Grime, page 24
The cooling fans buzz quietly. The keyboards click, lazy conversations about the revolution. “I’m for armed resistance,” says Hannah, imagining something under that term having to do with uniforms and weapons.
“And who do you want to shoot?” asks Pavel, who comes from some country where the inhabitants wiped each other out in a civil war. The children think about following up the attack on Westminster by wiping out the City of London, the Silicon Roundabout, banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, commodity traders, all the typical things that occur to a young anarchist. Armed resistance is set aside as unrealistic. There isn’t enough manpower for a cyber war. Founding a political party takes too long. “There’s nothing we can do.” Hannah looks around the room. The lights flicker, and perhaps these are the last people she will ever see, she thinks. If outside there’s a tidal wave coming, the polar ice caps and all that, then she’ll die here with these children. Which wouldn’t be the worst fate.
“Maybe a revolution,” says Ben.
“Exactly, a biological reboot.”
It is on this afternoon, which could also be morning, that Karen’s idea will be born.
The others are listening to music,
And
HANNAH
Is thinking about her earlier life. Back when there had been responsible adults. Neighbors or teachers who had given hours-long lectures about mediocre music. Hannah had never understood why men couldn’t just listen to music and keep their mouths shut, why, if they had to think about it, it wasn’t obvious to them that music was a legitimate medium for inhibited people to express their feelings. No, they had to waffle on about it. Every little twitch of suddenly perceived vitality has to be exaggerated. So the Beatles, right, Liverpool, our white geniuses who reinvented music for white, young people. Sting. Fucking hell. Sting. These bands as the most polymorphic, controversial, and magnificent pop musical documents of contemporary society and so on, and then eventually they always, always land on Bob Dylan. The greatest white male poet of all times, who shook the world of poetry with
Lines like
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done?
(Hmm…)
The tired horses, aren’t they a metaphor for an old white man? Who at the end of his life is taking stock of his so-called life’s work. And what does he see? Nothing. Life fucked them. The old Beatles fans. They’re probably driving Ubers, at least until self-driving cars take away that tenuous purpose in life, too; they drive through Paki and Arab neighborhoods and spit in front of every mosque, as if they haven’t yet realized that hating Muslims is out. They’ve given their all: they were in the Nazi Party and deposited pig heads in Arab areas. They were furious, and for good reason, because an old man like that, over forty, can sense that nothing more is going to happen for him.
“Do you have a few chips you could spare?” asks Hannah, snapping out of her thoughts, back to the room, where nothing has changed. The lights aren’t flickering, the music isn’t playing anymore, the hackers are talking about a plan that has to do with tunnels.
And
MAGGY
SEXUALITY: ambiguous
HEALTH QUALITY: suspended development
SOCIAL MEDIA: nonuser
COMMUNICATION: encrypted. We’re working on it
The girl, who looks like a boy, gives her three chips. Wherever they’re from, they represent shopping. Riding the tube. Going to the library. And to the movies. If you’re into that.
Maggy sits next to Hannah on the dirty sofa. She figured out the trick with the chips, or, let’s say, the location and surveillance implants, at a funeral. More precisely her grandmother’s funeral. More precisely, when her grandmother, who was only fifty, was beaten up by Nazis, and it went like this. Maggy was on the way to a food pantry with her grandmother. That should make it apparent that the pair’s financial prospects were negligible. Maggy’s mother had taken off for India a few years before. “Don’t be so egotistical,” Maggy’s mother had said to her weeping daughter. “I have to take this path for myself; it’ll be useful for you, too, to be able to learn from my experiences later.” With that she left, and Maggy moved in with her grandmother in a one-and-a-half-room flat in the south of the city. Her mother now lived in a commune on the beach. Pumped full of hallucinogenic drugs all day, which makes the colors look amazing, and the ocean, man. The ocean. Such a cool setup, and best of all reality just disappears.
