Grime, page 8
THE PROGRAMMER
“That would be great. Though when it comes to understandability, it’s not a problem for me. I’m autistic.”
MI5 PIET
“Didn’t mean to offend you. I’ll give it a try. So. For every man, every woman, every child, we have—”
THE PROGRAMMER
“That is, anyone with a device and internet access.”
MI5 PIET
“Yes, exactly,
“We’ve produced an avatar. Based on all the data collected from each person.”
THE PROGRAMMER
“Age, gender, sexual orientation, political activities, consumer behavior, clinical history, criminal record, credit and financial profile, political leanings, modes of transport, resource usage, consumer behavior, dietary failures, orthopedic insoles, porn consumption—”
MI5 PIET
“Yes, thanks, we understood, so we’ve built an electronic avatar for nearly every single person. Algorithms calculate a precise location profile for each person, a threat profile, they calculate voting and buying patterns, determine the anticipated likelihood of criminal activity, the—”
THE PROGRAMMER
“Which in the case of children from a troubled area is very high.”
MI5 PIET
“Correct. Additional surveillance …
Oh, look, it’s summer.”
Curious glances outside.
Nothing going on outside, thought
DON
Annoyed from the moment she awoke.
Don wanted. Everything. Immediately. To become an adult. An idea of what she should do with her life. To get out of Rochdale. To grow.
Not to be stuck in this agitated, strange body any longer. Was something else she badly wanted. Don thought about love. Meaning: she watched more pornos—like everyone who thought about love. Everyone Don’s age was busy watching porn. Pornos were the basic foundation of sexual education for growing people. Boys learned how women should look and that they were always up for it. That they lounged about, women, and that you had to bang them long and hard to be a good lover. Girls learned that as a woman you had to writhe rapturously if someone kneaded your breasts roughly and prodded your vagina with a penis. As a result girls would mostly wait their entire lives for this wonderfully satisfying sensation when a penis was shoved inside them and their breasts were roughly kneaded, they learned they had to dress like porn stars in order to have the pleasure of a man who would treat them like shit. So all the girls Don’s age looked like hookers. They could then take pictures of themselves in their fantastic hooker wear and post on Instagram about what top-notch hooker clothes they had on. When they forgot to photograph themselves, the precautionarily installed cameras took care of it for them. There probably wasn’t a nook in the country that wasn’t covered by surveillance cameras. At the end of the 1990s the government had begun to install them for the protection of the citizenry. First at every intersection and bridge, every tunnel, then in the lamps of basement entrances, and by now the job was done. There were simply no more places to put cameras. Not a sliver of space between person and device. Nobody got upset about the cameras, because it was good for security. By 2001 at the latest it was because of the Muslims. Everyone understood.
It didn’t change anything about Don’s situation.
Even after she’d watched porn. And before. And at night. In fact always. Don was afraid of herself. She no longer knew herself or the feelings welling up inside her. Something dark had taken hold in her, something that had to do with life and death. She moved differently, more aggressively. She wanted to brush people away with her demeanor, wanted to see them jump out of her way. Don listened to “Stress” by Justice on repeat. When she wasn’t listening to Justice, she listened to Young M.A.: “Them bitches cold as ice, man you swear them chickens frozen / Them pieces maxing out, you would swear those bitches broken.”
She moved like Young M.A., boys stared at her, Don stared back, and she felt nothing. Any excitement, like when listening to music or masturbating, she did not feel. She started to box in a neighborhood club that, like all the clubs, was run by an ex-criminal who’d found god. When Don wasn’t boxing she practiced martial arts in the park.
But
It didn’t calm her down. If Don were suddenly old and, transfigured, wanted to look back at her life, this summer would have been the most intense period of it. The summer when she was alive in a way she was never again to experience.
Sex is probably only that way in the imagination. Quick, dangerous, destructive, and intense. Perhaps sex is only good when you don’t actually have sex. When you still believe that sex will change the world or that you can fuck someone to death. For Don there was nothing romantic or tender about puberty. It was about destruction, she just didn’t know whose destruction. Don wanted to be a boy. Wanted a cock. And despised boys. She wanted to be around girls, smell them, look at them, but girls embarrassed her. No idea why. There was nobody Don wanted to talk about her situation with. Or could talk to. Because she didn’t know what her situation was about. It was probably the same for the others. They were all suddenly grown, their voices and odors had changed. The children were uneasy and bored, they were waiting for the summer to finally pass. All with their smartphones, with dozens of apps that decorated their faces with funny masks and delivered their biometric data, watching grime videos. Rating Tinder photos, looking at snuff films, and laughing at naked classmates who’d been stupid enough to put their genitals on the cloud. A girl had tried to kill herself. With drain cleaner, after too many comments about her uneven-sized breasts had been posted. She’d survived. Well. Kind of.
Most children, no different than adults, were too dumb to understand what they were doing, but back then nobody understood what the internet really was. There was at least a little talk during that hot summer. It was perhaps the hottest on record. Somewhere, constantly, it was the hottest, the wettest, the coldest weather on record, the world outdid itself with superlatives, the oceans rose, ice melted, animals died off, and everyone just continued on as if it was all normal, which perhaps it was. It didn’t matter. There were devices. And nobody, not one person, had gotten encephalitis. Or a strange flu. But new lights were put up everywhere.
