Grime, page 39
At last
There’s something to do.
THE PROFESSOR
Bids farewell.
He knows his old life is over. He’ll never again live on an elegant street, stroll past antique shops, quote classics. And now there are two children sitting here. No idea why. Maybe it’s about the feeling of having power again. Even if it is bought. And now there are two children sitting here. Not that he’d be interested in children; he isn’t interested in anyone living today. A little girl of indeterminate skin color, a sign of the transformation of the world he knew into one where whites were slowly dying off. Overrun by yellow and all shades of darker people who exhibit a better mating performance.
Back to the children. It had felt better in the imagining. Now tired children are just sitting there looking at the professor who isn’t even a professor. It is too light, the shades have already been taken down, his belongings are in boxes that he wanted to store somewhere but hadn’t found anyplace to leave them. His travel bag is on the ground in front of the children, who sit on two chairs. No noises from outside. Traffic rolls by quietly, people are muffled because there seems no more reason to be loud. There sit the children, and it is getting increasingly embarrassing. Particularly now, confronted with the shabbiness of the place in the light and in a nearly empty state. So this is it, the grand flat on Kensington Church Street. Two tiny rooms last renovated thirty years ago, black outlines where furniture and prints had been, linoleum floor. Perhaps his life hadn’t been so wonderful after all.
The children look at the floor.
The little assholes.
Their empty eyes lead to the conclusion that they aren’t so proficient with the language. Great. “Listen to me,” says the professor who isn’t even a professor but rather a foolish jobless person.
“Listen,”
The professor begins to read aloud from an old edition of Shakespeare. The whole thing takes into the wee hours.
The children will be picked up later. They would have preferred to service a client who just had a quick wank. Over and done with.
It was the final day of his old life. And now he sits in front of a fire, the old man, and
HANNAH
Says: “We need to get into the habit of locking the door,” and while delivering this line feels like one of those actresses with a white blouse, wild hair, and a breechloader. She distinguishes between we and you. Of all the unpleasant attributes that used to characterize the adults in Rochdale and Liverpool, racism had always been the most disgusting to her. Losers who sneered at other losers. It seems as if stalagmites should have grown in the hall. It seems as if, with the homeless outside their door, the cuteness of the location has disappeared. Obviously nobody here thinks: we’re sitting in the midst of totally cute surroundings. They just have a feeling. That their garden outside is in danger; same for the solar panels. That they can’t go out in their underwear anymore to drink the first coffee of the day. That they should lock the door like—people. That’s how it starts, acting like a capitalist, becoming a nationalist, a right-wing asshole, with vulgar fears about your meager belongings. That you would like to add to, protect, and celebrate. Would we have to let them, to sleep here? Don thinks, but doesn’t voice her thought because she’s afraid the others might be open to it and they’d have strange men sitting here at the table. “I’m going over to see the nerds,” says Don. “Anybody want to come with?” They all come along happily. They lock the door with much care. Outside there’s no wind. The yellow light of the city is reflected back by the sky, or perhaps there’s a full moon behind the clouds. It has rained again. The ground won’t absorb the water any longer; there’s no snow in the northern hemisphere.
It’s always something.
The
FRIENDS
For example are in a state of alarm. On the verge of complete meltdown. “Soon they’ll be licking the walls,” says Karen upon seeing the nerds. Although they have different skin colors and body types, the hackers resemble each other in their unhealthy, nervous vibe. They’ve barely left the building for days, eaten cold pizza from cardboard boxes, not slept, not washed. That still works at their age, as you can be sticky and dirty, exhausted and agitated, and nothing is off-putting about the shiny skin, the stringy hair, the rigid belief in being able to influence the world. The air in the room is filled with delusions of grandeur. “Spoofing doesn’t work, pass the hash check.” They hammer codes into their computers. Don rolls her eyes. Full of themselves, she thinks, so fucking full of themselves. “What are you guys doing anyway?” she asks Rachel, whose eyes are so infected she looks like a bunny in a spotlight.
