The Tamesis screen flickered and refreshed, refilling with streets and labels and tags and coloured heat. Travel Alert, it warned. Delays to C2C services into Fenchurch Street. Avoid if possible. More details / Show me other routes / What people are saying / Dismiss. I dismissed the warning. It might have been possible to avoid C2C services if I wasn’t sitting on one.

Twenty past five in the afternoon and as black as night on a viaduct snaking through Limehouse. I raised myself in the seat to look around the carriage. There were only a couple of other passengers. By now the train was at least thirty minutes late.

In the darkness, graffiti on the side of a new apartment building:

BUILD ROBOTS

DESTROY RENT

AND

TAKE THE REST OF HISTORY OFF

An electronic tok emitted from the train’s public-address system, and it crackled softly as if an announcement were about to come, but nothing happened. The crackle, a machine breath so gentle it was barely audible, continued – the sound of expectation, of something about to happen. Anything coming over? No.

Updating London … said Tamesis, the Bunk emblem spinning. East London unfolded on the screen again, with the rail line into Fenchurch Street an angry red and the District and DLR baleful orange. The map pulsed with markers. Fenchurch Street: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Tower Hill: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Bank-Monument: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Breakdown rippling outwards. Are you affected? Please tell Tamesis. We might not be able to help, but we love to listen!

From Kay: U in east? Drink?

I replied: Trains all ducked up.

The little Bunk-star under my words turned from grey to blue, indicating that she had read my message, but it did not pulse – she wasn’t typing a response. Nothing coming over.