Harmony tried to smile back. The muscles were weak, ached, it was hard to remember how to move her face to show these feelings.

Maybe that’s why the woman spoke. Maybe she just needed to speak.

“Mum’s ninety-seven,” she explained, staring at nothing much, wiping her fingers on a crumpled tissue with a coffee shop’s name half-lost in the stained old folds. “She’s had cancer, heart failure, diabetes . . . only she hasn’t. She hasn’t. She has excellent health insurance. Dad saw to that before he . . . It’s so good that these things only get a few seconds head start, a clot in the aorta and boom! Dealt with. Trouble with glucose? No worries. The nanos are keeping her alive, in good nick actually . . . They’re doing all right.”

She hesitated, glancing again at Harmony, trying to read the other woman’s expression. Harmony opened her mouth to say something, to explain that she wasn’t frowning, or dumb, that there was simply something wrong with her face. But the moment the words rose to her lips, she closed them. How fucking stupid did it sound?

The woman nodded, fears confirmed and, putting the tissue back in her pocket straightened up to grasp the back of her mother’s giant, stretched out chair.

“Her mind’s mostly gone, of course. Mostly gone. They tried an experimental process on her, nanos for the brain, something to fill in the broken neurons, but it didn’t work. She could talk and feed herself again, but it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her. It was just . . . some algorithm. It made her behave funny, do funny things; in the end we had to shut it down. Felt like shutting her down, but I thought . . . she wouldn’t want to be this. Now she’s just waiting to die. Does that sound terrible?”

Harmony shook her head. She could do that much.

“I play piano for her. I think she likes it. She probably doesn’t. But it makes me feel like I’m doing something. She’s been like this for five years now. They say with nanos she could live to be a hundred and twenty-five.” A little intake of breath, a thought not uttered.

The woman perhaps wants to say, “That’s my life. That’s my whole life. That’s the next twenty-eight years gone, waiting.”

But she doesn’t.

That wouldn’t be kind, or proper.

So instead she smiles again, apologising, and pushes her mother away.

Harmony didn’t see them again, and thought perhaps she’d been dreaming a digital dream.

Chapter 23

The ride back from hospital to Blackfriars was silent. Two people stared out of opposite windows. The fare was £7.20, and Jiannis looked for a moment at Harmony as if she might pay, dressed in the same clothes she’d been admitted in eight days ago, the day the world ended.

She didn’t look at him, and he put it on his credit card.

Upstairs, in the apartment, she went straight to bed and lay on her side, facing the wall.