Brilliant, Rachel seems to think. Boast. Alarm. Now.
“I’ll put it real simple,” she says. “We hacked our way into the surveillance system. We’re going to take it over today or, well, tomorrow, and transmit the images from the biggest crossroads in the city onto the screens.”
Don doesn’t yet understand what that’s good for. “What’s that supposed to be good for?” she asks. Rachel looks at Don the way you would examine an insect. “They’ll get it, the people. They’ll see themselves, their data, the information. They’ll realize what every moronic member of the private police sees through their data glasses, they will finally catch on.
“Okay, I’ll sketch it out for you.” Rachel sketches it out. “The government—or better yet: the intelligence agencies, who are directly connected to the private police—control all the surveillance and the screens in the city. All of it is connected to the network. That is, the screens where adverts, news, and official announcements are beamed at the citizens. Everything. Video surveillance data runs into this platform (circle) here, where, after identification of a citizen, everything that’s saved in the data bank is added to the video stream, so the screens of administrators display various citizens’ characteristics—like their age, gender, criminal history, or sexual inclinations. Do you understand?” Don looks at Hannah’s neck from behind. Hannah is allowing herself to be told some boring nonsense by Ben at the moment. Rachel is stuttering. She always stutters when she is excited. “If we put ourselves in the main console, the one used by the administrators to switch between the thousands of cameras in the city. Then—
Then we have this option here called Hotspots, that gives an overview of ten live camera views where the bigwigs think there’s suspicious activity or gatherings. But the console also allows for the definition of the Output option, which determines where the video stream with all the citizens’ traits is displayed. Check this out: here it says >localhost:1<—you see?” Don sees. She yawns. Inside. “Right,” Rachel says, still stuttering. “The main screen is associated with the console at the address IPv6-Address >>::1<< for the local device of the console. If we switch it to >localhost:0<, what do you see then?” Don stares at the screen. Linux bollocks, no organized graphics. “Forbidden,” says Don. “Ha,” says Rachel. “That’s the console itself! But if we go over to >localhost:2< and >localhost:3<, the results of the surveillance appear on other—screens. Here in this window, see?” Don doesn’t see anything. Except for Hannah’s back, which is long, and her vertebrae protrude through her hoodie. That takes quite a performance from the vertebrae, through such thick material. Hannah must be one meter eighty at this point, and she consists of only arms and legs and spine. “What’s that?” asks Don politely. On the computer are images from surveillance cameras somewhere in the city. “Covent Garden,” says Rachel. “You can see here, they know everything. That guy, for example.” Rachel reads aloud: “Sergej, thirty-three, Polish origins, he heads up a prepper group and is considered a right-wing extremist.”
“We’ve got him,” Don yells. “Peter, we…”
Peter isn’t there. He’s left without anyone noticing.
He’s been leaning against a tree for several minutes already,
PETER
Watching Thome in the first floor of the white box, behind curtains with tassels and a pair of matched and at the same time utterly pointless table lamps on the windowsill. Pant legs too short, fabric stretched across his backside, no chin—what an unpleasant person.
If only he would die,
Thinks
THOME
In the library of his father, who sits behind his desk. The Russian whore is standing next to him, one hand on her husband’s shoulder as if they are posing for an oil portrait, the future prime minister and his spouse, who carries the geezer’s child in her stomach. Thome sits down. He looks at the old man. He thinks: you fossil. I can already see the livor mortis on your sallow skin, I see the gout in your old claws, I smell your old balls, and nothing, nothing has changed for you, because you’ll be dead soon. While people like me will live on in machines after we’ve drained your swamp. His father starts to speak: “It’s time to arrange my inheritance. In the future I’ll be in far more danger than now, as I’ll hold an important political office.” Clearing of the throat. Tense silence. Humanity’s IQ has been dropping nonstop since 1990, Thome had read yesterday. He tries to concentrate on his father’s voice. He wonders why people actually still stick to the concept of family.
