I looked at my watch.

Again.

As though time had magically warped in the thirty seconds since I last looked at it. As though looking at it would make the time pass quicker.

No, I was still forty minutes too early. Why did I do that? Would it have mattered if I was late? Of course it would, but it wouldn't have killed me to be only five minutes early.

I felt sick. If I'd been able to eat anything that day I'd have up-chucked it by now. My shirt was soaked, despite the coolness of the day. I was shaking. This was stupid. I felt like I was on a first date. Not just a first date, but the first date I'd ever had. Like the first date anyone in the history of the human race had ever had. Which was stupid. It's not like Laura and I had ever been romantically involved. It was Laura, for Christ's sake. At least, it was meant to be. And if it was Laura, there was no need for this vomit-inducing terror. And if it wasn't... Well, if it wasn't her, then there was no need for this anyway. Stupid!

I wished I was a smoker. At least that would have given me something to do with my hands. My feet took care of themselves, pacing back and forth in front of the monolithic building. My stomach, well, that was somersaulting like an Olympic gymnast.

I caught myself checking my watch again. Stupid! Way beyond stupid. Stuff it.

I turned towards the main doors and strode forward. So I was early. End of the world stuff right there. Somewhere my brain screamed at me to stop, but if my legs kept pumping, if my arms kept swinging, I'd get it over and done with. Rip the sticking plaster right off, that was the way to do it, I lied.

The doors swished open and I marched across the expanse of marbled floor to the reception desk.

"How can I help you?" The woman behind the desk looked impossibly young. A porcelain smile on her lips did nothing to hide the apprehension behind her eyes. I must have looked a sight, sweating and trembling. How many court cases had they fought? How many bomb threats and polemic sermons? Were security guards even now sidling behind me?

I waved my card over the pad on the counter.

"I've come to see Laura. I've got an appointment?" I don't know why I phrased it as a question. Maybe I'd got the date wrong. Maybe I could back out and have every intention of coming back on the right date, honestly.

"Mister Simeon." The anxiety evaporated from her face. "Of course. Peter here will take you to her."

She plucked a card from the writer and handed it to me. "Please wear this all the time you're in the building. You can go through the gate." She indicated the airport-style arch manned by serious-looking guards.

I thanked her and forced the world's most unnatural saunter towards the arch. I passed un-beeped. A man in his thirties met me on the other side.

"Mister Simeon? I'm Peter. I'll take you to Laura."

I nodded my thanks and followed him across the lobby to the bank of elevators.

"She's on the lower fifth," he said, waving his id over the call button.

"That's nice, " I said. "She was always a vampire bat."

The joke completely missed its mark. Of course it would. He'd never known her before. He'd not know about the three a.m. rages on technet, the rants about the incompetence of doctors at the sleep clinics, the jokes about her penchant for steaks so rare they'd flinch when she stabbed them with her fork.

We stepped into the cage and stood, facing the doors in embarrassed silence, waiting for the doors to close.

"Are you a researcher in the field?" asked Peter, trying to force the situation into something slightly less awkward.

"I was -- I'm a friend," I said. "From before."

"That's nice." He seemed genuine about it. "She doesn't have any friends visit her."

That surprised me. But then again, maybe not. Some people make friends easily. My brother Mike, for instance. I'd go to a barbecue of his and he'd introduce friends he'd invited. The guy who'd installed his kitchen and his family. Someone he'd met on the seafront. He truly believed strangers were just friends he'd not met yet.

Not Laura. Where Mike gathered friends like sand, Laura had always refined them like diamonds. You had to really like her to get to consider her a friend. She had to really like you in return. She turned on the heat, squeezing the pressure, until the only ones who were left were those who really got her, who genuinely liked her huge intellect, her fierce passion and her acidic wit that could etch metal. Diamonds were Laura's best friends. Her only friends. That she wasn't flooded with friends to visit her was no surprise. That I was the first surprised me even more. I felt the bile rise in my stomach again. I was the first she'd invited. Please, please God, don't let me screw it up.

The elevator threw us out onto the lower fifth. We walked through several corridors and three manned security doors. Good old Laura. She might not have collected friends like sand, but enemies...

We stopped at a final door. Peter turned to face me.

"I have to tell you that your conversation will be monitored and all information divulged is AIGL intellectual property and must not be divulged to any third party without our express permission."

I held my hands up. "I'm pretty sure Laura isn't going to talk tech with me. She was always way above my league.."

"Even so. Um, you have signed a release. Also, I must warn you that she can be a little, um, short with people sometimes."

I snorted. "No change there, then."

"Of course. You knew her. I'm sorry. Um, do you mind? Can I ask, why did she ask for you?"

