It was male and naked inside a translucent plastic sac filled with a pale-blue gel. The frigid air stank of antiseptic, and Alice shivered. The body’s legs, torso, and arms bulged with muscles under tattoos. Alice recognized it from somewhere. She tilted backward to look at the head, except there wasn’t one. The neck terminated in a silver seal that connected to a brass cuboid the width of the giant’s shoulders and a foot thick. It was ribbed like a large heat sink, and Alice remembered the splinter mind from Europa. This was similar but on a different scale—the processing power would be substantial.