In the pale epilepsy of morning you could feel the city struggling with its own awakeness. Strings of shop facades, each frenetically signing meaning; the insignias of a million bodies zapping through the crazed arrays of street, filtering through the city's in/out gates; too many gestures and human postures for any observer to resolve into a coherent picture: it was there in the fits and starts, in the spastic jerks of the city's motors, in the interstices between human traffic and the systems enclosing it.

Even the network's cool, dispersed power, latent in its million eyes, did not tempt it to try out such a resolution. Instead, it consoled itself with the sorting and sifting of sense-data, chopping out and phasing in signals according to ineffable rationales comprehensible only in the tiniest portions, to itself and the handful of individuals it charged with overseeing it.

The city surveilled itself in shifts, transcribing its data into human schematics, ad-hoc bibles for the sys-admins who it had made the sole point of intercession with its febrile workings. Even then, the whole complex dance took on a degree of meaning only at the point of the system's partial self-assessments, where it reviewed for microseconds its huge bodies of data, scanning for patterns and resemblances, conjuring and rejecting analyses in the wink of an eye, and finally settling on new - and entirely mutable - systems of operation. Thus, at every moment, these analyses of the city's thromboses, its clotted malfunctions, would give way to new processes, new praxes, each wreaking change on the people it administered to. And thus at any moment, you would have thought, an attempt to map, to represent its processes, would be damned by its own temporality, precluded from verisimilitude - and indeed usefulness - from the very outset.

But it was, improbably, just such a map that Jo found himself following, gripping rigidly in his hand, as the morning came on and he struggled with his awakeness: an odd item, combining a baroque squiggle of streets, walkways, and patches of tube networks; a dense block of text denoting a sequence of movements around the city; and then, baldly:

The lines this map traced across the city were broken and tormented, lines of flight over its pedways and travelators, like the incisions of a zany scalpel, unfazed by the properties of the body they played upon. His musculature rigid against the mounting assault of daylight and people, Jo cut brief gutters through the commuting mass as he executed the increasingly ridiculous set of printed commands on the paper. 300 yds down Bunhill Row against the flow. Right into the cemetery. Stop at John Bunyan's grave. Half-blind, sweating with the effort, Jo hurdled himself over turnstiles, against the flows of human data. Faces lurched past him on fast-forward, painfully exaggerated, giving up everything at a single glance. Pedway up City Road to Northern line. Buy two singles. Tube to King's Cross. There was no question now in his mind that he was fading: everything was taking on a different consistency, and the map appeared suddenly an insubstantial, worthless scrap. 'Fucksake,' he heard himself say out loud, and four or five heads turned to look, though guarded and unsure: Jo's ejaculation had already punctured the consistency of their morning's travel.

The previous day, after the goldfish bowl had collided with the floor and Fats Fuller's little invention had been spirited away for the scrutiny of the network, Jo had fallen into a deep catalepsy. He had stared for one and a half hours at the spot where the goldfish's brackish water had darkened the shade of the carpet, at the twinkling of its fractured bowl, and at the tiny, greying cadaver. The thoughts that passed through him will remain as unknowable to us as they were to the set of processors in his flat that logged and scrutinised his actions. What they did see, however, was Jo rising at last out of his chair, grabbing up his pouch of twist and sloping off out of the door, down the stairs and out into the street. Other sensors, under other jurisdictions, tracked his movement over the Span and into the lanes of pedestrian traffic passing up the Westway towards the West End, then traversing Marylebone on the elevated tracks that connected it to Euston. From there, he was seen skirting down through King's Cross and onto the slower, smaller capillaries that took him to his favourite pub - his patch - The Red Hole. Inside Jo found his accustomed spot, slouched into the embrace of a massive leather armchair in the corner of the room, set his sunglasses in place, and took an exploratory wheeze at a half-vial of twist. The first punter turned up, paid for a couple of caps, took one there and then; Jo did another one, 'to get properly into it'. And then the exhausting architecture of the city was behind him: the night took on a blur, and began to dissolve.

Such was often the trajectory of a night's dealing: at some point his grip on the taxonomy of twist, amphetamine, hash and money reached a critical mass, went nova - lost its whole structure. Strange exchanges took place; odd glances and misplaced phrases defined new terms of barter. In short, a whole new economy came into being, fixed by the particular derangements of Jo's mind. Hence this map, this strange configuration of lines and text, swapped willingly for four caps of twist and a gram. The presence of this object he registered, in fact, as an absence: its existence indicated a concomitant lack of cash in his account, presaged an unfair deal. 'Fucksake.'

But he moved on, filled with some kind of grim resignation and an unwillingness to concede to himself that the five-hour old epiphany ö the one that had allowed him to appreciate the inestimable worth and value of this item - had simply been the by-product of his markedly dogmatic drug-use that night. (The facts, of course, spoke against any such worth. But, fortunately for Jo, it was exactly this that the sys-admins had in mind when they contrived to place these maps in the hands of the public: in pitting a single, obscure line of code against the overwhelming formats of the city, they sought precisely to speak against the facts.) He pushed on with great, ragged steps, lunging down corridors and backtracking frenetically, every motion obeying the whimsical exhortations of some ineffable protocol. Insistent, demanding, precise in its lunacy: Once round on the circle line. Out again at King's Cross. Put a fifty in the vending machine. Back on the Northern line and change at Bank for Liverpool Street. Wait on platform for train marked 'Aldgate'.

And it was through the lunatic lines on the page, the lines he replicated across the city, across the carcass of the network, that Jo came to board a decrepit train marked for 'Aldgate', a tube station, we know, long demolished and removed from the map. It was by these lines that he found himself yanking the emergency cord, prising open the carriage doors, stepping out onto the dim, crumbling platform. And as the tube moved away, as he confronted the dark silence, poked about blindly for a wall to guide him, those same lines, traded for two capsules of twist and a gram of low-grade amphetamine, were pointing Jo toward a long, long forgotten room, where light, dispersed and filmy, filtered in through grates set into the roof, the source far above, remote and anonymous; where the creep of lichens had layered a rich, dark carpet over every surface; a place without the trace of a camera, pressure sensor, or sound monitor. Nothing moved in this space, and it was as though, in the absence of surveillance, things had lost their reason for moving. In a kind of dumb, irreverent awe, Jo lowered himself onto a park bench set incongruously against the mossy wall. The realisation of what he had been led to was growing in him as his pupils dilated grudgingly in the dimness. It was here, all around him, undeniable, blatant, obvious. And, as if in confirmation, scrawled on the wall above him, he slowly made out the two triumphant, brazen lines:

J.J. King [jamie@jamie.com]