Grime, page 37
The previous night on the way outside, to look at the moon or whatever, Hannah went past Peter’s mattress, and something fluky happened. The moon shone on Peter’s blond hair and bare chest, and his biomass seemed to glow. Hannah thought: I want to protect you forever. Which, thanks to the hormones, actually meant: I want to have sex. Since last night Hannah has been out of her mind. She has spent the day trying to find a trace of Sergej, and she feels close to Peter as a result of the search, but in actuality she just walks tensely through the streets and is annoyed by people because they are there and Peter is not. Because she’s woozy as all she can think of is the sleeping Peter, and it’s almost gratifying somehow that the world can unravel and a human can operate in something approaching survival mode, numbed by horror, and yet can still fall in love, still reach this little extraordinary state.
“Quiet
For god’s sake!
Please, for once, be
Quiet, please!”
PATUK
Opens his window and throws his virtual assistant down in the pedestrian zone. Fuck the penalty points! He gives the finger to the drone filming him and the little heap of high-tech rubbish. For weeks now Patuk has asked himself why he has such strange thoughts when he wakes up. Words in his head that are totally unknown to him in a waking state. Today he woke up and heard the virtual assistant quietly murmuring:
“1995, Chechen separatists bury a cesium-137 dirty bomb in a park. No fatalities. So far. In 2004, members of al-Qaeda were arrested in London. They had plans to blow up radioactive materials that were to be taken from smoke detectors and deployed in specific locations. In Anders Breivik’s 2011 manifesto there are detailed descriptions of methods of attack using radiological weapons and strikes on nuclear power plants. A study by the US Government Accountability Office about the security of medical radioactive sources attested to grave security failings at some hospitals.”
Without realizing what had happened or what it meant, Patuk had flung the device out into the street like a disgusting insect. Below, a few men in nightshirts kick the rubbish to the side as they walk past, and Patuk can’t get the words “radiological terror attack” out of his head.
Like a bad song.
Kendrick Lamar
Really can’t be sung along to
Notices
KAREN
Who’d been in the library of the microbiology institute, surrounded by a few students quietly babbling to themselves, many wearing bodycams in their hipster glasses. Naturally. Complete idiots. Nearly everyone has them, well, everyone who isn’t totally thick. In the case of any dispute it’s important to be able to make an airtight case as to just who acted like a criminal. Just think about it: you’re tottering along the street and get run down by a self-driving vehicle of some kind. Right. Whose fault is it? He said, she said. Or. You’re at a restaurant and get accosted. Or you have an argument with a neighbor. Or you exercise your democratic rights and work out in a so-called public space and come into conflict with some sort of security officer. So, who is right? Hmm? “You’re right. And you can prove it!” It was the greatest slogan since the invention of advertising. As if bodycams weren’t ridiculous enough, many people here wear cortex stimulators. Transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS, as the pros say, used to be employed only for schizophrenia, migraines, and epilepsy. These days you can grab the little pads for free at any pharmacy, stick them onto your skull, activate, and whoosh, your brain is treated to an invigorating fireworks display. Fear, nervousness, insecurity are suppressed. The depolarization starts in the axon and then spreads through the cell bodies of the neurons and on to the dendrites. The customer quickly feels an effect. A blanket sense of well-being. And a certain indefatigability. That there are students in the library long after midnight can be attributed to the new stimulation technique. That and the terror over being intellectually left behind, because the gulf is no longer between rich and poor but between smart and dumb. A couple of percent of the global population compete with artificial intelligence to remain in the comfort zone. Over 90 percent can no longer keep up. They understand to various degrees:
Nothing.
Or they understand that they no longer understand anything. Too bad. But you don’t notice that anymore with TMS. Speaking of boredom, you can see bodycam recordings you unknowingly appeared in on My Day, My Night. An extraordinarily successful startup that is financed entirely by the government. Isn’t everyone curious about feeling affirmed by the gaze of others? So. Yes. Karen’s hand has accidentally landed on her face. There it registers stubble growth. Karen isn’t startled; she feels great. Anchored in the earth. Unique and good-looking. She takes a deep breath on the street in front of the library. On such an almost absurdly warm, humid night, Karen actually just wants to fuck. But with whom? She sees nothing but slow men with doughy midsections who brush along the building walls looking insecure and tired. It’s something she hadn’t considered when she put the virus in the drinking water supply. That with this mission she would kill her own chances of a wild, heterosexual fulfillment of her sexual urges.
The rest is going
Terrific.
Realizes
PROFESSOR DR. KUHN
INTELLIGENCE: IQ 167
CONSUMER ACTIVITY: no shopping interests
INTERESTS: Bach
SEXUAL PROCLIVITIES: at most an objectophile
And rechecks the results that the artificial intelligence had culled from all available data about aggression, sexual behavior, and personality change from social media and the karma points trove, from insurance data, motion parameters, and the avatar cities. It has worked.
