'Well done, you fucker, isn't well done enough. Burn it, you bastard, burn it, I WANT IT BURNED!' When one morning, and for the hundredth time, Lo-Fi Jo's toaster refused to burn his toast (it wasn't an option in the standard council-issue Matsui networked toaster which, to add insult to injury, couldn't be changed because the council's appliance network was private, and not compatible with public domain products) he shouted at it, pleaded with it, threatened it with a hammer, and - in due course - bashed the little machine's brains out, gathered up the pieces and threw them out of the window, down onto the street far below.

Suffice it to say that this behaviour did not go unnoticed, either by the network at large or the other appliances in Jo's meagre flat. The toaster, in the last moments of its life, sent out a distress signal to the nearest device - the fridge - which, comprehending dimly some kind of threat to its continued existence, immediately locked its door and advised the next nearest appliance to do the same. This kind of behaviour was swiftly replicated throughout the flat: with a multitude of small clicks and snaps, things were shutting down, locking up, turning off. Jo's progress around the flat, ordinarily a disturbed and pointless circuit, accelerated decidedly: he was now swearing freely as he moved from room to room, testing things, hammer clenched in his hand, administering blows to anything that refused to work.

Further afield, another set of responses had been triggered by Jo's most recent outbursts. At the desk of one Sheila Gulag, Jo's name surfaced from a stack of unseen databases to appear as an entry on her time-management system:

Monday April 20th. 12.30 p.m. Interpersonal counselling. Jonathan Pennel, aka 'Lo-Fi Jo', Flat 243a Universal House, Sydney St. N1. Standard Twelve Point Analysis. Identify client's Key Problem Areas. Make action plan with client.

Ms. Gulag's job had, for the last four years, consisted in counselling the area's weirdoes and finks, freaks and ghouls - individuals inevitably and constantly at odds with the city - and returning them, by fair means or foul, to an unproblematic relationship with the machinery around them. This process was known euphemistically as 'interpersonal counselling', a term which was of course deliberately and concertedly misleading, since the whole scene was treated at every level as a technical exercise which, despite unwelcome problems of the 'interpersonal' kind which could indeed sometimes intercede in the proceedings, usually required nothing more than a strict observance of form and the deployment of the proper procedure. No-one, at least, was expected to get to know anyone. This suited all concerned. Few counsellors had any real understanding of the network's exact criteria for its sometimes surprisingly eccentric selections, and indeed there was very little call for an understanding of the selectees as individuals: names just popped into the database, more or less unannounced, moving through different levels of priority, until, one day, they were flagged for this 'interpersonal counselling', as Lo-Fi Jo's had been.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the case of Lo-Fi Jo's counselling appointment with Sheila Gulag of the North & East London Therapy Partners. Thus there was no telling how what happened happened in that grubby apartment on the appointed day, and how exactly it was - to tell the end, with apologies, at the beginning - that Sheila Gulag failed to return to work that day, or the next, or ever again; what mysterious and submerged animus it was that impelled her to stay with Jo, to fiddle a normalised psyche evaluation onto the network so that he avoided mandatory reorientation, and to become, within an astonishingly short length of time, a more passionate and committed dope fiend than Jo himself had ever been. This was a complete and thorough character change, of the sort that is rarely spoken of in the manuals used by counselling firms such as the North & East London Therapy Partners, because - one might reasonably suspect - such radical changes of personality should not, could not, must not, be given any endorsement via a formal incorporation into the psychoanalytic canon. If word of such behaviour got out, after all, it might lead to an epidemic, and the network anyway had enough problems understanding what had gone on in this isolated case. Like everyone else, it knew what Sheila Gulag had been and, later, what she became - but the exact composition of events that led to the big change were a mystery to it. It would review, many times, the available data: Sheila Gulag standing on the threshold of Jo's apartment, patient as the man shifted to and fro on his feet, trying to keep her there, trying to explain his way out of things. Was there anything in her movements, in his movements, in the way those two people regarded each other that could explain what was to follow? No. The system knew the schematics of Jo's apartment, knew where he washed and where he slept, where he ate, but could not predict the configurations of furniture in each room, the deviations from the pattern; so it could know the general shape of what had gone on between Sheila and Jo that day- the questions that should have been asked, the forms that should have been filled out - but it could not block in the critical details that had led to her strange transubstantiation.

In fact - and we have to honest here - the system's analysis of events got very close, in a reductionist sort of a way, to the truth of what happened that day in April over in Universal House. It concluded, provisionally, and in the absence of any further data, that the drug known as 'twist' was involved, that the gaseous substance had been administered by some means or another during the initial interview and that Sheila's hitherto sturdy personality had been irrevocably altered as a result. It was, in respect of the brute facts, quite correct in this point. Sheila did inhale the peculiar chemical, quite of her own volition, and the effect that it had upon her did indeed contribute decisively to her ultimate change of lifestyle. But its conclusion failed entirely to render the quasi-mystical events which led up to the moment of inhalation, to register the importance of the inebriating and persuasive spiel that Jo, still exhilarated and inspired by his morning's excesses with the hammer and a bag of methamphetamine, unleashed upon Ms. Gulag from within the confines of his little room that day, in the stuttering intermittent light, surrounded by the ambient fizz of malfunctioning circuitry, his hands working madly like a prestidigitating conjurer's and his blonde hair blazing like a crazed electric halo. Would it have understood if it could have heard? Had it listened to him telling Sheila, in his inchoate and highly articulate way, who he was, what he had seen, who she was, how her body had become what he called 'a fleshy extension of the system'; heard him telling her how their whole meeting, which Sheila thought of, perhaps, unlikely as it may be, as a genuine therapeutic and 'interpersonal' affair, could be described purely in terms of ones and noughts, 'fucking ones and noughts'; of how the network had taken in everything, had consumed all human possibility and left only the semblance of choice, and agency, and how it mocked attempts to find any exit, and how, still, one could stumble, despite everything, across these moments, yes - moments such as this, when just such an exit presented itself, yes, in spite of everything, and as plain as day, so that there really was no choice: you have to take it, Sheila Gulag, you have to try, because it's your responsibility, because it's there, because no-one else will, because it's your only chance at a way out. If it had been witness to all this, would the network have understood any more about human life? No - let us hope, rather, that it would have stared in mute digital wonderment at this vision of the sturdy and workaday Ms. Gulag huffing tentatively, eyes squeezed shut, on one of Jo's little capsules, somehow carried away by the potence of his ecstatic, ragged sermon; that it would have failed to divine any future threat to its operation as it watched the sharp chemical fumes performing their incalculably complex neurochemical adjustments in her cerebellum, watched as she leant more heavily against the back of her chair and her eyes opened all black and glistening to the world, seeing things as if they were cut bare, and for the first time sensing, even right there in Jo's crumby flat, the possibility of something for which there was no word, and which was beyond the system's jurisdiction, and which was burning in Lo-Fi Jo's eyes as he regarded her, from across the room, his little bag of twist poised in his hand.

J.J. King [jamie@jamie.com]