Grime, page 18
On their further explorations of parts of London where a delighted Chinese tourist would never end up and where there wasn’t a single aesthetically pleasing millimeter on which the eye might happily light, rubbish containers stood before buildings where people lived behind boarded-up windows. “Check it out, a gathering of the undead.” Methadone clinic, suggested
KAREN
When she saw the long line of unsteady figures. But it was a blood bank. Twenty pound payment. The place was hopping. Donate blood, people’s last idea before hanging themselves. Junkies, alcoholics with cirrhosis and covered with rashes, who urgently wanted to support the Swiss blood plasma industry and who were too fucked up to have picked up on the whole basic income thing, stood in line unsteadily waiting to have their daily liters of blood drawn.
In the first three weeks,
During which the four tried to get a sense of London and find their place in the city, they all had to deal with their disappointment on their own. Nobody said: “I’m so disappointed.” Each of them thought he or she was the only one feeling that way. They all tried to make jokes and to seem adventurous in a manner suitable for children. What good would it have done to say:
“This city seems strangely cold. I can’t explain it any better than that, except that I’m always freezing here. Everywhere we stop the windows don’t seem to close properly, and the rain is sharp, as if it’s frozen. And always this cutting wind, I’m sure you know what I mean. The cold also has something to do with the standoffishness of the buildings. They’re like ships. There’s always bright light in the buildings so you can see the people sitting in their libraries. But they’re just decals of book spines, because real books smell too musty. The cold has to do with the peoples’ faces, the way they look through you. The way they all seem to know what they’re doing.”
The
PROGRAMMER
BUYING HABITS: sneakers, pizza, drugs (soft)
POLITICAL ORIENTATION: nationalistic, quasi-
FRIENDS: nope
STREAMING HABITS: zombie apocalypse
GAMES: Waffen-SS versus Werewolf shooter
Knows what he’s doing, right? “Yes, exactly. Right now I’m studying a fascinating report, unbelievably good. So. Have a look! What do you see? LED bulbs, right? But did you know that information can be transmitted by—I’ll put it in the crudest terms—waves? The frequency plays an important role in it. The frequency of light is—well, unbelievable. Do you know how much information you can fire through space and time? LED bulbs could be used as communications devices. An LED reaches transmission rates of eight gigs per second:
“That’s about one hundred and sixty times more than the fifty megabytes per second a private individual gets over Wi-Fi for the TV. One of the CERN superconducting wires can move one hundred gigs a second, which is gigantic, but only twelve times as much.
“This LED shit is enough, right, you could multiply the entire surveillance capacity of China many times over, and across the entire planet. By combining a few thousand LEDs you can attain much higher transmission rates, with no cables at all! Just imagine—you take in all the data from the chips, from the internet of things, with its networked minisensors, plus smartphones, and let’s bear in mind, the amount of data doubles every twelve months, and in the future every twelve hours. And all that data has to be moved. Have you seen the 5G towers? Massive, right? In many countries they struck down limits on radiation just for them. It randomly occurs to me.
“The next thing that comes into play are artificial LED suns—a new form of satellite called sun simulators because of the glaring light they emit, though they aren’t about light but about communications that are hidden in the light waves … and they operate from space. Somewhat more lax regulations on privacy up there, if you know what I mean. From space it goes to quantum computers, with which AI runs a superintelligent globe-spanning surveillance and control system.
“The German automobile industry is investing in quantum computers. Germans, eh?”
Just as an aside.
The programmer had never given any thought to Nazis. Except in video games. There he mows them down. But otherwise—they meant nothing to him. Maybe he understood their urge for a cleansed world …
It’s all quite sensational.
Only
MA WEI
No data
Finds the whole LED thing rather lame.
He isn’t so quick to get excited, because he
Is so old that he lived through the Three Years of Difficulty. It was later whispered that about 40 million people starved to death back then, which was probably propaganda. Ma Wei was ten at the time, and he had heard the stories about other difficult times. They scared children with those. People said to kids: “If you aren’t disciplined, you’ll starve.” Nothing worried people more than another period of difficulty. And when it arrived, young people thought it was just a temporary situation. Virtually nobody had supplies on hand, there was a drought, and the emerging nation found itself being restructured. Which meant that the farmers who had previously owned land were suddenly part of a large family with no land. Ma Wei remembered the hunger. Whenever he thought of the hunger, it pierced him deep inside his body in a way familiar to people who have suffered trauma. An amputation without anesthesia. Or rectal penetration during which their intestines are ripped out of them from the inside. The rest of the memory ended at the point when he ate excrement. When the dead were consumed. It ended in shame. Eternal shame and the feeling of being able to accomplish anything because he had survived. The only member of his family. Ma Wei didn’t find most people from Western countries unpleasant. But rather, just—laughable.
