‘We wired him as a pup,’ says Ralf, ‘before his eyes could see. Dogs are born blind. We gave him other eyes, and he grew into them.’

‘The dog adapted to the feed?’

‘Quite well.’

‘Quite well?’

Ralf shrugs. ‘We feed it raw data from the National Weather Centre. Whenever he feels a big storm on the way he starts barking.’

Vaux shakes his head – whether from wonder or confusion or dismay, Ralf (being Ralf) cannot tell. ‘A kludge, I admit,’ Ralf persists, nervous now. ‘The new neuroplastics give better results. With them, we can build new centres in the brain. New optic lobes, for different kinds of eyes.’

Vaux knows nothing of the thefts from Ralf’s home, from his car, and from the atelier he maintains in a piece of family property just across the road from Loophole’s old club.

Nor is he ever likely to. The thefts are a serious embarrassment for Ralf. That he ever borrowed such valuable and commercially sensitive kit for his own use is obviously a sackable offence. That he left it lying around unsecured for any passing street-thief or housebreaker to steal could well have Vaux suing Ralf for everything he has ever paid him, ‘Chief Imagineer’ or not.

It is Ralf’s own fault. Ever the tinkerer, he has never quite shaken off the feeling that he can achieve more by himself than he can while sitting in state in the bosom of some well-appointed science palace belonging to Vaux.

The thefts were not subtle affairs. Ralf surely guesses that the thieves knew what they were looking for. He surely suspects us – but he does not let on.

Meanwhile Michel and I find our own uses for Ralf’s aerosolised AR.

We hit the pharmacy without warning: surgical, bloodless and fast.

Wherever the night manager moves, walls tilt, floors vanish, ceilings fall. She comes to rest at last in the corner of the dispensary, barely moaning now, her vestibular system folding up under our psychoelectric assault.

Nausea has overcome her fear. She heaves miserably, spittle dribbling from her chin. She has nothing left to bring up. She has her eyes squeezed shut, but this is no defence against the images being hammered, seventy taps a second, directly against her visual cortex.

And what a cornucopia is here! Medicines and unguents enough to tide us and our loved ones through the Fall. We wander at leisure among the stacks. Pethidine and methadone. Methylphenidate and fentanyl. Oxycodone. While Michel fills the rucksack, I go keep watch by the window. I’ve repelled one unexpected visitor already. After a few minutes’ farcical dancing, trying to open a door that was not there, and falling, repeatedly, through a wall he kept trying to lean upon, our visitor has pretty much given up on reality. He’s kneeling now on the lawn outside the clinic, mouth drawn in a scream he will never utter, because it is possible, even at this remove, for me to paralyse precise channels in his vagus nerve. It is daunting that, after years of more or less constructive effort, I should once again be reduced to playing toy soldiers. Making them march. Making them fall. I might be back at the hotel, watching Dad’s soldiers picking their way across the back lawn.

Talking of which.

I weave my fingers in the air, tapping unreal keys, extending my field of influence. The authorities cannot be far away; better that I immobilise them while they are still out of pot-shotting range.

We change number plates twice before attempting to leave the city. We encounter no obstacles. The traffic is light. On the motorway, we listen to the radio. There is still no government. Compromise after compromise, pact after pact has collapsed before the region’s escalating economic and environmental problems. Tensions are running high and foreign interference is making the problem worse. Last night a dozen election observers found themselves trapped in their hotel by a placard-waving mob.

Still, Michel’s millennial interpretations of these events feel excessive to me. For thousands of years, civilisations have dealt with floods and droughts, failed harvests and pests and plagues. Am I so naive to hope that our world might, after all, save itself from itself?

Michel says that collapses happen all at once, and suddenly. I believe this. It does not take long for people to starve.

But when do we start to prepare for the Fall, and how? Michel says we have to become the very thing we fear. That preparing for the Fall brings on the Fall. ‘To survive,’ he says, ‘we may have to hate ourselves.’ The boot of our car is a measure of his seriousness. Packed in party bags of ice: paromomycin, ertapenem. Tamiflu. Meropenem, combivir, cefprozil, ceftobiprole. Every stripe of penicillin, polypeptides, quinolones.

I turn us off the motorway, west, towards Michel’s redoubt. Soon enough the road dwindles to a single lane over which high hedges impend, the canopies of trees touching here and there to make green tunnels.

The road disappears under pools of standing water. The steering wheel pulls oddly as I gun us through. I find a patch of hard-standing in lee of a barn and park up. ‘It’s deeper now.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll have to walk from here.’

We change our footwear, pull on galoshes and tug thick jumpers over our Ts. While Michel packs stolen medicines into my rucksack, I go around securing the car. Steering lock. Wheel clamp. I check the padlock securing the petrol cap. None of this would deter a determined thief, but hardly anyone lives around here any more and anyway, the fuel crisis is not yet so intense.

It’s been raining, and we’re still in cloud shadow, though coins of greenish light spin and glimmer over hillsides on the other side of the valley. After ten minutes we come to a home-made barrier – a string of orange plastic tape and a hardboard sign propped against an upturned bucket.

FLOOD

Michel holds the string up for me to duck under. The road lies under six inches of water. A wall has come down and there are stones all over the road.

Turning a corner, everything before us is silver – an inland sea. Birds zig-zag over the vanished land. Otherwise nothing disturbs the stillness. There are no people, no animals, no signs of damage or distress, no abandoned vehicles, no machines listing in the mud. The farmers here are used to floods. They have their routines to save their work and their livestock from the water.

‘“The scene was peaceful. Natural. This was the land as it had been, before the improvers and mechanics and engineers got hold of it, turning it to human use. For all the years men had worked and lived here, this landscape had lain in wait, encysted, weathering the drought occasioned by human progress, longing to be remembered.”’

‘Who’s that then?’

‘It’s you. Twat. Your first book.’

Michel makes a face. ‘What can I say? The copy-editor really got her teeth into that one.’

We stand together in silence, watching patches of light and darkness play upon the water. Michel’s happiness is palpable. After years of waiting and dreaming, his wish has been granted – the sea has come to him.

Me? I wish I had been braver, all those years ago. Even now Hanna and I might be on a boat together, tacking timidly about the poorer and more broken parts of the earth—

‘Help me with the boat.’

The rowboat is hidden under a screen of branches, well away from the waterline. We run the constant risk here of having our kit float off on an unexpected swell. Maps offer only the crudest idea of how the marsh will spread. The neglect and collapse of the old agricultural drainage changes the shape of the shoreline week by week.

The trailer is hidden a short distance away, to discourage thieves. Winching the boat onto the trailer is the hardest part of the job, and the one that takes the most time. Michel frets at this; he fears our exposure here.

‘Relax,’ I tell him, gluey fingers weaving the air. For the moment, we are ahead of the curve, invisible to all unweaponised eyes.