Singing their allegro low anthem, the joint of meat jumped the barrier into the subway station. Without a flicker of anything but the requisite fixed half-smile on his face, the inspector in his ticket-office blanked them so perfectly that they gave him a round of applause as they went on their way. All around them, commuters continued pouting their black lipstick lips, indifferent, intent on the screens of their devices, listening to muzak through ear-buds. Sluggish but inexorable, the commuters shuffled.
‘Heading somewhere not special?’ a slice asked.
See how they run.
The meat arrived on the platform in a blur and formed up in a seething knot, teasing and jostling each other as they waited for the train, their laughter yoga growing louder and increasingly raucous. One of them sliced off to deface an electronic poster advertising an app: ‘Share the passion!’ - a nudge to encourage commuters to send chain-reaction texts to ‘affirm the challenge and joy of living’. The slice of meat changed ‘passion’ to ‘poison’ with her jacker-hacker and added their trademark icon, a heart with fork stuck in it. Every poster in the city would be changed. For a short while, a very short while, her subvertising would stand.
When the train came, the meat reformed into a rolling maul and crammed into an already over-crowded carriage. Forming a tight circle, back to back in the centre of the oppressively hot and airless space, the meat began shouting greetings to their fellow passengers, waving, winking, flirting… No one responded, dull eyes glued to their screens, black rouged lips slightly parted in pallid faces to reveal rows of perfect pearly-white teeth. Some did bob their heads in time with the muzak streaming in their ears, the sounds of elsewhere nowhere.
Bored, the meat decided to play a game of pass the object above their heads. Each time one slice received the imaginary object from another, they noisily transformed it, changing its size and shape, mass and form: a squawking chicken, a pulsing quasar, a squeaking mouse, a juggernaut truck sounding its Klaxon… If the pinch-faced commuters even knew the objects the meat imagined and brought to life, they gave no sign, seemingly effortless in their blanking.
At their stop the meat quit the carriage, one by one squeezing out and popping like corks from Champagne bottles. They stayed on the platform to wave their erstwhile fellow travellers fond farewells, blowing kisses, clasping their hands over their hearts. Parting even reduced some slices to crocodile tears.
‘Such meat sorrow!’
Then, with no discernible signal, they all rushed for the exit, arms out at their sides, roaring jet planes on an un-bombing mission, blaring the Dambusters’ theme.
‘Dah, dah, dah, dah, dada, dah…’
Out of the subway and onto the city street, their senses assailed by an oppressive regime of neon and the thunderous groan of traffic. Exhaust fumes mingled with the aromas of food from everywhere in the world but no place anyone had ever visited or could ever go: fusion as forfeiture. And the sickly odours of multifarious waste, cloying the palate. Surging swarms of blanked, blanking people. Electronic billboards in every ever-shifting colour, every language and then some: pictographs, hieroglyphs....
Adverts for phone implants – ‘call girl’ and a picture of a short-skirted hooker, indecently young and thin, dialling, receiving; promotions for faster food, sweeter soda, designer e-cigarettes and stronger more exotic spirits, shifting to adverts for diets, heath farms, health foods, health care and rehab. Pitches for cosmetic surgery, gastric cropping and intimate trimming, for bio-enhancement. Sales slogans for sex and for Jesus, indiscernible offerings of salvation; for handguns – ‘man up, girl’, and automatic weapons; for cologne – ‘free spirited you’ or ‘escape today everyday’; for electronics companies, internet corporations, pharmaceutical giants, banks and bookmakers. Properties for sale or rent, to suit every pocket - so long as that pocket was infinitely deep.
‘Credit yourself’, rock bottom rates; pay-one-day loans…’
Cars, cars, cars and more cars, fast and furious, going nowhere.
‘I’m so tired,’ Goldie whispered, ‘drained. I need a break, to go with the flow, suck it up a while.’
‘You’re leaving us,’ Dom said, failing to get her to meet his gaze.
‘No, of course…’ Goldie began, squeezing her eyes closed, her hands cradling her face. ‘Just a rest. There’s a night job… I can build a little credit, get a few essentials together. I can’t go on against.’
‘If you plug into the feed,’ Dom said, ‘you’ll stay plugged.’
‘A month, two. No more,’ Goldie promised.
‘You’ll turn,’ Dom said.
‘I just need a little fare. And ease, down-time.’
‘You won’t rise-up again.’
‘I’ll reconnect with you at the squat.’
‘Goodbye.’
