Harry gets introduced to some people he doesn’t know. He says cheery hellos, hands out a few saucy compliments, gets a few laughs. This is a big cross-Circle party, made up from people who know Nick and his wife in different ways: university, work, family, close friends, acquaintances, even a couple of new neighbours. At this early stage, people are chatting to whoever they already know. But just about everyone is constantly consulting their smartphones, those that aren’t wearing Vades™, iSights™, GoogleGlasses™ or something else that overlays a constant online feed onto their vision. They’re checking each other out, summoning the public profiles of strangers, reviewing their timelines. Long before they ever talk to each other.
The friend requests are already happening, too. Like most things nowadays, friend requests are autoed. Once you meet someone and have a conversation with them, your auto will send a request to their auto. Usually, if both of you have a friend in common, the request is automatically accepted. If your see-eye is good – if your auto detects a high Compatibility Index between you and another person – it will probably send a friend request on your behalf anyway, even if you haven’t met them yet. So at a party like this, everyone’s Circle tends to swell quite a bit. It’s handy, screening out people who are not worth meeting. No point making friends with someone you’ve got nothing in common with.
Nick’s about to check his wife’s profile and find out precisely how many new friends she’s made, and how many of them are male, when Harry says “Mate, who’s the tall guy? Three o’clock, black shirt, tight buns?” To answer his own question Harry rattles his wrist to wake up his smartphone, aiming it to detect the man’s public profile. “Jonathan Collins?”
Ha. Typical. Harry’s doing what he always does in a crowd: checking out good-looking man, then checking their availability. “You won’t find John on the sexnets, man-whore,” Nick mutters. “He’s been married longer than I have.”
“Yeah, married men don’t turn up on Poundr after midnight, sure, that never happens.” He elbows Nick, hard enough to bruise. “You’ll be on there before long, Brady. Ten-year itch and all that, that’ll soon turn into a ten-inch itch…”
Nick shoves him towards the kitchen. It’s ringed with gleaming white goods, including a floor-to-ceiling fridge freezer of shimmering chrome. Six-packs, bottles, plastic glasses and ice cubes are littered everywhere, but the mess can’t hide the newness. Harry’s nodding a lot. “Not bad. Not bad a-tall, geezer. I know your new job’s paying well and all that, but still, bit surprised you had the dosh for a manor this size.”
Nick finds it funny that since the UK’s split from Europe, Harry’s continental accent has morphed into cockney barrow-boy. Nobody’s too fond of ‘conts’ these days. He replies “Well, the job helped, and Larissa came into some money earlier this year. Some family inheritance or something, not sure. But without it we wouldn’t have had a chance at a place like this.”
“Long way from Moss Side, innit?”
“I guess that had its charms,” smiles Nick, knowing neither of them could forget the damp flat they shared for three years. If Nick closes his eyes, he can visualise everything in it. Right down to the broken handle on the third drawer down of the dressing table.
Student days. The early Noughties. So long ago now, but Harry’s hardly changed at bit. Nick briefly wonders if he’s changed himself. He doesn’t feel any different from when he was young, to be honest. Not inside. He never feels like a grown-up. It’s all an act, really.
Maybe that’s why Larissa… why she’s…
“Right, so it’s an anniversary party, a housewarming party and a bank holiday weekend!” From his bag, Harry places bottle after bottle – dark rum, applegrass vodka and white wine – onto a stainless worksurface. “And that means, dum da-da dum-dum-dum daaaa – ”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Now look, cheese, this teetotal shit got old back in Manchester! You can’t be a boring tosser on your anniversary, you’ve got the rest of your life for that. And you need to, you know, wet the house’s head or something. Come on, one drink!”
“Cheers,” Nick says, raising his glass of fizzing white iCola.
Harry heaves a melodramatic sigh as he uncorks the rum and pours himself a large one on the rocks. “One day, Brady, you’ll try it with me and wonder how you ever lived without it. This is drinking I’m talking about, don’t get excited. Take my word for it, it’s a lot easier to deal with life with a stiff one inside you every now and again! Drinking again, control yourself.”
