2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Read online

  DEAD PERCH BOOKS PRESENT

  2023

  A TRILOGY BY

  The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  The Publisher’s Preface

  BOOK ONE

  The Blaster in the Pyramid

  1: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?

  2: MEET YOKO & JOHN

  3: SKY OF BLUE AND SEA OF GREEN

  4: SEVENTEEN KILOMETRES

  5: EVERYONE’S GONE TO THE MOON

  6: PUSH THE BUTTON

  7: WHILE WINNIE SLEEPS

  8: WHILE YOKO DREAMS

  BOOK TWO

  The Rotten Apple

  Roberta Antonia Wilson’s Preface for Book Two

  1: REVENGE OF THE CHILD ACTOR

  2: WHAT IS RAPE?

  3: A GOOD YEAR FOR THE ROSES

  4: SHIBBOLETH NOW

  5: THE GREAT TUMBLE FROM THE SKY

  6: BIG MAC WITH FRIES

  7: EARLY DOORS

  8: LIVE FROM THE LONDON AQUARIUM

  BOOK THREE

  The Christmas Number One

  1: THE GLOSSARY

  2: WELCOME TO THE DARK AGES

  3: WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

  4: PHONE A FRIEND

  5: THE GREAT ESCAPES

  6: CHRISTMAS TOP OF THE POPS

  7: THE LOW ROAD

  The Publisher’s Appendix

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  THE PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

  In the Spring of 2013, the undertakers Cauty & Drummond were on a tour of the Western Isles of Scotland. They were hoping to find and purchase the perfect plot of land to start work on the building of their long-promised pyramid – The Great Pyramid of the North.

  Part of the tour took in the Isle of Jura.

  Cauty & Drummond had made a name for themselves in the undertaking trade using the strap-line ‘The Undertakers to the Underworld’. In doing so they had also made a somewhat rash promise to all the families who had entrusted them with the funeral rites of their nearest and dearest, the ‘rash promise’ being they would use some of the ashes of the said ‘nearest and dearest’ in the making of a brick, and each of these bricks would then be part of a pyramid that Cauty & Drummond would build at an unspecified location on the Western Isles. As yet they had not found and purchased a plot of land, let alone made a start on building the promised pyramid.

  It was while staying at Jura’s one hotel that they came across a strange-looking book on the bookshelf in the bar. It was hidden among the volumes of Jeffrey Archer and Irvine Welsh. The book was titled Back in the USSR and authored by someone using the name of ‘Gimpo’.

  Back in the USSR was a slim volume. Cauty & Drummond read it together in one sitting over a couple of drams of Jura’s finest. But after reading it, all plans of finding the perfect plot to build The Great Pyramid of the North were shelved.

  Back in the USSR was the memoir of a young woman who had been a nurse in the Falklands War in 1982. Her revulsion at what she had witnessed had impelled her to escape the West for what she perceived as the enlightened opportunities of the USSR.

  Gimpo ended up in Kiev in what was then the Soviet state of the Ukraine. Here she met up with two young women named Tat’jana and Kristina, who were to have a profound influence on her.

  According to Back in the USSR, Tat’jana and Kristina went under numerous aliases, the most widely used being The KLF.

  Cauty & Drummond learnt from this book how, in the late ’80s and very early ’90s, Tat’jana and Kristina had a ‘haphazard and anarchic slalom ride through the underbelly of Soviet popular music and high art’.

  They also learnt:

  How Tat’jana and Kristina ended up being the composers of the epoch-defining acid opera Turn Up the Strobe.

  How for a generation of disaffected young folk growing up in the countries that fell under the Soviet sphere of influence Turn Up the Strobe told their stories and inspired them to believe they could make a difference.

  How, as an acid opera, Turn Up the Strobe could be performed anywhere at any time.

  How Turn Up the Strobe did not need Tat’jana and Kristina, as in The KLF, to actually be there for it to be staged.

  How Turn Up the Strobe was performed hundreds of times in all sorts of unlikely venues, from abandoned cellars to disused aircraft hangars, performed by groups of teenagers using the most basic of instruments and liberated equipment.

  How, to quote Gimpo, ‘Turn Up the Strobe sounded like Kurt Weil meets Delia Derbyshire mixed by The Todd Terry Project, with the libretto done by Maxim Gorky while working in the Brill Building circa 1962.’

  Elsewhere in her book Gimpo states there’s a version of history that interprets Tat’jana and Kristina’s actions as ‘the gentle push that was needed for the first domino to fall to bring about the collapse of the whole Soviet Union and all the disaster to follow’.

  Also, in Back in the USSR it was claimed that Tat’jana and Kristina had been heavily influenced by a book called Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія. This book had been originally written in English as The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy, by someone calling themselves ‘George Orwell’. But this George Orwell was in turn just the pen name for a Roberta Antonia Wilson.

  This George Orwell – or should that be Roberta Antonia Wilson? – wrote the majority of The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy over a period of less than one month while staying in a cottage at the very northern tip of the Isle of Jura, and although one of her previous books, Fish Farm, had been a moderate success, there were no publishers in the UK who were interested in publishing The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy.