“I shall divide my estate into thirds,” says Thome’s father. “One part will go to my wonderful wife, the second will go to the unborn child, and the third to you, my son. Though with the condition that you don’t let yourself get caught up in any scandal.” “What sort of scandal?” asks Thome, finding himself somewhat nauseated by the situation, such that he’d like to drop to the floor and just lie there. Thome’s father takes a deep breath. A bit of snot that’s entangled in his nose hair darts in and out like a kitten.
“Homosexuality, pedophilia, misappropriation, compulsive gambling, bestiality, violent crime. That sort of thing. In that case you will be immediately disinherited.” It’s important to know—Thome’s father has been a member for over ten years in the transnational Organization for the Restoration of the Natural Order, which opposes perversions. It had begun as the Agenda Europe network. Meaning: using lots of money and all legal means to create precedents. The draft proposal for the Polish abortion ban, the ban on same-sex marriage in various central European countries, and countless other triumphs of Christian ideas. Because: homosexuality and women taking on leading roles are the first steps toward anarchy. Parties to the organization include the Vatican, an Irish senator, members of European parliament, the head of the anti-abortion group European Dignity Watch, proxies for a Mexican billionaire, Archduke Imre von Habsburg-Lothringen, and alongside Thome’s father, Mr. Hylton, a former asset manager for the climate change denier Sir Michael Hintze. The organization is steered by the Vatican, which has managed despite all the disparate temperaments to reach a consensus, which creates laws and precedents. About order, right, well, and so forth.
Thome looks at the Russian’s throat. He’d love to hear her neck snap. After he’d cut off his father’s cock and stomped on it. While Thome’s father reads aloud paragraphs from his will, Thome watches the snot-kitten and his life go by.
His father’s silence when he had disappointed him. The complete deprivation of love. The periods of punishment spent in the cellar. The first animal he had to kill, and how he threw up and dirtied his father’s hunting kilt. Everything Thome remembers is tied to an off-putting sort of rot. The only thing not rotten in his life is
PETER
Who by now is lying on the sofa downstairs in Thome’s room, pretending to be asleep. He pretends to be asleep so he can think over how he can mount the cameras the hackers gave him. Who doesn’t want to open his eyes anyway because he’s tired of all the shit here.
Peter’s nearly translucent eyelids twitch. When Thome enters the room.
“You know how elegant you look, like you’re from another universe, it unnerves people when they see you.” Thome is deeply moved by the romantic and simultaneously worldly sentences that flow out of him—“But it doesn’t help you, does it? No?” he continues. “You little rent boy, you baby hustler, you look like you’re not even human. That’s why people stare at you. As if you never smell bad or get dirty, inside or out, that’s why they stare at you, and they probably want to tear you to bits because you make it clear to them how debauched they are.”
Thome kneels in front of the sofa. His voice has gotten quiet. As if he could mar the perfection lying before him with his voice alone. Peter’s shirt is a bit rumpled, leaving his chest muscles visible. The right collarbone, the line from his neck to his upper body. Thome gulps, sweats and wants to lick, and suddenly understands why meat eaters react so aggressively to vegetarians. This urge to consume something living can nearly drive one mad. Thome feels close to Jeffrey fucking Dahmer again and is thinking of a refrigerator full of body parts when the doorbell rings. Why would it ring now, just as he’s thinking up a recipe to perfect the flavor of Peter’s neck? “Shit,” Thome whispers and goes to the door.
Peter hears him talking to another man, and now, now is the moment. Peter hides the cameras in the room, and when he is finished with that—Thome enters the room with a redhead.
“This is the programmer,” says Thome, “I forgot that we still—doesn’t matter.” Thome thinks he’ll fire the programmer. Or push him out the window, but first he’ll make canapés. “I’ll make a few canapés,” says Thome, leaving the redhead behind with Peter. The programmer stands awkwardly in the room, looks around, looks at a porcelain dog. What an incredibly daft porcelain dog; why do people put that sort of shit in their flats, what would make them do that? Why do they put side tables with tablecloths in their flats and books that they will never read on coffee tables, in order to show that they’re capable of placing a fucking book on a table? “I’ve built myself a machine that irons my trousers and brings them to me.” Says the programmer to the wall. “Amazing,” says Peter.
