Now I’ll make this face again with a protruding jaw, the bones of an emperor. “So. Right. What am I doing here? Eh? Right. Nothing less than the complete restructuring of all societal processes. The abolishment of the current social order. Democracy, which was always just a pacifying term to prevent uprisings and so forth. An explosion has taken place, now the old ruins will be turned over and smashed again. And then left to sit. Two percent of my company’s employees are women. Mostly in communications. Each according to their abilities. The share of Black workers is one percent. Black women employees? Well, I’ve made an effort. I’ve tried, but you can’t force things. If a certain subset of the populace rejects taking part in the shaping of the world and instead would prefer to devote itself to dance projects—please, go right ahead! The old world was engineered one hundred percent by men. The new world, the shaping of the world reloaded, is ninety-nine percent due to men. We finally have the chance to reproduce ourselves with artificial intelligence.”

Thome glances at Peter.

PETER

Looks past Thome at the sky. His skin is too tight, his chest is too tight, the world is too tight. He would like to have been a dog. Then he would run across a field until he fell over, panting. Then he’d like to mate in that noncommittal dog way. From behind without eye contact. Peter thinks a lot about sex now, and it embarrasses him to think about it, because he has no idea how it is supposed to work. With that feeling when somebody touches him, that is, as if the body part that is touched freezes. Peter wants to fly or scream, he wants to grow out of himself and change the world, but he knows that he doesn’t understand even 1 percent of what the world is about. No clue why volcanoes spew lava, why rockets fly, how a computer works. He doesn’t even know what people want. What the hell do they want? Peter is no longer curious about what is waiting for him in the world, he doesn’t want to find out, doesn’t want to know whether animals give themselves names, he doesn’t even want to look at any more animals, which until recently, before he became so absurdly grown-up, had been his closest friends. Animals had always given him a sense that things weren’t so bad, neither life nor England.

Outside the window, a drone.

“You see,”

THOME

Points out the window. You see—

There you see the

THE PROGRAMMER

He stands at the window, the programmer, in the psychometrics department. Or some other department. It doesn’t matter.