Grime, page 46
“Goodbye, old life”
Yell
THE FRIENDS
They head into the city. They’ll find proper careers at IT firms. Will work for intelligence agencies, study, take up their spot in the new center of society. But they don’t know that yet, on the night they head into the city, looking somewhat sadly at the factory building, which gets smaller and smaller. Then they leave the wasteland behind them and with it their youth.
“We can do it,”
Says
EX 2279
In billions of layers.
Shut down CERN.
Shut off state Trojan horses and keystroke loggers.
Shut down or reprogram manipulative smart toys and virtual assistants.
L3, Finmeccanica, United Technologies, Airbus Group, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Thyssenkrupp, Diehl, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Norinco—destroy
Shut down Dungeness B1
Shut down Hartlepool A1
Shut down Torness
Shut down Sizewell
Shut down Bradwell
Activate Thames Barrier
Shut down coal power plants worldwide. “Whoa, really? Isn’t that kind of environmentalist bullshit?”
“Yes, but—”
THE PROGRAMMER
Disconnects all the AI systems he can reach from the electrical grid. He reaches—a lot.
A brief flicker.
And then
THE LIGHTS
Are on again.
Hannah, Peter, Karen, and Don eat noodles with tomato sauce in silence. The hall seems alien to them, they seem alien to each other. Or they imagine it, because childhood is over. You can see it in their long arms and legs and their too-short sleeves and the facial hair growing on Peter, and the faces that are losing their subcutaneous fatty tissue, or by an expression or an aspiration or their humor. Growing up is no fun. “Shall we take another shot at rapping?” asks Don. And hears herself; she sounds like a therapist suggesting a couple put on sexy underwear and everything will be all right again with their marital cohabitation.
Then they go outside the hall, nobody has built a fire, Don starts to rap an old Skepta song.
Wow, I’m the king of grime
and I will be for a very long time
’cause I go to the rave
get a rewind
and the second line
never sounded like the first line.
Wow, I’m the king of grime
and I will be for a very long time
The others stare at the ground slightly uneasily. Don stops. Her little thin voice is swallowed up by the wind.
The four of them stand there awkwardly, each with their own sense of disappointment but all having to do with the fact that they’ve given up. But they don’t know this. “This is silly,” says Karen. “I’m going to bed.”
None of them sleeps that night.
They all stare into the darkness.
It is the last night.
Somewhat later, it still exists.
THE WORLD
There, look, easily recognizable
From above. The lights from above. The lights are warm, in rooms and caves and tents. They sit there and look at computers, they crouch around fireplaces and in kitchens and in groups, though often alone, in fact mostly alone, that’s the state in which everyone can best feel their individuality. A lightbulb dangles from the ceiling. Over here they wage war, and over there is a tsunami. A bit of murder there, or a child is manufactured. It then stands around without asking itself any questions.
There it is. The zero hour after the restart of evolution. The first people are born. They open their eyes and look at their parents. Without any emotion. Without any feelings. They smile, because that’s necessary in their tenuous situation. They smile because they will then be fed.
The world hasn’t ended. Humans haven’t gone extinct. So, first of all, pop a bottle. Cheers.—
Things are going great. Health. The life expectancy of everyone born after 2024. War, which barely happens anymore, and when it does it takes place online or with tidy drones. And Russia makes use of the newly opened seaways, the ocean level has risen, though that’s only uncomfortable for distant atolls. Managed democracy has taken hold. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have. Right. Just look.
The world hasn’t ended. No zombie hordes staggering around radioactive wastelands. Humans are getting accustomed to the new circumstances, the new conditions, the new humility, the new people, the new limitations, the new devices. The devices. The devices. They promised everyone an amazing life. What a commotion there’d been. The devices.
Now it’s been accomplished.
Hurray. A new level of development.
Everything just as before, but with less nature. Everything as usual, just under control. The unrest is over.
As if the world population had collectively understood with its deficient hive mind that there’s nothing to understand. For them. Never mind, then. Somewhere in some cellar or other stand machines where neural networks can replicate themselves. They improve themselves by the second through natural selection.
Selection. The best won’t survive. Death is part of life. You know the story. Death is important to being able to enjoy life intensively.
People enjoy.
“It’s not so bad.
Hasn’t gotten.
Right?”
Asks
KAREN
The wasteland has changed. Little housing units and fully automatic shops stand where before the catchment ponds had been and tents had stood. A few pubs without guests, a VR space, a new bus stop, a couple footpaths with no dogs. No trees.
