People in Season Read Free Page A

home to suit your mood, so the untouched understand us. There is simply no value attached to their read of our features other than how they should react. It is this critical fault that defines them. Ethics, morality, law, love... they’re only known to the UPD as abstract ideas that make about as much sense as the fear of a black cat crossing their path...’ On the fifth floor of an office block overlooking the edge of Dublin city, a grey sky is pressed firmly against the glass. Suffering his way through a hangover, Francis Mullen takes a deep breath to salvage these lines he’s rehearsed in front of the mirror so many times. Before him are the forms from which he will have to decipher distinct personalities. Set to social agent mode, he peels his tongue from the roof of his mouth and goes on. ‘The truth is, a dying man on the bus seat next to the UPD is as moving to him as a minus number in a math problem. At most, you and I are something for the untouched to pity. Since they’re unable to form strong emotional bonds with others and lack any guilt and anxiety, what else could we be but pawns to them?’
    A crop of listless heads sprout above their cubicle walls to note the tabloid sentiment. Francis has been talking for the past twenty minutes, but only now piqued the newsroom’s curiosity. Painfully aware that he had been tuned out long ago, the mechanical typing of journalists at work and the ringtones of incoming calls have been interrupting him since he began. At first he politely halted his lecture, allowing whoever it was to quickly end their conversation, but soon he realised with a deferential laugh that he was just going to have to talk into the thrum. The lesson he has learned is this: The news slows for no man. Right now, as he’s getting to the point of his introductory speech, a particularly frightful woman is firing a string of profanity at her screen. Frustrated with the argument, she hangs up and looks about in search of another target. When she connects with the social agent, Francis gives her an aching expression that begs for an apology, but the woman only offers a spiteful look of contempt until he leaves her, opens a button on his jacket and closes it again, then looks to the editor of ChatterFive for support – Joanne Victoria, she’s hardly been a help so far. Stationed outside her office, the editor taps her e-smoke as though there were actual ash to be flicked off, and surveys the room to note whose heads are poking out of their cubicles, like soldiers from trenches, and whose are buried safely in their work. Her gaze stops on the Englishman, Barry Danger. Ankles and socks stretched out of pant legs, his lanky arms are folded while he ignores an alert from his screen. On catching the intense warning his editor directs, Barry nods his gaunt face in friendly greeting before giving his attention back to the presentation, only, Francis is frozen, watching as Joanne’s eyes abandon the daft man and continue around the maze of cubicles, past the cautionary posters that each advise, ‘Remember The Children,’ and land on his own once more.
    Francis is framed by a slide of the human brain, an organic mass bunched up like a load of laundry in need of ironing that hangs over everything he has to say.
    ‘Coupled with the illusion they present of being fully connected to our collective reality, the intelligent UPD are masters of mimicry. In part, their manipulative processes come so naturally because they’ve had to develop them from childhood just to fit in. As such, their use of lies and deceit is not a choice, more a compulsive state of behaviour that was crystallised in a severe detachment from consequences. The unintelligent are just as ruthless, but the threat both embody is their drive to get what they want removed from any deep emotions. Opportunistic, this is their most dangerous feature. If the brief moment we let our guard down happens to correspond with the realisation that they can get