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photosphere is full of antimatter blooms as they burn my bridges, sacrifice billions of gogols to contain me like a virus. The destruction spreads like a wildfire, until there is only one of me left.
    I try to hide in the firmament processes, become a slow, reversible computation. But in vain: they hunt me down. The chens and the engineers come, swarm over me like lilliputs over Gulliver, trapping me.
    Then the mind-blades come, invisible and hot.
    They take me apart. The metacortex goes first: the ability to self-modify to sculpt my neural matter. Fixed, dead, no longer changing personalities at will, imprisoned. But they make sure to leave the knowledge that something is gone.
    A voice asks questions.
    I don’t answer and die.
    A voice asks questions.
    I don’t answer and die.
    A voice asks questions.
    I don’t answer and die.
    Finally, the blades touch a trap I built inside myself a long time ago. My secrets catch fire and consume themselves in my head.
    In the end, I am naked, in a cell made of glass. There are phantom pains in my mind where the god parts have been cut away. There is a gun in my hand. Behind each of the four walls, there is somebody else, waiting.
    Cooperate or defect ?

4
    TAWADDUD AND ABU NUWAS
    While Duny waits, Tawaddud puts on a new face in her bedroom.
    She looks at her image in the mirror. The fantasy she created for Mr Sen is gone, replaced by a plain woman in a white body stocking that does not flatter her broad hips. Unusual ? Not today . She runs her fingers through her unruly hair, refuses to do anything about it and chooses a short, hooded cloak to hide it. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts on her mother’s old athar glasses. Somehow, it is easier to look at the world from behind the round golden lenses.
    She picks up her doctor’s bag and joins Dunyazad at the balcony of the palace’s apartment wing, to wait for the elevator. Her sister gives the glasses a disapproving look.
    ‘They do not really suit the shape of your face,’ she says. ‘Mother never had much taste, poor woman. I trust you will be extra charming to make up for the lack of style.’
    You never knew Mother at all , Tawaddud thinks. And you do not know me .
    She decides to ignore Duny’s barb. She has spent the whole day indoors, and it is good to feel the breeze and the heat of the afternoon sun.
    Her father’s palace is like a hand sticking out of the Gomelez Shard, resembling a climbing plant on a giant wall: five tall buildings that were once vertical but are now horizontal, overgrown with walkways, joined together with extensions, balconies and hanging gardens. Somewhere above, there are faint echoes of moaning jinn music. Heavy smells of food drift up from Takht the gogol merchant’s palace, mingling with the warm wind. Below, overhanging minarets, snaking platforms and vertical streets cling to the Gomelez Shard like ivy. The city itself is lost in haze far below, glints of purple, gold and blue within a shroud of white mist.
    The Shard is a cylinder segment almost two kilometres high, a piece of the orbital O’Neill colony where her ancestors lived, until it fell from the heavens. The impact broke its hull – millions of tons of diamond and metal and strange pre-Collapse materials – into pieces like an eggshell, into five Shards sticking out of the bedrock. They reach towards the sky that was lost, guarding Sirr the hidden, Sirr the blessed; the last human city on Earth.
    There is a cough behind her.
    ‘Please excuse my sister,’ Dunyazad says. ‘She is a dreamer, and sometimes I have to be firm to get her to notice the real world.’
    ‘The Aun know Sirr needs more dreamers, in these hard times,’ says a male voice, low and soft.
    Tawaddud turns around. A man stands on the balcony with them. He is small and slight, shorter than Tawaddud, and looks tired: his skin is pale and tallowy. He is dressed in rich black-and-silver robes that emulate a mutalibun’s traditional garb but are made from