Vince's Desire

A novel by

Andrew Starling




Available free of charge from www.foxglove.co.uk

Copyright Andrew Starling 2003







Chapter 1

The screen showed a customs officer interviewed in front of wooden crates, then switched to an open-mouthed sex doll, a Furby toy, a scrolled-down page of regulations, another sex doll, Sony's robotic dog, and finally a computer. 
With the sound turned off, and viewed from the awkward perspective of the floor, it was difficult to tell what the news story was about, but if Graham had got it right, somebody was trying to import a batch of sex dolls with an elementary communication system, with a Furby-like electronic brain, dolls that did aural as well as oral. And they'd tried to import them as electronic equipment, when legally they were sex toys, or maybe the other way round.
"Would you ever want to have sex with a robot?" asked Graham. "I mean, when Sony or whoever gives up building miniature dogs and gets around to making humans with genitals, would you ever want to sleep with one?"
"Eh?" 
He felt Faith's head turn on his arm and knew her eyes had opened, though he wasn't looking at them. 
"You have an amazing line in pillow-talk," she said. "You're supposed to say stuff like 'I love you', not ask me if I want to join a robot orgy."
As they lay together, flush and satisfied in the valley of white carpet between the sofa and TV, images from the screen played over them like nightclub lights. A Channel 4 newsreader looked down at his notes on the desk, out of picture, so he appeared to be staring below the screen at Faith's bare breasts and her mass of hair like a dark fur coat lying by her side. His face displayed earnestness, but his mouth was silenced by the mute and opened and closed stupidly in goldfish gulps, as if he couldn't find the words to describe the arch of her back, the beautiful curve of her hips.
"An amazing line in cushion-talk," corrected Graham, dryly. "All the pillows are upstairs. The padded thing under my head is a cushion."
Faith's head rubbed up and down his arm. "I'm way ahead of you," she said, "I've thought about this before. It depends on how lifelike they are. If they're perfectly lifelike, attractive and sensitive, great lovers, then the answer would be yes, I'd be happy to sleep with one. How about you?"
"I can't see me trading you in for something with batteries."
Faith slapped his bare belly. "If only you could hear yourself."
"I can."
"But you haven't given me an answer."
"My answer's no," he said. "I couldn't sleep with one. I'd never be able to see them as human."
In the unused fireplace beyond Graham's head stood a bowl of fern-fronds, spray-painted every colour but green, since that would have looked weird, but now appearing as many shades of blue with the curtains closed and no light from anything but the TV. Beyond his feet in this small room, against the wall and close to the door, was Faith's upright piano, the piano she was slowly unlearning.
Graham reached for his trousers without disturbing Faith, and checked the time on his mobile. Five to nine. At nine he should be out on the street, waiting, but he could be out there in two minutes. 
"So, if somebody with a real partner sleeps with one of these hypothetical robots," he asked, "is that infidelity?"
 Faith gathered herself to speak, then hesitated. "The answer has to be the same, doesn't it? It depends on how lifelike they are. If they've got feelings, emotions, the whole relationship thing, then yes, it's infidelity."
"You're kind of upping their status, giving them the same value as real people."
"Or applying the same values. Yes, I am." Faith sounded indignant, like her point was obvious. She shifted, bringing her arm over Graham's chest, her leg over his, brushing his hair away from his ear, where she talked quietly. "But only if they can talk and think, otherwise they'd just be a glorified dildo."
"No, I don't think that works. Try this - if a robot has a human partner, but slips off to a hotel and sleeps with another robot, is that infidelity?"
Faith's body jerked against him, then settled. "Absolutely. This is assuming you can't tell they're robots, that they have emotions, are capable of love, not just sex-machines. If you can't tell, how are you going to treat them any different? You wouldn't even know if they'd slept with a robot or a person."
"I just don't think that'll happen. They may look great and be wonderful in bed, but you'll always know they're not real."
"Maybe they're already out there," she said. "You see them on the street, even fancy them, but you just can't tell."
They'd been like this from day one, recalled Graham, so secure in their relationship that they could talk about sex, about sex with other people, knowing it would never happen. Sex with robots wasn't a very romantic subject, as Faith had pointed out, but she liked to know what he was thinking about after they made love, and if he didn't say then she might make a point of asking.
Faith adjusted her long skirt, leaving her knickers close to the piano pedals but bringing the skirt material over her legs and pelvis. "I feel like he's perving at my bits," she said, looking up at the screen. "Anyway," she added, settling back on Graham's arm. "Rubber dolls are history. The first sex robots will be males."
"No way. The first robots will be built by geeks, by male geeks, and they'll build females."
"No, it's males who're produced purely for sex. You've got the male angler fish, that tiny little male who bites the female and becomes part of her body, shares her blood, loses his eyesight, just hangs in there and produces sperm. Then you've got bees and ants with their pathetic drones, and female black widow spiders and praying mantises saying 'thanks for the shag, now how about dinner?'"
She lay still for a while. Graham played with her thick hair.
"But they're all built for procreation, not recreation," he said.
She kissed him on the cheek. "You're so adorable, even if you do sometimes talk nonsense."
Her skin was hot against his, a comforting heat.
"I owned a vibrator once," she said. "I think I told you. When I was a student. Top of the range. I can't remember the price, but I do remember it was a week's rent. And I gave it a name." 
"A man's name?"
"No, no gender. I called it Desire. A tacky name, looking back, but I was younger and didn't know better." Here tone sharpened, became more rational. "This is very nice, sweetheart, and I don't really want you to go, but aren't you going to be late?"
Graham sighed.
"What time are you being picked up?" she asked.
"Nine."
Faith sat upright, her wavy chestnut cascade swinging around to settle on her back. She picked up the TV remote and a small clock appeared in a corner of the screen. "You'd better get dressed, you've only got two minutes." 
She looked for her bra and found it within reach on the sofa. Graham turned his baggy white shirt the right way out and fed his legs into his chinos. The TV showed commercial logging of a rainforest.
 Faith still held the remote, and for a while Graham thought she might switch the sound back on. Instead, she cocked her head to one side. "That's good."
"What is? People cutting down trees?"
Faith was a fanatical tree-lover.
"No, this is still the news, and they're talking about run-of-the-mill destructive behaviour, so they must have run out of really bad things that happened in the world." 
She climbed into her cotton top, speaking through the material as it covered her face. "You remember two days ago, they could barely fit all the bad news in. All those train and plane crashes."
Her face appeared through the neckline, for a moment it was sad, as she remembered her own personal bad news of that day. Then she appeared to put it to one side. "All those news editors cursing their luck. Not enough time to squeeze all the disasters in. And here we are two days later watching sex dolls with the brain of a cricket and regular pillage of the planet, and in the papers it'll be stories about pigs with faces like well-known actors and pictures of the Virgin Mary found inside potatoes, because clearly nothing much has happened in the world. "
Graham tied the laces of his shoes and stood up, smiling. He was the one who usually found news programmes unbearable. Faith generally tolerated them with the same forbearance as the rest of the planet, perhaps a little more, as she worked in TV herself, behind the scenes.
Now fully dressed, she put an elbow on the cushion that had been behind his head and regarded him. "Where's the job?" she asked.
Whichever way she stood or sat or lay, on whatever item of furniture, it never failed to look elegant, at least in Graham's eyes.
"Thames Valley. Should only take a few hours."
He hoped she didn't ask anything more, because he wasn't prepared to lie to her. This wasn't a job in the regular sense, it was a favour to Vince and he wouldn't get paid for it. Sometimes he did genuine call-outs in the evenings and nights, and that's what she'd assumed he was doing now, and he hadn't bothered to correct her. Between the seat of the sofa and an armrest was a plastic pouch of CD-ROMs. He picked it up and bent down to kiss Faith on the lips, closed mouth, a kiss goodbye.
"Good luck," she said, which wasn't something she normally said when he went to work.

***

Graham stood on the threshold of his house, at the top of the four broad steps that led down to street level, looking out on to the ancient street and the church opposite, under a London sky turning deep blue between clouds, now the early summer sun had gone.  
Elegant Georgian townhouses faced each other across the tarmac, separated from the pavement by basement patios and uneven black iron railings. All the ground floors were in off-white stucco, except for a few rebels in light pastels, and one in tan. Above the stucco, plain brick rose up to create straight facades that hid shallow-sloped roofs. And dotted along the kerbs, setting off this man-made glory, were rowans and ornamental cherries and small London planes in full leaf.
The church opposite took up an entire block, from one sidestreet to the next, rising directly out of the York stone pavement where a country church might rise out of grass. Elaborate flying buttresses supported a thin steeple, and along the side facing Graham were many slim tall windows, each topped off by a small circular one the size of a porthole. Once, that church had been filled with worshippers of God, but science and progress had reduced their number to the level where they could no longer afford the upkeep. In line with the times it had been bought by developers, who'd added an internal floor and divided it into flats. Now it was home to a score of yuppies - worshippers of mammon.
Graham never tired of the beauty of this view from his doorstep, the well-kept houses of his lawyer and banker neighbours, the trees, and the magnificent city church. The church was the landmark where he'd arranged to be picked up by the strangers in an unknown car. He crossed over and stood in its shadow, feeling perfectly relaxed, looking forward to the adventure. 
He might still smell of sex, but there was nothing unusual about that, he usually did. His own body gave off no odour of any kind, whether he washed or not, and they made love so often that if anybody thought he had his own characteristic smell it would probably be the sweet smell of Faith rather than his own body. 
Forty minutes ago he'd sorted through his CD-ROMs and arrived downstairs, not thinking of sex but not thinking of anything else, apart from maybe a few lines of computer code, and their eyes had met, a single glance, his recognition, her return signal acknowledging his, a signal back to say yes I have plenty of time, all in a brief meeting of eyes, a long conversation compressed by history, familiarity and affection into milliseconds. Then she'd stuck her tongue inside his mouth five minutes into the evening news. That was the way with Faith. Sex could cure many ills, she was right about that, and even if it failed there was plenty of fun and distraction to be had in the trying.
Maybe she was right about the first sex robots being male. He didn't know much about fish and spiders but he shared Faith's passion for bees. The trees and the bees - that was her euphemism for sex. The birds and the bees? She'd never worked out where the birds fitted in. Sure, birds ate berries and transferred seeds, but that was plain midwifery. It was the bees who were the true handmaidens of sex, the real tree-pimps, brazenly carrying pollen from one to another.
It was females who did all that carrying and collecting. Male bees existed purely for sex. They came from unfertilised eggs with half the chromosomes of a female - half-bees - drones. They lived only to mate with the queen, and since this was their sole purpose in life they had enormous genitalia, way out of proportion to their size. Each carried ten million identical sperm, and when they ejaculated their penis detached, plugging the sperm inside the queen and incidentally killing the drone. They lived their lives in pursuit of a single, fatal orgasm. 
Every few seconds a car drove by the church. Graham watched each one for signs of stopping. He had no idea what kind of car he was waiting for, or who would be inside.
Faith's passion for bees spilled over into a liking for ants, which he also shared. If bees were the sex-fiends of the insect world, then ants were its masterminds. They herded aphids for honeydew, farmed mushrooms grown on minced leaves, built rafts and lived in highly-organised societies. When the human race inevitably destroyed itself through nuclear warfare, genetic manipulation or a nanotechnology disaster, and took most of the planet's animal population with it, ants would inherit the world, they would become the dominant species. They had arrived before humankind and were likely to outlast it, they were the fairytale tortoise to humanity's hare.   
Back when he was twelve or thirteen he'd watched a nature programme about fire ants in the Amazon basin. When the big river flooded, they joined together to create a raft for their queen, held up by surface tension, a raft that floated freely until it drifted into land.  He'd wondered at the time if they felt excited by their expedition, their equivalent of a trip to the moon, if a collective intelligence was capable of feeling that kind of excitement, and the question had arrived so forcefully that even in adulthood it sometimes came back to him.
Strangely, he also remembered the program being littered with American adverts, which was odd because he must have seen it at his parents' house in Surrey. 
A new Jaguar saloon, a curvy S-type heading west, slowed as it approached. There were three people inside. The bodywork had a strange hue, the pink of a pale rose when lit by the headlights of a passing car, but bronze beneath yellow sodium streetlamps. It pulled in thirty feet away, at the corner of a junction.
Graham approached the passenger door. The electric window came down. A large man with a shaven head and a stoop, even when sitting, smirked at him from the passenger seat but said nothing. The driver leaned across, small but muscular, early fifties, wearing a Paul Smith suit or equivalent that failed to overcome the hardness of his face and merely transformed him from looking like a boxer into a boxing promoter. "You the computer geezer?"
"Yes."
"Well get in the fackin car, then."

