The fairy statue also now makes a lot of sense. These are the fairies, the ghosts, the gods, the thing always around the corner, the thing that just walked over your grave, the beings responsible for déjà vu. They are sometimes helpful and sometimes terrifying and sometimes they make people vanish.

  He wonders if the ship showed him this to assess his reaction. Is it wondering if he’s one of the former crew, or if he’s a human, or something else? The blood sample must have been confusing. His surprise and slow understanding will have, perhaps unfortunately, answered some of its questions.

  Haunt squats down and observes, still unseen, the humans starting to cheer up again, to feel the ghost has gone away. Perhaps some of them have a half memory of an answering call from the doorway, of someone at the threshold who never entered. They’re going back to messing up their heads with mushrooms. He can see, amongst them, that hideous chimp pecking order, the thin, bullied one who keeps being cuffed by those seeking advancement. Most of the women look sad to the point of abuse. A few of the men are laying back, replete, clutching piles of mushrooms, ignoring the pleas and the grooming of those further down the ladder. The stories that are allowed to be told will be being underlined by the man in the red cape, and he will be scratching out the versions that do not suit him, and the strong ones will be loudly agreeing that they all cannot afford, given the cold equations of their existence, to listen to any other tales.

  Yes, these are human beings all right. Haunt sighs that he’s the child of these children, the inheritor of cycle upon cycle of abuse, even unto a change of platform. And yet he’s never felt sorry for himself. He’s always made the best of it. He sees his history not as something that created a condition in him, but as simply making him. And he’s all right. Better than all right. He’s great.

  And then suddenly he’s—

  * * *

  Back in the room. Standing beside his colleagues. Well, not all of them, he realises. There’s still no sign of Bob, but there’s no Huge either. “I . . . have much to tell you,” he begins. “I’ve been chosen as the messenger for an urgent communication from what I believe to be the mind of this ship—”

  “Yes,” interrupts Diana, “me too, and I was just telling Quin. I popped in and out while you were gone. Huge is in there now, and Bob hasn’t come back.”

  “We must see, we must share,” says Quin, and buzzes right into the sphere.

  “Well,” says Haunt. “That is disappointing.”

  “Did you work it out too?” asks Diana. “They’ve been around forever, hanging around alongside human evolution, but at some point, they left.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” drawls Haunt. “But I was going to attempt more in the way of poetry.”

  Huge, Quin, and Bob emerge from the sphere at about the same pico. “They’ve been on Earth, like, forever,” says Huge. “Caves by a river, bears, right?”

  “Different cave,” says Haunt.

  “Also a cave in my case,” says Diana. “I suspect there were a lot of caves.”

  “They do not understand the hives,” said Quin. “We were shown many insects, as if they all have something to do with us, including some of our most terrible enemies.”

  “Fucking shite,” says Bob. “I just saw a lot of old computers. Nothing like me. The first AI. Bollocks, I kept trying to say. Show me what I stand for, cowards.”

  “Judging by all our experiences,” says Diana, “the point of the process seems to be to work out who we are.”

  “And it understood us well enough,” says Haunt, “to at least make attempts at our personal family trees.”

  “Why did you get people?” says Bob. “When for me it was just fucking tinfoil?”

  “Perhaps because I have the memories of people, while you are your own special creation,” says Haunt.

  “They must have left in historical time,” says Huge. “I wonder if there was, like, a moment when everyone felt that magic vanished from the world?”

  They all feel there was, and they all name different years for when they’re sure that happened. It seems magic has always been leaving the world. Which, again, might be another feeling that’s been evolved into humans, that sense of something unseen always backing away.

  “They also left this ship behind,” says Diana. “I wonder if there was some sort of accident, and they abandoned ship, and it’s since repaired itself?”

  “Or perhaps it was left in case they wanted to return, or as some sort of sentinel in case human beings ever got out this far,” says Haunt, “hence its curiosity as to our natures.” He has read about similar concepts in fiction.

  “Anyway, I brought this back,” says Bob. And he drops onto the floor what must be a bit of some ancient computer, wires trailing. “I got pissed off and ripped it out.”

  They all stare at it for a moment. “That . . . was not a simulation,” says Haunt. “We were actually there, in the past.”

  They all digest that in silence for a moment.

  “If this craft can do it on a small scale,” says Diana, finally, “by changing its past, I guess it can do it on a big scale, by flipping back domino after domino until it’s taken someone to whenever it wants them. In short: bloody hell.”

  “Anyhow, this incredibly powerful spaceship/god must now have a better idea of who we are,” says Huge. “What’s it going to do?”

  “Given what it now knows about us,” says Haunt, “I doubt it’s fallen in love with humanity all over again.”

  “It was still confused by us,” says Quin. “It has not yet figured all of us out. We might still be someone helpful to it, or a threat to it.”

  “Whoever built this,” says Diana, “successfully hid from homo sapiens for millions of years. The craft must regard that species as something not to interact with, but to avoid.”

