i

Jade was out of place. Or, rather, it wasn't her but the restaurant that was wrong. The carefully crafted ambience, the skillful use of space and light, the murmur of smartly dressed people, the reasonably priced bottles of wine, all seemed tacky and cheap in her presence. The artifice of the whole situation suddenly proclaimed itself, as though the simple honesty radiating from her forced the brick facades and the laminated tables to confess. Under the quiet pressure of her intelligent gaze, the sad pretensions of the surrounding diners announced themselves in every gesture and utterance.

"I'm sorry," Terry said. "Not your kind of place, really. We should have -- I dunno -- had fish and chips under the flyover." Or, better still, he thought, sat around a fire, the Gypsy caravans drawn close, the smell of game roasting and the music of a lone violinist heard in the distance.

"Don't worry. The food is fine, the musak is bearable and the company is good. You can barely hear yourself shout under the flyover." He smiled and they began to talk, just exchanging sketchy autobiographies, the way people do as they begin to grow intimate.

He watched her as she spoke and ate, awed that such a beautiful and exotic creature should be there with him. He noticed how the other diners, male and female, would turn and look at her surreptitiously, thier eyes drawn by her strangeness and then held by her specialness. She had a special confidence, a special openness, a special radiance. Of course, he was besotted with her but then, who wouldn't be? And, as they exchanged their little confidences, he realised with a mounting excitement that this fabulous young woman with her outlandish clothes, her careless freedom of expression and her penetrating intellect, really did seem to like his company. The vain struggle he had foreseen against her growing boredom and indifference, had not happened. Instead she listened to his views and smiled at his obscure, introverted humour with every appearance of approving of him and enjoying his company.

The courses came and went. The conversation moved about as they each explored the breadth and depth of the other. Eventually, the coffee came and they began on the subject of magic.

"Oh but I believe in it," she said. "Totally and absolutely." He groaned inside. It had been too good to be true. Of course she had to be some kind of loony -- religious, perhaps, or a committed Socialist, or something. She was just too good to be true.

"I'm afraid," he said -- now how could he put this? -- "that I only believe in things that are consistent with everything else I believe." Get out of that! "I'm very strict about it."

"Very smug, too, I see," making his face fall, "but I'm sure I could convince you if you gave me time and if you kept an open mind."

He smiled again at the prospect. "Oh you can have all the time you want. Any time I don't spend with you from now on is wasted," he saw her eyes shine at the compliment, "but my mind is only as open as it is. I can't promise you much there."

She looked at him long and hard and he felt her weighing and calculating. "Oh I think you'll do just fine," she said and they both smiled.

After paying-the bill, they left and he walked her home. They held hands as they walked and Terry felt as though nothing better could ever, ever happen to him. His heart filled his chest to capacity and his thoughts were a dizzy whirl with Jade, delicate and beautiful at their calm centre.

ii

On Tuesday, Jade came to meet Terry for lunch. She walked into the big, open-plan office as though she worked there herself. She came straight up to Terry, all eyes on her, and kissed him like an old and favourite lover. He could have sworn he heard Bob Garret saying "Oh man!" under his breath. Flushed with pride, he happily agreed to show Jade the work they were doing.

"It's a computer science lab, of course, so lots of what we do is pretty off the wall. This is Stephanie (Hiy. Hiy.) She's working on getting a neural net to recognise when it's in danger. Creepy stuff but Steph believes it will give us enormous insights into the nature of consciousness. Thanks Steph. And over here, Bob is doing stuff on artificial life."

"Hiy, Bob."

"Hello! And you are?"

"Jade."

"Jade! Really? Well hello, Jade."

"What's artificial life?"

"A puzzle inside a conundrum inside an enigma."

"It's a kind of simulation of an eco-system," Terry broke in. "One creates a world in which artificial creatures live and eat and breed. You set the rules about what they eat and how they breed and so on and what kinds of creatures there are and then just set them off doing it and see what happens."

"Like playing God," said Jade, smiling sweetly. "Only in a tiny, tiny way."

Terry moved them on while Bob was still thinking about it. "It's a shame Mark isn't here. He's doing some incredible things in the area of self-organising systems and chaos theory."

"But what do you do, Terry?"

"Oh, er, me. C'mon. I'll show you."

He took her over to his workbench with all its piles of processors and tangles of wire. There were several large screens, all blank, and a jumble of odd-looking peripherals -- goggles, balls, joysticks, polhemus cubes, gloves. "What I do," he said, typing rapidly at one of the keyboards, "is virtual reality."

