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continued to slide sideways, in the same way that if he stood on the bank staring at the river’s flow, it seemed as if the bank was moving backward while the river remained motionless.
    Humans are astonishingly adaptable. A few years living within the Process and already it seemed as natural to him as the river’s progress to the sea.
    The soldier went splashing through the cold water of the bridleway; his features had the potential to be cunning, even demonic, if intelligence returned to them.
    He hauled the soldier along a muddy path and through the trees he glimpsed the gothic castellations of the Institute: the roof with its eighty or so chimneys, the east wing covered with autumnal ivy, the west wing a turret and great Round Room. Between him and the house, there were three hundred yards or so of meadow ending in a haw-haw, and then a low courtyard wall. It was as if the Institute was below sea level, in a muggy stilted zone, with mosquitos in the air that made the scar on his scalp itch.
    The foundations had been laid in the ninth century for a priory. The house had undergone a major renovation at the end of each of the previous three centuries so that it was a patchwork of architectural fashions covered in crimson lichen and vines. Time was fermenting here, becoming an intoxicant. The moon was high and so was the sun. He took the soldier by the hand and they walked together across the meadow. Atop the turret of the Round Room, taut silver sails rigged at oblique angles monitored the ether. Behind the windows, strange shadows passed to and fro.
    He stood at the door and shouted Alex’s name, then tested the handle. The door opened onto a hallway, a muddy black and white tiled floor interspersed with buckets and chamber pots to collect drips from the leaking roof. Murmurs and whispers came from a bright side room, and through a crack in the doorway he saw the painful movements of a tall and half-naked figure.
    But it was Alex Drown who met him at the entrance of the Round Room. Her right eye was entirely bloodshot.
    “James. You’ve come back.”
    “I’ve brought you something.” He helped Hector into a seated position on the tiled floor. “I found him trapped in some barbed wire on the Downs. The wire was new.”
    She inspected the soldier, opened the pockets of his outfit, rooted around in his backpack, and looked inside his mouth and his ears.
    “I’d say this one was made from archive photographs, reverse engineering from descendants, and something weirder.”
    She registered the name on the identity disc. “Has Hector been livelier than this?”
    “He took a swing at me outside Glynde. The villagers said they had found other soldiers and brought them to you.”
    “We have half a dozen now. But Hector seems different, as if made from a more detailed pattern.”
    “Pattern from where?”
    “Something weirder, as I said.” She grinned at him. Her dark hair was short and ragged, cut by herself in the reflection of a grimy mirror. Her trouser suit had blood stains upon the collar. He noted the vinegary odour of stale female perspiration. Two villagers dressed in boiler suits and frayed grey lab coats arrived to take the soldier away.
    “It’s good to see you again, James.”
    “Your eye,” he said.
    “I know. Upgrades. We should never have augmented the hardware.”
    He didn’t understand.
    “The implants,” she explained, reaching over to him, feeling through his hair for the scarred intake on the back on his skull. “We should have confined ourselves to hacking the software and not dabbled with the wiring. You live and learn. Every time Omega John upgrades me, my eyes bleed, my fingernails fall out and I lose my sense of balance. Will you join me in the Round Room?”
    The Round Room was in a state of benign neglect. The dome of the rotunda was covered by a mural depicting characters from the history of the Institute. The other walls were slick with damp and the paint sloughed off them in