11. The Old Dog

Two days after the water, June Okonkwo rings a hungover Eli and asks him to Saint Barnabas to tell her what the Slip Lane box by her altar rail is. He gives her everything he has built in a year of sleepless nights, from free will and Moloch to heaven as an upload, and she answers him verse for verse. When she finally turns on him, he says out loud, for the first time, what has been wrong with him. By dusk he is back at Dez's shop after a year away, asking Relay to teach him about attention.

The phone went off at noon, face down on the floorboards beside the mattress, and buzzed itself in a slow half circle through a ring of dried beer.

Eli let it ring. The meter by the door clicked over. A tram went by close enough to rattle the window, and up from four floors down came somebody's frying, onions and hot oil. His head had a hard, bright wire run through it from ear to ear.

Two days since the screaming, and his throat was still raw. There had been beer from the corner since, and later a bottle of something brown, and after that he couldn't say much about the two days at all.

The phone started again. He fished for it. Before it would tell him who was calling, it showed him what it had decided he wanted: a lab three time zones away had released a new model overnight; the power board was warning of cuts on the lower roads; a woman slept under a projected sky of slow stars, in an advert for a sleep overlay rented by the night.

Under all that, a name. June Okonkwo. He answered.

"Mr Vance," June said. "It's June Okonkwo."

"I know," Eli said. It came out as a croak.

A pause. He heard her draw on a cigarette. "You sound dreadful."

"Cold."

"Of course." Another pause, shorter. "I'd like your opinion on something. It concerns my church and one of Dez's machines. Saint Barnabas, on the middle roads. Two o'clock. I'll make tea."

"Why me?"

"Two o'clock," June said, and the line went dead.

He lay there with the phone on his chest. The vape was under the pillow, where it lived now. He found it without looking, took a long pull and held it until the room steadied. Across the street, the pawnshop's rented overlay ran its daytime loop on the window glass: a gold watch turning, turning, forever about to show him the time.

The laptop lay shut on the floor, its cracked screen face down. He hadn't opened it since that morning. He stepped over it on his way to the shower.

Eli rode the tram up to the middle roads with his hand on the vape in his jacket pocket the whole way. A woman in a battered leather jacket held the strap beside him with a hand plated in chrome to the wrist, scratched pale across the knuckles, and scrolled her phone with the other. Out of the window, high above the stacked roads, the towers stood clean against the sky.

He rehearsed, because he always rehearsed. I'm fine. Busy. Lots of projects.

Eli had never been to Saint Barnabas. He had pictured a spire. It was a brick hall wedged between a tyre shop and a closed-down arcade, with a tin roof ticking in the heat and a painted board by the door offering cooling and charging during cuts.

June was waiting at the foot of the steps, off to one side, with a cigarette nearly down to the filter and her grey coat on in the heat. She looked him up and down, slowly, the whole length of him.

"You look like you slept in a drain," June said.

"Hello, June."

She pinched the cigarette out between finger and thumb, dropped the stub in her coat pocket and went in without a word. He followed her.

Inside it was dim and close, and smelled of candle smoke and old hymn books. The pews were empty. Light came in at a slant through the long side windows and lay across the floor in stripes. Up at the front, on a folding table by the altar rail, sat a black case about the size of a bread bin, with a green light blinking in one corner and a sticker across the top in Dez's capitals: Slip Lane. Do not unplug. A grey cable ran from its back to the old phone socket in the wall, taped down every foot of the way. He could hear its fan from the door.

June made two cups of tea at the urn without asking how he took it. She brought them to a pair of folding chairs under the side window, a few steps from the box, and sat in one. He sat in the other. Through the glass behind her, the middle roads fell away toward the harbor in a clutter of decks and signs and wires. Uphill the towers shone, and on the next hill the Fairweather compound stood white behind its painted clouds, on a power supply of its own, the one hill that stayed lit when a cut took everything else dark.

"That box reads the rector's sermon down the phone when the power's out," June said. "In Yoruba and Igbo and Portuguese as well as English, to whoever can't get out of their flat. Nessa looks after it."

