The Peacock Cloak

looking at her. It was something he’d seen outside the window. This struck her as endearing somehow, and she smiled.
    To varying degrees – 75%, 90% – almost everyone in the carriage had made a similar adjustment to the opacity of their bug eyes after settling in their seats. And now a soft tide of voices rose up from passengers up and down the aisle, as they called up family members and friends to tell them they were on their way.
    But Jenny looked at the clock on her status bar.
    Ben will be calling soon, she thought. Best not to call anyone else until then, or he won’t able to get through.
    Ben had a bit of a short fuse when it came to things like not being able to get through.
    So she blinked up mail instead and sent a quick message to her boss.
    “Remember to talk to Mr Jackson in Data Services before the staff meeting!” she reminded him.
    It was already in his diary, but he’d grown so used to being reminded about everything that he often forgot to look. Imposing order, she did it all day. But when it came to Ben she felt like a chaotic fool.
    Around the carriage the tide of voices receded as, one by one, calls came to a conclusion and passengers settled down into their own bug eye worlds. Some watched bug TV. Some read bug newspapers and bug books. A Canadian student picked up on a game of bug chess she was playing with a bug friend across the Atlantic. A young boy from Woking played a bug shoot-’em-up game. A woman lawyer with red hair had a look at the balance on her bug bank account. An insurance broker surfed bug porn, having first double checked that his LCV was properly switched off. (For he’d had an embarrassing experience last week with a group of leering schoolboys.)

    Outside the window a building site passed by, lit by icy halogen spotlights. Diggers and cranes were still at work and would be through the night,
    “UCF London,” read giant banners all round the site. Building the Dream . It was a new kind of bug transmitter station, one of a ring around the city, which would create the new Urban Consensual Field. When it was done, every bug-wearer in London could inhabit a kind of virtual city – or one of several virtual cities – superimposed upon the city of brick and stone.
    There would be ghosts in the Tower of London; there would be writing in the sky; there would be virtual Bobbies on every corner… The past would be made visible; the future would rise like a phoenix from the concrete and tarmac of now; and people would even be able, if they wanted, to stay at home in the warm, and send out digital avatars to walk the city streets.

    The door at the end of the carriage slid open. A ticket inspector entered. His rail company bug eyes showed giant tickets hovering above every passenger in the carriage except one and he could see at a glance that every one of these tickets was in order. Only Richard had an empty space above his head. The inspector came to look at his piece of cardboard.
    “Forget your bugs today, sir?” he inquired pleasantly, feeling in his pocket for his little-used clippers.

    Jenny jumped slightly, startled by the inspector’s voice. She had been vaguely aware of him entering the carriage, but he had been a barely visible presence, remote, out there, like a parent outside the bedroom of a half-asleep child. So she had quite forgotten him and gone back into her bug dream by the time he had spoken.
    Not just for Jenny, but for almost everyone there, the carriage, with its white lights and blue seats and aluminium luggage racks, was now no more than a hazy dream. As to the used car lots and crumbling factory units that were flitting by in the dark outside, they were too insubstantial to make out at all with bugs set anything above 70%
    Richard was alone in the atomic world, the world of matter and space.

    “One day they won’t see it at all,” Richard thought. “It’ll just be me that keeps it going.”
    He laughed.
    “One day aliens will invade the earth, and only I will be able to see them. Like I see the foxes and those mice that run around under the trains. Like I saw that deer.”
    That was a powerful memory. One night he’d woken at 2 a.m feeling a need to go to the window of his little bedroom and look outside. The street had been empty, the traffic lights changing from red to amber to green and back again, secretly, privately, as if signalling to themselves.
    But a white deer had come trotting down the middle of the road: a pure white stag,