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  That would certainly get rid of the fashion quacks.

  Even something simple, like the shape and colors of a soft drink bottle, or a chocolate bar, could be based, not on the guesswork of some pretentious marketing nitwit, but on solid scientific data, based on the brain and body reactions of a group of kids sitting in those chairs and being projected the various possible looks of the new product.

  * * * *

  The last version of the future newspaper appeared on the screen, the participants made the last twists on the ‘stop boxes’, and it was time for Natalie to wrap it up. She went out of the observation room and heard Bob lock the door behind her.

  This was standard practice. You wouldn’t want some of the participants to look for the toilet and wander into the room on the other side of the one-way glass.

  Although this was all perfectly acceptable sociological methodology for at least the last sixty years, still everyone knew that it was better if the participants were not unduly reminded of how things stood. No specific acts of deception occurred, that would be unethical, but a certain amount of subtle precautions was usually more than enough.

  Natalie entered the focus group room.

  Inside sat seven women and five men, more or less evenly representing the three age groups and the two levels of income. Racially, they were unrepresentative, too many whites and only one East Asian, but one had to make do with the available material.

  As Natalie opened the door, all eyes turned to her. She was pretty, black, five feet four, very thin, and dressed in a tight gray dress, with a thin plastic pink belt loosely hugging her hips, and dark flowery stockings covering her spindly legs.

  Her hair was in an authoritative bun, with half a dozen thin wavy strands hanging suggestively here and there, and her dark brown face was almost entirely free of makeup.

  “Well, everybody,” she said, clasping her hands in a finalizing manner, “thank you very much for participating in this research, and we hope you weren’t too bored.”

  As people popped the electrodes off themselves and began putting on their jackets. They made polite noises concerning how interesting the whole thing had been, and how curious they all were to check out the newspaper once it sees the light of day.

  Natalie nodded with a professional smile and reminded everyone that their cash awaited on the second floor of the building.

  Half an hour later, as she went into the office of Mister Blonksi. He met her with a jovial roar, “Ah, the young genius, Natalie. No brain scans available soon, I’m sorry to say, hur hur.”

  He chuckled good-naturedly, his plump, large-pored face flushing with the emotion, and although Natalie knew that he was not really making fun of her, she couldn’t help feeling attacked by the mention of the brain scans.

  She gave him a thin and cold polite smile. “I brought the preliminary notes that Bob and I took at the focus group, and the report will be ready by tomorrow morning.”

  Her boss looked gaily at her. “Hang the report. Tell me what your first-hand impression is.”

  His whole demeanor was of someone who would not let any trifle ruin his mood. After all, he was almost seventy, had two heart attacks, and was now more or less succeeding at taking it easy, in spite of running a formerly minor, now an up and rising, market data agency.

  He rummaged in his desk drawer and took out a small, black wooden ashtray. “You can smoke here if you want to,” he said and after a jolly wink, his face smoothed out into his general amiable countenance.

  Natalie cursed him silently. In the last two weeks, she had managed, after reading Also Sprach Zarathustra, to cut down from two packs to seven or eight cigarettes a day, and here was Blonski, tempting her to up her daily dose.

  She shook her head vigorously and opened her notebook. “It looks like they most liked the black Gothic logo, and hated most the red and round logo.”

  “Hm, hm.” Blonski nodded. “What about the colors themselves, do they want a black and white newspaper?”

  “Either a black and white newspaper, or full color. They hated the two colored version.”

  Blonski looked at Natalie in mock surprise. “Why, in my day we were happy when there were two colors in a newspaper.”

  “Well, now we are all spoiled by glossy magazines and colorful websites, sir,” Natalie answered. “It’s either black and white, or full color.”

  Too late. Her boss fixed his stare on something beyond the room’s walls, and began telling a long and complicated story of what newspapers were like forty years ago, what someone had once said to him concerning a certain article, and what he had answered.

  Natalie resigned herself and delicately drew flowers and eyes in her notebook as her boss rumbled on and on.

  * * * *

  When she returned to her home in the evening, she was wrung out as usual, and her vision was a little blurry from all the work behind a computer monitor. Although it was supposed to be radiation free and magnetically contained and whatnot, it still strained the eyes.

  She put on her home gown, switched on the TV, and poured herself a glass of red wine from a half-full bottle—followed, very soon, by another glass.

  Forty minutes later, she was quite relaxed, or at least as relaxed as she could reasonably expect to get, for she could never completely unwind after work, nor did she try to achieve total unwinding.

  To the contrary, on some unconscious level she enjoyed being highly strung, for it gave her a feeling of focus, of strength and of purpose.

  She did need to let off steam from time to time, and as she gently touched her thighs, she suddenly remembered the touches of the two gigolos, Archie and Rafael, who had done such a perfect job half a year ago. She had solemnly promised herself to never stoop to using their services again.

  That was then and this was now.

