Diamond, like Briar, has been tutored by Phocan on the ins and outs of moving photons around. She shadowed him her whole first week at Pantarey. On the Monday, as technicians set up a pommel horse in The Cell’s gridded area, it was he who laid out for her the fundamentals of passive optical motion capture.
‘What a marker does,’ he pinched between his thumb and fingers the small, cream-coloured silken sphere he’d picked up from a table, one of thousands that seemed to sprout about the company’s HQ like tiny mushrooms round a forest floor, ‘is reflect light back to a camera. The camera’s LEDs send the light out and the marker, the “nipple”, bounces it back, thereby providing a position, or coordinate. One marker, one position; two markers, two positions; three, three; and so on. That’s all it does: reflect – which is why we call it “passive”. With me so far?’
She nodded. From a doorway on The Cell’s far side a short, muscular gymnast was emerging.
‘Here, though,’ Phocan continued, ‘is the paradox: the marked position’s not the final goal. It’s not the spot you want.’
‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
‘The spot you’re interested in, the one you really want, from a kinetic point of view, is the true pivot-point or centre – what we call the “root”. In a human motion, this is almost always hidden from sight. The markers serve as stepping stones or way stations towards unearthing this elusive root. With four of them, we can build point-clouds round it, extrapolate it and reconstitute it.’
The abstract formulation began to make sense once the gymnast, about whom Sennet had been busily attaching markers, mounted his horse and started swinging and scissoring around it. On the screen before which she and Phocan sat, Diamond watched lit dot-squares loop and gyrate in repeating sequences.
‘You see them here.’ Phocan’s finger skipped from square to moving square. ‘If we take these four, round his wrist, and draw them out’ – his mouse clicked its way through these actions as he described them – ‘then set this box up …’ With five or six more quick-fire clicks he’d built a rectangle out to the wrist’s side and reproduced the dots (still moving, cutting out a small, repeating sub-step of the body’s larger dance) inside this, their original arrangement expanded and enlarged; then, scurrying across a set of side bars, pull-down menus and the like, he made the duplicated dots fire out, like laser canons, four beams that, meeting at a fifth spot lying within their boundary, caused this last spot – itself moving on the screen, tugged back and forth by the four marker-derived dots’ movement – to blaze into visibility, and Phocan to announce triumphantly to Diamond: ‘There’s our root. That’s the wrist’s core.’
He went on to unearth several more roots from various passages and junctions of the gymnast’s body, building rectangles off to the side, replicating marker point-clouds inside these, shooting rays out from them to bring to light new pivot-points.
‘The goal, most of the time, in close-up body mo-cap,’ he told her as he did this, ‘is solved skeleton.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Think of your clothes,’ he told her, ‘relative to the skin beneath them. A person’s’ – he corrected himself as he caught her peering, cross-eyed, at her own jumper – ‘clothes. They’re moving all the time. A marker on the former, on a T-shirt or whatever, won’t give you a precise indication of the exact location of a mole on the surface of the latter. Just as a marker on the skin itself won’t pinpoint a joint’s coordinates beneath it, since skin’s also highly mobile: as far as we’re concerned, it’s just another layer of clothing. What we’re after is the base, the bones under it all: solved skeleton. In clinical situations, at least. With entertainment, it’s a little different: there the emphasis is more on augmented effect.’
‘And here?’ she asked him, pointing to the swivelling figure.
He had to think a little before answering:
‘Here’s somewhere in-between. It’s not so much the skeleton we want as the whole circuit of force and counterforce, balance and its limits. Here the root’s neither bone nor muscle, but something else, something more systemic …’
Diamond, staring at the screen, let her gaze lose itself in the proliferating boxes. Shifting it back to the real gymnast, she was greeted by the sight of yet another box: the pommel horse around which he was circling, spindling and flairing. It was elongated, leather-finished, cambered on its upper surface, like a coffin. That all this motion, all these sequences, this ultra-formalised display, was orchestrated round positions that themselves remained interred … The thought perplexed her; over the next weeks, it was to cloud her world view: everything she saw, each scene or situation she watched or participated in, she’d start extrapolating, reproducing, root-pinpointing, building boxes for, always off to the side …
The Tuesday was spent off-site, down in London. In the basement of Guy’s Hospital, Wing A, Lift C, she and Phocan were admitted to a gait lab on whose wall were painted sting rays, octopi and mermaids, all cavorting round a sunken treasure chest that Diamond at first glance misinterpreted as a flight recorder. Around an ethanol-dispensing tub and bandage box on a low table next to an examination couch were crowded soft-toy dinosaurs, ducks and gorillas; above them, half-depleted sheets of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig stickers magnet-clamped to a whiteboard, figures peering in bemusement at its diagrams. The patient (in the management idiom printed on the dossier Dr Cromarty, Chief Clinical Scientist, was perusing as they prepped the room up, client), waiting outside when they arrived, was designated by the string MA2703.
‘MA’s Male Adolescent,’ Cromarty explained. ‘This is his third visit.’
He handed Diamond the dossier. Flicking through it, she found page after page of episodic record, interspersed with boxes across which tricoloured contours (violet-orange-grey, now shadowing, now cross-cutting, now diverging from each other) depicted foot-progress angles and degrees of ankle torsion.
‘I devised this format myself,’ said Cromarty. ‘The consultants who have to parse it to extract their cues for surgical decisions hate it. They just want a story, with a simple moral: Do this, don’t do that … But pathologies aren’t fables. My task is to break each down to its constituent parts.’
MA2703’s was pretty broken down: it contained dramatic peaks – femur-fracturing and calf-twisting interventions of the previous year, for instance – but these were few and far between: mostly it was subplots – abductor tension drop-off and knee-range expansion – whose bearing on the main arc, or even on each other, seemed quite tendentious; overall, it offered scant development, imparted no sense of heading to a climax or dénouement, happy or otherwise.
‘Cerebral palsy’s non-progressive. That’s what makes it such a rich adversary, or quarry, or’ – Cromarty looked around and lowered his voice to a whisper, as though not wanting to pronounce the word within the client’s earshot – ‘muse.’
‘Here, Lucy,’ Phocan, sitting at a monitor-decked table with the gait lab’s technologist, one Agnieszka Czajka, called her over. ‘You can test the pick-up. Walk around waving this about.’
