“No, idiot! One after the other. You think I’m some kind of pervert or something?”
“You don’t want me to answer that.”
“Anyway,” Higgs said, “you should have come. We could have had a couple of drinks, I could have hooked you up with a girl or two, it would have been fearsome.”
“Thanks,” Huxley said, “but I don’t have time for things like that. I got work to do.”
Higgs sighed. “Sensei, we all got work to do. But all work and no fun makes Hux a dull boy. I’ll never understand why you keep doing this to yourself.”
“Do what? Work? Hm, let me see, why do I work? Oh, right, I remember! I work because I have bloody bills to pay!”
“We all have bloody bills to pay, sensei. What I mean is why do you have to get up at six on New Year’s Day? You’re your own boss, you don’t have to work six to four. You can start working at ten, or in the afternoon.”
“You know I’m a morning person,” Huxley said. “The early bird …”
“The early bird is grumpy and gets eaten by the cat.”
Huxley shrugged. “I like cats.”
“Yeah,” Higgs sneered. “You like cats, but you don’t like pussy, eh?”
“That’s not true!”
“Honestly, you don’t know what you’re missing. One of the girls I had tonight had honey implants.”
“Honey implants?”
“Yes!” Higgs said. “You know, like, when you suck on fake breasts and flavored juice comes out?”
“That sounds disgusting.”
“It’s fearsome, sensei! And the other girl, she was so moist, by the time I got my hand down there, her knickers were soaked in her juices.”
Huxley rolled his eyes. “And what flavor was that?”
“Pussy flavor. And don’t roll your eyes at me!”
“How did you know I was rolling my eyes at you?”
“Sensei, I’ve known you for a quarter century. I know when you roll your eyes.”
“I’m only twenty-two,” Huxley said absentmindedly because he suddenly realized that he was already standing in front of Java the Hut inside Paddington Station. He had no recollection of how he’d gotten there.
“Don’t be such a nitpicker. You know what I’m talking about.”
“All right,” Huxley said. “Listen, I have to go. Talk to you later.”
“Ay, talk to you later, sensei. Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year.”
When Huxley terminated the connection with a gentle tap on his eep, he looked around to make sure he really was where he thought he was. The last thing he remembered was crossing Eastbourne Terrace. After that he must have crossed two other streets, made a left turn into the station and another left turn towards the coffee shop, but he couldn’t remember any of it. It was a phenomenon commonly known as suimin. Actually, the correct expression was suiminjiyūkōshō and it literally meant sleepwalking, but since most people didn’t speak Japanese and couldn’t be bothered to pronounce this behemoth of a word in its full length, they simply called it suimin and associated it with swimming, as in swimming through a crowd or through traffic in a trance-like state. Suimin was the subject of many a scientific study that sought to examine how people wearing augmented reality glasses or contact lenses and reading, watching TV, or making video calls subconsciously managed to get safely from one point to another. Safely, in most cases, that is. There were accidents, some of them fatal, where people fell down stairs or walked into fast moving traffic, but long term studies seemed to suggest that since the advent of AR glasses a hundred years ago, the number of fatal accidents had gone down from one in a hundred thousand to three in a million. Human brains were slowly adapting to the new technology, and being able to navigate a megalopolis like London without looking or thinking about it proved to be a real Darwinian advantage. Since people usually started wearing AR devices at a very young age—Huxley had got his first pair when he was six—those who couldn’t do it died before they could pass on their inferior genes. Those who could do it usually passed their ability on to their offspring. It was evolution at work, right in front of people’s eyes. Literally.
“Meitner,” Huxley said, “send AR logs to Restless Mind Labs. Full video and audio.”
“Specify time frame,” Meitner said.
“From when I left the flat until the end of my conversation with Higgs.”
“AR log sent.”
“Thanks, Meitner.”
“You’re welcome, Huxley.”
