‘Now I remember what I was supposed to tell you about that adorable little widow and Aatos,’ Irma said suddenly. ‘He had asked her politely for a glass of whisky, and she had let him into her apartment.’
‘She keeps whisky in her home? This petite widow?’ Siiri asked in surprise.
‘Why wouldn’t she? Whisky is good for you. My doctor has ordered me to have a glass of whisky every night for my . . . all of this.’ To Anna-Liisa’s satisfaction, Irma cut the diversion short and returned to her original train of thought. As it turned out, Aatos Jännes’s visit hadn’t been particularly pleasant. The whisky had barely been poured into the tumblers before he had grown over-bold. Eila had not offered any details, but from the intensity of her indignation, Irma had deduced that Aatos had crossed the bounds of propriety.
‘On the other hand, this Eila is a rather timid soul, so how do we know what sort of Sunday School girl she is.’
‘It seems we have a real Don Giovanni in our midst,’ Siiri said, and Irma smiled as if she wouldn’t be at all disappointed to cross paths with a bull moose among the spruces.
Chapter 7
The young man’s long, bounding strides were familiar to all of them. But he had otherwise updated his look, as they said. In place of the waxed hair he now had an even more remarkable coiffure: his hair had been shaved everywhere except the crown of his head, where it formed a blond strip and a small bun-like topknot: the precise opposite of an ageing man’s hairstyle.
‘Maybe he wants to communicate that his testosterone levels are still high, since he has so much hair growing on top of his head that he can afford to shave it bald everywhere else,’ Irma said loudly to Siiri, who was sitting next to her.
Former Sunset Grove project manager, current Experience Director & Front-Line Support Jerry Siilinpää had slipped his feet into some sort of toddler slippers that had a separate pouch for every toe. It was as if he were barefoot, even though he wasn’t. Combined with the suit that was too small and too tight, the slippers looked like gorilla feet. But in every other way, Jerry Siilinpää was the same. He vigorously bustled around at his laptop at the front of the room and eventually managed to connect it to the video projector, which started spitting out keywords and illustrative images on a screen that was far too large.
‘GERONTECHNOLOGY: BRINGING JOY TO SENIORS’
The words formed gradually on the screen; at first they were a jumble and vibrated unpleasantly, but soon they found their place in time with breezy computerized music and formed the topic of today’s Evenings at Sunset Grove presentation. A relatively small crowd had gathered in the auditorium, as Jerry’s introduction to caregiving technology was too convoluted for most residents of Sunset Grove to comprehend. Anna-Liisa and Margit had taken their regular places in the middle of the front row, while Siiri and Irma sat a little further back, so they could whisper to each other without disturbing their gorilla-footed presenter.
‘Hey, everyone, it’s great to see all you guys here,’ Jerry began, clicking a new graphic kaleidoscope onto the wide screen. ‘I know you’ve all heard about gerontechnology, but it might seem a little dada.’
‘. . . even though it’s the latest,’ Irma whispered in Siiri’s ear so loudly that Anna-Liisa shot them an angry look.
‘The latest, that’s exactly right.’
Jerry wrote his favourite term on the flipchart and underlined it with a red marker. Then he started talking about humanized automation. A flood of arrows and huge numbers and fatigued sprites that were supposed to look chipper inundated the wall-sized screen. Siiri tried to make sense of the visual presentation, but the more she focused, the worse she felt.
‘All right, gang, so we’re all aware of the employment situation in Finland. The population structure is leading to a permanent cost deficit, and in the long run that’s an impossible equation. Over the next twenty years, the ageing population will form an economic ball-and-chain that’s just going to be far too heavy for Finland to carry. That being the case, the highly respected international credit-rating agency Goofy’s has estimated that Finland is going to end up among the so-called super-ageing countries. Doesn’t sound too good, does it?’
Jerry Siilinpää gave the audience a moment to consider their fatherland’s fate as one of the world’s most super-ageing countries. Each and every one of them felt guilty for this shameful state. When the mood started sinking from glum to black, Jerry once more took charge of the situation like an experienced monologue actor. ‘But let me assure you: there’s nothing to worry about, you can do something about this. And not just something, BTW, but quite a lot.’
