The This, page 8
Stabbing little holes in the plastic cover of his microwaveable chicken tikka like he was assassinating Caesar in the Capitol. Tak tak tak! Swift little strokes. The hum of the revolving plate and the ping of completion. Put it on a plate, or eat out of the plastic? The former was more civilised, but entailed washing up.
Decisions, decisions.
Rich collected banknotes. Nothing too fancy, since he didn’t have the money for the really rare and remarkable items. But notes are a good hobby for those with limited means. A lot of really cool pieces are available online quite cheaply. Rich could easily spend hours browsing the vendors’ websites and hoping for a lucky break on eBay. Hours and hours. Each hour unique, and yet every hour identical to every other hour.
There was a profound mystery in that fact, he thought, and clicked another tempting-looking link.
The This refused to leave Rich’s mind alone. Should he try it, he wondered? Give the insert a month, then have it taken out? Just to see what it was like? It’s simply the next stage in the evolution of social media, insisted AllCowsAreBlackAtNightime2001 on the biggest of the non-corporate-funded chatspaces. You don’t want to be an early adopter? Fine, wait until everyone you know has Thistech and won’t shut up about how marvellous it is and *then* buy in. There is no compulsion in religion.
Religion? That was a red flag word.
Dont be a luddite dude, said Xanadu3000, and Rich had to google what luddite meant.
Many people were fiercely pro-Thistech. Just as many were fiercely anti. Rich read about an American man who had taken The This to court, claiming that his implant had brought on epileptic attacks and psychotic interludes. The case was thrown out when the company’s phalanx of smiling lawyers brought evidence to the court from the plaintiff’s medical records that he had been diagnosed with these complaints long before walking into any Thisstore. He lost the case, but then he brought another suit, insisting The This had only won the previous case by breaching his privacy, hacking his confidential medical records, and that second case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Rumours online said The This had paid him a fortune because they were running scared – the whole hands-free Twitter thing was a front, and they were really in the business of aggressive data-mining. Other rumours said The This covered the man’s legal fees but otherwise told him to stop vexing them or they’d release more damaging and embarrassing secrets from his past. It seemed clear enough that manifest and large-scale breaches of data privacy regulations were happening. Nobody seemed to care.
The This had two tweetstreams: a public one, and a private one available only to members who’d had the tech inserted. A lot of Thissers tweeted publicly, and that stream was more or less indistinguishable from the timelines of Original Twitter or Nutwit or SocialGreedier or any of the big platforms. The only difference was that Thissers could tweet just by thinking about it, did not have to weary their fingers by typing or their voice boxes by speaking. It seemed like a trivial sort of advantage to Rich, but maybe it did make a material difference. Thissers were uniformly upbeat and positive about their implants, their membership, the vast improvements to their lives. Shiny, shiny, shiny!
As to what the private timeline looked like: nobody had been able to hack it, so nobody knew. Probably it looked like the public timelines, Rich figured, only with more housekeeping gubbins and maybe more in-This advertising. I mean, presumably it was a Twitter feed that approached telepathy, but presumably you could switch it off if you needed a break. Try it and find out? Or not?
Rich took a break from researching The This. He was starting to worry it was tipping the balance of his mental well-being. Stupid fucking system. Stupid robotic lovely-faced Aella Hamilton, getting under his skin. He’d stopped dreaming about her but was still sexually fixated on her. She was the one he pictured, in his mind’s eye, when he undertook his daily wank. Was that because she was so robotic? Attractive, intelligent, well dressed, sure – but that was true of lots of women. What was it about this one that meant he couldn’t stop fantasising about her? Perhaps only her very blankness.
Not healthy, that.
Rich got three D-Work gigs in quick succession. Nice to have a bit of money.
Reports came in from America of a mass suicide: twelve men and four women had hired a room in a conference facility, turned up in smart clothes, sat in four rows of four and – all sixteen at once – put guns in their mouths. The collective bang was so loud it was heard half a mile away. Banner news. Are reports of a suicide epidemic real? Is it really an epidemic in the technical sense of the word? What is causing this latest craze for tragic self-destruction? Link: an interview with a clinical psychiatrist. Link: Influencer Pen He. Link: Father Mackenzie, standing outside his church, wiping his hands on his cassock and talking nervously about God’s love. Link: suicide prevention hotline.
