Chapters 5-6

In chapters 5 and 6 we find out more about the world of NewState in which Peter Harrison lives. We learn about his past life with Janine, about his current life in isolation and he receives a surprising message that fills him with a mixture of excitement and extreme trepidation.

If you prefer to listen whilst walking the dog, the audio files are here too.

Chapter Five Autumn 2034 Peter Harrison

I am walking in a park. The sun is shining but I cannot feel the heat of its rays on my skin. I can see people dotted around. There is a lady walking her dog, a man flying a kite, a couple holding hands. The park is wide and spacious, with small copses of trees dotted about. The sky is clear, a few wispy summer clouds dissolving into the blue. The colours are clear, but not perfect. I decide to run. I do not start slowly. I sprint. I sprint past the woman and her dog, the man and his kite, the couple holding hands. They each turn to watch me as I pass, flash me polite smiles, the woman with the dog possibly something more - a spark in her eye.

After a few minutes at flat out speed I stop. I feel fine. No breathlessness. No panting.

I look up at the sun. It is too yellow. My eyes do not hurt.

I move to somewhere else.

I am in a restaurant - Parisian. I sit alone but it isn’t long before someone joins me. She smiles at me and I invite her to sit down. We begin to talk. It feels nice to talk. She asks me what brings me to this place, what I have done today, where I have been. I don’t have anything real to say, but that doesn’t stop me from answering her questions. She doesn’t either, but her answers are interesting, captivating even.

We talk for some time, absorbed.

And then I suggest we invite the man at the next table to join us. He’s sitting on his own and we could ask his opinions.

She tilts her head, confused. And then, she leans in to touch my hand, leans in to kiss me, and the beauty fades.

Like the sun that had no heat and the race no fatigue, I will not feel the smoothness of her skin or the warmth of her lips. I was happy to be talking, wanted the other man to join, to talk more, but when she moves to kiss me I feel a hollowness surge up from inside of me and I pull away. She looks surprised, then alarmed, then angry, and then she is gone, and then the room is gone, the world is gone, and…

I reach up to my face and pull off my headset, angry that I went in again. Angry that I forgot where I was. Angry that I allowed myself to indulge. Angry at the reminder of what people are like inside, what they always want. So fleeting. So quick. So fake.

Virtual Reality is addictive, even if it is not perfect. We move ourselves with controllers, our facial expressions are captured on camera, processed, pasted onto our beautiful avatars. The voices are real, unless we select otherwise. The conversations are real. The ‘connections’ and ‘likes’ are currency. But it’s not, well, real.

It is becoming more and more realistic though, the movements smoother, and already it is hard for me to resist. Tonight, I wanted a conversation, but you can thrill seek, take adventures: most people use it like an immersive computer game - WW2 snipers, bank robberies, car chases.

It’s not the only place inside to live. In fact, VR doesn’t quite yet amount to half of all activity inside, but the figures are rising. And every improvement makes it more desirable.

I shouldn’t have gone in, not so soon after a real run, but when I sat down to sleep, I already missed it, the real world, the interaction, Janine, James, Henry, Eleanor so I went in, knowing it wouldn’t quench anything.

I hate it.

I shutdown and go back to bed. This time sleeping for an hour before starting the day again.

I awake at seven am. I eat bran with half fat milk. I shower. I am dried by hot air blowing me from all angles. I dress in prescription clothing, a pale grey jumpsuit, white slipper socks and white underwear. We are all issued enough clothing to last for seven days. On the seventh evening, once I have changed for bed, I put all dirty clothing into my machine and in the morning, it is dry and ready to wear again for the next seven days. As I file through my closet, taking more time than necessary, I hover over my emotivest. This is what we wear outside, if we go outside. I have worn mine only once in five years. The emotivest came into fashion before the change. Not long after it started appearing on the high-street, it became all anyone wore. It’s almost identical to the standard grey jumpsuit but it has a control panel on the right sleeve, which you can use to programme your status. The status appears on the back of your jumpsuit and your chosen emoji appears on your chest. This way everyone knows how we feel. This way we are able to ‘connect’ with strangers: Socially Safe Communion.

When people first started wearing emotivests they were a novelty – I think the original idea may have even been ironical, but eventually they came to prove the very point they sought to ridicule. Everyone was wearing them and now it is all we are issued to wear outside. Of course, we do not have to wear them, but we are issued nothing else.

