The This, page 13
‘Why don’t they just unplug them? Get their insert surgically removed? That’s easily done, isn’t it?’
‘These individuals don’t want to unplug. I was in The This and I didn’t want to unplug. It would be like you pulling your own eyeball out. You could do it – technically, I mean. It’s physically possible for you to stick your fingers into your socket and yank the jelly out. But you won’t, you can’t, it’s more than your willpower is capable of.’
‘Can’t the rest of the group … I don’t know … apply peer pressure, make the anomalous individuals disengage?’
‘If you mean compelling a sentient individual, against their individual will, to make an appointment with a doctor, to sign consent forms, sit through the operation – no, that’s not something that could be reliably managed by the gestalt. Some of the undesirable individuals do have psychopathologies that make them, as individuals, vulnerable to suicidal ideation. They can be pressured into killing themselves, sure. Then again, others don’t, and they have to be killed.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘I know, dearie,’ said Helen Susanna. ‘It’s vile. I mean, from our individual human perspective it’s vile. From their collective perspective it’s necessary. It’s hygiene.’
‘It’s murder.’
‘Of course it is. ConnAct erred in being too obvious when they murdered their misfits. They hired mob assassins, paid them, left financial e-trails, and it was too easy to trace the hits back to them. The This have not been so careless.’
Rich stared into his cooling tea. He was thinking of Aella Hamilton, and of Emma, and of the fact that they both belonged to – that they were both intimately part of – an organisation that murdered people. That ought to give him the creeps, oughtn’t it?
Oughtn’t it? It didn’t feel real.
‘How do they do it?’
‘The murdering? Why, that’s easy. You as an individual couldn’t pull out your own eyeball, no, no, but your body as a collection of cells has no qualms about churning through its own cellular material. Once the implant is sufficiently embedded, with enough tendrils through the brain tissue, it’s not hard to induce a stroke, a heart attack or asthma attack, depending on the subject’s vulnerability to those sorts of things. The This are cautious, though. They don’t want to leave the implant for police or government scientists to get their hands on it and read. When members of the gestalt die of natural causes, they always stipulate cremation. But when members are murdered it’s often necessary to intervene physically, to destroy the insert. A gun in the mouth … an accident that crushes the skull. Decapitation, sometimes.’
‘Blimey,’ said Rich.
‘Amateurs,’ said Foforn. His voice, Rich was surprised to hear, was rather high-pitched.
‘More tea?’ suggested Helen Susanna. ‘I fear yours has grown cold.’
:8:
Rich was put up in the spare room. Or a spare room, for there were several. It was a nice enough space: single bed, view of the back garden. He had a desk and computer, the latter free for him to use so long as he didn’t sign into any of his personal accounts. Helen Susanna gave him a shell identity so he could browse. He ghosted his own social media, which was a vaguely disconcerting thing to do. He played online games and browsed around, but it felt hollow without his actual networks, the many silken threads he had spent years weaving around his online persona, his connections, his online friends who were in no meaningful sense whatsoever actually friends.
He kicked about Helen Susanna’s house. He checked out her banknote collection – it wasn’t particularly extensive, but it contained some extremely valuable specimens – and sat on her abbreviated patio in the sun reading books from her shelves. He watched a lot of telly. Foforn was a large, discreet, Jeevesian presence.
Helen Susanna was right about his cooking, though: it was delicious. After three days Rich looked back on his usual diet of microwave Tesco chicken tikka, takeaway pizza and noodles with self-contempt. Helen Susanna came and went, and was often away for long stretches.
‘Am I allowed out of the house, Mr Foforn?’ Rich asked.
Foforn’s marmoreal head moved from a perfectly vertical alignment to one angled at five degrees.
Rich strolled into town, had a coffee in Starbucks, went to the river. People were wandering up and down, these Oedipal tribes of the self-blinded with their phones always in front of their faces. Now, though, what Rich noticed were the people who didn’t have phones in front of their eyes. The people simply walking here and there, turning their heads to look at their environments. Staring not into their self-created fractal worlds, but out and up – looking, we might say, at the ceiling.
