‘Of course,’ Rollo said. ‘And sabotage is not our preferred option anyway. We’ll be campaigning hard to outlaw side-loading everywhere; smearing shit over your customers is just a short-term tactic. Eventually you’ll find a way to block us out, and even if Zendegi and Eikonometrics go bankrupt in the process, your intellectual property will just end up with someone else. But we’re starting early, outside the law, because it’s the only way to nip this atrocity in the bud: to slow the growth of the practice by making it clear – from the start, to everyone – that doing things this way will attract a penalty.’

‘Atrocity?’ Nasim scowled. ‘If you’re such a warrior for the rights of conscious beings, stop pissing around with Zendegi and go derail a massacre somewhere.’

The lights on the Ferris wheel snapped on; some of the Proxies beneath them clapped and cheered.

Rollo looked back at Nasim calmly. ‘So you’re happy with your games modules; your conscience is clear. Fine. But do you really think it will stop there? If there is no law, if there is no line drawn, what makes you so sure that it’s not going to end with software that even you’d call conscious? With no rights and no freedom. It might not require anything that sophisticated to churn out shoes or notepads, but what about aged-care services? Or child-minding?’

Nasim’s skin crawled at his use of that phrase, but she still didn’t believe that he knew about Martin.

‘Every time you attack us,’ she said, ‘we use tens of thousands of side-loads as part of the defence. How does that grab your conscience?’

Rollo betrayed no surprise or anguish, but his icon wouldn’t necessarily display every emotion that crossed his flesh-and-blood face. After a while he said, ‘That’s disgusting, but it’s not going to change anything.’

He looked down at the Proxies. ‘How long will it be before the process is so cheap and simple that you’re using side-loads in every crowd scene? Computers are never going to rise up and enslave us, like the idiots in Hollywood portrayed it – or rescue us, like the idiots in Houston believe – but you’d happily send our most human-like mind-children straight into a hell of meaningless servitude and fragmented consciousness that we built for them all by ourselves.’

Nasim said, ‘The only thing that’s going to come close to hell for side-loads is if we have to keep using them to screen out your shit.’

Rollo met her gaze. ‘These are our terms: you can keep Virtual Azimi and anything else that’s limited to vision and motor skills, but you have to announce an end to the use of all other side-loads. If you don’t make the promise within seven days, and honour it within another seven, the attacks will resume.’

Nasim nodded curtly, to signal understanding. She felt a grudging respect for him, for at least setting conditions that were probably survivable; the deadlines weren’t impossible, and with the sports Proxies untouched Zendegi could still remain afloat. She said, ‘It’s not my decision, but I’ll pass on the message.’

Rollo held out his hand and turned his thumb down. The whole postcard vanished with him.

Nasim removed her goggles and waited as the wall came down around her. When she picked up her notepad from the table beside the ghal’e Falaki called her immediately.

‘We couldn’t trace your visitor,’ he said, ‘but I do have some good news.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’ve got solid evidence from the supervisors of a process being corrupted at one specific provider. I’ve already passed the log files on to their security people.’

‘Which provider?’ Nasim asked.

‘The FLOPS House.’

That was in Europe somewhere. Nasim took her notepad away from her ear to glance quickly at the screen; the machine had already matched Falaki’s words to an address book entry for the company, in Holland.

‘It’s very likely that this wasn’t the only site breached,’ Falaki warned her. ‘Still, it’s a start.’

‘Absolutely.’ If it was an inside job from within the FLOPS House, there was a chance of seeing at least one of the saboteurs arrested. Grab a thread of the conspiracy and good police work might unravel the whole thing.

‘What do you know about the CHL?’ she asked Falaki. He and Bahador had been monitoring the whole encounter.

‘They haven’t shown up on our radar in the past,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve set some things in motion, but right now we have nothing on them that you won’t get from ordinary public searches.’

‘Okay.’

Falaki wasn’t expecting anything back from the FLOPS House for at least twenty-four hours. She thanked him and hung up the call.

Nasim set her own knowledge-miner sorting through the Cis-Humanist League’s net presence; it was mostly text, and mostly on untraceable torrents. Rollo had been exaggerating slightly when he said they went back decades, but they’d been in various fora for fourteen years. Maybe Falaki would manage to trace the group’s origins to some founders who’d been less careful about protecting their identities in the days when their agenda had been a lot more abstract.

Nasim needed to speak to the boss, but she lingered in the ghal’eha room, trying to decide exactly how she’d brief him. This wasn’t necessarily a fight to the death for Zendegi; their enemy had offered them terms of surrender that wouldn’t cripple them. And she could already see the comedians on Bloomberg: ‘Ever had a shit of a morning?’ Swiftly stopping the attacks – and appeasing Shahidi as part of the bargain – might be the only way to keep the share price from going into freefall.

Accepting the truce need not mean the end of their current growth spurt. Zendegi had yet to sign up a star Indian cricket player, but equally, Cyber-Jahan had failed to convince anyone that their latest version of motion-capture – spiced up with myoelectric recordings and marketed as ‘Muscle Memory’ – was a serious rival to side-loading. The Indian equivalent of Virtual Azimi could still belong to either one of them.

If they renounced more sophisticated side-loads though, that would be the end of the vision splendid, where every game developer released a special version first, exclusively for Zendegi. And Martin was not anyone’s idea of a sports star; the board would pull the plug on his side-loading immediately.

The boss would want a transcript of her conversation with Rollo, but there was no way in the world that he was going to view the whole VR recording. So she might be able to get away with spinning her impression of the encounter, making the offer of the truce seem less trustworthy – and making him want to dig in his heels against the extortionists.

Nasim closed her eyes and tried to see the way forward. It had been thirty years since she’d felt a strong urge to pray to anyone or anything, but for a moment she came close to begging for a miracle…

Not from God, but from the Dutch computer crime squad.