Web Central
The girl, Mandy Miller aged twenty-three, had made an appointment to see Josie Toothpad, the well-known literary guru, at eleven a.m. But already it was six minutes past, and Mandy’s face had not yet flashed up on Josie’s screen. Six minutes late: six minutes’ worth of ungratefulness, adding to the burden of Josie’s day.
Mandy was privileged; Josie did not normally see aspiring writers: her time was considered better spent writing haiku. But the Authors’ Guild, in this the year 2050, apparently saw promise in the girl, whose writing profile peaked at lyricism and fell to a disastrous trough around compromise, in a decade where such profiles usually ran as straight and flat as the heart trace of someone newly dead. So Josie had decided to be generous with her time.
Josie filled in the unusual waiting minutes playing solitaire. She hadn’t done that for ages. Click, click; cards flying, red and black slicing the screen. Her scores still ran in the six thousands, she was glad to see. Then the familiar melancholy settled in, that stuffy sadness which so often accompanies any obsessional activity and in particular the playing of cards – so much chance, so little skill. Josie adjusted the dial of her drip-feed as Dr Owen her personal physician had so often asked her not, increasing the flow of uppers as opposed to downers. But now she felt edgy. She stopped playing cards, and put her drip-feed back to normal, and meditated. But the edginess wouldn’t go away: it was moving into something remarkably like anxiety; a generalised foreboding. Josie turned up the voltage of the muscle contractors, which kept her limbs viable and strong, but for once the tingling sensation didn’t please her; rather it irritated. She turned the voltage down again. Personal monitors on the banks of screens around the room showed a steady, profound green. She should be in a state of tranquillity, but was not. The gap between what she felt and what the screen said she felt was unusually wide. Perhaps that in itself was the source of her anxiety.
Josie punched in a query to Zelda, her personal therapist. Zelda’s sweet, reassuring face appeared without delay on the main screen and softly asked Josie to profile her current emotions, choosing four appropriate adjectives from the available selection. None seemed to apply. Josie felt bored and closed Zelda, but Zelda wouldn’t be closed. Zelda just blanked out and reappeared before even a mouse had time to click. That was extraordinary.
Zelda said, ‘I’ve been waiting for a call from you, Josie. It’s your birthday, and it’s your right and your privilege to consult me, as you come to terms with the downside of being 132 today.’
The pause between the one, the three and the two were minute but discernible. It was crass of Web Central, Josie thought, to thus remind Heaven-on-Earthers that Zelda was a machine. And Zelda had got it wrong: Josie’s birthday was six days past. What’s more, Zelda once closed had not stayed closed, which could only mean Zelda was now operated directly from Nex Control. Since last week’s acquisition of Web Central’s main shareholding, Nex Control could override the Web Central computer. Which meant, Josie supposed, Nex Control could break into a transmission any time they liked, as an aircraft captain would choose to break into the soundtrack of a film you were watching, with warnings of turbulence. An archaic image, which almost made Josie laugh, for who went anywhere physically, any more? Space was in your head: vast quantities of it, as much as you wanted. You travelled the universe freely through the voices in your mind.
There was something wrong with the transmission: Zelda’s whole face flickered so that her smile looked like a smirk.
Then Zelda blanked out mid-sentence.
‘Is your cup half-empty or half-full? The choice is yours, the options –’
At the time of the takeover, Nex Control had promised there’d be no changes in management style. Promises, promises. Josie remembered enough about pre-Web life to know that the State was never to be trusted: States dealt in lies, as Nietzsche had pointed out; they spoke in all tongues of good and evil, and in the end what was Nex Control but another State, gobbling up smaller territories, grabbing up Web Central, asset stripping?
When in doubt, keep your head down, don’t make waves. Josie completed her mood profile, punching in ‘tranquil, reflective, industrious, confident’. Web Central valued feedback. Web Central had been created by a consensus of newly-young idealists; their computer’s stated mission, to create a Web Heaven and keep it non-political, pacific and angst-free for its subscribers. But that had been fifty years ago: language could have changed, the very words now have a different meaning. Years and years ago, Josie remembered, she had visited the Soviet Empire and watched armies marching around, chanting, ‘Mir, mir, mir,’ and being told mir was their word for peace! That had been in the days when one actually physically travelled, and very alarming they had been.
Josie took off her helmet and at once felt less disturbed. She was both post-menopausal and pre-menstrual, perhaps that was the trouble. For a couple of days a month she suffered from both conditions. Today was one of the days. She knew too much, felt too much, and remembered too much. She was an original Heaven-on-Earther. Sixty years ago a daily dose of Ecstasy 3 which, when combined with good old-fashioned oestrogen, reversed the ageing process and settled the body at around twenty-five years old, had become available to any female who could afford it. Josie could, and did. Ageing, for the pioneer Heaven-on-Earthers, need no longer be a cause of death but there were drawbacks: one’s personality remained cyclical. Those born after the millennium had it easier, as the science of non-ageing was refined.
Still no sign of Mandy. 11.12 a.m. Another of Josie’s screens leapt into life. Traders were ingenious: they found ways of putting their messages on screen no matter how elaborate the steps taken to prevent them.
‘Just punch D O N U T: @ revo.efil,’ required the salesman. He was dressed like a butler, smiled like a fiend, and had a metronome – surely banned by Web Central as a hypnotic device? But perhaps Nex Control permitted them – ticking away in the background.
‘Only punch and you will see
Something long denied and free
Stuffed with honey, fruit and rum
Down your food-chute swift will come.
DONUT!’
Josie, ever suggestible – one became more so with age it seemed – obediently punched up D O N U T: @ revo.efil. She’d been losing weight recently, but Dr Owen hadn’t seemed worried when he had checked her health feedback. How long ago had that been? Sometimes it was hard to tell one day from another. Her fingers, she could see, looked just plain bony – but still pretty. She’d always liked her hands: loved the fingers’ dextrous moving over keys, their sharp, flawless clicking of the mouse. If you liked yourself and loved being alive, what did your chronological age matter? So said Zelda. Let alone what season it was.
Josie steered her chair to the window and opened the blinds; she had to put her drip-feed on hold and detach it to get so far. Alone of her friends, Josie still liked daylight, and a view. Down below the underclass swarmed: the unfortunates who lived on earth, not in the space in their heads. Hardly anyone over twenty-five, the whole lot HIV positive, doomed to death ten years or so after their first
