“This city seems strangely cold. I can’t explain it any better than that, except that I’m always freezing here. Everywhere we stop the windows don’t seem to close properly, and the rain is sharp, as if it’s frozen. And always this cutting wind, I’m sure you know what I mean. The cold also has something to do with the standoffishness of the buildings. They’re like ships. There’s always bright light in the buildings so you can see the people sitting in their libraries. But they’re just decals of book spines, because real books smell too musty. The cold has to do with the peoples’ faces, the way they look through you. The way they all seem to know what they’re doing.”

The

PROGRAMMER

BUYING HABITS: sneakers, pizza, drugs (soft)

POLITICAL ORIENTATION: nationalistic, quasi-

FRIENDS: nope

STREAMING HABITS: zombie apocalypse

GAMES: Waffen-SS versus Werewolf shooter

Knows what he’s doing, right? “Yes, exactly. Right now I’m studying a fascinating report, unbelievably good. So. Have a look! What do you see? LED bulbs, right? But did you know that information can be transmitted by—I’ll put it in the crudest terms—waves? The frequency plays an important role in it. The frequency of light is—well, unbelievable. Do you know how much information you can fire through space and time? LED bulbs could be used as communications devices. An LED reaches transmission rates of eight gigs per second:

“That’s about one hundred and sixty times more than the fifty megabytes per second a private individual gets over Wi-Fi for the TV. One of the CERN superconducting wires can move one hundred gigs a second, which is gigantic, but only twelve times as much.

“This LED shit is enough, right, you could multiply the entire surveillance capacity of China many times over, and across the entire planet. By combining a few thousand LEDs you can attain much higher transmission rates, with no cables at all! Just imagine—you take in all the data from the chips, from the internet of things, with its networked minisensors, plus smartphones, and let’s bear in mind, the amount of data doubles every twelve months, and in the future every twelve hours. And all that data has to be moved. Have you seen the 5G towers? Massive, right? In many countries they struck down limits on radiation just for them. It randomly occurs to me.

“The next thing that comes into play are artificial LED suns—a new form of satellite called sun simulators because of the glaring light they emit, though they aren’t about light but about communications that are hidden in the light waves … and they operate from space. Somewhat more lax regulations on privacy up there, if you know what I mean. From space it goes to quantum computers, with which AI runs a superintelligent globe-spanning surveillance and control system.

“The German automobile industry is investing in quantum computers. Germans, eh?”