Link: historically rates go up and down, and the current situation is within those broader parameters, although admittedly at the upper end. Link: A NEW PSYCHIC PLAGUE??
He poured himself a whisky. McTesco-Ownbrand, that ancient Highland clan. Make mine a large one, barman – right you are, sir, glock, glock, glock.
At the point when being inside his flat began to make him stir-crazy, Rich would go for a walk, either around Putney Heath, or down along the river. Occasionally he might take the train into town solus and visit a gallery. He was no prisoner. He was no man in the iron mask. He could go wherever he chose. He just didn’t choose very often. Not until the crazy started stirring inside him.
Mostly he walked around the heath.
It was leaving the house for one such excursion that he first met Helen Susanna. You could not say this first meeting went well. This initial contact was very much not auspicious. She was waiting as he stepped out of his front door.
‘You should be investigating the suicides,’ she told him.
He looked up and saw: an old woman, salt-coloured hair awry. Half her face was hugely wrinkled, after the manner of the very old. The other half of her face, though, was bizarrely smooth: a diagonal line running from the outer tip of her left eye down to her left nostril and then cutting across her upper lip to the right point of her mouth, separated the two terrains. It was disconcerting when you spotted it, a kind of textural yin-yang, but Rich immediately saw the reason. She was wearing a half-mask. It was plastic, perhaps even Bakelite, and presumably covered some deformity beneath.
‘It’s the kind of scoop any journalist would kill for,’ she said, in a voice like scree sliding downslope.
‘I’m not a journalist,’ said Rich, grinning. Why am I grinning? He set his face into a more serious expression. ‘I’m sorry, I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.’
‘You are a writer!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry to get to …’ Rich said, waving non-specifically to his left. He was just going to wander the heath and have a pint or two in the Green Man, but on the moment’s spur he couldn’t think of a convincing lie. ‘A thing,’ he said.
‘The suicides are the key,’ she called after him as he trotted off. ‘You should be looking into them. They’re killing them off, I tell you!’
He put distance between himself and this other Homo sapiens.
Crazy old bird.
For a couple of days Rich piddled around at this and that, and then he told himself to get a grip. He resolved to dedicate proper time to his novel. Time to put it to bed! Finish it! Posterity was calling!
A first draft, at least.
His working title was The Long Hours Between the Light but that was going to change. He had mapped out his medieval-ish fantasy world, sketched the peoples and languages, drawn up a chronology of the key moments in the world’s history. The main story was about memory. The Dark Lord was controlling his domain via a complex magic that interfered with his subjects’ memory – changing the order of memories in people’s personal recollection, swapping memories between different people, occluding some memories and rendering others insistent and intense. Rich was toying with the idea of making the Dark Lord a Dark Lady, Cruel and Terrible as the Night, but he wasn’t sure. It appealed to him, but then again he worried it was just sexist and, worse, a cliché. The magic system that enabled the memory-work was intricate and the ways in which the (compromised and often unlikeable – this was the twenty-first century, after all) heroes hoped to battle this evil were precariously balanced on a series of plot improbabilities that Rich didn’t like. He drafted a couple of hundred words, and then decided he didn’t like them and moved them to the discard file. There was more verbiage in the discard file than in the draft. Rich was prepared to believe that was the sign of a good craftsman.
Of course a book doesn’t exist until more than one person has read it, and nobody had read any of this except Rich. He tried to push on with it. The words refused to come. Why not a glass of wine? Well, when you phrase the question like that what possible answer could there be except: sure, sure, sure. The serrations on the tin cap, like perforations in a field of new stamps, terribly easy to tear.
Glock glock glock.
Self-abuse, self-abuse, always picturing the same face, always the same imagined naked body.
