“I once had a book,” said Will’s mum, finally beginning work on her baconettes. “I liked the pictures in that.”

“That was not a book,” her husband told her. “That was a manual, for the home screen’s remote control.”

“I’ve seen books,” said Will. “And I’ve read them too. I’ve been to the British Library.”

“The boy is just full of surprises.” Will’s dad held out his cup for further coffee. “But you can call up books on the home screen.”

“Not like these Victorian books. I’ve read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The works of Oscar Wilde. And amazing books by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe. I go every lunchtime. I have a special pass because I work at the Tate. I can’t touch the actual books, but they’re all on digital.”

“I’m amazed,” said Will’s dad. “But surely you should be on your way to work now?”

“Indeed, yes.” Will finished his coffee and rose from his special chair. “Off to work. Off to the art and the literature of the past.”

“He’s a weirdo,” said Will’s mum.

“He’s not,” said Will’s dad. “He’s simply Will.”

Will togged up in sufficient protective outerwear to ensure the prolongation of his existence and bade his farewells to his mother and father. He would have taken the lift to the ground floor, had it been working. But it wasn’t working. It was broken yet again, and so Will was forced to trudge down the many, many stairs, no easy feat in a chem-proof suit that was many, many sizes too large, before braving the acid rain and plodding through it to the tram station.

Once inside he passed through decontamination – a hose-down, followed by a big blow-dry – then he raised his weather dome to admit an iris scan of his eyeballs, which confirmed his identity and present credit status, and allowed him access to the covered platform.

The never-ending shuttle train of trams, thirty-two miles of linked carriages, followed a circular route through London Central, The Great High Rise and surrounding conurbation areas. It moved with painful slowness and was dreary to behold. Will awaited the arrival of a carriage that did not look altogether full, pressed a large entry button and, as the door slid aside, stepped aboard the moving carriage.

Large folk sat upon large seats, heavily and sombrely. None raised their eyes towards young Will, nor offered him a “good morning”. Their heads were down, their masssive shoulders slumped; all were going off to work and few were going gladly. The morning tram had never been a transport of delight.

The in-car entertainment was, upon this particular day, of the corporate morale-boosting persuasion: plump, jolly holograms, fresh-faced guys and gals, cavorted up and down the carriage, extolling the virtues of a job well done for an employer who more than just cared. At intervals they flickered and slurred, ran into reverse, or stopped altogether. The system was long overdue for an overhaul – as was most everything else.

Will settled himself into a seat and ignored the colourful chaos. He took off his rubberised mittens, fished into the pocket of his grossly oversized chem-proof and brought out his personal palm-top.

This item was something of a treasure to Will, and would be another collectible should that bygone age of collecting ever return. In this particular time there should have been marvels of technology to be had, like plasma gel eye-screens, hardwired to cranial implants, which, when worn behind the eyelids, would offer three-dimensional virtual reality with all-around-sensasound and things of that futuristic nature generally. And there were, to a degree, but they just didn’t work very well. Technology had got itself just so far before it ground to a halt and started falling to pieces. Will’s palm-top was almost fifty years old, built in a time when folk really knew how to build palm-tops. It was indeed his treasure.

But what Will really wanted, of course, was a book, a real book, a book of his very own. But as books no longer existed, what with there no longer being any rainforests to denude for their manufacture, he had settled for second best. Will had been downloading the contents of the British Library into his ancient palm-top. He did not consider this to be a crime, although crime indeed it was. He considered it to be an educational supplement. Certainly he had been taught things at learning classes, when a child, all those things that the state considered it necessary for him – or any other child of the citizenry – to know. But Will craved knowledge, more knowledge, more knowledge of the past.

Somewhere in him, somewhere deep, was A Need to Know, about what the past really was, about the folk who had inhabited it, about things that they had done, the adventures they’d had. What they’d known, what they’d seen, what they’d achieved. There was excitement in the past, and romance, and adventure.

Exactly why these yearnings were inside him, Will didn’t know. Nor did he understand why he was so driven by them. But he did understand that it mattered (for some reason that he did not fully understand, so to speak).

But he would understand. He felt certain that he would.

Will had recently downloaded a number of restricted files from the British Library’s mainframe, part of the British Library’s collection of Victorian erotica, and installed them into his palm-top. Will was currently reading Aubrey Beardsley’s novel, Under the Hill[1].

Although Will did not understand much of what Beardsley had written, the words and phraseology being of such antiquity, he was aware that he was onto something rather special. Will had researched Mr Beardsley, the 1890s being Will’s favourite period: the gay nineties, they’d been called, a time of exuberance, of decadence, a time of enormous creativity.

Will almost missed his station, London Central Three. He had been engrossed in the chapter where Venus masturbates the Unicorn, and had got a bit of a stiffy on.

(Well, it is an extremely good chapter.)

Will switched off the palm-top, slipped it back into his chem-proof, redonned his mittens, rose, tapped the door button and departed from the eternally moving tram. He took the belowground to the Tate Terminal, passed through the retinal scan, checked in his weather wear and made his way via lifts and walkways to his place of employment.

The workroom was circular, about half an old mile in diameter and many new metres in height, with row upon row of huge, somewhat outdated and unreliable computer workstations, mounted upon IKEA terminal tops, and manned and womanned by many, many folk, all of whom exceeded Will in both years and girth.

“Morning, stick-boy,” said Jarvis Santos, a fine hunk of flesh in a triple-breasted morning suit. Jarvis was Will’s superior.

“Good morning, Mr Santos,” said Will, seating himself in the big chair before his big workstation. “Rotten old weather, eh?”

“The weather is hardly your concern. You’re here to do a job. Do you think your frail little fingers can deal with it?”

“Undoubtedly,” said Will, smiling broadly.

“And get that grin off your scrawny face. Your tasking for the day is on the screen; see to it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Will.

Jarvis Santos shook his head, rippling considerable jowls. He turned and waddled away, leaving Will smiling broadly at his terminal screen. Will read the words upon it: The works of Richard Dadd, and there followed a brief history of this Victorian artist.

Will read these words, and then he whistled. This really couldn’t be much better: Richard Dadd was one of Will’s all-time favourites; a genuine Victorian genius (although, it had to be said, a complete stone-bonker too). Like many rich Victorians, Dadd had taken the Grand Tour. He had travelled through distant lands, visited and painted Egypt, moved through Africa and India and at the end of it all, had returned to England, quite mad. His father, worrying for the mental health of his son had taken Richard under his wing and was escorting him to hospital when a singular tragedy occurred. They had booked into a hotel in Cobham, in Surrey, for the night. Richard and his father had gone out for an evening walk. But Richard returned alone and hastily made away from the hotel. He had murdered his father in the woods and, according to legend, feasted on his brain.