26:I[86215,["6446","static/chunks/53c13509-e7ec011f8ac7df7d.js","6711","static/chunks/8e1d74a4-841e61b20d784c5f.js","2266","static/chunks/870fdd6f-d81c5e21b0b96e34.js","5802","static/chunks/69b09407-1ce59c69e508049d.js","8500","static/chunks/8500-01a63dafd809e317.js","8437","static/chunks/8437-39ef04864806a0fa.js","6659","static/chunks/6659-a0fca0b5b95eb832.js","1610","static/chunks/1610-af6f888fe3ea871a.js","2100","static/chunks/2100-768a05088f320fce.js","6499","static/chunks/6499-3139357d7362d8fa.js","601","static/chunks/601-42518cde4342bee4.js","7663","static/chunks/7663-36eadf9c83563138.js","7870","static/chunks/7870-f026ded79a9a89b4.js","9891","static/chunks/9891-388cf3487c4bfb5e.js","2454","static/chunks/2454-11d335ce6901e263.js","7782","static/chunks/7782-4f8509118ce25d3b.js","1628","static/chunks/app/story/%5Bslug%5D/page-c4ed111418a82338.js"],"default"] 27:I[62454,["6446","static/chunks/53c13509-e7ec011f8ac7df7d.js","6711","static/chunks/8e1d74a4-841e61b20d784c5f.js","2266","static/chunks/870fdd6f-d81c5e21b0b96e34.js","5802","static/chunks/69b09407-1ce59c69e508049d.js","8500","static/chunks/8500-01a63dafd809e317.js","8437","static/chunks/8437-39ef04864806a0fa.js","6659","static/chunks/6659-a0fca0b5b95eb832.js","1610","static/chunks/1610-af6f888fe3ea871a.js","2100","static/chunks/2100-768a05088f320fce.js","6499","static/chunks/6499-3139357d7362d8fa.js","601","static/chunks/601-42518cde4342bee4.js","7663","static/chunks/7663-36eadf9c83563138.js","7870","static/chunks/7870-f026ded79a9a89b4.js","9891","static/chunks/9891-388cf3487c4bfb5e.js","2454","static/chunks/2454-11d335ce6901e263.js","7782","static/chunks/7782-4f8509118ce25d3b.js","1628","static/chunks/app/story/%5Bslug%5D/page-c4ed111418a82338.js"],"default"] 30:I[86869,[],"IconMark"] 28:T38a8,

Humanity became officially fed up in 2035.

There had, naturally, been plenty of unofficial fed-upness before then: private desolations, national sulks, the small domestic Bolshevisms of people emptying dishwashers too loudly. But 2035 was the year the measurements converged. For the first time, the international mood surveys, the clinical intakes, the sleep records, the cortisol maps, the birth figures, the facial-affect cameras and the sentimental divinations of several billion wearable devices all pointed in the same direction. Not downwards exactly. Downwards still implied travel, and therefore purpose. They pointed towards flatness.

The finding was not that everybody was depressed. Depression retained its old medical meaning and could therefore be disputed, diagnosed, coded, reimbursed. The finding was that the average human being had begun to experience existence with less conviction. Pleasure arrived weakened. Anticipation had thinned. People continued to marry, eat, work, masturbate, quarrel, travel and announce that they were so excited about things; but the inner punctuation had gone missing. Humanity had not stopped living. It had begun performing life from unusually good notes.

The threshold was crossed in September, although nobody crossed anything perceptible at the time. A consortium in Geneva announced that the Global Affective Mean had fallen beneath the minimum required for what its report called spontaneous future adhesion. The phrase was mocked for a week and adopted for the next four years. It meant that, collectively, people no longer felt tomorrow pulling upon them with sufficient force.

By 2039 there were hundreds of explanations and several thousand commercially licensed remedies. The explanations blamed, according to taste, screens, endocrine disruption, money, microplastics, loneliness, dietary oils, artificial intelligence, working from home, returning to the office, insufficient religion, excessive religion, pornography, declining testosterone, increasing self-awareness, poor sleep, long peace, permanent war, social media, the abolition of social media, and the psychic exhaustion of being continuously told why one was psychically exhausted.

Each theory had evidence. This was the discouraging part.

Mark Earl had no evidence at all, which gave him an advantage.

He wrote speculative fiction. Not successfully enough to be resented and not unsuccessfully enough to stop. His books appeared, received one or two descriptions he would secretly reuse, sold in quantities that could be represented without commas, and persisted for several years as thumbnails in digital catalogues. He had once been called prescient because a novel of his contained a municipal drone that issued fines for antisocial facial expressions. When Birmingham introduced something similar, Mark accepted the compliment despite the fact that his fictional drone had also become mayor.

However, for the last six months Mark had been unable to write. Ideas still occurred to him, but they arrived already exhausted, accompanied by the certainty that someone else had expressed them better and died long enough ago to make the comparison especially humiliating. He opened documents, named them, stared into their immaculate vacancy and closed them again. Eventually even the blank page seemed bored with him.

He was fifty-one and lived alone in a narrow house whose mortgage had reached the tranquil stage of no longer being worth thinking about because neither he nor the mortgage would survive it. The house stood in a row of houses constructed during an age when a front room, a back room and a patch of damp earth had been considered sufficient architecture for a complete human destiny. Mark worked in the front room. The back room contained books he meant to read and an exercise bicycle whose little screen continued offering congratulations to the dark.

On 14 March, at 4:17 in the morning, he woke with the word Shomrim in his mind.

It was not a voice. Voices were melodramatic and had paperwork attached to them. It was a word possessing the peculiar authority of something remembered. He lay still and inspected it. Shomrim. He knew neither its language nor its meaning. He knew only that it was plural.

Beside it, already attached, was another phrase: grounding resonance.

Mark reached for his phone, found his glasses under the phone and the phone under a paperback about the death of attention, then searched the word. Hebrew. Watchmen, guardians, keepers. Singular: shomer.

“Of course,” he said.

It was the sort of “of course” one uttered when nothing was obvious.

He went downstairs. The house was cold but not honestly cold; it possessed the niggling, legalistic chill of modern insulation, always sufficient to prevent complaint and never sufficient to provide comfort. He made coffee, opened a blank document and typed the word in capitals.

SHOMRIM

He looked at it for a while.

Mark’s ideas usually approached wearing evidence of the journey. They brought scraps with them: an overheard remark, a scientific curiosity, an irritation with the news, some neglected human behaviour asking to be made sinister. This one arrived laundered. It had no provenance. Worse, it had structure.

The Shomrim were not gods and not aliens in the muscular, mineral-extracting sense. They had no interest in gold, water, reproductive organs or the Pentagon. Matter was the cheap part of the universe. Their shells could be powered by sunlight; their station drank more energy from the sun in an hour than its material systems required in a year. They had solved propulsion, fabrication and physical continuity long before reaching Earth.

What they had not solved was consciousness.

Mark stopped typing.

He did not yet know what it meant, but he knew it was right.

The Shomrim were consciousnesses embodied in mechanical shells. Their original planet was gone. Destroyed, abandoned, rendered unsuitable—it did not matter yet. Their machines had carried them away from physical death and into a more intimate emergency. Consciousness had evolved in relationship with a living world. Remove it from weather, soil, animal warmth, biological time and the innumerable answers a planet gave without being asked, and consciousness began to lose adhesion. The shell functioned. The mind inside it ceased to care.

