‘Mum asked me if you were seeing anyone.’

I have to think about this. ‘That was nice of her.’

‘Okay, let’s have the next one.’

Strange that Louis should ever have sported a uniform, or even joined the service at all, with a job like that. You’d expect that kind of role to be outsourced, given to some tiger-economy whizz-kid earning two dollars an hour off some privatised military consultancy.

‘Did your Dad—?’

‘She spotted it straight away,’ says Michel, cutting across me.

‘Spotted what?’

‘The likeness. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I tell him, fussing the originals back into their wallet.

Michel’s machine is not up to copying subtle gradations of gray. The pictures aren’t coming out well. All you can see of Louis’s face is his glasses.

‘Yes, you do.’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘You don’t have to play games, Conrad. Agnes is all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.’

I keep my head down. ‘Well, that’s good to know. Any time you want to tell me what you’re on about . . .’

‘Come on, Conrad.’

‘You’re as bad as your mother.’

The printer churns and churns.

It’s well into the next day before I get the chance to speak to Hanna. After the midday meal we drag a complaining Agnes out of the house for a walk, past the riding school and down and up a wooded dip to a churchyard with a view of the mountains. The landscape is spectacular, but my attention is drawn more to the gravestones. The stones are white with frost, but the china photographs pinned to them have absorbed the heat of the day. The photographs are clear of snow, and gelid water clings to them like tears. The faces of the dead peer from their pockets with a certain truculence, as though to say that they cannot be so easily effaced.

We stand around while Mick takes photographs with this bulky antique camera Hanna bought him for Christmas. Films for the thing are made by this tiny, specialist company you have to hunt for on the internet. Hanna is cold and wants to go home, but Michel wants to stay and try again to engage Agnes’s enthusiasm for snow. The girl shows no interest in the stuff. She just sits there, crouched in her fun-fur on her plastic toboggan while Michel, bent-backed and drip-nosed like something out of a Hogarth painting, weaves round the gravestones, rolling up a snowball for a snowman’s head.

Hanna takes a picture of them with her phone. ‘Bless.’

‘Poppy said something to Michel yesterday.’

‘Yes?’

It is my chance. It may not come again. ‘Something about us.’

Hanna’s face locks down. ‘Us?’

‘You and me and Agnes. Michel’s pissed at me today.’

‘Really? I wonder what that’s about,’ she says, already moving away from me.

I follow her, wracking my head for something to say. Stupid, to have begun so obtusely. Stupid, to have begun with Poppy, and her random, gnomic pronouncements. What could Poppy possibly know? What could she have picked up? Whatever else she is, Poppy is not and never has been stupid, and she has mistrusted me from the first, ever since I went to stay with her and her son in Sand Lane. It doesn’t in the least surprise me that she’s been keeping an eye on me. But what can she have seen? That I am in love, always in love, and hopelessly, resignedly, above all, pointlessly, with Hanna? Perhaps.

A couple of weeks go by.

I’ve an afternoon of investment meetings today, so I’m on a train bound for the Forum, the city’s business centre, where all young entrepreneurs go to die. The rail line rises on brick arches above football fields and allotments, creeks and disused embankments. This was the old Middle, its leavings torn down after the last war. The gap was left as a memorial. Today it has its own value: an extra lung for the ever-expanding city. Over sheds and shacks, prefabs and mobile homes, half a dozen angels hover in the clean and cloudless air. They’re motion-capture figments – real-time feeds that Ralf has pasted on the sky for me. If I took my spectacles off, they would vanish.

Imagine them: jobbing actors, they have turned up to work in hastily constructed motion capture studios. They have pulled on black Lycra bodysuits stitched over with ping-pong balls, and they are spending the day performing simple, iconic actions in front of a green screen – walking, running, sitting, falling. Their movements, abstracted into three-dimensional vectors, will be used in our first big field demonstration, where we will animate whole avatar armies.

Creatures made purely of light and movement, our strange angels hover above the weedy lots, limbering up for some apocalyptic event. Over the earpiece, Ralf asks, ‘Well? How are they coming through?’

I crane and twist my neck, fretting under unfamiliar gear. They are made of points of light; only in motion do they make sense as bodies. They walk, run, sit, fall and dance in mid-air. ‘Are you trying to skin them? I’m getting only data-points here.’

‘Hang on,’ he says, ‘I’ll come see you.’

A minute later, here he is, inside the carriage, grinning, in his usual T-shirt-and-baggy-jeans combo. He looks out the window, following my line of sight. He frowns. ‘They’re skinned for me.’

Were I not so conscious of the amount of gear I’m lugging around, it would be easy for me to forget that Ralf – the Ralf sat here, opposite me – is an illusion. Ralf is leaning towards me, eager, earnest, his foot an inch away from mine in the packed and airless carriage. And if I kicked him, my foot would go straight through.

As it is, I’m feeling hot and self-conscious and eager to be done. Even by the chromed, futuristic standards of the financial district, this equipment of mine is absurdly conspicuous. Item: wraparound shades. Item: an electrode stickered not so subtly to my throat, to pick up speech I no longer need to utter. (In a year or two, everyone will subvocalise their calls by choice. This, anyway, is what the pundits are saying.) Item: a headset cradles my head with transparent silicone fingers. (Phoned sounds are crude intrusions – we bypass the ear entirely, and excite the auditory nerve, creating synthetic soundscapes that merge seamlessly with context and environment.)

Ralf tilts his head at me. ‘You don’t seem happy with this.’ His voice comes alive in my head, subtly smoothed and delocalised by the software. The link is not very good – Ralf’s lips move but his voice seems to be coming at me from the back of my head.

‘The thing is,’ (I say, speaking in perfect silence – electrodes parse the throat’s intention tremors into speech) ‘we create phantoms.’ I nod out the window. ‘That’s all they are. That’s all they can ever be. They’re completely ephemeral.’

‘You can interact—’

‘Only according to the narrow rules of a game. You have an object made of light. You manipulate it, scroll through it, open and close it, shrink and expand it. God help you should you ever try to lean on it, or sit on it, or make your home in it, or, well,’ and I nod out the window at our angels, ‘take it out on a date.’

We are leaving them behind now. Illusory Ralf has to turn in his seat to see a processed point-of-view of them as they flex in the sky, invisible to the gardeners, dog-walkers and six-a-side football teams toiling on the ground below. The view vanishes behind the blue glass wall of an office-block.

‘So you interact. Okay. What does that mean?’

Ralf turns back and makes a face. For him, this is an irrelevance. Everything is a game to him. He lives inside the game, and when he is outside the game, he pretends himself inside, for fear of what he might find Out There. The unmediated real. The world. Chaos.

‘Don’t you see? The stuff we make is doomed to a life in inverted commas. We’re not even building in light. We’re building in irony. Everything we make is steeped in the stuff.’