“Do you think you could do that for her?” she said.

After they had gone, Vesicle sat in his chair, repeating: “Do you think you could do that?” and, “You see a guy like that, we’re the first to know,” until he thought he had the intonation right. Then he went over to look at the tanks. He got a rag out of a cupboard and wiped the dust off them. He was wiping Chianese’s tank when he realised it was the warm one. “Who is this guy,” he asked himself, “the Cray sisters want him all of a sudden? No one ever wanted him before.” He tried to remember what Chianese looked like but he couldn’t. Twinkies all looked the same to him.

He went out to a stall and got himself another fish curry. “You see a guy like that,” he tried experimentally to the stallholder after he had paid, “we’re the first to know.”

The stallholder stared at him.

“The first,” Vesicle said.

New Men, she thought, as she watched him walk away up Pierpoint, one leg going out at an odd angle. What are they on?

Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid—if you stretched a point—and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less than reliable new entertainment technology.

Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:

“I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know?”

Vesicle went back to the tank farm. The head-ends of the tanks protruded a couple of feet from their shoulder-height plyboard cubicles, like stupidly baroque brass coffins covered with cheap decorative detail. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT, claimed the shoot-up posters on the back wall of each cubicle. Chianese’s tank was warmer than it had been. Vesicle could see why: the twink was out of credit. He had maybe half a day left, this was according to readouts in the tank fascia, and then it was the cold world for him. The tank proteome, a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones, was beginning to prepare his body for the life he left behind.