But
THE PROGRAMMER
Knows what he’s doing.
“What I’m doing,”
The programmer often tells himself, “is important for humanity.”
EX 2279
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And
Welcome to Holyroodhouse.
“Just look how nice it is here.” Says
DON
To herself. At night, when she’s on watch, she likes to talk to herself. At night, when she stands guard over an imaginary fire. If a social worker were to show up, one of those single women about forty years old, with good intentions and bad hair, she would say: “It’s delightful here.” Like at a children’s overnight camp. “You know, I used to be in one, too. Oh, good old Bath—how I loved it there.” And then she’d look at Don as if she, a member of the white former middle class, and Don, a descendant of the various waves of guest workers, were somehow comrades because of her memories of youth, which were guaranteed to be about bad sex. As if she knew what was going on here. As if she’d suddenly developed pigmentation that would release her from her pink existence and bestow upon her an agreeable physique. “I have lots of friends who are foreigners,” she’d say, because she wouldn’t be sure which shade of nonwhite to classify Don as. And the social worker would hang about, as if she were expecting an award for it, as if she wanted to show that in a pinch she, too, would eat vomit. Then she’d enter the factory building expectantly. Images in her head. If you said to someone, “Listen, we live in a commune of neglected children in an old factory building,” it conjures up images from American movies. Large windows, plank floors, wood stove, cashmere blankets, and dogs. Not something that looks like an art installation put up as a critique by some student from St. Andrews looking to grapple with social ills. Aha, the social worker would mumble helplessly while using all her might to conceal her disgust. Despite the efforts of the children to make the place into a home, to adult outsiders it still seemed a bit. Jarring. It was damp and smelled of unwashed children, there were things lying and hanging all over the place, old clothes, jam jars, pots stuck with spaghetti, broken windows, drugs. Okay, not drugs. Next, in the dusky light, the social worker would take the mattresses on the floor for beds and the candles for a romantic quirk rather than the result of the fact that the children could steal electricity only sparingly. And the solar panels—yeah, well. It rained a lot. And it was hot. And very cold. And these extremes alternated maddeningly. Strange weather, thanks to the failing gulf stream. But—
“Don’t the kiddies look cute? The way they cling to their pillows,” she’d say while patting one of the children, who would then bite her hand. “Oops,” she would say. Looking at the bones laid bare in her hand. “Like a sailboat, don’t you think, the bones,” Don would say, smiling at the bones.
The children lounged about, relaxed, calmed by the trickle of the stream outside, the branches scratching at the windows, at least the windows that still had glass in them and Don hadn’t had to cover with plywood. “A bit nippy,” the social worker would say, and Don would explain it was healthy to sleep in damp conditions in freezing temperatures with no heat.
“And … those aren’t real weapons, right?”
“No, no,” Don would answer, winking at the machine guns, “we made them. You know how it is; doing crafts is calming. We all have our psychological security zones, which make those affected feel they have some kind of illness they can blame for their inability to function in a socially idiotic context.”
“And what do you do when you need a doctor, are you just out of luck if you’re not registered?” the valiant fortysomething woman with energetic calves and red cheeks and, one suspects, a sip of liquor in the evening would ask while wondering whether she was breathing tuberculosis-infected air.
“Yep, that’s right, you only have access to doctors if you have a chip. But there are tutorials for everything online. We don’t need the state,” Don would say. “That’s why we’re here, that’s why we have weapons, that’s why we’ve planted potatoes out there and other stuff that will taste like potatoes when it ripens. And as for a bit of tuberculosis—everybody gets that.”
But
There were no more social workers. The last one had been rushing around Rochdale before, as if she were constantly walking headlong into a storm. She looked lost. Somehow picked apart and depressed because she couldn’t live out her calling to save the world. There wasn’t even money for boxing clubs for the area boys anymore. A service that had been very popular. After all, who wouldn’t rather be a well-trained criminal? The social worker had sat helplessly at Don’s kitchen table looking at the mold infestation and the mother, who had emerged from bed in a dirty nightshirt for the occasion. Through the open bedroom door, the metal bucket where Don’s mother relieved herself could be seen and smelled. Don’t ask. The social worker had broken out in blotches and said: “So, I wish you…”—she had stood up—“all the best, right. I must be on my way.” She had hopped up and stumbled over her bulky bag, which was filled with applications for food aid, and was gone. Suddenly,
Three weeks after their arrival
DON
Thinks
Of her family.
Who are probably still hunkered down on bunk beds in the homeless shelter. Mummified. And the social worker has surely transferred into the civil service. The place where middle-aged women who’ve been sufficiently disappointed by their leftist ideals always found a home.
