Haunt, looking down, doesn’t feel exactly the same way. He finds something gorgeous in the darkness, something of winter and night and enclosure and sleep, three out of four of which he’s never experienced. It’s singing to him with a series of deep, reverberating guitar chords, or at least it is in his primal imagination.

  He makes himself look up from it again. They all start to look for a way in, but it’s pretty obvious there isn’t a door in this thing.

  Only then, slowly, whiteness appears on the surface. It’s a white line, which slowly slides into being a white rectangle. It’s definitely an invitation.

  Quin gets there first. The giant wasp rushes at the white rectangle, does a sort of organically obvious little flip, something instinctive, and is gone right through it like it’s a curtain, not a floor. They look out again a moment later. “It is a clear route inside. This lovely entrance way. This way is the way to comfort and hearth, oh gorgeous natural notch of the hive!”

  There must be, Haunt thinks, a hell of a lot of inherited memory working there to get anyone to find this familiar. “Then, obviously,” he says, “it cannot possibly be a trap.”

  The head of the wasp does a little dance in a circle which feels vaguely frustrated, vaguely insulting, just sticking out of the whiteness, then swings itself back inside again.

  Haunt sighs and steps onto the white rectangle.

  * * *

  Not having Quin’s wings, he falls, and that turns into a sort of gymnastic flip a moment later, as gravity suddenly exists beneath his feet in a completely other direction.

  The others all land with a thump beside him.

  Now, suddenly, they are in a real place with real gravity which is exactly like the Earth standard gravity which is simulated all the time in their virtual spaces on the Rosebud.

  They’re standing, the white rectangle above them, in a huge, grey, very calm open space, the walls of which are rippled like sand dunes. What is this sensation it brings with it? A stadium, some ancient inherited memory of his says, before a concert. They’re the first five members of the audience, running across the pristine grass to get to the front while it’s still light. But it will be dark soon. And then there will be magic. Magic like Haunt felt on the surface. It’s light because mysteriously vague sources of illumination hang high in the vault above them, and they add to the vaguely theatrical, vaguely religious feel of the place.

  “Laaa!” sings Huge.

  “There’s no air,” says Diana, “it’s not going to echo.”

  “But it should,” whispers Huge.

  Haunt can but agree. He’s aware of a change of light above them and turns to see the white rectangle entrance is closing. Then it’s gone into the darkness of the vault.

  “What’s this now?” asks Quin.

  Haunt looks back to floor level, where, to his surprise, something is rising out of the ground.

  It’s a tiny statue of a fairy.

  That is to say, it’s at ankle level for them, so it’s really pretty damn small. It’s made out of the same strange grey material as the rest of the room. Indeed, it’s kind of growing out of the floor. It’s got wings, a sword, and a shield. It’s impossible to tell what gender it’s supposed to be. It has a blank face under a helmet. This is surely some sort of toy.

  It takes a step toward them.

  Haunt just has time to see that at no point did both of its legs separate from the material below it, that it’s part of the floor.

  “Fuck!” yells Bob and leaps on it with his tiger feet.

  It squishes immediately down into the floor, liquid making waves as it becomes again part of what they’re standing on.

  And then they’re all suddenly flying upward, as above them the rectangle they entered through is open to space.

  As it’s always been. They’ve only just entered, only just touched down, and nothing else has happened, and yet the room has vented atmosphere into the void, blowing them out with it. The room feels odd around Haunt as he flies backward. Like everywhere he looks is squirming away from his gaze. And he’s been flooded with that awful sensation of déjà vu at the same instant he’s also been flooded with vertigo. He’s cartwheeling his arms, this body hoping to grab something as his inbuilt ion motors strain to push Christopher Lee forward rather than back.

  Quin, used to flying, or at least to having parts of them flying, moves swiftly, getting to an edge of the rectangle and throwing out a long, spindly arm which grows and grows until Diana manages to catch it.

  A sort-of-human chain is swiftly established. They wait until the venting passes, then gently push themselves back down until they’ve finally touched down on the floor.

