He loves being up high above the city, especially this city, gazing out through floor to ceiling windows. The air-conditioned cool. The subdued lighting. He is looking at his own reflection in the window as night falls. His suit is beautifully cut. He has kept his weight down.
Johannes has, he must confess, an embarrassing obsession with Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ever since he was a boy. Because of his mother, no doubt. He used to imagine the Wanderer turning away from the precipice, seeing his face. Which was of course his own.
Perhaps he should mention this to Calvert. But perhaps that is too obvious. He doesn’t want to bore him. Better that he just free-associates rather than try to give him what he thinks Calvert wants. Before he went into analysis, at Nastya’s request, at Nastya’s insistence, he had his people prepare several executive summaries on the history, approaches, and latest trends in the field. He knows that one of the biggest problems in analysis these days is the analysand’s over-familiarity with the language and protocols of psychoanalysis itself. He attempts therefore not to provide a running commentary on his own observations, but he thinks that also Calvert is aware of this. Of a certain suppressed element. And that perhaps it would be truer, more genuinely revealing, if he were to vocalise those thoughts too. After all, Dr Calvert, the world is irredeemably meta, is it not?
He is sure that Calvert will say something like, why do you feel you have to ask me what you should and shouldn’t say? He feels a sudden burst of irritation and then almost immediately laughs. Perhaps he should just talk into a microphone then play it back and analyse himself. Perhaps there is a programme online that will allow him to run his recording through an algorithm, which will offer him some concrete analysis, a diagnosis. Disintermediation. He smiles when he hears that term. What on earth does that mean? Perhaps he should ask Calvert, who is pre-eminent in his field. If not that, perhaps he should outsource. No doubt he could find an online therapist for a fraction of the price; if money were a consideration. Was it not true that Argentina had the highest number of psychoanalysts per person in the world? He contemplates going to his workstation to check this out, or make a memo to investigate it more fully, but instead merely files the idea away and returns his attention to the view out across the Thames taking in St Pauls, the Gherkin, Zhu-Min Heights, Canary Wharf.
Yes, he loves being up high above the city, particularly this city. Night has fallen. He can see his own reflection clearly now. He has kept his weight down. He checks his jawline. He has a famous jawline, famously sharp, and he works hard to keep it that way. He never lets his body fat get above 12%. He repeatedly checks his jawline in the mirror, does face tightening exercises every night in the bathroom before bed. He uses a particular and very expensive Japanese collagen-enhanced horse fat face-cream. He knows the fat in the face disappears over time as it accumulates unnecessarily elsewhere. Another of the body’s archaic impositions. The body, an atavism.
These days, one’s face is everything, the integrity of one’s image an absolute requirement. Yet here we are, shackled to a primitive, stone-age biology. Yes biology is the battleground. He has already prepared himself for future surgeries, lifts and implants, regularly checking out the literature from the best personal cosmeticists around the world, many of whom are here of course, in London.
Johannes believes that the relationship between the image on the screen and the face in real life is essential to trust. He has contemplated having photos digitally manipulated so that he will look a little older than he is, a little more drawn, perhaps slightly fatter, so that when he meets associates in real life they will be taken aback by how much better he looks than on screen. He is part owner of a company, Stelth.com that provides brand and image management support to major corporations and high net worth individuals, one aspect of which is correcting and improving any unauthorised photos or videos that appear on the web. He would be asking for the reverse, of course, and this is the telling difference between Johannes and his competitors, his peers. He understands that the really scarce good, the premium good of the future will be the face-to-face, the unpressured moment of intimacy, the rich and puzzling, sublime ambiguity of the other.
Perhaps this is why he has agreed to analysis. Not entirely because he is incapable of refusing Nastya anything, but because it helps him in researching that soon to be most sought after commodity of all, direct contact. He is already toying with a company that will set up face-to-face encounters between the A-list clientele on his social media platform Networth and people from radically different backgrounds and income categories. They have begun trialling it among close associates, placing executives in neutral, wireless-free rooms for an hour or so with single mothers or teachers or Bengali immigrants, forcing them to interact in a radically de-hierarchical and anonymous space, seeing them emerge sometimes several hours later shaken and exhilarated, or disturbed, adrenalised. Intense, intense, one of his junior employees repeatedly muttered on emerging from the meeting room and summed up his 83-minute encounter with a 43 year-old cleaner from Philadelphia on the feedback sheet as “a real white-knuckle ride”.
He should go down into the street now perhaps, himself, walk freely among them all.
Head back, he smoothes his jaw-line with the back of his hand. The rest of his face is not such a worry to him. His hairline is solid, he has had enough peels and treatments to keep his skin supple and largely wrinkle free. Hydration is fundamental, as is the right kind of exercise. His diet is exceptionally nutritionally dense and rigorous, his workout regime qualitatively intense. Johannes has been in London for a week and it has been a full week, meeting with the directors of his charitable foundation, interviews, visiting galleries for private views.
Yesterday, David DuHaine, an old, good friend from back in the early PayPal days, tried to pitch a full drone service to him, driverless cars and trains, lightweight drone delivery straight to the eighteenth floor widow, a docking bay attached to the outside wall.
