This new figure, masked, she identifies as Smith. His body language is familiarly imperious. He dickers with the specialist in charge of the interrogation, apparently wishing the other man to leave altogether, then accepts him with ill grace as a flawed amanuensis. After a certain number of hours there’s a great medical flurry of intervention, a sudden crash. An emergency door opens and the crash team enter, resuscitate her, then she crashes again and they actually open her head to install a bypass tube for blood and then a chitosan interface chip to allow the System to connect parts of her brain that are no longer able to link themselves. The computer is not only keeping her alive, it is thinking with her: machine–substrate processing. It is both expensive and intensive, like using jet engines to power a wooden windmill. Hunter is unconscious, and then she sleeps. Then, nothing: a simple resumption of business as usual. Again the unprotesting body becomes the centre of a regular, slow procession of persons.