I shrugged. "She loved to torment me. Maybe she's just got bored tormenting people here."

Peter nodded, as though I'd revealed a secret of the universe. "Of course. She, um, she does get bored sometimes."

"And she torments you?"

"Not so much, no."

Then you're not a diamond friend, I thought.

He waved his card over the reader then stared into the iris scanner. The door clicked open.

"I'll, um, I'll be waiting here." Peter pushed the door open and stepped aside.

I took a deep breath, metaphorically grasped the edge of the sticking plaster, and stepped in.

The room was tiny, three metres by two. One wall consisted of a large window with a bank of controls underneath it. The window looked out on a huge room full of racks of servers, lights blinking, ceiling lights dimmed, barely enough room between each aisle for a person to pass.

In the centre of the window hung a screen. It showed a photo of Laura's face. I recognised it. Berlin. A conference on security where she'd had a hall full of the most cynical, experienced techs on their feet applauding.

I looked at the photo and smiled, remembering the conference. Several diamonds had cracked under the weight of the dinners that week, and several new diamonds born.

The photo blinked and the edges of her mouth distorted into a parody of a smile.

"Hi, qoq."

I jumped back, shocked. The room filled with laughter. "Yeah, gruesome, ain't I."

It was Laura. The voice was flattened, electronic, but the intonation, the rhythm -- it was unmistakably Laura.

"What? No. I -- it was just -- Laura?"

She laughed again, revelling in my confusion and awkwardness.

"No, I'm Queen Victoria. Who were you expecting? Pocahontas? Of course it's me, idiot. Who else would agree to see a perv like you?"

"No, right, it's just --" I took a deep breath, trying to formulate an entire sentence that would stop me sounding like a complete imbecile.

"It's just you didn't know what to expect from a pile of wires. Don't ya love me anymore?"

"Oh, let's not get carried away. I never said I loved you. It was always lust."

"Yeah, well, best of luck with that now. No lust possible."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "A little bit of salt water on a circuit could get you a little bit lusty."

"God, your jokes don't ever get better, qoq."

Qoq. She'd read a note I'd got from the other side of the screen, and ever since had called me qoq - 'bob' upside down. That it made me sound like a cock made it all the funnier for her. How could they have programmed that into -- I stopped myself. Of course they hadn't programmed that into anything. I placed a hand on the screen.

"Laura --"

"No, on that pad, down there on the right."

I looked down. It seemed to be an ordinary finger pad.

"That?"

"It's a sensory panel. No point touching the screen. Put your hand on it."

I did as I told, gently laying my fingers onto the pad. After a moment the pad pushed back. I snapped my hand back in surprise. Laura laughed.

"What? I can't touch you back?"

"No, no, I was just surprised, that's all."

I laid my hand on the pad and felt the pad push back.

"So, what? We're finally holding hands, after all this time?" I asked.

"Yeah, okay, let's pretend it's my hand you're fingering."

"Eww." I snapped my hand back and wiped it on my shirt in mock disgust. Laughter peeled from the speakers and I was transported back to those dinners in Berlin, where we all vied to make her choke on her wine. I laughed too, pleased and embarrassed in equal measure at the success of my joke. I held her hand again, an act somehow so much more intimate than holding her hand in real life. She squeezed back.

"Don't tell me this is the first time you've done this," she said. "I know you've got a sex robot back home."

"Yeah, but this is the first time where I didn't have to tie the robot down first."

"Yeah, well, there's limits to what hardware can be programmed to do."

"True, true," I agreed, sadly nodding my head.

"God, I've missed this," she said.

"What? Lusting over a pagan sex god?"

"Yeah, that." It took me a moment to recognise the sound over the speakers as an exaggerated yawn. "No, laughing. You wouldn't believe the stuffed shirts here. You met Um Peter?"

"Um, he made me, um, promise not to, um, tell anyone what we said."

"Yeah, like you're not going to post about fingering the Borg Queen, even if it means you going to jail."

"You want me to?"

The speakers remained silent for such a long time I thought there was a technical fault.

"I don't know. You can if you want."

"Um Peter said you didn't get visitors."

"Get over yourself. I've only had this interface six months."

"It takes you six months to put your makeup on?"

"Yeah, like I'd wear makeup for you."

"Still, six months."

"It's not easy. Me, like this. Just an array of ones and zeroes."

I pressed my hands harder on the touch pad.

"I can only guess. Still you got to know something."

"What?"

I sighed, putting all the sincerity I could muster into it. "God, you were an ugly cow when you were alive. We only wanted you for your mind."

And my soul soared at the peels of laughter from the speakers.