I flipped my viewpoint forty-odd miles, to the doorway of the Boyd Orr Building, and hovered. I wondered how many other invisible presences hung around that doorway beside me: boyfriends and girlfriends, over-anxious parents, jealous lovers, stalkers ... Just after five, students crowded out. The POV was partly inferential, its real-time elements pieced together from CCTV, happenstance overflights, passer-by phones. The time ticked on ... ten past, quarter past. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the spotty coverage had missed her, Gabrielle appeared. She was smiling to herself. My heart jumped like a hooked fish. The doors swung shut behind her. She walked up the ramp to the street, and turned right. I followed her all the way on her brisk brief journey, up the hill past the old university building and down past the library and the Students' Union to the traffic lights. She crossed and walked on, took a couple of turns, and in one of the back streets between the university and the Kelvin river she skipped up a flight of steps to a main door, opened it with a key, and went in. The door closed behind her.

Inside, as I could see from the building's overlay, were three flights of stairs to the door of Calum's flat. No doubt she had a key to that, too. The only view I could get showed a light coming on, but nothing closer was on offer. I dropped back out and took the glasses off. My hands shook even more than they had before I'd put the glasses on. Not with rage or jealousy, but with the sort of slightly shame-faced thrill I sometimes felt while viewing quite innocent ice-skating, dance and fashion-history sites. I found myself wondering what time Gabrielle went to work, and which evenings she and Calum went out.

I heaved myself off the recliner, and went through to the kitchen to prepare my dinner. A tin of mixed beans went into the pan, followed by a carton of passata, a pinch of dried herbs, a few leaves and stalks of fresh coriander and a chopped chilli. While it was simmering I tore off and buttered a chunk of bread, and poured a mug of wine. When the meal was ready I put the pan on the table and ate from it with the wooden spoon while watching the news on my glasses, pausing now and then to wipe off the steam. Replete, I stuck the pan and plate in the sink, topped up the wine mug, and returned to the recliner. I made a careful mixture of Focus and Mellow Yellow a a nifty little combo of cannabinoids, opioids and nicotine from the head shop on the South Bridge that I'd taken to dropping in on a and sat back for a physically relaxed but mentally alert evening of thinking, browsing and watching vapour rings drift apart. After catching up with the rest of the day's news and checking my email and watching a clip of a skate-dancing contest in Kyrgyzstan for the third time that week I found my attention turning back to Gabrielle. With a saving modicum of caution, I resisted the temptation of another virtual visit, but I couldn't stop thinking about her.

She had apparently settled in with Calum. She'd looked happy to be heading home, light on her feet, smiling, quick up the steps. I'd already seen the touch of her taste in the flat's decor, over Calum's shoulder. I could all too easily imagine the two of them together. They made a couple like those I'd noticed four and a half years earlier at the wedding ceilidh: all the big lunks and gracile lassies. That old Neanderthal sexual dimorphism thing ...

At this point a thought occurred to me that got me pouring a slug of whisky into the bottom of the now empty mug, and toking Zip, a mixture more potent than Focus or Mellow Yellow. My mind started racing, and I took a swig of whisky to slow my brain.

The thought was this. Remembering the ceilidh, I'd recalled the guarded looks I'd got from Gabrielle's parents the first time they saw me, and their obvious wish for further private conversation with Gabrielle immediately afterwards. Things had continued in the same way after that discouraging start. Her parents had never really taken me to their hearts. They'd been polite enough, even friendly and hospitable, but I'd never been able to shake the suspicion that they didn't rate me as good enough for their little girl.

Was it possible, I now wondered, that Gabrielle's extended family knew, at some level, who was and who wasn't likely to be a good match? That they had some traditional knowledge, even if only in hints and rumours and old wives' tales, of the speciation that Gabrielle had learned of from studying genetics? Calum's now-disavowed schoolboy claim of a secret family tradition came back to me with renewed salience. Of course, he'd said he'd made it up, but when someone says once that they were lying earlier, how can you be sure they aren't lying again?

I could easily imagine family occasions, and weddings in particular, being used as matchmaking opportunities, bringing together cousins distant enough to avoid inbreeding but close enough to be fertile. Was it possible, then, that whoever had invited Calum to the bash had expected him, and not some stranger he'd brought along, to fall for Gabrielle a or at least, for one of the many single ladies there? He'd ended up in deep conversation with one of the bridesmaids, to be sure, but as far as I knew nothing a or nothing much a had come of it. Looking back, I had the distinct impression that Calum had noticed Gabrielle at the same moment as I had, and that the other young woman was very much a second best as far as he was concerned. If Calum hadn't baited me about missing out more than once on Sophie's subtle signalling of interest, might I have been less forward in approaching Gabrielle? Might he have got to her first? Just as he'd got to Sophie first.