"Oh gosh. I've heard of that. It's where you wear helmets and gloves and things and you get a whole artificial world created for you that you can fly about in and believe it's real."

"Near enough," he said, still tapping in commands. "There. Come on, put this on." He handed her a lightweight visor and she slipped it on. "And this." He gave her an elastic belt with two black boxes attached. She put this on too. He had to help her tighten it because her waist was so slim. "OK. The visor receives signals by radio and it has its own position sensors for your head movements. The belt generates a small electric field around your body so that the positions of your limbs and torso can be detected by antennae under the carpet." She accepted all this without a word. "Now, if you'll just stand still for a moment and look straight ahead..."

"But I can't see anything!"

"Oh you will. Just a moment." He tapped again at the keyboard. Suddenly a world formed around her -- not a very realistic world, more like a very well done cartoon world. It was a simple plane with distant, parallel walls and a black sky above them. A little ball hovered in space in front of her. "OK," Terry said, "take hold of the ball."

"What?"

"Go on. You can. Just reach out and grasp it."

Hesitantly, she raised her arm and gasped in amazement as an arm came into her view, just where her real arm should be. But it wasn't her real arm. It was a naked, cartoon arm. She moved it about, flexing her wrist and elbow. Then she raised her other arm and it too was a cartoon arm. She put her hands in front of her and wriggled her fingers. Her cartoon hands wriggled their fingers too.

"Please, Jade. You have to grasp the ball. I need it for my calibration." He saw Jade's mouth smile under the visor.

"Oh, I see," she said. "It's a ritual. A rite of passage." Terry smiled too. Yes, of course. A ritual. Why had he never seen it like that? He saw her reach out her hand and, on the screen, he saw her hand touch and then hold the ball. Under the brightly-coloured plastic casing of his computer, he imagined the software components that dealt with the incredibly complex job of calibrating Jade's position signals and orienting its internal model of her body against the virtual world model it maintained so that, when the image of that world was projected stereoscopically into her eyes, it would appear to her the right way up and with distances and perspectives appropriate to her size and orientation. "Here we go!" he said, the technical magician, showing off his mysterious world.

All around Jade a new reality sprang into being. She was in a garden. Around her were trees and beds of flowers. Beneath her was grass and in the grass were hundreds of daisies. She looked around. To her right, the garden sloped away to small lake that glistened in the bright sunlight. To her left, she found a huge and impressive Tudor mansion. She took a step towards it, enchanted and was stopped by a disembodied Terry.

"No, don't walk," he said. "You'll only bump into things. If you point at where you want to go, you can glide there."

A slow smile spread on her lips as she savoured the idea. Her hand came up and pointed at the house. With a smooth, soundless acceleration, she began to glide forwards. Quickly, she put her arm down and slid to a gentle stop. Then, just as suddenly, she pointed straight up and soared into the air. She heard Terry make some kind of exclamation but she hardly noticed. With her hand high above her she continued to rush into space. Looking down, she saw the house and its grounds, the lake and the trees diminishing. In moments the edge of the world was revealed and she could see the house and its estate like tiny models on a big square board. All around the board was black. Absolute black. She looked around and ahead and the black was solid in all directions, only below her was any light or colour and that only in the rapidly shrinking square that had been the whole world. Still she kept her arm rigidly pointing above her. Looking back, she saw the square shrink to a dot and then vanish. Now she was racing -- or hovering she could not tell -- through the pure void. There was nothing at all in any direction. Nothing.

"Er, if you want to get back, I could re-set it for you." It was Terry's voice. She thought he sounded hurt, unhappy. She brought her hand down and took off the visor. He was standing beside her, a confused, uncomfortable look on his face. "People don't usually do that," he said, with just a touch of accusation. She had not taken it seriously, his tone of voice said. She had spoilt the game. Behind him she saw the watching Bob grinning from ear to ear. "But it was wonderful!" she said. "Incredible!" and threw herself on him in a huge embrace.

iii

Among his many other anxieties about tonight, Terry was worried that maybe Jade didn't know how to cook. The building had been hard to find. It was in a part of town he never visited -- a poor, dangerous place -- and his fear of it made him feel at a disadvantage, as though living here somehow made Jade a grown-up and him a child. Walking through the scruffy, threatening streets had made him wish he had bought her chocolates and not that huge, obvious bunch of flowers. And then he was standing in front of the door to her flat, bottle of wine in one hand and the stupid flowers in the other, wondering how he could knock.

