Madame Cecilie is in the Online Party, incidentally. She’s a normal, inconspicuous British woman with a penchant for poorly fitted amber-colored suits. She lives with her mother in a one-room flat and watches the changes of the world excitedly. It hits the spot. And it’s funny. Just recently she saw a small robot, whose function is to punish parking offenders, trying to copulate with a lamppost like an impassioned dog. There are strange computer malfunctions every day. Shops that lock in their customers, toilets that start their automatic cleaning process while someone is sitting on them. Children have disappeared in such toilets. Drones that collide with almost everything in their path like drunken dragonflies. Security barriers at nuclear power plants are said to have opened. Robots shine through constant foul-ups. The virtual assistant in Madame Cecilie’s flat gives speeches at night. Not that they would be uninteresting, but she no longer believes that AI will eradicate human beings.

It’s getting better

For

DON

She feels less lovesick. It’s probably over with. It’s definitely over with. Don wants to sleep in her own bed again, she wants to go back to the others. There are no more beggars in the trains or—anywhere else. They just disappeared at some point. The beggars, the homeless, maybe they died. People look at their devices or surf in their glasses if they’re completely mad. Don looks out the window; outside is an oddly familiar and yet strangely hideous landscape. She doesn’t know any other. The new tune by Kozzie wafts in from the next capsule. He’s found god. Still. Better than shopping.

Is it over now

Asks

THOME

The trauma of his childhood, which is lying in the ground.

He had shot his father in the head at his urging. “You do it, I’m trembling, I’m too weak. Do something for once that is bigger than you.” His father had said, and “Father,” Thome had said, “let’s just take a trip together. A father-son adventure. Fishing in the Bahamas or something. We’ve never gone on holiday together.”

“We’ve hunted,” Thome’s father had said. And Thome said: “Boy, did I hate that.” Then there’d been silence, and Thome’s father had begun to cry again. “Please, just shoot me, make me proud of you for once.”