Grime, page 17
Sir Ernest longs for a time when words like morality, trust, and pride were used. He wishes for an orderly manageability and tidiness that he no longer sees. When he looks around he gazes into an abyss of filth, he sees rubbish in the streets, decay in the faces, people on the side of the road, women who are aggressive and unladylike, men wearing laughable women’s clothing. He doesn’t see a cohesive unity of Britons loyal to the crown, but rather splintered groups of immigrants, feminists, Blacks, and white Nazis. Nobody can tell him that anyone could be happy amid this disorientating mess. “When the acquisition of goods,” the earl continues, “is the only gauge of a person’s success in life, then the system falls apart through nonconsumption. The human being. Here I’ll pause for a moment. And I believe, the person entrusted to us, the person calling out for leadership and rules, for a controlling hand to keep things in check, needs a handrail to grab hold of along the frightening path of his short life.” Said the earl.
“Look at China. A nation of rules, strong laws, and yes, the death penalty is not an unknown term there. The death penalty for child abuse, for acts of terrorism, and for treason. That’s right. Give me strength, for I am working on making my country into one for the native-born descendants of greater England once again. I’m angry. This is my country. Listen up, you idiots disrespectfully urinating on the very foundations of our history! That you flood with false ideas and filthy fantasies. Without any regard for the accomplishments of our people.
“Time for a new start!”
Which is also what
PETER
Thought,
When the children had arrived three weeks before,
After an unsettling voyage during which there’d been many fires to look at. Tent camps on the wastelands of abandoned industrial sites, on dead acreage.
Did I really think “new start,” Peter had thought, this stupid esoteric nothing phrase that people use in order to pretend they have things in hand? As if they’re not just sheep who are only superior to their four-legged comrades because of their gripping tools.
Once in London, it didn’t look any better. What was going on? A war, and nobody had said anything about it in Rochdale? Traffic stood still, people pushed their way through the gaps between the cars, it looked like a demonstration in the street in front of the station. But. It was just rush hour traffic. The pace was dizzying by comparison to the speed of people back home, who seemed to barely inch forward at a crawl. Here people ran to show that they could keep up. Jaws set, eyes, too, they were always ablaze. To show that they had ridiculous powers of consumption at their disposal. “I’ll buy the shit. Just tell me what. I’ll buy all of it.” After work—or various work, as you have to say to properly describe the system of multiple jobs—the wage earners and employees of London did their shopping in automated shops—“We also accept bitcoin!” The products all packed conveniently for single people, in cardboard containers. For the sake of the environment. The stove in the smart home, which meant eight square meters in some back court, turned on in advance with an app; ditto the oven. Lights switched on, the Underground ticket taken care of. A great hurrah of digitalization, which saved people time so they could take on a fourth job. In order to buy another device which would then save them more time. So. After they’d bought some shite or other in a plastic box, feeling modern—“I’m part of the fucking industrial revolution 4.0 thanks to shitty precooked pasta packed in plastic!”—they ran to the buses that would take them to their back courts. The news beamed at them from giant screens on every corner. There were fewer accidents now that people didn’t have to stare nonstop at their devices in order to overstimulate their synapses. Moments with nothing to do, moments without information, were damned as wasted time by the brain and punished by short episodes of depression. Moments without information to keep up the stimulation curve, since stimulation was mistaken for liveliness. People stared for a moment. Then kept running. Stopped again, came back. Double take. The reports on the flat-screens on an endless loop.
Something big was happening. As if to fittingly celebrate the arrival of Peter, Don, Hannah, and Karen, as if to mark the date of their “new start” in the collective consciousness.
One of those motherly, concrete-blonde television presenters, the only kind of women who seemed to have a right to exist on the island, announced the decision made the previous evening—“Yes, just last night”—by the government.
Effective immediately
Every citizen of the country
With a valid British passport
Would
Receive
A basic income,
Which was not tied to any conditions whatsoever.
Passersby stood frozen before the screens. You could see how the words went into their ears and then painstakingly burrowed into their brains, arriving at the Wernicke area at the back, the upper part of the left temporal lobe. This takes time. But then. The realization erupted in the form of a collective shout from hundreds of
People.
They fell, within the framework of their typical British contact aversion, into each other’s arms. Money. Free money! It would be said many times that Great Britain was as a result the first country in the world to rise to the challenges of the future, and so on. With a basic income, welfare, retirement benefits, sick pay, and disability pay would be dispensed with.