Jade was her usual, cool self, stunningly desirable in a dress that hugged her and yielded to her. Terry, holding out his gifts, felt stupid and gauche, suddenly so depressed he almost missed her opening remarks.

She freed him of his burden and led him into her den. It was dimly lit and queer. There was little furniture but what there was seemed strange and foreign. Curious knick-knacks stood on tables and shelves, or hung on the walls. They should have been African or Aztec fetishes but they seemed oddly home-made. He recognised a group of corn-dollies, dusty and neglected on a corner table and a little clay figure that could have been Celtic but most of it was just a jumble of junk to him.

"After dinner I'll show you where I work," she said and sat him at the table.

"I thought you worked at a photographer's" It was where he had met her, after all. He'd gone there to complain about the quality of some prints and the very young boy on the counter had gone into the back and fetched out this astonishing creature to deal with him.

"Oh that's just what I do to pay the rent. What do you think?"

He looked down at the food she was nodding towards. He thought the food was excellent. He thought maybe he had died and gone to Heaven.

The feeling lasted right through dinner as dish followed dish and the talked ranged far and wide. A few glasses of wine had relaxed him enough that he was chattering freely and happily and there were times when he almost forgot that he was alone with the most desirable woman he could ever imagine meeting, that they had dated and kissed and that the script according to a million million movies said that tonight was the night and he would be expected to do something about it.

"Come on," she said, standing and reaching for his hand. "It's time." Perhaps his face showed some of the sudden alarm he felt because she laughed and said again. "Come on."

He stood up and let her lead him across the room and through a door that had stayed discretely closed during the whole evening. "La voila!" she announced with a big gesture. "My sanctum sanctorum!"

Terry looked around in astonishment. It was a large room and almost bare. It was dark and although Jade moved about lighting lamps, it remained gloomy. The uncarpeted floor had a great pentangle painted on it with cabalistic symbols in and around it. There was a desk with books piled high and, Terry could hardly believe it, an altar with fat, black candles and strange objects on it that he dared not look too closely at. Jade watched him with the lamplight burning in her eyes and said nothing while he took it all in. There was a smell to the room -- herbal, perhaps, mixed with smoke and something sweet.

"Black magic," he said, weakly. It was hard to say which feeling was strongest in him; a sad disappointment that his wonderful, bright, intelligent Jade should turn out to be even more of an oddball mystic than he had feared, or the humiliation of having so badly misjudged the whole situation. "So you're -- what? -- a witch or something?" His feelings swung though disappointment and into depression.

Jade watched him with a serious, determined expression. "You were destined to come to me, to be my pupil," she told him and suddenly laughed, "But I see I've got my work cut out haven't I?"

"Pardon?"

"People have a lot of misconceptions about magic," she said. "It's nothing like you think at all, you know."

Of course, she'd told him she was into this -- on their very first date -- but he'd managed to put it out of his mind somehow. Because he'd wanted to, he thought, bitterly.

"It's just a set of procedures you go through to make things happen," she said. "Like a recipe, or following a knitting pattern."

"Or a computer program," he said, quietly.

"Exactly! Now don't judge this until you've given it a fair try. I had a go on your virtual world thingy, didn't I?"

"Yes but that's..." He stopped and sighed.

"Different," she said, finishing his thought. "Well, of course it's different." She stepped up to him and put her long, delicate hands on his shoulders. "But it's just as real," she said and the irony and the gentle touch of her hands made him smile at himself. Following up her success, she moved closer to him so she had to look up into his face. Her breasts moved against his chest and his loins stirred in instant response.

"Oh you are a witch," he said, amazed at how much he wanted her, how little all this mumbo-jumbo mattered, "and I'm completely under your spell." He put his hands on her strong, slender back and drew her to him, seeking her parted lips with his own.

iv

The past few weeks had been like a dream for Terry. Every day now he saw Jade and every moment that they were not having incredible, hot sex, he was learning magic. Jade insisted. His scepticism, his disbelief, even his occasional outright hostility were no deterrent to her at all. She proposed a deal. He would become adept to the third circle (as she put it) and, if he still thought it was rubbish, she wouldn't try any more to convert him. Apparently such a meagre degree of adeptness could be achieved in a few weeks of diligent application. So, given that he was getting quite interested in it all anyway, he agreed and was instantly rewarded with a little dance of delight from his paramour.

