Grime, page 29
So the new people—can finally look the way they want, because they decide that it’s beautiful not to wear deodorant, to have a potbelly and no muscles.
We decide that women like to gather up our socks and that nose hair is au courant. Right. And? Finally just be, off to Silicon Roundabout with a rucksack and orthopedic shoes or sneakers. Aside from a few lesbians and a few customer service reps: be among ourselves, make jokes about lightsabers, do guy stuff. Thome laughs today about his old classmates from boarding school. About the great athletes, the lads who were assured a government position after graduating university, or an even cushier job in the diplomatic corps. They’re sitting in a smelly office in Nairobi now, sweating it up in the House of Commons, they are the disappearing representatives of the old world. They’re married. Thome imagines the English spouses of his former classmates. English roses, who had passed their prime at the age of fourteen.
The new people,
In this wonderful world.
Just look at:
KAREN
Stares
Into the vats. Normal. The way one normally stares into vats. The concrete floor beneath her bare feet is cold; Karen sweats. She is the wood from which revolutionaries are carved. She is the resistance. The Rosa Luxemburg of biohacking. She is the avenger of all women and children, and now she looks completely crazy, she jumps around the brewery, today her work is complete. She’s done it. Here swims her work—harmless-seeming little cells, inside of which the virus has gestated. Zombie babies. Aliens. Now the cells must have disintegrated and she can siphon off the virus. Siphoning off virus—something everyone should do once, siphon off virus. Feel their life. One liter will yield about 2.5 trillion of them, which she can easily transport in small containers. Maybe it won’t be enough to effectively contaminate the drinking water. It’s a first attempt, and after a week there should be discernible results. Once absorbed through the oral mucous membrane, the infernal stuff will show its effect, blasting through the hematoencephalic barrier and deactivating the effect of testosterone. Right, and then. Listen up.
No sexual excitability, no aggression, no desire in men to impress sexual partners, to eliminate competitors, to bugger up the world. The effect is irreversible. Ir-re-versible. If it works. Here goes. Out. Into the world, where it is still drizzling, where it no longer smells. It no longer smells of anything, isn’t that strange? No longer like earth and flowers and petrol, tar, or food, it smells flat. Concrete and plastic. That is, nothing. This lack of olfactory sensations increases people’s feelings of alienation. They live without any participation in the actions of existence. The people.
Karen lugs the first container full of her little friends, excitedly awaiting their mission, toward the Thames. The artery of the city, Karen would think, if she were daft. The strong current, which for some time has no longer carried corpses—the hope, you know, there’s hope again, which holds many people back from jumping to their death. She sits down on the bank, which is primarily formed of old plastic waste. Karen looks at the dark, brackish-smelling water, she sees the distant lights of the city, she imagines how calm it will soon be. And wonders how she can expand her project to the entire country. Karen supposes she can see the curvature of the earth over there, where the sea must be,
Ha ha.
KEVIN
FAMILY STATUS: single
PROFESSION: aeronautical engineering, so to speak
HEALTH STATUS: insane
Curvature, ha ha. So, you know, when someone is told a lie at a fundamental point, then a basic sense of trust is lost. Then everything is false. Kevin knows that he lives in a construct, manipulated for the goal of the Great Replacement. The white man is supposed to disappear. That is explained with the round earth and the inevitable barbarian invasion. If people knew that the earth was flat, they would also know that having too many people in the northern half would change the axis.
Kevin had stumbled upon the teachings of Samuel Rowbotham at some stage. He had read Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. The truth had hit Kevin like a blow to the head and—
Destroyed his trust in everything. He had read the book several times. Reenacted the important experiments in it. Like Rowbotham he’d waded into a canal. You know the story. Rowbotham used a telescope at water level to watch a toy boat float from one bridge to the next. The top of the mast should have disappeared from view once it was ten kilometers away if the earth, as is claimed, is a ball with a circumference of forty thousand kilometers. But—the boat remained visible. A follower named John Hampden later made a bet with Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the developers of evolutionary theory, to replicate the experiment with other visual cues, having to do with a black scarf. This was the Bedford Level experiment. It involved, well, boring.
The experiment worked. The earth was flat. Kevin didn’t need to know anything more. Now when he lies in bed he’s afraid the earth could tip because of all the emigration and he and his bed could slip off into space. Kevin always tries to wear clean underwear to bed because his body might spend all eternity floating in space. Without decomposing.
The North Pole in the middle, a wall of ice all around the edge that people take for Antarctica in the false ball image of the earth. Sun, moon, and stars are just a few hundred kilometers above the earth and far smaller than claimed; gravity is a fictitious force derived from upward movement of the disk. The anger at established science accompanies Kevin from the moment he awakes each day. He trusts nobody, not even people from the Flat Earth Society. He goes to work. He still has a job. He works in a small firm that repairs drones. In a small firm that has yet to convert to robot labor. He has a tracker on his apron. He has a two-minute bathroom break. Twenty minutes for lunch. He is filled with anger.
