Little more than an hour had passed since their arrival, though it was hard to tell in this timeless place. Nevertheless, they’d grown restless. The white-walled chamber gave them all the creeps.

While the phantasm calling itself the emissary hadn’t returned, Jan occasionally caught a glimpse of starfields out the corner of his eye. It was worse when he closed his eyelids. He could only assume the others saw the same, although any shared experience remained unacknowledged.

He understood that this space was interfering with his brain. If what Vash had said was true, machines he couldn’t see were reaching out with electromagnetic fields and making him hallucinate. That might explain why little had happened until they’d opened the hatch.

Jan had always done his best to be reasonable. He’d taught Eva to never believe in fantasies like ghosts, immortals or demons from beyond the sky. But here he was, trapped beneath the ocean with all three.

Collectively, they agreed to move the Dyn from the sub. Whatever happened, it seemed reasonable to separate the alien enemy from their only means of escape. In the shadows of the cabin, trussed and bound, it looked genuinely helpless; a listless, pitiful, half-dead thing. They approached it warily at first, in cringing anticipation of one of those long limbs lashing out, but the Dyn remained motionless. It didn’t resist, but it didn’t cooperate either; it barely even reacted as Jan and Pao each shouldered one of its forelimbs.

‘Surrounded by godtech and somehow we still get stuck doing manual labour,’ grunted Pao, putting on a brave face. ‘It’s almost reassuring.’

Jan retched at the Dyn’s oily, inhuman stench. Its skin felt like plastic to the touch, the muscles beneath contorting strangely; just familiar enough to trigger revulsion.

‘It’ll all be over soon.’

Even in his own ears the words rang hollow. Pao nodded, heaving the Dyn out of the open hatch. Jan noticed a thin smear of milky fluid where it had brushed him.

Privately, he worried that the Dyn was dying of exhaustion. Perhaps it had expended its final reserves of strength just getting off the beach? How long could it go without food? How severe were its injuries? For all he knew this was just some perfectly mundane state for the Dyn, like being asleep.

‘We should see if we can find a cell or something, somewhere we can keep it contained,’ he suggested. He sorely wanted to hole up in the bathyscaphe until Vash and Aurelie returned, but he had to get the Dyn alone. Time was running out.

‘I don’t see why we’re still risking keeping it alive,’ muttered Pao. ‘I get that offing it in the bathyscaphe was too dangerous, but now… why not?’

‘It’s our prisoner.’

‘Come on Jan, it wanted to be here. You helped it get here,’ said Tuva sceptically, from a few feet off, laser still trained on the Dyn. ‘Sure it’s bound now, but – ’

‘We’ve already seen this… this thing,’ he gestured, sweeping his free arm expansively, ‘rescue the bathyscaphe, open doors in the walls, get inside our heads… Do you want to find out how it reacts to us using a weapon, to us killing something inside it? What if it really does need the Dyn here, the same way it needed Vash and Aurelie?’

‘He does have a point…’ Pao conceded. Tuva considered it.

‘I can’t believe I’m saying this but fine, we’ll do what Jan said,’ she relented, shaking her head. She turned to Jan, her tone suddenly deadly serious. ‘If you think I’m taking my eyes off you or the Dyn, think again. No more chances.’

Tuva held his gaze for agonising seconds, her eyes searching his for something she could trust. He said nothing.

‘So now what?’ called Pao, as Tuva strode over to the wall of the chamber.

‘Can we follow them?’ she asked, groping at the patch through which Vash and Aurelie had left. Growing frustrated, she beat against it.

‘Give it up Tuva, they made it clear that they don’t need us,’ groaned Pao. We’re here cos of a mistake, nothing more. Now we just stay out of the way.’

It was strange to realise just how vague and ill-considered Christo’s revolution had been. But then, it was never intended to overthrow Arco. Their one and only purpose had been to deliver Vash and Aurelie to this place. It didn’t need saying that he, Pao and Tuva no longer mattered. They were little more than ballast now; everything important taking place on the other side of that wall.

