He put the phone down on the sad little ledge that passed for a bedside table here. It was odd how small the phone looked, all of a sudden – a trick of the mind, perhaps, now that it had been stripped of its powers. It was an object again, inert like a brick, rather than an ever-watchful second brain. It might as well be a toy.

3

9 MARCH 2019

LONDON–EDINBURGH TRAIN, 00:06

James had a momentary flashback to his first encounter with an iPhone. It was 2007 and he’d just moved in with Karl and two other coders. Karl had brought the phone home from an Apple event which they’d all been invited to because, at that time, their start-up had been regarded as a pacesetter.

‘Look at it, man,’ Karl had said, holding it out like a bar of gold on the kitchen table. ‘You just touch the screen, like this. Not you.’ He playfully swatted James’s hand away. ‘Compulsory hand-wash before you even go near it, fam. This thing cost an arm and a leg. Look at it. You flick through – beautiful, isn’t it. Your conversations, it shows you like this. You’ve got all your apps, you’ve got all your music on it, like an iPod. It’s like a computer but the size of a phone. These things are the future, man, for sure. Ten years’ time, they’ll own us.’

‘How did you …’ James almost stepped back from the question, feeling it was the sort of thing his mother would ask – much too square for conversation with Karl. Karl wasn’t much like the programmers James had met while getting his degree, or in the past couple of years touring as a freelancer around the IT departments of companies which had only just upgraded their equipment from abacuses. Karl had pecs like Argos catalogues, his black skin was covered in tattoos of objects that James thought you could probably do violence with, he was keen on romantic adventures which always backfired. On their first week in the flat together, a woman had turned up in their kitchen shouting that Karl would be ‘judged by history’, and yet half an hour later they’d been having sex so loudly that James had to try to drown it out with a documentary about someone he didn’t recognize touring India’s railways. Yes, Karl was a lot cooler than James. Still, sometimes the cool found it useful to have the less cool around. James considered himself difficult to beat when it came to knowing the rules of board games and how long to put things in a microwave for.

‘How did I afford it?’ Karl raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that what you were going to ask?’

‘Sorry if it’s a rude question.’