Hello readers,
I clearly spend more time on my novels than I do on the format of this blog. Nonetheless, here are the first 5 chapters of my new novel, Dandelion, which will be released on 18/11/22. If you haven't read Chrysalis (or just want a recap of what happens) you can scroll to the bottom of this post and read the section in red first (it may also help with some of the concepts in Dandelion). I do think reading Chrysalis in its entirety first before moving onto Dandelion would be more pleasurable, though. Although, I would say that, I make about £1.30 every time someone buys it :)
Content warnings: violence, bullying, severe mental health issues, homophobic slurs. The recap mentions paedophilia and rape.
Dandelion:
Part One: Shrinking Violence
1
For
a century, Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer in English), the soapstone
sentinel, has kept watch, looking out in the hope of seeing something
resembling peace. A peace that the man he was built to replicate thought he
would bring about through his teachings roughly two thousand years ago. In actual
fact, he has never seen Rio de Janeiro this devoid of harmony. The closest he’s
ever seen were the protests calling for President de Mello’s impeachment in
1992. Back in those halcyon days where democracy still worked. Back when public
protest, when public opinion, still mattered.
Cinelândia Square can’t contain the
protesters spilling out into the major thoroughfares of downtown Rio. From the
chiselled Christ’s vantage point, they look like a giant arachnid with infinite
legs growing exponentially, sprawling like the city itself, creaking from the
pressure of all the internal refugees. The main arteries of the city are
completely blocked.
Not that anybody tries to get into the
city centre for commercial reasons in 2032. Machines do most of the jobs that
people used to, and climate change – whilst mostly mitigated in the West – has
only exacerbated the unemployment levels as people have flocked to the cities,
fleeing flooded settlements along the Amazon basin or deserting infertile
farmland. Whilst most of the world had made the switch to hydrogen cars, Brazil
declined; too in hock to the big petrochemical companies who were delighted
someone would still give them custom.
Not that it mattered. The reductions in
carbon emissions from road vehicles and aeroplanes switching to hydrogen fuel
didn’t slow the effects of climate change quickly enough to save some regions.
With the sheer demand for food with close to nine billion people inhabiting
Earth, and even with a yearning for more plant-based diets, too much land was
required to grow the sheer amount of crops. A tipping point was reached where
land in certain countries, notably Brazil, became infertile and droughts became
so regular that crops couldn’t be cultivated.
Job scarcity, food scarcity, and water
scarcity, aren’t things that the majority of Brazilians ever considered they would
experience in their lifetimes. Even in the squalor of the favelas, things were
never this bleak. Even if there were
countries in the world that were flush with supplies of surplus food or water
to send anyone else, why would they choose Brazil as the recipient? Ran by an
oppressive and often barbaric, undemocratic regime.
Down in the pulsating heart of Cinelândia
Square, Roque holds aloft a burning piece of wood he took from a bench that he,
his friend Yago, and a few other strangers that he has unquestioning solidarity
with, just kicked to smithereens. The piece of wood is a metaphor for their
country as a whole.
He doesn’t even know what he’s
protesting for. He wants change, but he has no idea how to bring it about.
Nobody does. With mechanised labour, capitalism isn’t bringing about anything
other than diminishing returns for the majority of people. It only benefits an ever-diminishing
pool of elites, and it won’t change whilst they remain in charge.
Redentor, the coincidentally-named
company, as opposed to the statue, which somewhat ironically billed itself as
humanity’s saviour, has only served to add to the unfolding catastrophe. Redentor
conceived of, and subsequently created, what should have been the technological advancement of the 21st
century despite there still being the best part of seventy years of it still on
the clock. It’s hard to fathom something else having as much potential to
transform life as we know it.
Whilst other egotistical billionaires
were embroiled in pissing contests, immersed in vanity projects, and nursing a
hard-on for space exploration, Redentor invented the Chrysalis, a small implant
which can bestow its bearer with incredible benefits; recalibrating the
contents of their brains, endowing them with new abilities and knowledge, and
eradicating a plethora of mental health conditions like depression or
addiction.
Sadly, it’s become a members-only club.
Chrysalisation, as it has become known, has become big business, and those benefits
are rarely ever imparted to anyone who wasn’t already in the aforementioned
pool of elites. Given that Redentor is only servicing the people with enough
money to pay for it, that’s probably how the Brazilian government can sleep at
night. They’re all chrysalised to the point that they are essentially
programmed to block out anything that happens outside of their walled enclave.
Any chinks of darkness that do seep through, and any associated guilt they may
feel for causing that darkness, are simply erased, like software updates being
installed, as they sleep.
Either that or they’re just monsters.
The crowd at the fringes of Cinelândia
square become noticeably louder, their screams deafening.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Yago asks.
Roque shrugs in reply. “Lift me up,” he
instructs as Yago crouches down to allow his legs to straddle the back of his
neck. He lifts him up like he’s a girl he’s trying to impress at a music
festival. Up above the crowd, he looks across the patchwork quilt of placards
and protesters, and tries to establish the source of their unease.
“Shit, it’s the Military Police,” he
confirms. “And they’ve got cannons.”
“What kind?” Yago enquires, knowing
they’ll be fine if it’s tear gas as they’re masked up. He’ll be more concerned
if it’s water cannons. If they manage to fire them from all sides they might just
crush everyone to death.
“I don’t know. If you keep me fucking
still I might be able to work it out, though.”
“Shut the fuck up. You’re not exactly
light, are you?”
“I don’t know how, given we hardly eat
these days.”
Yago grunts as he tries to keep balanced.
It’s not easy in the mass of panicking people barging against him.
“What the fuck?” Roque exclaims.
“What is it, Roque?”
“Whatever those cannons are, they’re
aiming them up into the air. I’ve never seen them before.”
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Yago
says.
Roque cranes his neck in every
direction. “The military police are at every exit. Whatever they’re about to
rain down on us, we’re not going to escape it.”
“What do you think we should do? Get
low?”
“Great idea. Let’s get fucking trampled
to death,” Roque protests as he gestures to be lowered back down. “I think all
we can do is stand our ground and just hope.”
“Hope for what? That they’ve brought out
a bunch of guns that don’t do shit? Come on, Roque.”
“Hope is all we have left, bro.”
That hope is soon shattered along with
everyone’s eardrums as cannons erupt from every angle. The protesters crane
their necks upwards and follow the flight path of the projectiles, as if watching
giants play tennis, though this crowd is more robberies and schemes than strawberries
and cream. The spectators are both awestruck and terrified by what they see;
metallic spheres coursing through a sky tarred by the onset of sunset,
reflecting the dying light and scattering it amongst the crowd.
Everyone wants to run but there’s
nowhere to go. Roque, filled with some bizarre faith that everything will be
alright, stares up at the multitude of what looks like disco balls. He can’t help
but feel that if this mass gathering was for some other purpose, like
Lollapalooza back when it was permitted, that this would be pretty fucking
cool. But this wasn’t some new-fangled light show at a festival; it was some
sort of weapon being wielded by the ruthless Lagarto administration. Even as
his admiration at the spectacle turns into terror, it doesn’t speed up the
process. It’s as if gravity’s power cord has been pulled out from its socket.