“Indeed.” Says the programmer. “I have a brain extension.” Peter says nothing.
“Here, look, a chip, in my head.” This ageless person, utterly devoid of gender traits, who could as well have been a giant infant or mummified, displays a shaved spot in his thinning hair. Peter says nothing. The programmer doesn’t notice; he has an unpleasant lack of timidity. He’s one of those people who became powerful too quickly but who mistrusts power and must constantly try to increase his own sense of worth with stuff that in earlier times might have been compared to engineering expertise. A technician with mathematical abilities, lucky enough to live at a time when the middle class was being replaced. The old middle class will be rolled into the category of societal parasite, the parasites will die off, and the programmer will live as comfortably as a middle manager at an insurance company would have in the past. He’ll mortgage a flat where previously a middle manager at an insurance company or perhaps a doctor’s assistant or architect had lived but who now lives in social housing and is old. He’ll buy a second electric vehicle for his spouse. In place of unattractive men before him, this unattractive person will create the world in his image, which means: it will become even more unaesthetic and middling. “So, right, here, I’ll show you the last thing I masterminded the programming of.” Says the programmer.
“Masterminded?” asks Peter.
Brief pause. “Yes,” says the programmer.
The programmer pulls his laptop from his rucksack; a paranoid programmer would never take so much as a step without his laptop, the NSA, you know, the Trojan whatever. He squats in front of Peter and shows him the website of a political party.
“Look, we’ve built an online party. Thome’s idea. Well. Really most of it was mine.” The programmer continues talking endless rubbish; he’d talk to a dog if it were in the room instead of Peter. It doesn’t matter to him whom he brags in front of, the point is just to be able to enhance his own esteem by describing some accomplishment. “So this party is utter democratic shite. Everyone can take part in decisions online, vote online. What do you think of the candidate for prime minister we’ve put in the race?” Peter looks at a young man. He shrugs his shoulders. “A fake,” says the programmer. “Came out well, eh? People are flocking to our page.”
“Yeah, great, a fake,” says Peter. He never knows what other people expect. Also, he doesn’t care.
“Can you access a smart flat,”
He asks
The programmer.
The perfect cue. The programmer immediately continues to talk. “You can program white noise into music clips that contains inaudible commands. The commands can then take over control of a flat, make bank transactions, lock doors, order pizzas, or summon a strike force.”
“Great,” says Peter. “It’s a place on Regent’s Park.”
The building
Where
PETER’S MOTHER
Is sitting in the window. She was just about to moisturize her hands with a lotion containing caviar extracts. That is, dead baby fish. Such is her life. Sitting in bad weather with a man she can’t stand, greasing her skin with baby corpses. Then the light flickers. And the door locks itself. There are always weird glitches here in this unbelievably modern, networked flat. Just last week the refrigerator had an entire pig delivered. A dead pig in the kitchen can throw your entire way of life into question by its appearance alone.
The Russian is meeting with yet another nerd. A Russian nerd, naturally. You know how it is, these Russian hackers, who are responsible for everything, sitting in their hoodies in Ukraine, and so forth. Right, in any event, since the diagnosis of his multibacterial antibiotic resistance, he’s hit upon the idea of trying out a beta version of a brain transfer.
Peter’s mother listens to the two men talk, she looks at her nails, she’s bored. It hasn’t come to pass, the sense of delight she had promised herself her life would deliver. She’d been able to get the Russian to marry her. With a prenuptial agreement, of course. The price was higher than she had been able to conceive of. She had to tolerate him, adore him, listen to him, and laugh at his jokes. The light flickers. It goes out. The blinds close on their own. It makes no difference. Peter’s mother stares into the darkness with her eyes wide and doesn’t know why of all things she isn’t able to be happy amid all this affluence, in the wonderful world of infinite material bounty. If it’s the case that poverty doesn’t make you happy and wealth doesn’t either, what else is there?