Again and again.
About twenty times.
KAREN
Goes between the vats and the river, carrying a bucket, back and forth, the virus slipping into the water like wet lynxes and swimming toward the city, which in the morning light seems to glow in the distance. A place of promise in the dreams of millions. The objective of their lives. That they’ve reached in wagons and boats, by ship and swimming, only to find themselves in the heart of a machine that is fueled by people. Money comes out the bottom and is channeled directly into the cellars of a small number of idiots. But most people don’t care. They identify with the winners. Because nobody counts themselves among the losers. Because everyone is oriented upward. Because nobody assesses their worth realistically, because everybody wants to feel superior to some other group. Because the masses share social media with the rich. They’re practically neighbors or colleagues of Stormzy. Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Fucking rap stars, with annual incomes equivalent to the cost of an intercontinental missile. So. Enough.
The world is ready to die out.
It is done says
THOME
Every day after his morning defecation. People like him are—first of all, chronically tired, since he had read that geniuses can get by on four hours of sleep. For several years now Thome has had his virtual assistant
(which additionally transcribes his conversations, forwards them to Tempora, where they are scoured for interesting keywords with XKeyscore, the search engine of the intelligence services, and then sent on to cave age in a Swiss bunker, all of which Thome must know, though perhaps his father is right in his assertion that he’s not the brightest)
wake him after four hours, after which he spends half an hour absorbed staring at his feet. He’d had electronic skin grafted on his feet. A no longer popping-fresh invention from the university in Boulder. He likes to remove his socks in good company and garner admiration for his feet. It was a painful procedure to have such an extensive patch of skin removed, but worth every millimeter. “And what can this artificial skin do?” the meddlesome will ask. “It can sense warmth and contact,” Thome says in such cases. That is, the same thing his skin was able to do before, only in modern form. His feet with the artificial skin stand for the realms in which Thome works. Digitalization, which can do anything people can, only without people.
Now Thome stands up and looks at himself in the full-length mirror. So, right. Well. If he hadn’t have been born rich, he could jokingly picture himself as one of those sweaty gamers who constantly eat pizza and are trapped in Second Life. Is that still around? Second Life, for all the amazing virtual stuff people could think up who had already been shut out of Life 1.0?
Time to get going. Out. The world awaits. Before the sun rises Thome is engrossed in VR, always in the same scenario, thanks to his imaginary Asperger’s, which craves repetition. He is sitting on the beach. Then—sunrise over the bay of Khao Lak. He always gets goose bumps as a light breeze blows in with the sun. And always when the goose bumps set in, an unbelievably handsome boy turns up, whose genitals are barely hidden by a sarong. Just the bell end peaks cautiously out. Thome starts to nuzzle the boy. What an absurd word—earlier it was exactly at this point, at this word, that a wonderful stiffening took place. No longer. Perhaps he needs to take his fantasies further, Thome thinks, but the alteration of habits causes just the sort of panic that he’d read about concerning his clinical picture. Following the failed erection Thome leaves the virtual world in order to take his hot-and-cold contrast shower.
Soon he’ll look for a new flat. Far from his parental villa and so forth. But—
At the moment there are things to do.
Silicon Roundabout buzzes with viral lust for life. Thome strides happily from the subterranean garage on New Oxford Street, runs into a colleague who looks like Thome. Somehow.
“The world consists of mathematics,”
Says Thome.
“And violence,” answers the young, lithe man, who works at one of the metadata analysis firms, which officially go bankrupt nearly every month only to reopen under a different name. The two men give each other friendly punches to their sides. Too hard. They knock the wind out of each other, then they trot off, full of strength and grace like untamed wild horses. Snorting, they enter the café, which everyone just calls “the café.” Every morning, the under-forty, white, male future of the nation meets up here. Many with initial signs of hair loss, many with rucksacks and sneakers. Unathletic young men.
Like
THOME
Who sucks in his gut in the morning. He gets a smoothie at the bar and in so doing deftly slips past two women. Blockchain bitches. Unimportant. Bam, you’ll just have to wait, you little butch dykes. The women don’t protest; the constant company of men has left them listless and tired, as if the testosterone has crept into them and benumbed something in their brains. All the men in the room move in a similar way: arms held away from their bodies as if huge muscles are preventing them getting closer. Chins held high. All have attention deficit syndrome. Another way of saying: we stare at various screens until four in the morning, program, chat on the side, and watch the stock price indexes. It makes us agitated.
