"You even sound like her sometimes. Chase tumbled to it when you visited her—she said it was eerie, that you could have been her. You even look like Hunter, in the expressions, the way you walk. Did you know your gait has changed? We’ve analysed it. You move the way she did. You were asking all the right questions in between all the wrong ones, and then Chase began to realise: you were telling her the solution, and you didn’t even know. You have Hunter’s connectome inside your head. Not all of it, of course, but a lot, and you’re incorporating it. It’s becoming part of you. There’s a window—we’ve calculated it—where you’ll be enough like her to unlock Firespine. To head off a disorderly shutdown." The words sound like the end of the world. Perhaps they are. Britain is still a nuclear state.