He laughed, I have Nastya for that, she would kill me if I replaced her with a machine. Anyway I can print everything I need now, can’t I? You can’t print a DRC like this, DuHaine said, and raised his glass. Positionality is everything! Remember? DuHaine quoting one of his own most famous maxims back at him. Johannes took a sip. True, but I am not sure I would want a bottle delivered by drone either! You would need a hedge, admittedly, DuHaine replied. They both laughed and DuHaine wagged a finger at him, don’t get too sentimental about Nastya, didn’t Connaught say we are ALL going to be replaced by machines, sooner or later?
Ah yes, Connaught. Connaught was, for all he was ridiculed and derided, a perennial topic at dinner, in conferences. It seemed that, dismiss him as you might, still he was there waiting: puzzling, insane, conducting who-knew-what kinds of experiments in his research institute in the Freezone that had opened up in the hinterland between Laos and Myanmar, in the jungle.
Even back in the early days when they were all making their fortunes, even among that select and divinely driven crew of innovators, Connaught had been a wildly visionary, uniquely brilliant and intense personality. For several years he had managed to hold himself in check, working alongside Kurzweil and Sharpton at The Singularity University before suddenly disappearing into the night with nothing but a series of devastated hotel rooms and bags of exotic pharmacology in his wake, reappearing two years later in the Freezone pushing his thesis on Techstinction, a more radically nihilistic and negatory corrective to what he saw as the latent and crippling Humanism in notions of the Singularity. He rejected both the terms Transhumanism and Extropianism, “we do not aim to improve or transcend the human condition, but to finally destroy humanity itself in the name of the truly radical, alien otherness within us, rationality, science, techne”, he declared in the long, semi-coherent lecture that appeared online two or three years ago. “Our aim is not enhancement, or transcendence, or eternity, but creating a technology which will destroy us.” “Tech Guru Connaught Goes Jim Jones in The Freezone” was the Tech Times headline that greeted his re-emergence. That seemed to sum up the prevailing attitude.
The last time they had shared a stage together, not long after Johannes had met Nastya and begun his charitable and curatorial work in earnest, when Connaught was still, as far as anyone could tell, keeping things together, was at a TEDX conference. Even then Connaught’s incipient madness had begun to disturb those around him, the organisers, the audience, his fellow panellists, and it was felt that perhaps he was not quite the young, brilliant billionaire though he was, the ambassador the Singularity University had hoped he would be. Johannes himself was perplexed by Connaught’s rambling, poetic, aphoristic speech. Shirt untucked and tieless, no PowerPoint slides, no tirelessly reiterated, upbeat, take home message, unless the message was: we are a split and suicidal species, we must drive forward our own extinction, not merely as subjects, but materially, as flesh. The end of the lecture was a long reflection on the term “dull and muddy-mettled rascal” from Hamlet as far as Johannes could recall. Mud and mettle, muddy metal, muddled metal, dull mud and metalled rascals, the dull mud and the metal rascal.
That was the first indication that Connaught would go rogue. And yet early on, they had been great friends.
Ah Connaught! Ah Post-Humanity!
He checks his watch, twenty minutes until his session with Calvert, two hours until he goes out to meet his gopher, Graeme. Johannes has made a point of remembering the name. These touches, this personal engagement matters even if one is, as the girl from the Guardian suggested yesterday, “richer than Croesus”.
That interview had been, perhaps, the only negative so far. He instinctively reaches up to smooth his jawline and is aware suddenly, though he has clearly been doing it for years, of this reflex action, when a negative thought or an ego-compromising reflection assails him, how he sets his own jawline in place, focuses on it, uses it almost as a talisman to ward off bad spirits. How odd. No doubt many people have such small, defensive rituals. He pauses and looks around the room as though there may be some clue to his own behaviour hidden there, though the room is of course minimally, even austerely furnished, a great white space with a black leather sofa, a low, heavily lacquered Japanese horigotatsu table, a huge, ultra-thin, wall mounted flat screen, state-of-the-art black and silver Samsung speaker poles in each corner for deeply immersive surround sound, and little else.
What other small, supporting tics and twitches of thought, what mechanisms and bits of barely visible maintenance might his whole persona run on? He is watching, through his own reflection, a thousand cars moving through the congested streets, lights coming on in flats and offices, buses and trains delivering the flow of workers and consumers in and out of the centre from the suburbs, the invisible army of small-scale tasks and repeated interventions that sustain the illusion, the fantasy of the City, its magical enormity, its dream-identity.
For a second, the room, the city through the windows, seem to shift and tremble, as though some other dimension has momentarily infused itself into this one, set it quivering. Perhaps, he reaches up for his jaw then checks himself, he should discontinue this analysis with Calvert. Connaught perhaps should be a cautionary tale.
Perhaps it is just that, yes that interview yesterday has disturbed him a little, despite his reputation for hardness of head, nose and at one time, heart. A situation he is trying now, through his curating, his charitable work and his analysis, to remedy.
Yes, the interview yesterday was a little tougher than these things used to be ten years ago, when they were all savants and saviours. The crisis was obviously to blame and he imagined that the piece would carry a fairly negative tone, as any such pieces were obliged to these days if they focussed on anyone who made money before the crash, or had continued to do so during it. And besides it was for The Guardian. The FT or The Economist would have been more supportive.
And yet, yes, he stretched up on tiptoe and settled back down onto his heels again, he did want to be, not loved, but seen differently, to be admired at least. To be, he searched for the right word. Understood. Connaught would sneer at him for that.
