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

  There seems nothing the various wealthiest countries in the world can do about this – not even China. None of them are willing to send in their troops to arrest the brightest and whitest of their nation’s youths.

  AmaZaba, already the world’s largest retailer, decide to step in. AmaZaba, which started out as merely a fast and efficient online way of buying and selling books, very quickly became the way most people bought all their essentials and most of life’s un-essentials. That is, bar skinny lattes and freshly baked croissants. It now seems strange that they started out way back in 1994 selling only books, a product the internet quickly made obsolete, while helping to save the rainforests.

  Before the 2013 crash, AmaZaba were already considering a move into using Bitcoins as their main trading currency. The Bitcoin movement is very much adopted by the young and alternative. So it is no surprise the Occupy Movement adopts the Bitcoin wholesale as a way of trading internationally among themselves. The fact that Bitcoins are an international currency that has nothing to do with the financial markets or any ‘big bad’ nation states is perfect for both Occupy and a global online retailer like AmaZaba. Occupy and AmaZaba are to be a perfect marriage and the dowry is paid in Bitcoins.

  AmaZaba make a deal with the Occupy Movement to run the world’s finances, using Bitcoins as the global currency. The first thing that is done is to change the name of the currency from Bitcoins to ZitCoins. Then overnight the power of all nation states is slashed. There is nothing the Big Five economic powerhouses of the world – the USA, Russia, China, Japan, and the EU – can do about it.

  Who is running the Occupy Movement is a bit less clear: some say it is just some teenagers drinking cider in a tent; others say it is someone in Helsinki called Hannu Puttonen.

  By the end of 2013 AmaZaba, with the help of Occupy, have not only saved the world economy, they are the only online retailer any of us can trust. Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of specialist start-up online retailers, but discussion of them will be left to another part of this story.

  The first state to go completely bottom up in late 2013 is Greece. The newly merged WikiTube sneak in while AmaZaba are still popping the corks at their wedding breakfast and buy Greece off the EU, for a fraction of its value. There is soon a queue of nation states lining up to be willingly bought by one of the new emerging Big Five. GoogleByte, WikiTube, AmaZaba, FaceLife and AppleTree’s time has arrived.

  Fast-forward again to a Starbucks somewhere in Mountain View, California; or is it Seattle, or Dalston, London? The choice is still yours, but my guess is Dalston may be getting the readers’ vote.

  Winnie takes a stool by the plate-glass window so she can watch the world outside. A helicopter passes across the clear blue sky, trailing a banner with the words ‘ABOVE US ONLY SKY’ and with the Starbucks logo on its tail. Yoko Ono is her favourite artist. She is pleased that her favourite artist has done a deal with her favourite coffee-shop chain. She watches the helicopter and its banner until it disappears out of sight behind YouTwo Tower.

  Before putting her iPhone23 away she checks how many Likes her latest FaceLife post has got – 3,554. Not as many as her last post, but she only put it up ten minutes ago. Winnie has been on FaceLife since her twelfth birthday in 2006. Before that she was on MyFace. Since then every moment in her life, every passing thought, photos of almost every meal she has ever eaten are there. In fact, she has photographed the love heart in the froth on the top of each and every latte she has ever had. Her whole life is there to be Viewed, Shared and Liked. Right now she has 7,356,725 Friends, as well as 654,823,156 followers on Twitter. Not as many as her best friend Primrose but more than her last boyfriend.

  Conspiracy theory types have been complaining about GoogleByte and AppleTree and AmaZaba and the rest since she was in her teens. The conspiracy theory brigade would tell you the Big Five are able to exploit the entire trail of personal information we leave in our wake. But these are usually blokes with something to prove, instead of getting on and making things happen themselves. She went out with one such lad for a few weeks when she was at uni, and he was into all that Illuminati conspiracy stuff. To begin with she was impressed with his attitude; he even persuaded her to come off FaceLife, but as soon as she finished with him she went straight back on it.

