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We teeter on the brink of world financial ruin and a return to the days of trading fucking seashells for food, every fucking day. Worse. It wouldn’t even be like Mad Max. Do you even comprehend how sad that is? Nobody runs Bartertown. That’s the thing, lad. It’s a runaway process. The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.”
A small, lean man around forty, who was evidently quite convinced that keeping his hair very short was hiding his male-pattern baldness.
The Director sighed, and looked at the speaker as if he was a child whose mother drank toilet cleaner during her pregnancy.
“Come on,” said the Director. “You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this.”
Was it a secret that I preside over a large sweaty pile of people in a useless fake profession who somehow didn’t have the mental fortitude to play pretend in return for paychecks all day? While I, Chief Asswiper to the Thought-Leader Elite, have to pay for three evil children, two shitty houses, and one supposed woman who stopped fucking me five years before she threw me out, literally, onto the street, where I was hit by some fat neckbeard on a Vespa so now in addition to all of the above I have to pay for five stupidly costly medications prescribed just to stop me from shrieking like a
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Adam knew it was childish, but he rationalized it in this way: carelessly harming other people was a decent stand-in for baseline human interaction.
I got sent to New York. Fucking New York. They pump more than thirteen million gallons of water out of New York every day just to keep the fucking subway running. So that people can perform ten thousand felonies a year on it. And that’s the small number. New York needs to pump another two hundred million gallons of water out of four thousand five hundred acres of city every single day to stop the city from drowning in its own piss and bathwater and the sea creeping up to grab at the ankles of the two million people south of Seventy-First Street. That is one system. Only one. And just in
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We just look at this stuff, we look wider and deeper, and then just deeper and fucking deeper, and all we can see is everything getting smaller and darker until it’s this infinite black dot of compressed shit and horror.
Adam was pleased by the idea. He was pleased that he could be pleased by something again. He found an old smile from some deep dark pocket, and put it on.
“It is a hospital, but it has only one kind of patient. People who have tried to look into the future in order to try to save the world and have been driven insane by it. The worst kind of insanity, Adam Dearden. We’ve all been sent mad by grief.”
“Darnel Booth.” Adam turned to Clough. “Darnel Booth. Negation Risk Scenario Planning.” “I never saw that film,” Clough said. “It wasn’t a … Christ. I thought you worked in economic foresight?” “Well, I do, but it’s like I told you. I mostly get bankers and politicians drunk.” “Don’t do this,” Darnel muttered. “Negation Risk,” Adam continued. “The first modern study to identify the issues around scenarios other than nuclear war that would wipe out all trace of human civilization as if we were never here. It was groundbreaking.” “And you’re asking what happened to him?” Clough chuckled. “Oh,”
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He took a breath, and then said, “People. You’re not crazy if there really are robot insects listening to every word you say.” Someone said, “I fucking told you.”
An expression crept over Asher’s face that was not unlike that of a lonely child being told that Santa had not in fact been strangled to death in an alley in New Orleans.
Adam searched for the word to describe the nostalgia for things you never knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht
Nostalgia for a word you once knew.
Saudade?
Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Unusually short for a German compound word with a complex meaning. Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearning for a comforting alien perfection.
Antigonish.’
The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that’s how the future always arrives. You don’t realize it’s here until you bump into it.”
“That was the easy part. That was the easy decision. It was the confirmation of my nightmare. We’re now in a place, you see, where we will never again have a private conversation. We’re never really going to be alone again. We will never again be in a state where we believe that we’re not being watched. Some futurists talk about a thing called the Singularity, where accelerating progress in technology becomes a runaway effect. Like an ascending graph that suddenly becomes a vertical straight line. Think of a Surveillance Singularity. A condition you cannot go back from, because it’s become a
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