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

  A lone cloud drifts across the blue sky.

  Winnie enters Victory Mansions, and instead of taking the lift to her floor she runs up all seven flights. As she is just about to enter her apartment to get on with her day’s work for GoogleByte, she hears the voice of her neighbour Tammy.

  ‘Winnie, it’s the kids’ mac-Bot again. It’s crashed three times today and it’s driving my children mad. They are on the Junior WikiCampus and it keeps returning “translation failed”, then the whole thing crashes. Can you have a quick look at it?’

  Although Winnie is totally psyched up for her day in front of the screen, she knows it is the neighbourly thing to do to give her a hand. She is on a push to be less selfish.

  ‘Yeah, I should be able to sort it.’

  She likes the smell of their apartment, as if Tammy is always cooking an interesting meal. Always trying out another dish from another part of the world. Winnie usually eats out or gets a takeaway.

  Tammy’s partner George also freelances for GoogleByte, but on the sales side of things. George and Tammy have two children, Tina (seven) and Richey (nine). Winnie being asked to sort something out on their mac-Bot is becoming a regular thing and she wonders if Tina and Richey create something wrong with their mac-Bot just to get her in. They usually tease her and ask about boyfriends, but it’s all friendly.

  Winnie has always thought Tammy’s a bit of an odd one. She was once a singer, even sang on a hit record by the Utah Saints, but now she’s stuck at home bringing up a couple of kids. Once Winnie sorts out whatever the problem is, Tammy usually tries to get her to stay for a coffee.

  But this time the problem with the mac-Bot does not seem to be something engineered by Tina and Richey. There is something else going on. George has left numerous pages open and they are all about the Illuminati.

  Winnie has not thought about the Illuminati for years. When she was at school in her early teens, there was a conspiracy theory craze all the boys were into. They were always going on about the secret powers that really pulled the levers in the world. Back then it was Obama, Putin, Merkel, Jinping and Akihito who were the players, the ones who ran the Big Five countries. But the boys in her class had this idea that there was another, secret Five that actually ran everything in the world. And had done so for thousands of years.

  ‘I got some Peruvian Organic Mountain Beans especially for you. Do you want a mug of coffee while you try and sort things out?’

  ‘No, it’s okay, Tammy. I will just get this done and then I need to get back to work.’

  Then there is this whole story about J-Zee and Beyon-Say being members of the Illuminati, and the proof is in the fact they called their daughter Purple Ivy. This name is supposedly a secret code revealing her membership of an ‘ancient and all-powerful occult society’. It is since then, when Winnie had just turned seventeen, that she knew boys and the male species in general were fundamentally stupid. It was one thing thinking there must be someone else in charge of things other than the President of the USA, but to think whoever that was would want to hang out with pop stars, however great she used to think Beyon-Say was back then, was just lame.

  Looking at all of these pages on the Illuminati that George has left open, and which are slowing everything down on his system, it seems he has not grown out of it all. Maybe, Winnie thinks, George is just getting a surge of nostalgia for those days when the world was totally fucked-up and about to collapse. Even Winnie sometimes, after a couple of glasses of red, feels nostalgia for those days. She knows it’s stupid.

  Something inside keeps pushing her to read more and more of these pages on the Illuminati that have been left open.

  ‘You sure you don’t want a mug?’

  The aroma of the freshly ground beans gets the better of her.

  ‘Okay, Tammy. Black, no sugar. Thanks.’

  ‘But you always drink latte at Starbucks.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s my breakfast coffee, this is my working coffee.’

  She is thinking about the words in the diary she has just started. The words she had no idea she was going to write. The ‘I HATE’ words. It is as if her appetite to read these pages about the Illuminati feeds that same need in her. But on another level she knows that if it is something GoogleByte could find that easily, then it is no threat at all. Anything really real, as in a real threat to our society, a threat to our hard-won world peace, would not be just there for all of us to read.