Yes he was faintly irritated by the interviewer, a very attractive but rather presumptuous looking young girl, fresh out of a Classics degree at Oxford, hence the reference to Croesus no doubt, obsessing over the phrase “Pay-Pal mafia”. He told her he hadn’t been involved in any of that for years and asked her, who did we exploit, helping to set up a payment system online? This is not the mining industry. Yes but the system, in its totality. This had seemed to be her argument. She had that faintly superior but brittle English upper-class appeal, an English Rose. She was probably good on a horse, had impeccable manners, was spending her twenties pretending to be tough-minded and radical. He felt a little throb of melancholy desire. She was nothing compared to Nastya of course. And yet he would love to somehow win her over.
No doubt this was why he had agreed to the interview in the first place. He did find himself seeking her approval, did feel a need to persuade her and her readership and the world at large. He stretched up on to tiptoe involuntarily again and again checked himself. Ah now what was this, another tic? He lowered himself down more circumspectly. I am not what you think I am, I am not who I was. I am one of the good guys.
She pushed him on his continuing and endlessly augmenting wealth and his maxim, Positionality is Everything. Had he not cornered many markets in many types of goods, especially foodstuffs, especially fish? Hadn’t one of his companies, for insistence, been racing against the major Japanese corporations to buy up stocks of Eel, Fugu fish and Blue Fin Tuna while another was harvesting seeds for particular types of potentially medicinally beneficial plants and stockpiling as much of the world’s declining biodiversity as it could in huge greenhouses out in Chilean Patagonia? Did he not have a vested interest in extinction? In creating artificial shortages, in scarcity?
His answer, which he had immediately sensed she was not prepared to listen to sympathetically, was that both he and his wife thought of themselves as Curators now rather than business people or entrepreneurs, that they were in a sense rescuing and maintaining, while on another level restoring and bringing into life, illuminating great swathes of the past. The past is not dead and gone, any more than the future is inaccessible, both are immanent. All I do, he explained, is draw value out of the future and use it to dynamise the past. I rewire it. Create new circuits. Forget the Futures market, he quipped, I am heavily invested in both the personal and financial senses of that word, in Pasts.
Take our great OutlierArt initiative, whose mission is to record and collate the entire artistic output of all humanity, not merely the greats, but to throw open the past and expose every nook and cranny to appreciation. To rescue the dead, he almost said that didn’t he? Then thought better of it. Yes, perhaps some man of means will pay an extraordinary sum for the particular frisson of sitting in that restaurant in Tokyo or Beijing or Singapore and eating the final piece, that extravagantly expensive piece of Blue Fin Tuna sashimi, knowing no other human being now will ever get to savour its unique delicacy. But this is how he sees his role, as a simultaneous driver into extinction in some ways and also a redeemer, a bringer into life, rescuing what was lost, granting recognition to the vast shadow-world of human endeavour and liberating it from the hierarchies of taste and judgement, the structures that have suppressed it.
If a man will pay millions for a sliver of flesh melting on his tongue and we can use that money to vitalise the great, unexplored, underexploited past, create more value, reinvest, drive forward more capital into the future! Look, he said. He became almost impassioned, didn’t he? He knows, he knows that he and Connaught are cut from the same cloth. He knows that this is all his mother’s and grandfather’s doing, this sense of mission, this religious fervour. He doesn’t need Calvert to tell him that. This is the only hope we have. You said earlier, you used the term “the spatial fix”. Johannes waved his hand skyward. There is lot of space out there still and we will reach it. You perhaps don’t know how close we are. But there is also the temporal fix, nor are they so distinct, time and space. The past after all is another country, is it not? Hamlet, too? He and Connaught.
He smoothes his jawline with the back of his hand, the screen up on the far wall is making a soft, insistent buzz and he pivots away from the window, checking the time on his watch. “Activate”, he commands and the screen clicks on. A soft exhalation of static, a faintly clinical glow and there is Calvert waiting to begin their session, his smooth face filling the huge screen, gazing enigmatically out.
The session is even shorter this time than before. He knows Calvert practices the variable length session, breaking off the dialogue when he thinks a significant moment has been reached, leaving the analysand to reflect on why perhaps the analyst has seen something in that moment, though Johannes is at a loss to see why his observations about his older brother being disciplined by his father are so significant. He thinks perhaps he ought to reflect on that if Calvert has found it notable and so returns to the window and his gazing. His family, all of them, are very well provided for, even his brother, who has put his wild, more dissolute years behind him now and settled into a position Johannes created for him, essentially unproductive and in a sense against all Johannes’ principles.
His brother, the freerider. Yes of course he resents him, yes of course he only gave him a job to satisfy his mother, his father he knows is more rigorous in his beliefs, a true man of principle who would have allowed Thomas to go to the wall, to have been washed away in drink and drugs, incarcerated, perhaps even allowed to die, rather than renege on his belief in individual responsibility. The modest bequest that they both received at age 23 Johannes put to good use, straight out of Stanford, hiring out what amounted to little more than a broom cupboard on Ansonia Street and setting up E-pay, while his brother dropped out of Law school and began a life of addiction and dependency, continual promises to reform his behaviour, constant relapses, disappearances, scrapes with the law, wild telephone calls in the middle of the night begging money or a place to stay. Johannes would have abandoned him too were it not for their mother always begging indulgence on Thomas’ behalf, manipulating both of them, both him and his father, appealing to Christian charity. Yes, his father had it right, Thomas and Johannes had equal chances, what more should he do? They were adults now and if one were squandering his resources, his life, in dissipation, that was his choice.
