“It’s a bargain!” she announced, when the bill came through. “You don’t remember, but I do – before the nanos, strokes were a big deal!”

Jiannis came with Harmony to visit her mum in the hospital in Reading, where the medical programmers and nano consultants bickered about protocols and code, and whether to try an experimental program on Mr O’Rourke in bed six, or how to convince Mrs Ng in bed four that she needed to upgrade her liver function.

Harmony wasn’t even especially anxious until she got to the hospital. Strokes happened sometimes – even the best programming couldn’t predict for everything, and huge leaps had been made in stemming the worst effects of age, especially if you were willing to pay for the extra packages.

Seeing Karen in bed, surgical socks pulled up around her pillowy blue-veined calves, indignant spotted grey robe loosely done up around her bare, sagging buttocks, caused a momentary flash of worry, but it was almost immediately dispelled by Karen hollering, “Cooey! Coo-ey!” across the snoozing late afternoon ward as if her daughter might miss her over the twenty yards that separated door from booth. Embarrassment flared in Harmony’s skin, barely suppressed by Control My Blush – never be betrayed by your skin again, recommended by pro-poker players and leading TV celebrities! If swelling persists for more than four days after activation, contact your healthcare provider.

But Jiannis was there, squeezing her hand, smiling patiently. “Your mother is a character,” he said. “You manage her very well.”

“Cooey, cooey! Oh, you’ve brought Jiannis too. How nice. How lovely to see you.”

“How are you, Mrs Meads?” Jiannis, white shirt, white teeth, white trousers, unfolding into a padded beige armchair next to the bed, a knight in shining armour come to visit the stricken queen.

“Oh, you know, I cope, don’t I?”

They stayed for forty minutes, as Karen blathered on about power walking this and local old age group that and the thing that Mrs Frith said at number twenty-six and how you couldn’t trust people these days and the local bus service and the new development by the council offices and . . .

“Going so soon? Well, quite right, I mean you’ve got to live your life, haven’t you? I’ll be out of here soon; they’re just keeping me in for observations. Toodle-oo!”

Harmony struggled to meet her mother’s eye, to look back as she headed for the door, smiling at nothing, Jiannis’s hand on her arm. A doctor scurried up to her as she headed for the exit, scuttling round from behind a desk where an ancient computer grunted and groaned with the effort of data. “Ms Meads? Ms Meads, I’m Dr Dalal, I’m—Excuse me!”

Harmony only stopped walking because Jiannis did, squeezing her arm hard enough to hurt. She spun round, smile already fixed, as a diminutive woman with skin the colour of chai and scraggy dark hair held up with a mass of pins and clips scampered up to her. “Ms Meads, thank you, yes, you are Mrs Meads’ next of kin, yes, you are . . . Can I have a word?”