2084

In 1784 medieval France, the lord of the manor owned the village oven, and the mill, and the wine press, and every peasant was obliged to use them, and to pay for the privilege. They called it the four banal, the lord’s oven. It took a revolution to get the oven out of the lord’s hands and into the kitchen.

It took us about fifty years, and no revolution at all, to hand it back.

I was born in 1984.

Through school, my literature teacher was quick to point out the significance of the year, usually while pointing two fingers at their own eyes and then at mine. We read the book at fifteen, the whole class, and came away knowing exactly what to be afraid of: a state, a boot, a screen on the wall that watched you back and could not be switched off. Ours was a generation raised from birth to spot a tyrant.

That same year I was born, an advert aired showing a woman in red shorts running through a hall of grey, shaven-headed men to hurl a hammer through a giant screen. It promised us that 1984 would not be like 1984. I was too young to see it, of course, but I saw it a hundred times afterwards, in lectures and documentaries and on the internet, always told as a story about freedom.

The advert was right. 1984 was nothing like 1984 and we convinced ourselves that it wouldn't happen later.

"The Factorus sends its congratulations!" popped up on my screen this morning. I am a hundred years old coming spring. The screen is the only one in my area of the complex, people can't live without it. It knows I have requested the same old film eleven times since Sam died. Last month it offered me a bereavement bundle.

There use to be multiple Factori, people say, though now it is one Factorus with three shutters. "Appliances", "Utilities" and "Entertainment". You do not buy from the Factorus; nobody has bought anything for years. You request.

Mira is my only grandchild, and she holds the bread licence for Thornby which was inherited from my cherub.

That means something different now. When I was a child, a baker was a person with an oven. Mira has no oven. Nobody in Thornby has an oven. There are ovens, tens of thousands of them, in long white rows inside the Factorus on the ridge, warm day and night, and they are better than any oven a person could own. They never burn anything. They bake a loaf for less than it ever cost to heat one at home. Everybody says so, and the ones who say it loudest are right.

What Mira does is write the request. Flour by weight, water by weight, salt, starter, proving time, a temperature curve. She submits it on the link, the Factorus bakes it to the gram, and the drones bring it down the valley before dawn. Three hundred loaves a day, each one identical, each one nominal.

This year she wanted to bake my mother’s soda bread for my birthday. Fennel, black treacle, a long cold prove. I tapped it out for her from memory, she clicked request and the Factorus answered in less than a second.

RECIPE NOT IN CATALOGUE.
Non-standard ingredients: caraway, black treacle.
Certification review: 14–21 days.
Nearest approved alternative: HARVEST LOAF (STANDARD).

She filed for certification anyway. Two days later the link chimed again.

OVEN CAPACITY REALLOCATED TO PRIORITY TENANT.
Your standard allocation is unaffected.
Requests outside allocation: next available slot in 19 days.

My birthday was this weekend. “Priority tenant,” Mira said. “Who’s that?” Nobody knew. Nobody ever knows. Somebody bigger than Thornby, which is everybody.

When I was ten, in 1994, my mother bought a bread maker out of the catalogue, the one you leafed through in the shop before writing the number down with a tiny blue pen.

It was enormous and ugly and sat on the kitchen counter like a small white car. You tipped everything into the tin, pressed a button, and four hours later the whole house smelled like a bakery. The loaf came out tall and lopsided with a hole in the bottom where the paddle had been. We ate it standing up, too hot to slice properly.

When the belt snapped, my dad turned it upside down on the table, undid six screws and sent off for a new belt. It cost about three pounds. That machine had no account. It had no allocation. Nobody on a ridge could tell it that caraway was not in the catalogue; it did not know there was a catalogue. It was ours the way a hammer is yours: completely, boringly, without anybody’s permission.

I did not think of that as freedom. I thought of it as a bread maker.

Here is what we thought, back then.

