Disappears again immediately after his successful prank, not without having filmed the effort. Just for himself. For a laugh. He indulges in such a prank every month. Every month he chooses a victim from his Your Fear app upon whom to bestow the gift of staring their greatest fear in the face. Thome ignores mundane fears like the loss of a loved one or the loss of a home and instead embraces an unusual anxiety. Like the fear of a loss of an appendage, for example. That was something he had managed for a woman to wake up to last month. Morning, light, birds singing, and you wake up and want to get out of bed. You wake up and want to get up and pull the covers off and look down and see two bandaged stumps. That really gives your brain something to think about. Kevin and his slipping-off-the-earth-into-space phobia was easy to satisfy by comparison. His bed was propped up on a slanted machine that had been used to get dirt off potatoes. Between the slant and the shaking action the terror was perfect. It’s helpful that all of these people totally voluntarily knock themselves out with propofol-containing drugs. Fun must be had.

Thinks

KAREN

As she runs past the losers. The immigrants, the alcoholics, the homeless, the number of whom seems to swell by the day. The homeless shelters were recently bought by a holding company and prices were raised. Karen follows the interesting research that began with the decoding of Neanderthal DNA in Germany. Years back, they had already grown mini Neanderthal brains, though only to the maturity stage of an embryo. But now scientists had succeeded in growing human brains with Neanderthal DNA inserted in them. It worked well. The next step was to abstract the feelings from brains. Goal! In the meantime they’ve produced fully functional brains. Brains without feelings, workers and soldiers without troublesome characteristics. And perfect, intelligent, troublesome-free brains for people who can afford to do well by their offspring. Karen knows she belongs to the second-to-last flawed generation.

Rubbish, thinks

THOME’S FATHER

Miserable do-gooders,

He mumbles. He’s just presented his plan to eliminate child benefits without a replacement, and to put what’s left of the health care system into private hands. He looks into the bright red, indignant, self-righteous face of a Labour woman. Unfuckable thing. She asks for the floor.

She is recognized and asks:

“The monstrousness our colleague once again recited here can only be understood as exhorting the needy to suicide. I have one question for him: When you create millions of homeless, ill and with no access to health care; when as a result of your actions millions of uneducated children are produced; when purchasing power is thereby reduced by the millions and subsistence crime grows by leaps and bounds; when these people completely disappear as consumers, where then is the economic advantage?”