Jade had given him piles of books to read and had sat with him for hours, patiently explaining the way she believed the world really worked. Last night had been typical.

"The world you see around you is just a veil," she had said. "True reality lies beneath and beyond what we perceive with our ordinary senses."

"So it's some kind of trick? An illusion."

"No. Not an illusion. It's just that the world we see is a surface on something bigger. An orange peel isn't an illusion, is it? But the orange is far more than just it's surface."

"So the world really is just a great big onion!"

As ever, when his flippancy got the better of his good manners, she just ignored him. "There are ways to lift the veil," she had gone on, "and to reveal the true reality beneath. Once you've gone beyond the surface, of course, there are all kinds of amazing things to be learnt."

"Of course," he had said drily.

"You can call the true reality the Otherworld. Different peoples have called it different things at different times but the Otherworld is the Celtic name for it and I think it's the nicest. OK?"

"Fine. Otherworld it is."

"Right. That's one thing. The other thing is to be able to do things in the Otherworld that will change things in this one. That's the real knowledge that all magicians seek."

"Can you do that?"

"Well, no, not yet. But I nearly can. Anyway. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to. Different people show different aptitudes."

He had nodded and the lesson had gone on. Now he sat with his piles of books -- quite a few of them already read -- and ran through it all, trying to make it all hang together. If he'd just read the books, he could have dismissed it all as utter drivel. Some were demented ravings from mediaeval thaumaturgists who were trying to get power over people by forcing devils to do their bidding (though why they believed it was easier to control devils than to control ordinary people he could not understand). Some were more modern texts to do with weird, hippy notions of balance and harmony, ley lines and astrology. None of it would have been worth a moment's serious thought if it had not been for the exegesis that Jade supplied. Somehow her crazy, mystical explanations of the underlying bases for all these bizzarre beliefs did seem to make them coherent.

He began to worry that his involvement with this enchantress was beginning to turn his mind. He had heard of folie a deux and knew that insane world-views could be transmitted like infections. Richard Dawkins, one of his favourite authors, wrote about memes -- ideas that worked like viruses of the mind and could pass from person to person until whole civilisations were infected. How easy it would be to pick up some kind of mad belief from Jade, made vulnerable, as he was, by his growing passion for her.

And yet...

Something nagged at him. Something about all this mumbo-jumbo was trying to say something to him.

He looked down at the book in front of him. It was a book of spells; spells against bad luck, spells to make women desire you, spells to give your horse a safe labour. His eyes ran down the lines of commands and invocations. Procedures, he thought. Like knitting patterns. Then it hit him.

Or computer programs!

Everything Jade had told him was suddenly whirling in his head. Not a veil at all. No. She had that wrong. It was all illusion. From the surface all the way down to... Down to what? What if the whole of what we believed to be reality was just like the virtual worlds he created in his computer? What if the people too -- he and Jade and everyone -- were just programs running on... on... Bishop Berkley, he recalled, had reasoned his way to the conclusion that the whole world and the people in it were just ideas in the mind of God. What if he'd been right but, instead of The Mind of God, what if you substituted A Cosmic Computer? And what if these cockeyed spells and incantations weren't just gibberish but were really expressions in some kind of cosmic programming language.

He knew of many many programs that could rewrite themselves. All it took was to create a part of the program that was intelligent enough to plan a change and then to give it editing rights to the language it was written in so that it could make the change itself. What if he created an intelligent being in one of his virtual worlds that could write code that could change its own surroundings? From the perspective of being inside the virtual world when it happened, wouldn't it be just like magic?

He threw on his jacket and, literally, ran to the door. He had to talk to Jade about this.

v

Jade was looking over his shoulder as he worked. Even without seeing her or touching her, he could feel the anger in her. The past few days had not been easy. At first she had received his revelation with a happy indulgence, pleased that he had found what she termed a 'personal metaphor' for the great mysteries he was grappling with. Later, when she realised that this was not what he was telling her and that he really believed that the universe was just a program running on the Cosmic Computer, she hit the roof.

"I should have known better than to try to share this with a computer nerd!" she had shouted, hurting him perhaps more than she realised. "You have to reduce everything to the level of bits and bytes, don't you? If you can't see it on that damned screen of yours, it's not real, is it? Well the world is real, Terry. Look. Touch it! Real. Solid. This is not all a stupid program!" He could easily have argued with her, pointed out the inconsistencies in her position, challenged her about her own views on the nature of reality, but he hadn't. He had just sat there like a lemon while she ranted. When she had said; "Maybe you don't even think sex is real. Maybe you'd rather have sex with one of your simulations. Cybersex, you people call it, don't you?" he had simply got up and gone home.