  The truth is Winnie has never seen any particular problem with it, seeing as the Big Five have solved most of the world’s problems in less than a generation. She cannot believe what the world was like, as in how shit things had been, even in her own lifetime. It is less than ten years ago that it seemed ISIS (Daesh) were going to hold the world to ransom. And now ISIS are just a bunch of blokes running the best channels on WikiTube.

  What happened is that when WikiTube saw how many hits ISIS were getting on their old YouTube set-up, they made them an offer they could not refuse. It was all done above board; the Truth & Reconciliation Board was brought in so no resentments were left to fester. Within a couple of years it seemed every former disenfranchised young Islamic man around the world was running his own channel on WikiTube. They were all offered very attractive start-up deals. They would work all hours and they knew what the customer wanted and at the right price. As for Sharia law and all those other problems, the former Wikipedia side of WikiTube was able to show them exactly what it was that Muhammad meant them to do and how to behave. In fact, it worked so well that many of the former Christian Right in what we still call, for nostalgic reasons only, the USA drifted across to Islam. I mean, if you read The Koran/Qur’an, Jesus/Isa is one of the Major Prophets. But he is just a man and not Truly the Son of God, which makes more sense to everyone.

  Winnie puts her phone away in her LabelFree† leather school satchel and pulls out the jotter. She found it yesterday in a vintage shop near Newington Green. She also buys a 1950s Parker fountain pen there and a full bottle of Quink ink. What she wants to do is write a diary, like Adrian Mole or even Anne Frank. A private diary in her own handwriting that is never Viewed, Liked or Shared. It can be her version of her life. The trouble with FaceLife is you always have to tell the truth because if you don’t, a million people tell you you’re lying, and the Likes start to dry up. But in your private diary you can say what you want and no one ever knows.

  Winnie fills the pen with ink, just as the man in the vintage shop showed her. She looks around at the other morning regulars in this Starbucks. Almost all of them are clutching their iPhones, updating their WikiTube pages, downloading the updated apps, or just Viewing, Liking and Sharing what their Friends are already putting up that day.

  She is hoping some of the others may look up and notice she is opening a jotter, clutching a pen in her left hand and writing the first words she has written in her own hand since about 2017. No one notices.

  Above the counter is the Yoko Ono line ‘WAR IS OVER’. This became Starbucks’ strap-line when the Yoko Ono estate came on board. Winnie has an almost OCD habit of reading the line five times in a row before taking her first sip of her first skinny latte of the day. There is something else that she is never able to work out about her daily Starbucks session – at home she rarely, if ever, listens to music, but one of the things she enjoys about her skinny-latte moments is the music they play in Starbucks. It can be anything from Bob Dylan to Bach to some of the new stuff she doesn’t know, but it always makes her feel better about the world and womankind as a whole.

  But today she writes her full name – ‘Winifred Lucie Atwell Smith’ – and today’s date – ‘23 April 2023’ – before taking her first sip. She then looks out of the window again. Yesterday she watched a young man there putting up one of the crude retro fly-posters she saw earlier. She didn’t see his face, just the back of him. He had the same pair of Levi’s as her, a pair of LabelFree work boots, but nothing on top. She could see his body was well toned, the muscles in his arms taut. She felt a rush of lust pass through her body. But this was followed almost immediately by a surge of anger. She had not felt proper anger for years.
Not since the age of ten, when the mere sight of her father could drive her into a rage of pure hatred for him and all she thought he stood for. She blames him for her Mother leaving.

  Winnie succeeded in transferring the hatred she once had for her father to the dark-haired young man she saw across the street.

  Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through her mind. She would flog him almost to death with a leather whip. She would tie his naked body to a stake and shoot him full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. She would ravish him and cut his throat at the moment of climax.

