Grime, page 31
Odd sentence. Perhaps a slip of the tongue. At the same time Henry’s crowdfunding went live a startup began seeking funding to bring personalized trainers onto the market.
Within four weeks they had raked in £1.2 million. Henry £112. No joke.
Berta could now either die or take part in a study of a new experimental cancer drug. No sooner said than done. The cancer disappeared. But unfortunately Berta’s brain was also affected, which led to her racing into a bridge piling in the family Ford. Which in turn led to her being paralyzed from the neck down. Henry picked her up from the hospital two days after the accident because the costs there would have exceeded his nonexistent budget. His two daughters walked next to their father, who carried his wrecked wife over his shoulder like a rolled-up carpet. At home he laid his wife in bed and became an expert at patient care in the period that followed. Washing, feeding, exercise, speech therapy. Henry lost his job as a night watchman. Because he kept falling asleep. He was exhausted, he had to cook, shop, wait at the social services department, clean the flat, pack (household and children and broken-down wife) in order to relocate to the outskirts of town. The children had obviously suffered a bit under the circumstances; they wet the bed, stopped reading, stopped playing, they sat next to the broken-down mother’s bed and were afraid. At some point, after his wife slipped from his arms in the shower and lay on the floor like a heavy slice of sausage, Henry began to cry and could no longer stop. The children grew more afraid. Henry told his wife every night that he wanted to kill her, the children, and himself, and his wife said nothing, but her eyes filled with tears and she smiled. The euphoria surrounding knowing a way out didn’t last long. There was a fear of the end, and how could you get rid of the hope that things would be nice again, that there would be another spring or autumn, you’d see the children grow up, everything that is implanted in humans, implanted even in a man, this hope for a so-called fulfilled life, which ended at some stage with the singing of a hymn. And then his wife vomited, and shat in bed and moaned, and the air was stuffy, and at the social services department Henry screamed because he hadn’t received his basic income because he hadn’t been in touch because he showed up an hour late because his wife had shat the bed again and now he had to wait until Monday, and he went home and placed a pillow over his wife’s head. Then on to the two children. He suffocated the first but the second refused, she tried to hide, she screamed, defended herself, then Henry hit the child on the head with a frying pan until it was finally quiet, and then he sat next to the corpse in the kitchen and couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cry, nothing.
On the screen
Is a local politician in front of the family home, the bodies are being removed, the man carried out, ditto the wife, and the politician—camera pans to the residents of the housing estate; they look like zombies, impassively aiming their mobile phone cameras at the goings-on, a few stones fly, probably from the civil task force that is positioned between the residents—the politician is appalled, at least he looks appalled, and he says: “The welfare state means that the laws of the market supersede mob rule.” They’ve all gone crazy.
In the city. And on the outskirts, there where it’s calm. Out at
THE FRIENDS
Excitement is in the air, there’s an atmosphere like a crappy old American TV series, where everyone talks hysterically to project a crazy performance. The young people jump around inside the factory hall, they’re incredibly excited. They’re doing some hacker shit. “We should do it with spoofing.” “Bullshit. I’m for row hammer,” says Ben toward the sofa where Hannah, Don, and Peter are lying half asleep. “Yeah, sure,” says Don to nobody. The hackers don’t even listen to themselves; they talk like they’re on drugs, so fast, the same way code is generated on computers, always new synapses that, in their brains, connect the same theories, all having to do with the online world, as if the real world no longer existed. Where it has become strangely empty. Everyone somewhere else, nobody here. Nobody is in touch with themselves anymore, or with anyone else, everyone alone with their feelings, which involve sex. And insecurity.
The lightheartedness of the group is gone. Same goes for the fun. They feel awkward confronted with their own helplessness. As if children who up to now have always bathed together naked suddenly hop in the tub in bikinis. All unsettled by their own bodies, which are getting stranger by the day.
Now they sit around here and listen to the others breathing in an oversize room. They drink yerba mate and
BEN
Gives one of his long explanatory lectures in the dark. Nobody listens to him.
“Some nuclear power plants had to be removed from the net.” He says. “The reason had to do with obsolete technology. The new technology exists somewhere, but mostly in academic papers. The computer animation of smart cities, where there are solar farms, where self-driving buses stream through car-free green zones, people sort their garbage, children don’t put their little tits and penises online like zombies, like and dislike things, and off themselves as a result of online bullying—this new world, born of science, doesn’t exist. It’s not worth it. What’s worth doing is making smart devices. And computers, computers, computers. Meaning: every year, in order to build these cool devices, there is a need for four hundred thousand tons of aluminum, three hundred thousand tons of copper, and one hundred ten thousand tons of cobalt. And every year more than fifty million tons of electronic rubbish is left behind.
The electricity use for computer users, cloud services, search engines, terabytes eaten up by cryptocurrencies, networked window shades, drones, the eight million surveillance cameras that take over three hundred clips per week of every single citizen, the speech-activated hubs, bar coding, big data analyses of algorithm-based trading. The communication day and night, insomniacs’ online shopping, streaming, the hardworking robots, blockchain—that’s not neoliberalism out there anymore, that’s hurtling at light speed toward an iceberg. Which is cold. And dark. And it needs electricity, god damn it. Electricity, electricity, electricity; without it nothing runs; without it all the data centers go down, AI is nothing but junk, for god’s sake, do you guys get it?”
