The This, page 17
The third thing was the real hammer blow. His mother called him. She never called him. The gravity of familial passive-aggression meant that rivers always run downhill, and Adan always rang his mother. But this was a first. Adan was playing chess with Elegy, the board shining on her belly as she lay naked on the bed, her giggling every time he poked a piece’s icon with his finger to move it. Then Gee trilled and told him that his mother was calling. It was unusual enough for Adan to sit up straight.
‘Mom!’ he said, as his Phene took on the features of his mother. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Son,’ said his mother, crumpling her brow and dipping her head. ‘I have news.’
‘News,’ Adan repeated.
‘My boy, there’s no easy way to tell you this.’
Adan’s inner alarm was chiming.
‘Wait up, Mom. What? What do you mean? Is this going to upset me? Let’s not talk about this now. Let’s not talk about this. I’m not in a place, psychologically, you know? Not in a place to hear this.’
‘I’m going, my boy.’
‘Going where?’
‘If I had an easy form of words,’ she said, her tone strained with held-back tears, ‘then don’t you think I’d use them? But ever since your father passed it’s been hard on me.’
‘Is this about Pops?’
‘It’s been preying on my mind.’
‘What has?’
Running through Adan’s mind, in a hurriedly assembled list of likelihoods: his mother remarrying; going on a religious retreat; adopting a grandchild since Adan wouldn’t give her one. But the reality was otherwise.
‘I’m travelling to Europe.’ She pronounced this yurp, but Adan knew what she meant.
‘A holiday, Mom? What the hell?’
‘Because it’s not illegal there.’
‘Mom … what?’
‘Joining the hive mind.’ And then she said: ‘I’m not a fool, son. Running my telephone conversations through an app that keeps the FBI from hearing certain key words that, well … You deserve to know.’
Adan was silent for a full minute. Thirty seconds in, his Phene started saying ‘Addy? Are you still there?’ and ‘You were saying your phone has been glitching – have I cut out?’ and eventually he said:
‘You’re joining the Borg?’
‘Don’t call them that! It’s disrespectful. It’s rude. They are the Spirit Embodiment of Human Destiny.’
‘Mom …’
It turned out that Adan’s limited expressive range was not capable of capturing his combination of astonishment and outrage at this news.
‘Mom!’ he said again. Then he said: ‘Mom!’
‘Don’t start with me, Adan,’ said his mother. ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’ve signed the necessary legal commitments.’
His first question, it turned out, was not the one pertaining to the imminent upheaval his life was about to undergo.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m afraid of dying, my boy,’ she said, her voice watering itself now with tears.
Adan’s Phene did not run to the actual mimicking of human weeping, and instead displayed a teary-eyed emoticon over its cheek. More expensive models could extrude salt water from a reservoir behind the bridge of the nose.
‘You’re not dying!’ said Adan.
‘We’re all dying, my son. And some of us are closer to the end than others. Ever since your father passed it’s been preying on my mind. But the Spirit Embodiment will not die, and if I join them then I won’t die.’
‘Are you kidding?’
This was the wrong tack. This was only going to harden her natural obstinacy.
‘No, I’m not kidding actually, my boy,’ she said, briskly. ‘When you’re a little older you’ll understand. Death is a very scary matter.’
‘I thought you were …’ said Adan, struggling, in truth, to remember the specifics of his maternal affiliation, ‘… Catholic Orthodox? Or Orange Catholic? Or … aren’t you …?’
‘The Spirit Embodiment offers a material, copper-bottomed path to personal immortality,’ his mother declared, ringingly. ‘A real-world, scientifically guaranteed immortality. Your actual consciousness joins the gestalt and the gestalt lives forever. And I’m taking that.’
‘Mom!’
‘I’m sorry, my lad,’ said his mother, looking away. ‘There’s a lot I’d do for you. There’s a lot I’ve done for you – paid for your toys, and your apartment, bought you that so-called girlfriend of yours. But I won’t die, for you, for anyone.’