“I can deal with my life fine.”
Even as he speaks, Nick tastes the wrongness. It’s no good, he has to say something.
“Harry, listen. This is going to sound – ”
“This way, this way, follow me, come in! Don’t you all walk in my house wit’ yuh two hands swingin’! Piña colada for allyuh crazy bitches!”
Larissa shoots into the kitchen like a human firework, her nanoweave dress ablaze with colours. She’s a short, curvy, dark-skinned Trinidadian woman, accent still strong after years away from home. Following her come four women in their twenties, all whooping and cheering. Nick doesn’t know any of them. The kitchen smartscreen blinks up their profiles one by one, noting they’re all part of Larissa’s work Circle, and clocks up house visitors 098 to 101. The music changes to something more modern that Nick doesn’t recognise.
There’s a lot of cheering and glass-clinking as Larissa ladles her home-made piña colada into four tall glasses stuffed with fruit and cocktail umbrellas, then adds some to the mohito she was already drinking. “Langiappe for me, yes I think so!” She explodes with hysterical laughter, infecting them all with giggles.
“What were you gonna say, mate?” asks Harry.
Nick shakes his head. Not now. He can’t say it now.
He stares at his wife as she entertains the new guests. She’s tiny compared to Nick’s huge frame, but seems to take up twice as much space: hands reaching out to touch whoever’s nearby, head darting back and forth, long black hair swirling around, wide mouth forever talking or laughing.
As the other four girls chatter happily, Larissa revolves their way. Her smile dims about 50 watts. “Harry, hello.” Even her accent is dialled down. It’s like she’s on screensaver, Nick thinks.
“Hi.” Harry is equally low power all of a sudden. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” The two of them lean close for a pseudo-hug, adding a non-kiss on each cheek.
“So. Ten years, eh?” says Harry, looking between her and Nick. “You get less than that for manslaughter!”
Larissa smiles tightly. Finally looks up at her husband. “We running out of ice and orange juice.” She eyes the bubbling glass in Nick’s hand. “And your iCola.” She pronounces it to rhyme with ‘ebola’.
“Okay, I’ll get some from the shop,” says Nick, but Larissa has already turned back to her work friends, joining in their laughter.
Hiding his reddening face from Harry, Nick gestures at the smartscreen on the kitchen wall, dismissing the guests’ profiles with a wave of his hand. He twirls a finger until the menu gets to the smart meters which monitor the house, and then flicks down the list: electricity, water, gas, central heating, broadband, refuse, recyclables, consumables. He’s already set each of them to allow higher usage for today’s party, thus avoiding automatic extra charges – and the horrible risk of being cut off – whenever anything goes above its pre-paid limit. Not that that’s happened for years. Like most people living in London, they’re well-trained in conservation. It costs too much not to be.
Nick checks the latest inventory. The fridge-freezer and food cupboards report precisely what’s in them. A few taps of his fingertips against empty air and he’s selecting a grocery order, then submitting it to their local mini-market. He authorises the extra fee for them to deliver it to the door within the hour.
By the time he turns back to Harry, twenty seconds later, Nick’s unsurprised to see him peering at the smartphone around
his wrist. “Eight already!” Harry beams, meaning his auto has accepted eight friend requests from other guests at the party. Or more likely, from their autos.
Producing a packet of cigarettes, Harry makes the smoking gesture as he heads for the patio, keen to meet his new friends. Nick wants to grab his old friend by the scruff of the neck and stop him from leaving, demand his time, demand his help, for God’s sake, talk to me, tell me what I should do!
Instead Nick just nods, and does what he always does. Lets it go.
“Allyuh ladies come wit’ me, we’re limin’ now, eh?” Larissa whirlwinds back towards the living room to start dancing, the four cheering girls carried along in her wake.
