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This is a podcast extra from Nature.

Every week, nature publishes a science fiction story in its futures slot.

Every month, we read you our favourite. This month's story

is The Sixth Circle, written by J.W. Armstrong, published on the 29th of September and read by

Charmany Bandelle. By long-standing agreement, we only meet in abandoned areas of the orbital.

As usual, I arrived slightly early and cloaked.

Cloaking is expensive, but I figure it's a cost of doing business.

The consequences of detection are too unpleasant to contemplate.

At the appointed time, I received an encrypted message on the darkband.

My supplier had verified I was alone and not transmitting.

We mutually decloaked, and, floating on antigraphs, got down to business.

I was briefly reminded of our first meeting.

Verifiable IDs are never used, of course, only code names. He had said

that first time, I should call him Ishmael. It seemed like a dumb cryptonym to me, but Ishmael was

somehow amused. Then, as now, he seemed on first scan to be like any other AI in the orbital,

nondescript, one of millions more or less

like me. On a closer scan, though, he was different. He carried himself carefully, purposefully,

...