He threw her a calibrating baton, and she paced about the floor turning first one way then another, gyrating the baton’s T-boned end in small loops through the air, as though to consecrate the space with holy water, or perhaps to dowse for water in the first place. As the corresponding loops and spirals etched themselves across the surface of their screens, Phocan talked Czajka through the pathways, shortcuts and (he seemed ready to admit this even if Pantarey’s own help page wasn’t) pitfalls of Physis 6™.
‘The most important difference between this version and 5 is that you don’t have to manually label each articulation point: the software does it for you. When it comes to the eventing, this will save you lots of time.’
‘We ready for him?’ Cromarty called out from beside his couch.
Phocan gave the thumbs-up.
‘Showtime!’ Cromarty, turning ringmaster, raised and oscillated an imaginary top hat. His second, Dr Winter (same job title as him minus the Chief), exited the room, re-entering with a boy and (Diamond presumed) his mother.
‘What’s this?’ Cromarty, turning from his couch, threw a mock double-take, and stared at the fourteen-year-old with friendly-astonished eyes. ‘They must have sent Nathan’s big brother!’
The boy smiled, blushing. Cromarty waved him over, and he left his mother’s side to cross the floor on pointed, scissored toes. Cromarty kept his faux-shocked spiel up while MA2703 approached him, instructing Winter to check that they hadn’t mis-prescribed super-strength growth hormones, screwing his face up Quint-like as he announced in his best sea-dog drawl We’re gonna need a bigger gait lab … Behind it all, though, Diamond, standing right next to him, could see his eyes running metrics, taking stock.
‘Nathan,’ he announced when the boy reached him, ‘our eyes are giving science the lie. We’re going to have to measure you, to bring your growth spurt back under the canopy of reason. Strip down to your underpants.’
Nathan, still reddening, obeyed. Cromarty steered him down on to the couch, extracting from his upper reaches waist-circumference and wrist-to-elbow figures with a measuring tape, while his second noted knee-to-foot and toe-abduction scores from the couch’s base, where, like a surveyor hunkered in the shadow of a cantilever bridge, he crouched holding a goniometer between one opened eye and the bent legs which towered above him. This completed, they swabbed the boy’s calves and thighs down and attached to these EMG electrodes, flesh-toned discs from each of which a miniature box hung, flashing intermittently, a tiny distress beacon. Their batteries, or perhaps his own nervousness converted into electricity, sent small local spasms through Nathan’s leg muscles, rippling the skin’s surface, and he reddened again, embarrassed by this subcutaneous excitation that was briefly, before Winter veiled its modesty with the bandages he coiled around his legs to hold the EMGs in place, visible to all – and even then still visible to Phocan and Czajka on the screen, across which they watched rows of fuzzy soundbars etch their way horizontally from left to right, jumping seismically with every quiver. Winter then, with Diamond’s help, dotted about Nathan’s metatarsals, thighs and kneecaps the Pantarey markers.
‘To the Catwalk!’ Cromarty commanded.
Winter now led Nathan to the gait lab’s central area, a narrow strip or runway.
‘If you pull the P6 window up,’ Phocan was saying to Czajka over at their side table, ‘you should see …’
There it was, on her screen: a set of light-points moving in conjunction with each other, as they had with the pommel-horse gymnast.
‘Now,’ said Phocan, ‘click on spline fill, and …’
As soon as Czajka did this, lines – green, red and white – sprung up between the white dots, weaving a cat’s cradle of intersecting, if irregular, triangles set on two perpendicularly adjoining planes; a configuration that, while purely geometric, nonetheless communicated unmistakably the hip-to-heel formation of MA2703’s lower torso. When Cromarty, still playing ringmaster, had Nathan walk from one end of the runway to the other, this formation also ambulated: a complex pipe-cleaner figure, or the bottom half of one, whose constituent vertices and edges shifted and reconfigured with each movement. Occasionally, a line between two points would vanish, then flash up again between two other points, trying to forge a plausible connection that, in turn, would either stick or, overridden by the software, vanish again.
‘I thought it knew which spot was which,’ said Czajka as the figure’s left thigh flickered out of visibility.
‘Well, it does most of the time,’ responded Phocan. ‘Especially when it’s been told once. If you just label that spot RTIB for right tibia, and that one LHEE for left heel, it should retain the designations as it moves on.’
Czajka pulled the labels from a menu on her screen’s right, and dropped them on the dots tracking the positions of the markers that in turn showed the locations of the boy’s tibia and heel; as his passage down the Catwalk continued, she performed the same click-and-drag manoeuvre for RTOE, LASI, RASI, LPSI … Once MA2703 reached the strip’s end, Cromarty, with a spinning gesture of the finger, turned him round and sent him back; then back again once he’d reached the other end; then ditto once more, and again. Phocan was right: after three or so passes, the lines joining the dots stopped fading, retaining their integrity instead from phase to phase.
‘All labelled,’ Czajka said, impressed. ‘Can we go for strikes now?’
‘Absolutely.’ Phocan nodded. ‘And it’ll tell you when you’ve got a good one. Hit Show Pads …’
When Czajka did this, the runway depicted on her monitor separated out into three rectangular sections, labelled 1, 2, 3, each corresponding to a strike pad set in the real strip’s floor. On MA2703’s next pass, as his heel hit the first actual pad, on screen an arrow jumped out of the first rectangle, thrusting upwards from the floor in line with the stick figure’s thigh.
‘That’s a hit,’ said Phocan. ‘You don’t need to mark it; it’ll auto-tag.’
‘How are we doing?’ Cromarty called pantomimishly across the room.
‘One strike on that pass,’ Czajka called back to him.
‘Nathan,’ Cromarty exhorted the boy, ‘we’re going to have to work you further. Keep it up. Imagine you’re a sentry, pacing up and down before the palace gates.’
On the next pass they got strikes on Sections 1 and 3. The middle pad, though, didn’t seem to want to register one: could have been reduced sensitivity from wear and tear, or how it lay within the boy’s gait cycle … Finally, after eight more to-and-fros, Section 2 pinged for them in concert with the others. Czajka, reprising Phocan’s earlier gesture, held her thumb up to her boss; Cromarty informed Nathan that he was a star, instructed him to relax, to put his clothes back on, to take a bow, conducting all the others in the room in a round of applause that caused the child to redden yet again.
‘Now,’ Phocan, Diamond at his shoulder, told Czajka when the clapping had died down, ‘you event it. Rerun the sequence; if you hit the notch marking each event, it’ll prompt you with …’
She was already gliding the cursor to the first, most leftward-lying notch; as soon as this reached it, a Create Event box popped up, with MA2703 right foot strike pre-entered inside it.
