It was supposed to be a phone. The box said it was a phone. So why wouldn’t it be a phone? But it didn’t look like any phone he’d used before. It was just a little device, two little devices; looked a lot like little Blue Tooth earpieces; the sort that could talk to your phone so you could talk on your phone without having to put it to your ear. They fitted snugly round and inside each ear and sat a little way across the cheekbones. There was no key pad, no way of dialing a number, not even an on-off switch. But when them-it turned on – it really was both it and them as they were wirelessly linked, both made up the same device, both talked to each other; ran in synchrony to be more precise; twins, that was it – they became very different. First of all they seemed to, sort of, hum, almost vibrate a little and then clamp themselves gently to either cheek; they felt as if they had become a part of him. Then they seemed to link themselves together, ear to ear, right through his head, as if they’d hard wired themselves across his brain and were pulling all the nerve fibers and neural pathways tighter and tighter, ratcheting them in, until it felt as if they had bolted themselves together right through his head.

Then things started to get strange. He started to remember how to operate them-it; he had a choice of ideas, or rather he could choose one idea that was already waiting or him; he chose it anyway; not really knowing if it was his idea or not. It was very strange to have ideas that weren’t yours, probably not yours, but felt like they were as well. The idea wouldn’t go away, it was going to hold sway, was going to grab all his attention; all of it. It was a sandbox, a sort of training program where he could play with the idea of what them-it were on his own until he knew what he was doing. He was going to play TV. something to do with the news, a way of interacting with the news. He let it chose him.

He was logged into an interactive news channel, News Play 24 - "Why watch the news when you can fake it for yourself". Without really thinking about it he chose a news item about a giant potato mountain protuberence that had momentarily appeared on the edge of the National Park and had then, just as quickly, disappeared again. As an idea it seemed to take over his whole consciousness, unconsciousness, everything. He had various options, he could climb the protuberance, play it as a Lemmings level and attempt to save the person who appeared to be trapped at the top, interview the person who appeared to be trapped inside the steel structure at the top, he could view it from the point of view of a small airliner that had nearly flown into it, he could change some of the initial conditions, heat for example, and see how this would affect the growth and duration of the huge object. If he really wanted to, he could watch a news report on what had happened and why and what were the consequences.

He decided to interview the trapped person whose name apparently was Myra.

"Hi Myra. My name is Jack," said Jack.

"Hi Jack," said Myra, "How are you today."

"Better than you by the look of it," said Jack rather flippantly. He was really talking to a virtual model of Myra, an avatar which talked and acted rather like Myra, just as hundreds, maybe thousands of other actors - not viewers because you were less of a couch potato on this channel - were talking to hundreds, maybe thousands of other Myras.

"It hasn't turned out to be a very good day right now I have to admit." The Myra avatar responded not seemingly put out by his flippancy. "Have you tried my new Kartofli's turnip or raspberry potato snacks yet?" She continued rather incongruously. Being virtual she was programmed to switch the conversation round to a sales pitch as soon as she could, the news was always just an excuse to sell something.

"Well … I've tried both and like both but I suppose I prefer the turnip. The sweet potato snacks always seem a bit odd to me." He said and then tried to turn the conversation round to her present predicament by asking, "how did this happen and why are you in some kind of alien spaceship anyway?"

"Market research has discerned that there is a significant demand for sweet potato snacks. That is of course, snacks made from ordinary potatoes with sugar added not from sweet potatoes. Though I don't know why we don't use these and dispense with the need for all that."

"But what about my question?

"All in good time. We are in fact thinking of adding a new range of snacks that aren't sweet or savoury or anything else for that matter so as to best address the huge group of people who don't like potato snack foods. This could significantly boost our maket share and ..."

"Thanks Myra but I gotta go," he decided to cut his losses. She'd never get back to the point now. In any case the story was so bizarre that it was probably not true at all. Just one of those humorous fill-ins the station always had ready in case there was nothing going on that people might want to waste valuable time on. The idea was fading, he sehmd to need more than the sandbox now, sehmd to need to be with others. The idea came to him that he needed to make a call, he was making a call; his brain was dialing a number he didn’t know, was dialling into something. He felt strange connections being made from inside his head to outside his head, way off somewhere. It didn’t feel like person to person

And then he was connected.

That very strange sensation - that his ears were bolted together across his brain - now sehmd to stretch tightly, very tightly out across a big expanse of … he didn’t know where or what.

There seemed to be others around him as well; not ideas but other collections of ideas he was aware of but couldn’t quite bring to mind. Not around him as such, but with him in a very real sense. Collections of ideas he felt he could probably link up with in some way. People! They were other people; but just their ideas; the essence of ideas; people as they were to themselves, inside their own heads; but more so, more than most people realized about themselves. They seemed to be sharing this new idea. Yes, the idea; what was the idea? It was something to do with lights; lots of lights, thousands of them; sparkling and twinkling in the blackness of night. Lights in patterns, grids, bits of grids, and structures, outlines; lights outlining great structures, regular structures like buildings, office blocks, sky scrapers, systems of them lit up at night suggesting shapes, vertexes and edges, complex buildings and complexes of building, streets of lights, and intersecting lights of streets and buildings, suggesting, signifying, a great city, downtown city at night, at play after the day’s work, like a real city centre. Like a real city centre, but not! Suggesting, signifying, but not really. Suggesting the idea of; what if it was? But it’s really Wilton, east of Middlesbrough, what used to be the ICI chemical works, huge, great, all lit up at night; but now rented off to Invista, DuPont, Union Carbide, Huntsman, and other bulk chemical giants. But that’s not the idea; the idea to play with, that’s it, the idea to play with. Wilton at night, all that Blade Runner, LA 2025 stuff, looking like a great city, but its not; so it can be thought up and played with, the idea of what it could be imagined to be. And they, those he was aware of, together, they could play with this idea: Wilton as the city centre, virtual centre of the City of Tees Valley; now just lights, lights obscuring the chemical plant structures and cooling towers, just lights suggesting shapes and complexes to play with; they had to fill those shapes with people, shops, bars, all sorts of downtown stuff going on, or rather all sorts of stuff that could be imagined to be going on and they, all those twins clamped to all those cheek bones talking to each other and holding on to all those ideas and letting people play with them as a whole, and there to be remembered, brought back to life as an idea when anyone came back to it. They might come back to it after other people had played with, added to, remodeled and reshaped it. They were imagineering … Walt Disney’s term imagination engineering Imagineering we know that … He didn’t know where the word came from but together they were imagineering a new city centre, the downtown district of Wilton. They seemed to be imagineering around the same ideas, because they were collectively imagining what Wilton was becoming, it seemed to change, to shift, to be somewhat illusive as well as real at the same time.

He needed to keep the Wilton City Centre idea at the centre of his mind, attention, consciousness; but it was shifting and changing; things were happening, people were doing things, starting to have fun. He needed to get down there, into the idea, get down in among the gritty reality of it all. That was the name of the game apparently: Gritty Reality: the chemical works ... no chemicals in these works ...