This Is Yr Life

Chapter Four

When Kyle was a teenager, he and his friends, a group of five scruffy haired underachievers, would spend their Friday nights walking around. Not old enough to drink or smoke, too old to hang about inside all night without getting bored, so they walked.

They walked around the city. They caught buses and sat at the back laughing and shouting and making the others on the bus; the professionals coming home from work late, or the middle-aged parents going into the city for a romantic dinner, they made these people uncomfortable. Their mere presence threatened.

But, Kyle and his friends never caused any problems. They were just there. They made these people nervous because kids their age didn’t spend time outside anymore.

Kyle had plans. He wanted to get out of this city he had lived in all his life, that his parents and their parents and their parents, as far back as they could trace had lived in this city all their lives. Born in the same hospital, some even in the same room. A lot of people in his town were similar. Dynasties born and spreading through streets and boroughs and everyone knew everybody else.

At school, his teachers had told him they had taught his mother or father. Some even remembered his grandparents picking one or the other up, and Kyle never wanted his children to be told the same.

Kyle wanted to see the world.

When his exam results came back as he was ready to leave school he was disappointed. They all were. Kyle and his group of intelligent but lazy friends had spent too long messing around at the back of classrooms; they had spent too long believing they knew it all, without actually learning any of it.

Without the results to take him to college, Kyle moved into the workforce. His father, a man with a great beard, a man who was unable to differentiate outside and inside voice, a man who had left school before his sixteenth birthday and joined his father’s carpentry company had suggested he follow the path of his father.

But this was right on the cusp of digitalisation. Fewer and fewer manual jobs were available for people. It was all done by machines. The kinds of jobs that were once a staple of a teenagers early working years, their first forays into a professional environment were dying out – for them. Artificial intelligence and machine learning was now no longer an electric dream, but a reality that permeated society.

Customer service administrators, data analysts, automation specialists, construction workers, taxi drivers, and farmers had all seen themselves become obsolete. Their jobs taken over by machines. It led to a strange limbo of unemployment and confusion. Early retirements without proper benefits. Smith and Sons Taxi Service became AUTO TAXI 4 U. Unemployment rose, with not enough new jobs created for those whose old ones had been taken over.

And so, Kyle was left in a rut. He had wanted to work hard for one year without spending frivolously to save enough money to move away from his hometown that no one seemed to ever leave, and see things in person, touch and smell and hear the sounds of faraway lands that people didn’t visit anymore.

Because what happened was that the economy went bust. And with the economy going bust, people couldn’t afford to do things anymore. They couldn’t afford to travel or tick items off their bucket list. Tourism, traditional tourism, anyway, died. Instead, people took up their Virtual Reality headsets and they sat on their sofas and they selected where, exactly, in the world they would like to visit and then they went on a journey.

And with advancements in technology over time, these headsets introduced smell, breeze, temperature. If users didn’t enjoy the sights, they could just skip to somewhere else. You could see Machu Picchu, The Great Wall, and Aurora Borealis all in the space of an hour.

For a few months following leaving school, Kyle and his friends sat around each other’s houses while their parents were at work, getting high or drunk and playing video games. But, as they grew older and his friends moved out of their parents’ houses, and found new jobs and girlfriends and decided what to do with their lives, Kyle found himself spending more and more time by himself, in his room. An initial job search proved fruitless, with Kyle finding nothing that felt suitable for his abilities. So instead, he collected unemployment benefits for three months while searching for something perfect.

As these three months progressed, Kyle spent more time in his room than anything else. He became too dependant on his bi-weekly earnings from the Job Centre that he didn’t see any need to find an ideal place to work. He was saving up to travel the world.

But the law was passed where the government were cancelling the benefits program, and Kyle was left without experience as the world around him became ever-more different than the one it had upon leaving school.

The last time he remembered seeing his friends was an engagement party three years ago. His oldest friend, Jake, the one who had been the brain behind every scheme, every little experiences or mischief in their youth, had met a girl on a dating app. Kyle remembered when Jake had first told him about her; he had said that it was just a bit of fun, that it wouldn’t last long.

‘Too young to settle down, mate,’ Jake had said, winking and clinking his pint glass against Kyle’s.

‘You should get on that app, Ky; you’ll definitely find something.’

But Kyle didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a sip from his pint and stared at his shoes.

At the engagement party, he saw a lot of people from school that he had forgotten about. People walked past him and if they made eye contact Kyle would try to say hello, and sometimes they would say hello back, but once this initial greeting was over, Kyle would find himself stuck without anything to say. Eventually, he stopped trying and while everybody else was singing along and dancing and drinking and talking and sharing stories, Kyle spent his time standing on the periphery, hoping and trying to build up the confidence to get involved and enjoy the night along with everyone else.