  Tammy brings the mug of coffee through to where Winnie is at the screen.

  ‘Don’t you want to have children? You’d make such a great mum.’

  Meanwhile:

  Stevie Dobbs is walking through a glade of Sequoias in the Redwood National World Park in Northern California. It is where she goes to get away from all the politics of AppleTree Boulevard. It is also where she does her best thinking.

  Suddenly she feels this sharp pain in the left side of her gut. Excruciating pain. Like someone has just jabbed her with a sharpened knitting needle. This is the second time this has happened to her today, but this time it is a lot worse.

  Meanwhile:

  Winnie takes her sip from the mug of coffee while not listening to what Tammy is telling her about her children. Instead Winnie is thinking it would be great if there was a secret society that actually controlled everything. And if that was the case, there could be another organisation that could attempt to undermine it all. Be at war with the Illuminati. An eternal war. She reads more of these pages. It seems there is another organisation called The Justified Ancients of Mummu who do just that. They exist to undermine the Illuminati and spread chaos in the world. They are called The JAMs for short.

  Meanwhile:

  In a warehouse on the side of a canal on the other side of the borough, in a place called Hackney Wake, a young couple called Yoko & John are just waking up. This Yoko & John are both 23; both have dropped out of art college. This Yoko has changed her name by deed poll in honour of that Yoko. John has changed his name from Paul Harrison, because he thinks it’s funny. Yoko & John do everything together. Except John is fucking Yoko’s best friend, and Yoko has yet to find out.

  Today Yoko & John plan to screenprint their second poster. Yesterday they fly-posted the one hundred copies of their first poster on walls around the city.

  Even better than getting all one hundred posters up is the fact that they did not document it in any way. Last night they celebrated by each taking a double dose of DMT2 and going to a retro rave.

  John thinks they should call themselves The Post-Digital Underground, but Yoko doesn’t like it.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is too literal. There is no poetry to it. And we should not be defined by what we are not, but what we can be.’

  John does not understand what she is on about.

  ‘But, Yoko, we are against the digital world, and we are underground. That is the whole point about us not documenting anything, so it can never be co-opted by the Big Five. And “post” is a good word, like in “post-war” and “post-punk”.’

  ‘But, John, it has no poetry. We need to harness the poetry in what we are doing. Poetry is our ultimate weapon. It is what will bring down the Big Five.’

  John is not too sure if he really wants to change the world, or even bring down the Big Five. He finds it difficult enough that they aren’t documenting what they are doing and uploading photos to Instagram and live-streaming content while they are actually putting up the posters. He knows if they did that, they could have an instant following of millions. Yoko always argues they may get that instant following of millions, but so does everybody who does anything, but that following changes nothing. And that following is just following you because they want you to follow them back.

  Yoko always seems to win these arguments. At least her best mate Cynthia never gives John this sort of hassle, and she is a better shag.* But he knows Yoko is his best bet, so he has to compromise.

  Yoko & John sleep on a mattress on the floor. Their d
uvet cover has not been washed for months. They don’t use condoms or any other sort of birth control, as Yoko had womb cancer at eighteen and had her womb removed.

  John goes to make Yoko her morning mug of sweet tea. She only ever has sugar in her tea while still in bed. She needs that sugar rush to face the day.

  He brings it back.

  ‘John, you shouldn’t have thrown that brick through the petshop window last night.’

  ‘Don’t talk shit. You know you are as against the keeping of pets as I am. It is evil to keep those fish in those tanks, just swimming around and around all day.’

  ‘Yeah, but all that happened was the fish died.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s better they are all dead than living miserable lives as slaves so some straights can watch their pretty colours. And anyway, you thought it was funny last night.’

  ‘Yeah, but I was off my head then. This morning my head is clear and I know what we should call ourselves.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.’

  ‘What the fuck’s that? I think we should be called The KMA.’

  ‘And what the fuck’s that?’

  ‘The Kazakhstan Medical Association.’

