Grime, page 34
Practically Michelangelesque.
Thinks the
PHILOSOPHER
SEXUAL PREFERENCES: homosexual. Presumably
CLINICAL PICTURE: no abnormalities
HOBBIES: collects wooden toys
Who rolls past Peter in a blue, self-driving tourist bus. He contemplates London. Such a pretty city, and yet also culturally cradlesque. The philosopher likes to make up words. He loves words and this city here is really something different. Different from the countryside where he lives, like very few live anymore, with a fireplace, with a library, and the investigation of the complete works of James Joyce. The philosopher had spent the last ten years retranslating an unpublished German translation of Ulysses, for which he first translated the German translation into English only to translate it back into German. Now, when his work was supposed to be published—parentheses: he was one of the few Joyce experts who as a native English speaker could also translate into German, a rare talent—now the widow of the German translator refuses to allow a new translation of her dead husband’s translation. The call came yesterday. Today the philosopher, as he likes to jokingly call himself. Used to. Has just come to London. To distract from the sorrow. From the rage. Of ten years lost. Well, what does lost mean. He had enjoyed working on the manuscript. Poorly paid. But enjoyable.
And now. He can’t stand his flat anymore. Or the countryside. Oh, how romantic. Life in the country. You idiots, have you been there recently? To the so-called countryside—with no insects, no barbecuing in summer, and wasps and bees and mosquitos and ants, because of the ludicrous nitrogen compound fertilizer—hardly any farmers still live the way you imagine farm life. With calves, fields, all a bit simpleminded, with that whole “Howdy, Philosopher, I have fresh eggs” thing—nobody lives like that anymore. The countryside is covered with abandoned farms, old, derelict agricultural operations. The towns have eaten away at the countryside with constant new rings of development, and everything in between seems to be made up of motorways and mud. To each his own. Food comes from production facilities in Africa being bought up by the Chinese. In the countryside, there where the countryside used to be, where today there is mud, now live the zero-performers who can no longer find space in the cities’ sewers and train tunnels; as if society’s castoffs have, like elephants, retreated to the countryside to die, they live there, build fires at night, feed themselves from the goods delivered by sporadically appearing aid agency carts. Good street workers with good-hearted foodstuffs that stave off death for the outcasts. “I volunteer here once a week,” say good, honest, good-hearted, under-fucked men into the camera whenever a TV team turns up in the fields in order to stir up sentiments against the poor. All the things you see there. Filth is one thing. Skin that’s so dirty it looks black, missing teeth, dried spittle in the corners of mouths, children in rags who do not look cute, they do not look cute. The way they squat around the fire. And the men with their faces contorted in anger. It’s something you recognize from zombie movies and that you are rightly frightened of. You are right to be scared of anyone who doesn’t receive a basic income. Because they’re illegally in the country, or they’re children, or they haven’t registered themselves. Or they don’t supplement their basic income with various jobs. Who would trust that type of person?
The philosopher doesn’t trust anyone, but he is enjoying this day, and such a beautiful young man there on the side of the road, the bus is standing still at the moment, offering enough time to study him carefully.
Mind-blowing. Invisible,
DON
Hurries
Along behind Peter. Nobody sees her. She is the one witnesses will not remember. “Um, yeah, there was a, um, person,” they’ll say. Don hasn’t grown, except in breadth. She has put on muscle mass and is darker thanks to her time outside the hall, where she installed a pipe from the stream into the building because Karen had strictly forbidden the use of the water from the tap, worked in the field, fed the animals they’ve stolen from farms. The things you do in an assisted-living facility as a teenager in need of socialization.
The invisibility that comes with walking near Peter is what Don’s accustomed to anyway. She’s never looked at by others with a surge of interest. And has always assumed that she must do something extraordinary in order to be observed with such attention. The muscles she had built up were great, but she was still just a not very big almost-still-a-child with muscles. There had to be another field in which Don could distinguish herself. The thing that scares her when she’s half asleep. When she wonders why she is on earth and what talent she has, she gets anxious. There must be something. Something big. But—nothing wants to express itself in Don. She’s not as clever as Karen or as pretty as Hannah, not as otherworldly as Peter. Just as mountains don’t grow more than ten kilometers because the tops erode and the rock at the base liquefies from the pressure, Don will also never grow larger, in every sense. She is average. And it’s maddening. The fact that she’ll never be seen. Just as an example: by Hannah. Whenever her name enters Don’s mind she looks around nervously, checking that nobody can read her thoughts. Don walks in Peter’s shadow.
On the giant screen: a doctor with a smashed head. Close-up of the smashed-up bits. Close-up of a resident: “He was a courteous, understated man.” A doctor. Not true. Close-up of the police spokesperson, a woman with a blonde helmet of hair who looks like a governess. “We are proceeding on the assumption that the perpetrators are from a social housing block in Tower Hamlets and that the probable motivation for this barbarous act is hatred of the elite.”—
And so on.