Then Distant Flow released a new iteration of their property – Distant Flow 9 – and, like hundreds of thousands of others, Rich dropped everything to play it. Three solid days. One of the many enemies was a Borg-style cybercollective, and the further into the game he played the more Rich wondered if this was some oblique satire about The This. But then, after trying a dozen strategies and failing each time, Rich finally found the gameplay that dissolved the collective into wailing Lego-brick units and pushed on to the real level boss, which was very unThislike: a geological feature, a sentient cliff face that reached all the way around its planet. Beating that took some doing.
He decided he was obsessing over The This in a way that simply wasn’t healthy. He had enough self-awareness to recognise when he was in the grip of one of his hopeless sexual fascinations. They usually lasted a week or two and then he passed on to fantasising about, and wanking over, some other unattainable beautiful person. This one, though, seemed to be lasting longer than they usually did. Rich couldn’t seem to get past it. By focusing on this one person so intensely he was building them up into something they weren’t. It’s paranoia, he told himself. All The This do is take the finger-strokes out of Twitter. That’s all they do. People have been hystericising social media for decades – and video games before that, and comic books before that. Fandom has always looked like a cult from the outside. Chill, Rich told himself.
Rich told himself: chill.
At last Distant Flow 9 was entirely played through, and – after he’d exhausted the various game fan-sites and logged all the Easter eggs – Rich went back to work. He didn’t fancy descending into the metaphorical mineshaft of his novel just yet. A couple of small fact-checking gigs came to him through D-Work, which at least got him out of the house.
He spent long hours on online banknote vending websites and, after a lot of toing and froing with himself, shelled out for a 1986 Gibraltar ten-pound note. Queen Elizabeth II smirking at him on the front, the Gibraltar Governor’s House on the rear. The house had four trees growing in front of it, and white clouds filling the sky behind its roof; and a great foliate watermark pattern sprouted seemingly in the back garden. Purple-blue with a sepia design to the right of the royal portrait, engraved with many folding curlicues. Only 84 euros and it was Rich’s. Just lovely. A lovely piece.
The days sagged, often. After he had curated his Tamagotchi-esque Twitter anniversaries, and checked his top ten blogs, and browsed for new banknotes, Rich found himself always inevitably drawn back to the subject of The This. Following a thread buried in the mega-discussion of whether belonging was compatible with freedom, Rich read an exposé regarding six shell companies set up with The This money to campaign for the relaxation of digital privacy rights. The consensus of online discussion around this matter was that this was the real game – the app, the tech in the roof of the mouth, all that was just a gimmick. In a year it would be entirely forgotten, ripe for nostalgia.com, like Tomodachis, Pokémon and atSacks. People would tire of it. I mean, it’s not as if typing a tweet in the conventional way was so onerous, after all. Presumably the executives of The This knew it. So their game must be something else. Data was where the real money was, and freeing up data protection would enable pirate-style raids that would dwarf the company’s present-day turnover.
Rich wasn’t sure he believed it.
Ajit, one of Rich’s friends, messaged him, invited him round for a drink. Since Rich wanted someone with whom to talk through the whole The This business, he agreed. Ajit was an old friend. A big faux-hearty geezer, and tiring, but a good sort. And, usefully, he knew a ton about software. He might have a good insight into what Thistech entailed.
It was a bus ride to Ajit’s place and Rich spent the journey on his phone, poking into further and deeper virtual rabbit-holes with respect to The This. There seemed to be no precise details as to the numbers who had actually signed up to their programme, who had had devices inserted into their heads. There were many conspiracy theories, ringing the sorts of changes one might expect – they are aliens spearheading an invasion, they are chthonic lizard people who have emerged from the hollow earth, they are the cloned descendants of Heinrich Himmler, or a secret cabal of US Democrats, or people from the far future returned to earth. One particularly busy thread concerned how to spot Thissers in the wild – the proposition being that they were easy to spot, because they were the ones walking around without peering into the screens of their phones all the time. Although this was countered by the assertion that they could easily disguise themselves simply by carrying their phones in front of their faces like everybody else. Not that they were consulting those phones, since they accessed all their social media by direct mentation, but that they were pretending, the better to blend in and infiltrate humanity.