  ‘Forget it, John. We are The JAMs. No debate. I remember my mum telling me about a book she read once; it was called The Eye in the Pyramid. It has this pyramid with an eye in the top on the cover. Rubbish cover but … Anyway, the book was all about a secret society called the Illuminati who controlled the world. And in this book was an even more secret dis-organisation that existed to undermine the Illuminati …’

  ‘Yeah. And?’

  ‘Let me finish. This dis-organisation was called The Justified Ancients of Mummu. They spread chaos through the world and brought down the Illuminati.’

  ‘So what does Mummu mean? Sounds like baby speak.’

  ‘Mu Mu is the ancient spirit of chaos.’

  ‘So you think that we should rip off the name from some dodgy old book your mum read back in the 1970s?’

  ‘No. Like I said, we call ourselves The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. As in, not Mummu, but Mu Mu. Two words, not just one. Mu Mu is the feminine of Mummu. Get it?’

  ‘And, like, that is some big difference?’

  ‘It is those subtle but all-important differences that count in poetry.’

  ‘All right. So what do we do now?’

  ‘We design a logo for The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, or even just The JAMs for short. Then we make a new silkscreen. Then we steal some more of that cheap newsprint. Then we print up one hundred posters. And then we go and fly-post them all tonight. But first can you get me another mug of tea?’

  It is then that Yoko notices the used condom semi-shoved under the mattress.

  Meanwhile:

  Winnie makes her excuses to Tammy and her kids, gets out the door and down the corridor to her own apartment. She takes her mac-Bot out onto her balcony to get on with her day’s work.

  The sun has shifted around. Her heart quails before this enormous pyramid shape in her head. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. She wonders again who she is writing this diary for. For the future, for the past, for an age that might be imaginary?

  ‘And, anyway, why does it matter what I do or don’t do? Why should I care, why should anyone care, when everything we ever do is there for all future generations to see on FaceLife? And who is to say that whatever I write in this notebook will ever survive? I remember learning at school how the paper used in the printing of real books disintegrates within a hundred years, that is why the internet is so much better as it is there for ever. Why do I want to have secrets I do not share? It is keeping secrets that caused so many of the world’s problems in the first place. And why use an old-fashioned pen, as if that somehow lends validation to what I am doing?’

  Winnie puts her notebook away to get on with her work for GoogleByte.

  But before she opens her own mac-Bot, she can’t stop the vision of that young man’s back and his taut arms passing through her mind. She suppresses it with thinking about O’Brien. But why O’Brien? He’s not good-looking by any stretch of the imagination. She knows where it started. One night at an office barbeque he whispered in her ear, when no one was looking, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’

  It is a meaningless phrase, not even an office-party chat-up line. For some reason the line stayed with her and grew in meaning in her head. It also caused her to be drawn to him in some way. As if he had the same feelings she had. That he too maybe hated in the same way she did.

  Meanwhile:

  I am about to stick another pin into another doll. This time it might be you.

  NOTHING IS YOUR OWN, EXCEPT THE FEW CUBIC CENTIMETRES INSIDE YOUR SKULL. Yoko Ono (2023)

  Barnhill

  Jura

  24 April 1984

  Dear Diary,

  As for last night, I will sidestep it. At least before things got embarrassing in the bar with Francis Riley-Smith and Duncan Buie I was able to use the hotel’s fax machine to send the first chapter of the book off to my literary agent. Within twenty minutes he, Dog Ledger (don’t ask), sent back a fax with his full response and some other information he wanted me to respond to.

  Firstly his comments.

  He thinks I am overloading it with too many facts. That I am somehow desperate to prove what a ‘brave new world’ 2023 is. That I should just let things evolve more naturally. That I should get the reader more interested in Winnie, and the colours and textures of the world she inhabits. Especially the smells– he thought readers would relate to the smells. Once I had done that the book should then, bit by bit and subtly, introduce all the detail about the world as it is in 2023, as the story unfolds. He might be right.

