But, as he reminded himself now, he had been that person once. He’d had a gang, even if it was a smallish one, and largely drawn from friends Karl introduced him to. In his years working for the tech start-up, they used to go to the pub almost every night. Karl – because he was working on a web encyclopaedia, as part of the project – would entertain the group with his knowledge of various historical figures’ lives, and James – because he paid more attention to detail – would quietly correct that knowledge.

‘This woman, can’t remember the name; they reckon she was the one who came up with DNA, but being a bird, they took the Nobel Prize off her …’

‘Rosalind Franklin. Actually, she never got the prize.’

‘What’s his name, Neil Armstrong, the geezer that walked on the moon: do you know, he said the “one small step for man” bit slightly wrong; he messed it up because he’d got the yips being up there – fair play, really – and also did you know he once punched a bloke who claimed that they never went to the moon at all?’

‘That last bit was Buzz Aldrin, I think.’

The start-up, where Karl and James worked in their mid-twenties, had been creating a platform called OnLife: a portmanteau of ‘online’ and ‘life’, which Karl feared was a ‘dogshit name for something that’s supposed to be cool’. Karl had tried to point this out once to Jacob, the handsome dimpled blond whose company it was – but unfortunately, he had used exactly those words, and had been drunk, and Jacob was from some nebulous but severe American background which meant he disliked both swearing and drinking. Even if the name was always a bit tin-eared, though, the actual project had at one time seemed very exciting. It was based on the notion that the internet’s best things would not remain free for ever. Email couldn’t always be free; nor could massive resources like Wikipedia, nor connection tools like Facebook. One day, in Jacob’s view, there would be a single hybrid of all these entities – a single place you went to do, as he put it, ‘everything you want to do with a computer, and some stuff you don’t even know you want’. When this megalith came along, people would subscribe to it in their masses.