No, she said. Absolutely not. It was a terrible idea. I would achieve nothing and we would both be appallingly bored. Before I could object – plead – she said that she had a much better suggestion, but I must come to the office immediately and she would explain. She was sending a car.
She was sending a car.
I think I realised then a little of what Michael had meant, but I still did not entirely grasp it. Another flaw of age and the habit of being the boss: I had not wondered what Annie might desire from me in exchange for what I wanted from her – after all, a few favours here and there are nothing when set against the great debt that is ancestry. More: I had not stopped to ask how she might think to reshape the world using me as a lever, because it had not occurred to me that she might shape the world at all. I was the mover and the shaper – by habit, by precedence and by custom. The world formed itself around my experiences and decisions, not those of a young seedling who had after all not existed until I was a great oak.
That person, that woman who was from my vantage still effectively a zygote, could not send me a car. Only full-fledged adults with expense accounts could do that. Who had given Annabel an expense account?
Well, she had, of course, when she created her firm. But who had given her that kind of money to work with? I realised I didn’t know. I didn’t know if she had employees, or rather: I knew that she did but I could not picture them. She must have investors. I might even be one, now that I thought of it, though not to any heroic level of commitment – and if I wasn’t, why wasn’t I? Wasn’t that what successful grandparents were for? Had she really gone out into the world and got her own funding as if I did not exist? How?
The same way Astatke got a recording contract: by being brilliant. So, she sent a car to pick me up.
When the car came, it was a new, new Prius with cameras on it. Of course it would be, I realised: a car that was mostly a computer. When I got in, the young man in the driver’s seat wasn’t driving. He was just sitting there, handsome and short-haired and a little bit messy.
The car drove itself, the young fellow told me, and his job was to make sure it didn’t go wrong. Which it wouldn’t.
‘Bobby Colson, but call me Colson,’ he told me, when I asked. ‘Dogsbody.’ I wondered briefly if that was the last part of his name – it happens that people have extraordinary names and are quite matter-of-fact about them – but I gathered shortly thereafter that it was his title, self-determined and a source of considerable pride.
‘The car has over a million hours of driving experience,’ he added kindly, as I peered nervously around. The steering wheel was turning one way and then the other like the keys on a pianola, the pedals drifting up and down. ‘The first few days, I was a bit twitchy. Then I realised: all the other cars on the road? They’re the ones driven by idiots. People on phones, people who can’t see through the screen because the blower’s out, people who just want to get home in a hurry. They do all this totally insane crap all the time. This car? This car doesn’t. It’s the most boring chauffeur in the world. It doesn’t just see the road, it sees in infrared and sonar, like that. It has real-time satellite information. And it makes decisions so fast you miss them. The law says I have to sit here, but honestly, if you see me reach for the wheel the odds are you should punch me in the face. The car is much better at this than I am. If there’s an accident, it’ll have saved us – or not – before I even know what’s going on. I’m just here in case it suddenly decides to take over the world.’ He grins. ‘Skynet, right? Only that’s not going to happen either. It’s bollocks. Specialised intelligence. It doesn’t think. It drives.’
My first lesson, I thought. ‘So,’ I said, ‘the car is better at being a car than the driver ever could be?’
Colson gave me a thumbs up. ‘That’s right. Now, suppose there’s a terrorist attack or something, right? And you actually need to smash into another car to get away from a falling skyscraper or whatever? That’s when you switch the computer off and take the wheel, because it doesn’t have any idea about any of that. It’ll sit there waiting for the traffic to get out of the way and you’ll get squashed. Limited vision. It’s all numbers and weights and measures. There’s nothing in there that isn’t in a wind-up. Not, like, spiritually speaking.’
I sat in the car all the way from Stoke Newington to Old Street, and of course I jumped every time I saw a pedestrian or a cyclist or a dog, every time we approached a traffic light, but I have to acknowledge that the machine was in the end a far more relaxing pilot than most any of the thousands who have taken me across town in the time I’ve lived here. It was, as Colson promised, utterly boring.
The company office was in a steel-and-glass building by the roadside, a new thing with green leaves tumbling from the upper storeys. ‘Green roof, green walls,’ Colson murmured. The building looked like a future I could live with, but not one I’d live in. I tapped the dashboard.
‘Thanks for the lift. Does it have a name?’ I asked.
‘The car?’ Colson raised his eyebrows.
‘Yes.’
‘Be like naming a steam iron.’ He smiled. ‘It’s got a number. Four. But that’s about it. See you later.’
I thanked him, and watched him cruise away to the company parking spaces. When I turned back to the building, Annabel Sophia Bekele was waiting on the step with her hand extended towards me in professional greeting.
‘Welcome to the Fire Judges,’ she said, and we shook.
*
That’s the name I can never remember. A historical reference, apparently – after the Great Fire in 1666, twenty-two judges were empowered to demark the lost property boundaries of London. This was necessary because so much of the city had been destroyed that even the reference points that might have been used to establish a rough outline had been reduced to rubble. Half the time they were just drawing lines in the air, and when that happened it wasn’t impossible that they took the opportunity to improve the flow of the city just a little, to root out dead ends and bad alleys and turn them inwards on themselves. ‘Benevolent ghost geographers,’ Annabel said, immediately after telling me it’s Annie, always Annie, because only I and her former headmistress still call her Annabel.
