It was my song they were playing – not yours, not anyone else’s who happened to be playing this game. There was no way they could have known this detail of my life – I’ve never written it down, never even told my mother any detail about that dance. Gabriel died during high school.

‘Pick up your favourite cheese and find a security camera in the ceiling,’ the voice says. Tom, I’ve dubbed him – he sounds like a Tom. ‘Smile at the camera and say cheese.’

They’re taking the piss, aren’t they? This is not a thin copy – it has moved through pastiche into parody.

Why here? I’m wondering. Why did this have to happen in Tokyo?

I didn’t find the answer, but the question became irrelevant after what happened next.

* * *

Annoying aside klaxon: remember Psychomart? It’s easy to forget just how big it was back in 2010 and 2011. Its popular appeal spilled way beyond traditional theatre-going audiences. The app sold over two million copies – decent numbers for any app back then and incredible for a pretty expensive experimental art app. For a couple of months in cities around the world, Psychomart was the thing for fashionable clever kids to do. It ushered in serious investment in AR technologies beyond mainstream gaming and entertainment, and inspired countless bad knockoffs that ultimately hastened the collapse of the oversaturated scene. Psychomart was the fidget spinner of immersive theatre. Remember fidget spinners?

But what’s interesting about Psychomart is the quieter news that happened after the craze had passed. Psychomart had started off as an art show created by two independent producers, Rafe Charlston and Linda Verazzi, but as early as its third tour a controlling stake in the small shell company had been bought by Qubit, a marketing consultancy and seed funder headed by Martin Trengove. It was then that Psychomart’s familiar branding and smartphone-based VR experience was designed and delivered and the model quickly exploded into hundreds of iterations across the world.

In 2014, Trengove was convicted on fraud and charges relating to the then-UK’s Data Protection Act. Probably instigated by Charlston and Verazzi themselves, an investigation showed that Psychomart under Qubit became a mass consumer-profiling experiment, charting shopping styles, gaits, attention spans and emotional feedback to thousands of planted products throughout the network. This user data from all the Psychomart shows was compiled and illegally sold on to advertising packagers.

So what? you might ask – Google and Amazon do that every day. True, and Trengove was small fry compared, without enough legal and financial heft (speaking of heft) to change the law to match Qubit practices. But he had just enough juice to have the jail sentence commuted in favour of a fine before relocating – you guessed it – to Tokyo in 2016, where he’s on the board of several marketing research companies but has stayed deftly away from company operations.

All this passed my notice after I’d moved on from Psychomart, and it may have evaded yours too.