Roque looks up as those spheres take an
eternity to reach the peak of their trajectory and begin their descent back
down to earth. To put him out of a misery he doesn’t want to be put out of. He
wants to struggle on, to fight.
On their downwards curves, the metallic
bubbles burst, thousands of smaller particles surging away from their hosts.
“What the fuck,” at least a hundred thousand
people call out in unison; a protest song that wasn’t on the setlist. It’s like
they’re watching something from a sci-fi film. Except this is very real and
they’re in imminent danger. The tiny shards soar down to earth with more
velocity and tenacity than their now-disintegrated master globes had; dart-like
mini-missiles homing in on their individual targets within the crowd.
Everyone hits the deck with impressive
synchronicity, as if James were playing on the main stage. They collectively
cower from the arrows still glistening and grimacing in the fading evening
light. The missiles land in the crowd with almost the same uniformity as the
protesters had braced themselves, but the screams of panic aren’t displaced by
cries of pain. Instead confusion reigns.
“Are you alright Yago?” Roque asks,
daring to peek up from a crouched position and disconcerted by the lack of
carnage surrounding him. It is like Lollapalooza, but the sound’s cut out and
James are playing to themselves.
“I got one of them in my neck. Look,”
Yago says as he yanks it out. “It’s like a thorn from a bush.”
“Oh my God,” Roque replies, rubbing his
own neck before checking his bare arms for any barbs that he didn’t feel.
Yago drops the little bit of metal to
the ground.
“Stop,” Roque chastises him as he goes
to stamp on it. “Let me see what it is.”
“What if it’s like a bug?”
“Like a listening device?”
“Yeah, if it is then we should stomp the
fuck out of it.”
“I agree, but let me look at it first.”
Cristo Redentor’s view is kaleidoscopic.
He sees thousands of geometric shaped jewels bearing the same image, pairs of
people perplexed at the little remnants of spheres that they’ve excavated from
their own bodies. Like archaeologists uncovering something perhaps extra-terrestrial,
other worldly. Roque gives the thorn the once over.
“You ever seen anything like that?” Yago
asks.
“God, no.”
“Do you think it was a good idea to pull
it out?” Concern is writ large on Yago’s face. He feels that maybe whatever it
is follows the same rules as bullets. You don’t want to keep one inside you but
you also shouldn’t take it out yourself.
“I don’t know, but I can’t help but feel
like keeping something the government is using against us inside us is a good
idea. Like you said, maybe it’s a bug, maybe they’re supposed to go deeper in
so that people can’t take them out. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones.”
“Not as lucky as you. You didn’t get
hit.”
“I mean, I don’t know if I did yet. Did
it hurt?”
“It was just like a little pin prick,”
Yago responded, his quivering voice invalidating the machismo. “But you’d have
known if one hit you. Definitely.”
“Maybe I was lucky then,” Roque tries to
convince himself, looking up from the object he is studying forensically; cupping
it carefully in his hands like it’s an endangered species of butterfly.
“I think you’re right, bro. We should trample
this into the fucking ground and hope to God that it stops it from doing
whatever it’s supposed to do.”
The relief of being alive is short-lived, and with lack of understanding comes further terror. If these little thorns had killed most of the crowd, but had spared Yago, then even though it would have been catastrophic, at least they’d have known where they stood – alive in a field of cadavers. The problem was that none of the assembled knew where they stood, whether they had been hit or not, and if they had what the ramifications were. All they knew was that the police were now in retreat; seemingly satisfied with whatever those cannons had achieved, seemingly happy to allow the destruction of Rio’s main public square to continue unabated. It’s not like they can really destroy something when it’s already broken, but even if they could, Lagarto and his cronies are all safe in their ivory towers anyway. Far, far away from here.
2
“Quite a predicament you’ve got yourself
into there, Nakita. Huh?”
Nakita makes nothing but stifled moans
as she hangs there in mid-air.
“Fucking answer me, you fat dyke.” I
slap her hard on the cheek knowing full well she can hardly reply with a “yes, Violet”
as she has her own tights bundled into her mouth, secured in place by strong
tape over her lips.
“Cat got your tongue, bitch?” I strike
her face again.
“She’d like some pussy on her tongue, I
reckon,” my friend Dani chimes in. We all laugh in unison.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you? You
dirty lezzer. Why are you even allowed in the same changing rooms as us? It’s
fucking creepy.”
A great sense of accomplishment washes
over me, having successfully manipulated Nakita into this situation. I told her
last week that she should start getting changed back into her uniform after
everyone else, even though it would encroach on her lunch time. She honoured
that arrangement. Too petrified not to, I suppose. All it meant was that it was
easier for us to get her on her own. The school’s two PE teachers have vacated
the standalone building that a subject which isn’t taken overly seriously got
left with. They will be over in the main building where the canteen is housed.
Even if Nakita wasn’t gagged, nobody
would hear her scream.
It’s ironic that the PE teachers,
entrusted with the physical wellbeing and fitness of the students, go to the
school canteen and eat the same bilge that most of the students do; burgers and
pizzas and fries, with fizzy drinks to wash them down, and home baking for
afterwards.
There’s a proper full-size athletics
track about a five minute walk from the school where, when the weather’s nice,
we go for PE lessons; to practice eight-hundred metres and the long jump and
such like. The aptly named Mr Currie is so fat and unfit that he drives and
meets the pupils there whilst they walk with the more mobile Mrs Walsh, whose
job it is to ensure that nobody tries to escape for the rest of the day whilst
temporarily out of school grounds.
Nakita eats too much of that junk as
well. Or at least that’s what we tell her. The truth is that she’s wearing
away. Today she will wear away a little more whilst Dani, Mel and I eat our salads
and a piece of fruit. As leader, I cast the deciding vote on whether we puke it
all back up afterwards. We don’t do that every day, but we do have our figures
to consider. Boys won’t go near us if we’re fat.
“I’m going to stop touching you now
actually,” I say.
Nakita looks slightly relieved by this,
but there’s still a lingering look of trepidation as she anticipates what actions
might replace the slaps and punches.
“Because I bet you’re getting a kick out
of it. In fact, we’ll be nice to you for a while and you can join us for
lunch.”
My accomplices do as instructed and
retreat from being right up in Nakita’s face. We sit down on the wooden slatted
benches that line the perimeter of the changing room and take our low-calorie
lunches from our school bags.
“Oh shit, I’ve just realised. You won’t
be able to have lunch, will you Nakita? As your lunch is in your big manly
backpack and you kinda can’t get into that right now, can you?”
“Not to mention her mouth is already
full,” Mel chimes in. We all cackle again like the witches that we are. Good
witches though. The toil and trouble that Nakita currently finds herself in is
her own fault for being so weird. We’re casting spells on her to eradicate her
likes. It’s for the wider school’s benefit. At least that’s what I tell myself.
It’s mainly just something to do as school is shit and boring.