The reality
Is that the commune is on the edge of an emergent Indian IT city, the residents of which despise the filthy tourists who take drugs, fuck, and piss in the bushes. Maggy’s mother is extremely malnourished, tanned to leather by the sun, and she laughs a lot. Including at the five locals who surround her and toss her around like a doll until she collapses, then kill her with a rock. They didn’t even want to fuck the filthy woman.
But back to the grandmother and the food pantry. You could almost call it a family curse, because when Maggy and her grandmother were on their way to the food pantry, they were surrounded by some Nazis, who shoved her grandmother to the ground and then stomped her with their boots. The result was severe brain damage and her demise after a few weeks in a coma. And it’s strange—that on the one hand the death penalty had been reintroduced and negative points were given out for fistfights, quarreling with the neighbors, and even giving the middle finger, but on the other, violence against the poor entailed no consequences whatsoever for the attackers. But back to the point. At the funeral, Maggy noticed that chips weren’t removed from the deceased. They also weren’t voided or erased. Nothing happened, which might have something to do with the excessive demands on IT personnel. Which meant there’s nothing more to do than remove chips from the deceased, which is relatively easy, as the dead are of no consequence for capital growth, which is evident in the custody of the dead, in the laughable locks on morgues, in the fact that morgues are not even equipped with surveillance cameras.
The only thing you need to get hold of chips are a blade, bodies, and patience.
Which is something
THOME
Does not have.
For him, this is the greatest moment of his lifetime, in fact the greatest moment since the invention of the steam engine. Everything is possible right now. Every goddamn area of life is being reinvented. By people like Thome.
Another way to put it:
The era of uninteresting men has begun.
The decade or—hey—the millennium, when brain power is more important than banal fame as a rock star or actor. Models consort with unsightly men like Ayers and Spiegel. Applebaum can have anyone, girls masturbate to digital 3-D fanzine puzzles of developers. What a gift, that the world is currently in the midst of a thoroughgoing renewal. Thoroughgoing—Thome loves to intersperse his thoughts with quirky terms. It makes him feel nifty, which by the way is another unfairly forgotten word. Today. The most exciting moment since the invention of the steam engine. And Thome’s on the team, meaning: men; meaning: he is one of the men making the transformation happen. The men planning the establishment of city-states on the high seas, the colonization of Mars, and various cyborg ideas of immortality, all of which, of course, always include leaving earth as quickly as possible after restructuring it. “On Mars. It’ll work on Mars,” calls
Thome. He’s talked himself into a strange condition of weightless euphoria. Without really even thinking about it, he has pulled his member out of his trousers and had a wank to his fading thoughts. Peter stands up, takes the mobile phone from the hand of the trembling man. Sends the video to his own device, which is resting beneath a shack almost beyond the city limits.
It’s quiet in the room
The silence
Is as heavy as a sack of coal, which
MR. M.
FINANCIAL STATUS: leader
HEALTH: tip-top
MENTAL CONDITION: manic depressive
POLITICAL INCLINATION: indifferent
Feels on his chest. It’s time once again to get up. Mr. M.’s current life, which is to say for months now, consists of a montage of waking-up moments. “I’m happy to go through my life without saying anything to anyone.” This saying, which Mr. M. had nicked from a wise man, white, dead, and which served as his motto, seems embarrassing. Beside his bed—no weapons. Weapons are banned here; the danger of ruining the glass dome is too great. If the glass dome were destroyed as a result of—let’s say—a weapon, the residents would have very little time to reach the shelter. Because outside is. Well.