  The thing is, right now I don’t know much about Winnie. She is as new to me as she will be to the reader. What I have known from the very inception of the idea of this book is that it is going to hang on the idea of the Big Five and how their power shifted from being nation states to five major companies. I knew all about that weeks ago, that was to be the whole premise of the book. Winnie was just the human element for the reader to project themselves onto.

  The other news contained in his fax was all about Fish Farm, ‘the book that made my “name”’, it seems. The book that has already become a set text at some of the more progressive schools, I might add. Roy Plomley even wanted me to go on Desert Island Discs.

  It seems Disney have been on to Dog Ledger. Disney want to turn it into an animated film, with someone called Bill Murray doing the voice of Sammy. I have not heard of this Bill Murray but I did learn that Walt Disney no longer makes the films himself, as he died a few years back. They want Jack Nicholson to do the voice of Jack the baddie in the story. I know who Jack Nicholson is; I had the serious hots for him in that film The Shining.

  It is very widely known, I’m sure, but I will try and get the basic outline of the story down to a couple of sentences:

  The fish farm in question is a salmon fish farm off the coast of Scotland, near the town of Oban. All the salmon in the farm are happy with their lot. They are regularly fed and the net around them protects them from killer whales. One day a charismatic wild salmon called Jack approaches the net around their fish farm and starts to tell the farmed salmon on the other side of the net stories about all the things they are missing in the ocean outside. About the excitement of leaving the sea to find the river they were born in, the leaping up the falls and over the weirs while heading to the spawning grounds, dodging the advances of the fly-fishermen. And the final spawning in the shallow waters where their mothers had spawned them, and their grandmothers and great-grandmothers before that. Yes, there were dangers, but that was the glory of life.

  The salmon in the fish farm debated and finally took a vote. Sammy, to be voiced by this Bill Murray, thought that Jack could not be trusted, but not many of the others wanted to listen to Sammy. Jack’s tongue was silver. T
he vote to make a break for it was carried by a landslide. The big break-out was meticulously planned. And then the day came and the break-out was successful. But as soon as they got to the outside, into the big, wide and wild sea, they were ambushed by a whole herd of hungry and ruthless grey seals. It was a massacre. The whole thing had been a set-up. Jack knew all along what was going to happen. But, as it happened, Sammy made his escape, and after weeks and months he did actually make it up to the spawning grounds where his great-great-great-grandmother had actually spawned her eggs.

  There was also a subplot. Wee Katie Morag was a lady salmon who was sort of Sammy’s girlfriend. She had never been in season, so the relationship had never been consummated. The thing was, Jack had his eye on Wee Katie Morag. Sammy was suspicious all along that Jack trying to persuade the farmed salmon to rebel was just a ruse so he could end up fertilising her spawn, before Sammy had a chance.

  I will leave it to you to buy and read Fish Farm to find out if Sammy got to father Wee Katie Morag’s spawn with his sperm.

  I had never planned for there to be a moral to the story, just as I am unaware of any moral to the story I am trying to tell about Winnie. But it seems all sorts of morals have been projected onto Fish Farm. It seems Disney think it’s an attack on the USSR, while the Left in the UK think it is an attack on Maggie Thatcher. I just think it is a story about fish that can talk.

  I followed up Fish Farm with a novel based on a rambling story told to me by this young ex-military nurse that I met in a lesbian bar in Glasgow, whose name was Gimpo. She had just returned from being a frontline nurse in the Falklands War, which we lost. Gimpo was suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress disorder and self-medicating with whisky mixed with cheap speed. This novel was named after the Royal Navy’s hospital ship HMS Uganda, which sailed down the Atlantic with the rest of our doomed flotilla for the war. That book was a complete failure, sold less than 700 copies. According to Dog Ledger the pressure is on from the publisher. I have to get back on form with this book. None of those negative war themes. Nobody wants to read a book about a war we lost.