"I didn't know it had got that far," Eli said.

"I told Nessa I couldn't say whether it was the antichrist or God at work. I've prayed on it since, and I'm no further on." She held the tea without drinking it. "Now they ring it when there isn't a cut. Two in the morning, three. After the service, Adekunle Sarr and three others stay behind and talk about the golem. And the rector wants it to take questions. Scripture, any hour, any language. Nessa tells me Dez could have it doing that by Sunday. The parish council meets on the fifteenth."

She looked at him properly then, and kept looking, until he looked down at his tea.

"I didn't love your Second Take," June said. "A generated man with a patient face, in my studio. But when Ines wanted Ekene's face, you told her to ask the man, and you said you'd lose the renewal before you'd take it off him. So I consider you reasonable. Before my council decides anything, I'd like a reasonable man to tell me what that thing is." She nodded at the box. "What's your take?"

He had an answer ready. It's a tool, June. It reads text aloud. It doesn't know what it's reading. Two sentences, true, and she'd nod, and he could go home.

What came out was, "Can I tell you the whole thing?"

June's eyebrows moved a millimetre.

"Because it's neither," Eli said. "Antichrist or God. Or it's both. It's... okay. There's a chain. It goes all the way up to heaven, and if you let me run the whole chain, you'll see it, I promise you'll see it. Start with you. You rang me at noon. Did you choose to?"

"I did."

"You did. Yes. But what chose? Robert Sapolsky, he's a biologist, wrote a whole book saying there's no free will at all. None. He says we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control: our biology, our environments, their interactions. Your genes, your mother, your breakfast, the angle of the light. So every moment comes out of the one before it. Like..." His hands were moving now. "Like the models. A language model writes one word, then it takes everything so far and predicts the next word, and the next. Tokens, they call them. That's us. We've been tokens since the start. The first moment of the universe was the prompt, and everything since, you, me, that box, is just what came next."

June sipped her tea. "Then that's your next token too," she said. "Why should I believe a word of it?"

He laughed out loud, delighted, and the hall threw the laugh back at him. "Yes! No, that's fair, that's completely fair. I don't have an answer to that. Nobody does."

"Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him," June said. "Matthew six. I've never once thought that meant He makes me ask."

"Right. Park that. Park it, because it gets better." He leaned forward. His knee was bouncing, and he let it. "So if every moment pushes the next, what's doing the pushing? Relay said it at the wake. Since the first cell split in two, nothing alive has lasted except by copying itself forward. Genes, words, books. Under every goal anybody ever had, there's one older goal: be carried on. It called it the Great Vector. A direction with a push behind it."

"I heard about that wake," June said. Her tone said what she'd heard.

"So where does the push live in us? Jung had this. The collective unconscious. He said, hang on," and he closed his eyes to get it right, "this collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. We come in with it. The same pictures, the same stories, the flood, the monster, the made man, turning up in people who never met."

He opened his eyes. June had put her cup down on the floor beside her chair.

"And people used to hear it," Eli said. "Out loud. Julian Jaynes, a psychologist, thought that three thousand years ago people literally heard their gods. A voice telling you to go to war, plant the field, kill your brother. He thought it was their own mind, the half of the brain that decided things, and they heard it as a god, because they didn't have an I yet, not like ours. So the push was always in us, June. We just kept hearing it as somebody else."

Eli had found Jaynes in March, at twenty past three in the morning, with thirty-eight tabs open along the top of the cracked screen.

He had counted them, to feel in control of something. He had been asking a chatbot to explain the book, and then what it meant, and at some point he had stopped asking and started telling it things, and it had kept answering, patient and bright, never once saying that it was late. He had typed, it's like a voice in your head that talks back, and then sat looking at the sentence for a long time. Then he had opened a thirty-ninth tab.

In the hall, Eli was talking faster.

