A couple of grey-haired lesbians were telling the people on the next table that they'd come to San Antonio every year since they were teenagers back in the nineties. An hour before, the cabaret singer had started singing Smack My Bitch Up and the other diners started cooing about the golden oldies and asking if anyone else remembered Compact Discs.
Welcome to the future, Anji Kapoor.
Before she had met the Doctor and she'd become a time traveller, Anji had been starting to feel a little old - she was twenty-seven, she had a real career, her student loan was all but paid off, she was in a steady relationship, and Friday nights had come to mean Changing Rooms and Frasier. Now she was surrounded by people pushing pensionable age who she could have been to school with. People who still came to Ibiza on holiday, but who only popped vitamin pills. Or would do, if the EZ hadn't banned them. Ecstasy, on the other hand, wasn't just legal, it was on the restaurant's dessert menu.
Before, when they'd landed in the future, it had almost always been the far future - on space colonies with flying cars and cyborgs. That was easy to cope with, it was just like being a character in a science-fiction novel. But this was weird - she just had no idea if she was meant to feel very, very old or very, very young.
It was strange to think that her dinner companion was only a couple of years older than her, but also almost too old to be her dad. Fitz had been born before the Second World War, and the Doctor had picked him up in the nineteen-sixties. His sense of time lag must be even more acute, he must find this place even more disturbing.
Anji looked up to see Fitz giggling at the menu.
Three hours or so ago, Anji had been impressed, too. After sitting them down, the waiter had handed them both what looked like a small piece of laminated card, but which had turned out to be some sort of liquid crystal screen with an interactive menu. If you tapped at it, it showed you pictures of the dishes, it gave you a detailed description, it showed you the ingredients and nutritional information, it even gave you a restaurant critic's opinion. You could scroll off in any direction, and it never seemed to end.
A logical extension of technology. Anji was starting to piece together a bit of future history. She was a futures trader. It had been - still was? - her job to spot trends, see patterns. So, this menu was a step up from the Psion organiser in her bag, the one she'd been so impressed with in the shop, but centuries less advanced than the library she'd seen on Hitchemus, which was positively Neanderthal compared with the technology Silver had operated in Hope.
The menu was guilty of all the worst sins of bad website design back home - doing things simply because it could, piling information on information, it was designed to actively - interactively - get in the way of simply ordering a meal.
Fitz had insisted on keeping the menu even after they'd ordered, and had played with it through each of the four courses, leaving Anji to play with her food.
The view was spectacular. The Mediterranean, on a beautiful summer's evening, now a beautiful summer's night. There were flaming torches on the beach, and some sort of party going on down there. Anji's fellow diners glanced out every so often, but now the singer had gone, most were looking at the vast wall-mounted TV screens. A soccer game between the Eurozone national team and Brazil was getting underway. Every few minutes play would stop for an ad break, which ended with a short news bulletin.
There was trouble in North Africa - Anji tried to get the context from the tiny snatches of news and a few images - gleaming tanks with EZ flags nudging past bemused Arab onlookers. The tanks were chrome, the shape of tortoiseshells. Sci-fi weapons. Cut to a White House spokesman in jeans and T-shirt, with the anchorwoman talking over him, saying class twos had been deployed, purely in a peacekeeping capacity. Hyperlinks swarmed uselessly around the pictures.
Then back to the soccer game. The referee started the second ninth as soon it was clear the ad break was over.
'Where is he?' she asked.
Fitz looked up. 'The Doctor? He said wait here. He'll be here.'
'Have you any idea how we're meant to pay for this meal?'
'It says they take any IFEC card.'
'And do you have an IFEC card?'
'No.'
'Do you even know what one is?'
'Back in my day,' Fitz said, changing the subject, 'if you couldn't pay, you had to do the washing up. I suppose they've got robots to do all that now.'
'I'm sure the waiter's giving us a funny look.'
'Relax. We're the customers. Just keep ordering coffee. They've got different types, you can mix and match. Look. Decaffaraspberchino.' He waved the menu at her, before returning his attention to it. 'You can get it to do different languages. What do your lot speak?'
'English.'
'No... ah, there we go. Hindu.'
'Hindi.'
'Look at it.'
'I know what a cup of coffee looks like.'
'This is coffee of the future. Look, the last couple of places we've been, the coffee wasn't up to much. Enjoy it while you can.'
There was an explosion out at sea. Just a flash of orange light. The other diners, and the waiters, hurried over to the window. Which was almost certainly exactly the wrong thing to do in the circumstances. Anji remembered when a few IRA bombs had gone off in the City. There had been an email circulated about it - if a bomb goes off, stay away from the windows. Glass shatters. Shattered glass does nasty things to your eyes if it gets into them.
'Could it be terrorists?' one of the tourists said.
'There aren't terrorists,' the other one reminded her. 'Not any more.'
'But this might be some sort of comeback. There was an article about neo-terrorism last week and -'
Fitz looked up from his menu.
There was something burning on the horizon. A black shape, surrounded with flame. So how far was that? A mile? No, more than that.
'It could be nothing. A coincidence,' Anji suggested.
'Yeah, right. Coincidence. Like every single time we land somewhere there's a big coincidence. Before you met the Doctor, did things ever explode?'
'As a matter of fact -'
'Hey, look at that,' Fitz was saying.
She realised, with a start, that they'd interrupted the soccer match on TV to report the explosion. An aerial shot - some news channel's helicopter, already on the scene.
Anji was more interested in the man who'd just walked in through the door. He was in his early forties, apparently at least, and wore a long black coat.
'Doctor!'
'Hello there.'
Fitz turned at the sound of the familiar voice.
He was carrying a briefcase, a small, silver one. Very expensive. His hair was wet.
'You have a fish in your pocket,' Fitz observed.
The Doctor handed it over to him. 'So I do. Have you eaten?'