She had come round about two hours later, crying and distraught, apologising for her outburst, ashamed of herself.

"You don't know how lonely it can be being me," she had said later, when they were lying together in his single bed. "I'm always being chatted up and all that. I get as much sex as I like. Everyone thinks I'm 'beautiful' and 'desirable'," she had almost spat the words in her contempt, "but no-one really likes me. They all think I'm too intense or too weird -- especially when they find out what I'm into. They ask me if I could dress a bit more normally. They don't like me to say anything about what I believe in in front of their friends or their families. They don't want people to think they're going out with a certifiable nutcase. It's pathetic!"

"I'm not rejecting what you believe," he had told her, sincerely, "and I'm not rejecting you."

"I must give you space to explore your own beliefs," she had said. "I mustn't be afraid." And with that, they had made a truce that had lasted six days so far.

"So what's it doing?" she asked, aggressively.

"It's just loading the new agents I've added." He'd worked night and day to get the demonstration working. As ever, when some project really excited him, he had neglected everything else and focused entirely on getting the program running. His flat was a mess.

"What's an agent?"

"Sorry. Jargon. It's just a piece of software that does some particular thing for you. These agents are simulating little creatures in the virtual world. One of them is Doctor Strange the Magician." He looked up at her. "You know. Like in the comics." Jade looked back blankly. "Anyway. You'll see. Here we go." He typed a few commands into the keyboard and the screen lit up.

There was the garden again. Just the way Jade had seen it before. "I'll need my paddles for the next bit." Terry picked up a little plastic gadget in each hand and, by waving them about, moved their viewpoint. Slowly, as though she were watching a scene revealed by some distant, remote camera, the view panned across the lawn to the lake and then back towards the elegant, Tudor mansion. They moved towards the house, passing a rhododendron in full flower, following a path of rough stone slabs and stopped in a little courtyard.

Terry put down the paddles and began typing again. "Watch the door," he said.

Out of the big wooden door, six little cartoon creatures appeared. They were like colourful eggs, a meter tall, with big, smiling faces on their fronts. They moved about by bouncing around on the cobbled surface of the courtyard. They seemed to move independently, each ignoring the others and they stayed on the cobbles, not venturing onto the lawn or the paths. If one met another, as it bumbled about, it gave a little squeak or growl, depending on which one it was. Despite herself, Jade was fascinated and delighted. She wished she could get back into the virtual world to play with them.

"Now for Doc Strange," said Terry, pleased it was going so well.

Out of the door came another egg-creature. This one was clearly different from the rest; bigger, darker, with high arched eyebrows and little stick arms with big, white-gloved hands. "I borrowed all these fellows from an educational program for kids," said Terry, in case she thought he could have had time to do all this artwork as well as write the demo. "OK." Seriously now, coming to the point. "You can see how the little egg-people get about, yeah?"

"They bounce."

"Exactly! Now, why do they bounce?"

"Because you made them."

"No, no. I mean, why does anything bounce?"

Jade was growing irritable again. She didn't want to see this demonstration. She didn't want Terry feverishly tapping at his keyboard trying to prove some stupid point. She didn't want him going off on some tangent that might lead him God knows where? "Just tell me," she said.

Despite her shortness, Terry ploughed on. "Things bounce because they're elastic -- like a rubber ball. They fall because gravity accelerates them towards the Earth and they bounce off the ground because they're elastic. Now, if my little egg-people were just rubber balls, each time they bounced up, they wouldn't get quite as high as the point from which they started their fall."

"I know all this," Jade said.

"Good. So I have to give them a little upward kick with each bounce to stop them running down completely."

"They jump."

"That's it. They jump. The point is..."

"Oh at last!"

"The point is, that this world is a simulation of the real world, with gravity and elasticity and all."

"That's the point, is it?"

"Well, no. Not exactly." The effort of keeping this up in the face of her hostility was beginning to get wearing. "Watch Doctor Strange." Again he typed a few commands, his long fingers flicking expertly over the grey plastic keys. She watched his hands and the concentration on his face.

