Over a year since the last post. Beneath the Pleasure Zones has been completed and is melting in various slushpiles. A Beginner's Guide to Radial City has been published as a Kindle e-book. The Gestaltbunker - Selected Poems 1965-2010 should be appearing in a few weeks from Shearsman Books.
And shortly afterwards we'll be leaving Hereford for Hastings...
Showing posts with label Beneath The Pleasure Zones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beneath The Pleasure Zones. Show all posts
Monday, 19 March 2012
Friday, 11 March 2011
A Sequel to The Qliphoth - extract
Here are the opening paragraphs of Beneath the Pleasure Zones , the evolving sequel to The Qliphoth:
1.1 Special Effects of the Rupture
“The post-Qliphothic aeon.” As time passed, the phrase seemed increasingly cryptic each time Lucas wrote it. This time he was using a cracked biro on the back of some old spread-sheets salvaged from a ruined tax office. He hoped that this latest attempt at a memoir would finally create an explanation, an exegesis that made sense of the Qliphothic Intrusion, the Yesodic Leakage, or as the authorities now termed it, desperate to sanitise its terrors, “The Rupture.”
Over a decade now since that brief aperture in the consensus of what then passed for reality, the daily time-line. A sudden blinding fissure in the sky; an eruption of darkness across the cities ; a crack in the shell of Malkuth, our root-world, according to the wandering street-prophets, that admitted the dark side of the Yesodic zones. The dark energies of the Qliphoth broke in and out. Everyone had a pet creed, a broken pot of theory that didn’t quite hold up. “No-one can develop a workable practice to cope fully with the afterbirths of the Rupture, ” wrote Lucas, cautiously. And yet again, paused.
For this was personal history. His dead parents, Nick and Pauline, became vessels and he was an agent, blundering into forbidden zones, who “let something fly in,” as the Lore of the Rupture had it. That’s all he could tell himself.
Rain drummed on the roof of his shelter, a ramshackle extension to an old Carbon-Age observation post dug out of the woody hillside in those wild years when our defence mechanisms were launch-keys in plutonic silos. Now everyone was into psychic self-defence. He sensed a remote inner-ear distant babble, perhaps from the squabbling sages of nearby Leynebridge- and the moment of self-recollection was gone.
He pushed the precious paper to one side of the table. So much for his Neuro-Saxon chronicle. His left temple ached. Focus on language became more difficult after the Rupture; and now it was impossible to concoct a narrative that he could live in comfortably.
Comforts in general were in short supply, especially here in the Borderlands, where the followers of the Lore had congregated, to live close to the Earth. He surveyed his improvised living space, his bunk, his books leaning on the rusty shelves that would have housed a short-wave radio console or a geiger counter. His late mother’s imported Chairman Mao alarm clock told him it was approximately eight-thirty. Simple tinplate mechanisms usually worked. So he peered out under the heavy concrete lintel into his extension, a crazy parody of a suburban conservatory cobbled together from plastic sheeting, corrugated iron and discarded pallets. It was raining heavily, as Vivienne had predicted. He must try not to think too hard about dreamy Vivienne. But it stopped him thinking about Carla. Or Leila. Or Robyn. All his lost girls.
Time to work if he was going to eat today , to go to Leynebridge and share the battered ornaments of his knowledge at the Learning Repository. With the kids. Damned kids.
He still couldn’t believe he’d fallen into his late mother’s vocation as an educator , albeit in modes she never anticipated in her Age of Ideology ( Marxist-Leninist) But in the chaos of the immediate post-Rupture period, it was his best chance of keeping his head down. Someone had to deal with the thousands of young persons traumatised by their new-found powers and the bombardments of a para-psychic society. Flash-back: the ghost of himself barely out of his teens, helping his mother instill some simple left-brain skills into moaning semi-children huddled in the shell of Westway Community School. The least he could do. All he could do. His encounters in the alt-worlds, which still try to entrap him in dream-frames, had given him some immunity against the Special Effects of the Rupture. He had survived. If only to talk it through.
