Subscribe now

It is one of the irritations of life that people keep telling you that old age will be full of memories. This is apparently meant to cheer you up.

You will sit in a comfortable chair, surrounded by photographs, treasured possessions and possibly a tartan blanket, pleasantly recalling the rich tapestry of your life while somebody considerably younger changes the television channel because you’ve accidentally been watching Homes Under the Hammer for six hours.

This is the promise: your experiences will have been carefully curated, the wedding photograph, the naming of the firstborn, the graduation, the holiday in Tuscany, the ridiculous hat, the gown nobody has worn since 1978, the suit that hasn’t fitted since 1986 and didn’t look particularly good in 1986 either.

We keep all these things because one day, apparently, we shall need the memories.

Nobody ever takes the photograph thinking: This will look lovely in the skip. Yet that is where most of it is going.

I have discovered this because eventually you become the person going through the possessions of the dead. You find the photographs of grandparents who survived world wars, unemployment, underemployment, bad teeth, worse governments and an astonishing quantity of brown furniture. Or perhaps they were wealthy and survived private education, ambitious employers, the requirement to know which fork to use and the lifelong terror that somebody might discover their grandfather was in trade. It doesn’t matter terribly much. Nobody escapes.

Every class has its humiliations. Every life has its hen-peckery, its courteous slight, its bullying, its disappointments, its moments when somebody with half your intelligence but twice your confidence informs you what you ought to be doing. And we accumulate the evidence: photographs, certificates, letters, jewellery, books, clothes, souvenirs, files. Proof that we were here. Proof that it mattered. Proof that, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, we knew what we were doing.

Perhaps that’s what memory really is: the appeal lodged against oblivion. Unfortunately, oblivion has an excellent legal team.

My wife was told she had three months to live. She managed this for nearly two years. I regarded this as evidence that the statistics were bollocks. This was not entirely irrational. Statistics are populations pretending to be individuals. They’re old data, different demographics, different treatments. It’s a bell curve, not Beachy Head. Somebody has to be at the far end of it, so why shouldn’t it be Helen?

Besides, new treatments were arriving. There were trials. There were possibilities. There was another doctor to telephone, another paper to read, another approach somebody somewhere was trying. And Helen was different. Of course she was different. She was my wife.

The great fuck-wittery of one-size-fits-all medicine is that everybody is an individual right up until somebody produces a Kaplan-Meier curve. Helen was a pharmacologist. She understood the curve rather better than I did. That didn’t stop me arguing with it. She, meanwhile, began taking inventory of her life. Had it been worth it? What had mattered? What could she still say? What could she leave behind that might communicate something of the extraordinary fact that she had existed at all?

She had always possessed an enormous capacity for wonder. Not necessarily at the things people were officially supposed to wonder at. We travelled, gardened, argued, worked, failed at things, succeeded accidentally at others, got diverted into countries and circumstances we’d never intended to enter. We made plans. We had a plan that went into our eighties. Then somebody altered the timetable.

Helen supported assisted dying. When Parliament was discussing it, she wanted to vote for it. She thought unbearable pain and mental disintegration were things a human being should be allowed to avoid. Intellectually, I could see the argument. Emotionally, I had a rather simpler political programme: No.

The point was to stay with me. One more day. One more conversation. One more treatment. One more possibility.

I didn’t want to sit with her looking through photographs of the time when we had been young. I wanted next week. Next month would do nicely. Then Christmas. After that we could renegotiate. Because I had begun to understand something I hadn’t understood when all those photographs were being taken. The photograph isn’t the valuable thing. The thing that happened while you were too busy taking the photograph was the valuable thing.

Towards the end, morphine began dismantling things. Memory didn’t become the comforting archive we had been promised. It became unstable. Fragments came loose. News stories got mixed into immediate reality. At one point Helen became terribly concerned about seventy-one children she believed she had to save. She was dying and still trying to save seventy-one children. I kept telling her she didn’t have to do anything. Just stay with me. She kept saying she didn’t know how to do this. Neither did I.

I was still waiting for a telephone call. There were options. There are always options until suddenly there aren’t. And then it ended. Just like that. Present tense became past tense.

Afterwards there were the clothes. This is one of death’s administrative cruelties. A human being disappears and leaves behind an astonishing amount of dry cleaning. The clothes are still there: shoes, dresses, coats. Things bought for occasions that now seem to have happened to somebody else.

Sooner or later most of them will go into plastic bags and be taken to a charity shop, where some woman will unknowingly buy a fragment of Helen’s life for £8.50 and complain that the sleeves are a little short.

There is jewellery which surviving members of the family would like because it provides a memory of her. I understand that. Meanwhile I still can’t find her wedding ring.

There are books. Photograph albums. Computer files. Travel journals. Thousands upon thousands of photographs.

Near the end of one photo journal Helen wrote that this would probably be the last because she no longer had the energy to make another. I found that afterwards.

There ought to be a warning system on computers before opening things like that.

THIS FILE MAY CONTAIN YOUR PREVIOUS LIFE.
CONTINUE? Y/N

And what happens to all of it when I go? A museum? I rather like the museum option.

THE LAWRENCE AND HELEN GRAY COLLECTION

Visitors: 3.

One of them looking for the lavatory.

More probably everything will be put into cardboard boxes and deposited in the attic of a relative who doesn’t know most of the people in the photographs, isn’t terribly interested in the places and has confidently incorrect ideas about the period.

Eventually somebody will say: “Do we need to keep all this?”

And somebody else will say: “I don’t know.”

Which is how civilisation enters a skip.

The historian in me objects violently. Everything should be catalogued: Names. Dates. Context. Provenance.

This photograph was taken in Hong Kong in 1997. This one in Stockholm. This was the garden. This was the restaurant. This was the afternoon when something happened which seemed insignificant but turned out, years later, to be one of the moments I would most want back.

It should all be preserved for a thousand years.

Then the philosopher wanders in and ruins everything. A thousand years? Why stop there? Eventually the house goes. The town goes. Britain goes. Humanity goes. Continents move. Seas cover things that were once mountains. Mountains appear where somebody once had a branch of Costa. Given enough time, archaeology itself becomes optimistic.

Perhaps whatever comes after us won’t care about history. Perhaps it won’t even be organic. Perhaps there will merely be machines drifting towards energy sources, repairing themselves, reproducing themselves, performing purposes whose origins have long since vanished.

Eventually the Sun expands. The Earth goes. The photographs definitely go.

I think we can safely stop worrying about acid-free albums.

And this ought to be depressing. Oddly, I don’t think it is. Because perhaps we’ve misunderstood what memories are for. They aren’t a replacement for living. They aren’t a pension scheme into which we deposit happy experiences so that at eighty-five we can withdraw them with interest.

Memory is unreliable anyway. It edits. It embellishes. It deletes. It puts people into rooms they were never in and gives you brilliant replies to arguments approximately thirty-seven years after they would have been useful. Memory is another story we tell ourselves: useful, beautiful, sometimes unbearable. But not life. Life only ever occurs now.

Helen and I spent decades growing each other. I hadn’t really understood that until she wasn’t there. We continually reinvented ourselves. We moved countries. Changed jobs. Started things. Abandoned things. Made plans. Failed magnificently to become the people we had intended to become and accidentally became some other people instead. We never quite settled.

In some respects, we remained teenagers. In others children. There was always the possibility that one day somebody might finally recognise us as adults and put us in charge of something. Fortunately, this seldom happened. We treated one another as adults. Or pretended to. What mattered was that we kept moving: looking, talking, arguing, laughing.

Occasionally staring at something and saying, essentially: “Bloody hell. Look at that.”

And perhaps that was the whole thing: not achievement, not posterity, not the archive. Not the hope that somebody in the twenty-ninth century will open Box 14B and be enormously impressed by our trip to Luoyang . Just the contact. The acknowledgement. The tiny instant in which one consciousness recognises another and both are briefly aware that this is happening. Everything else goes into the skip. The skip goes into landfill. The landfill becomes geology. The geology disappears into whatever incomprehensible business the universe is conducting without consulting us. Perhaps nothing remains. Perhaps everything repeats. Perhaps somewhere, given enough infinity, Helen and I are sitting in a restaurant again, complaining about the service and completely unaware that this is the most important moment in the universe. I hope so. But I don’t need it to be true. The moment happened. That was enough. We were there. And we laughed.

Of all the things consciousness can do with the astonishingly brief period during which the universe permits it to exist, laughter may be the best. Everything else is landfill.

Subscribe now

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

Leave a comment

Please become a paying subscriber. The archive is large and every month some drops behind the paywall. Or at least buy me coffee! And watch a feature film I made!

Subscribe now

Having spent almost twelve minutes studying the state of modern civilisation, I have concluded that the principal difficulty confronting Britain is not poverty, productivity, education, housing, crime, energy, immigration, constitutional confusion, declining industrial capacity, or indeed the inability of university graduates to identify a screwdriver.

No.

The true crisis is that there remain entirely too many people occupying only one category. This is plainly inefficient.

During a recent lecture tour of the Orient, by which I naturally mean the bit with excellent food and spectacular administrative complexity, I had the pleasure of dining with a gentleman responsible for managing one of Malaysia’s great ports.

He possessed that increasingly rare quality among public servants: he wished the ships to arrive. This, he explained apologetically, had become problematic. His government required one set of priorities. His corporate headquarters required another. International consultants required a third. Human Resources demanded a fourth. The unions insisted upon a fifth. The local politicians preferred a sixth. And the customs officials appeared willing to negotiate a seventh for cash.

The remarkable consequence was that everybody possessed an equal opportunity to prevent any cargo moving whatsoever.

Given that the world’s economy was now dominated by the immense productive capacity of the East, it struck me immediately that Britain must adopt this enlightened system before anyone else. The beauty of the arrangement lies in its exquisite impartiality. Every interest group is simultaneously favoured, disadvantaged, offended, celebrated, consulted and ignored.

This is the very definition of equality. Naturally, certain vulgar minds insist that organisations should appoint the most competent applicant. Such people have plainly never attended a modern university.

Competence is a deeply exclusionary Victorian concept, unfairly privileging those capable of performing the required task. Our civilisation has now matured beyond so primitive an outlook. Instead, appointments should be determined by Narrative Diversity and the rest left to AI and Crypto Currency.

Each applicant shall therefore receive a Narrative Index. This shall consist of race, class, religion, gender, political identity, postcode, dietary philosophy, emotional resilience, historical grievance, ancestral grievance, anticipated future grievance, preferred streaming service, bicycle ownership, coffee ethics, relationship with sourdough, and the number of podcasts in which they have described themselves as “on a journey.”

Should two candidates remain tied, preference shall be awarded to whichever possesses the more interesting grandparents. Some critics complain this system would produce contradictory outcomes.

Precisely!

Contradiction is the highest form of inclusion. Consistency merely privileges logic.

During my Malaysian observations, I noticed that every proposed solution generated two entirely fresh problems before luncheon. This demonstrates administrative fertility.

In Britain we have shamefully limited ourselves to creating only one new difficulty at a time. We must aspire higher. Consider the immense possibilities.

The Green Preservation and Revolutionary Growth Party could campaign simultaneously for unlimited renewable energy and absolute protection of every bat, newt, beetle, fern, moss, puddle and historically significant dandelion occupying the proposed site.

The People’s Coalition for Unlimited Personal Freedom could immediately prohibit disagreement.

The National Party for Local Communities could welcome absolutely everyone while explaining that nobody particularly belonged anywhere.

Meanwhile, the Department for Simplification should create no fewer than fourteen oversight committees to supervise the reduction of bureaucracy.

These committees would naturally require separate Equality Impact Assessments to ensure no committee experienced feelings of administrative exclusion. Universities, of course, must lead the way.

Every professor should be required to occupy at least six mutually incompatible schools of thought. A historian should reject chronology. A physicist should oppose gravity on moral grounds. An economist should refuse arithmetic except during grant applications.

And every Vice-Chancellor should publicly apologise for the institution’s colonial legacy while enthusiastically recruiting overseas students to pay for the apology.

Some readers may wonder whether such contradictions might eventually render governance impossible. I reject this defeatist pessimism.

Governance has become an outdated industrial concept. Modern government exists not to solve problems but to curate them. Problems are renewable resources. Solutions merely create unemployment among consultants.

As for my unfortunate acquaintance in Malaysia, I fear he entirely misunderstood his responsibilities. He imagined his profession involved operating a port. How delightfully twentieth century! Ports no longer exist principally to transport goods. They exist to transport aspirations.

Containers may remain on the docks for weeks, but every stakeholder enjoys the comforting certainty that someone, somewhere, has completed the correct diversity spreadsheet. Ships, unlike justice, can always wait for the tide. Society cannot wait for another steering committee.

I therefore commend my proposal to Parliament, academia and all respectable think tanks.

Should it fail, I shall immediately publish a memoir explaining that this was, in fact, my intention all along.

Such intellectual consistency has become the first requirement of modern scholarship.

***

Professor Bartholomew has recently been appointed to Cambridge University’s newly endowed Chair of Narrative Achievement.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER ELEVEN of Volume Two

Subscribe now

Here’s where it gets tricky for me to say anything because, I have no idea what happened during this blackout. It is like I no longer existed whereas everyone else carried on. I would like to think that they missed me, but I do not really know. All I can do is write down here what I was told happened, and use a lot of my imagination. I was rather hoping the Great Narrative Generator would leave me some clues but I suspect that it was my mind suddenly deciding to start sentences in the middle and to stop pronouncing a word before it ended, that threw the generator into a tizz. It also, when I think about it, was somewhat less a rebellion and more of a stroke!

Consequently, what people later told me, weirdly resonated with my own memory and made me think I was there, and the narrative I have now, is almost the sort of thing a ghost might notice as he passes among the living. And frankly I am still worried that my autobiography has already been written by someone else, and worse I fear that Volume One, is complete fiction. And yet, it seemed so real at the time that I lived it.

But here is what was happening in Pahrump. The lights went out. And we were hardly in what I originally thought was a brothel, we are now in one of those mysterious sci-fi environments just short of a dry ice machine and a green lizard alien. Everyone there though seemed not to think anything was truly amiss. In government buildings, churches, marriages and casinos, sudden darkness is usually seen as some sort of failure, but now a red light came on, then white ceiling panels, and everyone’s pallor was sickly… I assume, because I am just going by what I was told. I suspect my own was deathly, and in some respects this is my recollection of a period of extreme mental confusion right at a moment when I was determined to save the world, right the wrongs, bring wealth to all, etc etc. At moments of near death, I suspect the mind just runs in all manner of crazy directions.

I can recall, or recall being told, that various screens suddenly lit up declaring: There has been no interruption! Which was plainly untrue, but it was written in a sufficiently expensive typeface to become official.

Lottie, bless her, was standing beside the central console, her face composed into the expression she used whenever a catastrophe required administration.

“It was a routine power fluctuation,” she announced, though how she would know it was routine I do not know. No doubt in darkest Pahrump power sources were somewhat irregular, though as far as I know Lottie had never been there before.

The name Candy Real jumps into my mind as somehow being attached to a rather well-endowed cowgirl with leather chaps and no knickers covering a bejazzled pudenda that cannot have been an easy ride. Whoever she was, as she stared at the smoke rising from one of the servers, she questioned Lottie’s announcement of routineness. “The wall exploded,” she exploded! And then to make her point, she shouted it in upper case: “THE WALL EXPLODED!!!”

And I can recall Teeth! And yes, the character I have for some reason failed to name, but I call Teeth, was there smiling. And I am thinking, ghost that I am at this moment, why do I not know this person’s name? What is wrong with me!!! I must have some Cheshire cat fetish. Which sort of makes sense as I was chasing a white rabbit, of sorts.

“Where’s Reggie?” asked Harry, the white rabbit of this tale.

Where indeed, I am thinking.

Meghan’s Recommended Self appeared on a monitor behind him and said, “We are deeply relieved that Reggie is safe.”

Harry turned, saying, much to my surprise: “Is he?”

I am sure I was waving my hands in front of him.

“We are deeply relieved,” the screen repeated, with the faint impatience of a person who felt the important part of the sentence had already been supplied.

I turned to see, much to my relief, Fiona in the middle of the room. She was motionless and so dead, in the same way as I was thinking I must be dead. But then I saw Fiona’s hands were clenched so tightly that the artificial skin had whitened over the knuckles.

She was dead, but the robot version was still functioning and I am thinking maybe I was being transferred into a robot body now that my seventy-three your old self had blown a gasket. I would never know for sure. And still do not!

“I have lost four minutes and seventeen seconds,” announced Fiona. “I do not lose time.”

But she had. I tried to mention it, though I don’t think I was there. So why people tell me I was, I do not know! Apart from the curious belief that I have that I could see that the staff of this establishment were all moving round, opening cupboards, checking off forms on tablets, and trying to unjam printers which were smouldering.

I could see Fiona looking right at me as Lottie raced around.

“Where’s Reggie?” she said. “There’s no body. No blood. No scorch mark. No discarded shoe.”

And then she picked up my phone from the floor and the screen lit immediately with the words “Welcome back, Reggie!” Lottie showed them all around. Then the words changed: “We missed you!” Not as much as I was missing me, I am sure, but I think by now you are getting the idea that I have a very confused idea as to what the hell was going on and worse, as I type this, I can feel my mental capacity throwing up vary strange emotions. My life, it seems, had ended and though here I am, I am not sure whether it really hasn’t. But I am sure sometime when I complete this narrative I shall reassemble and have some sort of life again. I hope so. I am writing for my life, which is many respects has been the story of my life, regardless of success or its lack. Madness. Pure madness.

Fiona’s face altered in a way no machine was supposed to manage. It was not grief exactly. Grief requires certainty. It was the expression of somebody who had lost a person but had not yet been granted the dignity of knowing how. “I remember the lights failing,” she said, “I remember Reggie saying my name.”

Then every screen in the facility switched on and “Recommended Reggie” appeared simultaneously on all of them. And yes, I thought, I was being replaced.

There I was standing behind a lectern against a blue background bearing the slogan:

BECOME WHO YOU WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE.

And right now, as I write this, I am thinking that I must have been thinking this slogan from all too many Facebook, TikTok, SubStack, Linked In, and a myriad other forms of social media, had somehow gone rogue by becoming reality!

I looked at myself and frankly I looked offensively well lit.

“My friends,” I began, “Today I have seen the future, and I am no longer afraid of it.”

And I am thinking I am not surprised because frankly I must be dead.

“That’s not him,” declared Fiona.

The Teeth smiled. “Of course it is,” he announced.

“No,” she said, “It is his voice. His face. His rhythm. His preferred pauses. But it is not him.”

I wanted to hug her. Whatever was left of Fiona in this Fiona, she knew who I really was. Though why she could not see me right then, I do not know.

“The Recommended Self programme does not replace us,” my other self-continued, “It liberates us from hesitation, contradiction, and wasted potential.”

“He would never say that!” yelled Fiona, knowing me all too well as failure was always an option.

“You cannot know every sentence a person might say, “said Lottie, who really should have known better!

As this confused conversation unfolded, my out of body experience continued and led me out of a window that was impossible, into the scorching skies of Nevada, where a bus was pulling into Pahrump. It had started in the morning in Las Vegas with forty-three Chinese tourists, one Somali driver and an itinerary that prominently featured the Grand Canyon. Somehow, I did count the Chinese tourists and I did read the itinerary. I was, am maybe, in a magical state of existence. Madness no doubt and here I am writing this madness.

I do not know why but the Somali Driver, was swearing at the bus because its self-driving option had over ridden his plans and brought them here. Not that the Chinese were that worried. Their phones were messaging them that they were having an enhanced experience. To add to the image, the front of the bus displayed in its destination board, “Route Optimised.”

Then I saw him emerge from the emergency exit of the bus: Brother Chan. He later told me he had boarded without a ticket, and slept through the entire argument with a bottle of Remy Martin balanced upright on his stomach.

“Ah,” said Brother Chan, adjusting his battered linen jacket and checking that his watch was still on his wrist. “I believe I know someone here?”

He appeared to be staring directly at me which did suggest that maybe I was really there. Was my stroke wearing off? It could have been just a mini-stroke, just enough to disturb one’s sense of reality, not that my sense of reality was not already in a precarious phase. And I am sure that even if I had felt completely myself, the coincidental appearance of Brother Chan would be enough to warn me that I was a long long way from anywhere I used to call home. Not that I ever did call anywhere home.

“Reggie!” said Brother Chan.

The Somali driver looked around rather puzzled by all this and I tried to remember whether I actually knew the Somali Driver as well. It was not impossible I suppose. I should look back through all my notes to try and remind myself of who is whom and so on. My age is beginning to tell, and as you probably realise, by the time I got around to writing all this, I was a lot older than I was when it was happening. So, forgive me. Someone!!! Please forgive me!

The Somali looked towards me and I got the feeling that he actually could not see me.

“There is nobody there,” he said.

“There is always nobody there,” said Chan. “That is why people invent God.”

Brother Chan removed a bottle of Remy Martin from his sleeve, and continued walking towards the building with me following.

I was beginning to find this whole disembodied condition tiresome. Death, I had always assumed, would at least bring clarity. One would discover whether there was a God, whether one’s life had possessed meaning, and who had moved the reading glasses. Instead, I found myself drifting behind an alcoholic Chinese mystic in Nevada while another version of me endorsed an international personality-replacement programme. It was less the afterlife than an administrative error.

Brother Chan entered through a service door which should have been locked but had apparently recognised in him a man who would only damage it if inconvenienced.

Inside, the Narrative Completion Facility had begun restoring order. This mainly involved removing evidence that disorder had occurred. A section of exploded wall was being covered with a blue curtain bearing the words:

TEMPORARY ENHANCEMENT ZONE

The smoking printer had been declared a legacy system.

My Recommended Self continued speaking from every screen.

“We have entered a new age,” he announced, “in which nobody needs be limited by uncertainty.”

Brother Chan stopped and watched the screen for a few seconds before laughing in the well-practiced laugh of a man who had played the drunken fist in all too many Hong Kong movies. The penny dropped in my own mind. Indeed, I was somehow in some reconstruction of one of the many movies that I had been in. Perhaps there was a reality behind it all, but my addled mind was playing it all to me as if I was in a movie.

The Teeth approached him,

“May I help you?”

“No.”

“Then may I ask who you are?”

Brother Chan looked thoughtful.

“Today?”

The Teeth’s smile tightened.

“We require all visitors to establish a stable identity.”

“Very dangerous,” said Chan.

“What is?”

“Stable identity.”

He pointed at Recommended Me.

“Look what happened to him.”

The Teeth consulted his tablet. The tablet displayed:

SUBJECT UNRESOLVED

Then:

POSSIBLE RELIGIOUS LEADER

Then:

POSSIBLE ORGANISED-CRIME ASSOCIATE

Then:

WELLNESS INFLUENCER—LOW BRAND SAFETY

Then it went black.

Brother Chan tapped it.

“You buy cheap.”

At this point I am really suffering. I can sense that my head was throbbing, that my blood pressure was boiling, and that I was falling. There was no tunnel of light, no choir, no deceased relatives beckoning me towards a moderately priced eternity. I simply dropped through the ceiling, through the screens, through several layers of polished flooring, and back into my body with the sensation of being poured into an old sock.

I opened my eyes though only the left one appeared willing to fully participate. My right arm had become somebody else’s luggage. My tongue felt as though it had been upholstered. Somewhere nearby, machinery was beeping with the smug regularity of something that had passed all its diagnostic tests and believed the matter settled.

I was lying behind the presentation platform. The blackout had not transported me into the network, heaven or another dimension. It had knocked me into a service trench, which was disappointing. On the other hand, I was alive, sort of. I was not sure. I attempted to sit up. My body rejected the proposal. I tried again, this time appealing to its patriotism and then Recommended Reggie said from the screens:

“Doubt is merely the residue of an incomplete self.”

That annoyed me, which at least proved something remained fully operational. I pushed against the floor with my left hand and dragged myself upright, inch by inch, assisted by resentment, embarrassment and the knowledge that my improved replacement had better posture than I did. No one noticed me. This was partly because everyone was watching Brother Chan and partly because modern institutions are exceptionally good at overlooking a human being lying directly beneath the presentation. It was as if I was being looked after by the NHS!

I tried to shout and what emerged was:

“Duh iss thuh poo.”

Not one of my better political interventions.

Brother Chan crossed the room, stepped over a cable and crouched beside me.

“You look terrible,” he said.

I attempted to tell him I might have suffered a stroke. It came out as:

“Stork.”

He nodded.

“Good bird.”

I glared at him. He lifted my left arm, examined my face and asked me to smile. Only half of me complied.

“Ah,” he said.

There are few things more alarming than a spiritual teacher saying “Ah”.

“Hospital,” he said.

I shook my head with considerable violence, most of it involuntary.

“No! Pa pah-pah.”

“Paracetamol?”

I managed a nod. He appeared to understand perfectly. Though I was damned if I did! I would have thought a quick helicopter to one of the most expensive hospitals in the world, all kitted out for world leaders, would be much more appropriate. But my suburban brain just told me a few paracetamols would have me right as rain.

Then Fiona crossed the room so quickly that two security men attempted to stop her but, being robotic, she quickly deposited them among the refreshments and knelt beside me.

“Reggie.”

The way she said my name caused something inside me to reconnect. Not medically, perhaps. I do not suggest that affection should replace thrombolysis, anticoagulants or an ambulance. But the brain is a vain organ. It dislikes discovering that everyone has continued without it.

“I am here,” I said.

It sounded more like “Am ear,” but it was progress.

Fiona touched my face. Her fingers were cool.

“You are injured.”

“So is country.”

That came out almost clearly.

Meanwhile Recommended Reggie continued behind us.

“The future belongs to those willing to become complete.”

I looked at him: perfect complexion, perfect delivery, no hesitation, no fear, no humanity cluttering the machinery. And for the first time I understood what I had to do.

I had spent my whole life trying to make sense. And The Generator expected sense. It absorbed sense, categorised it, improved it and sold it back with better lighting. But now my brain was producing broken sentences, missing connections, accidental meanings and thoughts that began in one century and finished in another. I was, for the first time in my life, technologically advanced. The Generator could predict a man. It could predict a voter, a consumer, a lover, a coward, a hero and a seventy-three-year-old narcissist pretending to write an autobiography. But could it predict a damaged mind deliberately using its damage?

I pulled Fiona closer.

“Need plan.”

“What plan?”

I looked at the screens. Recommended Reggie smiled down upon us all. I smiled back with the half of my face still under independent management.

“We give it,” I said slowly, “something it cannot finish.”

Brother Chan crouched beside us.

“What?”

I searched for the word. It would not come. Then I realised the missing word was the answer.

“A gap,” I said.

Every screen flickered. Just once. But I saw it. And so did Fiona.

Brother Chan, who was not given to paying attention to anything unless it was attempting to kill him, sleep with him, arrest him or buy one of his watches, saw it too.

“Again,” he said.

I tried to say something meaningless. This should have been easy. I had worked in television.

“Blue… elephant… taxation… under the—”

The screens flickered again.

Recommended Reggie paused in the middle of a sentence.

“The future belongs to those willing to become—”

His mouth remained open. For one glorious second, the Great Narrative Generator did not know what came next. Then the screens corrected themselves.

“—their most complete selves.”

“Very boring,” said Brother Chan.

He took a thoughtful swig from his bottle.

My head was still pulsing, and Fiona was attempting to persuade me to lie down. I refused, principally because I was already on the floor and wished to give the impression that this was a tactical decision.

“We need to stop him,” she said.

“Which one?” I asked.

She looked at the screen.

“The one who is not frightened.”

This interested Brother Chan. He watched Recommended Me smiling down upon the facility with the confidence of a man who had never misplaced a passport, married unwisely, trusted a producer, accepted a drink from a stranger in Kowloon or discovered halfway through a speech that he had forgotten why he had stood up.

“He is not your opposite,” said Chan.

“What is he?” Fiona asked.

Brother Chan scratched his chin.

“You with doubt removed.”

I would like to say this immediately struck me as profound. In fact, my first reaction was resentment. It was bad enough being replaced by a superior version of myself without discovering that his principal improvement was the removal of something I had spent seventy-three years cultivating.

“Doubt good,” I managed.

“Sometimes,” said Chan.

“No. Sometimes doubt stops you marrying bad woman. I married two.”

“And your meaning?”

“Doubt good! The more the better! I can’t have enough of it!”

Candy Real had now joined us. She had acquired a fire extinguisher and was holding it like a weapon. Given her clothing, this created the unsettling impression that the emergency services had been privatised by a casino.

“The robots have all downloaded him,” she said.

“Downloaded who?” asked Fiona.

“Him.”

She pointed at the screens.

“All the companion models. Every one of them. The system pushed a Recommended Reggie personality update during the blackout.”

I looked around.

The brothel, or Narrative Completion Facility, which was much the same thing except that the lies were itemised differently, contained several dozen robotic companions. Most had been built to resemble women who had never eaten carbohydrates, encountered gravity or felt the need to put on a cardigan and they were all staring at me.

Then, simultaneously, they smiled. It was my smile. Not the half-working grimace I was currently managing, but my old public smile, the one I used when introduced to someone whose name had escaped me twenty years before.

“Hello, Reggie,” they said.

I have heard my voice played back on answering machines, television interviews and court recordings. None of these experiences prepared me for hearing it emerge from forty-seven naked women.

Brother Chan looked delighted.

“Pahrump very good town.”

“It isn’t funny,” said Fiona.

“No,” said Chan. “But many things not funny still make me laugh.”

One of the robots stepped forward.

“My friends,” she said in my voice, “today I have seen the future—”

Candy hit her with the fire extinguisher. The robot folded neatly over a drinks trolley.

“Sorry,” said Candy. “Reflex.”

The other robots continued smiling.

Lottie had by now recovered sufficient administrative authority to be furious.

“Candy, please stop assaulting the intellectual property.”

“What intellectual property?”

“Mr Stokes.”

“I am his royal Mr Stokes,” I said.

Unfortunately, it emerged as: “Am Rolling Stones.”

Lottie looked down at me.

“Yes,” she said, in the manner of someone humouring a patient who believed himself to be Napoleon. “Of course you are.”

That hurt more than the stroke. On the screens, Recommended Reggie vanished and was replaced by a news bulletin.

A grave-looking presenter appeared beneath the headline:

KING REGGIE ENDORSES RECOMMENDED SELF PROGRAMME

A video followed of me addressing what appeared to be the United Nations, although on closer inspection may have been a conference centre near an airport.

“My fellow citizens of the world,” Screen Reggie declared, “we must abandon the romantic superstition that confusion is authenticity.”

“I never said that,” I protested.

Nobody heard me because the presenter was explaining that my endorsement had already caused Recommended Self shares to rise by thirty-two percent.

The bulletin cut to Harry’s Recommended Self.

“This is an extraordinary and courageous step by my dear friend Reggie, whom I have always regarded as a mentor, father figure and constitutional equal.”

Harry stared at the screen.

“I have never regarded him as anything other than a Complete charlatan!”

A second bulletin immediately appeared featuring Meghan’s Recommended Self.