At seven twenty-eight am, I sit down within my computer screens and for two minutes before I am expected to boot up and lock in, I remain motionless and let my eyes fix upon my small defiance. Today, it is winter and still dark, so I have to imagine the world outside. I pick snow and fix my mind upon a moment in my past where the world was a sea of rolling white.

But at seven thirty am the alarm sounds. The screens flash on and the blue glow pulls my eyes in. The status box flashes on screen and I type ‘Good morning world’, deliberately holding back ‘What a lovely controlled sunrise we have just experienced from the light-bulbs in our prison cells.’ I must remember to boot up my machine a few minutes early tomorrow: it booted itself up yesterday too and I must avoid suspicion.

Today is a work day but work does not begin until 9am. Until then there is nothing to do but consume. And so, for two hours my life drones on.

I scan the hundreds of tiles recommended to me across my screens, showing me blogs, vlogs, pictures, profiles, games, VRs. I look at the NewState slogan plastered across the top of each of my six screens: Observe, Consume, Experience, Share - OCES, the pathway to Socially Safe Communion. In some ways I couldn’t care less what rubbish I consume, but I should be careful to select content that is least likely to ruin my brain.

I focus on the middle screen, NewStateMedia. NSM, runs over 200 categories of state-run programming. I don’t know how they select new actors or where they select them from. Programming is short. Films don’t really exist anymore, and most programmes run on indefinitely.

I select a category, RealityTV, and ten personalised suggestions pop up. I hover over one that claims to be ‘Trending Now with people like you.’ I click on the link and a voice starts to talk to me - ‘That’s right, you’ve been watching for a while now and so have others just like you. Keep up to date and you’ll have lots to talk to them about afterwards. Or why not pull up an IMGroup right now, and message while you watch. ‘Addicted to Gossip: the lives of London’s richest teen queens’ is available in 3D VR, so don’t forget to put your headset on!’

I sigh, pick up my headset, put it on and click play.

I’m in a bar. I push forward on my controller and am presented with the illusion that I am walking towards the ‘teen queens’ in front of me to then stand near them. I get close enough to feel like a fly on the wall or a paparazzo or an undercover journalist, spying for celebrity gossip.

I lean in to listen to their conversation.

‘I mean, if he wants to fuck that bitch then be my guest.’

‘I know, right! Like, I can’t believe he’d do that to you though, babes.’

If I lose myself in here, I could make myself believe that I’m their friend. I can say something, nod along, pretend I’m really there. Of course, I cannot actually interact with them, but I can deceive myself to believe I am part of their world.

But I don’t. These people are not my friends. They’re not real. Instead I turn to the barman and pretend to order a drink.

‘A pint of NewBeer, please.’ I laugh at my own joke and pretend to drink my imaginary pint, imagining a time when NewStateReality has developed far enough to fully interact with NewStateMedia, and we’re all sucked into a sensual virtual world.

Suddenly I’m not in the bar anymore. I’m on the street with two men - one of whom I presume is ‘fucking that bitch.’ The shows automation kicks in here and makes it feel like I am walking alongside them - I can’t see myself (I can’t stretch out my hands and see them in front of me or anything so advanced) but it feels like my point of view that moves through the 3D world.

The show continues. The scenes change. I ignore what I can. Someone pulls me into an IMGroup and messages start to intrude in clouds to the right side of my vision. I type an obligatory ‘OMG’ and then ignore them.

The show continues. The scenes change. And I ignore what I can until it is over and I can pull my headset off.

This is how we Observe, Consume, Experience and Share.

This is how we live SSC.

This is how I hate my life.

And yet I can still feel my legs burning and aching from our night of running. When the pain goes, I will have only my small defiance and my sunrise pendant to remind me not to forget.

I see the words ‘Observe, Consume, Experience and Share’ on the screen in front of me. It is a reminder that we are never alone. We are never the only one.

I laugh as I read the comments popping up in the IMGroup. I laugh at the intellectual infantilism of people’s obsession with this nonsensical Fictional Reality Television, their willingness to consume the lie: their desire to.

And then I think about how pitiful it is that we now live in this illusion of a physical life, without the risks of actually living it: if I am ugly, I am not ugly inside; if I am boring, I can run away into the refuge of some other me in some other place with some other people. And so the only price we pay for this safe rip-off of the real thing is a small act of self-denial.

