This was on the new parks. They had more than one game on the go. They would check in with random people that walked around their existing parks – seeing what they wanted. If they wanted anything, Peggy and Greta would try and keep them happy. They would sometimes close a rollercoaster and add a water feature to it. Playing for hours. The people kept coming and paying their entry fee but they also bought pizza and balloons and sometimes Peggy and Greta would charge a small amount for the maps and it would allow them to employ one more man in a panda suit who could show visitors around if they got lost.

Outside, the sun moved across the sky. The light moved away from Peggy and Greta as it sank behind the hill until there was no sun, and eventually they got hungry and had to stop. They closed the park for the night. Some parks they left open and just shut down the computer. They watched the screen go black then they sat for a moment and sighed and looked at their flat and for a moment the small scurrying people would walk back and forth on the walls and any light space they looked at. The people moved by themselves, but deep inside them was a destiny made up of code, and this was what Greta and Peggy loved the best. The way the people looked like they could go anywhere. Like they could be anything they wanted to be but, really, they were just lines of assembly under a thin layer of C. The people had different names, but they all looked the same.

Greta and Peggy stretched, stood up and went to the kitchen to make dinner. They put some bread in the toaster and Greta got peanut butter out of the cupboard and margarine out of the fridge.

‘Do we always have the right amount of cash?’ Greta said.

‘When?’ Peggy said.

‘Like, when we pay for things,’ Greta said. ‘Do we always have the right amount of cash?’

‘We always have cash,’ Peggy said.

Greta nodded. ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought.’

‘That would be weird,’ Peggy said. ‘If we always had the right amount.’

‘Yeah,’ Greta said.

‘Did Donna say that?’ Peggy asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘People just think that because everyone has a card now,’ Peggy said.

‘That’s what I said.’

There was hardly any margarine left. There had been a discussion in the staffroom at work that peanut butter didn’t need butter. ‘It’s got it in its name,’ Niall had said. ‘It’s like eating butter on top of butter.’ Peggy had kept quiet during the conversation, because Niall was master-cleansing, but it was the first thing she’d asked Greta when she got home. ‘Is peanut butter butter?’ They’d tried it, but without margarine they missed the extra fat and salt.