Hah. That was, to my surprise, a sore point. Sophie! Every time I'd met her since and including that time in the pub before our Highers I'd missed her signals, misread her situation, put a misplaced loyalty to Calum above the impulse to say something, to do something, to make a move. A sore point, indeed. I decided that probing it further would be like poking at a tooth you already know is going to hurt.

No, what was on my mind and galling me was the thought of Calum being welcomed into Gabrielle's family as the ideal son-in-law. I felt oddly more jealous about that than I did at the thought of Gabrielle in his bed, infuriating and agonising though that was. What if a and it was here, I think, that my most elaborate and self-serving and self-destructive conspiracy theory really took off a Gabrielle's parents had all along intended Calum to be Gabrielle's partner, and had subtly poisoned her mind against me? By hinting or outright saying that I was a waster, a drifter, a man with no future? I couldn't see how I could find that out other than by a direct admission, but that could wait. What I wanted to do, right this minute, was find out if my idea about the wedding and the family had been correct.

Unfortunately for me, I knew just how to do it. My phone, my pad and now my glasses contained all the tools I needed. Some of them were standard apps, others were part of every journalist's kit and therefore on the shady side of legal. I sat up, took a toke of Zip, spread my phone on the table and pulled everything together: Registry Office records of births, marriages and deaths; police and court records; genetic databases; personal searches; consanguinity calculators ... I started with Calum and Gabrielle, and worked my way back through generations. I soon found the two of them were indeed, as Calum had said, distant relatives. They had a great-great (etc) grandfather in common a that old village atheist Gabrielle had mentioned over our first lunch together: Seamus the Tink, Hamish an Duirach, James the Jura man. From there I began tracing the branching lines forward, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on into the twenty-first. Then I traced other lines back.

By midnight I had a rough genealogy for the clan. In three dimensions it was a multi-node roughly cone-shaped network. I saved it, vaped some Bliss, knocked back a nightcap slug of Glen Pokhara and hit the sack.

The following morning, feeling predictably bleary from the whisky but revived by a shower and boosted by a toke of Zip with my first coffee, I sat at the kitchen table with my glasses on and my chin propped on my hands and watched Calum leave the flat about eight and head down to the Kelvinbridge subway station. I flipped back to the street outside the flat and kept half an eye on it while making and eating breakfast, glancing at the news headlines, and conducting a more careful scan of my science and technology trawl to see if any items worth writing about had been caught in its nets overnight.

Gabrielle left the flat about forty minutes later. I followed her every step on her ten-minute walk to work, and then, in a moment of daring, hitched a floating camcopter to catch a glimpse of her through the windows of the sixth floor. She'd put on a white lab coat and tied up her hair, and she had her hands a fists, going by the muscle tensions a rammed in the pockets as she stared at a wall screen. Then she seemed to relax a little, took her hands from the pockets and slipped on glasses of her own. Quite unaccountably, unless she had the feeling of being watched or the glasses warned of the camcopter's gaze, she turned and looked out of the window as if straight at me. I felt a jolt like electricity, but held the orientation for another few seconds. She blinked hard, gave a tiny headshake and shrug, and turned away.

I dropped the connection and sat quivering. Had she noticed me watching her? Or had she just spotted the camcopter, as a minor flaw in her sight like a floater in the eye? I searched on counter-surveillance apps and found many, several of them recently and specifically developed and marketed in response to the release of SkEye. One or two claimed to be able to show the user the identity of any SkEye user watching them. This gave me a falling-lift moment of dismay, but my experience of tech journalism made me sceptical of the claim. My doubt was confirmed by a quick search on the apps: SkEye itself was advertising counter-counter-measures as standard. The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

But this was no cause for complacency: Calum could easily have given Gabrielle backdoor access to SkEye itself, or for that matter included some usage-tracking software in my trial package. For all I knew, it might not even be a hack, it might be a feature. Maybe I was being a bit paranoid, but ... I bit the bullet and bought a sub to EyeFly (the name was already in litigation), one of the rival products that had sprung up in the week since SkEye's launch, having been in development for months or years beforehand and hastily readied for market. That meant it was pretty much a beta release, but I could live with that for the peace of mind.