He thought that if he drank more, the looser he would feel, and the looser he felt, the more inclined he would be to get involved.

But that looseness never came, and Kyle remembered little else about that night. The next day, he received a phone call from Jake, asking, just ‘What the f**k, man?’ but Kyle didn’t know what he was talking about.

Jake said that Kyle had done nothing, all night, and that was the problem.

‘Like, I just don’t understand, man. We don’t see each other for months, f*****g months, and then when we finally do, you just keep to yourself.’

‘Jake, I’m sorry, but –’ Kyle tried saying, but Jake wasn’t listening.

‘No, mate. What are you doing? What are you actually doing? You don’t have a job; you don’t see anyone anymore. What do you do, just sit in your room wasting all your f*****g time?’

Kyle didn’t know what to say.

Kyle didn’t have anything to say.

‘When you get your s**t together, give us a call, but until then, I suggest you focus on you. Just not the way you’ve been focusing on you for the past who-even-knows how many months. The wedding is in eighteen months; if you’ve gotten yourself all together by then, it’ll be great to see you there.’

And Jake hung up. Kyle stared at his phone.

In the weeks following, Kyle sat in his room, barely eating, barely talking to anyone. All attempts to find a job ceased, and he spent his time browsing aimlessly through the internet, staring at his friends’ social media accounts, wanting to show support, to Like and Rate and React to their lives but as soon as his finger hovered over the button he pulled back, and carried on scrolling.

It was five months later when he saw that Jake and his fiancé were no longer together. Immediately, he grabbed his phone and called Jake. The phone rang and rang and rang until, eventually, it cut out and simply beeped, beeped, beeped.

So, Kyle tried his other friends, but all their numbers were deactivated, too. He searched his computer for details on where they were, what they were doing, and he saw one, Buzz, on the other side of the world, relaxing on a beach and smiling beside his foreign wife. The further he investigated, the more he learned. Buzz had been the first one to leave the country out of all of them. He had gone to University in the States, graduating and obtaining a scholarship for something in engineering or biomechanics or something that Kyle didn’t understand. Buzz had travelled through Africa, South America, Australia, learning and experiencing the world outside of the Midlands.

He found articles about Buzz, referred to throughout by his real name: Samuel Richardson. Jake had given Samuel the nickname Buzz at school, after he had been in a fight, taken a hit right in the jaw, and had his jaw swell up.

‘You look just like Buzz Lightyear, mate,’ Jake said, once the teachers had let them see him, and the name stuck.

Kyle read these articles about Buzz, reporting his endeavours in far-flung lands, finding solutions for clean water and renewable energy. He was offered a job at one of the larger companies in the southern hemisphere, taking it, and completely changing their fortunes. The CEO publicly commended him at a press conference, and it showed a photo of Buzz, or Dr. Richardson, smiling alongside some of the finest minds in the industry.

And when Kyle sent Buzz a message, congratulating him on his success he hoped to reconnect and perhaps find a way to talk with Jake. But a response never came.

Kyle Edwards just now

Hey dude, how are you? I saw how you’ve been smashing it overseas, so jealous. You ever thinking of coming home? Haha.

Read.

Every day he checked, he uninstalled and reinstalled, reset and requested repairs, but every time the phone came back saying there was nothing wrong with it.

Kyle changed his phone plan, tried sending anonymous messages. He reached out to relatives or distant acquaintances, but every time he was met with rebuttal.

Soon, he gave up trying to contact Buzz and turned to the other two who he had spent so much of his childhood with. One lived just down the road, Mike and when he left his house for the first time in nearly two weeks, Kyle ensured to look as completely-not-down-and-out as he could. He combed his hair and shaved, but when he knocked on the door, there was no answer. Kyle stood outside knocking and knocking until he gave up. As he walked away, he heard the door unlock and he turned. There was a woman standing in the doorway.

‘Who are you?’

‘Kyle, I knew Mike from school.’

‘I don’t know a Mike,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

But Kyle knew this wasn’t true; he recognised her from a long time ago. He had sat next to her in Chemistry.

And the final friend, Corey Hamilton, ‘Hammy’, the one Kyle had always felt didn’t like him, answered his phone when Kyle called. He agreed to meet him for a drink in town and Kyle got there early, ordered a beer for himself and Hammy.

But Hammy never showed up, and Kyle sat in the pub and finished his beer and then, when it was clear Hammy wasn’t going to arrive, he drank his too, and went home.

Upon getting back home, he went straight to his room. Lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, Kyle realised that, despite the memories of their youth, he had always been wrong about them, and they were not the people he thought they were.

He realised that he, too, was not the person he thought he was, either.