Is thinking about her earlier life. Back when there had been responsible adults. Neighbors or teachers who had given hours-long lectures about mediocre music. Hannah had never understood why men couldn’t just listen to music and keep their mouths shut, why, if they had to think about it, it wasn’t obvious to them that music was a legitimate medium for inhibited people to express their feelings. No, they had to waffle on about it. Every little twitch of suddenly perceived vitality has to be exaggerated. So the Beatles, right, Liverpool, our white geniuses who reinvented music for white, young people. Sting. Fucking hell. Sting. These bands as the most polymorphic, controversial, and magnificent pop musical documents of contemporary society and so on, and then eventually they always, always land on Bob Dylan. The greatest white male poet of all times, who shook the world of poetry with

Lines like

All the tired horses in the sun

How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done?

(Hmm…)

The tired horses, aren’t they a metaphor for an old white man? Who at the end of his life is taking stock of his so-called life’s work. And what does he see? Nothing. Life fucked them. The old Beatles fans. They’re probably driving Ubers, at least until self-driving cars take away that tenuous purpose in life, too; they drive through Paki and Arab neighborhoods and spit in front of every mosque, as if they haven’t yet realized that hating Muslims is out. They’ve given their all: they were in the Nazi Party and deposited pig heads in Arab areas. They were furious, and for good reason, because an old man like that, over forty, can sense that nothing more is going to happen for him.

“Do you have a few chips you could spare?” asks Hannah, snapping out of her thoughts, back to the room, where nothing has changed. The lights aren’t flickering, the music isn’t playing anymore, the hackers are talking about a plan that has to do with tunnels.

And

MAGGY

SEXUALITY: ambiguous

HEALTH QUALITY: suspended development

SOCIAL MEDIA: nonuser

COMMUNICATION: encrypted. We’re working on it

The girl, who looks like a boy, gives her three chips. Wherever they’re from, they represent shopping. Riding the tube. Going to the library. And to the movies. If you’re into that.