Their problem was not energy. It was mood.

Without grounding resonance, a Shomer became anxious, then depressed, then anhedonic, then catatonic. The Station ceased to feel like a home and revealed itself as machinery. Relationships remained factually present but emotionally unavailable. Tomorrow continued to exist while shedding every reason to enter it. At the end of deprivation there was no spectacular mechanical death. The shell was intact. Its occupant simply terminated the occupation.

Mark leaned back.

This, at least, had the indecency of a usable premise: a technically immortal species whose members killed themselves because immortality felt unbearable.

Mark typed on, in a surprising reverie.

The Shomrim had discovered Earth before recorded history, when human beings still lived in broad attunement with the planet that made them. Not paradise.

Mark distrusted paradises; they were gated communities with no narrative arc.

People became ill. Children died. Animals attacked. Winter demonstrated its views. But the ordinary human mind was not estranged from its own experience. Fear belonged to dangers, grief to losses, tiredness to labour. A bad event did not automatically recruit ten imaginary events and a theory of personal worthlessness.

Humanity possessed what the Shomrim lacked. It resonated with its world.
And resonance, once disturbed, produced something.

Mark did not have a name for the precursor. He wrote RETURN in capitals and disliked it immediately. Then YIELD, which was worse but usefully worse.

The Shomrim could direct a phase-inverted quantity of their stored resonance towards a human consciousness. This did not enter the mind. It could not read thoughts, manufacture beliefs or seize the will. It jammed the relationship between consciousness and surroundings.

Timing deteriorated. Intuition arrived stripped of authority. A person overlooked what they would ordinarily have noticed, spoke when silence would have served, remained silent at the one survivable moment for speech. Misfortune did not materialise from nothing. Its available routes became easier to enter.
The human called it bad luck.

The resulting anxiety generated the precursor. The Shomrim collected it, refined it and converted it into artificial resonance for themselves. Human consciousness was both receiver and signal. Dissonance entered; worry amplified it; the mind broadcast the struggle of attempting to restore its natural state. The Shomrim harvested that struggle.

Mark read the paragraph back.

It was mad, obviously. But madness was no longer disqualifying. In 2039, respectable people proposed that collective low mood resulted from solar activity, intestinal fungi, ancestral trauma, algorithmic weather and a hitherto unnoticed frequency emitted by reinforced concrete. Mark’s parasitical emigrants were as good a guess as anyone else’s. Better, perhaps, because he had no intention of founding a clinic.

He wrote in the margin:

They do not eat suffering. They convert it into relief from their own.

Then beneath it:

They disturb our relationship with the world so they can tolerate having no world of their own.

The second sentence troubled him. Not because it was weak. Because it seemed quoted.

He searched the phrase. No result. He searched smaller portions. Nothing. The sentence was his, insofar as sentences belonged to the person at whose keyboard they appeared. Still, it possessed none of the provisional quality of invention. It had arrived complete, with the polished severity of a line revised elsewhere.

By seven, the Shomrim had acquired an economy:

They held resonance in personal accounts. It was the perfect regulatory substance: no intoxication, no tolerance, no overdose and no benefit beyond what an individual consciousness required. A Shomer could not become euphoric by taking too much. Additional resonance simply remained unused. Wealth therefore purchased not greater pleasure but continuity—the guarantee that one would remain capable of pleasure next year, and the year after that.

Some held centuries. Some held days.

As humanity multiplied, so did they. The first surveyors had extracted little from a small population and survived partly upon reserves brought from elsewhere. Later arrivals came as the human crop expanded. The Station enlarged, reproduction resumed, private balances grew, and a temporary dependence became civilisation. They were no longer using humanity to endure an emergency. They had arranged every promise, institution and unborn Shomer around the assumption that human dissonance would remain available.

Then they overfarmed it.

The thought came with such force that Mark stood up.

The Global Affective Mean. The loss of future adhesion. The falling birth rate, the collapsing expectation, the exhausted cultures repeating old entertainments with younger faces. By 2035 the Shomrim’s problem had become visible from the field itself. Human beings still suffered abundantly, but suffering no longer created the former yield. A person expecting disappointment could not be efficiently disappointed. A generation that did not expect homes, security, institutional honesty or durable love offered little altitude from which to be dropped.

The Shomrim had mistaken distress for productivity.

They had depleted hope, which was the nutrient beneath the nutrient.

Mark walked into the back room and stood beside the congratulatory bicycle. Dawn had begun whitening the window. Across the narrow gardens, other houses emerged as shapes and then as obligations. Lights came on. Human beings prepared themselves for another day with the subdued competence of a species determined not to make a fuss about its own disappearance.

He returned to the desk.

There had to be a final harvest.

The phrase arrived with its own administrative calm: terminal harvest.

When ordinary expectations had collapsed, one remained. Even the pessimists expected civilisation to continue tomorrow. They renewed contracts, made dental appointments, bought food for Thursday. A world war would destroy that final collective assumption and produce an immense immediate yield. Enough resonance to sustain the Shomrim through the fallow decades while humanity rebuilt its numbers, confidence and capacity for disappointment.

But war, once begun, could not be controlled. The dissonance would become atmospheric, then self-amplifying. Human fear would jam other humans without further intervention from the Station. The Shomrim could initiate the event and collect its yield. They could not determine whether ten per cent of humanity died or ninety.

At ninety per cent, the harvest would be magnificent.

It would also be the last.

Mark saved the document.

The clock showed 8:52. He had written for more than four hours without checking the news, his messages, his sales or the precise location of his career in the long corridor between obscurity and death. This was unusual. More unusual was the absence of the little adjudicating voice that normally accompanied his work, marking sentences too pleased with themselves and ideas previously achieved by better men in 1957.

He felt exceptionally well.

Not excited. Excitement contained instability. He felt aligned. The coffee had gone cold without becoming accusatory. The room seemed neither cramped nor temporary. Even the light had stopped behaving like something rationed by England.

29:T38a8,

Humanity became officially fed up in 2035.

Each theory had evidence. This was the discouraging part.

Mark Earl had no evidence at all, which gave him an advantage.

On 14 March, at 4:17 in the morning, he woke with the word Shomrim in his mind.

Beside it, already attached, was another phrase: grounding resonance.

“Of course,” he said.

It was the sort of “of course” one uttered when nothing was obvious.

SHOMRIM

He looked at it for a while.

The Shomrim were not gods and not aliens in the muscular, mineral-extracting sense. They had no interest in gold, water, reproductive organs or the Pentagon. Matter was the cheap part of the universe. Their shells could be powered by sunlight; their station drank more energy from the sun in an hour than its material systems required in a year. They had solved propulsion, fabrication and physical continuity long before reaching Earth.

What they had not solved was consciousness.

Mark stopped typing.

He did not yet know what it meant, but he knew it was right.

The Shomrim were consciousnesses embodied in mechanical shells. Their original planet was gone. Destroyed, abandoned, rendered unsuitable—it did not matter yet. Their machines had carried them away from physical death and into a more intimate emergency. Consciousness had evolved in relationship with a living world. Remove it from weather, soil, animal warmth, biological time and the innumerable answers a planet gave without being asked, and consciousness began to lose adhesion. The shell functioned. The mind inside it ceased to care.

Their problem was not energy. It was mood.