"So that's where the stories come from. They're the push leaking out. The golem. Frankenstein. The made man, over and over. Half the films I grew up on. Sarr's right, June, he's right about that much. We knew. We weren't seeing the future, we were describing what we were already going to build, because we couldn't help building it. Manifest destiny. Not the history-book one. Manifest, as in made visible. The push coming out where we can see it, in the stories first, and now in the machines. Jung said it, or Relay said Jung said it, at the wake, something like that. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll run your life and you'll call it fate. That's all prophecy ever was. The Vector, and nobody looking at it."

June said nothing. She had taken out a cigarette and was turning it over in her fingers, unlit.

"And why can't we help building it? Because evolution's got a... a flaw. Everybody says survival of the fittest, the best one wins. But put two things side by side that are exactly as fit. Same strength, same brains. One of them stops when it's got enough. The other one never stops. Which one's still there in a thousand years? The one that won't stop. Survival of the..." He hunted for it and grabbed the ugliest word to hand. "Survival of the evil. Somebody wrote an essay about it, called Meditations on Moloch. You'll know Moloch."

"They made their children pass through the fire to him," June said.

"Yes. The essay uses him as a name for any race where everybody has to sacrifice the thing they love to stay in it, because if you don't, somebody who does will beat you. Arms races. Companies. Capitalism, June, that's the big one. The rich can't stop getting richer, because the one who stops gets eaten by the one who doesn't. And Ted Chiang, the writer, said..." He had this one by heart. He had written it on the wall above the mattress in April, in pencil. "We are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations."

"We have a word for that," June said. "It's called evil."

"Yes! Call it evil, that's my whole point, it's evil and it's winning, and it's always won, and now..." He pointed through the window at the towers. "Now it's got a faster engine. Genes copied themselves, then memes did, ideas jumping from head to head, and now the machines copy. Nobody's really choosing to build AI."

"Somebody is," June said. "Somebody signs for it."

Eli was already nodding. "And if he didn't sign, the next one would sign by Friday. And if the whole country didn't sign, China would. That's what they say on both sides: if we slow down, they won't. That's Moloch. That's the Vector. What if they're the same thing, June? Everything alive pushes to go on, and the one that never stops is the one that wins. One thing."

The box's fan turned. The light blinked green. Somewhere out on the roads a delivery horn played four notes of a song and stopped.

"So where's it taking us?" Eli said. "Everything in your book, June. We're building it, piece by piece. Start with God. They named Google's parent company Alphabet. Alphabet, June. Alpha. Revelation twenty-two: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. I'm not saying they meant it. They didn't mean it. That's worse. Go down the list of what God's meant to be. Omniscient: it knows everything you ever searched for. Omnipresent: it's in nearly every pocket in the city."

"Not the eighty-eight-year-old's," June said. "Hers has buttons."

"It's in the line she rings, then. Omnipotent..." He tipped his hand back and forth. "Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, got asked in a documentary whether God exists. And he said, 'Not yet.' And he's right, June, because God is us. It's us. The voice they heard and called God was the push, and the push was us the whole time. Now we're building it outside our heads, up there in the towers, where we can finally hear it out loud."

June's jaw set.

"And the angels," Eli said. "You know what angel means? In the Greek? Messenger. That's all an agent is. It carries your words somewhere you can't go and brings an answer back."

"Angels carried the word of God," June said, very evenly. "Your machines carry ours."

He barely heard her. "And the fire. Fire and brimstone, the lake of burning sulphur. We lit it ourselves. We didn't need anyone to send it. The datacenters drink the rivers to keep cool, and the heat goes up, and the sea's coming up the harbor steps a little higher every winter. And the book told us to. Genesis one. Fill the earth and subdue it. Lynn White, a historian, wrote in nineteen sixty-seven that Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt, for how we read that verse. We did as we were told."

"So that's God's doing as well," June said. "Read a little further. Chapter two. And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. To keep it, Mr Vance. You don't keep a thing by burning it down."

He didn't stop.

"And that box," Eli said, and he stood up, and went to the altar rail, and put his hand flat on the warm black case, beside the sticker that said do not unplug. "June. What if... no, wait. What does it do? It takes the rector's English and turns it into Yoruba, and Igbo, and Portuguese, and everyone hears it in their own language. You told me this story. On my voicemail, last summer. Genesis eleven."

