Grime, page 26
Don lies on the ground; she’s not afraid, not angry, she’s just humiliated. The men point their machine guns at her. Slowly she stands up.
Raises her hands.
One of the strike force members kicks her in the buttocks.
Everyone’s alone. With oneself and one’s misery.
A few hundred meters
Away, the
LAB DIRECTOR
Is talking about his life. He’s waiting for the end of his interview, he’s unsure, glances down at himself, his belly has gotten soft. “I was at the Tate Modern yesterday.”
Silence. “Okay,” the lab director clears his throat. “I always go to museums before I have to go home. There’s no modern art in museums anymore. And if there is, it’s only British. And even then, only images of nature. The study of art is like all scholarly avenues closed to most young people. Since the complete privatization. Only super wealthy oligarchs or the old upper class can afford to let a child study art. That’s how it goes.
I’ve had terrible headaches ever since the encephalitis jab,” says the lab director, who no longer has any idea what the AI expects from him. And at that moment, the door opens. An energetic woman enters the room. She is the manager of the Human Resources department. “Thanks very much,” she says. “We’d forgotten you here. Apologies.
You’ve spent the last hour talking to yourself. But the good news is we were already able to process your evaluation in the meantime. That is, our program evaluated it, to be more precise. Without considering your gender or your”—a quick glance—“outward appearance, it has reached the conclusion that it would be best for both parties…”
A whooshing sound fills the lab director’s head.
There are two moments of fundamental debasement in the life of a human being. The moment when one truly grasps one’s finite nature. With all the embarrassments that come with it. With all the: What am I doing here if it’s all going to end anyway and I’m going to be eaten by worms when I’m gone and everyone else is going to go on as if it is perfectly reasonable to do so without me? The second moment of debasement is when a person recognizes one’s mediocrity. Many people are not gifted with the intelligence to be able to really savor this moment, they’re just suddenly grumpy, and it never ends, and their hair thins, and they look for scapegoats. That is the instant when people go into offices with knives. The gig is up for the lab director. In a week he’ll be out of work.
But until then.
KAREN
Sucks
The lab director’s genitals. She has to push up his stomach so it’s not constantly in the way. The lab director grunts. In a second he’ll put his hand on Karen’s head. An extra rush of power.
The fatuous think it excites women to have a flesh sausage rammed into their uvula. Or perhaps they don’t even think that much. It’s enough to take out their penis. Seeking a feeling of transcendence. They completely lose their minds as soon as there’s an orifice in their vicinity. “It was good for you, right?”
Asks the lab director, tucking in his genitals.
“Yeah, it was super, let’s do it again tomorrow.” Karen extends her sperm-smeared hand, the lab director grasps it. Karen leaves. She notices that she’s strange. Has become strange. She’s beside herself. And doesn’t know how to find her way back to some kind of inner peace. Suspects that it isn’t the injustice of the world that’s so enraged her, but something about herself. About her humiliation. About her first love. Rage, because she had briefly believed herself to be a normal girl living a normal love story. Only for everything she had planned to suddenly be called into question as a result of a guy with too-tight pants and a gold chain. Karen suppresses the thoughts about the fact that, as with most people, it’s not going to be about saving the world but about saving herself.
Karen had
Ordered nutrient solution with fetal bovine serum to culture adenovirus. She’d also ordered via the lab 293T cells for reproduction of the little bastards. With a pipe fermenter, 37 degrees, and a little blast of CO2, Karen sets up a starter stock of the beasts which she will soon need to transfer into a new home. For today there’s nothing more to do. Karen looks out the window—there’s an incomprehensible light outside.
Waiting outside is
DON
In that light, which occurs only in areas near the ocean, creamy, pale blue—pink.
After the outbreak of violence which, unfortunately, she’d been at the center of, Don is in shock, as if she’d survived an accident and is now standing on the street, in front of her the wreckage of her convertible. Nice cue, thinks god. A few Russians glide past in an electric sports car with the top down. Nobody at the wheel. Probably for the best because they’re drunk. Bad Eurotrash music coming out of the giant speakers. The Russians laugh, pass a bottle around, and hold their arms up in the air, a move they probably picked up in the primitive music videos that people like them enjoy. They’re all wearing designer combat clothes. Camo with golden trim. It’s the thing of the moment. Uniforms. Fatigues, gas masks. But ironic. With gold. People love it. They want to survive. Want to look as if they’ve been to battle. But nobody knows what they should fight against. Everything’s calm, after all. The Great Replacement—whereby whites were to have been displaced by Arabs—hadn’t happened. If anything Europe had witnessed an increase in Chinese people buying up properties in so-called prime locations. The Russians, too, are barely noticeable on the street anymore. Karen’s eyes follow the people living out their own promo film clips. The others are still not happy.