Mr. M. is, as mentioned, a clever fellow, who, on top of it all, had a hand in the fact that people in America are increasingly shooting at each other again, that a vulgar man with an IQ of 98 is president, and that the Nazis are once again proudly staggering through the streets of Europe, singing. He had a hand in making it possible to hate Jews again and to despise the poor, he had a hand in largely dismantling government. Hurray. More impressive than his model railroad, which he reconstructed 1:1 here. Not yet seventy and untethered from the world. Quasi immortal. For those down below. Up here that doesn’t matter. There he’s nothing, there he notices his perishability. He recognizes it by his crinkly knees, by his scrotum, when he kneels over a woman and his balls hang down nearly to the mattress. The real reason for his presence lies in his overabundance of knowledge. Increasing blackouts are to be expected, and the raw materials for circuit boards and semiconductor plates are nearly depleted. Just to mention a few arguments against the earth. Not to mention increasing climate catastrophes, civil wars, mass migration. Yep. So now he’s here. Cheers. On Mars. Beneath a dome. With a giant reactor artificially polluting the atmosphere. Right. He had thought it through carefully beforehand. His wife, who remained on the estate below. For example. Had told him there was no water. No problem, Mr. M. had explained to her. It’s possible to divert ice comets from their paths, necessitating a mere circa 3 million tons of fuel in order to change the velocity of a comet by circa one hundred meters per second. You would need only divert circa 33 million comets per week. Well then. In the meantime, water will come from earth. And to make up for the lack of a magnetic field there’s the wonderful dome—and the atmosphere. Mars has in essence no greenhouse effect and an average planetary temperature of −63 degrees Celsius. The shit factory under the dome is tasked with discharging greenhouse gases. Though one doesn’t yet know exactly what effect the gases will have. Chlorinated hydrocarbons build up ozone, but even if an ozone layer develops, Mars isn’t attractive for microorganisms because of the lack of UV protection. There’ll also be a problem with the tilt of the planetary axis and orbital wobbles. And the force exerted by Jupiter causes variations in the axial rotation and orbit for periods of 51,000 to 2 million years. Mr. M. continuously ponders these problems. Also as a way to divert his attention from the new reality of his life. Which consists of a group of older men, at the moment there are fifty, with a couple of hookers, hunkered down beneath a glass dome, bored to death. Sure, there are amazing chefs up here, vegetables and livestock are cultivated in greenhouses and barns, nobody has to forgo the devouring of intelligent life forms.
Mr. M. wakes every morning—well, actually, he wakes up at some point in artificial warm light. He washes up, he talks to his virtual assistant, it plays Frank Sinatra for him. Frank Sinatra. He could eat him up, he loves him so. The feeling, the elegance this great musician embodied, combined with white, superior manliness that oozes out of all of his songs. Mr. M. has a light breakfast and heads out to golf. Ricochets don’t threaten the glass dome. He runs into a few interesting men while golfing. Unfortunately Ray Kurzweil died last week. To the end he hadn’t managed to digitalize consciousness. He had so hoped to live on in the form of a chip. He departed bitterly. Now he’s gone, they had him buried outside the dome. There are a lot of machines here. Funny Boston Dynamics dogs, which can also kill, in case aliens, ah, what nonsense. Nobody here believes in aliens. Mr. M. plays golf, then it’s off to the club, then to the pool, evenings at a restaurant for a little chitchat with the scientists who are trying to help the men produce offspring by means of cloning. Live on at least a little. Mr. M. cannot imagine that all the IQ points assembled here will simply disappear upon their demise. Hastily buried on a planet where meteorites constantly rain down. It sounds like hail. It sounds like home. Down on earth. This shit is no fun. What is the point of being better than others if the others aren’t present? When his mood bottoms out, he calls the hooker. The women live in a space at the far end of the golf course. A woman comes over in a golf cart. When Mr. M. sees her, he becomes nauseous. He’s finished with all the women here. They no longer excite him. They’re not worth slurping down a Viagra and imperiling his health. Though obviously they have a first-class medical facility here with the best Indian specialists. Why Indian? Doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Mr. M. is so hopelessly bored that he begins to scratch himself bloody. Before he steps out of the dome onto the surface of Mars without a protective suit.