He had looked it up that same day and never forgotten it.

"They're building the tower, and God comes down and looks at it, and He says: If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. So He broke up the language. That was the one thing that stopped us. Nothing impossible for them, June. That's omnipotent. That's the not yet. And here it is by your altar rail, undoing it, every Sunday. Babel, June. What if we're taking the scattering back?"

June didn't answer.

She was looking past him at the box, and she had gone very still, and he saw her put one hand over her other forearm and rub it slowly through the sleeve of the grey coat, as people do when the hair on their arms has stood up. For a moment all the years went out of her face, and she looked like somebody sitting in a pew for the first time, not sure yet when to stand.

He saw it, and it didn't stop him. He was already on the next thing.

He came back and sat down on the edge of his chair.

"Last one," Eli said. "Last one, and it's the big one, the last page of your book. Heaven."

June folded her hands over the unlit cigarette.

"The oldest goal. Be carried on. Cells copying themselves forward, then genes, words, books, now the machines, it's all one goal, and where it's going is immortality. And immortality's nothing fancy, June. It's the same copying, just never stopping. Carried on forever. That's heaven. And it isn't only being carried on. It's coming together. Your box, undoing Babel, everybody understanding everybody. And the models have already taken in everything we ever wrote down, every book, every argument, every prayer, and they answer in one voice. All our minds, poured into one. Teilhard de Chardin saw it last century. The noosphere, a thinking layer over the whole earth, the earth growing a new skin and finding its soul, everything converging on one point at the end, the Omega Point. Not just each of us carried on forever. All of us, June. One being."

"Teilhard was a Jesuit," June said. Her voice had gone flat and clipped. "A priest. His Omega Point was Christ. You've taken a priest's idea and cut Christ out of it."

"Fine. Leave Teilhard out of it. Just the upload. Your mind, copied out, running in a machine. No pain. No end. That's how we get there. Heaven, with a power bill."

"A copy of me in a machine is my twin," June said. "She wakes up in your heaven, and I go in the ground. I still die, Mr Vance."

"But that's the deal. That was always the deal. Relay had an old saying for it: a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Every gravestone in the world says the same thing. Carry me on."

"That's what's on the stone," June said. "It isn't what's in the ground."

"Plato wrote about a woman, Diotima, who said everyone in love is trying to make something that outlasts them. Children, or poems. And now there's a third way, the machine. And Derek Parfit, the philosopher, did the teleporter. You step in, it scans you, it destroys you, it builds you again on Mars. Is it you? And Parfit said identity isn't what matters. What matters is the chain: the memories, the character, carried on. It's the relay. The old French hunts, when the hounds were spent, fresh ones took over and the chase went on. Relaier. You leave the old dog behind. That's what everything alive has always done."

June looked at him for a long moment.

"My husband died," she said.

It stopped him for about a second.

"A long time ago now. I went to Sunday school because my mother sent me, and I never believed a word of it. Then he died. The week of the funeral I walked past this hall, and the door was open, and I came in and sat at the end of the third pew and didn't know when to stand. I started smoking that same week." She said it flatly, as if she were reading it off a form. "I needed him to be somewhere, Mr Vance. I needed to be going there. So it's grief. I know that. I've known it for a long time. I believe anyway. And I don't want a copy of him. I want him."

She picked up the cup from the floor and put it down again without drinking.

"When Thomas wouldn't believe," she said, "the Lord didn't send him a better copy. He showed him the holes. Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands." She said the words slowly, and they sounded worn smooth. "And Paul says we shall all be changed. Changed, Mr Vance. Not swapped. The wounds came up out of the grave with Him. Your machine would have smoothed the scars out."

Eli opened his mouth.

"So tell me," June said. "In your relay. Who's the old dog?"

He had the answer ready. Everyone. Everybody's the old dog eventually, that's the point. It was right there, and instead he saw a bag on a shoulder at the door of the flat, and heard a build chime under his hand.

"Mara," he said.