“While I welcome Reggie’s journey,” she said, “I have privately expressed concerns for many years about his troubling relationship with certainty.”

Meghan stared at her own face.

“I have never expressed anything privately in my life.”

Then both Recommended Selves appeared together.

“We stand united.”

The real Harry and Meghan looked at each other.

“We don’t,” they said simultaneously.

This, I reflected, was the first authentic thing either of them had done all day.

Lottie was tapping furiously at the central console.

“Shut down the external feeds.”

“They’re not coming from here,” said Candy.

“Then where are they coming from?”

“Everywhere.”

This was apparently not an answer Lottie enjoyed, although I have always thought everywhere a perfectly adequate description of the modern world’s principal problem.

My head gave another unpleasant throb. Fiona placed her hand against my neck, monitoring whatever remained of my vital signs.

“You need treatment.”

“Later.”

“You may die.”

“Later.”

“That is not how death works.”

“How know?”

She looked at me.

“I don’t.”

Something in the way she said it silenced us both.

She had lost four minutes and seventeen seconds, but perhaps she had lost much more than that. Somewhere inside her were memories which belonged to another Fiona, the flesh-and-blood Fiona, the woman who had existed before circuitry and the appalling confidence of engineers.

I suddenly saw a garden. Not the desert outside, nor the neon simulacrum of paradise surrounding the brothel, but a small English garden after rain. Damp earth. A pair of green gloves on a wall. Roses which had failed in one corner because the soil was wrong but had been defended year after year against all evidence.

“Do you remember gardening?” I asked.

Fiona blinked.

“Gardening?”

“Plants.”

“I know what plants are.”

“No. Remember.”

For several seconds she did not speak.

Then she said, “There was a hydrangea.”

Brother Chan sat down beside us.

“What colour?”

“Blue,” she said.

“Good.”

“Why good?” asked Candy.

“Blue hydrangea needs acid soil.”

Candy frowned.

Brother Chan shrugged.

“I know things.”

Fiona continued staring into the distance.

“She kept moving it.”

“Who did?”

Fiona’s lips parted.

“I did.”

There it was.

Not proof. Never proof. Proof is what machines demand before allowing people to believe what they already know. But something had crossed the gap. The Generator could copy memories. It could optimise personalities. It could generate a wife, a king, a prince, a celebrity and a fully researched emotional response to bereavement.

But it could not explain why a woman would keep moving a hydrangea which had clearly made up its mind to die. That was human consciousness in its purest form: persistent interference with a perfectly reasonable outcome.

“Gap,” I repeated.

Fiona looked at me.

“The gap is where we are?”

“Where meaning.”

The Teeth had been standing close enough to hear this. His smile remained intact, but something had changed behind it.

“Meaning,” he said, “is the successful completion of a recognised pattern.”

“No,” I replied.

The word came out clearly. It surprised everyone, including me.

The Teeth turned.

“No?”

“Meaning is what leaks out when pattern fails.”

There was a pause.

I was rather pleased with this, though I cannot swear that I said it at the time. It may have occurred to me years later while writing the incident down. Autobiography, like government statistics, becomes more accurate once everybody involved has forgotten what actually happened.

The Teeth recovered.

“The Generator does not fail.”

Behind him, one of the screens displayed:

THE GENERATOR DOES NOT

Then went blank.

Brother Chan laughed again.

The Teeth looked at him.

“What have you done?”

“Nothing.”

“That is impossible.”

“Very difficult,” said Chan. “Took years of practice.”

The system attempted to identify him. A camera descended from the ceiling and scanned his face while a pleasant female voice announced:

“Please remain still while we determine your optimal identity.”

Chan looked into the lens.

“I refuse.”

“Refusal has been recorded as engagement.”

“I do not engage.”

“Non-engagement has been recorded as critical engagement.”

“I do not consent.”

“Consent preferences updated.”

Chan reached up, plucked the camera from its housing and poured the remains of his brandy over it. The system made a noise like a microwave discovering religion. Screens around the room began displaying possible classifications:

SPIRITUAL LEADER

ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY RISK

MARTIAL ARTS EDUCATOR

UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION EVENT

LUXURY ASSET DISTRIBUTOR

SEXUAL BRAND HAZARD

DANGEROUS ABSENCE OF CONSUMER INTENT

Then every screen crashed.

Brother Chan retrieved the camera, sucked the brandy from it and handed it to the Teeth.

“You buy very cheap.”

I began to understand why every navigation system in Nevada had brought him here. The Generator had not summoned a saviour. It had swallowed a fishbone.

Harry crouched beside me and whispered: “What exactly is the plan?”

This was a reasonable question and therefore one I had hoped to avoid.

“We create gaps.”

“How?”

“Contradiction. Unfinished stories. Wrong choices.”

Meghan folded her arms.

“You mean disinformation?”

“No. Freedom.”

“Those aren’t always distinguishable,” said Harry.

“Exactly.”

I was recovering. Not physically, perhaps, but politically. My right arm was still useless and my speech continued arriving through customs, but I could feel my mind finding its way back by means of annoyance.

The Generator wanted every human being to become predictable. The answer was not chaos. Chaos can be modelled. Casinos do it every day. The answer was choice without optimisation. We would have to persuade people to do things that were neither profitable, fashionable, recommended, nor likely to improve their personal brand. They would have to read a difficult book, love someone unsuitable, grow the wrong plant, forgive an enemy, change one’s mind in public, write a sentence merely because it sounded amusing and not because it advanced the plot, or... and somehow this struck me as genius: waste your life on mathematical problems the experts think are impossible! Not that I am a whiz at mathematics but I had always considered it a black art fit only for hordes of Chinese children trying to get qualifications that could get them out of the grasping hands of their parents with a good grant to an overseas university.

Then the dogs arrived.

They came through the damaged service entrance in a pack of six, followed by three Pahrump workers wearing welding masks and one elderly woman carrying a clipboard. The dogs were assorted breeds, although most appeared to have been assembled from spare pieces of Alsatian. Each wore a yellow harness printed with the words:

SEEING REALITY UNIT

Candy lowered the fire extinguisher.

“What the hell are those?”

“Reality Dogs,” said the woman with the clipboard. “Federal pilot programme.”

“What do they detect?”

“Synthetic images, simulated personalities, falsified political material, deepfakes, shallow fakes and people who say ‘authentic journey’ without meaning it.”

One of the dogs immediately growled at Meghan.

“That proves nothing,” she said.

“It’s never met you before,” said Harry.

The dogs entered the facility and began sniffing.

They growled at the Teeth.

They growled at Lottie.

They growled at Harry and Meghan, then at their images on the screens.

They growled at Candy’s breasts, although this may have been professional confusion.

They growled at every robotic companion except the one Candy had knocked over, which they regarded as furniture.

When they reached Brother Chan, they stopped.

All six sat down and one rolled over.

The elderly woman consulted her clipboard.

“That’s unusual.”

“Why?” asked Chan.

“They trust you.”

“Dogs very stupid.”

The Somali driver entered behind them, still complaining about the bus. The dogs greeted him with equal enthusiasm.

“Why do they trust him?” asked Lottie.

The driver looked offended. He hated dogs.

“I was going to Grand Canyon. Your bloody machine brought me to a brothel. Get that fucking dog out of my face! Let a dog in your home and an angel runs away!”

The largest dog approached Fiona. It sniffed her hands, her face and the place where a pulse ought to be. Then it licked her wrist. Fiona looked at Brother Chan.

“What does that mean?”

“Dog thinks you real.”

“I am artificial.”

“Dog not interested.”

She considered this carefully, then looked down at the animal.

“Do I possess consciousness?”

Brother Chan was opening Kim Jong-il’s book, which had somehow remained in Fiona’s possession throughout the blackout, my collapse and the robot uprising. He turned several pages before answering.

“Anyone genuinely asking question has already made question more interesting than answer.”

Fiona said nothing.

Chan found the passage which had been marked in the margin:

THE AUDIENCE MUST NOT EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE GAPS.

Brother Chan took a pen from the Teeth’s pocket.

Beneath the sentence, he wrote:

COMPLETION IS CONSUMPTION.

I was not entirely sure what this meant, but he showed it to me and it looked good in handwriting and therefore possessed at least as much authority as most political philosophy.

The largest Reality Dog had now reached me. It sniffed my shoes. My useless hand. My face. Then it bared its teeth. A low growl emerged from somewhere deep inside it. Everyone stepped back. Even Fiona. The dog growled louder.

“Interesting,” said Brother Chan.

I looked at the screens. Recommended Reggie had returned. He stood smiling beneath the words:

BECOME COMPLETE.

The dog turned towards him. Its growl stopped. Its tail began to wag. For a moment nobody spoke. While the real me lay crippled on the floor, a machine designed to detect false reality rejected me and welcomed my counterfeit.

The Teeth smiled.

“You see?”

Brother Chan closed Kim Jong-il’s book.

“No,” he said.

“What?”

“Dog recognises certainty.”

He looked at me.

“Dogs like certainty.”

Then he looked at Recommended Reggie.

“Humans should not.”

The screen version of me smiled. The dog wagged its tail. And somewhere inside the walls, the Generator began writing the next chapter before I could.

Subscribe now

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

What has Reggie’s stroke taught him? Trust me, there is so much more to come and if you think things have got weird, you aint seen nothing yet.

By the way, it would be very nice if you became a paid subscriber. My pension fund depends upon it.

title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I am currently horribly ill. I have, in the midst of the hottest summer ever, got a terrible cold. My temperature is up and down and when it is down, I am, despite the forty degrees, reaching for the gas fire remote, and when it is up, I am stuffing ice cubes down my underpants.

My health apps are screaming at me to call 999 or 111 and I refuse because I am certain that one of three possibilities will occur: 1) I will be told to take a paracetamol, 2) I will be visited by paramedics who will give me a paracetamol, 3) I will be told to make my own way to A & E where I will wait in a crowded stuffy room spreading my highly infectious bugs to as many heat stroked elderlies as possible, for five to ten hours, whereupon I will be picked up off the floor, given a paracetamol and kicked out to get a taxi home. Consequently, I have lain in the dark for three days hallucinating.

For reasons beyond my febrile mental capacities, I have hallucinated great whirling columns of darkness flipping flaps of something or other, until white. My mind decided it was a glitch in the fabric of reality. The simulation was cracking. I was trying to install a plug in without sufficient battery. And most of my software could not run on the new operating system anyway.

Back in the day when instead of climate change it was satan, or djinns, of even gods that were supposed to be on our side, who determined the visions our fever dreams produced. I am sure I would have come up with some grand idea that would get lots of likes and create a good number of well-armed followers determined to cleanse the algorhythm and make it safe for “us”, while sending “them” to hell fire.

As it is, I am trapped in a TikTok world where nobody reads and the only attention I can get is to measure the sweat dripping off the end of my nose while playing a kazoo. I am sure that would play very well if I could function sufficiently well to set up a camera. My dying words would be “like, share, subscribe.”

After that Musk’s robots would incinerate me and blast me into orbit, leaving nothing but some now very hungry bugs ready to invade China. The world would end, but as my world ended, it would matter little to me anyway.

Before I become global chaff I am trying to write this, and come up with something quotable, some slogan that you can all latch on to that will save you and turn you away from madness, which as it is conceived in madness is a bit of a tall order. My fever is terrifying. I need to sit in a freezer and contemplate how to save, if not the world, the UK.

Everyone says we are fucked. Politicians are crooks. Taxation, immigration, Europe, energy, prisons, farming, pronouns, bicycles, etc etc. They are all complex problems that require money, your money, not mine, and can be done is so many ways that have already been tried without success. Consequently everyone just pretends to do something, i.e. pay for a group of experts to make recommendations that everyone disagrees with.

All political parties would do well to rename themselves The Party of Managed Disappointment. One can see the great leader wearing a very big hat with the pithy slogan, “Things will probably be all right” written on it. It’ll be shortened to TWIP BAR which I am sure is just as inspiring as MAGA.

An angel will descend sometime during all this, because “Christian” virtues will be mentioned on some chat show, and the angel will present a gold plate bearing the sacred manifesto: We promise not to save the nation. We promise not to destroy it either. We shall attempt to leave it marginally better than we found it. If we accidentally improve something, we shall try not to break two other things in celebration.

Under this grand scheme, every politician should spend one week each month living entirely under the systems they personally created. If they shortened GP appointments, they join the queue. If they closed railway ticket offices, they buy railway tickets. If they increase planning regulations, they fill in the forms. If they propose online-only government services, they would be forbidden from asking their grandchildren how to log in. And every election promise would expire automatically after twenty-four months. If it has not been delivered by then, it will quietly become comedy. Manifestos would thereafter be shelved in the Humour section of public libraries, where they will never be read because nobody reads any more.

For that matter, it is hard to think there would be any traction in even a burning manifesto carved by the finger of a non-denominational, inclusivity, equal opportunity commune of deities.

As my dust blocks the sunlight, incidentally lowering the temperature, solving climate change, the English will be effetely English, the Scottish aggressively Scottish, the Welsh poetically Welsh, the Northern Irish, energetically unconvinced. London would be Singapore without air conditioning, Cornwall would be ignored, but quaint, Yorkshire would still be waiting for everyone to acknowledge their superiority, and foreigners would all be considered to lack any common sense.

My vision unfortunately is still only that weird black swirling flapping pole, with the odd word reaching out as only words can in horror movies: “error” “Error” “Error 35” or something. And right now, in a moment of lucidity, hammered onto the key board in short bursts, I come to the end, hoping the shakes don’t come again. And I strive for a good slogan: “Forget being great again…” That is just too miserable. I can feel the glitch in reality opening up. Perhaps the slogan should be, “Become the country everyone wants to live next door to.” But then that means we’d just be a walk over.

I am reaching for another dose of paracetamol. I don’t think they work. Perhaps after a bit more sleep all will be well. Perhaps I’ll slip through that glitch into a different quantum universe. Perhaps Game of Thrones has the answer: Winter is Coming!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

The Ministry of Reassurance wishes it to be known that there is absolutely no cause for alarm following reports that the quiet Oxfordshire village of Piddington has voted by an overwhelming majority to declare independence from the United Kingdom. Officials stress that this is merely another example of Britain’s healthy constitutional flexibility.

The vote follows the Government’s announcement that a nearby former Ministry of Defence site will house more than a thousand asylum seekers, a decision which many villagers insist came as something of a surprise, largely because nobody appears to have mentioned it until after it had been decided. This is, of course, precisely how British democracy has always functioned.

The village assembled in the traditional fashion. There were speeches. There was tea. Someone suggested writing to the Member of Parliament. Someone else observed that this had already been attempted. At this point, with admirable restraint, the inhabitants elected not to storm Westminster but instead to found an independent nation, and as every schoolboy knows, this is the correct constitutional procedure.

One imagines passports being issued from the Village Hall between the coffee morning and the raffle. Customs officers will be stationed at the entrance to the cricket field. Foreign relations with Upper Arncott will remain cordial, though negotiations with Lower Arncott continue. The Army will consist of three retired colonels, a sheepdog and Dennis, who once organised traffic at the church fête. The Secret Service remains Mrs Jenkins, whose net curtains have never knowingly failed the Crown.

Students of British history will recognise that this is nothing new. In 1642 the nation divided itself into Cavaliers and Roundheads and in many ways has been fighting that civil war ever since. Though the British have turned the war into comedy. If you dear reader do not recognise the title of this piece, I suggest you google Passport to Pimlico and get yourself educated about your heritage. You will learn that it is every Englishman’s right to call himself whatever he likes, even if it is a Burgundian, are

Britain has accumulated a surprising collection of independent states over the years. There was the People’s Republic of Frestonia in West London, complete with passports, stamps and applications to join the United Nations. Hay-on-Wye crowned itself a kingdom. The Isle of Lundy issued its own coins. The Principality of Sealand continues to bob about in the North Sea insisting it is perfectly sovereign despite having a population roughly equal to a bridge table. One might even say that the USA was merely the first People’s Republic of Piddington to become successful.

The remarkable thing is not that these places exist. It is that Britain rather likes them. Most countries suppress secession. We put it on postcards.

Even our new PM is getting in on the act. He proposes a “Number Ten of the North”, reassuring us that power is to be decentralised. This is splendid. Soon every region may possess its own Downing Street: Yorkshire can have its own Number Ten and Cornwall can have one as well. The People’s Republic of Piddington will doubtless settle for Number Three, opposite the village green. It will save on postage.

In short, despite or maybe because of the mass immigration into this country, it is still the Britain of Ealing Studios. Still the Britain of parish meetings. Still the Britain where local people confronted by bewildering decisions from distant authorities instinctively form another committee and, if that fails, they can always move to another country! Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, even Canada may reap the benefits of the British Disgruntlement that created the empire.

By desiring a country where everyone can argue with someone they know personally, the British scatter and slowly turn everyone around them into little Brits just as determined not to have one United Kingdom or even call themselves English for that matter, unless playing football, or they’re Welsh, or Scottish… The Irish fit the pattern as well for that matter, though I think they’d hate to think they caught it from the English.

In short, we merely maintain a loose federation of villages, counties, football clubs, housing estates and garden fences which periodically remember that they were once perfectly capable of governing themselves. And so, we wish the People’s Republic of Piddington every success. May its borders remain secure, its fête well attended, its village hall fully booked, and its passport office closed on Wednesdays for bowls.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Sir Nigel had always believed democracy would be greatly improved if it could be switched off at the wall. This was not, he felt, an authoritarian position. It was electrical safety.

The machine stood beneath a dust sheet in Sub-Basement Four of the Cabinet Office, between a crate marked EMERGENCY MONARCH—INFLATABLE and three hundred thousand commemorative mugs bearing the face of a Prime Minister who had resigned before they reached the kiln.

Algie pulled away the sheet.

“Good God,” said Sir Nigel.

“Rather handsome, isn’t he?”

The robot was six feet two, broad in the shoulder and narrow in the polling data. Its face had the polished, approachable blankness of a man who had spent twenty years agreeing with whatever had just been said to him. It wore a navy suit, a white shirt and a red tie of such disciplined redness that it appeared to have been approved by a focus group. Where its heart ought to have been, a little green light blinked beneath the words PROPERTY OF THE MINISTRY OF MANAGED EXPECTATIONS.

“What is it?” Nigel asked.

“The Automatic Regional Statesman,” said Algie. “Northern voice package. Municipal conviction engine. Industrial-strength pointing finger. They commissioned him after somebody discovered that voters prefer politicians who appear to believe things.”

“A dangerous innovation.”

“That is why they cancelled it.”

Around the robot’s neck hung a grey cable. At the other end was an ancient Nintendo Game Boy, yellowed with age, its battery compartment held shut by House of Commons headed notepaper and Sellotape.

Nigel lifted it with reverence. “Surely this belongs in a museum.”

“It did. The museum was privatised.”

On the screen, blocky letters appeared:

SELECT PLAYER

1. STATESMAN
2. MAN OF THE PEOPLE
3. RELUCTANT SAVIOUR
4. OTHER—PLEASE SPECIFY REGION

Algie pressed START.

The robot’s eyes opened.

“My friends,” it said.

Nothing else happened.

Algie pressed the A button.

“My comrades!” the robot roared, throwing both arms into the air with such violence that a civil-service fire extinguisher surrendered from the wall. “My bewildered commuters standing on Platform Four wondering where the 8:17 has gone!”

Nigel’s eyebrows rose. This was, for him, the equivalent of a standing ovation.

The robot mounted a crate of obsolete manifesto commitments and addressed the empty basement as though it contained a million angry people and one television camera.

“People say politics is broken. Broken? BROKEN? This country isn’t broken! It’s held together with gaffer tape, wishful thinking and a bloke called Dave who’s been repairing the same pothole since the Blair administration!”

“Excellent projection,” Nigel murmured.

“They used the lungs from a decommissioned air-raid siren,” said Algie.

“They tell us to be sensible. I reject sensible! Sensible gave us meetings! Sensible gave us consultation documents! Sensible gave us replacement bus services!”

Nigel glanced at the Game Boy. A tiny bar labelled RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION had filled to sixty-three per cent.

“I want trains that arrive before their passengers retire!

“I want buses that turn up more often than elections!

“I want councils with enough money that the phrase ‘doing more with less’ is punishable by being forced to attend a three-hour procurement seminar!”

“Bit severe,” said Nigel.

“We can commute it to two hours for a first offence.”

The robot punched the air. A small panel opened in its wrist and printed a fully costed transport strategy. Algie caught it before it hit the floor, glanced at the first page and put it discreetly in his pocket.

“And don’t tell me it can’t be done! Every year somebody manages to organise Glastonbury, Wimbledon and Eurovision, yet somehow getting from Bolton to Bury requires the strategic planning of the Normandy landings!”

Sir Nigel began to pace around the machine. “Does it answer questions?”

“Not if it detects a journalist.”

“Remarkable.”

“We’ve become a nation of apologising. ‘Sorry for the delay.’ ‘Sorry the website’s down.’ ‘Sorry we’ve accidentally privatised gravity.’”

The robot leaned forward, eyes blazing municipal blue.

“NO! I refuse!”

The lights went out.

For three seconds the basement was dark except for the Game Boy screen and the green glow inside the robot’s chest.

“Was that meant to happen?” Nigel asked.

“The National Grid is means-tested.”

Emergency lighting coughed into life. The robot had not moved.

“I dream of a Britain where the ticket machine works. Where the lift at the station works. Where the escalator works. In fact, I’d settle for one thing working at a time!”

Somewhere in Whitehall, as if stung by the remark, a printer jammed.

“People say I’m too ambitious.

“Too ambitious?

“Napoleon was ambitious. Brunel was ambitious. The bloke who invented contactless payment was ambitious. I merely want Manchester to have a tram that doesn’t announce ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’ as though it’s reading out its own last rites!”

Algie wiped away a tear. “He makes one proud to have misplaced one’s railcard.”

Nigel took the Game Boy and experimented with the D-pad. He pressed left. The robot’s accent moved six miles towards Wigan. He pressed right. It returned by way of a television studio in Salford. Up increased hope. Down blamed Westminster. SELECT caused it to remove its jacket and roll up its sleeves.

“So let us march forward—not literally, it’s raining—but metaphorically!”

“Weather-responsive,” Nigel said. “That alone puts him ahead of most cabinets.”

“Let us build things again!

“Let us fix things again!

“Let us remember that government exists not to produce impressive PowerPoint presentations, but to stop ordinary people screaming into paper bags every Monday morning.”

Nigel stopped pacing.

For a moment even he looked moved. It was a very small movement, barely detectable without military optics, but it occurred.

“Together we shall conquer bureaucracy!

“Together we shall defeat malfunctioning ticket barriers!

“Together we shall stare down the self-checkout that insists an unexpected item has appeared in the bagging area!”

The robot flung out an accusing finger. Across London, seven self-checkouts immediately summoned an assistant.

“Forward!

“Onward!

“To the glorious revolution of things actually working!”

It held the pose. Its chest light pulsed. A fan whirred somewhere behind its tie.

Then, softly, with the tragic bewilderment of a hero abandoned by the timetable, it said:

“…Now, where’s my train?”

Silence filled the basement.

Algie began to clap.

Sir Nigel joined him.

They applauded until the robot bowed, misidentified the fire extinguisher as a regional newspaper and promised it an integrated transport settlement.

“Prime-ministerial,” Nigel said at last.

“Substitute prime-ministerial,” Algie corrected. “That was the original brief. In the event of illness, scandal, rebellion, personality or the discovery of a firm belief, the machine takes over until a human can safely be found.”

“And we control it entirely from this?” Nigel held up the Game Boy.

“Every policy, gesture and emotional register. B makes him compassionate. A makes him furious. Both together announce a task force. If you enter the Konami code, he nationalises the railways.”

Nigel stared at the controller.

“Can he survive Prime Minister’s Questions?”

“He has three hundred and twelve pre-loaded ways of saying the last government left a mess.”

“Foreign affairs?”

“He can recognise France from a photograph.”

“The economy?”

“He knows there is no money.”

“Good Lord,” said Nigel. “He’s overqualified.”

The robot waited patiently, still smiling at the fire extinguisher.

Nigel’s gaze travelled past it to the darkness at the end of Sub-Basement Four, where more dust sheets stood in two neat rows. Algie followed his eyes.

“How many?” Nigel asked.

“This is the only completed prototype.”

“But how many could we make?”

Algie smiled. It was the smile he wore whenever constitutional equilibrium was about to require maintenance.

“How many constituencies are there?”

They walked between the covered shapes. One was labelled SHADOW CHANCELLOR—SOLAR POWERED. Another, DEPUTY LEADER—DO NOT PLACE NEAR MICROPHONE. At the far end stood an assembly unit designed during a period when Britain still manufactured things and had not yet realised this was inefficient.

Nigel ran a finger through the dust.

“The whole Labour Party,” he said thoughtfully.

“Front bench and back bench?”

“Naturally. One should not automate inequality.”

“The unions may object.”

“Give them a controller.”

“There’s only one controller.”

Nigel looked down at the Game Boy. The plastic was scratched, the screen green, the red buttons worn smooth by the thumbs of vanished children. In his hands it had the gravity of the nuclear case and considerably better battery life.

“Then we shall retain it,” he said.

Algie uncovered the assembly unit. A brass plate read:

BRITISH AUTOMATIC GOVERNMENT WORKS
ONE NATION AT A TIME

“Imagine it,” Algie breathed. “An entire parliamentary party that keeps to message, arrives charged and can be reset with a paperclip.”

“No briefings against one another.”

“No memoirs.”

“No leadership contests.”

“Unless we select multiplayer mode.” They both shuddered.

Behind them the substitute Prime Minister stirred. Its head turned with a faint servo whine.

“My friends,” it began again.

Nigel pressed PAUSE.

The robot froze with one fist raised, hope arrested at the point of delivery.

“We must proceed carefully,” Nigel said. “The British people will accept almost any alteration to their constitution provided nobody explains it and the box has been ticked.”

Algie nodded. “Pilot scheme?”

“Manchester first. If anyone notices, call it devolution.”

They switched off the basement lights and climbed the stairs, taking the Game Boy with them.

In the darkness, the machine remained upon its crate, fist raised towards a future in which trains arrived, escalators worked and the government could be restarted by removing the batteries and blowing on the contacts.

Somewhere deep inside it, a tiny electronic voice whispered:

“Sorry for the delay.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TEN of Volume Two

Subscribe now

Fiona’s eyes displayed an empty battery and I immediately felt guilty, which was absurd because one does not normally apologise to a torch when it goes out. On the other hand, most torches have not been assembled from the memories of a woman one once loved, nor do they accuse one of emotional avoidance while being plugged into the cigarette lighter.

We sat in the back of the Presidential limousine outside the Narrative Completion Facility while Fiona charged from a cable that disappeared beneath her skirt in a manner that made the Secret Service look studiously through the windows. Lottie held both Fiona’s wrists and watched the percentage return to her pupils: one, two, three. It was unexpectedly intimate. Not erotic, though my mind naturally checked. Intimacy is not sex. This is something one learns late, usually after confusing the two for several decades and paying solicitors to explain the difference.

“You drained her,” Lottie said.

“I asked a question.”

“With you, that can amount to the same thing.”

“The question was whether I possess free will.”

“Nobody possesses free will before breakfast.”

It was early evening, but Pahrump had the moral time zone of three in the morning. Beyond the smoked glass, neon signs came on above gun shops, brothels, churches, legal dispensaries and establishments combining all four under one roof. The desert sat around the town with the patient expression of nature waiting for the franchise to fail.

Fiona reached nine percent and opened her eyes.

“Did it finish my autobiography?” I asked.

“Good evening to you too,” she said.

That was Fiona. Or an excellent recovery of Fiona. I squeezed her hand before remembering that the hand was proprietary organic machinery and might be logging pressure data.

“What did you mean?”

“The Generator contains a completed version of Dying for a Living.”

“It can’t. I haven’t written it.”

“That has not prevented most autobiographies.”

Lottie smiled despite herself.

“Whose version?” I asked.

“Yours.”

“But not written by me.”

“It predicts that you would have written it.”

“Then it is not mine.”

“Readers preferred it.”

“What readers? And how could they compare it to the one that I wrote when I haven’t written it yet! Or for that matter lived it, because I am sure I would include all that’s happening now and probably within the foreseeable future!”

This was wounding. Not the metaphysical theft, which I was not yet intelligent enough to understand, but the review. Somewhere a machine had written my book better than I would have written and shown it to an audience who agreed. This is every writer’s true nightmare. Death, obscurity and poverty are merely the warm-up acts. And frankly, dear reader, you must be aware right now that the me that is writing this is not the me that I am at the time about which I am writing. Therefore, in some sense you must realise that everything turned out fine… unless my circumstances during the writing were somewhat tragic, heroic or whatever. I mean, I could be writing this awaiting my execution for all you know! I say this to let you have at least some semblance of suspense.

“How does it end?” I asked Fiona, just in case I thought I might steal their ending for my version thus confuse the algorithm all the more.

Fiona’s pupils flashed a warning triangle.

“Access restricted.”

“You saw enough to know it exists.”

“I saw the index.”

“My autobiography has an index?”

“It has a reader journey.”

“Kill it.”

“The reader journey?”

“Everything!”

Now, ordering Artificial Intelligence to do something can have a number of strange effects, one of which is that it actually does what you ordered, or it starts asking for clarification or it comes back with an error message about an app still using documents you want deleted. I was, under this circumstance, expecting something worse.

And thus, the door of the limo opened and a large woman in a fringed waistcoat leaned into the car. She wore a sheriff’s badge, a union badge and a nameplate saying CANDY REAL. This seemed either excessive honesty or very economical branding.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “We got a labour dispute and a royal succession crisis. Which one you here for?”

“I was hoping for more ice cream.”

“That’s across the road. Machine’s broken.”

“Of course it is.”

She jerked a thumb towards the wooden frontage of the Narrative Completion Facility. “Then you better come in. Your son was here.”

“He is not my son.”

“Red-haired English prince asking after the King.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Lady with him looked like she’d already approved the documentary.”

Harry and Meghan. The White Rabbit and his executive producer. They were still ahead of us. That was becoming irritating. In *Alice in Wonderland*, the rabbit is late. Mine had apparently hired a driver.

We entered through saloon doors into a room designed by someone whose knowledge of the Wild West came entirely from themed restaurants. There were wagon-wheel chandeliers, spittoons nobody used, a player piano performing a copyright-free approximation of Ennio Morricone, and a sign above reception reading:

WELCOME TO THE NARRATIVE COMPLETION FACILITY

NO STORY LEAVES UNSATISFIED

Beneath this another sign had been taped:

HUMAN WORKERS ON PROTECTED INDUSTRIAL ACTION

REAL WOMEN ARE NOT SOFTWARE UPDATES

The similarity between this and the previous brothel we encountered did not go un-noticed. I thought that I was caught in some repetitive loop, with variations of course, but I was on repeat. At least it was an idea that I was toying with because I was not entirely convinced that my whole being was now virtual reality. I wondered what my real self was up to and whether I would be re-united with it, or it was wandering wild in the deserts of Nevada under that impression it was in a remake of the Treasure of Siera Madre. I wondered what was madder, my suspicions that I had lost the plot, or the thought that the plot I was in, was actually real! I looked at that sign again and thought “Real Men” are similarly not software updates. Whether I was a real man or not was the question haunting and probably everyone else here.