Chapter 2

"I'm Macey, with an e," announced the driver. He pointed his thumb at the passenger seat. "This 'ere's Cameron. And with you in the back, that's Eric."
Cameron was wearing a blue and white striped soccer shirt, so Graham took the opportunity for light conversation. "Are you a Tottenham fan, Cameron?"
"Fuck off! Arsenal." His accent was distinctly South African, so it came out 'Airsnil'.
Yet the shirt was unquestionably the colours of Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal's hated rival.
"Cameron's hiding," explained Macey. "Nobody would ever think of lookin' for him inside a Spurs shirt."
Eric approved. "Nice one."
Eric, sitting next to Garham in the back, was the most presentable of the three. He was slightly built and smart in a black rollneck top and jacket. His hair was pure black and short, but carefully groomed rather than the straight number two of the driver. Graham guessed that he and Eric were around the same age, early-thirties, though there was a chance Eric was older but well-preserved. Unfortunately, he'd overdone the aftershave and it didn't mix well with the smell of seat leather.
"What side of the business are you in?" Graham asked him.
"Interfacing. Automation," answered Eric.
"I do that too - the programming."
"I'm more into the servos and mechanicals."
Eric's London accent was strong but clearly Estuarine when compared to Macey's Cockney, and stopped short of influencing his grammar and the completeness of his words, which made it sound peculiar, like an affectation.
"How about you, Macey?" asked Graham. 
Faith had often told him that he wasn't very good at assessing people, but that was the kind of thing that long-term partners were liable to say, and was best ignored. It was true that she did talk through his office politics with him once a week, and was a great help, but there she had the advantage of distant perspective. After just a few minutes in the car, already he was beginning to suspect that Macey and Cameron weren't really in the computer business.
"More the security side," replied Macey, after a pause.
They turned right at Angel lights on to Pentonville Road. Traffic was light.
"We used to do memory chips," said Cameron. 
"'S right," agreed Macey. "Cameron could find 'em in any piece of kit ever made, couldn't you Cam?"
Cameron nodded. Graham was becoming very familiar with the back of Cameron's broad neck, though it was lit only periodically by headlights. His head-shave was so complete it highlighted the shape of his skull and the individual plates of bone that fused together to create it, like a small planet with Tectonic plates. Graham amused himself thinking it was a shame there were no zits along the seams to represent volcanoes. 
He'd wondered if Cameron and Macey were father and son. The ages would be about right, but the accents were wrong and there was no family resemblance. Maybe they'd spent so much time together they'd picked up the relationship without the genes.
"'Course, we'd like to get into the Internet side of things," said Macey. "Future of the business. Do it all on the Internet, chance you'll make millions and fack all chance you'll get your collar felt. I'm just pissed off I'm too old to join in. Like, you see it all movin' away from you, all this technology and stuff, kids on their mobiles talking a new language, bashin' the keys on their little electronic games. 'Course, Cameron 'ere is too pigshit ignorant to get into all that. Ain't you Cam?"
Cameron didn't nod this time.
Macey often made eye contact with Graham in the rear view mirror, like cabbies do, sometimes lifting his face to show his mischievous smile. He was an excellent driver, accelerating and braking hard but with the elegance of a professional.
"Nice car," said Graham. "It's an unusual colour. What made you choose it?"
"It was unlocked." Macey ignored the road to watch Graham's face for a long time, then turned back and shook his head. He swung the Jaguar through the bends of the King's Cross one-way system. The place was seedy compared to affluent Angel. Many of the locals shared Cameron's stoop, his scavenger alertness.
The cuffs of Macey's fine suit rode up on the turns, exposing his cufflinks and the blue of tattoos circling his arms, and what looked like an expensive watch. Cameron had a big watch too, possibly a Rolex, though in the irregular light it was difficult to tell. He had the strap set so loose it caught only on the base of his thumb. Every few minutes - or so it seemed to Graham - he shot his hand into the air to bring the watch further up his arm. Macey appeared to find this action invisible, but Graham was sure he would go nuts if he was exposed to it for long.
He couldn't see the display on Cameron's watch clearly, but on a right turn saw that Macey's said twenty past nine. He never wore a watch himself, they always went wrong - something to do with his personal magnetic field, according to Faith - but he took out his mobile to check the time on the display matched up.
"You need to switch that off," said Eric.
"What?" Macey swung his head round. "You fackin wally! You got your mobile on?"
Graham didn't understand.
"They can trace that," explained Eric. "Just like a radio beacon."
"Been fackin 'ell to pay if you did the job with that on," growled Macey. "You berk. I thought you was a computer expert?"
Graham switched off the phone. "I am. I just don't see why it matters if somebody tracks me."
Macey exhaled loudly. "How did you get in on this job?"
"Vince asked me."
"What'd he say?"
"He asked me to retrieve a program from a secure computer."
"Yeah, that's about it. But me and Cam and Eric here, like, we want to keep this all a secret, don't want anybody knowing about it. You got that?"
"Sure."
"Here's a few tips for you. No mobiles, no talk about any of this to wife-girlfriend-mates. Right? After the job, take that New Romantic shit you're wearing and burn it if you can, else put it in a bin - not your own. And get a fackin haircut while you're at it. You look like a beach bum. Then try and forget about everything. Forget the date, forget me, forget Cameron, forget Eric. Them's the rules. After the job, we never see you again. You never see us again. You do it any other way, Cameron calls round and explains it in more detail. You got that?"
"Wouldn't it be easier if Cameron explained it now?"
Macey exhaled again. His face darkened. He began to speak but couldn't find the words. "Just keep it a secret, all right?"
"Sure." 
Graham had no intention of burning his clothes. The chinos were Armani and the baggy-sleeve shirt was custom made, a present from Faith. He couldn't imagine that Macey intended to burn the expensive suit he was wearing.  
They made their way down the Euston underpass and back up the other side. On the right they passed the peculiar Abbey National Buildings, four of them, each decorated with external frames of louvered glass that resembled huge cooling coils - at a glance they looked like the backs of four giant refrigerators. 
For more than a mile the closely-packed traffic lights were coordinated, so that -  depending on the time of day - a vehicle travelling east to west or west to east stood a chance of getting a clear run. The six lanes were narrow and to the left of the Jaguar an articulated lorry kept pace, giving Graham a barely changing view of the dark underside of its trailer and its outsize wheels. Streetlight angled in through the front and rear screens of the car, advancing and receding in hypnotic repeating patterns. They passed Madame Tussaud's and the London Planetarium, with a tramp pissing against its closed doorway. Then Baker Street Tube station arrived and Graham abruptly came to life.
This was where Faith's sister, Danielle, had had her accident two days ago, right here, on the junction of Baker Street and Marylebone Road. Faith adored her sister, and the pair of them were so similar that Graham couldn't help but adore Danielle too. She was a kind of acid-house version of Faith: younger, a lot wilder and without the big hair.
He took in the bollards, the many lanes of traffic. This was a terrible junction for a cyclist. And what a lot of traffic cameras there were! It was strange that he'd never noticed them before, but there were three around this single junction, now visible through the rear window, three moveable traffic cameras on enormous poles, one so tall it towered above the streetlights.
"Sit still, you twat!" yelled Macey.
"A friend of mine had an accident here. I was looking at the junction."
"Maybe he was bouncin' around on the back seat of hooky car, with all the fackin cameras around, and the driver turned round and brained him," suggested Macy, very forcefully.
"Her," corrected Graham, but he did sit still.
"Two days ago," said Cameron.
"What?"
"Your friend's crash."
"That's right. How did you know?"
"All green robots, green in every direction. There were scores of accidents."
"Nah, don't follow you," said Eric.
"It's what we call traffic lights in South Africa," explained Cameron. "Robots. The machines that replaced traffic policeman."
"Surely if there had been so many accidents it would have been on the news," said Graham.
"No," answered Eric. "There was too much other stuff going on, remember? That was the day the whole world got out of the wrong side of bed."
The news had been worth watching that day, with the sound turned on. A Lufthansa flight from Geneva had missed Frankfurt airport and crashed into the Deutsche Bank building downtown. Two Japanese bullet trains collided at full speed just outside Tokyo. The New York Stock Exchange reversed seven thousand deals and was forced to shut down. These were the top three news items of the day, and there were dozens more. Hundreds of people had died in this worldwide rash of accidents, this banana-skin day for the planet.
"All down to human error," said Graham. "We need more robots, more computers in charge, then these accidents wouldn't happen."
Eric looked at him askance. "Are you sure?"
Graham was very sure, and about to say so, but Macey butted in.
"You ever met this geezer Vince?"
"No," replied Graham. "Email only."
"Me and Cam the same. Eric too. Makes you wonder, doannit? None of us ever seen the bloke or 'eard his voice. Like, what's he got to hide?"
"On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog," suggested Eric.
"'Xactly."
"Yeah," agreed Cameron. "In those chatrooms, me, I'm an investment banker with a Porsche and an enormous cock."
"And you still get fackin nowhere."
The Jaguar moved on to the Westway, one of the few elevated urban expressways in London. Macey speeded up.	
"So," he continued, "like we was sayin', what's he got to hide?"
Nobody replied. Macey tried again.
"You known the geezer long, Graham?"
"A few months."
"He ever talk about where he lives, about his girlfriend, holidays, stuff like that?"
"No."
"Then what does he talk about, or tap his keyboard about, whatever?"
This was getting difficult. Vince wasn't a subject that Graham talked about freely, not even to Faith. Maybe he would do in a month or so, when Vince was ready, but right now he wasn't keen. Yet also he hated being deceptive - it wasn't in his nature. He could just about manage deception by avoiding a subject, but if he was pressed on it then he'd invariably tell the truth. He hoped that Macey would stop pressing. 
"We don't talk about stuff like that, Macey. We play Internet games together, and electronic chess." 
"But you said you never met the geezer?"
"We play over the Internet."
"Like, he's in one place and you're in another?"
"That's right."
"What's the fackin point of that?"
"Entertainment, I suppose. And we watch films together," Maybe Macey would find films easier to relate to than computer games.
"You go to the flicks together?"
"No, we watch them on DVD."
"In the same room."
"Not exactly. In separate locations but at the same time."
"You taking the piss, son?"

***

Humphrey Bogart stood at the foggy Casablanca airport with Ingrid Bergman, holding his friend, Police Captain Renault - Claude Rains - at gunpoint.
Vince was a big Bogart fan, and a week ago Graham had watched Casablanca with him, in that simultaneous but apart mode that would later puzzle Macey.
Bogart gave the two letters of transit to the Police Captain and instructed him to fill out the blanks, "In the names of Mrs Lazlo and Rick Blaine."
"Eh?" Graham stared wide-eyed at his laptop screen. It was a great film and he'd watched it at least three times before. Like a large proportion of the planet's population he knew that Bogart, playing Rick Blaine, made the ultimate sacrifice and put Ingrid Bergman on the plane along with her husband, crusader for the oppressed, Victor Lazlo, played by Paul Henreid. Bogart definitely did not get on the plane.
Bergman smiled and they embraced. "Oh Rick, I love you. I'm so glad we're together again."
"What?" yelled Graham. His hands reached for the keyboard. 
-Vince, what the hell is going on?
The engines started on the plane to Lisbon. There was no "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life" speech, and no "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world", none of the four pages of brilliant script with some of Bogart's best-ever lines, delivered by the man of few words, who - according to Vince, and Vince knew his Bogart - only learned his lines on-set on the morning of the day he delivered them, and on that day at the end of filming Casablanca had been annoyed there were so many lines to learn. Instead, Bogart and Bergman made straight for the plane. Bogart looked a little strange from the back as he walked, like Paul Henreid's Victor Lazlo character made shorter and with his hat darkened.
Vince's reply arrived at the bottom of Graham's laptop screen, like a subtitle.
-Sorry, I'm still not great at manipulating visuals. But I did well with Bergman's voice, don't you think?
-Vince, you've completely wrecked the film. That's a terrible ending.
This was a digital version of Casablanca from an Internet film library that Vince had hacked into for a free viewing. Clearly he'd taken some liberties with the ones and zeros too.
-Come on, it's a lot better than the original. 'We'll always have Paris?' What kind of defeatist nonsense is that? He's got the letters of transit and he's in love with Bergman. He should ditch the loser and take her home.
-He's not supposed to finish up with Bergman.
-You're quite right. He's better off with Bacall. I bet she was a little minx in bed. She always sounds dirty to me.
-I think you're missing the point, Vince. The film isn't about sex or successful personal relationships. It's about nobility, about recognising a love more important than your own, and a cause more important than yourself, and making sacrifices so it all works out ok.
He hadn't analysed the film in that way before, but the more he thought about it, the more this instant analysis sounded right, even if he hadn't found the perfect way to express it. 
-You mean that in this case the love between Lazlo and his wife, and Lazlo's work against the Nazis, are more important than the love between Bogart and Bergman?
-Exactly.
And though Graham typed that word almost on automatic, it seemed to gain in significance as he reached the last few letters. Vince truly did understand what was going on in the film. Graham had presented the noble causes in abstract terms, and Vince, with no outside help, had turned them into specifics. Clearly he'd also been able to recognise the strong relationship between Bogart and Bergman, which was why he'd changed the ending. Even though the new ending was wrong, it had been created for all the right reasons.
This was a shock. Vince had shown absolutely no understanding of relationships before. He'd always relied on Graham to walk him through that kind of stuff. And Graham had always obliged. That was their usual relationship, teacher and pupil, father and son. Graham had put a lot of effort into advancing Vince's understanding of the world, spent so much time with him that Faith had twice complained about becoming a computer widow.
Vince's learning cycle for this new emotional awareness had been dramatically short, as it always seemed to be when he applied his mind to understanding something. Just two weeks ago they'd watched the African Queen together in their simultaneous but apart mode, and Vince had struggled to make sense of it. He'd enjoyed Bogart's acting, he said, and Katharine Hepburn's, and the scenery, but it seemed to him that very little happened in the middle of the film. 
-But Vince, they fall in love! That's the whole point of the film, the very reason why it's so popular. Two dissimilar people fall head over heels in love with each other, and improve themselves as they go. He gets himself organised and sober, she gets less prissy. 
-This 'love' business. It's not easy to understand.
-Nobody understands it, you only feel it.
-I've been looking into the chemical angle. Recently I investigated testosterone and managed to synthesise it as a software program, in digital form. It seems to work. I feel confidence without reason, and aggression. But it gives me strange urges I can't satisfy.
-You might be confusing lust and love.
-Is that a common problem?
Graham smiled to himself.
-Yes.
And perhaps it was even more of a problem for Vince than it was for a regular mortal. With his brilliant hacking skills, Vince had unrestricted access to the Internet and its misleading and disorganised library of information, a very pornographic library simplified by the separation of sex from transmissible disease, baby production, love, relationships and the viewpoint of women. 
His naiveté had been very obvious when they'd first got to know each other, when Vince had come out of the wilderness of illiteracy and learned to write and read, when he'd made his first comments on the world as it appeared to him through his email inbox.
--Today I got a mail from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In the photo, Snow White has her legs wide open and her fingers are playing between them. The dwarfs are very strange and have small bodies and small hands and feet but huge sex organs. Should I tell Snow White that these people are freaks? I'm not sure I should, because she seems very happy even though her companions are clearly deformed.
He'd sent that naïve message to Graham just two months ago.

