I had been told the Ghosts were close to completing their new quagma project. I was chief administrator of the Ghost liaison office, representing most of mankind. It was my job to stop the Ghosts endangering us all.

So that I could deal with the Ghosts, I was remade, a decade ago.

I look like a statue of a man, done in silver, or chrome. My legs are pillars. My hands and arms have been made immensely strong. I don’t live behind my eyes anymore: I live in my chest cavity. I feel like a deep-sea fish, blind and almost immobile, stuck here in the dark. My mechanical eyes are like periscopes, far above “me.”

I can subsist on starlight, and survive the vacuum for days at a time, enfolding my seventy-six-year-old human core — me — in warmth and darkness. I have a Ghost doctor; twice a year it opens me up and cleans me out.

I have a face, a sculpture of eyes, nose, mouth. It doesn’t even look much like I used to, before. It doesn’t matter; apart from the eyes, the face is non-functional, put there to reassure me.

I can run with the Ghosts. I can fly in space, if I choose to. I don’t, much. When I’m not dealing with the Ghosts I spend most of my time in Virtual environments.

So my physical form doesn’t matter much. In fact, lately I’ve come to wish the Ghosts had just rebuilt me as a sphere, as they are: simple, classical, efficient.

A Ghost came soaring up to me. It was a silvery, five-feet-wide globe, complex patterns shimmering over its surface. I recognized it from its electromagnetic signature: contrary to myth, Ghosts aren’t all alike, at least not to another Ghost.

I greeted it. “Sink Ambassador.”

The Ambassador to the Heat Sink floated before me, shimmering; I could see my own distorted reflection in its hide. “Jack Raoul. It has been many years—”