Still no sign of Mandy. 11.12 a.m. Another of Josie’s screens leapt into life. Traders were ingenious: they found ways of putting their messages on screen no matter how elaborate the steps taken to prevent them.
‘Just punch D O N U T: @ revo.efil,’ required the salesman. He was dressed like a butler, smiled like a fiend, and had a metronome – surely banned by Web Central as a hypnotic device? But perhaps Nex Control permitted them – ticking away in the background.
‘Only punch and you will see
Something long denied and free
Stuffed with honey, fruit and rum
Down your food-chute swift will come.
DONUT!’
Josie, ever suggestible – one became more so with age it seemed – obediently punched up D O N U T: @ revo.efil. She’d been losing weight recently, but Dr Owen hadn’t seemed worried when he had checked her health feedback. How long ago had that been? Sometimes it was hard to tell one day from another. Her fingers, she could see, looked just plain bony – but still pretty. She’d always liked her hands: loved the fingers’ dextrous moving over keys, their sharp, flawless clicking of the mouse. If you liked yourself and loved being alive, what did your chronological age matter? So said Zelda. Let alone what season it was.
Josie steered her chair to the window and opened the blinds; she had to put her drip-feed on hold and detach it to get so far. Alone of her friends, Josie still liked daylight, and a view. Down below the underclass swarmed: the unfortunates who lived on earth, not in the space in their heads. Hardly anyone over twenty-five, the whole lot HIV positive, doomed to death ten years or so after their first sexual contact. So much noise, dirt, and squalor. The underclass lived their short lives intensely: they were even said to write naive poetry, novels, plays. Well, why not? – Shelley, Keats: short lives, great poetry. For a moment Josie almost envied the wretched of the earth. The underclass lived unobserved and uncounted, unnoticed, unfrightened: they’d make way only for the armed delivery squads who attended to the physical needs of an overclass which lived decorously, individual unit by individual unit, stacked neatly one above the other. All Aids-free. They had Zelda to keep them healthy in mind and Dr Owen, healthy in body. Josie’s friend from way back, Honour, had recently filed a memo saying there was increased political unrest in the underclass.
There was a growing sense that computer literacy – forbidden by pain of death amongst the lower orders – was a human right. That was absurd. The underclass was too physical, too little given to logic, ever to cope happily with computers. They were happier as they were, their minds relaxed and unbothered, living in their unbinary world. See how they bustled, jolted, swarmed below.
‘They touch one another so much,’ said Josie aloud, and the sound of her own voice bounced strangely and dangerously off window and walls. She was accustomed to the deadening effect of headphones. ‘All the time they fondle and embrace, push or hit or hug. Kiss and copulate. Flesh touches flesh.’ There was no one to answer her. Josie remembered that nine decades or so back, she had actually given birth to a son, and had shared a living space with a man, a husband. They’d slept touching, side by side. It seemed a strange thing to have done, let alone enjoyed. Her son, one of a generation of men who had declined to take up the Heaven-on-Earth project, being reluctant to abandon their masculinity to the effects of oestrogen, had died of old age a decade back. She did not want to think about that. A short life but a merry one, like that of the underclass wilfully chosen. She went back to the console, readjusted her medication and changed the colours on all the screens for the fun of it.
Again Zelda’s face appeared unsummoned on the screen. ‘Josie,’ she said, and her voice sounded cracked and strange, ‘I know you are troubled. Let’s talk about it, dear. Together we’ll work on it.’
But Zelda’s lips and nostrils were blurring. She was hideous. Zelda dissolved and vanished in a scramble of snow. Josie pressed the alarm for the emergency technician. ‘Your fault has been automatically recorded,’ the stand-by screen flashed. ‘Please do not block emergency lines, OK?’ Josie clicked on OK, although it was far from okay. But what could you do? If you didn’t acknowledge OK, the screen pinged back at you interminably. She tried to click to No-Sound, but couldn’t. Was this what life was going to be like under Nex Control? Inefficient and ineffective? It was intolerable. Perhaps one hundred and thirty-two years of life was intolerable, full stop.
The whole point of age was the acquisition of wisdom: she could impart it, in haiku form, or in advice to the likes of Mandy Miller. But if Mandy Miller didn’t turn up, what use was Josie Toothpad? A silly name, given to her by a computer. Besides, she’d gone right off haiku: recently she’d developed a liking for romantic verse. She wanted to be in love again. If she couldn’t be in love she’d rather be dead. Right back in the beginning, she’d never wanted to live to be more than thirty. She’d outstayed her welcome by one hundred and two years.
How long since she’d ordered her doughnut? Six minutes? Delivery was meant to be within four. She’d complain, although that was a breach of good manners. The more reprehensible complaining was, the theory went, the more others would struggle to ensure no grounds for complaint existed. But Josie was allowed her eccentricities, being a pioneer. She called back D O N U T: @ revo.efil. ‘Fuck off,’ she entered, giggling. ‘Your comment has been recorded,’ said the screen. ‘Please be patient. OK?’ OK, Josie clicked, lying through her teeth.
The Friendship Screen bleeped. It was Honour, her friend. These days Honour seldom called. Honour had got caught up in the Occult ‘n Oracle network: Josie had denied the existence of the paranormal and Honour and Josie had quarrelled. Zelda had advised them against patching it up. The two friends, Zelda said, had clearly outworn each other, grown apart. Better to finish it now. It happened to Heaven-on-Earthers that friendships failed as the birthdays mounted up. There was always Zelda, for companionship and consolation. Zelda never fretted; Zelda always knew.
Honour on screen looked lovely; about fourteen years old. Red hair tumbled round perfect features. Before you enrolled as a Heaven-on-Earther, you had cosmetic surgery to perfect any flaws blind Mother Nature had inflicted upon you. Not for the sake of attracting men – there weren’t many around these days anyway: most who started male had foetal microsurgery and a dose of oestrogen three weeks into conception and ended up female, or roughly so – but for the sake of self-esteem, self-image. You had to be comfortable with yourself. It was a duty.
Josie squealed and all but leapt up and down to see her friend. Her feet, oddly, had some difficulty reaching the ground. Josie thought ‘but I’ve shrunk’. Nor was there much life in her legs, for all the voltage she’d put through her muscles over the years. She didn’t think she could get to the door. She just knew she didn’t want to stay in her chair, though the chair it was which wrapped her, soothed her, stroked her, made love to her, sung to her – all of a sudden Josie just wanted not to be in it, couldn’t bear to sit still a moment longer.
‘Josie, what am I going to do?’ asked Honour. ‘All my screens are on