The world is a harsh and ugly place, so of course it seems appealing when you are told that you can have bionic eyes installed that make everything look like how you want it to be. Suddenly the cruel (dirty, potholed) streets of Manchester are transformed into the great crystal walkways of Mantrax-12, a colony founded on a laboratory-grown fungal asteroid that has been placed in orbit around Saturn. The IKEA furnishings of your flat are now all fine Art Nouveau pieces. Outside your window, tramps and drug dealers no longer lurk: in their place are friendly critters, and industrious-looking humanoid robots.

A vast improvement, you might think. But the technology is only a prototype, and there is a problem: there is no equivalent implant for the rest of your senses. So, really you are staggering around looking at what you want when you are still hearing, smelling, touching and tasting what is really there. That fine steak dinner still tastes like a decaying Rustler’s cheeseburger. King Rollo’s Magical Palace still smells like a rendering plant. Your mother’s body is actually decaying, and those aren’t chocolate fingers flying around her, they’re flies.

The worst heartbreak of your life was when she told you she doesn’t love you anymore, that it is over. But the scene cannot be afforded the tragic air that might be thought appropriate since as she does so she takes her top off, right there in the street. The two of you have drifted irreparably apart, she says, as you see her unbuttoning your fly and taking you, now boldly erect even in objective reality, in her mouth. It is this sort of disgusting, deluded behaviour which is why she must leave, she declares, as you are left there fully priapic in the road, cock out, the impressed-looking members of the harem really strangers, staring in disbelief and horror.