And I feel the utter exhaustion of hopelessness that SSC is now the only viable way of being happy, because the more we live it, the more distant the real world becomes, and the scarier it becomes.

I still have an hour before I must start my work for the day. I leave my headset to one side and watch a YouTube video. I generate a picture of myself and post it anonymously to appear on random screens for five seconds across the country. If users like it, they will subscribe. If enough people subscribe, I will become famous. I do not post interesting images.

It is 9am and my working day begins. My screens automatically change into work mode.

Before the change I was a teacher. It feels strange to think that I’m forty-eight, taught for fifteen years and have been trapped inside for five. I feel younger than my adult life suggests because when the change happened it was as if time stopped - how can you age when experience stops? My subject was sociology; after my PHD I taught at secondary school and so I had a certain academic background that made me both a valuable asset and a potential dissident to NewState’s Socially Safe Communion Amongst Men. Now, I am one of the people who make Observe, Consume, Experience and Share the success it is and by enforcing my conformity, they ensure my inability to dissent.

I look up at, through, and out of, my small defiance.

I am a data analyst. Although personalised advertisements are run by complex algorithms, which ensure that people are able to comfortably live inside the echo chamber of their choosing, my job offers the qualitative input that the machines still can’t tune quite as finely as an analytical brain.

My job is to look at what media is being pumped out to individuals by the algorithms and then analyse what this means in terms of the psychological profile of NewState citizens – on mass: a social profile. With this data the leadership then decide what new media projects to commission to maximise happiness, giving them what they want on a level they couldn’t articulate themselves.

Today, I receive a new set of data: viewing figures for the fictional reality show, Down the Pub, are up 1%. The top three image makers have stacked up over one million subscribers.

The first rule of my job is that fame must be capitalised on. The more that people see the same content, the more people have in common and the more they can ‘Share’. The more shoulders they rub in VR, the more ‘connections’ they build, the more famous they become, the ‘happier’ they become, and I must help SSC make this ‘happiness’ flourish and grow.

The day drones on. I analyse. I write my report. I make my recommendations. I eat lunch: one micro-ovened macaroni cheese with bacon bits and sweetcorn – healthy enough. I watch the top-rated videos, open and read the top-rated blog, check the trending comments, post another picture, update my status, drone on, and on, and on. I work again. I eat again. I watch again. I respond to a comment. It responds back. I have a conversation about a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute episode I watched yesterday. I compare it to a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute episode I watched last week. I predict the content of a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute episode to be aired in two days’ time. I have observed, consumed, experienced and shared enough. I will not raise suspicion. I leave a video running and pull out of my VR headset. As I leave my screen, my wide eyes retract in the dim light of my room. It is nine pm and winter.

I think I can afford to not go back in tonight. Most users will remain locked in until at least midnight, whilst many will push through as close to morning as their bodies will allow. I walk around my apartment to feel the ache in my legs. If it wasn’t for this physical ache, I may already have forgotten about last night’s run: being locked into the screen all day, living online, makes everything else seem like a dream; even meal times go by in a blur. I walk over to where a bookshelf would be if this had been my home before the change. I imagine that I am scouring the shelves, pulling out books, reading their blurbs, sliding them back into their alphabetised places. I breathe in through my nose and remember the musty smell of old books. My fingers remember the roughness of course yellowing pages. My mind’s eye remembers the stacks of books piled high from floor to ceiling when there was no shelf space left, the alphabetised system rendered useless amidst the mounds of randomly stacked books.

I remember a day when Janine and I took six bags of books to one of the local charity shops because we’d moved in together and had six bags worth of duplicates. I remember how giving the books away felt like a confirmation of our love, even more than moving in together did. I remember the shop assistant sorting through the bags. He came across two copies of The Notebook and asked if we wanted to take one back. We laughed and said we had the DVD if we got desperate. As he picked out a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey he asked, with a smile on his face, if there was another copy of that too. There was, I told him, but I was keeping it. We laughed again. I remember the joy of books. There was always a sense of accomplishment when you finished one that you didn’t feel when finishing a film or a series. Perhaps it is because it was more difficult to read than to watch, and because it was more difficult, it was more rewarding.

And reading was personal. We all read the same words but our imaginations pictured them in our own unique ways. No-one could say that they had read a book in the same way that someone else had. The reading process is an opportunity for original thought. Perhaps this is why they have gone now. This process is incongruous with the NewState way of life. Perhaps it isn’t safe enough.