Problem was that he was still talking it through ( or its voices were talking through him) years later in the Borderlands, with nowhere to go but round and round. Except on his solitary shift at the “community” radio station. Leynebridge 930 AM. Which was about to close. It looked as if the community didn’t want his communications.
He pulled the plastic sheeting off his trike and checked the battery. Hopefully it might last another season. The motor whined fitfully. Then, with his bag of books over his shoulder and his greatcoat flapping in the drizzle, he bumped down the grass-fissured track towards Leynebridge.
The route curved down through a copse, passed an abandoned pub, its picnic tables chopped up for firewood, and crossed sloping pasture lands where huddles of sheep ruminated. As he cycled, he noticed a faint tremor in his right temple. The glistening hedgerows are signalling, alive with biomorphic energy. Then he controlled the reflex - it was surely a slight breeze. Or the animals simply stating their presence-in-itself. The dim murmur in his head merged with the hum of the motor as the trike gathered speed.
As he reached the fork between Leynebridge and Old Hallows, he overtook a dented pick-up carrying a sagging pyramid of potatoes. The driver was mouthing something, probably some mantra intended to keep him focussed on the road, but his fuel trailer full of methane was swinging everywhere, so Lucas gave him a wide berth. He could see the turrets of the Leynebridge Tower through the haze.
The road skirted a burying ground, another mass grave from Rupture-times. Between the yew trees and the crooked wooden markers, he noticed three Harvesters and looked away quickly. Hooded in grey they slowly moved their snaking detectors along the overgrown paths. Refugees from the Urbs often assumed they were using metal detectors to salvage precious metals - a saw blade, a claw hammer, a lock-knife. But Lucas knew their modus operandi. Even now, they still claimed an ancient right to harvest souls; and on their vigils they claimed to see a bluish orgone-flicker of astral energy hovering over the grassy mounds, to be gathered as a life-feed in their secret ceremonies. The Leynebridge Elders discouraged the micro-sect and it was unusual to see them after sun-rise. Another sign that the precarious social order was collapsing?
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Beneath the Pleasure Zones - another strand
William was in a hollow chamber. The dream narrator said so. Light flickered. Perhaps he emitted this flickering light. Sometimes the curving walls were impacted earth, and fungal stones densely inscribed with lines and whorls, ones and zeros, but when he looked more closely he couldn't read those codes; and filaments of wire, or dusty webbing, or tangled fibrous roots drifted across his face like insect limbs, and the walls became bony, slippery with secreted fluid, and white matter puffed into everything.
And there was a pillar at the centre, and she was tied to it, her flow of fine hair falling across bare back, pale buttocks, and she turned, smiling, and released her wrists, and took off her head with a single motion, and offered it, eyes gleaming -
The dream rarely went further these days, and William, sweating
in his sleeping bag on the lumpy mattress, had been saved by the
bleeping digits of the clock, and now as he stumped about in the
bathroom, was determined to take a grip on the physical world,
the worn plastic cistern handle, the mottled mirror displaying
his face.
William Crowe had never been tempted to change his face by some magical procedure or change his ID by playing games with the collapsing bureaucracy, even by hacking through networks and infiltrating his corrupted files. None of that would have convinced him, in the lower levels of his being. For the defensive languages encoded in that po-face had somehow irradiated his infrastructure. Crowe was hating the image of his balding head, as he urinated in the blear light.
But this was fuggy August in the outlands of London. Forget your forgettable face, nightmares about brains and sex. Go for bathroom gropes and pangs. A cratered tooth sang of corruption as cold bacterial water surged under dentine. Bowel shakes would wobble him later. He was always a worried organism.
Who had forwarded his CV to Pleasure Centres? Some smart head-
hunter? It was a diabolical liberty, as South Londoners used to say. He hadn't applied for a job for months. Did he really have to find all his certificates in time for this interview? They'd be on a database, somewhere in the silicate wrinkles of the Lobe, cyphers lost in hyperspace, his lost competences... Hurry up, William, stop dreaming...