His father certainly would disapprove of Johannes’ sessions with Calvert. He scoffed at psychology; he did not believe that there were any forces one could not master within oneself. One had the capacity to reflect on the consequences of one’s action, to project the likely outcomes and choose accordingly. He believed in character, the ability to know that one had elected one’s life, and that to deny that one was free, subject to forces within oneself beyond your control, well, this was mere babyish pandering to weakness.
Johannes’ heart is beating a little more quickly, yes, he finds such notions, such assertions stirring, he agrees with his father and many of his friends that in the late Sixties with the hippies, that was where the rot set in, with this turning away from the world and the heroic vision of man to the inward looking, dependent permanent child, powerlessly caught up in the grip of the State and always demanding more.
But Nastya has suggested therapy to him and so he will do it. It seems that at least two contradictory impulses, his father’s severity and unflinching rigour, his mother’s pleas for charity and understanding, are pulling at him more fiercely now and he is finding it hard to bind them. Why should it be that he feels the impact of his childhood more keenly now in middle age than he ever did in his youth? When he was younger, hungrier for success, he was his father’s son, very much so, and that perhaps is why he has the reputation for toughness that the journalist focused on yesterday. And of course for Nastya analysis is really just a fashion, in New York someone mentioned that they were in analysis with Calvert and Nastya said that she had always wanted to try it but that she was too busy and so she would get Johannes to take it up on her behalf. That was the same party where a fellow philanthropist had mentioned Crane to him. Who was that?
No matter. The gauntlet had been thrown down, the complete works of Vernon Crane, the life of Vernon Crane, the residuum, the flotsam that his short, troubled passage through the world have left bobbing in their wake. Out there, somewhere. Johannes enjoyed these challenges, mobilising vast networks of contacts and information-gathering services, a few of perhaps questionable legality, to hunt down treasures long since lost, disappeared. A modern day equivalent of the Great White Hunter except that he brought life, resurrected the dead, conferred a kind of immortality. A modern day alchemist, taking what was once considered dross, effluvia, and creating a market, monetising it, transforming dead matter into product, into value.
Perhaps it also gave him an opportunity to come back to London too, and that was why he particularly seized on these works, this story. He was generally quite the Anglophile anyway, especially when it came to music. He admired what one of Nastya’s Curector acquaintances, listening to some extremely low-fi and very hostile form of early 21st century rap at his studio, dubbed a continuation of “the long peasant tradition in British music”.
He shifts his weight from foot to foot. Where is Nastya now? Out there, somewhere in the City. There are things he could tell Calvert that would surprise him. Do you know Dr Calvert that I have never seen my wife naked? Half-undressed and posing in the most provocative outfits, certainly. Do you know that we have never kissed except for a peck on the cheek, that she disappears for days on end and that I trace her movements through credit card transactions and status updates, that her feeds are filled with pictures that incite my jealousy without ever directly revealing any infidelity, and that no rumours reach me of a scandal? That once in Manilla she sat back in the chair in our suite at the Hilton, one leg draped over the arm of the chair, stripped down to her underwear, gazing at him and smiling as he, eyes roaming uninhibitedly over her, had two Filipina bargirls she had picked up on her flight around town blow him?
Yes, yes, they are a perfect couple in that respect, he is exquisitely unsatisfied. Even when they are together it is always as though he is seeing her on a screen, except of course for the scent of her perfume, the heat of her body, the million subtle disturbances of having her there in the flesh and how magnified to his engorged senses these micro-stimulations become, like being flayed with nettles, the smallest gestures, movements, the way she bends to buckle her shoe, the arch of her back, the dreamy absorption as she applies her lipstick, presses her lips to a paper towel then passes it to him with a smile, a memento, a sacred object. He becomes aroused walking past shoe shops or clothing stores, imagining how Nastya would look wearing particular items, and has spent significant amounts of his unimaginably vast resources dressing her up and asking her to parade before him. He has revealed himself, lain out the shapes and totems of his desire uninhibitedly before her and yet she seems to have no desire of her own, except to excite his further, always there is some reserve tucked away inside, beneath, beyond her at which his imagination aims but cannot shape or give name to, and it is this which drives him on.
Immortality. The stars. He lifts his eyes to the heavens, smoothes his jawline. Imagines himself up there, standing on a crag, sheathed in starlight, deathless. Other worlds, the superman, absolute conqueror of time and space. He wishes them all luck, Sharpton and Kurzweil, in their attempts to beat death, or Fisk’s determination to establish the first off-world colonies, he knows Fisk is probably right, that Seasteading is not enough, that only finally, ultimately with Spacesteading can a true libertarian society be born, only then will the dead hand of Leviathan be truly lifted from what is best in man and the best of men. Is it not then more than merely ironic that Fisk is so dependent on NASA for research grants in his attempt to set up free market utopias on the moon? Yes, that was the question that the journalist asked yesterday. That, you will have to talk about with Fisk himself, he demurred.
Fisk. There was a cartoon accompanying an interview in the Wall Street Journal, normally a sympathetic publication, a few months ago entitled “To Infinity and beyond?” with Fisk lampooned as Buzz Lightyear.