The collective mouth was agape. This policy, it was further said, would necessitate a laborious registration of all residents; citizens should sign their claims in the next few days by appearing at registration offices. And don’t forget proper ID. And kiss my ass, thought
DON
It’s nothing to do with us. We’re not citizens, we’re runaway children. Meanwhile
What had upon their arrival seemed like a demonstration had become a riot. As if the money the state was giving the citizens would be shared only with the quickest, everyone seemed to go mad with greed. Taxis were stopped. People ran, fell, stumbled over those who had fallen, and everywhere single shoes lay dubiously in the streets. Peter got scared. It seemed advisable to leave this scene of insanity. The children took their bags and pressed through the tumult. It took a quarter of an hour to shove their way into a rich neighborhood a hundred meters from Victoria station. The contrast between the wretches in the street, the riotous common people, the homeless, and these elegant living arrangements was amazing. The general public apparently stuck to the division between the classes. Residences as big as ships, with golden light shining from within, overlooked a handsome park that seemed perfect for their first night, a night on which for once it wasn’t drizzling. The four children had barely sat down before two security guards with a dog, which was probably mechanical, turned up. They told them that this was no public park. Because there were no public parks. That is, there were parks that the public could use under certain conditions. Every green patch and open space, every square in the city, belonged to somebody. Russians, Arabs, mobsters, and it was up to the owners to determine the rules.
So
The new life
Started with a delayed euphoria.
Over the course of the first few weeks, the nearly still–children of parents of undefined ethnicity slept on the street in front of a Bentley dealership, in a youth hostel, in a squatted building, and in office buildings they managed to get themselves locked into. Office buildings were the best overnight locations, as they were heated. During those nights in office towers the children had longed for a regimented life. They came up with plans during those nights in the towers. “Before we put down roots we should get to know the city first.” Said Don during this time. The others agreed.
So the children got
To know the city.
The central districts seemed inhabited exclusively by Chinese, Russians, and Arabs. Whom one glimpsed only through the windows of golden cars with five gold-plated exhaust pipes. These inhabitants of the central districts insisted on their petrol motorcars, and law enforcement forces turned a blind eye. They knew who owned most of the city. The rich sat in traffic in their golden vessels, same as the electric cars and the little self-driving vehicles. Nobody wanted their right to individual transportation taken away. A car was freedom where there was otherwise little freedom left. With a car one could drive around, at least in theory.
The children began their confidence-building explorations in the City of London. Barely three square kilometers, just eight thousand residents. With its own laws since 886 AD. Only reptiloids hung about Temple Church.
There wasn’t much else going on. White men in suits who looked so similar that you might think it more practical to condense them into one man. What he would then be good for was, however, unclear.
Aside from the rich idiots in golden motorcars, the central areas of the city seemed made exclusively for tourists. Chinese tourists who wanted to buy marmalade worth its weight in gold in authentic shops. Aging models who’d married Russian men and now shopped with wicker baskets for superfoods in organic groceries, still a bit unstable on their feet because of surgical belly button revisions and vagina rejuvenations. Standard operating procedure. You know how it is.
In the entire city center, from Nottingham and Chelsea to Mayfair and Kensington, there were no children. They’d probably been sent off to boarding schools, or were dead. The looks that followed Hannah, Peter, Don, and Karen could be interpreted without difficulty as greedy. “Maybe they eat children around here,” said Hannah. “We should get out of here.”
Like everywhere in Europe, the streets started to look squalid as soon as you left the city center. No trees, no limousines, no gold. No good honest red brick, organic cafés, fitness studios. For a hedonistic world metropolis, these, shall we say, “locales” looked depressing. Garages and sheds had been turned into flats, signs had been put up in warped window frames. Solicitations for flatmates or offers of sofas to crash on were posted everywhere. And the rates,
You can guess.
In the districts
Beyond the manicured white villas, the expensive shops, the charming private parks, the government’s announcement reverberated. Long lines had formed at the registration offices. Those in line emanated confidence, hope, and fear. Perhaps this incredible basic income would be gone by the time they made it to the front of the line? Inside the offices, people were attended to at long tables that had been set up temporarily. The customer looked into a camera. The facial image was transmitted to a database, in fractions of a second a chip was loaded with all the data of the person in question. Device IDs, biometric passport details, bank accounts, addresses, medical files, police record, sexual predilections, friends, family, social peculiarities, legal troubles. At info stands, trained staff explained the typical applications of the sensational new technology. They spoke less about the personal information which could now be ascertained even when a target wasn’t within the catchment area of a biometric facial recognition system and went around without a mobile phone or ID. The personnel praised above all the simplification of the cashless transactions and the ease of use of public transportation. “And see, you don’t need a credit card or proof of insurance; you have all your passwords in one place and can manage your smart home with this chip.”
“What smart home,” one or two asked. “More on that later,” a staffer would respond. The registered citizens left the office feeling buoyant. Finally! They seemed to be thinking. Finally it was coming to fruition. The dream of progress and future. Finally things would be looking up,
Felt
The young
COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT
HEALTH STATUS: two abortions
DEFORMITIES: foot fungus
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Tinder
POLITICAL CATEGORIZATION: on the left side of the spectrum, critical of consumerism
Well, theoretically a communications consultant. At the moment nothing was being communicated. And certainly not by her.
She’d had no idea what she wanted to be, like most of her classmates. Studied something that sounded nice. Something that involved people. Speaking to people sounded nice. The communications consultant didn’t want to put herself out. She didn’t want to be hated, get caught up in any shitstorms, didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, be unloved. Wow, how exciting.