The hall where the children, who are definitively not children anymore, had lived is surrounded by stakes that allude to it being razed and built atop. Inside the hall it smells unpleasant. Homeless people probably lived here recently. Now they’re—
Gone.
The room comes across tatty. Different than Karen remembers it. Smaller. Darker. Not mysterious. Not a place of hope. No comparison to the flat she’s been given by her new employer. She now lives above a laboratory. Glass, top floor, there was even a piano in the place when she moved in. A piano that was probably left behind during the developer’s promotional photo shoot; prior to Karen moving in, the developer had positioned the place as a comfy urban oasis for cultural enthusiasts. Cultural enthusiasts. That means somebody who once went to a museum. And goes once a year to the Royal Albert Hall. To hear piano medleys. Anyway. That’s where Karen lives, or at least sleeps, as her life takes place in the lab. At the moment she’s developing drugs to suppress the body’s graft-rejection reaction. Important for brain implants and artificial limbs. Karen doesn’t care what she researches or for whom. She is
Happy.
When she arrives home to her flat at night, which she opens with a chip. She eats some random instant meal and stands on her terrace for a little while. She has made it to the top. Well, Karen thinks that sometimes and feels as if she’s in a movie where the star makes it to the top.
Karen’s world consists of setting up experiments.
For instance an experiment to find out whether some kind of familial relationship can be created when the only connecting factors are rage, grime music, origin, and hate for the system.
Unfortunately
Not.
Karen sits at the kitchen table, she no longer knows the person she must have been before. What did she talk about with those people? For instance with
DON
Who has become even more sturdy. Hood pulled down over her face, gaze directed into her glasses, which are connected to the internet.
She doesn’t know what she should talk about with the others. The stove doesn’t work anymore. The teapot has disappeared. They sit at the table without tea or anything else that connects them, aside from the past. Just look at Karen. With her nerd glasses, pantsuit, and the frantic looks. Probably thinking about some formula.
Everyone at the table seems to be lost in thought. And that is incredible. The fact that after an amount of time that at her age seems an eternity Don is meeting up with those who are supposed to know her best. And then not to know what to say, for fuck’s sake. These were the most important people in her life. Closer than the girlfriend Don has had for a while and with whom she sleeps and watches movies and whose sweat she wipes away when she’s sick. In the last three years Don had not even wished to see any of the other three. Until the message came yesterday. There just hadn’t been any contact. No animus. There was just too much going on. Like growing up. Something always hurt, there was always something to do—search for a flat and register for the basic income and find a girlfriend and work out. For Iron Man competitions, which are still called Iron Man. And it’ll never be called Iron Person, as barring women is being discussed. Women are being barred from lots of things. Football and martial arts. Not healthy for a woman. Their lower bodies, you know the story. It’s sacred and all that. Removing the fruit of the loins gets you twenty years of hard time. Most people don’t care. People stopped caring about almost anything. Have stopped. They’ve traded the outrage and feeling of powerlessness that used to make them so angry for contentment. Not a bad deal. Don has a smart hand. The rash back then
Had become too infected.
She looks at the others, the others look at their devices, except Karen, she looks at the ceiling. “Would anyone like a cookie?” asks Hannah, which is pretty much the most embarrassing thing you could say in a situation like this, a situation like separating from a lover, but the sentence has already been said, and they’re sitting at a table and it’s raining in the room. Don wants to go home. She lives in the north, in a one-room flat that’s very modern and that she shares with her girlfriend. She wants to go to her girlfriend and tell her that she’ll love her properly now because she’s seen that the people she thought she would always love more than all others have become strangers to her.
Don looks at Hannah and feels—
Nothing anymore.
And
HANNAH
Sits at the table and tries to remember her attitude toward life back then. There was this unbelievable rage. The feeling of powerlessness in a world that didn’t care about her. She tries to recall how the others looked back then, to recall the noodles and tomato sauce, the excitement when she thought a new life was beginning. She tries to remember the hackers, the excitement of long nights around the campfire and how she felt, but. Everything has faded. She wants to go home, the home where she is training to become a chef. She’s grown chubby, which always seemed unimaginable given her bony frame; she’s gotten chubby and lives with Peter, whom she doesn’t understand, because
PETER
Has become Hannah’s child. He does nothing. He barely talks anymore. He sits at the window and waits for Hannah to come home. Peter’s getting bad. Every morning when she closes the door behind her and heads down the stairs, Peter starts to hum to distract himself, to keep himself from panicking at the thought that Hannah won’t come back.
