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it was encased within a bulky surgical clamp. Beneath the head, enclosing the neck, was a tight metal collar separating it from the rest of the machine.
    Oleg surveyed the beaked and goggled face with deep dread and apprehension.
    “Rhawn will speak to you now,” the robot said.
    “Thank you, Rhawn, for agreeing to listen to me,” Oleg said hastily. “I have come from Jupiter, with …”
    “I know where you came from, you spineless little shit.”
    Oleg bristled. He had listened to enough recordings to recognise the voice as belonging to Rhawn, despite a deliberate machinelike filtering.
    “I …” he began.
    “Stop cowering. What are you, bacteria? A vegetable? The Totalists horrify you, but you are the puppet, the thing with no free will.”
    “I only need an answer.”
    “I studied your background, when I knew you were approaching. Oleg the failed artist. Oleg the supine instrument of market forces. Oleg the pliable little turd, shat out by Jupiter. Why do you imagine your insolent little piss-streak of an offer would be of the remotest interest to me? Why should I not have your suit drilled through now?”
    “My masters thought …” His throat was as parched as the sunlit Playa itself. “They didn’t know that you’d left the Collective. They thought there might still be a possibility to …”
    “To do what? To make me normal again? To bring me back to the condition of meat?”
    “To undo what has been done.”
    “As if it were a mistake, that I now regretted?”
    “I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “But your masters did. Did it never occur to question this mission? To doubt its idiotic purpose? To show the slightest sign of independent thought?”
    One of the robots at the control plinths turned its head slowly in his direction.
    “Things have changed since you came to Mercury,” Oleg persisted, refusing to waver under the robot’s eyeless regard. “No one knew what to make of your art, when you joined the Collective. It was too different, too hard to assess.”
    “If they were idiots then, they are idiots now.”
    “But idiots with money and influence. Do you understand the terms of the offer, Rhawn?”
    “My understanding is irrelevant. I can no more be ‘undone’ than an egg can be unsmashed, or meat uncooked. Let me demonstrate. Have you a strong stomach?”
    “I–”
    But Oleg had barely begun to give his answer. The surgical clamp around Rhawn’s cyborg head was reconfiguring itself, pulling away to separate the tight-fitting segments of her armour. Oleg thought back to what he had learned from Gris, of how the cyborg exoskeleton had become its living skin. This was how it must have been for Rhawn, before she exiled herself to the Totalists. There was a human head under her metal plates, but it was a head already skinned back to an anatomical core of muscle and sinew and nervous system. She had been blind, without the cameras. She had no nose or mouth or ears, for she did not need to breathe or speak or hear. Her cyborg senses were wired directly into deep brain structure, bypassing the crude telemetry of ancient nerve channels. Machinery was plumbed directly into her heart and lungs.
    “Are you horrified? You should not be. This is the state of being that Mercury demands of us. There is no pain, no discomfort, in being what we are. Far from it. We revel in our new strength, our bold new senses – our resilience. To each other, we have become beautiful. We drink in the sustenance of the dayside Sun and glory in the stellar cold of the Mercurean night. But why come this far, and not go all the way?”
    “They tell me that your crossing is nearly done.”
    “It’s true.” And for the moment her spite seemed to move off him. “There is almost nothing left of my old self now – the old vehicle in which I moved. What use are lungs and a heart, on Mercury? What use is a digestive system? What use is meat? These things are simply waiting to go wrong, waiting for their moment to