He is glad in many ways to be out of it. Perhaps the tide is turning again and the heroic effort his generation made to think on the cosmic scale, to pursue those dreams, will be dragged down and ridiculed. He still has his Prometheus Fund of course, to maintain his reputation as an Angel investor, and is still active in Zarathustra Capital, a source of some embarrassment and another of the obsessions of the girl yesterday, down 60% over a seven-year period. Skittish investors with no long-term commitment, no real vision. No, his decision to withdraw, to pursue philanthropic work and devote his time to Curecting with Nastya has been wise.
Angel investor, he likes that term. Curector is ugly, he agrees. He thinks of himself more as a patron, a gatherer in of lost souls. A shepherd. The wanderer above the sea of fog, crook or staff in hand, in this world or the next or some other entirely. To be able to live to see that, to live forever and to touch the dust of distant planets, to hurtle on alone into the bright unending emptiness. He imagines Nastya and he, deathless, indestructible, gazing on each other always a moment away from contact, floating silently above the surface of a barren moon.
The girl, the English Rose, the reporter asking him questions, the interview, the online comments on the piece he glanced at, the sneering, the attacks, some more cogent and informed than others of course, the scrum and babble of dissenting voices, the tumbling vibrant, rambunctious marketplace of ideas. The most consistently upvoted comment pilloried his “messiah complex” and the “ludicrous hubris” and “folly” of his interests in geoengineering, his “market fundamentalism”.
He was almost tempted to respond to the commentators, but had learned his lesson from some of Fisk’s disastrous engagements with social media a few years ago. He understands the need for caution, has always understood it, caution or rather perhaps dissimulation. What the philosopher king sees cannot be adequately communicated to those in the cave, transfixed by the shadow play. This is the oldest lesson of all. Since one cannot help but sow confusion, one may be best served by its maximisation.
Yes, markets. He is a market fundamentalist.
He breathes out slowly and feels excitement course through him, hotly up from his guts a cool wave down from his brain and the eddying confluence around his heart that feels much like love must feel, he imagines.
And for what except for you do I feel love? What does that come from? He tilts his head almost imperceptibly to one side. A poem, yes, but by whom? Never mind for now, he knows and soon his mind, having been set the task of recalling it, will provide him with an answer. In this way he sees the homology between the market and consciousness that his mindfulness life coach insisted on, the market as consciousness, he sees his own relationship to his brain as that of the individual to the market, his brain knows vastly more than he does and if he can simply trust it and not get in its way it will work for him in ways he cannot consciously exploit or know, its processing power attached to but not under the control of his meagre I. But that was last year, now he is in therapy and everyone is reading Lacan for Busy Execs.
Markets, always more markets, always greater more endlessly ramifying complexity, yes, death, the shredding of the self in the infinitesimally graduated crystalline flows of the markets, the self nothing but some impulse to surrender to risk and chance, god does not exist but if he did he would have invented the universe purely to play dice with, yet that doesn’t capture it. Imagine the self naught but a whisp; a divine, aspiring afflatus enmeshed within an ineffable, omniscient, multi-directional order.
He has read these critiques of his interest in the culture of retro and antiques as a repudiation of futurism, but this is a misunderstanding. He has not forgotten the future, quite the reverse; this is about markets, this is about taking a resource, taking inert matter, and making it vibrant through the power of the market, it is this, yes, holy power that he sees at work, this power to resurrect in a sense. Take this current Curectorial pursuit, the minor, marginal, unknown Vernon Crane, this poor lump of cold, dead clay. Already he is a figure in people’s lives, his and the other Curectors searching for his work, the gophers, those who hold or know about his output, those who will now come into contact with it and be influenced by it, how it will become a shared passion, retrospectives and so on. It is not nostalgia, or backward looking, but rather this, the giving life to the dead and inert, creating a site of power.
He calls up some music, Robert Leiner’s Visions of the Past. 1993. What a year that was. Was, and will be, again and again and again.
Johannes is suddenly hungry, he checks the time, yes he’s due to eat in forty minutes or so but is feeling small, glinting pangs already, which is unusual, his diet quite precisely timed in its glycaemic profile. He should never become hungry as such, nor feel especially full, but move smoothly along an arc of productive, sensorially discrete satiety. Perhaps he has burned more calories today than he anticipated, though his gym-routine and recovery meals are constructed for maximum efficiency, a strict, punishingly intense forty five minutes followed by a post-workout savoury brown rice smoothie with raw egg and natto. Well, he is hungry, perhaps peckish as they say over here, a sensation he hasn’t felt in several years. Interestingly and now a little disruptively, images of food are flashing into his mind, Japanese food, primarily, he has always loved it, some of the best food he has ever had. He has a little craving suddenly for a simple, plain rice and salt Onigiri and he calls out to the wall screen to bring up a list of the best Japanese restaurants nearby.