‘Click Confirm …’ said Phocan.
Czajka did this; then confirmed the next Create Event box’s default content as MA2703 right foot lift; and the next MA2703 left foot strike; and so on, moving rightwards down the runway, until the cycle was fully marked.
‘Now we plug the holes,’ said Phocan.
‘There are still holes?’ asked Czajka.
‘’Fraid so. Even Physis 6 can’t prevent markers going into blind spots, clashing with each other, and the like,’ he conceded. ‘What it can do is give you the tools for overcoming this …’
For the next fifteen minutes he walked her through the program’s various gap-filling options. While he murmured instructions, Czajka rotated the stick figure round on her screen like a clay pot on a wheel, combing it for parts where body-lines, despite the software’s interventions, were still missing; when she found one, she swooped down on it, zooming in to enlarge single points, threading these with wavy filaments she fed through needle-eyes of cones and onwards to the next enlarged point, which she cone-threaded too, the frazzled braids floating around the figure in a loose gossamer web until, tightening the filament to pull it straight, she bridged the void between the paired points once again. On completing each fill, Czajka road-tested her fix, running the tibia- or thigh-formation of which it formed part backwards and forwards through sub-segments of the event in which they, in turn, played their own micro-role or function: the quarter-second following right foot-strike, while the metatarsal was straightening, or the two-tenths preceding lift off, when it was curving up again …
Diamond, not having much to do at this point, found herself staring at MA2703’s mother, who’d been hovering around Phocan and Czajka’s station, watching the accumulated data being fed into the gait lab’s server, amalgamated with cached readings from his previous two sessions and fed forward to the online cataloguing systems of CMAS and ESMAC, to be worked through by the matrix of five continents’ and heaven knows how many leading institutions’ interlinked, cross-indexed CP research. Canopy of reason. Under this woman’s gaze, the processors, blinking synaptically beneath the table, seemed to take on the status of boxed hierophants, oracles which she had ventured, suppliant, down to this grotto to consult; the wires linking them to one another to become black naval cords that, dipping from view behind gun metal, wound their way back to dark secrets, mysteries of origin, her child’s sad incunabula. Her eyes, tracking them until they disappeared, were filled with a look not just inquisitive but also pleading – as though somewhere, among the labyrinths of circuitry, printed on some nanometric stretch of RAM-card, there lay the key to fixing Nathan, fixing the whole situation: something as simple as a switch that might be thrown, a feedback loop reversed, a line of code rewritten …
‘So,’ the mother haltingly asked Cromarty when he, too, sauntered across to the processing station, ‘what’s your current thinking?’
‘On what?’ he enquired back.
‘Rhizomoty.’ She spoke the word carefully, as though its very syllables contained an incantation.
Cromarty pulled a face. ‘The trouble with SDR – rhizomoty,’ he said, rolling out what Diamond could see was his standard lecture on the subject, ‘is that it’s based on the belief that you can simply isolate a problem from the body that it’s part of. Edit it out, as it were. It doesn’t work like that. Bodies are systems; complex networks; parts all interlinked. This is especially true in the neural field. Just slicing through the nerve-roots in the spinal cord won’t stop the overstimulation in the upper brain: the ataxia’s caused by a million other channels and transmitters, all of which are over-firing. Look, here’s how …’
He began to sketch her, in the margin of his dossier-pages, a motor neuron. When Diamond dropped back in on it two minutes later, the lecture had broadened out to embrace the entire history of hyperkinetic disorders – their social reception, the attendant attitudes and mores – through the eras.
‘The Ancients held sufferers in esteem, thought them possessed of second sight; and the Medievals attributed to them the votive fervour of the followers of Vitus, shaking in rhapsody before his statue: choreia, choir, a chorus. You don’t have to see it as a curse.’
‘I don’t,’ the mother countered in a half-indignant, half-found-out tone.
‘Besides,’ Cromarty added, ‘the surgical decision, ultimately, won’t be mine …’
His words trailed off, and he tapped his pencil’s end against the paper, as though marking out a rhythm – to the process of decision-making, or of illness, or simply of time, its non-progression. His sketch’s neuron had a core from which grew tentacles that trailed beneath it, like a jellyfish’s. Diamond, feeling like an interloper, looked away, towards the gait lab’s wall, where cephalopod limbs danced lithely with the fronds of seaweed woven all around them, with the happy crabs, the concupiscent mermaids.
Wednesday, it was back to HQ, where she progressed from single- to multi-body capture. Arriving in The Cell, she found its area divided by foam building blocks into a kind of floor-plan, with walls reduced to stubs that stopped at shin-height.
‘It’s an embassy,’ Phocan explained.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘Generic,’ he said. ‘SG are building a training tool for police forces around the world. The old embassy-storm scenario: terrorists, hostages, window-shattering abseils, boom, et cetera.’
SG was Serious Games plc, a regular Pantarey client. They’d brought both terrorists and captive embassy personnel with them – all, Diamond discovered when she chatted with them over greaseproof-wrapped brie and chutney sandwiches whose lustre was fast crusting over, junior SG staff.
‘I feel like a dickhead,’ a young man called Darren told her, standing beside the trestle table in a gluteally unflattering, nipple-studded black bodysuit. ‘Pearly King in a gimp outfit.’
‘It could be worse,’ his colleague and her counterpart, the SG intern Michael, added. ‘Last time it was loonies for …’
‘Mental health system users,’ Darren corrected him.
‘Mental health system users,’ Michael, in mock naughty-schoolboy voice, repeated, ‘wriggling and slithering about the walls and floor, to train nurses and orderlies to talk them into taking meds or standing still while straitjackets got pulled over their heads.’
‘At least we don’t have to do facials,’ murmured Darren.
Diamond saw what he was getting at when, unfinished sandwiches abandoned, Darren, Michael and the other bodies were directed through their various routines, terrorists shuffling sideways across rooms with hostage-shields clasped tight in front of them, or jumping out of doorways to point guns at absent SWAT teams, or, touched by the latter’s prospective bullets, crumpling to the floor. They executed these actions and others in a matter-of-fact, quite undramatic manner: dying, they expressed no shock or sorrow; threatening death, they exuded no menace; suicide vests, detonated with motions as banal as those deployed to release seat belts, produced no explosions. There were neither shouts nor screams: the actions all took place in studious silence punctuated only by the squeak of trainers on the floor, or SG’s line manager and the ex-SAS man he’d brought with him calling out instructions. Since these were generally to repeat a certain shuffle, dart or crumple, or to move to another section of the floor, there to perform an action unrelated, or at least non-sequent, to the one they’d just been doing, there was no continuity, nor coherence, nor even any sense of anyone pretending, at a level either individual or collective, to be actually living out the situations and events they were depicting.
