Is standing. And along which she will now walk home. Well, walk. Or swim. She took LSD at the lab. Infernal stuff, so pleasantly retro-pointless. Today people take pills. Happy pills. They’re offered by the ton at a price that speaks the language of subsidies. You can buy them at any kiosk. A blister pack for the price of a bread roll. You can think it over. A bread roll or a good mood. Karen has experimented with those pills, to know how people feel. The pills cause you not to want anything. Illogical in an era when everyone has learned that it’s mandatory always to want something, and, as a result, everyone lives with a constant pained feeling because you never get what it is you want. Or because hardly anyone thinks things all the way through, because what most people want is to lie beneath the earth and finally be left in peace. The pills connect people with this primal instinct. Unconditionally content, not missing anything. The masses have become wantless contentment incarnate. You needn’t even be employed anymore in order to find a meaning in your existence. One-hour contracts, which are the pinnacle of employment politics, fulfill individuals’ ideas of being useful. Companies must employ the delinquents at least one hour per month. And pay them. Everyone has the right to demand more. Millions who used to live on social benefits are now respectably employed. And receive their basic income. As a prize for their presence on earth. They live in cellar flats, have perhaps one of the two mattresses in a bunk bed that can be locked up with a metal grille, and still believe that things will still somehow work out, when they leave their accommodations in their only unmoldy clothes, with the scent of poverty they give off, and with their threadbare rucksacks stand in line in front of shops that sell expired groceries. But you can pay with cryptocurrency by holding up your fucking hand to a scanner. That’s modern. We are the fucking future. And always with an eye on the phone, it could ring, you know. The streets are full of motorcars moving at a walking pace. Everything is the same as always. The great goal of removing cars from the life of humans that developers had mentioned over and over again in their TED Talks—“We want to rethink mobility,” they’d said, traipsing back and forth in front of a screen—hadn’t really come to pass. The sharing economy. The congenial people who out of a collective awareness would share their belongings to save the world, they didn’t exist. Low-cost car sharing doesn’t exist because people find it so great to have companionship; it’s because they’re poor. So they drive other idiots around all night who also have no money; they share flats, accommodations, and their food, the goddamned losers; they share misery and pay a quarter of their micro-earnings to a few people who are the new slave owners. But in our day everyone is free to make their own app, an app, hooray, an app, a sharing app. It used to be, Hey I’m opening a rental agency for some shit or other, but today everything has to be a startup. The latest successes had been the sofa sharing thing, and the meal-sharing startup that allowed you, for a fee, to share in eating the goods a family had picked up from the food bank. It was a huge success. Feeding people who were even worse off than yourself. Most sharing app users had until recently been hipsters who had dreamed of careers as writers, musicians, or actors or had run some organic café with a little stage in it. Now they’ve gotten a little older and sleep on strangers’ sofas and eat expired food at strangers’ tables, but beards are still okay, and you can talk to the strangers about the latest music or latest live performance, about the play you’re working pro bono. It’s not so bad,