His mother's imperious voice, over fifty years ago, squalling with
lungfuls of refined indignation - William! - down that little
hall, across the brown linoleum patterned by golden lozenges of
afternoon light... No, he never wanted to hurry off to singing
lessons, he wanted to sit and finish his Meccano aeroplane. He
dreaded most human interfaces, interviews, whatever, but if he
failed to attend his benefits would erase themselves, wouldn't
they?
He'd meant to scan the morning's multimedia, catch the 8.00 Lobe
update. Too much retrospection already. Always scanning for memories that weren't quite there. He shuffled across the bedsit/kitchen room, trying to ignore the skeins of mould on the walls, sidestepping those damned fluffed-up clumps of carpet. He rummaged through the identikit of his possessions.
The name on his old ID pass was the authentic Dr. William
Arthur Crowe. MSc.PhD. High security had to be exact in these
matters. Surely the guard at the Research Establishment used to
smirk as he checked William through the gate and raised the boom
to admit the Rover to the reserved parking place. William may
have been a top-drawer boffin back then. But he had this moony
loonface which once made a girl at a sixth-form dance giggle into
her handkerchief. He blamed his mother back then.
He tried the Lobe Newsnet again as he munched and slurped. Toast,
coffee and a big shot of Dawn Surprise, the budget-priced North Korean vodka. Breakfast of champions. He had to learn which were the morning's relatively safe routes into the West End sector. To the Head Offices of Pleasure Centres plc. His old monitor blipped and flickered, the
mouse was grease-encrusted, but there was something happening...
The screen filled with the quivering monochrome image of a
monitor. This wasn't the Newsnet logo. And on this screen-within-
a-screen William could see two identical grey faces, Caucasian
male, clean-shaven, forty-plus. Sober square-headed men in suits
and ties,anyway. Solid no-nonsense men, with shiny well-parted
hair. Like old 1950s publicity photos of bandleaders, movie gangsters, radio announcers. Each stared formally out of a flickering oval halo. Their graphite-coloured lips moved jerkily in unison.
Another viral infestation by those damned cyber-fibre pirates! He
hadn't time to sort it out. When he had that flatlet in North London
it was just the same, except he kept getting endless loops
of a sermon from the Westminster Mosque when all he sought was a
little diversion on the Fast Fun Action Line. No wonder the poor and/or technically disadvantaged gave up altogether on the cybernautic complexities of accessing the Lobe and still preferred to totally immerse themselves at their neighbourhood Pleasure Centre. It used the Lobe but it was a user-friendly interface, a smiley face. "You can get Virtually anything you want at Pleasure Centres." Corny, but it worked. Perhaps Pleasure Centres really had work for an old cornball prof like him. But he had to stop getting lost in this somnambulistic drift, and get on with it.
He turned away, to delve for his CV; and there, under a
precious, irreplacable back issue of Scientific American, was the last uncrumpled copy.
Approaching seventy, William was still attempting to rescript his life. But the standard version, the bit he couldn't get out of his head, always went like this: he was born in Tooting, South London. An end-of-terrace - but featuring leaded panes, and a privet hedge, in Saunders Road. The only son of Norah and Lionel. His sister Charlotte had somehow died in The War, she wasn't discussed. Lionel was a clerk for London Transport. The Underground, safe as houses, everybody said so. Despite that bomb down the lift shaft at Clapham South. Thin Norah had post-war nerves, couldn't stand the noise of machines, while sour Aunt Doris lurked in the spare bedroom. Everyone listened to the wireless. No-one had any spare change. But Uncle Doug round the corner had a motor-cycle and sidecar.
He ate horrible cod-liver-oil pills in jam at St. Cosmo's Primary
and kids stole his macintosh, then broke his Coronation Mug. But he pulled himself together, mastered long-division, mental arithmetic, decimals, fractions. "Quite the little professor, aren't we?" coo'd Mrs. Tulse, nervously, as he started playing with algebra two years before taking the eleven-plus.
