"Because you don't have the need for love."
"Why should I have a need for it? It has no need for me."
Communicating with Christoph had become hard for Fabian. He felt as though every nuance could tick him off. After every thoughtmit or conversation, Fabian would have to take a breather. He would gather his mental strength, inhale, exhale, and relax. Yet most of the time he remained frustrated, distressed and dreary. The only moments he felt alive were when he immersed himself in Re-Minds; when he reran projections of the beautiful moments they had, few as they were.
"Sometimes, so little can be so much. All that there is," he said once to a Minds representative as an afterthought. Somehow, those few memories sustained him, especially the one of the moment when their eyes first met at boarding school. In that time and place, he felt elated. It was almost a passing glance, random, even casual, but Fabian found a fateful significance in it.
As the years passed, joy would often come from crisis: when, for a moment, they would both laugh in the middle of a catastrophe. Perversely, it was precisely at those times when everything around seemed to fall apart - giving him a chance to support Christoph - that Fabian most enjoyed. But eventually, that also dried up. Here they were, years later, and Christoph had no need for him, and their communications wore him out to the point of drifting into sleep alone early in the evening.
The occasional sex was also over. It was all purely business. While Christoph threw himself into vast amounts of work, Fabian trusted in the idea that one day Christoph would realize that he was the only one for him. He had patience.
As far as Christoph was concerned, his time was better spent raising miniature orca dolphins and watching them swim in the huge aquarium he installed in the Bubble Game compound. They did not intimidate him, did not ask him for displays of emotion or explanations. Sometimes, when he dared to imagine himself and Fabian together, he would panic, pull back and reel the thought back in. He could not afford to develop feelings, because he considered them a dependency, and being dependent would make him needy, and being needy was a weakness, and weakness was death.
***
“So what are your plans for tonight?” Fabian timidly asked as they were leaving the office building.
“I want to do some reading, I suppose.”
“Did you hear a new book by Robin Nice was out? I can't figure the interest in him.”
“So why do you even bother reading the shit?”
“Believe it or not, I took a peek to try and understand all the praise he's been getting. But it’s all crap, I'm telling you.”
“People like him should be deleted,” Christoph said with contempt.
“Absolutely,” Fabian answered and noticed Christoph pausing for a second. He turned to see what kept him, but Christoph had already closed the small gap and caught up.
Fabian looked at him with gleaming eyes and his heart ached. He wanted to kiss him and hold him so much. But he pulled himself together quickly and stared at his feet.
“OK, let’s thought it later,” Christoph said and stepped into his waiting neocar.
Fabian stopped in his tracks and watched Christoph fly into the clouds. It started raining, but still he stood there, and rushed to his own car only when he could no longer see Christoph.
After taking off, he ordered the vehicle to read out parts of the new Robin Nice book which everyone was talking about. He memorized several clichéd passages to make fun of tomorrow with Christoph. He knew it would almost make him happy.
3
To Life and to Death
The years had passed Kenny Little by. He went through most of his days without daring to stop and look around, only to see that he had no one to share his sad and happy moments with. His wife had left him, and his only son, Don, a released convict, almost never got in touch. When they did meet, they mostly sat in silence.
Once, years ago, the universe had given him a chance, but he missed it. If he had not, everything might have been different. His evenings were a ritual of torment, as he replayed the memory on Re-Minds, reliving that day, long before Don was born.
Kenny stepped out of his house, irritated by a noise; it seemed that one of the flying cars had been forced to make an emergency landing between two buildings. Suddenly his legs stumbled into something wrapped in a pretty blanket. He didn't realize what it was until he saw a big head poking out. It was a fat baby boy with a blond tuft of hair, abandoned. Kenny didn't know what to do with the screaming child. He rushed to pick him up, held him against his chest like a protective father would, and stared at him.
Neocars zoomed across the blue sky. The streets were deserted, apart from several garden planners who labored over a faulty patch of programming in the shrubbery that lined the boulevard. They were moving methodically between the digital shrubs and tuning their perfect growth. Everything was sparkling clean. The baby moved his limbs helplessly.
Suddenly Kenny remembered his two close friends, Marley and Alice Grey, who were activists fighting a rearguard battle against hyper-progress, and were widely acknowledged for an erudition which did not depend on digital sources. The two, thirty-something intellectuals, never found the time to have a child. Their schooldays were an endless cycle of protests and virtual revolutions they had started. They met with some success, and some defeat. To put it in their words, they fought against the political and cultural subjugation of the human essence in the hands of digital networks. Life was too short for reproduction, they always argued. They were determined not to bring a new life into a broken world, postponing such thoughts until after the long-awaited mending. But recently Kenny heard them talking about children, and now he decided to give them a call. He started a video call.
“Hey Marley. How are you?” Kenny asked.
“I'm fine, preparing everything for the big demonstration on Saturday.”
“You gotta hear this… I just found an abandoned baby outside my house.”
“A baby?!”
