Needles. Condoms. Rats.
He stepped over the putrid pavement, the mizzle following him like a state trooper clings to a drug boy. Giant OLED screens were seemingly watching his every move as they advertised their wares, from beer to God to girls and everything in between. An all-night porno house was still going, hardcore nonsense streaming from the noise leaking from its old underground street cellar. The muscled black stud gave it good and proper to the pneumatic blonde. Both were looking as bored as they were dead behind the eyes, unlike the Asian grandfather peering over the stage for a better view, like one of those old Mr Chip cartoon heads.
He wasn’t far from home now, but he’d still have to be careful, and his plan meant that a cop stop could be catastrophic, especially if they found his prize, and what was in The Book. He was desperate to look at it but couldn’t risk the rain ruining it. His eyes were failing in the night to reveal the detail of what was in it. He was so distracted by the contents that he switched off, and was nervous of being jumped—or worse, stopped by the night troopers.
05.00. Light was starting to peel through the safe black curtains of night as he skipped over another pile of fetid kerb-shit. Up to the other side of the road, instinctively he moved out of sight, hitting a doorway as he thought he heard the whirr of a trooper’s bike. Pressing himself as close to the door as he could and turning his eyes into the damp brick so the sensors couldn’t find his eyes, he cursed his stupid judgement for being out after curfew, for possibly being caught so close to his mission taking off.
The oversized front wheel squidged and slushed as it threw up raindrops and sludge from the street. The exaggerated dome in the middle of the bike housed the trooper, his blue scanner treading the forward path, slightly side by side as it peeked onto both pavements. If he clung tightly to the door, as long as his breath or his eyes didn’t wander into the beam, he’d be fine, and hopefully it would pass.
Not that it was a crime per se to be out after 02.00, but it meant an automatic stop if you were caught in any one of the seven or eight Night Time Boroughs that made up the Central and East End of London. From Soho to Covent Garden and on through the City towards East Ham, these were the wastelands of London, which were lawless in the day when the sheer weight of population meant that trying to keep control was pointless. Rather than the Government giving away total control, they heavily policed the night, reckoning that nothing good came after 02.00, and if you were a normal citizen, you’d want to be at home plugged into your Hydration Station, watching movies or TV serials, or at the very least running around Virtual Town with your mates, racking up pointless VR points, which you could redeem for grocery store coupons.
The trooper bike was the other side of him now, its rear sensor giving a less concentrated field of view but wider, so he clung even tighter to the brick and the door, and waited. His hand reached around inside his overcoat, the crisp leather edges of his prize keeping him occupied, a sense of nervous anticipation adding to his heightened senses. He was mentally in two places at once. Here, now. Cold and damp. Afraid and watching. And there, home: opening his highly sought-after bounded diary, eagerly lifting the algorithms, and the code to input as part of his plan.
The trooper bike turned the corner, and in a flash, Dylan was gone, skipping back along the pavement, this time with more purpose, annoyed by his near miss, and determined to get back and survey his plan. The meeting had gone well. He’d worried about The Book being stolen right back as soon as he’d handed over the cash, but the source was good. His instinct told him that the motivation for sale was quick and easy cash for drugs, despite the sharp suit and the eau-de-banker aura that surrounded him. Something told Dylan that this guy didn’t care what he was going to do with the info. He only cared about his next fix. And he was probably right.
He knew the back way through the old multi-storey. Once a prime piece of real estate but now mostly deserted, this part of town was not safe enough to be a halfway house for the GCabs, and no one was spending millions on city centre real estate now anyway. They had long killed off the concept of the office since the Covid debacle of the early twenties. Working from home had thrown real estate markets into a spin all over the world as the traditional concept of the city centre died out as a form of housing big business. Elon Musk was the first to rebel, moving his entire HQ of the X-App out of downtown San Francisco in 2025—or sometime around then—after one of his VPs was stabbed to death in broad daylight while popping out for lunch. It was around this time, but it happened slowly, that cities themselves ceased to become important anywhere. The lack of daytime Monday–Friday economy had crippled the value of the space. Commercial rents had nosedived and nearly everyone worked from home, until even that was stopped. It began being controlled in the early thirties with the setup of the suburban offices, often taking the place of large supermarkets or hyperstores that had also mostly long gone as everyone had their every need delivered by drone right to their doorstep.
Retailers now were nothing of the sort you would remember, and online e-commerce had exploded in the late twenties once they’d figured out the rules of the skies and how AI could control the buzz of the traffic above, as the drones delivered your every whim, sometimes two, three or four at a time, depending on what you were ordering. Retail companies themselves had morphed almost into marketing agencies with carefully curated lists and categories of goods well organised so you could find what you needed. And the AR capability of the GGlasses enabled you to ‘see’ whatever it was you wanted to buy, with sumptuous fresh fruit displays being particularly inviting on the eyes. Nearly everyone had a rig, as they were sometimes called, the glasses being connected to the HIM that controlled your world 24/7. That could order ahead for you, make a call, take a photo or capture some video right from your glasses. The Chinese had experimented in the mid-thirties with the first implant, but the West was as ever highly sceptical of anything China did and would not sign off the technology for use in the States or in Europe. Many did so on the black market and even tried to disguise that they’d had it by wearing a pair of glasses so they didn’t stand out.