There’s something to do.
THE PROFESSOR
Bids farewell.
He knows his old life is over. He’ll never again live on an elegant street, stroll past antique shops, quote classics. And now there are two children sitting here. No idea why. Maybe it’s about the feeling of having power again. Even if it is bought. And now there are two children sitting here. Not that he’d be interested in children; he isn’t interested in anyone living today. A little girl of indeterminate skin color, a sign of the transformation of the world he knew into one where whites were slowly dying off. Overrun by yellow and all shades of darker people who exhibit a better mating performance.
Back to the children. It had felt better in the imagining. Now tired children are just sitting there looking at the professor who isn’t even a professor. It is too light, the shades have already been taken down, his belongings are in boxes that he wanted to store somewhere but hadn’t found anyplace to leave them. His travel bag is on the ground in front of the children, who sit on two chairs. No noises from outside. Traffic rolls by quietly, people are muffled because there seems no more reason to be loud. There sit the children, and it is getting increasingly embarrassing. Particularly now, confronted with the shabbiness of the place in the light and in a nearly empty state. So this is it, the grand flat on Kensington Church Street. Two tiny rooms last renovated thirty years ago, black outlines where furniture and prints had been, linoleum floor. Perhaps his life hadn’t been so wonderful after all.
The children look at the floor.
The little assholes.
Their empty eyes lead to the conclusion that they aren’t so proficient with the language. Great. “Listen to me,” says the professor who isn’t even a professor but rather a foolish jobless person.
“Listen,”
The professor begins to read aloud from an old edition of Shakespeare. The whole thing takes into the wee hours.
The children will be picked up later. They would have preferred to service a client who just had a quick wank. Over and done with.
It was the final day of his old life. And now he sits in front of a fire, the old man, and
HANNAH
Says: “We need to get into the habit of locking the door,” and while delivering this line feels like one of those actresses with a white blouse, wild hair, and a breechloader. She distinguishes between we and you. Of all the unpleasant attributes that used to characterize the adults in Rochdale and Liverpool, racism had always been the most disgusting to her. Losers who sneered at other losers. It seems as if stalagmites should have grown in the hall. It seems as if, with the homeless outside their door, the cuteness of the location has disappeared. Obviously nobody here thinks: we’re sitting in the midst of totally cute surroundings. They just have a feeling. That their garden outside is in danger; same for the solar panels. That they can’t go out in their underwear anymore to drink the first coffee of the day. That they should lock the door like—people. That’s how it starts, acting like a capitalist, becoming a nationalist, a right-wing asshole, with vulgar fears about your meager belongings. That you would like to add to, protect, and celebrate. Would we have to let them, to sleep here? Don thinks, but doesn’t voice her thought because she’s afraid the others might be open to it and they’d have strange men sitting here at the table. “I’m going over to see the nerds,” says Don. “Anybody want to come with?” They all come along happily. They lock the door with much care. Outside there’s no wind. The yellow light of the city is reflected back by the sky, or perhaps there’s a full moon behind the clouds. It has rained again. The ground won’t absorb the water any longer; there’s no snow in the northern hemisphere.
It’s always something.
The
FRIENDS
For example are in a state of alarm. On the verge of complete meltdown. “Soon they’ll be licking the walls,” says Karen upon seeing the nerds. Although they have different skin colors and body types, the hackers resemble each other in their unhealthy, nervous vibe. They’ve barely left the building for days, eaten cold pizza from cardboard boxes, not slept, not washed. That still works at their age, as you can be sticky and dirty, exhausted and agitated, and nothing is off-putting about the shiny skin, the stringy hair, the rigid belief in being able to influence the world. The air in the room is filled with delusions of grandeur. “Spoofing doesn’t work, pass the hash check.” They hammer codes into their computers. Don rolls her eyes. Full of themselves, she thinks, so fucking full of themselves. “What are you guys doing anyway?” she asks Rachel, whose eyes are so infected she looks like a bunny in a spotlight.
Brilliant, Rachel seems to think. Boast. Alarm. Now.