Nakita is guilty of all the illogical
charges we level against her, except her weight issue and her sexual
preference. I made both of those things up and the rest of the school ran with
it. In actual fact, her cropped, matted hair and her big manly backpack are
attributable to her being a tramp, rather than any conscious attempt at being
butch. There’s every chance that her father took that very backpack to school
when he was young, but there’s no way she’s passing it off as vintage. I have a
belt with an elaborately-carved distressed silver buckle. That’s vintage. Nakita’s
bag is just shit.
She must come from a family of tramps,
or else she was just an unwanted child and they don’t give a fuck about her.
How hard would it be to have just sent her to the hairdressers? And got her a
big handbag from the high street to lug her books around in? Like everyone else
has. Even one from Primark would have sufficed. I’ve allowed people in school
to remain unscathed for a lot worse.
She’s uncool, unkempt and often
unwashed. There’s a smell that follows her around; her only friend. It’s
putting me off my lunch slightly. Maybe I won’t have to force myself to bring
it back up.
The reason that Nakita can’t access her
big, manly, allegedly lesbian-symbolising backpack to retrieve her lunch is,
that she is currently hanging from it. We looped the small grab handle over a
coat hook. Her arms were still in the shoulder straps as I pulled them both
tight, in case gravity needed some help keeping her there. It’s a wonder that
the straps have held, given how old they are. She looks like a horseshoe
magnet, her face glowing bright red and her hands chalk white as the straps
restrict her circulation. Like the sports kit itself, she hangs there voiceless
and immobile, waiting for someone to take her off the hook and endow her with purpose.
“If you didn’t have that big butch
backpack then you wouldn’t be stuck up there, would you, Nakita?”
Nakita knows it’s not as simple as that.
She might have shit for brains, but she knows how fickle I am. She can’t do
right for doing wrong. If she doesn’t do things which might make her fit in,
she’s tormented for it. And on the rare occasion she does, she’s told not to
get above her station, to know her place. She once borrowed some accessories,
amusingly from Claire, one of the only girls in school who would actually dare
communicate with her, for a non-uniform day at the end of term; one of those
Aztec-style statement necklaces that were all the rage when we were in year ten.
“Stop trying to be something you’re not,” I remember almost spitting at her,
such was the force with which I said it, before confiscating the necklace. If
it wasn’t Claire’s, I’d have trampled on it until it was broken into tiny
pieces. Instead, I just gave it back to Claire and told her not to be so stupid.
“What fucking century is that
abomination even from?” Mel joins in, making reference to the backpack
“Abomination’s a bit harsh” I joke. “And
she’s from this century.”
Mel and Dani both laugh hysterically. An
eerie, awkward period of silence follows the laughter. They both look at me,
and then back at each other, wondering whose turn it is next to say something
obscene.
“I fucking hate you,” I scream at the
top of my lungs as I throw my uneaten apple at Nakita. The connection with her
cheek bone making an almighty thud.
“Did you hear the fucking noise that
made?” Dani stutters between fits of laughter.
“That sounded fucking painful by the
way, like it smacked right off a bone,” Mel adds.
“I’m surprised it managed to hit a bone
with all the layers of fat on her fat fucking face,” I shout. “Fuck it. Let’s not
wait any longer. Are you ready, you guys?”
Dani and Mel set what’s left of their
lunches aside, and cast each other a look as uncomfortable as the benches
themselves. I reckon they probably think what I have in store is crossing the
line, but they know better than to voice any discontent or they risk taking Nakita’s
place.
“Come on. Get a fucking move on.” I
implore, sensing their hesitancy.
It invigorates them and they hold Nakita
still. Her groans increase in volume and become more desperate as maybe she too
can sense the change in atmosphere, that whatever’s in store is truly awful.
I rummage around in my bag, careful to
shield the chosen item from Nakita’s view to turn the tension up another notch.
Often, the not knowing can be worse than finding out what it actually is. This,
I’m almost certain, will not be the case here. I walk towards Nakita, slowly
unveiling the item as I walk. The object glints, even under the dingy strip
lighting of the weary old building. Dani and Mel have to tighten their grip on
her as she begins to wriggle more violently upon seeing what it is. She tries
to kick out at them too. They manage to disarm her legs, trapping one each
between their own and squeezing their thighs tight together to secure them in
place.
I hold Nakita’s head steady with one
hand and begin carving into her forehead with the razor blade in the other.
Pained screams sound at seemingly full-volume despite the gag. The audible
anguish reaches every corner of the entire building and caresses every crevasse
of the ceiling beams. But the only ears that hear them are wilfully deaf.
Present day
It’s
the last day of Chris’ first week as a postman. Approaching the first block of
flats on Eudicot Grove, he is rudely welcomed by a black bin bag crashing to
the ground in front of him, landing on the grass that runs adjacent to the
front entrance. He looks up hoping to catch the culprit, or even just a window
closing, confirming at least the flat that they occupy. He has an idea of who
it was. The woman who stays in number ten is an utter scumbag; a living and
breathing caricature of the Benefits Britain, single mother cliché. He cranes
his head upwards. No windows suddenly slamming shut. No faces at the windows.
No definite culprits; just one suspect.
He visualises the floor layout and the
numbering in his head, trying to establish whether it would have come from her
flat. That bottom flat is number four so
the one above is… It checks out. He can’t believe how shameless some people
really are. The old idiom that you shouldn’t shit on your own front doorstep
should extend to dumping rubbish as well.
He reaches the security door of the main
entrance and delves his hand into his pocket for his key fobs. He tries several,
still not fully familiarised yet with which one is for which apartment block.
He wonders how the person who did this route before ever mastered this. The
fobs are all identical. He needs to invent some colour-coded system. Maybe the
order that they’re in is crucial but he’s not yet cracked the previous postie’s
code. Maybe after another week on the job he’ll have this down to a fine art.
The fourth fob he tries does the trick and he gains access.
Chris has mainly letters to deliver,
easy enough to slot through letterboxes. It’s parcels that require a signature,
as well as uplifting collections or returns, which slows him down. He organised
the mail for this block in the van beforehand. The letters are all in
decreasing numerical order, so he takes the lift to start off on the top floor.
Twenty-four, twenty-two and twenty up there, before descending each flight of
stairs one at a time to do the other floors. He doesn’t object to stairs if
he’s coming down them.
The only collection today is from one of
the second-floor flats, and there’s one lot of parcels, from various fashion
chains, all to be delivered to the flat directly beneath that one. Number ten
actually, he realises, where that cretin lives. It’s always a pleasure going to
see her as she bawls and curses at her child who has obvious learning
difficulties. She either can’t control him, or just doesn’t want to. Chris
wonders if she’s even realised that there’s something there to diagnose. She
will have, he reckons, as that will indubitably furnish her with more benefit
payments to spend. She really ought to have him taken off her, although the
honourable thing to do would be to give him up.
He completes the top floor’s deliveries,
nothing particularly interesting amongst the letters here; correspondence from
a bank and a life insurance provider the only things he can identify from the
envelopes. He enjoys the little insights that can be gleaned from people’s mail.
At least some of the occupants of flat number twenty must be approaching their twilight
years based on the fact they’re being encouraged to take up an over-fifties
plan.
