I walked into a corridor constructed with the same material as the walls of the previous room. I looked in both directions. Circular hatches capped either end. There were a dozen or so air seal doors flanking the corridor.

‘What is this place?’ I asked Ben as he emerged from the room carrying Beth.

‘An isolation unit for infectious diseases.’

He turned right and I followed him. When we reached the hatch at the other end of the corridor, a sensor registered our presence and the aperture opened like an old camera shutter. Ben ran on, but I only managed to take a couple of steps beyond the aperture before I came to a halt.

We were on a glass bridge that connected two skyscrapers. The building we were leaving was a sleek glass and steel structure. The one we were heading towards was a contoured building made of translucent white plastic.

Both structures towered over the ground, rising perhaps as high as two hundred storeys. We were about two-thirds of the way up. Beyond the glass walls of the cylinder was a city unlike any I’d ever seen. Buildings, just like the one we were leaving, rose into the sky in elegant contours to create a beautiful skyline that contrasted with the jagged teeth of most cities I was used to. There were holographic billboards, advertising products I didn’t even understand. The sky was full of aircraft, personal drones that carried people from landing pads which protruded from the buildings. There were vapour trails high in the sky, but they didn’t traverse the atmosphere. They were heading straight up. I looked across the city and saw the source of the trails – a spaceport – and the physicist in me was overwhelmed as I realized humankind had achieved an ambition that was as old as our species. We had touched the stars.

Everything seemed to shine beneath a golden sun.

‘Ben,’ I finally managed. ‘Is this . . .’ I trailed off.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Come on.’

I marvelled at what I saw.

The future was dazzling.

Chapter 56

‘Help,’ Ben said, running through the aperture at the other end of the bridge. ‘Someone help us.’

I snapped out of my astonishment and ran after him. I entered a sleek lobby. Everything in it was curvilinear and geometrically complex. Even the chairs were designed in honeycomb shapes that shouldn’t have been possible. Self-supporting structures that had to have been 3D printed.

A nurse and doctor came through a door on the other side.

‘She needs help,’ Ben said as they rushed over.

The nurse – a tall, muscular, rakish man in his mid-thirties with a windswept California tan and straw-blond hair – ran to the wall by an unstaffed reception desk and pressed a panel. It retracted to reveal a small closet, and he pulled out a platform that had no wheels. As he removed it from its holster, it powered up and hovered at waist height. He ran over, pushing the high-tech gurney ahead of him.