“Can’t you just shut it all down? Just . . . turn off the nanos. Turn them off.”

“We are still in contract unless you pay the termination fee. Our contract obligates us to ensure that your primary systems are in excellent working order! If you can’t work, how will you ever manage to sort this sort of thing out? Did you know that influenza killed more people in 1919 than died in all of World War One?”

“Mummy, why is the lady ugly?” whispered the child as Harmony motioned the family round their private tour of this charming semi-detached three-bedroom property with two bathrooms, one en suite, on the side of the North Circular.

The house shuddered and shook as the lorries roared by, the windows faintly misted over with exhaust, the once-white tiles in the kitchen stained a yellow-brown from the years of relentless smoking by the previous occupant, who’d finally cracked and was selling it all to go and live on a canal boat in Tring.

“Shush! She’s not . . . Don’t say things like that!” whispered the mother, glancing askance at Harmony to see if she’d noticed.

Harmony Meads, the flesh sagging beneath her chin, not yet sure how to wear the almost perfectly taut ball of her belly, hair done up in a bun as if a conflagration of pins might disguise the shedding of her locks, stares vacantly at nothing much, having perhaps seen it all before.

“Well, thank you, yes, very interesting,” muttered the dad as they squeezed back into her tiny estate agent’s car, a postage stamp on wheels, knees to chin, Harmony’s chair pushed all the way back from the pedals so only the child can fit.

“Mum, she’s weird,” whispered the child, and Harmony stared at the road and made no sound until the dad awkwardly asked if they could put the radio on. The child was seven years old – old enough to be running a basic nanos package and maybe a few upgrades of her own too so that she might grow up big, strong, smart and beautiful.

After, at the estate agents, as dad and child were heading away, the mum hesitated, then turned and scurried back.

“My daughter is . . . She’s very . . . I mean to say that she doesn’t understand the choices people make, you see?”

Harmony stared, blank and cold, into the woman’s eyes, and the woman looked away, nodded once, licking her lips, and scurried after her family.

That night, drunk on cheap beer, she finally called Karen.

“Mum? I’m . . . I’m in trouble.”

There is a great darkness that sometimes she dreams of, that she is falling into. Sometimes when she dreams, she hears herself say these words – “Help me” – and wakes up terrified, not knowing what is real. “I’m in . . . I’ve got these bills I’m in . . . It’s credit cards too. It’s credit cards and I’m behind on everything. Just – I’m in real trouble.”