Into the vats. Normal. The way one normally stares into vats. The concrete floor beneath her bare feet is cold; Karen sweats. She is the wood from which revolutionaries are carved. She is the resistance. The Rosa Luxemburg of biohacking. She is the avenger of all women and children, and now she looks completely crazy, she jumps around the brewery, today her work is complete. She’s done it. Here swims her work—harmless-seeming little cells, inside of which the virus has gestated. Zombie babies. Aliens. Now the cells must have disintegrated and she can siphon off the virus. Siphoning off virus—something everyone should do once, siphon off virus. Feel their life. One liter will yield about 2.5 trillion of them, which she can easily transport in small containers. Maybe it won’t be enough to effectively contaminate the drinking water. It’s a first attempt, and after a week there should be discernible results. Once absorbed through the oral mucous membrane, the infernal stuff will show its effect, blasting through the hematoencephalic barrier and deactivating the effect of testosterone. Right, and then. Listen up.

No sexual excitability, no aggression, no desire in men to impress sexual partners, to eliminate competitors, to bugger up the world. The effect is irreversible. Ir-re-versible. If it works. Here goes. Out. Into the world, where it is still drizzling, where it no longer smells. It no longer smells of anything, isn’t that strange? No longer like earth and flowers and petrol, tar, or food, it smells flat. Concrete and plastic. That is, nothing. This lack of olfactory sensations increases people’s feelings of alienation. They live without any participation in the actions of existence. The people.

Karen lugs the first container full of her little friends, excitedly awaiting their mission, toward the Thames. The artery of the city, Karen would think, if she were daft. The strong current, which for some time has no longer carried corpses—the hope, you know, there’s hope again, which holds many people back from jumping to their death. She sits down on the bank, which is primarily formed of old plastic waste. Karen looks at the dark, brackish-smelling water, she sees the distant lights of the city, she imagines how calm it will soon be. And wonders how she can expand her project to the entire country. Karen supposes she can see the curvature of the earth over there, where the sea must be,

Ha ha.

KEVIN

FAMILY STATUS: single

PROFESSION: aeronautical engineering, so to speak

HEALTH STATUS: insane