Chapter Three: “The Temporary In Contemporary” 16. 10. 2016

Darren didn't much look at the buildings before him as he clomped through the preceding fields trying to kick and scrape the caked-in mud and fudge from his shoes. Behind him lay farming fields as far as the eye could see although the shapes looked a little strange for crops like wheat. 

Being caught without his mobile phone was an uncomfortably exposing feeling and he wondered if many places even had payphones any more. He would have to get all his keys cut again as well. Safely on the preferred side of survival, the mundanity of everyday life rushed back depressingly quickly. He thought about if Martin could be bothered to try and get him fired over this, despite it being the fault of the machinery or whoever turned it on.

It was a unique type of fear that dominated Darren's life up unto today. Nothing as exciting as sheer panic but a quiet humdrum anxiousness about a hundred little things that would likely stress, inconvenience or embarrass him. He often wished for something truly calamitous to happen just for the change of pace, all the while knowing he would immediately regret it were it to ever actually occur.

As he approached the shining pavements and roadsides of the unknown city he took a closer look at the people milling around aimlessly outside their houses. Wherever he was it seemed very metropolitan with almost every person smartly attired and constantly addressing a new kind of smartphone. Darren even saw a man with two, instinctively tapping away on both of them with a single thumb each whilst staring off into the middle distance.

Even the people without phones wore incredibly sophisticated clothes albeit more eccentric and garish but Darren never followed fashion so he had no idea what was “in” at any given time. A lot of these people were in a far greater hurry, striding down the streets purposefully and to the full extent of their legs as though every footstep cost them money. Most were equipped with odd new kinds of Bluetooth headsets, except there was no visible branding on the small black rectangles and they seemed to stick to the temples rather than clip onto your ear.

As Darren stepped off the roadside he felt a strange pulsing warmth underneath his foot. He lifted it immediately and the sensation faded away. He took a few steps forward across the road and the current of heat seemed to dissipate towards the pathway. Finally he noticed the towering, reflective and smoothly designed buildings populating the city and on top of everything else these unsettled him the most.

He might not know about fashion but in terms of media and tech he was a shameless consumerist whore with the best of them and yet he recognised none of the large glowing names indented on the faces of the buildings. From the products visible on the ground floor these were clearly shops selling some kind of technology but he recognised neither the products or the companies.

Inside the nearest shop he saw complex metallic tangles of pipes with pistons in the middle oscillating, presumably through battery power although no screws, panels or different sections could be clearly identified. There were cylindrical cubicles that people stepped into at the far corner of the shop. Looking like incredibly polished toilet stalls but fitted with curved video screens on the doors playing some kind of vibrant video Darren couldn't distinguish the details of.

Most customers in the shop seemed interested in a huge wall of small different coloured tubes. Every spectrum of every shade seemed to be available and customers would pick them up and stare at the tube in their palm for a uselessly long time. The only perceptible change being some of the tubes would blink or change colour slightly.

Fearing some kind of cylinder-based apocalypse Darren glanced around for a different shaped product but what he found was no less disquieting. Disturbing animatronic masks lay on another table twitching and forming grotesque expressions as though they'd just been peeled straight from someone's writhing face. The level of realistic detail made them quite horrifying, especially when children picked up and wore the faces of scowling or madly grinning adults.

Where exactly was this place? Darren had never really left the Greater Manchester area before but he was pretty sure this was an unusually significant cultural difference. He walked further into the city down what he now realised were metal footpaths rather than concrete or stone. He noticed more and more of the headset wearers but now some of them had a form of visor wrapping around their face extending from the black shapes on the sides of their head.

Was this the Google Glass thing he'd heard about? Darren wandered closer to the bustling crowds but couldn't see the actual “Glass” or plastic of the visor and there was no hint of the computer part besides the black shapes which themselves, upon further inspection, seemed too small to power such a device. 

Even apparently customisable to your own fashion tastes, Darren saw purple, blue, pink, red, striped, patterned and logo adorned variants in rectangular, oval and even gaudy star shapes, all affixed to the sides of people's heads and somehow projecting this curved screen a few centimetres from their eyes.

Perhaps it was some big opening event for one of these unheard of companies and everyone got free samples. Those are some expensive looking free samples though and everyone seems almost subconsciously familiar with all their functions. Unwilling to again let his thoughts continuously counter one another to no avail, he decided he'd have to ask someone. Primarily for directions but if he could also learn what all these bizarre new gadgets were that would be nice too.

He looked for a normal-looking pedestrian amongst the intimidating new fashionistas with braces connecting their trousers to themselves and digital shirts that seemed to play entire films across the fabric. The former latched the top of their trousers to the bottom leaving a huge gap in between exposing the knee and a solid few inches either side of it. The latter were not entirely new concepts but Darren had never seen them without a bulky computer tablet underneath and never spread seamlessly across the front, back, sides, shoulders and even collar of the shirt.

A girl strutted past in what looked to be a steroid-abusing-Viking-sized brown and white woolly coat that covered everything except her rear, cleavage and face which were all but naked besides some coloured string. Another man appeared to be wearing little more than a flesh coloured slingshot that wrapped around one arm, his genitals and terrifyingly far up his arse.

Others stood up straight and glided along the pavement without much more than a flick of their feet on what Darren assumed to be advanced Heelys. An elderly woman wore what Darren recognised to be a Onesie but it was smothered in branding of some fictional character he had never seen. A group of teenagers jostled Darren as they passed and he noticed one of them wearing 70's style flared trousers. Another wore a shirt that seemed to have rigid shelves jutting out from its fabric on which the guy had put cans of drink and electronics.

One of the teens had somehow acquired the beard of a thirty year old lumberjack wizard and wore dungarees that seemed clipped straight onto the hair of the beard without discomfort. Beneath the fuzz and sharp purple denim he was shirtless apart from what looked like metallic bionic replacements for his nipples.

Darren eventually found a relatively normal or at least familiarly dressed individual on the footpath opposite him. She wore a long black coat with a matching knee-length business skirt as though she had just stepped out of an office. Her footwear however was akin to bowling shoes but made of metal and detailed with a pattern of silver aesthetically rusting away to black further to the soles.

The other less office-usual fashion included blue leggings and a white buttoned shirt that would look like normal office attire were it not for the large printed image of a Chinese ceremonial dragon and a futuristic aeroplane about to collide vertically in the air.

Still, she was practically T-shirt and jeans in comparison to everyone else and Darren felt steadily more uncomfortable around the unfamiliar practices in this off-beat “free-thinking” city. Putting on his best “approachable friendly guy” expression Darren crossed the warm but empty road and waved at the passer-by, stepping just ahead of them to ask for help...