The room had changed in the months since I was last allowed in. The God Board had been moved to one side, and a second screen of equal size now stood beside it. This showed the entire British Isles, and while the London screen fizzed with information, the new map was cool and grey and empty. Waiting. There was only one readout that was not resting at zero: a countdown, ticking towards a couple of weeks in the future.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ a voice said from the ranks of desks. I had registered that I was not alone – about a third of the desks were occupied. But none of the workers sitting there had so much as glanced at me when I entered. They were lost in communion with Tamesis, suckling on map-glow.

The BunkMate who had addressed me was seated at the far end of the room, his voice carrying easily through the Wi-Fi-heavy hush. His desk was at right-angles to the others, facing the doors, facing me, and he sat back, picked out by a shaded task light. I recognised him, or half recognised, the glitching partial memory of the drunk. He had been Quin’s chaperone in the pub the other night. And we had met before then, exactly here, the first time I had come here.

Behind him was an etched glass wall, containing a private amphitheatre of light. Quin’s office.

Quin’s desk was a long, wide strip of a glossy composite material, supported by four wooden trestles. I was reminded of Pierce’s story about the sheet of mdf he wrote on; but while that was parsimonious and utilitarian, Quin’s set-up had the fingerprints of an architect or a designer on its spotless surface. Money had been spent to make it appear unconsidered and practical. Underneath was a dustless labyrinth of toy-bright cables, canalised in wire trays and banded by fat, colourful zip ties. These fed into the four large screens arranged on the desk – three in a triptych at one end, for private devotions, the last at the other, with a wide gap, giving airspace to facetime. The rest of the office was expensively spartan: unshowy leather seats, a thriving fern, little else. The only decoration was a few old Bunk signs on the wall, salvaged from past offices, showing the leaps the company had made in its graphic design and image management since its days as an early millennium start-up.

At first I thought I was alone, that my quarry was not here after all – which led to the ghastly whisper that he might be nowhere, another apparition of paranoia and software. But, of course not, I had met him before, and there he was, behind the group of three screens, like a birdwatcher in a hide. As I entered, he emerged, sliding along the line of the desk on chair castors engineered to total silence.