We thought the computer would set us free. We were the first children to grow up with one in the house, a beige box that shrieked down the phone line to get online, and the grown-ups called what it connected to the information superhighway. Anybody could publish. Anybody could build. The big companies were finished, everyone said, because now a kid in a bedroom could reach the whole world. And for a while, we could. I know, because I was one of those kids.

Then it got easier to let somebody else run things. Our photos went to someone else’s computer, then our music, then our documents, then our games. They called it the cloud, which was a lovely fluffy word for a warehouse. A friend of mine had a sticker on his laptop that said THERE IS NO CLOUD, IT’S JUST SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER. We all laughed, and then we all moved in. I moved in further than most. I spent the best years of my career building those warehouses, and I was proud of them. They were very good warehouses.

It went the way these things go: never all at once, and never by a vote. We stopped buying films and rented them instead. Then software. Then the heated seats in your own car came with a monthly fee. Printers refused ink that had not come from the printer company. Farmers were told they could not mend their own tractors. Each one made the news for a week, each one was a little bit reasonable, and then each one was normal.

In the twenties the big machines arrived, the ones that could think, and they were hungry. Valleys filled with datacentres that drank rivers and ate power stations. The companies that owned them bought up the world’s memory and chips years in advance, and the computers the rest of us could buy got dearer and thinner and weaker until they were not really computers at all. They were screens. A window into somebody else’s building. Why would you own a computer, when the Factorus’s were better, and cheaper, and always on?

And once the computers lived in the Factorus, everything that ran on a computer followed them there. Which, it turned out, was everything. An oven is a computer with a heating element. A boiler is a computer with a pump. The car, the front door lock, the hearing aid, the school, the bank, the radio. You cannot own the oven when somebody else owns the thing that tells it what to do.

Orwell gave us a dictator, and we never needed one. Big Brother did not have to watch us. He only had to own the oven.

Mira’s son Lux is nine, and on Thursday night he asked the link for a game.

It arrived instantly, the way everything does: a bright, impossible world streamed from the Factorus to the screen in our kitchen. He played for two hours with his tongue between his teeth. He was nearly at the top of a mountain when a line of text slid across the bottom of the screen.

THIS TITLE LEAVES THE CATALOGUE AT 00:00.
Progress will not be retained.
You may also enjoy: SUMMIT (STANDARD).

Lux did not cry. Children do not cry about this any more. He put the controller down and asked what was for tea, and it was the not crying that got me.

So I went upstairs and found the shoebox.

It has lived at the bottom of every wardrobe I have owned for ninety years. Inside is a grey handheld with a scratched screen, four cartridges, and a bag of batteries I had been saving for no reason I could have explained to anyone. At school we swapped those cartridges in the playground. You lent a game for a week and got it back with a stranger’s name on the save file. Try lending a stream.

I put the batteries in and switched it on. A little chime, and the logo dropped down the screen exactly the way it had in 1994.

Lux held it like an egg.

“Who’s it asking?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“When you press start. Who does it ask?”

“Nobody,” I said. “It doesn’t ask anybody. It’s mine.”

He played until his mother sent him to bed, and then he played under the covers, and I lay awake listening to the tiny music through the wall. I should be happy but all I can feel is grief.

They will never have what I had.

On Saturday morning Mira mixed the rye by hand in the big bowl, the way my mother did before the bread maker, and left it to prove on the windowsill. She still had no oven. Nobody had an oven.

But the Factorus does not own fire. Not yet.

We built one in the garden from the bricks that had been holding up the shed. Lux fed it sticks all morning with enormous seriousness, and when it had burned down to coals we laid a flat stone in the embers, set the loaves on it and turned a tin bucket over the top, and we waited.

They came out black underneath, pale on top, and lopsided, nothing like the Harvest Loaf (Standard). The smell went all the way down the lane. People came out of their houses to see what it was, and before long half of Thornby was standing in our garden eating burnt rye, too hot to slice properly. Mrs Okafor from the end house, who is eighty, cried, and said it tasted like when she was little.

It was the worst bread I have eaten in fifty years, and the best.

It took about fifty years, and no revolution at all, to hand this all back to the Lord of the Manor.