Doctor Strange moved to the centre of the courtyard and held up his stick arms. "Hear me O my little egg-people!" he said in a synthesised computer voice, his cartoon lips opening and closing in synch. The little egg-people all turned towards him and began to bounce in his direction. Soon they had formed a loose circle around him, bouncing quietly, squeaking and growling as they nudged one another. At the centre, arms still high, Doctor Strange waited for his people to gather. At last, he spoke again.

"By the beauty of the Great Witch Jade, by the never-failing might of Terry, Creator of the World, by the power invested in me by the State of California, etcetera, etcetera, I hereby utter the spell that will abolish gravity." There was a pause. Doctor Strange began to rotate slowly as he began the incantation. "Edit sub gravcontrol," he intoned. "Findstring 'gravconst equals 9.8'. Substring 'gravconst equals zero'" Then, with a flourish; "Recompile!"

All around him the egg-creatures began to shoot up into the sky. Even Doctor Strange, who had not been bouncing, slowly drifted upwards and out of the picture. Terry quickly picked up the paddles again and the viewpoint turned upwards to reveal the seven little dots disappearing into the blue sky.

"There!" he said.

Jade continued to stare at the screen, strangely moved by the plight of the egg-people. She thought of the little green square of the world below them shrinking and shrinking until it was gone. "And what does this prove?"

"Apart from what a genius programmer I am?" he said, smiling, happy that it had all worked so perfectly. "Well, Doc Strange actually rewrote part of the program that defined the world they all lived in. What probably sounded like a lot of hocus pocus to you was actually a set of instructions to the program editor that dynamically reconfigured the part of the code that defined the strength of the gravity for the simulation. Once he'd switched it off, the very next bounce anybody did took them up into space with nothing to pull them back. Just like magic!"

Jade said nothing. She stared into the empty screen and wouldn't look at him. After a while she turned her face towards him. Her lips were pressed together and her eyes were grey and hard. "Alright," she said, "it was like magic." Then she walked out of the flat without another word.

He called on her many times over the next few weeks but she was never in -- or wouldn't answer the doorbell. Eventually, he stopped calling. His new project was fully absorbing his time anyway.

From the books Jade had lent him and from others he had started collecting, he was piecing together what he called the Cosmic Instruction Set -- the words which formed the programming language with which reality could be rewritten. After a couple of months he had put together enough of them to write some powerful routines -- or 'spells' as he felt he ought to call them. The sheer magnitude of his insight and the incredible importance of the discoveries he was making drove him to work harder and longer than even he was accustomed to. He neglected his work, his flat, his body. When he thought about Jade at all it was only with a vague regret that he could not share his new knowledge with her.

Three questions obsessed him. The first, practical one was how to invoke the editor for the Cosmic Program so that he could insert and run his programs. The second, also a practical one, was what his first reality-changing program should be. Obviously he couldn't do anything as radical as changing one of the physical laws. Even for the most minor of changes, the consequences would be unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Imagine a tiny reduction in the gravitational constant; planets spinning away from their suns, stars flying apart and dying. It was unthinkable that he should play with such fundamental forces! No. He must choose something small, something local, something with no further effects.

But then there was the third question. The ethical one. Now that he had discovered such power, what should he do with it? Abolish death? End war? Save the rain forests? Yet every choice he could make would deny someone else's freedom to choose for themselves. It was almost too weird to think about. Maybe the ethical thing was just to get rich, get laid and leave everyone else alone!

Still, all that was for the future. First, he had to prove it worked. He went back to the books, looking for the invocation of the editor. It took him only a little time to find it since he knew exactly the kind of thing he was looking for.

Sally Roberts from work turned up at his door. He ran to it as soon as he heard the knock, thinking it must be Jade. "We were worried about you," she said, looking at his wild, half-starved appearance, looking past him at the room littered with empty pizza boxes and coke bottles. "We thought you might be ill."

"I'm fine," he said. "Thanks for coming round," and closed the door on her.

"When are you coming back to work?" she asked through the door.

"Soon," he lied. "Goodbye, Sally."

He worked on his test program during the next few days. If he had been learning a new computer language, it would have been traditional to write a little program that puts the words "Hello World" on the screen. He laughed so hard and so long at the idea of putting the words across the sky, twenty miles high, that he felt sick and dizzy. But he rejected the idea. It didn't have to be big. It just had to prove that it worked. And he wanted Jade to see it. That suddenly seemed very important.

