.

  “It’s a bit scary,” says Diana. “If I look down at it, I feel like I’m falling, despite being in freefall anyway.”