Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman

Instead she ended up in Berlin, working at a series of short-lived product development jobs. Here, too, she observed an almost libidinal desire to relinquish autonomy, except this time in the context of various silly, infantilising ‘innovations’, each product solving some non-problem – ‘No more browsing for hours while your dinner gets cold: let us decide what movie you’d enjoy tonight, based on your hormonal and metabolic indicators!’ – like a prosthesis fitted over a perfectly healthy limb so it could shrivel from disuse inside the plastic casing. When she’d done her masters, she’d believed that artificial intelligence was about computer minds ascending into personhood, but this was more about human minds decaying out of it.

Except how could he disappear? Disappearing was something people did in the old days, when there were a lot more gaps in the world. Now you were always under surveillance wherever you went – what a hellish time to be alive.

It was always a bit chastening when you met someone who was absorbed in a job that did some real good in the world and you saw how little they felt the need to keep up to date on everything.

She remembered the contempt she had felt herself at that age for adults who chose to accept each other’s lies: nothing else like it, nothing so intense in the whole solar system, a jet of plasma that could take out satellites and power grids. Her father had told her she would become more forgiving of adults once she knew what it was like to be one. But for the most part that had not turned out to be true. The opposite, actually. All those mitigating facts that her father implied would explain everything, the sealed evidence for the defence: now she’d seen the file for herself, she knew there was fuck all to it. The teenagers had it right.

He didn’t have to worry about her opinion of him because it had already sunk as far as it could go, which made her very relaxing to be around.

From then on things felt awfully drastic. I began to think about all sorts of escapes. I considered everything. I even considered the United States.’ Everybody but her looked at the floor. The avoidance of any direct reference to that country – a custom adopted in the late 2020s out of sheer embarrassment – was these days so strictly observed that for Resaint it was genuinely startling to hear somebody say the words. But of course in the Hermit Kingdom they would not have the same modes of etiquette.

Barka is filling the peninsula with endangered and extinct species.’ These words were utterly unexpected; and yet the problem with Barka’s category of youngish billionaire was that these people had so many hobbies and side-projects, they were so driven and broad-minded, they were such consummate Renaissance men, that as with some spoiled, precocious nephew who wouldn’t shut up about his go-karting and his cartooning and his fucking robotics, it was impossible to greet the announcement of any new adventure with anything other than reflexive boredom and distaste.