  This rush of hatred towards a man whose face she had not seen and whom she had never met felt real. Not the fake real you see in films and read in books. It was like something worth killing for. She did not know she could still feel like this. Now she has everything she could ever want. Now world peace is guaranteed. Now we no longer have the need for prisons. Now we have harnessed the power of the sun, meaning there is no need to worry about greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere and us running out of fossil fuels and whether the ozone layer has been patched up. Now there is enough food for everyone. Now you can practise whatever religion you want, or none at all. Now the existence of God can be proved and disproved in equal measure, and all are agreed with the findings.

  The only trouble is that this opening up to negative thinking, which her seven years of therapy has all but sorted, reminds her of another of her previous boyfriends. It was when she made the classic mistake of falling for an older man. He was a bit of a hero of hers when she was still at uni. He was one of those super-hackers. His name was Julian Assange, there was some sort of media kerfuffle around him for a while, but WikiTube did a deal with him for his WikiLeaks company. They set him up to run a programme in education. Between the years 2018 and 2020 WikiTube took over all the schools in the world, making free schooling available for everyone between the ages of four and twenty-four at the now rebranded WikiCampus. The fundamental premise of WikiCampus was that every child was given a Wikipedia page at the age of five, and it was down to them to add to it daily and correct those of their classmates. It had an instant effect of improving both the literacy and numeracy rates of children around the globe. Because children started to want to have their Wikipedia pages in more than one language, and Google Translate could still not be trusted, a side effect was that almost all children could read and write at least three languages before starting high school. Sadly Winnie was too old for this and could only speak English and Cantonese.

  Winnie loathes Assange; she thinks he is a total fraud. It was her relationship with him that her seven years in therapy dwells upon most.

  Back to Starbucks.

  Winnie’s eyes refocus on the page in the jotter in front of her. She realises that while she has been thinking about the man’s torso from yesterday with a mixture of lust and loathing, she has also been writing, as though by automatic action. In huge letters across the page she has written the following five lines, over and over again in large capitals:

  I HATE GOOGLEBYTE

  I HATE WIKITUBE

  I HATE AMAZABA

  I HATE FACELIFE

  I HATE APPLETREE

  She cannot believe the words her hand has placed on the virgin paper in front of her. She glances around Starbucks to see if anybody has noticed what she is doing. They haven’t. Why would they? They are all completely engrossed in the world filtering through their own iPhone23s. Winnie picks up her phone, flicks through a few apps, notices she had more than eight thousand new Likes to her FaceLife update and at least four thousand new followers on Twitter since she first sat down.

  She wants to smash her phone on the ground and grind it with her boots into a thousand pieces. But she doesn’t.

  Instead she sips the last of her skinny latte, puts her jotter, Parker Pen and bottle of Quink ink away in her LabelFree satchel and strides out through the automatic plate-glass doors of Starbucks into a world that has no idea what is going to hit it.

  SAY WHAT YOU WANT, WHEN YOU WANT, TO WHOEVER YOU WANT. Marcia Zuckerberg (2007)

  Barnhill

  Jura

  23 April 1984

  Dear Diary,

  So I have finished the first chapter of this book. Writing about Winnie starting a diary made me think that I should do the same.

  The pen name I’m using is George Orwell. Bit of background information there, in case anyone is ever interested. I do wonder if the reader will wonder what my real name is or even what sex I am. I have taken it upon myself to escape the clutches of London to live for some months in a crofter’s cottage at the northern end of the Isle of Jura, off the West Coast of Scotland. Or for as long as it takes to get this novel written.

  I was born in 1926, so that makes me fifty-eight.

  My companion on this expedition and in life is a Brough Superior Motorcycle, the finest motorbike anyone could ever have and also probably the most beautiful piece of engineering that has ever existed. No woman could ever want a man after she had done a ton on a Brough. Well, I guess I have just given my sex away. If you need to know any more about Brough, I will leave it to you to find out.

