But what am I saying? I'm talking as if all this business is still going on when I've already explained that it's all over. But I'm not so sure anymore, increasingly uncertain. What actual existence has love after all, other than inside our own heads? How strange that is, for something so dominant in our lives. How far-fetched the leap of faith, our trust that the object of our desire dreams of us equally in a shared hallucination, or dreams at all. I resolve to go on loving Kyrie, even though she renounced us and pronounced me persona non grata. I go on loving within the kingdom of my own head, and who is to stop me? And thus Kyrie lives on, in my heart and mind and in these pages. I try to get on with the everyday, to conduct my life normally, but once opened: the windows and doors to Mirrorworld cannot be closed so easily. Indeed, I even know how to make my own, I carry them with me.

I disembark when my train arrives at the city centre, jostled by the crowd of other eager robots, and commence my routine walk up Sauchiehall Street. Rather than arrive at my office today, I take a detour through the West End Park instead and a find a quiet corner between two glossy-leafed rhododendrons in which to unfold a hinged black wooden frame from inside my briefcase. A tricky trapezoid, rapid rhomboid, parallelogramophone of forbidden music, the frames rotate to form a right-angled rectangle and then I simply step through it once like a little girl with her skipping rope or hula hoop. Ka-boom! I vanish sideways out of our world, condense into a straight line of carbon shadow in flatland stripped of my higher dimensions, then disperse as dust on the wind, a slate wiped clean.

I fall out of the sky above Queen's Park and land laughing in a duck pond. I can tell immediately that I am back in never-time again, a years-ago November, before the whole thing got too serious. When Kyrie and I could still just about convince ourselves we were only friends. Friends who kissed a lot and licked each other's genitals. As you do. I shake myself dry as best I can, but am chilling fast in the morning air. Clouds of fog still cling to the dips and hollows of the park as I hurry my way along the manicured curving paths over the hill towards Kyrie's district. She receives me shivering at her door. Her guardian daughters, twin moons of caution and prudence, are both absent today, drawn south by the gravitational pull of London. Only I really need to get out of my damp clothes, but she gets out of hers also, obligingly mirroring to the last, and we sink together into each end of a steaming hot bath, to discuss life, love and the universe as usual. Her hair is tied up behind her head in a most appealing tortoise-shell clasp, revealing her charming little ears. She smiles mischievously.

What the hell are we going to  do…? -I sigh. Emily still suspects nothing.

But we can't go on like this, Kyrie nods sagely, all this surreptitious skulduggery goes completely against my moral order. It occurred to me the other day that perhaps you were thoroughly mad and you've somehow drawn me into a kind of communal madness with you. I mean, we've hardly known each other more than a handful of weeks. How long has it been exactly?

About twelve years… I calculate.

Her brow furrows. Are we dead, Bruce? One loses track of time in the afterlife.

Quite possibly, I agree. I always said that breaking up would be like that for us. That we would be dead people for the rest of our lives, robots going through the motions.

But was there really ever any other way?

To have confessed to Emily then left her, I suppose. I was ready to do it, but you stopped me, remember?

You stopped yourself if you really think about it, but tell you what: let's not really think about it. She pours me a cup of tea from a little china teapot she's brought to the bath's edge specially, sitting on a tray on the bathroom floor. All very genteel. Do you think there are actually choices in life? Parallel universes even, of theoretically infinite number, in which we each did things differently and life went on in a completely different way?

No, in a word. I answer bluntly. That's a load of mystical bollocks that particle physicists have dreamed up recently, but it feels to me as if it has no basis whatsoever in real life as we experience it. Just goes to show that our scientists have become merely priests, and science our religion.

You favour the idea of karma then?

Yes, the inevitability of a pre-destined future that is a product of who we each are. Time is circular.

But you mention God quite a lot, you know, and not just at the top of your voice when you're having orgasms with me. What's that all about?

I suppose I find him or it a useful thought experiment, or maybe just a atavistic paradigm which I can't shake off, along with a lot of other baggage from my parents. I can accept him as a metaphor, more of a her than a him, for the spirit of all life on this planet. Gaia, if you will.

But that's not a very reasonable or moral god or goddess really is it? She muses.

No, indeed, and neither are you… I smile sadly and she leans forward from her side of the bath and kisses me passionately on the lips. I run my hand across the marvellously soft and smooth skin of her back and arms and legs, like strawberry sorbet I sometimes think, as if scarcely there at all, the mellifluous epidermis of her boundary with the outer world, melt-in-the-mouth sweetness of oestrogen. Just where does Kyrie end, if she ends at all? She is a breeze, a mist, a breaking wave. And the bathroom is filling with fog now, as she runs in more hot water. I lose sight of her and when my vision clears I find we are walking hand in hand a few blocks away, in our long Winter coats and hats, down by a bend in the River Cart, looking up at the windows of a rented flat I once planned to share with her. This district is cold and grey, too few gardens, too many tall tenements in narrow streets.

What were we thinking of? -She chuckles, looping her arm through mine in a gesture I always loved, thinking it made me feel strong and reliable and useful.

You had a house, but you never seemed at home in it. I wonder how much time you might have spent round here instead if I had gone ahead with this? -I ask her.

The dampness in the walls… She begins, the dry rot, the spores, the mushrooms…

Nah, let's be honest, Kyrie, the wood rot was in just one room that you never used. It was more than that. That house oppressed you. You claimed you couldn't get peace when Phoebe and Demetra were home with their friends round, but we both know that didn't happen much. You were most oppressed of all when the two of them were absent and you were left alone in the place. That was when you felt the strongest urge of all to leap into your campervan and speed around the city and the country, escaping yourself, shadow-boxing some inner demon, pursuing some elusive sense of freedom and happiness.