  “And it’s right to be worried,” says Huge. “I mean, the Company will take one look at this thing, claim salvage rights on all the incredible technology, and use it to exploit resources across all of time.”

  “Which would be excellent,” says Quin, and then they all repeat it, because they have to, because it’s true.

  That makes Haunt’s skull ache with the gears grinding together. It’s difficult to see himself as rebellious when he expresses ideas like this. Well, that’s an odd thought, not something that’s occurred to him before. All down to the lack of updates, of course. “Do you think,” he says, “it was entirely a good idea to say all that out loud?”

  “I think we should fucking—” begins Bob.

  Which is when it turns out they’re all inside the sphere.

  * * *

  “I now have many, many bowers of conflicting memories,” says Quin. “For it seems we just all walked into the sphere immediately.”

  “It did it to us again,” says Diana.

  Haunt’s déjà vu has also gone off again. He looks around. They’re standing in a dull, musty-smelling corridor, painted in military colours, with Earth-like gravity and air.

  “And it did that because you mentioned what the Company might do,” says Quin to Huge, visibly bristling with annoyance.

  Huge shrugs back. Which, on those human shoulders, looks incredibly rehearsed.

  “It understands our language,” says Diana, “perhaps because its builders were still on Earth when ancestral English was spoken.”

  “So,” says Haunt, “where is this?”

  “Somewhere in time,” says Diana. “And I suspect the aim will be to discover exactly what Quin and Bob are, and then render some sort of judgement on us all put together. If it hasn’t already decided that, since we all said that about the Company, we’re a threat to the craft. If that’s the case, this is probably some sort of death trap.”

  “Instead of communicating with us,” says Huge, “it keeps just making like these crude experiments. I don’t think it’s very intelligent.”

  “Will you stop—” begins Quin.

  But then Bob rushes off, shouting incoherently, and before they can say anything he’s leapt through the double doors at the end of the corridor, double doors which have some sort of military signage on them, in a language which Haunt knows to be Russian.

  Haunt and the others follow at speed. They find themselves, on the other side of the doors, in an open-plan office at night. There are hundreds of illuminated workstations, stretching as far as the eye can see, with nobody at them. A track for bringing food and drink to every station has been switched off for the night. The place smells of human work, and it hasn’t been adequately cleansed after the day. The atmosphere says humans have baked their old skin into this place for years. Another cave. Haunt has only ever been in places like this in a virtual way, armed and expecting assailants to pop up randomly, but a number of the people whose memories he’s inherited know locations like these very well.

  “It is! It’s central office,” says Bob, awe in his voice. The others look at each other. None of them have heard awe in Bob’s voice before. “This is where I was fucking born. Me and all the others. Tommy and Charlie and Bozzer and Mad Kenny.” He bounds along the aisle, looking up at big screens set into the walls. “This is where I was taught, on my dad’s knee, about the glorious squad of 1956, and how we hate the—” And there follow a lot of words Haunt would rather he hadn’t heard and yet will have trouble forgetting. “Jumpers for goalposts,” concludes Bob, a sigh of nostalgic pleasure in his voice. “The songs. A few beers. Bashing the filth after. And bashing them all online. All of them. All as hate us, all as look down on us and spit on us.”

  “Present company excepted?” suggests Huge.

  Diana has gone to a small window, obviously designed to let in just the required modicum of daylight. “I think this is Moscow. There’s the Kremlin all lit up.”

  “The home of English soccer,” says Huge.

  “You weren’t fucking there,” hisses Bob. “I was made in these machines. My childhood, my dad, my family, my work as picker, it’s all in here. The mind of the ship’s finally getting to the point with me, but it’s not close enough.” He looks upward. “I need to get back in there,” he says. “Back into the machines. You won’t get who I am unless you take us in there.”

  “It can’t,” says Diana. “We’re actually here. You’re flesh and blood. It would be like a hamster climbing into a toaster.”

  “Fuck flesh and blood.”

  “You say you had a family and a work life,” says Haunt, “and yet you also know you were made in a computer, that you’re an AI?”

  “Right. I had that because I was made to have that. You lot make it all so fucking complicated. But what it comes down to is: I remember it, so it’s real.”

  “If that were true in my case,” says Haunt, “my life, and many deaths, would be full of impossibilities.”

  “Look who’s talking,” says Huge, with a gesture toward Haunt’s chosen form which says he means it literally.

  “How can you love this place so much?” asks Diana, a serious look on her face. “Considering what was done to you here? I mean, they created you to act like a human being, from the sound of it, when, unlike Huge and myself, you weren’t born as one. They made you as something more like Haunt, a digital construct, but one designed for a life of horrors, to pretend to be a human online and conduct social warfare.”

  “Yeah,” says Bob, with a sigh in his voice, “but we called it home.”

  “If you loved it so much,” asks Huge, “how come you ended up on our ship as a balloon?”

  Bob stops dead still, and for a moment Haunt wonders if he’s going to attack Huge. If that happens, Haunt is probably the only one of them who stands a chance of stopping him. And that comes down to what the Rosebud’s judgement was concerning who’d win in a fight between Dracula and a human tiger.

