‘You saw nothing, House.’

‘Ma’am?’

She wiped its caches for the last thirty seconds, substituting harmless extrapolations of the previous few minutes’ surveillance.

I was Rafael.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Like pulling one instrument out of an orchestra, memories of a single plexcore should be incoherent fragments - particularly for an individual as unusual as the late, murderous Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega, dead for one hundred years. And he had subsumed so many other Luculentus personalities, absorbing them into his vast plexcore network, trembling on the brink of transcendence, when a single human felled him . . . with the aid of Pilots.

‘Pilots,’ she said out loud.

The ones who had killed her - killed Rafael - would be long dead themselves. She considered this for nearly a thousand milliseconds, a long time for a Luculenta.

Lowering her head, she closed her eyes and immersed herself in Skein. So much data about the past was invisible, but she instantiated a flock of netSprites and netAngels to help, scouring the query-reefs, helping her to interpolate and extrapolate, to form a strong guess about what ordinary Luculenti knew, and what the peacekeepers were likely to suspect.

Pretty much nothing, was her estimate. They had buried the old knowledge too deeply.

So she did a thing to please herself, to create an ironic footnote in history, should Skein survive her intentions. Accessing the legal functions, she changed her name.

She was now Rafaella, not Rashella, Stargonier.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

A holo menu grew to one side, displayed by the house system, but offering only food. How could the poor thing understand what she really needed? There had only ever been one other person such as she was now.

And Rafaella was not going to meet Rafael’s sudden, violent fate.

Hungry . . .

Inside Lucis City, with so many people, she could find what she needed. Of course there were surveilling systems in every building, in the smartmaterial of the ground, and in the open from SatScan. That made it all the easier to get away with it, for someone of her capabilities. Peacekeepers would believe the data, believing it incorruptible.

She walked across the atrium and gestured an opening in the outer wall. Outside was the blue lawn, shimmering beneath a creamy sun in a dark avocado sky. Any of her aircars could get her to the city in twenty minutes.

High in the sky, a clear shape was soaring. She wore no smartlenses - that was so plebeian - but could still magnify the image, by accessing the house surveillance and by using coherent sound, emitted by vibrating smartmotes, to alter the refractive index of the air overhead, forming a lens.

A lone man rode in the clear hull. Gliding for fun, high above the grounds of Mansion Stargonier.

She pinged him. A Luculentus.

So hungry.

There he was, a Luculentus, élite of the élite, his mind enhanced with plexnodes: faster, more powerful than an unenhanced human . . . and succulent prey for Rafaella Stargonier, trembling on the brink of her first, panting with the knowledge of another kind of virginity she was about to lose.

While the other party knew nothing of his imminent transition.

Daniel Deighton was not born a Luculentus. Nor had he belonged to a family who aspired to upraise for their son.

His mother Liva had been poor, raised in old Schaum Crescent on the Tarquil Coast. She met his father on a trip into a hypozone, one of the receding areas of natural ecology that continued to shrink before the encroaching, centuries-old terraforming.

Shadow Folk of various clans and clades still lived there, needing respmasks to breathe outside their homes - very traditional, a dying way of life. Oz Deighton was one of them: slimeherder and biochemist, thirty Standard Years old when he met Liva. He loved the outdoor freedom, even in a region where to breathe unmasked meant lung-searing death. Yet he gave it up to marry an urbanite who could never thrive amid native ecology.

Oz and Liva opened a small store in Caltrop Pentagon, on the outskirts of Lucis City. They worked hard. Daniel was born during the first year of their marriage; and many of his earliest memories involved crawling around the shop floor, playing with bright toys, sitting in shafts of sunlight that fell through skylights.

What happened was, one of the store’s customers, a Fulgidus merchant trader who shipped goods via the Pilot’s Guild to a dozen human-occupied worlds but remembered his own humble beginnings, saw just how bright the young boy was. He recommended the mindware enhancements that first allowed Daniel to excel at his schooling.

Richer Fulgidi often did everything they could to assist their children, sometimes pushing them too far in their familial ambition. There was no talk of hothousing Daniel that way; still, his parents loved it when he won a literary prize aged fifteen for his essay on cognitive changes during the twenty-second century.

His thesis was that writing changed the way people thought. In old two-dimensional writing, ideographic languages were written vertically, alphabetic languages with vowels were written left to right, while those without vowels, such as Hebrew and Arabic (the missing sounds filled in via the reader’s interpretation) were written right to left. And the neurology was different too, like the additional right-hemisphere processing required to contextualise missing vowels.

And in the late twenty-first century, with the advent of FourSpeak holoscript for both Anglic and Web Mand’rin, the beginnings of modern cognition were evident. He traced current trends, with a diversion on new departures, such as the high-response triconic writing of the mysterious world called Nulapeiron.

On the third day of Lupus Festival, the family attended the Lucis Literary Congress where Daniel received his award, a crystal statuette. Afterwards, his parents drank far too much jantrasta-laced champagne. In the aircab home, their singing had been loud, off-key but harmonious in the ways that truly mattered.

That night, while they slept in their apartment above the store, thieves broke in.

Oz and Liva were giggling as they staggered downstairs to investigate the noise, asking each other who had let the cat in - a joke, since they had no pets. Perhaps the last sound they heard was each other’s laughter; or perhaps it was the hum of vibroblades in the seconds before death.

It was Daniel who found them later, never knowing what had woken him up, for he had slept through everything else.

The therapist who helped him afterward was a Luculentus. The bills were paid by the Fulgidus merchant trader who had first recommended mindware for the young Daniel. The man was kind, and though he had no wish to enlarge his own family, he helped with Daniel’s finances and education, guiding him.

Neither of the thieves-turned-murderers was caught. A smartatom mist and strategic scanwipes were all they needed to evade surveillance.

Pride and vengeance drove Daniel to study hard, to become ambitious, and when he applied to the Via Lucis Institute for upraise, he passed every test. One year later, he was a Luculentus.

Aged fifteen, he had written about old FourSpeak, whose name partly derived from the ability of some people to think four-dimensionally given strong three-dimensional constructs to work with, such as model hypercubes. Now, entering his third decade, his expertise became mathematical fields whose understanding required the many-dimensional and multimodal cognition that only a full Luculentus, at home with every capability Skein offered, could comprehend. Esoteric, strongly-coloured figures in hypergeometrical spaces were just part of it - a person had to feel the momentum and intensity as it varied through the figures, and taste the rightness of his logic.