Goes between the vats and the river, carrying a bucket, back and forth, the virus slipping into the water like wet lynxes and swimming toward the city, which in the morning light seems to glow in the distance. A place of promise in the dreams of millions. The objective of their lives. That they’ve reached in wagons and boats, by ship and swimming, only to find themselves in the heart of a machine that is fueled by people. Money comes out the bottom and is channeled directly into the cellars of a small number of idiots. But most people don’t care. They identify with the winners. Because nobody counts themselves among the losers. Because everyone is oriented upward. Because nobody assesses their worth realistically, because everybody wants to feel superior to some other group. Because the masses share social media with the rich. They’re practically neighbors or colleagues of Stormzy. Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Fucking rap stars, with annual incomes equivalent to the cost of an intercontinental missile. So. Enough.

The world is ready to die out.

It is done says

THOME

Every day after his morning defecation. People like him are—first of all, chronically tired, since he had read that geniuses can get by on four hours of sleep. For several years now Thome has had his virtual assistant

(which additionally transcribes his conversations, forwards them to Tempora, where they are scoured for interesting keywords with XKeyscore, the search engine of the intelligence services, and then sent on to cave age in a Swiss bunker, all of which Thome must know, though perhaps his father is right in his assertion that he’s not the brightest)

wake him after four hours, after which he spends half an hour absorbed staring at his feet. He’d had electronic skin grafted on his feet. A no longer popping-fresh invention from the university in Boulder. He likes to remove his socks in good company and garner admiration for his feet. It was a painful procedure to have such an extensive patch of skin removed, but worth every millimeter. “And what can this artificial skin do?” the meddlesome will ask. “It can sense warmth and contact,” Thome says in such cases. That is, the same thing his skin was able to do before, only in modern form. His feet with the artificial skin stand for the realms in which Thome works. Digitalization, which can do anything people can, only without people.

Now Thome stands up and looks at himself in the full-length mirror. So, right. Well. If he hadn’t have been born rich, he could jokingly picture himself as one of those sweaty gamers who constantly eat pizza and are trapped in Second Life. Is that still around? Second Life, for all the amazing virtual stuff people could think up who had already been shut out of Life 1.0?