‘The face stuff gets added later,’ Phocan explained to Diamond when she asked about this. ‘We have a trove of expressions – fear and anger, and so on – that we’ll provide them with. For dialogue specific to this tool, we’ve got two actors coming in this afternoon.’
These actors, when they appeared, were transformed into overgrown teenagers, faces marker-pustuled, and then made to utter lines such as Get back, I’ll kill her, I’ve got a bomb and Save me, all with the requisite look of desperation, terror and determination – but ultimately, since Phocan had instructed them to speak the words out clearly and, what’s more, slowly, to facilitate good capture of mandibular and labial modulations, in a manner as strangely denatured as the morning’s movements.
‘It’s not really acting, is it?’ she commented to Phocan as he extracted roots from jowls, temples and cheekbones, reconstituting a snarl’s pivot-points inside another box.
‘Oh, it is, though,’ he said – then, raising his voice to address the male performer, called out: ‘Peter, come over here a minute.’
Peter, still silk-acned, ambled across and, when asked by Phocan to tell Diamond what he’d studied, announced proudly:
‘German Expressionism. Did my thesis on it.’
Seeing her look blankly back at him, he added:
‘The stuff you see in the old silent movies – how the villains scowl and cackle, and the heroines expand their mouths and eyes into huge gaping circles, to convey a state of mind that’ll be recognised by any audience. That’s what acting was about in those days: facial showjumping. You had to ride your skin and muscles through a course, negotiating obstacles, like troughs and fences: joy, shock, menace …’
‘Do you do theatre stuff as well?’ she asked.
‘You mean contemporary theatre? Do I act in it?’
She nodded.
‘God no,’ he snorted. ‘Naturalist bullshit – like the twentieth century had never happened, let alone all … this.’ He gestured round The Cell. ‘This,’ he repeated, smiling at Phocan with what seemed to Diamond a mixture of affection and gratitude, ‘is where the action’s at. It’s the real deal.’
‘Faces,’ Phocan explained to her as he manipulated Peter’s feature-dots after the actor and his leading lady had retired, ‘are landscapes. They’ve got peaks and ridges and ravines, which can be surveyed with absolute precision. Once you’ve got the contours, you can start manipulating them – like landscape architects … you know, Capability Brown … Anything’s possible. Look …’
A couple more clicks and Peter’s upper lip started to curl back on itself, unwrapping his left cheek. Moving the pointer over to the right ear, Phocan then peeled back the other cheek, folding it down over what was left of the mouth and pinning its apex (now its nadir) to the long, underhanging ledge of the submaxillary passage where chin curves round into neck. He continued this origami until what had previously been Peter was no more than a cubistic scramble, resembling more a quarry or a bomb site than a face.
‘For lots of applications,’ he told Diamond, ‘you don’t need an actor in the first place. You can build the features up from scratch, then flesh it out. Look here …’
Shuffling windows, he called up a file named Annabel and popped open a girl’s face – a child’s, no dot-point reconstitution but, it seemed, a gif filmed on a webcam: she was smiling, brushing hair out of her eyes and blinking shyly.
‘This one was made for Interpol,’ Phocan explained. ‘A honey-trap for paedophiles. There was no original, for ethical and legal reasons. But she looked authentic; and she could even hold short conversations with the marks; so they thought that they were FaceTiming a real child, and would stay online for long enough for police to trace their IPs.’ Closing the file, he added: ‘Poor Annabel. She never got to exist, other than as a composite built around general metrics: long lashes, thin arms, brown hair, whatever …’
He sat in silence for a while. Diamond watched him, waiting for him to continue with her priming. But he’d slipped into a kind of dazed hiatus, staring at something she couldn’t discern, his mind trawling files inaccessible to her. The first time she’d been introduced to him, she’d misheard his name as Focal; and the elision, the corrupting metonym, had stuck – wasn’t he, after all, inducing her into the world of focusing, of looking? His own look, she’d since noticed, was sometimes jumping between distances and depths of field, as though trying to lock on to two or more focal points at the same time – and, as a consequence, finding itself stranded between staging posts, lost in some interstice whose vagueness spurred it on towards new acts of focusing at once more strained and more vague; as though, like the earliest photographers out of whose bellowed, velvet-curtained clutter his whole discipline had hatched, he’d been conjuring his subject into visibility by use of multiple and staggered lenses, both inverting and reversing, and through not just apertures but also veils. He had that look now, seemed to be staring not so much at the actual screen in front of him as at some absent, offset one that floated spectrally a few inches in front of, or behind, this. She found it intriguing, and compelling, and somehow, in ways she couldn’t quite articulate, as instructive of the pursuit to which she found herself apprenticed as any concrete or specific knowledge of it that he might confide to her.
Phocan, Phocus, hocus-pocus. They spent the last few hours of Wednesday cleaning. Multi-body capture turned out to be a nightmare in terms of its sight-lines. Limbs and torsos of one figure, passing in front of those of a second, or a third, as terrorists clasped to their breast or ducked and scuttled behind captives, produced weird and grotesque mergings: bodies seemed to mutate, sprouting organs and appendages in every which direction, then to slough them off again – a fluid orgy of construction and dismantling that ran simultaneously, at a range of speeds and rhythms that were unaligned yet still conjoined, processing at the same overall pace. Phocan’s (and Diamond’s) job, then, was to separate the bodies out again, to subjugate the schizoid carnage to the strictures of fixed individual identity, in which a leg, head or shoulder was assigned to a single person, and that person was determined as either an aggressor to be vanquished or a victim to be saved.
‘We’re like the rugby referee,’ he said, ‘who has to dive into the maul and strip the players from it one by one, to work out whose hand the ball’s lying in, where another player’s hand or leg is relative to that and to the ground, and so on. Come to think of it,’ he went on, turning from the screen, ‘sport’s even worse than this. I’ve got to go and pitch our software at a sport-science trade fare in a few weeks from now, in Rome. We’re supposed, before then, to have come up with a tool that can untangle football post-goal celebration pile-ups.’