Chris excitedly heads down the first
flight of stairs, pops a letter with a handwritten address through eighteen’s
letterbox and then knocks on sixteen where he hopes to gain even more insight than
can normally be obtained from knowing she gets craft supplies delivered
regularly. He has yet to put a face to the name of the woman in number sixteen,
one Miss V. Clark. He wonders what the V stands for. Victoria? Vanessa? Maybe
even Veronica? She usually just instructs him to leave the parcel outside and
she’ll get to them. An actual collection will force her to finally open the
door. She’s down on the system as having regular collections every Friday.
Maybe she runs some sort of online business. Perhaps she makes something
saleable from all the craft supplies?
He rings the doorbell and peers into the
camera lens.
“Two seconds,” her soft, bashful voice
sounds out from the speaker; a stark contrast to the loutish howl of her
downstairs neighbour. He hears the sound of socks or soft slippers scuffing
against a wooden floor and then the clinks and crunches of several locks and
deadbolts being disengaged. Incredibly security conscious given he’s the only
non-resident that can access the block without at least buzzing first. What
exactly is she afraid of? Is it someone within? Maybe if she’s running a
business from here she has a lot of stock. Would she not have business
insurance though? And who would want to steal oil pastels and tissue paper? The
mind boggles.
After the symphony of percussive locks
reaches its climax, the door swings open slightly, constrained by a chain. One
half of V’s face can be seen in the gap, grey and apprehensive in direct
opposition to the confident, pink headband she’s wearing, demanding to be
noticed. She looks like a dead sprinter that has been revived for one more
race, for this single interaction. Like an alien seeing a human being for the
first time, unsure over whether he’s friend or foe. Maybe she really liked the
previous postman. She doesn’t really need to worry on that front. He’ll be
back.
Maybe she’s just hypervigilant, a term
that received a lot of tuts and head-shaking in a training course he attended
recently. If so, living in this fortress she has constructed would make sense.
She’s impenetrable up here. She has the height advantage over all her subjects,
except she doesn’t rule over them, she keeps them at arm’s length. The
drawbridge pulled up.
“I’m here to collect three parcels,” he says
to shatter the awkward silence. What else would he be there for, dressed like a
postman?
“Can you take a step back?” she says,
her bashfulness dissipating, replaced by brashness. As if Chris should know the
script. He obliges though, and the door closes. Then there’s the frantic scraping
noise of the chain uncoupling from its slider. The door opens again, not fully.
She inches her head out into the corridor, discreetly, like a periscope trying
to detect enemy vessels. There are none to find, just a baffled postman
wondering why this quiet corridor is being treated like a war zone.
“Two seconds,” she repeats. The door
closes again. A lock turns. Chris sighs wondering what all this palaver is in
aid of. The door opens fully this time. She steps out and leans forward, laying
two big parcels on the ground. She retreats back inside quickly and moves the
door in front of her again covering most of her body.
Chris had enough time to get the measure
of her. If it weren’t for the zombie aesthetic, she’d be quite easy on the eye.
Tall and thin – too thin – long, dark hair, a nice jaw structure but her face is
too gaunt, cheekbones protruding far too much, like Jigsaw from Saw. She’s wearing
a loose-fitting cream jumper that nearly reaches her kneecaps, cotton wristbands
the same colour as her headband, bright pink. It’s like she’s lounging just now
but has tennis at five. If someone were to just plug her in at the wall she’d
easily by coveted by most straight men in this town. Chris is sure of it.
“Anything nice?” Chris queries. She
looks at him vacantly. “The parcels?” he says, gesturing towards the packages
on the floor as he scans the barcodes to verify that they’re the correct
pre-paid labels. “A present for someone maybe?”
“Are we all done?” V says suddenly, looking
stressed.
“Yes, thanks.”
“Okay, bye.” The door slams shut.
“For fuck’s sake,” Chris exclaims rather
than muttering under his breath. Not that she’d hear him from inside Fort Knox.
That cretin down on the first floor might not be the biggest pain in this apartment
block after all. Not now that he’s met tennis elbow incarnate. The inhabitants
of Eudicot Grove are a right lot, either throwing bin bags or shade.
With
shade out of the way, Chris descends the next flight of stairs and readies himself
for the ray of sunshine that is Miss Bin Bags, or more accurately, Miss N.
Guthrie, as the labels on her numerous ASOS parcels refer to her. He knocks the
door of number ten and braces for impact.
“Shut up.” Chris can hear her scream at
her son from inside, for the crime of what Chris suspects is severe autism. She
has him down as a devil child. He has long lost the ability to let things like
that get him down. He has seen and dealt with much worse over the years. “Get
out my fucking way, I need to get the door,” she adds. Such a delightful way to
address a youngster.
The door shamelessly swings open. Chris
thinks that it really ought to be N who is hesitant to show her face, to not
own up so readily to the dismal parenting. Instead, it’s V upstairs who seems so
tentative and furtive. She is hiding something. He’s not wrong about that, but
N is hiding something too. She just doesn’t seem to care enough to hide it well.
“Sorry, he’s being a little shit today,”
she says. Her arm, saturated with tattoos, snatches the parcel from Chris’
hands, before he even attempts to pass it to her. The door slams shut again.
His mouth hadn’t yet managed to produce speech. The manoeuvres his lips make
settle upon a look of astonishment instead. What is it with the people in this
place?
Two total bitches, one floor apart, but
miles apart in their priorities. V clearly doesn’t care about herself, whereas
N clearly cares about herself, to the detriment of her own son, probably
because he isn’t what she would have chosen. She probably wanted a normal child, maybe even a girl. Nor
does she care about common decency, why should she have to go to the effort of making that walk to the bin sheds?
Why should she have to talk nicely to
the postman? She’s far too important for that.
She prioritises her looks too. Another
aspect in which they couldn’t be more different. V is naturally pretty, but
looks like a celebrity in rehab, or an actress normally so beautiful at the
glitzy awards ceremonies, but dumbed down for a film role where she plays a
victim of trafficking.
At the other end of the spectrum, N is
mutton dressed as lamb. Always comes to the door in a different outfit,
pristine like it has just been taken off the rack even though the boy is often
running around with no pants on, just a t-shirt, always the same one. Make-up
trowelled on to give her rough-looking face the faintest trace of allure, hair
is always strand-perfect, shaped into a bob with long fringe coming down like a
waterfall. If he could see her eyebrows he reckons they’d be drawn on. He
reckons she’s had a boob job too, although he has no before to compare her to.
It’s just a hunch.
There’s not much real. There’s making
the best with what you’ve got and then there’s this. Although in a society
where people can now change their actual personalities, he feels like his
unease towards people who only look fake should be lower down on his list of
concerns. Despite this, he carries on inwardly critiquing her looks. Although
some uncertainty remains over her breasts, her lips are unquestionably
artificial. They’re far too prominent compared to the rest of her face, like
she’s been in a fight. Maybe her boy punched her one of the times she has
bawled in his face and told him to shut the fuck up.
