Chapter 4

An Englishman's Home

Alex

2021

Agnieszka made sure that her final exit through the front door was at least as dramatic as any other during the term of her relationship with Alex. This time, however, she didn't pause to shout up to him from the hallway before she stomped off to her car to drive off to one or other of her many friends and relatives who would soon once again be reminded just what kind of bastard, shithead or cunt Alex was. This omission was a novelty to Alex and probably also a relief to his neighbours who already knew far more about the couple's tempestuous love-life than they might have wished.

Well shit, thought Alex, as Agnieszka's environmentally unfriendly petrol car drove noisily away, if she thought he was a cunt then he might as well act like one. Or better still, he might even get hold of the genuine article.

Life with Aggie hadn't been that great an experience although having sex with her had been and continued to be right to the end. From the very start, Aggie had ideas about how to run the connubial home that conflicted with Alex's. And, as a habitually single man, Alex wasn't used to having to compromise.

"The way we first met each other is shit. Absolute shit," Aggie said. "On-line sex is shit."

"But it is how we met," Alex countered.

"That's because it's almost the only way anyone gets to meet anyone these days," Agnieszka admitted. "No one lives where they were born or went to school any more. Somehow you have to make new friends without the benefit of a social network that you'd built up through school or university. And since everyone uses the internet, that's become the only way."

"So, it's not all shit."

"But it is at the same time," Agnieszka responded. "The person you meet on the internet isn't a real person. It's a kind of made-up thing that's fashioned for whichever dating or friendship site you've logged into. If we'd met on a BDSM site, then I'd probably have been Agnes Leather or something..."

"Rather than Alfalfa2020."

"Exactly."

It wasn't just sex that both kept and drove Alex and Agnieszka apart. The two of them worked in two different towns and for both of them the daily commute was almost more tiring than their actual jobs. Nowadays, Alex was working longer and longer hours which often continued until late into the evening. That might entail an expensive taxi ride home. If he drove home after even the smallest drop of drink, he risked being caught by one of the countless automatic traffic surveillance patrols that lined the roads and having to submit to a breathalyser test that he'd almost certainly fail.

In material terms, Alex's job at DRNI was going well. He'd been promoted from a job where he put collated news about VR Entertainment to one with the broader remit of covering VR Current Affairs. That was mostly because the distinction between Current Affairs in the virtual world and real life was becoming increasingly blurred. It was increasingly necessary to monitor the politics, economics and personalities of cyberspace as so many people spent a steadily greater proportion of their lives in that domain. Real money was being exchanged in cyberspace and ever more effort was expended on its administration.

Nevertheless, Alex didn't need to spend much time immersed in Virtual Reality to find out what was going on there. In fact, he spent rather less time in cyberspace than the average visitor. If he had, it would have been impossible for him to find the time to actually do his job. His task was more to sift through the huge volume of blogs, notice boards, flash messages and the like generated in and around the virtual realm and then summarise all this in either short text articles or video messages presented by his website avatars (who looked a lot better than him anyway). And what he couldn't find out about the Virtual World for himself, he could easily retrieve from other news sites which fed off each other in a kind of mutual cannibalistic frenzy.

Alex strode over to the window and looked out across the street at the houses opposite and the slowly rotating blades of the wind farm just beyond. There was no sign of Aggie. On previous occasions she'd sometimes driven off and come back after less than an hour: tearful and open for reconciliation. In the early days of their relationship, this was exactly what Alex hoped for as a resolution to their frequent quarrels, but it had now become almost what he most dreaded. It was better when Aggie stayed away for a day or maybe two. Her sister in Gloucester or her best friend in Banbury or even her aunt and uncle in Rugby could be relied on to take care of her until Aggie was ready to return home.