‘Yeah, I guess I do.’ Jeff’s voice had cracked slightly. He remembered the coffee and gulped it, to wash a dry stickiness out of his mouth. ‘But it’s going to take time to get my head around all of this.’

‘Not too much time,’ Mitchell had replied, nodding at a screen mounted at an angle over in one corner.

It seemed like every channel and feed was running the same footage of the Pacific growth. Wreathed in steam, it had already reached hundreds of metres in height, and was still rising out of the ocean at an accelerating rate. Warships could be seen in its shadow, each of them utterly dwarfed by its broadening petals. Helicopters buzzed around it like so many mosquitoes, while various talking heads debated whether or not the Sphere or the Western Coalition were going to try to nuke it, or any of the others now sprouting all around the globe.

‘I feel like I want to get up and yell at everyone we meet,’ Jeff had declared. ‘Just to warn them to get away.’ He had glanced around the autocafé at the lone drivers or tight family groups, all of them undoubtedly talking about nothing but the growths. ‘When I think about what’s going to happen, I feel . . . paralysed.’

Mitchell’s response had been to shake his head. ‘There’s nothing you can do for any of them. Your best strategy is to just focus on what we have to do.’

‘I understand that. I just don’t know . . .’ He paused and glanced down at his half-finished coffee, struggling to control the sudden upwelling of emotion deep within his chest ‘I don’t know that I deserve to survive what’s coming. You understand that, right?’ His tone had been plaintive, almost childlike.

‘Jeff, listen. I could tell you to try and hold it together, but I already know that you will. I was there in Arcorex – am there in Arcorex – and one thing I do remember is when you turned up and got me out of there.’

Jeff had felt a chill running down his spine. ‘But what if this time I decide not to? What if I just walked out of here right now and—’

‘No, Jeff.’ Mitchell shook his head, speaking slowly, as if to a child. ‘You’re talking about a paradox, but time paradoxes are impossible. Look . . . think of it this way. You won’t walk away without helping me, because history already shows that you didn’t. If you had, I wouldn’t be here; but I am here; ergo you did help me.’

‘You’re saying we don’t possess free will. That our actions are pretermined.’

Mitchell had given him a strange look. ‘That’s true, but it’s not the way it has to be.’

Jeff couldn’t hide his confusion. ‘What do you mean?’