Mickey lives in Utopia Street with an alcoholic father whom, so Auld Archie tell us, is supremely gifted at programming computers without recourse to using dig-ether-al. This work, undeclared of course, keeps him in bottles of Irish whiskey and basic groceries. Father and son surviving mainly on cheese and toast.
Mickey has an ancient X230 Frankenpad, thoroughly ‘debugged’ by his father. (Josef A’s spyware rendered ineffective by a few choice pieces of code.) This makes the laptop safe for us to play games on. No chance of its user inadvertently accessing the free sky-fi networks.
Mickey, who knows that computers and smart phones have no place at château, is respectful of our conventions and willingly partakes in the Kommune’s staples of activity: the vigorous chopping of vegetables, the whirling with gusto in Saskia’s Sufi workshop, the banging a gong. i think he sees it as a sort of hippy traineeship.
The digiphobic Kommune has a ‘reputation’ among normals for weirdness. Those my age liable to utterly freak out upon coming here. It baffles teenage normals that i manage to live without gaming devices, electricity, TV, and Skyline porn. (Skyline is goved and therefore especially frowned upon.)
On solicitial nights i never invite anybody but Mickey. The château surrounded by naked flares stuck on poles – a ring of fire! While inside all is flickering candle light and moving shadows. Dark and Light. Which Mickey says he doesn’t mind. But for all his efforts Mickey continues to struggle with ‘château time.’ The Kommune not recognising the public hour as a unit of time. There are no clocks, digital or otherwise. Phones never ‘ring.’ Teenage normals unsettled by the complete absence of ring tones and what they might recognise as food. Even the fridge itself is viewed with suspicion, for it is not electrically cooled. The climate in winter does that job for us. And, in summer, there is the stone coolness of a cellar, which effectively combats the heat. So preventing the goats’ milk from churning instantly into cheese. The cellar is dry too, littered with the desiccated carcasses of woodlice, which enter (fatally) from a humid patch of ground behind the building.
Kommune phobias…
… are many and varied: skynet (to state the frackin’ obvious); meat from an abattoir; digital appliances (computers, television, phones) and darkness killing electricity. (Candle light considered an illuminator of it.) For the Kommune is suspicious of anything that we cannot sense; stuff invisible to the human eye like electromagnetic fields. Meaning starnet, radio waves, televisual data bytes, nano-epifields (nanopulsi). Other pet Kommune hates include artificial intelligence, bracketed with robots and cyborgs; plastics; state supplied marijuana, and chess ‘cheating’ software (Calculus being particularly disdainful of the King killer mac 5 series). And then there are the more personal pet hates. Manu can not stomach (quite literally) red lentils. Martha detests football, believing it to be the chief pacifier of the masses. She cannot in fact abide any form of competitive sport.