Without grounding resonance, a Shomer became anxious, then depressed, then anhedonic, then catatonic. The Station ceased to feel like a home and revealed itself as machinery. Relationships remained factually present but emotionally unavailable. Tomorrow continued to exist while shedding every reason to enter it. At the end of deprivation there was no spectacular mechanical death. The shell was intact. Its occupant simply terminated the occupation.

Mark leaned back.

This, at least, had the indecency of a usable premise: a technically immortal species whose members killed themselves because immortality felt unbearable.

Mark typed on, in a surprising reverie.

The Shomrim had discovered Earth before recorded history, when human beings still lived in broad attunement with the planet that made them. Not paradise.

Mark distrusted paradises; they were gated communities with no narrative arc.

People became ill. Children died. Animals attacked. Winter demonstrated its views. But the ordinary human mind was not estranged from its own experience. Fear belonged to dangers, grief to losses, tiredness to labour. A bad event did not automatically recruit ten imaginary events and a theory of personal worthlessness.

Humanity possessed what the Shomrim lacked. It resonated with its world.
And resonance, once disturbed, produced something.

Mark did not have a name for the precursor. He wrote RETURN in capitals and disliked it immediately. Then YIELD, which was worse but usefully worse.

The Shomrim could direct a phase-inverted quantity of their stored resonance towards a human consciousness. This did not enter the mind. It could not read thoughts, manufacture beliefs or seize the will. It jammed the relationship between consciousness and surroundings.

Timing deteriorated. Intuition arrived stripped of authority. A person overlooked what they would ordinarily have noticed, spoke when silence would have served, remained silent at the one survivable moment for speech. Misfortune did not materialise from nothing. Its available routes became easier to enter.
The human called it bad luck.

The resulting anxiety generated the precursor. The Shomrim collected it, refined it and converted it into artificial resonance for themselves. Human consciousness was both receiver and signal. Dissonance entered; worry amplified it; the mind broadcast the struggle of attempting to restore its natural state. The Shomrim harvested that struggle.

Mark read the paragraph back.

He wrote in the margin:

They do not eat suffering. They convert it into relief from their own.

Then beneath it:

They disturb our relationship with the world so they can tolerate having no world of their own.

The second sentence troubled him. Not because it was weak. Because it seemed quoted.

By seven, the Shomrim had acquired an economy:

They held resonance in personal accounts. It was the perfect regulatory substance: no intoxication, no tolerance, no overdose and no benefit beyond what an individual consciousness required. A Shomer could not become euphoric by taking too much. Additional resonance simply remained unused. Wealth therefore purchased not greater pleasure but continuity—the guarantee that one would remain capable of pleasure next year, and the year after that.

Some held centuries. Some held days.

As humanity multiplied, so did they. The first surveyors had extracted little from a small population and survived partly upon reserves brought from elsewhere. Later arrivals came as the human crop expanded. The Station enlarged, reproduction resumed, private balances grew, and a temporary dependence became civilisation. They were no longer using humanity to endure an emergency. They had arranged every promise, institution and unborn Shomer around the assumption that human dissonance would remain available.

Then they overfarmed it.

The thought came with such force that Mark stood up.

The Global Affective Mean. The loss of future adhesion. The falling birth rate, the collapsing expectation, the exhausted cultures repeating old entertainments with younger faces. By 2035 the Shomrim’s problem had become visible from the field itself. Human beings still suffered abundantly, but suffering no longer created the former yield. A person expecting disappointment could not be efficiently disappointed. A generation that did not expect homes, security, institutional honesty or durable love offered little altitude from which to be dropped.

The Shomrim had mistaken distress for productivity.

They had depleted hope, which was the nutrient beneath the nutrient.

He returned to the desk.

There had to be a final harvest.

The phrase arrived with its own administrative calm: terminal harvest.

When ordinary expectations had collapsed, one remained. Even the pessimists expected civilisation to continue tomorrow. They renewed contracts, made dental appointments, bought food for Thursday. A world war would destroy that final collective assumption and produce an immense immediate yield. Enough resonance to sustain the Shomrim through the fallow decades while humanity rebuilt its numbers, confidence and capacity for disappointment.

But war, once begun, could not be controlled. The dissonance would become atmospheric, then self-amplifying. Human fear would jam other humans without further intervention from the Station. The Shomrim could initiate the event and collect its yield. They could not determine whether ten per cent of humanity died or ninety.

At ninety per cent, the harvest would be magnificent.

It would also be the last.

Mark saved the document.

He felt exceptionally well.

2a:T4014,

“My name is Neil Henderson.”

Then he said nothing for thirty seconds.

The lecture theatre had been built at a time when universities still wished to intimidate the young into gratitude. Its walls were panelled in a blond and expensive wood; its seats descended with parliamentary severity towards a shallow stage; and above the stage, suspended where a crucifix might once have performed the same administrative function, hung the university crest. Sixty people looked down upon Neil Henderson. Neil Henderson looked back.

At first, the silence was merely the silence after a sentence. It possessed grammar. It was the little white space in which another sentence collected itself.

At five seconds it became a delay.

At ten, it should have become a mistake.

By fifteen, the audience should have begun to assist him. Someone should have coughed. Someone should have adjusted a bag with needless vigour. Someone in the back row should have smiled at someone else in the back row, inaugurating that small republic of ridicule by which strangers protect themselves from witnessing a public failure. The professor who had invited him should have felt the first proprietorial twinge of regret.

None of this happened.

Neil stood with his hands lightly touching either side of the lectern. He had brought no notes. He wore a dark jacket, a white shirt without a tie and the expression of a man neither waiting for permission nor withholding anything for effect. He did not stare them down. That would have made the silence a contest. He simply remained where he was, available and unembarrassed.

At twenty seconds, the room settled more deeply into itself.

At twenty-five, a young woman near the aisle noticed that her shoulders had dropped. A man two rows behind her stopped pressing his tongue against a troublesome tooth. Professor Alice Venn, seated at the far end of the front row, experienced the unfamiliar pleasure of having arranged an event whose success she could not yet explain.

At thirty seconds, Neil smiled.

“Well, that was odd, wasn’t it? You come for a talk and I give you thirty seconds of silence right after announcing my name. You should be dying of secondhand embarrassment, and I should be lying on the floor from experiencing it firsthand.”

A pause.

This one was shorter. It was also different. The audience could feel itself being asked to inspect the silence that had just passed through it.

“Did that feel … pleasant?”

There were a few nods. Then more. A subdued laugh moved across the middle rows—not derisive laughter, but the sound people made when caught agreeing to something before they understood its price.

“It did to me,” Neil said. “But then almost everything does now.”

He stepped out from behind the lectern.

“Three months ago, I was bedridden. Not metaphorically bedridden. Not taking calls from bed, answering emails in bed, having what people with functioning lives call a duvet day. I was twenty-seven years old and I lived in a single room whose door was six paces from the bed. On a good day I could reach it. On an excellent day I could open it.

“I had severe anxiety, severe depression and agoraphobia. Those were the official names. I collected names because names were among the few things still capable of reaching me. Panic disorder. Major depressive disorder. Avoidant behaviour. Derealisation. Intrusive ideation. Each diagnosis was delivered as if a committee had finally discovered the correct Latin inscription for the stone on my chest.

“I had not been inside a shop for fourteen months. I had not travelled on a train for two years. When my mother visited, I sometimes pretended to be asleep because being loved created obligations I did not have the strength to misunderstand. I knew the dimensions of my ceiling more intimately than I knew another human face.”

