The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Kenya

‘Fredrika Langer’s locally grown asparagus’ was sold across half of Germany, in lovely bunches with black, red and yellow ribbons around their middles. Her price was 20 per cent lower than that of all her competition, each of whom was at the economic disadvantage of actually growing their German asparagus in Germany. Fredrika’s local product, incidentally, was not as locally grown as she would have liked: it would take time for the Kenyan plants to deliver. In the meantime the Indonesian ones would have to do – they were, after all, equally German.

Gustav Svensson was no longer a valid brand in Sweden, but that was fine with Julius Jonsson. Gustav was much needed at the Kenyan operations anyway. He was the one who knew how much distance there had to be between each furrow; he knew how deep they should be, and how wide at the bottom. He was the one who patiently spoke to every single plant, in Hindi. And he was the one who, just as patiently, experimented his way to the optimal blend of fertilizers: two parts elephant dung and one part buffalo for the white asparagus; two parts buffalo and one part wildebeest for the green.

Sabine spent her days at the office just beyond the lounge. It turned out she really was useless as an entrepreneur, but she was a superstar at calculating and administrating what other entrepreneurs accomplished. She reinvested 80 per cent of the overage in fresh soil. With the last 20 per cent she bought the camp from the man who had inherited it from his father and was never around anyway. He needed the money to continue living his deeply destructive life in Kinshasa, with wine, women and Congolese song.

Meitkini sent Fredrika Kenyan red roses every day for three months before her heart finally melted. Five months after that it turned out she was pregnant. If it was a boy, Meitkini wanted to name him Uvuvwevwevwe.

Fredrika said she would hope for a girl.

All this happened while Allan spent his days on the veranda with a view of the watering-hole. His new hobby was Twitter. Not only had he discovered what it was, he had also ventured onto it himself. He did not, however, understand that in doing so he was telling the whole world where he was.

He was glad to see how satisfied the kids were with life. But there was something gnawing at him. He had started to see a pattern in the flow of news on his black tablet.

On the whole, the world was a better place than it had been a hundred years earlier, even if progress didn’t seem to happen in a straight line. It went up and down in cycles.

As far as Allan could tell, it was currently on the way down. The risk was that it wouldn’t turn up again before a sufficient number of people, for a sufficient amount of time, did sufficiently awful things to each other. After that people would start thinking again.

It had always been this way. But was it so very certain that it would be this way again? Researchers had just announced that the average level of intelligence was in a downturn. Allan read that people who spent too much time with their black tablets lost the ability to have a conversation. The thing about the tablet was that it tended to talk at its owner more than with them. As a result, people were going all over the internet and letting others think for them to the extent that they were on their way to becoming stupid.

Allan was concerned when he realized that truth was losing ground along with intelligence. It used to be easy to know what was true and what wasn’t. Vodka was good. Two plus two was not five.

But since people weren’t talking to each other any more, it ended up that whoever said the same thing the most times won. Some had refined this talent to the point of repeating themselves several times in the course of a few seconds. In the course of a few seconds.

What concerned Allan most of all, however, was that he realized he was concerned. Everything was the way it was. Couldn’t it just turn out the way it turned out, without a whole lot of hassle along the way?

Sabine happened along and noticed that the old man had put down his black tablet. He was sitting with his arms crossed and gazing across the savannah with an empty expression. ‘What are you thinking about, Allan?’ she asked.

‘Too much,’ said Allan. ‘Far too much.’