Her studies didn’t provide her with anything substantive. Linguistics, story framing, modern media, to name just three meaningless subjects. Then she’d gotten an internship at a startup that was launching a new messaging service. Something like WhatsApp. Snapchat, Instagram. Before them though. Just not as user-friendly. Together with an external thought-reading device that could put sentences from your head directly into a message. Or was supposed to. Didn’t work. Nothing but gibberish came out. The communications consultant covered the cost of her shared flat and her spaghetti by working at a bar in Soho and worked ten hours a day for herself, for the optimization of her portfolio, meaning she wasn’t paid by the startup. Which went bankrupt after half a year. The communications consultant then found other internships at ten new up-and-coming IT firms that were developing some shit or other and dreamed of making it big. Two of them even paid. Well. Sort of paid. The communications consultant was gender-fluid and polyamorous. Whatever—it had always been clear to her that she was unique. She believed in equality for all. Respected religions, sexual preferences, gender self-identification. It wasn’t that she didn’t care how others lived. She just pretended she didn’t care. The communications consultant had been opposed to Brexit, her arms were covered in tattoos to such an extent that they looked like black prosthetics. Her stated enemy was neoliberalism. About which, just between us, she didn’t know too much about what it meant beyond rising rents and a generally more fraught societal situation. Take Amazon. Oh, man. Amazon. When the communications consultant still had money she had ordered books from Amazon, of course, even if she had held her nose. Who had the time, blah blah blah. And when Adidas brought out a new Capsule Collection from a grime star, she had camped out in front of the shop. She was a totally normal, self-important windbag whose cluelessness was touching. Since birth she’d been preached to about the sacred value of individuality, for the sake of selling Capsule trainers to her, and now none of the promises were coming to fruition. No prize for gender-fluidity, no certificate for juggling seventy-eight different social media accounts featuring seventy-eight possible genders. But

From the cute, tousled experimental stage of youth she had reached an age when her lifestyle began to stink, and suddenly a number of uncomfortable happenstances began to pile up. Shocking moments as the communications consultant felt the downturn in her life in a nearly physical way. It began on the day she got her chip. The government bureaucrat had scanned her head with some kind of machine.

MI5 PIET

“That was the IQ test, sweetie.

And it wasn’t so exhilarating in your case.”

And the

COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT