Page 13 of Tapeworld Induction

Isaak had been a gentleman last night. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would have handed her a drug blotter out of the blue.

“Dylan, come on! It’s getting cold!”

Forced to a hurried conclusion, she put the tape down to some odd fashion sense or underground new vogue. She tucked the idea of the tape into the back of her mind, and then tucked the actual tape into the back of a desk drawer.

Her father was laying breakfast on the table as she emerged from her room. “Morning!” he called.

The aroma of boiled tomatoes wafted across the room. Another meal made with loving abandon.

“That smells amazing,” Dylan said as she went to sit down.

“I appreciate the enthusiasm, Dee! Haven’t heard you that excited by breakfast since you were a kid. What did you get up to last night?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re a guest in my house, Dad. I’m old enough not to have to tell you what I’ve been up to…”

Her dad frowned. “Touchy! Can’t an interested father be curious about his daughter’s— Ouch!” He’d burned his finger trying to remove the toast from the toaster. “Can you get this? Ain’t got enough hands!”

She made for the machine as four perfectly golden slices popped out. “Were you trying to pry them out before they were ready?”

“Trying to stop them from getting burnt!” He snatched the toast from her hands and laid them onto the plates. With a knife, he slathered the plant butter generously on the slices. “You came home late though, right?” her dad pressed.

She panicked slightly, taking too long to answer. Instead, she grinned at him, hoping to diffuse his questioning. She really didn’t want to talk about the boy she’d met, or how he’d given her some weird-looking duct tape.

“Did you have fun with Talia?” he said.

“Yeah, it was great!” She could own up to that much of the evening at least. “You know, girls’ night out. Well, I guess you wouldn’t know, actually…”

Her father smiled.

They sat down. Dylan was looking forward to this. Usually her breakfast was a bottle of protein drink gulped down as she rushed to her train. But when her dad visited her, he’d cook every morning. Maybe she’d get used to waking up earlier and making time for a proper breakfast… Or maybe as soon as her dad went back home, she’d go back to her mad-dash habits.

She heaped some of the tomatoes onto her spoon and tasted them before fishing out a smoked tofu cube, dripping in the sauce.

Her dad had stayed in the guest room. Well, Dylan called it a guest room – that’s what the estate agent had convinced her it was – but really it was storage room that happened to have a window. Still, she was lucky to be able to afford this place. Of course she’d had her parents help, but who didn’t these days?

Her dad switched on the news. A CGI Union Jack flag flapped in the wind over the whole sixty-inch screen.

It’s the anniversary of that fucking thing. I can’t.

It seemed like her dad felt the same way, letting out a grumble.

“How come you didn’t undo this when you had the chance?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

The telly bathed the room in blue, white, and red, displaying the flag in all of its hyperreal three-dimensional glory – a model assembled of points, vertices, and polygons, with a simulation of wind making it flutter and wave in place.

Goddess Save the Queens.

“When the Apocalypse Revolt sat down with the tech CEOs and made the new rules… You could have reversed Brexit then, couldn’t you? Everything was on the table.”

He shrugged. “It was all so new. It felt like an impossible place to be in. We had to make some concessions.”

“Well, you could have moved to the Kingdom of Europe afterwards. At least then I’d be able to travel freely in all of it.” One of many reasons to resent the generations before her parents’. And even Apocalypse Revolt hadn’t fixed this one.

“We had to stay here and see the revolution through. One day you’ll understand.” Her dad laced his fingers together, rubbing the weathered knuckles.

Things were better since the immediate aftermath, she knew, but Brexit was still a reality. The problem with climate change didn’t change people’s hearts about a decision made more than forty years before.