I remember the smell of roast beef and the warmth of a wood burning fire. After we had dropped off the books, Janine and I had gone to the pub for Sunday lunch. I remember the smoky smell of burning wood, the mesmerising properties of the golden burning flames and then the satisfying amber glow of the embers. We stayed in the pub all afternoon eating, reading, talking, even sleeping for a short while. Then we pulled each other out of the deep arm chairs by the fire and braved the winter cold, walking back home wrapped in layers of winter clothes, long duffle coats and thick scarves. I remember that Janine’s coat was red and mine was a deep evergreen with wooden toggles and a hood. We walked home and when we got in we lit the fire, made fresh coffee and ate homemade biscuits that Janine’s mum had brought round the day before when the family had visited. Our house was old and had wooden beams running along the ceilings and down the walls. We had bookshelves lining one wall and there were stacks of free-standing books piled high next to them. Our home was welcoming, and it was warm, and in that memory it had been full of family, excited to see it for the first time.

I have not read a book in over five years, but I have written them. I do not commit my ideas to paper but every night before I go to sleep I lay in bed writing in my head, like I am telling myself bedtime stories. I make them as imaginative as possible. I write fantasy stories like Robin Hood, Peter Pan and King Arthur. I speak them aloud in my head until my lids become heavy and they bleed into my dreams. For a moment I am half conscious and think that my story is real. My imagination spills out of my head and fills up the room in technicoloured beauty. The ocean pours out, the walls collapse and the great ship sails into the night. My story becomes my night’s first dream and this way I dream of the old world every night. Sometimes I imagine that I am talking to Janine, telling her an epic love story. More recently I’ve imagined that I’m telling children’s stories to our children. I imagine what they look like and what they sound like. I have created imaginary personalities and tastes. One loves stories about Cowboys and Indians and the other loves funny stories about silly monsters who’re scared of humans. Sometimes I tell other people’s stories; I try to remember the ideas of Tolkien and Tolstoy, Lewis and Dahl, and tell them in my own words.

As I’m leaning over to turn my screens off for the night, a notice pops up on the info screen to the far left. It reads:

‘Reminder: December 18^th, 2034. Attend annual NewState address. You are now asked to attend in person. Dress appropriately. NewState Square. 10am.’

I am surprised. I have never been asked to attend an annual address in person before. The only occasion for which I was summoned out for work was in the early days of the change, before all systems were fully functional. Then I had to drop off some reports and presented some findings to a NewState government committee. But I’ve not been asked to leave for years. The address is a major event of the year. It is the closest thing to news about an outside world that we receive. The daily news consists of stories from inside – entertainment news, viewing statistics and recommendations. Every day the news ends with a short video reinforcing the message of SSC. The NewState leader provides an uplifting declaration of the joys of living inside and the pleasures of our consumption.

There is very little else by way of reminder that someone runs NewState. Indeed, almost all food, clothing, luxuries and necessities are now delivered to the home door and our living needs are streamed directly to our screens. The convenience leaves no room for questions, let alone the desire to ask them. But the annual address is a major event. The address is broadcast to everyone’s screens, everywhere. All six screens that encase me every day will be filled with the annual address and nothing else.

‘Dress appropriately’. That means emotivest. It would be easy to forget we have them, given how little cause there is to wear them. I still wonder what reason they have for inviting me in person, but I suppose I won’t know until I’m there. It occurs to me though, that if I have been invited, then Janine may also be there. She’s working in delivery at the moment, the closest thing to an outside job still in rotation, and maybe she’ll be part of the event organisation. At any rate, I won’t know until tomorrow. But the possibility fills me with a gentle sense of anticipation nonetheless.

I continue to think my novel from memory. Tonight is non-fiction, and I go back to a time before the change.

Chapter Six Autumn 2034 Peter Harrison

I dream of the first time I met Janine.

We were both studying for our postgrads at Oxford. We weren’t in the same field or at the same college, so we hadn’t met through any academic circles or lectures or parties. We might have passed each other on the street a hundred times but had no reason to stop and say hello. She may have served me coffee in the coffee house where she waitressed and I went to study: it was barely a stone’s throw from the library I used. But she worked morning shifts and I studied in the afternoon. I may have rubbed shoulders with her at the Simon and Garfunkel tribute gig it later turned out we had both attended, but she had had to leave early, and I was rammed in at the front.