That was probably the year Uncle Doug took him to see the
bouncing bomb in The Dam Busters , maybe the year he saw British
Gaumont newsreels of mushrooming fireballs in the Maralinga
outback, and stared for hours at the battered cone of a V2 rocket-motor in the War Museum at Lambeth. SCIENTISTS WARN , said all the papers. ATOM MEN'S DEADLY SECRETS. He realised big sums created powerfully corrective spells. They were his equalisers, they evoked a stunning revenge on the boring, bullying world.
That's what he needed right now. A triumphal bloody scenario, for
a change. It's all he deserved. A dose of the right destiny, for once. To escape this deep gravity-well, with all its litter and dirty vests. He could not find clean socks. This biopic narration in his head would not stop. It was consuming time, his real-time life. He couldn't help it. He'd become a mechanical dreamer.
Yes, William had enjoyed his technicolour dream, long ago, on the
night before his eleven-plus exam. He was in the UK Secret Space Rocket. The cramped interior of the domed cabin was painted pastel green, walled with panels of round dials, racks of bakelite toggle switches, calibrated pointers, rows of buttons and solid well-machined levers, like the gearshift on Uncle Doug's Ariel Square Four. Secret formulae flashed across the tele-data screen of the electro-computer as he fed in the punched cards. Purple and amber warning lights glowed softly. With rising excitement, using his entire body weight, he'd pressed the central red switch on the Command Pedestal. Then smoke had filled the cabin of the UK Rocket, he could smell gunpowder and hot metal. The solid-fuel rockets were firing in clusters. This was his finest hour. This rocket would be his burning bush. He was about to ascend vertically into the future! And between his wet legs he felt the swelling curvature of the British Bomb...
At grammar school William's dreams had gone totally nuclear
- he was going to control British Atoms for World Peace, he planned to design the first UK atomic space rocket, he was going to turn the launch key and see a finned cylinder rise from Woomera on a pyramid of fire.
For he knew, he damned well knew Maths and Physics had created
his sanity at the Grammar School, had given him a secret enfolded space, a realm of hidden dimensions where he could retreat from the Teddy Boy Years and the Big Beat Boom. Their dirty menace throbbed distantly, on the far side of a glassy wall, the steamed-up windows of coffee bars, youth clubs with girls laughing dangerously.
He'd paid a passing tribute to his youth by trying out some hobbies - archeology, home electronics - but all that really mattered was earning the stingy approval of Mr. Lawson, Head of Physics - who'd actually smiled when he won the Scholarship to read Maths. He was a little too early for the permissive society but no matter, there was work to be done, so he got a Double First. And then there was that ground-breaking doctoral dissertation on artificial intelligence. Once upon a time,he'd been a brilliant flash. It said so, right here on the CV.
No wonder the Ministry of Defence had head-hunted him; and
tasked him to the Establishment. To work on our own truly British warheads. Admittedly he was working most of the time with computers, which were rapidly becoming his specialism, and there were no all-British space battleships to design, for even the Blue Streak missile had long been cancelled. But those years were still his glory days. He'd show those idiots on the Pleasure Centres panel - or as much as the Official Secrets Act would allow. Whatever had happened he was still a loyal Servant of the Crown. A guardian of the Heritage.
Sadly he'd arrived too late to serve Blue Danube and Red Beard,
those mighty fifteen-foot one-megaton monsters. He had missed the
dawn splendours of Yellow Sun and Orange Herald. But he contributed to key projects - the 950 MC, the Chevaline warhead modernisation programme, the A 277 free-fall weapon, and the elaborate preparations for Trident- and then he had a little department of his own, surely, until...
Until the Blackout. He'd lost his mathematical cutting edge after
the Blackout and all those tranquillisers and the ECT and Elaine walking out all over him in her scruffy boots before walking out with the damned kid. But Personnel were very kind (at least he thought so then) and they'd taken off him the serious hard stuff, to fool about with "tele-presence" gimmicks for remote-control weapons assembly and servicing. For a while, anyway.
