Harmony picked up Karen’s phone.

An alert was visible on the screen, flashing indignantly, and the drained battery suggested it had been flashing for a while.

YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

Harmony found her mother upstairs, where she’d fallen in the corridor outside the bathroom. She was conscious, in her way, one side of her face hanging loose and low, the other side twisting, trying to form words, and producing only slurred gs and rs as her eyes danced empty through the dark.

Only when the ambulance was already on its way to the hospital did Harmony get out her own phone and find the missed call. Her mum was always stupid, and had called her daughter before trying to dial 999.

Chapter 31

They took her to Reading Hospital, still in her pyjamas.

Harmony sat outside the curtained-off booth in A&E, and wished she’d brought her toothbrush and toothpaste. She couldn’t smell her breath, but she could taste it, see it in the eyes of the doctors as they tried to talk to her. Her skin felt pasted in waxy alcoholic sweat, warning all who came near.

Eventually, as the sun began to rise, a senior doctor with tablet in hand found Harmony outside the programming diagnostic’s room.

“It’s mixed news, Ms Meads. The nanos caught the stroke before it could do too much damage and blasted the clot, but I’m sorry to say that this was a far more significant incident than her last, and there is some sign of scarring to suggest that she may have been experiencing micro-strokes in the run-up before this. Has she complained much of headaches recently?”

“No. Mum doesn’t complain about these things.”

Mum never complains.

“I see. The prior damage was too small for the nanos to have picked up on it without specialist programming, which is why we may not have seen it until now. I’m afraid that this does mean that this more significant event may have . . . consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“Your mother will need specialist support and software. Right now we’ve got her on an emergency prescription on hospital Wi-Fi, but when we start looking at discharging I think there’s going to have to be an extensive conversation about upgrades.”

Harmony nods, the dead, dumb nod of one who has forgotten how to think, as the doctor witters on.

This is Karen Meads, seventy-five years old, unconscious in a hospital bed.

There aren’t any pipes or tubes going into her.

just a monitor on her index finger, and a live feed from her nanos on a diagnostic screen, code and commands, executors and sub-routines.

Karen sleeps, and for a while Harmony does too, and wonders what her mother dreams.

Chapter 32

There is a list of medication.

It is not short.