“Some nuclear power plants had to be removed from the net.” He says. “The reason had to do with obsolete technology. The new technology exists somewhere, but mostly in academic papers. The computer animation of smart cities, where there are solar farms, where self-driving buses stream through car-free green zones, people sort their garbage, children don’t put their little tits and penises online like zombies, like and dislike things, and off themselves as a result of online bullying—this new world, born of science, doesn’t exist. It’s not worth it. What’s worth doing is making smart devices. And computers, computers, computers. Meaning: every year, in order to build these cool devices, there is a need for four hundred thousand tons of aluminum, three hundred thousand tons of copper, and one hundred ten thousand tons of cobalt. And every year more than fifty million tons of electronic rubbish is left behind.

The electricity use for computer users, cloud services, search engines, terabytes eaten up by cryptocurrencies, networked window shades, drones, the eight million surveillance cameras that take over three hundred clips per week of every single citizen, the speech-activated hubs, bar coding, big data analyses of algorithm-based trading. The communication day and night, insomniacs’ online shopping, streaming, the hardworking robots, blockchain—that’s not neoliberalism out there anymore, that’s hurtling at light speed toward an iceberg. Which is cold. And dark. And it needs electricity, god damn it. Electricity, electricity, electricity; without it nothing runs; without it all the data centers go down, AI is nothing but junk, for god’s sake, do you guys get it?”

Silence.

The empty, dark space. The beginning and the ending and everything in between filled with products and fear. With little moments of intoxication.

Here at

THE FRIENDS

Who have removed themselves from real life and transferred their existences into machines. Which would be washed away if there were no more electricity, if the water were to rise. But at the moment everything is okay. Some of them have become a bit paranoid. Adults would say: “Oh boy, that sounds like paranoia right there!” Which could be true, but isn’t necessarily, some of them just know too much, they know about all the invisible things that happen, that go on in the world beneath the world, where people play no role.

“What the fuck are you up to anyway?” asks Hannah at some point.

She shouldn’t have asked. Because now Rachel, the youngest hacker, starts to explain.

Ha ha, funny,

Thinks

MI5 PIET

At the window. He looks down at the Kensington Palace Gardens. Nothing has changed here except for the owners. Abramovich had to sell. Some sheiks had to sell. It’s mostly Chinese living here now. And him. Well, “living.” The London Cage, earlier a well-disguised interrogation prison or, to put it more elegantly, an interviewing facility, has for some time been back in business.