Qualityland

LITTLE HELPER

Martyn Chairman gets out of his car and sends it off to a secure car park for the night. With a click of his fingers, he switches the light at the pedestrian crossing near his house to green. Just because he can; he’s already on the right side of the street. With a smile, he watches as all the cars stop at the light. Then he turns around and lets his house security system identify him. Even before the door opens, he can hear his child screaming.

“How long has my wife been home?” he asks.

“For ten minutes, Martyn,” says the smart door.

“And how long has the child been crying?”

“For ten minutes.”

Martyn shakes his head. It’s clear to him that his wife is completely out of her depth again. And as expected, there she sits in the living room, with the screaming child on her lap and tears running down her cheeks. Martyn sighs. As far as he is concerned, Denise has been practically useless since she got pregnant again. There are, of course, men who find pregnant women sexy. But Martyn isn’t one of them. He can’t help thinking about how much her belly has already cost him, and what it will cost him in the future.

Denise was once a QualiTeenie, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her now. And yet it wasn’t that long ago. Martyn laughs bitterly at the thought of his former identity manager, who had convinced him that a family would be good for him. Martyn, on the other hand, had known even back then that it was a stupid idea. But he hadn’t had much choice in the matter, because after one of the parliament tours he had knocked up a particularly hot QualiTeenie in the visitors’ toilets. By accident. Luckily for him, Denise had just celebrated her 18th birthday, but Martyn’s father had still been very annoyed that his granddaughter had to be called Ysabelle Schoolgirl, and had made sure his son knew about it. Especially in a financial sense. Martyn looked at his wife. Denise simply had no class, he thought to himself. His mother would never snivel like that.

“For God’s sake, Denise!” he says, shaking his head. “Why don’t you use the app?”

“Oh yes, the app!” says his wife, exhausted. “I completely forgot about it again!”

The previous weekend, Martyn had made a special trip to the doctor with his daughter in order to have a hormone chip implanted in her.

He pulls the QualityPad out of his bag, selects the Little Helper app, and presses soothe. The chip releases a considerable portion of progesterone, and the 3-year-old brat swiftly falls silent. Martyn picks up the girl and looks at her. He wonders how much money it will cost him overall to raise this child. First the genetic improvement, then the eye-smartingly expensive electronic nanny, and now the chip. But the chip is worth every cent. Noticing in annoyance that his daughter has begun to suck on his expensive tie, he pulls it out of her mouth and opens the app again.

“Nooo!” cries his daughter pleadingly. “Pleeease, Papa! I don’t want to sleep yet!”

Martyn presses a button. Two minutes later, the girl is sleeping peacefully in his arms.

“Nana!” calls Denise.

The electronic nanny appears in the doorway at once.

“Take the child to bed,” orders Martyn.

“And afterward show us the replay, okay?” says Denise.

Nana takes little Ysabelle tenderly in her arms and carries her up to her cot.

“Oh, the replay,” sighs Martyn.

When they bought the nanny, he had wanted them to choose a more economical model. Five of the big toy manufacturers had some on offer for an absolute steal. But Denise had put her foot down, purely because the nannies produced by these companies allegedly showed the children back-to-back advertising for their toys as soon as there were no grown-ups around. Denise had gotten really worked up about it. Anyone would think Martyn had suggested getting one of the nannies that are offered for free by religious groups. The well-respected neoliberal faith group, for example, had a really exceptional robot on offer, and some lobby groups even provided free loan nannies. These were even valuable from a pedagogical perspective; the children could learn a lot from them, about the many advantages of nuclear energy, for example. But Denise had made a scene about a few trivial advertising slots. Martyn himself had watched advertising from a very young age, and had it done him any harm? No.

Glancing out of the window, he sees a drone flying past, not by chance, advertising Heineken on a large display. Martyn immediately stands up, goes to the kitchen, and fetches a bottle of Heineken from the fridge. The drone flies on contentedly. In front of the window of the next house, where the tenant is being beaten by her husband yet again, it shows the woman one of the new personalized QualityPartner slogans: “Love doesn’t have to hurt.”

The electronic nanny comes back into the living room. Denise had insisted on this expensive high-end model. “It can do four different martial arts,” she had explained to Martyn, “so it can protect our little girl from child molesters.”

“Why four?” Martyn had asked. “So if the child molester knows karate she can come at him with kung fu or something? That’s ridiculous.”

In truth, Denise had wanted this specific model because it generates automatic video summaries of the sweetest moments of the day, so that the parents no longer have the feeling they’re missing out. Martyn now has to sit next to his wife for half an hour every evening while they watch a compilation of the pedagogically valuable learning games the nanny conducts with his daughter. Or, in other words, he has to watch half an hour of toddler babble every evening, and ever more frequently he catches himself thinking that he, at least, would far prefer the back-to-back advertising.

“I have something I need to do,” says Martyn, disappearing off into his study. He’s just remembered the little minx he bookmarked during the last parliament tour. He searches the internet for pictures. Luckily, a spurned ex-boyfriend has posted naked photos of her on revenge porno sites. These girls are so careless.

“Bingo,” murmurs Martyn. There’s even a short, blurry video. The comments beneath it are disgusting, sexist, brutal, and downright inhuman. Martyn immediately gets an erection. He slips the sock off his right foot and pulls it over his penis.