White heat
Living on a spearhead is not the most comfortable of lives. Britain is hurtling, relatively, into the technological future, and this College intends to be there first...
March 9th, 1996
Fred Icprole, average student of the Anti-Imperialist College of Science, Technology and the Useful Arts, drives in from his digs in Bristol. Trying to finish a tutorial essay, he accidentally sets the destination control of his battered old Ford GT to Southend, and so he is half an hour late when he finally finds a parking place in the College's fortified parking lot, which covers most of Chelsington. London's most important industry in the age of automation is high, higher and highest education. AICSTUA, once merely a part of the defunct University of London, now comprises a substantial part of London itself.
On the walkway Fred jostles thousands of well-fed, well-clothed, utterly unemployable people on their way to and from the Department of Adult Education. Here advanced research and education in Hobbies, Handicrafts, Motor Maintenance, Scientific Child-Rearing, Creative Televiewing and Social Adjustment for Domestic Robots exist side-by-side with laboratories for reprocessing Professors in obsolete subjects. Fred passes the Surplus Information Crematorium, Air Traffic (City and Guilds) Control Centre, and enters the Department of Computer Ecology. In a vast, softly-lit, Muzak haunted eezi-learn concourse, three thousand fifth year undergraduates are receiving expert instruction from individual teaching machines.
Fred's day begins with his tutorial; this means that the question frames are couched in amiable, pipe-smoking terms, and the answer frames are rambling and filled with anecdote. The conversation begins... How's work going? Skydiving Club not interfering with it too much? Rueful smile, well... followed by five minutes' programmed learning on Striking the Right Balance.
Fred eats in West Side Storeys, one of the older Hostels, only a mile high, and not nearly enough bowling alleys and birth-control clinics. His mind is on serious things—shall he specialise in Computer Counselling or Cybernetic Sociology? Even more grave:— should he graduate in a year, with a probable Lower Second B.sc. (Cyber), or be processed for another three years with the chance of rising a grade? No question of it affecting future earnings, of course,—no financial inequality in the economy of abundance—but it means another 20 points on his Eugenic Rating...
