The Peacock Cloak

have a set of bugs!
    “What kind of Neanderthal goes around with a bare face these days?” he said.
    It was almost obscene.
    Chas nodded grimly and pulled up Richard’s file by looking straight at the amber question mark above his head and double-blinking
    “Mental health issues. Diagnosed schizophrenic. Detained in hospital three times. Cautioned two years ago for failing to carry an ID card,” she read from the file.
    Not the crime of the century as even she would reluctantly have to admit.
    “Probably left his card at home on principle,” Ken said with a sigh. “Probably some stupid nutty principle. Probably the same reason why he doesn’t wear bugs. No need to pull him up, Chas. He’s got his card on him today.”
    Chastity found Ken’s attitude very lax. This was not a perfect world, of course – one had to accept that there were liberals in it, and human rights lawyers – but why let potential trouble-makers walk on by when you were perfectly entitled to haul them up, ask them questions and, at the very least, let them know you were watching them?
    “Excuse me Mr Pegg,” she said, stepping forward. (She loved the way this new technology let you have people’s names before you’d even spoken to them: it put them on the back foot straight away.) “Would you mind telling me why you aren’t wearing bug eyes?”
    Richard blinked at her, glancing anxiously round at the receding figure of Jenny, who he might never see again.
    Why didn’t he wear bugs? It was hard to explain. He only knew that if he wore bugs he would drown in them.
    “There isn’t a law that people have to wear them is there?” he muttered, glancing again at Jenny with her pink polka dot umbrella, who, cruelly, was getting onto the very same train that Richard would normally travel on.
    Chastity didn’t like his tone one bit.
    “Maybe not yet,” she said, “but there soon will be, like carrying an ID. And while we’re on that subject, I’d like to see your…”
    But here her colleague nudged her. Away across the concourse, a big red arrow was jiggling into view, pointing down at a young man from Malawi called Gladstone Muluzi, whose visa had expired the previous week.
    “Bingo!” breathed Chas.
    “Gotcha!” hissed Ken.
    “Can I go then?” interrupted Richard, glancing longingly across at the sacred train that now contained the sweet and gentle Jenny.
    “Yeah, go on,” said Chas.
    She didn’t even look round at him. Her eyes were fixed on her prey.

    Richard ran for the train and climbed on just before the sliding doors locked shut. Then he barged through three carriages looking for Jenny, stepping over suitcases and pushing past people stowing their possessions on the luggage rack. He upset several of them, because it didn’t occur to him to say “Excuse me” or “Sorry”.
    But who cared? Not Richard. He didn’t notice the reaction he was getting. There was Jenny, that was the important thing, there was Jenny sitting all on her own in a set of facing seats. Richard approached her and, with beating heart, spoke to her for the very first time.
    “Are these seats free?”

    “Yes. They are,” said Jenny.
    Her voice was like music. He laughed. Jenny gave a small clipped smile and looked away, reading him as odd but harmless, wondering why he wasn’t wearing bugs, and noticing with distaste the faint sour smell on him of slept-in clothes. Her older brother was autistic so she was used to oddness, and her feelings towards Richard were not unfriendly ones, as many people’s might have been. But all the same she didn’t want the bother of thinking about him just now. And she could have done without the whiff.
    Then the train began to move and she glanced at the opacity icon on her toolbar and blinked it up to 80%. Out on the street she’d kept opacity low to let her negotiate traffic safely and avoid walking into other people. But, now that it was the train driver’s job to watch the way ahead, Jenny no longer needed reality and could reduce accordingly its net contribution to the nervous signals reaching her visual cortex. Objects and people in the physical world became thin and ghostlike. It was the bug world that was solid and real.
    Shame you can’t shut out smell as well as vision , she thought, screwing up her nose.
    Richard, incongruously, laughed, and Jenny glanced at him, or at the dim ghost of him she could see with 20% of her vision, and wondered what it was that had amused him. He wasn’t