A young man wearing a THE NEW BAND T-shirt met his gaze and smiled. How Rich’s heart rate cantered!
He didn’t feel safe.
He picked up the pace and walked back to Helen Susanna’s house.
He didn’t feel safe. He didn’t feel safe.
:9:
Helen Susanna returned in the early evening, and Foforn cooked the three of them a mushroom risotto with parmesan and rocket that might have been the single most delicious meal Rich had ever tasted. Helen Susanna opened a bottle of Guangxi Beaujolais. They chatted about nothing very much. It was relaxing. Indeed, Rich found himself being struck, as if with a great philosophical profundity, by how pleasant it was. Then Foforn cleared away and Helen Susanna went into the garden to sit in a recliner and smoke an old-fashioned cigarette.
‘I allow myself one of these a day,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think it hardly matters and I should just go for it, smoke myself silly. I’ll be dead in a year either way.’
‘Oh!’ said Rich.
‘But then I think I would be missing something. The singularity of this experience intensifies its pleasure – if you smoke eighty a day smoking simply becomes the background noise of your life, as it were. The wallpaper. But if I limit myself to one …’ She blew an ectoplasmic spire of smoke into the summer dusk sky. ‘You want one?’
‘No thank you,’ said Rich. ‘I used to, I mean. I used to smoke. But I quit years ago.’
‘Yes, stay away from it, dearie,’ Helen Susanna said. ‘Quite right. Or you’ll end up like me, with ruined lungs and half your face surgically cut away. Too much smoke, too much boozy-booze. Misspent youth.’
They sat in silence for a while and stared into the darkening sky. A mob of bats scattered and reassembled on a tangle of crazy trajectories. The high-pitched whizz of an approaching mosquito. The planes overflying down to Heathrow were racks of blinking lights. Every so often one came over with some fault to its noise-cancellation equipment, scraping a deep-throated cacophony after it like a bridal train. Mostly they just passed, ghostly, only hissing through the air..
‘What was it like?’ Rich asked, shortly.
‘You don’t mean smoking,’ Helen Susanna noted. ‘You mean The This.’ She was silent, and then she said: ‘Individual people are different, so their experience of being in the gestalt is always unique. Some connect straight away, in a deep way, as if the group is what they have been waiting for all their lives. It’s the ultimate cure for loneliness, after all. Other people connect and feel a baseline belonging, a security that simply enables the rest of their lives. Doing their job, raising their kids, whatever it is. For plenty of people in The This, it is a part of their lives. For others it’s the whole of their lives.’
‘And you were … the second kind?’
‘I dived deep. It filled the hole in my soul that I’d spent all those decades trying to stuff with alcohol and drugs and tobacco and sex. I was deeply, profoundly in.’
‘You wouldn’t have come out, if the … you know.’
‘You can say cancer, dearie. Cancer’s not a swear.’
‘But without it you wouldn’t have left?’
‘Oh no. Then again, having left, I have the double perspective. And hand on my heart – I can’t tell you how glad I am to be out. I don’t have long left, but I have a mission now, and it’s to do what I can to break The This.’
‘You really think they’re that much of a danger?’
Helen Susanna’s cigarette was nothing but its filter now, and she crushed it into the ashtray. The quality of light had gone from lavender to purple-black. A dog was barking away in the middle distance, repeating the same frantic shout over and over, as if it were trying to communicate something desperately simple and desperately important and nobody was listening. Human laughter from the other side of the fence, sudden and then gone.
‘Existential danger,’ she said. ‘No hyperbole. It’s a matter of bald existence. They will grow vaster – vaster than empires, as the phrase has it. They won’t immediately seek to supplant humanity, not entirely, because at the moment they need us – people like you and me – or people like you, at any rate – to keep having sex and keep having babies. They need to keep watching over those people as they grow up so that these new people can take the tech and join the gestalt. Since The This can’t renew itself, it needs us to do the whole mitosis–cytokinesis thing for its component cells. At least, that’s what they need for now.’