‘That means by the way, btw,’ Ritva interpreted from the row behind Siiri and Irma.
‘Exactly. Sustainable consumption and everyday technology, they’re the solutions to everything that’s bringing us down.’
Long words and spinning arrows flashed across the wall. Happy-looking sprites started pushing up from the bottom of the screen; one was sitting in a sailing boat and two were cycling aimlessly. Jerry spoke of the growing importance of free time, quality of life and everyday design.
‘Encounters and meeting places are key.’
His presentation had advanced to cosiness, which he described as a factor that increased a human touch in one’s life. It meant striving for an increasingly unique look by decorating with recycled furniture and introducing elements of rusticity alongside the traditional materials of the automated world, and in doing so steering the service experience in a direction that would generate the right sort of fermentation.
Siiri’s head was thrumming and her stomach was churning; apparently some sort of fermentation was taking place there. Colours and strange words danced on the screen: acoustic listening chair, sensitive smart-tag, design-intensive product, interactive telemedicine, and stimulating multisensory auxiliary reality. She tried to focus on her fat ankles, but curiosity won out, and so she kept glancing up at Jerry Siilinpää’s visually over-stimulating audit.
‘What bugs you most when you guys think about automation and technology? People’s attitudes. Exactly.’
Jerry was off and running. He paced the auditorium in long strides, waving his hands around. He pointed vigorously, alternating between the screen and some innocent resident who was trying to keep up with his vision.
‘This is a digital revolution, the best ever, truly amazing. And you guys can help change the world, too.’
‘Aren’t we a little too old for this?’
It was Anna-Liisa. Her voice strove for friendliness, even though it was strained by fatigue and frustration. When Jerry didn’t immediately parry this attack, the others took heart, too. A barrage of questions and random catcalls rained down on Jerry. Tauno demanded Sunset Grove’s electronics be tossed in the lake and young women be brought in instead. Someone else wanted employees who were a bit older, as opposed to such inexperienced ones, no matter how sweet they might be. One insisted caregivers be Finnish, and the others got mad, because being old was no excuse for racism and many of their best caregiving experiences were with immigrants.
‘But I’m going to keep saying “negro”, it’s not a bad word. And neither is Russki,’ said an overweight woman sitting next to the resident with a Somali background. The Somali-Finn stared at the hands resting in her lap so expressionlessly that it was hard to tell if she understood the conversation surging around her, or if she was simply accustomed to not showing her feelings.
‘If one of those coal-black men shows up one morning to wash me, it’s going to terrify a feeble old woman like me.’
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Eila. No one is going to wash you. The toilet has an automatic rinse, one of those cosy humanized inventions. Haven’t you noticed?’ It was Tauno. He had advanced up the aisle and was now standing almost flush with the front row, fanning his hands furiously.
‘How come there’s no bingo any more?’ asked the woman holding the seal pup in her lap. She still had a hair curler snarled at the ba
ck of her head.
‘Bingo!’ Siilinpää exclaimed, dashed up to the flipchart and printed out the word in large, childish letters with a green marker. ‘Let’s not let things escalate too far. Bingo is a good point, I’ll pick it up from here.’ He pointed at the woman petting the seal pup, who didn’t notice, because at that moment she was whispering something to her little robot that made its tail wag wildly.
Siilinpää felt that bingo didn’t require expensive resources, by which he meant people. Why, anyone at all could play a fun game of bingo whenever they wanted by themselves with a computer; it was a cinch. Suddenly the screen was filled with a storm of websites shooting from different directions that vanished with a pop in the middle of the screen. Every website was an example of the world’s easiest bingo game, and you could find them all from Sunset Grove’s smartwalls, if you just bothered to search for them there.
‘So we would play bingo alone?’ Margit asked.
‘Exactly. It doesn’t take two to bingo, just to tango.’
Jerry started yodelling something in English and then laughed heartily to demonstrate to his grave-faced audience that he was lightening the mood.