Unless the tracking software I'd imagined had been left on my glasses ... No. I stopped that train of thought right there. No need to get paranoid, I told myself, and just to test my nerve used my newly installed app to look at Calum at work in StrathSpace's glass tower on the Clyde. He didn't look back.

Paranoia, I decided, was something I needed to think about. There was a definite danger of my falling into it. It wouldn't do at all to let it get in the way of my investigation into a possible generations-long conspiracy that I suspected had now turned its attentions against myself.

I dropped out of EyeFly and fiddled with my e-pipe, as something to occupy my hands. A calmer toke than Zip seemed called for so I unscrewed that tank and replaced it with one of Focus, to which I added a few drops of Mellow Yellow. After I'd surrounded my nose with a soothing cloud of maple-syrup-scented vapour, I faced up square to my misgivings. Let me try to reconstruct a rapid and at the time rather frenetic process of thought.

What was I worried about? Like everyone else, I'd long taken for granted that the state, and anyone with the relevant resources and connections, could monitor all my online activity. I already knew, or had good reason to suspect, that this had happened to me at least once a when Baxter had traced my search on Revelation a and again more recently when he'd picked up on my conversation with Sophie. But Baxter had no reason to be interested in what I was doing now. I doubted that Calum, or his employers in StrathSpace, had the kind of influence and connections that Baxter and British Avionic Systems had. Nor was this likely of the people whose genealogies I'd roughed out the previous night. True enough, that network of linked extended families demonstrated a thriving lineage, but it was of people who'd done well in the small to medium private sector a business owners like Calum's father, professionals like Gabrielle's, farmers like Big Don's a rather than within the state or in companies cock-in-condom with it like defence. Oddly enough, they were exactly the kind of people Baxter's party appealed to, rather than like Baxter himself.

Baxter ... something was bugging me about Baxter, some connection I hadn't made. I scribbled his name down, and returned my attention to the main point a that no one I was looking at was likely to be able to repeat his feat, whatever it was he had done.

So I was probably safe enough investigating the supposed family conspiracy. As for watching Calum and Gabrielle, the simple measure of changing to a different app would keep me off the radar of any unconventional counter-measures. That left the conventional ones: if Gabrielle's phone or glasses or just uneasy feelings warned her that someone was watching her, she could call the police with a complaint of stalking, in which I'd be the natural prime suspect. A mention of my name would trigger an automatic trawl of my records, and have me bang to rights.

Well, not over my adventures of the previous night and this morning, obviously, but certainly if I were to make a habit of them. A pattern of behaviour a that's the phrase the lawyers use. I wouldn't go to jail or even be fined for it, unless I'd made actual threats or actively harassed her, which I had no intention of doing. But being convicted of persistent unwanted watching of a specific individual a particularly a former lover a is a good way to get a restraining order slapped on you. And the usual restriction imposed? A software lock on your phone and other devices that leaves you with little more than the capacity to phone your mum or order a take-away. Add to this a legal restraint on your acquiring any other devices or access, and that flags up your name to every business and institution you might approach. There are ways round it, of course, but I'd be barred from any legitimate work in freelance journalism. Even after the order had expired, its record would remain. My employment prospects would be like those of someone whose name had once been on the Sex Offenders Register looking for a job in a nursery.

It might be a good idea to establish a pattern of doing a lot of virtual viewing of other places and other people. There were, after all, many uses I could make of the app in my legitimate work. I just had to be careful, and not watch Gabrielle too often. No more than once a day, say, and only when she was on the street. Or in another public place. Or in a place where she could reasonably expect to be seen. Or in a situation where she had made no provision for privacy. Or ...

You get the idea.

22.

Outside my window, snow wasn't so much falling on Leith as precipitating out of the air, in tiny particles of ice like frozen drizzle. Typical weather for the beginning of April, but enough to provoke a stirring of vague surprise and resentment, which people my age have probably picked up from their parents. It fitted my mood, which was rattled and out of sorts. I'd just come out of my by now daily self-torturing quarter-hour session of watching Gabrielle. I wasn't just watching her on weekdays. For several Saturdays or Sundays now, I'd observed her and Calum doing banal, soppy, couple-ish things, like walking hand in hand in Kelvingrove Park or shopping in Sauchiehall Street or browsing the bookshops and sitting in the cafes of Byres Road or going out to or walking home from an Indian restaurant. The more happy and relaxed they looked together the worse I felt, both about the situation and about my own jealous obsession. Time and again I mentally said goodbye and good luck to them both, waved a wry blessing at their unheeding images, and switched off. Time and again, sometimes after as long as two days, I found myself watching Gabrielle once more.

So now. Oh well. I watched her go to her work, and turned with a certain reluctance to my own. I'd sat up until late the previous night refining my history of Gabrielle's and Calum's ancestral clans, and gone to sleep feeling I had it pretty much nailed down. Now I wanted to dig deeper into it, but that wouldn't bring in any money. Paying rent on a two-person flat, I needed all the money I could get. So much for being out of sorts. What had rattled me, though, was an item that had come up in the overnight trawl.

A space access project, one of several taking shape around the old RAF airbase at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre, had announced the date for its first full-scale test as sometime in the first couple of weeks in May or thereabouts. (There was a reason for this imprecision as we'll see.) The project was one of the many schemes, some on the face of it rather hare-brained, which the Scottish Government had a thanks to the crowd-sourced market-plan hybrid chimeric bastard offspring of the Scottish Futures Forum on the New Improvement a more or less backed itself into backing. We all remember the Sighthill Salmon Ladder scandal, of course, but it's only sad bastards like me who can give you the details of the Spey River Turbine affair, the Moray Firth Delphinarium outrage, the Boat of Garten Wing-Mirror Farm receivership controversy, and so on.

This particular boondoggle involved launching a huge high-altitude balloon which, from high in the stratosphere, would drop a payload strapped to a cluster of ramjets. The ramjets would ignite, the craft would pull out of its powered dive and make a hairpin turn to ascent, and up it would go. The final thrust to orbit would be with a conventional rocket engine, kicking in when the air-breathing ramjets choked off for lack of air to breathe. This being Scotland, the project was called the Rammie, allegedly standing for Rapid-Airbreathing Multiple Motor Innovation Experiment, though I suspected the acronym had been an afterthought to the moniker.

One tiny little technical issue with the whole project was the inconvenient truth that the prevailing wind in Scotland is from the west, as is the jet stream, which likewise inconveniently has a tendency to wander over Scotland quite a lot. This meant that the balloon would tend to drift, not out over the Atlantic, but over the central belt of Scotland, the North Sea and on over Scandinavia and Russia, none of which were used or inhabited by folks likely to take kindly to experimental rockets making a vertical screaming nosedive in their general direction, regardless of how well-tested the 'pulling out in a hairpin turn' part of the plan was.

To this sort of knee-jerk, negative, nervous-nellie, nimby eyebrow twitching the project's participants and backers had a well-rehearsed response, repeated wearily and oft, prominent in the site's FAQ. It was ... Ah, fuck it, let me just me pull up the quote: Q: Won't prevailing winds and the jet stream make the balloon drift to the east, over heavily populated territory?

A: No. The balloon we're going to use is made of a new metamaterial which takes in air from one side and expels it from the other, thus moving the balloon. The thrust is small, but steady, and more than enough to counter these air currents. The balloon will only drop its payload over the North Atlantic. Furthermore, there's no intention to set up regular commercial launches from Machrihanish. The purpose of our project is to develop the technology and establish proof of concept. If successful and commercially adopted, any use of the system for scheduled launches is likely to be from the eastern coast of the Americas, or from China. The aim of our project is that Scotland will then have a head start in manufacturing equipment for this new and exciting system of cheap and reliable space access!

As a further safeguard, all our experimental ascents will be carefully timed to coincide with wind from the east, and with the jet stream flowing to the north or south of the flight path.

Not everyone, you may be surprised to learn, was reassured. Disquiet over the project had reached the Scottish Parliament, refracted through the cracked prism of political alignments. The Green Party was in the government coalition, with one junior minister, and its MSPs spoke in support of the project through gritted teeth and with one arm twisted behind them. Plenty of rank-and-file members and supporters of the party were hostile or dubious and backed a small but noisy campaign (predictably called Nae Rammie) against it.

The Renewal Party, as a small component of the official opposition bloc, presented a mirror-image contortion. Party policy and rhetoric derided the New Improvement. Some journalists, however, suspected that Renewal's three MSPs had a sneaking regard for this particular project, it being the sort of wacky optimistic private-sector government-backed space-hype adventure that appealed to them as well as to the party's younger voters, whose free-market principles could always be relied on to take a back seat to a chance to stick it to the Greens. In Parliament two had abided by bloc discipline and voted against it. The third, James Baxter, the opposition bloc's Shadow Minister for Technology, had recused himself on the grounds of perceived possible conflict of interest: the manufacturer of the self-propelling balloon's engine was none other than his former employer, British Avionic Systems.

