Nothing changed, because nothing was allowed to change. The London historical buildings continuity council made quite sure of that in its rigorous defence of heritage. Anyone was free to purchase the Lancini and start a commercial business up in it, providing it was refurbished to match the original interior plans, and that business was retail shopping. Another setback to refurbishment was the price the receivers were demanding to satisfy the store’s creditors.

Then news of possession and the beyond reached Earth. And, quite paradoxically, age suddenly became a highly motivating factor in change. It was old people who sat on the historical buildings continuity council. London’s most venerated (and richest) banks and financial institutions were mostly governed by centenarians. These were the people who were going to be the first generation of humans who would enter the horror of the beyond knowing it was waiting for them. Unless, of course, a method of salvation was found. So far the Church (any/every denomination), Govcentral’s science councils, and the Confederation Navy had been unable to provide that salvation.

That just left one possible refuge: zero-tau.

Several companies were quickly formed to supply demand. Obviously, long-term facilities would ultimately be needed to carry these customers of oblivion through the millennia; mausolea more enduring than the pyramids. But they’d take time to design and build; meanwhile the hospital chaplains remained in business. Temporary storage facilities were urgently required.

By a near unanimous vote, the historical buildings continuity council quickly approved a change of use of premises certificate for the Lancini. Zero-tau pods were shipped in from the Halo and taken in via delivery gates more used to household furnishings and haute couture. The ancient cage lifts had the load capacity to take them up to every floor. Oak floorboards, seasoned by five centuries of dehumidified conditioning, were strong enough to hold the new weight distribution pattern. Heavy-duty cabling laid in for the floor displays carried sufficient electricity to feed the pods’ power-hungry systems. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the building’s projected three hundred year lifespan, the Lancini would have made a good eternity crypt.

Certainly Paul Jerrold thought it appropriate enough when he was shown to his pod. It was on the fourth floor, one of a long row in the old Horticultural section, lined up opposite the windows. Over half of the big sarcophagi were active, their black surfaces absorbing the dust-choked sunbeams as if they were spatial chasms. The two nurses helped him in over the rim, then fussed round, smoothing down his loose fitting track-suit. He kept quiet through the nannying; at a hundred and twelve he was becoming used to the attitude of medical staff. Always exaggerating the attention they gave their patients, as if the care would go unnoticed if they didn’t.

“Are you ready?” one asked.

Paul smiled. “Oh yes.” The last couple of weeks had been busy ones, itself a blessing at his age. First the devastating news of possession. Then the slow response, the determination by himself and the others at his elite West End club that they should not become victims of the beyond. The web of discreet contacts put out, offering an alternative for those who could pay for it. His solicitors and accountants had been tasked with shifting his substantial holdings into a long-term trust that would pay for maintaining his stasis. It didn’t cost much: maintenance, rent, and power. Even if the trust was badly bungled, he had enough money in the bank to keep himself secure for ten thousand years. Then once it had been arranged, there had been the arguments with his children and their swarm of offspring, all of whom had adopted a quiet waiting policy to obtain his wealth. A brief legal battle (he could afford much better lawyers than they), and that was it, and here he was: a new breed of chrononaut.

His habitual dread of the future had faded, replaced by a keen interest in what awaited. When the zero-tau field switched off, there would be a full solution to the beyond, society would have evolved radically to take knowledge of the afterlife into account. There might even be a decent rejuvenation treatment available. Possibly, humans would have finally achieved physical immortality. He would become as a god.

A flicker of greyness, shorter than an eyeblink . . .

The pod cover lifted, and Paul Jerrold was slightly surprised to see he was still in the Lancini. He’d expected to be in some huge technological vault, or perhaps a tasteful recovery room. Not right back where his voyage through eternity had started. Unless these new, magnificently advanced humans had re-created the Lancini to provide their ancestors with the psychological comfort of familiar territory, a considerate way to ease their introduction to this fabulous new civilization built in his absence.

He glanced eagerly through the big, dirty window opposite. Dusk had fallen across the Westminster Dome. The thriving lights of the south bank glimmered brightly in front of the steel grey clouds smothering the vast arc of the dome. A projection of some kind?

The pair of medical staff attending him were somewhat unconventional. A girl leaned over the pod, very young, with amazingly large breasts squeezed up by a tight leather waistcoat. The adolescent boy standing beside her wore an expensive pure-wool sweater that was somehow wrong on him; his face was stubbly, with animal-mad eyes. He held a loop of power cable in one hand, plug dangling loosely.

Paul took one look at the plug, and datavised an emergency code. He couldn’t get a response from any net processor; then his neural nanonics crashed. A third figure clad in a jet-black robe slipped out of the gloom to stand at the foot of the pod.

“Who are you?” Paul croaked in fright. He levered himself up into a sitting position, skinny hands with their bulging veins gripping the edge of the pod.

“You know exactly who we are,” Quinn said.

“Have you won? Did you defeat us?”

“We’re going to, yes.”

“Oww shit, Quinn,” Billy-Joe protested. “Look at these old farts, they ain’t good for nothing. No soul’s gonna make them last, not even with your kind of black magic.”

“They’ll last long enough. That’s all that matters.”

“I told you, you want decent possessed you gotta go to the sects for bodies. Fuck, they worship you. All you’ve gotta do it tell them to bend over, they ain’t gonna put up no fight.”

“God’s Brother,” Quinn growled. “Don’t you ever think, shithead? The sects are a lie. I’ve told you, they’re controlled by the supercops. I can’t go to them for anything, we’d just give ourselves away. This place is fucking perfect. Nobody’s going to notice people going missing from here, as far as this world’s concerned they stopped existing as soon as they walked through the door.” His face jutted out of the hood to grin down at Paul. “Right?”

“I have money.” It was Paul’s last gambit, the one thing everyone desired.

“That’s good,” Quinn said. “You’re almost one of us already. You don’t have far to go.” He pointed a finger, and Paul’s world howled into pain.

Western Europe had hooked eight AIs in to London’s communication net, which gave him enough processing capacity to review each chunk of electronic circuitry in the arcology on a ten second cycle, providing it had a net connection. All processor blocks, no matter what their function, were datavised on a fifteen-second rota and examined for suspect glitches.

He wasn’t the only worried citizen. Several commercial software houses had gripped the marketing opportunity and offered possession monitoring packages. It consisted of a neural nanonics program which sent a continual capacity diagnostic and location datavise to the company security centre, who would alert the police if the user suffered an unexplained glitch or drop out. Bracelets were also spilling into the shops which did the same thing for kids too young for neural nanonics.