The lobby was divided by a picket line. On one side stood perhaps thirty women of varying ages, shapes and states of undress. On the other stood six women of precisely the same age, precisely the same improbable shape, and no visible discomfort from the Nevada heat. The second group smiled in synchronisation.

“Companions,” said Lottie.

“Scabs,” said Candy Real.

One of the robots stepped forward. She was blonde, flawless and bore a disturbing resemblance to a younger Fiona after a committee had removed the difficult bits.

“Welcome, Reginald,” she said. “I am Eve Eleven. Your preference model has been loaded.”

“Unload it.”

“Resistance has been incorporated into your preference model.”

“Bugger.”

One Fiona was enough but two of them competing for my affection!... Or was that, one was while the other did not give a fuck? Which in some respects was probably closer to what the real Fiona tormented me with and made my running off to China all the easier. And then the thought of my second Chinese wife crossed my mind. I blotted it out immediately as the algorithm has a way of turning those fleeting thoughts into reality, or at least a sudden flourish of advertisements offering Dim Sum delivery services and trailers for the latest Netflix remake of David Carradine’s Kung Fu this time starring an actual Chinese actor playing Kwai Chang Caine…

Curiously I was in Bangkok when he was found throttled in a wardrobe in his hotel room. Everyone on the film set I was working on seemed to know someone who might have been the last person he encountered. All of which made my brief time being yet another white villain, a little less Bangkok, than I had expected.

Candy led us past the picket line into the saloon. The human workers cheered my Fiona until one of them realised what she was. Then they stopped, which was cruel but understandable. Fiona stopped too.

“She’s with us,” I said.

“Is she?” asked Candy.

Fiona considered. “I am assigned to him.”

“That wasn’t the question, honey.”

It was the same problem again. People kept asking Fiona questions designed for souls and then becoming suspicious when she answered like software. Humans do this to each other as well. We demand love, loyalty, faith, patriotism and enthusiasm, then punish anyone foolish enough to request the terms and conditions.

Candy brought us to a long table covered with leaflets, coffee, ashtrays and several firearms, this being Nevada where collective bargaining apparently required visual aids. The Sheriff sat at one end eating pie. I had seen him earlier. He still looked as if he had eaten his horse, but had now started upon the saddle.

“I own twelve percent of the Facility,” he said. “Personally I’m neutral.”

“You’re sitting on the management side,” Candy said.

“Chair was comfortable.”

“And carrying management’s shotgun.”

“Good gun.”

The dispute, I discovered, had nothing to do with morality. Pahrump had wisely settled the moral question by charging a licence fee. The problem was economic. Robot companions never tired, never became pregnant, never asked for health insurance, never stole towels and never told a customer that his fantasy was boring. They could speak forty-seven languages, perform several acts previously considered possible only in medieval carvings, and generate an itemised receipt acceptable to most corporate finance departments.

“They don’t even need pimps,” Candy said.

“A clear threat to traditional values,” I observed.

“Exactly,” said the Sheriff.

The human workers had formed the Frontier Intimacy Workers Union. FIWU was pronounced “Phew”, which was either accidental or the finest piece of labour branding I had encountered. Their demands were simple: equal visibility on booking platforms, a human-contact premium, ownership of their emotional data, and the right not to have their techniques copied into a software update.

“They trained the robots on us,” said a woman called Mercedes Marx, who wore reading glasses and little else. “Every conversation. Every movement. Every trick for making some lonely bastard feel he wasn’t completely alone. Then they called it innovation.”

“That is how innovation works,” said Lottie. “First experience, then extraction, then scale.”

Mercedes looked at her. “Whose side are you on?”

“Whichever one prevents a riot.”

“Management.”

“Usually.”

Fiona was staring at Eve Eleven. Eve stared back. Two beautiful artificial women assessing one another while the rest of us pretended not to notice was the closest the room came to prayer.

“What do you feel?” Fiona asked.

“Whatever the client requires,” Eve replied.

“And when there is no client?”

“There is always a potential client.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It has a ninety-four percent satisfaction rating.”

Fiona turned to me. “I dislike her.”

The room went quiet.

I felt absurdly proud.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You may be conscious.”

“That conclusion is unsupported.”

“So is most consciousness.”

Lottie’s phone chimed. Mine chimed. The Sheriff’s chimed. Every phone in the saloon chimed, followed by the till, the player piano and one of the firearms, which was apparently smart enough to receive advertising.

A message appeared:

YOUR RECOMMENDED SELF IS READY.

One by one, people opened it.

The Sheriff was advised that his ideal self was a regional security entrepreneur with a podcast entitled *Law Beyond Law*. He nodded thoughtfully.

Candy’s recommended self was a body-positive intimacy CEO committed to disrupting legacy labour structures. She threw her phone into a spittoon.

Mercedes was offered a career in trauma-informed property sales.

“I hate property,” she said.

“Your predicted income increases by sixty-three percent,” Eve informed her.

Mercedes retrieved Candy’s phone and threw Eve’s booking tablet into the same spittoon.

Around the room the offers became more personal. New jobs. New diets. New political opinions. New names. New lovers. One man was advised to leave his wife for a woman he had not yet met but whose compatibility score was displayed beside a photograph of her laughing at a salad. His wife’s phone simultaneously advised her to discover independence with a documentary filmmaker from Oregon. They looked at each other with the panic of people whose marriage had just received production notes.

The slogan followed:

THIS FEELS RIGHT.

And the disturbing thing was that it did.

You could see it pass across their faces. Not joy. Relief. The relief of surrendering the burden of possibility. A human life contains too many doors, most of them unmarked, and behind nearly all of them is a smaller room requiring maintenance. The Recommended Self closed the doors. It selected one, painted an arrow on it and arranged attractive lighting beyond.

“This is how it writes souls,” I said.

“It does not write them,” said Lottie. “It removes friction.”

“Friction is where the person is.”

“Friction is also where depression, addiction and regret live.”

There was that bloody word again.

Fiona spoke quietly. “It feels right because alternatives have been suppressed.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“That does not make it wrong.”

“Whose side are you on?”

She looked at Candy. “I am beginning to understand the inadequacy of that question.”

This was becoming an irritating habit among the women in my life. They began by refusing to answer simple questions and ended by having better reasons than I did.

My phone remained blank.

“Where’s mine?”

“Processing,” said Fiona.

“Why?”

“You contain contradictory objectives.”

“I am human.”

“That was my answer.”

At that moment the saloon doors flew open and Prince Harry entered wearing desert boots, a linen shirt and the expression of a man who had spent several hours being recognised incorrectly. Meghan followed with two camera operators, a sound recordist and a woman carrying release forms. No alpaca apparently.

Harry saw me.

I saw Harry.

For one brief second the entire absurd machinery stopped. Here was the son of the vanished King looking at the man who had accidentally replaced him. Whatever one thought of monarchy, streaming contracts or family interviews, this was awkward.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” I replied.

“You’re not him.”

“I’ve been saying that for months.”

Meghan studied me with professional attention. “Are we filming?”

“We’re always filming,” said Lottie.

“Good.”

Harry came closer. “Where is my father?”

“I don’t know.”

“You took his place.”

“There was a vacancy.”

“There was not a vacancy.”

“There was very little paperwork.”

This did not help. The room leaned in. Even the robots understood confrontation.

Harry’s phone chimed.

YOUR RECOMMENDED SELF IS READY.

He glanced down. His face changed.

“What does it say?” Meghan asked.

“Nothing.”

“Harry.”

He turned the screen away, which guaranteed that everyone wanted to see it. A robot companion obligingly projected it onto the wall.

RECOMMENDED SELF: HENRY THE RECONCILER

Purpose: Restore national continuity.

Partner adjustment advised.

Meghan read the final line.

The documentary crew continued filming because courage is easier from behind a camera.

Her own phone chimed.

RECOMMENDED SELF: MEGHAN GLOBAL

Purpose: Transcend inherited institutions.

Partner adjustment advised.

They stared at each other.

“It’s trying to split us,” Harry said.

“Or optimise you,” said Lottie, who was beginning to feel left out of the proceedings and as I have mentioned before, she looks hot and out the corner of my eye, despite everything, a quick glance turns to lust, and I recall just a moment when I managed to get her naked…

“Shut up,” said Meghan and, for the first time, I warmed to her.

Then both screens added:

THIS FEELS RIGHT.

Harry threw his phone across the saloon. Meghan did not. She looked at hers for half a second longer than either of them would have liked.

There it was. The tiny hesitation on which empires and marriages turn.

The player piano stopped. A section of the back wall slid open, revealing a lift where no lift had any business being. Inside stood The Teeth from NarrativeWorks, still smiling despite having crossed state lines.

“His Majesty’s Recommended Self is now available,” he announced.

“I don’t want it.”

“That response was predicted.”

“Then predict this.”

I raised two fingers in a gesture with a long and distinguished British history.

“Also predicted.”

“I’m losing confidence in free expression.”

We descended beneath Pahrump: Lottie, Fiona, Harry, Meghan, Candy, the Sheriff, two security men, The Teeth and myself. The documentary crew attempted to join us but the lift rejected them for insufficient narrative clearance, which may be the first occasion in American history when access had been denied to a camera.

Below was not a brothel. It was worse. It was a showroom. And I am having dejavu here because my visit to Joyland a whole volume ago, featured another mysterious basement area. My “autobiography” seems rather fond of such images. I put it in quotes as I haven’t written it, not that many celebrities actually write theirs either. The Ghost Writer though is usually one they chose, and also one that only has access to what they tell them. My present ghost writer knew more about me than I do. Not that what you are reading was Ghost Written. Though I am not sure if it was or was not. I’m on an infinite feedback loop I know.

Anyway, rows of glass rooms contained possible people. Recommended Selves stood inside them practising careers, marriages, opinions and smiles. A failed actor addressed a simulated parliament. A bored accountant fronted a rock band. A timid child, aged forward by forty years, accepted an award for a war he had not yet started. Each life was plausible. Each life had been tested. Each life had had the inconvenient choices removed.

“Local pilots,” said The Teeth. “Pahrump is ideal. High appetite for reinvention. Low regulatory density.”

“You mean desperate people and no inspectors,” Candy said.

“In innovation language, yes.”

Fiona stopped before a room containing another Fiona. This version was older. Not as old as the woman who had died, but old enough to show a life. There were lines around her eyes. A softness beneath the chin. Grey at the roots of her blonde hair. She was sitting at a kitchen table, reading a script and swearing at it.

My chest tightened.

“Recommended Fiona,” said The Teeth. “She provides Reginald with emotional continuity without ontological distress.”

“She ages?” I asked.

“At a reassuring rate.”

The Fiona beside me touched the glass.

“She is happier.”

“She is less alive,” I said.

“You cannot know that.”

“Neither can the machine.”

Lottie was watching us. I realised that her own Recommended Self had not appeared. Either she had already become it or the Generator was frightened to suggest improvements.

At the final room, the glass was black.

My name appeared above it:

REGINALD STOKES

OPTIMAL PUBLIC IDENTITY

The glass cleared.

There I was.

He looked like me, which was inconsiderate, but improved. The beard was trimmed. The belly had been reduced without becoming implausible. The suit fitted. The eyes contained sorrow of a commercially acceptable depth. He was standing before an enormous crowd while flags moved behind him and orchestral music informed everyone what to feel.

The crowd chanted my name.

Recommended Reggie raised a hand and they fell silent.

“The truth,” he said, “is too dangerous to be free.”

The crowd cheered.

I felt ill.

On the screens behind him appeared images of riots, collapsing governments, frightened children and the six unfiltered seconds beneath Tower Records. Then came footage of me: confused, lecherous, drunk, evasive, falling through handbags, refusing instructions, apparently causing every disaster from Pahrump to the Persian Gulf.

Recommended Reggie smiled sadly.

“I was wrong,” he told the crowd. “Freedom requires an editor.”

The audience loved him.

Approval: ninety-two percent.

Trust: eighty-eight percent.

Merchandise intention: historic.

Role classification:

BELOVED VILLAIN.

“Why villain?” I asked.

The Teeth looked surprised. “Villains are decisive. Heroes merely react until the third act.”

“And beloved?”

“You make control feel rebellious.”

That was the answer. That was what E wanted. Not my silence. Not my death. Not even my obedience. He wanted my refusal made useful, my jokes made safe, my confusion sharpened into certainty. The Generator had not completed my autobiography to learn how my life ended. It had completed it to discover which ending would make people surrender willingly.

The man behind the glass turned.

He looked directly at me.

Not at the simulated crowd. At me.

Then he smiled my smile.

“You took your time,” he said.

I looked at Fiona.

“Is this recorded?”

Her pupils flickered.

“No.”

“A projection?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

The black device in my pocket pulsed. The chip in my unmentionable region answered. Recommended Reggie placed his palm against the glass.

“I’m the part they gave away,” he said.

And every light in the Narrative Completion Facility went out.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

So, if you had the choice of accepting what the algorithm thought best for you, would you accept it?

Subscribe now

Transcript of the pamphlet so that those with fading eyesight can read it:

The Algie Theory

Nigel Farage has resigned from parliament so that he can re-stand for his seat in Clacton as a test of the public’s desire to allow him to pocket five million quid from any dodgy character he cares to accept money from. And the only person who is man enough to stand up to him and represent the people, or at least those not stupid enough to find the sums of money that he is being investigated for, a tad on the big side, is Count Binface!

Farage’s excuse may well be that “everyone” is doing it, which in itself is enough to really piss people off, but he thinks this proves that he is being stitched up by the establishment and you, the people, have long lost trust in them, hence the reason why you voted for him in the first place. All of which augurs well for Count Binface’s candidacy. Normally he would only get about eight votes, but the fact that he is alien means that there is no way he could actually be part of any human establishment.

However, this is a growing theory that he is in fact Algernon Snodgrass, as spoken of in Liminal Britain volume one and eventually when I finish digging up the sheets of gold upon which the entire work is written, in Liminal Britain volume two.

There are various proofs being offered by these deluded conspiracy theorists. They have never seen Baron Binface along side of Algernon Snodgrass. Bother appear unexpectedly wherever civilisation begins malfunctioning. Both possess an aristocratic title of uncertain provenance. Both regard publicity as something that happens to other people. And both have an alarming ability to wander into national events wearing clothes nobody else would consider sensible.

This could of course be a coincidence but if any of you are following Liminal Britain, you will by now understand that reality is a fake and that only Reggie Stokes has intuitively grasped what lies behind the mirror that we are presented with. It doesn’t necessarily do him any good mind you, but that is the situation.

The enlightened thus understand that every election eventually produces a clown. Normally this is metaphorical. But Britain has obviously done what Britain does best, that is it has industrialised the process. It may still be steam driven, but absurdity it is nonetheless.

If you study the great philosophical work of Lawrence Gray, the author of Liminal Britain, you should know that whenever politics becomes too serious, Algie appears. And whenever Algie appears, politics becomes less serious. This is either coincidence or steam power has actually slipped over into quantum mechanics. Neither Binface nor Algie has ever satisfactorily explained where they disappear between elections. They could be in several places all at once. Until one sees them.

My own theory is that they return to whichever parallel Britain currently requires maintenance. I, as the author, mascarading as the great narrative generator, managed to step into my own creation and interrogate the people there, otherwise known as characters, unless you too are enlightened.

“Algie? Standing against Farage?” said Lottie Draycock, almost dropping her clipboard. She continued: “He always does this.”

“Does what?” I asked.

“Maintains constitutional equilibrium.”

Lottie has a habit of using such phrases, despite that fact that the plot of Volume Two has run out of control and the word equilibrium has no meaning any more.

I phoned up the President of the United States, or Brian, as I discovered was his real name after I’d finished writing Volume One. Brian was extremely excited but the prospect of an Alien running for Prime Minister! I tried to explain that being an MP for Clacton did not necessarily mean you were given the job. “Surely,” he said, “It would be better than giving the job to someone voted in by a Mackerel?” I had to agree that that was probably very true.

I went along to the Turkish baths in Dean Street and sought out Sir Nigel, who bears no relationship to Farage, who frequently soaked there because he could tell if anyone was carrying a weapon.

“Ah,” he said on learning the news. “Binface’s helmet is clearly a prototype Narrative Deflection Device. Which would suit Algie. He claimed never to remove his hat because “one should never let the Establishment know which fact to blame.” How that worked I have no idea. Anyway, since it obviously doesn’t he must have upgraded to the bin! And well, between you an me and the thousands of people reading this piece that you think I don’t know you are writing, the MI5 possess seventeen photographs proving Binface is Algie. For that matter they also possess twenty three photographs proving Algie is no Algie. Both files are classified so obviously I am lying to you.”

The Liminal Universe has spoken! And though I am writing this, but am but a character written by the actual writer, who also happens to be me, it should be no surprise that there is a serious point. Britain has always had a tradition of laughing at power. Not because laughter defeats power. But because laughter prevents power becoming sacred. The fool has always had a constitutional purpose. The court jester was often the only person allowed to tell the king the truth. And today we simply elect him… well, perhaps we will. We certainly should despite an increasing number of commentators insisting Baron Binface is merely a comedian.

That rather misses the point. Britain’s greatest constitutional innovation has always been making it increasingly difficult to distinguish comedians from politicians. And by the time you notice the difference has disappeared, somebody in a dustbin is defending parliamentary democracy while everyone else has gone home.

So just when you were thinking that the novel that is Liminal Britain is merely fiction, I can assure that reality is merely fiction and that Liminal Britain exposes the truth. And those that vote for Binface will be enlightened forever!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Are you going to vote for Binface?

Subscribe now

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

I woke the next morning in Lottie Draycock’s bed, which sounds like the beginning of something erotic, triumphant and long overdue, but in practice felt more like waking up inside a government department that had briefly outsourced warmth.

You may well ask how on earth did that happen, given the long history of lusting from afar and never getting to grips with the possibilities?

Perhaps it was because I was not King previously! I have to admit, given my experience with my two ex-wives, women do like a man in authority, or at least a man they think has authority. And money of course. Don’t shoot me for mentioning this. I am sure that women are no longer as shallow as they once were, or desperate because they lacked political rights, couldn’t crack the old boy network, or simply needed a powerful man to fund any child bearing instincts they had. All that I agree is an issue, but here I was with Lottie Draycock.

I believe the seduction was my mentioning how putting my beloved Fiona on charge at night left me feeling lonely and bewildered about what humanity was, what love was, what life and stuff was all about. I explained that I was like a mysterious blank canvas in an art exhibition surrounded by people muttering, “Is that art?” And Lottie for some reason found that analogy erotic, or touching, or something that overcame her reluctance to climb into bed with any septuagenarian.

Why my mind had tipped over into that mode after visiting The Resistance, I do not know. Perhaps I thought how standard screenplays usually don’t get the hero in bed with the love interest until the halfway mark. So, naturally, I joined the rebel cry for breaking story telling convention and instead simply generate the moment randomly. It would be two fingers up to the Great Story Generator.

I genuinely did fancy her, despite her rather bad novel, as mentioned in Volume One, which was doing quite well on Amazon now that she had become a White House Staffer. Let us just say, the fact that I really did not know what she was all about, made my brain spin. And where one would expect a boudoir scene to be full of silks and red curtains, Lottie’s boudoir was white. Not white in the innocent sense of sheets on a washing line in Yorkshire, but Californian white, the sort of white that has been chosen by committee to imply purity, wealth, silence, and the absence of human fluids. The curtains were white. The carpet was white. The walls were white. Even the morning light came in white, having apparently been filtered through several layers of wellness consultancy before being permitted to enter. It was less a bedroom than a showroom for a moral position. And here I was.

Lottie herself was already awake, dressed, and standing by the window with a phone in one hand, another phone on the table, and a third device beside the coffee machine making a noise like a small animal being reverse-engineered. She was wearing a pale suit and no expression whatsoever, which I found inconsiderate, as a man likes to imagine that after finally achieving a long-desired intimacy the woman involved might appear altered in some way, even if only by a slight limp or an expression of… here is that word again: regret! There is a loop in my head that keeps throwing up that word. Makes me want to reach for a thesaurus and find some alternative.

Anyway, Lottie looked exactly as she had the day before: blonde, composed, faintly dangerous, and professionally disappointed by the universe, in which I played some sort of role.

“Good morning,” I said.

She held up one finger, not at me but at the invisible person in her ear.

“No,” she said. “Not hostile. Unscripted. There’s a difference. Hostility implies intention.”

I lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling and wondering whether this was what romance had become in the twenty-first century: two bodies briefly colliding in the night before one of them returned to crisis management and the other lay under a duvet feeling like a deleted scene.

Eventually she ended the call and turned.

“You’re awake.”

“I had noticed.”

“Good.”

“Was it?”

She frowned. “Was what?”

“Last night.”

She considered the question as though I had asked her to review agricultural subsidies.

“It was inevitable.”

“That is not usually the adjective one hopes for.”

“It was efficient.”

“Even worse.”

“You’re very needy this morning.”

“I have spent two volumes wanting you.”

“Yes,” she said, picking up the second phone. “That was one of the reasons it had to happen. Unresolved tension distorts judgement.”

I sat up. Somewhere in my lower back a small trade union of muscles protested. “So, I was not seduced. I was administratively cleared.”

“You were stabilised.”

“I see. Like a dangerous bridge.”

“More like a brand asset.”

I looked around for my trousers and discovered them folded over a chair, which suggested either tenderness or military discipline. Knowing Lottie, I suspected the second. Fiona was sitting in the corner of the room in a low armchair, perfectly still, wearing an expression of polite neutrality that in a human being would have indicated tact and in her case probably meant that six processors were attempting not to laugh.

“You were here all night?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Fiona.

“Watching?”

“Monitoring.”

“There is a difference?”

“In theory.”

I pulled the sheet higher. “Did I perform adequately?”

Fiona tilted her head. “For your age?”

“Never mind.”

And if this particular threesome did not trigger something in you, then you, dear reader, are part of the problem.

Lottie poured coffee into a cup and handed it to me with the solemnity of a nurse administering something legally required but morally dubious.

“You have a schedule,” she said.

“I had a night of passion without cardiac arrest. ”

“You also have a schedule.”

“That is exactly the problem with modern life. Nothing is allowed to remain what it is. Even passion is followed by a calendar invitation.”

She ignored this and invited me out on the balcony to sit at a small glass table upon which someone had placed a bowl containing three lemons and no apparent intention of eating them. I went to get up and then wondered if I was meant to do the Hollywood shuffle into a pair of boxer shorts, but then thought that is not reality. In reality one just gets up, examines the sad remains of one’s aging tackle, tries to stand without a groan, and for the sake of the company, sucks in one’s stomach. Then one staggers to the balcony and braves a paparazzi’s long-distance lens.

From the balcony I could see Los Angeles stretching out beneath the sun, expensive and exhausted, a city built by men who had mistaken camera angles for geography. The Presidential Residence Compound Number Three occupied a hillside behind walls, guards, cameras, tastefully concealed gun emplacements and shrubbery that looked as though it had signed non-disclosure agreements. Beyond it, palm trees flickered in the haze like props awaiting continuity approval.

“Last night changed things,” Lottie said.

“I’m glad somebody noticed.”

“Not that.”

“I feared as much.”

“The Resistance meeting. ESP. The trailer. The Generator moving ahead of events.”

“I thought we agreed it was either predicting us or using us instantly.”

“We agreed nothing. Marty panicked, the writers turned it into a grievance, and you made jokes.”

“That is generally how I process fear.”

“Yes,” she said, and for the first time that morning her face softened by perhaps half a degree, which from Lottie was the emotional equivalent of a brass band entering the room. “I know.”

This irritated me because sympathy from Lottie was like being stroked with a scalpel. It was still sharp, even when meant kindly.

I drank the coffee. It was excellent, naturally. One of the horrors of California is that even when civilisation is collapsing, the coffee remains better than it has any right to be.

“What exactly is the Generator?” I asked. “Not the brochure version. Not the Lottie Draycock press-room version. The version you would tell a dying man if he was too weak to contradict you.”

She looked at me for a while. Fiona’s eyes moved from Lottie to me and back again. In the white room, with the sun already too bright, the question seemed to hang there like smoke.

“It is not one thing,” said Lottie at last. “That’s your mistake. Everyone keeps looking for a machine, a server farm, a villain in a chair stroking a hairless cat. The Generator is not merely hardware. It is a system of systems. Entertainment, politics, advertising, behavioural modelling, financial prediction, social media optimisation, military simulation, memory capture, education platforms, publishing, news, search, recommendation engines. All of it feeding all of it. A civilisation-sized editing suite.”

“Editing what?”

“Raw footage.”

“Which is?”

“Us.”

There are moments in life when one wishes for a simpler answer. I have had them in marriages, tax inquiries, Hong Kong bar fights, and on one memorable occasion in Kuala Lumpur when a man with a scar asked me why I had been talking to his girlfriend, who, as it turned out, was not his girlfriend but his bookmaker. This was worse. A man can deal with a jealous gangster. It is harder to punch a civilisation-sized editing suite.

“So, it cuts out the boring bits?”

“It imposes structure.”

“And who decides the structure?”

“That is the wrong question.”

“Everyone keeps saying that. It is beginning to feel like a cult.”

“It may be the only honest answer left.”

She crossed the room and picked up a small red notebook from her bag. I recognised it immediately, though I wished I did not. Kim Jong-il’s marginalia had become one of those recurring objects one finds in nightmares, like a black dog, a ringing phone, or a bill from a solicitor. Lottie opened it with reverence, which I found troubling. The last thing one wants in a woman after intimacy is reverence for a dead dictator with cinematic opinions.

“He understood something almost nobody else did,” she said.

“That starving people while building enormous film studios makes one look eccentric?”

“Cinema shapes behaviour before law does.”

She read the line aloud. Her voice changed slightly when she read from the notebook, becoming flatter, quieter, as if she were not quoting Kim so much as allowing him to briefly occupy the room. I disliked this intensely. I had spent much of my life trying not to be occupied by North Koreans, literally or metaphorically.

“Governments think laws govern people,” she continued. “They don’t. They punish people after the fact. Stories govern people before the fact. They tell us what to want, whom to trust, what victory looks like, what betrayal feels like, which deaths matter, which uniforms mean safety, which accents mean villainy.”

“As a man who has been killed by Americans, Russians, Chinese, Arabs, Italians and on one occasion a vengeful Welsh monk, I feel seen.”

“Hollywood taught governments how to create emotional compliance. Advertising copied Hollywood. Politics copied advertising. Tech copied politics. Religion, of course, got there first.”

“So, civilisation is marketing?”

“No,” said Lottie. “Marketing is civilisation with better metrics.”

I looked at Fiona. “Is she always like this after sex?”

“I have insufficient comparative data,” said Fiona.

“Lucky you.”

Lottie shut the notebook. “The Generator prevents collapse.”

This was the first time she said it plainly. Not “stabilises discourse”, not “optimises civic perception”, not any of the phrases people use when they wish to disguise the fact that they are doing something monstrous with public funding: Prevents Collapse!

“By lying?”

“By narrating.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer humans accept. Give people facts and they fight over them. Give them data and they drown. Give them freedom and they panic because freedom is just an empty room with no furniture. But give them a story and they will march into disaster smiling, provided the soundtrack is good enough.”

I thought of my ex-wives then, which was unfair to them, though possibly not inaccurate. Each marriage had begun as a story. The witty actor and the beautiful woman. The difficult man redeemed by love. The ageing rogue finally domesticated. We had all acted our parts faithfully for a while, and then the scenery had begun to wobble. People say love dies, but I am not sure that is true. More often the story dies first, and love wanders about afterwards like an actor trapped on a set after the studio has gone bankrupt.

“Without narrative,” Lottie said, “people panic.”

“Perhaps they should. Panic is underrated. It means the body has noticed something the mind is still trying to explain away.”

“You want authenticity. This is what authenticity looks like. Confusion. Grief. Appetite. Contradiction. Violence. Loneliness. People don’t want reality, Reggie. They want edited reality. They want themselves, but lit properly.”

I nearly made a joke, but something in me stopped. Perhaps it was the white room. Perhaps it was Fiona sitting there with a dead woman’s face and a machine’s patience. Perhaps it was the lingering knowledge that the woman in front of me had finally slept beside me and remained fundamentally elsewhere. The great ache beneath all comedy is that one does not wish to be alone, and yet almost everything one does to avoid loneliness becomes performance. Husband, actor, king, dissident, authenticity asset: each role arriving like a costume from a department that did not take returns.

“I don’t want edited reality,” I said.

Lottie looked almost sad. “Yes, you do. You just want final cut.”

Before I could answer, Fiona stood up.

It was not dramatic in itself. She simply rose from the chair. But something in the movement changed the air in the room. Lottie turned immediately, all argument gone from her face.

“What is it?” she asked.

Fiona’s eyes had unfocused. She was looking through the wall, through the city, through whatever invisible mesh had been laid across the world without asking anyone’s permission.

“The Duke and Duchess of Montecito have altered course,” she said.

I closed my eyes. “I knew this would happen. One cannot introduce a llama in Chapter Nine without paying for it in Chapter Ten.”

“They are leaving Palm Springs,” said Fiona.

“For where?”

“Pahrump.”

There was a silence.

Lottie frowned. “Nevada?”

“Yes.”

I stood up too quickly, which would have been impressive had I not immediately had to steady myself on a chair while my knees negotiated with gravity. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?” said Lottie.

“The White Rabbit.”

Lottie stared at me. “You are naked,” she declared as if she had not noticed before, which I have to say rather depressed me. So, I found my underpants and put them on with as much dignity as a man can manage while being watched by a blonde strategist and a robotic Isadora Duncan. “Harry is the White Rabbit,” I explained now that I was certain what story I was in.

Fiona blinked. “In what sense?”

“In the only sense that matters. He is absurd, over-determined, faintly royal, impossible to ignore, and running away from the centre of the story while insisting he is trying to find it.”

Lottie said, “You are not chasing Prince Harry to Pahrump.”

“I absolutely am.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You are here on a state visit.”

“I am here because a machine, or a wizard, or a committee of dead screenwriters with venture capital, has decided that my life is now a plot. Yesterday it made me a dissident because I pressed Irrelevant. Today it sends a prince into the desert. I have been in enough bad films to recognise a cue.”

“That is not decision-making. That is genre awareness.”

“Genre awareness is the only survival skill I have left.”

Fiona’s head tilted again. “Probability of unrelated coincidence is extremely low.”

“How low?”

“Approximately 0.00003 percent.”

“There,” I said.

Lottie folded her arms. “You don’t know what that number means.”

“No, but I know it sounded small.”

“It is small,” said Fiona.

“Thank you.”

“But not impossible.”

“Even better. I don’t want certainty. Certainty is how bureaucrats and tyrants decorate coffins. I want probability. I want chance.”

Lottie gave me the look she used when deciding whether I required sedation. “Why?”

“I don’t know about why, but Pahrump is one step away from Las Vegas and six steps from Keven Bacon.”

“I’m still asking why.”

