1.

Thank you for joining us on our journey.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke

‘Companies would prefer not to acknowledge the hands-on effort required to curate our experiences. “It goes to our misunderstandings about the Internet and our view of technology as being somehow magically not human.”’ ~ Wired

“Lancaster, Preston, Wigan North Western.” Gunpowder, treason and plot.

The announcer mentioned something about sandwiches and ersatz coffee, but it was lost in the clack-clack, clack-clack of the tracks and murmur of people. I glanced up at the route map. Still four stops to go: three hours sat on a dirty, cramped train as it careened down uneven tracks. The faint smell of toilet wisped through the carriage, mingling with passengers and beer to create something less than the sum of its parts. Sweat and piss had been part of public transport since time immemorial.

At least you’ve got a bloody seat, I told myself. With a table and everything, even if it was covered in a sticky layer of used-to-be-coffee and half-dissolved crumbs, the source of which sat across from me reading The Sun.

I’d boarded down south, at London Euston, when the train was still relatively empty. Many of my fellow passengers hadn’t been so lucky. Some had to cram their knees into the tiny spaces between seats. Some of them had boarded in cities further up north, like Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and found themselves crammed into every available space. They stood two abreast in the cramped corridor space between seats, and in the spaces at the end of the carriage with the luggage and bins overflowing with trash.

Far down the carriage, an elderly woman leaned against a younger passenger for support. A trickle of someone’s drink — Coca Cola, or maybe this was the source of the beer smell — ran across the floor. Beer might make this tolerable, right enough, I thought. Some of the passengers had gin and tonic that came in a shiny can, and that seemed like too much to dream for.

My watch buzzed against my wrist: “Time to stand! Move a little for one minute.”

I rolled my eyes. Go fuck yourself, I told it, silently. Awkwardly, I half stood up from my seat, constrained by the table, and wiggled slightly until the alert on my phone told me it was safe to sit down again. I felt like an idiot, but the last thing I could afford was to be classified as unhealthy. Particularly not on the way up to a new job. It was hard enough to get work at the best of times; being demoted to a less-desirable category would make it almost impossible.

Even now, on my way up to a new job, I needed to be careful. I’d managed to work my way up to the top tier through exercise, careful eating and — if I was honest — gaming the algorithm as much as I could, walking the line between cheating the system and getting caught. Losing my privileges could mean giving my position up to someone more qualified. How could I pay my subs then?

The man across from me looked up from his paper and quietly burped, as if to say, you look ridiculous. It was ridiculous, of course, but this was a part of life now. Just another thing to shrug off and get on with. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. Mustn’t complain. Stop fussing. How many revolutions had died with those words?

Halfway across the carriage, another man got up as far as he could without leaving his seat and performed the same involuntary dance. He had seen me perform mine moments before, and shot me a brief half-smile in a show of embarrassed solidarity. We nodded to each other with as much dignity as we could muster, and he sat down as quickly as I had. We turned, together but apart, to study the grey landscape hurtling past our window.

The world outside was concrete: grey building after grey building sped past the carriage windows, separated by deserted roads and building sites. Monochrome cranes stretched out into overcast skies, their white claws reaching for cloud. Sometimes, when the train slowed down a little, you could see the primary colored logos of the companies who owned them, innocuous and friendly, as if doing no harm. Happy, bright colonizers.

The man opposite me folded over his paper and started intently studying a picture on the next page. I caught a glimpse of a sub-headline reflected in the glass: LAST OF THE GREEN BELT WILL PROCESS FOREIGN DATA.

Foreign data. I shook my head at the phrase. We were tearing up the countryside to process information, workhouse after workhouse, and the newspaper was worried the data didn’t come from here.

Once upon a time, the train lines had been surrounded by countryside. Wildlife grew up between the rails. The endless grey boxes had been green fields, farmed for generations, demarcated by stone walls built millennia ago. Hedgerows and rivers, canals and estuaries that outlasted recorded history. It wasn’t majestic, necessarily, but it was beautiful, and it was ours.

