Steve pouches air and blows it out, on the cusp of saying pussyole, thinks better of it. Says, blud, I got into all this to look after my family, get me?
Joolzy knows this young crowd don’t have a Legend, just glorified informers really. Fuck knows who let this youth up to Covert Ops. No Legend needed for these boys, little more than grasses really, no skill in being yourself and meeting up with your supervising officer once a week to spill your guts. When he went freelance he had to get
USG
to buy his Legend off the Met for him, fake Passport, driver’s licence, the works. It took him a long time to find someone with the same first name, had died around the same year he was born, but got one eventually from out in Walthamstow, spent a few weeks walking round, familiarising himself with the area, the schools, the places his namesake would have hung out, spoke to people in pubs and shops, said he’d left the area as a kid, said it had changed a lot, hadn’t it? Listened to them talk, went home, made notes, began to construct for himself a different childhood, a different self, with a dad who was a teacher, a mum who stayed at home, an older sister, imagined the friends he’d had, the games they had played, the accident he had avoided, how, coming out between the two parked cars to get to the ice-cream van across the road some instinct had restrained him, stop, look, listen, green cross code, whatever, and that the car had gone past, no screech of tyres that would have brought the mother, hurrying, disbelieving from the kitchen to see there, just feet from the comfort and security of her home, her son, and the ashen face of the driver, hands gripping the wheel. He went to a local library and trawled through the microfilms, found the report in the local newspaper, sat for a long time looking at the blurry photo, distorted, magnified on the screen. Towards the end of his fact-finding mission he sat outside the house and waited for the parents to come home, needed to see them, both white of course, normal looking enough, but inside, he knew they carried the pain of a lost child, a child with the same name as his and as he watched the mother struggle to put down her umbrella before she went in, face screwed up against the rain, he said to himself, distinctly, he remembers it, don’t worry, he’s not dead, I am your son now.
He pours himself another small shot. After another half an hour or so of listening to the chatting and boasting he heads down to a
USG
transfer van that will spirit him up the express road back into town. There’s a little bunk in the back and he can get his head down for an hour or two sleep off that whisky. Not much room and two other people in there, but still, he’s tired and there’s just enough space to stretch out. The road rolls softly under him and soon he dreams of his childhood, that childhood as real to him as his own, dreams of the house he never lived in, dreams of the friends he never knew, of love he neither gave nor received, of hopes that were not his own.
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.