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mind, but enough that it feels supremely decadent. You need a permit for real wood these days, and very few people are granted one.
    There are some stables out back, and about two acres of land. It’s a far cry from the cramped, chaotic living conditions of the majority of the city’s population.
    The path leads up from the gates and through an elegant but spartan front garden that had more space than anyone in New Lincoln Heights could ever dream of owning.
    Genetically recreated peacocks paraded the lawns, their electric plumage catching the half-light of a slowly descending twilight. I stopped to watch a neon male fanning out his digital feathers, sending rays of many colours in all directions.
    Most people have never even seen a peacock, and we have a half-dozen of them in our garden. Previously that would have given me a real sense of pride; today it just felt wrong somehow. Unjust. It didn’t diminish the beauty of the birds, but it sort of tarnished them a little in my mind.
    On both sides of me were vast bushes of some hybrid plant with purple, bell-shaped flowers that bobbed in a faint breeze. I could hear the electric drone of a couple of bees at work within them and found myself wondering what real bees had sounded like.
    I was halfway up the path when the front door suddenly opened and my father came out. He was dressed in a sharp, metallic suit and the expression on his face told me that he was impatient and angry.
    I felt a sudden jolt of panic that my father had found out about my little course change. I mean, it would only have taken a LinkMail from the college to tell him that I had put in the request. Maybe that was the kind of thing they notified parents about, I don’t know.
    Anyway, I didn’t need to worry.
    Not about that, anyway.
    ‘You’re late,’ My father said.
    Uh-oh . I thought. What have I forgotten?
    ‘I know,’ I said defensively. ‘They were scraping up another leaper off the tracks of the slideway and I had to walk.’
    ‘Tonight of all nights,’ he said, and his tone betrayed the fact that he was still holding me personally responsible for my lateness. ‘Hurry up and get changed.’
    ‘Changed?’ I asked him.
    He looked exasperated.
    ‘You do know what tonight is, don’t you?’ he barked.
    I scanned my LinkCalendar and found nothing there to help me. Which meant that it was my father’s error, not mine. If he had told me it would have been automatically entered on to the calendar.
    Still, it wouldn’t help to point out who was to blame. So I just shook my head and tried to look sorry.
    My father wasn’t impressed. Status report: normal, then.
    I can’t remember the last time my father was anything but unimpressed with me. Since mother . . . left . . . he’s been increasingly worried about what he calls his legacy – the ideas and inventions he’ll leave behind when he takes off into the great unknown – and I am, I guess, an important part of that legacy. He wants me to carry on with his work, to take his ideas forward, so that a future historian will look back and say this is where it all started, and David Vincent was the man who started it.
    But here’s the thing.
    I’m nothing like him, not really. For my father, work is everything. And life is just something that happens in the gaps between the discoveries and the theories.
    He’d work twenty-four hours a day, if he could. Fun and poetry and music and . . . I don’t know . . . just hanging out . . . are only distractions to him. He’s only truly happy when he’s saving the world, or building the next great supercomputer, or meeting up with his high-powered friends and planning the future of the human race.
    Me, I like the moments in between: I like goofing off and relaxing, kicking back and letting the world pass by me.
    I’m not driven like my father. I realise that I might have a part to play in society, but it’s never going to be the only thing I use to define myself.
    My father was looking at me