The outrage of good citizens, anxious citizens, decent citizens toward society’s parasites grows.
They’re excited,
THE FRIENDS
In order to prove the dangers that come with the pleasure of automated driving, they’ve hacked the steering system of a blue, self-driving tour bus. It was relatively easy, and now they watch via surveillance cameras as the bus drives across Tower Bridge, swerves, and plunges elegantly into the Thames.
Shame
Thinks
PETER
He would like with people. For instance: to talk. And give his words emphasis with hand gestures. He would
Really like to be
Impulsive. But.
For the most part he thinks about a sentence he’d like to say for so long that everyone else has already long since moved on from the topic his sentence is about; indeed, Peter is still thinking about the sentence when the others have gone to bed and he’s staring into the fire alone. He wakes up with the sentence. The next morning. And is unhappy. Because it was a beautiful, a true sentence, which he then has to bury.
Consequently Peter has the crazy idea to hug one of the three others. Then he tries to imagine what it would be like to spread out his arms, to go up to people and in the wake of a successful hug to bury his face in the body of a stranger. He senses how nice human contact would feel, how warm and safe it must feel—and then he gets sick. And he simmers with rage about the inability to trust, and finds no consolation in punching walls.
Otherwise, everything is fine.
“No, really, I’m doing fine,” Peter would say if he were to talk to someone. No, ridiculous, of course he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d freeze up. Outside the group. That he’d grown accustomed to.
He hasn’t grown accustomed to the city. To the mass of humanity. When Peter is out in the city, he gets dizzy. He has to be out in the city because they’ve agreed on this silly plan for revenge. In a faraway life. And because he can’t express himself, because if he could he would say. “Come on, let’s cut the crap. Let’s cut the childish bullshit. We’re busy, we have a home, a life, we have to steal credit cards, go shopping, cook, make sure we don’t get stupid in our little criminal existence. We have to understand what is really happening in this country, and we shouldn’t get bogged down in some silly cops-and-robbers game.”
But
He doesn’t say this. Surely he’s mistaken. Surely he’s just sick. He’s nuts, like always. Peter is nuts. And he stops. On one of the screens an interruption. An accident. In which all occupants of a bus have been killed.
Just look. The blue bus is hoisted from the water, divers bring corpses to the riverbank. Passersby stare. Stand and stare and are captured by the typically human lust to look at accidents and bodies, the shudder of a brief understanding of the transience of it all.
Some have their mouths open. It’s being filmed. But that’s normal. It has become normal to film every death, every disaster.
How they try to suppress smiles and appear concerned. There are points to be had for empathy. Peter scans every detail, the desperate way they try to hide their shabbiness; he can’t stand it any longer and heads off, he walks, his gaze on the ground, until he stumbles. A man has stopped in front of him. He’s looking at the entrance to a business,
The man,
At whom
DON
Is staring
Is Walter.
Walter has stopped in front of a bordello. An automated brothel that is called Game Paradise and as a result is also open to minors, it resembles a car wash for sperm. Futuristic you’d say if you had to say something. No corners, soft ochre-colored retro-chic plastic, but totally green, everything is green now, and sustainable, in hallucinogenic forms. Ecological hallucinoids. At reception: a robot hostess.
The man battles within,
He is Christian, after all—
WALTER
But—hey, come on, Lord God, dear Lord God—
Sex with robots is like masturbation. Not exactly divinely ordained, but acceptable somehow. There are no relevant passages from scripture to be found about it. And Walter needs to try something, needs to clear something up, he needs to know what the hell is going on of late—because it doesn’t work anymore, it won’t get hard.
Walter is a believer.
Woman shall be subject to man. Even if it is made of algorithms, circuits, and silicon. Walter studies the menu that the robot hostess hands him with a smile.
Women. And men. In all skin colors and hair colors. Many with cool extra functions: “Rape me!” for instance. Lots of minor models on offer, the youngest four months. Children. Man, they are sick. Walter won’t fuck a child, even if it’s only a machine. Right.
Cheapskates can consummate a money-saving deal if they let other visitors take part in their fun visually. Walter opts for an extremely submissive sixteen-year-old. He pays. He allows viewers. Booth number three. There are three hundred booths. Occupied booths have a red light over the door. Occupied booths where you can join in have an additional blue light. Walter looks to see what’s going on. In the first booth there’s a baby on its stomach, and a man is standing in front of it trying to get his penis hard.
The next booth. An old man lies in the arms of a very heavy Chinese woman and cries. In the next booth a man sits in the corner rocking back and forth. A sex robot lies on the floor, destroyed. Violence against sex robots is the most common type of assault. Even more common than acts of violence against the homeless. Sex robots simulate pain and fear almost perfectly. It will take a while yet before men are able to anticipate the costs of such assaults. Right now, though, Walter is not angry at all. Also, unfortunately, not hard, either. But that will come.
