Everywhere they sit around and plan and toast each other and think it will change something in their own existence. They’ll get younger, more handsome, happier. They think power and the euphoria that comes with it will be a permanent condition rather than a short-term boost of hormones. There’s no goddamn global conspiracy. No Bilderberg–titled aristocrats–Rothschild–Goldman Sachs–Vatican axis of evil, just old men clinging to life with their yellowed fingers. There’s just a league of men who, thanks to their muscle mass, which is superior to that of women, have for millennia declared themselves the top of the food chain, and who try to erase through murderous terrorist attacks any life form that doesn’t resemble them. Well, or actually—erase. It’s just a shame that there are always non-male life forms left over. But unfortunately nobody from the old systems will survive, no landed gentry, no members of filthy rich aristocratic families, not the Vatican, and not the old billionaires. People like Thome will take over leadership of the world. The new people. Thome is experiencing feelings in a bothersome way. Every inch of his towering intellect seems to be occupied with Peter. Thome’s hands tremble with the feeling. And it is noticeable at work. His work, or as he jokingly says, his calling, when on the one hand he is constantly thinking of a boy and on the other hand doesn’t understand, for fuck’s sake, what in the hell is being developed in the ever-new coding languages, goddamn nerds. It feels like something groundbreaking arises nearly every hour. Something revolutionary. Unprecedented. But as far as any and all human needs, developers bypass them. The citizens—yes, we’ll call them citizens, the idiots—don’t care one wit about what form of voice-activated, totally networked bullshit has them waiting in traffic. They don’t care whether their toilets can think and their bathtubs render skin analyses that are transmitted to their clothes. At some point it has to stop. Nobody out there is going along. But when programmers are let loose they won’t ever stop until all human life has been expunged. That which cannot survive the market has no right to exist. Developers work on perfecting sex robots despite the fact that at least in London no men seem to be interested in sex anymore. They build brain add-ons, hyperloop transport tubes, rockets that can return to earth; they perfect data input via thoughts. “Disruption” seems to be tattooed on every developer’s forehead. A market in its present form will be obliterated only to be artlessly re-created in a form that yields more profit. Speaking of obliterating—Thome goes into the cellar where his stepmother is immersed in a vat of acid. He opens the lid and sees teeth floating on the surface of the brew. Guess it’ll take a bit longer. Thome drops to the floor. If only he had at least been abused as a child. He wraps his arms around the vat where his stepmother is decomposing. “Mother,” he whispers. “Mother.”