Fingerprints to the dash, eyes close to the scanner, Dylan hurried into the foyer of his building and towards the lift he’d taken thousands of times. Calling it, he hit floor 10 and then jumped straight back out, scooting along the side wall towards the back of the building. What if he’d been followed? They’d be checking the lift, so his little double back was his clever yet rudimentary way to protect himself. Watching. Waiting.
Nothing.
He called the lift again, and this time his correct floor 12 gave access to his door. After a thorough inspection of the frame, he was in. And four locks later, he felt safe. Time for The Book.
‘Where have you been at this time of night?’ said the shrill, yet whispered, voice from the corner of the living room.
‘Don’t worry. It’s nothing, Mama, just an errand,’ he said as he made for his bedroom, swinging his arms sharply behind his shoulders in an attempt to hide The Book.
Once inside, and with no further admonishment from the other side of the door, his gaze fell back to The Book. Turning the pages gingerly he could see the code, he could see the system architecture diagrams, and he smiled.
Dylan had been learning to code ever since he was a kid. Ever since the AI Wars of the mid-twenties, it was clear that you had to be able to ‘do’ things in this world or you would never get out of the inner-city shit. You had to either manage the people who did things, which was never going to happen to a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, or you had to be able to create, to code, to manage the plethora of machines and systems that made our world happen. If you could get machine A to talk to machine B and issue an instruction that could be understood and an action carried out as a result, then you were valuable in this world. It was the way towards riches for Dylan, and getting his hands on The Book was another part of his plan so that he could understand what really went on deep in the backends of the AI systems and in the very secretive world of Google, and of Alphabet.
It was 05.30 now and Dylan knew he had to get some sleep, as tomorrow would be a busy day. He’d seen enough in The Book to know it was exactly what he wanted and needed to know, and he crawled into his bed, satisfied with his adventure.
It was quite a while before morning squeezed sufficiently underneath the blinds and he woke ever so gently and tried to appear normal. Keeping his routine the same, he did little to arouse suspicion—as if it mattered in his mother’s apartment—for what he was about to try, to test, would be the culmination of his intellect, his coming of age, proof that he was indeed a giant among lesser mortals. He should be revered.
‘What time do you call this, Dylan? What have I told you about sneaking around at night and being on your computers at all hours?’
He ignored his mother and headed for the fridge. Orange juice, that would do.
Gulping down the sweet juice right from the carton, he knew he risked his mother’s ire once more with such uncouth habits. He could easily get a glass, but he didn’t care as after today, he would be gone anyway, and she would no longer matter.
‘It’s OK, Mum, I’m actually doing a really vital research assignment, and I’m getting paid to code something really cool for this company. I’ll get some cash later today if it goes well.’
‘OK, whatever. Good. We need some. Look, I’m going to be late for work, I’ll see you later, OK?’
She moved towards him for a kiss goodbye on the head, but he stayed in character and swerved her advance at the last minute, giving her a rare smile as he tiptoed back to his room.
Hearing the door shut with a bang, he wasted no time in finding what he was looking for. A pneumatic blonde appeared on stage at what appeared to be a live concert. The camera panned and swerved as her silver dress always stayed central in the view, but the footage appeared to constantly switch between first-person view, overhead drone shots and professionally shot footage of the concert. She roared into her first song:
‘Dreamer. You are all I need, all I want, all I neeeeeeeedddd…’
Tapping more keys, the scene shifted now to what appeared to be a hotel corridor. Back to first person, the blonde was still there, gesturing to the viewer and asking for a hand as she opened the door to a penthouse suite.
Once inside, she beckoned suggestively to the bedroom and the camera of course followed as she reached behind her neck to unfasten something. Then she flicked the corner of her dress off with her right arm, performing a shimmy first with her shoulders and then her hips as the dress fell to the floor. She was a picture of beauty. She must have been five feet six tall at the most, and wow, what a body! So natural. Legs to die for, seductive hips and breasts that didn’t move an inch as she reached behind her again and unclasped her bra, which also fell to the floor.
She advanced towards the camera now, dropping to her knees and looking up at the lens, smiling seductively again, as the sound of the zip was unmistakable. Dylan was a young man clearly with needs, and his were going to be met right now as he snuggled back under the covers of his bed.
A few hours later, he awoke refreshed, and got to work. Checking the time, he needed to complete his tasks before 16.00, his time, ready for his plan, well, the test of his plan to see if everything else was able to be put in motion.
Dylan was in high-energy mode now, his frantic bashing of the keys only matched by the movements of his head between keyboard and book, back to book, back to keyboard, and only occasionally up at the screens.
‘Creating digital cousin. Please wait…’
He waited.
His processing power was up against it, but he was harnessing other fire power in the cloud, so he knew it would take a while. He just had to be patient.
An hour went by in what seemed like minutes.
Tapping his system awake, he fingered the keys feverishly, as if performing a frantic piano solo from back in the day. That guy with the stupid colourful suits, what was his name? Ah, never mind. Keys rattling, all the while looking back and forward at The Book, occasionally stopping to digest the next layer of system architecture until the money shot was revealed, the main event. And there was silence! Had he done it? Switching screens, he saw the sunshine, the camera view from on high, the GoogleCab, the intersection, the traffic lights. The crash. And he smiled.