And so on.

THE COURIER

has not received his medicine for a month now. He is no longer able to pay the premiums for the new, wonderfully fair insurance. He already had pneumonia, but he’s getting by at the moment. If you look past the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his face.

Right. Suddenly he was unemployed, the carts and drones, you already know all about it, and as an unemployed courier in his mid-forties, his chances in the labor market—mustn’t grumble. The courier had been one of the first in line to sign up for the new basic income, he was one of the first to have a gorgeous sum of money land in his account every month. That’s something. The place where he sleeps, on a sofa in the southern part of the city in the three-room flat of a single mother with two children, costs three hundred pounds a month. Insurance comes out of what’s left. There’s 150 pounds left over for him. It’s possible to get through the winter on that as long as you cut back. As long as you don’t get another bout of pneumonia.

People are becoming ever more sickly. You see them without prostheses, sitting in little pushcarts on the sidewalk, with sores on their faces, missing teeth, everywhere, and they’re back again, the measles, shingles, and polio. Shit happens. The courier’s doing fine so far. He rents the sofa at the single mother’s flat from eight at night to seven in the morning. The ex-courier leaves the flat at seven in the morning before the single mother gets the children ready for school. When the ex-courier steps out onto the streets of the city’s south side after seven in the morning, he’s never alone, regardless of the weather conditions. There are other ex-couriers and a striking number of old women hanging about the streets. The usual faces. Raised three sons on their own. And not one of them became a grime star. The grizzled old women, who are forty, kicked out of a council flat by one of the sons, these women, who huddle apathetically, extinguished, not a spark of rage in their gaze, which is okay, nobody would see it anyway, the people who are still able to walk go past them quickly, don’t look back, don’t want to get infected, everyone is so scared. That the promises that were made to them of wonderfully partaking in the exciting dream have not been fulfilled is clear to everyone at this point. Before health care reform, broken-down homeless people were patched up in the emergency room and put back out onto the street. How inefficient. Now they just die. Losers.

From all the entryways, ex-couriers slip out with looks of helplessness on their faces. How long can you sit around a playground without attracting attention, how long can you loiter in a shopping center? How long can you wander a train station, sit in a park, look at shopwindows? How often can you go to Hampstead Heath on the bus? You can go to a VR space once a week.