No one moved. This was partly courtesy and partly arithmetic. They had already calculated the distance between the man described and the man before them. There was no visible route connecting the two.

Neil indicated the room with one open hand.

“This is my first time at this university. It is my first time at any prestigious university, although I did once deliver a parcel to one. This is also the first talk I have given in my life. Professor Venn has been very brave, or very irresponsible, in lending me forty-five minutes of institutional credibility.”

Venn smiled. The room laughed again, more freely now.

“Three months ago I could not cross the landing without preparing for it. Today I came here by train, ate a sandwich in a crowded station, asked a stranger for directions and stood in silence before sixty people while my body neglected to kill me. You are entitled to ask what happened.”

He looked towards the clock mounted above the rear doors. It showed 6:06. There were forty-two minutes left.

“Five dreams happened.”

The laughter did not return. This pleased him.

“Five dreams over five consecutive nights. Or five transmissions, if you prefer the word she used. The distinction matters, but not yet. The entity who contacted me gave me a human name by which I could think of her. Fah. F-A-H. It is borrowed from Thai and means sky. It is not her name because her kind do not possess names in precisely the form we do. But conversation requires handles, even when one of the speakers is not human.”

There it was. The first unmistakable absurdity.

The audience accepted it with admirable professionalism. A beard was stroked. A pen moved. Somewhere in the upper rows, a laptop key was pressed with judicial emphasis.

“I know,” Neil said. “We have arrived rather quickly.”

Another small laugh.

“Professor Venn has heard the whole account. She has not endorsed it. The university has not endorsed it. No faculty, department, laboratory, funding body or distinguished dead benefactor has endorsed it. I say this partly for their protection and partly because endorsement is irrelevant to what I am going to tell you.

“I have no evidence that would survive an examination. I cannot produce Fah. I cannot show you the mechanism by which she reached me. I do not have a blurred photograph of a machine in the sky, a fragment of unusual metal or a recording spoiled at exactly the useful moment by interference. What I possess is information, and the peculiar fact that receiving it cured me.”

A young man in the third row raised his hand.

Neil nodded to him.

“Cured you completely?”

“No,” Neil said. “It did not improve my eyesight, straighten my teeth or make my father easier to speak to. It did not eliminate grief, irritation, pain, indigestion, boredom or the possibility that I may one day be hit by a bus. It removed the disorders I named. My anxiety vanished. My agoraphobia vanished. My depression vanished. Not gradually. Not through exposure, discipline or a heroic rediscovery of exercise. They vanished because I learned why they were happening.”

The young man lowered his hand, dissatisfied in a thoughtful way.

“I need to be exact here,” Neil continued. “Fah did not persuade me of a theory. She did not present an argument whose propositions I weighed and accepted. She installed the explanation as grounded truth. That phrase may sound evasive, but you already know the difference. You know facts that can be challenged and facts upon which the act of challenging appears to stand. If somebody asks whether you truly believe you are awake, you can entertain the question. You cannot inhabit it for long. Wakefulness is beneath the discussion.

“What Fah gave me sits there. Beneath discussion.”

He placed a hand flat against his chest, not sentimentally but as if indicating the position of an internal instrument.

“I feel highly privileged that she contacted me. I did nothing to earn it. I was not selected because I was spiritually advanced. I was selected because I was nearly unusable.”

The sentence produced no laughter.

“My suffering had ceased to be productive, even to those producing it. I was an exhausted circuit: too frightened to enter the world, too depressed to imagine losing it. There was almost no remaining distance between what I hoped for and what I expected. That distance is important. We will spend quite a lot of time on it this evening.

“Fah was also approaching the end of her life. That is why she spoke. She belongs to a civilisation whose continued comfort depends upon our continued disturbance. Her people intend to increase that disturbance beyond any level they have previously attempted. She believes the result may destroy us. She also believes it may destroy them. Whistleblower is our word for her position, and it is good enough.”

A rustle finally passed through the theatre. It was not yet disbelief. Disbelief tends to be cleaner and more enjoyable. This was the discomfort of sensing that an outlandish claim had come equipped with an internal structure.

Neil waited until the movement ceased.

“She revealed the information over five nights because the human mind is not built to receive the whole of it at once. On the first night, she showed me what consciousness is. On the second, what had been done to ours. On the third, why her species did it. On the fourth, what they intend to do next. On the fifth, she showed me the one part of the system they cannot completely control.

“Us.”

He let the word remain uncomplicated.

“A direct transmission is not what I can offer you. I cannot install this account in your minds as Fah installed it in mine. A lecture is words. Words become propositions, propositions invite judgement, and judgement is rarely unattended by vanity. Some of you are already composing objections. Some are diagnosing me. At least one of you is deciding whether this would make a good dissertation provided all references to nonhuman entities were replaced by references to late capitalism.”

The loudest laughter so far came from the postgraduate rows.

“That is fine. I am not asking you to surrender your judgement. I am asking you to notice what occurs immediately before judgement arrives. The little contraction. The internal noise. The impulse to defend a position you did not know you occupied until something approached it.

“Fah calls the absence of that noise resonance.”

Neil returned to the lectern, took a sip of water and placed the glass down without looking at it.

“I touched on resonance. Resonance is simple. It is harmony. It almost doesn’t need any explanation because our consciousness is built for attunement. But dissonance?”

His smile tightened, though it did not disappear.

“Do you know that is the subject we humans cannot stop talking about? It causes all the complications in the world. Most stories begin when resonance ends. Most philosophies are systems for explaining why it ended. Most religions promise to restore it. Most industries offer to rent it back to you by the month.”

Pens moved now. The laptop keys lost their judicial character and became merely industrious.

“Resonance is not happiness,” Neil said. “Happiness is weather. Resonance is the climate beneath it. A resonant person may be grieving. A resonant person may be ill, afraid, angry or in pain. The distinction is that the experience does not immediately divide against itself. Grief does not say: You should have recovered by now. Fear does not say: Your fear proves you are weak. Pain does not say: This is your life forever, and it has happened because you are the sort of person to whom life happens.

“Dissonance echoes. That is its great economy. Something occurs once in the world and then a hundred times in thought. We relive the insult, prelive the catastrophe, rehearse the abandonment, prosecute ourselves on behalf of people who have forgotten our names. The original signal may be faint. We provide the amplification.”

The woman near the aisle looked down at her hands.

“You know this,” Neil said, more softly. “Not my explanation. The experience. You know the exhaustion of being both the frightened animal and the person standing over it demanding that it stop being frightened. You know what it is to feel lonely and then feel ashamed of loneliness, to doubt yourself and then treat the doubt as evidence, to suffer and then become the author of an additional suffering in which the first suffering reveals something contemptible about you.

“That second movement is not inevitable. More importantly, it is not entirely ours.”

He allowed them a moment, but only a moment.

“During the first thirty seconds of this talk, I gave you almost nothing to amplify. More precisely, I gave you something which ordinarily produces amplification—a man failing in public—but I did not generate the corresponding signal. I did not apologise with my face. I did not contract. I did not ask you, silently, to rescue me from my own decision. There was no embarrassment in me for your embarrassment to attach itself to.

“So most of you remained where you were.”

The room had become very quiet again, though this time the quiet contained the audience’s effort to understand its earlier effortlessness.

