The This, page 3
Rich turned on his computer and played White Lies for a while. Peeling a whole Peperami out of its revolting little condom and eating it in four quick bites. Washing it down with some Diet Coke. Watching himself warily in the bathroom mirror, as if himself had anything with which he could surprise Rich.
Back to his computer. He preferred Apple products to PCs, computer-wise. You might say: pomme? – cuter.
You might say.
Rich was often lonely. He consoled himself with the thought that most people are often lonely, actually. And he had a wide circle of online friends, well mediated via social media. His computer, in its poky little study, was a window into a literally worldwide nexus of friendship. So he had no reason to feel lonely. Ergo, his sometimes feelings of loneliness were irrational and should be ignored.
And now it was midnight, and Rich was weeping openly at a video someone had posted, of an elephant mother in Nepal being reunited with her baby elephant. The baby had slipped down a sort-of cliff, this super-steep incline, and human beings worked energetically to clamber down and put the baby in this kind-of harness thing, and rope her back up the slope – not wholly vertical, but not far off, and with a big drop below into a river chasm – and all the time the anxious mother was waving her trunk and walking up and down up top and making this odd little hooting sound. And when the baby was finally dragged to the top and the mother wrapped her trunk around him, Rich started crying – proper open-mouth, gaspy, ugly crying. Oh, he wailed. It didn’t matter because there was nobody around to observe his breakdown, or his release, or his what-would-you-call-it. He went through to the bathroom and washed his face.
Eleven next morning, a bright sunlit day outside, and Rich was at his computer. He had some of his creative files open, and was piddling away the time on Coole, on Instagram, on Twitter, on Rowndup, and refreshing a couple of his favourite blogs and adding tiles to his month-long game of Tessellation. He wondered about getting on with some writing. But there was no hurry.
The D-Work app pinged, and he pulled up the requisite window. It was a job. And that was good, because he certainly needed the money. The gig was 690 metres away: a ten-minute interview for a magazine piece to be machine-polished later. Cushty. He picked his phone from its cradle and was about to head straight out the front door when he clocked the little telephone icon in the corner of the job receipt. That tiny stylised humpback bridge floating a fraction above that tapering base, that yurt-shape with its grid of ten little windows in its middle. Odd, really, that nobody has designed a more up-to-date phone icon. You wouldn’t actually see a device like that outside a museum.
D-Work didn’t usually require an actual phone call, but that was what the icon meant. Odd. Rich took a breath. He was a normal guy and had a normal guy’s aversion to actually speaking to people over the phone. But it couldn’t be helped, not if he wanted to be paid. So he pulled the job receipt on his phone and pressed the icon.
Four rings. Indicative of busy-ness, or an insolence that derived pleasure from making him wait, impossible to know. Finally a voice said: ‘Rigby?’
‘Hello,’ said Rich.
‘Alan Richard Rigby?’
‘Speaking,’ said Rich. ‘That’s me. I’m Rigby.’
‘Superb,’ said the woman. Well educated and middle-class, but not from London. If he had to guess, Rich would have said Lancashire, Cheshire, somewhere like that. ‘That’s just excellent, superb news. Really good to speak, Adam.’
‘Alan.’
‘Say?’
‘It’s Alan.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Adam. But it’s Richard.’
The slightest of pauses.
‘What?’
‘My first name is Alan but people call me Rich, not, not …’ He sucked a swift breath. ‘Not that it matters.’
Her voice re-ramped its enthusiasm. ‘Excellent – Rich. Thanks for that clarity, Rich. Superlative.’
‘The gig’s,’ Rich said, ‘a half-mile off, and I’ll need to saddle up Shanks’s pony – I mean, I’m assuming you’d rather I didn’t hire a cab?’
‘No expense file on this one, Richard.’
‘Rich. But, that’s fine, but of course it means I’m walking, so I really need to get going. We can quicken our chat, I hope?’
‘Superlative,’ said the woman. ‘Excellent. I just wanted to have a quick actual-talk with you before you went. Copy is for First Adept – the magazine?’
