In the calm of the afternoon, with no phone calls from Spoder, with no more links to follow, with no rumbling exhaust of an over-powered roadster, I thought that if I proceeded carefully through the mutability software I might be able to discover what in fact it had done. I remembered how long it had taken for the program to load – afterwards I had discovered a note of the huge amount of internet data that had been sent to and fro. I also found allegedly temporary files on my hard drive in obscurely named folders.

I located the program and ran it, went carefully past the questions about language, social level, password, location, software update (I clicked on No). I saw the menu I had used before, and pulled it down. The option for Financial Services under Salay, Raba was still pre-ticked. I moved the cursor to the box, and unticked it, just in case.

I then tried looking in more detail at the various front menus, searching for some idea of what the program was capable of doing. The Help page, written in coders’ geek, contained a note of recent upgrades to the software. While I was looking at the Help option I searched for warnings about the possible side-effects of the program. There were no warnings: all the documentation under Help was cursory and opaque.

I selected Exit.

Immediately, a message flashed into sight:

You Have Concurrently Safeguarded a Background Option:

Salay Group: Raba, the fourth – Arts / Literature and Books / Fiction / Novels / Commercial Novels / Writers / Detective Thrillers

Do you wish to Deconcatenate this Option? [y/n]

I stared at the screen.

What did that mean? A ‘background option’? I did not remember doing more than going through those menus – was that enough to initiate the program? And did I wish to ‘deconcatenate’? Deconcatenate what from what? If I clicked No, would that mean the option would be concatenated? With what?

Had the people who wrote the program used the word ‘concatenate’ in the usual sense of linking one thing to another? Or was it computer jargon, perhaps specific only to this program? Only to this moment of software choice, a single use, in this particular program?

I remembered the evening when I had gone through the menus, looking for some subject in the options that might mean something to me, might be relevant to the life I knew, playing around experimentally with what I entered.

I also remembered shrinking back from going any further: unless there was some other writer of commercial detective thrillers living on Salay Raba (and I had never heard of one) then the program was going to zero in on me. Here – this house, perhaps even this room. Me, protected from mutability. Concatenated.

My cellphone made the beep that meant a text message had arrived. I picked it up. The text was from Jo: AT MURISEAY AIRPORT. WHAT ARE TIMES FOR RABA SHUTTLE FLIGHTS? HOME AT LAST!!! SEE YOU TOMORROW! JO XXX