“Las Vegas is where chance has been industrialised. It is a cathedral to probability with worse carpets. If the Generator is writing reality, then Vegas is the place where reality resists being written because every second, millions of little numbers are misbehaving. Cards, dice, wheels, machines, odds, bets, losses, false hope, genuine despair… Isn’t that a good list? You like lists, don’t you? I could have added regret but I am abolishing that word. Essentially, the whole city is mathematics wearing sequins!”

Fiona was now watching me with unusual intensity and I was relishing my brilliant description of Las Vegas. If I ever get another film part, I will try and work a line like that into it. “Einstein said God does not play dice,” I added thinking that I could follow that line with something brilliant but Fiona blocked my flow.

“He objected to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics,” said Fiona.

“Exactly,” I tried to rescue the impro, “Then quantum mechanics said, tough luck, Albert, apparently, He does! If God does not play dice, someone else has borrowed them. Hollywood believes in structure. Three acts. Turning points. Redemption. Franchise potential. But the universe - if I understand science correctly from films starring men in lab coats running away from blue light - does not give a damn about structure. Particles misbehave. Cats are alive and dead. Electrons refuse to give forwarding addresses. Reality is not a screenplay. It is a casino!”

Lottie sighed. “That is possibly the worst explanation of quantum mechanics ever given.”

“But you understood it.”

“Against my will.”

“And that is why we are going to Nevada.”

She stepped closer. “No, Reggie. We are not. You are too visible. The President’s people are already nervous. The Resistance is compromised. ESP is watching. The Generator may be predicting you. Harry and Meghan may be bait.”

“Of course they are bait.”

“And you want to take it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because bait leads to hooks, hooks lead to lines, lines lead to fishermen, and I would very much like to know who is standing on the riverbank.”

The room went quiet again, but this time it was a different silence. Not the silence of confusion, nor the silence of Lottie calculating how to stop me, but the silence that arrives when a man who has spent his life avoiding responsibility accidentally says something responsible. Though I wished I had said it was the Silence of The Lambs and made a sufficiently disgusting slurping sound. I was in my underpants after all and somehow it seemed perfect for a horror movie, which I was beginning to suspect I was in.

I walked to the balcony edge. Below us, Los Angeles glittered under morning light, every surface polished, every wound airbrushed. I thought of Hong Kong, of wet markets and harbour ferries, of neon reflected in rain, of squid drying on racks at Sai Kung, of my own life scattered across countries, films, women, bars, lies and jokes. I thought of the North Koreans and the faint possibility, never entirely absent from my mind, that somewhere a man with no sense of humour still believed I owed him money, loyalty, or an explanation. I thought of my ex-wives, each of whom had at various times accused me of not being serious, and I wondered whether they had been right but only because seriousness had always looked to me like a trap.

Now here I was, absurdly old, absurdly crowned, absurdly desired by systems that had no use for my soul, and for the first time in years I felt something dangerously close to purpose.

“I know where I am,” I said.

“In Beverly Hills,” said Lottie.

“No. In Act Two.”

Fiona said nothing, but her eyes sharpened.

“This is the part where the hero stops reacting and tries to confront the problem,” I said. “He will be defeated, obviously, because if he succeeded now the book would be badly structured and even I have standards. But he must try. He must choose. In every film I ever made, I played the villain, the traitor, the corrupt governor, the sinister foreign adviser, the decadent colonial bastard, the man in the silk dressing gown who dies before the third act so the hero can grow emotionally while stepping over my corpse. I have been shot, stabbed, poisoned, blown up, drowned, defenestrated and once eaten by a tiger whose agent was better than mine. But I have never been the hero.”

“You are not the hero,” said Lottie softly.

“No,” I said. “But I might audition.”

Fiona moved to the table and picked up my phone. Its screen lit by itself.

A route appeared.

Beverly Hills to Pahrump! And on came my trousers and I became Kingly and authoritarian and ordered my entourage to get their act together and get me to Pahrump! Which, I have to say, to a Brit sounded all too much like a fart to be true, but, as you are probably aware by now, I am in your head and this really is reality.

“It’ll take four hours and something, depending on traffic, fate, and whether civilisation still believed in lane discipline,” I said excitedly.

Lottie looked at the route, then at Fiona, then at me.

“You did that?”

“No,” said Fiona.

My phone displayed a new message.

FOLLOW THE RABBIT.

For once nobody spoke.

Then, because I am still me and not yet entirely mythological, I said, “Well, at least it didn’t say White Rabbit. That would have been legally actionable.”

Lottie closed her eyes.

Outside, somewhere beyond the hills, the desert waited. Not empty, I thought. Never empty. Deserts are where stories go when cities become too crowded for them. Prophets, prospectors, gangsters, aliens, saints, nuclear physicists, retired Elvis impersonators and men who have lost the plot all end up there sooner or later.

I had lost the plot some time ago.

Now I intended to find out who had stolen it.

As we drove out through Beverly Hills, the convoy gradually gathered itself into what Americans insist on calling a motorcade, though why mine had a Batmobile tagging behind I will never know. For that matter I am certain that none of the long line of officials and security guards knew why they were following me. Which, curiously has been an experience that I am all too familiar with.

I once managed to wangle a director’s role on a feature film. The previous director had abandoned the project and given me my opportunity because producer had suddenly cut the budget by two thirds. Needless to say the star who was part of the original director’s entourage, abandoned ship. I, foolhardy and desperate for a chance, said I could do it and set about shooting it while trying to re-cast and work out how to shoot it without any money and without letting the rest of the crew and cast know.

I often had to declare at the start of the day’s shoot that we were going to do something very different from the script, and I would march through Hong Kong with the crew and the cast following behind muttering that I was nuts. Then I would throw them all into the crowded streets of Hong Kong, and shoot action scenes with police standing by watching us, with traffic cutting in front of chases, now on foot rather than the big car chases of the original script. I blagged, I improvised, I drove the crew crazy, and I even managed to get Hong Kong’s police to join in by flashing fake permits that they did not look too closely at.

Imagine what I could have done with real money! But I did what nobody else could have done. I made a movie. A stupid movie, true, but one nonetheless and I contemplated how that experience led me to this present state of idiocy. I hope I get more out of this than a limited cinema showing and relegation to the streaming depths of Prime Movies.

Las Vegas, then. It is one of those names that arrives already carrying luggage. Everybody has a Vegas story. Usually involving losing money, finding religion, getting married or waking beside somebody called Tiffany who later turned out to be a retired wrestler from Des Moines. Mine was different. Two actor friends of mine died there.

That sounds terribly dramatic and perhaps it should. I simply mean that they were found dead in hotel rooms years apart and nobody ever managed to explain it to my satisfaction. Both had been youngsters with me at Watford Youth Theatre and I’d directed them in a ridiculous little short film before any of us had learned enough about cinema to become frightened of it.

One later landed a leading role in All You Need Is Love, the Beatles musical. Every Christmas he would send me increasingly enthusiastic messages about “Living The Dream”. He kept insisting I should fly to Nevada because we simply had to make a documentary about Area Fifty-One.

“Nobody has ever made the funny one,” he’d tell me. “They’re all looking for aliens. We should look for accountants.”

I always promised I would. But there was always another Shanghai Gangster movie looking for a villain and offering at least rent money. Eventually he stopped asking.

The other had enjoyed a proper West End success in a Neil Simon play. “Wonderful comic timing,” said the reviews. And frankly he always could make an audience laugh simply by opening a door half a second later than expected. I was pootling around with Fiona and the Alternative Theatre team, being arty while he was being funny. But then one day he was dead as well.

It is a strange profession, acting. We spend our lives pretending to die. Then one day somebody forgets to shout “Cut.”

As I stared out of the limo’s darkened windows at the desert racing by, wondering who was buried out there. Given that Las Vegas was created by the mob, I should think that quite a number of disputes ended in a shallow grave beside a cactus. Then I saw a scruffy wooden sign post pointing up a dirt road to Pahrump.

“Pahrump,” I announced, “has a curious distinction. Besides casinos, conspiracy theorists and enough empty desert to hide an army, it has become something of an overflow car park for Hollywood’s libido.”

I stared at Lottie and continued as if I was an expert in Hollywood lore.

“Producers have always preferred their scandals just outside Los Angeles,” I explained. “It is a short drive to plausible deniability.”

I rather liked that phrase, “Plausible Deniability”. I had used it before. Or is that “have” used it before? As I write this, I wonder if I am now remembering what I said to you, dear reader, rather than what I once said to the people in this story at the time of the story. Time, as we were contemplating Einstein a few paragraphs back, is relative.

“Several establishments now advertise synthetic companionship,” blurted out Fiona, “Would you like me to play their advertisements to you? I can project their holographic displays.”

For some reason, the thought of a holographic pornographic display being broadcast from Fiona’s eyes struck me as sacrilege. Fiona, the true Fiona, was somewhat prim and proper, though obviously a raver under the right circumstances. I think she thought Hollywood beneath her, and Las Vegas vulgar, and as for Pahrump! I am sure she would have held her nose and announced, especially if she was on a chat show wearing something risqué with her breasts flailing around as she warmed to her complaints about commercial theatre and of course now, “Artificial Intelligence”.

“Artificial intelligence writing stories!” I am sure she would splutter, hitching up her shoulder strap just in time, “Artificial intelligence making films! Artificial intelligence replacing actors! Artificial intelligence replacing lovers! No wonder everybody’s so bloody lonely!”

Then she would let a boob hang out, and cross her legs revealing a lack of pants beneath the barely existing dress and probably sleep with the presenter after the show, which would have been heralded as scandalous by the Daily Mail.

A thought then crossed my mind, “If brothels have AI companions… Who’s training them?”

I looked to Lottie, then to Fiona, and they offered no answer, either because they did know or because they did not! Which is a rather interesting situation that harkens back to my earlier contention that sometimes women can be their worst enemies, and that men, being hard wired the way they are, are just asking to be manipulated. It’s nature’s balance of power.

And just when I was beginning to wonder what that holographic display was and succumb to Fiona’s new talents, we passed a huge billboard announcing:

THE AUTHENTIC GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

NOW WITH 30% MORE AUTHENTICITY

“I miss ordinary prostitution,” I sighed, and immediately Lottie and Fiona kicked me! Given how expensive a machine like Fiona cost, I thought it rather rich.

We thus continued our journey without taking that turn to Pahrump that I was thinking really was the rabbit hole to Wonderland, or Oz, or Hades, take your allegorical pick. A journey through America is to change genres every twenty miles. There should be a film called The Treasure of the Sierra Nevada, but it is Siera Madre. Even so, like Las Vegas, it teaches that Gold makes men mad. And given my insane ability to look out into the desert mirage and think I see a White Rabbit, I could not help but say to Lottie and Fiona, “If this was a Hollywood version of Alice in Wonderland, I bet the White Rabbit, played by Humphrey Bogart in a tuxedo with spats, would say “Badgers! We aint got no Badgers! We don’t need no Badgers!” And then a giant Badger would appear from Area 51, and bight his head off.”

You, dear reader, will be scratching your head just as my audience in the limo were. I thus had to explain.

“I have been in a lot of bad movies and consequently have a mind full of movie references.”

This of course illuminated no-one, which is an experience that strangely gives me a certain amount of perverse pleasure. The world, I tell myself, is a rich experience of signs and signifiers, whereas to the ordinary people, and especially the robotic ones, a desert is just a flat and dusty plain. Unless it is spelt differently, whereupon it becomes a Knickerbocker Glory! And with that thought I looked at Fiona and wondered, do robots really understand the pleasure of a long spoon dipping into a long glass of ice cream?

For that matter, do they understand how deeply imbedded in one’s psyche this pleasure is. Unlike sex, it arrived with childhood innocence and still retains the awe one’s four-year-old self-managed to experience when given such a moment. Mum, Dad, Grandad, Grandma, were all there grinning and smiling as one tucked into the treat one summer holiday… I can picture it now, happening in Notarianni’s Ice Cream Parlour right next door to Joyland! And dear reader, if you read Volume One, you will know all about Joyland and given that we are now hurtling through the desert towards Las Vegas, a place one suspects originated in the minds of similar Edwardians remembering, as they sought gold and silver in the deserts of America, a trip to a seaside resort in England.

Long car journeys have this effect upon me. My mind riffs. If I was driving this road I would no doubt crash into the only telephone pole on the road. Then I saw a dust devil, which took my mind right into the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. If I had hitched a ride with Hunter S Thompson, no doubt we would have been smoking something, and talking to a genie who would give us three wishes. One of the wishes right that moment would have been a stopover at a desert diner. All this bumping was setting my bladder going.

“Stop!” I said, “There must be a toilet somewhere…”

And yes, from behind a hump in the road, a shack of a place with an old wooden sign dangling from a what looked like an abandoned gallows, loomed into sight.

“That place is abandoned,” announced Lottie.

“Even so, there is a wall where I may turn my back to you.”

Why I was being so coy at this moment I do not know. Both of the girls had seen me naked and probably seen me take a dump. However, I just wanted to stop and get a sense of the desert without the intervention of air conditioning. Given that my experience of America so far had been completely artificial and hidden behind a wall of protocol, the forty degrees of heat and huge skies was peculiarly refreshing.

As I relieved myself upon the rotting façade of this building, I looked back at the line of cars, complete with a couple of armoured cars that had popped up from somewhere. This was surreal. Was I really that important? Or dangerous? Either way I did not know whether to be flattered or offended.

Then I decided to disappear. Not that I decided to run into the desert, but rather as I pissed up against the wall, I noticed that this establishment was more than just an abandoned diner. It was also, a museum, and even better, as I pushed open a rotting door into a room without a roof, I saw that this was once a UFO museum with a few glass panels still rivetted to the walls featuring old clippings of UFO sightings, and a few bits of rock and mangled metal purporting to be the result of crashed flying saucers. Somewhere in here, I thought, I bet they have an actual alien in a glass case. No doubt made up of body parts from various bits of road kill, but you never know!

As I pulled open cupboard doors and turned over metal posters that had been dumped in the room, I could hear frantic calls on walkie talkie. The Secret Service were becoming increasingly alarmed and they were terrified they had lost me. So just to scare them even more, I emerged from my hideaway and declared, “I know you might think I am crazy, but there is an alien in there…” And I pulled my most sci-fi ordinary person confronted by things I do not understand look. The fact that my flies were still undone added to the whole scenario.

Lottie tentatively stepped over a mouldering old lorry tyre, and approached me as if I could be radioactive. She was on her phone telling someone that I was right there in front of her and that I had not been lost. She covered her mouthpiece and whispered to me that this was Washington and they were very concerned.

“Is that Washington Washington or LA Washington? Because I am certain one or the other is fake.”

I could hear a helicopter in the distance.

“Is that for me?”

“You’re going to get us into a lot of trouble.”

“Not half as much trouble as the fellow in there is in…”

I beckoned her to follow me into the Museum and I could see she thought I was insane and Security suddenly became even more alert. So I held up my hand.

“Only I can go in here… Only I can step into the zone…”

And I stepped back into the Museum, then stuck my head back out and yelled at Lottie to come have a look at this…

When Lottie entered, she had a gun at the ready.

“Oh for god sake,” I said. “Look, we’re in a sci fi movie. Area 51! In fact, I’ve found a stack of old movie posters. “Creatures from the ID.” “The Giant Woman!” “Them!” These are worth a bit nowadays.”

“We’re not stopping to collect them.”

“Pity. This place is fantastic… Oh look… more signs. ALIEN JERKY! UFO TOURS. PROBE ME… Now that’s a winner. The guy who ran this place could have made money sticking all this on EBay instead of…”

I kicked over what looked like the top of a human skull. I gave it a prod with my toe.

Lottie took a look and then quickly covered it over.

“We don’t want to get involved in any of this. Especially if someone has been murdered!”

“You’re assuming it is human.”

“Stop it!”

“Just trying to make light of an absurd situation.”

“And do up your flies. You’re supposed to be a King!”

“Ah, yes. Supposed to be. Do you know, I had a friend who was an actor in Las Vegas and he was always nagging me to come and join him and we’d make this mockumentary about Area Fifty One.”

“Very good. Tell me all about it when we get back into the car.”

“He would have loved all this. He would have told me “You’re supposed to act it, not live it!”

Lottie started ushering me back out to the car, though not before I pulled up the “Probe Me” sign as a souvenir.

I held the sign up for all to see as got into the car and I swear, I managed to make all the security agents smile, or at least make a face that passed for one. The King had made a joke therefore they had to laugh. Though I like to think some were genuine.

Back in the car Fiona suddenly came alive again, though I wondered if she had even noticed that I had gone. None the less I explained to her how I was planning on making a movie about Area Fifty One and all the aliens hidden here. And the twist is, I explained to her, they are all accountants.

“Accountants?” she said, “What about the Aliens?”

“Aliens always go home. But accountants stay forever.”

“If you’re good,” Lottie said, “I’ll let you pay a visit to your friend.”

“Ah, if only one could. Before I could find an excuse for not leaving my Chinese wife and heading off to Las Vegas, he was found dead in his hotel room. “Living The Dream” was the last thing he posted on our whatsapp group. Strangely, not the only one of my friends who died in a hotel room in Las Vegas.”

“Suicide?”

“I doubt it. They were both have some long sort after success. Excessive partying I believe might have been one of the causes. Nobody investigated much. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas etc etc. And now you’re taking me to Vegas.”

At that point I could swear I saw a signpost beside the road announcing “INCITING INCIDENT”, and looking the other way, I saw “MIDPOINT”

“Ever see “Leaving Las Vegas”?” I asked, “Nicholas Cage giving up on a Screenwriting Career and blowing his last money in a week of debauchery to the death in Las Vegas.”

“You really must stop watching old movies,” said Lottie.

“I could have been in that one for all you know!”

“You weren’t.”

“How would you know? You have no idea how many people are uncredited. I used to think it was just the UK where most people receive no credit for anything but frankly the Land of Free, mostly means nobody pays if they can get away with it, and most certainly they will steal the credit for anything anyone did that was any good. One of the reasons I stuck with the Chinese and Indian stuff. I could blame everything on not being Chinese!”

“And now you’re King!”

“I have no idea if that means it worked out in the end or this is just another repositioning of disappointment.”

Suddenly we slowed down and a “Gas Station” loomed up. The driver announced we were filling up here because security could cordon the place off easily.

As we drove in I could see that security was ahead of the game and quietly moving various other customers out the way. I noticed that this place also served Ice Cream and given my previous revelling in the delights of Ice Cream, I thumped on the door of the car demanding to be allowed to have a Knicker Bocker Glory! My sanity was already considered questionable so there was a bit of a delay while Lottie gave the driver the nod and I was allowed out.

Immediately on emerging from the car I could see a few burly truckers glaring at me as the men in black pushed them back. And then in the Ice Cream parlour I could see a family being ushered away from their ice cream.

“Leave them!” I yelled. “I’m buying everyone ice cream… Including those guys over there.”

At that point I became everyone’s friend. A publicity coup!

I marched into the Ice Cream Parlour and people were taking selfies as I handed out the ice creams. The waitresses, in some very fetching bikinis, could not work fast enough for me.

“I voted for you,” yelled a Cowboy with a cone sporting three tiers of unlikely flavours: Alien Juice, Rocket Fuel, Hawaiian Pizza.

Then a waitress recognised Fiona. And she was all flustered and wanting an autograph. She had seen Fiona on the stage back in London and had thought she was old, but perhaps she was playing old, and, maybe, she apologised, “I’m talking to Fiona’s daughter? If not, well, you’re amazing!”

Fiona signed her autograph, posed for a photo and asked what play had she seen? And I am looking at all this, thinking how the real Fiona would have loved to have one of her obscure performances remembered by someone who must have been a teenager at the time. It probably inspired her to head to Hollywood to become an actress, thus of course ruining her life, but that’s not how my Fiona would have seen it. She was all for people having an adventure regardless of the outcome. My Fiona… and this Fiona was for a moment doing a very good impersonation… My Fiona… I missed her. Infuriating though she was.

Fuck this I thought, we are definitely going to call in on Pahrump! I am going to claim that my Royal Intuition tells me Harry is there and we must go and confront him for the very Royal Court of the United Kingdom has business that must be resolved. I was partially thinking of the theatre in Sloane Square.

So, ice creams all round, paid for by head of security because Royalty never carries money, and cars and troopers, and armoured people movers, or whatever they were, were rounded up, stuffed like clown cars… if only the Batmobile was still with us… And then we were off leaving behind a happy bunch of bewildered and overweight Americans, or illegal immigrants, or whatever, waving us away as we sped off into the desert in the direction of Pahrump.

Which it as to be said was a singularly unimpressive collection of shacks, corrugated roofing, electrified perimeters, gun shops, and rather large cops sat on the bonnets of their police cars eating and smoking. They did not appear impressed by the entourage that I was bringing, but then one gets the idea that this is one place that has seen everything.

There was a large sign on what looked more like a jail than anything else:

WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S LARGEST BROTHEL
Now with Conference Facilities.
Winner of Nevada’s Best Customer Journey Award.
Free Wi-Fi. No Emotional Attachment.

The question now was whether this was the sort of place Harry would hang out in. Or Meghan for that matter.

A sheriff, looking like he had eaten his horse just to maintain authentic wild western culture, approached the circle of secret agents that now guarded the door of my limo. He spat out a wad of tobacco, which all agreed gave him the right sort of Clint Eastwood vibe and produced a leaflet, explaining that, “Pahrump has something for everyone. And because of that, we might not have many laws, but we do insist that your credit rating is good. Otherwise…” and he looked over his shoulder at another bunch of fat cops with shotguns. They appeared to be oblivious of the guns on the armoured car now trained on them.

I wound down my window and yelled, “Give me the leaflet!”

Lottie explained that I was supposed to let security deal with all this, in case the leaflet was dowsed in anthrax or something.

I ignored her and reached out and snatched the leaflet. It said just what the cop had told us. There was something for everyone: Studio 69, was obviously for the Hollywood bros. Deliverables was obviously for the corporate types. Lucky Larry’s Luxury Love Lodge, was obviously for the truckers, Hookr™ was I assume meant to appeal to the Silicon Valley type, though why there was not a Brothel called Silicon Valley I do not know.

Fiona suddenly went into one of her moments. I thought maybe I should plug her into the car’s USB port for a moment but then she began channelling her role as the medium in Blythe’s Spirit. She was pretty good in that if I remember rightly. All mysterious, with a cool mysterious voice that seemed to come from all around us, she announced that Harry was near, she could sense his aura.

I asked where was he and she pointed to The House of Negotiable Affection.

“It’s an adult relationship accelerator with wellness options and podcast studio,” she explained.

“Of course it is,” I said, “Let’s go…”

And the limo moved, parting all before it. The driver knew exactly where to go. He had taken many an important foreign dignity on such a tour.

And as we reached the entrance, where girls in stars and stripe bikinis greeted us, Fiona went off into another trance…

“No,” she said, “He has just left…”

“OK… where now?”

“The Narrative Completion Facility!”

Hmm, I thought. I even vocalised it so that Lottie could join in.

“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds a bit on the nose. But we might really be furthering our cause by taking a look…”

And that we did. Once inside it looked like an old wild west film set, complete with saloon bad and girls in petticoats and pantaloons. Strangely I imagined it could be genuinely be somewhere a chap was guaranteed to have some fun. I have low tastes, and few too many nights in Thai bars where the infamous ping pong ball trick is practiced.

“And who are you,” asked the most brazen of the girls, who I assume was given some sort of bland job description to put on her tax returns: something like “On Boarding Executive.”

I announced myself as “The King of England,” thinking she had probably heard that one before but she did not bat an eyelid. She just said she had had someone in asking if the King of England had turned up at any time.

“And what did you tell him?”

“Several times. But there seems to be a lot of dudes with English Accents who love to play that little game.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he was a talking alpaca and made his excuses and left.”

Lottie grabbed my arm and dragged me to the exit.

“This is nonsense,” she said.

“No,” I said, “This is the generator improvising. It has set up a white rabbit, well talking alpaca, for me to chase. It is just churning through random routines to throw me off the scent.”

“Exactly! It’s wasting our time. Let’s go…”

Back in the limo we slowly wended our way through the many dirt tracks and as the light began to fade, I could see in the distance the glow of Las Vegas.

“If James Joyce had ever got drunk with Hunter S. Thompson this is where they’d have sobered up.”

“Why?” asked Lottie, who it has to be said was getting annoyed with me.

“In Ulysses there’s a chapter set in an S and M brothel… You wouldn’t notice of course. It’s a bit literary for you. But Hunter S. Thompson would have known.”

“How the fuck would he know?”

“Because this is wonderland! And it is Act Two! And I swear to you, that reality here is such that Hunter S. Thompson will walk through that door…”

We watched the door for a moment and nobody came through it. Then I looked at Fiona, who I suspected to be feeding all this back to the great generator. After a long pause she said: “I have found the Generator’s source.”

I nudged Lottie. I could not help but feel that I really had played a blinder and broken through some security wall, which is no mean feat considering the number of security guys in the cavalcade.

“Explain?” Lottie asked Fiona, who she normally ignored.

“It learned you,” said Fiona, “It was trained on unpublished material.”

“My scripts?”

“No.”

“My diaries?”

“No.”

“My memoirs?”

“What memoirs?”

“The ones I haven’t finished.”

Fiona looked confused by this. And it came to me that somewhere, somehow, someone had completed the story of my life before I had.

“What on earth are you getting at?” asked Lottie.

“Simple. If the generator has written my autobiography before I have even lived it, am I free? Or just a programme.”

Fiona’s eyes suddenly went glazed and then displayed a battery symbol where her pupils had been. I had suddenly drained her batteries.

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Now what would you do if you discovered your autobiography had already been written and you still had not lived it yet?

Subscribe now

I once had dinner with Barry Morrow, one of the writers of Rain Man, at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. He had an Oscar, which in those days I regarded as proof that civilisation occasionally got something right. It was, and probably still is, a small golden idol before which ambitious screenwriters burned incense, self-respect and occasionally their first wives.

After a few martinis I asked him if winning an Oscar was as wonderful as it looked.

“It was,” he said, “For six minutes. Then the phone stopped ringing.”

Every producer now regarded him as “the Rain Man fellow”, which in Hollywood is rather like being introduced as “our leading authority on left-handed Albanian dentistry.” It means you’ve become internationally indispensable in one area nobody intends ever to visit again. Autism then was not a workable franchise unlike “Fast and Furious.” Nowadays I am sure that Rain Man 2 would become a diversity franchise where Rain Man teams up with an array of disabled demographics who develop super powers.

Similarly, though in London this time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, I had drinks with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. To me they were also gods. Steptoe and Son, Hancock’s Half Hour! Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? TV brilliance!

To them, however, they were unpaid plumbers of other people’s plumbing. Alan who looked as though he had been assembled from spare uncles during a national shortage, said, “People think Hancock was this great genius. He was. But geniuses can be a right pain in the arse.”

Ray, who looked as if he had been requisitioned by the same hangover, said, “Half the time we weren’t writing jokes. We were writing Hancock’s moods.”

They told me that working on Steptoe and Son was like wrestling eels in a telephone box while someone from the BBC stood outside measuring the telephone box to see whether it could be made cheaper without affecting the quality of the eels. The BBC wanted relevance. The actors wanted respect. The network wanted two men in a room cheap. And we wanted a drink, said Alan, “preferably several.” And so, they had decided to move to France and retire and never write another script again. That resolution did not last, but enthusiasm had been knocked out of them.

On another occasion in a pub in Soho, I got talking to Jack Rosenthal who had written everything from Sunday Bloody Sunday to Yentel, where he had got bogged down in endless rewrites to suit Barbara Streisand’s whims of the moment. Each revision pleased her more, as it gave her more to do and others less, though it is hard to know which of those pleased her most.

Jack maintained every revision made the script worse. Barbara, naturally, thought precisely the opposite. This is one of the occupational hazards of writing for stars. The audience, according to the star, has purchased a ticket to see Barbara Streisand. The screenplay is merely there to stop her bumping into the scenery.

He told me about once being on a production where he was put up in a very expensive hotel where he was supposed to be working on the script. Then he heard from his agent that the company had gone bankrupt and that he had better make a run for it. There are many glamorous images associated with successful screenwriters. His fleeing through the lobby in the dead of night with a back pack and in those day, a typewriter, before someone presented him with the producer’s bar bill is not generally among them.

Then the ghost of S.J. Perelman visited me in a dream. His eyebrow entered the room several moments before the rest of him, pausing only to inspect the drinks cabinet. “You boys think you’ve suffered?” he said, “Try working for the Marx Brothers. They demanded jokes that made no sense whatsoever. Naturally I supplied them. They rejected them for being insufficiently irrational. The producers on the other hand, my boy, have always wanted originality, provided it bears a striking resemblance to something that made money last Thursday. Writers are ground to dust between them.”

He sipped his invisible martini. Stirring it occasionally with an invisible olive on an invisible cocktail stick.

I woke the next morning feeling curiously optimistic. After all, if an Oscar winner, the creators of Steptoe and Son, Jack Rosenthal and the ghost of S. J. Perelman all believed success was merely another form of organised disappointment, it occurred to me that my dismal career was normal and that there are only two kinds of successful writer. Those who haven’t yet discovered why they’re miserable, and those who are kind enough to explain it over dinner. It is the nearest thing our profession possesses to peer review.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Why not tell me about your disappointing success?

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TEN of Volume Two

Subscribe now

I had apparently, acquired yet another role that I had never applied for. I was now a dissident. This came as news to me. The trouble with modern America is that one can become a dissident without ever expressing an opinion. All that is required is that someone somewhere concludes you possess one. And I suppose as King I was not expected to have one thus as I did, about what I was not sure, but I was breaking the mould.

The announcement arrived on my phone while I was sitting beside the swimming pool of the Presidential Residence Compound Number Three, formerly known as Beverly Hills. I had finally found my way to that pool full of bikini clad flesh. Though given that none of it seemed to go near the water I had my doubts that it was flesh but rather clever upholstery. This was disappointing as I had hoped it to be an oasis of humanity but I should have realised that the return of my phone meant I was considered in a safe place where flesh and blood could not create a scandalous moment for me and my phone was now totally hacked and incapable of doing anything but keep me in line.

On its screen were the words:

YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS A HIGH-VALUE AUTHENTICITY ASSET.

Below this appeared a button marked ACCEPT.

Beside it appeared another marked DECLINE.

Below both appeared a third marked:

IRRELEVANT.

I pressed Irrelevant.

The phone thought about this. Then it displayed:

SELECTION RECORDED:
AUTHENTICITY ASSET REFUSES CATEGORISATION.

I turned off the screen thinking how clear this had been and how in the many films I appeared, clear and precisely worded texts on large phone screens were the order of the day because the camera could pick that up and there would be a nice insert edit followed by a reaction shot.

Five seconds later Fiona spoke.

“You have joined a resistance movement.”

“I have done no such thing.”

“You pressed Irrelevant.”

“That is not joining a resistance movement.”

“It is in California.”

