‘A fluke,’ she said. ‘Understand?’

I nodded.

Selwyn came towards us, looking a little unsteady on his feet. ‘Goddam you, Vishnevsky,’ he roared at Casey. ‘What you’re doing is in bad taste, even by your usual standards. Don’t you understand that?’

‘Maybe you should relax,’ said Casey, apparently unflustered. He seemed to have recovered from his back pain. ‘Besides, I don’t give a damn what you think.’ He glanced around the bar. ‘And I’m pretty sure no one else here does, either.’

Behind him, Wallace made some alteration to his virtual console, and a hyper-realistic, three-dimensional image of the Earth – looking solid enough to reach out and touch – materialized in the air above our heads. As Wallace made tiny adjustments, the globe first grew larger, then smaller. It was so sharp and clear, I could hardly imagine that gazing down at the real thing from orbit could have given me a better view.

‘You’re showing some kind of film?’ I asked Wallace.

‘“Film” isn’t really the right word,’ Wallace replied, with evident pride. ‘What we’ve got here is a far more sophisticated technology than straightforward two-dimensional projection.’

Casey clapped Wallace on the shoulder. ‘Couldn’t have done any of this without my partner here,’ he said. ‘He keeps trying to tell me how all this junk works, and it’s the best damn cure for insomnia I ever found.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Wallace, ‘Casey fails to appreciate the technical difficulties involved in hacking into heavily encrypted networks in order to obtain the kind of footage we’re about to show.’

‘Wallace used to work in network security,’ added Nadia from beside me.

‘We just got back from an alternate prior to its extinction event,’ Wallace continued. He seemed to have lost his earlier reticence. ‘That’s what you’re gonna see tonight. Back where we just came from,’ said Wallace, his excitement palpable, ‘there was absolutely no possibility of anyone surviving. It took more groundwork than you’d believe before we could even begin to hack into the networks.’

‘Networks?’ I echoed.

‘Both orbital and ground-based military,’ he said. ‘And was it ever a challenge! Their satellite technology was at least a couple of years ahead of the curve compared to where I—’

‘Wallace,’ said Casey, ‘let’s save it for the damn show.’ He looked around and saw people looking expectantly at the projection. ‘I’d say about now is as good a time as any, since we’re all here.’

Wallace nodded and turned back to his virtual console without another word. He stepped backwards, shooing the rest of us out of his way, and the console drifted after him, coming to a halt only when he did.