  She had deleted the number of their firm from her phone, but had neglected to throw away their business card.

  It was a matter of minutes before she found the card in a drawer with other odds and ends and soon she was talking to the operator of the ‘Salt and Leather Lonely Hearts Club.’

  Rafael was still working for them, but Archie had left. They did, however, have a wonderful new guy named Shane, who would come with Rafael. They would be over in an hour, and the whole thing would cost only a third of her monthly wage. Natalie wished the operator a good evening, hung up, and lay back on her sofa with a dreamy expression.

  “Face me, face me, I want you to face me...” she sung softly to herself and giggled. She decided to allow herself a ninth cigarette.

  After that, she would put the special sheets on her bed.

  Chapter Four

  Anton stood on the corner of a bakery, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. It was a pretentious bakery, naturally. Only pretentious bakeries may survive in the city’s center.

  Trying to charm both conservative and modern office rats, it had a two-foot high plump plastic chef with the appropriate white hat by its front door, and on the door itself the picture of a blue-haired moekko girl eyeing a flying croissant with delighted, glinting, wide-eyed awe.

  He was smoking his fifteenth cigarette for the day and trying to look inconspicuous. Although an albino—a condition which made him stand out somewhat even on streets of a 21st century city—he dealt with that when the need arose by use of makeup and huge oblong shades, turning into just one of many anonymous aging fashionistas.

  He was fifty-two, five foot eight, and lean as some intense smokers tend to be. His hair painted a light orange, was still in considerable health. He was currently on something like a stakeout.

  Anton was the director of the city’s N.M.H. office. ‘N.M.H.’ stood for ‘National Mental Hygiene’.

  It was lunch hour and here in the center, the streets filled with office workers scrambling to get a coffee and som
e food into themselves.

  Of course, that also included the ones who were scrambling to buy something fashionable, do some shopping therapy in the limited time before the office grind sucked them back in.

  At this very moment, though, a number of people were diverted from their scrambling. A crowd was gathering at the base of a bank, looking up in agitation. On the fourth floor, on the ledge of a window, stood a fragile-looking, petite blonde, dressed in tweed pants, a purple shirt, and a thin red tie. She was obviously a junior something, who was crying, wringing her hands, and looking at the ground below through smeared mascara.

  “Don’t do it, girl,” a man shouted from the crowd.

  “It’s not worth it,” a woman standing near him added her opinion.

  The girl did not answer, and whether she whimpered or not couldn’t be heard above the noises of the city.

  “Where are the police?” a third person demanded indignantly. Others concurred immediately.

  The girl gave a forlorn wail, then shouted quite coherently, hands clenched into little fists, “I can’t take it anymore!”

  The crowd gasped and surged back as the girl stepped into the air and plummeted. Some of the spectators echoed her scream.

  A man stepped forward.

  He was an ordinary looking young man, in a brown suit, with lime green hair, probably a worker in advertising or design.

  With unnerving confidence, he spread his arms… and caught the girl. As the screaming body made contact with his arms, he buckled and grunted but didn’t fall. Gently, he laid her down on the pavement.

  For about ten seconds he knelt stroking her hair and soothing her with baby words like, “There, there” and “Everything will be all right,” before the crowd finally digested what had just taken place and the clapping of hands and jubilant hooting commenced.

  Within a minute two police cars, an ambulance, and a news team arrived. Business went back to usual, events were now back in sanctioned and governed channels.

  Before being lead away, the girl turned to look at her savior. “I’m sorry I be a fool now, no more trying to killing me again,” she said with a shaky voice.

  A grown woman hugged a surprised man beside her as she heard these words.

  * * * *

  Anton stepped on the stub of his cigarette and walked to his car. As he drove his green Moskva Opel back to HQ, he replayed the whole incident in his mind.

  All in all, a successful operation. A satisfactory crowd had gathered and he could already see the news reports: “Stranger Saves Distressed Girl” and “A Miracle on Hamsun Street”.

  The girl and the man who saved her were both professionals. They had signed declarations that they were aware of the hefty penalties were they ever to disclose their participation in such staged events.

  Tomorrow they would be on their way to another town, where with a makeover they would be ready to carry out some other morale-boosting stunt. It was part of Anton’s job to devise and oversee such events.

  For the most part, his job was to collect and evaluate data with his team. Sometimes, now and then, when he identified an increase in some sort of tension in the city, he would begin offering his superiors plans for relevant scenarios to play out as a sort of counter magic.

  A surgical strike on the city’s morale may diffuse tension and avert an explosion of desperation-fueled violence, by adding a little shard of optimism, a belief that ‘real values’ do indeed still exist and are even practiced, and that everything currently happening in life is just some sort of misunderstanding which just has to be resolved sooner or later.

  With the help of a mathematician friend, good old Deus, who was also a programmer to boot, Anton had presented his would-be employers with a computer program that demonstrated through various entangled mathematical proofs that producing a positive situation in one part of the city may diffuse tension in another.