The city is full of tense people for whom the basic income hasn’t provided genuine peace. It just isn’t enough. The money just isn’t sufficient, even though the official numbers are so brilliant. Thanks to the basic income there’s no more unemployment, for instance. Thanks to minijobbers and job-hoppers and minicontracts and temp work and
JOB NOMADS
HOBBIES: gaming, making videos of themselves, being free
HEALTH CONDITIONS: bad teeth, sleep deprivation, trouble concentrating
POLITICAL TENDENCIES: none.
Who live a truly free life. Well, kind of. And who are constantly being visited by BBC camera teams. Used to be. Before. When there were. Bye-bye.
In the Philippines, for instance. There sat young, urbane digital natives in front of rental houses, always in flip-flops, always with tattoos and beards, well, like, building websites for consultants and motivational coaches. That is, for the unemployed. And they would say: “I work hard, I’m available for my clients 24–7, but just look at this setting.” The camera pans to simple, good-hearted natives, who’ve just robbed a bank. Are there even banks in the Philippines? Perhaps they were just members of a terrorist organization. But these days the digital nomads aren’t even sitting around with terrorists in Guatemala or Malaysia but in warehouses in Leeds, gathered around a campfire, and the only things in working order are the charging stations and the server and internet. Anyone who can use a computer is doing some shit or other online. Mostly content managing or building bots that are supposed to get people to do something, when in doubt getting them to shove a poker up their own asses. It works.
“Come on,” says
DON
She pulls Karen along behind her, whose face is paler than usual, and usually she is very, very pale. Karen looks as if she’s asleep. And dreaming. Dreams are a neglected arena for the children. Other than imagining themselves as grime stars (Jet, Rolly, Brilli, Bling), hardly any pleasurable experiences occur to them that they might lose themselves thinking about. What are they supposed to dream about? World peace, ecologically sustainable housing, functional sewers, or saving the earth’s climate? Nobody knows what the matter is with the climate, which had earlier been constantly used as a threat in various scenarios. Nobody had been interested. Warmer is better. Now it’s even warmer, and it rains more often, and the water can’t soak into the ground because it’s too parched, soon millions of people in distant parts of the world will disappear. Or want to. To go to nicer areas. So far, so good.
In the park, the first few homeless people are setting up to sleep for the night, or at least until anxious citizens chase them off. Don and Karen walk through the masses of people who are moving along the streets in order to enjoy their lives. Yay, hurrah, enjoying life. Going out to eat in the city, a little celebration of daily life. Come on, let’s indulge ourselves. Come on, we’ll run into other people like us, people in our social strata, who are in a position to partake in a tasty pad thai with organic bean sprouts for £6.70, who can afford to have people, in this case a cook and waiter, work for them. The slight excitement at being able to decide between rewarding and penalizing. About rating the waiter, which follows after payment occurs. “Would you be so kind as to rate me?” How good that sounds, that submissive tone and the fear in his voice, something they the guests recognize in themselves, as they, too, are all rated at their jobs.
Don and Karen haven’t talked to each other. Don hasn’t said that it is more and more unpleasant to stay in the city with nonpink skin. Karen hasn’t said that she plans to sterilize all men. They don’t talk, they walk. Slowly. Because running or other hectic motions lead to alarm and the dispatching of drones. Or strike forces. Deep breaths, movements. Hoods pulled down over their faces, they stumble over one of those moronic delivery robots,
Which, instead of the
COURIER
HEALTH CONDITIONS: varicella zoster virus, spleen problems, HIV
SEXUALITY: heterosexual
QUIRKS: crying fits when looking at wet dogs
FAMILY STATUS: very much alone
HOBBIES: lying about
Distribute Alibaba’s wonderful wares these days. The tons of shoddy rubbish made in Bangladesh and the Eastern Bloc, you know how it is, the stuff people would virtually go insane without.
XIANG MAI
The products that people in the Western world buy are, surprisingly enough, made in Western countries by Western workers. Twenty years ago, the first Chinese workers arrived in England on tourist visas. We say simply England, but they also arrived in Spain, Germany, and America. In every country that used to be considered rich. They went to run-down areas. They went as cheap laborers. Slept on the floors of warehouses, worked twenty hours a day, didn’t bother anyone. The next step was for them to open their own companies. Where they worked twenty-two hours a day. The companies grew, brought recovery to regions long since thought dead. A mafia developed, a Chinese middle and upper class developed in Europe. The Chinese take care of the fixed assets, distribution, expansion, structure. The Europeans work. That’s how it goes.
THE COURIER
Was a courier for ten years. Had been. He’d started during his university days (literature and education—WTF?). “I like to be around people,” the courier said. “I get to exercise my legs and be out in the fresh air.” He said, unprompted. To other couriers. Because soon he broke off his studies because in order to afford his studies he had to ride his bike so much that he had no time left to study. Yes, well. There were no jobs for literature graduates anyway. Nobody read anymore, either. “I’d love to read a book,” people said, unprompted and a little sheepishly, “but—time.” Of course, time was spread thin. There were online chats to be had and houses in Costa Rica to look at, hate comments beneath articles nobody read, and after that TV series, TV series. Series that prepared people for actual conditions. Everyone remembered—like the cherry blossoms in grandpa’s garden, which they never had, that is, no garden and no grandpa—the wonderful effect of a good book.