Dom re-joined the reduced joint of meat who were simulating exuberant sex in the middle of the packed evening sidewalk. He noted that the crowd was all heading in one direction: There must be a product launch. Without registering the meat’s pornographic pantomime, the crowd parted to flow around them, re-merged, like a miracle sea.
‘Where’s Goldie?’ Puffa asked as she ground her rear into Dom’s crotch, exaggerating her movements to the exotic max, squealing with salacious delight.
‘Retired,’ Dom said, automatically responding to Puffa’s mime with his own overstated hip-thrusting, joining in with a fleshy chorus of orgasmic moans, groans, screams and exhortations: ‘deeper, harder, faster…’ Becoming a chant.
‘Fuck!’
‘Tired?’ Puffa queried, yelling to make herself heard above their racket.
‘Yes,’ Dom said.
The crowd converged on the giant store where You-Ni-Media told them the new ingestible device would be launched in this city. They arrived in their thousands then tens and then hundreds of thousands, making their slow, fixed smiling way in from the suburbs. Each was encouraged by the breaking product news that interrupted their muzak, vid feeds and social media e-solations with such regularity that it was the rule not the exception. Though it was impossible to discern just how, their wan unchanging features betrayed something of their fervour. Though the collective pace didn’t quicken, their shuffle was suffused with ardent tension. Tall or short, fat or thin, regardless of skin colour, everyone wore dark clothes, mostly shades of black or the darkest navy. They moved as a tide, washing along the street, filling it, enveloping it.
Erasing it.
As they neared the giga-store, the architecture of the street funnelled them into a tighter, denser throng, homogenous. A homeless man, sleeping near the warm air vent at one side of the store complex, awoke as the crowd parted around him and then, with no more room to part, trod over him. His pleading, cursing and then curtailed screams were lost, unheeded. After only a few minutes he no longer even stained the patent shoes of the famished multitude.
* *
The meat were evicted and lost the squat. In an impossibly short time it was redeveloped as a fitness centre and fried chicken franchise. Along with the squat went their plans for a social centre, something they’d read about on un-weeded sites still trailing on the web decades after their authors had passed. They had talked of sheltering refugees and the homeless, of free food, of makers’ workshops and legal aid, of street art, music and theatre classes. Most of all they’d talked of developing a cold-turkey capacity, to support people in unplugging from the feeds. They would have called the centre ‘The Joint’. But they had talked too long, planned too closely, hesitated. And lost. Now the meat was fragmented, slices couch-surfing with an ebb of friends, enduring familial condescension in the refuge of childhood bedrooms, sleeping rough on roofs or stuffed in the cavities of the under-city, living off waste heat.
Dom waited for other slices at the subway station, at first passing his time by staging shambling monster attacks on passing commuters, all of whom were wholly unmoved. Giving up, he read an ancient e-book downloaded from the under-web on his stolen slab.
“Whose city? The answer, perhaps, is pretty clear: it’s the parasites’ city and their progeny is a species we can now label the parasitic city. A parasite, remember, is an organism that feeds off the larger “host” organism, an uninvited diner at the lodge who doesn’t pay for their grub. Parasites chomp away at the common-wealth the world over, eating their way inside the social body…1”
‘Parasites feeding must be what made the zombies,’ Dom reflected aloud, nodding comprehension. ‘They don’t rise from the grave but are consumed to living death. Their spirits are drained.’
Tonight’s action, which he had conceived and proposed, was to be a hit on one of the Terra-Malls. They were going to enter stores and try to give away goods to customers. Christmas was coming and the stores were even more laden than usual, ridiculously crammed with the unneeded, the next instant’s de-junk: The next publishing splurge, how to ‘Make yourself some space.’ An opportunity to market more stuff. The meat would press holovision-sets, uni-devices, smoothie synths, well-being monitors, designer clothes - black was the new black again for next season – object d’art and game-stations into the hands of baffled, but expressionless shoppers, insisting they were gifts from a grateful management.
‘How to incubate such an alternative meme,’ Dom read from the slab, ‘how to dose up on it to strengthen our immunity system? How might it circulate as a prophylactic within the generative cells of our urban politic, permanently ridding us of parasites.’
‘We obviously never found out how,’ Dom muttered. ‘The social body is gutted and putrid to the core: insipid putrefaction, the zombie meme.’
When he’d finished reading and put the slate on stand-by, Dom felt drained. Commuters continued to flow around him, oblivious, consumed.
‘Content.’