Why can’t the people who concoct
conspiracy theories about how vaccines are dangerous turn their attention to
lip fillers instead? Vile things he reckons, as he tries to excise the image of
Miss N Guthrie’s duck-billed chavvy-pus face from his mind and think about Miss
V Clark instead. He knows she’s up to something, even if it’s N who seems more
like the type. But how does he even begin to forge any semblance of connection
with her, let alone prove it? He has his work cut out for him this time, that’s
for sure.
‘Dr
N. Kajal – Psychiatrist,’ the plaque on the door reads. Light reflects off the
brass plate as it swings open. Another patient passes over the threshold to
exit her surgery. A subsequent exchange of pleasantries follows. A habitual
smile emanates from the doctor’s face.
She returns to her room, closing the
door behind her. She would normally re-appear a minute or two later, after
having typed up her patient notes, and summon some other ailing soul from the
waiting room. Not this time. Her next consultation is online. They all were
during the pandemics, but they’ve naturally mutated into being a mix of both
formats since those viruses have abated.
Some people still like the convenience
of not having to travel, whereas some prefer face-to-face interaction, feeling
like they get a more personal touch. Online consultations never happened at all
prior to the pandemics, which would have been of little use to her next patient
who suffers from severe agoraphobia. It’s a strange silver lining to the
pandemics for her, being able to see a doctor remotely.
Other recent developments may also
benefit her. Chrysalises offer a mental health solution like no other. Things
like cognitive behavioural therapy and behavioural activation require so much
input and determination on behalf of the sufferer, and as a result often fail
to remedy them. A Chrysalis allows for actual modifications to the brain,
through a process called a partial neurological overhaul (PNO), rather than
simply offering a suite of coping strategies. The trauma that causes mental
illness can simply be erased.
Britain is one of the few countries in
which the state provides PNOs free of charge through its National Health
Service, which in 2032 is still hanging on by the slightest of threads. However,
as it continues to be underfunded year on year, only a finite amount of
procedures can be performed each year. Dr Kajal’s specialist role is to assess
patients to see if they’re eligible for a PNO based on a strict range of
criteria. Her recommendations are then at the mercy of the board with whom the
ultimate decision rests. This patient is at the top of her list without
question.
Dr Kajal watches the preview video of
how she’ll look on screen before going live to her patient. She adjusts the
brim of the lip beneath her hijab, pulling it down lower than most people would,
ensuring her forehead is covered. She clicks to commence the call.
“Hi, Violet. How are you feeling today?”
Dr Kajal asks the face that has now appeared on her screen.
“You already know the answer to that,” Violet
replies. The doctor nods in agreement. If ever there were a patient that should
be allowed to bypass all paperwork for and simply be given the date for her
PNO, it would be Violet. The doctor knows all too well her condition, and what
she’s capable of.
“Are you still getting out? Going on
walks along the corridor. Sometimes saying hello to… Dot, wasn’t it? Your
neighbour?”
There’s an awkward silence.
“It’s okay if you haven’t been.” The
doctor sounds fearful, like she’s treading on eggshells, desperate not to say
the wrong thing.
“I’ve not been out at all. I don’t know
how long for.”
“You haven’t been keeping track of time.”
Kajal poses this as a statement, rather than a question, eager not to provoke
the patient.
Dr Kajal suppresses a sigh and retains
her bedside manner. She’s frustrated as they had been making substantial
progress of late. She had been going a daily walk along the corridor of the
storey she lived on, leaving the block completely sometimes to put the bins out.
She reminds herself as she scrolls through the patient’s notes that she had
even hung out and collected in a washing on separate occasions.
“You know how I feel about time.” Violet
gives an indirect answer to the non-question.
Dr Kajal does know. She’s the only
patient where they don’t agree upon a date or a time for the next consultation.
She just chooses one and sends Violet a reminder half an hour before it. Violet
always attends. No chance of any scheduling clashes. She makes enough money to
pay her bills through selling various crafts and artworks online, but that work
is flexible. Besides that she doesn’t leave the house. The doctor can’t get her
to divulge any more details about how she manages to try and block out time.
How
could she do it? She wonders, even if she wanted
to.
In the mists of time itself, before any
technology ever existed, even the most primitive of tribes would have been
privy to the day-night cycle. Even before we started counting those cycles and
delineating them into weeks and months and years, assigning those month’s names
and the year’s numbers, days would have been observed as people looked up to
skies to witness the sun and moon’s endless pursuit of each other, never
seeming to get any closer, like points on a compass. As the sun enters stage
left, the moon departs stage right, endlessly. A perpetual game of cat and
mouse.
Maybe she has blackout curtains to
eliminate the day-night cycle. Maybe she has some display settings on her phone
which disable the date and time. Even still, there are things that happen with
regularity, even without the weekly ceremony of putting the bins out for
collection to remind you. The knock of the mail carrier and the printed proof
of time passing on each of the letters they deliver; the yearly notification of
council tax, which always costs more than it did the year before. Avoiding time
seems unfeasible to Dr Kajal, but it’s what Violet claims she does without ever
elaborating on how.
“Don’t be disappointed,” Kajal assures
her. “Don’t be hard on yourself. It’s fine to have bad periods. You can
implement the things we discussed again as of now. A clean slate. What’s done
is...”
“I’ve started throwing my rubbish out of
the window,” Violet announces abruptly.
“Why?” Dr Kajal asks, without judgement.
“The bin needed to be emptied, but I
couldn’t bear the thought of going out there. It began to stink too much to
keep it in the flat, so I threw the entire bag out of the window. What if
someone reports me, though, and I get evicted? I won’t cope on the streets,
exposed to all those people who mean me harm. If I get an eviction notice in
the post then I’ll slash my wrists again, but I’ll do it fucking properly this
time.”
The doctor remains professionally,
artificially calm. She doesn’t acknowledge the mention of suicide as telling
someone with suicidal thoughts not to act on them is counter-intuitive. She
simply notes the mention of it on her patient record and focuses instead on
strategies to stop her from being evicted.
“Was it Dot, your neighbour’s name?”
“Yes.”
“If you phoned her, would she not take
your rubbish down whenever she’s taking her own? She’s nice, isn’t she? And she
knows you have your struggles.”
“She thinks I’m a lunatic. You all do.
And doing that denotes a week has passed. I’m not doing that.”
“I don’t think that, Violet. And I’m
sure she doesn’t think that either. She won’t truly understand you because
she’s never met someone like you before. You’re not abnormal. I meet people
like you all the time; occupational hazard.”
Violet smiles at that comment, which
makes Dr Kajal wary. She doesn’t like unexpected behaviour from patients. It’s
the only time she’s ever witnessed her smile; a very pretty smile too. If only
she had a similar amount of tickets as your average person does for the rides
in the unfair funfair that is life, maybe seeing that smile would have been as
predictable as the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening.
“Could you not come to an arrangement
with Dot? Like the one you had with your old postman?”
Dr Kajal refers to how Violet’s old postman
took out her bin the day before collection day, but never told her when it was.
She expects the unexpected at this point, a lurch from one from extreme to
another, and a smile to turn to instant anger. She can’t quite explain why she
suspects this. It’s nothing she learned from the manuals, it’s just down to
experience, a hunch.
“I suppose.”
