Ralf has brought me here tonight to talk through some work. He has not told me what. ‘What will you drink?’ he asks me and before I can answer he has snapped his fingers at a passing waiter. I have never seen anyone do that – let alone get away with it – outside of an old movie. I sense some shift, some change in him. I was expecting to meet the rest of the dev team here tonight, but Ralf and I are on our own.

‘I want to ask you something.’ Ralf’s show of self-possession would be unremarkable in any other man. Coming from Ralf it’s frightening.

‘Go ahead.’

‘How wedded are you to your work?’

What kind of question is that?

‘I don’t mean the company,’ says Ralf. ‘I mean the work.’

I shrug. ‘The work’s the work.’ This will hardly do. I try again. ‘The work’s the important part. The company—’ I’m not sure where I’m going with this. ‘The company can get in the way of the work. If you know what I mean? It’s a frustrating time. What about—’

‘Drink up.’

‘We’ve only just got here.’

‘Put your spectacles on,’ Ralf says. ‘I want to show you something.’

Ralf must be on better relations with the club than I realised, because he has mounted this surprise of his in their basement – a cramped, windowless null-space that must once have been furnished, going by the patches of glue still adhering to the poured concrete floor.

The room is quite empty. I stand, waiting for the system to kick in and for something to appear in this neutral and depressing grey interior. After a while I reach up to reboot my spectacles.

‘There’s no need. Leave it. It’s working.’

‘It is?’

‘It’s working.’ Ralf’s eyes glitter in the half-light. It occurs to me that he’s not wearing spectacles. Whatever it is he wants me to see, he will not see it. He says, ‘Why don’t you explore?’

I walk round the room, trying to prepare myself for God knows what surprise.

‘Stop. Now. Take half a step to your left. Yes. Now, turn a little to your right. There. Now. Gently. Sit down.’

‘Sit down?’

‘Yes.’

I make to sit on the floor and the back of my knee catches the edge of something. I jolt, turn, and straighten in a single movement, staring at empty space. I reach out and touch—

‘There you go.’

I explore it with my hands. It’s a chair. I step back and take off my spectacles. A regular chair. Chrome, wood, a padded vinyl seat. ‘Oh. That’s neat.’ I look around the room. ‘You hid the cameras, too.’ There they are; I can see them now. There is one in each corner of the room.

‘Of course. If you’d seen the cameras, you’d have guessed the trick straight away.’

I put my spectacles back on. ‘What happens if I move the chair?’

‘Let me show you.’ Ralf picks up the chair and carries it across the room. The lines of the chair stutter in the air, wheel, turn to grey-blue wireframe, and disappear again in an instant. He sets the chair down and steps away. The chair folds itself out of the air, folds itself back in again and disappears.

‘It’s brilliant.’

It is. The effect is seamless. I step towards the place where I know the chair to be. It takes me a moment to spot the four spots, grey on grey, where the chair’s feet connect with the floor – a junction no camera trickery can mask. ‘What’s all this for?’

Ralf barks one of his trademark humourless laughs. ‘You tell me. Seriously. Tell me. I need to know.’

As if I’m not pulling fourteen-hour days as it is. ‘Well, Ralf, I think it’s a great demo, but—’

‘I’m leaving the company.’

‘You are?’ Does the dev team know? Does the company know? What will they do without him? ‘What will you do?’

He casts his hand about the empty – the seemingly empty – space. ‘This. Ideas like this. Ideas without an immediate return. I want to play with this stuff, and I want you to monetise what I come up with. If you can. If you can’t, then probably they weren’t good ideas in the first place. That’s the thing, you see. I have lots of ideas. I just don’t know how to rate them.’

I don’t understand this. ‘And for this you need to quit your job?’

‘I’m setting up on my own.’

‘Oh.’

‘Will you join me?’

‘Oh.’ Christ. ‘How?’ This whole conversation is becoming more and more strange. ‘Who’s going to pay for all this?’

‘I will.’ He sees my confusion. He smiles. ‘Whose club do you think this is?’

This certainly goes some way towards explaining how Ralf – Ralf, of all people – gets away with clicking his fingers at the staff.

Strictly speaking, Ralf does not own the club. His sister manages it. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t own the building. The family do – at least, they run a property company that operates, not just these premises, but the entire block and several beyond it.

I’ve acquired ideas about what money looks like from our interns. They all come from money – how else could they afford to work for us? I thought money came well-dressed, labouring under brittle, cutesy names like Flick and Roddy. I always assumed the dev team were safely proletarian – grafters on a credible wage. Strange that money could throw up a sport like Ralf. Ralf the workaholic, Ralf the star.

It doesn’t take me long to decide to accept his offer. The company we’ve been working for has had six years to break through and in that time the technology we pioneered has matured. It’s become cheap. It’s become easy to use. We’re a ponderous service company trying frantically to reinvent ourselves as a portal for user-generated content, all on a shoestring and a series of half-baked promises from various government-sponsored industry foundations. We won’t be the first outfit in this sector that’s been encouraged to death. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the way of things. The first person through the door almost always gets shot.

Ralf wants me to handle business for what amounts to an inventor’s atelier. He wants to stay on the dirty, technical side of the IT divide, establishing patents for software engines which I’ll go on to sell to bigger, public-facing companies. But if we establish just one good idea, and get bought out for our trouble, I will count this venture a success. We are not living in the nineteenth century. The pace of change far exceeds any individual talent – even one as focused, as monomaniacal as Ralf’s.

For a while, Loophole (the name was my idea) is a sofa in an out-of-the-way corner of the club’s sheltered and heated tea-garden. We lounge about under canvas in oversoft armchairs, overheated laptops scorching our knees as we hammer out, like struggling poets, a form of words that will get Ralf’s work noticed. Ralf’s family have money, and this cushions us, covering our own needs. It will not drive the company – for that we need investment.

This is my job. For eighteen frustrating, toe-stubbing months, the only work I find for us is old work, throwing together image recognition systems to paste virtual movies over billboard posters. Ralf is patient with me, but I can’t help thinking that I’m scoring three stars at best. This is my fault. I’m the one charged with dreaming up new applications for imaginary light, but I have to bring in money as well, and here I am reaching for easy solutions, again and again.

By the time of my thirtieth birthday, Loophole is two. A weedy toddler, it employs six people to crunch code in the club’s refurbished basement – a start-up company indistinguishable from dozens of others all crammed in the same three-block radius, all of us more or less dormant as we wait for our long-talked-about spring: the moment everyone is wearing spectacles and drinking in imaginary light as unthinkingly as they run water from a tap. ‘Because that’s what it will take.’

Michel accepts another cocktail from the tray and sits back in his chair. It’s autumn but hot, and the roof-garden stinks, quite frankly, of damp vegetation and rot.