There were forty thousand online magazines, and outside his narrow and idiosyncratic set of personal interests, Rich knew the name of none of them. He said: ‘Ah.’
‘We are assembling a piece on The This. You have heard of The This?’
‘Sure,’ said Rich. ‘Hands-free Twitter, and so on and so forth.’
‘Forewarned is,’ said the woman, dropping her voice, ‘forearmed. Verb-sap, yes? Some people call them a cult, but that’s – let me stress – not the right way to think about them.’
‘Not a cult,’ Rich said, pulling up a quick search on his computer with his free hand to refresh his memory. The This. Their app ran on a somatic implant, injected into the roof of the mouth, that augmented the interactivity experience. You could, if you wished, continue to type messages on your social media in the traditional way, but the insert meant that communication could be sent directly if you preferred. It was, apparently, a middling-to-exacting mental discipline to learn how to subvocalise a message with enough clarity for the cranial implant to pick it up and transmit it. But the more users practised, the more they were able to send messages to their friends and followers just by thinking them. A gimmick, clearly.
‘Please don’t antagonise them,’ said the voice at the end of the phone.
‘Not a cult,’ said Rich.
‘Seriously, don’t use that word in your interview. There are four questions on the docket, feel free to expand and let the conversation go where it will, but steer clear of the c-word, yes?’
‘Sure,’ said Rich.
‘By c-word I mean “cult”.’
‘Yes,’ said Rich.
‘Not that you want to use the other c-word, I’d imagine, in an interview like this,’ she added, with a forced little laugh.
‘Yes,’ said Rich. Then he said: ‘No.’
Then an awkward pause. But these talking–hearing conversations were so tricky to gauge: was that pause an awkward one? Or just a regular pause of the sort that happened in regular conversations? Perhaps he should fill the silence.
The silence stretched.
Eventually, she said, chillily: ‘Can you have the interview text entered into the pro forma by four this afternoon?’
DifferenceWork contracts mandated a 24-hour turnaround, but clients always wanted copy much more rapidly than that. Rich could insist upon his contractual leeway, but if he did so the client would likely give him a crummy rating, and that could impact his going-forward likelihood of picking up future gigs, so he said, ‘Yes, of course, that’s fine.’
‘One more thing, Adam,’ she added.
He didn’t correct her this time. ‘All ears.’
‘This is for your own protection,’ she said. ‘I’m serious when I say this. You’re our third choice for this interview.’
‘Oh,’ said Rich.
‘The initial idea was to have a celebrity conduct the interview, ya? I won’t tell you her name, except that you would instantly recognise her – an influencer, a star. She took the gig and went along and then she messaged us to say she was returning our fee and joining The This.’
‘Ah,’ said Rich.
‘Celebrities can be flaky. I mean, you know? Right? So we figured – a professional writer would be the very and exact thing. That’s when we went on D-Work. This was yesterday. Got a writer in the Putney area, he accepted the gig. When he never returned copy, we pushed through the thicket of D-Work customer care until we got a real person on the line. It seems this individual has also joined The This. Do you understand?’
‘OK,’ said Rich, thinking to himself: Not a cult, right.
‘Forewarned is forearmed, ya?’ said the woman. ‘Ya? I’m not saying you can’t join, if you like the look of them. You’re a free agent. Do what you like. But please just promise me one thing, please just file your pro forma first, yeah?’
‘Sure.’
‘Be a professional, Adam, yeah? Do your job.’
And the conversation was at an end without further pleasantries. Was that how voice-to-voice phone calls went these days? Rich thanked his lucky stars he didn’t have the sort of extensive experience that would have meant he knew the answer to that question.
Rich had been pressing the phone so hard against his left ear that it was now sore from the pressure. He slipped the device into his shirt pocket, rubbed his face hard with both his hands, and got up from the desk. Logged the call, put on a jacket, touched the safepanel in the hall and stepped outside.
