Arkil didn’t feel the cold, but not wanting to stand out, he turned his collar up against the bitter wind as he pushed through the winter tide of holidaymakers making their way east across the bridge. He walked quickly but with an easy gait towards London’s ancient book-buyer’s arcade just the other side of Charing Cross Road. Scattered e-lites glittered in the polysnow that had blown up at outer edges of the passage, outlining the paving. Electric fireflies danced through the alley, here and there illuminating the animated faces they picked out. Everywhere people laughed, eyes twinkled, and necks craned as the more excitable children in the eager crowd pushed against each other to peer in amazement at the richly decorated window arrangements that ran along either side of the busy lane. He took the stairs away from the upper level down to the crossway, two at a time, engaging fraction traction so as not to slip on the icy stone steps that swept down to the street below. He dodged across the main road and through the stone arch that marked the entrance to Denmark Street, only finally stopping at the door of his favourite Earthside place, The Antiquarian Rareleaf.

From everywhere and nowhere in particular, unintelligible, AI screams, crisis calls, and erratic, fragmented quad code rained down on him. Thousands of systems in terminal shutdown spat out splintered routines and subroutine viruses, scattering meaningless statement shards and half-images of themselves throughout still-functioning parts of the system, clogging its control, and pushing the already fatally extended MI closer to the edge as it grappled to maintain the hull integrity. This ship was not just limping out of control; it was convincingly charging headlong into oblivion. There was no order here, there was no control here, the energy of a dwarf star seemed to be discharging from real-time space, back, against the gradient, through the ship’s energy pump! That couldn’t be right; normally, that would have meant instant destruction. The ship should have been destroyed by that alone, minutes ago. He scanned frantically up and down his Personal. He must have been stupid to think that he could manage this situation, even babysitting it for an instant while the Mungo was otherwise engaged seemed so way above his head. Then, for no reason in particular, in the face of such insurmouheard a long, long time before.

Mungo had decided quite early on to abandon the MassivePresence Participate sensory free-for-all that the Main State Union MIs were cooking up, and instead had turned itself fully inward, focussing every stack segment of all its accessible partitions on probing the maximal existence limit of its newly fitted engine arrays on probationary loan from Ohio Deep Space Discrete Lab’s Skunk Works. It pulsed them non-uniformly, phasing their drive units out of sync, expanding the energy pump draw requirements way beyond the published spec limits, overdriving the core, misaligning the interspace segment to add even more gradient, in turn forcing the array to exist in higher and higher energy states. From time to time, an almost imperceptible shudder ran through the fabric of the ship as the Mungo experimented with every feasible way of increasing speed and assessing the extreme envelope of each engine block. The engine systems were seriously tough, designed with a machine’s mind in mind. With the extreme degree of hardcoded failsafe built in, even taking these new units to the edge of a virtual real-space singularity was not as negatively time-dilating as it could have been. 

Gundel looked expectantly at Martek as he slowly unscrewed the crown cork from the bottle of pale cereal spirit. He studied each line and crease in the doctor’s complexion, trying to figure out what the old man was thinking. As he did so, holding the bottle by the neck, he poured himself and the doctor a large drink and pushed one of the glasses across the table towards the doctor using the bottom of the bottle. Without taking his eyes off the doctor, he screwed the crown back on to the bottle and placed it gently on the table between them in an exaggerated gesture of self-control. Grabbing the glass ritualistically in both hands, he rolled the drink round its heavy base and sat back in the deep chair, inhaling the liquor’s thick vapour. He made it as if to speak, but just shook his head instead, all at once very tired and completely lost for words. “This is not going to be easy,” said the doctor, breaking the silence. Gundel took a sip of his drink and nodded in agreement. “And, before we get to that, I want to say thank you. Oh… and sorry for not saying that, err, I mean, thank you, earlier, that is… sooner.”“Thank you for what?” asked Gundel, rubbing the nape of his neck.

Novel methods of construction had enabled what had been called, only in the junk media, the plastometals to come out of the development lab and into production. As a result, the delicate visceral parts of the already highly capable AP machine substrate were now fully protected by a two-millimetre, fully conformable lamina of polycadmonium siliconicate. The new material had the advantage of a variable modulus, and so while most of the body was covered in a case-hardened isomer of the material (which was cool to the touch), the face and hands were delicately coloured, soft, and warm. These strangely human parts, which even though they were blended seamlessly in the tastefully clothed area of the machine, appeared to peep out from under what looked like a close-fitting garment of the more machinite body covering. The molecular structure of the main body coating material had been further developed to give a limited degree of viscoelastic response to applied force, which translated meant, that to the gentle touch, it was compliant, but when exposed to more aggressive stimuli it became instantly, and proportionately more resilient.