And isn't it elusive for all of us? She counters.

Yes, I concede. But for you more than most. It was the departure of John and all his children that made that house too quiet for you to bear, I reckon. A big family like the one you grew up in. Your father left you, and then years later there was John leaving you too, taking his kids with him, repeating the paradigm but worse this time, leaving you only your daughters. You still have feelings for him. You dated me, if one might use such a quaint term for an adulterous bastard like me, on the rebound.

Kyrie tenses, stiffens and drops my hand and now I know I've gone too far. Here you go again! Haven't you learned diddley-squat? This is what I grew to hate about you, the way you always tried to psychoanalyse me!

But I love you. Isn't it inevitable to want to try to understand those we love?

But you don't understand at all. You misunderstand. You disregard my own explanations for myself with obscene arrogance, as if you know, as if you have lived my life when in fact only I have. Only I know the truth about me. You patronise me. I don't want to be understood, not by you at any rate. You're not fit to understand me! She is raging now, eyes blazing, come to a standstill on a street corner, as the river mist thickens, comes pouring up the street like a prowling cat.

I lose her again in the grey fog of confusion, mutual miscomprehension. Except for her beloved voice, that gentle almost-whispering tone so burned into my memory which pursues me as ever, echoing down the street in the muffling fog, wrapping itself around me like a scarf, like a hangman's noose: I don't want to be understood. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

So now I am left alone again. The mist half clears and I find I am seated in Café Tapioca on Pollokshaws Road, where Kyrie and I met so many times, with all the midweek traffic lurching by outside, except that the place is nearly empty, oddly cold, and filled with the sort of Winter mist that only belongs outside on street corners. You'd think it would set off the fire alarm. Two middle-aged women are seated at a nearby table eating gateau with forks, but one of them is wearing a Halloween mask of a skull, and continuing to talk and sip tea as if everything is normal. A young man is sitting at another table near the windows onto the street, scribbling rapidly into a notebook, as if writing poetry. He looks up and I see he has the face of an old-fashioned clock, complete with Roman numerals and hour and minute hands decorated like florid spears.

The waitress comes over to serve me, and I remember her sadly beautiful face from years ago, sense that she recognises and remembers me. She is made sadder still by her empathy, her inkling that Kyrie and I are no more and I am a sad sack inhabiting my haunted memories of her. I open up the tall black hardback menu and look for something to order but find only a printed black square on the page which grows and amplifies bringing with it the sound of discordant middle-European music played by a string quintet, as the mist in the café thickens and I begin to cough and choke. The twelve-tone noise and blackness overtakes everything else until I feel a jolt in my stomach, a sudden feeling of falling, and wake up, coughing, back on the north-side.

How are you going to vote in the referendum? -Someone is asking me.

What? Say that again? I repeat, trying to get my breath back.

The Robot Referendum. Whether Robotland should leave the United Kingdom of Great Boredom and weather-is-dire land. I am at work now I see, seated at my computer desk inside my office: the Cutty Sark building, a great swelling attic of distorted sarking boards like ship planks that creak in the wind, tapping away at my computer keys. I search my mind for any opinion on this issue. I think we should be free, I say at last, …it's time we took responsibility for ourselves and grew up, like teenagers leaving home, took our freedom.

My colleague laughs. How ridiculous! Robots can't run their own affairs! They need real people to run things!

I smile humbly, deferentially, sadly, to myself. If only I could just be a robot. If only I had never loved, had never fallen for Kyrie. If only I could forget her now. If only I had no secrets, could go on living every day mechanically sustained on clockwork. If only. But my heart is alive, it bleeds as much as that of any human being who has ever loved. Rubble overgrown with ivy, all soaring arches and broken windows, it is a ruined cathedral.

*

Exhausted, dishevelled, I drag myself up and out of a puddle on a pavement in the north side and sit on the ground with my back against some well-to-do suburban garden fence, trying to get my breath back. Eventually I get to my feet and struggle at length to brush the worst of the muck off my jacket and trousers. I take my pocket watch on its long silver chain from my waistcoat and check the time. The glass is cracked, but the damn hands still hobbling their way around with fiendish persistence. Rushing as ever, as I often did, to get home before my wife Emily so I could sit there and pretend I hadn't been over at Kyrie's all day. I limp, I hobble, a wounded animal who's just had his wounds licked, back up the humpback hills of suburbia towards the immaculate home I share with Emily.

Everything is perfect there, not a speck of dust, not an ornament out of place. I get home breathless, only minutes before her. Not yet out of my winter overcoat and suit when she arrives, Emily comes in and takes these apart for me. I stand in the hall with arms spread wide like a scarecrow as she disassembles me. My arms click off, my chest clicks open, the jaws of my ribcage spreading wide to give up, with only the very slightest of resistance, my clockwork heart ticking away, a miraculous well-oiled piece of Victorian machinery. She lifts it out gingerly and places it on the mantelpiece where we're both sure I won't need it until tomorrow. She takes my legs off and folds them up over a hanger and puts them into our full-height wardrobes in the bedroom. She unscrews my hands and fingers and polishes and dries them each carefully before putting them away in the cutlery drawer in the kitchen. My head gets stored with my feet and boots, under the upholstered footstool in the hallway, lying sideways where its dead eyes can stare endlessly across the deep weave of hall carpet finely groomed as wheat sheaves, towards the awaited spectacle of sweet bright November light that will fall there again, on the distant living room carpet each morning from now until eternity.

Emily switches the television on, and settles down to a long satisfying evening of watching real people.