Up in the sky a drone approaches with the typical lawn clipper sound. Don tries to blend in with the floor. Private drones had been banned by then. If you spot one of the little comrades on the horizon these days, it can be assumed that it’s a government surveillance overflight. Drones. Right. Don sits up and thinks she’d like to smoke a cigar. Just because it would make a cool image. And to poke around in a campfire with a stick. Don likes the night. She likes to be alone at night, nothing to do, as if she has things figured out. She likes the night and the idea that millions of people are lying down in the city, dreaming of solutions.
Like
CARL
HEALTH STATUS: high blood pressure risk group
POLITICAL ATTITUDE: conservative
POTENTIAL FOR MANIPULATION: easily susceptible to right-wing propaganda
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: porn
Who had worked as a foreman on the building. Until he’d been replaced by a Polack. Which is why he’s against Islam. And against all that shit. For which Carl has a theory. In his opinion, the imbalance, the lack of respect, the poverty, change as a background noise, all of it was the result of women in the workplace. It stood to reason, after all, that a new generation of mothers had been raised who preferred to go to work rather than bother with bringing up growing—go ahead, say it—children. Carl didn’t have a wife. He was ill. He had some fucking disease, the name of which he could never remember and which, given the current state of science, could be cured with a one-week course of tablets. Could be. Which didn’t happen, because it was more lucrative to support Carl’s lifelong decline with medication. So no more work because of the illness and the Polacks. And now. No idea. Cunts. The latest thing was that they wanted men to have themselves sterilized because the birth control pill had side effects. For example, women on the pill had no sexual desire and got cancer—“Divine retribution,” mumbled Carl, thinking that was just the sort of madness that would lead to the end of the world. Women who fucked their way around and men who weren’t supposed to come anymore. Carl had lost three molars to his nightly grinding, and he hadn’t recovered them in his stool.
Carl
Had for a year now liked to drink milk. He’d seen a report on it, how baby cows are separated from their mothers after two days. Both parties scream. Even cry. Most of the baby cows are slaughtered for meat. Which the mother cows once again greet with tears and screams. Since then Carl drank milk with a grin on his face. He often sat up nights in his kitchen with a glass of milk in front of him, sensing it wouldn’t be his kitchen for much longer. Even in the southernmost part of the city, where Carl lived, the soy milk–flat white cafés had arrived, always a sign of transformation. Transformation, right. The streets would be repaved and Zara shops would replace Sudanese greengrocers. And then: See you later! Carl sat in his kitchen and looked into the yard, where he could see a light. In the apartment across the way lived young, urbane people of indeterminate gender with dyed blue hair. Assholes. And Carl sat in his kitchen because he didn’t want to sleep, he didn’t have enough teeth left, and it was cold, creeping up from his feet, and it was nauseating or at least it smelled that way, and there was nothing but mayonnaise in the fridge, and nothing grew from the walls, nothing grew into something he could disappear into, where he could stand in a glade in the forest and breathe deeply, and then everything began again from the beginning, counting down, and at night Carl counted, there were ten more years, then he’d be retirement age, and then another ten and he’d be dead. His breasts sagged and so did his balls, and he wasn’t going to find a wife now. They’d gather him up somewhere along the imaginary walls of the city. What was that goddamn mongoloid poof doing over there in the light? A light that made him restless. A person that made him restless. That woman in homo rags.
Or the other way around. The fact that she was unable to keep things straight. That the restlessness and disorder in her sexual statements had to be dragged out into the world. “Listen up. That thing sits at the kitchen table with blood in the face. I’ll show you what blood is.” Says Carl. And heads out. He’ll give the communications consultant a piece of his mind.
It
Had been worth it.
For the
CHILDREN
The long search. Wandering around various parts of the city, because otherwise they’d never have found this useless district. Just when they thought they would never find a spot that wasn’t already occupied by a vacant condo building, they had taken the last tube on their list to the end of the line. They’d passed old rail tracks and ponds in an area that seemed ready-made for ironic dystopian photo shoots. Dystopia had been the big thing in recent years. Everyone was filled with an overwhelming end-of-times fear. Fear-based laws were passed in a matter of days. Laws against: covering your face, gathering, disguising yourself, hate speech. Internet-blocking laws, asset-freezing laws. But all the loving attempts by the government to calm the people, to protect them, hadn’t helped. Like ants being hunted out of their colony, or hive, or hill, or whatever the hell you call what ants live in, people ran around scared to death, shitting their pants with fear. Scared of multiresistant microbes, Sharia law, feminization, the abandoning of traditions, poverty, and, well—they were still alive. Fear still lingered in the Western populace’s DNA, but it was already half forgotten. Now there was—a basic income. Everything would be all right. Oceans were still rising, the ice caps were still melting, resources were getting more scarce, but everyone had returned to their religion as if nothing had ever happened. The religion of shopping.
