The Net!

2049  · 

A condensed version of the novella for the blog. Part One as written — morning of 14 April 2049, apartment 7C. The author’s note at the end is his.

Don’t open your eyes, darling. Don’t, my dear. We can’t afford to wake up my son.

Esmira says this in a whisper so thin it barely disturbs the air, and the air itself in this room has already been paid for, and is already running out.

The first thing you need to understand about the morning of the fourteenth of April, 2049, in apartment 7C of what the building’s official DigiCouncil registry calls a Tier-Two Residential Consciousness Unit, though the people who live in it simply call it a flat, because some words resist monetisation, is that Esmira Varlan has not slept.

She has been horizontal. Sleep of the officially sanctioned depth, the kind the building’s BioSense infrastructure detects and logs and invoices, carries a nightly tariff of 0.4 blocks of nets per full REM cycle, and Esmira has not had 0.4 blocks to spare for eleven days. The room runs on the overnight Basic Breathe package, 0.02 blocks per hour: adequate for resting adults. Not comfortable. Adequate. She has borrowed seventeen minutes of chat space from Nadia next door. She hasn’t told Nadia that she doesn’t know if they will still be here by Friday. She talks to Gon through the WhisperChannel. Delayed debt accrual. Every syllable a small stone on a scale, and somewhere outside Bratislava — a name from her late husband’s notebook — an algorithm is recording the weight.

It is 4.17 in the morning. Gon is awake. He is fifteen. ADHD that makes stillness a kind of sustained violence; dyslexia that makes the world’s primary channel, text, text, text, into a maze. He has learned the economy of silence. He presses his palm to the TagSensor beside the bathroom. Net balance of precisely zero. The door does not open. One quiet tone: the DigiCouncil’s product designers have spent significant resources on the tonal register of denial. He reaches for the curtain. Please, she says, and the word costs 0.004 blocks of delayed debt. If you open those curtains the light sensors will register a Comfort Environment Request. He removes his hand. The street outside, free light, is three centimetres of fabric away from him and he is not allowed to have it. The last two weeks have been this. Not one large catastrophe. A thousand small ones.

The CogNeeds premium: 1.2 blocks a week, a processing fee for existing in the category. His LifeTag was implanted at birth under the Continuity of Access Agreement, nine hundred pages; she had read twelve before the hospital terminal timed out. Anxiety spikes cost 0.3 blocks per event under the Wellbeing Maintenance Protocol. Gon at thirteen, on a homemade tag-reader, in uneven handwriting: Look. Every time I feel bad, they charge us. So they want me to feel bad. Or they need me to. It’s the same thing, isn’t it.

Nadia Ferencz in 7B is fifty-three, a RemoteVerification analyst. She had known Gon since he was nine, when he knocked with a broken chip and left a basil plant — actual soil, actual roots, free of tag — the most honest gift she had ever received. Delayed debt accrual is not a grace mechanism. Trigger: 8 blocks. Then Residency Stability Review, Maintenance Mode, the relocation queue for Tier Three. She had seen Esmira’s number in her workflow: 6.3 blocks. 1.7 from the trigger. She had lent the chat space. She had not yet decided whether to say anything.

Gon’s father was Daniyar Varlan, system architect. He had known about buildings that look like logistics warehouses, powered by tidal generators, because the ocean is the last thing in Europe that no one has yet figured out how to charge for. He applied for Voluntary Network Severance on a Tuesday morning in November 2039. The four-page family impact notification arrived at 6 p.m. They moved to 7C six weeks later. She had said: your father needed to stop. He was very tired. He loved you and sometimes love isn’t enough to make a person stay. Gon’s first feeling was not grief but anger at the notification. At the fact that the first thing the world had said about his father’s leaving was a document.

At 7.00 the hour window opens. 2.5 blocks, essential only. Gon pulls the curtain. Grey morning. Barcodes on the lamppost, on the dog’s collar, at child height. His dyslexia made text slow; the visual pattern-recognition that his brain developed in compensation meant he could look at a transaction barcode and understand its structure the way other people see a face. He had never told anyone this. After breakfast that tastes like the idea of food, he looks at the empty Sync container. Nine days without it before. The world sold him the thing that made him functional in the world. 0.4 of credit left. Nothing for Sync. Mom, he said. I know, she said. I need it. Not for school. If we go to the allocation office and I can’t hold the thing long enough to explain it— I’ll do the talking, she said. Let’s go while the exit is still in credit.

They take the stairs. The stairwell is free by accident: charging for it would have been a hazard fee. Outside, the Ambient Economy. Gon had listened four times, on a secondhand chip, to a 2041 paper by a Dutch economist named Voss, taken down three weeks after publication: the completion of capitalism’s long project of colonising consciousness itself. At the allocation office — once a public library — a Queue Administration Fee of 0.01. He draws the TagSensor pad from memory, overlays it rotated ninety degrees. A secondary read. Cognitive load. Every locked door logging the neural signature of not having enough. Who bought fear.

Nadia writes four sentences on building paper that has no tag. She will put it under Esmira’s door. Esmira, for fourteen months, has been in RestContribute: the BioSense walls reading the emotional architecture of her dreams — not the imagery, the fear signatures, the grief — licensed to content companies and to companion AIs for elderly people in Tier-One. 0.3 blocks per night of qualifying sleep. The difference between accrual and the threshold. She had found it on Gon’s reader. She had not told him. She had not stopped sleeping.

The Emergency Net Credit Supplement: 1.5 blocks. They needed 1.7. On the Public Access pavement she does arithmetic. Mom, Gon said. I know something. He told her about the secondary read, Voss, BioSense, the credit at 4.13 a.m. He told her that he thought she already knew. I did know, she said. I’ve known for three months. Are you angry? I’m angry at the system. Not at you. She pulled him to her. The data of the embrace flowing into the mesh. She thought: let them have it. There is not a barcode in the world with a price tag big enough for this.

Late afternoon, Basic Breathe, bathroom locked again. He overlays the BioSense layout on the TagSensor drawing. Same grammar. The architecture has an edge: a shared relay in the free stairwell. You built this on the assumption that the people inside it would keep trying to pay. What he did in the stairwell took eleven minutes and cost nothing. It did not destroy anything. It logged the secondary read from every TagSensor and sent it, publicly, to every screen in Zone 4. A map of who had been afraid, and when, and how often. It ran two hours and nineteen minutes. In the attention economy, a very long time.

You did that, she said. They’ll know it was you. I know. Maps, once seen, are very difficult to unsee. He turned to a new page. He started drawing.

Author’s note, from the source: This story is set in a version of Europe approximately twenty years from now, though some of its architecture is already present. The commercialisation of biological data, sleep, attention, cognitive load, emotional state, is not a speculative technology. It is an existing one, awaiting infrastructure. The notebook is paper. The basil plant is real. Some things resist monetisation not through heroism but through the simple, structural fact that they are too small to notice. For now.