Two hours after her meeting with Professor Fossett, while she was in the lab, Monica received a message from his secretary through her ajna. Barbara told her that Yuke's appointment with the triumvirate would be on Monday, April 24th, and asked her to email the tainted report and the work that had been plagiarized. When Monica got back to her office and sat down at her toody she saw from her calendar that Yuke's meeting with the tri was the day before their next tutorial .

Bugger! He's going to be like a bear with a sore head.

As soon as she had zapped off the email to Barbara, Vishnu Bose, her senior research student, sidled into her office with the dreamy look he frequently wore when he was thinking about a work problem.

"What is it, Vish?"

"We're having some problems recording photons from the sample in the Princeton set-up. Chen can't interpret the data until we've sorted it out. Could you get the senior research tech to send someone..?"

She nodded and sent another message on her toody. They waited, Vishnu standing beside her desk and looking dour.

"Going to Caitlin's party tonight?" he said.

"Oh my God, I almost forgot. Yes, I suppose I should."  Caitlin, the lab administrator, was leaving at the end of the month for a job at UCL and she'd invited everybody to her place for one final bacchanalian bash - her specialty. Without Vishnu's reminder, Monica would have given it a miss. Now the shy girl had just committed herself, and she smiled tightly as she read the tech's reply.

"The tech says she's sending someone down in twenty," she said.

Vishnu turned to go. "I'll see you tonight at Cate's then."

Caitlin shared a rambling Georgian mansion with four other people on the outskirts of Richmond Park. When Monica arrived, the driveway was already jammed with wheeled cars and vans. She was glad she had the convenience of an EM rental, and sent it straight to the docking balcony built onto the mansion's facade. She stepped out, letting the car recharge itself, and looked through the balcony window.

The room glowed red and silver and hidden speakers were rolling out a dim cacophony of harsh, repetitive riffs. People in dark or shimmering clothes, magnified by the glowing light, were sashaying together and looked like ogres and ogresses in the magnifying glow. She didn't think much of the current vogue to make everything at clubs and parties look giant-sized. The whole room seemed like an ogre's cave.

She opened the balcony doors and walked into the room. Caitlin, Vishnu and Chen were easy to identify. Caitlin's face was long and thin, and she wore gold and pearl earrings and jewelry that shook as she danced. Vishnu, his skin looking beige in the glow, sat to one side with a glass of something amber in his hand, looking lugubrious next to the orgrish dancers. Chen was a flamboyant Korean and wore his blond hair like a spiky tiara. His bejeweled shoes made a clicking noise as he danced.

At the back of the crowd Monica noticed Yuke. He was talking to a girl whose hair hung like loose tendrils above a diaphanous green chemise. The rest of her outfit was green and almost transparent. Yuke's clothes were lime-colored. Two heart chakras having a heart to heart. Except that the girl was very thin and looked half-asleep - or half-drunk.

Monica progressed through the room, molding her face into a smile whenever she saw someone familiar. This was the kind of party that made her feel chaotic. She preferred intimate gatherings with friends or quiet nights alone in her apartment, wrestling a challenging work project or absorbed in a holomovie.

She went over to a sofa, which seemed to be made of foam, and sat down next to Vishnu.

"What are you drinking, Vish?"

"It's Chilean mead over ice from the kitchen. Quite good, actually. Stay here and I'll get you one."

He got up and squeezed past the dancers, disappearing into the dim light. Monica looked around and caught Yuke's eye. His gaze had been roaming - he was clearly getting bored with the skinny girl in her floaty layers of green. He came striding over to where she was sitting, barging through the dancers, and plonked himself down beside her, making the foam sofa wobble.

"Hey, Mon, how's your day been? Not as bad as mine I hope." He had abandoned his mock-Regency rhetoric tonight, for which she was grateful.

"Mine was okay. What was so bad about yours?"  She shifted her butt on the slack foam to be farther away from him, in a way that made it look like she was merely making room.

