She has a contract for a book on interfaces; she is trying to write up her PhD in human computer interaction “I don’t usually eat until the evening,” she says. “I find it distracts my energy.”Pascoe has always been this way: while still at school in Poland, she designed and launched a range of funky clothes. Studying Spanish and linguistics at Warsaw University, she ran an art gallery on the side. When she came to the UK to do a further degree in psychology, she worked part-time as a programmer. And her PhD sideline was developing software for the post- Communist banking system. Because information changes so quickly and I get so much input from the Net, I have to keep it [her loft] clean The flat is full of white walls …

There’s nothing to distract me.”She gets online at 7am, works weekends, is rarely home before midnight She can’t remember her last holiday. “Around four or five hours is enough for me.”Possessions tie her down “My security is my knowledge … “I don’t need that much sleep,” she says, in her slightly broken English, downing another black coffee. “They managed to capture the mysterious Zeitgeist of where people want to be,” says John Browning, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine The company had brilliant branding, too “It’s a hell of a good name,” says David Tabizel. And instead of cloning the original restaurant, each Cyberia is tailored to its city’s needs: the Edinburgh cafe works closely with the festival; Manchester services the club scene.They also had Pascoe – tall, lithe, green-eyed blond and variously described to me as “weird and intense”, “a magnificent self-publicist”, “very charismatic, very smart”, “a pioneer in integrating people and technology”, “going places”; “an evangelist for the Internet” She is, indeed, an unstoppable force of nature. “The fact that Planet Hollywood sells T-shirts doesn’t make it a clothing company.”Despite the carping, Cyberia was quicker than anybody else to spot that the Internet was coming out of its nerd ghetto and turning into an everyday resource; yesterday’s newspaper and cappuccino was tomorrow’s e-mail and Scooby Cyberspace.

It’s chaos.” Indeed, industry analysts are sceptical about Pascoe’s ambitions. “Cyberia is a restaurant chain,” says David Tabizel, director of research at Durlacher Multimedia in the City. Pascoe is a cyberspace version of Richard Branson.How has Pascoe, who grew up under the rigid conformity of Polish Communism, managed to fly so high in the “live fast, die young” world of the techno- nerd?At first, it didn’t look good. At the launch of the first cafe, she spent most of the day trying to buy a decent coffee machine. “It was incredibly disorganised,” says someone who worked there as a cyberhost “There was no proper kitchen.