  As for this book I am setting out to write, I expect the reader’s palette is reasonably broad, so they will notice I have borrowed from two monuments of twentieth-century literature. I do not feel the need to defend this on artistic grounds. I just hope that if this book is ever published, the holders of the copyright in both of these previous works of great literature will only feel honoured I have chosen to embrace them in my work of fiction.

  The light is already fast draining from this glorious Spring day. I will celebrate this first day of writing by mounting my Brough, driving the thirty-one miles South to the village of Craighouse and the one bar in the one hotel on the island. There I will partake in a dram or two of Jura’s finest. I hope that young lad from Jura House will be there tonight. What was his name again, Frank or Francis or something?

  Maybe I should write one of these diary entries at the end of each of the 23 chapters in this proposed trilogy of books.

  Love,

  Roberta

  * iJaz is AppleTree’s news and current affairs channel. It was Al Jazeera until AppleTree bought out the Qatar-based company back in 2018, or was it ’19? It was around the same time that AppleTree bought Sky and then launched their iSky entertainment and sports channels.

  † LabelFree is the name Fair Trade used to rebrand themselves once all trade became fair. Within weeks of Fair Trade rebranding to LabelFree, numerous major clothing brands started to adopt the LabelFree logo. This, of course, does not stop anyone with any awareness knowing exactly what brand the particular article of clothing or accessory is that is sporting a LabelFree logo.

  2: MEET YOKO & JOHN

  09:27 Sunday 23 April 2023

  There are some who have decreed order is the natural order of not only the human condition but of everything that has ever existed and is ever likely to exist.

  And there are those who have proclaimed chaos is the natural order not only of the human condition but of everything that has ever existed and is ever likely to exist.

  And there are those who have made it their lives’ work to exploit our natural hunger for order.

  And there are those who have made it their lives’ work to exploit our natural hunger for chaos.

  It is a free market for all of you living in the free world.

  Whereas I am on the island of Fernando Pó. It is where I was born and bred. I may have disagreed with us being a tax haven, but I so abhor us being bought by AppleTree. Or, for that matter, by any of the other Big Five. I am totally and completely against what they are doing with the world. Womankind needs to have war, famine and inequality to function properly: without them we as a species will be over within a couple of generations. As for religion, we need as many as we can have to compete for our souls. The more radical the religion, the better.

  That is why I am here with these five dolls I have made to represent the fou
nding mothers of each of the Big Five, and over the next few days I will be sticking my needle made from bamboo into them. You may think this is a futile and primitive approach to bringing about world change, but it worked for my ancestors and it already seems to be working for me. Last night I began testing the process by putting a needle just a short way into the doll that is Stevie Dobbs, and I think it was successful. I can already sense her days are numbered.

  Meanwhile:

  Winnie strides across the street, the caffeine gently coursing its way around her body. She looks up to see if the squirrel is about – she is. She is building a dray. Or that is what Winnie assumes it to be. On reaching the age of twenty-eight Winnie is wondering when her maternal instinct might kick in and start taking over her life. As yet it has not, but in some deep recess of her mind she is crossing off her fertile years. This, unbeknown to her, is influencing completely random aspects of her character. For a start there is a man called O’Brien at GoogleByte who she has only ever seen a handful of times, a man she would not have looked at twice a couple of years ago, but for some reason he keeps coming into her mind.

  It is while she is dismissing the thought of O’Brien that she notices the window of the pet shop next to her corner shop at the base of her block has been done in, and the tanks containing the tropical fish have also been smashed. There are a couple of police cars and what look like two plainclothes officers from a period police drama standing about. Winnie never liked the idea of this shop and seeing those fish kept in their prison tanks but … she doesn’t think any more about it.

  Instead she goes over to the wall that has the poster on it. The ‘2023: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?’ poster. Without thinking, she stretches out her arm and touches the poster with the open palm of her hand. She is surprised to find it still wet. Her arm recoils and she looks at her palm. It is covered with something that looks very much like male semen. Instinctively she sniffs it.