Kajal’s assumption was wrong. No anger,
just apathy. It’s hard to get Violet enthused by anything. The grip that depression
has on her is fierce.
“How has the other neighbour we often
talk about been? The horrible one?”
“She still bangs on the ceiling. She
still scratches on the front door sometimes, and covers the spyhole with her
finger. As if I don’t know that it’s her.”
“Have you been using the techniques I
taught you to keep calm when she’s doing those things?”
“Yes, I’ve been sticking to that more
than I’ve been doing the walking to be honest. I promise I’ll try and get back
into those habits.”
“That would be wonderful,” Dr Kajal
replies, again feeling the inadequacy of the support she can give her. These
recommendations, like cognitive behavioural therapy, are all just coping strategies
which require effort and energy on the part of the service user. Things like
taking deep breaths, repeatedly counting fingers, blocking her neighbour’s
wicked behaviour out by putting headphones on, and trying to get lost in music.
All she can offer is strategies, never solutions.
After the call, Dr Kajal sighs as she
types up the notes of the call. There’s not really anything to expand on in
terms of Violet’s condition. She is well and truly over the line in terms of
meeting the requirements to be given a PNO free on the NHS. Unfortunately she’s
a rare case whereby that alone won’t solve her problems. In fact, it might only
serve to make them worse. There are aspects of Violet’s circumstances that even
a Chrysalis couldn’t find a way of explaining.
"Who needs to be
rich when you can be made happy with what you've got?" That’s a bona fide
advertising slogan used by Redentor. I wouldn't believe it were I not living
through it. Ginley Sprott is proving to be more of a hindrance to liberal democracy
as a semi-retired PR consultant than he was as the full-time political editor
of a right-wing rag.
Alfie hits backspace and replaces ‘a
right-wing rag’ with ‘one of the most prominent right-leaning news outlets in
the United Kingdom.’ The editor-in-chief won’t sanction that description of The Conduit, accurate though it may be.
He described Mitch Creighton, who holds a
monopoly on all things Chrysalis-related, as ‘the most important man since
Jesus Christ himself.’ Give me a break.
Sure,
the things he can do are much more impressive than turning water into wine.
Since wine often only serves to exacerbate depression and Mitch can, and often does,
cure it. But only for those who can afford to pay, which is precisely why those
who aren’t rich can’t be made happy with what they’ve got. It’s the fundamental
flaw in that slogan. The poor can only become inured to their own suffering.
Not
that this can be pointed out in the public space without being shouted down.
The prevailing narrative seems to be that having the ability to solve the
world’s mental health problems makes him the messiah without actually ever
having to do it.
It
can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt, but it looks statistically likely that
being chrysalised seems to bestow an individual with a more conservative
political outlook.
It
sounds like I’ve gone full tin foil hat, but let’s remember that was exactly
how Ginley Sprott described feeling during the groundwork leading up to his
seismic article that blew the lid off what the Chrysalis is capable of, what it
was doing and how the disgraced former Prime Minister, Peter Lightfoot, was
complicit in the whole sorry affair. Before he then decided to jump ship and
work for Redentor.
Ginley
said he’d never doubted himself so much on anything, but it just felt so
obvious to him that the government were pulling all the strings behind the great
blood heist and the madness which ensued; people being forced to donate blood
in order to receive their wages in full, being surreptitiously compelled to buy
more blood from the black-market for no reason at all other than to boost the
nation’s coffers. All of this was a contrived scheme to conduct an egregious
experiment on the marginalised within our society. All of those people are now
essentially dead, but at the same time, experiencing new realities with new
identities that they never consented to.
Despite his innate ability to
subconsciously filter out incoming e-mails without becoming distracted, one
catches his eye. The rather exotic-sounding name contravenes his oh, it’s just my boss or I’ll e-mail them back later filtering
system. Alfie wonders who she is and what she could possibly want, but he files
that thought away for now and continues proofreading.
Anyway,
despite referencing Ginley and appealing to reason, most of the people reading
this and crying conspiracy will do so regardless of what I have to say.
However, ONS data, for the precious few of us that still care about facts,
shows that 97% of people who have had any kind of neurological overhaul vote
Conservative. On the face of it, this makes perfect sense if it’s people with
lots of money who can afford it; they’re more likely to be Tory voters.
However,
if you scratch below the surface, just over half of those 97% didn’t vote for
the Conservatives in previous elections. Some didn’t even cast a vote at all. There
are some more rational-looking explanations for this. I am not suggesting for a
second that the Chrysalis is deliberately designed to make people more right-wing;
even if recent events suggest that theory can’t be completely ruled out.
Maybe
when you are rendered completely happy, you do start caring less about others.
It’s a cliché, but ignorance is bliss. Therefore bliss must also be ignorance.
Maybe having problems of your own allows you to empathise with the problems of
others when at the ballot box.
Survey
data also suggests that most people who say they’re getting a PNO say they’ll
only ever get one, but it seems once they’ve had one they become addicted and
want more. They appear to be like tattoos etched onto your brain, but rather
than tribal designs and dragons, these tattoos allow people to learn Spanish
overnight, or improve their golf swing. What used to be a world where
appearance was everything, but substance meant nothing has now flipped on its
head for the wealthiest cohorts of society. Middle class pretenders, who used
to plough all their money into looking like they had loads, don’t feel that
urge now.
I
will make reference to another advertising slogan now:
“Whoever
it is you want to be, it’s yours to make.”
That
was Instagram’s tagline just over a decade ago and it drives exactly at the
point I’m making. That slogan is actually a better fit for Redentor now, than
it was for Instagram in 2021. Some of you will know that I am a wheelchair
user. That doesn’t bother me now as much as it did when I was a teenager, back
when I would only ever post pictures of me from the neck up so that some people
who had never met me wouldn’t ever know. That was me making myself ‘whoever it
was I wanted to be’ in a sense. But people on Instagram are seldom what they are
like in reality, whereas what people become through Redentor is very, perilously,
real.
My
wheelchair analogy starts to run out of road here. If I had a TNO it wouldn’t
allow me to leave the chair from which I’m writing this article. The problem
isn’t that I don’t know how, or couldn’t learn, how to walk. The problem is
that I physically can’t. I have anxiety too though, and unlike on Instagram,
where I can post as many contrived pictures of me looking happy as I like,
Redentor could actually remedy that for me. And then some.
Who
needs a German car when you could become instantly qualified to land the job
that would buy you the whole showroom? That should be Redentor’s advertising
campaign. I might sell that to Mitch actually. Who needs to post their every
bowel movement on social media in order to try and feel relevant when now you
can pay to know that you’re the dog’s doo-dahs? People soon realise that when
they’re perfectly happy, caring what anyone else thinks is no longer an
immediate concern, and neither are their concerns.
This
shift in societal norms has the Tories laughing all the way into Downing Street,
and Mitch Creighton laughing all the way to the bank. After being briefly
displaced by Jaxton Vala, the hydrogen vehicle tycoon, as the richest man in
the world, he has since been catapulted back into top spot. How come all the
others who have been in and around that top spot, the likes of Bezos and Musk,
have all come under scrutiny? Yet Creighton seems immune.