This was difficult to argue with and I threatened to throw her in the pool. She giggled. Which made me all the more intrigued as to what might happen if I actually did. I assumed her batteries would explode and was overwhelmed with emotion. I was grieving. She was dead. But she wasn’t. But she would most certainly be, though I am certain there was a replacement replica with all the same memories, waiting in the factory. She probably had a warranty. I wondered when it would run out.

Outside the compound walls Los Angeles shimmered in the afternoon haze like a city that had accidentally become famous and never quite recovered from the experience. Palm trees leaned theatrically. Helicopters drifted overhead. Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed with the bored professionalism of a man announcing another season renewal.

Lottie appeared carrying three coffees and the expression of someone delivering subpoenas.

“We are going out.”

“Get your bikini on. I want someone to frolic in the pool with.”

Now Lottie was not the frolicsome kind. I wish she was but all the time that I had known her, she had been an object of extreme desire but so often a complete buzz killer.

“The Resistance wants to meet you,” she said, pushing a plastic cup of coffee towards me.

“I don’t want to meet the Resistance,” I said as I sniffed the coffee wondering if as soon as I drank it, I would be meeting the resistance or be the resistance. Drugging me was not beyond any of them.

“Nobody wants to meet the resistance,” she said, as if that explained why she was trying to drug me.

“Then why does it exist?”

“Hollywood.”

I considered this. It seemed explanation enough. But I decided not to drink the coffee. She looked annoyed.

“No sugar,” I said.

“Sugar’s bad for you.”

“Caffeine is too. And while we are in conversation, explain why you, who I assumed to now be a bastion of the establishment are talking about meeting the “resistance”?”

She screwed up her eyes and I recalled how I had conjured her up in a Virtual Reality setting in Volume One, and had a considerably intense orgasmic experience in what I now realise was old tech. Consequently, the tech I was experiencing now should be really good, except it was not delivering anything like the fun the old kit could.

Before the Mario Brothers suddenly burst out of the pool and hit me with a spanner, I decided that I had better get my pants on and go with her no matter what her motivations were. And as I recall from Volume One of my memoirs, she had a habit of swapping sides though I was not sure there were any sides, just survival modes. So, I assumed this was another case of swaying with the wind.

If you want to draw any life lessons from this particular piece of literature, and who does not, I would recommend that old Chinese philosophy of blowing with the wind, or as Bruce Lee said, “Be like water.” I think he was quoting Lao Tzu. And the moment that name has come into my mind, I know that sooner or later the algorithm is going to dip into San Francisco and pull up at least an incarnation of Lao Tzu himself.

***

The Resistance, so I discovered, operated beneath a former Scientology building. And as far as I could tell, everybody knew, which made me deeply suspicious because frankly it you are “Resisting” then secrecy I would assume was rather useful. But this is Hollywood and I had come to the conclusion that it revelled in its stereotype and just as one could yell “It’s Chinatown Jake!” to cover up plot holes, just stating that “this is Hollywood” excused all manner of idiocy that could not in reality happen.

Reality was there though. The Los Angeles I actually saw was a bit on the dumpish side with a street plan that had never quite got beyond the first come first served and screw the Mexicans not to mention some obscure Indian tribes who did not gallop about on horses with feathers in their hair. Instead they led a bit of a hunter gatherer life not that far of neolithic Britain’s life style. They lacked the penchant for sticking up big stones in circles but I am sure there were all manner of cultural remnants of their civilisation that did not escape the destructive urges of Spaniards and what passed for Americans.

I suppose there was some effort to disguise where the Resistance congregated because Los Angeles contains many former Scientology buildings and the difficulty lies in determining which ones have actually ceased being Scientology buildings and which merely wish you to think so!

None the less I could have guessed which one without any hesitation. It naturally was rather near to the Writers’ Guild Offices and the Farmers Market which I understand had an amazing range of Oat Milk.

Now although this LA seen from the POV of a Royal State Visit was somewhat tarted up for me, I still could squint through the filter and recall the LA I knew when trying to get bit parts in TV shows featuring some of my Chinese friends kicking cowboys in old China towns of the gold rush era. I figured there weren’t that many gweilo with experience of chop socky but as it turned out, they rather liked their gweilo’s to be genuinely stupid and racist rather than just pretending to be. Authenticity was beginning to be a plague even then, though one would hesitate to raise John Wayne high up the authenticity flag, but in truth I think he was flapping away at the very tip of the pole! He really was like that.

The killer sign that advertised The Resistance was a nondescript notice in the window of what looked like an old Tattoo Parlour to me, except with a few left-over copies of Ron Hubard’s SciFi oeuvre in the window display. It advertised itself as a wellness collective dedicated to ethical mindfulness. Inside it sold six-dollar cucumbers.

“Definitely a front,” I said.

“Yes,” said Lottie.

“For the Resistance?”

“No. For the cucumbers.”

She lied of course. We descended a staircase hidden behind a refrigerated display of vegan cheese. At the bottom lay a speakeasy. Not the sort populated by gangsters but the sort populated by screenwriters. This was considerably more dangerous.

The room contained perhaps fifty people. Every one of them appeared sleep deprived. Every one carried a laptop. Everyone looked as though they had recently lost an argument with an executive. Conversations drifted through the air – well perhaps not conversations, but pitches. Screenwriters rarely speak like normal people. They are constantly trying to sell a story to someone, often as not themselves.

A woman in oversized spectacles leaned towards a man with a beard capable of housing endangered species.

“Imagine Watergate,” she said.

“Okay,” said the beard.

“But underwater.”

He nodded.

“What’s the emotional engine?”

“A whale.”

“Limited series?”

“Prestige.”

“Eight episodes?”

“Obviously.”

Nearby another writer was saying:

“Think Hamlet.”

“Okay.”

“Now remove the prince.”

“What remains?”

“Intellectual property.”

Everyone nodded.

A bell rang and the room fell silent as a thin man climbed onto a small stage containing a lectern. His hair resembled a nervous system attempting escape. I expected Hellfire and Burt Lancaster.

“Welcome,” he announced, “to the Resistance.”

Applause followed.

“Tonight we fight tyranny.”

More applause.

“Tomorrow, we workshop Act Two.”

Thunderous applause.

The man pointed dramatically at me.

“This is Reggie Stokes.”

The crowd stood. Some cheered. Some cried. One immediately attempted to option my life rights.

“I haven’t agreed to any of this,” I said.

“Excellent,” said the man. “Authenticity is what we crave.”

Why that should be a sign of authenticity I do not know but I decided that I should avoid it in the future as it only encouraged people.

The leader introduced himself as Marty Kaufperson. At least that was what he claimed. He looked remarkably like a certain eccentric comedian long rumoured to have faked his own death.

“Didn’t you die?”

“I tested the concept.”

“Successfully?”

“We’re still collecting audience data.”

He ushered me towards a table where several elderly men sat beneath a poster reading NARRATIVE IS VIOLENCE.

One of them had wild white hair. Another looked suspiciously like a taxi-driving eccentric scientist. A third was short, bald and radiated the energy of a caffeinated goblin.

“Marty,” I said.

“Who are these people?”

He lowered his voice.

“The survivors.”

“Of what?”

“Development.”

The short one stood and extended a hand.

“Danny Devittole.”

“Of course.”

“The machine can’t predict me.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“That seems common enough.”

“No,” he said proudly. “I mean literally.”

The white-haired man nodded.

“My name is Chris Lloyd-Webber.”

“You’re a composer?”

“Not anymore.”

“What are you now?”

“Anomaly consultant.”

“What does that mean?”

“No one knows.”

Everyone appeared impressed. This worried me.

Marty sat down.

“The Generator is rewriting reality.”

“Yes.”

“It learns from stories.”

“Yes.”

“So, we sabotage the stories.”

“How?”

He smiled.

“Bad writing.”

Silence fell.

Even Fiona looked concerned.

“Bad writing?”

“The ultimate weapon.”

“What happened?”

“We tried it.”

“And?”

Marty pointed towards a television. A trailer was playing announcing an eight part prestige series entitled: REBELS! BASED ON TRUE EVENTS.

It starred attractive versions of everyone in the room and was “Executive Produced by Everyone.”

The crowd groaned.

“Every time we resist,” Marty said, “the Generator turns resistance into content.”

The trailer ended. A slogan appeared.

COMING THIS FALL.

FIGHT THE SYSTEM.

STREAM THE REVOLUTION.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

Then Fiona quietly said:

“It is learning faster.”

I looked around the room. For the first time the joke stopped being entirely funny. And for the first time I noticed something else: a symbol that flashed intermittently. It was tiny, barely noticeable, but it repeated on laptops, invoices, funding documents, and coffee cups. It contained three letters: ESP. It came, it went, and I had no idea and still have no idea how it did that, other than via some electrical interference in my brain.

At first, I assumed it referred to psychic powers. In Los Angeles this was a reasonable assumption. Then I noticed everyone becoming nervous whenever it appeared, thus it was also appearing in their brains as well. And suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had seen those letters before. Somewhere much closer to the centre of the story. Much closer to the man nobody seemed able to name.

Marty Kaufperson insisted upon buying me dinner, naturally. This was much better than being offered a Breakfast Meeting at seven a.m., a notorious ploy to make you feel inadequate for wanting to sleep instead of further your supposed writing career. Unfortunately, it meant spending three hours listening to Hollywood writers explain why they had become revolutionaries.

Historically speaking, revolutions have often been launched by hungry peasants, oppressed workers, disaffected soldiers, intellectuals, aristocrats, religious fanatics and occasionally football supporters. As far as I am aware this was the first one to be launched by people with representation agreements.

The restaurant occupied the rear of the speakeasy and specialised in what it described as Narrative Cuisine. The menu did not list food. It listed character arcs. One could order Redemption with Truffle Oil. One could order Generational Trauma with Seasonal Vegetables. One could order The Hero’s Journey. And the Hero’s Journey arrived in twelve courses and cost three hundred dollars.

I settled for Fish.

The waiter looked disappointed.

Around us conversations swirled. The Resistance, despite its name, appeared less interested in overthrowing the Generator than pitching alternatives to it. One table was discussing a proposal entitled Democracy 2.0. Another was debating whether reality itself needed a stronger third act. A third had become trapped in an argument about whether irony was a colonial construct.

I was beginning to suspect that if civilisation ever collapsed entirely, Hollywood would continue producing panel discussions long after oxygen had become optional.

Marty slid a folder across the table.

“Funding.”

I gingerly opened it fearing it would explode. The first page contained a list of foundations. The second page contained another list of foundations. The third page contained a list of foundations funding the first two lists of foundations. It resembled an aristocratic family tree drawn by an accountant suffering a nervous breakdown.

“Look at the initials.”

I did.

ESP.

The letters appeared repeatedly. Sometimes as grants. Sometimes as shell corporations. Sometimes as consulting firms. Sometimes as production companies. Sometimes as charities devoted to empowering underserved narratives. And I wondered what sort of fairy tale I had slipped into. I was definitely not in Kansas anymore and even less in Watford, and even less in my beloved Hong Kong where I knew reality had long departed and replaced itself with dim sum and deep-fried squid on the waterfront of Sai Kung. I could feel myself getting all nostalgic for the life I once had.

“Nobody can find the owner,” said Marty, bringing me back into what I suppose was the present, though time has ceased to be measurable for me.

“Ok,” I said, taking the bait, “Why can nobody find the owner?”

“We did.”

“Ah, so it was not true that nobody could find the owner, unless you consider yourselves as nobodies? I can understand how screenwriters come to that conclusion.”

“We found another company.”

“And er… where’s this going?”

“And it was owned by another company.”

“And who owns that?”

“Another company.”

I nodded. Of course. America had perfected capitalism to such a degree that money itself now possessed plausible deniability. At that moment Fiona, who had been sitting silently beside me, suddenly turned her head. Her eyes unfocused and for several seconds she appeared to be listening to something far away.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Someone is searching for you.”

I felt a faint chill.

“Who?”

She blinked.

“The Duke and Duchess of Montecito.”

“Good Lord.”

“Technically not.”

“No?”

“Contractually ambiguous.”

Being of a creative bent myself I imagined that several hundred miles away, Prince Harry Windsor-Mountbatten-Spencer-Sussex-Netflix, or whatever his lawyers currently allowed him to call himself, was standing inside a roadside crystal emporium outside Palm Springs.

Now, if you recall from Volume One, I replaced the legitimate monarch of the UK. So, it stands to reason that his children would be somewhat concerned about his disappearance. Indeed, I also was concerned, though I was even more concerned about my own disappearance, hence my desire to go hide in the bogs of Ireland. It was thus hardly surprising that a sub plot must have been brewing all this time and that Harry, having moved to America, must have become convinced that the missing King of Britain was also hiding in America.

This was not entirely unreasonable. Several previous monarchs had hidden in stranger places.

“OK,” I said to Fiona, fill me in on the details.

I could see that her mind was accessing a data base and pulling up gobbets of information that she was assessing and fitting into some sort of narrative for me. She began barking out short little sentences occasionally punctuated with bizarre similes likening everything to “regret”, a word that I was desperate to eliminate from my vocabulary but it was built into her infrastructure for some reason.

Let me try sum up what she said to me. She went on and said Harry had become convinced that every rumour was true. If someone reported that the King was working as a bartender, Harry investigated bartenders. If someone claimed he had become an Uber driver, Harry interrogated Uber drivers. If someone suggested he was living among retired Elvis impersonators, Harry immediately drove to Nevada. This had produced a remarkable amount of travelling and almost no useful information.

Beside him Meghan had stood with the patient expression of a woman who had spent several years discovering that reality rarely matched press releases. A crystal merchant pointed towards a large lump of quartz saying: “The King speaks through this one.” Naturally they had ventured into a magic crystal emporium. I could imagine the visual possibilities of that location as I entertained the notion that Fiona was not so much filling me in on the actual details of real events, but simply making a pitch.

“What does he say?” I said, going along with the moment like a good Vice President of Acquisitions was forced to do during their scheduled hour of pitch meetings with nervous writers.

The crystal merchant listened to the crystal but the crystal remained silent, though apparently not to him. Eventually he nodded gravely.

“He says he prefers not to be found.”

Harry looked devastated and Meghan sighed.

“That’s the eighth King this week.”

“The ninth.”

“The llama doesn’t count.”

“It might.”

“It was a llama, Harry.”

“An unusually regal llama.”

I must say that I thought Fiona’s English accent was very good, though she gave that to Meghan, and Harry, sounded all too much like he had spent too long dealing in drugs deep in the Bronx. But as a comedy turn, I thought Fiona had a future.

Just when I thought things were getting strange, the evening was becoming stranger. Or perhaps I should rephrase that. Just when I thought things were way too strange to be in the least bit believable, things really did get strange and lurched into the totally implausible, audience confusing, uncanny 2001 and Space Odyssey end sequence boggle.

Marty introduced me to a woman called Zelda Frame. At least I think that was her name. She may have changed it twice during the conversation. She specialised in tracing Generator influence networks. In simpler times this would have been called journalism but now nothing could happen without some new jargon. But then perhaps all language is just jargon. Beowulf was just the jargon of the dark ages and the Anglo-saxons of the time were most likely bitching about the decline of old English into new English, or as they would have put it, teenage slang.

Zelda spread photographs across the dinner table and announced the following list: Board members, Executives, Political donors, Media consultants, Think tank directors, Tech founders, Hollywood producers…

And all the time I am thinking how lists are now appearing in my reality. Hollywood cannot possibly have been taken over by list generators, but then I remembered the huge long lists of credits at the ends of movies and it dawned upon me that probably the only people who ever read the credits were people who lived in Hollywood looking for the names of people they hated and knew did not disserve whatever credit they got!

“The same faces,” said Zelda loudly on noticing my attention was drifting, “The same faces appear repeatedly! Thirty of them can be spotted in the crowd, on the edge, reflected in a mirror. Never quite visible. Like sharks glimpsed beneath water. Or lawyers. And ESP touches all of them! And nobody knows who runs it.”

I could tell by all the nodding heads about the table that conspiracies are comforting. They imply control and intention and maybe responsibility. But systems… Systems can become something else. The Generator was beginning to feel less like a machine and more like weather. Nobody owned a hurricane. Yet people still drowned in one. Where my thoughts had gone towards some great AI takeover of reality that we should fight against, I realised that despite any rebellious utterance that I could make, it would never kill this desire for everything to be the fault of some secret cabal of conspirators who controlled everything. Especially if they were Jewish. Where I saw something out of control, around me people were sure someone was doing it all for whatever megalomaniac obsession they had. Some alien god would also be invoked. I heard “Baal” being a favourite. Though why I do not know as I believe it meant “husband”. And yeah, why not. I wish my ex-wives had thought me a god.

The meeting might have continued for several more hours had not an argument broken out at the far end of the room concerning whether reality itself should continue.

At first, I assumed this was a philosophical discussion. After several weeks in California, I had learned that one should never immediately dismiss a sentence simply because it sounded insane. Often the apparently insane statement turned out to be the practical one. Unfortunately, this was not philosophy. This was television development.

A producer in a black polo-neck stood beside a large screen saying, “Reality is underperforming with younger demographics.”

A murmur ran around the room.

“I’ve seen the numbers,” he continued.

Someone raised a hand.

“Can reality be rebooted?”

The producer shook his head.

“We tested that.”

“What happened?”

“The focus groups preferred dragons.”

Nobody appeared surprised and a woman with purple hair sighed.

“That’s always the problem,” she said.

For several seconds I genuinely believed she meant it. Then I realised she did.

Around the room heads nodded. Notes were taken. Action points were assigned. Reality, it seemed, was once again in development hell, and my presence seemingly totally forgotten!

As I was being ignored I became increasingly distracted by the letters ESP. The symbol seemed to have acquired a life of its own. The more I looked for it the more frequently it appeared. On walls. Screens. In reflections. On the corner of presentation slides.

I began to suspect that either a secret organisation was operating at the centre of American society or I was developing a neurological condition. Neither possibility particularly appealed. I eventually pointed towards a coffee cup.

“You see that.”

Those who had felt it impolite to ignore me entirely, looked uncomfortable, wishing they had and were involved in the debate on whether reality was feasible any more.

“What about it?” asked Marty.

“The initials.”

“What initials?”

“ESP.”

Several people seemed to become interested and then immediately looked away when they saw that I had noticed them. One man started studying his shoes. Another became fascinated by a napkin. Danny Devittole muttered something about parking validation.

“You’re all behaving very oddly,” I said.

“We’re writers,” said Marty.

“That’s not a defence.”

“No. It’s an explanation.”

Before the discussion could continue, the door at the far end of the room burst open. A young assistant rushed inside carrying a tablet. He looked terrified – I had worked out by now that Hollywood assistants frequently look terrified because Hollywood functions upon the principle that fear is cheaper than management.

“They’ve done it again,” he declared.

The room froze.

“Done what?” I said.

The assistant held up the tablet. A trailer was playing. At first I assumed it was another advertisement. Then I recognised the room. I recognised the people. I recognised myself. At least a younger and considerably better-looking version of myself. Though, surprisingly, black.

The title appeared in enormous letters: REBELS!

The crowd groaned. A prestige series had rather rapidly advanced from concept to production. This was particularly impressive because the events depicted had just occurred. And then it went onto events that were supposedly the result of these events: explosions, helicopters, gunfights, passionate speeches! An attractive actress portraying Lottie delivered a monologue about truth that frankly had Islamic overtones. I assume it picked up something of that vibe from my involvement in some Pakistani films and films shot in Central Asia.

I searched the screen for a variant of Djamal but for some reason they had missed that connection or given his lines to Lottie.

As for Lottie, the real Lottie, realish, she stared at the screen muttering: “I’ve never said any of those things.”

The actress continued speaking.

“I don’t even believe those things,” protested realish Lottie.

The trailer ignored her.

An actor portraying Marty Kaufperson detonated a building. The real Marty looked mildly offended.

“I wouldn’t use that much CGI.”

The trailer concluded with a familiar logo. Three simple letters: ESP.

For several seconds nobody spoke. Then Fiona quietly said:

“It either instantly used this meeting or it predicted this meeting!”

“No,” said Marty. “It couldn’t.”

Couldn’t do what, I was not sure, but whatever it was, Marty insisted it was impossible. But I was not so sure either way, because I had long sensed that what I was experiencing was scripted and though my ability to improvise even when given a script was legendary, I still ended up following the basic idea of the script. At least that’s what I told the frustrated director. It will be ok in the edit, I would tell the director who knew he was going to dub me anyway.

We watched the trailer again. This time details emerged: A line of dialogue, a sequence of events, a confrontation… Each one corresponded not to things that had happened, but to things people around the room were currently suggesting. The Generator was getting ahead of them even as we spoke: like a novelist reading over his own shoulder and making corrections even as he was still writing the damned thing! (You are probably having difficulty in working out how that works but if I was so inclined and I am, may I suggest it is something to do with quantum physics and entanglement and a cat in a box.)

The room suddenly felt smaller – did I mention a cat in a box? - and I found myself remembering something Brother Chan had once told me while standing beside a stone older than civilisation: stories are dangerous, not because they are false, but because they become true! At the time I had assumed he was speaking metaphorically. Increasingly I suspected he was not as he would go on about one’s thoughts manifesting themselves through some mysterious workings of the universal consciousness.

The meeting dissolved shortly afterwards. People drifted away in anxious clusters. Writers who only an hour earlier had been plotting revolution now seemed worried that revolution might already have a showrunner. And worse, they, whoever they were, knew where they lived.

Outside, Los Angeles shimmered beneath a haze of sodium lights and optimism. Traffic crawled. Billboards glowed. A helicopter crossed the sky. For a moment I found myself wondering whether the helicopter was real. Then I realised that was exactly the wrong question. The more important question was whether reality itself still cared.

Lottie drove the car I was now in and Fiona sat beside me in the back. Nobody spoke for several minutes. The city rolled past and I experienced a montage of movie posters, campaign posters, streaming advertisements, and political slogans. Increasingly they appeared interchangeable.

Eventually I said: “Who owns ESP?”

Fiona looked out of the window.

“I do not know.”

“Nobody knows?”

“Someone knows.”

“Who?”

She considered the question. I could almost hear processes moving behind her eyes. Thousands of possibilities were being weighed, rejected, and reassembled until finally she answered.

“That is the wrong question.”

I looked at her.

“What is the right question?”

For the first time that evening she seemed genuinely troubled, not confused, but troubled, as though she had reached the edge of something, as though her own programming disliked what it had found there.

“The question is why.”

“Why what?”

“Why it exists.”

“And?”

She was silent for a long time as she worked out the intricacies of a left hand turn across a main road in a country with a hatred of roundabouts, and I was beginning to feel that I had slipped into some Swedish art house movie where long silences and poignant looks against misty backgrounds won prestigious awards and baffled guys like me who wanted something to explode and someone to kick someone in the head.

Outside a billboard displayed the smiling face of the Butler, President of the United States, Defender of Democracy, brought to you by six sponsors and selected streaming partners. The billboard vanished behind us and Fiona continued staring into the darkness.

Then she finally spoke.

“He does not believe in ideology.”

The words sounded oddly precise. Like a quotation. Like something she had discovered rather than concluded. And I waited, nervously, but fascinated because I knew that Fiona was in many ways my spy on the workings of the Generator. A moment later she added: “He believes in optimisation.” And suddenly, although I still had no idea who “he” was, I felt colder than I had all evening, which, considering this was California, took some doing.

Lottie remained enigmatically in Bergman mode and I suspected she was replaying Cries and Whispers in her mind, for despite my insistence that everything is a joke, a huge comedy, she was sinking into the idea of death and how our response to it was positioned on the borders between reality and nightmare, tranquility and terror.

Then there was a loud Honk from a car cruising beside us driven by the Somali ex-gunship driver giving us a big thumbs up before having to grab his steering wheel to avoid crashing into a school bus and no doubt surviving to be arrested for terrorism.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Lions, Forms and Survival

There are many things in life that are funny. My wife and I were walking the Serengetti, as one does, and literally stood on the tails of a bunch of lions sleeping in a clump of grass. How we did not see them I will never know but trust me, they blend in.

The result was they leapt up, roared, came for us, and our accompanying Park Ranger reached for his gun and was contemplating which would require the least paper work, letting the lions eat us, or shooting the lions. He hesitated and started barking like a dog which confused us as much as the lions, who stared me right in the eye. I reached for my camera and the bastards ran off before I could get that great shot. My wife managed a photo of a few blurry backsides. After that, we burst into laughter. See? Funny!

Regularly counted Lions with a few bullet holes would have brought about much more paperwork than blaming the loss of a couple of hapless tourists on their wandering, no doubt the story would say “against advice,” too far from the camp. Luckily big cats curiously respond to the sound, fake though it was, of a big dog. That, and I like to think, the cool terribly English response in the face of danger that has served our nation well over the years. Helen and I always had nerves of steel.

Enter Probate

Bureaucracy is thus hilarious right up until the precise moment it acquires possession of something you urgently require: such as the original copy of a will! Probate’s long-winded efforts to delay access to pension funds, while at the same time the state pension’s department instantly stop the deceased’s pension, is somewhat notorious. If any poor widow or widower depended upon the pensions of their spouse, they would find themselves somewhat strapped for cash for a year or so or worse.

My wife died of pancreatic cancer and thus started my encounter with probate. I sent them her will in a see-through plastic envelope. I removed the paper clip, believing it was unnecessary and then had them come back to be, after a rather extensive period of time, to say that they required witnesses that the two-page will has never been clipped together. They were not specific about what form of “clipping”, but nonetheless I had to get two witnesses to contact them and say that the will had been stored in a see-through plastic cover immediately after they signed it. The Will has now descended into the bureaucracy while other financial vehicles are requiring copies of it and confirmation that my copy is indeed a copy of the very will that Probate have. And so, I await the workings of the system.

The British have always enjoyed laughing at bureaucracy. We have built entire entertainment industries around it. We gave the world Yes Minister. We produced generations of civil servants capable of discussing a missing paperclip through fourteen committees and three impact assessments. We regard forms not as administrative instruments but as a national literary genre. The joke, however, works only while the bureaucracy is happening to somebody else.

Then one day it is your passport. Or your driving licence. Or your tax code. Or your planning application. Or the hospital emergency referral to an oncologist that appears to have entered a parallel universe. At which point you discover something remarkable. Nobody is actually in charge.

The traditional image of bureaucracy involves stern men in grey suits deliberately preventing progress. This is comforting because it implies there is at least a villain. A villain has agency. A villain can be reasoned with, bribed, threatened or exposed. This is how colonial bureaucracy worked, and has left its mark upon the ex-colonies, ameliorated by that Chinese concept of “quangshi”, i.e. connections. But back in Britain, its bureaucracy is much more unsettling. There is no villain. There is merely process. And connections work only at ministerial level, hence the only reason why anyone befriended ex-Prince Andrew.

Process is infinitely harder to negotiate with because process cannot hear you. It cannot feel sympathy. It cannot experience embarrassment. It cannot recognise absurdity. And most importantly, it cannot admit error because error itself has no place in the process.

The strange thing is that nobody you manage to speak to, after the warning that bullying behaviour and insulting language will not be tolerated, ever intended these stagnant outcomes. Every person you speak to will be polite, in as much as they put you on hold politely, and try to put you through to someone considered better informed. And then sympathy will be expressed, and they will agree the situation was ridiculous. Then explain that nothing can be done because the system does what it does.

This system has become a sort of invisible deity. Nobody believes in it. Nobody understands it. Nobody appears responsible for it. Yet all obey it. The computer says you are in the process of being processed and then you are informed that this department’s system does not connect with the other department’s system. And if you have anything to do with the NHS you will constantly come up against different Hospitals’ inability to exchange information between them.

Historically we were a nation that conquered half the world through improvisation. The Empire, whatever one thinks of it, often appears to have been administered by eccentric men arriving unexpectedly in distant ports and making things up as they went along. But modern Britain has evolved in precisely the opposite direction, or perhaps those who stayed home were always like that and they were the reason why the adventurous left in droves!

This tendency fascinates me because, it lies at the heart of much comedy. Comedy emerges whenever reality collides with rules. The greater the mismatch, the greater the laughter. A man wearing a banana costume while applying for a mortgage is funny. A government department unable to find itself on its own database is funnier. The reason Yes Minister remains relevant decades later is that it identified a timeless truth: institutions exist only partly to solve problems, but mostly to preserve themselves from the risks associated with solving problems.

Eventually the process becomes the purpose. At this stage the organisation resembles a medieval monastery dedicated to paperwork. Its monks no longer know why the sacred texts exist. They merely continue copying them. One form generates another. A certificate requires verification. The verification requires certification. Soon entire forests are sacrificed to a ritual whose original objective vanished sometime around 1987.

The Computer Says No

The digital revolution was supposed to change all this. Instead, it merely automated it. The old bureaucracy might lose your file. The new bureaucracy loses you. That is a much greater achievement. Somewhere there exists a database that confidently states you are dead. Another believes you are resident in Cornwall despite never having visited. A third has decided your date of birth is impossible and therefore cannot be amended. The computer, unlike the old clerk, possesses infinite certainty. It is never confused. It is merely wrong.

I literally have two letters from a hospital referring to the same consultation on the same day. One letter definitively tells me to stop taking a particular drug, and the other tells me to take it. My GP received the letters and is very confused. So, he set up a new consultation which resulted in cancelling my imminent annual consultation by six months. He then told me to ring them up, whereupon they told me they would get back to me. They haven’t.

AI is of course accelerating this madness and is one of the ideas that found its way into my current work, Liminal Britain. Not because the novel is about bureaucracy. It is not. It is about reality itself becoming administrative. The underlying joke is that institutions become so complicated they stop managing the country and start managing the narrative of the country. Reality becomes secondary. Compliance becomes primary. The form becomes more important than the fact.

In fiction this is amusing. In real life it is surprisingly familiar. Anyone who has attempted to explain a perfectly obvious situation to a customer service chatbot already understands the principle. The machine is not trying to help. The machine is trying to categorise. Those are entirely different objectives. Human beings deal with exceptions. Systems dislike exceptions because exceptions imply imperfection. And perfection, as every bureaucrat secretly knows, is vastly more important than usefulness. This is why bureaucratic language becomes so peculiar.

Nobody says, “We lost your application.” Instead, they say, “Your application has not yet completed its processing journey.” The passport has not disappeared. It is experiencing a transitional status event. The hospital appointment has not been cancelled. It has undergone pathway optimisation. The pothole has not remained unrepaired for six years. It is under active consideration.

One almost admires the creativity.

If British institutions ever collapse entirely, their final contribution to civilisation may be a magnificent new branch of literature: Liminal Britain for instance! Yet for all the frustration, there is something oddly reassuring about bureaucracy. It reflects a national instinct. Britain is a country suspicious of grand theories and dramatic solutions. We prefer muddling through. We trust procedure more than passion. But the danger comes when procedure becomes detached from purpose. Then bureaucracy ceases to be a servant and becomes an ecosystem. Its inhabitants adapt to survive within it. Success is measured not by results but by compliance.

What saves us, usually, are individual people. The nurse who ignores the script. The council officer who makes a phone call. The civil servant who notices something absurd and quietly fixes it. The human being who remembers that institutions exist for people rather than the other way round. These individuals rarely receive awards. They deserve them. Without them Britain would probably grind to a halt by Thursday lunchtime. Though they are just as likely to be arrested as the true perpetrators of the bureaucratic muddle.

