I hadn’t had time, though, to visit the hushed tombs of Bishopsgate or Wapping. I’d flown straight to Manchester – which appeared to be thriving. According to Sisyphus ’s potted history, the balance between real-estate prices and infrastructure costs had favored the city in the twenties, and thousands of information-based companies – with a largely telecommuting workforce, but the need for a small central office as well – had moved there from the south. This industrial revival had also shored up the academic sector, and Manchester University was widely acknowledged to be leading the world in at least a dozen fields – including neurolinguistics, neo-protein chemistry, and advanced medical imaging.

I replayed the footage I’d taken of the city center – swarming with pedestrians, bicycles and quadcycles – and picked out a few brief establishing shots. I’d hired a bicycle, myself, from one of the automated depots outside Victoria Station; ten euros and it was mine for the day. It was a recent model Whirlwind, a beautiful machine: light, elegant, and nearly indestructible – made in nearby Sheffield. It could simulate a pushbike if required (a trivial option to include, and it kept the masochistic purists happy), but there was no mechanical connection between pedals and wheels; essentially, it was a human-powered electric motorbike. Superconducting current loops buried in the chassis acted as a short-term energy store, smoothing out demands on the rider, and taking full advantage of the energy-reclaiming brakes. Forty kph took no more effort than a brisk walk, and hills were almost irrelevant, ascent and descent nearly canceling each other out in energy lost and gained. It must have been worth about two thousand euros – but the navigation system, the beacons and locks, were so close to tamper-proof that I would have needed a small factory, and a PhD in cryptology, to steal it.

The city’s trams went almost everywhere, but so did the covered cycleways, so I’d ridden the Whirlwind to my afternoon appointment.

James Rourke was Media Liaison Officer for the Voluntary Autists association. A thin, angular man in his early thirties, in the flesh he’d struck me as painfully awkward, with poor eye contact and muted body language. Verbally articulate, but far from telegenic.

Watching him on the console screen, though, I realized how wrong I’d been. Ned Landers had put on a dazzling performance, so slick and seamless that it left no room for any question of what was going on beneath. Rourke put on no performance at all – and the effect was both riveting and deeply unsettling. Coming straight after Delphic Biosystems’ elegant, assured spokespeople (teeth and skin by Masarini of Florence, sincerity by Operant Conditioning plc), it would be like being jolted out of a daydream by a kick in the head.

I’d have to tone him down, somehow.