It was a sunny day. A marine-coloured sky. A scattering of bright white clouds were stretching their irregularly shaped wings. Birds circled. Rich paused on his building’s doorstep to put on sunglasses, and then navigated the mob of bins, gathered like ravers in the tiny front yard, mouths open at the gobsmacking splendour of the day. Then onto the pavement, turn left and along to the main road. The paving stones were the heaviest pack of playing cards in the process of being very slowly shuffled by the swelling tree roots, and it meant he had to watch his footing as he walked. But once he reached Putney Hill and turned down it, he was able to get his phone out and check his feeds.
A wait at the junction, where the South Circular traffic buzzed and fizzed its electric way westward and eastward. Rich on his phone, just like every other pedestrian, crowds at each of the four corners of this cross-hatched yellow box. All this infrastructure, set up in the last century to service that small fraction of the population who were actually blind, had found new purpose in this century servicing the physically sighted but functionally blind population walking about with their gazes kidnapped by their phones.
Bip-bip-bip-bip, and Rich stretched his legs and strode across.
Past the station and down the hill, swerving as and when another sightless pedestrian approached in the opposite direction with that sixth sense modern humanity has developed since the invention of these screens, these ubiquitous screens, these unignorable screens. An electronic patter of unignorable status updates, and he couldn’t look away. The map-app pinged him to turn left. He was at the river. Putney Bridge, which is of stone, wearing its row of Victorian-style lampposts like eyelashes. And there was the Thames, the only English river worshipped as a god by the aboriginal inhabitants of these islands, still not weary after forty thousand years of scouring its gravel bed and pouring itself into the sea. The air smelt of silt and brine and vaguely of something tartly chemical, which fact barely registered on Rich’s sensorium. Rich didn’t look at the river. It’s not as though he’d never seen it before, after all. Eyes on his phone, he trotted down Lower Richmond Road and stopped when his map-app sounded its little alarm.
He was there.
There is a word that always describes where we are, of course.
Rich finally disengaged his eyes from his phone. The Putney offices of The This were a new-build seven-storey weave of glass, helixing white stone pillars and steel. It looked expensive which, Rich assumed, was the point. He walked up the ramp. Doors swished away before him and reconnected behind him and he was in a marble hallway.
‘Hello?’ he said to the receptionist. A real live human, paid to sit behind a counter all day. Rich moved closer, smacking the marble as he walked, as if his own feet were slow-clapping him. ‘I’m Rich Rigby. DifferenceWork have set up a quick interview with –’ he checked his phone – ‘Aella Hamilton?’
‘Alan Richard Rigby?’ returned the receptionist.
The desk buzzed and extruded a credit-card-sized badge with Rich’s face on it. In the image he was looking nervously away and to the left. He peered at himself.
‘It’s only,’ said Rich, pressing the sticky side of the badge to his top, ‘a ten minuter, I think.’
‘Lift four, please,’ said the receptionist.
Rich crossed the hall to the row of lifts and waited. There was a stand-alone artwork in the hallway, a sort-of lace pyramid assemblage. Rich snapped it on his phone and it was immediately app-explained to him: 86,000 individual grains of rice, cooked, miniature pieces of magnetised wire inserted into each, and then dried. Once this feat had been accomplished the artist – Yu Fo He – had sculpted a complex magnetic interference pattern and positioned the grains in the field. The work symbolished the beauty with which the irreducible individuality of humanity combined into larger patterns and structures. Yu had used brown rice to reflect the ethnic diversity of humanity and …
Ping, said the lift. Rich stepped inside.
He pressed no buttons but the lift set off anyway. Symbolished. An actual word he happened not to know, or a trendy neologism by the artist? He fished his phone out to check, but he’d reached the necessary floor so he didn’t have time to look. And there, as the doors slid back, was his subject, hands behind her back, a large and wholly insincere smile on her face.
‘Rich? Wonderful to meet you. Come through. I can offer you coffee, water?’
‘Nothing to drink, thank you,’ said Rich. ‘Shall I call you Aella?’
‘I’d be very surprised if there’s a need to call me anything,’ she replied, and gestured towards an L of brand-new sofas.