‘This is epic. Totally amazing!’
Then he compared bingo to a health centre and explained why they didn’t need doctors any more either, any more than they needed a girl to call out the bingo numbers. Mobile appointments were the latest, and the integration of various electronic systems turned doctors from experts into service providers. And because all service was self-service, doctors also plummeted fast and hard on the digital service roller coaster.
In the middle of the whirlwind of terms, Siiri once more made out the word ‘humanity’. Jerry pondered the deepest essence of humanity and rather speedily arrived at communication. He felt humankind had exceeded the limits of human communication. There was too much communication, and statistically that caused misunderstanding, generated unnecessary emotional reactions and was overrated.
‘Misunderstandings always arise from emotions, am I right? And emotions bring in anger and irritation and that other negative stuff that makes life a drag. Who disagrees with me? No one.’
The presentation had grown almost psychedelic, so rapidly did the complicated words and animated presentations ricochet in and out. The adorable little woman complained she was feeling nauseous, and Tauno started cursing more and more emphatically. Siiri held her head and tried to force herself to obey: do not look at the wall. Irma looked pale, too, even though she claimed to find the presentation exciting.
‘Computers never miscommunicate or cause misunderstandings. Computers don’t interpret your tone of voice or mood; they just do what you tell them to and listen. It’s that simple. Best ever.’
Jerry described humanized automation as if it were more miraculous than God. In this instance, humanity meant that some computers followed voice commands, recognized people and movements and reacted to changes in temperature or even the expressions on the user’s face. And because they were computers, not people, they didn’t cause confusion and stress, both of which were especially dangerous things for the panther crowd. He had used the term ‘the panther crowd’ to refer to them in the past, but no one was exactly sure what he meant.
‘Silence is liberating! When humanized automation is your companion, you have the freedom to not communicate. You get to decide. And when we go further down this path, we come to gerontechnology and humanized automation increasing the end user’s long-term independence, autonomy and freedom of choice. That means you decide what you’re going to do. Is that epic or what? Such environments, like Sunset Grove here, are cost-efficient, customer-friendly, and it’s both of those things 24/7. Exactly. This isn’t dada; this is the latest. This is the solution to the ageing-induced welfare-deficit problem recessionary societies are facing, not some prehistoric HSS revamps, hey, get real, that stuff confuses normal folks like us.’
The adorable little woman threw up. A smooth brown porridge sprayed everywhere, because in her panic she clamped her hand to her mouth. Those sitting next to and in front of her got their share of the shower, but the majority of the gruel was in Eila’s lap and on the floor. One of Eila’s neighbours got upset, another one didn’t understand what was happening, and a third vomited, too. More of the brown soup splattered to the floor and the back of the seal pup stroker. This was what the 3D-printed multicoloured food turned into in the stomach, of course, as when primary colours are mixed together, they create brown.
‘It’s that video. It’s impossible to watch without getting sick,’ Siiri remarked to Irma.
Tauno gave orders to the nearby troops, and the old Somali-Finnish woman who had been sitting silently throughout the presentation led Eila from the room. Someone brought water, one looked for a cleaning robot, and the seal pup stroker tried to take off her clothes. Two robots woke up in their respective corners and hummed over to swab the deck. Anna-Liisa and Margit guided people out by an unsoiled path so they wouldn’t track the mess all over the premises of the pilot project in monitored care. Siiri and Irma both felt so nauseous that they decided to go upstairs to rest. As she stood, Siiri spied two rats between the rows of seats, making their way to the scene of the vomiting. She was too exhausted to react; she just tiredly noted the rats’ eagerness. Maybe the rats would be of some use cleaning up this mess.