Ajit worked for a big software company, on an e-hygiene and virtual-purgation brief. His company flew him all around the world. He wasn’t a social media specialist, but Rich figured he could pick his friend’s brains on the practicalities of The This’s ware. If they were going to a pub, then it needed to be one where the music wasn’t too loud, so they could have a proper conversation. Although knowing Ajit, it was just as likely that he’d open a bottle of wine in his sitting room.
Hazel answered the door.
‘They’re watching cartoons,’ she said, letting Rich into the hall. ‘They can have another forty-five minutes – I’ve told them, precisely forty-five minutes, yes?’
Rich looked at her. They were the twins.
‘All right?’ he offered, tentatively.
‘There won’t be any problems, I promise,’ she said. ‘But if there are, we’re only twenty minutes away.’
She was, Rich noticed, with a clench inside his torso, wearing an expensive smartthread dress. A waterfall flow shimmering down the shot silk.
‘I …’ Rich began. But Hazel had gone, tripping rapidly upstairs. Ajit emerged from the kitchen.
‘Rich,’ he boomed. ‘How’s it going, mate?’
‘Oh, you know,’ said Rich.
‘Great!’ cried Ajit.
‘Things …’ said Rich. ‘Things are fine.’
‘Great!’
Hazel was pattering back down the stairs, a shawl over her shoulders.
‘Thanks a million for doing this,’ she said, placing a rapid, spectral kiss on Rich’s cheek. ‘You must come to dinner properly. With a plus-one. I hope and trust you’re seeing some—, nay, anybody.’
She was past him and out the front door.
Ajit was advancing down the hall, following his wife.
‘You said, come for a drink,’ Rich said.
‘Absolutely,’ Ajit boomed, ‘absolutely, fill your boots – although not the unopened whisky, not the FIOLX, that’s a present for Diarmaid. But the rest is yours, help yourself.’
A slam of the door. Rich was alone in the hallway.
He went into the sitting room, said hello to the twins and was resolutely ignored by them both. Then he went through to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of wine, sat at the pinewood table and let out a moderate sigh.
He scrolled through things on his phone. And here was the official site of The This, with its promise of instant, intimate community. Belonging itself reified into a small piece of metal-threaded plastic and inserted into the roof of the mouth.
A ping, as The This site registered his scrutiny with a little, personalised welcome message. Then another ping, and this one a message from Hazel: 45 mns up now, chase them upstairs and TEETH! Rich slipped his phone into his pocket and got up to sort the youngsters into their beds.
:2:
Once, after working all day at his computer, Rich noticed that the window had grown dark. Easy to lose track of time when you’re immersed. He got up, and stretched, and had a piss, and went through to his kitchen and made himself a bowl of noodles and confetti chicken. Which is to say: he’d microwaved this meal and sloshed it into a bowl. Then he’d gone back to his mainframe to send a message (quicker to type on a proper keyboard than pick it out with his fingers’ ends on his phone) and had fielded a couple more necessary queries, and then checked something, and an hour passed before he remembered that he had cooked himself supper and had not eaten it. D’oh. It was a strangely specific sensation, actually, starting as a broad feeling of foolishness, of something having slipped his mind, but metamorphosing – as he went back through to his kitchen, and looked down upon the bowl of cold noodles, and the undrunk glass of beer next to it, and the fork laid on the table in readiness – into something more existentially unnerving. As if he were a ghost haunting his own life, looking down upon himself from a great height. The museum display labelled, in neat letters on the subtitle card, A STUDY IN LONELINESS. It was self-pity, of course, Rich knew very well; and he was too canny to succumb to self-pity. That led nowhere. Although, that said, it was, oddly enough, not a corrosive or psychopathological kind of self-pity. Rather, it was a distant sort of pitiable melancholy, focused on himself only to the extent that his selfness was defined by the same solitude that defined so many other people’s selfness, all living their monadic lives (monads on Macs not PCs which means these monads are Windowsless). Going through their undermotivated routines, filling their hours with cupfuls of business when everyone knows that time is a chasm deeper than the diameter of the earth, and those cupfuls would disappear into obscurity.