Restless Mind Labs was one of the scientific institutes that specialized in suimin research. Huxley was one of their voluntary guinea pigs and shared relevant data with them on a regular basis, usually a couple of times per week. They would then analyze the data—video and audio recordings as well as a number of his life functions such as his heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar level, and the movement of his eyes—to gain a deeper insight into what kind of activities might cause and affect instances of suimin. Whenever he submitted his AR logs to Restless Mind Labs, he effectively gave up the last bit of the little privacy a twenty-second century city dweller had left, but Huxley didn’t mind. The advancement of science wasn’t possible without a certain degree of self-sacrifice, and besides, the compensation Restless Mind Labs paid him for his cooperation was rather generous. In an average month it amounted to nearly a quarter of his income, depending on the quality of data he submitted. People slipping into suimin while reading or watching videos were the most common cases that didn’t pay anyway near as much as instances where suimin occurred without any visual distraction such as the audio-only conversation Huxley had just had with Higgs. The most lucrative suimins were those that happened without any visual or acoustic distraction whatsoever, cases where a person simply got lost in their own thoughts. These cases were rare and usually required a follow up one-on-one conversation with a Restless Mind Labs research assistant to determine the exact physical and psychological circumstances that led to the suimin. These conversations were almost like free psychotherapy, and in Huxley’s case they had been revealing a pattern suggesting that if he was thinking about food, fiction, or himself, he was much more likely to slip into suimin than if he was thinking about politics, sports, or celebrity gossip.
“Good morning, sir, and welcome to Java the Hut. Your name please?”
The surprisingly cheerful voice of the young female barista womanning the pre-order takeaway counter pulled Huxley from the brink of another suimin. Dang it, Huxley thought, slipping into suimin while thinking about suimin, RML would pay a small fortune for that.
“Sir?”
“Yes!” Huxley said, snapping out of his absentmindedness. “Sorry. Huxley. The name is Huxley.”
“That’s all right, sir,” the girl said with an irritatingly pleasant smile. “And your last name?”
“My last name?”
The girl, still smiling, nodded like a teacher encouraging a squeamish ten-year-old to jump off of the three-meter springboard for the first time.
Huxley looked at the queue forming behind him before he asked the girl, “How many Huxleys do you think you have waiting here?”
The girl checked the screen of her cash register when her supervisor stepped up behind her and whispered in her ear, “You’re not allowed to divulge that information.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, looking at Huxley. “I’m not allowed to divulge …”
“It was a rhetorical question,” Huxley interrupted her with an irritated smile. “The name is Pendergast. Huxley Pendergast.”
“Thank you, sir. Let me get your order.”
“Please.”
As the girl scurried away, Huxley rolled his eyes and sighed. He had never been asked his full name when he picked up his order at Java the Hut, or any other food dispensary for that matter, which was just as well. He wasn’t particularly fond of his name, because it was such a mouthful. Huxley Pendergast. His parents, like most others, had been unable to withstand the fad-tur
ned-fashion-trend that had swept the world like the plague in the last two decades of the twenty-first century. Despite the gamma ray burst of 2079 that had killed more than half a billion people in the Americas and parts of Europe and Africa, global population had been pushing twelve billion, and it had become increasingly difficult to give a newborn child a name that hadn’t already been taken by thousands of others. And so, by the mid 2080s, it had become fashionable to name children after famous scientists, actors, and authors. Soon the world’s classrooms were teeming with Darwins, Faradays, Maxwells, and Newtons, with Goldings, Salingers, Dickenses, and Ibbsens. Much to Huxley’s relief there weren’t too many people bearing his own name, because as scientists and authors went, Thomas, Aldous, and Julian were relatively obscure, at least more obscure than, say, Peter Higgs or Franz Kafka. Thankworthily, Huxley’s parents, unlike many others, had been able to withstand the temptation to blindly follow another fad that had come up not too long after the first; the fad of giving children a name that started with the same letter as their last name. With great pity Huxley remembered a primary school classmate whose unfortunate name—Hubble Huddleston—had made him the target of much mockery and bullying. And then there was his and Higgs’s friend from secondary school, Orwell Orson Osmond. Even their science teacher had been unable to resist mocking the poor chap by constantly referring to him as O3, but somehow Orwell had managed to turn this curse into a virtue and started calling himself Ozone which, Huxley had to admit, was actually rather cool and made Ozone one of the more popular kids at their school. Nevertheless, Huxley was grateful that his parents hadn’t named him Poe, Pavlov, or Picasso Pendergast. Huxley had never been exceptionally impressed by the idea of turning famous last names into painfully embarrassing first names, at least not for real people who had live with their names their entire lives, but when it came to naming his VPA, he hadn’t been able to resist. He had always been fascinated with strong, assertive women, and that’s what was he was looking for in a VPA. Huxley himself was of a lazy, idle disposition, and he had no use for a VPA that encouraged his listlessness and reinforced his avolition. He needed someone who would tell him in no uncertain terms what he had to do and—if necessary—kick his ass to make sure he did it. Unfortunately, most commercially available VPAs resembled virtual slaves, so Huxley decided to program his own. The result was Meitner, named after the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, a strong, powerful woman with a name so sharp-edged and stern that the mere sound of it made you want to click your heels.