This is why he has arranged to have his diet so perfectly calibrated, to cut out these kinds of interruptions, this endless obsessing over food and being driven to pursue particular types of foodstuff. He dislikes hunger, thirst, tiredness, illness, libido, the constant background noise, the niggling away of the body, the way it channels and diverts thought. Libido he accepts, the chemicals, the testosterone are vital to well-being and clarity of thought and he has always accepted that some of his time will be lost to sexual reverie, to masturbation, to developing sexual obsessions and pursuing them; but hunger, thirst, he has quashed. It has been good to excise these intrusions from his life. Years ago he had electrolysis on his face and torso so that he need never waste time shaving again and when this information became public he was ridiculed and held up to be the kind of detached, billionaire obsessive who could never understand real human needs and wants. The amount of column space it generated seemed to him absurd and he understood more clearly the hippy-liberal mindset then, that this permanent removal of the possibility of growing a beard, this absolute rejection of the natural, the burdensome imposition of nature on the body and the technological means to supervene it was for them a fearful act of hubris.
One must be a slave or the gods will punish us. In this age still, with so much achieved, with the stars within reach and death almost expelled, with these ancient, impossible hopes almost realised, these secular priests of an ancient fear will draw us back into the mud and wallow of our prehistory. Yes, that was the lesson of the Sixties.
He could have his cook prepare him his prescribed Saturday 8pm dish, an organic Walnut and Goji berry smoothie enhanced with spirulina and green tea, mixed leaf salad and tuna sashimi, along with eight of his thirty five daily supplements a little earlier than usual, but there is a Chinese restaurant a few floors down and he calls up the menu. He has time perhaps to eat a quick, small meal and still make it out to meet his gopher, better still, he should re-arrange for his gopher to come here, to Hutong on the 33rd floor.
He sends a message.
Please come to Hutong restaurant, the Shard at the appointed time.
This will throw his dietary schedule out and, irritated, he makes a note to speak to his nutritionist, to ask him why after such a time-consuming and demanding series of consultations the plan has failed to fulfil his express requirements. His phone vibrates against his thigh. A message from Nastya, she is in a bar somewhere in Stoke Newington with, she says, a group of fascinating young artists whose work she insists he sees and sends a photo of herself draped around two bemused and excited looking young girls with dreadlocks in a colourful, harlequinesque patchwork of retro clothing. Tomorrow, he messages back.
I am still in the process of collating everything for our current project. He gazes at the photo for a moment. She has gone for a rock-chick look, hair scrunched, heavy eye liner, wearing her The Derivatives t-shirt, the all-female, ex-model covers band that she played bass for, girlfriends of various financial hotshots, who turned up as the main attraction at some banking conference after-party he went to. Instantaneously he knew he had to have her. That may turn out to be your most expensive acquisition yet, DuHaine quipped.
He has found himself in the elevator, dropping smoothly down to the restaurant. The doors open and a young Asian girl is standing waiting for him, iPad poised. He notices a discrete silver A-monitor attached to her crisp white blouse and after a few questions and an introduction, her name is Amy, she draws his attention to it, saying, this is my pleasure-in-service reading which is displayed here and also recorded for training purposes, some customers prefer it if we turn off the display while waiting on them, would you like the display off or on.
I would like you to keep it on please, he says, watching the monitor, a constantly flickering numerical display like a stopwatch; it stalls for a moment then pushes higher, a reading of 9.2.
He smiles at her. You are very good, he says.
She smiles back. 9.3.
Actually, he almost says to her, I am responsible for this little piece of hardware, for its dissemination, for the massive boost in value of BioX’s market cap. It was my last really profitable venture before I started to Curect. She leads him to his table. Attractive girl, if Nastya was here she would be alternately scolding and flirting with her, generating as much sexual tension as possible, the evening opening up perhaps in all kinds of unexpected directions or shutting down suddenly, leaving a cloud of unresolved affect clinging to everything like static.
Ah yes, Nastya and he in Tokyo, Kabuki-Cho, extraordinary evenings. It was here of course that he first encountered the Affective Monitoring Service being put to use: a group of seven grimly determined men fucking a beautifully blank and pliable, baby-faced, large-breasted Japanese girl of sixteen, bending her into all kinds of positions and applying all kinds of devices to her as she stared shell shocked at them all through perfectly round, surgically adjusted, baby-blue eyes, each one trying to get her monitor score up to 100, the readout displayed above her head on a retro LCD screen, the room gaudy, almost like an art-deco circus tent, and indeed it was reminiscent of the lines of strong men queuing up at the town fair for the test-your-strength machines. It was almost comical to watch, the mordant theatre of it, the way the younger men allowed themselves to be pushed out of the way by these sagging corporate samurai, who showed them how to really do it, the girl instinctively observing the age-hierarchy and through whatever means she could pushing the Affective Monitor reading higher for the middle management and the higher ranks, so no one lost face. Never beat your boss at golf used to be the key to corporate success; never out-perform on Affective Monitor readings with a teenage whore seemingly its modern equivalent.
Beep. He checks his phone. The Gopher.
Shard at 10, may be a bit late.