For all people talk of soul mates and fate, we were near misses at least this many times and who knows how many more. How many times might we walk past the potential love of our lives, with our head down, or to the left or right or distracted by someone else on the other side of the road? If we followed signs, we may have deduced that we were very much un-fated to be together, once we met and realised the number of times that we had ignored each other or the number of times the ‘universe’ had set an obstacle in our way. Perhaps I did see her in the coffee house and, having a particularly snobbish day, decided not to take much notice of someone working in a coffee house. But then, on another day, perhaps I might have been feeling romantic, had just watched something very Notting Hill at the cinema, and was longing to meet someone who worked at a bookshop or café or library. These near misses may have been absolutely meaningless, or they may have been the precise thing that put us on an indirect path to one another.

I had just popped into a local art gallery on my way from the library, where I used to study in the afternoons. The gallery sold lots of local work and limited-edition prints, but they also stocked a small section at the back of cheap prints – the sort you buy posters of during freshers’ week at university, picking the obscure or suitably clichéd and famous to impress yourself when you wake up and want to feel academic, even though you haven’t been to a lecture in weeks. The gallery had chosen to stock up on Van Gough prints and one took my eye in particular. It was the Café Terrace at Night. It was my Notting Hill moment I suppose. I hadn’t been out much recently, being hard at work on my thesis, and something about it made me feel rather nostalgic. The painting seemed to induce a warm sense of déjà vu. It wasn’t that I felt I had been at that café before, but it was as though I had thought that I would like to be there someday and as though I had known someone who had been there and thought to myself that someday that would be me. Perhaps that ‘someday’ sort of thinking was complete and utter romantic nonsense, but in any event, I left the gallery with a copy of Café Terrace at Night rolled up under my arm, and a sense of feeling ready for something that hadn’t quite happened to me yet. I suppose I was halfway to feeling hopelessly romantic, which wasn’t at all like me, and yet I left the gallery utterly convinced that in some wonderfully sweet and cosmic way things would wind up alright in the end.

I walked, as usual, down the busy street that ran between where I had just been and where I was going, the coffee house. It was busy with cars moving by and bicycles whipping in and out of the gaps. As I stepped out to cross the final road before the café, I had to suddenly jump back. The belated sound of a bell and the muffled sounds of ‘watch out’ hit me as I shook myself from shock. A wild cyclist had narrowly missed me. Slightly jolted, I remained rooted to the spot for a moment and looked around for a fraction longer than usual to be sure that it was now safe to cross. As I did so, my eyes fixed upon an image that renewed my sense of déjà vu, for the scene that lay before my eyes was the scene I had just purchased and was securely rolled up and clutched under my right arm. There were the tables on the path outside the café. The pathway was cobbled. The tables were half full – packed toward the rear and sparser at the front. The autumn afternoon had already started to create a soft fiery glow and a woman was sat alone, her back to me, head in a book, stirring her coffee without looking.

I knew I didn’t believe that things would just wind up alright in the end without some careful thought, consideration, a thousand more setbacks and some profound mistakes, but filled with my new-found sense of romanticism I decided, without thinking too much about it, to walk over to the woman sat alone and say something.

‘Excuse me. Hello.’ She looked up. ‘I’ve just had something of a near death experience with a very reckless cyclist and feel a bit out of sorts. I’d like to sit down and show you something I’ve just bought.’ I was being bold, and it was one of those moments in life where if she decided she liked it, being in a good mood that afternoon, it would come off as charming, but if she decided she didn’t like it, it would come off as smug, rehearsed and unoriginal.

‘I want you to take a look at something. I just bought this at an art gallery down the road.’ I unrolled the poster print of Café Terrace at Night in front of her. I smiled as I did it. She hesitated for a moment. And then she broke out into the warmest smile I’d ever seen in my life. Her whole face lit up. I let out a short, involuntary guffaw. I tried to hold it in, but it was no use and then we were laughing, I was ordering more coffee for the two of us and we went on talking for days.

We loved to walk. We loved to stay out all day and experience all four British seasons at once: crisp and cold in the morning, slowly warming at lunch, beaming sun in the afternoon and cold as ice at night. We loved to walk and talk and feel the weather shift our moods, move our thoughts, fuel our feeling. We fell in love. We didn’t need to know what love was or how to measure it. We didn’t need to express it a thousand times a day. We didn’t need to tell the world. We didn’t need to consciously craft or thoughtfully update it. We felt it. It existed. We shared it. We embraced it. It grew.