“You thought you were waiting for me to speak. For part of that time, you were not waiting. You were simply here. That is why it felt pleasant. Not thrilling. Not narcotic. Pleasant in the almost insulting way that something feels pleasant when it has ceased to interfere with you.

“For thirty seconds you did not have to manage me. I did not have to manage you. Nobody in this room was required to anticipate, repair or conceal the private judgement of anybody else. We were not sixty people succeeding or failing at being an audience. We were sixty fields of consciousness briefly falling into attunement.”

A hand rose at the rear.

“Are you saying you did that to us?”

“No,” Neil replied. “I’m saying I stopped doing something, and for a few seconds you stopped with me.”

“What did you stop doing?”

“Believing the disturbance was mine.”

The answer was so immediate that the questioner had no time to arrange a face for it.

Neil moved once more from behind the lectern. There was nothing evangelistic in his manner. Evangelists leaned towards their audiences, burdened by the need to close a sale. Neil leaned nowhere.

“This is the difficulty I face tonight. Fah gave me knowledge in a form that interrupted the echo. I can give you only an account. You may believe me, disbelieve me or entertain me provisionally as a thought experiment. The people Fah belongs to will prefer the second response, but they are perfectly capable of using the first. Frightened belief produces as much internal noise as frightened disbelief.

“So I will not ask you to believe yet. Belief is one of the complications. I will ask you to observe. When the explanation sounds impossible, observe the part of you that wishes to punish it for sounding impossible. When it sounds persuasive, observe the part that wishes to be saved by it. Neither reflex is resonance. Both are attempts to reach it by force.”

He glanced again at the clock.

“We have definitions ahead of us. Signals. Fields. Extraction. A civilisation that calls itself the Shomrim, borrowing—as it borrows nearly everything that makes its condition tolerable—a human word. We will discuss why human consciousness is both receiver and signal; how an external interference can reach the field without entering the private contents of a mind; why dreams exist; and why, after thousands of years of carefully managed disturbance, the management is failing.

“You will have plenty to object to.”

He rested his hands on the lectern exactly as he had at the beginning.

“But first I’m going to ask you a question.”

Sixty faces waited.

“Do you want another thirty seconds of resonance?”

A sea of hands rose up.

2b:T1cce,

“I thought that, for a writer, there could be nothing worse than writer’s block,” Kris Durrell said from the doorstep. “Then I read Shomrim.”

Mark stood aside. “Come in, Kris. And, by the way, tell me what you really think of my first work in six months.”

Kris entered with the manuscript clamped beneath one arm. He went directly to the kitchen table, sat down and placed all fifty thousand words in front of him with the care one might afford an explosive device whose manufacture one personally resented.

“Neil-fucking-Henderson,” he said. “Let’s start with him.”

“Let’s.”

“He’s an exposition dump positioned between two larger exposition dumps. He gives a talk to the most obedient audience in literary history—sixty human prompt devices who exist solely to ask whatever question permits the next parcel of lore to be unloaded.”

“They’re curious.”

“They’re furniture with hands. Neil explains something, one of them raises an arm, Neil explains something else.”

Mark pulled out the chair opposite.

“You liked that bit.”

“I stopped reading and walked around my house.”

“To absorb it?”

“To establish that another world still existed.”

Mark smiled. “Anything else?”

“That ending where he asks if the attendance wants another thirty seconds of ‘resonance’ and then, ‘A sea of hands rose up’?”

Kris began to laugh. It was not the professional cough with which writers acknowledged one another’s comic intentions. It was helpless, full-bodied laughter. He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Each attempt to look at the page produced another attack.

Mark waited.

“A sea,” Kris managed.

“Of hands.”

Kris folded over the manuscript. Eventually he recovered, replaced his glasses and looked at Mark with genuine concern.

“That is so...well, I hate this word I'm going to use now, but it's so cringe, Mark. Are you okay, seriously?”

“I'm writing for the first time in six months.”

“I'm not sure this is how you break through writer's block.”

“Forget what I'm writing. Acknowledge that I'm enjoying the process in the moment. Even if I read it back later and think it's....”

“Absolute shit?”

He turned to the manuscript’s middle and allowed several pages to run beneath his thumb.

“Neil isn’t actually the issue. Neil is merely the point where your condition acquires a lectern. The whole book is this. It explains itself from the first page to the last.”

“It’s deliberately expositional. And it's not finished.”

“Exposition normally exposes something so that a story can occur. Here, the exposure is the story. You explain the Shomrim. Then you explain resonance. Then dissonance, static, human fields, mechanical shells, personal reserves, control Gardens, animal yields, dream extraction, expectation differentials, birth rates, world wars and agricultural policy after world wars. Then the Shomrim hold a meeting and explain it all to one another.”

“The meeting introduces the terminal harvest.”

“It was introduced twenty pages earlier.”

“The meeting formalises it.”

“Thank God. I was worried the interplanetary despair farm lacked minutes.”

Mark put two mugs on the table.

“Coffee?”

“Does it possess mass?”

“Yes.”

“Then I still understand one object in this house.”

Mark poured. Kris drank and resumed.

“There are no scenes. There are locations where information is released. Nobody discovers anything because they are all either explaining or being explained to. Fah downloads the complete truth into Neil. Neil downloads the abridged truth into sixty students. The narrator downloads the annotated truth into the reader. You’ve invented a universe in which every character is a delivery method.”

“Kris—”

“Fifty thousand words, Mark. A respectable novel could have contained a death, an affair and a moderately convincing childhood. Yours contains a six-page clarification of why dolphins are an inefficient crop.”

“Unihemispheric sleep complicates extraction.”

Kris looked at him. Mark absorbed Kris's exhausted look and admitted:

“You're right. It’s a lore dump. There’s no real plot. Neil is a mouth. Fah is a delivery system. The students are prompts. The Shomrim exist mainly to discuss their own operating procedures.”

“Then why are you still writing it?”

“Because three weeks ago I couldn’t write a sentence I wanted to keep. Now I wake at four in the morning because fifty thousand bad words want another five thousand. And yes, I read it all later, and it sounds exactly as you describe it. Amateur lore. An instruction manual for a delusion. Then after ten minutes I stop caring whether it works as fiction.”

“You decide it’s good?”

“No. Good becomes irrelevant.”

Kris went still.

“While I’m writing, I enter a reverie. I can hear the boiler and the traffic. I know where I am. But the material doesn’t feel invented. It feels retrieved. I don’t ask what should happen next. I know what must be explained next.”

“That sounds psychotic.”

Mark laughed, then looked down at the manuscript.

“Perhaps it isn’t meant to be a novel.”

“That is what writers say when a novel fails.”

“I know. But perhaps failing as a novel is not the worst thing it could do.”

“What would be worse?”

“Making me stop again.”

“Mark, remember the reader? What are you trying to tell the reader?”

“To give the reader a message. About us. About why everyone feels as they do. Why the decline after 2035 isn’t behaving like ordinary depression. Why people are losing not merely pleasure but expectation.”

“So you invented an explanation.”

“I thought I did. I’m not choosing scenes or characters. I’m recording specifications. That may be why it’s such a terrible novel. Whoever is writing it doesn’t care about novels.”

“Whoever?”

“Whatever. The reverie. My unconscious. Call it what you like.”

Kris fastened the pages beneath their clip.

“Call it a first draft and put it in a drawer.”

“That is what I should do.”

“If you wake tomorrow and realise it’s rubbish, trust that version of yourself.”

“I do trust him.”

“Then stop.”