They were taken there by a group of business associates of Nastya’s whom he believed, though he never sought to confirm it, had been supplying them with blonde Russian and Ukrainian hostesses for several years. This was where his investment in affective management began, it had yet to creep further into the Japanese service industry at that stage but of course he immediately saw the potential, imagined if this became standard issue to everyone working in customer service worldwide. Certain professions have resisted it of course, teachers most notably, but eventually they too will succumb. He believes the market applications of these products, now prerequisites in many prenuptial contracts, will be far reaching, that they will permanently alter relations between people. No Affective Monitor? What have you got to hide? What we want least is to be deceived, we crave truth and authenticity, to see our effect on others truly, to seek congruence, to banish doubt. Or perhaps that night in Tokyo revealed a certain truth to him, that what one craved most of all in making love to a woman was to obliterate all the other lovers she may have had, to be seen to be good at, better at fucking by other men. No doubt if Calvert were here he would say perhaps, to destroy one’s father, to finally heal the wound that our father gave more pleasure to our mother than we ever could, that in the end she chose him, that you had to reject your mother, give her up, while your father got to enjoy her in unthinkable ways. Yes, yes, this will of course be Calvert’s thesis; he is starting, he thinks, to get a sense of where Calvert will try to lead him.
As a consequence of all his time spent in Tokyo he speaks more Japanese than Chinese but he can read a menu and his pronunciation is excellent. He has, he was told, a good ear for tones, he thinks of his musical training as a child and he takes pleasure in his waitress’ surprised smile and the polite, unenforced reverence in her bow as she turns crisply to place his order. The duck he was tempted by, but then the fat content. Instead he has ordered the famous Dim Sum. There are only two other tables occupied, disastrous for a Saturday evening, surely, even at these prices, both couples Asian, though he guesses the couple nearest to him are Singaporean, the others across in the booth are definitely mainland.
He is a notorious China bear, there have been some successes thus far certainly, he accepts that, but this century is American, as was the last, as every century will be. The Chinese themselves, he thinks, view China as something to escape from, a resource to exploit, land and labour, in the quest to live elsewhere. The ecological degradation, the unbreathable air, the extraordinary cost, the endless worry about falling out of favour with the men at the top, the arbitrariness of law. To live there, in Beijing or Shanghai, how could that compare with the deep and burnished satisfaction of being driven through New York or Paris or London, of running in the deep grooves of history, of being inducted into those profound and venerable continuums of power for which London will always be the epicentre. That sense of cleaving cleanly through sedimented layers of history that a man in a black BMW with blacked out windows edging through a mob might feel, hearing the sirens cutting open the night, the distant fires, the rolling news reports and helicopter footage.
And yet he feels they have missed an opportunity to more deeply marketise their economy, here they could lead the way. A surge of excitement again, that has him laying down his fork and spreading his fingers out on the table. He should be careful; he will cause hormonal imbalances, compromise his digestion. They tried and have been trying with only limited success to interest the Chinese in their geo-engineering initiative. It may yet bear fruit, luminous, magnificent, exotically mutant fruit, silver apples, but he fears that they are too conservative, too timid to push on, to see more experiments with the biosphere as the solution rather than the problem. Imagine the world transformed, the full and final death of anything natural, the dried up lakes, and melted ice caps, the levelled mountains and artificial islands, the algal blooms roiling leagues deep under the crimson sun, the animals transformed, spliced, hybridised into a bestiary of extraordinary new strains, the flora and fauna of a world in which all original forms have been altered, superseded. Yes these other worlds we dream of, these other life forms, are simply this world, ourselves, and what the relentless seeding and reaping of the market, it’s viral enormity, will make of us. Will it be good or bad? He scoffs at such a question. It will be beyond such considerations, who can judge from this vantage point with this system of ethics, these concerns, the life there on the other side of the event, past the singularity when the last scrap of uninflected matter has been harnessed and transformed, transubstantiated. This is the divine hope and terror; he feels it swelling through him, the full and final cutting of the cord, the lowering of a screen, nature no more.
But the Chinese will not do it, they are not radical enough. No matter how old the Chinese state itself might be, it remains a new country in the only sense that matters, new to Capitalism and conscious, just like Russia, of its late entry, its backwardness, its riding on the coat tails of systems of thought and practices invented and improved, innovated on here in the old world.
The girls by the entrance are showing a higher level of animation than he would normally expect, his waitress Amy glancing discreetly twice in his direction. She nods and approaches, smiling.
Just to say, sir. If you are planning to leave the building or if you have any guests arriving there is a disturbance on the ground floor. Protesters. She smiles. We will keep you updated if you wish.
He smiles and nods. Ah, that’s interesting; he sensed that somehow didn’t he? The vibrations, the impact of a distant event rippling through him, nudging his thoughts in a particular direction.
Not necessary, he says.
Thank you. Your main course will be with you in just a moment.
Beep. Message.
Can’t get into Shard. Police blocked road.
He dislikes looking at his phone during meals or in public places in general, this low-grade browsing is another habit he has assiduously broken, better to let the thoughts run free, to hear and observe oneself, to be alive to those vibrations, rather than this constant distraction, though he understands of course that his wealth has depended upon the web, the now almost universal engagement. He clicks on BBC News and sees that whatever is happening 35 floors below him justifies a video feed and a series of live updates, he calls up Twitter and follows #burstthebubble. He recognises many of the profiles, has a certain sympathy for protesters; he believes they are wrong but admires their Libertarian conviction, is certain one or two of them will come out of it all well.
He should, perhaps go down into the street, talk to them. Is he in danger of becoming a recluse?
He messages back.
Please stay nearby, will endeavour to arrange a meet/pick up.