“There you are, sir,” the girl said and placed a paper bag containing Huxley’s breakfast on the counter. “That’ll be a hundred and thirty-five Euros.”
Stone-faced, Huxley stared at her until she double-checked the screen of her cash register.
“And … that’s already been paid for when you placed the order online. Sorry.”
“First day on the job?” Huxley asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, her face turning a pale shade of pink. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Well, good luck,” Huxley said and grabbed his breakfast. As he turned and walked towards the exit, he heard the girl call after him, “Thanks for your business, Mr. Pendergast. Please visit us again. Happy New Year!”
As Huxley stepped out into the humid early-morning heat and made a right turn onto Praed Street, he found himself in a state of bewilderment, wondering who that person was that had just picked up his breakfast. Asking a nameless coffee shop worker bee sarcastic questions about how many Huxleys were waiting for their breakfast and whether it was the girl’s first day on the job didn’t sound like him at all. In fact, it didn’t sound like anyone he knew. Picking up pre-ordered food was part of an industrialized routine that served only one purpose: to feed people quickly and without a fuss, like cattle. The process was time-tested and designed to work smoothly without any delays or interruptions. Most people who picked up their meals from a pre-order counter did so because they were in a hurry, and service personnel was paid by the amount of customers they served, so making friendly yet time-consuming conversation was in nobody’s interest. For a coffee shop girl to ask a customer about his life story and talking like a waterfall was most unusual, and even if it was her first day on the job, she ought to have known better than to waste not only Huxley’s time but also the time of the customers waiting in line behind him.
Perhaps she was born on the moon, Huxley thought. Two or three years ago, the first generation of humans born in LuCo, the lunar colony, about two dozen of them, had visited the home planet of their parents for the very first time. They were all young people in their late teens, and their verdict had been almost unanimous: they hated the place. Earth, that is. They hated the noise, they hated the pollution, they hated the gravity, the weather, and the way life was organized. LuCo was relatively small—only a few hundred people lived and worked there—so when the first lunar children came to earth, they were overwhelmed by the amount of people they had to deal with and by the speed at which human interaction took place on the mother planet. At the same time they were underwhelmed by the lack of purpose earthlings seemed to have. Down here, there were sports and cultural events that attracted live audiences of hundreds of thousands of people, and video entertainment that was watched by hundreds of millions at a time. The LuCo children perceived all this as an appalling and reckless waste of time and energy that was on top of it severely lacking intellectual challenges. These kids had been growing up playing with toy models of atoms and double helices, and they found life on earth trite and dull. So, after they had visited their grandparents and extended families for four weeks, which had been the main purpose of their trip to earth, most of them couldn’t wait to hop on the next rocket and head back home to LuCo. Only five of them stayed behind. There were always some who would be intrigued by the unknown, by everything that’s strange or different. Even in the twenty-second century you’d still find people, born and raised in a modern city surrounded by computers and machinery, who’d choose to leave it all behind; who’d walk into the woods and build a log cabin with their bare hands and live life without electricity or running water. There were always some who felt they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time; people who were intrigued by the often illusionary romanticism of distant places or a past long gone.
