But when she got to Esperance, she saw that the map was wrong. The whole town had been abandoned. The streets were empty. There was graffiti smeared across everything.

She pulled over and parked beneath a flaking sign that said Esperance Sands Motel and got out of the car.

Dull heat. The loneliness of wind across sandy fields. No birds, just flecks of black plastic, and higher up, she guessed, the sturdier bodies of tiny drones.

She walked across the road, not knowing what she was looking for, then through the motel carpark and out under a brown-brick archway that led to the rear of the building. Far-off dogs barked. Rubbish skittered past.

Standing beside the empty swimming pool, she spoke to her watch. She’d been offline almost twelve hours. Much more than that would raise alarms. The screen shimmered open, and she approved connect. One hundred and eighty-five messages. Fifty-seven fresh videos. Thirty-one calls. Harlow. Frida. Her mum. The office. Both bar jobs. The government loans office. Her SkinSuit required updating. Her credit rating had dropped three points. Also, new emergency procedures, and a bunch of automated government messages requesting her to verify her identity, because she’d been offline for more than eight hours. The accumulated messages disgorged their tiny vibrations through her. Twelve hours’ worth. A rush. She sifted for Harlow.

Seventeen fresh videos.

She chose the most recent. Nine minutes ago.

He appeared to be sitting on the edge of a skyscraper, strumming a dumb tune on his guitar. His legs dangling in fluffy clouds.

‘Oh baby, you’re still offline,’ he sang. ‘I want you to come back and be mine oh mine.’

In the distance, Mount Fuji or something was disgorging rainbow coloured love-hearts.

‘I promise, babe, I’ll be better this time,’ he sang. ‘Everything is gonna be fi-i-ine!’

She considered calling him, but a door was banging repetitively behind her in the wind. Turning, she caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and was briefly annoyed at her hair, and then at herself for caring about it. She decided not to call. She dropped offline, felt the sad offline tune play through her. That plunging feeling, like a kind of grief. It mingled with the nausea in a way that seemed about right. She’d been chewing apple-flavoured gum, but apple flavour no longer did the trick. Ginger was what she needed, but she was all out of ginger. Also, she had a painful ulcer in her mouth. Also, she was pregnant. The reality lurched through her again. No one she knew had ever been pregnant. She was thirty-one years old, and she didn’t want a baby. Obviously. She and Harlow had agreed about that a long time ago, though neither of them had got round to having the op. The op was insanely expensive. As would be what she’d have to do now. She wasn’t sure how they were going to afford it, which was, of course, the idea. But it was cruel to bring a child into the world. Cruel and selfish. That was still Harlow’s position. ‘Our position,’ he had clarified, and she had hated him for that, though he had meant, or had meant to mean — and she knew this — not simply his and her position, but rather The Group’s position, the whole reason they lived where they lived, the precondition for their apparent semi-happiness. If that was indeed what it was. It was a communal set-up across seven houses in suburban Sydney. They had goats and bees and grew a lot of their own food, though Sylvie wasn’t particularly interested in that aspect of the arrangement. She liked the parties, the big dinners, the easy way you could come and go in a crowd. She liked standing on the roof at dusk, high on whatever, in music, watching the bats come over. There were twenty-five adults and no kids. That was the position.