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the various monitors and fed them all into a central image-processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.
    And there, revealed in all its glory, was the inside of the alien device.
    And it was beautiful.
    ‘What the hell is that?’ Owen’s voice said from behind her.
    ‘It’s a composite image,’ she said without turning, ‘formed by combining the images from three separate sensors. By themselves, the sensors didn’t have enough resolution to be able to map out the interior of the device – each one could see a bit of the picture, but it was only when I combined them all that I could see the whole thing.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Owen said, dubious, ‘but what the hell is that?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Toshiko said simply. ‘But it’s beautiful.’
    The image on the screen was a multicoloured structure in which there were no straight lines at all. What appeared to be a series of flat oval plates of different sizes were linked to each other and to a constellation of small spheres by cobwebbed connections, and behind it all were hints of a larger irregular mass.
    ‘I was expecting wires,’ Owen said. ‘A battery, perhaps. Would a battery have been too much to ask? Circuit boards, maybe? Or am I being old fashioned here?’
    ‘They’re there,’ Toshiko said, running her fingers gently across the screen, following the contours of the inside of the shell, ‘but they aren’t obvious. They follow a different design logic to the one we’re used to.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘The devices we humans build tend to follow some simple rules,’ she continued, confident now that she was talking about the things she loved. ‘Wires carry current, but the current heats the wires up, which means that resistance increases and the current drops, so we make the wires as short as possible. That way we don’t lose too much power. The heat needs to dissipate, so we separate components as much as we can in order to allow some circulation of air. We use transistors to switch the current in different ways, and capacitors to store it up and discharge it in big chunks. But what if some alien devices were designed with a different set of rules? What if art was more important than power conservation? What if symmetry was more important than efficiency?’
    ‘That’s mad. Isn’t it?’
    Toshiko shook her head. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Look at it, Owen. Really look at it. What do you see?’
    ‘A mess.’ He moved closer, screwing his eyes up as he concentrated. ‘No, wait. OK, it’s still a mess.’
    ‘Relax. Don’t try to look at the screen: try to look beyond it.’
    ‘What, like those dot pictures? I could never get them.’
    ‘Try.’
    ‘OK.’ There was silence for a few moments. Toshiko could imagine Owen screwing his face up like a small child. Perhaps his tongue was even poking out between his lips. ‘Oh. Oh shit. Is that what I think it is?’
    ‘What do you see, Owen?’
    He sighed deeply. ‘This can’t be right, but I think I can see a face . Inside that piece of tech. A fucking face !’
    As soon as Gwen walked into the Indian Summer, she knew that something had changed.
    It wasn’t just the fact that the place was almost empty and the waiters were standing around with tea towels, waiting for the last few diners to leave: it was more the fact that Rhys and Lucy appeared to be holding hands and staring deep into each other’s eyes.
    A farrago of feelings bubbled up within her, rooting her in the doorway. Her legs seemed to be operating independently from the rest of her: they simultaneously wanted to run across to the table so she could slap their silly faces inside out, turn and stride out of the restaurant in a massive hissy fit, and collapse on the floor. Part of her felt like she wanted to be sick. Another