‘We can steer it, Jack. Tamesis can. If people are afraid, they’ll rely on us even more. We can make sure the right people are affected, made more afraid, and that the innocent are spared. We can drive out the profiteers and the arseholes. We can make the city ours again. The way it used to be, before it went mad.’

‘You want to use Tamesis to cause crime?’

Quin shook his head. ‘To cause fear of crime, for the right people, and to guide and spare the others. To properly distribute fear. And to ensure that crime happens in the right places. Bring the rents back down, take the pressure out of property, and get into it ourselves. Urban regeneration has run its course, Jack. Urban degeneration, that’s what’s next. Controlled. Tailored. And, for the right people, very profitable.’

I looked from the map, to Quin, and back. Madness, yes. But no more mad than the boiling human pyramid before me, streams of data rising from it into the empyrean of Bunk’s servers. It was the destination, all right, the conclusion: to recognise that the place before us did not exist, that no place did, that it was a fragmenting artefact of 10 million shifting perceptions. To recognise that, yes, what we wrote together in those trails of data could be edited – and would be, whether we participated or not. Here was the future, rising from every phone and computer and device like so much blinding smoke. I could confront it or ignore it, but it was coming. Or I could join it.

But addicts refuse to face the future. Their whole life is a battle against it, one I had been fighting myself for years. And for good reason. The future contains a simple binary: continue and die, or stop and live. That’s the truth, the only truth that matters. You can evade and manage, and scrape another day or week or month, but it will only work for so long – ultimately, there’s that choice, the one you’ve been making every day without knowing. Now I knew, and tomorrow would be different.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am particularly grateful to my agent, Antony Topping, and to my friends James Smythe and Sam Byers. Adam Roberts, Lee Rourke and Nikesh Shukla all contributed their wisdom and moral support. Anna Minton and Douglas Spencer provided much invaluable reading and discussion. Many ideas were shaped in conversation with Fatima Fernandes. My parents and my wife, Hazel, have been extraordinarily supportive, both now, and then. Philip Crowther gave vital details on the procedures of the emergency services.

At 4th Estate, my thanks go to Nicholas Pearson for his guidance and patience, and to Katy Archer, Michelle Kane, Matt Clacher, Jordan Mulligan and Morag Lyall.

This book could not have been completed without a generous and timely grant from the Authors’ Foundation, administered by the Society of Authors.