And then it was gone.

We had been the center of our own empire once. They didn’t teach it this way in schools, but anyone who knows anything about history knows that colonialism is always brutal. Britain, for its part, invented concentration camps; it invaded half the globe and induced famines for nothing more than its own profit. But in its old age, not completely under its own free will, it had receded into something tolerant and peaceful.

Then came the people who said there wasn’t enough room for anyone new, who passed laws to close off the outside. They wanted to return to the brutality of empire; they said they would turn us back into an industrial powerhouse, that we’d make things here again instead of buying them from far-off places. Slowly, the green began to give way to steel and grey and black.

Of course, they hadn’t considered that the industry wouldn’t come from here, or that we were laying out a welcome mat to be the engine of someone else’s prosperity, or that it wouldn’t be what anybody recognized as industry at all.

They certainly hadn’t thought that if we returned to empire, we might not be at the center of it. In some ways, it served them right.

The man opposite me spilled his coffee for the third time. A dark mass of instant granules and sugar cut with water oozed towards me like a giant finger, singling me out. Grunting, he put down his paper, and the headline, a catcall to the bigoted expressed in words of two syllables or less, disappeared into brown. Three more hours left.

“Cheer up,” said my watch. “Happy people live longer.”

“Name?”

“Lem,” I said.

“Your full name, sir?” The intake officer couldn’t have been older than 20, but her stare seemed older than time.

“Lem Steinberg,” I said.

She took my arm and touched my watch to hers. She began flicking her fingers through the air. I knew she could see my personal details through her lens and was going through them. If I’d had a lens I would have been able to see them too, in shared space, but I’d never been able to afford them. It always looked strange to me to see people interact with data that wasn’t really there, and I appreciated the rare show of vulnerability in people with so much more money and power than me. I liked to think they were tickling ghosts.

We’d made it to Glasgow with only an hour’s delay: less than I’d been told to expect, but my legs were still getting used to being able to walk again after so long being trapped on the train.

We had pulled into the station and immediately been boarded by officers. The surveillance infrastructure was sparser in Scotia, and they couldn’t chance us doing a runner and going off-grid. We were shunted into makeshift corridors, marquees of metal and plastic, that led directly to the intake zones. From there, we would be sent off to our jobs at the various workhouses. We would eat, sleep and work there.

Everything was a sub: food, clothing, accommodation, the train to get there, every piece of entertainment and information. Even the tools we would use to work would be subbed. If we earned less than our total subs, we would build up a debt that would have to be paid off. If we earned more, and made it to debt zero, we had increased freedom. In other words, leaving would be possible, but not guaranteed.

Even then, though, everything would be subbed. Everything was always subbed, and there would always have to be more money to pay for the subs, month after month after month. They called it “the sharing economy”, which made it sound like it was something from a friendly hugs-and-kisses nursery rhyme. What it meant was: we were a commodity, who owned nothing but our ability to sell our labor for a wage, and even that ownership was tenuous.

The intake officer turned her focus back to me. “I’ve gone through your records, and I need you to confirm some things for me,” she said, reading from a script for what must have been the hundredth time that day. “Your watch is set to tell me if you’re lying, so please be truthful.”

I nodded.

“Have you tried to game your quantified self stats?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Were you a member of the Labour Party between 2018 and 2025?”

“No.”

“Are you carrying any weapons or sharp objects, have you been trained in mindfulness, or do you have any physical training with any martial arts or other fighting sports?”

“No.”

“I see you had a family. I take it you won’t try to find them,” she said.

I shook my head and looked her directly in the eyes. “Of course not,” I said.

She waved me on, and I was shunted wordlessly, through winding corridors, towards my new place of work.

This is chapter one of my NaNoWriMo 2016 story. To follow along, click the “follow” button below. Or click here to read my non-fiction pieces.