Remember I told you I found a room in our building registered to Egypt? I heard the staff go in via a big blue plastic sheet, after that they can’t be seen. I found out more. They remove their clothes in a sealed room, shower, then get into boiler suits, then go through more sealed spaces – to get into a laboratory. I have looked into it and when they are in that room they are definitely not working under UK law. They are working under Egyptian law. What is more acceptable under Egyptian law? I am no expert in that legal area specifically but what kind of work also requires people to remain in a sealed unit and to have a full shower on arrival and then again when they leave?

It is cloning.

I think they are trying to clone the first animal.

In the cafe the workers from the Egypt room have their own table. They don’t talk to the rest of us. If they find a way to clone animals, then next it will be humans – it sounds like science fiction but it is going to happen. What next? No humans needed? Just machines running the whole world? Machine horses. Machine penguins. Mechanical animals performing sacred rituals? Cloned humans working every job and telling the great un-cloned that we were merely the makers of bad history and now we are to be replaced? They are playing God in that room in the Cube building and it is a dangerous game. Why would you clone a human when you can’t even look after the humans who already exist? I have been reading about futurists and the lost generation. Apparently futurists attended your first World Science Fiction Convention this year in New York and they thought they were better than everyone. If I had met them, brother, I would have shook each one of their hands and informed them that no geek is better than me – I can out-think all of them. Did you see them there?

I’ve found somewhere I can buy the New York Times. I cannot believe the dust bowl is so bad again – in Texas it’s blackening the sky. I remember how bad those dust storms were at the start of the decade. Do you remember one deposited 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago? Red snow in New England. They say 3.5 million people have had to migrate already, they are always going on about migrants, about identity and colour and race – it’s almost as if the universe did not create us all from stardust!

No?

I say words out loud to soothe me.

Osteomyelitis, osteitis, acromegaly, multiple myeloma.

There are whale bones at the end of middle Meadow Walk.

I am beginning to think this entire city creaks and groans with bones.