There's such a bloody amnesiac haze shrouding that whole
episode. How the hell could he gloss it over with Pleasure Centres? That sneak Denis Weekes alleged he was incompetent, too much of a maverick generalist, who could no longer cope with focussing on the specifics of his job. But he was convinced that his demotion - no, redeployment - might have occurred because of his involvement in something else, some other
project under the Establishment umbrella, something big. Which he
couldn't deliver.
That was the worst of it. He couldn't deliver it, and now he wasn't clear what it was. His ROM had been sabotaged, his hard drive had been buried under a ton of shit. Electro-convulsive-therapy, for God's sake. Across his precious lobes. And amenotrophylene, they must have given him some of that, he's certain of it. Sleepy-juice for double-agents, to make them dozy. When he'd only been a hyper-alert patriot, playing his
long game for Britain. No wonder his ancient night brain was deeply fucked, no wonder he needed these big shots of Korean vodka.
But as he recovered from the Blackout, he found the whole country was buggered up by this accursed Event, declining into terminal
lunacy and New Age psycho-burble. Nobody could give him a coherent account of how or why. There was a lot of rhetoric about incursions from an alternate reality but nobody seemed to able to do the maths properly and prove it.
Now Christian and Islamic fundamentalist militia battled with the Panic Police for control of the inner cities, while that New Age brain-fungus,fed and watered by hallucinogens, spread throughout the countryside. After the Blackout Elaine tripped off to some strange neo-pagan community at Lethbridge on the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands. They’d only met once since, after Louise died. Marriage to Elaine had been a cold war from the start, and the Blackout plus the Event not long afterwards provided good opportunities to divorce him. Then it was downhill all the way to eventual redundancy.
For the end of the world came, when suddenly we couldn't even
afford our miracle bomb, when everything was cut, and cancelled,
and decommissioned, and nothing and nobody worked properly any more and the redundancy notices went out for everybody, even creeps like Denis Weekes, and now the grass was growing around the guard-huts and the barbed-wire was corroding in the drizzle...
No, stress the good times in the interview. Pure work. Sixteen
hours on a peak day. Balls to the rest of the silly sixties and seventies and eighties and their lazing and prancing, their obsession with the appearances of mere being, hazy crazy clothes and music. So he'd worn Aertex shirts and Hush Puppies and practical plastic Pakamaks all the way. So bloody what...
Anyway, so many of those public-school radicals had become street-walking bundles of rag and bone. Everyone looked as if they wore charity-shop rejects these days. Some young people even aped his style of haircut. At least he had decent old brogues for his interview. Unlike most people under thirty he could handle the physics and maths behind the computing? At least he'd burnt out with real flair, hehe hehe. He really ought to make up his mind to go.
Unlike some of his colleagues - Ebdon, O'Malley, Weekes - who
sold their talents (and probably nuclear materials) to the Caliphate or the Pacific Rim, William was a true patriot. So they could call him cranky, so there was this problem with his CV and of course, Dr Crowe had to understand that he was too old to find a niche in what little remained of UK industry. But surely the nation needed some glittering fragment of his shattered expertise. He glanced at a week-old business news print-out of The Times:
Pleasure Centres is Britain's only home-grown Virtual Reality
group, and one of its few remaining high-tech hopes. As our environment becomes increasingly threatened by post-Event malaise, overpopulation, crime and pollution there's a world wide demand for cheap interactive fantasy systems.
©Paul A Green 2010 - usual Creative Commons terms apply
And there was a pillar at the centre, and she was tied to it, her flow of fine hair falling across bare back, pale buttocks, and she turned, smiling, and released her wrists, and took off her head with a single motion, and offered it, eyes gleaming -
The dream rarely went further these days, and William, sweating
in his sleeping bag on the lumpy mattress, had been saved by the
bleeping digits of the clock, and now as he stumped about in the
bathroom, was determined to take a grip on the physical world,
the worn plastic cistern handle, the mottled mirror displaying
his face.
William Crowe had never been tempted to change his face by some magical procedure or change his ID by playing games with the collapsing bureaucracy, even by hacking through networks and infiltrating his corrupted files. None of that would have convinced him, in the lower levels of his being. For the defensive languages encoded in that po-face had somehow irradiated his infrastructure. Crowe was hating the image of his balding head, as he urinated in the blear light.