Without his phone, Rich wasn’t able to check what those technical terms meant. But he got the gist.
‘Can’t the members of The This just have their own kids?’
‘They can. Some of them do. But not at the rate they need. And not without diffusing their unity as a gestalt – because if a member of The This has a child – as, of course, lots have – then there’s no alternative to making the kid the focus of your attention. For a couple of decades, anyway. Focusing on the kid rather than on the gestalt. That’s … destabilising. You end up in the outer party, rather than the inner ring. It’s OK, but it’s not all it could be. A fuzzy cloud of mostly-Thissers, circling the hard kernel of True Thissers. And you can’t fit a baby with their hardware. That can’t be done until the brain is full-sized and properly wired in, and that doesn’t happen until late in adolescence. There’s always the chance that these kids will look at their blank-eyed, weird-smiling parents and think, this cult’s not for me, daddy-o.’
‘Blimey,’ said Rich.
‘So The This finds it more strategic to keep a large population of old-school humans kicking about. Let them – us, I mean – keep breeding, so they can harvest their offspring.’
‘Jesus-blimey,’ said Rich.
‘Eventually,’ rasped Helen Susanna, ‘they’ll find a way to do without us. Then they’ll supersede us altogether, and they won’t have any use for us, and I’m really not sure that will be such a desirable outcome for us, dearie.’
‘Blimey-Jesus and crikey,’ said Rich. ‘That’s pretty apocalyptic.’
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Helen Susanna, and started coughing.
It was thirty seconds before she got her cough under control.
‘You don’t think,’ Rich suggested, ‘you’re overplaying the danger? These things are fads, aren’t they? You said the other day there are six hundred thousand registered users of The This. Maybe it grows to a million and then does a Myspace, fades away as something newer and cooler comes along.’
‘Well,’ croaked Helen Susanna, ‘you say that, my dear lad, if I may say so, because you’ve never been inside.’
Rich was silent.
‘They will grow. I had cancer but they are cancer, on the largest scale. They will grow and grow. The only constraint on their growth is the one I mentioned – the fact that they rely on the rest of us to resupply their component cells. But that won’t be the case for ever. Science keeps making advances, and one of the ways in which The This prosper is that, because they are able to pool the expertise and creativity of a large population of people, they make breakthroughs in science. And they have no problem generating money. So, yes. Not this year and not next year, but it won’t be long before it’s too late to do anything about them. We need to act now.’
Rich sat looking out into the night. Stars filtering through a neighbour’s trees. The singular moon. He had a distantly vertiginous sense of reality itself moving, shifting on some huge scale, Ptolemaic spheres layered over one another like a cosmic onion. The future is behind you, because you can’t see it; but you’re hurrying backwards into it nonetheless. Who was it said that? Rich didn’t have his phone and so couldn’t check. We tear up the map, and remake the map.
‘Helen Susanna,’ he said. ‘What was it like, though?’
‘It was amazing,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘It was the most amazing thing of my whole life. And I didn’t even like it! Think how it is for people who do!’
‘You didn’t like it?’
‘Not really.’
‘But you said you absolutely loved it.’
‘Oh, I did!’
Rich pondered the distinction she was making. But of course it made sense.
‘You still think that way, even now you’re out?’
‘One hundred per cent, dearie. Which is it to be? Bits of frayed lint blowing in the breeze? Or threads threads threads woven into the most beautiful and meaningful tapestry the world has ever seen? It’s no choice at all, really. The fact that it’s so beguiling is what makes it so dangerous. It’s like sex. It’s better than sex.’
‘Better than sex,’ said Rich, who was of a gender and age for which sex was that kind of speed-of-light or absolute-zero limit, than which more was not to be conceived.
‘It’s the difference between masturbation and an orgy.’
