It was inconvenient to lose Delores and Moses. The woman had been clever, in her own way, and Moses, well he was a legend. But, as they said, legends … never died. Moses would have to continue, in one shape or another.

It was messier than he would have liked. But that was beta-testing for you. Unpredictable. Thankfully, it was frighteningly easy for people to be wiped away – if you chose the right people in the first place.

But still … messy.

And exactly what Morpheus could be used for in the future: one carefully constructed dream, one perfectly balanced REM sleep, and those people would simply forget what had happened on that island. Their brains would be reprogrammed. So much cleaner.

He clasped his hands and tapped the two index fingers together. Sweat Stain cleared his throat nervously.

‘And?’

‘Well …’ The man swallowed loudly. ‘We’ve just had a report of a boat, coming from one of the coves and heading to the mainland. It has two people in it. As yet unidentified.’

The barefoot man clenched and unclenched one fist, watching the tendons in his wrist flex and disappear.

One day those tendons might be reinforced with a biologically compatible substance that hadn’t been invented yet, something that would keep his skeleton strong while his organs were replaced one by one. Then, eventually they would find a way to open up the parts of the brain currently unmapped, stimulate those dormant neurons into activity as yet unimagined.

Better human beings.

Smarter people who learned quicker and made better choices. The kind of people who would not choose to get in a silly boat and sail away. This was the ultimate purpose of the glowing map, wasn’t it?

The barefoot man hadn’t realized how useful sleep could be, before he discovered Moses. The world was obsessed with it, or rather the lack of it, but previously he’d thought of it as wasted time: necessary, but a waste all the same. Thanks to Moses though, sleep now held all sorts of possibilities that could be utilized by all sorts of people with different agendas.

Well … they’d think they had different agendas. He smiled. Soon though, they would discover they all had the same agenda: his.

The flashing light that represented St Dunstan’s on the map blinked out.

That was an improvement. Now there was no irregularity to needle him as he stared at the map, all the lights glowing unwaveringly. It was like one of those magic-eye pictures, if he stared at it long enough something else would form in his vision – he could see the future in it, a future in which he was the centre and pivot.