A cluster of needle sharp skyscrapers pierce the Old London skyline towards the east end of Noho. There, nestled against the base of one of the district’s many technology emporiums is a Japanese tea room, distinguished from its neighbours by an absence of neon signage and a lack of tasteless decor.

Tea is seldom served in this establishment, for the majority of its customers come for one reason only - to get online. Here, those who call themselves the pasokon otaku spend tens of hours at a time in silent meditation on the god of technology. It’s not that they don’t have any other way of getting on the net, this place mainly caters to the rich offspring of city workers after all, it’s more that the tea room offers an almost Zen like atmosphere, and more importantly, safety, while the otaku indulge in their obsession.

If this were Japan these adolescents might take offence at their title, but this is Old London Town, baby, and here they take pride in their cultural label.

There are row upon row of low-sunk terminals in the room, each one positioned before a square tatami mat and separated from its neighbours by waist high paper screens. In front of each terminal - they are all occupied - sits a user. The clientele is predominantly male, but females are not unusual. Not that it matters. Gender is nothing but a word to this crowd, with some of the most obsessive even pushing the boundary of species.

They live online, accessing a miasma of virtual worlds through VR eyephones, or in some cases, neural jacks wetwired straight into the optics. An IV drip delivers nutrients of their choice, reliably maintained by the tea room staff, while catheters and colostomy valves carry away their bodily waste and dump it into the building’s plumbing system.

To the unaccustomed, the silence can be eerie, but the spectacle of watching them is more so. They kneel seiza style on the mats, with sleek black wires extending from the body in every direction like spindly legs, the insect-like eyephones bobbing and tilting while their arms and hands move constantly in the sign language of Pidgin, allowing them to communicate with anyone in cyberspace, regardless of their mother tongue. The overall impression is of a nest of spiders, collectively weaving an invisible, far reaching web.

Alone, but never lonely.

Among them sits Gaijin, an 18 year old Anglo-Japanese boy. It used to be that by this age, boys had become men, but with so few babies being born, adolescence has come to last a lot longer. It was a trick the UK borrowed from the Chinese at the height of China’s power, which coincidentally, was also shortly before their own economy imploded and they were forced to cede economic leadership to the Russian Federation. Fertility-suppressant hormones pumped into the water supply by the government had kept birth rates at an all time low for years now, and it was only the rich, and therefore the few, that could afford the fertility medication required to have the remotest chance of having children.

In 2030 the UK population was nudging 80 million, and the recent discovery of the Methuselah gene by a company called DeKode Genetics, had given some (the rich again) the opportunity to increase their health and longevity by factor x, or 15-20 years. The government took drastic action, using its stake holdings to influence the assortment of private enterprises which ran the country’s infrastructure to bring the birth rate down to almost zero within five years.

Fortunately for the country’s governors, at the same time, a mysterious disease which some discount as a sham, a conspiracy, or both, reached pandemic proportions. The official line is that it was the dumping of waste materials that started it, because it hit the East first. The media called it “The Hi-Tech Trashing of Asia.” Picked apart technologies strewn across Southern China filled the air with carcinogenic smoke and polluted the water, with world health organisations reporting that as much as 80 per cent of the West’s electronic waste collected to be recycled was shipped out to the Eastern territories.

But there are those that believe it wasn’t the dead technologies that started the outbreak of temporal lobe lability (TLL) - the black shakes - maybe it was the living ones. At best guess it seems to be a stress disorder caused by too much contact with technology, but the problem is no one knows exactly what it is, how you contract it or who is most likely to get it.

As the epidemic took hold, primarily singling out and killing off the middle aged, pockets of religious fanatics and Neo-Luddites sprung up, arguing that the source of TLL stemmed from fear of technology, or more accurately, fear of falling behind, of losing that technological edge. The Anarcho-primitivists went one better, advocating a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialisation and abandonment of technology. While the megacities to the north and south of the country flourished and expanded, large agricultural communities grew up around the remaining backwater towns that weren’t in danger of being absorbed by either New London or Edinburgh.

But Gaijin, who has led what can only be described as a sheltered life, is oblivious to all of this. His father came over from Japan to head up the UK sales office of West Pacific Steel, where he met a pretty mainframe programmer. Three years later Gaijin was born. Like most of the other kids in the tea room, his parents were rich and Gaijin never wanted for anything. His father taught him about his heritage and his mother taught him to code. If his parents never did anything else for him in his entire life, they would have already given him the greatest gifts they had to offer. What Gaijin learned from his father taught him discipline and what he learned from his mother taught him everything else. Naturally, he had to survive the harsh elitism of a private education, where he became increasingly uncomfortable around others because of his almost preternatural ability to manipulate technology. Instead of chasing girls, goofing off and living off mommy and daddy’s money like his Trustafarian peers, he withdrew into the cold anonymity of cyberspace, and that is where he found Solace.

Solace is a marketplace, an underground network made up of an infinitely interlinking number of hawkers, buyers and fences. Here, information is the only currency and its worth is set by the freshness, significance or obscurity of the data.