‘And will we?’ she asked. ‘Come up with it, I mean?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘It’s impossible. What we can do, though, is fill the gaps, the unknown – unknowable – blank areas, with what, based on the possibilities, are the most plausible conjectures. So, with this hostage situation,’ he turned screenward again, ‘you’ve got – just as with the single-subject capture in the gait lab yesterday – your spline-fill, pattern-fill, rigid-body and kinematic-fills, then cyclic and quintic spine-fills …’
Moving vertically along his drop-down, he ran all these options through their paces – one after the other, and with varying success. Sometimes a scrambled mass reorganised itself into the same number of clear, differentiated bodies as had entered the mix in the first place; at other times, though, the reconstituted figures would gain an accessory, hanging in the air beside them – neither gun nor handbag, nor any other prop that had been present earlier in the day, but such incongruous paraphernalia as umbrellas, party balloons and top hats.
‘Artefacts,’ smiled Phocan.
‘Artefacts?’ she repeated. ‘Like handcrafted things?’
He nodded.
‘But,’ she said, ‘aren’t they the opposite of that? Not things at all, or even images of them … Why do they call them that?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose because they’re artificial – not there in reality, just generated, “crafted”, in the interface between the object and its rendering. They’re the mirages of our profession. You get them a lot in UAV work.’
‘UAV?’
‘Unmanned aerial vehicles. We’re doing it tomorrow. I’ll have to get you clearance.’
In fact, they spent both the Thursday and the Friday at BAE’s headquarters outside Farnborough. The site was huge, ringed by two layers of reinforced green fencing; at the entrance, beside a security post whose personnel took fifteen minutes to admit (their preferred term, sent back and forth down radios, was ‘verify’) them, a Union Jack hung limp from a giant flagpole.
‘Is this a company or a military base?’ she asked him as they crawled past various fighter jets and helicopters planted in the verges and roundabout-islands.
‘The distinction kind of blurs here, I’d say,’ Phocan muttered as he parked by a gargantuan hangar. Pointing to two figures who’d emerged from a minute door at the foot of this, he added: ‘Ah, here’s Roger. He’s our guy.’
Roger was the younger of the two; the other, smartly dressed, austere, the other side of sixty, wasn’t introduced to them and, after murmuring some kind of order or instructions to Roger soon after they’d entered the building, retreated down a corridor into what Diamond took to be an even more restricted area. Unmanned aerial vehicles turned out to mean drones. In the sector of the hangar to which Roger led them, three or four of these were buzzing round a demarcated cube of airspace not unlike that of The Cell: black rubber floor, one fixed wall, string-mesh curtains making up three floating ones, HDI220 cameras clamped to rails establishing the control area’s effective ‘ceiling’ (the hangar’s actual ceiling was a good hundred feet higher). The drones were kite-sized, like the ones she’d see hovering above Port Meadow of a Sunday, playthings of children and hobbyists – only these ones came across as sharper and more waspish. They’d accelerate across the space then stop right on a speck of airborne dust without seeming to have to brake or slow down first; or turn one way then another in figure-of-eight patterns that recalled for her the gymnast’s moves about his pommel horse. Their sound, undissipated here by any meadow’s wind, was sharp too: an insistent and vindictive whine.
‘With drones,’ Phocan informed her as he hurled one roughly from his hand into the control zone’s midst, where, after weaving around a little, discombobulated, it eventually re-stabilised itself, ‘responsiveness is everything. Roots have to be recalculated several times a second – which removes much of the human interface.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘We’re too slow.’ He smiled back at her, as though her question, and the computational inadequacy it betrayed, had furnished its own answer. ‘These quadrators have IMUs to measure …’
‘Have what?’
‘Sorry: inertial measurement units, to sense angular velocity. The idea is that they should be able to pitch and twist their way through doorways, vents and all manner of cavities, taking requisite decisions onboard, autonomously.’
‘Hey,’ called Roger from the far edge of the cube. ‘Now the Ancient Mariner’s gone, let’s show your friend the Buzzby Berkeley skit.’
‘Ancient Mariner?’
‘Pilkington.’ Roger jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of the inner warren into which his grey-haired boss had disappeared. ‘What say?’
Phocan smiled indulgently. Roger and his sidekick Josh strolled over to a bunch of drones lying to the control zone’s side and, crab-zagging around crouched, from one spot to another of the demarcated area’s floor, arranged them symmetrically about this. Retiring back out past the white tape, they gathered round a laptop with a Beastie Boys sticker on it, Josh looking on with eager anticipation while Roger typed in commands.
‘… and … Enter! Now sit back, enjoy …’
He stepped back, and the drones all lifted off in sync. Once airborne, they, too, started a crab-dance, a quadrille, with pairs cutting parallelogram-figures around other pairs, then splitting to form new pairs that in turn would cut new parallelograms, knitting intangible chain mail in the air as the block glided diagonally, overall shape intact, from one corner to another. That corner reached, the drones all wedged themselves into a tight-packed bud inside its right angle, then, like stamens of a wind-blown dandelion, turned outwards and detached again, one row after the other, shooting off to the cube’s furthest reaches.
‘That number’s called “Little Web of Dreams”,’ Josh told her.
‘And,’ Roger, still in announcer mode, added as each of the web’s dreams wended its way back to an assigned spot on the floor, there to await further orders, ‘I’m afraid it’s the finale as far as you’re concerned.’ Then, to Phocan, by way of explanation: ‘Reaper guidance system next. This one’s Level Two.’
Diamond, too, turned to Phocan, for a translation.
‘I couldn’t get you clearance beyond Level One,’ he told her apologetically. ‘You’ll have to sit this bit out.’
‘Try,’ Roger chipped in as she traipsed down her path of exile, ‘to pump Aidan in the next room for state secrets. He’ll be happy to spill the beans.’
Aidan was, indeed, talkative. Like Josh and Roger, he was dressed in jeans and trainers; his demeanour, though, was slightly stiffer, less at ease – the consequence, it turned out, of a military background.
‘I used to fly those things,’ he told her.
‘Quadrators?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, opening his own, stickerless laptop. ‘Predators – the predecessor of the Reapers you people are helping us with. They look like this …’
Diamond peered past him at a picture of a long, windowless tube whose several short wings, like those of insects, were arranged about the thorax in a range of positions and angles, some pointing up, some down. If it was insect-like, it was aquatic too, its smooth, grey carapace reminding her of the skin of seals, or the large, featureless underbelly of a whale as it passes a tourist boat. There was, as with the whale-glimpse, something incomplete and unsatisfying about the sighting – as though, even when viewed in close-up, the creature’s face, or character, its centre of intelligence, had stayed submerged.
