‘I don’t like to travel like this,’ she told the shadow operators, ‘with those fish outside the window.’ She didn’t like the food on the Uptown Six. She didn’t like the Vicente Fernandez lowrider music Carlo played, with its heavy reliance on traditional ranchera stylings. When he turned it off, she didn’t like a noise she thought the air-conditioning made which no one else could hear. Every time the ship changed course she said, ‘Is it supposed to sound like that?’ Her problem wasn’t travel itself. It was that she couldn’t feel comfortable away from Saudade. The shadow operators – obsessed by anything new and dysfunctional, and thus already deeply invested – took on the grey, slightly translucent appearance of mourning women, rubbed their bony, work-roughened hands together, and begged her:

‘Would you prefer something different to eat, dear?’

The cabin was filled briefly with their smell of violets and Vinolia Soap.

‘Can we fetch you a blanket?’

An hour or two into the journey R.I. Gaines opened the FTL routers and tried to refamiliarise himself with Galactic events. He fell asleep instead and dreamed he was in a rocket port surrounded by refugees. They resembled people, but they also resembled something like a swarm of bats or locusts too – or even a swarm of shadow operators, with a similar kind of sadness to their voracity and yearning. They were an ongoing process yet they never seemed to change. Gaines sat at a table with his hands in his lap. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind him, laughing and shrieking. He didn’t know what to do or think next. Adverts fluttered overhead like moths: his eyes followed them. People went in and out of the travel terminal doors: his head turned that way. Listening to the chimes of the public address system, he realised that, quite literally, he was not himself. He was someone he knew, but he couldn’t remember who. Eventually his number was called and he got to his feet and walked towards the gate.

While Gaines was dealing with these issues, whatever they were, Carlo – whose meds had flattened him off nicely for the day – tried to lure the assistant into the pilot tank with him. Though she seemed interested, even after she had lifted the lid, she would only do sex inside an immersive art experience called Joan in 1956, which apparently featured an old car and something she described as ‘waisted cotton briefs’. Carlo wasn’t disheartened.

‘I’m so fucking in love,’ he told Gaines when Gaines woke up.