His old-fashioned device quivered and bleated in his pocket and he took it out, thumbed access and read the text.
‘With you in spirit!’
From Puffa.
The most vital of them.
The last of them.
Dom blanked.
‘Heading somewhere not special?’ a slice asked.
See how they run.
The meat arrived on the platform in a blur and formed up in a seething knot, teasing and jostling each other as they waited for the train, their laughter yoga growing louder and increasingly raucous. One of them sliced off to deface an electronic poster advertising an app: ‘Share the passion!’ - a nudge to encourage commuters to send chain-reaction texts to ‘affirm the challenge and joy of living’. The slice of meat changed ‘passion’ to ‘poison’ with her jacker-hacker and added their trademark icon, a heart with fork stuck in it. Every poster in the city would be changed. For a short while, a very short while, her subvertising would stand.
When the train came, the meat reformed into a rolling maul and crammed into an already over-crowded carriage. Forming a tight circle, back to back in the centre of the oppressively hot and airless space, the meat began shouting greetings to their fellow passengers, waving, winking, flirting… No one responded, dull eyes glued to their screens, black rouged lips slightly parted in pallid faces to reveal rows of perfect pearly-white teeth. Some did bob their heads in time with the muzak streaming in their ears, the sounds of elsewhere nowhere.
Bored, the meat decided to play a game of pass the object above their heads. Each time one slice received the imaginary object from another, they noisily transformed it, changing its size and shape, mass and form: a squawking chicken, a pulsing quasar, a squeaking mouse, a juggernaut truck sounding its Klaxon… If the pinch-faced commuters even knew the objects the meat imagined and brought to life, they gave no sign, seemingly effortless in their blanking.
At their stop the meat quit the carriage, one by one squeezing out and popping like corks from Champagne bottles. They stayed on the platform to wave their erstwhile fellow travellers fond farewells, blowing kisses, clasping their hands over their hearts. Parting even reduced some slices to crocodile tears.
‘Such meat sorrow!’
Then, with no discernible signal, they all rushed for the exit, arms out at their sides, roaring jet planes on an un-bombing mission, blaring the Dambusters’ theme.
‘Dah, dah, dah, dah, dada, dah…’
Out of the subway and onto the city street, their senses assailed by an oppressive regime of neon and the thunderous groan of traffic. Exhaust fumes mingled with the aromas of food from everywhere in the world but no place anyone had ever visited or could ever go: fusion as forfeiture. And the sickly odours of multifarious waste, cloying the palate. Surging swarms of blanked, blanking people. Electronic billboards in every ever-shifting colour, every language and then some: pictographs, hieroglyphs....
Adverts for phone implants – ‘call girl’ and a picture of a short-skirted hooker, indecently young and thin, dialling, receiving; promotions for faster food, sweeter soda, designer e-cigarettes and stronger more exotic spirits, shifting to adverts for diets, heath farms, health foods, health care and rehab. Pitches for cosmetic surgery, gastric cropping and intimate trimming, for bio-enhancement. Sales slogans for sex and for Jesus, indiscernible offerings of salvation; for handguns – ‘man up, girl’, and automatic weapons; for cologne – ‘free spirited you’ or ‘escape today everyday’; for electronics companies, internet corporations, pharmaceutical giants, banks and bookmakers. Properties for sale or rent, to suit every pocket - so long as that pocket was infinitely deep.
‘Credit yourself’, rock bottom rates; pay-one-day loans…’
Cars, cars, cars and more cars, fast and furious, going nowhere.
‘I’m so tired,’ Goldie whispered, ‘drained. I need a break, to go with the flow, suck it up a while.’
‘You’re leaving us,’ Dom said, failing to get her to meet his gaze.
‘No, of course…’ Goldie began, squeezing her eyes closed, her hands cradling her face. ‘Just a rest. There’s a night job… I can build a little credit, get a few essentials together. I can’t go on against.’
‘If you plug into the feed,’ Dom said, ‘you’ll stay plugged.’
‘A month, two. No more,’ Goldie promised.
‘You’ll turn,’ Dom said.
‘I just need a little fare. And ease, down-time.’
‘You won’t rise-up again.’
‘I’ll reconnect with you at the squat.’
‘Goodbye.’
Dom re-joined the reduced joint of meat who were simulating exuberant sex in the middle of the packed evening sidewalk. He noted that the crowd was all heading in one direction: There must be a product launch. Without registering the meat’s pornographic pantomime, the crowd parted to flow around them, re-merged, like a miracle sea.