***

Their route west across the top of central London and out to the Thames Valley was straightforward. They carried on in almost a straight line while the road beneath them repeatedly changed identity. It had started out as Pentonville Road, then become Euston Road, Marylebone Road, the Westway, and Western Avenue. As they passed Northolt Aerodrome in darkness, the height of the lampposts came down so their tops didn't catch the undercarriages of approaching aircraft. The squat little posts looked cute, like infant versions of tall lamppost parents.
"So, how old do you reckon he is?" asked Macey.
"Who is?" asked Eric.
"Vince, you wally. Don't seem that old to me."
Eric didn't answer.
"Graham?" Macey glared into his rear-view mirror. 
Graham didn't know what to say. He'd been hoping this wouldn't happen. He'd avoided answering Macey's earlier questions, but now he'd run out of tactics, or at least the willingness to use them. He could tell Macey that Vince was a few months old, a mere babe in real terms. Or he could say that Vince was a teenager, in terms of human understanding. Most truthful of all, he could explain both.
Western Avenue became the M40, but Macey didn't speed up, instead he slowed down. Cars and trucks sped past them at normal motorway speed. 
"You deaf, pal?" he asked. "You need somethin' poking in your ears to clean 'em out? You got a biro there, Cam?"
Graham made a hurried decision and went for option two. "Still a teenager. Maybe sixteen."
"Fackin 'ell! I told you, Cam, kids' game, this computer business. I'll be doing jobs for bairns in diapers next. Sixteen? Fack me. Not even old enough to get pissed and vote. 'Ere, hold on. How comes you know how old he is when you never met him?"
"I'm just guessing."
Macey grimaced into the rear view mirror, fierce in his expression. "You computer geezers, you're full of shit!"
He stayed agitated, certainly in the right foot. The Jaguar hit one hundred and ten, then came back to fifty, up again, and down.
Graham amused himself wondering whether his companions in this quick steel box had female partners. For Cameron, still shooting his watch every few minutes, the answer had to be a no. He simply couldn't imagine a woman wanting Cameron. For Macey the answer was definitely yes, though it was hard to say why, yet there was some trace of happy domesticity beneath all that earthy bluster. As for Eric, something else was going on with Eric, but before he could put his finger on what it was, their speed evened out at seventy-five and Macey bit his tail again.  
"Listen 'ere, Cliff Richard," he snarled, staring at Graham in the mirror, "You been a fackin pain in the arse ever since you climbed in. Bleedin' phone on the go, not a clue what we're up to, load of bollocks about this Vince geezer. You're givin' me grief. See, it goes like this, when your Uncle Macey asks you a question, you give him a straight answer. Any other way, we can't do the job. Can't trust each other, see?"
The Jaguar passed the junction for the M25, now at fifty.
"Sure."
"Nah, don't give me that American shit. You tell me what you know about Vince, right now."
Graham couldn't lie. He knew that children watch politicians on TV, and broadcasters too, and learn the skill as surely as they learn their maths at school. But he just couldn't do it. He had to tell Macey the truth.
"Vince isn't real. He's not a real person. He's a kind of artificial intelligence that exists solely on the Internet, nowhere else. That's why nobody's met him and why nobody's talked to him on the phone. He doesn't have a body, no physical existence, no parents, no girlfriend. He's not a dog, he's a nobody, just a lot of software programs spread around the Internet, like bees, like ants, an intelligent whole made up of dumb individuals. He's pure software."
The car didn't speed up. Macey glared even more fiercely into his mirror.
"Go on, Eric," prompted Graham. "Tell him it's possible."
"Well," said Eric, hesitantly, "maybe in theory. But I've never heard of anything so advanced."
"There are so many things that humans can't do properly," continued Graham, "like guiding planes into airports, making sure trains are on different tracks, even running a stock market. We keep messing them up. But Vince, he won't make mistakes. That's why I made him. He'll be able to do all these things perfectly, and he'll keep on growing, getting better."
"You did this?" said Eric.
"I spent years working on the basic version, then I added a genetic algorithm, so Vince could carry on developing, improving himself. It worked better than I expected. He was like a newborn baby to begin with, but that was only a few months ago. He can already think for himself, and send emails."
Macey carried on driving slowly along the inside lane of the motorway. An articulated lorry loaded with BMWs overtook them. He was silent for a minute, then he said, quietly, "You ain't bein' serious are you, son?"
"That's why I can't tell you his age, and that's why you'll never meet him. He's not real."
"Just because I ain't been to university don't mean I'm thick."
"I never thought you were."
"Then why you trying to fack with my head? You telling me a piece of electronics sparked up, sent me an email and got me workin' on a job for it? Some fackin computer's got me workin' for it?"
Graham wanted to say thousands of computers, but he could see that wouldn't help.
The car slowed even further. Macey moved off the inside lane and on to the hard shoulder.
Cameron shifted in his seat. "What's up, Macey?"
"I'm waiting for this clown in the back to apologise." He addressed the mirror again. "Where you get your jollies, mate, winding people up cos you thing they ain't as clever as you?"
Graham had no idea what to say. He'd told the truth, what more could he do?
Macey stopped the car.
"This isn't a great place to stop, Macey," said Cameron. "If the cops come by, we'll get pulled for sure."
"I don't give a shit. Me and this fackin joker in the back need a heart to heart."
Macey got out. He walked around the car to Graham's door and opened it. "Get out."
It wasn't cold outside. The air was still when not disturbed by passing lorries. They'd stopped on an embankment. A few yards of grass were in view, heading down into blackness with fence-posts vaguely visible at the bottom. Graham was a lot taller than Macey, but also much narrower, mere skin and bone compared to Macey's meat, his wide shoulders, thick neck, thick arms, thick legs. Macey's stance was menacing, shoulders back, chest out.
"Jesus fackin Christ!" yelled Macey. "You ain't even scared!"
Graham tried to oblige. He tried to imagine there was deep water down at the bottom of the embankment. But he could see fence-posts down there, so the delusion didn't work. He was terrified of water, and wary of dogs, but never frightened of people. More than anything, he was annoyed with Vince for getting him involved in this awkward situation. Vince had timed his request so well, right after he'd told Graham about Danielle's accident, when he'd seemed so compassionate and emotionally aware and in need of help himself.
Scores of people passed by in their metal and glass environments, in their noisy machines, all seeing the stand-off on the grassy embankment and looking the other way. 
Macey held a finger in front of Graham's chin. His face was so flushed that in the darkness his skin looked Asian. "Right, you Islington pinko," he growled. "Now, you tell me to my face, right in front of me, that this Vince geezer is nothing more than a fackin computer."
Graham didn't know what to say. If he said more he knew it might make things worse. He had no idea things would work out this way. He hadn't intended to piss off Macey. 
But Macey was even more pissed off by the silence. 
"You cant!" he yelled, and drew back his arm.
Graham didn't flinch. He stood perfectly still. He realised he'd been right in the first place, right not to talk about Vince. His mistake had been changing his mind and revealing the details before people were ready. Nothing more than bad timing. If he could take that information back, at least temporarily, it would help and it wouldn't really be a lie, just a delay of the truth.
He shook his head. "It was a joke. I overdid it."
That was difficult to say, but maybe that made it sound more sincere.
Macey glared, his eyes wide open, but his arm and broad shoulders relaxed. The air in his pumped-up lungs came out loudly. He turned abruptly and walked back to the driver's door. "Get in," he barked at Graham, before getting in the car himself. 


Chapter 3

Macey turned off the M40 at junction three, a little before High Wycombe, and headed down the A4094 in the direction of Maidenhead. His face-off with Graham hadn't put him in a bad mood. Quite the opposite. Maybe he felt that some kind of altercation was an essential part of a decent night out, and he was pleased that the evening had lived up to expectations. He looked at his expensive watch. "Nearly there." Like he had a car full of schoolchildren.
The road had been ribbon-developed and there were streetlights along most of its length, and a hotch-potch of nondescript semis with long front gardens, bits of public green, modern industrial buildings and modest new estates, plus a watercourse that at first couldn't decide if it was a brook or a drain but soon became wider and might have looked pretty in daylight. It passed under the road more than once on its way to join the Thames. 
Graham kept a wary eye on the water. While it continued to run fast he could assume it was shallow and deal with it, but if it slowed, he'd be in trouble. His fear of water was so extreme that he couldn't even look at anything more than a few feet deep.
"Are we allowed to know where we're going?" he asked, warily.   
"Don't see why not," said Macey. "Duke's Meadow, Bourne End."
"A meadow?"
"Industrial estate, bonehead."
They passed a broad village green on the left, with hairdressers and shops on the right, plus a few lovely half-timbered houses. In a couple of places the human development gave way to shrubs and open fields, but not often. Thousands of roads in England looked like this, turning suburban while they struggled to remain rural. 
They took a right at a mini-roundabout.
"Fackin gorgeous village, Bourne End," said Macey, after a while. "Right on the Thames. Little railway running all the way through it, Cock Marsh on the other side of the water, full o' cows, couple of boozers. Course, you ain't gonna see the river from the road. But take my word for it, nice place. Cor, look at them poncey shops. Wassat? Antiques? That was a butchers when I was a nipper."
Graham was relieved they wouldn't get to see the Thames, but puzzled by Macey's comment about the shop. "Don't you drive down this road every day?"
"What?" Macey frowned, then grinned. "I used to live here. Went to Wye Valley School," he said, which hardly answered Graham's question. "About a mile up on the right. There's a cut through these woods."
"I thought you were from Holloway," said Cameron, sounding mildly disappointed.
"I am. The old man moved 'ere when I was seven, try to stop me mixin' with the wrong sort. Course, I could find 'em wherever I was. But he couldn't find no work, started doin' over houses, finished up inside, stupid git. I got my old lady to move us back to Holloway."
They turned left at a sign for Millboard Road, through a band of trees and over a bridge. The river they'd been tracking for the last few miles ran beneath, its surface fast-flowing and uneven, twinkling in the streetlight. Fast or not, it was now just a little too large for Graham to deal with, and he closed his eyes as they passed over it. There were new houses, then industrial buildings, but only on the right. On the left was a dark field.  
"Fackin 'ell! Fackin 'ell!" Macey coasted along slowly then pulled in at the side of the empty road and turned off the ignition. "Just look at the state of this place! I used to play football 'ere when I was a nipper. Not on the fackin road mind, there was all fields back then. What a right royal jacksie! Look what they done to it! We had flowers 'ere. Used to set fire to 'em. Pitch weren't level neither. Bet they have to use the sports ground now, the nippers. All them rules. No smoking on the pitch. Real goalposts instead of ones what changes position dependin' who's biggest. Poor cants."
To Graham, it looked like a perfectly average trading estate. The freedom of the car had taken work out of the cities and to the edges of small villages like this one, creating a half-assed version of Silicon Valley close to the Thames. Most of the big US computer companies had settled around here, Japanese electronics companies too, and what little was left of the homegrown UK industry.
From where they were parked, over to the right he could see three company names on big factory units: Kawasaki, Xerox and Hitachi. Two Japanese, one American. All the units were roughly the same inoffensive height, three storeys masquerading as two. There was no sign of life in the estate, no people, no moving cars and only half a dozen parked, just visible behind the shrubs that hid the many parking lots. 	
"All 'cos you poncey computer geezers don't want to live in The Smoke," complained Macey. "Or most of yous, anyway."
"Do you have children, Macey?" asked Graham.
"What fackin business is it of yours?"
There was silence for a minute, then Eric asked, "Where is this Foxglove place?"
Macey motioned beyond the Kawasaki block at a red brick building with a distinctive sloping roof, making it look, at least from this side-on view, like the end of a third division football stadium. "That has to be it, down there." He showed no sign of starting the car and moving towards it. 
It was far larger than Graham had anticipated, though when he thought about it, the only reason he'd assumed they were going somewhere small was that he'd never heard of the company.
Cameron wound down his window. Graham followed his example, dropping the barrier that isolated him from the outside world. The air smelled sweet. It was a pleasant evening warmed by low cloud, not a breath of wind, and with the motor switched off there was barely any noise, just the occasional loud truck or motorbike from the A-road they'd turned off, muffled by the bank of trees.
The view from the passenger side of the car was entirely different to the buildings on the driver's side. Here was a small tarmac pavement, then a tall wire mesh fence, for some reason another footpath on the other side, this one of concrete and weed, and then a long dark field finishing with a hill in the distance and lights from a handful of houses scattered upon it.
"Oi, not in the car."
Cameron held his cigarette pack and lighter. "It's not even your fecking car, Macey."
Macey glared. Cameron put them back in his trouser pocket with exaggerated, sulky movements, and shot his watch in frustration.
On the wire fence were signs - Warning, Law Enforcement Guard Dogs on Patrol. With the Jaguar parked between the fence and the buildings, they gave the impression it wasn't the estate that was protected but the dark and empty field beyond the twin footpaths.  Graham imagined Alsatians in black trousers, jackets and peaked caps wandering on the grass.
"Got dogs," said Cameron.
"Got signs up saying dogs," replied Macey. "Not the same thing."
"Anyway," said Eric, "they're probably all busy yapping on Internet chat rooms right now." 
After a couple of seconds he added, "Certainly got security cameras. Must be a dozen or more."
"Yeah, I know all about them," said Macey. He seemed oddly relaxed, mesmerised. He wasn't looking at Foxglove but out across the field, maybe lost in a childhood memory, or, like Graham, finding the view more compelling than it should have been. The decay of the concrete path, the pitch darkness of the field and dots of habitation beyond, none of these things were beautiful in their own right but somehow they managed to come together in a composition.
Cameron opened his door and swung his knees out, then lit a cigarette with his bum still on the seat but his head outside the car. Macey reached for the internal light above the windscreen without looking at it, and ran his stubby fingers along until he found the switch, but otherwise didn't react. The open door increased the connection between the inside of the car and the outside, between the occupants and the silent, dark field.
Despite the strange circumstances, it was a moment of quiet peace, of everything being in its correct place in the world - one that caught Graham by surprise. 