“I’ll put it real simple,” she says. “We hacked our way into the surveillance system. We’re going to take it over today or, well, tomorrow, and transmit the images from the biggest crossroads in the city onto the screens.”
Don doesn’t yet understand what that’s good for. “What’s that supposed to be good for?” she asks. Rachel looks at Don the way you would examine an insect. “They’ll get it, the people. They’ll see themselves, their data, the information. They’ll realize what every moronic member of the private police sees through their data glasses, they will finally catch on.
“Okay, I’ll sketch it out for you.” Rachel sketches it out. “The government—or better yet: the intelligence agencies, who are directly connected to the private police—control all the surveillance and the screens in the city. All of it is connected to the network. That is, the screens where adverts, news, and official announcements are beamed at the citizens. Everything. Video surveillance data runs into this platform (circle) here, where, after identification of a citizen, everything that’s saved in the data bank is added to the video stream, so the screens of administrators display various citizens’ characteristics—like their age, gender, criminal history, or sexual inclinations. Do you understand?” Don looks at Hannah’s neck from behind. Hannah is allowing herself to be told some boring nonsense by Ben at the moment. Rachel is stuttering. She always stutters when she is excited. “If we put ourselves in the main console, the one used by the administrators to switch between the thousands of cameras in the city. Then—
Then we have this option here called Hotspots, that gives an overview of ten live camera views where the bigwigs think there’s suspicious activity or gatherings. But the console also allows for the definition of the Output option, which determines where the video stream with all the citizens’ traits is displayed. Check this out: here it says >localhost:1<—you see?” Don sees. She yawns. Inside. “Right,” Rachel says, still stuttering. “The main screen is associated with the console at the address IPv6-Address >>::1<< for the local device of the console. If we switch it to >localhost:0<, what do you see then?” Don stares at the screen. Linux bollocks, no organized graphics. “Forbidden,” says Don. “Ha,” says Rachel. “That’s the console itself! But if we go over to >localhost:2< and >localhost:3<, the results of the surveillance appear on other—screens. Here in this window, see?” Don doesn’t see anything. Except for Hannah’s back, which is long, and her vertebrae protrude through her hoodie. That takes quite a performance from the vertebrae, through such thick material. Hannah must be one meter eighty at this point, and she consists of only arms and legs and spine. “What’s that?” asks Don politely. On the computer are images from surveillance cameras somewhere in the city. “Covent Garden,” says Rachel. “You can see here, they know everything. That guy, for example.” Rachel reads aloud: “Sergej, thirty-three, Polish origins, he heads up a prepper group and is considered a right-wing extremist.”
“We’ve got him,” Don yells. “Peter, we…”
Peter isn’t there. He’s left without anyone noticing.
He’s been leaning against a tree for several minutes already,
PETER
Watching Thome in the first floor of the white box, behind curtains with tassels and a pair of matched and at the same time utterly pointless table lamps on the windowsill. Pant legs too short, fabric stretched across his backside, no chin—what an unpleasant person.
If only he would die,
Thinks
THOME
In the library of his father, who sits behind his desk. The Russian whore is standing next to him, one hand on her husband’s shoulder as if they are posing for an oil portrait, the future prime minister and his spouse, who carries the geezer’s child in her stomach. Thome sits down. He looks at the old man. He thinks: you fossil. I can already see the livor mortis on your sallow skin, I see the gout in your old claws, I smell your old balls, and nothing, nothing has changed for you, because you’ll be dead soon. While people like me will live on in machines after we’ve drained your swamp. His father starts to speak: “It’s time to arrange my inheritance. In the future I’ll be in far more danger than now, as I’ll hold an important political office.” Clearing of the throat. Tense silence. Humanity’s IQ has been dropping nonstop since 1990, Thome had read yesterday. He tries to concentrate on his father’s voice. He wonders why people actually still stick to the concept of family.