  Fish Farm had a cult following in parts of the USSR. It was seen in those parts as a literary attack on the West, in much the same way as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley had been a generation or so earlier. The Ukrainian arm of the Soviet State publishers decided to translate The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy into Ukrainian and publish it on the back of the cult success of Fish Farm.

  The now translated Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія did not repeat the moderate sales of Fish Farm, but for a select few individuals it became an underground classic. These rare few included Tat’jana and Kristina, who were then both still at an impressionable age – their early twenties.

  Tat’jana and Kristina stopped everything else they were doing in their lives and started calling themselves The Ice Cream Men (The ICMs) and then alternatively The KLF. It was never revealed what the letters KLF stood for, although there seems to have been many assumptions.

  As The KLF, they set about making art/music/situations very much according to the influence of much of what was described in George Orwell/Roberta Antonia Wilson’s book Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія (The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy).

  Cauty & Drummond asked their fellow drinkers in the bar if they knew anything of this Roberta Antonia Wilson or of Gimpo. The older drinkers remembered Wilson well, but not for her literary achievements; rather, for the fact that she, a woman of a certain age, had turned up on her Brough Superior Motorcycle most nights and proceeded to get drunk in the bar. Overall, their memories were warm and fond, but some had anecdotes of how she had a tendency to make inappropriate advances. There were other stories they told too, but now and here is not the place to recount them.

  It should not go unrecorded that most of those remembering Roberta Antonia Wilson were male. The male gaze and mindset has a way of remembering things the female gaze and mindset does not.

  It seemed the person on the island closest to Roberta Antoni
a Wilson was another local legend, Francis Riley-Smith, who was the wayward son of one of the local landed gentry. Francis Riley-Smith lived alone in his family’s ancestral home, Jura House. Francis Riley-Smith had succumbed to cancer some years earlier.

  As for Gimpo, she had worked as a chambermaid in the hotel over the Summer season a few years back. It seems she was also wild and reckless, but in a completely different way to Roberta ‘Ton Up’ Wilson, and she too had written a book in less than a month. Francis Riley-Smith had also taken to Gimpo, and it was Francis who had published a private edition of Gimpo’s Back in the USSR. Other than the few copies Francis had given to friends, it was thought the rest had just sat in boxes in one of the outhouses of Jura House until Francis died. After that they would have been thrown on a bonfire with the rest of his collection of excesses and indulgences. By then the Riley-Smiths were impoverished gentry and having to sell off their highland estate to pay the death duties.

  Duncan Buie, one of the more forthright drinkers at the hotel bar, claimed Francis had given him a copy of Roberta’s book in Ukrainian. He said he would give it to Cauty & Drummond in exchange for a bottle of Diurachs’ Own (the sixteen-year-old local single malt), but they had to buy him the bottle now. They did.

  Duncan Buie was as good as his word. The next morning, as Cauty & Drummond were breakfasting on kippers and poached eggs in the hotel, Duncan turned up with his Ukrainian copy of Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія.

  Forty-eight hours later.

  Back in London they had the whole of Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія scanned and, via Google Translate, translated from Ukrainian back into English within seconds. The first thing they discovered was that The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy was a book in three major parts, as if there were three books within one. They were also surprised to find that at the end of almost all of the 23 chapters in the book was a diary entry by this now mythical Roberta Antonia Wilson.

  Cauty & Drummond knew someone who knew someone who knew us. And we are Dead Perch Books, an independent publishing house specialising in science fiction.

  What you are about to read is what they read – well, almost. We have had our in-house editor Rosa Ainley go through the text and correct the grammar, punctuation and spelling, which Google Translate failed to do.

  And now, thirty-three years after it was written, it is being published for the first time in English. We are not too sure if it can be classed as science fiction, fantasy or a utopian costume drama set in the near future. What we are sure about is that it is a book that deserves to be read by a discerning few.

  Originally we were only going to publish Book One and see how that went before risking publishing Books Two and Three. We changed our mind but …

  Our legal department alerted us to the fact that much of the book contains quotes from famous and some not-so-famous songs. They told us that for us to publish this book we would have to gain copyright clearance for all of these lyrics. They then pointed out to us this would probably cost us a substantial amount of money and take much time. And even with an unlimited budget and an eternity of time, we could not be guaranteed to receive the clearances required.

  After some deliberation we decided we owed it to Roberta Antonia Wilson, the people of Jura, Tat’jana and Kristina, and you to publish and be damned. But we are taking certain precautions. The precautions are that we will initially only publish a small run and not make them available through the usual channels. Instead of the Waterstones and Amazons of this world, we will make them available under the counter at various corner shops across the UK and beyond.

  As for Back in the USSR, if we are able to sell this initial edition of the book and make a return on our investment, we hope to publish Back in the USSR.

  As for the current whereabouts of Tat’jana and Kristina, we have no idea. According to Back in the USSR, they were last seen disappearing into the depths of the Black Sea in their decommissioned Project 865 Piranha submarine. This supposed disappearance happened on 23 August 1994. Rumour on the internet has it that they would not reappear for another 23 years.