“He only gets ten minutes.”

After Kris left, Mark decided he would abandon Shomrim. The decision brought immediate relief. The book was a lore dump without a story, a warning delivered in the form least likely to be believed. Kris was right about Neil, the audience, the dreams and the sea of hands. Especially the sea of hands.

At 4AM the next morning, Mark woke with a sentence complete in his mind.

A story requires uncertainty. A warning does not.

It was portentous, self-important and exactly the sort of sentence Kris would circle before writing OH, FUCK OFF in the margin.

Mark lay in the dark, smiling.

Then he went downstairs and began Chapter Sixteen.

2c:T37e8,

Evan could not believe he missed the twenties.

Not his twenties. The twenties. COVID, the Iran war, the oil shock and the eighteen-month period during which international travel became an expensive method of remaining inside airports. He missed all of it. This seemed both obscene and diagnostically significant.

He had not enjoyed the decade while it was happening. Nobody had. Its principal activity had been announcing that no previous decade had placed the human nervous system under such sustained and unreasonable pressure. Every year had arrived already condemned by the preceding one, then contrived to make its predecessor look spacious and well managed. People had spoken of 2021 with nostalgia by 2024, of 2024 with nostalgia by 2027. Even then, the past had been improving at extraordinary speed.

They had been wrong about the pressure, of course. The human nervous system had merely been warming up.

Evan turned into the park and checked the time. Seven twenty-three. He had been walking for nineteen minutes and needed another twenty-one before breakfast. Forty minutes of low-intensity movement, ideally performed within an hour of waking. Natural light into the eyes. No glasses unless essential. No phone, except to check the time, the air quality, his pace and whether the absence of his phone was producing any measurable benefit.

He had followed the routine for three years. It did not make him feel good. Nothing made him feel good with the reliability implied by the phrase. The walk made him feel less bad than he would feel if he did not take it, although the benefit could be identified only by removing it. Miss one morning and the day acquired a faint internal gradient. Miss two and ordinary tasks began to require preliminary negotiations. By the third, the kitchen bin was no longer an object awaiting evacuation but a referendum on whether he remained capable of participating in life.

So he walked.

The park was crowded. Exercise participation had risen every year since 2033 and was regularly cited as one of the period's encouraging social developments. Alcohol consumption was down. Smoking had almost disappeared. People ate vegetables, protected their sleep, monitored their blood sugar and performed resistance training with the solemnity of villagers strengthening a flood barrier.

Nobody in the park looked encouraged.

They moved with the grim custodial concentration of people preventing an internal emergency. Running had once been undertaken to become attractive, fast or unusually good at running. Now people ran because missing two consecutive sessions caused the floor of the mind to tilt. The healthiest population in history felt too bad to live carelessly.

There was a phrase people used: mental slack. Evan could not remember who had coined it. A psychiatrist, probably, or one of the public thinkers who spent their careers attaching handles to general despair. Mental slack was the surplus by which a person absorbed a bad night, a humiliation, a hangover or an unexpectedly large bill without the entire system seizing. In the twenties people had possessed more of it than they knew. They had spent it extravagantly. They drank wine on weeknights, smoked cigarettes outside pub entrances, remained awake until two in the morning arguing with strangers and ate food delivered by motorcyclists whose location they watched on a map with imperial impatience. Then they got up, complained and recovered.

They had damaged themselves casually because they assumed there was a self beneath the damage capable of repair.

Evan found their recklessness moving.

Now a bottle of wine was six bad days poured into glass. Everyone knew it. People still drank, but usually in the furtive, self-punitive manner of diabetics eating the thinnest possible sliver of a wedding cake. The pleasure arrived with its invoice already attached.

Evan passed a man of approximately sixty performing slow squats beside a bench. The man wore weighted gloves and the empty expression of someone completing maintenance on a body whose occupant had not requested an extension. They nodded to one another. The nod counted as neither man's daily human contact, but it was not nothing.

That was another phrase: not nothing. The age had developed a tender regard for whatever could not quite be called something.

He missed COVID. There it was. An indecent sentence, but true.

He did not miss the deaths, the sealed wards, the arguments or the small blue masks floating in gutters. He missed the boundedness of it. COVID had waves, variants, dashboards, press conferences and an eventual afterwards. It was an interruption, which implied that somewhere beneath the interruption life remained intact. People spoke continually of getting back to normal. They disagreed about when, how and whether normal had been good, but even the argument assumed a destination.

The later crises retained something of that structure. Wars still began on identifiable mornings. Markets crashed between an opening and a close. Governments announced packages. Experts drew curves which rose, peaked and—this was the important part—fell. Even catastrophe observed the old dramatic unities: something happened, people reacted, and eventually a person on television used the word recovery without being laughed out of the studio.

In 2039 nothing was happening.

That was the problem.

The oil shock had been the last great happening. It began toward the end of 2026. Refineries burned, two shipping channels closed, then reopened, then became commercially unusable. Insurance costs completed what the missiles had started. Oil did not run out. It became too politically charged, physically vulnerable and financially erratic to organise ordinary life around.

For eighteen months, aircraft remained on the ground in white ranks. Supermarket shelves acquired long pale interruptions. Private cars became expensive furniture with windscreens. People said the world had stopped.

It had not stopped. It had paused.

A pause still contained the promise of resumption.

The planes eventually returned, but not in their former numbers. Routes came back as seasonal privileges, then premium services, then something people discussed in the historical register. International travel became a pain anyway. That was what everyone said. Evan said it too. Airports had been demeaning. Security was theatrical. Seats had been designed around an extinct human pelvis. Foreign travel damaged the climate, spread disease and converted cities into international franchises selling versions of themselves.

He did not miss it.

He kept his expired passport in the top drawer of his desk. Sometimes he opened it and looked at the stamps. Not because he missed airport queues, foreign beds or the administrative hostility of borders. The document belonged to an age in which another country had remained an available answer to the question: Where might I go?

By the early thirties, flying had become the preserve of the rich. This was denied for several years on the grounds that technically anybody could still purchase a ticket. The distinction between availability and affordability had become regarded as an ideological complaint. Aircraft continued to cross the sky. Therefore international travel continued to exist. The fact that most people experienced it as a white line seen from the ground was unfortunate but statistically complicated.

Evan watched one now, a bright incision above the trees. Perhaps two hundred people were going somewhere. He felt no envy towards them individually. He envied the sentence: Going somewhere.

He reached the lake at the centre of the park and began its outer circuit. Nine minutes remaining. His mind had started to perform the modest correction for which the walk was intended. Thoughts no longer caught quite so sharply against one another. The day ahead seemed possible provided he did not examine its contents collectively.

This was how people lived now: they kept moving.

Nobody could afford to stop, though some couldn't help it. They stopped the morning walk first, because it had never appeared to achieve anything. Then the light exposure, the regular meals, the fish oil, the strength training, the calls to friends conducted partly to satisfy both parties' awareness that social isolation accelerated decline. They stopped keeping the curtains open. The collapse looked voluntary from outside because each individual action was voluntary. Nobody was compelled to remain in bed, ignore messages or allow plates to accumulate beside the sink.

They had merely stopped running, and the belt had carried them backwards.

Everyone knew somebody to whom it had happened. Everyone had privately adjusted the distance between themselves and that person in case collapse possessed a field. Invitations became less frequent because refusals were painful to receive and embarrassing to issue. Messages went unanswered because the answer required an account of why earlier messages had gone unanswered. Shame sealed the structure. Within months, a human being could disappear without changing address.