He was at her door again just two days later. As before, she would not answer his knock. "Jade," he called through the letter box. "Jade, I've done it. I mean, I can do it. Open the door, please. I want to show you. Please Jade." Still no-one came. He shouted, then he began to hammer on the door. Eventually, he heard a voice from inside. "What?" He had missed what it said because of the banging.

"I said, go away." It was Jade's voice.

"Jade! Let me in. Jade, please." There was a silence, then he heard her quick, light footsteps approaching.

"I don't think we've got anything to..." she started saying as she opened the door but the sight of him stopped her dead. "Terry! What happened to you? You look..." She stopped herself.

Terry smiled. "I suppose I must look a bit rough," he said. "I've been working. Actually, I don't feel all that good, now you mention it."

She looked at him with a mixture of horror and confusion. "Come in," she said at last.

He came in and headed straight for her magic room. "I need the right ambience for this," he said.

"What you need is a doctor! How did you get in this state?"

"What state? Look. I came to tell you. I've done it. I've got the Instruction Set, well, most of it anyway. Enough. And I've worked out how to access the editor. I can make it work, Jade. I can do magic."

Jade shook her head and came to where he stood at the centre of the pentagram. "No, Terry. I've been thinking about it. This magic thing, all my weird stuff, it's all just a smokescreen, something I hide behind. I've got to face it all: grow up."

"No, no. That's just it, it's all real! Or, rather, nothing's real at all! Look. I know the incantations. I can work the Cosmic Machine."

She took hold of his hands. "Oh Terry, my poor Terry. What have I done? Don't you see? This is just crazy. It's just a trap that people fall into when they're miserable and unloved and can't deal with life any other way."

He shook her free and raised his hands high, just like Doctor Strange had. "You'll see!" he said and began, in a loud voice, to cast his spell. Jade backed away from him, suddenly afraid of the wild, rapture in his upturned face. The spell wove itself around him, filling the small room. His voice became firmer and more certain as he fed his commands to the waiting ether. Jade recognised some of the words he used, old words from forgotten languages.

"Wait! Terry, stop! What if you're right? What if it's just like reprogramming the world?" She ran to him and pulled down his arms. He shrugged her aside. "Terry, no. You know what it's like. A program never runs first time. It's always got bugs in it." Terry's voice rose higher to drown her out. She grabbed him by the lapels and shook him as her fear mounted. "What if your program goes into an endless loop? What if it hangs? How can you debug it? How can you test it before you run it?" She sobbed in her frustration as his voice roared on and on. "What if there are unexpected side-effects? What if it crashes, Terry? What if you bring the whole system down?"

It was useless. He was in some kind of trance, bellowing out the instructions that might change the world. She looked about her desperately for something to make him stop: a chair or a stick to hit him with. Her eye caught a large candlestick and she rushed over to it, grabbing it with both hands.

At the same moment that she touched it, he stopped. She froze too and looked at him in horror. With the wild, ecstatic look on his face still, he drew a deep breath with which to utter the final recompile instruction. She couldn't stop him now. She would never reach him. It was the end. The end of everything. With a shout of triumph, he pronounced the final command.

And nothing happened.

In the breathless silence that followed, Terry slowly lowered his arms and looked around the room, as though expecting something to be there that wasn't. The look of surprise and amazement on his face was eloquent of the complete failure of his experiment. Watching him scan the room, Jade found herself overwhelmed by how ludicrous he looked and a snort of laughter burst out of her and, once she had started, she found she couldn't stop but just had to let the laughter gush through her.

Terry stopped searching the room and looked at Jade. She was clinging to the altar and laughing uncontrollably, tears running down her cheeks. The magic had failed. Nothing had happened. He suddenly saw what a complete bloody fool he had made of himself and standing among the runes and symbols that were, after all, nothing but superstitious nonsense, he too began to laugh. He laughed so much that he fell to his knees and, when Jade crawled over to him on all fours, laughing and sobbing both at once, they clung together and laughed and sobbed on each other’s shoulders. The joke seemed huge, cosmic. Everything that had happened was hilarious. But the holding each other, the relief at being together again was delicious and wonderful and gave them both something to laugh about.

vi

Outside, in the scruffy, deserted street below Jade's window, a strange thing had just happened. A meter-tall egg-shaped creature with a big, smiling face had just popped into existence out of the thin air. It turned now, side to side, as if looking over its new surroundings. Then, with a little shrug of its stick-thin arms, it bounced off in the direction of the main road.