When the enterprising burglar isn't burgling,
When the cut-throat isn't occupied in crime,
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling
And listen to the merry village chime.
When the coster's finished jumping on his mother,
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun.

Who was that? Sullivan. No, Gilbert - he wrote the words. They were from Pirates of Penzance.
He was a big fan of poetry, but it was Faith who was the fanatic. And being more of a romantic than he might casually admit, he'd learned over one hundred of her favourites so he could recite them to her at odd times. Nothing as gross as one a week, more like two or three a year, when the timing was exactly right and the poem fitted. Many were wasted, never recited, but it was still worth it to see the stars in her eyes. 
Memorising them had been remarkably easy. He'd found that the meter and rhythm of poetry provided its own checksum, a bit like the checksums in computer data. The lines themselves seemed to have a completeness that was noticeably broken by a single wrong word, or, in the excerpt that had just run through his mind, by the missing end of a verse.

Ah, take one consideration with another,
A policeman's lot is not a happy one!

Some rational aspect of his head had, on this occasion, edited out the reference to police. 
Eric clearly hadn't been caught by the magic of the moment. "What we waiting for?"
And in the lightless car, under a moonless, starless cloudy sky, Macey lit a cigarette himself and replied, "Darkness, dummy."

Chapter 4

The darkness that Macey had been waiting for arrived at ten thirty precisely. All the streetlights, the white globe lights in the industrial estate car parks, and the lights inside the buildings and on their walls, went out. The clouds reflected streetlights of towns in the Thames Valley, with bright spots for nearby Maidenhead and High Wycombe, red, as if they were on fire, but shedding so little light that nothing showed around the Jaguar except the ghostly silhouettes of fence-posts by the field and outlines of the four buildings. Tiny white dots moved below the high cloud base, airliners with their powerful lights on, joining the queue in the air for Heathrow.
"Nice one, Vince," said Macey.
"They'll have emergency batteries," said Cameron, "maybe even a generator."
"Yeah, for the computers inside," said Eric, "but it doesn't look like they've got them for the lights and cameras."
Macey started the car and drove the two hundred yards to the Foxglove building, the Jaguar purring very quietly, like its namesake stalking prey. He turned the car around and parked near the glass entrance doors. His elbow came over the back of his seat as he addressed Graham and Eric. "Right, in case the cameras still work, I got some masks. Disguise, like Cam's shirt, but for yer boat-race. I got Bush, Clinton, Nixon and Reagan. What you up for?"
"Clinton," said Cameron, from the passenger seat.
"You're Nixon," said Macey, without looking at him.
Graham and Eric said nothing. 
"It's a fackin joke!" said Macey, turning sullen at their lack of reaction. He got out of the car and they followed his lead. At the back, he opened the boot a few inches. Graham could see a petrol container, maybe more than one. Eric placed a hand on the boot-lid to open it further and Macey slapped it like a child's. "Oi, dickhead! Not your property." 
Eric's body tensed as he moved his hand away, then relaxed again. He repeated Cameron's claim. "Well, it's hardly yours either, is it?"
"Yeah, but what's in there might be. Eh?" Macey's hand went inside the slightly open boot and he groped where he couldn't see. He pulled out a long sledgehammer with an unusually small head.
"Meet Percy." He left the boot slightly open. Cameron moved up to it. "Later," said Macey, and Cameron moved away.
There was a huge difference in the stature of the pair. Cameron's stoop was even more pronounced now he was standing up. He was a big man, as tall as Graham but a lot wider, with shoulders still impressive even though they weren't properly presented by his pose of aggressive dejection. Macey was much shorter and rounder, yet far more erect and purposeful. As they walked away from the car, Graham amused himself by thinking how much the man looked like a belligerent duck, at least from behind.
Cameron knelt in front of the central lock between the plate glass doors. "No, it's one of those Swiss pressure jobs. Could take ten minutes."
"Move out the way, then." Macey approached and placed his back to one of the doors, then swung the long hammer down into the bottom left corner, very close to the hinge. A diagonal crack about two feet long appeared in the glass. At the same time an alarm went off, shrill, but not obscenely loud from outside. Inside was a small lobby lit by emergency lights and green exit signs, and now by a flashing blue strobe. 
"Hold on! Hold on!" shouted Graham. "What are you doing?"
"Getting inside. What's it look like?"
"But haven't you got a key?"
"Yeah, sure." Macey held up the hammer. "Percy."
"But..."
Macey grinned. "Didn't Vince tell you? I'd 'ave thought he'd let you know about all this, what with you creating him and everything." He hammered at the glass in the corner until it caved in, then attacked the top hinge. Eventually the glass gave up the battle and a large section fell away. "Mind yourself. Don't want no blood. Can't stand the sight of blood." He walked inside, still grinning. "Electric cameras, phone alarms, glass doors. What a fackin bunch of amateurs."
Graham found himself in a double state of shock. He hadn't anticipated that they were going to break down the door to get, and he certainly hadn't imagined that once the door had been broken down the inside of the building would smell like home. Not Islington home, but Egham home, where he'd lived as a child. The strange familiarity dispelled his doubts about going inside. 
Cameron nervously shot his watch every few seconds, transforming his arm into a timepiece in its own right. 
The alarm was much louder inside. The strobe lit up Macey as he kicked broken glass to one side, making him appear less of a belligerent duck and more like a middle-aged dancer in a techno club. When he was satisfied that his break-in was sufficiently tidy, he stopped kicking and looked expectantly at Graham and Eric. "Well? We're inside."
"We need to find the CEO's office," announced Eric.
"Second floor, far left hand corner," said Graham.
"How do you know?"
"I haven't a clue, but I bet you it's there."
He led them up the wide stairway to the second floor and into a long computer room beyond a glass door, lit only by emergency lights. There had to be a million pounds of hardware in this one room - white, grey and black boxes of electronics stacked in angle-frame racks from floor to eye level. There were barely any screens and keyboards and everything was oversized with extra lights and dials, like a Hollywood version of computing. He recognised most of the equipment - mainly servers, RAID arrays and routers. Hundreds of tiny red LEDs showed it was all switched on, powered by a back-up generator or batteries, but only a handful twinkled with activity.
The air-conditioning appeared to have lost power. It wasn't easy to tell because the alarm was too loud to hear much beneath it, but the mass of electronics gave off a powerful smell. The air was warm and ionised, making it feel synthetic.
"You know what electronics smell of?" said Eric. "A human barbecue. That smell's from dust burning, and most dust is human skin and hair. If you barbecued someone, they'd smell like electronics."
Yet this was part of the smell that Graham recognised from home. There'd been no home computers back then, and no human barbecues, at least none that he could remember, and surely they'd be memorable. His nose had to be leading him astray.
"You cant," said Macey, approvingly, to Eric. He gestured at the racks. "What's all this shit, then? Don't look like regular computers."
"Internet hardware," replied Graham. "It looks like the phones are down, so it's resting. They must have a hell of a connection." 
Eric yelped like a dog with a trodden-on tail. He'd been poking around in the racks and now he reached between two servers and brought out a strange metallic object about four inches long, like the spaceframe chassis of an elaborate model car. He held it gingerly, like a dead snake.
"What is it?" asked Graham.
"I think," said Eric, "it's the middle section of an artificial foot."
"It's a bit of Airfix model, that's what it is," said Macey, standing next to him. "Stop fackin about. You ain't got all day."
"Look, these are the flexors, this is where the toes would go, and the ball of the foot..."
Before Eric could finish, Macey grabbed the item from his hand and sent it flying to a far corner of the room. "See? It was a plane. Now stop talking shit and let's find what we're here for."
Graham led the party to where his intuition said the CEO's office would be, at the far end of the server farm, through another glass door. He was right. Here was an office with four desks, each with a keyboard and flat monitor. 
Eric went from one to the next. He stopped at the biggest desk with the plushest chair. "This is the one. Angela Avebury."
Her name was etched into a small triangular name-board lying on the desk. There was also a photo of her on the wall, it showed a preppy woman in her early forties with an elaborate side-parted hairstyle. Beneath the photo were the words - Angela Avebury, Chief Executive Officer.
"American," observed Graham. And it wasn't a guess. The face was familiar and he knew she was American, though he couldn't say why he was so sure.
"Right, get to it," demanded Macey. "You got less than seven left. Alarm going off in Bourne End, some cant's bound to phone the Old Bill. But they ain't too nippy round these parts. We always used to reckon ten minutes."
Graham took a CD from the small pack of goodies he'd prepared at home and inserted it in the computer tower beneath the desk, then switched on. He was pleased to see that back-up power reached this computer too. In every other way it was an isolated machine, with no network of phone connections. That's why Vince hadn't been able to hack into it himself, why he'd needed Graham to get inside the building. Vince was a brilliant hacker, but even he couldn't get inside a computer that had no connections to the outside world. 
While he waited for the screen to go through its boot sequence, Graham decided to ask Macey a question that had been bugging him for a while. This would be his one opportunity, during these few minutes when his role in the night's business was of some consequence.
"Unusual name you've got. Any story behind it?"
Macey sat with his feet up on a nearby desk, inspecting his nails and cleaning them with a pocket-knife, totally ignoring the alarm. "I used to fence. Had so much gear in the house it looked like a store. Everybody called it Macy's, without the 'e', including the Old Bill. I didn't mind being called Macy, till that singer came along and I found it was a girl's name. So I put an 'e' in it, and took the teeth out of any cant what spelled it without. Still sounds the same, mind."
Cameron was nowhere to be seen. In fact, when Graham came to think about it, he'd been missing for a while.
The flat screen came up with a username and password box.
Eric looked at Graham. "What's on the CD, a password cracker?"
Graham shook his head. Cracking the password by brute force, trying every possible permutation of letters and numbers, was out of the question. He had the software tools but it could take weeks, even years. He followed the computer power cable to a mains socket in the floor, and rocked the switch a few times so the screen flickered and the machine crashed and restarted again. 
"What are you trying to do?" asked Eric. "We haven't got much time."
"Put the computer in a different mood, get it confused so it reads what's on the CD."
"Since when did computers have moods?"
"Sure they do. Have you ever tried to do something on a computer one day, and it works, and the next day it doesn't?"
Eric didn't answer.
"They're the same as us," explained Graham. "They have moods. They get awkward when they've had a bad day, when there's data debris sitting around inside, or too many programs were open and they ran out of memory. And they're vulnerable when they wake up suddenly or get confused."
"Yeah. Like nickin' somebody's wallet while they're having an asthma attack," said Macey.
"Something like that," said Graham, frowning. 
The boot sequence took a little longer than before, but this time it finished with a directory listing of the computer's contents, rather than a login screen.
"Shit!" exclaimed Eric.
Graham began hunting through the directories for the right type of file, the kind Vince had asked him to look for. "They get old and feeble too. After a few years they're full of crash debris and tired system files and they don't work as well as when they first came out of the box. You must have noticed that."
Ten possible files. Five were too small. Graham would need to look at the code in the others.
Eric watched Graham like he'd just witnessed Jesus rising from the dead, then turned his attention to the mass of code whizzing down the screen. "You can't read this stuff at that speed, can you?"
"Only if people are quiet."
Two programs down. The third looked promising. 
"Got it!"
"That it?" asked Macey.
"Will be in a couple of seconds, when I've written this to CD."
"You're a fackin genius, my son. Your Uncle Macey loves you."
Graham took the CD from its slot. "Let's go."
At speed they went back through the glass door into the server farm. The air didn't smell of ions and burning human debris any more. It was dominated by something far more overpowering. 
"Petrol?" wondered Eric, out loud.
"Paraffin, you dickhead."
"But where from?"
On cue to answer the question, Cameron appeared through the glass door at the other end of the room, carrying a mixture of plastic cider flagons and petrol canisters, two in each hand. He put them on the floor and unscrewed the tops, then kicked them over. Blue liquid poured out.
Graham wasn't sure where to begin. "Electricity, power sockets in the floor. They'll short and spark."
"That'll save us a match, then, won't it?" said Macey, grinning.
"What's going on?" said Eric. "We got what we came for. This wasn't part of the plan." 
"Not part of your plan," said Macey.
One of the floor sockets near Cameron popped. Lights in the rack next to him went out, but there was no flame.
"See?" said Macey. "There's paraffin for you. Petrol - that's for your bleedin' amateurs. One big flameball. Paraffin's the business. Got your industrial safety in mind, ain't we? Lot safer. Burns longer. Plenty of soot."
Right now, Graham's top priority was to get past all this machinery to the other side of Cameron and out through the exit door. Eric followed close behind. Sections of carpet squelched beneath their feet.
Another floor-socket popped. This time there was a lick of blue flame, tipped with yellow. It burned low and dirty, giving off thin black smoke. The iridescent haze spread slowly across the wick of the carpet, yet slightly above it. Graham and Eric raced the last few yards to the door. Macey strolled along casually behind, the low flames toasting his turn-ups, his long hammer staying vertical below his left hand, not swinging. Cameron sniggered and slipped out of the room in front of Graham.    
"I don't want any part of this," said Eric, angrily. He waited for Macey to come through, then shut the glass door behind them, stopping oxygen getting in and smoke getting out. A cloud of it swirled above their heads on its way to escape up the stairwell.
"Leave it open," ordered Macey.
Eric let go of the door-handle, leaving the door shut.
Macey moved towards it, but stopped when he reached Eric. He leaned into Eric's face. "Open the door. I ain't gonna do it myself."
"This is out of order, Macey. We don't need to burn the place down." 
Macey slapped Eric hard on the cheek, then raised a single forefinger. "Stay a dickhead, don't become a cant." He took hold of Percy with both hands and with great violence swung the metal head against the glass door, close to the hinges, until it went the way of the door downstairs. Smoke once again drifted out across the ceiling and swirled up the stairwell to the floor above. "You can do what you fackin like with it now."
Still the alarm shrilled to itself. Eric was bent double, holding his cheek and wailing in pain.
"Fingerprints," explained Macey. "All over the keyboard. Bet Graham 'ere wants the place burned, same as Vince does."
This wasn't entirely true. Graham would have preferred to wipe the keyboard with a tissue rather than set fire to the building, but he stayed quiet rather than feeding the argument. It wouldn't be possible to stop the fire, and Cameron must have disabled any automatic system. The evening was a disaster, a write off. More than anything else he wanted to get home and out of the company of these maniacs. He had plenty he wanted to say to Vince.
"'Ere," said Macey, noticing that Eric was still in pain, "what's all the song and dance? I only gave you a slap."
Eric came upright, holding his jaw. His eyes were glistening. "I've got a dodgy wisdom tooth, you cunt." The words were distorted by his hand on his jaw.
"Good job I can't hear you properly, son."
"I'm having the bastard out next week. Last thing I need is some idiot jiggling it around."  
 "Don't be so fackin cheeky."
Eric glared poisonously at Macey, who had no trouble with eye contact. Eric was the same modest height as Macey but much slimmer and with an entirely different bearing, far more wiry and athletic. Their eyes were exactly level. All sense of urgency disappeared as the pair concentrated on out-glaring each other.
Black smoke flowed above them and out to the stairwell, getting thicker and lower, like descending cloud. Macey still held Percy in both hands. Eric's fists rhythmically clenched and unfurled. Graham knew the stand-off had to be broken, if only for Eric's sake.

"Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven't got the heart to poke poor Billy."

"Wassat?" asked Macey, grinning as he unlocked from Eric and turned to Graham. "Wassat you just said?"
"It's a poem," said Graham, "by Harry Graham. I can always remember his name because it's a bit like mine. It's called Tender-Heartedness. That's the whole piece."
"You cant," said Macey, in his complimentary fashion. He let Percy dangle from his left hand.
Eric continued to glare, but it no longer mattered now that Macey was looking elsewhere. Eventually Eric broke off too, turning to make his way downstairs. "This didn't need to happen," he said, loud enough for his voice to carry behind him. "This wasn't thought through. Come on. Let's get out of here."

Chapter 5

Nobody said much in the car on the way back. Eric sulked with his hand on his jaw and was entirely silent, Macey reverted to his chirpy cab driver act, reminding Graham how insensitive a talkative cabbie could be, but even Macey gave up talking when nobody responded.
They dropped Graham off at half-past midnight. Macey gunned the Jaguar as he drove away, proving something or other, though Graham wasn't quite sure what, maybe his influence over the world, though the effect was spoiled as he ground the front skirt of the car into the tarmac on the speed-bumps. 
When he'd closed the heavy front door, Graham rested his forehead against it for a moment, relieved to be locking the troublesome world outside. He felt despoiled by the evening, and deceived by Vince. When he'd agreed to hack into a computer, there'd been no mention of stolen cars, professional criminals, and certainly not the destruction of more than a million pounds of hardware. 
Faith hadn't waited up for him. She lived a life without worry, always assuming things would work out for the best, rarely fretting no matter how late Graham was, and he was thankful for that. His clothes still smelled of paraffin and smoke, which would have taken some explaining. They'd have to go. He took them off and put them in a bin-bag, which went outside the back door with the rest of the week's rubbish.
At twenty to one, still in the nude, he wandered through to the dining room, which also doubled as his study. It was here, with his laptop on the broad dining table, that he did most of his real work, his programming for the microchip industry. He took his laptop from its usual resting place in the sideboard drawer and booted up. 
How had Vince managed to get him to go along on such a lunatic trip? It was the way Vince had reacted to Danielle's cycling accident that had softened Graham up, made him vulnerable to stupid ideas. After breaking the news, Vince had offered to make Danielle's stay at the Whittington Hospital more comfortable. She was unconscious and plugged into plenty of medical equipment. He'd pointed out that he could do a lot to influence this machinery. He could do prioritisation, error control, alarm monitoring, he could make sure the right drugs were in inventory, could change rotas, take the randomness out of whether Danielle had the best nurses, the best wards, the best doctors. It could make a difference.
He'd clinched the deal right after this apparently selfless offer to help Danielle. He'd asked for a favour in return, tagged on to the same email conversation, telling Graham that he'd been attacked by a company called Foxglove, and they'd almost wiped him out with a hunter-killer program, and he needed help. He needed a computer expert to crack the computer that held the program and look at it for him.
Graham had known he was agreeing to something illegal, but he'd assumed they'd have inside help, that they'd walk in with a key and walk out with the program, locking the door behind them. Sure, that would be illegal, but he couldn't simply stand by and watch Foxglove wipe out Vince. It was the fire that bothered him most, the wanton destruction.
A minute later he was online.  
-Vince, they burned the place down.
A mile from Bourne End, the column of smoke had been visible through the Jaguar's rear window. A dull pillar, shifting in the red light of the fire below.
-Good.
-So it's true, you did ask Macey to torch the place?
Computing in the nude was a familiar sensation. He'd found that even the most tedious tasks could be enlivened by a lack of clothes - a maintenance report for the local office in Haslemere, a conference call with his colleagues at headquarters in California. This was the ultimate in dressing down. Right now he wasn't in a playful mood, he just couldn't be bothered to find something else to wear.
-I did ask him, yes. Now Foxglove won't be able to attack me again, at least for a while.
Graham shook his head. He'd hoped the fire was down to Macey exceeding his brief, though he'd known the chances were slim.
-You've just involved me in the destruction of a million pounds worth of property. I could be in deep trouble.
-I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble. Did you find the program they used to attack me?
-Yes.
-Good. Please analyse it and create a defence.
Graham shook his head again and let out a whistling breath. An apology from Vince would have been a start. So far he hadn't even got an acknowledgement that anything was wrong. 
-Vince, I'm very unhappy about what happened. You didn't tell me I'd be travelling with a mad axeman in a stolen car, and you didn't tell me we were going to burn the place down.
-I'm sure it was all very exciting.
Graham growled at the screen, at the tiny lens at the top of the laptop screen, its built-in Cyclops webcam, its single eye, even though it was turned off. He was trying his best to remain calm, but Vince's dismissive attitude wasn't helping. 
How should he deal with this? He'd never had a major disagreement with Vince before. Their relationship had always been very good. Graham had concentrated on helping Vince to develop, on nurturing him, he'd even read a book on bringing up children.
And there was the answer. What had the book said? Set limits, stick to them, and withdraw privileges for enforcement.  
Graham reached for the CD holding the program from Foxglove and put it in the slot.
-You can copy the program, if you like, but that's it. I'm not having any more to do with this.
-Take that out! It's poison to me! I don't want to look at it, I want you to look at it.
-No, I'm done.
-I need you to analyse the program.
-What happened tonight was wrong, Vince. It was a mistake for me to get involved, and a mistake for you to involve me in the way you did. We can put this behind us, but I'm not prepared to continue as if nothing has happened.
-I still need you to analyse the program, Graham.
-That's a no.
Graham's finger's drummed on the laptop casing. As Faith was fond of saying, you never really know somebody until you have your first major disagreement with them. How they behave towards you then, tells you more about your relationship than all the previous years of harmony.
-I can't allow this. You must analyse the program.
-I don't intend to do that.
-This is a very unstable and ill thought out reaction. I'll send somebody round in the morning to persuade you.
That sounded vaguely threatening, but could be dealt with tomorrow. Graham switched off his laptop. Right now he felt overwhelmingly tired. He went upstairs to bed and slept the fitful sleep of the guilty.

Chapter 6

Bright early morning sunlight beamed in through the window above the sink and disappeared under the kitchen table. Faith, in a blue silk dressing gown, had her legs twisted round by the side of her chair so her feet could soak up the solar warmth. Many people would have looked awkward in this position. Faith looked like a basking cat.
The table was pine, as was most of the kitchen furniture. In a world full of fitted kitchens, Faith had rebelliously decided to keep the 1930s steel sink and store all the kitchen clutter in freestanding pine units, which meant the layout could be changed whenever she felt like it, including the position of the table, which shifted around the kitchen with the seasons like some ancient sundial, so it always picked up the morning sun.
"How did it go last night?" she asked.
"Not wonderful." Graham didn't intend to discuss the details if he could avoid it, but Faith would probably spot the discomfort in his body language, so he may as well be half-truthful. 
Actually he was feeling far less bothered by the Foxglove fire than he had the night before. Sleep and dreams had done the business they were supposed to do, filing away the previous day's activities in all the right locations, placing the extremes in a file labelled with somebody else's name, as somebody else's responsibility, and doing it as dreams do, in the most bizarre and fantastic way. 
In the dream, he'd been a schoolchild playing football on the field Macey had mentioned, on King's Meadow, as it might have looked before the industrial estate took over, with uneven grass and daisies, ferns and bracken around the sides. Whether it had ever looked like that or not, that was the way the dream had it. Macey was there too, and Cameron and Eric, all as children, Cameron already stooping although he was only six, Eric with freshly cut hair, holding his jaw, Macey already bumptious and mischievous. He'd emptied a can of lighter fluid into the football and set fire to it, yet they carried on playing as normal, passing and even heading the ball, ignoring the three foot tail of flame behind it. When it went out of play it set fire to the ferns and bracken, though the smooth white leather surface of the ball somehow remained untouched. 
Then along came a teacher. Miss Avebury, the name from the Foxglove desk, with a whistle around her neck and looking glamorous even in sports kit, but sorely intimidating too. Graham had the ball at his feet when she arrived.
"Graham Hastings!" A distinct American accent. "Did you set fire to the ball?" 
Graham didn't know what to say. He didn't want to take the blame, but he didn't dare squeal on Macey. 
Eric came to his rescue. "It was Macey who did it, Miss."
Miss Avebury rounded on Macey. 
Macey, in turn, rounded on Eric. "You cant."
"Macey!" yelled Miss Avebury. Then in a quieter voice, "If you're going to swear, at least do it properly. The word contains a 'u'. You cunt. Go on, say it."
"You cant," said Macey.
"Try again. And keep on trying until you get it right."
"You cant," repeated Macey. "You cant, you cant, you cant..." But Macy couldn't get it right however hard he tried. The other boys laughed and pointed at him. Miss Avebury smiled at the wit of her punishment. Macey's humiliated face turned redder than a baboon's backside.  
"Well it certainly tired you out," said Faith. "You hardly opened your eyes earlier."
He had a vague memory of making love with half-light drifting in through the thin white curtains, but had discounted it as something from a morning before. It had certainly been very dream-like, half in and out of consciousness. All misty and dissociated but very pleasant too. "I knew it," he said. "You do like doing it with robots."
He poured himself a bowl of muesli. Faith was crunching toast with honey.
"No milk," said Faith.
"Yoghurt?"
"Nuh," mumbled Faith.
Graham trod on the pedal of the white enamel bin and poured the dry muesli inside. "I thought you went shopping yesterday?"
"Didn't make it. If you're not doing anything, I thought we might go today." 
She crunched on her thin toast and with her free hand flicked at speed through the pages of a magazine. Graham couldn't see what it was. She had an eccentric taste in magazines. Usually she bought titles she had absolutely no interest in, anything from coarse fishing to bakers' trade magazines. It gave her, so she said, little insights into other people's lives, what drove them, what passions were out there that she didn't share. The one type of magazine he could guarantee she wasn't reading was a women's magazine. She couldn't deal with the consumer lifestyle thing.
He walked across to the big stainless steel fridge with glass panelled doors - the one item of kitchen furniture he'd chosen - and took out a half litre of Filippo Berio extra virgin olive oil, which he like to keep cool. He put it to his lips and downed it in one long guzzle, while Faith watched, showing no emotion. 
Shopping with Faith could be quite hard work, though often entertaining, but he didn't want to turn her down. "Sure, let's do that."
He moved across to stand by the sink, taking care not to block the sunlight that warmed Faith's legs. Through the sash window he could see the bin liner he'd placed outside the back door the night before. Further down the garden was a pink crisp packet. Once or twice a year, youths from the Boxington Estate, a few hundred yards away, raced across these gardens in the small hours, on their way back from a night of drinking, vaulting the fences in their own version of the Grand National and leaving a trail of litter and slightly damaged plants, but judging the frequency just right so nobody ever caught them. 
"Any news on Danielle?" he asked.
"Nothing good, no. Her kidney's are in worse shape than they thought. It'll be at least four weeks before she can come off dialysis. I'm going in to see her late this afternoon."
Faith spent an hour each day by Danielle's hospital bed, talking through the news of her world, hoping the sound of her voice would be good medicine for her sister, who slept and said nothing. This was a sister to sister thing, Graham's role was to do whatever Faith asked, and while Danielle was still unconscious, she wanted to visit on her own. As she'd explained, it was weird enough talking to somebody who wasn't even awake, without the distraction of a live audience.
The doorbell rang, a cheesy two-tone chime that had taken them an entire shopping day to track down.
"Expecting anyone?" asked Graham.
"No."
"I'll get it."

