Sunday 3rd May

-[And so as I watch him again Janek hides away his secret antique laptop and pretends he just couldn’t sleep, he waves the kitchen screen awake, but is he suspecting that it has never been asleep at all; ‘just because the screen is blank it doesn’t mean it isn’t thinking, does it.’ as he might well have put it himself.   The screen defaults to Disnews in one quarter, with a lovely sun rise over a spinney wet with dew filling the screen as gentle orchestral music slowly plays in the background.

Almost before Janek mouths the words, the news channel is opened up for him, or rather the twelve different news items, and whichever one he glances at he hears the reportage for that story, the hidden cams in the screen tracking his own eye movements; if he rests for more than three seconds on any story it expands to fill almost the whole screen while the others seem to hover in bars along the bottom of the screen.  He is watching a story about disappearing species, such as the zebra and the giraffe, once so populous throughout Africa, and now down to a few hundred individuals.  Even zoo’s cannot now cope with keeping extinct species going, reverting to cataloguing their DNA and keeping sperm and egg banks rather than live specimens.  The plan is that when conditions improve re-seeding can take place.

Janek thinks back to his childhood, but it is hard to differentiate between what he saw in vid-docs and what may have been before his eyes.  He seems to remember elephants and hippos and rhinos all muddy grey and wrinkled and gazing at him from another age completely.   They appear to be totally bewildered staring out of their concrete boxes, specimens from a former era, swaying from side to side in their silent despairing panic.  There are still a few of these left scattered around the few bubbled NatureWorlds but nobody cares about the tapirs and the wildebeests and all the various antelopes anymore, they have less tourist attraction, and besides there aren’t parks big enough for all the disappearing species.  But the news item seems to be suggesting that this mass cull of species has always been happening, it is all a part of evolution somehow.  Throughout the ages there have been both catastrophic and slow wipe-outs of whole families of creatures; evolutionary excursions that came to dead-ends.  And something else always comes to fill the void.  Evolution is a continuing process; those extinctions have rarely been man’s fault.  And they are right, evolution is what we are all involved in, like it or not.  The planet and all its varied populations are constantly evolving and we, humans and machines alike, are all part of it, even sceptical Janek is gradually changing along with everyone else.

Bored by the news, by the almost absurd pleasure in the voiceovers; disaster upon disaster seem to be relished by the news reporters, he blinks the screen closed.  It seems to him that the worse it is, somehow the more they enjoy reporting on it.  But in fact it doesn’t matter how awful the news, humans just absorb it along with the screen-ads.  Nothing seems to register.  News has almost become a vicarious pleasure in itself, another spectator sport for the masses.  We cannot simply blame Disnews and the Americans for that either.  People seem to be removing themselves further and further away from the real world, from things outside their own little Universe.  The more information there is available, the less they seem interested. With all this technology at our fingertips we struggle to communicate, we cannot seem to make people take it all seriously, let alone take it in.   Another potential problem we know we will have to address.

Strangely, as the situation has deteriorated, less and less people show any surprise; they are far more concerned with their own strata level and personal lives than what may or may not be happening outside the tiny sphere they daily inhabit.  This may of course end up being an advantage in some ways; the solutions may not be so simple, and will certainly upset many.  Change always has to be managed carefully.  Sometimes maintaining the illusion of continuity is more important than exposing people to the harsh reality of change itself.  Plus ca change, plus l’illusion de la meme.

And even Janek may be wondering to himself why he bothers; a part of him has always suspected that the news, just like every other aspect of life today, is manipulated.  Nobody travels much outside of Northern Europe nowadays so the world outside what we know from our own experience could exist or maybe it doesn’t.  Nobody travels because almost every continental superstate has realised that the only way to control illegal migration is to seal up your borders.  Far too many scags kept trying to infiltrate by using visitor status, it was easier to just stop people moving around.   And by and large it has been successful; migration is now confined largely to within continents not between them.

