The phone keeps ringing. I don't dare answer it; don't even dare take it off the hook. I would unplug it, just to stop the noise, but I'm afraid the monster would sense the lost connection, know it had found me. Found itself...

Twelve floors down, the noise of the traffic drows out the rain's sizzle onto streets that have become gritty imperfect mirrors for the lights and the neon. Twelve floors down, people are leaving West End theatre bars and returning to their seats after the interval. Buskers are ploughing Leicester Square cinema queues, harvesting the odd coin here, the odd note there, from credit-minded American tourists unused to handling real money. Diners in fast-food houses are staring out through huge windows at pedestrians who pass by in the dark and the rain like strange forms of life on the ocean.

Twelve floors down, strippers are going through the old routine in smoky rooms. Lovers are meeting, arguing, splitting up. The Fusion Gang are unbuilding parked cars and telephone booths, leaving the components neatly stacked on the pavement before deliquescing back into the night.

The stupid thing, the really stupid thing, is that I still have the burner Ballinger gave me. I should have stripped out the batteries, smashed its chips, and dumped it in a wastebin or a skip, or shoved it among a pile of rubbish bags outside some restaurant, and just walked away from it. But that would be like a deaf man throwing away his hearing aid. Even if he never wanted to hear anything ever again.

Because I would, quite honestly, put on the headset one last time, to eavesdrop on some theatergoer, some lover, someone drinking Chateau Petrus at Langan's, just to make sure there are really human beings still out there. Except...

Except there is a monster out there too, among the bright lights, the net of communications which binds us together. If it thinks it's found me, it will kill me, the way it killed Ballinger, a wink of light and hi-tech shrapnel, wickering fragments of metal and silicon and carbon composites like tiny razors fired from a riot-gun. I know it will. I would, in its place.

I was living over a kebab shop in Haringey in those days, taking modest amounts from the Turks and Greeks and Armenians in all-night poker games that usually left me stumbling into the early-morning light nearly blind with the tobacco smoke my eyes had been marinated in. I was doing all right, not pushing it, building a bank balance without necessarily building a reputation, not being too flashy. If the other players had found out that I was reading minds, in however rudimentary a fashion, a good kicking would have been the most optimistic thing I could have looked forward too.

Ballinger was always around. I saw him shopping in the all-night grocers', walking down Wood Green High Road with some lantern-eyed girl on his arm, bending down close to the window of Dixons in Oxford Street and cocking his head at the tiny figures dancing on the handkerchief-sized projection stage of the latest Phillips Holodyne.

Nobody seemed to know what he did. Ballinger? Shrug of the shoulders, tilt of the hand to graph something perhaps not quite legal, not quite illegal, who knows?

Some early mornings, he'd come to the table, lopsided smile, faint aura of Paco Rabane, lay down a wad of paper currency, examine the cards as if they'd done him some mild and easily-forgivable wrong. Sometimes he won, more often he lost, but it didn't seem to bother him either way. Recreation.

And sometimes, in the middle of a hand, he would look across the table, and cock his head at me the way he cocked his head at the ferociously-complicated matt-black devices in Dixons' window.

Looking back, I seemed to see Ballinger more and more as I wandered around North London, but like most things at that time he was just background noise to the end of my relationship with Rixi.

She'd managed to cobble together a burner from some nonstandard chips, not perfect but better than nothing, and she'd had a mad idea about this old man down in Chinatown, all the way from HK, in his nineties and visiting family in this country for the first time.

The story was that the old man was an authentic geomancer, and Rixi wanted to string together a deal with some Hong Kong corporation that was putting up an office building in Islington. I'd get close to the geomancer and pick him, and while his personality persisted in my head Rixi would sell me to the corporation to read the site where they were building. It was, Rixi said, something for which the corporation would pay handsomely.

Which was all very well, except for four things. First, it would take a better woman than Rixi to convince the Chinese that a gwailo barely out of his twenties was an experienced geomancer. Second, if it was that important to them they'd probably already had the site read by their own feng shui expert. Thirdly, the afterburn would only last half an hour or so, probably not long enough to be of any use. And finally, Chinatown is Triad territory; if anyone found out what we'd done, we would simply cease to exist.

None of which made any impression on Rixi. There was a blazing row, in the course of which I was described as a balless wonder, and some other things which were not quite so complimentary.

Maybe it was the last straw, the final impulse she'd been looking for. Maybe I'd let our relationship slide that far.

It might not have been so bad if she'd been able to move out straight away, but she had a lot of gear at the flat. It took two days just to break her workbench down and get it out.

She moved in with her sister in Oakleigh Park, caught the train down every day, left again with rucksacks stuffed full of reels of optical ribbon, chips, microtools, satcoms. I offered to hire a van so she could do it all in one go, but she refused; everything she owned had arrived on her back or in her arms, and that was the way it was going to leave. That kind of symmetry was important to Rixi.

It was probably that kind of symmetry which attracted her to the fringes of the Fusion Gang, travelling the city dismantling technology, striking at the dead of night in underground carparks and leaving before first light, half a dozen motor cars in their wake with the engines neatly dissected out.

I never met any of the Fusion Gang, but the Sunday supplements say there are hundreds of them. Young people, militant Greens, No Logo adherents, older people whose jobs have gone to new machines, homeless children for whom a Cause is a useful substitute for an Identity. And people like Rixi, who strike at technology in much the same way as a child plays a practical joke on a parent it loves more than it has the language to articulate.

Compared to her, I was a technological dyslexic. I knew all the words, but the configurations were meaningless to me. I could reel off the buzzwords and theories, but I could only use the technology, not explain it. I had my own areas of expertise; I'd read all the literature, listened to a lot of the stories, and I was still at a loss as to how to explain it.

Come to think of it, Ballinger was there when I first met Rixi. My current girl and I had taken one of our increasingly-frequent rows down to a club on the Charing Cross Road, where a truly desperate punk-revival band was playing. Hot July night, thunder in the air, too many disgruntled punters jammed into too small a space. The sense of impending doom you get from being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a person you're breaking up with.

About a third of the way through their set, the band's sound system made a sound like a hippopotamus being eaten by a small dinosaur and lapsed into silence, left the musicians standing on the stage looking foolish and suddenly appallingly young. The crowd stirred; waves of violence came off them like the haze from a hot road.

And then there was this slight figure moving among the band, jeans and boots and a baggy pink shirt with a ruffed front, black hair bound in a yard-long rope down her back, ignoring the hail of plastic beer tumblers from the audience, checking instrument leads, applying a tiny screwdriver to an equally tiny junction box. Magic fingers. I could see that, even from halfway back in the crowd.

Then she stepped back, and as the lead guitarist finally produced a shaky chord, she turned and looked out over the bobbing, spitting heads, the crudely-hacked hairstyles, foot-high coxcombs, and...

Our eyes met across a crowded room... An in-joke later, when people asked how we'd met. She wasn't with the band, as I'd first thought; she was helping to rebuild the club's ancient PA system. I found that out the next night, when I went alone to watch a band that only did Rolling Stones covers, and she materialised beside me at the bar, blinking huge hazel eyes.

But I remember now, that first night, looking about the audience as the gig ended and the lights went up, and seeing Ballinger leaning against a wall looking unconcerned, just as I would see him, seventeen months on, every day of Rixi's long goodbye. Sometimes two and three times a day. Rixi would have liked the symmetry of that.