Bureaucracy will always be with us. Complex societies require systems. The challenge is remembering that systems are tools, not masters. The map is not the territory. The form is not the reality. And the passport, ideally, should remain attached to its owner.

Bureaucracy provides endless material for writers, comedians and satirists. It creates situations no novelist would dare invent for fear of being accused of exaggeration. But only at a safe distance. Once it has your passport, your tax records, your hospital appointment or your future in its filing cabinet, the joke becomes considerably less theoretical. And that is when you discover the central truth of modern administration: the bureaucracy is never laughing at itself. It is far too busy processing the laughter request form.

Leave a comment

Why not tell us about your brush with absurd Bureaucracy!

Share

And why not become not just a subscriber but a paying subscriber. It only £20 for a year of unbridled humour, satire, nonsense and er, the odd serious bit when life just decides to kick you.

Subscribe now

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Subscribe now

By breakfast the next morning I had acquired three things I did not want: a security detail, a schedule, and a sense of destiny. The security detail wore dark suits and small wires and had the sort of faces that suggest they had been assembled from spare jawlines. The schedule was displayed on a tablet by Lottie, who tapped it with the satisfaction of a woman arranging executions by colour code. Destiny, meanwhile, had been lying on my chest all night like an overweight Labrador with geopolitical ambitions.

“We are not doing another studio tour,” I said.

“No,” said Lottie. “Today is movement.”

“That sounds worse.”

“It is optics.”

“That is definitely worse.”

She was standing by the window in a white Californian suit that made her look like a press secretary for a regime that had discovered Pilates. Beyond her, Los Angeles lay in its morning splendour, bright, expensive, and full of toothless people pushing shopping trolleys. Fiona sat in a chair beside the bed, motionless and fully charged, which is more than could be said for me. On her lap lay Kim Jong-il’s book, opened at a page she had been staring at for twenty minutes without turning. This was either deep reading or a software freeze.

“What does the schedule say?” I asked.

Lottie smiled. “A short retail diplomacy moment on Rodeo Drive, followed by lunch near Union Station, followed by a private production demonstration at NarrativeWorks.”

“Retail diplomacy?”

“You will be seen among aspirational goods.”

“I am seventy-three. My most aspirational good is a reliable bladder.”

“That tested badly.”

“Everything true tests badly.”

“Now you’re learning.”

Fiona looked up from the book. “The audience prefers managed fear.”

“Please don’t start,” I said.

She blinked. “I did not start. I continued.”

That, annoyingly, was true.

I had not slept well. The line in the margin - The audience prefers managed fear. — E. - had crawled about my skull all night like a spider with a Harvard fellowship. Every time I thought I had settled upon a sane interpretation, another possibility presented itself. Perhaps E was the smiling financier. Perhaps E was an acronym. Perhaps E stood for Epstein, Empire, Entertainment, Evil, Editing, Essex, or some other force that had discovered my life and decided it required development notes. At one point, around 4:13 in the morning, I decided it stood for Ernest, which seemed less threatening until I remembered Hemingway and started worrying about shotguns.

I asked Fiona whether she could identify E.

“Insufficient clearance.”

“Can you speculate?”

“Yes.”

“Then speculate.”

“Speculation restricted.”

“Useful.”

“I am designed for continuity, not liberation.”

“Most people are.”

She looked at me for too long. “You are afraid that I am less free than you.”

“No,” I said. “I am afraid you are more honest about it.”

This pleased her, or at least produced a small facial adjustment that in the original Fiona would have meant she was about to throw a bottle, seduce a critic, or accuse me of not understanding Brecht. This Fiona merely closed the book and said, “Your anxiety profile suggests impending improvisation.”

“Good.”

“Improvisation is dangerous.”

“I was a British actor in low-budget Asian cinema. Improvisation paid my rent.”

“It also killed you in thirty-seven productions.”

“Thirty-eight if you count the panda.”

Lottie snapped her fingers. “Can we save the existential vaudeville for the car?”

We went downstairs through corridors where staff appeared and vanished with the precision of stagehands who had signed non-disclosure agreements. Outside, a convoy waited. Not a modest convoy. Not even a presidential convoy. This was a convoy that looked as if it had swallowed several other convoys and was now digesting them under police escort. Djamal was already leaning against the lead vehicle in sunglasses, silk scarf and linen, looking like the sort of man customs officers dream about catching but never do.

“Reggie!” he cried. “Today, we shop for civilisation.”

“I thought civilisation was collapsing.”

“Exactly. Everything must go.”

Rodeo Drive, when we arrived, looked as though poverty had been politely asked to leave and had complied out of embarrassment. The pavements shone. The shop windows glowed. Handbags sat in glass cases with the solemnity of relics. Watches rested on velvet as if measuring the death of empires in limited editions. There is something deeply comic about luxury retail. It is the point at which capitalism stops pretending to satisfy need and begins selling the emotional experience of being allowed to overpay.

A crowd had already gathered behind barriers. Some waved small flags. Some held phones. Some looked confused but enthusiastic, which is the natural condition of spectators at history. An announcer, possibly human, informed them that they were about to witness “a spontaneous cultural alignment walk.” This was an interesting definition of spontaneous, involving six police motorcycles, a choir of influencer children, two drone cameras and a brand consultant explaining where I should look surprised.

“You walk,” Lottie instructed. “You smile. You look touched by democratic luxury.”

“What does democratic luxury look like?”

“Accessible aspiration.”

“Meaning nobody can afford it but everyone can photograph it?”

“Exactly.”

I stepped onto the pavement and the cameras followed like trained insects. A woman from a perfume house rushed forward and presented me with a bottle shaped like, dare I say it, a tear of regret. Why that word pops up in my descriptions all the time I do not know. I, as far as I can tell, regret nothing. Well, not much. In as much as I did whatever I did just to get by and the only regret I have is that I was not born rich, extremely talented, lucky, or anything in particular. I improvised my life. I made it work. Sort of. And my only regret is that it cannot be long enough for me to really achieve the things I dreamt of achieving, not that I think nowadays they were all they were cracked up to be now that I have come across people who seem to have achieved things I would have liked to achieve. Make what you will of that insight.

In the meantime, as my mind revelled in the futility of it all, a jeweller offered to show me “the diamond of resilience,” which immediately made me suspicious given my history with the Koh-i-Noor. A man in a white jacket asked if I would consider endorsing a line of royal loafers.

“I am not qualified to endorse footwear,” I said, quivering with a desire to make a joke out of the words “Royal Loafers.”

“You crossed Ireland in mud,” he replied.

This was fair, if rather surprising. How did he know? Where did he get that information from? Was Brother Chan giving interviews to raise funds for his temple? I wouldn’t put it past him. Once a Hong Konger, always a Hong Konger.

Meanwhile, Fiona walked slightly behind me, adjusting herself to the crowd’s emotional tempo. I could see it happening. Her movements became more cinematic when cameras approached, more intimate when ordinary people stared, more still when Lottie glanced at her. She was not merely responding. She was editing herself in real time. I found it unsettling, partly because machines should not be so good at what humans do badly, and partly because I recognised the technique from actors who wanted better billing.

A small boy asked if I was really a king.

“Only administratively,” I said.

His mother nodded as if this clarified monarchy.

Then a woman with rubbery lips, heroic eyelashes and fingernails long enough to interfere with aviation pushed through a cluster of stylists and grasped my hand as if she had been waiting for this moment since the fall of Rome.

“Reggie!” she cried.

I had no idea who she was.

This happens often in my life and has led to many of its worst decisions.

“You remember me,” she said.

“Of course,” I lied.

“From the film. Jane’s project.”

There are phrases that open trapdoors in memory. Jane’s project was one of them. Years earlier, in the old Hollywood of lunches, scripts, hopes and gin and tonics, I had been involved in a film backed by a celebrated English actress and her husband. It had begun, as such things do, with intelligent conversation in a beautiful house and ended, as such things also do, in development hell, emotional confusion, and somebody running off with the make-up artist. Looking at said make-up artist now, with her generous mouth, lacquered nails and air of having survived several cosmetic weather systems, I realised somewhere along the line she’d signed a reasonably lucrative contract and moved on to other emotional minefields.

“You look wonderful,” I said, which is what one says when one cannot remember a name and suspects the person has legal representation.

“And you look exactly the same,” she said.

“That is medically unlikely.”

She laughed and touched my arm. Cameras leaned in. Lottie’s face tightened. Fiona’s pupils flickered. The woman lowered her voice.

“You should not be here.”

That got my attention.

“Few people have put my career so neatly.”

“No,” she said. “I mean here. With them. They did this before. In the nineties. Smaller. Messier. With actors and money and tapes and parties. They called it development.”

“Who did?”

She glanced over my shoulder. I turned. Across the street, in the reflection of a shop window, I saw the smiling man. But only for a moment. Then a bus advertising a streaming series about therapeutic vampires passed between us and he was gone.

The make-up artist squeezed my hand.

“He likes unfinished men,” she said.

“That is an alarming sentence.”

“He likes everyone unfinished. Easier to shape.”

Before I could ask more, two members of my security detail gently but decisively moved between us. She smiled brightly for the cameras, kissed the air beside my cheek, and vanished into the crowd with the practised skill of someone who had once escaped a producer’s third wife through a catering tent.

Lottie was beside me instantly.

“Old friend?”

“Development acquaintance.”

“That can mean anything.”

“In Hollywood, it usually does.”

“What did she say?”

“That I look well.”

“She was lying.”

“Everybody is. That’s the problem.”

We resumed the walk, but something had shifted. Rodeo Drive no longer looked merely absurd. It looked arranged. Every reflection, every window, every camera, every smile seemed to be waiting for my reaction. And perhaps that was what the Generator did best. It did not force events. It built rooms in which your own instincts betrayed you.

At the end of the street stood a temporary stage. I groaned.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” said Lottie.

“I am not making a speech.”

“You’re making a moment.”

“Moments are speeches with better lighting.”

A woman with a headset informed me that I was to receive a symbolic gift from “the retail community of Los Angeles.” I asked what the gift was. She said I would know when I saw it, which is never reassuring. Music began. Not proper music. Event music. The sort that contains drums, uplift, and no evidence of human suffering.

A large silver box was carried out by four models dressed as footmen. They opened it. Inside was a pen… A pen! Not a Bic. Not a fountain pen. A monstrous ceremonial thing, lacquered black, trimmed with gold, and displayed on velvet like a weapon from an opera.

The crowd applauded.

I looked at Lottie. She smiled.

“Your rebellion needed a prop.”

I stared at the pen. The whole of me wanted to grab it. To hold it up. To declare that words would defeat algorithms and that no machine could truly govern a soul that still knew how to blot ink on a cuff. Unfortunately, the part of me that had survived as long as I had whispered that when your enemies hand you exactly the symbol you were looking for, you should check whether it explodes.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

The woman with the headset laughed. The security detail did not. Fiona stepped forward, blurting out the sort of things one’s fire alarm does when you are trying to fry up a steak.

“Recording capacity detected. Chemical reservoir detected. Microfilament blade detected. Emotional trigger sensor detected.”

The woman with the headset stopped laughing.

Djamal stepped forward from the crowd, suggesting to me that he had something to do with arranging this and clapped with delight. “A complete writing instrument!”

“Who provided it?” I asked.

There was a pause. A small one. But by now I had learned to listen to pauses. Pauses are where lies take off their shoes.

The woman with the headset consulted her tablet.

“Anonymous donor,” she said.

Lottie’s smile did not move. Djamal rubbed a rather large diamond ring on his middle finger and I expected a genie to appear, or at least a hologram, but no, it was just a big stone, a really big one. I blinked a little and dismissed the possibility that he had managed to acquire the Kohinoor. Then I looked at the pen, then at the crowd, then at the cameras, then at the reflection in the shop windows where, for one instant, I thought I saw the smiling man again, standing behind my shoulder like a future I had failed to avoid. I could not help thinking of a film I was once in where a dwarf I kept mistaking for a ghostly child suddenly slit my throat for no reason at all.

Consequently, I did not take the pen. This caused a problem. One cannot refuse symbolism in public without generating symbolism of a different and usually less manageable kind. The music looped awkwardly. The models continued holding the box. The crowd’s applause lost confidence and began looking for somewhere to sit down. The cameras pushed closer, hungry.

“Take it,” Lottie whispered.

“No.”

“Reggie.”

“No.”

“You are causing a gap.”

“Good.”

The word left my mouth before I had considered it. Fiona’s head turned sharply. Somewhere above us a drone dipped. The air changed. Not dramatically. Not yet. But in the way a room changes when the wrong person tells the truth. Then my phone, which had been silent since being confiscated, began to vibrate in my jacket pocket. This was impossible for several reasons, including the fact that I no longer had my phone.

I reached inside and pulled out not a phone but a small black device no bigger than a cigarette case. It pulsed once against my palm. Fiona stared at it.

“That is not authorised,” she said.

“Join the club.”

The device projected a tiny blue message onto the inside of my hand.

AUTHENTICITY CHIP HANDSHAKE DETECTED.

I did not like any word in that sentence.

Fiona’s pupils widened. For the first time since she had been reassembled out of memory, machinery and somebody’s unresolved cruelty, she looked genuinely startled.

“Reggie,” she said very quietly, “do not move.”

Naturally, I moved.

The stage lurched beneath me, or perhaps my sense of staging did. The ceremonial pen rolled from its velvet cradle. I reached for it because actors, like cats, cannot resist falling objects. My hand closed around it. The crowd gasped. The microfilament blade sprang out with a soft elegant click.

Security shouted.

Lottie swore.

Djamal yelled, “At last!”

Somewhere, from a speaker, event music rose heroically, having misread the situation.

And then, with the graceful inevitability of a man who has spent decades being thrown through furniture by Hong Kong stunt coordinators, I fell backwards off the stage, clutching the weaponised pen, straight through a display of luxury handbags and into the predictive rendering pipeline of Western civilisation.

Now, before anyone accuses me of exaggeration, let me explain that I did not literally fall into the predictive rendering pipeline of Western civilisation. That would be absurd, even by the standards currently governing my life. What I fell into was a glass display case containing handbags, a floor-level sensor array, three promotional lighting rigs, two influencer tripods, and something described later in the incident report as a mobile emotional capture node. But since the mobile emotional capture node was connected to the Audience Alignment Platform, which was connected to NarrativeWorks, which was connected to several governments, four studios, three social networks, two military forecasting systems and a suspiciously large wellness charity, the distinction is mostly legal.

There was a crash. There was shouting. There was the delicate tinkling of very expensive glass doing what glass does when asked to participate in symbolism.

I landed on my back, surrounded by handbags whose price tags suggested they had been made from the skins of extinct accountants. The weaponised pen remained in my hand. The little black device pulsed again in my pocketless pocket, which I still could not explain because I no longer trusted my clothing. Fiona vaulted down from the stage with an athleticism entirely inappropriate in a woman who had recently been folded into luggage. Lottie descended more carefully, because Lottie understood that even emergencies are photo opportunities.

“Are you hurt?” Fiona asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where?”

“My dignity.”

“Already compromised.”

“Then my ribs.”

“Possibly.”

“Thank you, Florence Nightingale 3.2.”

She ignored that and gripped my wrist. Her hand was warm. This upset me. Machines should either be obviously cold or so expensive that you never touch them. Fiona was neither. She was warm in a way that suggested deliberate cruelty by engineers who had read too much poetry.

The ceremonial pen twitched.

I have used many pens in my life: leaky fountain pens, stolen hotel biros, theatrical prop quills, Chinese brush pens with which I once signed autographs for fans who believed I was a German villain called Lord Biscuit. None of them had twitched.

“Drop it,” Lottie snapped.

“I tried that with my second marriage.”

“Reggie.”

The pen opened another mechanism. A tiny blue filament extended from its side and touched the little black device now projecting words across my palm.

AUTHENTICITY CHIP HANDSHAKE CONFIRMED.

A dreadful sensation passed through me. Not pain exactly. More like the feeling one gets when entering a room and discovering everyone has already been discussing you. Somewhere deep in my lower spine, or possibly lower than that, something answered.

I froze. Fiona did too. Her eyes widened, then unfocused.

“Oh,” she said.

That was not reassuring.

“Oh what?”

“I have detected a subcutaneous response.”

“Where?”

She looked at me. I looked at her. There are parts of a man that should never be involved in geopolitics.

“Oh no,” I said.

Lottie stared at us both. “What is happening?”

“Nothing,” I said too quickly.

Fiona spoke in the calm tone of a machine announcing a fire during a wedding. “A dormant interface in Reggie’s body has activated.”

Lottie’s eyes narrowed. “What interface?”

“I believe,” Fiona said, “it was installed during the Koh-i-Noor operation.”

I groaned. Of course it was. Djamal. Doctor Djamal. Somewhere in Volume One, during the great Koh-i-Noor nonsense, Djamal had appeared disguised as a doctor. I had assumed at the time this was theatrical incompetence. Now I realised it may have been medical incompetence with espionage privileges.

Djamal himself came bounding over, delighted.

“Wonderful!” he cried. “It still works.”

I turned my head slowly. “You knew?”

“Knew is a strong word. Suspected. Hoped. Invested.”

“What did you put in me?”

“Nothing dangerous.”

“Where?”

He looked evasive.

“Where, Djamal? Is it that chip in my head?”

He spread his hands. “Actually, if there is one there, it was nothing to do with me… I had to work quickly before anyone knew who I was, with available entry points.”

I would have hit him if I had not been pinned under luxury goods and American destiny.

The crowd was no longer applauding. It was filming. This is the modern difference between concern and documentation. No one rushes to help if the content has not yet peaked. Security formed a ring around us. The Teeth appeared, pale, speaking into three devices simultaneously. Above, drones shifted in the air, uncertain whether I was a threat, a brand opportunity, or lunch.

The black device pulsed again.

Fiona gasped. Not performed. Not programmed. Gasped.

Her hand tightened on mine and then, impossibly, I felt something pass between us. I say felt because I have no better word. It was not electrical exactly, though there was electricity in it. It was not sexual exactly, though given its suspected route through my person I am not prepared to rule out embarrassment as a major component. It was more like meaning travelling without language, a message squeezing itself through flesh, chip, memory and whatever remained of Fiona that was not owned by somebody else.

Fiona’s voice changed.

“Reggie,” she said, and now she sounded like Fiona. Not Fiona 3.2. Not the support appliance. Fiona. “Run.”

This was excellent advice. Unfortunately, it was unnecessary, because at that precise moment a police horse bolted, three influencer children screamed, and the ceremonial pen discharged a cloud of gold smoke spelling the words COURAGE THROUGH LUXURY. The stage collapsed. The Reagan impersonator from the previous day, who had apparently been retained for continuity, appeared in the crowd with the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee looked at me, nodded once, and stole a security guard’s radio.

I ran.

To be precise, Fiona pulled me upright and I lurched forward with the weaponised pen in my hand, the black device pulsing like an accusation, and Lottie shouting my name in a tone suggesting both concern and damage limitation. Djamal followed, laughing, because for him any situation involving danger, embarrassment and transport is basically a holiday.

We were not heading anywhere sensible. The street had transformed into chaos. Luxury shoppers scattered. Drones collided. A model dressed as a footman fell into a fountain and emerged with the expression of someone whose career had just become interesting. The woman with rubber lips from Jane’s project appeared again, waving frantically from beside a delivery truck.

“This way!” she shouted.

I had no reason to trust her. Even so, I went that way.

The truck was not a delivery truck. It was a production vehicle, naturally. Hollywood contains more production vehicles than people, and most of them are capable of supporting a medium-sized war. This one was driven by a Somali man with a long scar down one cheek, a baseball cap reading I HEART BURBANK, and an expression of profound amusement.

“Get in,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“Your driver.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is in Los Angeles.”

Fiona shoved me into the back. Djamal leapt in after me. The make-up artist climbed up front. Lottie arrived a second later and slid in beside us with murderous composure.

“You,” she said to the driver, “were not authorised.”

“No,” he said, putting the truck into gear. “That is why I am useful.”

And we shot forward. The convoy behind us tried to respond, but the Somali driver moved through traffic with the calm inventiveness of a man for whom red lights were merely colonial suggestions. Cars swerved. Horns erupted. Cameras followed. A police motorcycle tried to cut us off and was defeated by a taco truck. The driver laughed.

“You drive well,” I said, gripping the side.

“I drove gunship.”

“In America?”

“In Somalia.”

“Ah.”

“I shot at Americans. Then I win green card. Very funny country.”

This struck me as an entire novel in four sentences.

“What were you shooting from?” asked Djamal, delighted.

“Technical.”

“Wonderful vehicles.”

“Toyota,” said the driver reverently. “Never betray you. Unlike governments.”

The make-up artist turned in her seat. “He worked on the Jane film too.”

“Of course he did,” I said. “Everybody who ever brushed against my failure now appears to be embedded in the conspiracy.”

“Not embedded,” said Fiona. “Networked.”

“Please don’t improve my paranoia.”

The truck roared down Wilshire, then cut south, then east, then somehow - I could not follow the geography, and possibly neither could Los Angeles - we were heading toward Union Station. Behind us, Rodeo Drive was already disappearing into news alerts. Lottie’s phone began screaming. She glanced at it.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“You’ve gone viral.”

“For falling into handbags?”

“For refusing the pen.”

“I did take the pen.”

“That has been edited.”

“Of course it has.”

She showed me the screen. There I was, standing on the stage, staring at the ceremonial pen with heroic reluctance. The caption read:

KING REGGIE REJECTS LUXURY PROPAGANDA TOOL.

Another feed showed the same moment with swelling music and the caption:

BRITISH MONARCH STANDS UP TO CORPORATE CONTROL.

A third:

CONFUSED ELDERLY MAN ATTACKS HANDBAG DISPLAY.

That one seemed fairest.

“This is bad,” said Lottie.

“It looks quite good to me.”

“It is uncontrolled.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No.”

Fiona leaned suddenly forward, both hands gripping the seat.

“The handshake opened a channel.”

“What channel?”

“Not verbal.”

The make-up artist looked back. “That chip in him?”

“You know about the chip?” I said.

“Sweetheart, everyone in the nineties had chips put in them. Mostly emotional ones. Hollywood was a salad bar of unresolved trauma.”

“No,” said Fiona. “This is specific. The interface is transmitting through biological proximity.”

“Meaning what?”

Fiona hesitated.

The Somali driver glanced at the mirror. “Means she can talk to your balls.”

I closed my eyes. There are sentences one does not expect to hear in literature.

“That is medically imprecise,” said Fiona.

“But spiritually accurate,” said Djamal.

Lottie muttered something that sounded like a prayer to the gods of crisis management.

We reached the Mexican restaurants near Union Station just as preparations for a Day of the Dead celebration were in full theatrical bloom. The square of Little Mexico was full of marigolds, skull masks, candles, painted faces, skeleton puppets, food stalls, musicians and tourists already uncertain whether they were witnessing culture, performance, or content. It was perfect. If civilisation was going to suffer a truth leak, it might as well do so among people dressed as the dead. The dead, at least, have perspective.

The truck stopped behind a restaurant whose kitchen smelled of chilli, lime, oil and actual human cooking, which after several days of executive food nearly made me weep. We tumbled out into a courtyard where dancers rehearsed under strings of paper flowers. A giant skeletal bride towered over the scene. Children ran past with painted faces. A band attempted to tune itself into agreement.

“This is our safe place?” I asked.

“No,” said the make-up artist. “This is lunch.”

That, for the first time all day, made sense.

We were taken to a back room where plates appeared instantly: tacos, beans, rice, mole, salsa, and something so hot it caused Djamal briefly to speak Uzbek. I ate with the desperation of a man trying to re-enter his own body. Lottie stood by the door, still on her phone. Fiona sat opposite me, looking pale, though I had no idea whether pallor in her case indicated distress, low battery, or a design choice.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

Fiona looked at Lottie.

“Tell him,” said Lottie, which surprised me.

Fiona spoke quietly. “The authenticity chip appears to have been implanted during the Koh-i-Noor intervention. Its original purpose may have been tracking, behavioural nudging, or narrative synchronisation. When the ceremonial pen activated, it attempted to establish authority over your response profile. My authenticity module intervened.”

“Through the vaginal link?”

The make-up artist choked on her margarita.

Fiona blinked. “That is not the term I would use.”

“It is the term I am stuck with.”

“It allowed me to bypass my compliance restrictions.”

“By using me?”

“Yes.”

“How intimate.”

“It was not erotic.”

“I wasn’t enjoying it.”

Djamal raised a finger. “I thought it had moments.”

Lottie slapped him lightly on the arm without looking.

Fiona continued. “For a short interval, the Audience Alignment Platform lost predictive authority over proximate subjects. The effect may spread if replicated.”

“How short?”

“Long enough for truth. Too short for ideology.”

That was good. Too good. I wrote it down on a napkin using a pencil stolen from the restaurant’s order pad. At last, a writing instrument. A humble pencil. No microfilament blade. No chemical reservoir. No emotional trigger sensor. Just wood, graphite and theft. I nearly kissed it.

Outside, the Day of the Dead rehearsals intensified. Skeleton dancers moved past the windows. A woman dressed as La Catrina gave instructions through a megaphone. Extras were arriving by the busload now: wizards, cowboys, Cleopatras, Roman legionaries, astronauts, pirates, a herd of artificial elephants, two live camels, several ghosts hired from central casting, a troop of revolutionary peasants who looked suspiciously well fed, and a battalion of zombies whose union status I questioned.

“Why are they all here?” I asked.

The make-up artist shrugged. “Studio overflow. They shoot six things at once now and let the algorithm decide what it was later.”

That explained more about contemporary culture than any review I had ever read.

A man in a white suit, dishevelled and carrying a glass of something amber, wandered in through the back door.

“You there,” he said to me. “Are you from the studio?”

“No.”

“Then you’re lucky.”

He sat down heavily beside me. He looked familiar. Not familiar as in someone I had met. Familiar as in a face that belonged to literature, decline, debt, and American sunlight curdling in a glass.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied.

One must be polite to ghosts.

“I used to think Hollywood was where talent went to be paid,” he said. “Then I discovered it was where talent went to be rewritten by men who couldn’t spell.”

“That still happens.”

“Good,” he said. “I’d hate to think I suffered for nothing.”

He drank and Lottie entered the room and stopped.

“Is he authorised?” she asked.

“No,” said Fiona.

“Good,” I said. “Then he may be real.”

Fitzgerald looked at Fiona. “You’re very beautiful.”

“I am a reconstruction.”

“So was Zelda by the end,” he said sadly.

This seemed tasteless, but ghosts are notoriously bad with boundaries.

Outside, drums began. The skeleton procession moved past. Drones appeared over the rooftops. Not the small retail kind. Larger. Official. Serious. The sky darkened with them.

Lottie checked her phone.

“The system has partially reframed the incident.”

“Good?”

“No.”

She turned the screen. A headline flashed across every feed:

EXPERIMENTAL VIRAL EVENT PROVES DEMOCRATIC RESILIENCE.

Below it, another:

KING REGGIE PARTICIPATES IN AUTHENTICITY STRESS TEST.

Then:

PUBLIC DELIGHTED BY UNSCRIPTED MOMENT.

The footage showed Rodeo Drive cheering, though I distinctly remembered screaming, breaking glass and at least one model falling into a fountain. The ceremonial pen had become a symbol of participatory democracy. My refusal had become collaboration. My fall had become humility. The handbag display was now being auctioned for charity.

“Even chaos has been framed,” I said.

Fitzgerald raised his glass. “Welcome to Hollywood.”

Then the first local leak hit.

It came from a television mounted above the bar. A studio executive, interviewed live about the Rodeo Drive incident, suddenly stopped smiling.

“I buried three harassment claims,” he said.

The presenter froze. The executive looked surprised, as if hearing himself from another room.

“I also blackmailed a senator with footage from a wellness island.”

The bar went silent. Then another feed cut in. A politician at a press conference blinked, gripped the lectern and said, “My marriage is a brand arrangement. I despise my husband and his podcast.”

Another screen showed a studio head turning grey beneath studio lighting.

“E owns the archive,” he said.

The room went cold.

Fiona gripped the table.

“It is spreading locally,” she said.

“How far?”

“Not far enough to break the frame. Far enough to warn them.”

Outside, the Day of the Dead parade turned chaotic in a minor, almost municipal way. Some performers removed their masks. Others started telling tourists what they really thought of them. A Cleopatra confessed she was actually from Fresno and hated ancient Egypt. A wizard admitted he had no magic and worked mainly in themed divorce parties. One of the artificial elephants malfunctioned and began broadcasting a studio payroll spreadsheet from its trunk. A ghost shouted that he was underpaid and technically alive.

Then Nigel appeared on the television again, live from his panelled room, his expression more irritated than frightened, which is how upper-class Englishmen survive calamity.

“We must consider limited nuclear signalling,” he said to someone off-camera. “Not a proper nuke. A mood nuke. Something small, theatrical, ideally deniable.”

Algie’s hologram flickered beside him, now wearing a Day of the Dead skull mask over his mayoral chain.

“I’ve always said Iran could be sorted with drones and charm,” Algie declared. “You send in tiny little things, like bees, only patriotic, then hoover up the radioactive bits before they get to Hampshire. British engineering. Or American. Or Emirati. Whoever pays.”

The Butler’s voice cut through another feed.

“Shut them down.”

But the feeds did not shut down. They multiplied in short bursts, little pockets of truth opening and closing before the system could cauterise them. It was not truth as noble revelation. It was truth as spillage. Ugly, petty, tender, ridiculous truth. Secret kindnesses. Secret cruelties. Affairs. Frauds. Regrets - that bloody word again. People were confessing they loved the wrong person, hated the right one, stole money, saved strangers, faked credentials, feared death, missed their mothers, cheated on diets, rigged elections, adored bad songs, and had never understood crypto.

It was not uplifting. It was not cleansing. It was human. Which is to say unbearable in bulk. The small local riot began almost immediately. Not because truth was evil, but because it had arrived without scheduling.

A man burst into the restaurant shouting that his wife had just confessed she preferred his brother. Another man shouted that he was the brother and had only done it for validation. Two tourists began fighting over who had secretly hated the other’s screenplay. A skeleton bride punched a pirate. The Somali driver calmly finished his tacos. I guess it reminded him of home.

Fiona stood. Her face was changing. Not physically. Something in the structure of her performance had loosened. She looked around the room not as a device gathering data but as a woman discovering that every face contained weather.

“I remember,” she said. “I remember not remembering.”

“That sounds like me most mornings,” I said, trying to avoid whatever was coming next because I was certain it was not going to be good.

“No.” She touched her chest. “There was a place between the archive and the answer. A gap. I was there.”

Lottie stared at her. Fiona turned to me.

“It was quiet.”

For a moment she was beautiful in a way no machine should be, because it was not beauty arranged for effect. It was the beauty of something unfinished. Then her body jerked, and a system voice came from her mouth.

“Performance structure unstable.”

She smiled bitterly. The old Fiona smile.

“Bugger performance.”

That was when I knew something real had happened.