Knowing this made the running harder. A missed walk was not a missed walk; it was how it began. A takeaway was not dinner; it was an early concession. An evening alone with bad thoughts became evidence that one might soon spend every evening alone with them. People feared depression, then monitored themselves for fear of it, then interpreted the monitoring as proof that depression had already begun.

The mind watched the mind watching the mind.

By 2035 the arrangement became official, although nobody announced it. Language changed first. People stopped asking whether someone was depressed and began asking what they were doing for their depression. Employers offered mood-maintenance hours. Restaurants printed affective-impact guidance beside the alcohol content. Exercise was prescribed not to the unwell but to the population. The distinction was initially too small to notice.

Four years later it contained almost everybody.

Evan remembered an old survey question: Have you experienced low mood for a period exceeding two weeks? By 2037 it had been removed because respondents no longer understood what comparison they were being asked to make. Low relative to what? Which two weeks? The condition had ceased to present as an episode and become a climate. Happiness still occurred, but locally, unpredictably and with the guilty brightness of unseasonable weather.

He was not severely depressed. This was important. Severely depressed people received interventions. Evan worked, paid bills, answered most messages and changed his bedding every Sunday. He laughed when material justified it. He anticipated meals within reasonable limits. He possessed no desire to die.

He was managing.

Managing had once described what people did between experiences. Now it was the experience.

His watch vibrated. Forty minutes.

He could go home, eat the breakfast he had assembled the night before and begin work. Thirty-two grams of protein. Fermented food for the gut-brain axis. No news until ten, no caffeine until ninety minutes after waking, no contact with algorithmically selected images before he had established an internally generated sense of self. At twelve he would lift weights. At one he would stand outside again. At six he would telephone his sister, unless she telephoned first, and each would prevent the other's company from deteriorating into a recognised risk factor.

It was a good routine. He was fortunate to possess the discipline for it.

He had once possessed a life which could tolerate indiscipline. He missed the slack. People could make themselves ill in pursuit of pleasure because illness was temporary and pleasure did not yet require a recovery plan. They could cut loose because something inside them remained loose enough to cut.

They had complained constantly. Complaining was one of the freedoms they failed to recognise. A complaint contained an expectation. This is unacceptable meant that something better remained imaginable. This cannot continue meant that time was expected to perform an intervention.

By 2039 people had become more reasonable.

International travel became a pain anyway. Private cars were selfish. Fast fashion was obscene. Alcohol was depressive. Cigarettes killed. Parties disrupted sleep and produced shallow social contact. Spontaneity was merely poor planning described by its beneficiaries. One by one, the age supplied excellent reasons not to miss anything it had lost.

Evan accepted every reason.

He missed it all.

And people—what had happened to people? Evan knew that every generation accused the next of decay, but this was not hairstyles or manners or the traditional old man’s grievance against noise. Across the decades, people seemed to have become steadily more vain, more mercenary, more boastful about smaller achievements, more casually cruel and less capable of forgiveness. They advertised compassion and practised contempt. They treated loyalty as stupidity, restraint as repression and pleasure as the only appetite whose demands carried moral authority. Everyone displayed goodness; fewer people appeared burdened by it. Perhaps humanity had not worsened at all. Perhaps the machinery for revealing character had merely become perfect. But Evan could remember when ugliness still felt obliged to lower its voice.

At the park gate he passed the sixty-year-old man again. The man had finished his squats and was stretching one calf against the railings. His face was flushed. Whatever internal fall he had got up early to prevent had, for another morning, been prevented.

Evan nodded. The man nodded back.

They were doing well.

Evan walked home beneath a sky crossed by a single aircraft. His mood had not improved. This was not considered a failure. The walk had prevented it from becoming worse.

In 2039, that qualified as health.

2d:T1377,

In 1984, Andrew Lang had 255 lives.

Inside the Spectrum, death was a number. Andrew changed it.

The guards remained murderous, the arrows remained airborne and the rope continued its policy of being elsewhere. He had not made Hunchback easier. He had made failure affordable.

At twelve, abundance meant 255 lives.

Nineteen eighty-four did not regard itself as abundant. It had unemployment, strikes, bomb scares and nuclear extinction, which had entered popular comedy because remaining exclusively in terror would have given it airs. Britain was shabby, violent and tired in several important places.

But it leaned forward.

The inhabitants of 1984 did not think they had never had it so good. They thought they had barely started.

Orwell’s dreaded year had arrived thrilled to be here.

It arrived with home computers, synthesisers and a chart full of people dressed for futures that never happened. Every Thursday, Top of the Pops delivered the next world into the living room, where somebody’s father complained about its trousers.

Andrew loved synthesisers because they made sound inspectable: waveform, envelope, filter, modulation. A guitar hid its mathematics inside wood and fingers. A synthesiser put the controls on the front and dared you to produce weather.

Still, the number of possible sounds had to be finite. Vast, certainly, but finite. There were only so many useful relations between frequencies before music became a domestic alarm. Therefore music must eventually peak.

This was not prescience. It was twelve-year-old mathematics applied to pop.

To Andrew, the peak remained impossibly far away. Every week disclosed another room. Pop music in 1983 and 1984 had the indecency of a civilisation discovering new colours and putting them straight into the charts.

A summit becomes visible only during the descent. It was not a summit of universal excellence: 1984 manufactured rubbish with tremendous confidence. But the confidence mattered. Even the rubbish wanted to astonish strangers. Films, games, fashion and pop music presumed that novelty remained possible and that ordinary people might recognise it when it arrived. Failure flourished because an unsuccessful attempt did not yet destroy the person attempting it.

Culture had lives to spare.

Andrew bought Eurythmics’ 1984 and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: the soundtrack and the warning.

Orwell’s world was grey, hungry and watched. Language narrowed. History changed behind you. A boot had secured a permanent booking with the human face.

The book seemed outlandish.

It was outlandish. Andrew’s television could not watch him; it could barely maintain a picture without spiritual correction to the aerial. The Spectrum knew nothing about the hands touching it. The government did not know which bus he had taken. Nobody had yet made surveillance look like convenience.

Orwell had made 1984 the year the past feared. It would become the year the future missed.

The watching came, of course, but democratised and smiling. There was no single Party substantial enough to hate. The telescreen was purchased voluntarily, upgraded annually and carried into the lavatory. History vanished not by incineration but beneath limitless history. Machines learned everything about their owners while their owners learned where the battery went.

Andrew knew none of this. He wondered why Winston Smith had not run away sooner.

He put on Eurythmics and opened Orwell. The book entered the music; the music entered the room. The future sounded cold, grand and interesting.

Then, for perhaps thirty seconds, interest stopped.

Nothing happened. That was the peculiarity. The room remained available, but Andrew could not quite reach it. The objects lost their invitations. He was not sad; sadness would have been company.

This was one dark pixel in a bright consciousness.

He had felt it before, usually on Sunday afternoons. He had no name for it and therefore no secondary fear of the name. He did not become anxious about anxiety or depressed by the possibility of depression. A strange minute was permitted to remain a strange minute.

Then the route reopened.

Andrew looked at Popular Computing Weekly. His name was still there. So was his work:

POKE 24760,255

The world had answered him once and therefore seemed likely to answer again. He loaded Hunchback and waited through the electronic shriek.