Long strides, somewhat uncoordinated. These are people at the top. Who, thanks to cybernetics, have managed to offer the people a better life online than they would ever have offline. Who have contrived to replace the old globe-spanning 1.0 monster corporations with new globe-spanning empires. The ones who had rethought every field. Mobility, the finance sector, telecommunications, entertainment, trade, agriculture—come up with something. Come up with a sector that hasn’t been turned on its heads by these lads here.
Why?
Because they can.
Cheers.
A moment of silence.
On screens out in the street, adverts for a weekend in Ireland. Smiling people in front of herds of sheep, cliffs, blue skies.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen any animals, thinks Thome. Where are they, actually?
Smoothies are being tipped back. At the moment, Tasmanian pepper with spinach is the in thing. The blockchain bitches have withdrawn to a corner. From afar they seem as if they are already dead. They had at some point worked on a digital currency that was supposed to make the banking system superfluous. Cryptocurrencies had been the revolutionary tool a few years prior. Ethereum, Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, kiss my ass—Thome had already forgotten all of their names, just as their democratizing concept had been forgotten. These days so-called alternative currency was just the currency and under the control of financial institutions. Lucky them.
As mentioned. Everything new, but somehow also
Well, you know.
Lolling about the café’s only seating area—
De Sede, naturally—
Are the AI aces. A couple of professors and their coder boys. The rest of the men stand at a distance from the gods of IT. AI is the thing of world domination. Whoever understands AI
EX 2279
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Has found the Holy Grail. Business analysts calculate that even in the most conservative scenario AI will account for 14 percent of global economic activity. Ignoring exponential growth, that means: $15.7 quintillion. Jesus, mate. Respect. Create brains that develop further on their own. It’s better than sex. When it’s not possible to further improve the human brain, why not a new start by non-fleshly means?
In the back there, by the toilets—the women’s bathroom was removed last year for lack of women; the lesbians can piss in the urinals—sits a man who as a sign of his defeat had SpongeBob tattooed on his face a few years back. Embarrassing story. His startup was one of the first to have worked with brain implants. They promised to push IQs to dizzying heights. But then there were deaths. The cortex is a delicate flower. No hard feelings.
The firm has in the meantime overcome this loss of confidence–inducing faux pas and is a leader in interpreting brain signals. Reading thoughts is the hot new shit. In his last TED Talk, one of the firm’s founders showed how a deaf-mute, the politically correct name for which is probably something else, converted a touching speech in his head into words. Many of the viewers wept.
Another AI freak, neural networks and so forth, drinks his coffee standing up and then disappears. The gazes of the others follow him. He is the deadbeat who doesn’t have his devices under control. They’ve developed their own language, the little bastards. Incomprehensible to humans. All this loser could do was remove the robots from the network.
EX 2279
>++++++++++
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THOME
Had bought shares in the company that converted thoughts into text. He was sure that the shares, which he’d bought for £32, would triple in value once the interest of the intelligence services had been piqued. Currently they’re up to £789, Thome just couldn’t keep track of all the new cryptocurrency mergers.
He remembered the day the beta version was launched. One of the programmers had conducted a thought–sound experiment just as the founder of the firm entered the airy workspace. With a creaky but clearly audible voice, the programmer’s device thought aloud:
“Here comes the little pervert. I saw his cock in the bathroom. I’m sure there’s an implant in there that he cradles in his hand while two dwarves fuck in front of him and he smears them with shit.”
Though the creaky words were stated in breathtakingly bad grammar, astonishing for a beta version, the test did not go well. The development of the speech transfer tool was tabled as a result of the all too predictable fisticuffs, and efforts were instead devoted to the transfer of thoughts in written form.
There’s a strong odor in the café.
The gang has talked itself into an adrenaline rush. They all try to one-up each other with over-the-top jargon. Except the AI aces. They’re relaxed. They don’t smell. They’re already there where the rest wish to be.
The AI aces speak only to other AI aces. Nobody else understands what they’re all about. Unfortunately they barely understand each other, either. Artificial brains. The interplay between 86 billion nerve cells, 100 trillion possible connections, 7.6 billion variations, what the hell.
The freaks from National Security are also standing at the bar knocking back smoothies. They wear expensive jackets now, they have healthy color in their faces. They have balls. Most of them, who had been involved in hacker culture, the only cool youth movement that had still existed back then—they wanted to save the world, fight against surveillance, expose flaws in so-called democracy using funny hacks, disable Nazi networks, leak secret documents, and so on—
Nearly all landed at National Security. Because that’s where the money is, the super servers, the research, the power. Fuck tinkering on homemade servers. Fuck pizza.
The National Security people have come up with the most brilliant inventions. Keyloggers, which transmit every keystroke from a keyboard. The Dumbo project, voting manipulations about which they’re still proud.
Yeah, great.
And, hey, who do we have here? Pressed against the wall in genuinely cheap clothing rather than expensive clothing made to look cheap?