Back in the apartment, he goes into his study and settles into the ergonomic smart chair that activates the prototype Nanotop DuHaine has passed on to him and which he is thinking through in his consultancy role for the recent start-up Biobot. The English Rose questioned him again yesterday about the company’s role and that of his other “mafia” friends in commercialising technologies innovated elsewhere in the public sphere, whilst raising the issue of tax avoidance and so on. He is in a position these days to wave such considerations away, but really he feels that they owe the Government little or nothing; yes they have provided innovations, but without their zeal and expertise in markets they would be piling up unused in some warehouse somewhere instead of expanding and enriching the lives of a global citizenry. Tax disincentivises; let the others pay tax, genius must be exempt from all constraints to flourish, especially mere financial constraints.
He smoothes out his jawline, closes his eyes, feels that he should perhaps deploy techniques of mindfulness but instead reflects on where the anger he felt then might have come from, where in his upbringing, his relations to others he might find its seed and source. Distractedly he removes the aquamarine blue button, about the size of a five pound coin, from the desk draw, presses it between thumb and forefinger until it activates, places it on the desk top, watches it assemble, screen, keyboard. They have been debating the assembly time and it is a remarkable thing to see, the twenty-second ambient piece commissioned from William Basinski suddenly fizzing and surging in seemingly from nowhere but in reality from the clusters of invisible, tiny speakers that have positioned themselves around his ears as it takes shape. Remarkably beautiful but also time consuming, hence the option he is insisting on, that the assembly mode has variable speeds. Microsecond assembly in which the laptop appears to simply instantly pop into the world from nowhere is a no less remarkable spectacle. Move too slowly and it will assemble around your hand and already some of the researchers are wearing and customising them. As usual, wearable technology comes about, but through other means, through the desire to adapt and customise, to re-appropriate.
He calls up his numerous feeds and streams, uses Spreed to power through them, making his mind as emptily receptive to the accelerating letters and images as possible. He has managed to reach levels of input in which it is only later he finds he has recorded or has access to the information. At the point of delivery he has no conscious recognition of the content at all.
Yes the moment is near, the horizon drawing ever closer, exponentially, so that suddenly in a flash what seemed remote and impossible is upon us. He knows this from his parascending, one of the activities they all used to indulge in back in the day. Groundrush is the term; how the earth, the fields and planes, roads and rivers, houses seem to stay suspended at the same distance as one floats idly down until suddenly with tremendous speed and violence it is all springing up to meet you. His understanding is that at the Singularity Labs they are already working on something called Breach, an interface that sends nanobots into the bloodstream of the user on activation. Clariq, working on a crude prototype and the guinea pig, compares the experience of his first nano-hit to Albert Hofman’s first pipette drop of LSD, only infinitely more pleasurable, infinitely more empowering, offering not mystical insight but metaphysical mastery. His news feed informs him that they have already linked up with major pharma companies.
And yet, there is some other way in which he is basically bored of technology. Johannes sends down a message to the concierge to let Graeme Ferris in but he seems to be impossible to contact. Very well, he will do it himself. He looks at his phone and its seems that the disturbance has been largely contained, various aerial shots from the police helicopters he has been watching circle around the building from his apartment window show the smallish group of protesters well kettled in one corner of the square, repeated slow motion shots of youths being Tasered and cuffed, dragged off into vans.
It will be difficult for Graeme Ferris to enter no doubt, to get past the police. And Nastya, later. Perhaps she will stay elsewhere tonight. Shame, recently they bought a pair of studded White-burn high heeled pumps he had been keen to see her in.
He messages Graeme Ferris.
Please come to the main entrance I will admit you.
Then as an afterthought as he heads for the bathroom. Text, Ferris.
Please send a photo for recognition.
The phone beeps in acknowledgement. He has had a Hitachi 675 toilet installed and as the lights in the bathroom flick on the lid rises ceremoniously.
Message.
Can’t get near the building, Police cordon. There is a photo attached.
Well, today has presented numerous unexpected twists and turns. He takes a deep breath, goes up on his heels, smooths his jawline. He has a sudden desire for a whiskey or a glass of wine; even though he does everything he can to avoid alcohol. The occasional glass with DuHaine, the odd mouthful on vineyard tours as they continue to lay down the cellar in the house in Patagonia.
He takes the lift all the way down, strides purposefully through the lobby waving away the concerned expressions and cautious entreaties of the staff not to go outside and then across the square. He spots a USG Met attachment officer, the distinctive high viz branded armband, and heads for her, shows her Graeme Ferris’ photo and instructs her to help him locate him. There’s a group of onlookers bunched up at the entrance to the square, the kettled protesters over in one corner, thirty or so people ringed by twice that number of police in full riot gear. He is not afraid to go down onto the street; here he is, among them, almost.
Graeme Ferris has pushed his way to the front and is weaving his head around to attract attention as they arrive. The USG Guard approaches one of the police officers, explains that Johannes is a resident in one of the flats, that he has business with this admittedly rather dishevelled looking youth on the other side of the cordon. It has started spitting slightly, the smell of petrol in the air, traffic stalled and backed up honking all along London Bridge, flashing blue lights, circling helicopters, more coming in over the river, hundreds of phones up in the air, recording the scene. The Police Officer is initially diffident, blankly explaining to them that no one is to be admitted to the building, that this is an on-going Level 5 operation, until he shows her the exemption permit he has gone to some pains and expense to acquire from the Met’s VIP programme, at which point she talks quickly into her radio and then points at Graeme Ferris, flicks her wrist back. You, in!