  Where, to Haunt’s surprise, something is rising out of the ground.

  It’s a tiny statue of a fairy.

  What? That’s weird. What’s that doing here? And there’s that odd feeling again. He looks to the others. “Let me check something: does anyone know what déjà vu is like?”

  “I’m experiencing it right now,” says Diana. “And I have no idea why.”

  Huge looks tense in every muscle of their new body, Bob Ross’s face wincing. “I can’t make this body show what I want it to,” they say. “Imagine all my hands are flexing, okay? Because I’m feeling that too, and what just happened is really freaking me out.”

  “What did just happen?” says Haunt.

  “We got pushed out as we were entering,” says Diana. “I am finding that very hard to forget. And yet . . .”

  “That is again not how our backup memory recalls it,” says Quin. “I now recall multiple different versions of several things that have happened. Oh, we need nectar, for we are far from home and there are spiders.”

  “Spiders?!” says Bob.

  “Metaphorical spiders,” says Huge. “He’s talking about the weirdness of us all just . . .”

  “Having our memories changed,” says Diana.

  “It feels like more than that,” says Haunt. “The déjà vu has gone, but now . . .” He squats to look at the fairy. “It’s like someone walked over my grave.”

  “In that body, you could mean it literally,” says Diana. But she now looks tense too.

  Quin is looking urgently between them. “It is not a matter of our memories being changed. It is as if these things have all happened, and contradict each other, but we still recall them.”

  “Watch it, that rectangle’s closing,” says Bob. And indeed, overhead, it is.

  Quin quickly tells them all the different versions he can remember. “I am still getting new memory information downloaded,” they say, “from many other outcomes, most of which involve us all returning to the ship.”

  “So we were thrown out,” says Huge, “after, in one of those memories, Bob attacked that figure. This time he hasn’t. So we get to stay?”

  “Don’t remember that,” says Bob. “Didn’t happen.”

  “I . . . think I might have a working hypothesis about what’s going on,” says Diana. “I think this craft, or those who are piloting it, is holding a bunch of potential futures in reserve and then deploying them whenever it feels threatened.”

  “How,” says Haunt, “is it doing that?”

  “By entangling particles, and then collapsing those potentials at a moment of its choosing. It’s a theoretical use for time crystals which was never put into practice. You move one each from a bunch of entangled particle pairs into the future at useful intervals of time, say placing one particle ahead of you every hour, like stepping stones, and keep one of each pair with you in the present moment, and then when you want to change what happened, you measure the stepping stone particle you’ve just arrived at as you move through time, which would also determine the state of one of the twinned particles in the past, setting that past in stone.”

  “Err . . . what?” says Huge.

  “Or to put it another way, the sphere enshrouds itself in a probability wave that means should something bad look like it’s going to happen, it can shift the probabilities and either move away unseen, or, if it’s safe, it can collapse the probabilities and reveal it was ‘there all along,’ although it was only sort of there.”

  “Still not getting it,” says Bob.

  “It’s like a macro version of the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. The ship is both here and not here, and if the bad thing doesn’t happen, it decides to have been there all along, but if it does happen, then it chooses to not have been there. A totally passive but highly effective defence system.”

  “I think,” says Haunt, “we shall have to take your word for it.”

  “Thank God,” says Diana. “It’s a real headfuck which can’t really be diluted into anything digestible.”

  “And yet it fits with our experience,” says Quin, sounding relieved. “But what enormous resources would this require?”

  “Not so enormous,” says Diana. “A powerful source of energy would be needed to hold the particles apart and deploy them without them being measured. Not that ‘measured’ is the most exact term, but . . . anyway . . . You’d need a supply of photons to make the particle pairs, but they’re everywhere. And you’d need to be able to manufacture ships made of whatever this stuff is. I’m guessing it’s a metamaterial the structure of which can change depending on the state of entanglement of the particle pairs it’s employing. Hence the squirminess of it and the way it’s messing with our heads. Its nature is changing depending on when it’s first measured. Hah! It must have been manufactured in an observerless environment!”

