‘Off the record, then,’ De Chauncey said, a Bulgari sparkle in his eye. ‘The tenants don’t know they’re dealing with a machine. As far as they’re concerned, their landlord is a small-time buy-to-let guy, that’s who they’re emailing. The algorithm writes its responses like a person – like some random slob who owns a couple of flats on the side to top up his pension. It says “yeah” and “cheers” and so on. It even puts in typos. If it replies at all. That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t always reply, less than half the time, and it never replies immediately. Just like a real small-timer. It’s fantastic. It soaks up all the tenant’s frustrations, and only occasionally logs jobs for attention, depending on the level of tenant anger, potential risk to the fabric of the property, cost versus yield, and legal liability. Amazing what it can do, what it can decide. They think they’re dealing with Dave Stockton, but in fact they’re emailing HAL 9000. HAL, only lazy.’

I watched wind-snatched raindrops fall on my phone screen, splashing rainbows in its light. ‘Dave Stockton,’ I said, mouth dry.

‘Yeah, we give them all generic names, Frank Smith, Susan Roberts, Ahmed Khan, Dave Stockton. It’s all the same program. “Dave” was one of the first.’

‘So—’ I began, and I had to stop to try to work some moisture back into my dry mouth. ‘So Dave Stockton is an algorithm? A computer?’

‘Like a voice assist thing on your phone, but over email. Bunk built it, we just advised on how it should behave and what we wanted from it. But what’s clever is that Cortana and Alexa and Google Assist and all those have to be very sophisticated because people expect them to be helpful and useful and fast. No one expects that of Dave, the buy-to-let landlord. They expect him to be a bit shit.’

‘Isn’t it dishonest?’

De Chauncey shrugged, tipping a spray of water off his umbrella. My phone was still recording. I stared at the jerking line, watching it keep rhythm with the drumming of the raindrops against the material above me and the swish of passing cars. That was what I clung to, hoping that it still contained a link to a form of reality. Not my wet feet or the obvious, morbid biology of my coldness, tiredness and sickness. The phone.