And when Jiannis says, “I’ve never liked that dress. You should bin it,” she does, even though she’s had it for years and it’s always been her favourite, always looked great in it, because it’s easier to bin it than have the fight.

And when he says, “Give me your phone,” she does, and he goes through deleting contacts and tweaking her nanos on the app, altering customer-lead parameters, and she sits next to him silent and is grateful that he isn’t calling her ugly, or fat, or stupid, and how much he clearly loves her, and how deeply he cares for her well-being.

He proposes marriage, and she would have cried with gratitude, or relief, or the overwhelming sense that yes, this, this is obviously where they were going and once they’re married it’ll be better, it’ll be the best, marriage is the solution for it all – but her tear ducts haven’t worked for months, and so she daubs very gently at the lower rim of her eyes with a tissue, careful not to nick her skin with her perfect, pointed nails, thinking that’ll achieve much the same effect.

He pays for the wedding dress, and her mum chips in £300 towards the cost of catering. Jiannis roars with laughter when she tells him, head back and chest shaking, brighter with merriment than she’s seen him for months. “Is that—? Well, I suppose it means a lot to her!”

The dress is too small.

She tries a corset, but can’t breathe properly in it, ribcage popping against the side.

Jiannis says, “Give me your phone,” and she does, and as he murmurs, “Babe, this is perfect, you’re so perfect, this is going to be the perfect . . . ” he buys another app on her credit card, and she watches over his shoulder as it uploads from the Wi-Fi to her phone, from her phone to the nanos in her body, and wonders at the millions of tiny machines running through her blood, self-replicating, sustaining, healing, nurturing, and suddenly thinks that when she is pregnant – and she will obviously be pregnant one day – she’s not sure she wants the nanos to be involved, that there is something almost obscene about the idea of a baby engineered with binary code, every piece of it curated by a pre-natal DNA tweak, a diet of data siphoned through her placenta.

And she has just enough time to feel sick at the thought, to feel repulsed at the idea of the monster that’s going to grow inside her, before the app on her phone freezes, an error code pops up on the screen, and her world goes black.

Chapter 18

The doctors were quite excited when Harmony Meads nearly died.

They were obviously very worried, very concerned; it is a terrible thing that has happened to her, a really terrible . . . but very interesting thing that has happened.

Medical programmers from the Royal London and the Whittington rushed down to join the dissection of faulty and clashing code, to trawl through her logged nano history and poke at her control panel interface. They even got in a couple of ancient old surgeons, with their knives and saws and squelchy old-fashioned ways, just in case they needed to cut her open and do something horrendously, enthrallingly, bloodily analogue. Students flocked to her bed to marvel at her temperature, peer into her vacant, gummy eyes and bicker about the error messages flooding their screens as they prodded and poked at her skin, her bones, her nanos.