“Yes, a boy. I was thinking of calling the authorities. He was left with an electronic note that read: 'Take care of me.' It's heartbreaking.”
“They just left him on the street?” Marley asked, incredulous.
“Yes, on the street.”
“Listen, we'll take him,” Marley decided without giving it a second thought. Kenny saw him looking at the stunned Alice. “We'll take him and raise him as our own.”
“He's fair skinned and you're black… people will get suspicious. We should report it, don't you think?”
“No, no. They'll stick him in a shelter. If you call it in, you know how it starts but not how it ends. No one needs to know about it.”
Silence.
“Alright, hurry over.”
Kenny wanted to cry now, when the sentence reformed in his mind: Alright, hurry over.
How could he let them have that gentle child?
Shortly after, when Don was born, it was hard for him. No one prepared him for the havoc that boy would cause. He couldn't avoid thinking that had he raised the other child, a lot of suffering might have been avoided. At the same time, he hated himself for shamefully thinking about a world without his son Don. But it was stronger than him, the memory of the little baby and an alternative, easier life.
***
Marley and Alice named the abandoned child Solly.
It was not easy for the boy to grow up as a son to dark skinned parents. The boy with the curtain of golden hair parted to the side was an easy target for the other kids and their stinging remarks: "You fatso, no one but a black couple would adopt you… what a loser, probably grow up to be a bum," and so on and on.
"Why are they so mean to me?" Solly asked his parents in tears.
"Kids can be mean and stupid sometimes. Don't let it get to you," Alice soothed him.
"They're making fun because I'm white and you're black," he complained.
His mother looked at him and then at her husband Marley and her heart clenched. "We wanted only you and
no other boy," she said and hugged him. She was upset. His life isn't going to get any easier, she thought.
The child grew up to be an introverted daydreamer. Other boys would gang up on him, toss and kick him around like a ball. He made a habit of keeping a safe distance from groups. He understood that people like that were more brawn, less brain, but put a few of them together and they became dangerous. In time, he developed an acute speech impediment that showed up as mumbling and difficulty sustaining conversation. His eloquent parents tried everything to make it better, but could not.
Solly did not get invited to parties or social events. Most of the time, he chose to stay in his room and immerse himself in an interactive fantasy game world where he rescued beautiful fairies, battled fire breathing dragons, and had long heart-to-heart conversations with sorcerers who would appear only to him in the dense virtual forests which sprouted in his room. Within a space of several square feet, he traveled through fantastic worlds he designed himself, feeling that even the skies were no limit. There, he could kill the bad and lead the good. His imaginary worlds were as real as anything he knew.
In his teens, Solly clothed himself only in black - perchance rebellious, perchance depressed. He was simply grieving for his life. His parents could not hide the truth from him. They already tried explaining at a very young age why his biological parents abandoned him.
“They probably weren't able to raise you,” Alice comforted him again and again. “Not everyone can raise a child. It's not you, it's them. Don't go around blaming yourself.”
Solly repressed the pain of being abandoned. The mystery of who his real parents were weighed on him, but he had to be patient and wait for his eighteenth birthday to find out. Sometimes he wondered if it might be better not to know. It was easier to gorge himself on nano-molecular food than to search for love where there was none.
He gained weight from frustration instead of comfort, and would still get laughed at for it. He was diagnosed with a genetic condition that made him fat regardless of what went into his mouth.
Marley did his best to be a good father. He also tried feeding his son ideas about the destructive nature of progress, but none of it stuck; Solly had a mind of his own, and he was drawn to life on the Cloud. The boy's daydreaming was unusual in an age that spared no time for dreaming. The world was pulled into a vortex of multitasking which spun a range of phenomena behavioral scientists termed Accelerated ADHD
[7] , which lowered people's ability to concentrate to a limit of one task and one second. The latest research showed that people were no longer able to read more than two lines of text at a time. The afflicted were mostly children and teens. School exams became practically extinct; everyone had some sort of medical pass and, in any case, exams were considered an outdated and inefficient procedure when compared to available algorithms which could monitor students in a transparent way and provide accurate performance based evaluations through their work with holographic agents.
Solly suffered from this condition like many kids his age, but, unlike the others, he could detach himself from any situation and dive into analog fantasies about a future where it would no longer be necessary to leave your chair to get somewhere or to communicate - the ultimate state of comfort.
“What fun it could be to travel inside the mind,” he told Alice.
“We call that imagination,” she said and smiled.
“No, not just that. If I could really travel, go anywhere and reach anyone with just a thought. Without ever having to get up.”
“You talk as if you don't spend most of your time in your realm there as it is,” she answered.
The brain and its functions were very intriguing to Solly during the long hours he spent by himself. The walls of his room were covered with a changing exhibition of detailed brain images that were unintelligible to the untrained eye. He listened to all the leading brain surgeons lecturing, and even though he understood little of it, he was indoctrinated with the notion that knowledge itself was more than just power. It was everything.