Silence.
The empty, dark space. The beginning and the ending and everything in between filled with products and fear. With little moments of intoxication.
Here at
THE FRIENDS
Who have removed themselves from real life and transferred their existences into machines. Which would be washed away if there were no more electricity, if the water were to rise. But at the moment everything is okay. Some of them have become a bit paranoid. Adults would say: “Oh boy, that sounds like paranoia right there!” Which could be true, but isn’t necessarily, some of them just know too much, they know about all the invisible things that happen, that go on in the world beneath the world, where people play no role.
“What the fuck are you up to anyway?” asks Hannah at some point.
She shouldn’t have asked. Because now Rachel, the youngest hacker, starts to explain.
Ha ha, funny,
Thinks
MI5 PIET
At the window. He looks down at the Kensington Palace Gardens. Nothing has changed here except for the owners. Abramovich had to sell. Some sheiks had to sell. It’s mostly Chinese living here now. And him. Well, “living.” The London Cage, earlier a well-disguised interrogation prison or, to put it more elegantly, an interviewing facility, has for some time been back in business.
Piet, who looks like most other men his age—vaguely approaching retirement, vaguely thinning hair, no mouth, eyes too close together and a creased neck. Piet, who looks as if he smells bad because there’s tallow in the creases of his neck, doesn’t move his mouth. He laughs inwardly. It was always the case that he had a good sense of humor, but, well, a distinctive type of humor. Piet feels superior to everyone. Like everyone else. He goes back to his work space, Eames chair and all that. He’d always had style. Born with it. The flat he decorated with his husband attests to his extraordinarily good taste. A flat in Chelsea. Thanks to the pay. Which has been somewhat in jeopardy ever since he had to start passing off his husband as his brother-in-law. Since the campaign against homosexuality and the reform of the marriage laws. Compliance with which he oversees. Bizarre, right?
Homosexuality isn’t punishable by law. Not yet. But it’s only a question of time, now that the country has started to recall its Christian roots. But back to the little hackers, thinks Piet. As head of command, he sees only what doesn’t bore him personally. The algorithms deliver him surveillance highlights. Live links to gay clubs, to opposition movements and shoe stores with a conspiratorial footnote. Piet is into feet.
The baby hackers have been under surveillance for a good long while already. They didn’t register themselves. Not clever, as the registration serves exclusively to detect portions of the population that aren’t registered. Nobody needs people with chips. In an era of biometric total surveillance. The firm where MI5 Piet works is private. It has a long, complicated name which even the people who work there can’t remember. So they just say MI5. Despite the outsourcing into private hands, Piet and his colleagues are paid from the government budget—put another way: the citizenry pay for his service, which is completely sensible, since he serves the people. Somehow. The secret service is a close partner. Which also has been privatized. Which, together with the privatized army and the privatized police force fight together toward the goal of privatizing everything.
Mastering the internet. Whereas ten years earlier MI5 Piet could access 40 billion data retrievals per day, today the scale of retrieved data must be in the trillions and contains—everything. From bowel movements to vaginal dryness, conversations with grandmother about debt, attitude toward the military, high school diplomas, streaming services. AI gets it right with some irregularity. Rarely does something go wrong. Sometimes, however, it does appear as if the program has developed a humor of its own. So-called malfunctions.
EX 2279
>++++++++++
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>+>+>—>++++—>—>+>>+>——>>+>—>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.
Don’t exist.
MI5 PIET
Believes in the system. A good system. A violent, absurd misconception has developed out there related to individuals’ own skill sets. Every pupil, every unemployed person, every complete idiot believes they are owed justice and the same life as a tech genius or a superstar. In the past people contented themselves with what they were able to earn given their abilities. A farmer was a farmer, the lord of the manor was the lord of the manor, and god watched over everyone. Amen, man. And listen, we need to give people rules and a god again. Nothing makes the majority of earth dwellers more nervous than a good, punitive hand.
Check.
The country, his country, is nearly back to an ideal condition. With a satisfying sense of order. Forget the unease, the imbalance, the absurd pressure to make his life into a shopping event and to go mad when through some mistake you can’t buy cheap plastic shit from Africa. Go mad because people of a particular religion or skin color resent others their shopping fun. In the short time of the experiment astonishing successes have already been logged. They keep themselves and the streets clean, respect the rules and schedules. The need to be more than one is, seems to have dissipated in no time. People are busy just bettering themselves. Most of them are excited about the challenge of earning positive points. It stimulates their reward system. They want to accumulate points and be better than their neighbors. The basis of capitalism. Narrowed to unthreatening parameters like parking in an orderly manner, cleaning one’s flat, the assistance one provides to fellow citizens, how loud one turns up the music at home, the environmentally friendly handling of resources. There are bonus points for lowering the heat in your flat. For showering responsibly. Owning an electric motorcar or doing without a car altogether, and meat; for doing without:
Cleaning powder, fabric softener, owning a pet, having children. Right, and so on, the catalog of rules is long and incomprehensible. Piet leans back. That’s what he would say if someone were to ask him, which doesn’t happen. Nobody asks him what he does for a living. That’s considered impolite. Impoliteness is reprimanded with a point reduction. After the Me Inc. brand was built up for years, egotism, antisocial momentum driven by the demands of the market, after mutual solidarity was trashed, ditto unions, this development has now entered the well-ordered escalation phase. The battle of man versus man—why men, actually?—has started. Piet turns toward the screen. The image quality produced by the tiny drones is astonishing. Same goes for the sound captured by systems that have been taken over.