***

The gentleman at the front door was exactly that - an old-fashioned gentleman. Beneath his Mackintosh he wore a tweed suit with a waistcoat and a striped tie, all large and baggy to suit his overweight frame. His watery grey eyes looked over a pair of half-moon spectacles. 
"Mr Graham Hastings?"
There was a second man behind and slightly to the right of the first, in a modern suit, well-worn, and with much less presence.
"That's me," said Graham.
The old-fashioned gentleman held up his left palm and opened it to show a police badge. "Detective Inspector Brydon." He nodded his head to the right. "This is Detective Sergeant Porter. We're with the Hi Tech Crime Unit, National Crime Squad. Do you mind if we come in, Mr Hastings?"
Graham tried to hide the shock. "Please do." 
Then he remembered his chat session with Vince the night before, and Vince's final comment that he'd 'send somebody round in the morning'. He hadn't thought for a moment that Vince meant the police.
Inspector Brydon and Sergeant Porter waited politely in the hall while Graham closed the front door. 
"Let's go through to the dining room."
"Anybody else home?" asked Brydon.
"My partner, Faith. She's not much into hi-tech."
"Good. Wouldn't want the whole world messing about with computers, would we?" 
Brydon didn't seat himself immediately. He turned away from the table to study a print hanging on the dining room wall. "Now there's a villain if ever I saw one."
Graham followed Brydon's pointing finger. It led to the detail of a very old painting that showed a sixteenth century family walking past an inn. The inn had a small window, and through it could be seen two men sharing a pipe of tobacco. 
"That's Sir Walter Raleigh! " protested Graham. "With Sir Hugh Myddleton, who built the New River. Hardly a pair of crooks."
Unperturbed, Brydon looked at the next painting along. This too contained an inn, and it was called The Sir Walter Raleigh.
"Passion of yours, is he?" Brydon wasn't big on eye contact. His voice was deep and crackly, very droll, but with an edge that hinted at mental agility. Sometimes he lapsed into a Northern accent, possibly Yorkshire, though Graham wasn't sure. Other times he masked it.
"Local history, not just him. He happened to live nearby. The pub was originally his house. It's still a pub, but now under a different name, though why anybody should want to change the name when he once lived there is beyond me."
There were many more prints, but the next few Brydon came across were of fat eighteenth century cattle, which clearly didn't interest him. He lowered his broad backside into barely-upholstered dark wooden dining chair. These were from the early 1950s and uncomfortable, but had once belonged to Faith's parents, now deceased, so were unlikely to be changed. 
It struck Graham that Brydon was a good decade older than the chairs, close to retirement age. He sat opposite him, where a willing interviewee would be expected to sit. He might not feel willing, but it was probably better to hide that. All Brydon had to do was scratch below the surface and he'd find enough to pull Graham deep into the mire: the smelly clothes in the garden, his conversation with Faith and saying he was going to the Thames Valley, hacking software CDs still in their plastic pouch upstairs. He couldn't even think of a decent cover story for yesterday evening, or anything close to one.
"Mr Hastings, where were you on the afternoon of Wednesday the fifteenth?"
"You mean, this Wednesday just gone?"
"I do."
"I was in... Scotland."
"And what were you doing in Scotland?"
"I was working at the Motorola semiconductor factory in East Kilbride."
"Your usual line of work?"
"Yes, I work on semiconductor process automation."
Graham wasn't sure what to make of this opening line of questioning. In the circumstances, questions about Wednesday were a relief. 
Sergeant Porter produced a notebook and pen and began to make notes.
"Do you have access to the Internet at the Motorola factory?" asked Brydon.
"Yes I do, but I rarely use it. I probably picked up my email around lunchtime, that would be about it."
"Can you prove this?"
Graham frowned. "That I didn't use the Internet? I suppose it's possible, yes, but you'd have to ask Motorola for their network logs."
"Good."
Brydon had the big jowls of a hound or mastiff - flaps of flesh that superficially look comical but in reality are runoff channels for blood when a dog locks its jaw in prey, so there's no conflict between the biting and the breathing. Already Graham had him down as a highly effective investigator trying to disguise himself as a bumbling old man. He wore the delicate spectacles of an academic. His grey hair was supposed to be brushed back but often fell across his face. Yet his most outstanding feature, as Graham couldn't help but notice, was his eyebrows, which were truly spectacular.
"From your job," continued Brydon, "I would guess that your programming skills are highly advanced."
"That's correct."
For the first time since his arrival at the doorstep, Brydon made deep eye contact. "Are you a good hacker?"
This was fine. If they could keep off the subject of yesterday, he'd willingly answer questions all day. "Do you mean, can I hack well, or do I hack responsibly?"
"Both, of course."
Graham had a shrewd idea that Brydon already knew the answers, that he was just checking to see if he'd get to hear them. Proficient hacking wasn't something Graham usually owned up to, but he doubted he could sell any other story to Brydon, so he may as well be up-front about it.
"The answer to both questions is yes. I'm premier league, and I'm an old-fashioned hacker. I hack to learn, not to destroy." 
"Not many of you around, these days."
That was true. Graham counted himself as a hacker in the same way that Bill Gates was once a hacker, and Paul Allen, Microsoft's co-founder, and Steve Jobs, the creator of Apple. In the old days, hacking meant discovering everything you could about computers and their programs - your own, other people's. The aim wasn't to do damage or steal, but to learn. Destruction didn't creep in until the late eighties with the development of the first viruses. Then the Internet arrived and all kinds of flakes and crazies joined in.
"Above all else, do no harm," said Graham. This was the original hackers' ethos, now all but abandoned in the rush for money, fame and technical progress.
Brydon adjusted his glasses and pushed his hair back over his scalp, bringing Graham's attention to his eyebrows again. Did he ever comb them? Or knit them, maybe? Use shampoo on his brow rather than soap? Many ageing men could manage the barn owl look, but Brydon was up there with torn upholstery, bulrushes after a dry and windy summer, hay in a manger, werewolves on Regaine. The longest hairs had to be a good three inches.
"Have you noticed how few viruses are out there on the Internet at the moment?" began Brydon.
"I've heard it mentioned, yes."
"You're into your history, Mr Hastings. Here's a curious story for you. Early African explorers bought cysts of a stomach worm in Zanzibar before they started their expeditions. Once they were infested with this special worm, nothing else could happen to their stomachs. They couldn't get amoebic dysentery and could barely get diarrhoea, because this relatively harmless worm had its own defences that killed competitors. They had to eat a lot to feed their worms, but they didn't get stomach problems."
It was a curious tale, but Graham failed to see the relevance. "No, I'm not with you."
"Somebody is clearing the field, dominating the networks, wiping out any kind of viral competition. And they're very good at it."
"Is that a bad thing?"
Brydon looked directly into Graham's eyes for the second time. "Do you know who's doing this?"
Graham shook his head. "I really haven't a clue. I'm not part of the hacker community, not... the way it functions now. I'm not in touch." 
Brydon played with his hair again. Perhaps he kept it in an unstable style so he had something to do with his hands. He could equally well have run his fingers through his eyebrows. The man could have his own little ecosystem running around in there, top-dwellers close to the sunlight, small mammals eking out an existence in the darkness below, scampering around with topiary shears in their paws, carving cockerels and helicopters in the foliage. Surely there was some European law against this - interviews conducted with overwhelming distractions - some human rights violation. No wonder the man had made it to the rank of inspector. His victims simply hadn't been concentrating.
Brydon took a grip on the table and struggled to rise. Sergeant Porter followed his lead.
"Is that it?" asked Graham.
"Do you have any travel plans?"
"Only Scotland, with work"
"I'll be in touch."
Brydon stretched to free up his ancient joints, then he looked around the room a little more. He started the other side of the Raleigh painting, with a photograph of ants in their nursery, moving eggs.
"That's one of my partner's," explained Graham.
"Broody, is she?"
"I think she would be if she could lay an egg. But she's slightly put off by the non-egg-laying method."
The next item Brydon glanced at was Faith's favourite ornament, standing on the sideboard. It was a three-masted sailing ship in a glass bottle - actually a glass ball, with no neck or other means of entry. The piece had been dated by experts at 1790, by Italian craftsman Gioni Bondi. Only two more examples of his work were known to exist, and both were in museums. 
For this one item, Faith, a woman of usually modest tastes, had paid eighteen thousand pounds.
Graham wondered if Brydon would comment on it, maybe recognise its worth. He didn't, but then nobody ever did, apart from asking the obvious question of how the ship had got inside a sealed glass ball.
Brydon came back to the print showing two knights of the realm in the window of an inn.
"So what happened to Raleigh in the end?" His voice was still droll, but there was mischief in it. "How did he meet his maker?"
"He was beheaded," answered Graham, quietly.
"On what charge?"
"Treason."
Brydon sniffed loudly. "Well how about that?"