It was the sort of story I'd normally avoid, because a besides Baxter a it involved the silver spheres. I was still reluctant to so much as think about the new aviation, despite seeing an increasing number of anomalously speedy balloons and blimps flit across the skies. I'd tinkered with the settings of my tech-news trawls, but now and again something on the subject didn't slip through the deliberate holes in my net. What had snagged this one were two company names that I definitely did keep an eye on.

One was StrathSpace, which had offered to provide the launch with hyper-local weather information and real-time coverage, an offer gratefully received and duly publicised. The other was Fabrications, the company that had given Sophie her internship and her first proper job. Its range had expanded beyond fashion textiles a the division in which Sophie was still employed, and as far as I knew doing well a via outdoor wear to tent, canoe, and microlight-aircraft fabrics, and thence to the new aviation metamaterials. It was flashed up as a sponsor and listed in the background links as the supplier to BAS of the self-propelling balloon fabric, which BAS had developed (ha!) and patented, but which it found more efficient to license out for large-scale manufacture.

Now that was an angle, I thought. It was high time I got over my phobia about the new aviation. Coming at it by way of the new metamaterials might be a gentle route to desensitising myself on the topic. And anyway, I hadn't spoken to Sophie for years.

The time was just after 9.30. I texted Sophie asking for a good time to call, and she replied that she'd ring me back in about an hour. This gave me time for more research, so I got on with that. When the phone rang I threw the call to the wall screen and let her see me too. Sophie sat at a desk, coffee mug to hand, sheets of paper and pads around her, and a wall with tacked-up sketches and swirling whiteboard arrows behind. She grinned at me. The grin faded as she looked at my room.

'Hi, Ryan. Did you have a party last night, or what?'

'What?' I shook my head. 'No. Why?'

'Bit of a tip you've got there, if you don't mind my saying so.'

'Oh!' I waved as if swatting at midges. 'Yeah, I need to tidy up, I guess.'

'Do that,' Sophie said. 'And yes, I've heard.'

'Heard about what?'

She gave me a look. 'Gabrielle.'

'Oh, yeah, well ...' I shrugged.

'I understand why you're gutted,' Sophie said. 'But don't let it demoralise you, OK?'

'Well, yeah, I suppose it does seem a bit ...'

'It does seem a bit,' she said firmly. 'It looks like it whiffs a bit, to be honest.'

I looked at the condition of the front room and saw what she meant. It wasn't obvious squalor: there were no pizza boxes or take-away cartons, because I cooked for myself; no unwashed plates, because I always ate out of pans and left them in the sink; no beer cans, because I didn't drink beer at home; and no whisky bottles, because I doggedly took these to the recycling bins every week. It was just lots of things out of place, an entropic increase in disorder.

'Anyway,' she said brightly, 'I take it this isn't what you wanted to talk about.'

I outlined what I did want to talk about.

'I'm not sure I can help,' said Sophie. 'It's not my area.' She indicated the colourful, slow-twirling sketches behind her. 'I'm still in fashion fabrics.'

'Oh, sure,' I said. 'I know. I just wondered if you could point me to someone who knows a bit more-'

'There's a link here' a she limned it in the air with the tip of her forefinger a 'to aviation fabrics enquiries-'

'Yeah, yeah,' I said. 'I've tried that. Just got the standard stuff, anyone can look at and listen to. I'd like just one sentence from an actual human voice with a name I can quote.'

'Hmm. All right. I shouldn't really do this, but try Jasmine.'

She pushed out the name and I grabbed it, slapping it on my phone before Sophie could change her mind.

'Thanks.' I felt awkward all of a sudden, like having caught myself in a faux pas. Oh yes, I'd been a bit too instrumental and brusque. 'Uh, how are things with you?'

'Fine, thanks for asking,' she said. She sipped from the mug, enjoying my discomfort, knowing I knew she knew about it. 'There's hope for you yet, Ryan. But I have to crack on at the moment.'

'Oh, that's OK, thanks, I understand. Those lampshades don't light themselves, or something.'

'Ha-ha! Not bad, not bad.' Her eyes narrowed. 'And do remember to take care of yourself, Ryan, yes?'

'Yes,' I said. 'You too.'

She snapped her fingers and her face dwindled and vanished, leaving an after-image in my mind if not on my retinae of a fleeting impression of irritation from just before the connection broke.

