The penny drops. My PDA! Okay, it’s Laundry-issue. But it’s toast! Sure I have a cheap, dumb mobile phone as well, but I relied on that PDA; it had my life embedded in its contacts and calendar. Yes, there’s a backup, but it’s on my office PC, which is most definitely not a laptop and most definitely not allowed to go home with me-the last thing the Laundry needs is headlines like CIVIL SERVANT LOSES LAPTOP: ENTIRE POPULATION OF TOWER HAMLETS EATEN BY GIBBERING HORRORS

FROM BEYOND SPACETIME-so for the time being, I’m adrift. If Mo called me right now I genuinely couldn’t phone Pete and Sandy. Help, it’s a crisis! Well okay, it’s a minor crisis, but I rationalize: obsessing over my lost address book is a lot healthier than obsessing over a blinding purple flash and an imploding face-

Besides, shopping is therapeutic. Right?

I pull out my phone and look at it in distaste. It’s a cheap Motorola jobbie with a pay-as-you-go SIM, and its major virtues are that it’s small and it makes phone calls. I bought it a year and a half ago when word went round that IT Services were threatening to inflict Arseberries on us along with a centralized work directory, and start billing for personal calls. The rumor turned out to be unfounded but I kept the phone (and the PDA I wangled Andy into signing off on) because between them they did a better job than the old Treo, and besides, all smartphones are shit these days. It’s the one industry where progress is going backwards in high gear, because the yakking masses would rather use their phones as car navigation systems and cameras than actually make phone calls or read email.

About the only smartphone that doesn’t stink like goose shit is the JesusPhone. But I’ve steadfastly refused to join the Cult of Jobs ever since I first saw the happy-clappy revival tent launch; it brought back painful memories of a junior management training course the late and unlamented Bridget sent me on a few years ago. Nothing can possibly be that good, even though the specifications look rather nice on paper, right?

You know how this is going to end…

I spend an hour shuffling around mobile phone shops, comparing specifications and feeling my brains gently melting, which confirms what I already knew: all mobile phones are shit this year. Then I allow my feet to carry me into the O2 shop and plant me in front of an austerely minimalist display stand where halogen lights play their spotlight beams across the polished fascia of a JesusPhone, a halo of purity gleaming above it.

“Can I help you, sir?” beams one of the sales staff.

“That thing.” My finger points at the JesusPhone as if drawn to it by a powerful geas. “How much?” (That’s the only question that matters, you see: I’ve already memorized its specifications.)

“The 64Gb model, sir? On an eighteen-month contract-”

The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me, come to me and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons in the multi-touch interface-whoever designed that thing is an intuitive illusionist, I realize fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on the screen: That’s at least a class five glamour.

The next thing I think is, I shouldn’t have let myself get so close. But by then I’m on my way out of the store, clutching a carrier bag and a receipt that says I’ve put a dent in my bank balance big enough that Mo’s going to have something new to swear about this month, to the benefit of Apple’s shareholders.

I slink home with my metaphorical tail between my legs, clutching my shiny new JesusPhone like a consolation prize for my lack of a real life.

IT IS 4 P.M., THE COOL RAINS HAVE BROUGHT THEIR GURGLING freight of water to the overflowing gutter above the kitchen window, and I am sitting at the table with a laptop and a freshly jailbroken JesusPhone when the doorbell chimes.

(You didn’t expect me not to jailbreak an iPhone so I can run unsigned applications on it, did you? That would be no fun at all!)

I get up and slouch towards the front porch.

“Surprise party!” It’s a pair of familiar faces. Pinky is holding the umbrella while Brains hefts a pair of beer casks at me.

I take a step back. “Hey, what’s the big deal?”

“Beware of geeks bearing beer.” Pinky cocks his head and looks at me madly as Brains makes a beeline for the kitchen and clears some counter space. “We heard about the whoopsie and figured you might want some company.”

Pinky and Brains: the (ex-)flatmates from heck, if not hell. I used to share a house with them, back in the days when I was still seeing Mhari. They’re a matched couple of geeks, working for Technical Support these days (Gizmos department, Dirty Tricks directorate). Brains does the hardware, Pinky does human factors and delivery flourishes, and both of them do the Pride march around Regent’s Park every summer even though they don’t need to be publicly out to maintain their security clearances these days.

A voice calls from the kitchen, “Hey, who let that thing in here?”

I go back inside hastily. “It’s mine. As of this afternoon.”

“Mine, precioussss.” Brains is bending over my new phone. “Jailbroken it yet? I’ve been doing some evaluation work on these too, they look promising…”

“Don’t be silly.” I peer at the beer casks. He’s lined them up next to the sink. “Hey, that’s not nitro pressurized.”

“That’s right; they’re cask-conditioned!” Brains says proudly. “Normally you have to leave them twenty-four hours to drop bright after you tap them, but with this”-he produces a home-brew box of electronics from one waterproof pocket-“you can cut the wait to sixty minutes.”

“What is it?” I pause. “If it’s a temporal multiplexer I’ve got to warn you, last time we had one in here Mo had to beat the fridge contents to death with a cricket bat-she was most annoyed-”

“Nope, it’s ultrasonic.” He switches it on as he plants it on top of the first cask, and I feel my jaw muscles clench. Ultrasonic it may be, but it’s got some low frequency harmonics that remind me unpleasantly of a mosquito the size of a Boeing 737.

“Switch it off, please.”

Pinky is doing something bizarre to the umbrella, turning it inside out through its own center-I do a double take: Is that really a Möbius strip umbrella?-and it vanishes, except for a stubby handle, which he hangs on the inside doorknob. I blink. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Iris said you could do with some company,” Brains says blandly as my phone chirps and does an incoming-text shimmy on the counter. I grab it. It’s a message from Mo: UNAVOIDABLY DETAINED BY WORK, DON’T STAY UP.

I might not be wearing a ward around my neck right now-I didn’t stay in the office long enough to sign out a replacement for the one I toasted yesterday-but it’s not my only defense, and right now my this-is-a-setup gland is pulsing painfully. “This is a put-up job, right? What’s going on?” I glance at the front hall, half-expecting the doorbell to ring again and Boris and Andy to be standing there, along with a briefing on some kind of harebrained operation-

“Don’t be silly, Bob,” Brains says crisply: “Iris just got word that your fragrant wife has been called away to an incident in Amsterdam and she thought someone ought to keep you company today. The saintly Mo should be back tomorrow; until then, we drew the short straw.” He gestures at the beer: “Just like old times, huh?”

“No, it’s not just like old times,” I snort. Then the penny drops: “Job in Amsterdam…?”

“They needed a lead violin.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling very small.

There is this about being married to Mo: every few months she gets called to an unexpected job somewhere in Europe, at short notice, with her violin. A philosopher by academic training and a combat epistemologist by subsequent specialization, she doesn’t talk about what happens on those trips; but I get to hold her shoulders and calm her when she wakes in the pre-dawn gloom, shuddering and clammy. Years ago, shortly after we first met, we got into a situation where I ended up rescuing her from-well, it wasn’t nice, and she overcompensated, I think. The violin’s an Erich Zahn original, refitted with Hilbert-space pickups. There’s a black-on-yellow sticker on its case that says THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. And sometimes she sits up late into the night, playing music on it that I don’t want to think about.