Grime, page 19
In any event, there was
Nothing in the area where the children did their final round of scouting the city. Other than the aforementioned poisonous ponds, a few old warehouses, junk heaps, and motorway on-ramps. The group had checked out a few derelict buildings, old factories with collapsed floors, with rats’ nests in the corners or with drafty, horrible karma.
And then they’d found this space.
“Holyroodhouse,” whispered
KAREN
Impressed. Indeed a light fog hung over the wasteland, the contours of the factory hall became one with the sky and the world, and the building looked like a watercolor painting of the Highlands. Don opened the door, which didn’t even creak. “Please take note of the light in this architectural gem. We’ve spared no expense on the wood flooring, which is sourced from organic, sustainable forests. Significant, too, is the small but charming brook in front of the property, a feature sure to stand out in any portfolio,” said Don in the old warehouse, which upon first sight they knew was the reason they’d come here. A flat-roofed building with nearly intact windows, solid walls, and a wonderful view of—nothing. That was the day the four of them found their new home. A beautiful property. Beyond the gentrification ring. Meaning: a right shitty area. The financial resources of the investor class had run dry about five kilometers from Holyroodhouse.
And now
The sun is coming up. Within the limitations imposed by the fact that this is Britain in winter. Let’s just say the sun forces itself to insufficiently illuminate the area.
It becomes light gray instead of dark gray.
The others are still sleeping. It’s cold in the hall. Music’s on. The advantage of life without legal guardians: listening to music. All day. Listening to grime, recognizing the stars’ voices without seeing the videos—Kozzie always sounds like a tin can being kicked across a field by angry children, Ruff Sqwad like heroes, Stefflon Don sounds like she’s not afraid of anything, Abra Cadabra sings like he’s seven feet tall, with that deep booming voice that lifts you up. That voice that’s ruined the larynxes of millions of white men who tried to pitch their voices down until they sounded like talking Ken dolls. Whatever. Thousands of acts, thousands of teens, squatting in masks on top of garages and who wanted so badly to be threats to the world. Who were bored. Who wanted to change the world. But the world has its own plan. It watches the humans, who became too important as a result of the stupid accidental discovery of fire, and who can’t handle their position at the top because they’re simply too stupid. Maybe the earth is the god everyone yearns for and she will bring peace to humankind and a break from all the self-improvement and growth, and from fucking up every possible thing. She will just raise ocean levels by twenty centimeters, puff out a few clouds, and free herself from all the idiots with a wet ice age.
Right.
Don goes to make herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen—they have a kitchen, well, a stove and a table. None of the children like coffee, but it goes with adulthood. Adulthood. Which had felt better in its imagined form. They had assumed they would all suddenly know exactly what to do. Which is absurd, since most adults are just big children who think that if they wrap themselves awkwardly in clothing and toast with crystal glasses and swirl wine around in their mouths they will be imbued with adult wisdom.
They’re not adults. Just little criminals.
“Would you like to tell
HANNAH
How you get money?”
“Happy to. It goes like this.
You find yourself a solitary, average-looking, middle-aged, well-to-do man. You approach him and say: ‘Hi, I’m new in the city and I’m trying to find a good swingers club. Not that you look like the sort of person
Who would frequent a place like that, but—
The men are always interested. Always. Blame it on nostalgia for their past virility. Morons.
Sometimes if they look just too buttoned-down, I ask about a good bar that’s open late. After a bit of chitchat they always accompany me into some dodgy spot, they start to grope me, they get careless—and Don films it.”
DON
Continues. “Exactly, I film it, then I step in, we show the nutter the footage and ask him politely for his credit card and PIN. Usually there’re a few hours during which we can relieve their accounts of cash and go shopping in a select few shops.
There’s just been a nationwide conversion to cashless payment systems. If our current strategy ceases to work at some stage, we’ll come up with something else.”
They always come up with something else.
That’s the upside of a childhood without parents putting on Mozart at dinner, without a father admonishingly saying: “Sit up straight, Benedict.” The advantage of growing up without the limitations of a so-called education, without the active imposition of moral definitions and without any inculcation of a sense of right and wrong.
Children driven in opulent electric SUVs to school and afterwards to go horseback riding or to ballet class, who were read bedtime stories from the collected works of Ovid, and for whom the biggest conceivable catastrophe seems to be the possible separation of their parents, grow up with the idea that the world is a threat and they can protect themselves only with the help of the police. Children like that would stand helplessly in front of the cold heater in the case of an EMP bomb and they’d be the first ones eaten by the rest in a nuclear bunker.
One can say this for an absolutely solitary childhood: a fearlessness surrounds the four children, who had learned that it could always get worse, and thus they fear nothing. No panic during a power outage or a flood, no tears when there’s nothing around to eat, the four don’t believe in the system. They don’t believe in the fucking system and trust only themselves. People who survive a childhood without love, in poverty, surrounded by brutality, do not expect any gifts.
They just get by.
And
Don
Is satisfied.
