O coughs and I hear her shifting herself into the armchair. ‘So I take it you got the client.’

‘She is very interesting. Do you know anything about sleepwalking?’

‘She sleepwalks, too? Is that the problem, or . . . ?’

‘No, the problem is a complex in her dream. It manifests as this horrible murderous dude. I just feel . . . I want to make sure I’m not missing something with the sleepwalking. I don’t know that much about it.’

‘I used to do it when I was small,’ O says. ‘My parents had to put an extra latch on the door up high because one night when I was about four they found me out in the front garden.’

‘Do you remember what it was like?’

‘Only the one time. In my dream, I was lining up my brother’s toy trains in numerical order in their sheds, and then I started to wake up and I realised I was in Mum’s spice rack instead, moving around the bottles. She found me and guided me back to bed. Apparently I’d colour-coded everything.’

I smile.

We eat in companionable silence, each of us checking our messages at the table. It’s what I love about O. As old as she is, she’s always au fait with the latest tech even if she hates BigSky with the passion of an ex-lover (or, in her case, ex-funder). My mum would be appalled at our lack of manners, but if you ask me, a real friend never minds if you’re in the Cloud when you’re having a meal with them. We can’t see or hear one another’s AR so a fly on the wall would see two people living in private bubbles, laughing, gesturing, talking or even weeping completely out of sync with one another. I could never do that with my parents, but O is different.

If neither of us has much going on, we sometimes have a funny video duel across the table by candlelight. I’ve been known to message O while I’m on the couch and she’s in her bedroom. It feels more polite than knocking on the door. I mean, what if she’s having a wank or something? It just makes sense.

Over salad, she sends me a link about sleepwalking.

‘Was pootling around the Imperial alumni website and found a mention that might help your client if it turns out your therapy doesn’t do the trick.’

‘Oh? Lost faith in me so soon?’

‘An old contact of mine from Imperial works for a start-up nanotech company. They can activate and deactivate switches that control your brainwaves and neural gates when you’re sleeping. They’re studying an AR-modulated drug that can disable your muscles when you’re asleep. The brain is supposed to do this on its own, to stop you acting out your dreams, but it fails for some people.’

‘Sleepwalking is fairly rare, isn’t it?’