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Josie is sitting on her sofa, thinking. She is remembering leaving a London cinema in 1984, having just watched a film of the same name. She recollects an eerie feeling of detachment from the outside world, into which she was once more about to be ejected, now even less able to cope with the recycled thought- and behavioural patterns of her peers. Instant recall: yes, 's truth to say she is still a freethinker twenty-four years later and always chooses to engage with fresh webspace of her own free will.
The recent interaction of the Internet with Josie's thoughtspace has had a profound effect upon her lifestyle; in the mid-to-late nineties she was still a deskbound newbie, surfing for hours before scoring safe. These days she rarely feels impelled to leave her sofa, and although she does put in an occasional token appearance at the New Mirror Group collation depot, most of the information she imparts is retrievable without the need for physical access. Her life has become timeworld-exclusive and Josie's temporal input into work is underplayed only by her emotional input into sleepworld engagements with need-and-want.
At the dawn of the millenium, Josie's general disinterest and self-imposed charmless lifestyle would have been deemed by many to be mere self-evasion or sociological escapism. Only one hexidecimal later, and Josie is in a good position to exfoliate this overgrown notion: able to see every branch of every tree in London's newly-planted woodland, she is also fully aware of Axid's return and motives for the same. She even knows where he is going to start looking for her, tomorrow morning.
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Since the abolition of the money system in Europe after the Great Crash of 2004, life has become a lot more straightforward for alien visitors, whether they hail from the Fallen Empires of the East or - like Axid - from precisely nowhere-on-earth. But this is little reassurance for Axid, whose preoccupations are engaged moreso with whether Josie survived the Grand Coup of the same year. Somehow, he knows she did.
'How many other girls are there ?' she once asked, more out of duty than curiosity.
'And who are they ?' she followed, with perfect indifference and social deference.
In short, Josie was not the type of girl to get involved in any kind of competition; she was legion, and proud to have conquered all trace of earthly pride. Her robotic readiness to deal with change, shock or threats of any nature was second-to-none and mercilessly superhuman. And it was probably this particular aspect of her other-worldly personality which had kept Axid's dissociated alter-ego hooked for the last decade in this one.
He was well-and-truly stuck on her, as they used to say, and although presently empowered with retrospective foresight, is nonetheless convinced that when he does find Josie she will either take him over or send him hurtling back into space for being weak and incapable of earning her respect. Unless, of course, he can shield his old-fashioned, shapeless sentiment with some kind of twenty-first-century bravado. Surely even Josie cannot be happy in this lonely, trivialised new psycho-culture which, by offering the world its mirror has succeeded only in destroying it.
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