‘So what, we just sit here? You’re taking marching orders from the dictator of the world now? He’s the enemy. Nothing’s really changed. Even the Wastelander knows that,’ snapped Tuva.

‘Something tells me Arco’s fired him by now,’ Pao replied with a sardonic grin.

‘There has to be another way out. How could Aurelie have known?’

‘Same way she’s known everything else. She gets this thing, this place… ’

Jan cast his eyes around the chamber, looking for some alternative exit. Nothing leapt out at him, but there wasn’t all that much to take in.

The waiting room of the gods, everybody.

The space was irregular, vaguely oblate, the walls almost smooth and subtly patterned. Beneath them the floor was minutely perforated, a grille of overlapping fractals. Jan guessed that was where the silver machine had seeped away to and that the whole chamber might flood and drain itself, if desired.

Suddenly he was struck by a flash of insight. There was a sensation of discovery, of openings and forking paths. It was over as quickly as it had begun. But now Jan found he could read the space, the way Aurelie must have just intuitively understood. It wasn’t hard, now that he knew what to look for. The wall they’d left through was somehow fresh-looking, and there were at least two other circular patches, matching filigree patterns converging on them. How had he failed to notice?

‘Try over there,’ he called to Tuva, gesturing towards the nearest one.

She walked over, making no effort to conceal her doubt. Tentatively, she placed her palm against it. The door slid open. The corridor beyond curved out of sight.

‘Lucky guess?’

‘Just a hunch,’ Jan replied. Where had that insight come from? Was the intuition his own, or had it been planted there by something else?

It was an unsettling thought. He pushed it aside.

‘Hmmm. Better than nothing. Let’s try it.’

‘I’m not dragging the Dyn the whole way. Let it walk,’ interjected Pao, before she could take another step.

Tuva scowled, but didn’t object as Pao slackened the ties that bound its limbs, while checking those that trussed its jaw in a makeshift muzzle and held the twin whiplash tails and foreclaws in place, mindful of what had happened last time. Jan hung back, keen to avoid any suspicion of interference.

Pao tugged at a lead and the Dyn stirred, lifting itself slowly. Its head tilted and it fixed Jan with a single eye, furiously trying to convey something across the gulf that separated their species.

If not now, when?

‘I know you can understand me. No sudden moves, ok?’ cautioned Pao.

Understanding or not, the Dyn gave no sign, but as Pao led it towards the corridor it complied. Jan went on ahead, with Tuva taking up the rear, laser levelled at the alien. It could just as easily be turned on him.

As Jan entered the corridor, the others just paces behind, all hell broke loose.

The Dyn, twisting round, threw its weight against Pao, knocking the man between itself and Tuva.

‘Get down! Get down!’

She hesitated for a moment, but it was enough for the Dyn to lunge clumsily for the doorway, sprawling onto the floor, just over the threshold.

Jan fired the dotbow. The bolt tore clean through her forearm, sending her returning fire wide, the invisible beam scoring an arc up the wall, skittering as the gun fell. She cried out in agony, clutching her arm. Jan was losing his balance, falling. He heard a crack.

The door slammed shut, far quicker than it had opened, triggered by some reflex to keep the danger contained.

As the seal thickened, Tuva’s pained cries and Pao’s enraged hammering grew muffled, then inaudible. The whole sequence of events was over in a blurred instant.

His heart pounding in his chest, Jan leant back against the wall, regarding the Dyn with apprehension. With the bathyscaphe on the other side, his last connection with the world beyond was severed. Just the two of them now. What leverage did he have? The dotbow?

The Dyn struggled back to its feet. Even hunched on all fours it was still as tall as him. Although its growing exhaustion was readily apparent, Jan knew that it still had reserves of strength to call on. What chance did he stand against it, alone and in such a confined space? He managed a despairing laugh.

‘Dad?’

The word hit him like a punch in the gut.

The sound was uncanny, stripped of something by the machine, the resonance all wrong as it emanated from within the Dyn’s body. And yet it was her voice, warped, stolen.

‘How are you doing that?’

