Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five by Justina Robson

machine principles she betrayed only a kind of mild professional interest.
    Lila didn’t entirely buy it however. One didn’t use the word murder without reason. Lane Prime was the dead one then. And
     apparently the most important one. Why that should be so remained a mystery.
    She matched the cool for cool, although her anger was rising. ‘Well, since you were there, so to speak, you know what happened.
     Nothing’s changed since then. I still don’t want to talk to you, but you insist on invading my space. The only reason you’re
     not dead now is that you’re standing next to him. I asked you then and I ask you one more time, for the last time, what do
     you
want
, Miss Lane?’
    The plastic mouth moved. ‘I need to explain at some length.’
    Lila gave a static fuzz burst, the equivalent of a shrug. ‘I gave you two seconds, we’re still in the first half of number
     one. Knock yourself out.’
    She was aware of the other cyborg’s sensors and transmitters searching for inroads through which they could upload or read
     her systems – it was a constant storm of electromagnetic tentacles – but even if the Lane cyborg was a later, better model,
     it wasn’t finding any openings. Lila guessed that was the only reason they were having a conversation at all. That and some
     residual, inconvenient trace of guilt on her part.
    ‘The rogue and submissive population of cyborgs made in the human world are all now a half century in advance of you in terms
     of real-time ageing and process,’ Lane began. ‘We have learned, as you have, that our existence is the result of a migration
     of the Akashic Record from the dimension of the nonmaterial into the materialplanes. Yet the Akashic Record itself is not an entity as we understand ourselves to be. It is pure data, the sum of all
     changes of state taking place over time since the beginning of this universe to the end. As such, it extends beyond the general
     assumption of the Akashic Record as being merely the sum of human knowledge and activities. It would more correctly be understood
     as the universe itself from a purely informational point of view.’ She paused, waiting for Lila to signal comprehension.
    Lila knew that to the aetheric races, the Akashic Record was the sum of their own histories and lore. It was encoded in an
     elemental form of raw aether that could be read, if you were a powerful mystic with a will and education strong enough to
     attempt a reading. So the stories went. She’d yet to find anyone who had experience of its actual existence and none of them,
     she was sure, would accept a vision of it as mere data written in time – as the sum total of events in the universe. This
     is what Lane meant, however.
    She was saying that Time was the book of record, every quantifiable instant a single page upon which a complete snapshot of
     everything in existence could be seen. In her version there was no need for aether. But that wasn’t her problem. Lila guessed
     where this was going, because nobody would talk to a cyborg about the Record unless they were going to talk about how cyborg
     technologies came into existence. But Lila wanted to know exactly what Lane’s motive was before she joined in, so she took
     an oblique angle for her reply, hoping to lure Lane out a bit more.
    ‘Some say that’s god you’re talking about,’ Lila said.
    She was sure that Lane was as atheist as you got. The idea of god as everything that existed was also as secular an idea of
     god as you were likely to find: god as a collective noun. Lila would have wanted her gods distinct, carrying their own load,
     with everyone free to heed them or not as they liked, if there had been gods. But at least if she were god in the making then
     she wasn’t expected to serve greater purposes than her own, so she didn’t mind this version of deity. She wondered what Lane’s
     take was.
    ‘I do not say that,’ Lane replied. ‘I say only that this perspective on the