Walter’s booth is small, windowless, across the back a moving cable where girls drift past, hanging from it. Walter undresses, pushes a button, and his sex robot is delivered. She slides off the cable. Onto the floor. A quiet crash. Walter looks at the girl, who looks very real. She opens her eyes fearfully. “Please don’t do anything to me.” She says in an extremely nervous, fearful tone.
“Nobody’s going to take you guys seriously as long as you have such god-awful voices,” says Walter, smacking the thing. Amazement.
He touches the thing. Warm. Fleshy. Solid. Little breasts, shaved pubic region. To the left of his booth Walter hears moans, to the right whimpers. His girl has the pretty voice of a fucking woman. “Hello, I’m Lisa. What shall we do?”
The thing breaks his train of thought.
“I’m going to rape you,” says Walter. “Okay,” says Lisa, beginning to perfunctorily rub her breasts. “I’m just doing this for myself.” She says. “I always rub my breasts…” Walter lands an uppercut to her jaw. The things don’t bleed, it’s a shame, he thinks, and says: “Shut up. Lay down and be afraid!”
“I’m terribly afraid.” Lisa whines. And tears gather in her eyes. “You’re too strong for me.” Now she’s crying. Real tears. She protects herself, squirms. Her flesh moves in flesh-like ways. And Walter stands there and looks down at her. He’s bored.
It could get dreary
For
DON
Watching the stream of customers excitedly enjoying new freedom in a new world. On the other side of the street a couple of Eritreans are being put into a gray bus. Raids against illegals take place daily. Finally getting things in order. Think the onlookers at such spectacles. Finally cleaning things up. The foreigners returned to foreign lands. “Political correctness belongs on the dung heap of history.” An old man from the ruling party quotes the German nationalists. Forget which one. They all look the same with their slight paunches. With their white hair, the red veins of an alcoholic on their noses.
Smart.
The entire area
Is smart. A Chinese IT firm with capital from many countries had financed and built it, and now it belongs to them, this part of town. Charming. Rubbish removal is accomplished by automated aliens, lighting turns itself on and off economically, the roofs are covered with solar panels, the shops are all cashless, with facial recognition. “Pay with your own good face.”
It’s a conveyor belt, a quiet purr, velvety smooth. A joy. Soho and Mayfair look like a sketch of the future drawn by a modestly gifted schoolchild. It only hurts for a moment. “Speaking of which.”
Says
THOME’S FATHER
His speech about the upcoming election, his speech about the candidacy for regional party secretary as leader of his new splinter party the name of which has something to do with national identity, is being broadcast, but nobody is listening. If it’s not something about freeloaders-slash-parasites, the people’s interest in information has become negligible.
“Hardship,”
Says
Thome’s father
Raising his eyebrows,
“Is in this country self-inflicted. You, the industrious people out there in coworking spaces and so forth, you bear the burden of all those who voluntarily live on the fringes of, practically outside of, society. Wish to.” The people nod.
They nod, the good people, the normal people, who work, at something proper, something that turns up in job statistics. They drive for an hour to go somewhere and do some shit or other that’s available to those incapable of IT work. To old people. To the morons who’d been civil servants, or lawyers or teachers or automobile builders or train drivers, or had worked at the counter for an airline and now were in their mid-forties and too stupid to code. Service work was still possible. Serving the poor bastards who indulge in a service before they throw themselves in the Thames. They definitely work, the decent people, make it through every day, do things they don’t want to, though what they do want they don’t know. Get up, eat, in a full bus, in a shop, shitty faces, fluorescent lights, workplace enhancement. Meaning there’s a green plant and a water cooler, they get a short break in the afternoon and rush around in the sun, blinking. Hey, wow, what’s this, there’re trees, there’s light, you could—yeah, okay. No idea. So back it is, make stuff, go home, full bus, stand. People too tightly packed. All gray in the face. At home, on the outskirts of the city, some street without trees, but hooray, still, a flat with windows, you have to be thankful. Savor life. Savor life either alone in the kitchen with some ready-made food and the water faucet, you know how it is, in the yard there’s a rubbish bin and no cat.
Or
There is your wife, your husband, tired, your child is screaming. Or you’re homosexual. Which doesn’t help, either, the food is bad, so is the TV show. But tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll do something, we’ll celebrate our life, our short life will be celebrated. And on the weekend you go to the movies because it’s raining. Maybe in the past people didn’t give it much thought, you know how it goes. Thought. They were busy with all the things that took so much more time without washing machines and hoovers and all the stuff that today is smart and networked and self-regulating, the devices that sit around your bed at night and observe you disdainfully. Back then you lived in a permanent state of depression and disappeared from this world without any drama. Now people compare themselves. Even the dumbest think they know better about everything.
Thome’s father doesn’t say this. He says—
“Democracy is a temporary solution to the final goal of a nation led by technocratic means. The digitalization of all areas will give all citizens of the kingdom the unfailing security and oversight of punitive standards that you, dear countrymen, voted for.