Consider
Zuckerberg too for a moment. Remember when we were all up in arms about
Facebook finding ways to keep you on Facebook for longer? How do we know that
Redentor isn’t employing the same strategies? It’s taken as read that Redentor
isn’t going to manipulate us in any way. There was a time when we had that same
faith in Facebook. Look where that got us.
Mind
control isn’t advertising, but it’s the most effective form of it.
Alfie is pleased thus far with the rare
opinion piece that The Custodian is
allowing him to publish. He is allowed to give his opinions, but they’re
usually coalesced with breaking news stories, rather than on wider societal
issues. He should press on finessing the article, but something about the
exotic name of the sender, Acacia, is enticing him to look at her message, like
it’s a rare tropical fruit on a greengrocer’s stall that he’s never seen
before. He opens the e-mail.
Hello
Alfie,
I’m
a Singapore-based YouTuber who conducts social experiments, many of which are
on chrysalised people – which I know is a particular interest of yours. My
social media handles are all @YTKaish if you need to verify me or want to check
out my work. I have a current project that I think you’ll be extremely
interested in given its possible effects on the political landscape.
I
strongly believe that Redentor are involved in rigging elections. To prove this,
I want to go to Lotus and run for mayor there. Elections will happen in
November there if an opponent joins the running. So far none have, therefore no
election will take place. The incumbent, Ed Pieters, will keep his hand on the
tiller of Redentor’s social experiment.
The
problem, as you’ll be more than aware, is that any filming or reporting of
events in Lotus is strictly forbidden to protect the inhabitants from finding
out that they were victims. This, however, also allows Redentor to act with
impunity there, getting away with whatever they like. I need someone who I can
trust to help me get this story, if there is one, out there somehow, without
endangering ourselves in the process.
The
favour I have to ask is this. I would be honoured if you would be my campaign
manager, remotely of course, as I’m sure there aren’t enough hours in the day
doing what you do for a living to come all the way to Canada. Reach out to me
if you’re interested and I’ll let you know what I need, how I hope to prove
what Redentor is up to, and how I fear that it could be scaled up to affect the
rest of the world.
This
could lead to the biggest story you’ll ever write. The challenge will be how to
get the story out there… safely.
Please
reply to me promptly, as even though you’re my first choice and resounding
favourite, I do need to consider other avenues quickly if you decline.
Kind
regards,
Acacia
Redondo
If Alfie didn’t have people who filtered
his e-mails, and removed all the correspondence from various unhinged
individuals and trolls, he wouldn’t have taken any of the contents of this
e-mail seriously. But his team will have checked out her credentials. She must
be the real deal and really wants Alfie as her campaign manager.
It’s a bit of a quandary for Alfie. He
feels torn between loyalties: to his old mentor and previous political editor
of The Custodian, Sara Gauci, and to
her ex-partner, Vic, who he has since been in regular contact with. He knows
his loyalty to Sara is illogical, as she no longer exists, having had a TNO,
but he can’t help but feel like he should side with her. He feels guilty for
communicating with Vic, for sympathising with him.
Before he really knows what he’s doing, he’s
already started replying to Acacia, confirming that he won’t be accepting her
offer to become her campaign manager remotely.
He’s going to fly to Lotus and campaign
with her, side-by-side.
He stops typing in disbelief at what his
instinct is compelling him to do. What will his boss say? He has some annual leave,
yes, but he can’t take off several weeks right now, not with elections coming
up in Britain too; elections that affect millions of people, not hundreds. He could
work remotely, he figures. His boss might allow that. How time-consuming will
running such a small campaign actually be?
Snap
out of it. Stop this nonsense, Alfie thinks to
himself as he keeps his flight of fancy grounded for now and tries to re-focus
on his pending deadline.
With
the remainder of the article proofread, polished and up to his usual meticulously
high standards, Alfie is poised to upload it to The Custodian’s website. As his finger readies itself for the final
click of the mouse, his phone rings; a number he doesn’t recognise. It couldn’t
be an impatient Acacia demanding an immediate answer, could it? Alfie supposes
that if the election is soon then she can’t spend too much time standing still.
Election campaigns are all about momentum.
Alfie reins himself in. There’s no way
that Acacia would be that forthright. The e-mail only landed in his inbox
around half an hour ago. It’s probably a new source, an informant with a new
lead. He hangs fire on publishing his piece and answers.
“Hello, Alfie Fallon, The Custodian.”
“Hi, Alfie.”
He hasn’t verified Acacia’s authenticity
yet by watching one of her videos so he has no idea what her voice sounds like,
but he’s pretty confident it’s not this caller. She doesn’t sound particularly exotic. “My name’s Bridget Dempster, I
represent Tanya Alora. I would like to discuss a potential meeting with you
about a new venture she’s involved in. I feel The Custodian would be the best outlet through which to announce it.”
“Hi Bridget, I feel honoured that you’ve
chosen to speak to me first and foremost. Sorry if I’m recollecting events
incorrectly, but the last time The Custodian
spoke to Tanya, she had a different agent, a male, whose name temporarily
eludes me.”
As Alfie ponders Tanya’s last
interaction with his newspaper, he feels a weird sense of déjà vu wash over him.
Tanya Alora is the popstar who unwittingly catalysed all of the events that
culminated in Sara ending up in Lotus. She was unlucky enough to have been
caught buying a bag of illegal blood. She gave Sara some information in
exchange for the media easing off her. She initially sent Sara down the path
which led to where she is now, no longer Sara at all. His sense of dread is
only fleeting. Alfie is not one for superstition. Thousands of journalists have
spoken to Tanya Alora and a grisly fate only befell one of them.
He wonders how Sara’s getting on over in
Canada, or whatever she’s called now. Alfie hopes she’s found happiness amidst
all the chaos the rest of the world is engulfed in.
Lotus, a hamlet in Alberta Province, was
where Redentor decided to resettle the guinea pigs from their egregious
experiment. Not long after journalists got wind of it, they flocked to the
area, determined to tell the world who the people of Lotus once were, to inform
the people themselves. A journalistic amnesty was called at once. It was deemed
unethical to let the inhabitants of Lotus know what had happened to them. It would
be too distressing. Not that that stopped some journalists devoid of any sort
of empathy and oblivious to the consequences of their actions. Legislation was
enacted that put an end to the interference. The world’s governments decided
that it was better to allow the people of Lotus to lead the lives that had been
artificially inserted into their minds. It would be so freaky to see Sara,
Alfie imagines, with somebody else essentially wearing her body as skin.
Sara’s clinical, journalistic mind and
dogged determination to hold the Conservatives to account is all gone now, wasted.
Alfie is certain that Sara wasn’t intended to become collateral damage in Prime
Minister Lightfoot’s depraved scheme. After all, what were the chances of her
son becoming a blood-dealer? But boy would he have been counting his blessings
that it did happen given that she was one of the foremost critics of the political-right
in the UK. Alfie reckons that TNOs can be reversed, that Lewis could have been
restored to his original self, but Redentor just wanted Sara Gauci out of the
picture. He’s heard of several rumours of reversals happening, but he’s never
been able to substantiate them. It does also stipulate in the terms and
conditions of a TNO that the procedure is final and irreversible. But since
when have Redentor ever been paradigms of truth and transparency?