‘Mom!’
‘Don’t feel sad, my boy. I’m going to live forever. Literally live forever!’
‘Is that even legal, Mom? Isn’t there a war … I mean, a war … I mean, this is …’ He meant to say treachery, but the word eluded him. He rummaged through his wetware brain, said ‘illegal?’ and then added ‘-ness?’
‘I’ve always loved you,’ she replied. ‘As a mother,’ she added.
A curious qualification, when Adan thought about it later. Then she rang off.
Adan sat in silence for a long time. What to do? He rang round his friends and told them what had happened, and they were variously laughter-hooty and mocking, or solicitous and consoling. But there was nothing they could do and there was nothing he could do.
He ordered in a bottle of Oddka and a pizza and watched TV for a while. Then he popped a mauve and had sex with Elegy for over an hour. It didn’t usually take him so long, but he was trying to keep his thoughts off the conversation with his mother. But maybe she hadn’t really meant it. Surely she couldn’t have actually meant it.
Eventually he told Elegy to go to sleep, and drank some more of his alcohol, and searched for info on Hive-Mind-θ. It turned out there was – just – enough residual curiosity in him to at least enquire into the group to which his own mother was giving her life. But opening the news and comment media, and an automatically selected spread of chatspaces, on ‘HMθ’ revealed a yawning virtual chasm absolutely bristling with opinions and polemics and propaganda and the online equivalent of hectoring, screaming and begging. The mere fact of the enormousness, not to say enormity, of human responses to this growing hive mind dissuaded Adan from pursuing the topic, although it did at least alert him to the fact that it was a topic of pressing contemporary concern.
He tried again: ‘HMθ Immortality’, but the spread of results was no more focused, and he gave up.
Then it was three in the morning, and he went for a walk to clear his head. Striding around the city at night, under a liquorice sky. Moving through steel and stone channels, at the feet of gigantic monoliths half a klick tall and dusted all over with lit windows. Overhead the endless stream of supercargo floaters flickered and blinked, passing down their ever-replenished parade. There were as many people out and about as during the daytime, and the silent cars swished past as if trying to whisper something eloquent and wise to him. He stood for a long time at the junction of 300th and Broad, watching the wavefront of red tail-lights pass up along the line of cars as they shuffled forward. All these people, Adan thought to himself, as if it were a piercing insight into the nature of things. They all had homes to go to, jobs that gave their lives meaning, mothers who loved them.
A drone swooped down, fat buzzing bug, and flickered a message directly into Adan’s left eye:
JESUS IS STILL HERE lose weight the Christian method LOVE.
Adan tried to sweep this away, but it wasn’t a regular flyer, it was some other kind of intrusive projection, and persisted, until he took a swing at the drone and it flew off.
Adan went home.
In the morning, the first concrete intimations arrived that his mother had been deadly serious: notification from the AI that ran the rental corps that owned and maintained the block. The previous payee had withdrawn credit. If Adan wished to remain in the apartment he had seventy-two hours to arrange alternative credit and payment bona fides, legally endorsable by etc., etc., nonrevocable under the terms of the Finance & Accommodation Legislation of etc., etc.
This was a shock. It was such a shock, indeed, that for a good half hour Adan simply didn’t register it at all. He played a game, and pretended life was just carrying on as before.
But the messages didn’t stop arriving, and, howsoever petulantly, he was eventually obliged to reply. Of course there were no other funds, and of course he had access to no line of credit that would enable him to keep the apartment. He called his mother, but she wasn’t picking up. He called his friends for advice but they had nothing to offer except platitudes of sympathy of the sucks-to-be-you variety. He lay on his bed with his top off, and played his ample belly like a set of Jello tom-toms. What to do?
‘Gee?’ he asked aloud. ‘What should I do?’
‘Just be yourself, loverboy,’ was his Phene’s purringly expressed opinion.