‘The This is the orgy,’ said Rich. ‘And living the traditional mode of life is … the other thing.’
‘You might think the orgy is more exciting, but the truth is it’s less. It’s more constrained. Maybe that sounds crazy. But it’s true.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you say so,’ Rich said, who had limited experience of sex and none whatsoever, except through porno fantasy, of orgies.
‘Dearie, you’re making a common mistake,’ Helen Susanna told him. ‘You don’t fancy me, because I’m old and ugly. Because I’m not a sexual being to you, you find it hard to think of me as a sexual being at all. My dear boy, that speaks volumes about how your own sex drive distorts your perspective of the world, don’t you think? Remember, I’ve been alive three times as long as you have. Back in the seventies I was young and attractive and there were plenty of orgies. I used to be a regular orgee. I don’t go to so many nowadays, obviously.’
At this, she laughed her weird, scrapy laugh. Rich could almost picture her ruined lungs churning in her chest like a slushy.
‘I’ve never been to an orgy,’ Rich confessed.
‘It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, you know. There’s an initial buzz, when you first arrive, and that’s pretty exciting, because you’re surrounded by people having sex. There is, of course, a kind of baseline excitement tangled up in all that. But it soon goes off. When you have sex with one person, you choose them. You know you like and fancy them – and they you, which is more important, actually. You’re in control, the two of you are. But at an orgy there are people you fancy and people you really don’t, and actually the latter outnumber the former. Still, you have to, as it were, muck in. And it’s amazingly smelly. Hu! I mean, really, believe me, I went to quite a few, when I was younger. Because it took me a while to realise I wasn’t enjoying myself. I thought I was, but I wasn’t. I mean, I was getting sex, and that’s good, right? You need the wisdom of maturity to grasp that that’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Nowadays me and my dildo are sharing the best sex of my entire life.’
‘Jesus!’ said Rich, genuinely startled.
‘Why is that surprising? I know what I like, sexually, better than any stranger does.’
‘You talk like no old lady I’ve ever met.’
She scraped out another laugh. ‘It’s not like it’s not a universal. Sex, I mean. But this, this is my point – you yourself coming … that’s exquisite. Watching someone you love orgasming … it’s lovely. But a stranger’s orgasm-face is an ugly and disconcerting thing. Trust me on this. All that gurning and straining, like you’ve stubbed your toe, or are labouring at a constipated shit. Mostly we can ignore the pleasure of others, but we find the intense pleasure of others obnoxious. However, there are times when you’re forced to pay attention to it. And that’s The This.’
‘I mean … wow, though. An orgy.’
‘Pretty much. I mean, in a manner of speaking. This is an analogy, OK? It’s not literally like an orgy because it’s really not a sexual thing. Being in The This is not a sexual connection. The connection is much more spiritual than it is physical. Sex barely enters into it, in fact. My point is – it’s the erosion of the borders of your individuality, which means that your emotional and intellectual pleasures, not to mention your willpower, get overwritten by the pleasures and willpower of the group. It’s not that your individuality disappears entirely. It’s still there. And in the most you’re part of the same group that’s overwhelming all the given individuals who are not you, which is exhilarating. But you’re also you, so you’re also being overwhelmed. Nobody attends orgies all their life. It’s a thing people do in their promiscuous youth, before settling down into settled middle age with one partner. Or with none. Some older people do keep attending orgies, of course – always geezers, usually creepy geezers. But everybody knows there’s something a bit off about them. You know? With The This they’re trying to invert that life-arc. They want people to give up the solitude of their pleasure and get with the gang-bang.’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘Woof,’ she said. ‘Time for bed.’
For one startling moment Rich thought she meant: the two of them together. But she didn’t, of course. She was just declaring the evening conversation over. She got laboriously to her feet and toddled off upstairs. Rich poured what remained of the wine bottle into his glass, and went inside to watch TV for a while.
:10:
Some days Rich tried to engage Foforn in conversation. It did not flow.