‘It doesn’t have a head,’ she said.
‘I’m its head,’ Aidan told her. ‘We’d fly them from the ground.’
‘Where?’ she asked. ‘In Afghanistan?’
‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘I mean no. The Predator was in Afghanistan; but I’d be flying it from a field in Hampshire.’
‘You’d be standing in a field?’ She still had pictures of Port Meadow in her mind.
‘A hangar in a field,’ he said. ‘Like this, but smaller. A box in a hangar; freight-container size. On a base, of course. I’d be there in full uniform, reporting to and liaising with various officers in other rooms: mission intelligence coordinator, director of operations, all the computer support personnel. But it was me and one co-pilot, or sensor-operator, in the box itself, flying the thing.’
‘From a joystick?’ she asked.
‘Well, not just,’ he said, sounding taken aback. ‘We had six or seven screens around us: live-feed, instrumentation, flight data, terrain maps, ground-truth intel uploaded from the troops – photographs, basically … Then chat boxes, so you could talk with the ground forces and with your own superiors – on the base, in London, Kandahar, wherever – directly, in real time. We’d be there at the controls for nine hours at a stretch.’
‘Just watching?’
‘Sometimes. Once I watched a house for a month straight, while people wandered in and out, or not; nothing important happened there. Or sometimes we’d scour roads for IEDs: hidden bombs, booby-traps. Troops can’t see these, but we can, because metallic objects have a different temperature to the soil they’re buried in. So do the cords that lead from them to detonators: they leave bright heat-signatures that run straight to the insurgents waiting to trigger them off when a Humvee or squadron comes along. When you’ve pinpointed these guys, then you either tell the ground troops where they are or send a strike down yourself, from the bird.’
‘What bird?’
‘The drone. You whip a Hellfire missile off its rails, and take them out.’
‘How long did you do this for?’ she asked.
‘Two years,’ he answered. ‘Then I got discharged.’
‘Why?’
‘PTSD,’ he said. ‘Pilkington took pity on me, brought me in here, and …’ He stopped and, mistaking her confused look for incomprehension, started annotating: ‘Post-traumatic stress disor …’
‘I know what it means,’ she said. ‘But you weren’t …’
‘Weren’t what?’
‘You weren’t … I mean … in a war zone …’
‘Wasn’t I?’ He smiled, then added: ‘Aren’t we?’
Diamond made no response. From the restricted area next door a quadrator banked or accelerated, its tone crescendoing aggressively, then, just as suddenly, diminishing to no more than a liminal hum, like lights or fridges make. For half a minute, neither of them spoke. Then Aidan, keen to keep the exchange going, outed with:
‘Guess how I and the other sensor-operators spent our out-of-theatre time.’
‘What theatre?’
‘The war zone. Guess how we passed our time between shifts.’
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged back. ‘Sleeping? Drinking?’
‘We played video games,’ he told her.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’d even sometimes do a flight-simulator one. You could pick different eras: pilot a Handley Page Victor or a de Havilland Mosquito, all the way back to a Sopwith or an RE8. I found it relaxing; even therapeutic. Nobody was getting killed …’
Silence, laced with modulating background whine, set in again. Then Aidan, suddenly animated, said to Diamond:
‘Hey: you wanna see the Light of God?’
‘I’m sorry?’ she replied.
‘Here, look.’ He beckoned her towards his laptop, cursor skipping between folders. The file that he eventually clicked open was an mpeg; it showed a terrain, rendered in night-time vision: houses, trees, a deserted street … The scene was being filmed from the ground, from something (she deduced from the slight movement, a slow heave and fall, as though the picture were breathing) like a body-camera. Nothing was happening – until a broad and brilliantly shining column burst out of the heavens and planted itself on the earth a hundred or so yards from the filmer.
‘That’s our beam,’ Aidan announced. ‘The laser that we send down from the sky. Our ground guys put their goggles on and pow! they see it, showing them the spot they need to hit. Only them: to the bad guys, it’s invisible, but to our people it shines like a holy apparition: Light of God. When it reaches the floor, it blossoms.’
‘Into what?’
‘A square shape, usually.’
‘God’s a square?’
‘Apparently. This is one of my own missions: I beamed the Light down on a sniper I’d located, and the Captain thanked me after they’d wiped the guy by sending me the video, a keepsake. Here, I’ve got another one that I can show you …’
The new mpeg he opened had been shot in daytime, from the Predator itself – or rather, Aidan explained, from its Hellfire missile. Watching it, Diamond was at first reminded of generic YouTube parachuting clips: it showed, from POV a descending body that itself remained unseen, this same body’s passage through the air. First there was blue sky, then, at the picture’s base, the flat horizon line; then this last tilted upward like a trapdoor opening around a hinge set just beyond the frame, pushing the sky away as though the latter were a cushion or tarpaulin lying atop it, sliding off to be replaced by a single dry-brown surface that filled the whole screen. This new surface was approaching fast, and gaining definition as it did so, pixels refreshing at a rate that matched the speed of the descent. Eventually, out of its earthy gauze, a form emerged, an image: of a settlement or conurbation, perhaps no more than a village, whose white edifices were arranged around a central opening, a yard or plaza. In this opening a group of people in white robes stood, clustered loosely together, engaged in some kind of congregation. As the ground rose nearer it seemed to accelerate, and all the clearing’s edges raced away, the opening opening further, flowing out, its borders running while its centre, too, expanded, growing ever clearer: white-robed men, locked in their confab, unaware that they were being observed – until the mpeg’s final frames, in which they turned their heads up to look straight at the camera, and at Diamond, for the fraction of a second just before the screen went blank.
‘I think that it’s okay to show you this,’ Aidan reflected. ‘It’s my own; never got classified. I say “my own”, but actually, it was the software that rumbled the baddies this time: it detected sequences of movement and alignment that implied a probability of 95.6 per cent that something insurgent-linked was going on. Above 95, a strike usually ends up being called. All I did here was send the thing down, save its video-feed as a keepsake. I’ve got a whole bunch more that I could … Are you staying in Farnborough tonight?’
