Thome takes a glance at the new app that he created. Well, it was built by a programmer who is a bit more on the ball, but what counts is the idea.

Your Fear

Is the name of the app. Wherein you can share your deepest fears with the community. One could of course also find out people’s phobias in their harvested metadata, but it is much more fun with the app. Once in a while Thome indulges in a bit of fun by fulfilling this or that fear of app users 1.0.

What’s this then?

Respect, lads—sunlight?

The unfamiliar sight

Leaves

DON

Squinting.

Wow.

This light in Shoreditch, how beautiful the present is. Never before had a present been so beautiful. The formerly poor district of the city. Social housing, seven children, three stillbirths, boozers, fighters, leukemia patients, TB bacteria shuffled down the damp, narrow alleys shared with rats. And just look what’s become of it all: an open-air museum of a successful lifestyle. Organic bakeries, oat milk lattes, muesli, smart clothing boutiques. And the people. So international, so colorful, with such incomprehensibly interesting lifestyles.

Don watches the breakfast café in one of the former industrial buildings. A few hundred men crunching disgustedly on kale chips. They built the new world order. The reinvention of the world by—men. It’s simply up to them. One fucked-up system swapped out for the next fucked-up system. Always done within the limits of their comprehension. The women were busy. With their children, their makeup, the question of how to find a fascinating, world-altering man. And because they don’t understand, the bitches, why a hoover needs to talk to a soldering iron. Or why dildos need to talk to a pizza delivery service.

Everyone talks too much already.

There’s no more escaping the sound of talking now that the giant screens have been installed all over the city. Don looks at the screen next to the nerd café.

“Have you never had the need to work for a living?” asks a blonde reporter with a microphone. A man, whose teeth are all missing, starts to laugh. He inadvertently spits in doing so. In the background, bedraggled children play with a dead cat. Ah, it’s about suicide in social housing blocks. “I’m in therapy now,” says a train driver accusingly. A woman had thrown herself onto the tracks. You see various body parts and hear the sympathetic voice of the reporter, who commiserates with the train driver. A boat pilot on the Thames complains about recurring nightmares after an old man splattered on the roof of his boat. The mother of two private school children grumbles about coming upon a corpse hanging from a tree while driving through Hyde Park in her SUV.

Next to Don a man stops, sweating heavily. He leans against a wall and tries to get control of his bodily secretions.