Soft Voice thinks Kyriakos and the others are a strategy. He calls it a recursive narrative firewall rather than a Scheherazade, and he says he’s been looking into it as a possibility for some time. I, he suggests, am blocking the machine from seeing my real life by giving it a full-bandwidth fiction of someone else’s, and when that one starts to wear thin I loop into a fresh story and start again. What’s unexpected here is that the multiple narratives loop back on one another, creating a recursion that is potentially infinite, or rather, will last as long as my brain is functioning in any recognisably human way. He smiles. "Hello in there," he says, directly to me. "This is very impressive."