The name was appropriate, my granddaughter explained, because this was a company that made worlds out of air – or, more accurately, out of numbers. They had other revenue streams – they were field-testing that magic car for the maker and tweaking the learning software, and they used spare computing time on their prodigious infrastructure to host various calculations for institutions that didn’t have enough cycles of their own – but mostly they were about creation.
The company owned this building outright, she said, so there was potential revenue there, too, although they didn’t charge a powerhouse rent to half their tenants because they wanted ‘the benefit of serendipity’, which I took to mean that having young programmers floating around the hallways and coffee spaces gossiping and one-upping with the originators of nascent fashion labels, toymakers, microbrewers and architects produced a miniature version of the cultural and commercial stew that has been so successful in Silicon Valley. Annabel – Annie – said yes, exactly. This year, the Fire Judges had shared in the success of a new kind of ergonomic chair and a mesh-networked child tracking system. I did not know what the second one of these might be, but Annie said it was simple yet very clever, and this combination of virtues appealed to me just as it obviously pleased her. I saw her glance over my shoulder at Colson, now happily unscrewing something with many wires and arguing over it with a boyish man in dungarees, and thought that he pleased her, too, and for the same reason. Simple but clever: it’s a good pairing in a lover. Complication and angst are much beloved of the authors of romantic fiction, who take their cues from Byron and Tolstoy, but in real life a little simplicity can be welcome, along with kindness. I thought I should pass this immense wisdom along to Annie, and then acknowledged that, if she liked Colson, she already had it.
&nbs
p; We wandered through wide hallways trimmed with metal pipes, ducked into bare-brick workspaces lit by industrial-scale anglepoise lamps. We met a man who had invented a new musical instrument and another who was building a better mouse. I almost said ‘Mousetrap?’ but realised in time that he meant exactly what I thought he meant, although of what benefit an improved rodent could be I had no idea. He explained that the digestive systems of vultures are purgative of disease. The birds’ excreta are pure fertiliser, even the most revolting diseases burned out by their fierce internal chemistry – for which reason the killing of vultures across the world represents an unprecedented risk to global public health. In many areas where they are almost extinct, bad old germs are resurgent in their place. He wished to introduce the vulture’s happy trait into urban rodent populations, a giant leap towards the eradication of serious infections – and crucial in a world that is rapidly losing its grip on resistant bacteria.
‘So he’s a medical doctor?’ I said as we moved on, and Annie laughed. ‘He has a degree in theatrical design,’ she replied. ‘He got into biotech because he wanted to make a goldfish in his team’s football colours. He does the design work here on our system and outsources the experimental stuff.’
All of which was possible, it seemed, though I had had no idea. When did that happen? I said that perhaps I was suffering from future shock, and Annie replied wryly that the term ‘future shock’ was itself nearly fifty years old. ‘Although Rousseau complained about something very similar in 1778.’ I recognised the absent tone: this was something she said often, to meetings and conferences, to journalists asking whether the world was changing too fast.
All the same: how was this all happening, under my nose, and I was just carrying on? I’d been living, by my own decision, in the past, imagining that the world wasn’t really changing all that much, imagining that now was a great deal like then, and that the future probably would be, too. But I have to tell you that it won’t be. Mouse Boy won’t stop once he’s created proactively hygienic vermin. He’ll come up with something else. People are already talking about bioluminescent trees to replace street lamps, and I find myself imagining the city that might grow out of that idea: a soft, moonlit haven to replace the industrial sodium of my time. But Mouse Boy is concerned about light pollution, Annie said, so he doesn’t want to work on that. Anyway, he’s reaching further, towards digitally mediated emotional interfaces for the improvement of human communication. Imagine, she murmured, having a relationship with someone and actually feeling their joy, their fear. Being perfectly aware of them all the time, being able to tell them they’re loved when you’re not present to reassure them. Imagine negotiations where you can know for a certainty where there’s room to haggle and where there’s an impasse. Imagine trials where innocence was measurable on a graph.
This is the place she had created, my little granddaughter. The company called Fire Judges: they drew lines in the air, and made them real.
I knew now why Michael had laughed when I wondered if Annie would teach me about computers. I was a little ashamed of myself for asking, for imagining that it was a fit use of her time. Ask Astatke to teach you to play ‘Happy Birthday’, indeed. Or Einstein to wire a plug.
Well, here was my first lesson: it had almost nothing to do with computers, the modernity I was trying to understand. Computers were the bones, but imagination, ambition and possibility were the blood. These kids, they simply did not accept that the world as it is has any special gravity, any hold upon us. If something was wrong, if it was bad, then that something was to be fixed, not endured. Where my generation reached for philosophy and the virtue of suffering, they reached instead for science and technology and they actually did something about the beggar in the street, the woman in the wheelchair. They got on with it. It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.
We had reached the far end of the building, the space that belonged to the Fire Judges, and she opened the big double door.
