Sunday 12th April

“At work I sit in front of a bank of four screens and watch as numbers and the occasional letters and symbols zip up and across the screens.   While it is the work of an instant to stop a screen or go back in slow-mo; just by raising your hand in front of a screen it will freeze and wait for your instructions, I find I work best by scribbling down numbers and references and backtracking later when I am sure.  My eyes never leave the screen, my hands are scribbling on auto-pilot.  When I have detected some sort of a pattern, something uneven, a slight ripple, a whisper of a flaw emerging through the weave I ask the screens to scroll back and I check. This takes far longer I am sure, and sometimes even I have trouble deciphering my own scribbles, but somehow that’s the way I work best.  So I still use a pen and paper at work.  I order these special thick pads of A4 from a specialist paper maker and always make sure I have several pads in reserve as they take a few days to be fed-exed to my office.   I have several times thought about taking a pad home to use for my own use, and I am not sure if it is actually prohibited, but whereas the general consensus is that you are not watched (but no-one can be sure) in your own home, it is also absolutely certain that you are watched at work.   And let’s face it counting my pads and even the sheets I use and discard is hardly astro-physics, now is it?

And anyway I like the feel of this laptop, the way you have to hunch over it to see the screen properly, the way your hands hover over the keys.  I quite like using a keyboard again, even this old-fashioned ‘qwerty’ one.  It is years since they too were consigned to the scrapheap along with the mouse and all of that slow-command-tech.  We all use the spoken word, or rather the whispered word now.  All screens can accurately lip-read, so there is no need to shout, like you used to fifty years ago.  And they are so clever they can almost always tell what you are saying, or more importantly what you mean, long before you have finished saying it.  This is as close as the tech has got to the human mind, this ability to learn and mimic an individual’s language usage, but actually mimicry is all it is, as no-one would ever dream of actually trying to talk ‘with’ a screen.  We talk, or whisper at it, to make it do our bidding, to control the programs, to try to win at games, to ask for info, but actually conversing is out of the question.  Even though they can string words and sentences together remarkably well, confirming your commands, or giving you info, there is no inflection, no emphasis, no meaning behind the automated words they use.  Much like a lot of human conversation has been reduced to now incidentally.  (Irony again folks, sorry – can’t stop myself.)

No, the thrill of what I am doing is that I am using tech for my own self, and keeping it safe and away from prying eyes.  Unbelievably I am not connected in any way to any other human being (or machine), and you cannot imagine the freedom that gives you, how exciting that is, to just be on your own with your own thoughts being recorded.   I can go back and read them again as many time as I like and change them knowing that no-one else has ever seen them (the edited or the original either, because of course, even when you change things your first version is just as visible as the final one).

The beauty of this machine is that it still has a hard drive.  Unheard of now as every machine since the mid-teens has stored all your stuff in the ‘ether’.   Com-units are merely portals to the connected world and have no storage facility of their own at all, and now, of course, no-one has computers of their own, no-one buys or owns a computer.  What would be the point of that?  Screens are everywhere.  You don’t own them, they just are.  They are as essential to life as running water and no-one pays for them, or of course has any choice but to use them.  One screen is the same as all the others.  They are all completely interactive, and any screen anywhere will recognise you wherever you are, and accessing all your stuff is only ever a silent-mouthed request away.

I deliberately waited three days before even switching this machine on again, just in case.  But it’s all here, all the precious words I committed to its tiny internal memory, and I had to really search around for any of that old-fashioned ‘ram’ stuff they used before everything was on upload and so needed no internal memory at all.  I have always loved markets and there are still tech enthusiasts around who play at building antique machines and wondering at the old-fashioned and slow chugging processors they used to use, just as there are collectors of 2dtv sets and old ‘bluray’ players just so they can watch stuff in really lo-tech pre-holo mode.  So I started going to a few antique markets in the last couple of years and gradually found out enough of the old tech to rebuild this baby and make it sing.

So what do I want to use it all for?  Why all this subterfuge, this dicing with death, or at least being down-strata-ed or clagged?  Because I just want to record this stuff, for me, for my kids maybe when I am gone, for someone a hundred years from now who maybe might just wonder what our primitive society was really like.  The unofficial version, if you like.

Because as always the official history is being written elsewhere, and will never ever get near to the truth of stuff.  And what I want to write about isn’t really that amazing, maybe, just my sad little life here in the middle years of the twenty-first century.  Just another bit of human flotsam swept along in the tide of the Universe. But being washed up on a different beach perhaps.   Maybe it is a tiny attempt at some whisper of immortality.   Man’s final and impossible quest; the desire to leave something behind, some tiny record that I existed at all.  In the complete knowledge that my whole life is recorded and retained forever in some vast databank somewhere anyway.   But none of that, believe me, is me.  It doesn’t even come close.

All a bit grandiose isn’t it?  I wonder if Samuel Pepys ever felt so self-important.  And maybe I am dreaming all of this anyway, maybe it’s all part of some super game, like that ancient 2D film they are always showing – ‘The Matrix’, with its world of illusion and game-playing.  Who knows?  Anyway, for the first time in years I am having fun.  No, fun doesn’t come anywhere near to describing it.  Alive is what I am, and believe me I have been dead up here, in my mind, for years.

And maybe I am not so all alone, maybe there are thousands of us out here on our own in lonely little cupboard rooms secretly tapping out our pathetic dreams.  The screens always tells us of reb-orgs being broken up or discovered, so maybe some of that is true and there are millions like me who don’t want to live like this.  Weary fools who don’t really want to be a part of it anymore, but don’t want to be a hobo or a nonperson and have to try and survive in the direst of poverty either.  No-one wants to exist like the scags you see living off the rubbish dumps in Southern Russia or those derelict city-slums of middle-America.  We have to do it this way, in isolation, a meek sort of an apology for rebellion because in our world, there is absolutely no way of getting cred unless you are part of the system.  They got rid of actual money decades ago, and now that everything, every transaction, is electronic and connected, there is just no way of surviving without being part of the system.  Without cred you might as well be dead.

The few nonpersons are the drop-outs who have slipped steadily down the strata and then don’t even exist, selling themselves or begging for crusts or booze on the streets until they are eventually picked up and euthenased completely.  Disnews occasionally shows them being rounded up and taken away; no-one ever tells you where.  There have always been rumours of tiny communities on remote Scottish islands or in mountain caves who somehow live off the land, but you can never really know if they are real or not.  Like everything else, they might be real or they may be made up so you think they are real; you have no way of telling.  Our lives are lived indoors mostly, and we rely on the screens for all our info.  It isn’t safe to walk the streets at night, so you stay in and get drip-fed whatever passes for the truth these days. The only way to live any sort of private life is to comply on the surface, give them no reason to suspect, and do it all in secret.  And tell no-one at all.  Not even my wife.  No, for fucks sake; especially not my wife!  She would kill me if she thought I was threatening our strata level in any way at all.”