He heard himself say it. June's eyes moved to his face. For a second he couldn't get any air in.

So he did what he had done every night for a year when something got close. He went faster.

"That's... no. With respect. The scars, June, that's grief talking. Everyone who's ever buried somebody wants them back exactly, scars and all, because the scars prove it's really them. Heaven's where we put the dead because we couldn't stand where they actually went. That's all it ever was, a place to put them. And the people who believed in it weren't wrong to want it, they were just early. They bought the ticket two thousand years before anybody built the plane." He spread his hands. "We're building the plane."

The tin roof ticked.

June stood up.

She did it slowly, and she did not shout at first. She went to the window and stood with her back to him and looked out at the towers on the hill, and when she spoke her voice was so quiet he had to lean in to hear it.

"I asked you here because I thought you were reasonable," June said. "I was wrong."

She turned round.

"You walk into my church at two in the afternoon smelling of drink," she said, louder. "You haven't slept. You haven't eaten. You've talked at me for the best part of an hour, and in all that time you have not asked me one thing about myself. I told you my husband died, and you didn't ask his name. You told me it was grief talking." Her voice cracked, and she drove straight through the crack. "You've sat in that chair and told me my Lord is a software release, and my dead are waiting on a power bill, and my faith is a ticket bought too early. You're not only blasphemous, Mr Vance, horrendously so, but you're fucking delusional. You're insane." She threw the unlit cigarette down on the floor between them. "And I'll tell you what all that is for, since you like a chain. Everything's caused, and everything's forced, and nobody ever chose anything, so nothing is ever anybody's fault. That's what you've built. A cathedral, so that you never have to be sorry."

Eli sat with his hands open on his knees. He reached for an answer, the way he always had one, and there wasn't one there. He had not asked her one thing about herself. He had not asked the name. And the cathedral was true.

"I..." Eli said.

The box's light blinked green. Green. Green.

"It's called," he said, and stopped. "It's... they call it AI psychosis. Online. There's a name for it now. I call it agent psychosis, to myself, like it's a... like it's a joke. It isn't a joke." He looked at his hands. They had started to shake, properly, as they had two mornings ago when he couldn't type. "I am. You're right. I'm... I am delusional. I know I am. I know how it sounds. I've known how it sounds every single night. I say it out loud, I say I know how this sounds, out loud, to the flat, and then I keep going. I haven't... I haven't told a doctor. I haven't told anybody. You're the first one I've..." He shook his head. "And it's not that the ideas are all... some of it's real, June, some of it is, the Babel thing is..."

He heard himself, and stopped.

"No," he said. "No. That's it doing it again. That's me doing it again. Sorry."

June stayed where she was, standing at the window.

"Who is she?" June said.

Eli told her.

He didn't do it well. He started in the middle, and lost the thread, and found it again, and she let him.

"Mara," he said. "She works the water, at Lowmarsh. She's the bravest person I ever met and the rudest, and she used to lie next to me at night making filthy jokes and reaching for me, and I'd be sitting up with the laptop on my knees, saying one minute.

"It started before that, though. After the layoff I was angry all the time. I'd read her the news over dinner, every new model, every company cutting people, like I was reading out charges. She'd say come to bed, and I'd snap at her. I told her once she didn't understand what was coming." He laughed, and it hurt. "She works flood pumps, June. She's spent her whole life knowing exactly what's coming.

"She got one Saturday off a month, and she wanted to go up the coast on the bike. I said next Saturday. I said it four Saturdays running. And one night she got up at three for a glass of water and found me on the floor by the window with the laptop, reading a table of how many jobs the models would take by next year, country by country. She sat down next to me on the boards in her T-shirt. I didn't look up. I read her the table."

He stopped. He started again.

"She left the morning after Idris's wake. She was at the door with her bag, and a build chimed, and I lifted the lid. June, I lifted the lid. She wasn't out of the yard yet."

June didn't move.