Her studies didn’t provide her with anything substantive. Linguistics, story framing, modern media, to name just three meaningless subjects. Then she’d gotten an internship at a startup that was launching a new messaging service. Something like WhatsApp. Snapchat, Instagram. Before them though. Just not as user-friendly. Together with an external thought-reading device that could put sentences from your head directly into a message. Or was supposed to. Didn’t work. Nothing but gibberish came out. The communications consultant covered the cost of her shared flat and her spaghetti by working at a bar in Soho and worked ten hours a day for herself, for the optimization of her portfolio, meaning she wasn’t paid by the startup. Which went bankrupt after half a year. The communications consultant then found other internships at ten new up-and-coming IT firms that were developing some shit or other and dreamed of making it big. Two of them even paid. Well. Sort of paid. The communications consultant was gender-fluid and polyamorous. Whatever—it had always been clear to her that she was unique. She believed in equality for all. Respected religions, sexual preferences, gender self-identification. It wasn’t that she didn’t care how others lived. She just pretended she didn’t care. The communications consultant had been opposed to Brexit, her arms were covered in tattoos to such an extent that they looked like black prosthetics. Her stated enemy was neoliberalism. About which, just between us, she didn’t know too much about what it meant beyond rising rents and a generally more fraught societal situation. Take Amazon. Oh, man. Amazon. When the communications consultant still had money she had ordered books from Amazon, of course, even if she had held her nose. Who had the time, blah blah blah. And when Adidas brought out a new Capsule Collection from a grime star, she had camped out in front of the shop. She was a totally normal, self-important windbag whose cluelessness was touching. Since birth she’d been preached to about the sacred value of individuality, for the sake of selling Capsule trainers to her, and now none of the promises were coming to fruition. No prize for gender-fluidity, no certificate for juggling seventy-eight different social media accounts featuring seventy-eight possible genders. But
From the cute, tousled experimental stage of youth she had reached an age when her lifestyle began to stink, and suddenly a number of uncomfortable happenstances began to pile up. Shocking moments as the communications consultant felt the downturn in her life in a nearly physical way. It began on the day she got her chip. The government bureaucrat had scanned her head with some kind of machine.
MI5 PIET
“That was the IQ test, sweetie.
And it wasn’t so exhilarating in your case.”
And the
COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT
Lost her last job a few weeks ago. She was a social media specialist at a big real estate firm. Had been. A company primarily concerned with privatizing public housing. With her look, i.e., the gender-fluid one, the communications consultant didn’t necessarily find favor among the overwhelmingly conservative male workforce. After a week a film clip that, thanks to new software looked deceptively real, went around the internal office mail system. The face and voice of the communications consultant had been placed in a bestiality porno. Keyword: stallion. Though viewers knew better, the fake news, images, videos that made social media a battlefield always left a lingering doubt. One knew better, but could there be something to it? And hadn’t the communications consultant paged through a horse calendar at a rather slow gallop? Didn’t she look at the office pooch with an unmistakable desire?
So she was let go. And subsequently, thanks to the fraught economic situation, didn’t find a new job. Not at an established firm or a startup. Not even one of the one-pound jobs was available, and the communications consultant bounced from one shared flat to the next, always having to leave after a short time because someone always came along who could pay more. It was as if the weeks and months ran together into one day that always consisted of the communications consultant standing in some apartment, being greeted indifferently by the occupant, and then lying down in a dark room. And she was always afraid to go onto the street. Because outside, with her ambiguous look, the communications consultant got beaten up once a week. And someone always recorded it. Humiliation was a powerful and always effective weapon. She huddled in her room. Looked into the courtyard. A shadow in the window on the opposite side. Tomorrow she’d register and then she’d have a basic income. Then everything would be okay.
And it wasn’t raining.
“They’ve gone mad.”
Said
DON
Looking with amazement at the excitement of the natives. People with ragged clothes, bad teeth, bloated faces, gazes muddled by alcohol, danced downright boisterously. They had faith in their government again. Pride in their country again, pride in being British. Pride in being part of a global empire. This wonderful country that gifted them an income. “Fuck off.” Thought Don. Loudly. The atmosphere was perhaps best compared to the feeling laboratory apes feel when first released into the wild. A completely exaggerated cheerfulness reigned in the streets. There was silver confetti coming from somewhere, which now covered the streets. On the oversize screens on every corner came images of spontaneous basic income parties and interviews with happy citizens. Various politicians appreciatively praised the decision to take this important step for social justice in the country. “We’re surrounded by complete idiots,” said Don. “I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but they should leave us out of it.” Hannah nodded. None of the four was really what you would call an IT nerd. They just knew it was advisable for them to go underground if they didn’t want to end up in some sort of child welfare institution. They knew that as children they had no human rights. Knew that adults didn’t have any human rights, either, and that the idea to let themselves be implanted with a chip like a pet was weird. The four stood with their mouths agape, looking at the crazy big-city people as dark fell.