In the meantime the courier was over forty and in excellent physical condition, as long as you look past the bronchial infections he contracted during the era when the cityscape was still dominated by combustion engines. And if you ignore his HIV. Which had been totally ignorable. The medicine is infernal stuff, but
Then the health system was revolutionized.
Something that
THOME’S FATHER
Emphasizes in one of his talks in the House of Lords: “Too much inequity marked our previous health system. The costs to treat the so-called uncooperative members of society, who wantonly endanger their own health, fell on the shoulders of the common man. The system is deeply unfair. With the new system, each person pays what they should. You’re hardworking, keep yourself in good shape, don’t take drugs, don’t drink? Then you are like ninety percent of the population, who up to now had to pay for the ten percent of spongers. For people who engaged in overly prodigious sexual activities, who put parties and drugs above the willpower it takes to lead a healthy, responsible life. Now that the free primary health care has been eliminated as a result of abuse by parasitic foreigners, the fair system of health insurance…”
And so on.
THE COURIER
has not received his medicine for a month now. He is no longer able to pay the premiums for the new, wonderfully fair insurance. He already had pneumonia, but he’s getting by at the moment. If you look past the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his face.
Right. Suddenly he was unemployed, the carts and drones, you already know all about it, and as an unemployed courier in his mid-forties, his chances in the labor market—mustn’t grumble. The courier had been one of the first in line to sign up for the new basic income, he was one of the first to have a gorgeous sum of money land in his account every month. That’s something. The place where he sleeps, on a sofa in the southern part of the city in the three-room flat of a single mother with two children, costs three hundred pounds a month. Insurance comes out of what’s left. There’s 150 pounds left over for him. It’s possible to get through the winter on that as long as you cut back. As long as you don’t get another bout of pneumonia.
People are becoming ever more sickly. You see them without prostheses, sitting in little pushcarts on the sidewalk, with sores on their faces, missing teeth, everywhere, and they’re back again, the measles, shingles, and polio. Shit happens. The courier’s doing fine so far. He rents the sofa at the single mother’s flat from eight at night to seven in the morning. The ex-courier leaves the flat at seven in the morning before the single mother gets the children ready for school. When the ex-courier steps out onto the streets of the city’s south side after seven in the morning, he’s never alone, regardless of the weather conditions. There are other ex-couriers and a striking number of old women hanging about the streets. The usual faces. Raised three sons on their own. And not one of them became a grime star. The grizzled old women, who are forty, kicked out of a council flat by one of the sons, these women, who huddle apathetically, extinguished, not a spark of rage in their gaze, which is okay, nobody would see it anyway, the people who are still able to walk go past them quickly, don’t look back, don’t want to get infected, everyone is so scared. That the promises that were made to them of wonderfully partaking in the exciting dream have not been fulfilled is clear to everyone at this point. Before health care reform, broken-down homeless people were patched up in the emergency room and put back out onto the street. How inefficient. Now they just die. Losers.
From all the entryways, ex-couriers slip out with looks of helplessness on their faces. How long can you sit around a playground without attracting attention, how long can you loiter in a shopping center? How long can you wander a train station, sit in a park, look at shopwindows? How often can you go to Hampstead Heath on the bus? You can go to a VR space once a week.
Virtual reality rooms are the amusement arcades of the new era. Nobody goes to put on embarrassing goggles and play shooter games anymore. A lot of people go on holiday. They lie on the sand and travel to Thailand or South Africa. With breezes, aromas, the whole deal. Finally multisensory. To touch, feel the breeze, the warmth of the sand. The ex-courier likes above all else to go the rain forest. He loves the rain forest. Once in a while someone turns up nude.
So. Seven p.m. Another day spent bumming around. Watching time slip away. Is this how it’s going to be now? It really will be like this until the ex-courier dies—without any role or function, together with all the others with no role or function, who jam the streets with too little money to travel the world, to shop, or do whatever else you’ve learned to do to avoid thinking. This thinking. What’s the point of it in the end?
The courier stops. A placard. How 1.0 is that? A prepper group advertising its next meeting. To be prepared. Next weekend in Colne Valley Regional Park. The courier has never been there. The class is cheap. The instructor is named Sergej. I’m going to do this, thinks the courier. In his excitement, he nearly trips over a delivery robot.
Nobody complains about the delivery robots anymore. At the start, all the obvious symbols of the digital revolution had a hard time of it.
They were kicked, thrown into the Thames, and then suddenly you had points subtracted for that sort of thing. So now people just stumble over the white robots darting about, equipped with cameras.
DON
Also
Stumbles over a delivery robot.
