For the first time she really understood that the man next to her had once not been human. His face looked old and tired, the way Proxy One had looked under all the bluster. The way Ergo had looked, when he stared at her in her apartment. Only beings like that were fascinated with humanity. Or pseudo-humanity, as it were.

"You're wrong," she said. "Time has nothing to do with it. My fellow citizens never had an original thought in their lives, and Pino had more creativity than most humans I met. Pseudo-human, AutoReiv, Proxy, angel. It's not what you are, it's what you do and what you think that matter."