Through his immense curiosity, Solly got a taste of everything. He learned how the brain worked, and eagerly absorbed every new technology and groundbreaking research. He learned that human memory had degenerated over time. People relied completely on the pieces of memory they sent floating through the net. They allowed themselves to forget names, dates, even personal experience, supposedly to make room for contemplation and analysis. This was true mostly for unique individuals like Solly, who was excited to the point of sexual arousal by any new scientific discovery.
People, on the other hand, were of little interest to Solly. Thoughts took precedence over emotions, which mostly complicated things and clouded judgment. Reality was the only obstacle to his dreams, and he wasn't going to let it stand in his way. He envisaged himself standing in front of a huge window overlooking an expansive horizon.
As an adult, he enjoyed remembering all the hard times when he managed to pull through. For example, the time when a large deal he believed in was shot down. Every young entrepreneur knows that nothing can be accomplished without endurance and determination. You cannot give in to negative feelings. Always rise up and move on.
***
When he was twenty-four years old, after two long years of litigation, Solly won a huge claim for compensation against his biological parents. He paid a large sum to gain access to the national registry of births and to the global archive of security cameras. A cross check yielded documented records of the geographic area and years in question, and in the end he narrowed it down to the specific day he was abandoned between two buildings. The program zeroed in on a footage showing the individual who left him there, and he could match an identity to the person by using face recognition software. He then crossed his findings with publicly available information, and finally proved his parents’ identity by obtaining a Proof of Paternity injunction, which forced the people accused of abandoning him to submit to a test.
After the identity of the people who dumped little Solly in the street that day had been established, the young man sued them for depriving him of his childhood. Admittedly, he was emotionally detached from his biological parents, but he found a non liquet in the law which allowed him to be compensated for the complex circumstance that caused him so much suffering. His real mother regretted giving birth to him and the father had never wanted a child to begin with. They felt he was using the trial to exact revenge; Solly simply felt his pain was being acknowledged.
The press coverage of the precedent-setting trial had been very extensive. After winning his case, Solly was widely photographed and granted interviews to every possible media outlet. Many adopted children decided to dig up their past in search of a way to sue their own parents, but most were denied; not only were they asked to provide proof of serious mental injury, but it was also a long, painful, debilitating and expensive procedure – something Solly could afford with his savings and the proceeds from his business ventures.
With endless patience and impressive composure, Solly presented evidence showing that, despite the love and dedication he received in his adoptive home, and even though he benefited from positive discrimination and never encountered institutional prejudice for being the snow white son of coal black parents, he still suffered humiliation at the hands of other children, prying eyes, gossip, and speculation about his origins.
It is human nature to assess, classify and ostracize, and it comes with a cost. The fact that Solly was born with his rare congenital weight problem in an age of engineered DNA did not help. Since he was abandoned as a baby, he did not have the benefit of genetic enhancement procedures in the critical early phase of infancy, which might have cured him and prevented a lot of grief.
The court valued his pain generously: 18 years at 250,000 Unis
[8] per year, plus 50 million Unis to be paid in full by the time he turned 80. After all, nothing could send him back to start his life over again. The damage was done. The young man managed
to prove that his speech impediment, the alienation and detachment he had experienced all these years all had their source in being abandoned. According to the expert opinions of several digital psychoanalysts, the feeling of worthlessness that came with miserable thoughts such as, “Why didn't they keep me?” made him develop severe emotional disorders. He suffered from it in his school days and also later in his work.
The math was simple: at the age of twenty-four, Solly Grey had become too rich to ever need to work again.
***
Solly felt a warm satisfaction when he saw his new apartment on the top floor of a 120-story tower, his new home after winning his online trial. After moving in, he started taking a little better care of himself, sticking to nano-dietetic foods and a personal training program he put together with the best athlete-endorsed software on the market. He also became obsessed with a particular species of algae that was found to contain a high-rate calorie burning chemical compound. All these factors combined to put him in shape and lose some weight, though he was still chubby.
His parents gave him a red panda-cat neopet called Pandy, who was a perfect match to his personality. Just like him, the cat had a weight problem, and they would train together. Solly treated her like his own baby. When Pandy took her first steps, Solly was delirious with joy. Pandy slept by his side, and every night he would pet her until he fell asleep.
“Who needs people when I have you?” he said one day, sitting on his knees in front of Pandy. “You'll never hurt me, will you?”
Pandy howled in agreement.
It was not long before he founded a start-up company with a few other geniuses who went to school with him. They had an idea for an app that made it possible for anyone to adopt the lifestyle of someone they loved or admired, and to practically live that person's life. The app, whose trademark name was ‘Like Them,’ though better known as ‘Stalk Them,’ brought together the world's leading photographers, editors, magazines, content syndicates and advertisement firms to concoct an attractive user package which contained all the icon's interests and predilections – products, articles, clothes, services – everything one might need to feel in their skin.
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