by J S Hollis
to all those mentioned and to all those unmentioned who have helped me along the way, it is truly special to receive help for no other reason than love and friendship. i hope to have the opportunity to return your kindness tenfold. peace and love to you all. jsh.
Notes
* * *
1I would like to thank HumanIT staff for speaking to me about John Simpson.
2There was one cursory review from the man who checked their groceries before delivery.
3Although some individuals nearby were so coned in and phoned up that they didn’t notice the gun shots until they saw the news reports on their Eyescreens.
4This discussion will have to wait for another book.
5The full history of this nickname is not evident from W but was given to me by one of Cecil’s earliest childhood friends. At first, Cecil’s friends called him Cee or CS. Abbreviated names were particularly common at that time due to the limitations of typing on a phone keypad and as a result of restrictions on character usage on Twitter (a microblogging site). As Cecil grew up, his friends extrapolated from CS and began calling Cecil “Gas” or “Lewis”. These nicknames somehow became Alice. It is believed that that one of the following happened: (i) Lewis became Alice either because Cecil’s friends erroneously believed that CS Lewis wrote Alice in Wonderland; or (ii) as a result of the following word association: “CS Lewis”, “Lewis Carroll”, “Alice”.
6Noa Bromfield, Know Your Member, 2 March 2055
7SpeX were the most common form of wearable augmented reality in the early thirties and continued to be the dominant brand until wearable contact lenses entered the consumer market later that decade.
8The Invanity movement began with an enraged video by an American university student, Selena Chavez. She supplemented her complaint with edited footage of all the judgements men and women she had never met had made of her. She complained about how she had been driven to set her alarm to go off at regular intervals during the night so that she could check she looked “good” at all hours. The video trended and Invanity was born. Its radical element was to “end the competition of attraction” by inveighing against anyone who tried to look good. After initial and widespread success among the under 35s, the movement faded, its end brought about by a mixture of its negative health effects and biological determination. There are, however, some who still identify with it.
9Neoplasticism: Strikingly Empty by Clara Francis
Through Neoplasticism, a number of artists, including Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, sought to achieve universal meaning in art through abstractions of form and colour. The Neoplastic paintings are very distinctive: they are often large grids of black lines on plain backgrounds with intermittent squares and rectangles of single primary colours.
The Royal Academy has brought together an impressive collection of the group’s work including: Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red; Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray; and Counter-Composition 6.
However, in spite of the colour and boldness of the art, the result is emptiness. While the works are striking, they are sterile. This is a shame because the philosophy of the movement, which Mondrian set out in detail in The Style, the group’s magazine, is compelling. Mondrian believed that concrete representations of the natural world obscured universal meaning. Greater abstraction on the other hand could provide a direct expression of the universal while simultaneously being an expression of the subjective. There is a certain authenticity to simplicity.
But not this simplicity. Paintings like Doesburg’s Composition VII with its randomly assorted blocks of colour could be murals in Legoland. Like the ideologues of the early twentieth century, the movement departed from humanity through its rigid idea of perfection and focus on geometric shapes.
Nevertheless, Neoplasticism’s important influence on later abstract artists is evident. Rothko’s No. 14, which has a red block on top of smaller indigo one, could be a magnified section of Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, Black and Yellow, where the colours have run. Those later artists, like Rothko, were not wedded to the Neoplasticists’ formulism and they benefitted from that freedom. It allowed them to create more liberated abstract works from which the observer could draw something meaningful from the minimalism of colour and shape.
Neoplasticism at the Royal Academy until 6 May 2032, Student Entry: LG15
10Clara was referring to the Liquid Gold market crash the previous year, which had significantly reduced most people’s savings. Many historians believe that if the crash had happened prior to W there would have been serious violence across the world. W assisted with social control but also made it difficult to blame any one individual or group of individuals. Collective ignorance was a source of peace.
11It used an early version of the Direct Effect technology now used in Mind Games.
12Initially, Direct Effect was purely experiential. The users were unable to control the experience.
13This comment led to the university coordinating a chat between Clara and the woman, Sophia Johnson, so that they could straighten things out. Clara found the whole thing so painful that she rarely criticised people she knew again other than to their faces – not because she realised it was wrong but because she would rather just amuse herself than have to surgically unpick her judgements.
14Clara’s father, Leo, had been her mother’s scuba diving instructor.
15This was the first year after W had full coverage and schools had yet to adjust to its many ramifications.
16Information from before W has been sourced from interviews and other records.
17Emma Stanhope disputes this but family and friends have confirmed this state of affairs. Her mother apparently would regularly give her prizes for poor pieces of drawing and for being one of her prettiest daughters.
18The introduction of W had encouraged the early twenty-first century thirst for glass and steel. This only changed when a desire for the momentary perception of privacy led to spelunkism.
19Matchstick was released shortly after Invanity’s initial success. It was originally intended as a dating app that prohibited judgement on the basis of looks. As you will know, nowadays it is primarily used to arrange one night stands.
20Cecil only watched those who explicitly wanted to be watched, which is not the same thing as watching real sex.
21Sylvio claimed he was benefitting from Invanity but in fact he had selfidentified as promiscuous and found himself connected with promiscuous women.
22Sylvio later regretted this behaviour, as it undoubtedly restricted his ability to work for some of the bigger engineering companies.
23Open Democracy allowed every registered adult in England a vote on each piece of legislation. They voted to end it during the financial crisis of 2041.
24It was much harder in the thirties, as ethical consumption was not yet hardwired into consumer habits.
25Emma and Kingsley broke up a few months later. For once, Emma enjoyed the conversation with her husband.
“Kingsley, I am leaving you,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a reason?”
“Yes.”
“Does it outweigh the benefits of staying together?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“The fact that you are reacting to the end of thirty years of marriage with a cost benefit analysis.”
“But that can’t have been your original reason? You didn’t know that this conversation would happen like this.”
“Yes I did. If only I had been wrong.”
26An early AI healthy living applicatio
n.
27He finished it in jail thirty years later.
28Cecil’s only real business hiccup was his early focus on colour and design functionality. The initial gimmick was quickly overtaken by the spread of augmented reality wearables such as SpeX and then Eyescreens. Once people could overlay their clothes with whatever design they wanted, it was unnecessary for clothes to have a particular colour or design. Cecil had to cut his losses on the development of design characteristic and focus on fit and durability.
29The underlying flaws in biological determination were not understood at that time because there were no BDs who had reach adulthood. In particular, society was caught up by the good behaviour and academic success of young BDs (and there was no time to waste in competing against other nations in the absence of war). Our parents’ generation had not anticipated the apparent inability of BDs to adapt to changing circumstances.
30The repurposed shop of what was formerly a Texaco petrol station.
31At that time, she was probably more famous than Cecil. She had led a campaign to make the Greens more attractive to fat vegetarians.
32I say “seemingly by chance” because the head of the Drawers programme, Lloyd Hamilton, was a supporter of Cecil. It is possible that he saw this as an opportunity to remove one of Cecil’s political liabilities.
33Based on W figures.
34I have made twenty-six love revelations, ten of which have led to the realisation of those relationships.
35Donatella also suspected that Clara had more than a platonic interest in Tom.
36“Reactive” relates to TTT that allows a thought to be used to control a device. Essentially, it allows the user to “push” a thought. This form of TTT has been used for decades, for instance, in Mind Games and AR tools.
37Quality of life index.
38[2048] ICII R 1062.
39[2051] ICII R 608.
40[2048] ICII R 1062.