Gaijin, like those seated around him, was a collector. He didn’t have what you might call a specialist area of interest, most data had some value no matter how bizarre and Gaijin could afford expansive data warehousing, but he did have a fondness for ‘off-world’ information. The world at large may still have been shrouded in economic gloom, but the Great Depression had really only made the divide between the rich and poor, greater. Now there was a nascent but booming industry, with plenty of competitive Russian, US and Asian countries rushing to launch satellite hotels and themed orbiters, and the information Gaijin brokered earned him a decent wage. It wasn’t so much corporate sabotage as inter-enterprise war, and Gaijin was a sword for hire.

He knew the address blocks and locations of most of the subnets that various satellite operators used to channel data and kept a regular watch out for anything which might be of interest travelling over those networks. He had automated software bots in place, constantly scouring endpoints for configuration vulnerabilities or undisclosed bugs in the code, although even he had to admit that most of his targets hired pretty decent security engineers.

So it was with genuine surprise that Gaijin noticed that something had started publicly broadcasting its network address from within what he knew to be the subnet owned by Russian satellite operator Nexus Orbital. He could see absolutely no reason to do this, and it seemed unthinkable that anyone on the Nexus security team would even consider something so stupid as to attract attention to an endpoint that is normally invisible. Gaijin’s hands twitched and a flurry of traceroute and port scanning tools flew into action, confirming at once that the network address did indeed belong to an endpoint on the Nexus network - an endpoint that looked almost certainly like an orbiting satellite. Beneath his insect-like headgear Gaijin’s brow furrowed.

Even stranger was the fact that his scanning software, which was making continuous passes on the satellite’s communications software, was discovering an increasing number of known security holes, as though someone on board the orbiter was uninstalling critical software patches, essentially sabotaging the satellite.

Something about this situation was just plain wrong. There was a transmission coming through from the satellite, and whatever it was, it was being broken up and distributed across one of Solace’s peer to peer networks.

Intrigued, Gaijin switched his attention to the broadcast, monitoring the distribution of the packages across Solace and pulling back copies to his own machine. In the meantime, now that he had access to the satellite’s communications software it was trivial for him to kill the outbound connection, making the endpoint invisible once again, but leaving him with a link back. If whatever information he had got his hands on turned out to be interesting, he didn’t want the hacker world at large to be able to get access to the source, where, he mused, there might be more treasures awaiting.

Gaijin’s machine was busily recompiling the data packets into their original form - a video stream. He hit play…

…

Just over 30 minutes later, Gaijin was hurrying weak kneed through the neon drenched streets of Soho, eager to put some distance between himself an the tea room. What he had just seen had made his blood run cold. The original video file that had been transmitted to Solace was fairly uninteresting - a few minutes of frantic babbling by a character of questionable sanity - it could have been filmed anywhere. But it was the fact that Gaijin knew exactly where it was filmed that put the video in context and gave him the impetus to tap back into the satellite.

Exercising his complete control over the orbiter’s communications software, Gaijin began trawling the video dumps from the network of closed circuit cameras evidently installed around the outpost. The footage was straight out of a nightmare. The satellite appeared to have a network of tunnels at its core, the floors of which were scattered with the bodies of young men and women. A handful of well armed men were sweeping through the mob, blasting and bludgeoning everyone in sight. It was nothing short of extermination.

Gaijin had puked into his mouth at the sight of a bloodied woman being dragged screaming by her hair and had killed the visual shortly after. Shaking with adrenalin he had set up an encrypted tunnel between the orbiter and one of his own accounts at an off world data crypt hosted on yet another satellite, then he had copied over all the video dumps he could find. It was at this point the voice of reason finally made itself heard inside Gaijin’s head.

He had just hacked into a satellite where people were being mass murdered. A satellite owned by a state funded operator based in the world’s foremost economic superpower. Gaijin had no doubt in his abilities, but he also had no doubt that Nexus Orbital would be very thorough in its investigation when it found out what had happened. He also had no doubt that if the Russians discovered any link back to him, he was a dead man.

So Gaijin pursued his only other option. He dropped a logic bomb of his own devising on the satellite’s server, hoping to wipe out all evidence of his tampering. Then he got the hell out of there.

Now, standing on the slick black asphalt of the street he leant against pockmarked brickwork and prayed to all the small gods for inspiration, for deliverance. Nobody looks at the sky anymore, there’s nothing to see, except thick sulphuric clouds whose presence is more tellingly indicated by the persistent stink of brimstone. And the rain, always the rain. But on this occasion Gaijin cast his eyes heavenwards and through a curtain of wet hair found exactly what he was looking for. High up on the wall opposite was a garish neon signboard, a flickering green monstrosity depicting a bald headed, bearded man lifting a halberd between two positions. With each alternating pulse of electricity the halberd swung up and down, ceaselessly chopping the thick air.

Gaijin’s theological knowledge was good enough to identify the figure even before his eyes fell upon the faded wooden board pinned to the wall below. The Church of Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Gaijin was saved.