All good stuff, and I smiled as the gates of my subconscious opened—or the gates of the great Jungian quantum collective did, so far removed from our first encounter and yet, no doubt, hardly changed at all from that divine perspective—and connected me with the great artistic beyond. Angst and strangeness bubbled out of me, and we put it all into the game: Clotho at her work, lifting a boy from a stark Italian Futurist coffin that might have been the headquarters of an international bank; a great crowd of identical women laying siege to a white stone castle; a dead man lying murdered in the street of a city whose new architecture sprouts cancerous and optical from homely London redbricks; a nest of wires becoming roots becoming roads, penetrating the sleeping skull of a goddess; a lonely detective pursuing or fleeing a killer along a film noir alleyway whose shadows were cast not by dressed neo-Gothic stone but by the steel and glass of tomorrow’s skid row. Annie’s software recognised the human shapes and weeded them out, replicating them as statues and logos, and designed apartment buildings and council estates, mansion flats and skyscrapers after my fashion. Little by little, over the map of London, our new territory grew, dipping in and out of what was there and becoming something that was no longer grafted on but supporting and penetrating, so that our illusion became the substrate upon which the old city sustained itself and without which it would wither and die. The infection became the host.