Who has somehow managed to make it back to the wasteland on the outskirts of town, and is nearly home. Nearly sober. No longer staggering. No longer talking to her hand. No longer unhappy. But also no longer alone, because, in the mud between the catchment basins, settlements have popped up overnight. Tents are set up. Plastic tarps draped over boards, campfires, and—as always, when people settle down somewhere—piles of rubbish. Illegal itinerant workers. Young and sort of young men from Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland. Before the country’s departure from the wonderful European political union they’d been happy. In places like Manchester, Blackwater, and Birmingham. They saved for small houses, the things people do when starting out. Since Brexit most of them had lost their residency permits. And then stayed for a while in the dreary areas where they’d been, where there was no sympathy for them, where the long-established residents reported them. So now they’re here. The second-to-last station. None has money for a ticket home, none wants to go home, to some dark place where there’s nothing awaiting them but liquor and cold winters. They sit here in front of lodgings made of tarps, which is better than sleeping on the street in the city. That has become dangerous, as now they aren’t even the hated foreigners with jobs anymore and are instead considered lepers. They are the offerings that had to be sacrificed to save the world. The men smell. The possibility to wash their clothes or themselves in the oily runoff streams is of little interest. They seem almost relieved now that their fear is gone. The years-long fear of losing the amenities, the leakproof windows, the flowing warm water, the incomes, and the mattresses had been so great that a sense of relief now wells up. They have arrived back where they started. A tarp on the ground, a couple of pieces of furniture scrounged up, and beans. That’s what life provides for them. Like all here in the wastelands, these men are so far removed from the idea of having a hearth and library that they don’t even get envious when they walk through central London looking for a chance to get into a bit of petty crime. They would never conceive of their lives as so boring that they would voluntarily forsake it for hours-long voyages into virtual reality. They’ve never thought of optimizing themselves with the help of apps and trackers, only to then have the optimized version of themselves evaluated in the virtual world by unknown idiots. They have never paid for anything with an app, have never stuck an internet-enabled dildo in their orifices, they have lived 1.0 lives with the romance of 1.0 life, pubs, friends, staring at women, falling in love and dreaming of owning a house of their own. And that’s why, dear scum of society, that’s why you are here, staring into the night at your wits’ end. Some distance away