Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey

pump broke, would you suffocate?” I ask with interest, thinking of a possible plot for an eco-whodunnit.
    “It would take five to six days,” says Tom, who always works things like this out. “So you’d probably start to notice before you finally expired. I’ve installed carbon dioxide monitors, just in case.”
    Most of the windows in the house face south, to maximise solar gain. A system of blinds prevents overheating. Shade creepers grow up over the porch in summer, and die back in winter, when sunlight is scarce. I have never seen the house, but I have an image of it in my mind as a live thing, a reptile basking in the sun, sucking into its belly every life-giving ray.
    Tom is not a fan of conventional wisdom. If he wants to know about something, he researches it himself. He rigs up a computer in an old barn, so that the image that would appear on the monitor is projected on a large scale on to a white wall, and he can sit at a keyboard far enough away from it to avoid discomfort. He thinks the Internet will result in social change on a scale that has scarcely yet been imagined, bringing people together so they can slip out from under the grasp of institutions and governments. People will manage their health without doctors, teach themselves things without schools, share and analyse data to find patterns that would never emerge in traditional scientific trials.
    I am stimulated by these new ideas, exhilarated by Tom’s optimistic view of the future, encouraged by the chance it gives for people written off by the system to work out their own salvation. But I’m not completely convinced. I mistrust anything that claims to transcend, once and for all, human nature, history and power relations, and offer unmixed liberation. “Don’t you think,”I ask him, “that all this cyber-utopianism, or whatever, could become—well, a bit ideological?”
    He doesn’t, really. He simply tells me about yet more startling developments in computing and on the Web, and also about what futurologists think will happen next, as computers become smaller and smaller and more and more powerful. Eventually a person will be able to download their entire consciousness, and become an eternal, inorganic intelligence, removing the need for a body, and all the messy fallibility of flesh.

Mother
    My mother is coming to visit.
    The first sign is the sound of a taxi drawing up. Then there is a banging of car doors, a rustle of bags and a loud cheerful voice in the street outside.
    There is more banging and stomping as she unlocks the front door and comes inside.
    “Hello-o?” she calls. “Now stay in the black, don’t get overexposed.”
    I come downstairs. In the hall, my mother is divesting herself of a black metallic walking stick, a backpack, a shoulder bag, a carrier bag, a purple coat and a turquoise hat and scarf.
    “I’ve brought various things,” she says, delving into her bags. “I went into Sainsbury’s opposite the station and bought you some yellow chrysanthemums. You ought to be able to see those in the gloom.” She comes into the living room and gives a yell as she walks intothe coffee table. (In the dim light, visitors entering from the bright world outside go temporarily blind.)
    “I’ll just stand here and give my eyes time to adjust,” my mother says, handing me a lumpy package. She has brought some raw beets, which she is going to make into borscht for lunch. (Raw beets, strangely, are a metropolitan luxury, very difficult to get hold of in my part of Hampshire.) She has also brought a new mug with a nice strawberry pattern, and some posh jam as a present for Pete, who is a connoisseur of conserves.
    My mother sits on the tall chair in the kitchen, chopping up beetroot, while I make cups of tea. She holds forth on:
      1.  Something outrageous that the government is doing (her indignation is fresh, as she bought a paper to read on the train).
      2.  Problems she is having with the venue for the music