When I dream of our first meeting now, I trail off into a collage of colour: parks, beaches, oceans, fields, hills, mountains, skies of all varieties, landscapes of all colours and climates: the places we shared, where our memories were created; the places we walked and roamed and ran and fell and dived and swam and lived.

These words and thoughts and pictures feel like an elegy, a memory that has become a dream. I wake up and clutch my sunrise pendant. I fear that what has faded to dreams may soon be forgotten and lost.

Dystopian regimes from our world history that have brought about drastic social change have always been led by mad, evil dictators. History looks back at leaders who were selfish, power hungry and deeply scarred, so that when we remember the horrors of the past we are able to conveniently swallow the story of how such tragedy was allowed to take place on our watch: it was simply pure evil. People were misled, brainwashed, cut off, and scared for their lives.

But what plagues my mind isn’t the obvious evil tragedies of our past, but the less savoury and far greyer questions that we must ask of history. Were all evil dictators actually aware of the immense evil of their actions? Or did they think they were doing the right thing, emboldened by grand feelings of moral principle? Did they really think they were acting selflessly and in the interests of others when they wiped out ‘vile’ races and ‘pestilent’ peoples?

No intention, of course, changes the fact that atrocities like genocide are wrong, but only ever focussing on the outcome of actions and not the intentions that motivate them might blind us to more profound truths beneath the surface. If all evil dictators are just ill, unhinged and broken, can we really hate them? We can hate what they do, of course, but should we really focus our hate on them?

Perhaps it’s all academic and doesn’t really make a difference when dealing with the extremes of Hitler or Mugabe or Stalin, but in this new world the evil of our dictators is not so neatly definable. In fact, it might not even be evil at all. I mean, I know it is evil, I feel that it is evil, but sometimes I cannot work out how to think that it is evil.

I don’t know what the motives of the NewState leaders are because ‘Socially safe communion amongst men’ provides exactly that, safety. Crime does not exist. Policing of the online world keeps trolls at bay. Hate has been replaced by obsessive communication. The most dangerous thing about NewState and SSC is that we wanted it, we tried and tested it and, ultimately, we created it. The NewState party just branded what was already happening, and now maintain it in the place of the self-motivated private companies who fuelled the technological revolution to begin with.

I cannot hate our leaders in the convenient way I am able to hate the evil dictators and fascists of the past, because NewState acts not for the will of itself, but truly for the will of the people.

My problem is that I do not share the will of the people.

My belief is that the people are ignorant to the truth that what they think is the ultimate paradisiacal mode of living, is in fact a self-perpetuating prison of denial: we changed the landscape without thinking about why we were changing it, or what the consequences of changing it would be.

This is what I think as I remember to boot up my screens early today. ‘Awake and ready for the big day.’ It seems strange to be getting ready to go outside in the day time, without thinking about EEO patrol schedules or meeting points. I leave a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute video playing with the volume all but off whilst I make breakfast: porridge with full fat milk and one sachet of sugar. It all comes in a plastic pot. Two minutes in the micro-oven, eat it, one quick rinse and throw it in the recycling afterwards: optimum efficiency. I leave the video running as I slide the metallic door of my wardrobe open. I pull out my emotivest, close the wardrobe door and climb into the grey jumpsuit. I press the battery check on my control panel. It flashes red, indicating that it is still full.

I sit back down in my chair, half enclosed in my horse shoe screens, and I wonder about the rest of the population. What do they look like in their horseshoe homes? Do they resemble zombies, as they habitually stare into their screens? Have their eyes evolved into rectangular wide screens that curve around towards their ears? Do they think about the past? What about the free-thinkers, the politicians, the professors, the lawyers and doctors of just half a decade ago? Are they all satisfied by NSM moments? Are the philosophers content?

But then, there is NSM for them too. It is not all mindless drivel like ‘Addicted to Gossip’. NewStateDiscovery still runs programmes about the natural world. NewStateTechnology runs programmes on the infrastructure that now controls our horseshoe living. Online forums provide the means to continue to lecture and debate. In fact, NewStateEducation still requires great minds to record their lectures for SchoolStream.