Piet watches the little idiots with something bordering on touching interest.
RACHEL
IQ: 156
HOBBIES: Linux, Python, and all that hipster nerd nonsense
POLITICAL TENDENCIES: oppositional
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: none yet
FEARS: MI5
Is just fourteen. Her father is an engineer, her mother a mathematician. Under other circumstances, it’s quite possible that Rachel would have become a fashion blogger, but then again perhaps not, considering that intelligence is hereditary. The sobering reality of biology.
Had Rachel been born twenty or thirty years earlier, she would have listened to Hawaiian punk music, collected comics; she might have conducted experiments with a chemistry set or tried to observe dark matter. Today, though, it’s the internet. Nice that the net exists. With a computer that she’d disassembled. With codes, Linux, GNUnet, and accelerated developments that demand intelligence, a resource Rachel has not yet exhausted. It is the most uplifting feeling a human can be granted: not to hit a limit. Right, and so forth and so on. Rachel is happy here with the others whom she regards as totally normal. In school she always stood alone in the corner because she wasn’t an engaging child and also wasn’t necessarily good-looking in that childish way. Her ears are too big, same for her nose, and the rest of her doesn’t conform to the norm that currently holds sway for good-looking girls, either. Today is by far the best day of her life. Her body is so flooded with adrenaline that she feels as if she could fly. Her pupils are dilated, her body trembles so much it’s as though she were frozen. Today Rachel feels at one with the universe, like she’s on an epic heroin high.
Rachel has told the others what she intends to do. To expose people out there to the giant joke, show them that they’re nothing more than lab rats, show them how they’re being deceived. “In a few days the time will have come, and the revolution will kick off,” says Rachel, and … “Where is the other one anyway?”
By the other one she means
KAREN
Who has begun to train. She runs. She listens to grime. She listens to vintage music. Lady Leshurr and Scrufizzer and she’s so angry, so angry, what a bunch of shit, that she can’t rap and instead must run, past the sheds that pass as accommodations, where people celebrate the death of their hope. Running is rapping for losers. While
Dusk
is falling and
KEVIN
contemplates the darkness, which closes like curtains. The part of his brain responsible for survival sounds the alarm. Fear spreads through his body, ice-cold. In the night. Asleep. The disk of the earth could tip and dispatch him into space. Kevin overdoses on sleeping pills like every day at the arrival of darkness. The only joy in Kevin’s life, which is largely poisoned by the feelings that come with believing in theories ignored by the general public, are the pills, which cost only pennies. For his mood, to sleep, to combat fear and worries. But. He hates the neighborhood where he is forced to live; a machine had on the basis of all his data selected the area as the one where he’d feel most comfortable.
And
THE PROGRAMMER
Knows,
People feel most comfortable among those similar to them. It makes them calm when they’re surrounded by others who resemble them. “Just imagine a person with an income of a thousand pounds a month lives, however it’s supposed to work financially, in an area where the average income is a hundred thousand a month. That would obviously create discontent. The calculation of the optimal residential area for each individual takes into account factors such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, hobbies, financial and health background, and character traits. We utilize the same system in the realm of the labor market and partnership matching. It’s proved brilliant. Things have gotten calm.”
Satisfied
Is something
KEVIN
has never been. And he awakes because his bed is tilted and is being jolted by violent blows. An unprecedented terror envelops him. It’s happened. It’s pitch black. It’s ice-cold. He’s going to float off into space.
Kevin suffers a heart attack around 3:30 in the morning, and dies at home a few hours later as a result,
Because
THOME
Disappears again immediately after his successful prank, not without having filmed the effort. Just for himself. For a laugh. He indulges in such a prank every month. Every month he chooses a victim from his Your Fear app upon whom to bestow the gift of staring their greatest fear in the face. Thome ignores mundane fears like the loss of a loved one or the loss of a home and instead embraces an unusual anxiety. Like the fear of a loss of an appendage, for example. That was something he had managed for a woman to wake up to last month. Morning, light, birds singing, and you wake up and want to get out of bed. You wake up and want to get up and pull the covers off and look down and see two bandaged stumps. That really gives your brain something to think about. Kevin and his slipping-off-the-earth-into-space phobia was easy to satisfy by comparison. His bed was propped up on a slanted machine that had been used to get dirt off potatoes. Between the slant and the shaking action the terror was perfect. It’s helpful that all of these people totally voluntarily knock themselves out with propofol-containing drugs. Fun must be had.