Everyone did their part, either out of a desire to help or out of confusion. Only Jerry Siilinpää had frozen at the lectern in his gorilla slippers. He had never envisioned a turn of events like this in his worst nightmares, and he was at a complete loss as to what to do; nothing like this had been covered in his national defence courses or in his continuing education in innovative business strategies. At that moment, he secretly longed for staff, even Sinikka Sundström, former director of Sunset Grove, who knew how to dig into her positivity pouch for handfuls of good cheer and make problems disappear with two claps of her hands. But Sinikka Sundström and her positivity pouches were in Pakistan at the moment, volunteering at a children’s hospital after having stepped onto the so-called pension pathway, which meant receiving full unemployment compensation until she reached retirement age. Jerry Siilinpää was Sunset Grove’s sole employee. He shut his laptop, turned off the video projector, tore the topmost piece of paper from the flipchart, and packed his belongings into an orange satchel that in a previous existence had been a life raft. Then he flopped down at one of the desks and logged on to Facebook.
Chapter 8
Siiri tried to pick up the pace as she walked down her corridor, although this proved to be more effective at the level of intent than action. She knew she was late for the morning card game yet again, but her feet simply wouldn’t move any faster. After all, she had to remain cognizant of her balance, as the most foolish thing a ninety-seven-year-old could do was to take a tumble because she was hurrying and break a hip.
As always, the corridor was deserted. Ghostly lights flickered on by themselves as her journey proceeded, but they reacted so slowly that she was constantly stepping into darkness and leaving oases of light in her wake. Just before she reached the elevator, she nearly crashed into a wheelchair in the gloom. It was a shock to the system: her heart started pounding nastily, she teetered dangerously, and she felt a stabbing pain in her head. A resident she didn’t recognize, presumably a woman, was asleep in the wheelchair: the compact figure looked like a black lump with cropped hair that glowed white in the dark. And then the bright lights flashed on, illuminating the scene of their violent encounter. Siiri saw a motionless seal pup in the woman’s lap and a hair curler on the floor.
‘I beg your pardon, I’m so sorry. It was so dark I didn’t see you. I didn’t bump you too badly, did I? I’m sorry? Are you . . . are you all right?’
Neither the woman or her seal pup reacted. Perhaps she had fallen asleep; that happened all the time. And the seal pup’s battery had apparently run out. Siiri decided to let the woman sleep in peace. As far as Siiri knew, Parliament hadn’t y
et interfered with an old person’s right to sleep in her wheelchair in the corridor, only with the possibility of dying on the floor of her own home. Siiri continued on her way and hopped into the elevator, which was already calling to her invitingly.
‘Going. Down.’
There was a robot in the elevator, one of those funny little cleaning gadgets. Siiri greeted it cheerfully and watched it bustle about. Apparently someone had thrown up in the elevator. The contraption whirred at the brown muck in the corner, but something must have been amiss, as instead of rinsing and scrubbing away the filth, it just spread it around.
‘Look at what you’ve done!’ Siiri cried to the robot. It stopped. ‘Can you hear me? Can you understand me?’ The machine continued whirring and smearing the liquid around. Siiri stamped her foot angrily and raised her voice: ‘Stop! You’re not cleaning, you’re making a mess!’ The robot stopped. It flashed a green light at Siiri and then a red one before retreating shamefacedly into the corner. ‘Good robot. You ought to think about what you just did,’ Siiri said, bending down to pat the machine. It didn’t react. ‘I see, you’re not as human as Jerry boasted you were. You don’t react to touch.’ The creature let out a little whimper and turned off. Maybe that was its way of saying goodbye to Siiri, as the elevator had reached the first floor.
‘Doors. Opening. Please. Exit.’
So someone else had vomited. It had been going on for some time since Jerry Siilinpää’s presentation, so it might well be an epidemic, not just a bout of general nausea brought on by Jerry’s video.
‘There’s some virus going around,’ Anna-Liisa said, sighing heavily. ‘Norovirus, perhaps.’
Irma was playing solitaire because Anna-Liisa was afraid that the stomach flu would spread through the cards, which was perfectly possible, although Irma claimed to have washed the cards with her own two hands. It had been a terrifically time-consuming undertaking. She had wiped each of the cards individually with a hot rag and then dried them. Two times fifty-two cards plus the jokers. With surprising speed, she calculated that that added up to 110. With washing and drying, that meant 220 treatments.
The End of Sunset Grove Page 6