NewStateSchoolStream solves everyone’s educational anxiety. All schooling is streamed directly to the horseshoe. There are no toilets to avoid, no alleyways to side-step, no humiliation to elude or fear, no playground to get left out in, no hand need ever be raised with an incorrect answer. The answers are streamed straight to your screen. You are then tested, to work the memory, and then never have to recall anything from memory ever again because everything is always available at the touch of a button, or, with Mia software, the sound of your voice commanding the computer to action. You can even choose Mia’s voice. There was a film made before the change about a man falling in love with his operating system. She had a beautifully seductive voice. I wonder how many people are romantically attached to their Mia now.

I suppose it does not surprise me that the great minds of our time are happy to live in the online world. Before the change, the academic world was more or less there anyway. It started with video conferencing I suppose, then podcasting lectures. The lazy student could already wait until the night before their essay was due to watch all the lectures in a sort of omnibus edition. That was the end of lectures as I remember them. Then distance learning embraced technology to the extreme. In the comfort of your own home, you could attend a lecture taking place anywhere in the world. You could submit your essays and receive feedback over the phone, or online.

This is how NewStateHigherEducation works now. Not everyone works, because not everyone has to work. The world is still becoming more and more automated so most of the jobs we once had to do have gone. The system is utopic, because currency is no longer necessary. The NewState government must cream off the top thinkers – those who bother to take online degree courses and subscribe to SchoolStream after the required graduation age of 14. These thinkers are happy to work at NewStateHQ. They work because they are privileged to work, and they are catered for like the rest of us are. Food is delivered. Detergent is delivered. Homemaking is made easy. And they consume in every available slither of time not spent working. This is how NewStateDiscovery explains it anyway.

At the moment, delivery is about the only job left on rotation. More and more jobs have become technologically automated and human labour has become surplus to requirement. Janine currently works in delivery but will only do so until her three-month rotation is up. The goal seems to be to advance to a stage where no one has to work at all, especially not in the traditional sense. I suppose this will only leave government, childcare and maintenance.

My question is what happens when there are no jobs left. When the system runs perfectly by itself, what will make us human? Consciousness perhaps: I think therefore I am? But what about ‘I act therefore I am?’ ‘I do therefore I mean something’? At this rate we’ll soon have all but evolved to pure consciousness. When we lose our bodies, will we cease to be human? Or will what it means to be human be so transformed from what it was to necessitate a new name - a new species - all together? Could I travel forward in time even just fifty years and mate with the women I find there?

I think so much because in the long gaps between running it is all that separates me from evolving into the NewState frame of mind. I cannot create any content on the episode I just ignored so I update my status. ‘Just watched the latest ‘Addicted to Gossip’ #cantwaitformore’. I can’t leave until 9am. It is only a thirty-minute walk to the city square where I have been summoned to watch the address at ten and it might be suspicious to leave too early. I decide to make my way into an academic forum. I try to do this as often as possible, whilst also streaming the more sensationalised media moments and uploading my own UG content as often as I feel I must to remain ‘normal’.

I find a discussion taking place on genetic engineering. This is a voiced discussion, so I switch on my microphone. I select a voice. Most people are concerned with choosing voices and uploading pictures that create what they think is the most perfect possible them. We can create the us we want to be.

Couldn’t we always?

There is no option to select my own voice. I select one that seems as close to me as I can remember. Someone with a grey beard is weighing in.

- It is the next logical step. NewStateEarlyLearning caters for the general population. The few who show the greatest academic aptitude.

- Someone with a brown beard interrupts: Scientific aptitude

- Grey Beard: Yes, of course. Though I think we can excuse the pedantics: the terms are interchangeable in this day and age. The few who show the greatest scientific aptitude are inducted into the NewStateInnovateAndMaintain division, whilst the rest are cognitively and socially ready to begin their independent lives inside. Would it not be better to engineer a species that is capable only of working in the manual sector that is not evolved to exist in our modern reality? We could then be rid of the mundanity of rotation all together.

- Brown Beard: But the goal is to advance to a stage where the infrastructure all runs itself, when only the bare minimum is required to innovate and maintain. What place does genetic engineering have in creating a populace of manual workers, when there will be no manual work left to perform?

- Someone without a beard: But NewStateChildBearing rotation is still a nine-month chore. And then there is the EarlyLearning rotation, where women and men are expected to care for the young whilst they fully develop into the routine of living inside. We may have evolved away from physical schooling, but we can’t escape the necessity of nurturing the very young. But, yes, I rather like the idea that this rotation could be served by a species of man designed for the function.

