The Planner(62)

James went back to his desk, determined not to do anything he was paid to do. He made himself a cup of tea without checking if any of his colleagues wanted one, and then sat down again. On his computer there was an email from Graham Oakley.



Hi James,

Just touching base, haven’t heard from you for a while. Just to say, HR have been on to me about Guy’s replacement, and I’m obviously keen not to have the role unfilled for any length of time.

I guess you’re still considering things, but if you could give me some indication soon (i.e. in the next week or so) whether you want the job that would be a big help. We don’t have to finalise starting dates, terms etc, but once I know for sure that you’re coming, I can at least tell people here, and halt any recruitment process.

All the best,

Graham



James read it through carefully. Growing up is a process of making compromises, closing down opportunities, narrowing options. He understood that – it was partly how he had ended up here – but that didn’t mean he had to do it again just yet. There was still, he felt more and more certain, too much going on. He closed his email, and then closed his eyes.



One day London will run itself, for they were living in an age of great technological acceleration and political stagnation. Traffic lights will flicker on and off in response to vehicle numbers and the mobile phones trying to cross the road. Buses, trams and trains will steer themselves across town, deftly avoiding one another and stopping at unmanned stations run by highly accomplished ticket machines. Electric photo sensors will track the swiping of microchip cards and embedded transmitters will relay the news to one another through interoperable protocols. Things won’t need to bleep or flash any more – information will invisibly and silently radiate across the warm sky in a billion little data packets, all backed up on a server farm just outside of Basingstoke. And everything else, everything that can’t be automated or computed or ignored, will be done by the immigrants – men and women of indeterminate skin colour and legal status, and who will never dare to speak.

All those labour- and social-interaction-saving devices. All those invisible machines, all that networked intelligence. The city was getting worse, all the statistics said so – there were more robberies and murders and everyone was getting angry and anxious. But it was also getting so much cleverer. It was absorbing information, gigabytes and terabytes of it, and it was processing it, it was applying coefficients and evolving weightings. And the more information it processed, the cleverer it became.

One day, too, there wouldn’t be any planners. Cities were full of humans and humans were too complicated for other humans to know how to deal with them. It was better left to the computers. Not just desktop PCs, but gigantic calculating machines of the kind that you only ever came across in out-of-date science fiction, and which would sit in the basement of City Hall and every day make a hundred billion calculations. They would compute air pollution, noise pollution, medium-term flood risk, waste disposal rates, levels of new company formation, housing stock supply, peak-hour congestion levels, the value of the visitor economy, the net rate of migration and the proportion of cyclists who wore helmets. They would make allowances for multiplier effects and positive feedback loops and non-linear sensitivities, they would undertake ingenious statistical analysis and relentlessly run through powerful algorithms, and then they would make optimal decisions – decisions that no one could fathom but which would invariably be correct – although in any case, it would be too difficult for any human to judge one way or another. And in Southwark Council, the only people with any jobs left to do would be the ones who could mend the computers and write press releases about how well it was all going. The only people left would be Ian Benson and Alex Coleman.



‘Well what the fuck did you expect?’ said Rachel. ‘You’re behaving like a knob. You even smoke cigarettes like a knob.’

They were outside now, and Rachel was smoking cigarettes. James was trying to smoke one too. He was practising, for when he next saw Harriet.

‘I’m not behaving like a knob,’ said James. ‘I think that’s unfair.’

‘You looked like you were on sleeping pills for most of last week. And that last report on retail you sent me was dogshit, you must have written it in about four minutes. And you haven’t been in the pub on Friday for weeks now – people notice these things. Remember: all we talk about is the people who aren’t in the pub with us, and it’s not as if anyone ever says nice things.’

‘All right, I hear all that. But it’s just a bit much to get criticism from Lionel, that’s all. I mean – he’s fucking Lionel.’