The hall looks almost
Well—
If sunlight were to stream through the leaded glass windows it would almost be romantic. The children have pushed their mattresses surprisingly close together. They could easily have a huge amount of privacy in this nearly four-hundred-square-meter space, but they lie close together around a TV, with green plants scattered around. A homemade table of brick and boards, stools.
Once they’d declared the hall their hall, the children, who are no longer children but adults, who drink coffee, had taken great joy in furnishing their life. The ark is now very well equipped. One of the first donations from a friendly mid-forties man had financed the solar panels on the roof,
Eventually, in a clumsily constructed garden, potatoes, cabbage, carrots—and all the other shit nobody wants to eat—would grow. Nitrogen fertilizer—you know, the magical stuff that multiplied the world population a thousandfold. For a few weeks they were busy getting money, shopping, transporting things by tube and bus, moving things around, covering the furniture with doilies, and now inside the hall and in the area in front of the hall it looks like the home of mentally ill, nudist survivalists.
Once their existence
Is sufficiently furnished that they’re able to comfortably hang about, they start the search for the people on their now expanded death list, in order to give their days structure. All of the idiots have posted photos of their surroundings and their acquaintances on some stupid social media site or other. All the idiots have websites with the appropriate registration info and IP addresses. All except Thome. His registration is listed as a boarding school and signed by his father—politician. Cheers. Sorting out all the results takes a few hours. A few hours’ farewell, during which they order weapons, listen to music, frantically watch the latest tracks,
And then
They close their laptops, and, after a tender caress, the children put their smartphones and devices in a trash bag. Smart watches, GPS, tablets, all that stuff.
Following instinct rather than any well-informed wisdom, the children had decided to bury their devices. Beneath an old shed. A good distance away. They stand around the grave transfixed for a moment, then silently make their way back inside. Each feels as if a body part has been buried. And it doesn’t even rain that day. Endless emptiness lies before the children. No mail, no Google Street View, no Tor browser, no Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, no online shopping, no way to stalk anyone—especially that: no way to stalk anyone. No movies, no music, no contact with the world. After just ten minutes the first signs of withdrawal appear. Hannah’s fingers start to tremble, Peter sweats heavily.
I represent for the jobless, that have been made redundant
That have got four kids and don’t know how to fund ’em
Ever since the wife and her husband
Both lost their jobs at the office in London
Now they feel financially trapped
Now they’re locked with rats in a dingy old dungeon
Devlin on the turntable. In an endless loop the next day. Cold turkey—no news upon waking up, no looking at photos on social media to kill time, no weather report, no searching the name of some idiot, and no music. No. New music. It’s as if the days are suddenly too long. Don starts to hug trees outside. But there are no trees. The withdrawal drives Hannah to reflexively look at her hand as if it were holding a phone, and then to bite her hand. Karen stares with wide eyes at the ceiling and scratches herself now and then, and Peter rocks back and forth. The devices were home, brain, confidence, and a life purpose. Had been. Now there’s nothing. Don distributes small doses of heroin (Victoria station) during the first few days in order to keep the group calm.
After a week
HANNAH
Tries
To find peace by taking walks. She’s grown recently and now constantly stumbles over her limbs, the length of which she hasn’t gotten used to yet.
Taking walks is completely useless if it isn’t connected to looking at shopwindows. If it isn’t connected to the acquisition of products. Such an obsolete activity is unimaginable. Long gone are the times when families had Sundays off and traipsed through various forests with the goal of reaching some gastronomic establishment to consume drinks or pieces of cake with other families or individuals, happy that something has happened other than being with oneself and the trees. For modern families there were no Sundays anymore that would allow time for such useless undertakings. You always had to work. Either in the service branch or in preparation for a fulfilling Monday of work. The only people with time for taking walks are the unemployed.
The unemployed.
The unemployed are the rejects of the ant colonies—ants again, isn’t there any other metaphor? No, what would ants do with ants who sat around the house and smoked and scratched their balls all the livelong day. Unemployment isn’t really intended in human life, unless you’re part of the upper class, and then you have to represent. Represent the upper class. The value and tradition. Be a role model for working people of how stupid you can look while idle. Which inevitably leads to golf or alcoholism.
Speaking of which, thinks Hannah, the history of humankind is a succession of contempt, degradation, and cruelty. The easiest to hate are animals. Animals, say humans, have no feelings and are dumb, they’re things. Animals will be eaten.
Children are not people. If they can’t work, you can scald them, lock them in the cellar, chain them to radiators or abandon them. Or kill them before killing oneself. Women can be raped, splattered with acid, burned; you can shove broomsticks into them, you can buy them and fuck them and piss on them, you can lock them up, you can dictate what they should wear, when and how they bear children, you can stone them to death. Other people, whose skin is different from your own, are not people, they are objects that you may despise, they’re dumb (see: animals). And if they resemble each other, people, as far as status and gender and skin color and income, then they hate each other because they are neighbors, because they think everyone else is stupider, deem them less dignified. So, do something, do something with these people whose expiration date is set from birth.
Who would want to walk around in the company of such beings?
