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‘That was when this century’s first great discovery was made: the use of nuclear weapons. Until then, they didn’t have a use. A threat, a deterrent effect – even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a sense, only a threat. A demonstration atrocity. It was an unknown genius in Azerbaijan who discovered what nuclear weapons are actually good for. Intercommunal massacre. Tactical nuclear intercommunal massacre. We know the result.

‘Naturally, this had to be stopped. Hence the next great discovery: a use for space-based lasers and indeed for space-based nukes. They were originally designed to drive the communist bloc to beggary, which they did, and shortly afterwards they drove the USA to bankruptcy – all of this before they were even built at all! Like the mythical tachyon bomb which destroys the target before it’s launched, orbital weapons struck backwards through time. But of course they were built anyway, and they keep the peace today by zapping any facility that looks as if it conceivably might be used to build nukes down here.

‘So there you have it: the wonderful checks and balances which have freed us from starvation, from the fear of nuclear war, from inescapable tyranny, and allow us all to go to hell in our own way. But with fourteen million, six hundred thousand combat deaths a year, we have surpassed the kill-rate of the Second World War on a permanent basis. It’s not all that different from the bad old days when we all went to hell together.

‘Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take my chances with animal-liberators, machine-wreckers, or born-again Christian militias any day rather than face new Hitlers, Stalins or Johnsons. But I’d like anyone who’s watching to entertain the possibility that maybe we could do better than this. And to ask yourself: where’s the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems…seamless. What can an individual do against it?

‘I’ll tell you. One of the ancestors of our modern militias was a group called the Falange. They had a slogan: Credere. Obedere. Combatere. “Believe. Obey. Fight.” I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.’

He paused for a moment, as if to indicate that he knew exactly what he was saying.

‘But, of course, that’s only my opinion.

‘And now, a word from my sponsors, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective, who have very different opinions. Goodnight. Go without God, or the goddess, if you’re godless; and, if not, go with.’

Jordan drained the coffee mug and put it down, too hard. Drained was how he felt. He watched the comrade whose turn it was to wash up without even a twitch of that impulse to help which had so amused the others on his first evenings here.

When he’d finished speaking and Mary was tidying the cameras away after their regular slot, she’d said, not looking at him: ‘That was really…something. Where d’you learn to talk like that?’

Jordan sighed. ‘Televangelists,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve sat through enough of them. Must’ve soaked it up.’

Pre-adapted for speaking on the Cable, just as his job had pre-adapted him for seeking on the nets. It was an eerie, deterministic thought, like Calvinism…

Oh, shit. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. He jumped up, had a shower, changed and went downstairs again. The table in the long room had been cleared, the studio gear tilted away. Havana Vice was on the television. Dafyd and Stone were sitting on a sofa by the window-screen (a metre-by-two version of the glades, which made him feel exposed even while knowing it was one-way and armoured), sharing a joint and cleaning their weapons.

‘Hi, Jordan.’

‘Hi, guys.’ He sat down on one arm of the sofa, inhaling sidestream smoke and watching with a not coincidentally increasing fascination the intricate pattern the men’s hands made as they rubbed and scraped, bolted and fitted, stripped and re-assembled, drew and passed. They worked and smoked in silence