I learnt of a man who fitted security camera systems. He installed the cameras themselves, prominently placed to deter wrong-doers; and he installed the monitoring equipment, hidden away in a back office; and sometimes he also installed screens in public areas so people could see themselves being recorded and know that the cameras were not dummies. He was a good worker - prompt, efficient - and jobs were plentiful. But one day he was contracted to install CCTV in a railway station, and he bolted the cameras to the wall as usual, and he wired up the monitors in the office on platform six, but when it came to installing a public screen in the station foyer, he decided - who knows why? - to introduce a time delay, so that whatever was shown was what had been filmed five minutes earlier. Whenever passengers glanced upwards expecting to see themselves looking at themselves, they found they were ahead of their time, and not there at all.

Some go in an unforeseen accident, a sudden rupture - it was just one of those silly things, one minute he was there and the next he wasn't - and some are spirits who fly by night so that nobody sees them go, but the commuters at that station had slowly faded away before they'd even arrived. They observed their own absence and, missing all connections, became atheist gods, convinced of their own non-existence.