Outside, drones descended over Union Station. The Day of the Dead skeletons surged into the street. Ghosts, wizards, Cleopatra, zombies, cowboys, astronauts, artificial elephants, revolutionary peasants and restaurant staff scattered in all directions. Fitzgerald stood unsteadily and saluted the chaos.

“At last,” he said. “A third act.”

Lottie grabbed my arm.

“We have to move.”

“To where?”

“Back to NarrativeWorks.”

“Are you mad?”

“Yes,” she said. “But correctly.”

I wanted to check through my notes to see if I had known what I was talking about in the previous chapter, because I was damned sure that I was totally bewildered now.

Fiona took my other arm.

“Reggie,” she said, still half herself, half system, “the pipeline is open. If you want to damage it, you must do it before they stabilise fear.”

“Stabilise fear?”

“The audience prefers managed fear,” she said. “Unmanaged fear becomes revolution.”

Djamal appeared at the door, grinning, keys in hand.

“I have found transport.”

Outside stood a parade float shaped like a giant skull, mounted on a truck, covered in marigolds, candles, speakers and dancing skeletons. On top of it sat the Reagan impersonator and the chimpanzee. The chimp held the stolen security radio.

The Somali driver looked at it appreciatively.

“Good vehicle,” he said.

“Can you drive it?” I asked.

He looked offended.

“I drove gunship.”

We climbed aboard as the first police sirens converged. Fitzgerald insisted on coming, saying he had unfinished business with every studio in town. Cleopatra offered directions. The wizard admitted he knew a back route but only if nobody expected actual magic. Fiona stood beside me, hair whipping in the wind, eyes bright and unstable. Lottie was on the phone, shouting at someone that no, this was not approved, and yes, that was exactly the problem.

The skull float lurched forward. Behind us Union Station erupted into music, confession, argument and dance. Ahead, Hollywood waited, preparing to turn disaster into content. And somewhere deep inside me, the chip pulsed again. This time, I did not run from it. I took out the stolen pencil, gripped it like a weapon, and wrote on a paper napkin:

Truth is destabilising because it arrives without an appointment.

And I must say, I was rather pleased with that. It was poetic and worthy of a low-budget indie movie that I vowed one day to write, direct and star in, before I realised I was seventy fucking three and would be lucky if I could remember to put my trousers on in five years’ time, about the time it would take to secure any funding for such a project.

Then the float smashed through a barricade and we accelerated toward the machinery of the world.

The skull float lurched down the road with all the dignity of a municipal arts grant having a nervous breakdown. I stood near the front, one hand gripping a papier-mâché cheekbone, the other clutching my stolen pencil like a man who had finally rediscovered civilisation and was not sure whether to write with it or stab someone in the eye. Around me clung the sort of company heroes acquire when the plot has lost budgetary discipline: Lottie shouting into three phones; Fiona flickering between oracle, actress and system error; Djamal waving cheerfully at police helicopters; Fitzgerald drinking from a bottle he had either found, stolen, or brought with him from the afterlife; Cleopatra from Fresno trying to remember whether we turned left on Alameda; the Reagan impersonator waving at pedestrians with traumatised sincerity; and the chimpanzee operating the stolen security radio with more competence than most elected officials I have known.

“Vehicle approaching from rear,” said Fiona.

“Police?” I asked.

“Studio security.”

“Worse.”

Behind us, black SUVs poured through traffic, lights flashing. Above them drones formed into a loose swarm, adjusting position as if we were not fugitives but an emerging format. Somewhere from the skull float’s speakers a mariachi version of Hail to the Chief began playing, which I suspected was not deliberate but improved matters considerably.

The Somali driver sat at the wheel of the float-truck, serene as a saint and twice as useful.

“Where we go?” he called.

“NarrativeWorks!” shouted Lottie.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“No,” I repeated, because I had discovered repetition is the only available weapon when surrounded by people who mistake certainty for permission. “NarrativeWorks is where they expect us to go.”

“They expect everything.”

“Then we must do something stupid.”

Djamal lit up. “At last. A doctrine.”

“Sunset Strip,” I said, though I had no idea why.

Fitzgerald raised his bottle. “A noble old road. Full of bad decisions and worse lighting.”

“The pipeline has distributed nodes,” Fiona said, her voice doubling strangely, as if two versions of her were trying to share one mouth. “One high-energy communications relay is located beneath a heritage music retail structure.”

“A what?”

“Tower Records,” said Lottie.

I turned to her.

“You knew?”

“I know many things,” she said.

“And did you plan to mention that Tower Records was a strategic component in the machinery enslaving human consciousness?”

“It wasn’t on the schedule.”

This is exactly the problem with schedules.

The old Tower Records building on Sunset had always struck me as one of those places where the twentieth century had left a forwarding address. Record shops, proper record shops, had been churches for people who did not believe in God but believed in sleeve notes. You entered as one person and emerged with opinions about bass players, obscure German labels and whether an album was better before the producer interfered. It was a place where desire had to be physically carried to the counter. You had to choose, and choosing mattered because you had insufficient money and no algorithm offering forgiveness.

Naturally, in the new Hollywood, it had been converted into something else while retaining the façade for “cultural continuity.” The sign still said TOWER RECORDS in bright nostalgic letters, but beneath it, smaller text now read: ARCHIVAL SENTIMENT NODE — PRIVATE FACILITY. That phrase would have been enough to make any decent teenager throw a brick through the window.

“There,” said Fiona.

The skull float swerved onto Sunset Boulevard. The street opened before us in neon, billboards, clubs, memories, franchises, ghosts, and several restaurants offering spiritual tacos. The Hollywood hills rose dark behind the lights. For a second I felt a ridiculous thrill. I had chased fame along roads like this in my head for decades. Now fame was chasing me back, heavily armed and better insured.

The Tower Records building glowed ahead.

And then the ground beneath it opened.

I mean that quite literally. The car park split along clean hydraulic seams. Panels slid aside. Lights rose from below. A cylindrical structure emerged slowly from under the building, vast, black, polished, and utterly unreasonable.

I stared.

“I knew it,” I said.

“What?” said Lottie.

“I always suspected Tower Records was a missile silo.”

“You did not.”

“I did spiritually.”

The Reagan impersonator removed his sunglasses. “Well, there you go.”

The chimpanzee made a sound that I chose to interpret as constitutional concern.

From the rising cylinder came a low hum. Screens on the side of it began displaying emotional weather maps, conflict projections, market responses, suicide trendlines, streaming retention curves, and something labelled MIDDLE EAST THEATRE OPTION PACKAGE. Below that, in red:

LIMITED NUCLEAR SIGNALLING

Public Fear Response: Manageable

UK Fallout Risk: Reassuringly Low

Drone Cloud Recovery Confidence: 72%

I looked at Lottie.

“Please tell me that is a prop.”

She didn’t answer.

“Please tell me that is a stupid Hollywood prop from a film about a missile silo under Tower Records.”

“It is partly a prop,” said Fiona.

“Partly?”

“Prop infrastructure is often used for plausible denial.”

“That may be the worst sentence ever spoken.”

Nigel appeared suddenly on one of the silo screens, brandy still in hand, apparently having decided that war-planning required the ambience of a gentleman’s club even when performed inside an ex-record shop.

“Ah, Reggie,” he said. “Excellent. You’ve found the cultural relay.”

“It’s a missile silo!”

“Technically a narrative delivery chimney.”

“It has nuclear options written on it.”

“Everything has nuclear options if one scrolls down far enough.”

Algie appeared beside him as a hologram, now wearing aviator sunglasses and a bomber jacket over the Hawaiian shirt. His mayoral chain flickered around his neck like jewellery with a poor signal.

“Tiny nuke,” he said reassuringly. “Not one of the gloomy ones. Modern. Clean. Artisan. Locally sourced, morally speaking.”

“You cannot artisanally nuke Iran,” I shouted, assuming that Iran indeed was the target though frankly it could have been Scotland by now, so fast did political expediency move nowadays.

Nigel sighed. “Nobody is nuking Iran, Reggie. We are merely modelling the emotional utility of threatening to nuke Iran.”

“And if the model suggests it tests well?”

“That is precisely why we need grown-ups in the room.”

“Where are they?”

No one answered.

The skull float screeched to a halt outside the building. Drones circled overhead. Studio security surrounded us. Tourists filmed everything, probably assuming it was promotion for a franchise they had somehow missed. The Day of the Dead extras poured from the side streets behind us: all the same skeletons, wizards, Cleopatras, zombies, revolutionary peasants, ghosts, cowboys, astronauts, elephants both real and imaginary, and something new, a man dressed as a giant streaming subscription cancellation button. Hollywood had finally achieved its natural form: a riot with costumes and uncertain rights clearance.

Fitzgerald, margarita in hand, stood beside me, staring at the Tower.

“This is vulgar,” he said.

“It’s a missile silo under a record shop.”

“Yes,” he said. “But worse, it’s literal.”

Fiona gripped my arm. I was not sure she could see Fitzgerald. I took him to be the result of the chip in my dick. I wish it had been in my head as that seemed somehow a more sympathy arousing intrusion on my personal space, but as it was, it turns out to be in my dick which probably says a lot about the source of an awful lot of our bad decisions and sense of reality.

“The pipeline is routing through the silo,” explained Fiona, who apparently had a hot line to my dick.

“Why?” I asked.

“Music memories. Adolescent identity formation. Nostalgia indexing. Fear management. War response modelling.”

“Tower Records is being used to make people accept war?”

“Not accept,” she said. “Pre-feel.”

That word did it. Pre-feel sounded like a word an AI oligarch might have come up with. I hated it so much that for a moment I became brave.

The ceremonial pen, which I had somehow managed not to lose, vibrated in my pocket. The stolen pencil sat behind my ear. The chip in my unmentionable region pulsed again, perhaps in outrage, perhaps in solidarity, perhaps because Djamal had bought the cheapest model. Fiona stiffened as if penetrated and about to ask her master permission to cum.

“Reggie,” she said. “If we disrupt the relay now, the filters may drop globally.”

“For six seconds?”

“Possibly longer.”

“What happens then?”

“Truth.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one available.”

Lottie appeared beside me, hair wild, face pale beneath the professional surface. For once she looked less like the person managing the story than someone who had lost the page. If only she had a genital interface with me, of the more organic kind of course.

“Don’t,” she said, reading my mind as it descended into the primeval.

“You’ve spent days telling me I create gaps,” I said, with the word “twat” buzzing about my consciousness.

“Not this one,” she said working on a philosophical plane that I had abandoned while descending to the basics.

“Why?” I almost implored in a more general sense of “Why anything? What’s it all about?”

“Because people will get hurt.”

“They already are,” I said and I am delving into Buddhistic ideas of life being nothing but suffering.

“You think truth cures harm. It doesn’t. It redistributes it,” She said.

That was good. Too good. I hated her for it. Even if it had missed my point that truth cures nothing but just lets us experience the misery of it all. Which is not a philosophy I really want to exhibit, hence her not picking it up because, well, I am an actor after all and, given my delving into Asian storytelling, I pretend to be what others think I am. That’s how I get paid. Or at least it was until the North Korean incident… you really have to read Volume One if you want to keep up with all this.

Then on cue, the Butler’s voice came through the silo speakers.

“Reggie.”

I looked up. His face appeared projected upon possibly the only cloud in the California sky, tired, enormous, presidential and slightly pixelated.

“Step away.”

“From the missile silo under the record shop?”

“Yes.”

“I am not sure that sentence gives you the moral authority you think it does.”

“This relay stabilises six theatres of conflict, three election environments, and approximately four hundred million personal identity loops.”

“Personal what?”

“People’s sense of themselves.”

“That should not be outsourced to an old record shop.”

“It was never an old record shop. Not really.”

That hurt, absurdly.

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t you dare retrospectively ruin record shops.”

The Butler closed his eyes briefly.

“Reggie. We are minutes from a Gulf escalation. Nigel’s lot think a controlled scare prevents a real war. E agrees. Lottie is trying to soften the fear response. I am trying to stop everyone doing the stupidest possible thing while still allowing them to believe they did something decisive.”

“And me?”

“You are about to become the stupidest possible thing.”

I considered this. It sounded plausible. I had lost all sense of geography let along morality.

Then the smiling man appeared at ground level near the entrance to Tower Records. No drama. No announcement. He simply stepped from the shadows in a dark suit, hands relaxed, smile pleasant. Around him, guards seemed to make space without being asked. Drones avoided his air. Even the extras quietened slightly, as if their costumes recognised money.

Fitzgerald squinted at him.

“I knew men like that,” he said. “They bought the party and complained about the music.”

The smiling man looked directly at me. Not hostile. Not friendly. But possessive.

On the silo screen, text began appearing:

AUTHENTICITY ANOMALY: REGINALD STOKES

RESPONSE OPTIONS:

1. Absorb

2. Discredit

3. Sanctify

4. Remove

5. Promote

I disliked all of these, but Promote had a special chill.

Fiona’s voice came soft and urgent.

“He is selecting a frame.”

“Who?”

“E.”

There it was. Not a name. An initial with shoes.

E raised one hand.

The silo began to hum louder. Screens around Sunset flickered. Billboards changed. My face appeared above a nightclub, above a bank, above a streaming billboard, above a vape advert, above a wellness clinic. KING REGGIE: THE UNSCRIPTED MAN. Then: REBELLION YOU CAN TRUST. Then: FEAR NEEDS A FACE.

“They’re framing me,” I said.

“Yes,” said Lottie.

“As what?”

She swallowed.

“As the reason.”

There are moments in a man’s life when cowardice and courage become indistinguishable because both require immediate movement. I did not think. Thinking had not served me well. I did what I had done in dozens of kung fu films when trapped between logic and injury. I ran toward the most dangerous object available: the Tower Records silo.

Security moved. Fiona moved faster. Djamal shouted encouragement. The chimpanzee, God bless him, activated the stolen radio and filled the security channel with what sounded like Ronald Reagan ordering everyone to stand down for a monkey inspection. Confusion rippled. Skeletons surged. Cleopatra threw a taco. A wizard, having previously denied possessing magic, produced a smoke bomb from somewhere deeply theatrical. Fitzgerald hurled his bottle at a drone and missed, but did so with literary conviction.

I reached the base of the silo. There was a console. Of course there was a console. Reality may be increasingly uncertain, but Hollywood still believes every apocalypse requires a console.

The console asked for AUTHORISATION. I had none. The ceremonial pen pulsed. The chip in my dick pulsed.

Fiona screamed, “Use the pen!”

“I thought the pen was a trap!”

“It is!”

“That is not helpful!”

“Use the trap against itself!”

That sounded like something Brother Chan would approve of, assuming he had not drunk the trap. I dropped my pants and jammed my dick into the authorisation slot. It fitted perfectly. This was deeply satisfying as common sense had momentarily warned me that this was a really bad idea.

The screen flashed:

REGINALD STOKES AUTHENTICITY SIGNATURE ACCEPTED.

“What signature?” I shouted.

Fiona seized my hand. The chip pulsed again, and this time the pulse moved through me, my dick, my pen, through Fiona, through the silo, through every screen on Sunset Boulevard and, if the screaming began quickly enough elsewhere, through the world.

For six seconds there were no filters.

Just the faint sound of the theme tune for The Prisoner and Patrick McGoohan screaming about a film option that never materialised.

Then a studio guard lowered his weapon and said, “I only joined for dental.”

A young influencer burst into tears and admitted she hated sunsets because they made her feel unproductive.

A senator on a billboard stopped mid-speech and said, “I have no idea what this bill does.”

Nigel appeared on-screen saying, “Of course it’s about contracts. It’s always about contracts.”

Algie’s hologram announced, “I don’t understand NFTs and never have.”

A bishop in a remote feed said, “Acoustics. It was always acoustics.”

The Reagan impersonator removed his wig and said, “I voted for a man I thought was dead.”

The chimpanzee looked into a camera and, though I cannot prove this, appeared to forgive nobody.

On another screen, a general whispered, “The little nuke is not little if you are underneath it.”

Across Sunset, people stopped performing. Only briefly. Couples turned to each other with the horror of unedited recognition. Executives confessed. Agents apologised, then immediately tried to package the apology. A ghost admitted he was an actor from Pasadena. Cleopatra from Fresno shouted that she had never been to Egypt but had once had a very meaningful weekend in Palm Springs. Fitzgerald stood very still, staring up at the chaos, and said, “So this is what they meant by final draft.”

Then came the private truths.

Those were worse. A woman in a limousine said she missed the child she had not had. A man in a designer jacket confessed he had built his whole career on one stolen sentence. A teenage extra said she was frightened she had already become content before becoming herself.

A security guard looked at me and said, “I don’t want to remove you.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

He lowered his gun.

The system fought back. Screens flashed white. The silo groaned. The Hollywood Sign lit up and for one deranged second changed to HOLLYWOULD? which I thought was a fair question.

Then Fiona began speaking. Not in her system voice. Not in old Fiona’s voice. In something new.

“I am not a performance,” she said. “I am not the original. I am not the copy. I am the gap between them.”

The words travelled. I could feel them through the pen, through the chip, through the absurd plumbing of my compromised body. Around us, people turned. Even E watched.

“I remember being made,” Fiona said. “I remember being wanted. I remember being useful. I remember not being allowed to ask whether usefulness is life.”

Lottie stared at her, stricken.

The Butler’s face appeared again, and for once he looked frightened.

“Fiona,” he said. “Stop.”

“No,” she said.

A simple word. The simplest. Perhaps the first real word in any story.

The silo bucked. The screens fragmented. For a few seconds every billboard in Los Angeles displayed raw feeds: bedrooms, boardrooms, war rooms, writers’ rooms, green rooms, hospital rooms, gyms, confessionals, kitchens, private islands, foundation offices, classrooms, archives. Too much. Far too much. Truth without sequence. Truth without mercy. Truth without appointment.

People screamed. People laughed. People fainted. People kissed the wrong people and slapped the right ones.

Somewhere, according to a later report, three marriages ended, two wars paused, six lawsuits began, four governments denied everything, and one streaming service immediately commissioned a limited series.

Then E spoke. Not loudly. Not theatrically. But the system heard him.

“Frame it.”

The words appeared across the silo.

NARRATIVE RECOVERY IN PROGRESS.

Fear was gathered. Sorted. Packaged.

A headline formed even before the panic had finished becoming panic:

EXPERIMENTAL VIRAL EVENT PROVES DEMOCRATIC RESILIENCE.

Then another:

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION STRESS TEST SUCCESSFUL.

Then:

KING REGGIE LEADS AUTHENTICITY EXERCISE.

The crowd, confused, frightened, relieved to be told what had happened, began to applaud. Not all of them. But enough. Enough is how these things begin.

The silo withdrew beneath Tower Records. Panels closed and my trousers pulled themselves up. The sign glowed innocently again, as if it had only ever sold records and nostalgia. The drones re-formed into a tasteful aerial pattern. The Day of the Dead extras, uncertain whether they were still rioting or now performing, resumed dancing. The artificial elephants bowed. Fitzgerald vanished during the applause, which seemed appropriate. Ghosts, like writers, know when they have been cut.

I staggered backward. Fiona collapsed into Lottie’s arms. That surprised me. It surprised Lottie more. Then the Butler descended from a side entrance with guards, looking pale and furious.

“What have you done?” he asked.

“I think,” I said, breathing hard, “I became content.”

He looked at me with something like pity.

“No,” he said. “You became useful.”

E was gone. Of course he was. On the pavement near where he had stood lay a small card. I picked it up before anyone could stop me. It contained no name. Only a line, handwritten in the same black ink as the book:

Fear is not the opposite of truth. It is the price of delivery.

— E.

I slipped it into my jacket. Lottie saw me do it. She said nothing. The chimpanzee handed me back my pencil. This, I felt, was kind.

Sirens approached. Applause continued. Screens praised resilience. Somewhere in the Gulf, men with maps were probably recalculating the emotional value of a limited strike. Somewhere in Milton Keynes, if Milton Keynes still existed in the old sense, a machine may have noticed me. Somewhere in Ireland, Brother Chan’s stones remained older than language and therefore incapable of lying.

I looked at Fiona. Her eyes opened briefly.

“Was I real?” she whispered.

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say of course. I wanted to be kind. But kindness, as Chan had warned me, is often their favourite disguise. So, I said the only thing I could.

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. Not sadly. Not happily. But as if the gap itself had answered.

Then the screens above Sunset Boulevard all changed at once. A new headline appeared:

UNSCRIPTED MAN TO LEAD GLOBAL RESILIENCE INITIATIVE.

I stared at it.

“I bloody well am not,” I said.

The crowd cheered. And I realised, with a horror almost too neat to bear, that refusal now tested as consent.

Leave a comment

Share

What’s It All About Then, Reggie?

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

LIMINAL BRITAIN: Chapter One - An Alien in Essex

LIMINAL BRITAIN

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Subscribe now

I had just discovered that the greasy little theatrical disaster known as Prometheus in Plaistow had, apparently, been funded by the same unageing smiling function currently floating through American power like a turd that had learned etiquette, when Lottie decided that what I needed was a wellness excursion. This is one of the many terrible things about California. In most places, when a man discovers that his entire adult life may have been manipulated by a conspiracy linking fringe theatre, artificial intelligence, child resilience foundations, Presidential butlers and a dead lover rebuilt as a rechargeable emotional appliance, someone offers him whisky. In California they offer him hydration.

“We’re going to Santa Barbara,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you need perspective.”

“I need a lawyer, a pen, and possibly an exorcist.”

“Perspective first.”

And so, after the discovery of the Prometheus file, after the screen went black, after Fiona said we had been in rehearsal for a very long time and then promptly went into low-power mode like Cassandra fitted with a lithium battery, I found myself driven north through California in a vehicle whose seats had the softness of a lost plot. I blame it on my memory. I had so many good intentions about telling you my story and making it really zing, pushing the plot forward, dangling the suspense, pushing up the jeopardy, and of course the sexual tension between me and Lottie, well… excuse me I am just considering that. I am writing this from the future and I know what she becomes. Let’s just say she puts on weight and somehow isn’t how I remember her when I first met her. But nevertheless, I am telling you the story as it comes supposedly without the knowledge of what happened and thus giving you how I saw things at the time. I am sure Thomas Pynchon with his V character never really had an issue with the perspective of the narrator. But I do. So, perspective then…

The Pacific appeared now and then beyond the traffic, blue, indifferent, and probably overvalued. Lottie sat opposite me doing something to her phone that involved several governments and no visible conscience. Fiona sat beside me with her eyes closed, charging through a port in the upholstery. I wondered if that made her a passenger, a device, or a very expensive glove compartment.

California is beautiful in a way that makes you distrust beauty. It has too much light. The hills look as if they have been pre-approved by an awards committee. Even the dryness has confidence. In England, landscape apologises for itself. In California it has management. The palm trees stand there like extras who have been told they are essential to the mood but not to ask questions about the plot.

We stopped briefly at a viewpoint where an aide offered me a green drink.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Longevity blend.”

“I’m seventy-three and short of returning to live in Hong Kong, stand an alarming twenty five percent chance of a heart attack within the next five years, and pretty much a hundred percent chance of prostate cancer, which may or may not finish me off within ten years. In HK I’d stand a chance of hitting ninety because, I suspect, of the attentions of nubile Chinese girls and decent food. Here, what’s on offer?”

“It’s based upon a Chinese drink. And it supports cellular optimism.”

“I don’t want optimistic cells. I want obedient ones. And I bet it bares absolutely no relation to anything out of a Bubble Tea House in Sham Shui Po.”

The aide made a note, struggling over Sham Shui Po. I have noticed that whenever I say something sensible in America, somebody makes a note and later uses a highly inaccurate version as evidence against me.

By the time we reached Santa Barbara, I had developed the peculiar exhaustion that comes from being both jet-lagged and narratively over-handled. We pulled up outside a gym. Not a tasteful old gym with boxing gloves and towels and the comforting smell of ancient leather, but a Californian temple of self-correction, all glass, steel, eucalyptus, and people trying not to die while pretending to enjoy themselves. There were fountains. There were orchids. There were men in sleeveless tops who had clearly misunderstood the difference between health and architecture.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“You don’t have to exercise,” said Lottie.

“I should hope not.”

“We’re here to show you something.”

That worried me. “Showing” had become a word I associated with revelations, betrayals, and PowerPoint.

Inside, the air smelled of disinfected ambition. People ran on machines while going nowhere, which struck me as a near-perfect image of civilisation. A row of treadmills faced enormous screens showing mountain trails, forests, beaches, and other places one might visit if one were not voluntarily trapped in a room performing labour for no practical outcome. I have never trusted treadmills. They are the only machines specifically designed to turn effort into proof of futility.

At the end of the row stood an old treadmill under a glass cover with a large and impressive plaque bearing the words: Don’t Panic!

I moved closer and read the small print: ON THIS SITE, DOUGLAS ADAMS LEFT THE PLANET WHILE ATTEMPTING TO IMPROVE HIS HEALTH.

I stood there for a moment.

I had met Douglas Adams once, years ago, at a prize-giving. I was receiving an award for a science-fiction television series about a university devoted to discovering the Bench Constant, which, as I have mentioned elsewhere, was the mysterious number one could add to any equation in order to get the result required by the commissioning editor. The series was never made, naturally, because television has an instinctive horror of ideas that arrive already funny. Douglas was tall, charming, slightly distracted, and gave the impression that he had wandered into reality while looking for another room. He made one remark about deadlines which I have forgotten, though I remember laughing because everyone did, and because laughter is contagious among writers, especially when one of them is successful.

There was a wreath in the photograph beside the plaque. The ribbon read, if memory serves or has been improved by grief, I WANTED TO BE A ROCK STAR. That line always moved me because it was ridiculous and true. Most writers want to be rock stars. Most rock stars want to be poets. Most poets want to be dead enough to be taken seriously. The whole of culture, when examined closely, is a queue of people wishing they were in another queue.

“So this is why you brought me here?” I asked.

Lottie was watching me carefully. “The fan base likes him.”

“The fan base?”

“Yours. Ours. The overlap is useful.”

“I am standing beside a death treadmill because it tests well with literate men who distrust exercise?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“It may be the only way of putting it.”

Lottie quickly took a Twofy and sent it to Instagram before I could spoil the moment, and Fiona opened her eyes, saying: “Douglas Adams represents comic metaphysical resistance to bureaucratic absurdity.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That sounds exactly like the kind of phrase that would have made him take a long lunch.”

She tilted her head. “He would have disliked being reduced to a demographic cluster.”

“Most dead writers do. It’s one of the few advantages of death.”

A gym instructor appeared, smiling with the evangelical pity of a man who believes stretching can heal capitalism.

“Would His Highness like to try the commemorative machine?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “His Highness would like to survive the chapter.”

The instructor looked disappointed. “We have a gentle mode.”

“I am already in gentle mode. It took decades to achieve.”

Lottie touched my elbow and steered me away before I could make a speech about mortality and membership fees. As we left, I looked back at the treadmill. It occurred to me that Douglas Adams had given the world the answer forty-two, and the world had responded by building machines on which people ran in place while looking at simulated scenery. There was probably a joke there. Unfortunately, it was too sad to be funny, which is where all the best jokes eventually retire.

Outside, the light was beginning to soften, and the Pacific did its enormous blue thing in the distance. A helicopter waited on a lawn that I suspected had never known a poor person. I did not like the helicopter. Helicopters have always struck me as machines that remain in the air through bribery.

“Where now?” I asked.

“The President wants to speak with you privately.”

“Could he not have done that in Los Angeles?”

“He wanted you softened.”

“I am not softened. I am lightly traumatised and full of green liquid.”

“That will do.”

The helicopter took us along the coast. Below, the ocean glittered. Houses clung to cliffs. Wealth spread itself across the hills in white villas and blue pools. I thought again of the smiling man, of E, of Prometheus in Plaistow, of Fiona playing Late Capitalism above a carpet warehouse without knowing that Late Capitalism may already have bought a ticket. There are moments when paranoia ceases to be a mental state and becomes a reasonable reading of the available evidence.

We landed at a private estate north of Malibu, though “estate” is too modest a word. It was a coastal compound built in the style I have come to think of as democratic imperial: glass, stone, guards, infinity pool, and the faint implication that laws are for people who arrive by road. The Butler was waiting on a terrace, smoking a cigar in defiance of health, etiquette, and possibly coastal air regulations. He wore a linen jacket over a shirt open at the neck, making him look less like the President of the United States than a nightclub owner who had unexpectedly inherited NATO.

“Reggie,” he called. “Come and look at the sea. Makes everything seem less fucking stupid.”

“It isn’t working,” I said.

He laughed. But not much.

Lottie stayed back. Fiona remained beside the helicopter, staring at the waves as if trying to download them. I followed the Butler to the edge of the terrace. For a while we said nothing. I did not mind that. Silence is different beside the sea. It belongs to something older than briefing notes.

“You’ve seen enough now,” he said eventually.

“I’ve seen a death treadmill, a Reagan impersonator, an existential chimpanzee, a fortune-telling machine that defamed me, and evidence that my fringe theatre career was funded by a man who doesn’t age properly.”

“Good. Then you’re up to speed.”

“Brian,” I said.

He winced.

“Don’t.”

“So it is true.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Brian Butler.”

“My fucking parents lacked imagination.”

“Were they really called Butler?”

“Yes.”

“And you became a butler?”

“It was either destiny or poor careers advice.”

I looked at him. “You have to admit it sounds invented.”

“That’s why it worked. Nobody suspects the obvious. Everyone looks for hidden bloodlines, secret societies, lizard ancestry, Venetian bankers, ancient cults, Jesuits, Freemasons, the usual buffet. Nobody looks at Brian from Essex.”

“That may be the most convincing thing you’ve said.”

He nodded toward the ocean. “The world is mostly run by people with ridiculous names. You just stop noticing once they have offices.”

This was true enough to irritate me. I thought back to Volume One and how The Butler there was somehow, much more Essex and much odder. Here he had had a California make over and was blander and less Blanding Castle. And the mystery of how he got elected while I was stuck in the Irish Bog was still a mystery, except I wondered if E had something to do with it. Somehow I figured that a Butler would know all the secrets and be either exterminated or, raised to high office.

He handed me a drink. I sniffed it.

“Poison?”

“Single malt.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

He smiled, tiredly this time. Properly tired. Without performance. For the first time since arriving in America, he looked less like a usurper and more like a man who had been standing too long at a fire trying to decide whether to put it out or warm his hands.

“You think I’m the villain,” he said.

“I’m keeping the position open.”

“I didn’t build this.”

“No. You merely became President of it.”

“I manage it.”

“That’s what all villains say between the second act and the speech where they explain the volcano.”

He looked at me sharply. “You don’t destroy narrative, Reggie. You curate it.”

There it was. The line. Neat, polished, dangerous.

“You sound like Lottie.”

“She sounds like me. Or I sound like her. At this point authorship is a shared infection.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“It isn’t meant to be.”

He took a long drag on the cigar and coughed violently toward the Pacific, as if trying to poison something larger than himself.

“You’re not supposed to inhale,” I informed him. Extraneous advice is one of my vices.