  Others say this was all just a myth they tried to create about themselves, and in reality they just grew up, got married, had kids and are now living normal lives in suburban Kiev.

  Dead Perch Books

  Breakfast Time

  1 January 2017

  AS-SALĀMU ‘ALAYKUM

  BOOK ONE

  The Blaster in the Pyramid

  1: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?

  ‘The history of the world is the history of the rivalry between five competing brands.’

  Stevie Dobbs, AppleTree

  09:00 Sunday 23 April 2023

  It is a bright warm day in April 2023, and the clock is striking thirteen. Winnie Smith, her Levi’s slung low and her T-shirt freshly unbranded, strides through the gates of Victory Mansions. The sun is already up.

  The tempting aroma of freshly ground coffee pulls her towards the Starbucks on the corner of her block. This is where Winnie has her first skinny latte of the day, every day. She checks her iPhone23 for the latest weather updates and the daily special offers from GoogleByte. She notes the retro fad for real fly-posters has made it to her part of town. The image on the poster is of an apple tree, hanging heavy with fruit. The tag-line is also indulging in some retro irony: ‘AppleTree is Watching You’. There is nothing else on the poster other than the usual logo of an apple with a bite out of it in the corner.

  Winnie looks at the screen of her iPhone23 again. Her iJaz* app pops up with a news story: Fernando Pó, the last nation state on Earth, is in negotiations with AppleTree to allow AppleTree to have the controlling share in their soon-to-be former nation. Winnie remembers with almost-nostalgia how, in her teenage years, nation states competed with religions to control the world. Almost as medieval as knights in shining armour rescuing maiden princesses from towers.

  For those who don’t know (and why should you?), Fernando Pó is a small island off the coast of Africa. It was once part of Equatorial Guinea, before Equatorial Guinea did their lucrative deal with WikiTube. But WikiTube decided Fernando Pó had no value to them. So they didn’t bother with it, and Fernando Pó claimed nation status and went into the business of being a tax haven. 2022 was the last year anyone on Earth ever had to pay tax again, so Fernando Pó’s trade as a tax haven was well past its sell-by date. This is why it had to do the knockdown deal with WikiTube.

  Winnie watches a squirrel leap from one of the sycamore trees that line her avenue to the next. She watches what she likes to think is the same squirrel doing it each morning. She then notices something else. She knows instinctively it is not another of those retro posters the Big Five have been using. This poster is crudely made, even by the retro chic modes of the day. Just the year 2023 in large block numerals, followed by the question, ‘WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?’ Just black ink on cheap white paper. There is nothing else on the poster. But it stirs something very deep in her. It triggers a longing, an urge that has nothing to do with sex, or networking, or travel, or keeping fit, or …

  But you must be wondering who I am, this disembodied voice that is telling you this story about a woman called Winnie and a squirrel in a tree. Well, you will just have to accept me, just as I accept the compulsion to speak out even though I am painfully aware I am talking to an invisible, perhaps non-existent, you.

  For it might be me who has spent the previous night fly-posting your city with ‘2023: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?’ posters.

  Winnie Smith enters Starbucks, orders her skinny latte, swipes her ZitCoins card and contemplates the rest of her life.

  We now need to slip back a few years to the year 2011, and to the height of the Occupy Movement. Like many of her generation, Winnie is swept up in the excitement and idealistic aspirations of the Occupy Movement. Although her stepmother is left-leaning and cynical herself of international banking and the business world in general, she never felt motivate
d to do anything about it. Winnie is different. Winnie acts upon her impulses. Winnie walks out of school and doesn’t stop walking until she is right there in the …

  It is at this point we have to decide where Winnie lives. I sort of imagined her living in Seattle, as in the heart of where everything is happening. I imagined her Starbucks to be there on the sunny, affluent West Coast of the USA, hence the clear blue skies, etc. But now I am imagining Winnie living in one of the hipper areas of North London, and her walking out of sixth-form college halfway through a lesson in medieval history and all the way down the Kingsland Road, down through Stoke Newington, Dalston, Hoxton and Shoreditch. All the way until she gets to the City of London, and it is there she joins the Occupy Movement, right there on the steps of Saint Paul’s.

  The compromise I am willing to make is this: you can imagine Winnie coming from wherever you are from and her joining your local Occupy protest. Then maybe some years later, after university and a joint philosophy and computer studies degree, Winnie moves to Mountain View in Silicon Valley to take up her job with GoogleByte. Or maybe she just stays in North London.

  It is on her first night in a tent, while sharing a second bottle of cider and listening to a nineteen-year-old filmmaker up from Brighton, that she loses her virginity. The nineteen-year-old filmmaker becomes her boyfriend. He is filming everything and anything that is going on. He (we will leave his name out of this for the time being) believes what they are doing could bring about the complete collapse of the crooked and corrupt financial institutions of the world.

  He is right.

  By the Summer of 2013 the worldwide Occupy Movement has a physical stranglehold on all the global financial centres, at the same time as having hacked all of their computer systems. The subsequent financial crash is complete. The Wall Street crash of 1929 was a mere blip compared to this.