“Broadcast them, probably. From the emergency command and control bunkers they had set up for running the country in event of a nuclear war: they had radio transmitters, didn’t they? I saw a TV drama about it years ago, called Threads.” He looks at me, curiously: “Would public broadcasting still work after an invasion of wibbly-wobbly nasties? What about the internet?”

I scuff my shoe on the bare concrete. “This stuff is useless. They haven’t blown the dust off it in thirty years!” I look around. “I mean, it’s useless except for kitsch value. Well, that’s not quite right. You might get the service museum curator excited. But I don’t see any of this junk going viral like KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.”

“It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi,” Pete agrees. “But what am I going to do?”

I shrug. “You’re going to dig out the original brief for the folks who came up with this stuff. I figure it’ll turn out to be ‘come up with a public information campaign’ or something along those lines. Then you’re going to write a proposal for how to update the brief for a new generation, so that the New Media hipsters can all point and laugh at us. It’ll get outsourced to a security-cleared agency, who in turn will pitch an iPhone app and a Facebook page, but by then you’ll be signed off the job, so tearing off their heads and shitting down their necks as you explain in words of one syllable that we can’t trust Apple or Facebook won’t be your problem.” I pause. “I can help you with that: it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. On the other hand, I’ve got a little project of my own I’m working on, and I could do with some help. And a library researcher is exactly what I need. Are you up for it?”

Thus I seal my fate.

4.

VAMPIRE START-UP

“DUDES, THIS IS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR! WHERE ARE MY fangs? Why can’t I turn into a bat? This sucks!”

“Silence, minion!” Mhari turns her nose up with turbocharged hauteur and places one hand on her hip, theatrically poised, as she faces down Evan. “There will be no whining among the pigs!”

“Vampires.”