The future he imagined was not extravagant. It was the present with its promises honoured: better computers, stranger music, easier travel, greater freedom. He could not know that the future would inherit the archive but mislay the momentum; that it would possess more songs and less elsewhere; that abundance would survive mainly as quantity.

2e:T23fd,

“How did you research it?” Kris asked.

Mark looked at the manuscript between them. It had grown considerably since their previous meeting and acquired, without becoming better, the dense authority of a document entered into evidence.

“Research what?”

“The 1984 chapter.”

“I didn’t.”

Kris waited. He had developed several different silences during their friendship. This was the one which accused Mark of wasting both time and oxygen.

“I checked a few things,” Mark said. “The Eurythmics album. What was in the charts. Top of the Pops was still on Thursdays. Cursory stuff.”

“The Spectrum?”

“I knew what a Spectrum was.”

“Did you?”

“Small black computer. Rubber keys. Made an appalling noise.”

“You’ve described the entire British electronics industry.”

Mark moved the manuscript aside and made coffee. Kris had arrived without warning at nine in the morning, carrying a thin tablet whose presence in Mark’s kitchen was already an ideological provocation. Mark distrusted any object that improved while its owner slept. His telephone made calls, received calls and displayed weather with a degree of confidence unjustified by English weather. Everything else he did on a twelve-year-old laptop disconnected from the domestic intelligence system. He referred to this as privacy. Kris referred to it as maintaining a technological shrine to 2027.

“You liked the chapter, then,” Mark said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’ve driven across London before breakfast to ask about its research.”

“I came to determine the scale of the fraud.”

“That’s practically a review.”

Kris accepted the coffee and did not drink it.

“The chapter is ... okay,” he said.

Mark sat down.

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t make me repeat it. You’ll turn it into dialogue.”

“Too late.”

“But it’s a dot-joining exercise in the fall of modern man. Cheap houses, open machines, pop music with somewhere to go, Orwell, surveillance, lost abundance. I could see you drawing the lines. Several of the dots had numbers beside them. Some of them were Bible verses.”

“That’s how dot-to-dot works.”

“Usually you remove the numbers before publication.”

“Thank you.”

“It is still indulgent beyond accepted medical limits.”

“There he is.”

“A prodigious little programmer representing the final year of cultural abundance? Called Andrew Lang? You might as well have given him a luminous forehead.”

“I liked him.”

“Of course you did. He has 255 lives and the narrator’s full pension.”

Mark smiled. Kris did not.

“Well, he - like Neil in Chapter Two - has got me writing again, with enthusiasm.”

“How did you find Andrew Lang?”

“I didn’t.”

“Which archive?”

“None.”

“Did someone send you the clipping?”

“What clipping?”

Kris watched him with a concentration that was beginning to feel impolite.

“Stop answering questions with questions.”

“Stop asking questions whose nouns I don’t understand.”

“Andrew Lang.”

“What about him?”

“How did you find him?”

“Find him where?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make me feel insane while we discuss your insanity.”

Mark leaned back.

“Kris, I made him up.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I invented a twelve-year-old called Andrew Lang.”

“Then you invented someone else’s childhood four years before your own began.”

Kris touched the tablet. The screen brightened instantly, pleased to be useful. He turned it around.

The page was yellow-grey and imperfectly squared. Its columns leaned towards one another with the intimacy of old print. Advertisements crowded the margins: joysticks, cassette compilations, memory expansions promising a future in units no modern refrigerator would accept. Across the top of the scan ran the title Popular Computing Weekly and a date in October 1984.

Kris enlarged a column.

Mark read his own sentence.

Or almost his own sentence. The typeface was different. The words around it were different. But the name, town and instruction were the same.

Andrew Lang, Northampton.

POKE 24760,255

Mark looked at Kris.

“What is this?”

“It’s Popular Computing Weekly.”

“I can see that.”

“October 1984.”

“I can see that too.”

“For fuck's sakes.”

Mark drew the tablet closer. The scan resisted enlargement by becoming blocks. Andrew’s name remained legible after the surrounding language began to dissolve.

“Where did you get it?”

“An archival search.”

“On what?”

“Everything.”

Kris explained. The public web knew little about obsolete British computer magazines and considerably too much about the nineteenth-century Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang. An ordinary search had produced fairy books, biographies and several thousand retailers offering Spectrum memorabilia at prices calculated to punish nostalgia. Kris had asked an archival intelligence to combine the name, Northampton, Hunchback, the magazine and the memory address. It searched undigitised periodical indexes, requested scans, interpreted degraded type and found the item buried in a miscellaneous readers’ column.

“It took two hours,” Kris said.

“You spent two hours checking a POKE?”

“I spent two hours trying to catch you cheating.”

“At what?”

“Reality, apparently.”

Mark read the clipping again.

Kris finally drank his coffee. It had cooled, but the morning had acquired other priorities.

“You were born in 1988,” he said.

“I remember.”

“You hate computer games.”

“I don’t hate them. I regard them as household tasks with orchestral accompaniment.”

“You write on a machine old enough to have voting rights. You once called cloud storage ‘burglary with branding’. When I asked what a POKE was yesterday, you said it was probably a command.”

“It is probably a command.”

“You don’t know what the numbers mean.”

“Do you?”

“No. But I’m not the one who put them in a novel.”

Mark looked down at the manuscript. The chapter had appeared after Evan’s walk and the scriptural interlude, a leap backwards into a year Mark had never inhabited. He remembered writing it in the same way he remembered writing the rest of Shomrim: an afternoon lost without unconsciousness, the words arriving already impatient with the speed of his hands.

“I remember writing it,” he said.

“Do you?”

Mark considered this.

“I remember having written it.”

Kris put down the mug.

For once, he did not exploit the sentence.

“You always write from what you know,” he said.

“Most writers do.”

“No. Most writers research. You cannibalise. Your divorce lawyer came from your divorce. The hotel in Departure Tax was the hotel in Leeds. The adult-education class was your mother’s. Even your ghosts haunt properties you’ve rented. You don’t fabricate detail. You steal it from your life and alter the curtains.”

“Andrew isn’t from my life.”

“That is my concern.”

The kitchen settled around them. A delivery vehicle moved along the street with its motor reduced to an administrative hum. Somewhere inside the wall, the house made a decision about temperature.

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Mark said.

“Correct.”

“It doesn’t prove the Shomrim exist.”

“Obviously.”

“It doesn’t prove Fah sent me the book.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t prove the decline after 2035 is an agricultural operation conducted by an interstellar hive of consciousnesses converting misery into artificial psychological stability.”

“Please don’t make Neil come back.”

Mark pushed the tablet away.

“Then what does it prove?”

Kris looked at the manuscript. Now seventy thousand words of cosmological exposition; a warning in the form least likely to be believed; a terrible novel that had somehow, for one chapter, remembered being alive.

“One part of your book is true.”

Mark said nothing.

“And you didn’t know it was true.”

On the screen, the old page waited. The clipping was comically small. It did not announce a visitation, predict a war or disclose the presence of invisible cultivators. It merely allowed a boy to fall from a castle two hundred and fifty-two more times than its developer - Ocean Software - had intended.

“Did it work?” Mark asked.

Kris frowned.

“What?”

“The POKE.”

Kris consulted the archive.

“Yes,” he said. “It worked.”

On the screen, in 1984, Andrew Lang still had 255 lives.

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3 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

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The Dark Pixel

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