‘We know that R.E.M. atonia is supposed to protect you from acting out your dreams. It fails in sleepwalkers. What if someone had a way of making it fail?’

‘Bernard Zborowski messed with my brain.’

‘And his study was pulled. I don’t believe in the collective unconscious,’ O says. ‘But I do believe that the connectivity of technology is more than the sum of its parts. For example, it’s been my observation that the collective can behave in ways that no individual member would behave.’

I yawn. I’m not sure if I’m stressed by what she’s saying or just genuinely tired.

‘That’s why you won’t see me networked to anything to do with BigSky or any of the other giants.’

‘I thought it was because BigSky has crime connections.’

‘It’s more that they have too many vulnerabilities. I worry less about other hackers now and more about . . . how can I put this? Malicious entities acting opportunistically in the system.’

Yawn. ‘Entities. Check.’

‘Of course, people can become paranoid with age. Maybe I’m getting like Stephen Hawking and his constant harping-on about the Machine Uprising.’

‘I don’t argue with clever people,’ I say. ‘That’s why everything he said must be true, same with everything you say.’

‘Except that I never agreed with him,’ O retorts, smiling. ‘Just because someone is clever doesn’t mean they are always right, especially late in their career. Look at Einstein. He kept trying to wriggle out of accepting quantum entanglement, and now we have quantum teleportation. It’s hard to change your mind when you get older. The corpuscles get creaky. One must work at it, constantly.’

‘So . . . malicious entities, yes, Machine Uprising, no?’ I say, eyelids drooping.

‘Machine Uprising, sure, but I don’t believe the ascent of the machines will be the end of humanity. It’s happening already, in any case. Do you smell something?’

‘My onions!’

I fly into the kitchen, open the window that leads to the roof, and suck the finger that I’ve burned because the pot holder was soaking wet when I grabbed the pan. Edgar promptly jumps in through the window and tries to insinuate himself around the precariously balanced Jenga tower of clean dishes on the dish rack.

‘What do you mean, the Machine Uprising is happening?’ I yell it a little too loudly, and then jump half out of my skin because O has wheeled in behind me. She is staring intensely at the pigeon coop, her hook nose silhouetted against the white clouds.

‘It’s happening. It started a long time ago; I’ve been watching it personally for forty-odd years. As each new layer of human-machine interface is built, I realise how deep the relationship is. Maybe the Machine was always seeded within us, from the first tools.’

That’s a big stretch for me. Excelsior-Barking Online, 2:2, remember?