‘I remember… ’ said the voice, and it stretched out, breaking up like a bad recording; ‘I remember the day on the hovercraft. I remember you teaching me to swim. I remember playing in the stream by the settlement, the notebook of investigations I used to keep… ’

‘I – I never told anybody that – ’

‘I remember when the shadows would come and how you would hold me and stroke my hair until I fell asleep.’

‘Stop! Please stop. How do you know those things?’

The voice could be skillful mimicry, but how could it know? Maybe they had interrogated her, but how would they recognise the significance of such personal memories?

‘Not knowing. Remembering. I was there. I felt it.’

‘No,’ said Jan, blinking back tears. ‘You are not my daughter. Eva is dead.’ Of course, he believed it, and yet the voice felt so real.

There was a shift in the Dyn’s body language. Eva disappeared, slipping beneath the surface, her voice replaced by the rasping, sibilant tone the Dyn had used before.

‘Eva lives. For now… ’

‘What do you mean by that?’ He breathed deeply, fighting to regain his composure. ‘Stop playing your games. I’ve done what you asked. Now tell me what you know. All of it.’

‘Untie me,’ the artificial voice rasped.

‘Answers first.’

‘You don’t want her to die. The others will kill her. You helped them,’ it hissed, shaking its head from side to side as though in admonishment, a curiously human gesture.

‘Where is she?’

‘In orbit.’

‘But you just said that you were her.’

‘You think in such flat terms. I am not Eva, but I contain part of her. Identity is mutable for us.’ Less so for you.

‘You think I’ll believe anything? Sure I’ll believe invisible machines mess with my head and make me see things that aren’t there. I’ve seen screens and computers, is it really so different? Maybe Vash can live for centuries, and the Dyn can fly between the stars. It’s only impossible until it happens. But I don’t believe in souls and I don’t believe you can steal my daughter’s away and trap it inside you.’

‘Believe what you want. Like you say, only impossible until its happened. Your child serves the Liar to Animals, as her… conscience. So that she may understand humanity.’

The Dyn paused, as though noting Jan’s incomprehension.

‘A merger, one corrupting another. Cortical wiring and semantic skeleton generation and correlation, facilitated by cascading deep language models trained on Human-Dyn translation. Human and Dyn minds become one. I shared my mother’s thoughts, and she shares the thoughts of your daughter.’

Jan rubbed his brow. He thought he understood enough of what the Dyn had said. It made him shudder to think of his daughter plugged into the mind of a monster. How she must have suffered. How she must still be suffering, he corrected himself. But if the Dyn wasn’t lying… if what it had said was true, if she was still alive… Jan felt joy surge through him. Then it dawned on him.

Vash and Aurelie had found what they were looking for, the Dragon’s Tooth. The plan, it seemed, was to empty the sky, to bring it all down, to destroy the Dyn in orbit. All this time he had been working his way towards killing his daughter.

‘We have to warn them! We have to warn Vash and Aurelie. There’s still time. We can exchange hostages – you for my daughter. You say Liar to Animals needs you… Maybe she will surrender if -’

The Dyn laughed. The sound was chilling.

‘Warn them?’ it mocked. ‘They already know.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Vash was Ambassador. He met with her. They don’t care. Ask him. What is one life compared to billions?’

‘Christo’s revolution… it’s bigger than any of us, but surely… ’ Jan trailed off. He felt like he might collapse.

‘They will let nothing divert them from their mission. They hate us, Jan.’

The Dyn pressed its broad head against his, forelimbs planted on either side of him, backing him up against the wall.

‘Why did you have us bring you down here?’ Jan asked, barely managing to keep his voice level. ‘What do you want?’

‘My inheritance,’ it snarled. ‘But I want this for all, Human and Dyn alike. My Line has seen the truth. Christo was misled, as were you. Aurelie, Vash… they lie Jan. They say they want to free you from us, but there will be no freedom for you in the world they seek to resurrect. You will be enslaved by their algorithms, their machine gods; there is no room for dissent. Those that oppose them are wrong. Those that oppose them are… evil.’