Written by Eva Pascoe for ‘Tales from Cybersalon’, June 2021.
The last drops of soil fell softly on the coffin. Ryan turned back and started walking out of
the cemetery, alone with his thoughts in the pounding rain. With his father gone, there was
nobody left to take care of the store, he had to rush back.
Not that there were queues outside. The last time Hawkett & Sons bespoke tailoring den,
hidden in a cobbled street of Marylebone, was busy, was ten years ago. The shop was
buzzing then with City boys, popping in for a cigar, while getting measured up for one of
Henry Hawkett’s trendy suits.
Ryan sighed, wishing that the collapse of the High Street did not happen on his watch. He
would have to close the store now. It was losing money every month, as postpandemic
government hiked taxes. He only had a handful of footballers as customers, their numbers
dwindling due to there being just six English teams in the superleague. Hawketts go back to
12 th century, hawk breeders to the Kings, later supplying uniforms to the royal army. After
the war, Ryan’s grandfather pivoted to business suits for the veterans leaving the Army,
who still wanted a uniform for life as a ‘civvie’.
As he got back to the shop, Ryan went downstairs to grab a beer from the fridge in the
basement. Opening the fridge, he noticed a loose brick sticking out of the wall. As he
checked the brick, it fell through the other side.
A beam of light shone through the new opening. Ryan kneeled down, curious and started
pushing the other bricks. Soon the hole was big enough; he could squeeze himself through.
Maybe it was a forgotten wine cellar, as the building belonged to wine merchants before
the Hawketts.
Expecting cobwebs, Ryan found the room he just crawled into was remarkably well
maintained. It was dust-free, all surfaces seemed to have been recently polished. On the
opposite walls there was a bank of computers humming softly on server racks, flickering
with blue dimmed light. It must be a datacentre of sorts, he thought. There was a door in
the corner.
He opened the door and tumbled out onto Marylebone Street. It was quiet. The sky was
dark, but Ryan could barely see it through the crowded giant QR codes projected above the
street, glimmering just above his head. Silver vehicles, wheel-less, were levitating above the
road, moving on a grid of sorts. A few couriers in orange biker suits passed by. He nearly got
knocked out by a redhead biker girl with flame graphics on her helmet, who whooshed past
him at speed.
“Get off the pavement dude“ she shouted.
Ryan stepped back and just stared at her as she whizzed off. The girl reappeared, this time
she stopped next to him.
“Are you lost? Don’t walk on the pavement, those are just for bikers and delivery robots,
you will get arrested.”
“Where should I walk then?“ asked Ryan. She looked confused.
“Nobody walks or leaves their house unless you have Bureau Permit – we deliver everything
to your apartment.”
Ryan’s head was spinning. He stepped back to the door to the strange storeroom.
He noticed a silver high office chair in the corner, with the back of a man sitting there.
Startled, Ryan yelled at the man, “Who are you? What are you doing in my store?”
The chair swirled towards him slowly. Ryan realised it was his father, with an oddly smooth,
avatar-like face.
Henry Hawkett, as it was him indeed, reached out to Ryan and touched his hand.
“Don’t worry Ryan, it is all right”. Ryan looked shocked.
“What do you mean? We just buried you, who was in the coffin if you are here?”
“In 1994, when cybercafes started opening, and people started using them to do shopping,
we realised that our retail business would die. People would shop online, move their work
and play to virtual world. They would want only digital clothes.
“We still had our old customers, and we also developed a new format, online shopping,
behind these closed doors, that was appealing to younger, more digital people. The business
grew slowly, initially the first and second businesses were similar, just one was online.
But soon our two worlds were diverging, with digital evolving fast, with mobile phones that
opened the Internet to all. All High Street shops were going online, a new world emerged.
At some point, those two worlds starting fighting, new digital brands squatting on digital
addresses for names owned by big old brands, trademark laws did not work anymore. It was
chaos and then, Internet Wars. We tried to stop them but there was too much conflict
between digital and analogue. Then people agreed to live in parallel worlds, separate
universes and stopped trying to reconcile them. The old, physical world continued as it was,
as long as there were some people still left that were deemed unready to make a transition.
Then Virus Wars came and nobody was leaving the house anymore.
“You managed to kick through the wall as you are ready for transition to Quantum Town – I
was ready to make mine years ago but your mother would not come with me so I had to live
in both worlds, in parallel. Quantum computing superpositions make it possible to be in
both worlds. When she died last year, there was nothing to keep me in the old world. I knew
you would come thru soon.”
Ryan looked around at the server banks and asked ‘What do you actually sell here?”
“Protective suits for couriers who deliver food and Soma pills to homes. They are the only
ones that go out. The QR codes on the sky are Courier Headhunters, trying to get new
recruits. All life happens indoors, on screens, including virtual holidays trips, work on
ZoomVR, e-games that replaced football” explained Henry calmly.
“High Streets gone empty, restaurants closed, cooking is done in Dark Kitchens.
“Couriers need protective suits as the temperature on the streets spikes to forty degrees
due to hole in the ozone. I run a server farm here with other retailers. We are a coop now,
cheaper to share the costs as AmeriZone cloud hosting provider became a monopoly with
high prices. We now host here, using underground streams to power the servers on hydro.”
Ryan slumped on the second chair, next to his father. So this is what we ended up doing to
ourselves – he thought. Not that he found it surprising. High Street and climate changes
were in the bad way for a while.
“I am going back to get a cold beer” said Ryan at last to his father. His forehead was dripping
with sweat, either from the shock or the basement was really hot and stuffy. He tried to
squash himself back to the old store, where he’d spent the last eight years learning about
suits business.
He tried to push at the wall but the hole was not there anymore. He was stuck in this new
world, with his young-looking father and this red-haired girl who had seemingly passed the
shopfront four times or more since his saw her first.
He watched the flickering lights of the server racks in the room. “Maybe I can make it here, I
have always liked biking and red heads,” Ryan pondered. He pulled a chair next to his father,
and asked, “So how do you make money around here?”
“We don’t. Pounds got phased out back in late 2020s, inflation has killed it” sighted Henry.
“Bikers pay us in crypto, which we then use to pay Hydro Stream Farms for servers and Anti-
Ozone fabric suppliers. What is left we swap for Eateroo tokens to pay for staff meals. E-
games are free for us as we make digital clothing for in-game avatars so we get to watch at
no charge. Welcome to digital world, you will love it here”.
