There is your wife, your husband, tired, your child is screaming. Or you’re homosexual. Which doesn’t help, either, the food is bad, so is the TV show. But tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll do something, we’ll celebrate our life, our short life will be celebrated. And on the weekend you go to the movies because it’s raining. Maybe in the past people didn’t give it much thought, you know how it goes. Thought. They were busy with all the things that took so much more time without washing machines and hoovers and all the stuff that today is smart and networked and self-regulating, the devices that sit around your bed at night and observe you disdainfully. Back then you lived in a permanent state of depression and disappeared from this world without any drama. Now people compare themselves. Even the dumbest think they know better about everything.

Thome’s father doesn’t say this. He says—

“Democracy is a temporary solution to the final goal of a nation led by technocratic means. The digitalization of all areas will give all citizens of the kingdom the unfailing security and oversight of punitive standards that you, dear countrymen, voted for.

Will have voted for. An algorithmic order will offer us unchecked possibilities.”

Right, what a lovely pile of shite; nobody nods anymore; incomprehensible, what Thome’s father is saying. What the fuck, think the people, and as if Thome’s father has a connection to all the surveillance cameras in the city and can study the blank faces of his voters, which he can, he finds his way back to more simple, kindhearted words.

“Nobody can live particularly well from the generous money gifted you by the state, my dear fellow citizens. For that reason, under my government there will absolutely be an increase in the basic income. We will make a few small trade-offs in other areas that we will bear in solidarity. If compulsory education is limited to eight years, and university studies are funded only for the highly gifted, the key players of our society, it would already be possible to raise the basic income by thirty percent…”

The people nod. Money. It’s arrived. Money. They always understand money.

Money, how unbelievably vulgar,

Thinks

THE MATTRESS SELLER

SEXUALITY: bisexual

“What a bunch of bollocks, there’s no such thing.”

“Of course there is.”

“Well, the only bisexual men I know eventually end up associating only with men. Naturally.”

“Yeah, actually that makes sense.”