“I shall divide my estate into thirds,” says Thome’s father. “One part will go to my wonderful wife, the second will go to the unborn child, and the third to you, my son. Though with the condition that you don’t let yourself get caught up in any scandal.” “What sort of scandal?” asks Thome, finding himself somewhat nauseated by the situation, such that he’d like to drop to the floor and just lie there. Thome’s father takes a deep breath. A bit of snot that’s entangled in his nose hair darts in and out like a kitten.
“Homosexuality, pedophilia, misappropriation, compulsive gambling, bestiality, violent crime. That sort of thing. In that case you will be immediately disinherited.” It’s important to know—Thome’s father has been a member for over ten years in the transnational Organization for the Restoration of the Natural Order, which opposes perversions. It had begun as the Agenda Europe network. Meaning: using lots of money and all legal means to create precedents. The draft proposal for the Polish abortion ban, the ban on same-sex marriage in various central European countries, and countless other triumphs of Christian ideas. Because: homosexuality and women taking on leading roles are the first steps toward anarchy. Parties to the organization include the Vatican, an Irish senator, members of European parliament, the head of the anti-abortion group European Dignity Watch, proxies for a Mexican billionaire, Archduke Imre von Habsburg-Lothringen, and alongside Thome’s father, Mr. Hylton, a former asset manager for the climate change denier Sir Michael Hintze. The organization is steered by the Vatican, which has managed despite all the disparate temperaments to reach a consensus, which creates laws and precedents. About order, right, well, and so forth.
Thome looks at the Russian’s throat. He’d love to hear her neck snap. After he’d cut off his father’s cock and stomped on it. While Thome’s father reads aloud paragraphs from his will, Thome watches the snot-kitten and his life go by.
His father’s silence when he had disappointed him. The complete deprivation of love. The periods of punishment spent in the cellar. The first animal he had to kill, and how he threw up and dirtied his father’s hunting kilt. Everything Thome remembers is tied to an off-putting sort of rot. The only thing not rotten in his life is
PETER
Who by now is lying on the sofa downstairs in Thome’s room, pretending to be asleep. He pretends to be asleep so he can think over how he can mount the cameras the hackers gave him. Who doesn’t want to open his eyes anyway because he’s tired of all the shit here.
Peter’s nearly translucent eyelids twitch. When Thome enters the room.
“You know how elegant you look, like you’re from another universe, it unnerves people when they see you.” Thome is deeply moved by the romantic and simultaneously worldly sentences that flow out of him—“But it doesn’t help you, does it? No?” he continues. “You little rent boy, you baby hustler, you look like you’re not even human. That’s why people stare at you. As if you never smell bad or get dirty, inside or out, that’s why they stare at you, and they probably want to tear you to bits because you make it clear to them how debauched they are.”
Thome kneels in front of the sofa. His voice has gotten quiet. As if he could mar the perfection lying before him with his voice alone. Peter’s shirt is a bit rumpled, leaving his chest muscles visible. The right collarbone, the line from his neck to his upper body. Thome gulps, sweats and wants to lick, and suddenly understands why meat eaters react so aggressively to vegetarians. This urge to consume something living can nearly drive one mad. Thome feels close to Jeffrey fucking Dahmer again and is thinking of a refrigerator full of body parts when the doorbell rings. Why would it ring now, just as he’s thinking up a recipe to perfect the flavor of Peter’s neck? “Shit,” Thome whispers and goes to the door.
Peter hears him talking to another man, and now, now is the moment. Peter hides the cameras in the room, and when he is finished with that—Thome enters the room with a redhead.
“This is the programmer,” says Thome, “I forgot that we still—doesn’t matter.” Thome thinks he’ll fire the programmer. Or push him out the window, but first he’ll make canapés. “I’ll make a few canapés,” says Thome, leaving the redhead behind with Peter. The programmer stands awkwardly in the room, looks around, looks at a porcelain dog. What an incredibly daft porcelain dog; why do people put that sort of shit in their flats, what would make them do that? Why do they put side tables with tablecloths in their flats and books that they will never read on coffee tables, in order to show that they’re capable of placing a fucking book on a table? “I’ve built myself a machine that irons my trousers and brings them to me.” Says the programmer to the wall. “Amazing,” says Peter.