  “And here we are,” says Haunt, “observing it and crushing fairies.”

  “I didn’t do that,” says Bob. “Not in this . . . time thing.”

  “Ah,” says Diana, “what happens in other wave forms stays in other wave forms.”

  “At any rate,” interrupts Haunt, “may I suggest from now on we all tread carefully?”

  “Yes,” says Diana, “and yet . . . the sphere didn’t just rewind and then not let us find it at all. And it let us in, as long as we’re not violent. It must be interested in us. For some reason.”

  Haunt looks around the chamber again, feeling a shiver run through him. Christopher Lee’s body is not comfortable with shivering, and neither is he. But this place is now setting something off in him, big time, something old and physical. Is the sensation merely an artefact of this real-world body? But from the looks on their faces—and now they all have them, that’s handy—the others are all feeling it too, and surely these bodies are all made differently? The feeling is close in nature, but not quite the same, to what he said out loud about his memories changing, to having someone “walk over one’s grave.” He knows, with a quick check of the archive, this is an ancient English expression. But it has its cousins in other dead languages. And in modern ones, though their metaphors are more about the movement between real and virtual worlds, and less gothic. This feeling he’s experiencing now, its close relative, is something he’s been previously aware of from the emotional inputs of some of his creators, lost names who wanted the goth they made to know the depths of their own angst. But until today he always thought it was just poetry. It’s the feeling of pacing the stage of an auditorium before an awards ceremony, of being a child about to go to bed on Christmas Eve. The magic is close by, but it is not here yet. The setting is prepared and pristine and the possibilities of the stage or bedroom have not yet collapsed. The possibilities are still infinite. There is something of that in the darkness between the spotlights, in the velvet quality of that emptiness up in the vault here, not pure black, but the space out of which possibility is made.

  He squats down to look again at the fairy. His hand is curled into a contemplative gesture worthy of Byron. He has, he realised, lapsed into one of his fugues. And yet he nearly had something there. He was so close. He still feels he is close, but he doesn’t know to what.

  “These are very knowledgeable aliens,” says Quin. “Or pirates with access to advanced technology. And we do not like their spider magic.”

  “There is one thing I do like,” says Diana. “And it’s quite an odd thing, and none of you will have realised it.” She surprises them all by unlocking the seals and taking off her helmet. After which she does a classic hair-freeing glamour head-roll. “The suit sensors told me the atmosphere in here, now it’s filled the room again, is pretty much what this body can deal with. It’s not spot on, but—” And she takes a deep breath. “Oh, it’s like natural air. I only ever tasted that once on Earth, high in the mountains. I can’t speak for how nostalgia may have influenced my senses, but this tastes even better, like my memory of that day on the peaks but . . . with childhood and . . . sort of an electricity, like after a storm . . . and now I am sounding ridiculous.”

  “Yep,” says Bob.

  Haunt doesn’t feel she is. He’s looking closely at the fairy. This material, the material the whole craft is made of, doesn’t look like what they themselves are made of. It’s irritating to look at, just a little. He puts out a finger to touch it, but then refrains. It somehow seems it might be sharp. He has something in his inherited memories about razor-blade edges. There’s an awful lot about blades in there. But why is he thinking that without even touching it? Is that normal? He has no idea whether or not these sensations are within the range of what physical bodies normally feel about different sorts of material. He looks to Huge. “Do you remember what it was like to . . . see metal?”

  It takes a little explanation, but Diana, Huge, and especially Quin, for whom the whole business of whether or not surfaces are safe is a major cultural inheritance, come to understand what he’s saying, and indeed, they all feel there’s something weird about the walls too. “We would not want to alight on it for long,” says Quin. “There might be spiders. Metaphorical spiders.”

  “Did the Rosebud’s sensors indicate anything strange about the composition of this thing?” asks Haunt.

