An express lift, pinging for each floor we ascend.
Out, thirty-three floors up.
Looking down at the foyer, hand in hand.
They’re going to install a great waterfall here at some point. That’s the plan, anyway. It’s modelled on something in Singapore. My husband’s very keen on Singapore …
I’m sure he is. Total authority. Total control.
We could thrown ourselves down – all the way. A love death. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it? We’ll be together in death.
Except we won’t even reach death. Where you are, death can’t be. You never actually die.
So you can’t just throw yourself off the ledge and, like, die?
Sure you can.
And your body will go splat, thirty-three floors down?
We won’t feel it. It’ll be too late for us
I think we’re bad – very bad for each other, philosopher. Talking about these things. Even thinking these things.
How deep does this building go?
As far down as it goes up – that’s what I heard.
What’s down there?
A whole secret bunker. An underground city, with its own energy sources and food pods and whatever.
For who? Why? It doesn’t show much confidence in the future of the Organisational Management world, does it?
The Observatory.
Over to the windows.
The Northern Lights … Are they real?
I don’t know. But they’re beautiful.
That’s not enough. I want to know whether they’re real. Do you think that the real sky? The real sky, Laure. Not the … Skynet sky. Not the all-set-up-for-holograms sky. The real sky … which is a tearing of the fake sky. That burns up the fake sky …
You can see for miles. Night time Newcastle. Can you see the river? It’s there. The Glasshouse. The Tyne Bridge …
These views …
Are majestic! Magnificent! Even you can’t deny that.
I don’t want a panorama ...
Give into it. Enjoy it.
This is where you and Alan come to gaze over your kingdom, right?
It really isn’t like that.
It’s where you look over the new campus and beyond. All the way out to the stony wastes … Knowing that you’re doing your bit for the Organisational Management empire. That you’ve set up the new capital of the northeast. The newest node in the network …
It’s actually one of the first nodes. They’re starting in deprived places first. Newcastle is just an Organisational Management testbed.
The horror …
Everything’s so still, up here. And calm. We’re in the still eye of the hurricane.
The Organisational Management hurricane.
Which is turning all around us. Wheeling around us.
But even Organisational Management is afraid. Even Organisational Management builds bunkers. Why, I wonder? What’s the threat?
The unorganisable, maybe. The unmanageable.
There’s this science fiction film: Alphaville. Jean-Luc Godard, from the ‘60s. A futuristic city, ruled by a evil AI, Alpha 60. That outlaws free thought. Bans all creative expression. And interrogates all those who show emotion, before killing them. In a giant swimming pool, strangely, with all these synchronised swimmers …
There’s this great interrogation scene. They haul Lemmy Caution in – he’s the protagonist, the hardboiled detective type. What transforms night into day? Alpha-60 asks him. Poetry, he says. What is your religion? I believe in the immediate inspirations of my conscience, he says. What is the privilege of the dead? he’s asked. To die no longer, he says.
Poetic questions, for a computer.
Caution quotes from a book by Paul Eluard, the poet. The Capital of Pain. And tries to make Anna Karina’s character tell him she loves him. Love is totally banned, you see.
Does she love him? Does love destroy the supercomputer? Does love win in the end?
They escape. They drive off into the outer realms.
That’s what we have to do: fall in love and escape. To die no longer … is that what you want?
Work in Progress 