Over iced mochas, Lucas explained the cat paradox in greater detail, ending with, ‘When Schrödinger and Heisenberg did their work, young people were dancing the Charleston and the Great Depression was years away from happening.’

Jacqui rubbed her forehead.

‘Iced coffee headache,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it’s quantum.’

‘My friend Arne, back in Imperial, who’s a bloody great Viking and into martial arts, says that aikido and Japanese karate date from the 1920s also, and they’re considered traditional. So why don’t people realise that quantum physics is old?’

There was a distinction between Japanese and Okinawan disciplines, but that was not what Jacqui picked up on. ‘Imperial? As in London’s answer to MIT?’

‘Or Caltech, right. I went there in—’

Sharing life history already, he outlined his modest upbringing, and she talked about growing up in Alaska where moose bolognese was part of the staple diet – that, or taking the piss was not a purely British art – and how she could shoot with either hand, but preferred not to.

‘I’m more into reading, chatting and sunshine, thanks all the same. Why I moved to California.’

‘That’s good,’ he told her. His own reasons for ending up there, involving a possibly imaginary conspiracy, a memory flake and breaking into Caltech at night to use Gus Calzonni’s mu-space apparatus, could wait until another day. For now he just told her how much at home he felt on the Left Coast; and he meant it.

Exiting the coffee shop, his old feelings of paranoia and fantasies about quantum-entangled minds came tumbling back, but the apparition across the street was no coincidence: it was simply that Maria, bloody Maria, had finally taken it into her mind to track him down.

His name had been on the membership list for the conference – probably his first appearance in public cyberspace – as opposed to corporate and government systems – since he had scarpered from London.

‘Shit crap bollocks,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘That’ – he pointed at Maria – ‘is my very, very ex-girlfriend.’

Jacqui gave a start, and clutched Lucas’s upper arm.

Balls. She’s coming over.

Whether Brazil possessed the concept of jay-walking, Lucas had never learned; but what he did know was that Maria Higashionna belonged among São Paulo’s upper classes, and she could blaze with full-on haughtiness when she chose – as she did now, crossing the street without regard to anything, including traffic, and dismissing Jacqui with a glance.

‘Lucas, meu amor. You left the flat in a mess.’

Like the parquet flooring he had dug up. Understood.

‘That’s what first-month deposits were invented for.’

The natural thing would be to introduce Jacqui, but for some reason he wanted to keep her out of Maria’s awareness. Luckily Maria’s gaze was fastened on him. She had never seemed so reptilian.

‘I always wondered what you dug up.’

‘Everything I had was on a memory flake,’ he told her. ‘And it’s gone. Doesn’t exist, anywhere in the universe.’

Those chestnut brown eyes had always seemed so beguiling. Was this the first time he was actually seeing her for what she was?

‘You’re telling the truth.’ She looked like someone at home in the sun, but her voice was icy. ‘And you’ve left everything behind.’

‘Everything, Maria.’

So very cold: not just her voice, but her eyes, when she turned to Jacqui.

‘All yours.’

Maria went back across the street, climbed into her shiny car, and hauled away from the kerb. At the end of the block she turned right, and that was that: Maria was gone from sight.

Gone from his life.

There was a delay that felt like hours and like nothing at all before the world re engaged, and he realised that Jacqui was still holding his arm in a fashion that was exactly right, the way things were meant to be.

‘I’m not into New Age schizotypal thinking.’ She was staring down the street where Maria had driven. ‘No one walks around with a glowing aura, not literally.’

‘Er . . .’

‘But there’s such a thing as synaesthesia, and when I see a strange sort of darkness surrounding your ex-girlfriend, I’m inclined to think I’ve picked up on something real.’

‘You mean Maria?’

It seemed a convoluted way of calling his former lover an evil witch, but the oddest thing of all was how deeply he agreed with Jacqui. Like the quantum collapse of a wave function to a single eigenvalue – as though it had always been that way – history seemed to have changed in retrospect, as if Maria had all along been reptile-cold, a lizard sharing his life for her own logical ends.

Their qPads chimed.

‘The conference,’ said Jacqui. ‘The next talk. Did you want to go back in?’

‘Not really. I’m already where I’m meant to be,’ he told her. ‘Does that sound weird?’

‘It sounds exactly right.’

‘You want to walk around downtown?’

‘That’s exactly what I want.’

So arm in arm, they did.

NINE

LABYRINTH, 2603-2604 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

After the first extended training exercise, four of Roger’s class mates were hospitalised because he had put them there. This was an environment designed to break people down before reconstructing them: a place where controlled sparring meant beating up anyone who tried to dominate you; where endurance runs through strange, shifting landscapes involved doing your best to leave your mates behind; and where games of deception in simulated social situations were always zero-sum – the only way to win was by ensuring the others lost.

None of this, presumably, was accidental.

Some of his classmates were highly talented in areas strange to him, and some possessed a great deal of experience in the soft skills arena of influencing new contacts, which would eventually involve recruiting assets, even running agents on hostile territory; but Roger was ‘serious as a bastard’, as he overheard in the dorm block, determined to be implacable, even when others took advantage of unobserved moments to slacken off.

He was making up lost ground, and more.

The history of espionage was one of their classroom subjects, and Roger chose to present a paper on the paramilitary aspects of intelligence organisations upon twentieth-century Earth. It was the variation that struck him, and became the paper’s thesis: how some organisations relied on infiltrating diplomatic bureaucracy and mixing at the right parties, while others stood somewhere further along a sliding scale that, at the far end, featured the KGB (later the FSB) and GRU. Those two services maintained their own spetsnasz companies: special forces trained beyond Spartan standards, every soldier a master of rokupashniboi, a combat discipline as close to Pilot fighting methods as realspace had ever seen.

Perhaps that was why, during the tracking exercise, when his classmates closed the trap in a deserted alley (role-playing an opposition cell who had seen past Roger’s anti surveillance tricks in a simulated cityscape), Roger responded in the all-out way he did. Or perhaps they simply misunderstood the consequences of not leaving an escape route for an ambushed rat.

There were eight of them in total, closing in, relying on hand-to-hand because his solitary smartmiasma was equal to all theirs combined, neutralising the femtoscopic threat. What remained was primitive, and his first whipping kick destroyed an attacker’s knee joint, curving elbow fracturing the same poor bastard’s jaw, dropping him in another’s path; and a lunging strike came at Roger, a near instantaneous closing of distance, but Roger entered the cyclone’s heart, spinning the man – no, woman – face first into the wall and driving a horizontal elbow into her spine. The wall and two fallen enemies helped close off angles, but the danger was high regardless, and when a big guy grabbed two-handed, Roger dropped his weight to keep on balance, shovel-hooking hard, left-left-right in half a second, to the holy trinity of liver-bladder-spleen, which did it: third bastard down.