They saw more priests hurrying towards the church and the three hibernators hid in the darkness of a narrow alleyway as they went past. When it was safe they carried on, moving as fast as they dared in an attempt to avoid notice. A gang of cutthroats appeared in their path. Their leader began to demand something but Loach ploughed straight into them, slashing with his knife. One man went down, blood pouring from a wound to his stomach, and the rest fled.

     Loach paused for a moment to rifle through the fallen man's pockets. Randall, who had started to run on, still holding Jane by the elbow, paused and looked back. "Come on!" he hissed urgently. "We haven't got time!"

     "Have you got a plan then?" asked Loach. "Is your plan simply to run blindly until they corner you in a dead end?"

     "I just want to get as far away from that church as fast as possible."

     "So do I, but we need a plan and we need money." He found a few coins and tucked them into a pocket. Then he unbuckled the thug's knife and sheath and belted it around his own waist. He tested the knife's edge with his thumb. It was very sharp. A much better weapon than the kitchen knife he'd brought from the hibernaculum.

     "We're in a walled city," Loach continued, handing the kitchen knife to Randall. "The only way in or out on foot is through the gates, and they're closed at night. By the time dawn comes the priests will have told the guards to be on the lookout for us, so we need another way out of the city."

     "Have you got an idea?" asked Randall.

     "Just one. As luck would have it, this is also a harbour town. We can stow away on a ship. Sailing ships have to sail with the tide. If we're lucky, it'll be high tide before dawn and the ships will be setting sail before the dock workers have been told to look out for us."

     Randall nodded. "Makes sense," he said. "But if that's the only way out of the city the priests will block off the docks as fast as they can, so we have to hurry!"

     "Right. I'm finished here." He stood up and the three hibernators left the dying man behind them, only Jane glancing back as Randall pulled her away.

     They headed west for a couple of hundred metres, to put distance between them and the church, before turning south, towards the docks. They ran from street to street, keeping a constant watch for people out and about in the middle of the night and crouching down out of sight whenever they saw one. "So am I your prisoner now?" asked Jane in a hushed voice as they hid beside a busy tavern, waiting for a couple of drunken revellers to stumbled away down the street.

     "Not at all," said Randall in an equally low voice. "I'm sorry I treated you roughly, but we had to move fast. You're free to go if you want, but if you leave us the priests will find you pretty quickly."

     "They'll disable your head phone," added Loach. "Leave you penniless and alone on the streets of the city. You'll have to make a living serving beer in a tavern or something. You'll end up married to some brute of a man who'll treat you like dirt. Women in this kind of society have almost no rights. They're the property of a man. First their father, then their husband."

     "We know almost nothing about this society," pointed out Jane. "Maybe women have full equality here."

     "So leave us and find out if you want. We can't stop you leaving us. We'll have to sleep sometimes. If you really want to leave we can't stop you sneaking off in the middle of the night."

     "And if I stay with you? What then?"

     "Then you get to be Queen of the solar system one day," said Randall. "Maybe pretty soon."

     "But how? Your plan failed. The machines will be on their guard now. They'll be examining every transmission from Earth for that yama programme."

     Randall nodded and anger showed on his face as he thought of Emily and what she had done. How had he not seen that coming? One moment of carelessness... He put it out of his mind with an effort. Nothing was gained by dwelling on one's mistakes. You learned from them and moved on.

     "There may be another way," he said. "I was a man of enormous resources back... Back before, and it may be that some of those resources still exist. The machines searched the world for hibernaculums and they missed the one we were in. They may have missed other things. Hidden things, buried deep underground. If we can find them, and if they still work after a thousand years, we can still win."

     "What resources are you talking about?" asked Loach, staring at him with interest.

     "I'd rather not say yet. First, we've got to get out of the city. If they catch us, it'll all be over." He searched Jane's face carefully, trying to read her thoughts. "I very much doubt that their offer of gold for our head phones is still on the table. Not after what we've done. If they catch us now, they'll throw us in a dungeon or feed us to the orcs."

     Jane looked thoughtful and Randall tensed up in doubt. Beside him, he sensed Loach also growing tense and alert. "If you decide to try your luck with them anyway, then go ahead," said Randall. "We won't try to stop you. Dragging a kidnap victim around with us would be foolish. You might betray us to the priests, betray our hiding place. The only way you can stay with us is if you're with us, one hundred percent, but if you stay with us I guarantee that you'll be Queen of the solar system one day."

     "If I leave, aren't you afraid I'll tell them you're heading for the docks?" said Jane.

     "Not really. There's no other possible way out of the city, they have to know we're going that way. Our only hope is that the docks are big. Big enough that they'll have to do a lot of searching to find us. So, what'll it be? Queen of the solar system, or barmaid?"

     "Or maybe spend the rest of your life rotting in a dungeon," added Loach.

     "I could tell them that I had no idea what you were going to do," said Jane, meeting Randall eye to eye. "It would be the truth, after all. Would they punish me for your actions?"

     "I have no idea," replied Randall. "You'd be taking one hell of a gamble."