  “Mostly carbon,” says Diana. “A lot of base metals, presumably in alloys. There are some powerful magnetic fields somewhere in here too. I don’t think what it’s made of is the issue here. For this material to be a problem for our eyes, and I believe I remember rather clearly how the human gaze actually works, this would have to be about how those minerals are arranged, how these surfaces are scattering light.”

  “Wait,” says Quin, and buzzes a little to themselves. “Ah,” they say a moment later, “we are able in this form to see, if we wish, in many other ways. We were observing only the human-visible spectrum of light because that is how the Company have arranged things for these bodies, in their great wisdom. But now we have seen in a number of other ways, higher and lower on the spectrum, and in every way we can look, these planes remain pretty fucking spidery.”

  “This thing would need a metamaterial of some sort to do what it’s doing with time,” says Diana. “The structure would have to change depending on the entanglement of the particles, on when it’s first measured. Everything also must have been manufactured in an observerless environment. It must be pulling more of it from whatever its version of the next world is.”

  Haunt has an idea. It’s a pretty scary one. But bravery is something he’s known for. “Wish me luck,” he says.

  He touches the tip of his finger to the head of the fairy.

  It does not sting him. It is not a razor blade surface. For a moment, there is nothing. In another pico he’s going to take his hand away again. Then there is the smallest of pinpricks, and a spot of blood has appeared on the fairy, and then it’s gone. Haunt realises, awkwardly, that these physical bodies are packed with information about the minds that inhabit them, that . . . did he not once hear that they replicated the minds in every cell, so the minds could always be retrieved if something remained after an accident? Is that a thing?

  They take it in turns pricking themselves on the fairy, as if it’s a game everyone has to join in, and then Haunt drops to the floor with a head full of déjà vu. “Damn it!” he yells. “It just selected the version of history in which we all did that, and now it knows all about us!”

  Quin shakily confirms the hypothesis with his external memories. “It can make us do whatever it wants,” they say.

  “It or they,” says Diana.

  And now Haunt is wondering why he, and the rest of his team, have been standing so long outside this open doorway, when all that can be seen through it is a perfectly unthreatening corridor.

  Oh. Again. He’s starting to hate this feeling.

  They talk about whether they should go through the open doorway. “It’s a trap,” says Bob. “It must be.”

  “It is also,” says Haunt, “now the only exit.”

  “Why,” says Diana, “would something or someone which has total power over us need to set a trap?”

  “Okay,” says Huge, “how about I just go first?” And Bob Ross marches for the door in a rather constipated way, as if Huge still can’t get the hang of not rolling. “I used to have one of these bodies,” they say, “but I cannot remember for the life of me how I drove it.”

  * * *

  The corridor turns out to be as harmless as it looks. And there’s another door at the end of it. The doors are the right size for them to pass through, which in shows is always a sign the aliens are human size, but in this case it either means the crew of the ship, if there is one, are also tiny, or that this squirmy metal is catering to them like it seemed to do with the air. The human race has never definitely, indisputably met an intelligent alien species. Sure, there have been a few fleeting sightings that might or might not have been something, but those belong to the delicious world of mythology. Increasingly, over the centuries Haunt has watched the human condition, the condition of actual humans, as it went from hoping and dreading alien contact in equal measure to feeling . . . he thinks as a mass they no longer feel they deserve it. That aliens would be disappointed in them. Would bring judgement on them. Alongside that, with the colonisation of the solar system has come the gradual understanding of exactly how damn far it is to the next one. Bigness comes hard to humans, Haunt knows, for reasons he can’t grasp, even now he’s in something like one of their bodies. And humans have had many ideas for how to travel beyond the solar system, and some of them might work, even, given enormous time and energy and money. But that’s just it. Humans are, in the end, stupid chimps without the attention span to achieve anything like that. And they’re only just starting to understand that. And that understanding has contributed to their spiralling embrace of death. Because there is global warming on Mars now. And there are whole moons which have vanished into the furnaces of Earth. And there is only so much water in comets. The Company is the only hope to hold it all together and try to still do something with it, to still do anything. The Company suit human beings. Human beings deserve the Company.