  He had known all this intuitively, without the need of mathematical proofs, but he also knew that without some scientific mumbo-jumbo he would never convince the government to fund such a dubious initiative.

  Now, six years later, the three biggest cities in the country were already using teams trained by him, and there was talk that the Japanese were inquiring into this new field of crime control.

  As Anton drove in slow faltering lurches with the rest of the traffic, his mind automatically absorbed everything in his vision range, and if possible, classified it, and deposited it in various mental drawers.

  The schoolgirls on the streets were wearing thinner ties this season, and tweed shorts were in full swing. Again. Many of the shorts were combined with shiny brown and red flat shoes.

  The combination of ballerina skirts over black nylon tights also survived the whole year without disappearing, but the bowler hats of last spring were much less frequent this season.

  Huge fake gems, a tongue in cheek imitation of formidable anal beads, were still hanging from the necks of many mature women, although the younger generation had already moved on to plastic sea shells. These multicolored shells hung from ears, noses, eyebrows; even some of the fake fingernails were now in the shape of tiny shells.

  Other things appeared to stay the same for a fourth year running. Small blobs of white gel that keeps its form the whole day still made appearances in the hairstyle of the feel-good type of women.

  The fashion-conscious men of the city were still divided into subculture-imitating fashionistas and postmetrosexuals.

  The old-schoolers still dressed in suits and sport outfits, but made up less than forty percent of the pedestrians.

  The lower class hooligans, the ‘nomies’, who dressed in a mix of clashing elements from all available fashions, could also be observed skulking here and there, but their presence was still scarce on the streets of the city center during the day.

  Come evening out they would go on the prowl in insecure noisy groups.

  Anton lit his twentieth cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and checked the pocket of his overcoat. He had two more packs, which meant he was okay for today.

  A poster caught his attention.

  A young woman in a modern combination of a white sleeveless shirt and wide yellow pants, barefoot, was eating a piece of toast with chocolate on it. She was smiling and holding her eyes squeezed tight, as if experiencing the approach of a colossal orgasm, and the chocolate was artfully smeared around her mouth.

  Right above her head was written: “Hidden Pleasures From Kool Delite Choco.”

  What made Anton take a second look was the chocolate around the girl’s mouth. Only about three or four years ago, a pressure group managed to pass legislation forbidding the display of commercials in which children were shown with chocolate, ice cream, and similar substances, smeared on their faces.

  In the past, these images would only have signified the pure childish delight born of eating something sweet, but these days there were other connotations, which made the contemporary adult squirm with unease at the image of a happy boy with chocolate all over his chin.

  The industry had reacted fast. By legally acknowledging the sexual significance of foods smeared on faces, the pressure group had in fact opened up the gates to another dimension in which advertisers could successfully convey erotic hints

  Anton remembered reading that since this new wave of messy sex legitimization had grown stronger in the last years, it had become almost obligatory for fashionable newlywed couples to smear wedding cake on each other’s faces.

  Naturally, almost half of the wedding cakes now were no longer white. Cocoa, coffee, and chocolate advertisers had caught on early to the new trend, and with a few sexual winks and nods the brown-colored sweets sales had climbed considerably.

  Now the transition from using happy-looking children to using happy-looking adults in the advertisements was comple
te. Although only a minority still practiced messy sex games, if online polls were to be trusted, the concept itself was absorbed into the tapestry of erotic hints out of which the modern fashionable persona was woven.

  Anton parked his car, went out, and smoked his twenty-first cigarette on the street, in front of the office building. It housed a different firm on each floor, and while every business advertised itself with huge plaques at the entrance, only Anton’s firm acknowledged its existence in modest two-inch letters: ‘N. M. H. Office.’

  He would write his report on the staged morale boost, and then would have about two-three more hours of surfing the web, of ‘general situation monitoring’ as he named this when selling the concept, before going home.

  Chapter Five

  The N.M.H. office was divided into four rooms. One was the monitoring room, where sat two workers, one watching and recording TV shows, commercials and news, the other reading magazines and newspapers, and site-surfing.

  The total team of the monitoring staff numbered six.

  Two always worked outside, ‘walking the beat’ around the city all day, taking note of the posters, the graffiti, the music being heard in various places, the way the citizens were dressed, and the ways they interacted with each other.

  They would, of course, also unobtrusively take pictures with their phones and record short clips.

  The three pairs in ‘monitoring’ worked in shifts of a fortnight, to avoid becoming too bogged down in their respective spheres.

  After two weeks of watching TV like a maniac, to get to walk around town or read magazines was a welcome relief. To the one who lurked in the shadows for a fortnight spying on people, the chance to watch some TV instead also offered a much-needed temporary change of pace and perspective.

  Every pair was also divided into a day and night shift, so that one would watch and record TV programs or crisscross the town on foot at day time, while the other one would do all that at night.