All the same: how was this all happening, under my nose, and I was just carrying on? I’d been living, by my own decision, in the past, imagining that the world wasn’t really changing all that much, imagining that now was a great deal like then, and that the future probably would be, too. But I have to tell you that it won’t be. Mouse Boy won’t stop once he’s created proactively hygienic vermin. He’ll come up with something else. People are already talking about bioluminescent trees to replace street lamps, and I find myself imagining the city that might grow out of that idea: a soft, moonlit haven to replace the industrial sodium of my time. But Mouse Boy is concerned about light pollution, Annie said, so he doesn’t want to work on that. Anyway, he’s reaching further, towards digitally mediated emotional interfaces for the improvement of human communication. Imagine, she murmured, having a relationship with someone and actually feeling their joy, their fear. Being perfectly aware of them all the time, being able to tell them they’re loved when you’re not present to reassure them. Imagine negotiations where you can know for a certainty where there’s room to haggle and where there’s an impasse. Imagine trials where innocence was measurable on a graph.