Motion behind Thales on the yacht’s deck. He turns, and there’s the urbane old man from the videos—Cromwell, he thinks—perched on the transom, surrounded by candles.
A ghost, he thinks, then smiles.
As the rain flattens his hair the old man says, “I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.”
The old man and candles vanish.
In the cabin, Akemi is watching the monitor where Kern is pacing a black ship’s deck. (They’re drone subs, he somehow knows, which the AIs have been stealing and using as transports for years.) Thales wonders just what Kern hopes to get from this adventure, hopes it isn’t Akemi’s love.
“I just saw Cromwell, I think,” Thales says. “I think it was from your memories.”
Her face closes, and he wishes he hadn’t spoken, as, without wanting to, he remembers how it felt when Cromwell appraised her, his evident slight contempt, his coalescing focus, the underlying pity. She’d been extraordinarily high, but could still see he thought he had no peer, yet was deeply concerned to be a gentleman, which meant he was a patsy, or at least gave her some room. He needed to see a posh good girl, someone worth saving, so she started channeling her friend Sonia, who was essentially a loser cunt failure with a has-been for a daddy, but had charming manners; shaking his hand, she undertook the assumption she’d be valued and respected.
Her thoughts veer to the tricks she’d turned for food money, about which she’s never told a soul, how it felt to knock on strangers’ doors in good hotels, the men’s discomfited formality, how it hadn’t been so bad—she’d never been prissy, and sometimes it was interesting, because, paying for it, they’d ask for what they really wanted.
He envies her the untidiness of her humanity, regrets the slightness of his own experience and how neutrally he sees the world. Made of two weeks of memory, he is the thinnest of beings.
What does he really want?
The light is fading, the swell getting steeper.