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silvered waves. Alex perched upon the edge of a heavy dark wooden desk and huddled into her suit jacket against the draught from the sash window frames.
    “Do you mind if I ask Omega John to come in on this meeting?” Remnants of corporate dialect remained in Alex’s speech. Before the Seizure, she had worked for a technology company called Monad.
    An awkward half-naked figure, the same one that James had glimpsed on the way in, walked into the Round Room. He wore a bedsheet like a sash. Skin and bone iterated in a massy cauliflower-like clump at the base of his bald head. Perspiration welled on his sunken spotted chest. The arms were as pallid as wishbones, the shoulders like knuckles. He ran a dry tongue over chapped white lips before speaking.
    Alex said, “No one understands the Process as well as Omega John.”
    Some parts of his body were young, some were old; he bared his strong white teeth in weak acknowledgment of her boilerplate praise.
    “I think we’ve met,” said James.
    “When you had your implant. Time has been unkind to me since. I’m between longevity treatments.” Omega John had a passive singsong voice. “The soldier you brought in, John Hector, was in the 32nd Field Ambulance in the Allied campaign against Turkey in the Great War, known variously as the Dardanelles campaign, the Battle of Gallipoli, or the Çanakkale. Hector landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. He was a stretcher bearer. History tells us that he survived the campaign, but that is all. The other soldiers delivered to us also wore uniforms consistent with the landing at Suvla Bay but only two of them prior to Hector are the simulacra of particular men.”
    Alex clarified, “The first four were generic patterns. Like toy soldiers.”
    “Are you suggesting the Process is playing war?” James asked.
    Omega John inhaled sharply. “You’ve spent too long in the town, bailiff. You are succumbing to the community’s anthropomorphizing projection. The Process is a set of algorithms. It does not play.”
    Omega John wound the bed sheet tighter around his attenuated body.
    “The unending Process reconciles the strivings of individuals within a framework of mutual benefit. Nothing more.”
    “Why has the Process not supplied you with clothes that fit?” asked James.
    “We try to keep our needs outside of the Process,” replied Omega John.
    “Would you like my wife to make you an outfit?” asked James. “Ruth is a very good seamstress.”
    Omega John treated the offer with disdain, instead asking, “Does Ruth still mark the winter solstice by dangling the broken casings of mobile phones from the window frame so that the Process will not overlook you?”
    “It doesn’t mean that we believe.”
    “The Process requires neither your belief nor your observance. Just because it watches over you, it does not mean that it cares about you or even understands what you are.”
    “Who told the Process to make these soldiers?”
    “No one programs the Process. It uses its data set to anticipate future need.”
    “We don’t know why the Process is concerned with the First World War,” said Alex quietly.
    “There is precedent,” continued Omega John. “The Process has created historical simulacra before. Last year, at a Process point in Totnes, in place of the expected allocation, a Methodist congregation and minister from Boston on August 26, 1873 were recreated in living detail. Then, on medicine day, the Process point contained the skin tent of the Reindeer Chuckchi people of the Kolyma district, early twentieth century. My first thought was that these simulacra were due to unusual agglomeration of needs in the town. Human desire is multifarious and liable to mutation. Bad input leads to bad output. However, I am coming round to the theory that prolonged exposure to human behaviour is introducing cognitive algorithms into the Process.”
    “It’s becoming more like us?” guessed James.
    “As we become more like it.” Omega