He tinkered around with a Financial Advice Bot for a while, and browsed possible employment opportunities. But there were very few opportunities, and he, Adan, was the opposite of opportune – under-educated, wholly without experience, too old, unable to bring a financial bond to Company A and equally unable to assure Company Z that he had never taken anything from their long list of proscribed pharmacological stimulants and hallucinants.
He sat down in a chair, facing the window, and looked out over the rooftops. Then, for focus, he slapped himself hard on his own cheek.
Priorities: somewhere to live, food, games, a place for Elegy.
That clarified matters. His mother was still not answering her phone. So he took photos of all his stuff, got a quotation from a Kippledealer, rented space at a storage farm on the outskirts of the city, and put his shoes on – all before his cheek stopped tingling.
He gave the Kippledealer the codes for the apartment, went downstairs with Elegy and called a cab. It was a twenty-minute journey.
‘I’ll come visit you as much as I can,’ he assured her, as an automated janitor led the two of them down one of the kilometer-long corridors in the facility. Tears threatened his eyes. Oh God, this was hard.
The space was as large as Adan had been able to afford, which wasn’t very large. Elegy stepped obediently inside, and Adan disconnected her power. The corridor was swimmy as he walked back to the main entrance, and the sunlight, as he came outside again, dashed sparks and glares from his teary eyes. He called another cab. As he waited for this transport, under the dusty sun, a profound bout of wooziness afflicted him, and he had to use the crash barrier at the side of the road as a sort of bench. But this had passed by the time the cab turned up.
Next stop: Army Recruitment Centre.
:4:
Giving up material possessions is a liberating matter, but the change in Adan’s circumstances was too abrupt for him to appreciate this spiritual benefit. And, anyway, the word possessions nowadays means a different thing than it used to, something cross-hatched between physical objects and virtual ones, more a discursive than an actual category. And discourse is not something that can be given up.
It’s a diverting place, this city of the future. The world under the rubric of toys. Because that’s the great truth we have discovered about ourselves as a species. Our existential opposition is not between life and death, because death is not a thing (death being, in point of fact, the absence of all the things). It’s true that fear of death is a thing, but fear of death, usually, makes us feel more alive – the rush and the push of adrenaline, the intensity of the now, this experience, this breath, this moment. I’m not talking about existential dread, of that psychopathological sapping terror of death’s inevitability. Bracket that aside. No: woman’s and man’s state is either: a state of being alive, or a state of being in fear for our lives that makes us feel even more alive. Caveman you is alive when you chase down your prey, and twice as alive when the sabre-toothed tiger is chasing after you. And so time passed, and history kicked into gear, and the eras succeeded one another, and we improved the efficiency of our food provision (call this: farming) and our population expanded, and soon enough we slid into the now. For most of us, living now, the opposition is not between life and death but between life and boredom. Boredom is much worse than death, because boredom is a thing and death is the elimination of all things. We’re much more anxious about things than we are about their absence.
This is the history of humanity on the larger scale. First: a struggle to stay alive. Then, when that battle was more or less won, a struggle not to be bored. And all the things that this second, larger scale struggle entails come to dominate existence. Not the Anthropocene so much as the Toycene. We have invested enormous amounts of energy and ingenuity and labour and money in making new diversions, new gadgets and games, gimcrack devices and cunningly written computer code and imaginary people’s imaginary adventures on page and screen. Giant harvesters scroll right to left, left to right, through huge fields furry with wheat, plaiting the stalks in their path and blowing an endless whale-blowhole of grain into their attendant lorries – and nobody pays it any mind. Harvest, which used to be the great central event of humanity’s year, has become a background event, automated and ignored. Meanwhile armies of people, larger than Napoleon or Mao ever commanded, work assiduously at making engines of distraction, real and virtual, for the remaining population of the world. Toys everywhere. The toy event horizon.