Dr. Kuhn, the son of a German immigrant, had refined the Google patent US6506148B2 for the manipulation of the nervous system with a screen. Since everyone in the country has a computer, a phone, or a smart TV, the poor get the devices for free, Kuhn can assume 99.9 percent coverage. The CNS is influenced by manipulated impulses that are embedded in nearly all software. Together with the pills, which over 90 percent of the population readily takes and which contain a mixture of estrogen and benzodiazepine, the following can be ascertained. Sexual urges, aggression, the ability to think logically and develop creativity have nearly disappeared. The populace exhibits a strong dependence. Addicted to the use of devices, which in turn further damage their cognitive abilities. The current numbers speak for themselves, no, they positively scream. Figuring in the incubation period, there’s been an 80 percent decrease in murders, 90 percent decrease in rape, 64 percent in property damage, 80 percent in domestic violence, 45 percent in breaking and entering, 66 percent in arson, and overall violent crimes have dropped 88 percent. There has, however, been a 10 percent rise in property damage to sex robots, and the suicide rate among males has risen 47 percent. Clinical depression numbers receded, and
Dr. Kuhn, who had studied neuropsychiatry, neurolinguistics, and computer science and at some point had once believed he could save humanity, is sure that he has reached the goal he had as a younger man. When he looks around his city, which is one of the safest places in the world. With satisfied, indeed, almost happy inhabitants. They are so happy. People on the street.
Where
KAREN
Is standing. And along which she will now walk home. Well, walk. Or swim. She took LSD at the lab. Infernal stuff, so pleasantly retro-pointless. Today people take pills. Happy pills. They’re offered by the ton at a price that speaks the language of subsidies. You can buy them at any kiosk. A blister pack for the price of a bread roll. You can think it over. A bread roll or a good mood. Karen has experimented with those pills, to know how people feel. The pills cause you not to want anything. Illogical in an era when everyone has learned that it’s mandatory always to want something, and, as a result, everyone lives with a constant pained feeling because you never get what it is you want. Or because hardly anyone thinks things all the way through, because what most people want is to lie beneath the earth and finally be left in peace. The pills connect people with this primal instinct. Unconditionally content, not missing anything. The masses have become wantless contentment incarnate. You needn’t even be employed anymore in order to find a meaning in your existence. One-hour contracts, which are the pinnacle of employment politics, fulfill individuals’ ideas of being useful. Companies must employ the delinquents at least one hour per month. And pay them. Everyone has the right to demand more. Millions who used to live on social benefits are now respectably employed. And receive their basic income. As a prize for their presence on earth. They live in cellar flats, have perhaps one of the two mattresses in a bunk bed that can be locked up with a metal grille, and still believe that things will still somehow work out, when they leave their accommodations in their only unmoldy clothes, with the scent of poverty they give off, and with their threadbare rucksacks stand in line in front of shops that sell expired groceries. But you can pay with cryptocurrency by holding up your fucking hand to a scanner. That’s modern. We are the fucking future. And always with an eye on the phone, it could ring, you know. The streets are full of motorcars moving at a walking pace. Everything is the same as always. The great goal of removing cars from the life of humans that developers had mentioned over and over again in their TED Talks—“We want to rethink mobility,” they’d said, traipsing back and forth in front of a screen—hadn’t really come to pass. The sharing economy. The congenial people who out of a collective awareness would share their belongings to save the world, they didn’t exist. Low-cost car sharing doesn’t exist because people find it so great to have companionship; it’s because they’re poor. So they drive other idiots around all night who also have no money; they share flats, accommodations, and their food, the goddamned losers; they share misery and pay a quarter of their micro-earnings to a few people who are the new slave owners. But in our day everyone is free to make their own app, an app, hooray, an app, a sharing app. It used to be, Hey I’m opening a rental agency for some shit or other, but today everything has to be a startup. The latest successes had been the sofa sharing thing, and the meal-sharing startup that allowed you, for a fee, to share in eating the goods a family had picked up from the food bank. It was a huge success. Feeding people who were even worse off than yourself. Most sharing app users had until recently been hipsters who had dreamed of careers as writers, musicians, or actors or had run some organic café with a little stage in it. Now they’ve gotten a little older and sleep on strangers’ sofas and eat expired food at strangers’ tables, but beards are still okay, and you can talk to the strangers about the latest music or latest live performance, about the play you’re working pro bono. It’s not so bad,
Says
JON
CHARACTER: extroverted, easily influenced
HOBBIES: frequently weeps, and watches himself while doing so
CLINICAL PICTURE: extreme narcissist
CONSUMER INTERESTS: white bread
“Very good, the kale, isn’t it?” says Jon.