But this was fuggy August in the outlands of London. Forget your forgettable face, nightmares about brains and sex. Go for bathroom gropes and pangs. A cratered tooth sang of corruption as cold bacterial water surged under dentine. Bowel shakes would wobble him later. He was always a worried organism.
Who had forwarded his CV to Pleasure Centres? Some smart head-
hunter? It was a diabolical liberty, as South Londoners used to say. He hadn't applied for a job for months. Did he really have to find all his certificates in time for this interview? They'd be on a database, somewhere in the silicate wrinkles of the Lobe, cyphers lost in hyperspace, his lost competences... Hurry up, William, stop dreaming...
His mother's imperious voice, over fifty years ago, squalling with
lungfuls of refined indignation - William! - down that little
hall, across the brown linoleum patterned by golden lozenges of
afternoon light... No, he never wanted to hurry off to singing
lessons, he wanted to sit and finish his Meccano aeroplane. He
dreaded most human interfaces, interviews, whatever, but if he
failed to attend his benefits would erase themselves, wouldn't
they?
He'd meant to scan the morning's multimedia, catch the 8.00 Lobe
update. Too much retrospection already. Always scanning for memories that weren't quite there. He shuffled across the bedsit/kitchen room, trying to ignore the skeins of mould on the walls, sidestepping those damned fluffed-up clumps of carpet. He rummaged through the identikit of his possessions.
The name on his old ID pass was the authentic Dr. William
Arthur Crowe. MSc.PhD. High security had to be exact in these
matters. Surely the guard at the Research Establishment used to
smirk as he checked William through the gate and raised the boom
to admit the Rover to the reserved parking place. William may
have been a top-drawer boffin back then. But he had this moony
loonface which once made a girl at a sixth-form dance giggle into
her handkerchief. He blamed his mother back then.
He tried the Lobe Newsnet again as he munched and slurped. Toast,
coffee and a big shot of Dawn Surprise, the budget-priced North Korean vodka. Breakfast of champions. He had to learn which were the morning's relatively safe routes into the West End sector. To the Head Offices of Pleasure Centres plc. His old monitor blipped and flickered, the
mouse was grease-encrusted, but there was something happening...
The screen filled with the quivering monochrome image of a
monitor. This wasn't the Newsnet logo. And on this screen-within-
a-screen William could see two identical grey faces, Caucasian
male, clean-shaven, forty-plus. Sober square-headed men in suits
and ties,anyway. Solid no-nonsense men, with shiny well-parted
hair. Like old 1950s publicity photos of bandleaders, movie gangsters, radio announcers. Each stared formally out of a flickering oval halo. Their graphite-coloured lips moved jerkily in unison.
Another viral infestation by those damned cyber-fibre pirates! He
hadn't time to sort it out. When he had that flatlet in North London
it was just the same, except he kept getting endless loops
of a sermon from the Westminster Mosque when all he sought was a
little diversion on the Fast Fun Action Line. No wonder the poor and/or technically disadvantaged gave up altogether on the cybernautic complexities of accessing the Lobe and still preferred to totally immerse themselves at their neighbourhood Pleasure Centre. It used the Lobe but it was a user-friendly interface, a smiley face. "You can get Virtually anything you want at Pleasure Centres." Corny, but it worked. Perhaps Pleasure Centres really had work for an old cornball prof like him. But he had to stop getting lost in this somnambulistic drift, and get on with it.
He turned away, to delve for his CV; and there, under a
precious, irreplacable back issue of Scientific American, was the last uncrumpled copy.
Approaching seventy, William was still attempting to rescript his life. But the standard version, the bit he couldn't get out of his head, always went like this: he was born in Tooting, South London. An end-of-terrace - but featuring leaded panes, and a privet hedge, in Saunders Road. The only son of Norah and Lionel. His sister Charlotte had somehow died in The War, she wasn't discussed. Lionel was a clerk for London Transport. The Underground, safe as houses, everybody said so. Despite that bomb down the lift shaft at Clapham South. Thin Norah had post-war nerves, couldn't stand the noise of machines, while sour Aunt Doris lurked in the spare bedroom. Everyone listened to the wireless. No-one had any spare change. But Uncle Doug round the corner had a motor-cycle and sidecar.
