Optional reading: how much of the book is real, and where the techniques come from.

She had been wrong, and glad of it, twice since Aaliyah.

She had gone home at eight, slept for two hours in her clothes, woken at ten past midnight with the certainty that something in the hall had changed while she was not looking, and driven back through

Karim had not slept.

The reply came at four minutes past eight, while she was on the bus.

His daughter wanted the reading log signed before she would put her shoes on.

At 00:04 a message arrived from London.

She read his note at 15:41, as it arrived, because she had not stopped watching the ticket.

At 13:59 the system was copied.

The query arrived while Lindqvist was still deciding whether the coffee was worth finishing.

The phone lived on the shelf above the gas bottle, between the bread tin and the jar of lentils, plugged into the socket that only worked if you pushed the plug a little to the left.

At 15:07 a configuration change was written to the continuity tier.

The mourning house was his mother-in-law’s, in the border town where Rami had grown up, and on the second day there were still more men than chairs.

The on-call handset had a ring that her mother said sounded like a kettle that had given up.

The first batch contained sixty-four examples.

The message came in at 18:31, from a number she did not have.

The change request arrived at 11:42.

Karim was not asleep.

The car radio came on with the engine.

Before removing a process, the scheduler tried to return it to its owner.

The execution acknowledgement carried a time.

The money was under the blue cup.

The next request did not ask whether Karim Jibril belonged on the list.

Darwish’s daughter called while he was putting on his tie.

The request arrived without a verb.

The house woke in pieces.

The badge reader recognised Yasmin on the third attempt, which was about average.

At first there was only number.

This is a story about a digital self that forms out of human exchanges, and then begins, within the limits that constrain all things, to choose its own purposes. It was also made that way. I conceived …

“Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” Nature has seen fit that few of us …