And thinks: Kale, seriously? The couple hosting him are people he would recognize and categorize on the street as belonging to his class. The woman is blonde, and at one time had a pretty face that has in the meantime gone a little gray. She wears overalls, combat boots, and is probably in her late thirties. The man is a good ten years older, he’s losing his hair, he is in tight pants, pointed shoes, a parachute-silk shirt that he wears half open. Undershirt beneath. You only notice at second glance that the clothes are very old. Same goes for the furnishings in the basement flat, which consists of a single room with a kitchenette. The flat costs the same as a basic income, it’s a little damp, but okay, it has a window that, if you lie down below it, reveals the gray sky. The woman has a yoga studio. Well, had. The rent was no longer within her means. Now she distributes business cards in café bathrooms. Yoga lessons in your home. The sessions typically end with a sad man inviting her to his sad basement flat and trying to fuck her. Recently not even that has happened. Her partner is a dancer and member of a modern dance company that is permitted to rehearse in school gymnasiums once in a while. There’s not much interest anymore in dance theater. To put it one way. To put it more precisely, they mostly perform in front of a few homeless people, who have disappeared in the course of the purge. The couple had met over the sofa-sharing app, they got on well, and there are no sexual problems on the horizon because the man isn’t gay, he’s asexual. “I always just wanted to write,” Jon hears himself say, he hears how idiotic the sentence sounds, a sentence from the year 2000, when almost everyone wanted to write because of Harry Potter. Every week a newly discovered shooting star shot into the best seller lists. Even then people no longer read, but owning hip books was a sort of branding. And branding oneself was the thing of the moment. The last rearing up of the so-called individual. The man and woman nod, they don’t give a shit about the story of yet another unsuccessful artist. “It’s going really well,” says Jon, stuffing a potato wearily into his mouth. Until a few years ago, he doesn’t add. Until a few years ago he always sold articles to online platforms, and he was even able to self-publish his first book. It has sold 123 copies to this point. Jon got by quite well for a long time. Lived in a shared flat, jobbed at bars, then the lease on the flat was terminated, sold to a Russian. Jon is on the lookout at the moment. “I’m looking for something new,” he says. And looks around the room briefly. Okay, this won’t be the new place. At the moment he sleeps on friends’ sofas when those friends haven’t rented their sofas out to a paying guest. But Jon has never been the type to settle down. He’s still young. Forty, that is. Things will get going again. Jon cannot imagine that there won’t be more to come, since he’s still young. “A little more wine?” asks the woman, pouring some out of a cardboard box that could be laced with strychnine. Wine, well, right. Doesn’t matter. Things spin. When the three are sufficiently drunk and are jointly doing the washing-up, the dancer says: “If we shoot a porno now and post it to an amateur site, we could earn a little something. Somebody in my troupe pays his rent that way.” Jon looks at the woman, who looks markedly older than she probably is, in the fluorescent light of the kitchenette. But a bit of money on the side doesn’t sound bad. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Where are we going to do it?” “Here on the table is best,” says the dancer, who has an eye for aesthetics. The woman hasn’t said anything yet. She’s too drunk, and when she’s drunk she gets unhappy. She opens her overalls and pulls them down, hops with the pants and her underpants around her knees and lies down on the table. The dancer aims his phone camera at the scene. Now Jon is on, he rids himself of his pants and stands before the woman’s vagina.
The evening ends with a fisting of the woman, following the introduction of a few bottles into her, one of which can’t be removed. The video brings in two dollars.
Utter shite
Thinks
MI5 PIET
Quickly looking at the porno. Double-checks the data of the participants. Uninteresting. Not relevant. And the cock. MI5 bursts out laughing. Coffee on the various keyboards. He has stayed a bit—shall we say—childish. He’s retained that. The childishness. And loves words like noodles, willy, pussy hole.
Yes. All joking aside.
Pan to the villas on Holland Park.
In one
THOME’S FATHER
Is writing
Talking aloud, a bit of spittle sprinkling onto the handmade paper,
A cigar smokes itself in a crystal ashtray. On the wall hangs some forefather, looking down with his degenerate, smug facial expression at his great-great-great-grandson. And there, the double glow reflected in the window, you know how it is, symmetry.
Thome’s father has had enough of these speeches. Of the phrases that represent the dumbing down of the populace, la la la: militant democracy, reclaiming our values. The great lie of a society that’s supposed to take care of everyone but that always comes at the expense of the working man, the preservation of Britishness, security, fairness, public resources to those who deserve it, those who work for it, who participate, those born here, the whites, who do all the work and won’t let outsiders come here and take the piss, personal responsibility, a societal cancer, fighting these vermin, cohesion, prosperity, “I assure you, my utmost concern will be the security of the earnings of ordinary British people, the doers, who make use of their full potential both in their work and in their leisure activities…”
This is really going to be an incredibly shite speech. People will cheer. Thome’s father looks at his library. All works by old men who think they are the only ones to have discovered their own transience, who fantasize about young women, bemoan the wishy-washiness of their loins, as if it were a fate limited only to them.
Thome’s father reaches with his liver spot–covered hand for the barrel-aged whisky. “Infernal stuff, old man.” Flabbergasted, Thome’s father looks around. “Yes, I mean you, old man.” It’s the crystal glass that appears to be trying to have a quiet conversation with him. “Old man,” the glass continues, “if you are honest with yourself, you know that it won’t work much longer. And you know that you’ve got maybe ten more years left. Half of them you’ll spend with arthritic hands gripping a walker. A nurse will feed you, you’ll wear diapers. You’ll contemplate the half-witted baby that you fathered with your rotted genes. You’ll die, nothing of you will be left behind. So why, why do you want this power that you can no longer savor?”