He ate horrible cod-liver-oil pills in jam at St. Cosmo's Primary
and kids stole his macintosh, then broke his Coronation Mug. But he pulled himself together, mastered long-division, mental arithmetic, decimals, fractions. "Quite the little professor, aren't we?" coo'd Mrs. Tulse, nervously, as he started playing with algebra two years before taking the eleven-plus.
That was probably the year Uncle Doug took him to see the
bouncing bomb in The Dam Busters , maybe the year he saw British
Gaumont newsreels of mushrooming fireballs in the Maralinga
outback, and stared for hours at the battered cone of a V2 rocket-motor in the War Museum at Lambeth. SCIENTISTS WARN , said all the papers. ATOM MEN'S DEADLY SECRETS. He realised big sums created powerfully corrective spells. They were his equalisers, they evoked a stunning revenge on the boring, bullying world.
That's what he needed right now. A triumphal bloody scenario, for
a change. It's all he deserved. A dose of the right destiny, for once. To escape this deep gravity-well, with all its litter and dirty vests. He could not find clean socks. This biopic narration in his head would not stop. It was consuming time, his real-time life. He couldn't help it. He'd become a mechanical dreamer.
Yes, William had enjoyed his technicolour dream, long ago, on the
night before his eleven-plus exam. He was in the UK Secret Space Rocket. The cramped interior of the domed cabin was painted pastel green, walled with panels of round dials, racks of bakelite toggle switches, calibrated pointers, rows of buttons and solid well-machined levers, like the gearshift on Uncle Doug's Ariel Square Four. Secret formulae flashed across the tele-data screen of the electro-computer as he fed in the punched cards. Purple and amber warning lights glowed softly. With rising excitement, using his entire body weight, he'd pressed the central red switch on the Command Pedestal. Then smoke had filled the cabin of the UK Rocket, he could smell gunpowder and hot metal. The solid-fuel rockets were firing in clusters. This was his finest hour. This rocket would be his burning bush. He was about to ascend vertically into the future! And between his wet legs he felt the swelling curvature of the British Bomb...
At grammar school William's dreams had gone totally nuclear
- he was going to control British Atoms for World Peace, he planned to design the first UK atomic space rocket, he was going to turn the launch key and see a finned cylinder rise from Woomera on a pyramid of fire.
For he knew, he damned well knew Maths and Physics had created
his sanity at the Grammar School, had given him a secret enfolded space, a realm of hidden dimensions where he could retreat from the Teddy Boy Years and the Big Beat Boom. Their dirty menace throbbed distantly, on the far side of a glassy wall, the steamed-up windows of coffee bars, youth clubs with girls laughing dangerously.
He'd paid a passing tribute to his youth by trying out some hobbies - archeology, home electronics - but all that really mattered was earning the stingy approval of Mr. Lawson, Head of Physics - who'd actually smiled when he won the Scholarship to read Maths. He was a little too early for the permissive society but no matter, there was work to be done, so he got a Double First. And then there was that ground-breaking doctoral dissertation on artificial intelligence. Once upon a time,he'd been a brilliant flash. It said so, right here on the CV.
No wonder the Ministry of Defence had head-hunted him; and
tasked him to the Establishment. To work on our own truly British warheads. Admittedly he was working most of the time with computers, which were rapidly becoming his specialism, and there were no all-British space battleships to design, for even the Blue Streak missile had long been cancelled. But those years were still his glory days. He'd show those idiots on the Pleasure Centres panel - or as much as the Official Secrets Act would allow. Whatever had happened he was still a loyal Servant of the Crown. A guardian of the Heritage.
