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shirts and look like they are on their way to a party. They brush invisible dust from their lapels, look at each other, blinking, as if they had just woken up from a dream.
    As he watches them, there is a sharp crack inside him. Another self hatches like a bird from an egg. I smile at the confusion in my other selves’ eyes as we shake off the heavy shell of the inspector.
    Next to me, the chen starts clapping.
    ‘Wonderful!’ he says, grinning like an excited child. ‘Wonderful!’
    We all look at him. He alone is unchanged, a small grey figure against the firmament white. Something is wrong. I look for his Code in the vir trap we have created and find nothing.
    The chen wipes his eyes and his expression becomes a serious mask again. Now that the xiao of my Sobornost disguise is gone, it is easier to look at him. A short, stocky Asian man with unevenly cut grey hair, barefoot, wearing a monkish robe. His face is younger than his eyes.
    ‘A vir that emulates the firmament,’ he says. ‘I did not think such a thing possible. And all this drama, just for me, just to steal my Codes. Better than going to the theatre. Very entertaining.’
    The six of us take a bow, all together. ‘Surely you can figure out how I did it,’ we chorus. I can see it in my other selves’ eyes: trying to find a way out. But the vir is sealed around us, tight as a bottle.
    ‘Of course,’ he says, looking us up and down, hands behind his back. ‘I remember the first sunlifter factory you broke into, a century ago. So you did it again. The old compiler backdoor trick. Basic cleptography. The only part I can’t figure out is where you got my old friend’s Codes. From Joséphine? I will need to have a word with her.’
    I am rather proud of it: hacking the ultimate trusted computing platform, by inserting a few choice things into the hardware of the Immortaliser when the sunlifter factory compiled it and its sister ships, four minutes or so ago in the Experiment reference frame.
    So of course, I also made an escape route.
    ‘A gentleman never tells. And there is a reason why classics are called classics,’ we say, a slight disharmony in our chorus now as we diverge.
    There. The vir is sealed tight like a bottle, but he missed one of my firmament back doors. Just have to keep him talking .
    ‘Indeed. And betrayal is one of them, isn’t it? The oldest of them all.’ He smiles a thin smile. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’
    I didn’t . But we only shrug.
    ‘It was always a gamble. That’s what I do.’ We gesture at the whiteness. ‘But you are gambling, too. This whole thing, the Experiment. It’s just to distract the others, isn’t it? You don’t need it. You already have the Kaminari jewel. The key to Planck locks.’
    He raises his eyebrows. ‘And can you think of anyone else who deserves to have it?’
    We laugh. ‘With all due respect, Matjek,’ we say, ‘you should really leave jewels and locks and keys to the professionals.’
    ‘Respect. I see.’ He crosses his arms. ‘You treat this as a game. Do you remember the first time we met? I told you it was not a game to me.’
    That was not the first time we met. But it’s good you don’t remember that .
    ‘Then why is it,’ we ask, ‘that I always won?’
    One of us – I’m no longer sure who – activates the escape protocol. The others self-destruct, flooding the white vir with noise. The software shell that contains my mind dumps its contents into thoughtwisps, launches them from the Immortaliser at other raion ships.
    I jump from node to node in the Sobornost communications network, splitting, merging, sending out self-sacrificing partials. The chens come after me, tenacious, relentless. But it doesn’t matter. A few milliseconds and I will reach one of my getaway ships, beautiful Leblancs built by the Gun Club zoku, with their warm Hawking drives, ready to make my getaway at the speed of light—
    Then the raions start self-destructing. The