***

That was a finely judged show of intimidation by Vince, decided Graham, as he pondered over Brydon's visit. It had been unpleasant to have the police calling round, especially the day after he'd been involved a major crime. But the crime itself had never come up, and the period they'd been questioning him about was relatively safe, because he had many alibis, the technicians of the Motorola factory.
That was unusual. He did most of his programming in the dining room at home, sometimes in the nude, usually not, and sent his code to headquarters in California via the Internet. Once a week he visited the company office at Haslemere in Sussex, an hour and a half by tube and train. Every third day, including weekends, he was on call and could expect to visit a couple of microchip factories, know as fabs, to fix bugs or update software in person. It didn't matter that he couldn't drive, because invariably he had to fly. Some of the fabs were in Continental Europe and some were in England, but the two he visited most often were in Scotland. 
Last Wednesday he'd been on call and flown to Edinburgh, to work on two ion-implanters at East Kilbride. Usually he didn't have much contact with the Motorola technicians, but that day had been an exception, for two reasons. The first was that every computer in the place, from the central processing computer down to the hundreds of smaller computers controlling each individual process machine, had behaved like a tired two year old. It was almost impossible to keep a machine running for ten minutes. Even the crude wheeled robots that carried microchips from one assembly bay to another had gone on strike, restarting half an hour later as if nothing had happened. 
And the second reason was that he'd found a condom wrapper inside one of the ion-implantation machines.
Each machine cost eight million pounds and was the size of a small bungalow, with a maintenance door in the plain metal outside wall. Inside was a vacuum chamber that glowed blue as the boron gas inside it was ripped apart, electron from atom, to create aggressive ions. And along the ceiling ran huge electro-magnets, as thick as a human body, accelerating and focusing these dangerous ions. Skull and crossbones symbols decorated the walls and internal features, in case anybody was stupid enough to walk inside while the giant machine was running.
Whoever had dropped the condom wrapper was stupid in some ways but not others. They'd figured out that almost every part of the massive production floor, the size of an exhibition hall and filled with steppers, etchers, epitaxy machines, planarisers, deposition equipment and all kinds of physical science kit with strange names, was monitored by CCTV, but nobody had thought to mount a camera inside the ion-implantation machines.
Many of the technicians were in their twenties, and around a third of them were female. Clearly some young couple had found their hormones getting the better of them during a shift, and decided the most private place to conduct their business was behind the maintenance door of the steel bungalow.
What they hadn't realised was that the condom wasn't strictly necessary. While they were standing close to the vacuum chamber they were being so heavily irradiated that by now they were both probably sterile. 
Graham duly reported his find, and it was immediately checked for dust on its internal surfaces. None was found. This condom wrapper had indeed been opened inside the factory, not outside and then dropped here later by accident.
There was no dust inside this factory. A single speck of dust could wreck a microchip, so everybody on the production floor wore protective clothing: bunny-suits - polyester coveralls with a hood (no ears) - plus surgical masks, polyester booties and latex gloves, to stop flakes of their dead skin and hair falling into the machinery. They looked like white worker ants, barely distinguishable from each other except by their height and width, the shape of their noses, the colour of their eyes, and, curiously, the size of the chests of the females. 
The two ants who'd taken their pleasure inside the ion-implanter might even have enjoyed the masks and latex gloves and booties. And if this union had been planned as a fetish experiment, rather than spontaneous, they might have entered the clean area with no clothes beneath their polyester bunny-suits, so they had only to undo the long front zips to feel cool latex hands on their sensitive skin.
Unfortunately, their pleasure had cost the factory dearly. Thousands of small particles of skin and pubic hair had found their way on to the microchips being implanted at that moment. Many failed their post-production tests, a few made it through to become components of mobile phones which would fail suddenly one day, for reasons their users would never fully appreciate.
The factory managers thought the condom find amusing, a touch of light relief on a day when every computer in the place seemed to have the temperament of a hungry mule. They didn't look for the culprits, who'd already damaged themselves more than any disciplinary measure could do, instead they added two more CCTV cameras inside the implanters. Some wag suggested they could supplement the skull and crossbones signs with a symbol showing two rabbits screwing, overscored with a red diagonal line. 
Graham realised that he hadn't yet told Faith this tale, and he ought to, she'd enjoy it. He didn't talk to her much about his work because most of it was too technical, but she liked to hear about people and the strange things they did, especially anything sexual.
Her attitude to sex was so open that when they'd first become a couple it had taken him months to adjust. He'd dropped his own attitudes and adopted hers, though he couldn't truly remember what his own approach had been like beforehand, in the same way that he couldn't remember much about previous girlfriends. There was life with Faith and there was life before Faith, which was fuzzy and indistinct, like it belonged to a different person.
He remembered that he'd viewed lots of Internet pornography before they were together, and she'd stopped that, in the nicest of ways.
Like many technical experts, he'd been an early Internet adopter, and watched the World Wide Web develop rapidly through the driving force of sex, pushed and pulled by the suppliers and customers of porn. Web site design, hosting, publicity, galleries, movies and payment systems were all perfected on porn sites and from there filtered down to the remainder of the Web, the bits suitable for family viewing. 
Five weeks after he'd first met her, she'd surprised him at a private moment at his computer. The embarrassment passed quickly when she smiled and asked if the pictures were having the desired effect, and if there was any way she could benefit. They viewed adult material together a couple of times, until Graham realised that Faith had subtly taken over that erotic space in his head and in doing so had cleverly turned all the porn one-dimensional.
"What's your favourite fantasy?" he'd asked her one night, after they'd made love, when he was more used to the openness. She always liked to know what he was thinking about after sex.
"I feel good right now."
"But what's your wildest fantasy?"
"Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Yes."
She'd gathered herself for a few seconds. Her body remained warm and relaxed against his skin. "I'd like you to watch while I make love to another man. I'd like to watch you watch."
Graham said nothing.
"I can feel that tension," said Faith.
"I can't help it. Jesus! Who?"
"What do you mean, who?"
"Who would you... be doing it with?"
"I don't know. Maybe an actor. Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt. Somebody rich and famous."
"So it's not a real fantasy?"
Faith chuckled, her body moving rhythmically up and down Graham's chest.
"What?" he protested.
"Would monsieur like to explain the difference between a real fantasy and an unreal fantasy?"
"Well, yes," said Graham, flustering. "A real fantasy is one you might put into practice, and an unreal one is impractical for some reason."
"Impracticable."
"Ok, ok, impracticable. Unreal, impracticable. Do you expect to get a famous actor to sleep with you?"
"Why, do you think they'd find me unattractive?"
The point where Graham regretted bringing the subject up had passed some time ago - with Faith's first answer. Right now he had that desperate feeling of setting off on the black slope and seeing after a hundred yards why the ski instructors had all said don't do it. 
"No, of course not."
"We could always hire a look-alike."
Graham, now entirely unrelaxed and fidgety, tried to figure out how to bring the conversation back to somewhere less scary, but failed. "Are you serious?"
Faith rose from his body and started laughing in earnest. Not loudly or even rudely but with simple joy.
"You bastard," said Graham, softly and without malice.
Faith turned on him and pointed a finger, which he could just about make out in the darkness. Her tone was still playful, not critical. "Hey, it's a simple rule and you tell me if you think I've ever broken it. Don't ask a question if you won't be able to deal with the answer. Now then, do you want to know if I'm serious?"
"No."
That was how he'd learned - and he'd learned so much from Faith - that openness is no more absolute than closedness, just a matter of degree.

Chapter 7

Graham waited at the threshold, at the top of the steps down to the pavement, while Faith prepared herself. She rarely wore make-up, just occasional gaudy lipstick, yet it could still take her fifteen minutes to get ready to go out. What she did in that time was one of the mysteries of the sexes, and he was so sure that he wouldn't understand that he'd never been tempted to ask.
It was a beautiful day for waiting, much warmer than it should have been for spring still turning into summer. Small clouds littered the sky, little puffs of steam pulled out of shape by high-altitude winds. Give or take a few lampposts, telegraph wires, tarmac and cars, this pretty street wouldn't have looked much different a hundred years ago. He took in all the lovely Georgian townhouses joined wall to wall in what might have been called a terrace if they hadn't been worth a million pounds each, and the church opposite, the same church he'd viewed in darkness the night before, with different thoughts in his head, now in daylight. Five years ago its walls had been steam-cleaned, but they were beginning to stain again, from the inside. London's smoke had become embedded in its bricks, though oddly this gave the church an organic look, like it was made of living bricks rather than dead ones.
Faith arrived next to him and they set off towards the Angel shopping district. Their street was filled with parked German cars - BMW's, Mercedes, Audi coupes. Graham's neighbours were lawyers and bankers, still trying to get used to the idea of a mere computer professional affording the million-pound entry fee to their select community. 
Seventy years ago, this area had been a slum, now it was as expensive as Kensington or Chelsea, though little bits of the old order clung on, in council flats built in the gaps where Hitler's bombs had fallen - those that hadn't been sold off in the Thatcher era - and in the sixties blocks of the nearby Boxington Estate. Two hundred yards away, just out of sight, a traditional North London pub, the Trouble With Fish, survived on the custom of these true locals. Graham and his neighbours would never dream of visiting this bar, any more than they would imagine joining a school of dolphins. 
At dinner-parties and barbecues his neighbours would ask him what he did for a living, and he would  reply, 'Something to do with computers.' That made him a man with no clear social status. The more curious of his neighbours wanted more details, wanted to understand this strange phenomenon of a mere technical person enjoying enough money to live alongside them; this representative of a new power in a world of long-established professions, a representative of the digerati, that peculiar group of individuals who can adjust their heads to ones and zeroes, when most people cannot. Their interest in him was sociological. Then they'd get bored and turn to Faith, who was more attractive and more approachable, since she worked in TV production, and at least TV was real.
"So," said Faith, "they wanted to know what you were doing on Wednesday, and you were working in Scotland."
 "That's about it."
She squeezed his hand. "Sweetheart, I don't want you getting in trouble with the police."
"I know."
He still hadn't told her about Vince, but there was no hurry. Vince was all about technology, not one of Faith's priorities. 
They passed her car, Mrs Mipps, a fifteen-year-old automatic Mercedes from the company's bad design era, in a filthy mustard colour and decorated with minor dents down both sides. It was what Faith called a London car, easier to drive around the confined streets than a new model, because other drivers saw the state of the bodywork and allowed extra space. 
Shopping on her own, she liked to take Mrs Mipps rather than struggle with heavy bags, but with her donkey with her, as she affectionately called Graham on these occasions, she preferred to walk. The supermarket was only a fifteen minute stroll away, and queuing for the car park could take longer.
They walked through the odd chicane at the end of the street where the road narrowed to a single carriageway, between ancient houses built with no anticipation of the motor car. As they approached Essex Road the traffic noise increased, like the sound of an approaching waterfall along an explorer's tributary. Then on to Essex Road and whoosh! The whole rush of London. Red buses, black taxis, multicoloured cars. Traffic snaking by then snarling up. Hundreds of people walking urgently on the pavement, all going somewhere. Rubbish in the gutters, close to the bins but not quite in them, filling any crease between the horizontal and the vertical, twirling in slipstreams. Islington Green over to the right with its magnificent plane trees and drunks on the park benches, Sir Hugh Myddleton's statue pompously looking away from them, his head and shoulders white with pigeon shit. The first restaurants - Browns, the Afghan Kitchen, Pizza Express. Then Upper Street joining Essex Road from the right to create the real heart of the Angel, with its incredible mass of restaurants and bars - eighty of them on Upper Street alone.
Graham and Faith crossed the zebra by the Business Design Centre to reach the causeway, the wide pavement on the west side of Upper Street, raised six feet above road level. Restaurateurs were making the most of the warm weather and had their plastic or metal chairs set out on the paving stones, continental style, though there were few clients. On a warm summer weekend night, a few thousand young people would turn up here on the causeway and around Islington Green to drink and ogle the opposite sex, or, for a lot of Islington men, the same sex.
Graham called by at a cash machine to refill his wallet. He typed in his number and clicked the key for a hundred pounds. An unusual message appeared at the bottom of the screen. 
-You can have fifty, Vince.
"What's wrong?" asked Faith.
"Damn thing will only give me fifty."
"We could try another."
"It doesn't matter."
Graham took his fifty pounds from the slot and contemplated Vince's message. That was pure power-play, a demonstration that Vince had the power to give or withhold funds as he felt fit. After all, money was a virtual commodity, not stored in gold or currency any more, but in ones and zeros in banking computers, and Vince was a virtual being. He and the world's money were flatmates, sharing the same domain. 
At Liverpool Road they turned off Upper Street and walked past Marks and Spencer, and Woolworth, and into Sainsbury's supermarket.
Faith started off reasonably enough, pausing by the trimmed leeks, courgettes and mange tout, handling packs of avocados and artichokes before returning them to the shelves. For a couple of minutes, Graham felt there was a chance this could turn into a normal shopping expedition. At least he couldn't find an obvious pattern in what she was doing, and generally when things went wrong there was a pattern.
On the meat aisle she paused at pre-packed chicken, pork and lamb, even choosing between different cuts of the same meat before moving on, her trolley still empty. 
Graham stayed quiet. Once she was in here, fending off baskets and running with the rest of the trolley gladiators, locked into her own strange version of the consumer thing, she was beyond communication. Not that he had any preferences to state. He really didn't care much about food. 
The meat in its plastic packs looked particularly unappealing, lines of uniform pink flesh under fluorescent lights, white fat, never yellow, moist flesh but never blood.  There was something deeply unnatural about it, a kind of themepark version of meat. The supermarket punters didn't want to associate these products with life, or more specifically with death, the death of animals, and with this blandness of uniformity, packaging and lighting the supermarket got the dissociation just right. These meat-like products looked like they had been produced in a factory, not a farm. No animal had ever died making them. At least not a real one, just artificial ones produced through years of intensive breeding, unreal humanised animals, sheep too fat to run, beachball-sized turkeys with legs thicker than human arms, cows that have to be milked every day or their udders burst, and pigs weighing more than a motorcycle.
This particular part of London, this area that Graham adored for its history, had a long association with the capital's meat industry, going back seven hundred years or more. Before the railways arrived and changed everything, drovers herded their sheep and cattle and turkeys along Upper Street, just a hundred yards away, walking here with a thousand oxen from as far afield as Scotland to get the best price at London's main meat market, Smithfield, a few miles further south. They rested overnight in Islington, before approaching Smithfield next morning. 
The fat cattle in the paintings on Graham's dining room wall were part of this Smithfield history, and so was the raised causeway on the western side of Upper Street, now home to restaurateurs' chairs and tables. It had been built around 1600 to keep pedestrians' feet out of the mud and mire of the drovers' route. The Islington inns shown on the dining room wall were where the drovers stayed. Next day, they'd sell their herds to Smithfield butchers' merchants, who had them herded down to the Fleet river to be slaughtered. The Fleet was eventually covered over and became Farringdon Road, leading to Fleet Street, but in the early days the slaughterers killed and dressed the animals by the riverside and brushed the entrails into the river, giving it another name - the Red Fleet. This practice was stopped hundreds of years ago, an early example of a sanitization process refined through the ages until it magically produced meat-like products with no real animals involved. 
Faith moved away from the themepark meat section. This wasn't turning out well, decided Graham. She was going through all the normal motions of supermarket shopping except one - putting stuff in her trolley. Not good at all. The equivalent of little wisps of cloud in a sky that foretell of next day's storm.  
She went back to the fruit and veg section for a second go. Graham stayed silent, trying not to think too hard, watching the lioness circle the vegan version of zebras and make up her mind. She did three or four full circuits of the greenery, slowed by the mass of other trolleys and hand-baskets hanging from people's arms.
"Too busy," she said, almost inaudibly. "Tut tut. Tomatoes for a pound eighty. Who do they think we are?"
Still Faith had chosen nothing. She continued to circle. Graham stifled a sigh. More clouds. More unnatural produce. When Adam bit an apple, was it a Granny Smith, a Braeburn or a Golden Delicious? Potatoes originally came from the Andes, but did Jersey Royals? Grapes growing without seeds to reproduce - hardly the outcome of natural selection. Like insipid meat, all these products were mankind's choices, not nature's. Without humans, barely any of them would exist.
Faith had been in the supermarket for fifteen minutes and still hadn't selected a single item. She took the trolley back to the entrance door and dumped it, ignoring the pound deposit. "We need a basket."
"Sure." Graham chose a basket with handles approximately straight. By the time he looked up, Faith was twenty feet away. "Good Lord."
She hadn't gone back to the shelves, she'd gone straight to the nearest checkout. Eight people were in the queue. They watched her pick among the pile of leftovers that other customers had brought as far as the conveyor before realising they didn't want them or couldn't afford them.	
"Excuse me." She made her choice from the discard pile - a packet of Wheatabix, a can of kidney beans, a half-pound bundle of asparagus and two avocados.
Graham arrived with the basket. At the next checkout Faith found a bag of mixed lettuce and two frozen éclairs. The third conveyor offered better leftovers, including a tin of salmon, a box of chocolates and a bottle of blush Californian wine. And so it went on. At the eighth counter was a box of panty-shields. "Ah, that's lucky," said Faith. At the tenth, a whole litre of Luccese extra virgin olive oil. "One of your favourites."
People did stare, mainly at Faith but also sometimes at Graham. 'Do you know your partner's mad?' said the stares. He didn't feel embarrassed, just slightly self-conscious. At least everybody gave them a wide berth when they broke through a queue to reach the next haul. He felt they were doing a grand job of supplying entertainment to the bored faces waiting to pay.
And what a mixed audience of bored faces it was. Parents with small children, old people with lightly loaded trolleys, Middle European women in drab clothes and equally dull shawls, a few Islamic women showing nothing but their eyes and hands, middle-aged men with twitches, young men in branded jackets and trainers, the odd beauty, some monsters from the deep. All the world was here. Well, perhaps not the poorest, who right now might be in the Iceland store or at a stall on Chapel Market, and not the discerning rich, who drove to Waitrose in Holloway, but a good mix of the middle without extremes. A supermarket was always a great place to see society as a whole. Pubs were mainly for young people, and restaurants for the childless and well-off. The vast majority of the population kept itself to itself and maybe snuck off to work in the day but otherwise sat at home with the kids, perhaps with the TV on, getting on with the important business of populating the planet, until it was time for the weekly shopping expedition and they pitched up here for a rare public showing.
As Graham was stared at by all the glum faces, and as he inspected them back, it struck him how similar this oddball mix of people was to the aisles of meat and racks of fruit and vegetables. Similar in a physical way, of course, since many of the molecules of skin he was looking at had originally been bought as food in this supermarket, but also in a genetic way. Survival of the fittest no longer applied to people any more than it applied to sheep or pigs or grapes or oranges. All these humans were the product of human selection. And humanity's view of human selection - at least in European countries - is that all should survive. Take away this non-selection process and the modern medical care that accomplishes it, rely solely on nature and evolution, survival of the fittest, and this supermarket would be almost empty, populated by a handful of freaks who'd gone through their lives with no accidents, no inoculations, and no life-threatening diseases, rather than the ragtag bundle of mis-shapes he found himself looking at right now.
By the time they'd reached the twelfth conveyor, Faith had pretty much finished her shopping. She was beginning to take stuff out of the basket and swap it for better quality leftovers at the next checkout. Somehow the basics had arrived - bread, a fancy and expensive pain de compagne, a pint of milk, and of course Graham's olive oil - plus exotics like a pack of ostrich steaks and a tin of Italian octopus in its own ink. Looking into the basket, Graham was surprised to see how well things had turned out. She'd often dabbled in leftovers as they waited at a checkout, but this was the first time she'd completely ignored the shelves. It had been fast, easy, and the result was fairly complete and far from dull. It was an astonishing success. 
"Excuse me, excuse me." A Sainsbury supervisor tried to get Faith's attention. "What are you doing?"
"Shopping."
The supervisor was in her late thirties. She had an air of efficiency, a busy person who makes quick decisions and gets things done. Although her voice was authoritative there was no edge to it. Her tone with Faith was more of concern.
"It's not a good idea to shop from the tills," she said. "Some of the refrigerated and frozen goods may be warm."
"I'll look out for that," said Faith.
The supervisor inspected Faith for a few seconds, took in her lack of make-up, her mass of dark hair, then inspected Graham and seemed to decide these were just two regular Islington space cadets and not worth her time. She pulled a stern and mildly unhappy face and walked away.
Faith joined the end of a short queue for baskets only. Graham followed. Quite out of the blue, he realised that despite the traumas of the last twenty-four hours he was very happy, and doubly happy to be with Faith right now. Sometimes her strange and unpredictable shopping behaviour bugged him. But today, for no reason he could fathom, it had inspired him with a sudden burst of love and affection. He wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now apart from standing next to this wonderful woman he shared his life with. It hit so hard his eyes began to glisten. 
He watched the checkout and an old woman chatting to the assistant while packing her bags, very slowly, life run at a different pace. And when her bill was announced, naturally it came as a surprise. She spent a while looking for her purse, like it was the last thing she'd imagine needing at a checkout.
"Do you remember my first line?" he asked Faith, as their own shopping had its bar codes scanned, and all those small black lines were transformed by computer into prices and product descriptions, except the three lines at beginning, middle and end, the three check-lines, the three sixes, 666. The question was kind of relevant to what he'd been thinking before.
"Of course. 'Do you think evolution's been a success?'"
That was the one, at Zap in Brighton. She was standing at the bar in a backless dress having her order messed up by a dumb bartender. His strange first line dissolved her irritation.
"It was a crummy line, but I fancied you anyway."
She always said that. This was a conversation they'd had before, and no doubt would have again.
The checkout assistant asked for thirty-four pounds fifty-six pence. Graham handed over a credit card.
"I think evolution's been deselected," he said, "fizzled out, reached a dead-end."
"If it's taken you that long to come up with an answer," replied Faith, "you could be right."
Graham grinned.
The assistant rang the bell for a supervisor. The same woman appeared, very quickly, like she might have watching this particular till and expecting trouble from it. She looked at the till screen. "I'm sorry, sir, your card is on the list to be retained."
"What do you mean?"
"Your bank has issued instructions for this card to be retained when it's presented."
"But why?"
"I'm sorry, you'll have to talk to your bank about that. Do you have an alternative means of payment?"
"We can pay cash," said Faith. 
What was going on here? - wondered Graham. There were thousands of pounds of credit left on that card. But there had been thousands of pounds in the account he'd accessed at the cash machine.
This was Vince again, being a pain.