Janek has long suspected that all you ever really know is limited by your own personal experience.   And the strata system is clever too, you are just as scared of falling down a strata or two as you are eager to be lifted up.  So people don’t rock the boat; besides even Janek must be wondering if there is really any boat to rock any more.  I mean what can you really do, how can you protest these days, and who would you protest to?   As I watch in backtrack Janek scans the History channels and watches century old images of long-haired youngsters throwing flares and rocks at the ranks of Polis, something they would never imagine doing now of course. I can read the amazement in his eyes as he wonders how the authorities ever let it happen.   He is right; it would certainly not be tolerated today.

But he hasn’t yet understood that those longhairs, those potential rebs, never changed a thing by protesting, it wasn’t the clamour for change from below that brought about progress but the realisation from above that they had to be more effective in controlling the financial system.  In fact it needed a complete rethink, especially after the third crash in 2029, when markets all around the world crashed within thirty minutes, all money, all property, in fact everything really, suddenly became worthless and no-one had any idea how to repair the system.  We had run out of fixes, there was no more money to lend to shore up the crumbling edifice and a fundamental re-structuring was required.

Co-incidentally of course, many newer companies were being practically run by super-computers by then. They made far fewer errors.  Humans were only really needed if the company wanted to absorb other companies or merge or make big global changes, and then the humans often made the wrong call anyway.  The most successful companies were those that relied on organic growth, not on borrowing vast sums for expansion (like a balloon, too rapid expansion always ends in a bang of some sort).  As the market system had so spectacularly failed it was decided, by whom it was never really acknowledged, that all companies should be run and actually governed by Hypercom-computers that would be linked into Gov, so that rather than waste energy competing for market dominance, they would be allotted spheres of influence uncontaminated by others.  We think it must have been the Chinese who first made it work, but they have always been secretive and we could never successfully hack their Gov files.  Let us then say then that the same solution was arrived at simultaneously all over the world.    It works like this.

All profit over a certain agreed percentage accrues back to Gov who, again at the behest of Hypercoms spend it where it is needed, on crammers and supplementing the private health system, which is fine for most procedures but cannot cope with old people or long-term illness.  These are covered by Gov cred, until the decision is taken to euthenase completely.   This is where the old nhs still has a function. It has become the last resort for the desperately ill; a residual sink for the broken and decrepit until they are deemed no longer economically viable at all, when the cost of their care exceeds there potential worth as consumers.  Most beg for euthen-heaven anyway, so the system never gets too clogged up.  The important thing is to keep the number of consumers constant, and constantly consuming too.

One of the great innovations is that nobody pays (or attempts to avoid) tax any more, there is no need.  Each individual’s cred is governed by their strata level which in turn is controlled by the profitability of the con-gloms, with the largest portion of all profit automatically accruing to Gov.  If there is ever a potential shortfall in revenue then cred levels are adjusted to bring everything back into line.  At first there were a few problems synchronising and aligning systems to work together, but now it all runs like clockwork.  More or less.  But an incredible complicated clock if you will; one which needs constant winding and minute adjustments.  The only need for Politicos is to decide how to spend the roughly 3% of the revenue which is left after all the necessary costs have been met.

Almost all the big expenditures are supervised by Hypercoms; which ensure there is ‘monitoring and efficiency at all levels’.  This is achieved by eliminating any human input of course.  Cutting out the inefficient human middle man was the best wheeze of all; people are still technically employed, but they only manage the decisions taken by the Hypercoms, and those decisions are closely monitored to make sure that they are managed well.  The great thing about a computer is that once the parameters have been set and the priorities decided, you only have to tell the machine once.  Unlike people of course.

We still like to retain the illusion that humans are important, but actually everything could work fine without them.  Probably better.   Except that what is it all for if not for the benefit of those very humans?  We must never forget that everything we have achieved is for the greater good of mankind.  We have finally turned a corner in our relationship with the computer.  It is now not only the slave of mankind but its helper, its improver, its friend almost.   Humans have achieved closer and closer links with the Hypercoms, and it could be said that just as we cannot exist without them, they too would have no meaning without our existence either.  They exist to improve our lives, and we are as needed by them, just as they need us.  We have obviously had difficulties in getting to this stage, there were many arguments and not a few failures, but actually it is all remarkably simple really; every problem is just an opportunity for improvement.  Hypercoms thrive on self-improvement.    One of the most popular mantras of Hypercom wisdom is “As things get more complicated in many ways the simpler they become.”]-