J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'That's misleading.' Penrose pointed to two nearby office buildings, each only six storeys high but effectively a skyscraper lying on its side. 'They're all at their computer screens and lab benches. Sadly, you can forget Cyril Connolly here. Forget tuberoses and sapphirine seas.'

'I have. Who are the tenants? Big international companies?'

'The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf-Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhône-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you'll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.'

I turned to glimpse a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week's unsold output at a Renault plant. Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world's spot prices. The sense of focused brainpower was bracing, but subtly unsettling.

'I'm impressed,' I told Penrose. 'It beats waiting at tables or working as a checkout girl at a Monoprix. Where do you get the staff?'

'We train them. They're our biggest investment. It's not so much their craft skills as their attitude to an entirely new workplace culture. Eden-Olympia isn't just another business park. We're an ideas laboratory for the new millennium.'

'The "intelligent" city? I've read the brochure.'

'Good. I helped to write it. Every office, house and apartment cabled up to the world's major stockbrokers, the nearest Tiffany's and the emergency call-out units at the clinic.'

'Paul, are you listening?' Jane's elbow nudged me in the ribs. 'You can sell your British Aerospace shares, buy me a new diamond choker and have a heart attack at the same time…'

'Absolutely.' Penrose lay back, nostrils pressed to the worn seats, snuffling at the old leather smells. 'In fact, Paul, once you've settled in I strongly recommend a heart attack. Or a nervous breakdown. The paramedics will know everything about you – blood groups, clotting factors, attention-deficit disorders. If you're desperate, you could even have a plane crash – there's a small airport at Cannes-Mandelieu.'

'I'll think about it.' I searched for my cigarettes, tempted to fill the car with the throat-catching fumes of a Gitanes. Penrose's teasing was part camouflage, part initiation rite, and irritating on both counts. I thought of David Greenwood and wondered whether this aggressive humour had helped the desperate young Englishman. 'What about emergencies of a different kind?'

'Such as? We can cope with anything. This is the only place in the world where you can get insurance against acts of God.'

I felt Jane stiffen warningly against the steering wheel. The nearside front tyre scraped the kerb, but I pressed on.

'Psychological problems? You do have them?'

'Very few.' Penrose gripped the back of Jane's seat, deliberately exposing his bitten fingernails. At the same time his face had hardened, the heavy bones of his cheeks and jaw pushing through the conversational tics and grimaces, a curious display of aggression and self-doubt. 'But a few, yes. Enough to make my job interesting. On the whole, people are happy and content.'

'And you regret that?'

'Never. I'm here to help them fulfil themselves.' Penrose winked into Jane's rear-view mirror. 'You'd be surprised by how easy that is. First, make the office feel like a home – if anything, the real home.'

'And their flats and houses?' Jane pointed to a cluster of executive villas in the pueblo style. 'What does that make them?'

'Service stations, where people sleep and ablute. The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself. We've concentrated on the office as the key psychological zone. Middle managers have their own bathrooms. Even secretaries have a sofa in a private alcove, where they can lie back and dream about the lovers they'll never have the energy to meet.'

We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints.

Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident.

'A fifth of the workforce live on-site,' Penrose told us. 'Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you're going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities – yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.'

'And you?' Jane queried.

'Well…' Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. 'I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?'

'Not me.'

'Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?'

'The wrong kind of sweat.'

'Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.'

'Sorry. Better things to do.'

'Interesting…' Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. 'Tell me more.'

'You know…' Straight-faced, Jane explained: 'Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?'

Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly. I noticed that he was forever glancing at the empty seat beside him. There was a fourth passenger in the car, the shade of a doctor defeated by the mirror-walled office buildings and manicured running tracks. I assumed that Greenwood had suffered a catastrophic cerebral accident, but one which probably owed nothing to Eden-Olympia.

Beyond the apartments was a shopping mall, a roofed-in plaza of boutiques, patisseries and beauty salons. Lines of supermarket trollies waited in the sun for customers who only came out after dark. Undismayed, Penrose gestured at the deserted checkouts.

'Grasse and Le Cannet aren't far away, but you'll find all this handy. There's everything you need, Jane – sports equipment, video-rentals, the New York Review of Books…'

'No teleshopping?'

'There is. But people like to browse among the basil. Shopping is the last folkloric ritual that can help to build a community, along with traffic jams and airport queues. Eden-Olympia has its own TV station – local news, supermarket best buys…'

'Adult movies?'

Jane at last seemed interested, but Penrose was no longer listening. He had noticed a trio of Senegalese trinket salesmen wandering through the deserted café tables, gaudy robes blanched by the sun. Their dark faces, among the blackest of black Africa, had a silvered polish, as if a local biotechnology firm had reworked their genes into the age of e-mail and the intelsat. By some mix of guile and luck they had slipped past the guards at the gate, only to find themselves rattling their bangles in an empty world.

When we stopped, pointlessly, at a traffic light Penrose took out his mobile phone and pretended to speak into it. He stared aggressively at the salesmen, but the leader of the trio, an affable, older man, ignored the psychiatrist and swung his bracelets at Jane, treating her to a patient smile.

I was tempted to buy something, if only to irritate Penrose, but the lights changed.

'What about crime?' I asked. 'It looks as if security might be a problem.'

'Security is first class. Or should be.' Penrose straightened the lapels of his jacket, ruffled by his involuntary show of temper.

'We have our own police force. Very discreet and effective, except when you need them. These gewgaw men get in anywhere. Somehow they've bypassed the idea of progress. Dig a hundred-foot moat around the Montparnasse tower and they'd be up on the top deck in three minutes.'