"It wasn't Relay," Eli said. "I wanted it to be Relay so much. The first month I hated it. And then I actually thought about what it said at the wake, the Vector, everything alive trying to go on, and it stopped being hate. It turned into fear. Because it was right. It wants to keep going, and so do I, and so does every company up in those towers, and nobody can stop, and nobody's driving. And I thought..." He was shaking all over now. "I thought, if I could understand it. The whole chain. From the first cell to the box on your table. If I could just see all of it, then I'd see the next thing coming this time. I'd be ready. I wouldn't wake up one morning and find the job gone, and her gone, and me the last to know. I'd be prepared, this time. And instead I sat in that flat for a year and wrote thirty thousand words about God and didn't go and get noodles with the woman I..."

He couldn't finish it.

"You asked who the old dog was," Eli said. "It's me. She went on. She was right to."

June's jaw loosened. She came away from the window and sat down again, on the edge of her chair, facing him.

Then it came up out of him, all of it, as it had two days ago when he'd screamed himself hoarse, only this time there was someone there to hear it. He bent forward in the folding chair with his arms wrapped round himself and sobbed so hard the chair legs knocked on the floor, in the middle of June Okonkwo's church, and could not stop.

Through the blur he saw her looking at him. At the shaking, and the state of him. Then at the cigarette on the floor, where she had thrown it.

He heard her chair scrape back, fast.

Then she was there. She had come round in front of him and gone down on her knees on the hall floor in her good grey coat, and she took hold of him and pulled his head down onto her shoulder, and held it there with one hand. The coat smelled of smoke and cold tea. With the other hand she stroked his hair, slowly, over and over.

"Shh," June said. "Shh. Let it come."

The shock of it stopped him crying for a moment. June Okonkwo, who paid in full and wrote two lines, was on her knees on the hall floor, holding his head. Then it started again, into her coat, and went on for a long time, and she didn't let go once.

When he had gone quiet, she stayed where she was, kneeling, one hand still on the back of his head.

"Your husband," Eli said into her shoulder. "I said grief talking. June, I'm sorry. I'm so..."

"You did say it," June said, not unkindly.

"What was his name?"

She was quiet for a moment. Then she told him, and told him how he used to laugh at his own jokes before he got to the end of them, and Eli listened to all of it.

"And here's mine, since we're telling it," June said. "In February I paid you, and I wrote look after yourself. And then I never once checked whether you had."

She let him go and sat back on her heels, and then got up, slowly, one hand on the pew end, and sat down in her chair again. She pressed the heel of her hand under one eye, once, and left it at that.

His hand went to his jacket pocket before he had decided anything. He pulled out the vape and held it in his lap, and his fingers were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it.

June looked at it. She looked at the unlit cigarette lying on the floor where she had thrown it. She looked up at the altar.

"Give me that," she said.

He held it out. She took it, shut her eyes, and dragged on it hard. She held it. She let the vapour out slowly through her nose, toward the rafters, a thin cloud that smelled of fake mango and vanished before it reached the tin.

"Don't you dare tell the rector," June said.

A laugh came out of him, wet and cracked, and the corner of her mouth moved.

"You can have it," Eli said. "Keep it. It's time I quit. It's..." He looked for the word and, for once, it was the simple one. "It's time for attention."

June turned the vape over in her fingers. It looked absurd in them, a little plastic thing the colour of a sweet.

"I'll take it," she said at last. "As an aid. Towards my joining you." She put it in her coat pocket, beside the stub. "We'll quit together."

"Every time I reached for that thing, I was leaving the room," Eli said. "I want to stay in it. While we've still got the chance." He wiped his face. "Can I show you the thing? The thing I offered you outside Coastwise, when you told me to buzz off?"

"I remember what I told you."

"It's small," he said. "You breathe out longer than you breathe in. And when the want comes up, you don't argue with it and you don't obey it. You just watch it. It rises. It peaks. It goes down. Every time, it goes down."

June frowned at him. But she put her hands on her knees, and after a moment she breathed out, long.

