‘Fuck you, Enka,’ he said aloud. ‘For getting yourself into this.’

As if in answer a voice said: ‘My name is Pearlent and I come from the future.’

The shed was empty under the arcs. Enka swam backwards towards him through her new reality, like someone suspended in a low-grade hologram.

Toni ran out the shed, past the Nova Swing – now closed and dark – and across the noncorporate port in the wind. He would have run all the way home to his refurb in the Magellan Ladder if a woman – or what he thought of as a woman – hadn’t come at him in a side street off Tupolev. She came at him very fast and at an odd angle out of the shadows – as if before Toni arrived she had been lying down in the shadows at the base of a building – and took hold of him round the upper body. Toni’s tailoring was state of the art, but a millisecond or two after it cut in, her tailoring somehow switched it off again. Toni was ramped – nerve propagation speeds were up all over his body, his haemoglobin structures were retuning themselves in the picosecond range – but he never landed a punch. He felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He was behind the action. He was still seeing her come up from the pavement when she wrapped her left arm almost lovingly round his head and pushed the barrel of a weapon up into his armpit.

‘So what do you want to do next?’ she asked him, in a voice which seemed really interested to know.

When Toni moved his head fractionally to be able to speak, she pressed the trigger and that was that. A couple of b-girls on their way back from a night at the Ivory Coast found him very early the next morning. Apparently he was surrounded by black and white cats. ‘We’re knee deep in them,’ one of the b-girls explained to the police detectives. ‘So cute. But then we find this guy.’ When Toni’s girlfriend heard later how suddenly he died, she said it was the way Toni would have liked it. He dug his existence in this world but he didn’t cling to it. Toni’s belief, she said, was that if you could get your life down to a nanometre thick it would stretch out forever.

She added: ‘As far as you were concerned, obviously.’

3 Swimming with Eels

THREE

Swimming with Eels

Saudade, Friday, 4am:

Two agents and a wire jockey were in a holding cell in the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, servicing a client.