Once in London, it didn’t look any better. What was going on? A war, and nobody had said anything about it in Rochdale? Traffic stood still, people pushed their way through the gaps between the cars, it looked like a demonstration in the street in front of the station. But. It was just rush hour traffic. The pace was dizzying by comparison to the speed of people back home, who seemed to barely inch forward at a crawl. Here people ran to show that they could keep up. Jaws set, eyes, too, they were always ablaze. To show that they had ridiculous powers of consumption at their disposal. “I’ll buy the shit. Just tell me what. I’ll buy all of it.” After work—or various work, as you have to say to properly describe the system of multiple jobs—the wage earners and employees of London did their shopping in automated shops—“We also accept bitcoin!” The products all packed conveniently for single people, in cardboard containers. For the sake of the environment. The stove in the smart home, which meant eight square meters in some back court, turned on in advance with an app; ditto the oven. Lights switched on, the Underground ticket taken care of. A great hurrah of digitalization, which saved people time so they could take on a fourth job. In order to buy another device which would then save them more time. So. After they’d bought some shite or other in a plastic box, feeling modern—“I’m part of the fucking industrial revolution 4.0 thanks to shitty precooked pasta packed in plastic!”—they ran to the buses that would take them to their back courts. The news beamed at them from giant screens on every corner. There were fewer accidents now that people didn’t have to stare nonstop at their devices in order to overstimulate their synapses. Moments with nothing to do, moments without information, were damned as wasted time by the brain and punished by short episodes of depression. Moments without information to keep up the stimulation curve, since stimulation was mistaken for liveliness. People stared for a moment. Then kept running. Stopped again, came back. Double take. The reports on the flat-screens on an endless loop.

Something big was happening. As if to fittingly celebrate the arrival of Peter, Don, Hannah, and Karen, as if to mark the date of their “new start” in the collective consciousness.

One of those motherly, concrete-blonde television presenters, the only kind of women who seemed to have a right to exist on the island, announced the decision made the previous evening—“Yes, just last night”—by the government.

Effective immediately

Every citizen of the country

With a valid British passport

Would

Receive

A basic income,

Which was not tied to any conditions whatsoever.