"Got a call from old Fossil's secretary - seems the tri want to have a word with me. God knows what I've done. And just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the love of my life's gone up to the attic to get wasted - says she's sick of my philandering."

Why am I not surprised by that?

"Perhaps you should try to be faithful to her," she offered. "Maybe it just takes sincerity or something..." She was out of her depth when it came to giving Yuke advice about his love life.

Just then Vishnu came back through the melee of black and silver bodies with two long glasses of mead.

"Hey bro, one of them for me? Thanks!"

Yuke snatched one of the glasses before Vishnu could react and took a deep pull. "Sweet!"

Monica suddenly found a means of escaping Yuke. "Let's dance," she said to a surprised Vishnu.

She led him, his glass still in his hand, among the dancers. Soon they were up close and in the glittering crowd she noticed he was in black, which made him almost invisible in the crimson glow.

"Sorry about your drink, Monica - he caught me by surprise."

"That's okay, Vish, you gave me the excuse to get away from him. Is there any more mead in the kitchen?"

"Yeah, lots. Come, I'll show you."

Vishnu, a supernerd who wasn't into dancing, plodded out of the room with Monica in tow.

The kitchen was large, cavernous and well-stocked with drinks. Under the whitewashed ceiling they sat at the kitchen table drinking mead while partygoers drifted by.

"So what's up with Yuke?" she asked.

"His girlfriend's going crazy." he said, "and he's making her crazier. He's also made her pregnant."

"Oh God, poor bitch - I hope he does the right thing by her."

They drank silently, Monica enjoying the taste of cold, alcohol-infused liquid honey.

"Yuke's trouble is, he always picks girls who are out of his class," Vishnu said, sipping reflectively. "I mean, they're better than he is as people but a lot less wealthy."

"Mm, that wouldn't be difficult."

"Yes, he prefers to sleep with girls that live at street level - that way he's got more control over them."

Monica nodded. That was what they called people at the bottom of the heap - street-level - the new euphemism for the underclass.

They finished off their drinks.

"Fancy another? My treat!" he said. He sounded mildly flirtatious.

"I'll pass. What the - ?"

They suddenly heard shouting coming from the top of the house.

A race to the stairs, Monica getting there first. They could hear screams now, and a man's voice yelling curses.

They climbed quickly, Monica a few steps ahead of Vishnu. The shouting continued, it seemed a couple were having a vicious argument.

On the second floor was a ladder, which appeared to lead up to the attic where the screaming was coming from. The ladder was steep and Monica was glad she was wearing  yellow trousers and not a skirt. She didn't want Vishnu peering up at her old-maid knickers.

When she reached the top, she was confronted with a tiny, slanted room. Yuke Corrigan stood in the middle of it, his arms folded. A slightly-built girl in a flouncy green blouse cut off above her navel and green supershorts was lying on a bed, sneering at him. The room reeked of cannabis.

"You think you're so it, dontcha? Poncy rich boy! Swanning around in your EM sports picking up whores, while the likes of me has to crawl the streets in a poxy little four-seat wheelie."

"Shut it, bitch," Yuke said. He wore his granite face.

"No, you shut it! My granny got it right - it's the rich what gets the pleasure and the poor what gets the blame. Now I'm up the duff and you just walk away. You're nothing but a tosser with a gold credit pad."

Yuke, who was more in control of himself than the girl was, noticed Monica and Vishnu outside the door.

"Hey, guys," he said almost nonchalantly. "Just sorting things out with my old lady. Catch you two downstairs."

"I'm not your old lady, you wankstain!"

Yuke suddenly lost his composure. The girl had insulted him in front of his tutor and a fellow student and couldn't go unpunished. He darted over to the bed and the girl rolled away from him. "Piss off!" she shouted.

Yuke looked across at Monica and smiled, before his hand cracked down.

The girl was sitting up in bed now, holding a hand to her cheek. When she saw Monica and Vishnu staring, dumbfounded, she lowered her hand and revealed a red strawberry mark spreading up her face.

"You see what he just done? He hit me."