‘I miss them so much, Bob.’

› You miss your family?

‘Mum and Dad.’ She sighed. ‘It seems like years ago.’

› You have been in the team 44 time cycles. 88 days precisely, Sal.

Time cycles — the two-day time bubble that played out and reset for them, constantly keeping them and their field office in 10 and 11 September 2001, while the world outside moved on as normal.

Outside… outside was New York — Brooklyn, to be more precise. Streets she was now getting to know so well. Even the people she had conversations with, people who were never going to remember her: the Chinese laundromat lady, the Iranian man running the grocery store on the corner. Every time they spoke, it was, for them, the first time — a new face, a new customer to greet cheerily. But she already knew them, knew what they were about to say, how proud the Chinese lady was of her son, how angry the Iranian man was with the terrorists for bombing his city.

This morning was the Tuesday, 11 September, the second day of the ever-resetting time cycle. In just under six hours the first airliner was going to crash into the Twin Towers, and New York and all her inhabitants were going to change forever.

‘So what’re you doing, Bob?’

› Data collation. Hard-drive maintenance. And reading a book.

‘Oh? Cool. What’re you reading?’

A page of text appeared on the screen. She could see individual words momentarily highlight one after the other in rapid blinking succession as Bob ‘read’ while they talked.

› Harry Potter.

Sal remembered seeing the old films from the first decade of the century. They didn’t do much for her, but her parents had liked them as children.

‘Are you enjoying it?’

Bob didn’t answer immediately. She noticed the flickering of highlighted words on the open page of text on the screen grind to a sudden halt, and the soft whirring sound of hard drives being spun momentarily ceased. Forming an opinion… that was something Bob struggled with. It required the computer system’s entire capacity for him to actually formulate, or rather simulate, something as simple as a human emotion… a preference. A like or dislike.