Then he leaves me standing there, watching his retreating arse and aching up inside myself, and yawning again and again.

Unique and impactful

Unique and impactful

‘Another one bites the dust,’ O says. I am straining the chicken soup she made while I was out. She is brushing Edgar. The evening news roundup is running on the surface of the fridge, so that my story of Antonio’s planned flight is interspersed with reports of the latest spasm in the stock market due to politics I don’t understand. ‘Of course, he’s just a hireling. Probably he’s been told to leave the country.’

I smile. ‘You know who you remind me of? Roman.’

‘Really.’ Her tone is so arch that the single word makes me laugh out loud.

‘Well, I mean, you both have such dark minds. Always imagining the worst possible motives for people.’

‘I didn’t get to this age without learning how to watch my back,’ O says. ‘Now, let’s have our soup and I’ll show you some footage I found for you.’

Meera Bhango is both photogenic and likeable. She’s plump, thirty-ish, dressed stylishly with gold trim on the edge of her hijab that picks up the warmth of her skin tones. Her smile looks genuine and her voice . . . she’d be good at ASMR. I get tingles just listening to her and it’s hard to focus on her words because her tone is making my scalp purr. She’s being interviewed by a nasal Swedish journalist wearing rimless vanity specs; he pretty well kills the tingles every time he opens his mouth.

So Meera, you’re out there on the neural frontier, exploring that innerspace with your company, and is it safe to say that there are few laws on this frontier because lawmakers don’t really understand it?

Well, Bryson, it’s not that we’re living on a frontier, that’s the wrong way to think about it. A frontier implies there’s an undiscovered land just out there beyond our knowledge. No, we’re living on the growth edge of an organism. The creature that our noosphere is becoming is actually creating itself as we speak. Human knowledge keeps pushing outwards, making more connections, and new regions of understanding form and light up.

Noosphere, now there’s a word we don’t hear every day!

Well, if we have our way at Little Bird you’ll be hearing more of it soon. ‘Noosphere’ is a funny word that has never really caught on, but it comes from the Greek ‘gnosis’ meaning simply ‘to know’. The noosphere is the knowledge-space that we all share.

What are you hoping to do with Little Bird?

We wanted a way to work outside academia, to make a contribution to the public interest without having to work off the increasingly Byzantine system of grant applications and so forth.

Wait a second . . . that sounds just like BigSky.