Phocan arrived at that moment and whisked her to safety. She found herself excluded from the inner hangar’s sanctum for a stretch of the next morning, too, but managed to confine Aidan to showing her pictures of artefacts (she had retained the term, and impressed him now by using it) thrown up by drones’ remote-sensor software: of rainbow-cars and aeroplanes, their outlines doubled, tripled and quadrupled, daubed in glorious, RGB-separated technicolour; of the glacial and crystalline terrain-effects produced by vignetting and mosaic blurring, by relief displacement, colour balancing, chromatic aberration, bidirectional reflectance … She spent what seemed like ages staring, captivated, at these glitches. It wasn’t just that they were beautiful; beyond that, in their abstraction of a battlefield, of snipers, IEDs and doomed village summits into pointillistic billows, scumbled glazes, dribbles, splashes, smears, they offered her relief, a kind of psychic camouflage …
Thus passed her first week. That was a month ago. Today, she finds herself doing PM analysis. The clients in this case are Ruff, an architecture firm, who’ve been commissioned by the City of Bedford to redesign one of the town’s central shopping areas. Pantarey’s brief is tripartite, and alliteratively so: transit, entanglement and tempo. The shopping strip is outdoors but, being divided from the street itself by retail outlets, steps and bollards, carless; whence today’s mode of enquiry (PM stands for ‘Pedestrian Motion’, although in-house, they prefer the trade-term ‘Pedestrian Flow in Urban Corridor’, whose acronym, if you remove the linking preposition, never fails to prompt a giggle). They’re to notate, in terms of not just route but also rhythm, the passage of self-selecting, if unwitting, subjects through the area of enquiry, translating every eddy and coagulation, every bump, swerve and dispersal into data-clusters that will form the basis of a model that in turn will inform Ruff’s, and Bedford’s, reconfiguration of the space under investigation. In lieu of white tape, this space’s borders are defined (although not marked) by T40Ss, nestled furtively under the eaves of facades and the bracket arms of lamp-posts – cameras that, instead of bouncing rays off reflectors stuck to the bodies of their subjects (who today, naturally, aren’t wearing any), deploy laser-detectors to register depth of field. It’s a new system, a new method, one in terms of whose hard- and software Pantarey have (as Garnett likes to boast) opened up clear blue water between them and their competitors, thus maintaining in their industry not only market advantage but, beyond that, a heroic status tinged with traces of the mystical. Markerless is the holy grail of mo-cap.
If she’s progressed to markerless, she’s become Markless too: Phocan’s off purchasing gallons of bubble-mixture, to waft at a bobsleigh when they go to Holland next week. She’s not tagged to him any more exclusively, in any case; these days she’s farmed out to whoever needs an extra pair of hands. Today it’s Sennet she’s assigned to. He’s had her climb a ladder, tweak a camera’s angle, talk the cashiers in the precinct’s Pret a Manger into letting them charge two iPads and a Mac whose batteries were running low and, now, dip back into the same Pret to buy Danishes and coffee so that she and he can ensconce themselves at the outdoor tables incognito: just two folks doing whatever they’re doing here in St George’s Walk, two grains of sand or pebbles on a beach, lost amidst all the others sitting, walking, idling, clicking, eating … though, of course, they’re not. These grains of sand also contain the world: their little screens, like the Quaker Oats packet in the hand of the Scot on the Quaker Oats packet, are feeding them the entire strip, captured and enclosed, from above …
‘What’s interesting about the way people move in public space,’ Sennet mumbles at her through pastry-flaked lips, ‘is that they don’t do what they’re meant to. They don’t follow the paths laid down for them. The planners envisaged shoppers leaving the Waitrose and the smaller concessions, then resting a while on those benches before moving on down the strip. But the benches get nabbed by the tramps, who take up residence there permanently, and create a natural exclusion zone around them; and besides, the spot under the willow tree’s much nicer, as it’s shaded in the summer – and warmed by low sun in winter, thanks to the gap between the supermarket and the cleaners to the south. Then the steps provided as the corridor’s main exit: see how no one’s using them. They like to cut between the bollards and the optician’s instead …’
On the laptop, the veracity of his claims, unascertainable to the naked eye, is instantly self-evident – all the more so when a heat-trace filter’s applied, uncovering the accumulated smudge-tracks of each passage since recording started half an hour ago.
‘By contrast,’ Sennet continues, ‘certain interventions produce certain predictable effects. Our trestle tables here, for instance: people don’t climb over them, they go around. Even so, you notice how most of Pret’s customers prefer to carry their snacks over to the empty market traders’ stalls, and requisition these for picnic spots.’ He cancels the filter before adding: ‘That stuff we can all chart, though. What’s really hard to get a handle on is self-congestion.’
‘What’s that?’ asks Diamond.
‘People instinctively move to spots where other people happen to be gathering. These spots are themselves as often as not intermediary – that is, they spring up in the gaps between “actual” or landmarked spots. But once they’ve sprung up they become a kind of landmark, temporarily at least. Which means that they, too, get offset on to other spots that spring up between them; and so on and so on, recursively. The only constant is the gap-structure, the “gapping”. Outdoor life takes place in intervals.’