Nick puts down his iCola and slips along the hallway as if following them. But instead he turns up the staircase, excusing himself as he edges around two people he doesn’t know perched on the steps having a deep, drunken discussion. They don’t pay the host any attention as he heads upstairs.
He gently closes the bedroom door behind him. Music is thumping through the floor. He can hear voices, laughter, chinking glasses and sizzling meat through the open window from the patio outside. He doesn’t turn the light on, even though it’s now properly night. It’s all happening downstairs, and here he sits, alone on the king-size bed. He feels guilty for sneaking away by himself. He feels like he’s still a teenager, sloping up to his room away from the grown-ups to play computer games rather than be sociable. Oh, so many cool computer games.
Nothing’s changed, he thinks. Still that same clumsy, awkward, geeky kid. It hadn’t been easy at school: towering over everyone else in his class, making it difficult to keep his head down, stay quiet at the back. The number of times they’d laughed as he walked into walls, tripped over his own feet, spilled a drink, broke or dropped or trod on any number of things. What was it Dad always called him? ‘Cack-handed.’ That’s stayed with Nick his whole life. Can’t trust himself to do anything too physical, knowing he’ll make a hash of it. DIY, driving, dancing, anything like that... hopeless.
It’s only when he’s in front of a computer that he feels comfortable. Feels like he knows what he’s doing.
Nick pulls out his smartphone. In fact the correct term for it is ‘autophone’ – a phone designed to be a permanent interface to your auto. But people have got so used to calling them smartphones that the term hasn’t died out yet, although there hasn’t been a non-smartphone on the market for years. Nick’s is a Samsung Nebula IV, a more traditional shape than Harry’s but much more expensive. Every part of its surface, front and back, is a touch-sensitive display. He can open it up to tablet size, or flip out the extension to watch widescreen movies. But for now he just holds it in one hand, watching it activate in response to his touch.
9.38pm Saturday 28 May 2022
Nick Brady
Gender: Male
Age range: 36-40
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Married/Monogamous
Nick Brady is married to
Larissa Brady
Current location: Radnor
Mews, London W2 2SA
Status update: Everyone is
welcome this evening to
celebrate our 10th Wedding
Anniversary and housewarming
of our new home.
Hi Nick, hope you’re enjoying
your party! Here’s the selected
feed since 7:07pm:
16 friend requests
3 direct messages
1 personal videos
7 referred videos
18 status updates
24 tweets
12 veets
2 bleets
...
Nick cuts off the scrolling list. He knows it’s a fraction of the updates from all the people he knows. If it wasn’t for his auto, he’d be drowning in messages and adverts and videos and everything else the world constantly throws at you. His auto filters all that out, keeps in touch with people in his Circle, organises his life, makes recommendations based on his tastes. But right now he only wants to look at one thing.
Larissa Brady
Gender: Female
Age range: 36-40
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Married/Monogamous
Larissa Brady is married to
Nick Brady
Current location: Radnor Mews,
London W2 2SA
Status update: FÊTE!!!!!!
Nick spends a minute staring at his wife’s relationship status. As if it might try something funny, if he doesn’t keep his eye on it.
He skims through Larissa’s public profile. It shows that 11% of her Circle have accepted her event invitation for tonight, nearly two hundred people. Not all of them will show, of course. She’s sent or accepted 31 new friend requests in the two hours since he last checked. Nick calls up the male ones. Five are married, four have partners, two are single.
He focuses on the last two, scrutinising their images, their statuses, their timelines. Are they her type? Do they have high see-eyes?
Is one of them... is it one of them?
Nick runs a hand over his face, feeling sick.
“What the hell happened!” he says aloud to the empty room. “When did everything turn to shit?”
And then he murmurs her name: “…Larissa.”
It’s funny, he can’t actually remember the first time he laid eyes on her. But he knows he has his job to thank. The IT consultancy he worked for in 2010 had sent Nick and a small team to Trinidad on a month-long contract. The Republic Government was setting up a new server farm to hold public records, in an old warehouse outside the town of Diego Martin. They were willing to pay for experts in Windows, UnixWare and Solaris servers, especially those who could configure large-scale MS SQL databases. At the age of 28, Nick was already a veteran.
