Virtual reality rooms are the amusement arcades of the new era. Nobody goes to put on embarrassing goggles and play shooter games anymore. A lot of people go on holiday. They lie on the sand and travel to Thailand or South Africa. With breezes, aromas, the whole deal. Finally multisensory. To touch, feel the breeze, the warmth of the sand. The ex-courier likes above all else to go the rain forest. He loves the rain forest. Once in a while someone turns up nude.

So. Seven p.m. Another day spent bumming around. Watching time slip away. Is this how it’s going to be now? It really will be like this until the ex-courier dies—without any role or function, together with all the others with no role or function, who jam the streets with too little money to travel the world, to shop, or do whatever else you’ve learned to do to avoid thinking. This thinking. What’s the point of it in the end?

The courier stops. A placard. How 1.0 is that? A prepper group advertising its next meeting. To be prepared. Next weekend in Colne Valley Regional Park. The courier has never been there. The class is cheap. The instructor is named Sergej. I’m going to do this, thinks the courier. In his excitement, he nearly trips over a delivery robot.

Nobody complains about the delivery robots anymore. At the start, all the obvious symbols of the digital revolution had a hard time of it.

They were kicked, thrown into the Thames, and then suddenly you had points subtracted for that sort of thing. So now people just stumble over the white robots darting about, equipped with cameras.

DON

Also

Stumbles over a delivery robot.

They’ve reached Savile Row, the lovely museum of a street from the old days, back when the latent homosexual upper class had peacock-like clothing made here. In one of the little, semi-elegant shops for bespoke survival uniforms, a light is still on.

Overtime is being worked.

For

PATUK

Lives in Luton.

He hasn’t landed in a town house in Mayfair. He lives in Luton, because friends of the family live there, too. He lives in a little flat above a butcher shop. He likes the smell of dead animals. He likes death. He doesn’t like much else in his life. As mentioned, it has gone poorly. Patuk has his own business. At an address that any tailor would kill for. He likes death. The Mount Olympus of gentlemen’s tailors, a Michelin Guide five-star rating in street form as far as bespoke tailoring. Patuk owns the smallest business on Savile Row, the best address for dapper men’s suit since 1740. It’s on Patuk’s business card.