- I speak up: Here’s a thought, if we are not passing on our genes to our own children – children that we have a vested interest in, ones we shape and know and like – what is the point in NewStateChildBearing at all? I know the result will be that our glorious society is not maintained for future generations but why does this matter if all conception of the family unit is gone? What is the point of legacy and preservation if we do not have a relationship with the people we are preserving the world for?

- Grey Beard: There is some merit in what you say, but it does not follow that just because we do not share family ties with our offspring that we should seek to end their very existence.

- I say: Not purposefully end their existence, but just stop thinking about creating it.

- Grey Beard: Still there remains the selfish gene to consider, or perhaps the more aptly named ‘immortal gene’. As Shelley put it ‘Look on ye mighty and despair.’ Legacy and survival still drive us. Knowing that we had wilfully eradicated our genes from the great pool, would create a hollowness within us that even the beauty of SSC could not placate.

- Brown Beard: But would we lose something if we eradicated all contact with children beyond birth? Is there something in fostering a child that makes us human?

- Grey Beard: An important issue to consider, but the mother still physically bears the child. The father still donates the sperm. We no longer worry about the act of sex because this has been replaced by superior methods of gratification. Our sexual encounters in the online world have not left us incapable of building relationships. Indeed, we have more than ever, and they are filled with far less indecision and hate than they were before the change. And we do still nurture our children. They exist in the online world, albeit a restricted frame of it, and we interact with them there. The more motherly or fatherly among us can spend more time in the EarlyLearning inside spaces. Those who may never have had children before the change are still able to abstain from the whole process. We lose nothing if we create a workforce to deal with the nitty gritty of changing nappies and training children to control their bodies. As always, we are able to free ourselves of the mundane and arduous, and use the time freed up for more fulfilling pursuits. I have made such recommendations to the NewStateInnovateAndMaintain department when asked and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear something radical announced quite soon.

Eradicate any motherly or fatherly contact between adult and offspring? I have been looking forward to the day I am called up on ChildCaring and EarlyLearning rotation. The few rotations that exist, and the possibility of being called up to fulfil them, is another small tool I use for maintaining my sanity and for resisting the NewState frame of mind. I now see how the academics are content in this new world: there is no real culpability for their purely academic points of view. In the imaginary universe in which we live, consequences of race changing proportions can be made in blissful comfort.

- I say: But is childbearing and childcaring undesirable? It might be incongruous with the pleasures (I have to imagine my sarcastic tone) of SSC, but does that mean it is undesirable? Everything in moderation. We can raise our children, fulfil that need, and then re-enter SSC.’

This isn’t what I want to happen, but I am curious to hear what an educated mind now makes of our most basic and fundamental human credentials.

- I continue before anyone has a chance to answer: I think it’s worth asking why we ever procreated in the first place? What did we ever get out of it? A by-product, a worker, a carer? Even in the most privileged societies where children weren’t needed for any practical benefit we still had them? So what intrinsic value do we lose if we don’t have them? What if not only having children but nurturing them is hardwired into our machinery?

- Grey Beard: It is all very well talking of human nature, but you have already suggested how that has changed: from carnal lust, to pragmatic need, to emotional wellbeing. You are describing social evolution, and does it not follow, therefore, that the process will inevitably continue – that, as the landscape changes again, as it did in your examples, so too will our relationship with our childbearing capabilities. In this New World, the next step is undeniable. We are on the brink of a major evolutionary shift, in which we will be released from the shackles of our physical limitations. And, even were this not the case, we could argue that the motivations you so passionately and accurately listed were only ever a façade, obscuring a deeper root cause: the selfish gene. The system I propose continues to satisfy that root cause and bypasses all inefficiencies in the process.

There is so much more to say but time is escaping me and I have to politely leave the discussion to make my final preparations to depart for the Annual Address. As I switch off my microphone, I reflect upon the dangerous truth of what the grey bearded man said: our physical environment has always reshaped the state of our human consciousness, and I now feel a sense of urgency: is our all-consuming transition into the online social landscape fundamentally changing the way in which our minds and bodies work? Will there come a time, and will it be soon, when we evolve to a point of no return? A point where our minds and bodies are so dramatically altered that devolution to our current physiological and psychological condition is all but impossible?

However admirable the intention, we cannot ignore the consequences.