Don’s mother had begun to take sleeping pills. She slumped on the sofa with her mouth hanging open and the TV blaring. Another show about the effectiveness of emojis as a reward system. So-called reward systems were being propagated everywhere, meant to replace the old system of punishment. For a just world and all that. People like to be rewarded. It produces endorphins, it makes them happy, the people. Outside the heat shimmered
And
DON, PETER, HANNAH, AND KAREN
Met up every morning. They sat together outside each of their various homes in turn. Then they went to the old factories, sat around there, then went to the playground.
“Should we beat somebody up?” asked Don on one of these interminable afternoons, on the way to one of the abandoned factories in the hope of watching people in the act of having sex. The others looked up briefly from their devices.
“Beating someone up is not radical enough for me,” said Karen. Since the vaccination she’d had headaches more often. And been inclined toward violent fantasies.
“Do you have the feeling they implanted something in our brains when they gave us the vaccination?” she asked.
Peter nodded. “Trackers. They must have implanted trackers.”
Don touched her head. “It would be interesting,” she said, “if they had injected us with nanosensors that worked their way through our brains and sent all our thoughts to a control center. Of course, you have to wonder who could possibly be interested in our thoughts, but…”
Karen said, “Exactly, that’s it. A vaccination. Takes a second, don’t you guys get it?” None of them got it.
“Everything in the world is determined in seconds,” she continued. The others readied themselves for one of Karen’s usual rants, which in their most extreme form didn’t end in less than an hour.
“I’ll put my penis in the vacuum,” said Karen. “My hand in the blender. Chain myself to the car and jam a brick on the gas pedal. Send a message to the school director, climb up a ladder, drive across an icy bridge at night. Light the coal oven with the flue closed and go to sleep. I’ll push the button that starts a nuclear war.
“Know what I mean?” None of them knew what she meant.
“One false choice,” said Karen, “that you can’t even call a choice, more like a reflex. And the result is landing in a coma in the hospital, a shattered family, welfare, layoffs, divorce, and ending up on the street, life without a hand, life in a wheelchair. Choices are illusions of holding power. Oh, yeah, power, how cool. And then they think, well, what they call thinking, and write notes full of pros and cons, but in the end everything is decided—in seconds. When they make false choices in fucked-up lives. But they could all just not be made. You understand what I mean?”
“No,” said Don. “No idea.”
Peter stared glassy-eyed.
Same with Hannah.
“So,” said Karen,
“we’ll take revenge on everyone who’s hurt us. Let’s make a hit list. On it goes everyone who has tormented and insulted us. We’ll track them down, figure out their weaknesses and give them a second they’ll never forget.”
Karen looked at the others with a slightly crazed look.
None of the others knew exactly what she meant, but a hit list sounded good, it was a welcome diversion from the last days of the endlessly long, dull summer. And then they all sat alone with their thoughts and recalled moments they wished to forget. That they’d suppressed, so that they could grind them into dust when they were old enough to. They thought of loneliness and humiliation. About being fucked on stinking mattresses, beat up, they thought about death and helplessness.
Peter wrote down his mother, the Russian, and Sergej, the Pole who had raped him. Hannah noted Doctor Brown, her mother’s murderer. And Thome Percy. Developer of the site Dream Island.
And Don jotted down Walter, her mother’s former boyfriend.
Then they didn’t know what to do next. They were suddenly no longer cool, young, and strong. They were children who actually just wanted to cry. And knew that nobody would comfort them.
“I’m waiting.”
Said
THOME
INTELLIGENCE: average
POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high
ETHNICITY: pink
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: asexual or perhaps homosexual
FETISH: sniffing athletic shoes
POLITICAL CLASSIFIABILITY: right-wing conservative. But also doesn’t really matter
HEALTH RISKS: high blood pressure. Fatty liver
It was the time when his mother was still alive. His real mother. Mother—Motherrrrr!—
Mother didn’t answer. It was midday, she was probably lying on her George III sofa. Thome hated that piece of furniture, with its brocade cover darkened at head height by the grease of his mother’s hair. Thome’s mother considered frequent hair washing a hobby of the newly wealthy and the lower class. Her hair was always matted down on the back of her head. It was the color of her faded cashmere sweater. If she wasn’t lying on the sofa she was perhaps outside with the dogs. Those filthy creatures that looked as if they’d had their legs sawed off. Good hunting dogs who, on their sawed-off legs, hunted other animals to death. The hunt, a displacement of the lust to kill people on the turf of the Scottish Highlands. Mother knew a thing or two about that. About killing, scorn, scones, and alcohol. In the community where Thome’s family home stood, there was nothing but drunks. Amazing, eh? That the country’s upper crust consisted of a giant cirrhotic liver, that alcohol wielded the scepter in this manicured bougainvillea-covered development. Owing to a bit of a stalker quirk, Thome knew what every resident did at every second. He knew them naked, knew what they ate, how they voted, knew their influence in politics, knew which weapons they stored where, which sexual proclivities they harbored, he knew how long their orgasms lasted. Already at a young age Thome laid the foundation for his later passion: observing people. And pondered how he could hurt them.