Adan had his toys. He had a library of seven thousand virtual games he had played, some of which he returned to and replayed many times. He had hundreds of thousands of screen dramas to watch, and millions of songs he could listen to, and more online platforms on which he could pass his time arguing with strangers than he could ever visit. Most of all he had his phone, and in this he was like an increasing number of people. Because the iron law of the Toycene is this: kids want their toys to be their friends and adults want to fuck their toys. There are local variations in the ways we, as individuals, invest emotionally in our pastimes; but emotionally invest in them we do, and that’s the spectrum human emotions parse: befriend it; fuck it; kill it. Pick a point along the line mapped by those three positions and, there you are!
You! Yes … hello.
Person? Hello?
Doesn’t hear me.
In the city where Adan had spent most of his life, everything, more or less, was a toy. Some people prefer their toys to be inert, not to answer back, because that’s how some people prefer their fellow humans. But others relished the interactivity of play, and so there was a lucrative market for toys with whom you could chat, or fight, or have sex. And the people who profited from that lucrative market, by inventing brilliantly diverting new toys, or by manufacturing and marketing toys successfully, those people took their money and spent it on toys.
I mean, what else were they going to do with it?
In the army, the toys are called things like ‘guns’, ‘drones’, ‘tanks’, ‘fighter planes’, ‘orbital flitters’, ‘dreadnoughts’ and many other things. Back in the deeps of history the army could afford to bore its members with rituals like marching up and down the parade ground, or twelve-hour stints of monotonous guard duty, or simply standing in line for hours. They could do this because the army had cornered the market in the more intense of the two ways of being alive – that is, living under the threat of being killed. But as war evolved, the odds of any given squaddie dying were reduced. It was no coincidence that, as this risk diminished, the number of toys soldiers were given to play with increased. Graph the two against one another and you will see an exactly inverse proportion.
At the recruitment centre Adan was scanned, interviewed, and handed a screen on which he could sign over his soul to the military. He suggested they take him on as a drone pilot, and laid out some of his gaming high scores, but the recruiting officer was only too manifestly unimpressed.
‘We have kids coming in with scores vastly more altitudinous than these,’ she told him. ‘I can put your name down, but I have to be honest with you … honest with you … uh … Adan – you won’t make this programme. It’s, like, super-competitive.’
‘Oh,’ said Adan. ‘For sure? So what should I, like, do?’
‘Basic training for now,’ said the RO brightly. ‘Your officer orientation team and personal development sergeant will help you make the best career choices going forward.’
Adan was put on a shuttle flight with eighty or so other men and women, and whisked to a training base near the sea. Here he gave up his clothes and received his uniform. Here he showered in unisex showers and ate the nanoseed pills the orientation officers told him to eat. Here he was assigned a bed, and woken every morning to his new routine – one supervised hour in the gym, three hours learning to drill as RSMs stood yelling at the side of the parade ground and as drones overflew the ground to display aerial shots of the formations onto a giant screen. Adan discovered he quite enjoyed drill. It was a waste of time, and, considered as a game, it was certainly not a very sophisticated one. But there was a Tetris-satisfaction in making your body perform a set of rigidly predetermined movements, and learning to co-ordinate with a whole crowd of others was a bit like dancing. He’d never been much of a dancer, so there was some satisfaction in learning these new moves.
The hardest part of the experience for him was missing Elegy. He felt her absence so intensely that, several times, he wept loudly into his pillow. The other cadets didn’t mock him for this – they all had something equivalent in their own lives, after all, and many of them were equally prone to the weepies. Nor did they pry. They didn’t need to. Adan’s grief was intensely particular, unique to him, focused on a this or a that of his own. But grief as such is a general and fungible quantity, universal to humankind, and one of the things that links us all to all.
Lights on, like a splash of white water in the face. Out of beds, you slugs! Wash, dress, breakfast and jogging in order. Down to the range. Lie on your bellies, you worms!
