Timo waves at him one last time, as he pulls down the garage door entrance to his studio-slash-operating room. It’s not quite what he’d envisioned a backstreet grinder clinic would look like, and — despite his subtly animated tattoos and achingly faux-scruffy beard — neither is Timo. What the drop-out med student turned artist has just done to him is technically illegal, yes, but then the Amsterdam authorities have a penchant for turning their eyes away from such things, hence Timo is able to operate out of this prime location overlooking the Singel. Just across the water from the flower market. Lovely. A certain clientele expects a certain standard of surroundings, he tells himself.

He takes the tram home, Timo advising him it’s best not to drive. It makes him uncomfortable, itchy, sitting here amongst the unwashed, unchosen. Even through his face mask, the stench of untweaked, un-perfumed sweat and fried-food flatulence scalds his nerve endings. He touches fingertips to his cheek, feels a numbness there that he knows is caused by more than the December air, that recalls childhood memories of dentist’s anaesthetic, feels a sickly tumour like solidity under his skin where the gel’s excesses are still dissolving into his blood. It reminds him of touching his mother’s heavily botoxed face as he wiped confused, angry tears from her dying eyes.

His hand brushes against the seat — he’s forgotten his gloves — and he instinctively reaches for the anti-bac spray in his jacket pocket, and applies it to his fingers. As they return the small tube they brush against a larger metallic cylinder. He tries to resist it, but finds himself removing it from the pocket anyway, obediently touching the top so that previously invisible LEDs flare on its brushed aluminium surface, showing charge and signal levels. He rolls the cylinder between his fingers.

Timo said to give it a few hours

She’s probably not up yet anyway

Instinctively he unscrews the lid, disgorges the two floppy deep-sea invertebrate-like contact lenses, inserting each one into a welcoming eye. A microsecond of flash bulb white-out. The interior of the tram spins, then steadies, feels heightened. A flurry of peripheral notifications. A sense of known, sprawling depth beyond the corporeal.

She’s probably not up yet anyway

He pings her. A few tense seconds of buzzing and chimes.

And then the empty seat on the tram starts to reorganise itself, attempting to cope with two realities merging, software trying to make sense of conflicting context. Through the window the blur of passing shops and the never-ending stream of bikes fades and disappears, mercifully replaced by the view out of her window, across the bay at the three towering black pyramids, an unfinished science fiction cliché surrounded by multi-limbed stick-insect cranes and scaffold cages, stark against the dawn sky.

And then that is blocked from his sight as she manifests, on the empty seat, her hands air-typing at unseen interfaces, windows of data lighting her face with a simulated, non-existent glow. She turns to face him, and his tension starts to lift.

-Hey.

-Hey. I didn’t know if you’d be up yet.

-Got lots to do, hon. Only a month until the big visit. Gotta make sure there’s enough for the VCs to see beyond simulations. They seem very insistent on being able to touch stuff.

-Talking of which…

She gasps.

-It’s done? It went ok?

He shrugs, smiles back at her, touches his still numb cheek.

-I guess so.

-Let’s see.

He watches her stare past him, into non-space, eyes mechanically blinking through menus he can’t see.

An area of her cheek starts to glow a pale, dull blue, followed by a similar effect on a section of her forearm. He glances down at his, sees the same glow where his arm is numb. He extends his hand out to connect with the glow on her arm, running his finger in tiny, repeating circles. There’s no feedback, no sense of touch for him, but he knows she can feel him, even as his fingers intersect with her ghostly avatar, by the way she moves in response, by the way she breathes, whispers.

-Oh baby.

Her hand comes slowly up to his face, hovers in front of it, millimetres from where he knows his cheek must also be glowing blue. They’ve tried this a thousand times, unsolid spectres trying to make impossible contact, fingers flailing through skin like video game models fighting a collision detection bug.

Except this time.

He feels a finger on his cheek, followed by a second. Feels them stroke his face slowly, downwards. At first the sensation takes him back to childhood dentist visits again, that feeling of cold, fading anaesthesia — but then there’s sensation of warmth, of blood flowing back. Shivers down his spine, hairs on end. Dizziness, excited nausea. He struggles to breath, to hold back tears.

She sees his reaction, her eyes widen in concerned response, and she places her other hand on the glow in his forearm. Everything multiplies. A tear rolls down his face, and she watches it pass effortlessly through her hand.

-Baby, you ok?

-I… yes. I’m…

-I know. I know.

-It’s… it’s so intense.

More tears.

-I know baby. Just relax. Roll with it.

-I…

-Relax baby, it’s fine.

Struggling to breathe, form words.

-I… I love you

-I know. I love you too.

And then everything freezes, the dull light of her apartment giving way to the artificial glow of the tram, as his lenses interrupt the call to tell him it’s his stop. He blinks back angrily at reality’s inconsiderate interruption, at the idiotic gawping faces of the still-human idiots that turn away to avoid his glare, and frustratedly pulls himself to his feet.