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weird dreams, goes straight to the hips). A snappy little bob and a summer tint maybe. Come on, come on … Pft.
    Oh Jesus. Did I turn the gas off? Bet the battery’s flat in the smoke alarm … Right, if I get a spade now I’ll get back tonight to find the house burned down, and the Elliots’ place, and the next one along … No spade, no spade, please … Phew. Heh. (Silly: don’t think like that.) Now … if a heart stops in the middle, that means he’s thinking about me. Or I get a clover on the left. Heart or clover, he’s thinking of me right now.
    [Excerpt, audio interview, location unspecified: Milk | Damon]
    Sure, that’s your job — ask questions. But you’ll paint the wrong picture if you misunderstand the motive here. Earning a living … Okay. Forget it.
    Yeah, a very new field — but the potential. I mean, take hospitals: you’ve got sick people, women giving birth. Newborn babies, kids getting tonsils out, guys having heart surgery. So what do they get? Blank corridors, fluoro lights. And that smell: sickness and antiseptic, lukewarm plastic, boiled scalpels. Just a big people factory, a setting for bad dreams. Get well soon? I don’t think so.
    Now imagine gentle light, warm colours, low-frequency sound pulses. At night, for the insomniacs: waves on a beach, so soft it’s almost imperceptible. You pipe in a subtle mix of ozone, jonquils, cut wood, maybe a hint of human breastmilk. Jonquils are almost guaranteed. Very few people can recall a negative experience with jonquils. Right, the cancer ward: you synthesise each person’s unique childhood scent, the smell of them in perfect health, dab it on their pillow. Grandpa wants morphine: he gets colour saturation, audio therapy, internal projections. And surgeons: always exhausted, right? So you tune the operating theatres to keep them alert. More skill per hour. The drop in medical misadventure suits would pay for the whole thing. And it’s altruistic.
    Of course we don’t. That’s illegal.
    I do my own tuning experiments around the city. As research, you know? I’ll just set up somewhere, tune up an atmosphere — usually a nostalgia-based mood, all nostalgia has some common ingredients — and monitor the effects. Times are hard enough already, so it’s all positive stuff I’m putting out there; people don’t even know it’s happening, but they feel good. Scores me brownie points for the soul, heh. Don’t put that in.
    Not really. Mostly, ah, shopping centres so far. But that’s my point: the infrastructure’s there, we just have to realise the potential. And build up a greater respect for the art form too. Hopefully that’s where you come in.
    [Main floor, Double Six Casino: Milk | Carol | unidentified male patron]
    Three hours into Milk’s shift the casino is humming, but despite his best efforts Carol has left her blackjack table and headed for the bar. Doubt prickles through him; she didn’t look like a drinker. She still has credit, he’d set her into a nice rhythm, and according to his calculations she should have stayed put.
    But his human barometer, with her neat hair and cheerful handbag, has abandoned her seat and wandered away, distracted by something invisible. Milk has no idea what. But what does it matter? It’s not personal, and his test rabbit has done her job. So he scans the room for another type of subject.
    Milk has made progress. The electricity in the room is fizzing somewhere near hip level. The grim downward slant repeated across each pokies player’s mouth has tilted upwards by half a degree. The hard-faced blonde is still at her machine, feeding in coins at a steady rate. He shoots out a squirt of peppermint to mask the sour feet of a baccarat player; women unwrinkle their noses, nearby seats begin to fill. He sees a Chinese woman in a red dress, stacking her tigers high, and outlines her