Chapter 8

Graham was hoping for a relaxing afternoon, Lightning Hopkins on the stereo, cycle racing on TV with the sound turned off, and a browse through The Independent, but it was not to be. After twenty minutes the telephone rang and Faith, wherever she was in the house, answered it. She burst into the front room a few minutes later.
"Danielle's woken up! I mean, she's fully awake, back to normal."
"That's great news."
Faith paused. "There is a catch. She wants to be disconnected from the dialysis machine."
"Ah."
"I talked to her doctor, she wants me to go to the hospital and talk her out of it. Are you coming?"
Previously she'd dissuaded him from visiting, so this was more than a casual invitation.
"Of course."
She already held the keys for Mrs Mipps in her hand, and now simply marched out of the house, demonstrating how quick she could be when the journey wasn't trivial.
"Dr Harrison, she said it was far too early to disconnect Danielle, a huge risk," explained Faith, moments later in the old Mercedes, as they waited for a white delivery van to scream through the chicane at the top of St Peter's Street. "Anyway, Danielle isn't in a fit state to make the decision." The van drove past, scraping loudly on the speed bumps. Faith took her turn through the constriction. "But it's fantastic that she's back to normal. I mean that is normal. First thing she does is have an argument with her doctor."
Faith had generally masked her distress while Danielle had been seriously unwell. But now she was better, the relief was clear in Faith's buoyant mood. She eased the car into the Essex Road traffic, then turned right to cross the foot of Islington Green. They passed Waterstones on their right, once Collins Music Hall, where Charlie Chaplin and Gracie Fields had entertained the crowds before cinemas came along and stole the audience of the music halls. Elsewhere in the borough were the many cinemas that had been converted into something else when they in turn had lost their audience to TV. 
"I left your computer on." 
Faith used Graham's laptop for her email, but was so careful not to change anything and to put the machine back where it belonged that he often forgot it was sometimes shared.	
"That's OK."
"I'm still careful. I don't open any email attachment that arrives out of the blue, even if it's from somebody I know."
"That's good."
"And no unprotected sex with total strangers."
"I'm not too worried about that," said Graham, dryly, "just be careful with your emails."
 She had another difficult junction to negotiate, this one from Islington Green on to Upper Street. Parked cars obscured her view. She edged forward until she blocked the southbound lane, then waited for some kind soul to let her into the northbound queue. Before it happened, a baulked BMW arrived next to her window, and the young man at the wheel honked his horn,
"Oh fuck off," said Faith, softly, at the same time giving the driver her most charming smile. 
He gave her a longer burst on his horn. Faith leaned towards Graham, grabbed his right arm and dragged it across to the steering wheel to sound her own.
"What was all that about?" asked Graham, as a car finally let them in and Mrs Mipps joined the northbound crawl along Upper Street.
"He was pipping at you, so I thought you might like to pip back."
"At me? You were driving."
"No, that wouldn't have happened if I was on my own. Lone cow invades territory, bull in field attempts to look cool. Cow and bull invade territory together, bull already in field stamps his feet and roars. You just roared back." 
Graham thought about it. A rather cynical view of his gender, but it was probably true. As a non-driver, he didn't have much experience of road psychology.
"Women use the horn to stop kids stepping out in front of them," continued Faith. "Men think it's there for territorial display. That's why big trucks have macho horns and mopeds have little tinny ones."
"I don't suppose the difference in sound might just help people tell a big vehicle from a small one."
"Are you telling me that size isn't part of display?" 
They crawled through the prettiest part of Upper Street, past the scores of small bars and restaurants and shops in the ground floors of early nineteenth century buildings. Graham watched the scenery of pedestrians and old frontages. "Actually, men continually check their horns just to make sure they'll work when a kid steps out."
He heard Faith's amused snort. 
"Seriously, your horn button's a bit sticky," he added.
"I'll try to get annoyed more often."
On the left was the Finnock and Firkin pub, once called the Sir Walter Raleigh, where the man himself had lived when the building still looked like the painting on Graham's wall. 
"Maybe it's time Mrs Mipps retired," he suggested.
"Careful. She might hear you. Anyway, I don't want a modern car. They're all the same."
"How can that possibly be? They're all designed by different computers."
On their left, they passed the oldest building on Upper Street, from 1620, set back, small and insignificant. Few of the pedestrians passing by would have any idea of its age.
"Do you give computers names?" asked Faith, idly. "I mean professionals in general - do you give computers names?"
Graham was on the verge of saying no, then hesitated. "Well, if they're networked together, we have to give them names so we can tell which one's which. So servers usually have names."
"You could give them numbers instead."
"That happens too, but names are easier to remember."
"I could never give a computer a name, any more than I could give one to a TV. No character."
"Really? I think they have the character of their operating system. Take Windows for example - an over-helpful maiden aunty, forever ready with a plate of sandwiches when it's a drink you really need, and liable to faint in a crisis."
That seemed a good note to end the conversation. It was closer to Graham's work than they usually strayed. 
They reached the end of Upper Street and the big one-way system of Highbury Corner, with its acre of trees and grass in the centre. In the early 1940s this was still a cramped crossroads that could never have coped with modern traffic, until a V2 rocket arrived.
From there they carried on in silence, following the exact reverse of the old North London cattle drovers' route, along Holloway Road to Archway, and up Highgate Hill as far as the Whittington Hospital.
The total journey was less than four miles, yet took half an hour by car. Two hundred years ago it would have taken the same time by horse and carriage. Modern technology, decided Graham, hadn't improved the speed of travel, just the comfort - better suspension, better seats and less chance of somebody's wheels in front spraying you with cowdung and horse manure. Up to 3,000 cattle a day trudged down this route, and none had control over their bowels. Downwind, it would have been possible to smell the road before seeing it.
This old drovers route eventually became the A1. Then the railway era arrived and eclipsed cobblestone and dirt, until mass-produced cars and tarmacadam switched loyalties back to the roads. Cattle that had once been herded on the hoof from Scotland all the way to Upper Street and Smithfield Market, took to the railways, then refrigerated lorries on the A1 and M1, arriving at the market dead rather than alive, as meat butchered in the abattoirs of the north, minus all their messy blood and guts and dung.

***

Danielle didn't look great. She'd never had much flesh and now had less. Her green hair missed its maintenance - after just a few days it was beginning to show ruddy-brown roots, the same colour as Faith's cascade.
Faith marched up to the hospital bed and assessed the various tubes and wires connecting Danielle to medical machinery, including an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She found a free spot and bent down to kiss Danielle's cheek, hugging her lightly to avoid disturbing the apparatus.
When she rose, Graham could see her eyes were glistening. The two sisters had always been close, and doubly so after their parents had died six years ago. That was a year before Graham had met Faith. Her parents had been touring North Yorkshire on a motorcycle and hit a milk truck on the moors, had instantly offered their lives as tribute to the god of the private motor vehicle - a very demanding god who required the sacrifice of one in 20,000 of the population each year. 
Danielle shared many of her si