I called Jasmine, who turned out to be a technical specialist in the aviation fabrics plant. She was wary at first, but relaxed when I mentioned Sophie and, I think, when she realised that like her I was from Greenock. A virtual tour of the plant and running commentary took about fifteen minutes, at the end of which I had plenty of soundbites, quotes, stats, technical details and so forth to cobble together.

'I got to get on wi things, mind,' she said, sounding actually regretful.

'Oh, it's been great, many thanks.'

I wove what Jasmine had told me into other material I pulled in during the course of the morning, fired off the piece, and got a couple of acceptances before I'd finished my lunch. All very well, but picking over my necessarily unused scraps of research I sniffed the potential of something bigger: an analytical article that would get picked up by the serious sci-tech sites, and (if I pushed the right political buttons) even the main news and comment channels, especially in the US where 'The New Improvement: Threat or Menace?' was a perennial talking-head topic of displaced and disproportionate, not to say fair and balanced, debate.

The prospect was tempting. I had the track record, the background knowledge, a good list of contacts and sources, and I was now fully up to speed on developments. The opportunity was mine to seize. Only one thing made me hesitate. There was one politician I could not avoid quoting, and could not pass up the chance of an interview with or off-the-record briefing from.

I sat staring at Baxter's name on the screen for a long time, trying to think of a way I could avoid talking to him. There seemed to be none. Even a news bot wouldn't generate a story about the Rammie debate without some mention of him, and the only way I could get my story past any decent editing software would be for it to be better than anything a news bot could compile. (It's an open secret of journalism that editors fire up news bots and run comparisons on incoming copy.) I leaned back, looking away from the screen, and my gaze fell on a scrap of paper on which I'd scribbled Baxter's name.

For a moment I berated my earlier self for leaving my later self such an unhelpful reminder. Why had I written his name down? Oh yes, I'd been seeking some connection that had eluded me. Some connection a other than the coincidental one raised by my worries about surveillance a between Baxter and the problem of Calum and Gabrielle. And of course other than the obvious one with our encounter all that time ago with a light from the sky that might well have been a smaller and earlier version of the very same kind of balloon as the Rammie project would use. I still didn't get whatever my subconscious had flagged up. I hadn't seen or spoken to Baxter since Calum and I had met him by chance outside the Parliament, just before our far more fateful convergence of paths with Gabrielle. I'd glimpsed him on screen now and again, usually spitting soundbites like he had that time Gabrielle and I had watched him on my phone while he'd ranted on a panel at the Forum.

The Forum! It was as if a light flickered in my mind. Not the connection itself, but a tiny indicator that I was close to the connection ...

Then I saw it. I literally jumped out of my seat.

'Fuck!' I said. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.'

Half my life suddenly made a lot more sense. I'd never been the person of interest, the focus, the centre of attention. I'd been collateral damage. I'd been played. Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers, I thought. I was a player now, I was going to play Baxter right back, and I was going to play him good.

I picked up the phone. I made a call, then wandered through to the kitchen and made a coffee. The time was about 3.30. I decided to give it an hour.

I took my time over the coffee, and crafted a pitch with care. Some journos pitch by buzzword bingo, and you can see the results all over the net, but reputable sites like my first target, Sci/Tech World, have more sophisticated editors. You can game these, too, with subtle logical constructions. You'll get the gig, maybe. But your story will get pulled as soon as real people see it (which can take some time, admittedly) and in the long run you have to change bylines so often that you never build up a reputation. Sci/Tech World's front-end editor knows me from way back. It considered my proposal and commissioned the piece in, literally, less time than it takes to tell.

I cheered, celebrated with a toke of Zip, then did a bit more background research while keeping an eye on the clock icon. As soon as the number changed from 4.29 to 4.30 I called Baxter's office at Holyrood, and got straight through. This was unprecedented. I wasn't surprised.

'Hello?'

'Good afternoon,' I said. 'I'd like to speak to Jim Baxter.'

'Speaking,' he said. 'How can I help you?'

I'd already recognised his voice. He had me at hello, I thought. He'd had me at hello from the start.

'My name's Ryan Sinclair,' I said. 'I'm a science journalist, and I wondered if we could meet to discuss the Rammie project. Off the record, if you like.'

'Tomorrow,' he said. 'Ten thirty suit you?'

'Yes indeed,' I said. 'Thanks.'

'I can give you an hour and a half.'

'That's great! Thank you very much.'

'You're welcome,' he said. 'It's just my job.'

We'll see about that, I thought.

'See you then!'

'Cheers.'

He clicked off.