‘Are you still liking it, the driving?’ asked Karl, in a tone which contained a number of male ingredients James correctly identified: a little envy, a little regret, and a total refusal to admit either of those even to himself. Last week Karl had been giving out leaflets in a shopping centre for an energy drink which had been withdrawn from shops on the Friday, because a boy in Hull had drunk four cans and tried to attack a swan in a canal; it wasn’t clear if he was even going to get paid. During the summer he’d gone to Cornwall and worked for six weeks on a whale-watching cruise, where he was forced to begin every day with the words: ‘We can’t actually guarantee seeing a whale, but we’ll do our best, and of course if we’re out of luck you can always ask for a refund!’ It was meant to be a joke, but there’d been so many refund requests that, once more, he had ended up with less than half of what he was meant to get paid.

‘It’s great,’ said James. ‘You really should just get over it and sign up. You know I’d get you in.’

‘Get over what, fam?’

‘Whatever’s stopping you doing it,’ said James, in a rare spurt of alcohol boldness, ‘which I assume is the fact it’s my idea.’ As would happen with the fitness class two years later, the conversation then flitted with a butterfly’s lightness onto something else, but – again like a butterfly, in that thing about the wings that Karl could never quite remember – it had thrown things onto another course.

*

It was true that, even ten years ago, what Steffi was now trying to initiate would have been impossible: at least impossible to achieve as quickly as James needed them all to achieve it. But since Karl and James first worked in tech, things had moved on at a giddy pace; exponential, mind-bending, if you stopped to think about it, and yet – with hindsight – inevitable, as soon as machines began to talk to one another. Now, the eight billion cells of the earth’s body could speak to each other as fast as thought. There were think-pieces every week about how dangerous this was, how paranoid it was making teens, how easily exploited it was to drip-feed poisonous ideas into the world’s bloodstream. And some of those were probably right, Steffi supposed; maybe the internet was going to drive us all over a cliff, but deep down she thought maybe humans were better than that. Could use their powers of connection to do cool things, even if they were only making up and sharing fiendishly complex sheep-pursuit tasks.