‘Where’s Goldie?’ Puffa asked as she ground her rear into Dom’s crotch, exaggerating her movements to the exotic max, squealing with salacious delight.
‘Retired,’ Dom said, automatically responding to Puffa’s mime with his own overstated hip-thrusting, joining in with a fleshy chorus of orgasmic moans, groans, screams and exhortations: ‘deeper, harder, faster…’ Becoming a chant.
‘Fuck!’
‘Tired?’ Puffa queried, yelling to make herself heard above their racket.
‘Yes,’ Dom said.
The crowd converged on the giant store where You-Ni-Media told them the new ingestible device would be launched in this city. They arrived in their thousands then tens and then hundreds of thousands, making their slow, fixed smiling way in from the suburbs. Each was encouraged by the breaking product news that interrupted their muzak, vid feeds and social media e-solations with such regularity that it was the rule not the exception. Though it was impossible to discern just how, their wan unchanging features betrayed something of their fervour. Though the collective pace didn’t quicken, their shuffle was suffused with ardent tension. Tall or short, fat or thin, regardless of skin colour, everyone wore dark clothes, mostly shades of black or the darkest navy. They moved as a tide, washing along the street, filling it, enveloping it.
Erasing it.
As they neared the giga-store, the architecture of the street funnelled them into a tighter, denser throng, homogenous. A homeless man, sleeping near the warm air vent at one side of the store complex, awoke as the crowd parted around him and then, with no more room to part, trod over him. His pleading, cursing and then curtailed screams were lost, unheeded. After only a few minutes he no longer even stained the patent shoes of the famished multitude.
* *
The meat were evicted and lost the squat. In an impossibly short time it was redeveloped as a fitness centre and fried chicken franchise. Along with the squat went their plans for a social centre, something they’d read about on un-weeded sites still trailing on the web decades after their authors had passed. They had talked of sheltering refugees and the homeless, of free food, of makers’ workshops and legal aid, of street art, music and theatre classes. Most of all they’d talked of developing a cold-turkey capacity, to support people in unplugging from the feeds. They would have called the centre ‘The Joint’. But they had talked too long, planned too closely, hesitated. And lost. Now the meat was fragmented, slices couch-surfing with an ebb of friends, enduring familial condescension in the refuge of childhood bedrooms, sleeping rough on roofs or stuffed in the cavities of the under-city, living off waste heat.
Dom waited for other slices at the subway station, at first passing his time by staging shambling monster attacks on passing commuters, all of whom were wholly unmoved. Giving up, he read an ancient e-book downloaded from the under-web on his stolen slab.
“Whose city? The answer, perhaps, is pretty clear: it’s the parasites’ city and their progeny is a species we can now label the parasitic city. A parasite, remember, is an organism that feeds off the larger “host” organism, an uninvited diner at the lodge who doesn’t pay for their grub. Parasites chomp away at the common-wealth the world over, eating their way inside the social body…1”
‘Parasites feeding must be what made the zombies,’ Dom reflected aloud, nodding comprehension. ‘They don’t rise from the grave but are consumed to living death. Their spirits are drained.’
Tonight’s action, which he had conceived and proposed, was to be a hit on one of the Terra-Malls. They were going to enter stores and try to give away goods to customers. Christmas was coming and the stores were even more laden than usual, ridiculously crammed with the unneeded, the next instant’s de-junk: The next publishing splurge, how to ‘Make yourself some space.’ An opportunity to market more stuff. The meat would press holovision-sets, uni-devices, smoothie synths, well-being monitors, designer clothes - black was the new black again for next season – object d’art and game-stations into the hands of baffled, but expressionless shoppers, insisting they were gifts from a grateful management.
‘How to incubate such an alternative meme,’ Dom read from the slab, ‘how to dose up on it to strengthen our immunity system? How might it circulate as a prophylactic within the generative cells of our urban politic, permanently ridding us of parasites.’
‘We obviously never found out how,’ Dom muttered. ‘The social body is gutted and putrid to the core: insipid putrefaction, the zombie meme.’
When he’d finished reading and put the slate on stand-by, Dom felt drained. Commuters continued to flow around him, oblivious, consumed.
‘Content.’
His old-fashioned device quivered and bleated in his pocket and he took it out, thumbed access and read the text.
‘With you in spirit!’
From Puffa.
The most vital of them.
The last of them.
Dom blanked.
1. Andy Merrifield (2014) ‘The New Urban Question’. London: Pluto Press