‘When I was little and couldn’t sleep, I’d listen to this old-school ASMRtist on YouTube called Deep Ocean of Sound. I modelled myself on him: no images, no personal involvement, just the pure acoustic experience. So the Marianas Trench is the deepest part of the ocean, right?’

‘But yours says “trench coat”.’

‘Yeah. Cos I’m like a spy, nobody knows who I am, get it? People write to me calling me Mariana.’

Roman shakes his head.

‘It’s not sad. Stop shaking your head. You just don’t get it.’

‘Too deep for me . . . bazinga?’

Shandy leans over the table and says, ‘I’d like to know how you can claim to work in cybercrime when you’re not even up to speed with what people are actually using the platforms for.’

She has a point, but he ignores her and turns his attention to me.

‘The Dream City that Melodie described. I wanted to ask more about it in the interview but Donato doesn’t let me go off-piste. Is there such a thing? Where does it exist? Who or what has created it? These are the questions that interest me.’

‘You sound more like a philosopher than a cop.’

He laughs. ‘I’m really not a cop. I’m a kind of scientist.’

‘First you were the Dream Police, now you’re a kind-of scientist? Why do you operate out of a kebab shop?’

‘What if I told you, Charlie, that we suspect there has been a dream underworld for years?’

‘Who is we? And why?’

‘Why, because it flows naturally from the implications of the technology. BigSky lets people construct consensual realities. Part of that building process means sharing information about neural activity so that all the users can sync up in more or less the same virtual space. If you have all that information about someone’s patterns, it’s not a big leap to decode them and translate them into your own terms.’

‘Telepathy.’

‘In a word. It’s only a matter of time before we have it. The leap between reading someone and feeding back to them is even smaller. The brain heavily reconstructs sensory input. Everything you see, hear and feel has been highly processed by your cortex before you’re even aware of it. The reason why headware works so well is because it interferes with your perceptions, makes you see things that aren’t really there.’

‘I get all that. But I don’t need headware to hack dreams. I only use it to record content. I told you, I first learned I could dreamhack when I fell asleep next to someone on the bus who was also asleep.’

‘Were you wearing your earring?’

‘Yeah, probably, but—’

‘And the other person must have been on a BigSky platform. Nearly everybody is.’

‘I’m an alternative therapist. I’m not into tech.’