Where do you see yourself in ten years? (6)

Horrors abound: tracking mass death by app, university marketing, the great unwashed masses, and the spine-chilling arrival of... normality.

[Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Also, for your narration convenience, a reminder that the flashback is over.]

We kept Brady alive long enough to send him to the hospital. If he died now, at least it wasn’t my fault.

His chances were not good. He probably wouldn’t survive even the journey in the ambulance; in all likelihood the ambulance wouldn’t survive. Those things were prime targets.

I asked one of my students to accompany him in the ambulance, and they were so terrified that they were willing to sacrifice their most precious possession rather than take the risk.

“Can't we just send my phone with him?” they suggested. “We can use that to track whether the ambulance makes it.”

While I tracked my student’s phone’s progress, I took a call from the Dean of the College.

“Dean Jones here! I want to congratulate you! I’ve just seen the new revenue forecasts after that blasted freezer was switched off, and they’re incredible. It should have been done years ago. If only you had been head of the department!”

“Am I the Head of Department now?”

“I never thought of that! Good idea!”

You see that, young people? If you want something, you have to ask for it!

But then he continued: “I’ll have to have it signed off, of course. Should be just a formality. Make sure no-one in higher administration has heard of you, do a bit of market research, that sort of thing. I’ll get back to you. Is Brady still alive?”

“He’s on the way to the hospital.”

“I'll take that as a No. Excellent. Much cleaner if he’s gone. I’ll look into any imminent air strikes, just to make sure.”

He hung up, and I went back to tracking the ambulance. I also fired up my weather radar app, in which the current version not only displayed satellite images of raincloud movement, but also, if you paid for the Premium version, enemy aircraft and drones. Three separate swarms of drones were currently approaching the city’s airspace. I felt bad for my student’s phone.

I then switched to a seismic monitor app. That was much better for determining what was actually being bombed. It showed three waves of explosions travelling across the city. The three moving clouds of dots, each representing a blast, became more sparse as the clouds moved; the drones were being shot down. It was hard to judge whether any would still be flying by the time they reached the ambulance.

On the other hand, if the Dean had sent a message to the right people, then at least one was guaranteed to make it, and to hit exactly the right target.

My phone rang again.

“Dean Jones?”

“This is Dean Smith.”

“What happened to Jones?”

“Unfortunate accident. We just got back the marketing poll results. Brady is famous. His presence would boost student recruitment by at least 17%”

“Across the entire university? How is that possible?”

“The results are unequivocal.”

It was impossible to argue. I knew how these marketing polls worked. The general populace spent their lives roaming the battered landscape, plugged into their phones, screaming at whichever random strangers the chat-room algorithms had most recently hooked them up with. They could even keep blathering away to each other while doing their menial jobs. The nation’s production capacity might have been catastrophically reduced, but fortunately the population had been reduced even more, so there really wasn’t that much for people do to — other than complain. This provided, on the other hand, oodles of data to keep the algorithms extremely busy. It was now possible to pose any polling question you wished, and the aggregate popular opinion could be accurately interpolated from trillions of recordings of moronic utterances.

The Dean was clear: “If you want to be Head of Department, Brady has to be alive!”

I switched quickly to the seismic monitor app. No more explosions.

I switched to the “weather radar” app. All the drones were gone.

I switched to the phone tracker. Aggh! My student’s phone was gone, too!

I switched back to my call with the Dean.

“I think your predecessor had him killed.”

“That's no good for you.”

“Can you check if any ambulances were destroyed by the most recent drone strikes?”

He went away to check.

Shit shit shit! I was so close to being Head of Department, but it felt like I still had to make an impossible leap across a bottomless chasm.

He came back to the phone.

“You were right. Jones had them target every ambulance they could find. A total of five were destroyed.”

“So Brady is...?”

“Don't worry — Brady made it to the hospital.”

“Thank God!”

“The ambulances that were hit killed only one old man, three women, and two children.”

“What a relief!”

The Dean went on. “Reports say Brady is awake, but in a bad state. He’s angry and raving.”

“I'm not surprised. He thought he was waking up in 50 years to a futuristic paradise. Instead it’s been only eight years and the world has gone entirely to shit.”

“He didn't care about that.”

“So what is he upset about?”

“He found out that people have stopped citing him.”

Oh my God! Someone told him his citation count? What kind of clowns did they have up there at the hospital?

I told the Dean I’d go to see Brady right away. This guy’s health was the key to my future career.

I rode to the hospital on my bicycle. It’s the only way to navigate the rubble-strewn streets. I was painfully aware that every one of the shambling raving people that I passed on the way were unwitting participants in the university’s most recent marketing poll. I cursed them as I biked past, but they were unaware of me. They were too focussed on their phones.

They had this ridiculous crabby way of inching forth, and it was hard to tell whether it was due to some deformity or injury, or if that was just the safest way to move if you couldn’t see anything because your eyes were fixed on your phone screen, and you couldn’t reach out to protect yourself because you had one arm devoted to holding your phone at an angle where you could both see its screen and continuously yell into its microphone, and of course you couldn’t hear anything around you because of your ear buds at maximum volume.

After a while I decided to attempt an intervention into the polling data.

Every time I saw someone, I made sure to cycle straight at them, furiously ringing my bell.

I bore down on them at full speed. “DING DING! DING DING DING!”

When I inevitably knocked them over, I cried out, “Sorry! My name is Brady Alexander!” and cycled off before they could get hold of me. All they could do was pick up their phones, put the buds back in their ears, and rant about what had just happened to them, possibly for days.

If there was any more polling to be done, it was sure to be vastly skewed by the small number of explicit references to Brady himself.

Once at the hospital I went straight to his private room, but they wouldn’t let me in.

“We had to sedate him. Then he went into a coma. Then there was a thirty-minute power cut and all of our life-support apparatus were switched off. We think he’ll survive, but he might have suffered severe brain damage.”

While I waited outside I got another call from the Dean.

“Smith?”

“No, this is Baker. Smith has just been killed by a speeding cyclist.”

Ooops.

“That’s not important,” he continued. “I’ve been reviewing our finances.”

“Yes, I know, we’re now making a huge profit because we no longer have to pay for Brady’s cryogenic storage. You’re welcome.”

“I don’t know anything about that. That was under a previous regime.”

“You mean two hours ago?”

“That is beside the point. What I am currently concerned about is that a new Professor salary has appeared on the books.”

“What new professor?”

“Professor Alexander.”

“But...”

“And currently he has no teaching assignments. What sort of unprofessional operation is Farmer running over there in physics?”

“I thought I was running it now?”

“Not yet, and you won’t ever be if you don’t fix this budget shortfall.”

He hung up, just in time for me to greet a doctor with the latest news on Brady.

“How is he?”

“The good news is that he has come out of the coma.”

“And the bad news?”

“His brain appears to have been horribly damaged. His mind and his personality have been completely ruined.”

This didn’t sound good. “Tell me the details. I need to know how bad it is.”

The doctor just shook his head, apparently overcome with emotion. “He is no longer the scientific genius we have all revered for so long.”

“What do you mean? What has he become?”

The doctor finally brought himself to look me directly in the eye. His own eyes were glistening with tears. When at last he managed to speak some words, this is what they were: “He has become a kind, friendly, normal human being.”

Jesus Christ. Would the horrors never cease?

---

Can you imagine what kind of havoc a normal human being would wreak in a university department? You don’t need to try. Just read the next episode!