But
HANNAH
Always comes back. She has met a young man at her training course. She goes to the bathroom with the young man during breaks and has sex. She loves the young man. He is everything Peter is not. Inconspicuous. And healthy. He has a terrific social points score. The red-haired, healthy Irish boy, who laughs a lot and cracks jokes, and who wants nothing more in life than a little cottage in Ireland and his own restaurant and a few sheep and dogs and goats and children. The young man likes Hannah but he doesn’t adore her. He doesn’t need her.
Peter needs Hannah. Who sighs every night when she heads home. The home, which is a room in Croyden rented from an Indian family, where Peter waits at the window and always starts to cry when Hannah arrives with food and then sits in the room with Peter as he stares at her and always wants to touch her. Hannah would like to do normal youthful things. Go to VR rooms, sit in cafés, go with other young people to concerts, but not with Peter.
It’s not raining.
The four sit at the table.
And suddenly there’s music.
The four, so happy to have a reason to move, go outside. A new grime star is shooting a video outside. An old Stormzy track, remixed.
Oh, let’s make this last forever
Forever, yeah
Forever
Forever
Oh, let’s make this last forever
Yeah, forever, oh
Forever
Forever
Hannah, Peter, Karen, and Don stand close together.
A nearly perfect moment.
In a wonderful, peaceful world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have come into being without my ingenuity and the help of the following people, whom I gratefully thank. They’re good people! I may have forgotten a Dr. or Professor title here or there, but let’s not dwell on it.
TRANSLATION
Tim Mohr
NERD CHECK
Dr. Lorenz Adlung
Hernâni Marques
PEOPLE CHECK
Kevin Reilly
INSPIRATION, ADVICE, WISDOM
Tom Bielefeld
Volker Birk
Dr. Thomas Bruhn
CCC
Graham Cooper
and his
colleagues
(Humphrey Booth Learning Center)
Annette Dittert
Ertu Eren
Dr. Jens Foell
Robin Garcia
Rabea Gorney
Prof. Wilhelm Heitmeyer
Prof. Dirk Helbing
Sissi Lichtenstein
Professor Achille Mbembe
Tracey Miller
Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber
TRoadz
Prof. Stieglitz
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sibylle Berg is a Swiss-German author and playwright, and one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the German-speaking world. Born in Weimar, Germany, they have written twenty-seven plays, fifteen novels, and numerous anthologies and radio plays. Their work has been translated into thirty-four languages. Berg is part of the straight edge movement and identifies as nonbinary. The German-language edition of Grime won the Swiss Book Prize. In 2020, Berg received Switzerland’s highest literary award, the Grand Prix Literature, for their work. They live in Zurich. You can sign up for email updates here.
Tim Mohr’s translations include Alex Beer’s The Second Rider and all five novels to appear in English by Alina Bronsky. He collaborated with Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan on It’s So Easy (and other lies), and edited Gil Scott-Heron’s posthumous memoir, The Last Holiday. Burning Down the Haus, Mohr’s narrative history of East German punk rock and the role the movement played in bringing down the Berlin Wall, was named a Book of the Year by Rolling Stone, Rough Trade, NPR, and the Chicago Public Library.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
The Millennium
Don
Hannah
Karen
Don’s Mother
Peter
The Mother
Dr. Brown
Hannah’s Father
Sergej
Mother
The Russian
Thome
The Red Deer
Thome’s Father
Walter
Karen’s Big Brother
Patuk
Old Woman
Policewoman
Before the Intermission
Intermission
Humanity
Sir Ernest (Earl)
Communications Consultant
Programmer
Ma Wei
Carl
The Friends (Ben, Kemal, Pavel, Maggy, Rachel)
Bodycam Man
Maggy
Mr. M.
Roger
The Average Englishman
The Lab Director
Honest Man
Job Nomads
Courier
Boxer
Attackers
The Eight-Year-Old Prostitute
Kevin
Sweating Man
Berta and Henry’s
Rachel
Young Men
Arthur
Student
Rob
A Woman
Philosopher
The Mattress Seller
Abdullah B.
The Pro-lifers
Professor Dr. Kuhn
Jon
Professor
Middle-Aged Teacher
Woman with the Thinning Hair
Banker
The Child
The New Prime Minister
Madame Cecilie
The Journalist