Sadly he'd arrived too late to serve Blue Danube and Red Beard,
those mighty fifteen-foot one-megaton monsters. He had missed the
dawn splendours of Yellow Sun and Orange Herald. But he contributed to key projects - the 950 MC, the Chevaline warhead modernisation programme, the A 277 free-fall weapon, and the elaborate preparations for Trident- and then he had a little department of his own, surely, until...
Until the Blackout. He'd lost his mathematical cutting edge after
the Blackout and all those tranquillisers and the ECT and Elaine walking out all over him in her scruffy boots before walking out with the damned kid. But Personnel were very kind (at least he thought so then) and they'd taken off him the serious hard stuff, to fool about with "tele-presence" gimmicks for remote-control weapons assembly and servicing. For a while, anyway.
There's such a bloody amnesiac haze shrouding that whole
episode. How the hell could he gloss it over with Pleasure Centres? That sneak Denis Weekes alleged he was incompetent, too much of a maverick generalist, who could no longer cope with focussing on the specifics of his job. But he was convinced that his demotion - no, redeployment - might have occurred because of his involvement in something else, some other
project under the Establishment umbrella, something big. Which he
couldn't deliver.
That was the worst of it. He couldn't deliver it, and now he wasn't clear what it was. His ROM had been sabotaged, his hard drive had been buried under a ton of shit. Electro-convulsive-therapy, for God's sake. Across his precious lobes. And amenotrophylene, they must have given him some of that, he's certain of it. Sleepy-juice for double-agents, to make them dozy. When he'd only been a hyper-alert patriot, playing his
long game for Britain. No wonder his ancient night brain was deeply fucked, no wonder he needed these big shots of Korean vodka.
But as he recovered from the Blackout, he found the whole country was buggered up by this accursed Event, declining into terminal
lunacy and New Age psycho-burble. Nobody could give him a coherent account of how or why. There was a lot of rhetoric about incursions from an alternate reality but nobody seemed to able to do the maths properly and prove it.
Now Christian and Islamic fundamentalist militia battled with the Panic Police for control of the inner cities, while that New Age brain-fungus,fed and watered by hallucinogens, spread throughout the countryside. After the Blackout Elaine tripped off to some strange neo-pagan community at Lethbridge on the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands. They’d only met once since, after Louise died. Marriage to Elaine had been a cold war from the start, and the Blackout plus the Event not long afterwards provided good opportunities to divorce him. Then it was downhill all the way to eventual redundancy.
For the end of the world came, when suddenly we couldn't even
afford our miracle bomb, when everything was cut, and cancelled,
and decommissioned, and nothing and nobody worked properly any more and the redundancy notices went out for everybody, even creeps like Denis Weekes, and now the grass was growing around the guard-huts and the barbed-wire was corroding in the drizzle...
No, stress the good times in the interview. Pure work. Sixteen
hours on a peak day. Balls to the rest of the silly sixties and seventies and eighties and their lazing and prancing, their obsession with the appearances of mere being, hazy crazy clothes and music. So he'd worn Aertex shirts and Hush Puppies and practical plastic Pakamaks all the way. So bloody what...
Anyway, so many of those public-school radicals had become street-walking bundles of rag and bone. Everyone looked as if they wore charity-shop rejects these days. Some young people even aped his style of haircut. At least he had decent old brogues for his interview. Unlike most people under thirty he could handle the physics and maths behind the computing? At least he'd burnt out with real flair, hehe hehe. He really ought to make up his mind to go.
Unlike some of his colleagues - Ebdon, O'Malley, Weekes - who
sold their talents (and probably nuclear materials) to the Caliphate or the Pacific Rim, William was a true patriot. So they could call him cranky, so there was this problem with his CV and of course, Dr Crowe had to understand that he was too old to find a niche in what little remained of UK industry. But surely the nation needed some glittering fragment of his shattered expertise. He glanced at a week-old business news print-out of The Times:
Pleasure Centres is Britain's only home-grown Virtual Reality
group, and one of its few remaining high-tech hopes. As our environment becomes increasingly threatened by post-Event malaise, overpopulation, crime and pollution there's a world wide demand for cheap interactive fantasy systems.
©Paul A Green 2010 - usual Creative Commons terms apply
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