The others, real people with employment contracts, who don’t sit stuck to a sofa somewhere waiting to die, go crazy while taking a so-called stroll. The body, accustomed to speed, produces stress hormones. Nobody can take it with their overtaxed muscles, with worn-out synapses trained only to digest short info captions in seconds.
Thinks
Hannah.
The things your brain will speculate about when your fingertips are burning with desire for the touch of a keyboard. My goodness—just look at this place. Hannah has been walking for fifteen minutes, and the area looks. The way she pictures the surface of the moon.
The user interface is defective: you see here the detritus of long-ago progress. That’s the absurdity of the earth, that because of gravity, everything you put on it just stays: the skeletons of old factories, rusted fences, plastic waste, unidentifiable metal junk, liquids that turn ponds green. An old pharma plant or a brewery? Or a trout farm? Hannah had never walked so far. Behind the former trout farm was another factory. And inside glowed
A light.
THE FRIENDS (BEN, KEMAL, PAVEL, MAGGY, RACHEL)
MENTAL LIMITATIONS: various obsessive-compulsive disorders
CLINICAL PICTURE: psoriasis, actinic dermatitis
HOBBIES: bad food, gaming, uh—nothing else
TECHNICAL ABILITIES: satisfactory
AVERSIONS: Marvel movies, fascists, the ruling class
Had gotten lucky. When their old clubhouse sank into the ground, they were asleep. All of them. At home at their various parents’ places.
The old clubhouse had been in the cellar of a building in Tower Hamlets. The building is gone now. The whole thing went down like this: Chinese investors had bought the extraction rights for some Scottish oil and natural gas. In order to transport these resources, a subterranean pipeline was to be built. The Chinese had slightly modified the plans of Elon Musk’s hyperloop. How. Only they knew. Gas, oil, and passengers were to be carried in seconds from the north to a newly built port at Canvey Island. That was the concept, until that Thursday at about quarter past noon when substantial parts of the tunnel imploded. Twenty-three people lost their lives—approximately. Two hundred buildings were sucked into the abyss. Which entailed only moderate financial losses because the pipeline route ran for the most part under social housing projects. So much for the disappeared hacker space of the young people who, because of a lack of acquaintances in 1.0 life, call themselves “the Friends.” The Friends have established rules for membership and talked a lot while looking at the ground to live up to their designation as Asperger-afflicted nerds. They exchanged notes about programming languages, their devices, servers, racks, cryptography, and soldering irons, and they were so excited, indeed still are, that there were other people like them. Outsiders who, because their sense of outsiderdom was so strong, felt a calling to fight for all outsiders. They’d found a mission that was bigger than themselves. Young people who stutter, who are incapable of looking others in the eyes, who have no connection to other sorts of people because none of them have a clue what other sorts of people talk about. Concerning the 20 million IP addresses that had been blocked by the government in the last few months. “WTF is an IP address,” they would ask, the normal people, with blank looks.
The Friends. Who now sit around an old factory celebrating the collapse of the financial system, because if not for the country’s market restructuring, this area here would long since have been developed into condos and organic cafés and yoga studios. They’d found it in the course of a targeted search. Very much like the climate mission GRACE, which supposedly measures the earth’s gravitational fields, primarily looking for disappearing water resources so that Western military forces can be deployed to places in the global south in order to keep people from fleeing drought-prone areas. Similarly, the Friends had looked for interesting data on the cloud from the most popular fitness tracing app. And found this pearl on the edge of the city. Not a soul jogged here. No heat cluster, no network. Meaning: there were no surveillance cameras here. Meaning: there was nothing here. No animals, no drones. No drones linked to robot dogs. Nice neighborhood.
MI5 PIET
Chokes on a sip of pinot noir.
THE FRIENDS
Have been busy for two days setting up their infrastructure again. Stealing electricity, server, network, cables, and so forth, all the shit you need to have the virtual world up and running. Now stand up and introduce yourselves!
That’s Ben; he’s already eighteen and supplies the group with money. He tests corporate IT for vulnerabilities. And in his free time he’s trying to develop a decentralized network. Which he’ll probably manage to do in fifty years. Well, maybe. Or maybe not, because he doesn’t have millions at his disposal to hire a swarm of top programmers to set on the task. He doesn’t have millions at his disposal because nobody who has millions at their disposal is interested in a new internet. The old one is working just great.
That’s Maggy, who’s very young and has problems with people. Well, actually, people have problems with her, as Maggy is too heavy and too manly to fit the social conventions that determine how a young girl should look. Rachel, over there in the corner in the plush coverall with bears’ ears, is just fourteen and doesn’t like to talk. Talking bores her. She’s also not too good at it. She constantly has cold fingers and chews on them while staring at the internet—it’s warm there. Over there are Kemal and Pavel. The children of some immigrants or other, groups that have started to be hated of late, and for good reason of course, because they’re to blame for global warming. And privatization. And tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.
These are: the Friends.
Who are angry at society but don’t know who they mean by that. Who talk about anarchy but don’t know what it is. Who pine for action but mean things online. They’re the good guys. Whatever that means. There’re also the others, the bad guys.
