It was as if someone had turned Harriet up a few notches. Her smile was wider, her voice chummier, her eyes warmer. She was altogether more … everything … compared to the woman who had come to her house a month or so ago. Maybe someone had slipped something into her sludge. Maybe they all had drugs in their food and, in six weeks’ time, Thea would wake up to find this had all been a mushroom dream.

‘Fellow pioneers!’

A voice rang out. People looked around, confused, trying to locate the person speaking, until others who had worked it out nudged them and pointed upwards.

There on one of the second-floor walkways, a woman stood looking down on them. She had incredibly long, incredibly straight, incredibly red hair.

‘Is that Moses Ing?’ someone whispered loudly near Thea. ‘Thought he was a man?’

Harriet frowned at the whisperer, a young woman with a pencil securing her dark, frizzy hair who smiled widely at Harriet and gave Thea a little wave. The woman on the walkway continued.

‘My name is Delores. On behalf of Ing Enterprises I welcome you here today and wish you a happy and healthy stay with us. We are on the cusp of an exciting future.’

Harriet looked up at Delores with the bright-eyed face of someone who has seen God.

‘A human being sleeps for roughly eight hours every night. Until very recently, those eight hours have been an unknowable land for scientists. Technology is now allowing us to take a peek at that land, to map and explore it. Getting you to sleep will not be a problem; I guarantee it. Give us a week or so to allow the systems to get to know you and we will then be able to facilitate you into the best sleep of your life. But better than that, we will then be able to help you start building the person you have always wanted to be. How? Through the untapped power of your sleep, and your dreams. You lovely people here before me’ – she gestured down to the upturned faces below her, smiling warmly – ‘you are the beginning of something that will help humanity take the next evolutionary leap.’

Harriet started to clap enthusiastically, and others joined in. The way she felt today, Thea would not be able to help evolution make a leap so much as a stumbling sprawl. Her eyes felt as if they’d been put in the oven for too long.