“Indeed.” Says the programmer. “I have a brain extension.” Peter says nothing.
“Here, look, a chip, in my head.” This ageless person, utterly devoid of gender traits, who could as well have been a giant infant or mummified, displays a shaved spot in his thinning hair. Peter says nothing. The programmer doesn’t notice; he has an unpleasant lack of timidity. He’s one of those people who became powerful too quickly but who mistrusts power and must constantly try to increase his own sense of worth with stuff that in earlier times might have been compared to engineering expertise. A technician with mathematical abilities, lucky enough to live at a time when the middle class was being replaced. The old middle class will be rolled into the category of societal parasite, the parasites will die off, and the programmer will live as comfortably as a middle manager at an insurance company would have in the past. He’ll mortgage a flat where previously a middle manager at an insurance company or perhaps a doctor’s assistant or architect had lived but who now lives in social housing and is old. He’ll buy a second electric vehicle for his spouse. In place of unattractive men before him, this unattractive person will create the world in his image, which means: it will become even more unaesthetic and middling. “So, right, here, I’ll show you the last thing I masterminded the programming of.” Says the programmer.
“Masterminded?” asks Peter.
Brief pause. “Yes,” says the programmer.
The programmer pulls his laptop from his rucksack; a paranoid programmer would never take so much as a step without his laptop, the NSA, you know, the Trojan whatever. He squats in front of Peter and shows him the website of a political party.
“Look, we’ve built an online party. Thome’s idea. Well. Really most of it was mine.” The programmer continues talking endless rubbish; he’d talk to a dog if it were in the room instead of Peter. It doesn’t matter to him whom he brags in front of, the point is just to be able to enhance his own esteem by describing some accomplishment. “So this party is utter democratic shite. Everyone can take part in decisions online, vote online. What do you think of the candidate for prime minister we’ve put in the race?” Peter looks at a young man. He shrugs his shoulders. “A fake,” says the programmer. “Came out well, eh? People are flocking to our page.”
“Yeah, great, a fake,” says Peter. He never knows what other people expect. Also, he doesn’t care.
“Can you access a smart flat,”
He asks
The programmer.
The perfect cue. The programmer immediately continues to talk. “You can program white noise into music clips that contains inaudible commands. The commands can then take over control of a flat, make bank transactions, lock doors, order pizzas, or summon a strike force.”
“Great,” says Peter. “It’s a place on Regent’s Park.”
The building
Where
PETER’S MOTHER
Is sitting in the window. She was just about to moisturize her hands with a lotion containing caviar extracts. That is, dead baby fish. Such is her life. Sitting in bad weather with a man she can’t stand, greasing her skin with baby corpses. Then the light flickers. And the door locks itself. There are always weird glitches here in this unbelievably modern, networked flat. Just last week the refrigerator had an entire pig delivered. A dead pig in the kitchen can throw your entire way of life into question by its appearance alone.
The Russian is meeting with yet another nerd. A Russian nerd, naturally. You know how it is, these Russian hackers, who are responsible for everything, sitting in their hoodies in Ukraine, and so forth. Right, in any event, since the diagnosis of his multibacterial antibiotic resistance, he’s hit upon the idea of trying out a beta version of a brain transfer.
Peter’s mother listens to the two men talk, she looks at her nails, she’s bored. It hasn’t come to pass, the sense of delight she had promised herself her life would deliver. She’d been able to get the Russian to marry her. With a prenuptial agreement, of course. The price was higher than she had been able to conceive of. She had to tolerate him, adore him, listen to him, and laugh at his jokes. The light flickers. It goes out. The blinds close on their own. It makes no difference. Peter’s mother stares into the darkness with her eyes wide and doesn’t know why of all things she isn’t able to be happy amid all this affluence, in the wonderful world of infinite material bounty. If it’s the case that poverty doesn’t make you happy and wealth doesn’t either, what else is there?
