There is a problem.

With, how to put it exactly,

Blacks. White programmers still haven’t developed a properly functioning biometric marker for Black faces. They’re just too—dark.

But first the noodles.

Ten more minutes. Another ten minutes of staring into the pot of water. “Come on, you maggots, come on in,” calls Hannah, and the others tiredly come to the so-called kitchen table. “Imagine we’re in a romance film and this is the second date, and here comes the scene in the movie where the man, in an effort to create intimacy, tells a story about his childhood, like: ‘Back then I was always with my grandfather at the seaside, and he showed me how to skip stones.’ And the woman takes his hand because she is touched by his manly vulnerability.

“I have no idea whether I have any grandparents,” says Hannah. Taking another scoop of noodles because she’s never full. Nobody here is full, they eat and eat, but the hunger remains, their bodies grow by the hour. The mind and feelings stay hungry. That’s it now. Thinks Hannah. Nobody is going to come and make her life into something extraordinary. And the realization that she must do it all herself is so unpleasant that Hannah has to brace herself on the stove. She looks at her hands bracing. The fingers like spider’s legs. The truth that Hannah is incompetent and untalented and that she must live with this uninteresting person for an eternity does nothing to improve her mood. They’ve been here in the city for several months now and none of the grand visions have come to fruition. They’ve constructed lodgings for themselves as if they were putting up a tree house in the garden, though none of the children ever had a tree house. None of them thinks of apple trees, grandmothers, there are no childhood memories that involve the smell of cake. A place that is safe, where you don’t have worry about anything because there’s always someone there to protect you.

It goes on.

Thinks

PETER

As he stares utterly emotionless at the private road, until all he can see blurs together into an indistinct slurry of white and green. He wonders if it’s possible to privatize the air. Earlier in life, Peter—it is rather sweet when such a very young person thinks “earlier in life”—anyway, earlier he’d not had anything against people. They just didn’t matter to him. They could live, who cared. In the meantime, however, animosity had developed in Peter toward most. They’re just so unbelievably stupid.