Rich glanced past her at what he supposed was The This office space. There didn’t seem to be anybody about. Desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling windows providing a fine view over the river and into Fulham. No workers at the desks, though. Rich sat. There was plenty of room on this sofa but Aella sat on the adjacent spur.
‘Fire away,’ she said.
‘I’ve always thought it strange we still use that idiom, don’t you think?’ Rich said, matching her smile. ‘Imagine if I started shooting a gun in here!’
Her smile did not diminish, but neither did she laugh. Something in her eyes brought him back to reality. He was an app-delivered interruption to her day. Banter was not why he was here.
He said: ‘Sorry,’ and then, ‘Sorry, I know we don’t have long.’
‘Ask your first question,’ she prompted.
He looked at his phone and asked. It was about staggered share price improvements, and the follow-up was about the expansion of the company.
‘This very building,’ said Aella Hamilton, ‘was completed only two weeks ago. We are putting up state-of-the-art edifices in every important global trading city.’
‘Expensive?’ said Rich.
That wasn’t one of the questions in his brief, but he was expected to go off-piste, or the questions could just as well have been messaged across.
‘Money is speech, not silence,’ Aella Hamilton replied.
That wrong-footed Rich momentarily.
‘You mean, it’s not to be hoarded? You’re saying you’re not …’ He couldn’t remember the name of the religious order, so there was a momentary hiccup while he prodded his phone for the reminder. ‘… Trappists, in a commercial sense?’
‘I mean,’ said Aella Hamilton, ‘exactly what I said.’
Gnomic, thought Rich. He asked the third and fourth questions he’d been prepped with, about the technological advances of The This app, and possible health consequences of embedding tech literally inside the body. Aella Hamilton fielded these questions smoothly, and Rich recorded everything she said to simultaneous sound- and transcription-files. Six minutes. Now was the time to ask some questions of his own, justify his presence and – if he unearthed anything journalistically valuable – thereby ingratiate himself with both his temporary employer and so, via good feedback, with D-Work itself. But all he could think of was the question: People are saying you are a cult, how do you respond? And obviously he couldn’t ask that.
For long seconds he drew an absolute blank. Aella Hamilton’s smile was deeply unnerving. He became self-consciously aware that she was wealthy, attractive and assured, and that he was none of those things.
Off the top of his head he said: ‘I’m not just speaking to you, am I?’
‘Of course you’re talking to me.’
‘That old awkward lack of a tu–vous distinction in English,’ he said, trying another smile on her. It went nowhere. ‘I meant – I’m not just speaking to singular-you, am I?’
‘I am in contact,’ she agreed, easily.
‘You’ve had the app installed, too, I mean, the device? In … up past the roof of your mouth?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Is that This policy, then?’ Rich asked. ‘Is it that This, is it that The This –’ curse these trendy start-up companies and their trendy fucking names – ‘is it that The This company policy requires it, then? Are employees obliged to join the … uh, network?’
Her smile slipped away, although she looked blank rather than displeased.
‘Oh, there’s no compulsion.’
‘Not policy, then?’
‘Not policy, no.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Rich, as his phone notified him that he was at nine minutes. ‘I’m a freelancer, yeah? I’ve never, myself, worked in a large organisation, so I’m trying to grok the culture. But I understand that successful corporations often manifest a strong corporate collective identity. Singing the company song in the morning, socialising together and so on. It’s about belonging, isn’t it? So The This app is a sort of …’ He suddenly started to doubt himself. ‘A sort of super-belonging, yes?’
Wasn’t that just the are you a cult question wearing a different hat?
But Aella Hamilton didn’t seem incommoded. The smile was back.
‘Questions of belonging are at root political questions, don’t you think? Are we lonely and vulnerable, or do we stand together? And it seems to us that all the spite, all the anger and bitterness, that presently characterises contemporary politics derives from the factitious moral burden of solitude. Being alone – it’s jejune, but it’s more than that. It’s the dictionary definition of self-indulgence. It’s not properly human. Humans need to believe in something bigger than their individual selves. We need that absolutely. We need to atone our private guilts in our public belonging, we need to lose the sheet anchor of our individual selves.’