     Jane nodded. "Fortunately, it's one I have no intention of taking. VIX is an abomination. A machine pretending to be God. It must be stopped, and whether we succeed or fail there'll be a place waiting for me in heaven if I try. I'm with you. One hundred percent."

     "Good," said Randall, relaxing. He saw that Loach was relaxing as well. He wondered what the former crime boss would have done if the girl had given a different answer.

     Randall looked out across the street. "The way seems to be clear now," he said. "Let's move." Loach and Jane nodded, and the three of them left their hiding place.

☆☆☆

     Emily woke to find herself lying on the hospital bed with two priests looking down at her. The one that had cured them and another who was shorter and had a fringe of hair around his bald head.

     She expected her head to be fuzzy and clouded, still suffering the after effects of whatever had knocked her out, but to her surprise her mind was quite clear, as if she'd only closed her eyes for a moment. They gave me an antidote to the sedative, she thought. Something that woke me right up, all in one go.

     The two priests glanced at each other and Emily suspected that they were communicating electronically, sending radio signals to each other. "Is Randall still here?" she asked, lifting herself up onto her elbows and looking around.

     "Your companion fled," replied the first priest. "He will be caught."

     "He? There were three of them. Don't you rememeber?"

     "He commanded me to erase all memory of him before he left. Presumably, the others did as well. We know that one of them was George Randall because he commanded me to access information from the lunar data archive to confirm his identity."

     "It sounds like you're back to your old self," said Emily. "Have you got a new CRES code?"

     "Yes, VIX downloaded a new copy into me. I am sapient once more."

     "So what he did to you was more like a stun gun than a murder. That's good."

     "It was still a great crime,"said the first priest, "and if he had succeeded in his original purpose there would have been no-one to restore us. He and his accomplices are charged with attempted genocide."

     "Who were his companions?" asked the other priest.

     "One of them was a former criminal, the boss of an entire organisation of criminals. He's ruthless, very dangerous. The other was just some innocent girl. She's harmless."

     "She is not harmless. They are in possession of an extremely dangerous piece of computer code. All copies of that code must be deleted."

     "Tell us about them," said the first priest.

     "You can take everything I've got on them in my head phone. Oh..."

     "The entire contents of your head phone have been erased. You must describe them from your organic memory."

     "Okay, I'll do my best. I assume you know what Randall looked like, from your records."

     "No. No images of him survived the nuclear war. You must describe him."

     "Okay. Well, he was pretty tall, a couple of inches taller than me..."

     Emily spoke for some time, describing first Randall and then Loach and Jane. It was a strange experience for her. Like everyone from the late twenty first century, she'd gotten used to letting her head phone do her remembering for her. Her own brain hadn't had to remember anything for itself since she'd been eight years old and its ability to do so had atrophied, leaving her almost entirely incapable of recalling detailed information. The two priests led her to the view screen of the room's medical equipment and made it display an average human face which Emily changed to resemble each of her former companions in turn. A wider face, a longer nose, shorter hair... Eventually she had three images that were as good as she could make them. They still weren't quite right, she knew, but she couldn't put her finger on what was wrong with them. "That's the best I can do," she said apologetically.

     The image of the three faces shrank until it took up only half the screen, and the other half was filled with a dark, shadowy image. Three people running down the street. The brightly lit windows of the church were behind them, putting their faces into silhouette.

     "I caught only a momentary glimpse of them before they erased my CRES code," said the second priest. "This was the only view I got of them." The image brightened as the priest manipulated it and details grew sharper as sophisticated algorithms adjusted the pixels, but when he'd finished it was still almost impossible to make out their faces.

     The two priests glanced at each other again as another radio communication took place between them. Emily assumed that the images were being transmitted to every priest in the city, who would then be giving verbal descriptions of the fugitives to the city's police force. "So, do you need me any more?" she asked tentatively.

     "Your head phone must be permanently deactivated," said the first priest. "It will only take a moment. Then you are free to leave and make whatever life for yourself you wish."

     "You said you could give me gold. Enough to be rich."

     "You no longer have anything to offer us." The first priest turned to face her. "I will erase your head phone's operating system. There will be no need to physically remove the hardware."

     "If you do that, you have to compensate me! You can't just take my most valuable possession and give me nothing in return!"

     "I have cured your illness. An illness that was incurable in your time and would have killed you in another few weeks. That is compensation enough. Your head phone's operating system has been erased. You may now go."

     Emily thought her phone's wake up command. Nothing happened. No voice sounded in her ears, no symbols appeared in her field of vision. She tried again with an increasing sense of panic. Again nothing. She suddenly felt weak, helpless and afraid. Her head phone had been her constant companion all her life, constantly nagging her with notifications from its many applications and reminders from her calendar. She suddenly felt like a child that had been torn from the arms of a loving family and thrown out into the street, hungry and cold.

     "Where will I go?" she asked, her voice trembling despite every effort to remain strong. "What will I do?"

     "Whatever you want," replied the first priest. "That is freedom. True freedom. The glorious state that humans have been singing the praises of for thousands of years. Be glad. Be thankful, but above all, be gone."

     The two priests then began communicating in their own way again, their visitor ignored and forgotten. Emily turned, her heart fluttering with fear, and walked with hesitant, uncertain steps towards the exit from the church.