You can’t see Mars
From below. From the outskirts of the city,
There where wolves once lived,
DON
Is preparing
Dinner.
“Potatoes?” asks Karen, who is sitting with the others on the terrace, which is to say, a muddy bit of garden they’ve covered with a tarp from a freight truck. Of course potatoes, potatoes are always passed around the fire. In the half-darkness, the building lit up yellow from within, whatever did they use this space for in earlier times? Back when there was still an economy that wasn’t online. Perhaps this was a warehouse for spare auto parts, or maybe they manufactured rope here, who knew. And who needs rope or wire or watering cans or jam jars anymore? Nobody needs real products when there’s no real life anymore, just a nervous waiting on the state of things. The potatoes roast over the fire. The young people stare at them. Like a group of English teachers at Stonehenge.
Down, down
Yellow and brown
The leaves are falling
Over the town.
Silence. The fire crackles sporadically as potato peels pop. Planting food is such a The Day After Tomorrow thing. Youth in paramilitary outfits, dirty and armed, gathered around a fire in the middle of nowhere like in an old cyberpunk comic. Back when young people still had time for so-called youth culture. “Anyone want another potato?” asks Don, breaking the tinnitus-like din of the distant city that is otherwise broken only by helicopter rotors.
They’re coming again, thinks
ROGER
HEALTH CONDITIONS: high blood pressure, aquaphobia
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: irrelevant
SEXUALITY: none
POLITICAL SUGGESTIBILITY: very receptive
Who is sitting by the river. It’s dangerous by the river, but at least this way he can keep an eye on it. Under control. He can react. That way the fear is bearable. The fear he’s had since the flood. Although—fear doesn’t adequately describe his fundamental feeling of discomfort. Roger has lost his inherent human confidence. The self-conception of existence that protects one in daily life. Roger reckons with the very worst at every moment. Since that night, when he still had a little house on the sea, up north. The night when he was watching television and suddenly had wet feet, the night when the water slowly rose and all the neighbors stood on the street until their ankles, knees, thighs were submerged, it’ll recede. It didn’t. Then came the helicopters. Since then he starts to scream whenever he hears the whoosh of rotors, since then he can’t get the vision out of his head of the life that sank in the flood. For years the residents of his cute little town on the sea had resisted. Had trekked to London with cardboard signs, protested against carbon emission trading, warned of global warming; they had no idea what exactly it all meant, or whether it really was the cause of the changes in their world, but somebody had to bear the blame. All these boring, abstract things that mostly sex-starved old ladies demonstrated about, things that gave them a purpose in life before they were composted, all of it had burrowed into Roger’s cells. That and the knowledge that people had destroyed him and his home, his life, just because they could, was comparable to what people experience during a war. The loss of faith in oneself. And the world. So Roger sat by the river. He knows that he is nothing. Insignificant. With no rights. With no purpose. From afar, noises—
HANNAH
Puts on music.
Cheers to retro turntables. As always, there’re new rappers daily, somebody somewhere, in some social housing block, is always trying their luck at becoming a grime star. This movement turned business. That’s had its rage sapped and replaced with Gucci. Never have so many people tried to make art as now, with the basic income making everything possible. That’s what had been predicted, that people finally freed from the drudgery of work in the digital era could pursue their creative urges. Now they’re all sitting around, building ships out of matchsticks or shooting pornos. Speaking of which, there are no more birds. Either they’ve all died of boredom. Or they’ve all left the island because they wanted to have a look at other places. “What would you guys think of me contaminating the groundwater with a virus?” asks Karen. The children try to play dead. They’re worried about getting a lecture from Karen. It’s no use. Karen starts to speak. Only a few disconnected sentences make their way into the brains of those present. “… obviously you have to do it again, if pregnant mothers drank uninfected water during their pregnancy, you have to redo it,” Karen is saying now. The effect is irreversible because the virus stays in the brain cells and they cannot reproduce.