From time to time, Nick’s colleagues dragged him away from setting up computer servers to experience the nightlife. Bit of a disaster, really. He was too clumsy to calypso, too shy to pay for a ‘jagabat’ girl, and since he had sworn off alcohol ever since almost dying one night in Manchester, the tavernas were just noise and crowds to him. He was what the locals called a ‘mook’ – someone just too shy to party. That was fine. He was there to work anyway. He usually ended up spending those nights perched on a barstool in the corner, hunched over his iPhone 3GS, wishing the battery wouldn’t keep dying so quickly.
But by the time he was introduced to Larissa Caballero, at the launch party when the server farm went online, he already knew exactly who she was. A local celebrity in Diego Martin, she was forever being talked about or pointed to by the locals. She was a beautiful young model who could be seen in clothes adverts throughout Port of Spain, the nearby capital, so naturally her home town was proud. He’d spotted her a dozen times. She seemed to be out every single night, surrounded by people, drifting past wherever Nick sat, always on the arm of her equally-famous musician boyfriend.
There was no sign of the boyfriend at the launch party, when her slim, cool hand shook Nick’s stupid giant sweaty malformed nerveless bear-like paw, God she made him feel like he was made of clay. She asked who he was. He genuinely forgot his own name. Which made her laugh – a booming laugh he never imagined could come from this petite girl. “You such a mooksie!” she told him, still holding his hand.
Two hours later, she was standing on an old crate in the alley behind the warehouse to kiss him.
Two years later, she was standing on threadbare carpet in a registry office in Hackney to marry him.
Nobody said “He’s punching above his weight there.”
Nobody said “What the hell does a girl like her see in him?”
Nobody said “Guess she got what she was after, she’s a British citizen now.”
Nobody said “That’ll never last.”
But they might as well have done. Nick and Larissa could hear every word.
It was one
of the reasons why they wanted a tenth anniversary party. To prove a point. Prove them all wrong. They were good together, they were solid, they were happy.
And now...
Once again Nick is hunched over his phone, although at least this time he won’t have any battery problems. The 5G network includes directed microwaves, and all modern smartphones have tiny rectennas inside which convert the microwaves into electricity. So if you’ve got wireless reception, you’ve also got wireless power, delivered at the same time. Nick could stay up here all night every night, and never run out of juice. Right now that doesn’t sound so bad.
Thumbing through the photo galleries on Larissa’s profile, Nick realises for the first time how few he’s in. She’s always got a wide smile for the camera, no matter where she is. He can see changes over the years: her hourglass figure filling out a little, her sleek black hair losing some shine. But at 36, she is still the most gorgeous woman he’s ever laid eyes on. She can still turn heads in the street. Still loves being the centre of attention.
The autophone is trembling slightly in his hand, and not because he’s being called. He’s scared. He doesn’t deal with change very well, even the threat of change. Every time they argue about anything he gets this same quivery feeling, nervous that he might suddenly find himself alone. Christ, what would he do? He can barely remember how to look after himself. He’s forgotten what it’s like being ‘Nick’ rather than ‘Nick and Larissa’.
But he can’t stand being lied to. He can’t stand being cheated on. And he is. He knows he is.
Nick remembers – only the night before, but it feels like days ago – grabbing a few minutes in the hustle and bustle of preparing for the party to check his profile. He was ordering a few last-minute things and needed to know many guests had confirmed they were attending. And he saw there were now 2,222 friends in his Circle, instead of the 2,221 there had been half an hour ago. If it wasn’t such a satisfyingly neat number, Nick wouldn’t have noticed. But instead he punched the air with a grin, and checked to find out who it was. Almost certainly a friend of a friend, maybe one coming along to the party, so of course his auto accepted their request by default, obviously seeing a natural connection –
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