Sennet’s got two hobby horses. One is talking down Phocan:
‘Mark doesn’t get this,’ he continues. ‘You can bring a joint or femur or torque-increment into definition, right down to the micrometre and beyond – but what does that tell you of the flux and reflux of the bigger-picture, the temporal-pattern set-up? I’m surprised Garnett can’t see that. He loves Mark, treats him like his own son …’
At times like these, she senses, with a tinge of excitement mixed with squeamishness, as though the vision were a secret whose unveiling is almost obscene, Pantarey’s own solved skeleton creeping into focus. Sennet’s other hobby horse is Markov chains. His conversation defaults to them in every second gap imaginable – and, the rhythmic sensitivity inculcated in her by today’s task hints at her now, is about to again. ‘A discrete-time Markov chain in countable state space is what we’re dealing with here,’ he tells her between sips of coffee. ‘Although I suppose that you could argue for this corridor being viewed as a continuous or general state space … Either way, the transition matrix is composed of the same jumps and holding times. If you take just one metric – length of pause between each burst of forward movement, for example … Here, let me try to pull that one up …’
Diamond, masticating leathery apricot, tunes out and runs her eye along the shopping precinct’s floor. A section of its paving stones has been replaced by slabs – or not so much ‘replaced by’ as ‘converted into’, since the slabs have been cut from the paving stones themselves, in blocks whose edges don’t align with theirs, placed in thin metal frames then returned to the paving, each block reset in its original position but removable so as to afford access, when required, to beneath-street-level pipework and cabling. Eight of these framed slabs run, one after the other, from a spot parallel to where her table ends to where the Waitrose starts: a strip within the strip, like old-style unspooled film, narrowing as it runs away from her, perspective accentuated by the rows of columns on each of the avenue’s sides. A woman in a dress is entering this sub-strip now, being hit side-on by sunlight falling through the gap that Sennet pointed out a moment ago. From somewhere behind her, out of view, accordion music carries on the air: a slow, repeating tune that’s full of minors. At the precinct’s far end, by the bollards, a man leaves the optician’s, holding the door open for a policewoman who’s peering at a notebook as she enters. On the window by this door a diagram shows a cross-section of the eye, with sclera, retina, cornea, iris, aqueous humour, extra-ocular muscle and retinal blood vessels all labelled. Beside it, smaller diagrams contrast a healthy eyeball (spherical cornea, single focal point) with an astigmatic one (oval cornea, multiple focal points). A group of men in ties cuts between Diamond and this poster; as they pass her table, one of them says, When I see that, it’s time to go; another answers, It was time already; they all laugh. The first man retorts something back, but the accordion music drowns his words out as they cross paths with the woman in the dress, replacing her within the sunlit zone …
Here’s a strange one-two-three: a moment ago, a bald man with a backpack on his shoulder cut sideways through this zone towards the cleaners. As he entered it another man, bald but without a backpack, exited. Now, not half a minute later, a third man, also lacking a backpack although this time hirsute, is making his way in through the door. Diamond knows, because Sennet has told her, that the patterns they extrapolate from these comings and goings will be used not just by Ruff as they reshape the precinct; they’ll also be harnessed, transformed and further monetised by Pantarey, deployed to other contexts and assignments, birthing algorithms for crowd scenes in movies, background movement in games … But what’s creeping into her mind now, metabolising with the sugar in a buzz of whimsical conjecture, is the apprehension, the suspicion, that some algo’s at work here already, moulding this space’s tempo, orchestrating all its paths and modulations; some source-code hiding not, like skeletons, beneath layers of skin and clothing but (quite the opposite) in the transience of its relay to the surface and beyond, the stealth of its convection up into ephemerality. She looks back at the ground. The paving to the framed slabs’ right has painted signs and numbers running over it, instructions to the workers who will drill it up next week, or the one after that: algebra-strings of ciphers, as though it had come pre-annotated. She looks up again, right up towards one of the T40Ss, whose cold gaze tells her nothing. Beneath it, on a ledge, a pigeon’s staring back, ostensibly at her and Sennet’s Danishes; to Diamond, though, its concentration has a complicit air about it, as though, at some level, on some animal frequency, it (unlike her) had worked this stuff out, learnt to ride the streams and thermals of the algo’s sequence – whence the superior, disdainful gaze it’s sending back at her.
‘They’re memoryless, naturally,’ Sennet’s saying. ‘That’s the defining Markov property: absence of hysteresis. The amount of time between this movement-burst and the last one, or the one before that, has no bearing at all on how long we’ll have to wait until the next. Only the present counts – or, if you want to be exact, the “stopping time” …’
Diamond’s not memoryless, though. Her thoughts are starting to ride back, like homing birds or web-dreams, to that first week, and Aidan’s video: the second one, the mpeg with the village. It comes on suddenly, and quickly grows: the incongruous insertion, plane by plane and frame by frame, of the foreign scene into the precinct’s tableau, to the point that soon it feels as though she were watching the former episode all over again – not on her screen but right here, in the space itself, replaying across its surfaces and textures, accelerating as it heads towards its lethal end. Is it some shared formal character that’s causing the strange superposition, this overwriting of a Bedford plaza by some clearing in Afghanistan? It seems unlikely: that other space was square, while this is elongated; and the buildings were quite different, and the clothes … Besides which, Aidan’s mpeg had no audio: no human chatter, hum of background traffic or accordion notes emanating from behind the market stalls; and no smells, neither of Danish nor of tobacco, nor of the perfume coming at her from a woman stepping off the sub-strip now, out of the lateral light-block, depositing about the air a Roberto Cavalli vapour trail that spreads and dissipates …
No: it’s the above-thing, the above-ness, that’s prompting this hysteresis in her. That she can see, with naked iris, cornea, etc., the whole doomed area from down here on her bench, and at the same time from on high, translated into topographic layout, sliced by the passage of its movements into clefted sections pieced together like some weird confection – this splitting, this doubling, is asking her mind to spindle and flair in ways it’s just not trained to. Small tension-spasms start to scurry outwards from her spine. She senses her own presence as a threat: to buildings, people, life itself, to the whole atmosphere and habitat in which she finds herself embedded – unsuspected, deadly, fingers caressing the interface, the packet, the command-screen that’s calling destruction down; senses in the very act of watching it this way a violence so ruinous that nothing, up to and including vision itself, will escape it. As the sequence playing out at the cleaners’ entrance is brought to completion by the emergence of a new man with both hair and backpack, Diamond’s mind supplies what neither file nor precinct has managed to show: the explosion – screams, cascades of glass and concrete, slabs and bodies opening, faces unravelling, space peeling and crumpling. Would this crowd, haphazardly assembled civic body of which she’s just one small sensory organ, even know it had been hit? Or would these people carry with them to eternity this snapshot of drab market stalls and benches, perfume and accordion music, shopping trolleys being shunted by old ladies past the tramps, and eke out some kind of afterlife inside it? Who’s to say that’s not what’s happening right now …?
Diamond’s never had a panic attack before, and isn’t sure this is one coming on – but there’s a shortness to her breath, a need to tell someone, let them know … know what? The policewoman’s emerging from the optician’s again, folding her notebook closed. She glances towards Diamond, and then up, towards the bird. Diamond, for her part, looks down, and fixes her gaze on the paper bag her Danish came in. Are you meant to breathe into it? Her right hand, reaching towards the table for this prop, detours (through either instinct for self-preservation or just hunger) at the final moment to the pastry – and it’s this that saves her: raising it to her mouth again, she senses in its freighted texture and solidity, its leathery resistance, a guarantee of life that’s strong enough to override the spectre of destruction, firm enough to steady now her breathing, calm her muscles; biting into it, she understands with growing confidence that whatever crisis she felt coming has been averted. By the time she’s pushed the final mouthful in she’s laughing inwardly: at the absurdity of the whole episode, perhaps, or perhaps with relief. She runs her gaze once more across the paving stones. Downtrodden wads of chewing gum in the illuminated areas glimmer like markers; in the darker patches they sit dullened, faded stars. Apricot tangs her lips. These, starting to move, mouth silently: It’s okay, nothing’s happening, everything will carry on.