‘So,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here today.’
Dimples. Granddaughters with dimples. That’s what you need to be careful of in this life.
*
We walked through a room with a ceiling that went up and up, between rows of photographs, both colour and black and white. And not just in, but of: black people and white people photographed on different film stocks. And not just that endlessly reductive duality, but every imaginable variation of skin was sampled here. It was actual film – I knew, because I could see the negatives hanging in spirals by the side of each board – and the textures and tones of the skin were rendered to different degrees of fidelity and atmosphere. In one photograph, a tall fellow I judged to be Haitian looked sickly and angry. In another, he seemed filled with a secret life. Next to him was a pale woman with a French flag on her shoulder, a UN official, glowering hot and rashy in the second photograph, filled with a sort of diffident hope in the first. It was the same all the way along the rows: pairs and sometimes sequences of images with different subjects, and always one set favoured one kind of skin and made others look oddly sinister. Then there were streets done the same way, hazy and soft, hard and cold, warm and welcoming, and on and on, all in monochrome, all subtly different and yet showing the same scene at the same time. Different countries, different architectures. Different worlds.
I asked Annie what I was looking at.
She gestured to the nearest picture. ‘Ordinary celluloid film was optimised for white north-western European skin. The chemical composition was not intended for non-whites, so it didn’t capture us well. We were either over-lit and sweating or shadowy and indistinct. Do you remember Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night? I mean, okay: it’s supposed to be hot, I get that. But he’s awash – they’ve got the lights dialled all the way up because the film can’t see his skin. Until around the year 2000 they still used white-skinned models for colour balance during processing. Digital cameras changed that, but I wondered how much. I started wondering if there was still a bias – in the chip design or the imaging software’s basic presumptions.’
‘Is there?’
She made a gesture, hand tipping one way and then the other. ‘Maybe. The fidelity of digital is absurdly high, and you have access to the raw image, so some of it just goes away. Displays and projectors, that’s another story – and photographic paper and printing ink. Anyway, I poked around a bit and it actually turns out that eight per cent of white males are colourblind, as against only four per cent of African males and about one per cent of Inuit and related populations, although I’m a bit sceptical of the broad data there given the ethnic variety inside all the populations we’re talking about and I suspect the research we’re seeing may have been a bit basic. So it’s not just about race, it’s also about a given white male relationship to the physical perception of colour.’
‘What about women?’
She looked back at me, approving. ‘Yes! Exactly. A small fraction of the female population is tetrachromatic. They have an additional receptor in the eye that theoretically allows them to see colours that are not available to the rest of us, although because the tetrachromat population is so small we don’t have words for those colours, or even concepts for them. They exist only as something felt and experienced.’ She sighs. ‘I’m not one. I’d love to be, wouldn’t you? To see a broader spectrum, another dimension?’
I found myself thinking: No. Because if I saw another set of colours I would need to reconsider everything I paint. Which was an odd thought, because I hadn’t painted in decades.
Annie gestured at the pictures again. ‘I turned it all upside down. I wanted to go back to celluloid and create the opposite sort of celluloid film stock: film stock that favoured black people.’ She pointed at the images. ‘It worked. I think we’ll use it when we create the character types for this project, maybe the architecture. Blackness will be ordina
ry, whiteness will look odd. It’ll be part of the experience. A little truth, hidden in the game: the people most often referred to as minority populations in this country are the global majority, so their vision is arguably the normative one.’
I knew plenty of people who would have considered that enough for an exhibition, back when. Combined with even a moderate talent for the image it was enough even nowadays to make a name. For her it was backdrop, just an element in a bigger work. But:
‘What project?’
She grinned. ‘Ah,’ she said.
I followed her down the line of images, the different tints and tones of non-white skin picked out in perfect clarity, the strange incompleteness of what the Americans call Caucasian skin rendered real for the first time in my life. In the middle of the maze, there was a circle of sofas and a coffee table, and when I saw my favourite cake waiting for us I knew I was about to be pitched.
*
‘Did you know,’ Annie asked, as I took my second mouthful, ‘that the government recently trialled electronic sobriety anklets for those who have been ordered to avoid alcohol? They test the wearer’s sweat every half hour. Imagine a society premised on that logic of benign observation, and go from there.’
I hadn’t known, so I shook my head.
Annie shrugged. ‘Nor did I. They don’t make a big thing about it. Rather talk about the stuff that doesn’t freak people out. But it doesn’t seem like a great leap from there to networking those quantified self bracelets’ – I had only the vaguest notion what these were – ‘so that the state can tell you: “Hey! You want to smoke, that’s fine, but your NHS contribution goes up because you’re a risk.” Or whatever.
‘So, okay,’ she went on, ‘next question: did you also know that there’s a private prison firm working on a house arrest system that allows judges to impose permanent surveillance? They call it SDORP – pronounced “stop!” – for sub-dermal observation and restraint platform. It’s a unit that goes in your gluteus muscle and if you do something the supervisor doesn’t like it can knock you out and call a team to come and pick you up. It’s perfect. Any environment can be a prison.’