Against the backdrop of all adversity
and injustice, Alfie is hell-bent on picking up where Sara left off. If he can
be even one-fifth of the journalist that Sara Gauci was, then her spirit,
wherever it is – he feels queasy as he realises it’s probably computerised data
in a laboratory somewhere – will have been aptly honoured.
“Benny Neguzia?” Bridget suggests,
coaxing Alfie away from his tangential thoughts.
“Yes, that was him.”
“He’s still her agent, in terms of her
record deals and commercial contracts. I’m more her PR person, solely for the
new charitable arm of her empire, so to speak, Tanya AF. The Tanya Alora
Foundation.”
Alfie’s ears prick up, despite knowing
nothing about what this foundation does. Superficially, it sounds like a good
thing. It’s hard to think of a better person to be endorsing a cause than Tanya
Alora in the current climate. She was a pariah during the blood-money era when
she bought blood from a dealer to fund her lavish lifestyle. That stigma has
been healed – not just from the passage of time (see Chris Brown) – but also
with the retrospective knowledge that the blood-dealers weren’t a bunch of
depraved criminals profiting from a pandemic, but actually a bunch of depraved
politicians profiting from a pandemic, and that the money was actually being
redirected towards public spending; a stealth tax at a time where tax and
public spending had become ugly words. They still are.
Alfie asks Bridget for a gist of what
Tanya AF is being set up to achieve before deciding whether the prospect of a
meeting is tantalising as it sounds on instinct alone. He deems it worthy and a
date and time is pencilled in. Benny Neguzia will also be in attendance.
Pleasantries are exchanged before Bridget disconnects the call.
With
the article now published, and a date in the diary with Bridget, Alfie finds
himself absorbed by what could be happening in Lotus. Along with North Korea and
Brazil, Lotus is one of those mysterious, restrictive places, covered very
partially, if at all, by Western news outlets. They are the world’s deleted
scenes; ones he could be watching if only he went there. There’s so much there
to pique his interest; the travails of his old friend, Sara, and her
ex-husband, Vic, as well as the potential election-rigging.
The enormity of the problem that Acacia
poses weighs heavy on his mind though. Alfie can’t just report on what
information he manages to glean from Lotus without severe reprimand. The end of
his career at best. The end of his life at worst. Redentor, even though they’re
the most popular brand in the world, are very dangerous if crossed. Alfie knows
that he shouldn’t be going anywhere near this. There’s a fine line between
brave journalism and stupid journalism, and this is so far across that line
that brave is starting to disappear beyond the horizon. Nevertheless, something
is compelling him to go there, to indulge in a strange form of grief tourism,
but rather than finding graves or a memorial statue, everyone is alive and
well, oblivious to their own former plight and conscious of their new, amazing,
carefully-curated, anxiety-free lives.
What would it be like to walk past Sara in her new form, and for her to not recognise him? What does she do for a living nowadays? Will she look exactly the same, or would he be able to tell it wasn’t really her? How will she dress? Will she be as well-off? These are all great unknowns, and great unknowns are like unpicked scabs to journalists. He consigns these thoughts to the vault in his brain filled to bursting with similar thoughts like an overflowing suitcase; all the unpicked scabs, the everyday curiosities, the leads which have yet to be followed.
Chrysalis Recap/Explainer
In 2031, Derrick Haynes invents an implant called Chrysalis which has the ability to
reconfigure people’s brains, either incrementally or in order to make wholesale
changes – essentially rendering them different people entirely, but in the same
bodies. He wanted to alter his mother’s brain as she has onset dementia and
also help his brother, who was a paedophile, by suppress his urges.
His half-brother, Peter Lightfoot, was the Prime Minister. He
and Derrick concocted a plan to trial Chrysalis on unsuspecting members of the
population – the undesirables in society, people who wouldn’t be missed. To
make them into something better.
They fabricated a story that all of Britain’s blood supplies
had been stolen overnight by a criminal organisation known as the BPG.
Lightfoot responded by implementing a
system whereby donating blood essentially became currency and the BPG responded by enlisting blood dealers to
sell the stolen blood back to the general public in exchange for temporarily-unusable
Pounds Sterling. Derrick and Peter knew that the normal British currency would
be re-instated once they had been satisfied with the efficacy of the implants.
Although the original cohort of blood dealers were people
abducted by the BPG, once people saw how lucrative it was, they started to sign
up. In exchange, they had to consent to getting an implant which the BPG said
would keep them safe, without ever explaining what it would really do. The
grand plan was to force them into undergoing a process called a Total
Neurological Overhaul (TNO) which completely re-programmes their brains.
Derrick wanted to see if the Chrysalis was capable of altering everything,
rather than just trialling small changes one at a time. Time was of the essence
if he wanted to fix his mother in time.
Liberal-leaning political journalist, Sara Gauci, and her
main rival, the conservative-leaning Ginley Sprott were both trying to find out
more about Chrysalis, and the scandal behind the blood-money era. They both
became even more passionate about it after Sara’s son, Lewis, was abducted by
the BPG and they found out he had an implant. Ginley cared as his partner, Vic,
used to be married to Sara before he came out as gay. Lewis was his son too.
Having joined forces, Sara and Ginley eventually uncovered the
conspiracy behind the blood theft, what the implants did, and that Peter
Lightfoot had sanctioned the whole hideous debacle, and that he was a
paedophile. It was too late though, Derrick had already given all of the
dealers, including Lewis, TNOs and transported them with their new identities
to a small hamlet in Alberta, Canada, called Lotus, which had lain abandoned
for decades. Peter Lightfoot was now called Ed Pieters, and was now the mayor
of Lotus.
Just like the rest of the people in Lotus, Ed cannot remember
ever being the person he was before the TNO. He has artificial memories of his
own history, written by employees of Derrick’s company, Redentor. Derrick also
had a TNO to avoid responsibility for the egregious experimented he conducted.
He became Mitch Creighton, and is now the world’s richest person – by dint of
having designed Chrysalis.
Sara agreed to bury the majority of the conspiracy story in
order to be given a TNO and be reunited with her son. She became Susan and her
daughter became Farrah. Ginley elected not to have a TNO and stay and try and
salvage the reputational damage done to the Conservative Party. Vic also
declined the offer, but holds Susan, Ed, and Mitch in contempt for separating
him from his children in different ways.
Ed chose a girl to take to be the child he never had. Known
as Shelley in Lotus, she was sexually abused by her original father, before
being taken from him and left at the mercy of the care system. She started
dealing for much the same reasons as Lewis did. To make a bit of money when she
wasn’t old enough to work legally yet.
She is brutally raped and murdered one night in Lotus. The
perpetrator was never found, but it was blamed on rampaging meth-heads who had
gone in a crime spree throughout Alberta Province in the days preceding the
tragic event. However, Shelley had always hinted to Darryl (Lewis’ new
identity) that her father mistreated her. Whether that was a malfunction of her
implant releasing memories of her biological father, or a malfunction of Ed’s
releasing Peter’s old tendencies, is not certain.
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