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She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom.
“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration.
“I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.”
She doesn’t know quite what to do with Bigend’s proposition, which has kicked her into one of those modes that her therapist, when last she had one, would lump under the rubric of “old behaviors.” It consisted of saying no, but somehow not quite forcefully enough, and then continuing to listen. With the result that her “no” could be gradually chipped away at, and turned into a “yes” before she herself was consciously aware that this was happening.
What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”
Goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Her face in the mirror, against the white tiles of the wall behind her. The tiles are square and she looks like something snipped from a magazine and placed on a sheet of graph paper. Not such good work with the scissors.
She looks, Cayce decides, like a prop from one sequel or another of The Matrix; if her boobs were bigger she could get work on the covers of role-playing games for adolescent boys of any age whatever.
And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.