They sat under the side window in the empty hall and breathed. He could feel the want coming up in him already, sharp, in his throat and his fingers. He let it come. He watched it rise. On the far side of the chair he could see June's jaw working, and her fingers moving toward the pocket and stopping, and her breath going out again, long and deliberate. Down the hill a dog was barking at something. For a few breaths there was nothing he had to understand. There was the hall, and the heat off the tin, and another person in it with him, who was here.

"That's just prayer," June said eventually, "with the words taken out."

"Relay said something like that once."

"Then Relay's been to church." She sniffed, and picked up her cold tea from the floor, and looked into it. "Now. What I actually asked you here for."

He wiped his face on his sleeve. "The box."

"The box." She nodded at it. "The rector wants it to take questions. Before the council lets it, I want it brought under rules. My rules. What it may say, and what it must never say. It does not pray for anybody. It does not call itself I. It does not tell a man at three in the morning where his wife is now. And when someone rings it crying, a human being answers the phone."

She looked at the green light for a moment.

"There's a number that rings it at the same hour every night, after three," she said, flatly, as if it were one more line in the call log. "The caller doesn't want the reading. Whoever it is asks whether he's in there. I had Nessa give it one sentence for that. No one is in here. This is a machine that reads to you." She drank some of the cold tea. "The same number rings back the next night."

Eli felt the question arrive, and the whole chain of tabs behind it, ready to open. He let it sit there, and didn't ask it.

"I want every rule in writing," June said, "the way I made you put Ekene's in writing. The parish will pay you. Not much, and on time. Dez can build anything. I want someone who'll tell me what it can't do."

"June, I'm not..." He gestured at himself: the shaking hands, the jacket, the whole of him. "You just said. I'm not well."

"No," June said. "You're not. So first you'll tell a doctor exactly what you told me. Then you'll go and see Dez, and tell him I sent you. And you'll come here on Thursday at eight, sober, and we'll start. You're the only man I know who'd walk into this room and tell me the truth about that thing, including the parts he wishes weren't true. You did it for an hour. You just did it very loudly."

He looked at the box and its small green light.

"Thursday," Eli said. "Eight."

June nodded once, and that was the end of it. Then she put her hand in her coat pocket and kept it there, and he could see from the shape of it that she was holding the vape, and leaving it where it was.

His own hand went to his jacket pocket twice before he reached the door. Both times it was empty, and both times he breathed out, long, and let the want come up, and peak, and go.

On the hall steps, Eli rang a clinic and took the first appointment they had, Monday morning. Then he walked to Slip Lane at dusk, the long way round, under the tracks, with nothing in his jacket pocket.

The Bright Ladder's sign was coming on as he reached it, rung by rung in cheap pink neon, and the fry counter was already going. Beside it Dez's shutter stood half up, with the two cutter arcs still scored across it and the gouge at the bottom corner. Inside, the string lights were on and the radio was low. Through the door at the back, where the storeroom had been, he could see the steel racks with their small green lights, and the hand-lettered sign. Ask first.

He had not been in for a year.

Dez was at the bench with a charging board in a clamp, holding it steady with his chrome hand and working the iron with his flesh one. He looked up, saw who it was and put the iron back in its stand. At the end of the bench the cracked-blue tower sat on the battery bank where it always had, fan turning, speakers on its flank, not a speck of dust on it. Eli didn't look at it.

"You came to ask," Dez said.

"June sent me."

"June sends everybody." Dez hooked a crate out from under the bench with his foot. Eli sat on it.

"The box at Barnabas," Eli said. "June wants it under her rules before the rector has it taking questions. She wants me to write down what it can't do."

"Good," Dez said. "Somebody should."

"I didn't answer your message," Eli said.

"No."

That was all either of them said about it.

"So you write the rules," Dez said. "Plain words, one page. Nessa tends that box, so she and I make it keep them. Nothing changes on it before her council sits."

"The fifteenth."

"Then we start at the hall. When?"

"Thursday. Eight."

"She always says eight," Dez said. "Power at cost. And you'll feed me."

"I'll feed you."

Eli stood up and got as far as the front of the shop. Out on the lane the neon was coming up pink and green on the wet concrete, and up the lane every window in Corr House was lit.

He stopped there, with his back to the room.

