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pronounced ‘Casey,’ like the last name of the man my mother named me after. But I don’t.”
    “Who is Casey?”
    “Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach.”
    “Why does she, your mother?”
    “Because she’s a Virginian eccentric. Actually she’s always refused to talk about it.” Which is true.
    “And you are doing here?”
    “The market. You?” Still walking.
    “Same.”
    “Who were those men?”
    “Ngemi sells to me ZX 81.”
    “Which is?”
    “Sinclair ZX 81. Personal computer, circa 1980. In America, was Timex 1000, same.”
    “Ngemi’s the big one?”
    “Dealing in archaic computer, historic calculator, since 1997. Has shop in Bermondsey.”
    “Your partner?”
    “No. Arrange to meet.” He lightly slaps the pouch at his side and plastic rattles. “ZX81.”
    “But he was here to sell those calculators?”
    “The Curta. Wonderful, yes? Ngemi and Hobbs hope for combined sale, Japanese collector. Difficult, Hobbs. Always.”
    “Another dealer?”
    “Mathematician. Brilliant sad man. Crazy for Curta, but cannot afford. Buys and sells.”
    “Didn’t seem very pleasant.” Cayce puts her facility with entirely left-field conversations down to her career of actual on-the-street cool-hunting, such as it’s been, and as much as she hates to call it that. She’s done a bit, too. She’s been dropped into neighborhoods like Dogtown, which birthed skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding whatever the next thing might be. And she’s learned it’s largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. She’s that good. “What does this ZX 81 look like?”
    He stops, rummages in his pouch, and produces a rather tragic-looking rectangle of scuffed black plastic, about the size of a videocassette. It has one of those stick-on keypads that somehow actually work, something Cayce knows from the cable boxes in the sort of motel where guests might be expected to try to steal them.
    “That’s a computer?”
    “One Κ of RAM!”
    “One?”
    They’ve come out into a street called Westbourne Grove now, with a sprinkling of trendy retail, and she can see a crowd down at the intersection with Portobello. “What do you do with them?”
    “Is complicated.”
    “How many do you have?”
    “Many.”
    “Why do you like them?”
    “Of historical importance to personal computing,” he says seriously, “and to United Kingdom. Why there are so many programmers, here.”
    “Why is that?”
    But he excuses himself, stepping into a narrow laneway where a battered van is being unloaded. Some quick exchange with a large woman in a turquoise raincoat and he is back, tucking two more of the things into his pouch.
    Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. “Like hackers in Bulgaria,” he adds, obscurely.
    “But if Timex sold it in the United States,” she asks him, “why didn’t we get the programmers?”
    “You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers. Also, on launch of product in America, RAM-expansion unit did not ship for three months. People buy computer, take it home, discover it does almost nothing. A