Perhaps he looked a little bloated. Internal changes had taken place. If you found him, it might not be wise to move him. And he was, of course, dead: so his hold on things had become tenuous. But he still had what might be described as a footprint there, in the assistant’s old room. At this scale, anyway. If you were able to see the room as a context fixed across a couple of hundred years, George, like everyone else who had spent time there, would be part of a kind of dark smoke rushing through. However hard they tried to fix an identity for themselves at one scale, it was taken away from them at another. They thought of themselves as people but they were more like ghosts or ads – anything that flocks or swarms.

. . . Lucky Pantera, Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7, ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. Janice. Jenny. Geraldine. You blody polse thing. Fucking in me. Get out! & don’t come in! October falls into November. West London draws round itself & for one second seems comforting. Then Michael comes in & there’s a row. Marnie, seven years old: ‘It’s a dog’s poo in a paper bag & he lit it on fire.’ You aren’t a camera, but you are, in everything you do, a description of the present. We fall into the dark street & kill someone. My name! she calls out. We kill someone again . . .

Meanwhile, a thousand light years from home, the assistant was undergoing transitions of her own. They were quick and dirty. The world, coming apart into pixels, streamed like eels then reassembled itself around her. She was looking out, as if through tinted glass, or from a very dissociated position, into a room.

Part of her was a million years old and the size of a brown dwarf; other parts were, for the moment at least, describable only as ‘something else’. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. Sediment oozed from the corner of her mouth. If you had asked how she felt, she would have answered, ‘Spread thin.’ There were deep shadows up in the ceiling. There was a noise like tinnitus. People came and went at the wrong speed, in groups and smears like animated statistics. Some of them were people the assistant had talked to earlier. Some of them were pushing racks of equipment about. They were all ignoring her. All she could do was wait for them to notice what had happened, wait for the situation to stabilise, and encourage them to engage with her. She was patient and calm. If she didn’t have a name, she could at least identify herself.

‘SiteCrime, Saudade City,’ she repeated at every opportunity. ‘Junction of Uniment & Poe. Fifth floor investigator.’

Someone peered in at her from very close quarters.

‘Gaines?’ he said, raising his voice and tilting his head almost horizontally into her field of view: ‘You might be interested in this. It’s asking for something.’