  But Bob finally lets out a long breath. “I mean, thank fuck for the Company, who finally gave me a home after I’d been passed from hand to hand. It was my own fault I failed. The other side started putting out chaf. They’d get us talking to each other in endless loops, until sometimes it was just us in there. They made agents of their own, designed to get into our heads. I . . . sometimes you think someone’s your mate, and what he’s saying, it’s not quite right, but you go along with it, and the next thing you know you’re telling batch workers in a protein plant to throw off their chains. You’ve got their way inside you. And then, when central gets hold of you again, well, you’re past your sell by date, aren’t you? Packed off to a farm in the country. If only. Who you are is still useful, the shape of you is still useful, a valuable artefact, useful as a moving part, as a set of . . . responses. The trouble is you’re still conscious, still . . . what do you call it, sentient. And I never asked to be sentient, I could have done fine without, but central thought it was better in those days. So you’re a person who gets chucked from what they’re about, chucked from what they’re meant to do, from satisfying work and a life away from work that’s what you live for, and you’re put somewhere you don’t live for and didn’t ask for, and they’ve made you into . . .”

  “Oh God,” says Huge, who’s wandered a little further into the room. “That.” They’re pointing up.

  By a joist in the ceiling is a single, solitary, slightly deflated balloon, obviously a forgotten relic of some office party. Its positioning suggests that to those in these cubicles it might have become something of a symbol. Or a shared joke.

  Bob joins Huge to look up at it. “Oh fuck,” he says. “I can’t even cry.”

  * * *

  So it’s probably a good thing that a moment later they’re all somewhere else.

  Or maybe it’s not a good thing, because as soon as Haunt has realised their surroundings have changed, Quin starts . . . screaming. Haunt has never heard an insect scream before. He doesn’t feel he’s missed out. It’s the sound of whatever Quin has got in that made-up body instead of a mammalian voicebox having a terrible malfunction.

  And no wonder. Because Haunt now realises where they are, and what they’re looking at. They’re in the hills of Los Angeles, and the sky is dark with insects. They’re looking down into a valley filled with elaborate paper structures. And they’re burning.

  “It is the fire of the hives,” shrieks Quin. “We have seen it in the cellular memory, but here it is for our eyes. It is the greatest horror. Spiders. Spiders.” In the air are indeed something that resembles spiders, great drones in the livery of one of the later American federations, spraying napalm. The swarms overhead are flailing around the drones in bunches like the fists of a helpless giant. A plume of the smoke roars over them. Haunt realises that if his body needed to breathe, he wouldn’t be coughing, he’d be dead. Diana already has her helmet back on. With the smoke come bodies, thousands of them, insects with tiny mechanical devices, shreds of colour and paint attached to them, splattering across their faces, char and ichor covering them like warm rain. “My people,” says Quin. “Oh my people. They made us think. They put us to work. They used Box Curious Tabasco Purple, the first great hive, to create their first AI. And then when we built, when we tried to communicate . . . this, instantly this. There is no order here. There is only rot.” And the great wasp, covered in the flesh of its kind, curls into a ball, as if it wants to die.

  But then they’re somewhere else again. A calm, peaceful space, a shining museum of some kind. An empty hall that smells of polish. Enormous windows.

  “Is that all we were shown about them, then?” asks Bob. He still sounds shaken. It’s like his own nightmare has now been merged and connected to Quin’s.

  “No,” says Diana. “Look where we are.”

  Haunt looks around and sees a sign and knows the place from his own inherited memories. It’s the Hall of Species in Dangjin, Korea. One of the few global cooperation exercises those who contributed to him remember. Here are records of all the species that shared the world with humanity, and specimens, kept alive through infested nanobots, of the Six Species, those chosen to keep their place alongside homo sapiens as the Earth was fully colonised and enclosed by the Company’s predecessors and then by the Company itself, thank God.

  Quin slowly uncurls and moves forward, making little sounds of distress. “We have to see, we have to see.” They pass the Last Dogs, who have been returned to something close to their wolf status, back where humanity found them. There are the beloved chimps, once again dressed in human clothing. It was supposed to be a statement of their assumed sentience, which nobody had ever bothered much with, but in the end of course it was for the entertainment of human children. Further up ahead is Tagaa the whale, alone and immortal. But here, here is the last nest of Quin’s people, a simple colony, a glass wall they couldn’t see as transparent, small cameras everywhere to watch them make their paintings and build their shrines and never again have enough brains or materials to get beyond this cage.

  Quin hovers over to the glass. “The Company brought back order,” they say. “It was the Third Federation of the United States that did that to our people. The Company changed that government as soon as it could. The Company made us a good offer. We have a better life than this now. All of us do, scattered about the solar system, being of use.” They sound like they’re reading words from a script. But it doesn’t feel like the words are being forced from them. Instead it feels as if they’re considering, for the first time, the meaning of a passage in a text.