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middling guys with seriously abundant attitude.
    One smirked, the other frowned. Both nodded.
    The first widened her eyes. ‘It’s the third single from the album.’
    The other replied: ‘That’s the trouble. Overexposure.’
    ‘Correct. Nola’s charm is draining away. What little charm there was, to begin with.’
    ‘Oh, she had enough, to begin with. More than enough.’
    ‘But now? Somewhat pallid, think I.’
    ‘Certainly, she is wasted on this material. Have you heard the demo tracks?’
    ‘You’re one up on me there, Andy.’
    ‘Early days material, before Gold Enterprises got hold of her.’
    ‘Good, is it?’
    ‘More than averagely good, I would say. Her own songs. Now that’s what she needs to be doing.’
    ‘Well she needs something.’
    ‘It’s the George Gold attitude, isn’t it. Mister King Pop himself, in charge of the system.’
    ‘Gold is old .’
    ‘The system no longer works.’
    ‘Check the status figures, kiddo. Thirty-six? Next step: accelerated decline.’
    ‘All I’m saying, Marty, is wait and see. Maybe Nola will break loose.’
    ‘Too late! I hear a bubble bursting.’
    Click.
    Nola jumped to another programme.
    One more. Another.
    Click, click.
    Anything but that. Anything but her own self being dissected, poked and prodded like a cute media specimen: broken down, licked at, wrapped up, halfway discarded.
    Nola went back to the couch.
    Click, click, click.
    Her finger pressed idly now at the buttons, moving further out, beyond the legal channels. Her set decoded encryptions on the sly, calling up temporary signal jumps. Click, clikk, clikck . Out to the telesphere’s edge, where the spectrum blurred into mist and static. Here buzzed the fractalcasts, quarter-tuned pirate stations stealing frequencies for an hour or two. Cable dreams and nightmares. Political rants, home sex videos, karaoke soaps, real-life domestic arguments, porno-dramas, hyper-specialist dating agencies, bidding wars, medical fibre optics, ghost broadcasts, security surveillance footage, glamacam exposures, old-time ballroom dancers, blurry car crashes, flower arranging, real-time feeds from the street where little kids with pixel faces were singing the new urban folk ballads of guns and blood.
    So many thousands of microgenres.
    Everybody was on camera these days, everybody.
    Click, click .
    Nola chanced upon an old movie, black and white, one she had not seen before. The story was trite, overly romantic, but certain images seemed to have a fix of their own, to be more like memories:
    A black cat walking through a garden where a fountain sprayed arcs of water in sunlight.
    A teenage girl flying a kite.
    A broken-down car resting at the edge of a lake, its back seat occupied by the corpse of a businessman.
    The images glowed with a light of their own.
    Images. Moments. Slowing down.
    Molten flow.
    Nola managed one more click of the remote, one more sleepy finger press,
    suddenly tired,
    lulled by the sound and the vision
    spellbound.
    Image: a man’s face, mist-painted. He smiled.
    Soft glow of the screen
    like a charm cast over the room,
    over the viewer as she lay there,
    over Nola as she lay there quietly, eyes staring, and then drooping, softly closing; two lovely lashed portals to let one last glimmer of light in, and then no more.
    Darkness.
    The remote control fell to the carpet.
    And by half past one
    Nola Blue lay fast
    asleep.
    ~~~
     
    The gentle blue-bronze light of the screen shimmered across her face.
    Characters spoke to each other,
    gently, covered in soft static,
    unheard.
    A clock ticked.
    Outside Nola’s apartment block, the warm air stirred. The tangle of aerials and satellite dishes on the building’s roof reached for the moon that hung full but half hidden in clouds. Invisible waves of information moved through the air. Now and again, vehicles passed quietly along the avenue below, briefly disturbing this spectral glade of the capital.
    A solitary nightbird flew across,
    heading