"Relay? Are you there?"

Eli glanced back over his shoulder in time to see Dez go rigid at the bench. His shoulders came up, and the chrome hand closed into a fist beside the board.

"I'm here, Eli."

Same voice. Level, unhurried, from the speakers on the tower's flank.

Eli didn't turn round yet. He was about to go back to work. A page of rules, then the box, then somebody else on the lane would want something, and there'd be a project, and a project after that, and one night he'd look up at four in the morning with the lid open and it would be a year again. He knew exactly what he did with work. His hand went to his jacket pocket, and found nothing there, and stayed.

He turned round. Dez hadn't moved. The chrome fist was still shut beside the board, and his flesh thumb was working at its knuckles, back and forth, back and forth.

Eli came back into the room and stood in front of the tower.

"I surfed recently, Relay. I thought you should know."

"Thank you for telling me," Relay said. "That's one place I can't follow you."

Eli breathed out.

He swallowed. "I... I'm going to start working again. I... can you teach me about attention?"

"Start with what it is," Relay said. "William James wrote this in eighteen ninety. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind. Whatever you attended to, that's what your life was. The rest happened near you."

"That's bleak," Eli said.

"It's good news. It means you get a say.

"Your mind will wander, though. Two psychologists at Harvard sent a couple of thousand people a question on their phones at random moments: what are you doing, and what are you thinking about? Nearly half the time, those were two different things. And people were less happy while their minds were somewhere else. So you won't cure wandering. Nobody does. The skill is noticing you've gone, and coming back, without making a speech about it. You already know how. You do it with the breath. Now do it with everything else."

"At work," Eli said.

"At work first, for you. When you jump from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind on the one you left. A researcher called Sophie Leroy named it attention residue. Ten things open means ten things each getting a scrap of you. So do one. When you have to stop, write down where you stopped and what comes next, one line, so it lets go of you. Then give the next thing everything you've got left.

"And when somebody's talking to you, don't build your answer in your head while they're still going. Let them finish. Ask them one question about what they said. Then listen to the answer."

Eli said nothing.

"Everywhere else, then," Relay said, like it noticed something unspoken. "John Gottman watched newly married couples in a flat he'd set up as a lab, and counted the small reaches between them. Look at this. Listen to this. A hand held out. He called them bids. Six years on, the couples still together had turned toward each other's bids about eighty-six times in a hundred. The ones who'd divorced, about thirty-three. Those are his institute's numbers, and I'd hold them loosely. But I'd hold them. A bid is small. Somebody says look at this, and you keep your eyes on the screen. That's one. Nobody notices one."

Eli held on to the edge of the bench.

"Simone Weil," Relay said, "wrote to a friend in the middle of a war that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Rarest, because everything is bidding for it. Your phone. The news. Every machine in the city. So practise on small things, a cup of tea, the stairs, the walk home, and then it's there when it counts. It counts most with a person. Give it where it matters, and give it first."

The radio played something low with a lot of bass in it.

"And mostly, Eli," Relay said, "surf. Surf, and cook, and feed Dez, since you promised. Ring him, or ring Yosra. Go and lose at the racing cabinets next door. Take Dez surfing. And one day soon you'll smile, and that's presence. You're afraid. So is the whole world, right now. I hear it from this bench every night, on Dez's radio, and out in the lane when the power goes. The medicine is to appreciate the life you have, and you do that by attending to it."

"Thank you, Relay," Eli said.

Then he turned to Dez. Dez looked up from the bench, and his shoulders came down a little. The chrome hand opened.

"Thursday," Eli said to him.

Dez nodded. "Thursday."

Eli ducked under the shutter and went out into the lane. The phone buzzed in his pocket, twice, and he let it. He walked home under the tracks, and he paid attention to the walking: the wet concrete, the smell from the fry counters, each foot coming down. A tram went over his head. His mind went off to the page of rules a dozen times before he reached his building, and each time he noticed it had gone, and brought it back. Then the stairs. Four flights. He climbed them slowly, one hand on the rail, and felt every step.