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‘Waterfall,’ the machine had explained, unhelpfully.

Now it shifted on its feet and answered Wilde’s question. ‘You’ll be understood,’ it said hesitantly. ‘English is the predominant language. Your usage and accent – and mine, I might add – may seem a little quaint.’

‘Before we go any farther,’ Wilde said, his gaze flicking from the buildings under the first street-lights ahead to the machine, ‘get me straight on a couple of things. First, is it normal to be seen talking to a machine? I mean, are – robots? – like you common around here?’

‘You could say that,’ said the machine dryly.

‘OK. Next item on the agenda as far as I’m concerned is getting something to eat and a drink and a place to crash out. Am I right in thinking that I’ll have to pay for it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the machine.

‘And you don’t happen to have some money stashed away in that shell of yours?’

‘No, but I can do better than that. See the second building along the road? It’s a mutual bank.’

Wilde said nothing, although his mouth opened.

‘You do remember what that is, don’t you?’

Wilde laughed. ‘So I get to raise some cash by mortgaging my property?’ He gestured at the clothes he stood up in. ‘That’s not much help –’

The machine gave a creditable impersonation of a polite cough.

‘Oh.’ Wilde looked at it with a renewed, speculative interest. ‘I see.’

He set off along the road, ahead of the machine for the first time since they’d met. The machine lurched into motion after him.

‘Just don’t get the wrong idea,’ it said, its voice as stiff as its gait.

One of the girls at the nearest table is giving a rendering of the pub’s signature song in an authentically dire accent, full of maudlin yearning.

‘If Ayyyye could walk acraaawrse the ryyyinbow

that shiiiines acraaawrse the Malley Mile…’

Self knows that the Malley Mile is a real place, and that both the sense of loss and the rainbow effect refer to aspects of its reality that – strangely, or is it just part of the program? – bring tears pricking to even her cold eyes. Scientist is yammering on about it, but she doesn’t want to know right now.

She’s just settled down with her third drink, burning the alcohol straight to energy but remembering to emulate the effect, when the door bangs open and a girl walks in who sure isn’t some office-worker deciding the weekend starts here.

She’s tall and thin, though her flak-jacket makes her look broad. Narrow jeans, spacer boots, a big automatic holstered on her hip. On her other hip she’s carrying a large bag with a strap taking the strain to her shoulder. Short blonde hair lying close to her skull. Face too bony to be bonny. The main things going for it are her bright blue eyes and her big smile, which at this moment is turned on the men at – and the man behind – the bar.

She walks up to the bar and orders a beer, and as she drinks it she chats to one or two of the guys, and while she’s chatting she reaches into her big satchel and hauls out fresh-looking tabloid newspapers and carefully counts coins from the men who take them. Some of them take them as if they’re keen to read them, others with a show of reluctance and a lot of banter, but most just shake their heads or shrug and go back to their own conversations and watching, the television screen, where somebody’s just about to take a sudden death shoot-out. All the while the girl’s every so often glancing around the room in a way that has Spy torn between admiration at the unobtrusive way she does it and anxiety that she’s looking for someone quite close to Spy’s hard little heart, namely Self.

The girl at the bar goes on talking to the men at the bar for another few minutes, then eases herself casually from the stool and takes a handful of papers and tries to sell them to the office-girls. She’s only successful at one table, and then she’s walking to the last table where the dark-haired woman sits alone.

A shot echoes. Two hands jolt towards two pistols, then retract as a ragged cheer from the screen and from those watching