In the circles Thome’s parents moved in, there was no morality. Morality was something with which to occupy the underclass in a contest to curry favor with a higher being.
In the circles where Thome grew up, there was neither political correctness nor organic food, people smoked, drank, whored around; they were the last free people, who had nothing to do with those beyond the bougainvillea bushes. The people here didn’t know Netflix, Facebook, they’d never been to McDonald’s or on a package holiday. They didn’t know there were self-service supermarkets and Google search engines, they didn’t know Starbucks or Tinder, except that
Those businesses belonged to them.
On Thome’s street there were a few men with pronounced pedophilic tendencies. The enjoyment of being tied up and debased was at home in nearly every building on the street—Thome sensed his thoughts wandering, which was normal in a brilliant, quick mind such as the one he carried.
“Then we should set off, sir. Are you ready?”
The quirk of addressing himself formally was something Thome had affected since his time at boarding school. It gave one a sense of security to know an adult was with you.
So
It was in earlier times that Thome stood with his father and mother behind a bush in the Scottish Highlands waiting for game. It was Thome’s first hunt, he was terribly frightened. He had his boning knife attached to his belt; around him the Scottish Highlands in fog, inside him terror. “We are here to put the animals out of their misery.” His father had said. Which could make sense if you considered life misery, as his parents seemed to. Thome froze. He was waiting for
THE RED DEER
OPENNESS: N/A
HEALTH RISKS: depression, hunters
He was a rather introverted game animal. Amazing that anyone could have had enough of life, thought the game animal, just the way one cannot imagine getting old when one is young. That happened to others. Others, with their embarrassing self-inflicted aging.
It would never happen to him. At least hunters were good for that. And
There it is, the shot to the chest, but. No pain. Thinks the game animal. Did they miss, the complete and utter idiots? Is even that too much for them to manage? Unfortunately no, because I can’t manage to keep my eyes open. I’ll just close them for a second. What’s the meaning of this? The most beautiful moments of life aren’t playing back. Inside. No tunnel, no light. Only me. Alone. With the sky, the light, that’s going out. And the knowledge that everything, everything, for nothing. Was.
And then the sun goes down—for the last time.
Goodbye, you unspeakable assholes.
Barrel of laughs with you. You complete and utter idiots, thought
THOME
And heard the shot as if from a great distance. When his father brought him the head of the animal, he threw up. On the deer. On his father’s tweed trousers. And then Thome cried. He couldn’t stop. Back then. When his father began to despise him. And his mother got cancer. Because of him. And died. His fault. Later things got worse.
The curtains of musty-smelling velvet—outsiders would be shocked if they were to enter the villas of the upper class and see the run-down, decayed condition of the furniture, which the upper class considered befitting of their status—were pulled halfway closed. The father—a Sir, by the way—was sitting with his head resting on his hands in a dark corner of the room. On the bed where nine generations of relatives had already lain dead now lay Thome’s mother. A stern woman with large breasts. She’d been. And the breasts, which even now towered toward the ceiling, had been the greatest source of shame over the course of her life, the low-class bosom which hindered her while hunting. Contrary to her silent wish, which she included in her drunken evening prayers, she hadn’t expired while on a hunt, but from breast cancer. A disease about which people always whispered: “She fought so bravely.” As if that would interest the cancer cells. Cancer cells were humans in miniature form. Eat everything that crosses their path with no regard for the damage, taking for granted, out of greed, that the host will eventually cease to exist. Thome’s mother had chosen an unlucky moment to become ill. Biosensors had only just been invented. Programmable bacteria that could be read from the outside. Later they’d track down cancer and set to work right in the middle of the tumor. But yeah, that was later. Thome stood at the side of the so-called deathbed and explained away his absence of grief or sympathy with a string of quirky and absolutely hip mental diseases. Asperger, ADHD, giftedness, WTF. He felt nothing and could only think: Oh well, gone is gone. Thome had survived—somehow—his boarding school years at Manchester Grammar School as the catchment basin for the perversions of his fellow students. Now it was off to university. His grades were middling, but the contacts of his parents—sorry, his father—eliminated any misgivings. So it would be Cambridge, and so his way forward would be sketched out. If he didn’t completely screw it up, a comfortable life lay before him. A family villa on a private road on Holland Park, an influential post somewhere, first in IT, due to his aptitude for nerdy explanation, later politics, then a stroke. Until then: membership in a first-class college society, and perhaps he’d get to know a woman who loved cashmere twinsets and would live out her last few unencumbered years at Cambridge attending group sex parties. And later, as a moderate alcoholic with a weakness for hunting dogs, produce a couple degenerate children for him. Incidentally, the mother had just died of cancer in a region of the body people like her never referred to by name. Amusing detail. An astonishingly inappropriate sigh echoed through the silence of the room.
THOME’S FATHER