Earth’s reaction to the LuCo kids had been ambiguous, to say the least. When they first arrived on the planet, the media naturally pounced on them like birds of prey. Everyone wanted a piece of them; everyone wanted a little sound bite. But soon the novelty wore off, and their perceived arrogance and their ticks and idiosyncrasies gave rise to mocking and criticism. Some people in the media who had never been very talented at restraining themselves dubbed the LuCo kids ‘lunatics’, a moniker that quickly gained popularity with the general public. By the time nineteen of the twenty-four went back to LuCo, nobody was all that sad to see them leave. Yet at the same time, those that had chosen to stay on Earth weren’t treated with any more respect at all. In fact, the very media that had criticized them for being arrogant little know-it-alls now mocked them for being naïve and ‘probably not the smartest’ for staying on Earth, a notion that seemed to be confirmed when within eighteen months, three of the five had died. One had been run over by a bus when he had tried to cross a street in downtown Sydney without looking both ways. Another had been raped and killed by a convicted sex offender who had escaped from prison in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk a few days earlier. The third had hanged herself in her bedroom at her grandparents’ house in Kyoto. Huxley wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to the remaining two, but now that he thought about it he seemed to remember that one of them had been African American and the other one male. Unless the latter had had a sex change, it was extremely unlikely that he’d ended up as a barista at Java the Hut at Paddington Station. So the girl had in all likelihood not been born on the moon, but in Huxley’s opinion that was not an adequate excuse for her to be so obnoxiously friendly and smiley and to treat her c
ustomers like human beings. For a moment, Huxley entertained the idea of filing a complaint with Java the Hut’s head office, but then he realized that he was standing in front of his flat with his key in his hand, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there.
“Bloody hell!” he said. “Meitner?”
“Yes, Huxley?
“I’m going to need an appointment for a one-on-one with Restless Mind Labs.”
“Specify time.”
“You know my bloody schedule better than I do, Meitner, just pick a damn slot!”
“Your appointment with Dr. Chakrabarti of Restless Mind Labs will be at three o’clock this afternoon.”
“Thank you, Meitner,” Huxley said and unlocked the door.
While munching on his second chocolate croissant and sipping his large, plain, extra strong, no sugar no milk coffee, Huxley started working. He had a bunch of stuff to do, not only the five jobs that were due today as Meitner had so kindly reminded him earlier, but also a number of assignments that had to be completed in time for submission to their respective clients later that week. Many of these assignments were casual micro jobs that paid micro salaries, but they added up. Huxley did around fifty of them in any given week, with each of them taking anywhere between fifteen minutes and two hours to complete. This left him with an average monthly income that didn’t make him particularly wealthy but that allowed him to live more or less comfortably; at least more comfortably than most worker bees who held just one or two traditional jobs. Even more importantly, his line of work allowed Huxley to pick only jobs that suited him financially and that fit both his talents and his interests. He was good at compiling large sets of data as well as analyzing them, but he usually preferred data analysis over data compilation, because it paid better and required more brain work. Other jobs that Huxley quite enjoyed included copy editing and proof reading—he was very talented at spotting other people’s mistakes—and in this world of declining literacy, his language skills often proved to be a valuable asset. His one true passion, however, was science. Huxley had a great interest in all things science, from biology to cosmology to epistemology. Unfortunately, casual science jobs were coveted and relatively rare compared to corporate micro assignments, so he pounced on them whenever they presented themselves, and he would often pick them over other jobs that were more lucrative but intellectually less demanding. To Huxley, identifying genetic markers in sea slugs and scanning radio telescope data for deep space anomalies provided much greater satisfaction than analyzing customer behavior and sales patterns for soft drink companies and clothing manufacturers. It gave him a sense of purpose to advance the scientific knowledge of mankind, and he was convinced that science, not sales strategies, made the world a better place, one sea slug gene sequence and one newly discovered comet at a time.
Eschaton - Season One Page 7
