Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon онлайн

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In every traditional sense, nothing at all happened.

The counter clicked up to 945 viewers.

I crossed out the old number on the Post-it, added the new one, and then pinned it up on the board.

It’s both compelling and reassuring to watch a person living in real time. The long pauses. The stillness. Sleeping, staring, thinking, reading – all played out in their vast and blank entireties. Putting those familiar little islands of talking, arguing and laughing that we always think of as what people do into wide, empty oceans of context. And then, at the other end of the scale, the opposite of those stillnesses – the rare, powerful, private things – the truthful, the revelatory, the sexual. Those one-in-a-million moments that probably won’t happen while you’re watching, but just might, just might, just might . . .

The phone rang, loud in the quiet flat.

I jumped, grabbing the handset before it could ring again.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Euston,’ said Imogen. ‘This is Eagle One.’

On the screen, my wife’s green body slept soundly. ‘Hello, stranger,’ I said. I half-expected the tremble of adrenaline to come through in my voice, so the hardness I heard there instead surprised me.