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at the thought of how close I came to landing in one of those trucks myself. And for a reason that I couldn't be held responsible for missing! Why did it have to be me who landed in this mess? I wonder as I look for the sick bay with an appropriately dazed expression on my face. But my all-seeing eyes and Superbright-processed wisdom database don't hold an answer to my problem. For that I have to look to the Dreamtime.
    The Dreamtime: Distant Intervention: life after death ... where to start explaining? To understand what I was doing on New Salazar you'll have to cut deep, deep into the layers that hold human civilization together across a gulf of light-centuries. So let me start by telling you what I'm talking about.
    The Dreamtime is, quite simply, the afterlife. It's the biggest virtual reality of all time, distributed across planet-sized processors in different solar systems. By default, everyone goes there when they die; the nanoscale monitors are ubiquitous, stitched into our brain cells along with the organic components we evolved with. They feed labelled packets of data about the brain and body they're embedded in to cellular transceivers, a network that repairs itself constantly and funnels the information up to the big extraplanetary expansion processors where the Dreamtime runs. At death, your point of presence is transferred to that other universe automatically: your personality, that is the software that defines you, is saved from dissolution. But that's just the beginning of the story. There are other services. Wisdom: direct memories and knowledge piped into our brains, the ultimate in decision support systems. Magic: the ability to bias sensory inputs, to control machines by thought. And reincarnation: expensive, but available to the citizens of the wealthier worlds, the most practical way of evading death and the uncertainty of a Dreamtime existence.
    The Dreamtime is the uppermost layer on a cake of information as deep as human history. The same mechanisms support the afterlife and the tools of interstellar commerce, the Gatecoders. Uploaded minds and their associated physical parameters can be transmitted between Gatecoders in different star systems at the speed of light. Once present they are funnelled through the local Dreamtime, reincarnated, and downloaded into cloned bodies: which is how I got here in the first place. At least, that's part of the picture.
    Actually I couldn't have got here if the system had not been visited, centuries ago, by a seeder probe; a self-replicating robot factory that built the Expansion Processor and Gatecoder, then moved on to colonize other systems. I couldn't have got here without The Boss, either. The Boss, like all the controlling intelligences of Distant Intervention, is a Superbright: an artificial intelligence vastly more complex than any human mind. Travel through the Dreamtime is hazardous for unaccompanied humans. We are no longer the only minds in this creation, and not all the others are friendly.
    Nevertheless, I'm here. The people I work with -- Distant Intervention -- are behind me. We're troubleshooters. We look after the links, even when the local colony world chooses to ignore the vast network they are connected to. It's in everyone's interests to keep travel convenient, to keep the afterlife running, to make sure that the multiplicity of services the Dreamtime provides are available at all times. Sometimes people want to interfere with the system for their own reasons. Sometimes, as with Year Zero Man, the interference is malign beyond belief.
    Tell the truth, it's hard to explain some of the jobs we do to keep the Dreamtime running. The system is so big that it defies description. I leave understanding it to Superbright intelligences like The Boss. The Boss can encompass concepts that no human mind can grasp. I may not like what he says, some of the time -- much of the time, these days -- but there's some comfort in knowing that at least someone knows