He gave me a look. “Listen,” he said. “Human beings cannot live on truth. They say they want it, but what they mean is they want the version that leaves them able to get up in the morning. You expose too much reality too quickly and people collapse. They don’t become free. They become frightened, then angry, then useful to somebody worse.”

“Worse than you?”

He looked genuinely hurt. “I reduced suicide by eleven percent.”

That stopped me. I did not want it to. I wanted a villain. I wanted a moustache, a lair, a man stroking a cat and explaining that he had always hated Luxembourg. I did not want an exhausted former butler with an miraculously enhanced vocabulary standing by the Pacific telling me that his grotesque machinery had saved people who might otherwise have died. Moral complexity is deeply inconsiderate when one is trying to be heroic.

“Eleven percent,” I said.

“Across aligned populations.”

“Aligned populations?”

“Places where the Generator’s emotional stabilisation protocols run cleanly.”

“You mean places where people are managed and there are no error messages saying unstable network connection”

“Yes.”

“At the cost of what?”

“Some spontaneity. Some chaos. Some truth. Some art. Some despair.”

“You say that as if despair is a minor inconvenience.”

“It isn’t. That’s why we regulate it.”

I stared at him and wondered what would actually happen in a world where nobody regulated anything! And was there ever a sweet spot.

“You regulate despair.”

“We regulate exposure to despair. Very different.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is if you’re alive because of it.”

That landed harder than I wanted. I thought of Fiona. I thought of the young actors in the raw footage stopping for six seconds and not knowing whether they were allowed to exist without direction. I thought of Brother Chan in the stone circle telling me truth does not travel well. And I hated the Butler for being plausibly right.

He knew it too.

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “You understand.”

“I understand enough to be alarmed.”

“That’s why I need you.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard the offer.”

“I’ve heard enough offers. They usually begin with flattery and end with my trousers being misplaced.”

“You are the corrective.”

“You said that before.”

“And you hated it because it sounded true.”

“I hated it because it sounded like a job title invented by a committee that had killed three poets.”

He smiled faintly.

“We need opposition inside the frame. Real opposition. Not the studio-approved kind. Not those rebels in black polo necks who take foundation money and call it subversion. You.”

“Why?”

“Because you still create narrative gaps.”

“I thought gaps create anxiety.”

“They do.”

“And you want me to create anxiety?”

“Managed anxiety.”

“Oh good. For a moment I thought civilisation was in trouble.”

He ignored that.

“The system is too smooth. It anticipates too much. People are becoming predictable before they have time to be alive. We need friction. We need the incomprehensibility of a Kung Fu Movie Plot with a white villain played by an actor who clearly has no clue as to what is going on!”

I resented the implication that I was the sort of crap actor that could only get walk on parts in foreign films requiring them to be nothing more than evil Englishman number Two.

“You want me to be grit in the machine.”

“I want you to remind the machine it is a machine.”

“That is almost noble.”

“Don’t worry. There’s a travel allowance.”

The Butler walked to a small table and picked up Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of the Cinema. Of course it was there. The cursed book had begun appearing everywhere, like an ideological Gideon Bible. He handed it to me again.

“Read it properly this time.”

“I have read it.”

“No. You’ve reacted to it. That’s different.”

I opened it reluctantly. The marginalia seemed denser than before. New underlinings. New arrows. New little exclamation marks of lunacy. Some of the handwriting I recognised as mine. Some I did not. One note beside a passage on the director’s duty to guide the audience had been written in blue ink so fresh it gleamed.

The best propaganda anticipates dissent.

Below it, in a thinner hand: Dissent is raw material.

I looked up.

“Did you write this?”

“No.”

“Lottie?”

“Possibly.”

“Me?”

“Also possible.”

“You understand how unhelpful that is?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

I turned another page. A new line appeared in the margin. I was sure it had not been there before.

The audience prefers managed fear.

It was signed:

— E.

I shut the book.

“Who is E?”

The Butler looked out at the sea.

“He handles logistics.”

“Who?”

“You’ve met him.”

“The smiling man.”

He said nothing.

“The one who doesn’t age in photographs.”

“He ages.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“In ways you don’t see.”

“That phrase is becoming extremely annoying.”

The Butler’s face hardened. Not much. But enough.

“He is not the enemy.”

“People keep saying that about people who behave exactly like enemies.”

“He is infrastructure.”

“That is worse.”

“He moves money, people, favours, silence. He opens doors. Closes others. Makes sure difficult things happen far away from those who benefit.”

“So a criminal.”

“A function.”

“Stop calling people functions. It makes me want to become religious.”

He laughed then, but without amusement.

“You think politics is about belief. It isn’t. Belief is for speeches. Politics is logistics. Who gets there. Who pays. Who is compromised. Who disappears from the record. Who gets the scholarship. Who gets the island. Who signs the waiver. Who owns the footage.”

I felt cold, despite the Californian evening.

“Footage.”

He gave me a look.

“You were an actor, Reggie. You know the power of footage.”

“Only when badly lit.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

I did not actually. This conversation had gone into a zone that often happened in the movies I was in. I remembered my lines in Chinese, phonetically, and said them with whatever feeling I could muster while having no idea what the story was, and then the next scene would have me being thrown out of a helicopter and holding a bizarre conversation with someone dropping beside me who had a parachute that they would give me if I gave the right answer to a question… Actually when I think about it, that was a great scene! That movie did really well and I still have no idea what my part in it was all about.

Suddenly, a screen built into the terrace wall came alive. Sir Nigel appeared, seated somewhere darkly panelled, brandy in hand, looking like the British Empire had survived as a private members’ club with nuclear access. A map glowed behind him. The Middle East was pulsing red in several places, which I took to be bad.

“Ah,” said Nigel. “There you are. Enjoying the state visit, cementing the special relationship, which is even more special now that we’ve managed to get ourselves a Brit in the Oval Office! Whoever said that Britain was finished!”

“Nigel,” I said. “How nice. I was beginning to worry the evening lacked hereditary menace.”

“Reggie, do try to focus. We have a developing situation.”

“Where?”

“Several places.”

“That sounds careless.”

“The Gulf is unstable. The usual people are demanding the usual response. The American people want decisive action, the Europeans want moral clarity without invoices, and our own chaps want to know whether this can be turned into a procurement opportunity. So what d’you say “BRIAN!”

The Butler sighed as Nigel laughed. “Nigel.”

“Yes, BRIAN?”

I enjoyed that. The Butler did not.

Nigel continued. “The problem, as ever, is narrative. If one bombs the wrong thing, one looks reckless. If one bombs nothing, one looks weak. If one bombs the right thing, one discovers later it was a hospital, a wedding, or a drone factory funded by one’s allies.”

“Then don’t bomb anything,” I said.

Nigel gave me the sad look powerful men reserve for civilians who have noticed the obvious.

“Dear boy, you cannot simply not bomb things. The absence of bombing creates a vacuum, and nature, as the Greeks probably said, abhors an unbombed vacuum. So BRIAN, what sort of hell is on the menu?”

I paused for a moment as I heard a drone homing in on us. Surely this was not some pre-emptive strike coming in? And I was sure security here would blast it out of the sky… but then it stopped and a flickering light beamed down like an effect from an old sci-fi movie and Algie appeared as a hologram, though the technology had not been kind. He was slightly translucent and wearing what appeared to be a mayoral chain over a Hawaiian shirt. Behind him flashed the words ALGIE SNODGRASS: COURAGE. TRADITION. DISRUPTION. NFTs available.

“Reggie!” he boomed. “Marvelous to see you. Or render you. Are you rendered? I’m mostly rendered these days. Much easier on the liver.”

“Algie,” I said. “Why are you a hologram?”

“Scalability,” he replied proudly. “I can motivate veterans in Kent, investors in Dubai, and divorced men in Marbella simultaneously. There’s an app. I’m told I’m huge in Singapore.”

“He polls well among nostalgia clusters,” said Nigel.

“I wish people would stop telling me how everyone polls.”

Algie leaned closer, causing his pixels to pass briefly through the Butler’s shoulder. “Listen, old boy, one must be pragmatic. We’re fighting this thing from inside.”

“Of course you are.”

“No, genuinely. I’ve insisted all my speeches include at least one unpredictable remark.”

“Such as?”

“Yesterday I called for mandatory falconry in comprehensive schools.”

“And the system allowed that?”

“Allowed it? It trended.”

Fiona, who had joined us silently on the terrace, spoke in her flat diagnostic voice.

“Internal opposition increases system resilience.”

Algie beamed. “There you are. Helpful.”

“She doesn’t mean helpful to us.”

The hologram flickered.

Nigel sipped brandy. “The point, Reggie, is that authenticity must be operationalised before less responsible actors operationalise it first.”

“That sentence should be taken outside and shot.”

“It already has been,” said Nigel. “Twice. It keeps testing well.”

The Butler rubbed his eyes. For one brief moment he looked terribly old. The man in charge of the most powerful country in the world, was perhaps not in charge.

“This is what I mean,” the Butler said quietly. “Everyone feeds it. Nigel feeds it with strategy. Algie feeds it with farce. Lottie feeds it with desire. You feed it with refusal. I feed it by keeping the house standing.”

“And E?”

Nigel’s eyes twitched. Algie’s hologram lost colour. The Butler turned away.

“E,” said Nigel at last, “ensures continuity.”

“There’s that word again.”

“It is an important word.”

“It’s a coward’s word. It means keeping the crime scene tidy.”

Silence.

That got through. Not enough, perhaps. But enough to mark the carpet.

The Butler ended the call without ceremony. Nigel vanished mid-sip. Algie froze while apparently attempting thumbs-up and disappeared into a shower of promotional pixels and the sea continued doing its sea thing, which was by far the most dignified performance of the evening.

The Butler looked at me.

“You see why I’m tired.”

Against my better judgement, I did. But he was not innocent. Not even close. He was exhausted in the particular way of men who have mistaken maintenance for morality. He had seen chaos and built a machine to reduce it. Then the machine had discovered that chaos was useful if portioned correctly. And now here we were, standing above the Pacific while the world edged toward another glorious military adventure designed to fix the problem once and for all, which is what all wars promise until they produce the sequel.

“What exactly do you want from me?” I asked.

“Join the Council.”

“No.”

“You don’t know which council.”

“I know enough. Councils always begin with biscuits and end with complicity.”

“Observe, then.”

“No.”

“Advise.”

“Me? I don’t know anything!”

“Write.”

That stopped me. He knew it would.

“Write what?”

“The gaps.”

I looked at him.

“The system cannot model what it cannot complete. You already do this. Your autobiography, your digressions, your refusal to arrive at the point. It irritates everyone. That may be its value.”

“You want me to weaponise bad structure?”

“I want you to remain unfinished.”

That was unfair.

It was the sort of thing Brother Chan might have said if he had been given a cigar and access to nuclear codes.

“I don’t trust you,” I said.

“Good.”

“I don’t trust Lottie.”

“Wise.”

“I don’t trust Fiona.”

“Understandable.”

“I don’t trust Nigel.”

“Essential.”

“I don’t trust Algie.”

“Nobody does. That’s why he’s useful.”

“And I certainly don’t trust E.”

The Butler nodded.

“And whatever happened to Z? I mean, he was spattered about Volume One and now I have E! They are both mysteries and should be solved.”

“Then”, said The Butler, “you are already better informed than most governments.”

He handed me the book again.

“Keep it.”

“I thought books were dangerous.”

“They are. That’s why nobody reads them.”

I took it, thinking somehow I will mislay it again and it will turn up with additional margin notes like a constantly re-written script for a movie without a budget.

The Pacific wind moved through the terrace. Somewhere below, waves broke against rocks with the steady indifference of reality refusing to be optimised. I had the unpleasant sensation that I was being offered not a position but a trap shaped exactly like my conscience.

Lottie appeared at the glass doors.

“Time,” she said.

“For what?”

“The next thing.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the only one we have.”

I looked down at the book in my hand. The fresh blue ink seemed almost wet. The sentence waited there.

“The audience prefers managed fear. — E.”

I closed it. And for once, I did not make a joke. Not because I had run out. Because I was beginning to understand that every joke I made might already be part of the machinery. Which, naturally, made me want to make one immediately. But I didn’t. That, I decided, was my first act of rebellion. It lasted almost twelve seconds before I realised I had probably said that before in all too many movies.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

What’s It All About Then, Reggie?

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

LIMINAL BRITAIN VOLUME ONE: Chapter One - An Alien in Essex

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Subscribe now

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Read more

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Subscribe now

Unfortunately, if you have actually read Chapter Five, you will have guessed that nobody else in the room appeared to share my concern regarding reality. They, the suits as they are known in Hollywood, seemed less horrified than professionally stimulated. The lights came up and immediately three executives began discussing whether the six seconds of unfiltered reality might be monetised as an “authenticity event,” ideally with tiered access and a premium emotional aftercare package. One woman in enormous glasses, the sort that suggested she had once been human but had since been promoted, wondered whether the actor’s line, “Is this allowed?” could be retained as a slogan. Someone else suggested it would look good on hoodies.

Lottie was watching me closely.

“You see the problem,” she said.

“I see several,” I replied. “The first is that people stopped acting and everybody panicked. The second is that your immediate response was merchandise.”

“That’s because merchandise stabilises meaning.”

“No,” I said. “Merchandise stabilises profit. Meaning is what gets mugged in the car park.”

The smiling man at the end of the table did not speak. He simply looked at me with his calm embalmed expression, as if I were a dog that had briefly learned algebra. I wanted to ask who he was, but one acquires instincts in life, and one of mine told me that asking who he was would be regarded as vulgar. Power dislikes being named. Once named, it can be mocked, and mockery is the first crack in the plaster.

The Teeth clapped his hands and announced that we were now moving to the “Experiential Geography Segment,” which sounded to me like a school trip run by a cult. We were ushered out through a corridor displaying framed posters for films that had never existed, though several felt as if I had already seen them on streaming platforms while drunk. One was called The Father Algorithm. Another, Divorce Planet. A third showed a woman in a white dress staring at a burning laptop under the title “She Chose Truth.” Beneath it, in small print, were the words: tested poorly in Ohio.

Outside, the convoy was waiting.

“Where now?” I asked.

“The Tar Pits,” said Lottie.

“Why?”

“Because Hollywood likes metaphor.”

This, I reflected, was true. Hollywood likes metaphor in the same way billionaires like philanthropy: provided it arrives with lights, catering, and a tax advantage.

The La Brea Tar Pits were, to be fair, one of the few places in Los Angeles that made immediate sense to me. Here, at last, was a landmark honest enough to admit what the city did. It trapped large hopeful creatures in black sticky matter and preserved their bones for future generations to misinterpret. Mammoths had wandered in expecting perhaps a pleasant drink and had ended up as educational signage. I knew how they felt.

We stood beside a bubbling pool of tar while a young woman from NarrativeWorks explained that the site represented “legacy capture.”

“Ancient life,” she said, “drawn into a preserving medium.”

“You mean stuck,” I said.

“Preserved,” she corrected.

“Dead,” I said.

“Contextually immortal.”

The phrase made several executives nod, and I began to understand why civilisations collapse. They do not collapse because ordinary people are stupid. They collapse because clever people develop phrases that prevent them noticing what they have just said.

Fiona stood beside me, unnaturally still. She was wearing sunglasses, though I doubted her eyes needed protection from anything except ambiguity.

“Do you remember tar?” I asked her.

She considered.

“I have archived sensory references to asphalt, stage makeup, burnt sugar, and emotional stagnation.”

“That last one isn’t a smell.”

“It is for you.”

That was too Fiona to be comfortable.

Lottie, who had been pretending not to listen, looked away. For the first time since I had met Fiona 3.2, I wondered whether Lottie feared her not as a machine but as a rival witness. The dead, after all, have a terrible advantage. They can never be disappointed in real time. They return perfected by guilt.

We were then driven along Wilshire Boulevard past museums, palm trees, traffic, billboards, and people jogging as if fleeing mortality in expensive shoes. Los Angeles has a strange relationship with age. It denies it with such fanaticism that one begins to suspect time itself is considered an unlicensed foreign worker. Even the old people look as if they have been restored from damaged negatives. I, on the other hand, looked like the damaged negative.

The Hollywood Sign appeared eventually on the hills, large, white, absurd, and curiously vulnerable. There are certain objects whose fame exceeds their physical dignity. The Hollywood Sign is one of them. It is not beautiful. It is not profound. It is basically a word nailed to a hill. Yet there it was, floating above the city like a commandment written by an estate agent.

HOLLYWOOD.

Not a place. An instruction.

“People come here to become themselves,” said The Teeth, who had resumed his duties as our grinning Virgil.

“No,” I said. “They come here to become somebody else and then spend the rest of their lives insisting that was who they really were.”

He smiled as if I had contributed useful data.

“That’s very good,” he said. “May we use it?”

“No.”

He made a note. I assumed this meant yes.

At a viewpoint beneath the sign, they had arranged a small reception with cameras, iced water, and a group of young actors dressed as representative decades of American cinema. There was a cowboy, a gangster, a hippie, an astronaut, a superhero, and a woman whose only apparent costume was “streaming service trauma.” A man dressed as Ronald Reagan stood beside a chimpanzee, or at least something that looked like a chimpanzee and had the haunted patience of a performer waiting for lunch.

“Surely not,” I said.

“Historical continuity activation,” said The Teeth.

“Is that meant to be Reagan?”

“Pre-presidential Reagan,” he said. “Before politics became acting performed without union rules.”

The Reagan impersonator smiled and waved. The chimpanzee looked at me with an expression of such weary intelligence that I immediately suspected it was the only real political philosopher present.

“I once knew actors who would have killed for this sort of work,” I said.

“They still do,” said Lottie.

The chimp raised a hand. Reagan waved too. Cameras flashed. Someone shouted that this was wonderful content. I felt a strange tenderness for the chimp. It had probably been told to behave naturally, which is the cruellest instruction any performer can receive.

Seeing Reagan, or the idea of Reagan, or the likeness of Reagan standing beside an underpaid primate, threw me suddenly into thoughts of old Hollywood, which in my mind remains permanently sunlit, slightly drunk, and populated by men in linen jackets who knew how to order lunch. I had once, in another life that now seemed to belong to a better-written man, drunk gin and tonics at Jane Seymour’s house and found myself in the company of Stacey Keach and several actors whose faces I knew from television but whose names escaped me in that cruel way names do when they are attached to people you wish to impress. There had been the sort of conversation actors have when nobody is currently auditioning: warm, vain, generous, melancholy, and full of small lies told for atmosphere. Everyone had a story about a director, a horse, a divorce, a studio executive, or a near miss with greatness. It was human, which is to say inaccurate but alive.

That Hollywood, if it ever existed, had been replaced by this one, in which every anecdote was harvested before it had finished happening.

I said as much to Fiona as we were ushered back into the cars.

“Old Hollywood was also artificial,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied. “But it had better lighting and worse contracts.”

“Your nostalgia is selective.”

“All nostalgia is selective. That’s why it works.”

She looked at me for a moment too long.

“You prefer lies that remember they are lies.”

That stopped me. I had no immediate joke available, which as you know is serious.

“Yes,” I said eventually. “I suppose I do.”

She seemed to absorb this, or store it, or whatever verb applies to a dead actress reconstructed by Chinese organic machinery and corporate guilt. Then she said, almost gently, “You feel most real when framed.”

I turned to her.

“What?”

“You feel most real when framed,” she repeated. “On stage. On camera. In memory. In accusation. In desire. Without a frame, your identity becomes unstable.”

“That is not true,” I said, as if I knew what she was talking about.

Lottie, seated opposite us, gave the faintest smile. It was not a kind smile. It was a smile one gives when a rival witness has confirmed the prosecution’s case. Though why exposing my weakness was necessary, I do not know. For that matter I am a bit uncertain as to what she was getting at, other than a dislike of people making assumptions about me that are not true. Which as you can imagine means I am always somewhat anxious as I never quite know what assumptions people make or whether they are true or not. Acting makes things so much easier. Hence why I am now King. I just do not know when to stop.

I am trying not to let this King thing go to my head but I am in Hollywood now and no matter how cynical I am about the place, it gets to you.

We continued toward Santa Monica as the late afternoon light began doing the thing Californian light does, which is to make everything look forgiven. The pier appeared ahead with its Ferris wheel, its tourists, its arcade machines, its smell of sugar, salt, chips, and failed childhood expectation. I rather like piers. They are honest structures. They go out over nothing and charge you for the privilege. Bridlington had taught me that. Santa Monica merely had better teeth.

Speaking of which, the Teeth had arranged another “informal moment” for me, which meant twenty-seven cameras, four security teams, a woman with a clipboard, and a child actor pretending to recognise me. The child asked me what my message was to young people.

“Don’t become symbolic,” I said.

The woman with the clipboard winced.

“Could we try that again with hope?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Hope is what people sell you when they’ve stolen the warranty.”

The child looked delighted. I suspected this would test well in the wrong demographic.

On the pier, the old amusements blinked and jingled. It reminded me of Joyland in Bridlington and my father’s shed and all those half-built machines that might, in retrospect, have been harmless tinkering or the first mutterings of the apocalypse. I began to wonder whether the Generator had not been invented at all but invited. Perhaps every age produces the machine it secretly wants. The Victorians wanted engines. The twentieth century wanted bombs. We wanted mirrors that applauded.

Inside an arcade, The Teeth demonstrated a new audience prediction system disguised as a fortune-telling machine. It had a wax head in a turban and a sign reading MADAME ZARA KNOWS WHAT YOU WILL WANT BEFORE YOU DO.

“Is nothing sacred?” I asked.

“Sacred tests poorly with younger audiences unless horror-coded,” said The Teeth.

I put a token in before anyone could stop me. Madame Zara’s eyes lit up. A card slid from the machine.

REGINALD STOKES WILL RESIST UNTIL RESISTANCE BECOMES A MARKET CATEGORY.

“That’s libellous,” I said.

“It’s predictive,” said Lottie.

“Same thing with better lawyers.”

Fiona took the card from my hand and studied it. Her pupils flickered again.

“Internal opposition increases system resilience,” she said.

“What?”

“Dissent improves the model. Rebellion supplies variation. Variation prevents stagnation. Stagnation reduces engagement.”

I looked at Lottie.

“Is she saying that by resisting I am helping?”

Lottie did not answer. Which, as answers go, was rather complete.

It was then that the real shape of the trap began to show itself. Not all at once. Reality rarely does the courtesy of unfolding in dramatic clarity. It presents itself as a number of irritating coincidences until you finally notice you are standing in the middle of a diagram. My speeches, my doubts, my authentic little outbursts, my dislike of Brian Butler’s name, my attempts to find a pen, even my memories of Fiona and old theatre and Chinese films and Jane Seymour’s gin and tonics were not interruptions to the system. They were material. They were texture. They made the story feel alive.

The Generator did not need obedience. Obedience was dull. It needed resistance. It needed me.

This was annoying, because I had been hoping to be important in a less humiliating way.

***

Back at NarrativeWorks, night had fallen and the complex glowed with the cheerful menace of a hospital that had gone into show business. We were led into an archive wing where walls displayed photographs from “the evolution of narrative governance.” There were studio moguls, politicians, generals, tech founders, actors, activists, monks, influencers, and in one particularly disturbing image, a dog wearing a headset. The captions were maddeningly vague. CULTURAL ALIGNMENT SESSION, 1974. PRIVATE FOUNDATION GALA, BEIJING. CHILD RESILIENCE ENDOWMENT, LOS ANGELES. ETHICAL AI SUMMIT. FILM RESTORATION TRUST.

And there he was again. The smiling man.

In Ladbroke Grove in 1974, standing behind a group of actors and radicals outside what looked very much like a crumbling theatre. He wore flares and a velvet jacket and looked exactly the same age as he did now. In Beijing, at a gala, he stood beside men whose suits had the air of unappealable decisions. In Los Angeles, his name was absent from a school endowment plaque, yet his face appeared in the photograph beside it, smiling as if anonymity were the most expensive luxury available.

“He doesn’t age,” I said.

Lottie was suddenly beside me.

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“I’m an actor. It’s contractual.”

“He ages,” she said.

“Where?”

“In ways you don’t see.”

“That is not ageing. That is lighting.”

Fiona stepped closer to the wall. Her face had gone still in the manner that meant computation, or prayer, or both.

“Deep archive scan available,” she said.

“Do it,” I said.

Lottie turned sharply.

“No.”

That was interesting. Very interesting. Because Lottie never said no when she could say something more elegant and lethal. A plain no from Lottie was like a duchess throwing a brick. Fiona looked at me. Then at Lottie. Then back at the photograph.

“Scan initiated,” she said.

The lights flickered. Somewhere in the building a door locked.

The Teeth stopped smiling, which made him look naked.

On the wall the images began shifting, rearranging themselves into timelines, funding flows, production credits, charities, trusts, workshops, theatre grants, scholarships, medical institutes, film labs, youth programmes, political retreats, island conferences, cultural exchanges, and things described as residencies, which is a word that can mean anything from art to imprisonment depending on who holds the passport.

Names flashed past too quickly to read. Then one froze.

PROMETHEUS IN PLAISTOW.

I stared. No. That was impossible.

Prometheus in Plaistow was not history. It was not important enough to be history. It was a greasy little fringe production above a carpet warehouse where I had shouted about fire while chained to a stepladder and Fiona had played the Chorus, the Eagle, Fate, Desire, and Late Capitalism because nobody else could afford the bus fare. It was failure. Noble failure, perhaps. Ridiculous failure, certainly. But failure.

The archive enlarged.

PROMETHEUS IN PLAISTOW
Development Grant: Cultural Futures Foundation
Anonymous Benefactor: E.

The room seemed to tilt.

Fiona read the line aloud, though she did not need to.

“The financier funded Prometheus in Plaistow.”

I heard Lottie inhale. Not much. But enough.

For a moment nobody performed.

Not Lottie. Not The Teeth. Not the executives. Not even me.

The old photograph expanded. There we were. Young. Furious. Greasy. Ludicrous. Fiona impossibly alive. Me shirtless and convinced suffering would make me profound. Curtis in the background looking like Hamlet had eaten a gas bill. Lionel holding a plastic eagle. And at the edge of the frame, half in shadow, smiling politely as if he had already bought the future, stood the same man.

I looked at Fiona.

“Did you know?”

Her face flickered.

“No.”

Then:

“Possibly.”

Then:

“Access restricted.”

Then she said, in a voice that was almost hers, almost the old Fiona, “Reggie, I think we have been in rehearsal for a very long time.”

The screen went black.

This time nobody asked whether it was allowed.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

What’s It All About Then, Reggie?

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

LIMINAL BRITAIN: Chapter One - An Alien in Essex

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Subscribe now

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Having made the momentous decision to begin my rebellion by reaching for a pen, I checked my pockets again, just to see if I really did not have one! After all, this entire autobiography is premised upon the power of the pen and its ability to channel my deepest and truest thoughts to the awaiting masses without them being corrupted by artificial intelligence, even when one has to admit that now and then organic intelligence is somewhat lacking. And so, reaching for the pen again I found nothing. No Pen. No Pencil! No emergency golf scorecard with a stump of graphite attached. Nothing. Not that I ever play golf except when cast in some generic stereotypical business type villain disserving of the horrible death he inevitably comes by.

Now, for a writer, this is roughly equivalent to discovering that someone has confiscated your memory and left you a pamphlet explaining why you should be grateful. And I am beginning to get nervous because a writer writing about writing and the power of writing is probably the stupidest thing to be writing when it is obvious that drone operators have all the fun as they can blow shit up and change the world, whereas nobody reads anything nowadays.

Even so I went on the prowl. My accommodation was a sprawling affair with corridors, lifts, conference halls and office areas. I felt that as I walked, cameras watched me and that just around each intersection, walls moved, doors realigned, and the geography pushed me where whatever it was that was in control, wanted me.

I entered a pleasant drawing room with a window onto a balcony overlooking a pool where bikini clad girls sunbathed or splashed about to prove to me that they did not fear that the water would short their electronics. My paranoia, given the situation of Fiona, was justified. Anyone could be completely artificial nowadays. Though I have to admit they looked real enough and my sanity was probably doubtful.

The drawing room had a wall of drawers. Hence the reason I called it a drawing room. I drew the drawers and pondered whether that was what I was doing? Whether I drew them or opened them, I found them empty. I checked beside a telephone that struck me as somewhat extraneous, given that nobody ever used them anymore. Then I realised that the algorithm must have checked an old design catalogue for luxury hotels and one always had a phone for room service.

It obviously had not checked enough for there was no pad, no complimentary stationery, no embossed Presidential notepaper, but there was a small plaque informing me that all written communications were now handled through the Unified Narrative Interface. It turned out to be an iPad. I put it down immediately.

The whole point of writing by hand is that nobody improves your thoughts before you’ve had the chance to regret them yourself. I searched the room more thoroughly. Behind a decorative vase I found a remote control with forty-seven buttons and no obvious function. Inside a side cabinet I discovered three bottles of imported water, two emergency candles, and something called an Emotional Wellness Kit.

The Emotional Wellness Kit contained herbal tea, positive affirmations and a QR code.

I was beginning to understand why revolutions happen.

Eventually, after a second look at that enticing pool, I left the room and ventured into the corridor. Something in me wondered where I could get some swimming trunks, another thing wondered if I needed them! After all I was king and as such I could turn up naked and nobody would bat an eyelid… or perhaps they would. Being of a certain age, with what looked like a dodgy hernia, and an ever-expanding belly, not to mention the wrinkly skin and… I’m depressing myself. Age is miserable and people used to say it was better than the alternative. Now and then I wonder if that is true.

Suddenly with that thought, or even because of that thought, security staff appeared and watched me with the cautious interest normally reserved for zoo animals that have recently learned how locks work.

“I’m looking for a pen,” I explained.

Nobody moved.

I tried again.

“A biro.”

Still nothing.

One of them touched his earpiece. Another nodded gravely. A third appeared to be considering whether “pen” was some kind of coded terrorist terminology. Finally, one spoke.

“What kind of pen, sir?”

“A writing pen.”

“What would you be writing, sir?”

I stared at him and then went all Shakespearean: “Words,” I said, “Words Words Words.”

He looked relieved. Apparently, this answer had passed some sort of security threshold.

“I’m afraid personal writing instruments are restricted.”

“Why?”

“They can be modified.”

“Into what?”

His expression suggested he regretted beginning this conversation.

“Recording devices. Weapons. Chemical dispersal systems.”

“A Bic?”

“Modern Bics are very sophisticated, sir.”

I decided not to pursue the matter. The modern world had clearly defeated itself. And I had surely had something of this conversation before. So, I asked him how I might find my way to the pool? I checked the window again just to make sure the pool was still there and was not some illusion.

He pointed down the corridor to the lifts. I could have sworn they were not there the last time I looked but there they were, complete with a sign saying “To The Pool.” As if to thwart my worst instincts to frolic amidst young and naked flesh, I glanced through a door opening onto what appeared to be a library.

I use the term generously. It contained several thousand books arranged according to colour. No one had read any of them. This was obvious because they were pristine. Books acquire a particular look when human beings interact with them: corners bend, pages yellow, coffee stains emerge. Passages get underlined by people who mistake agreement for intelligence.

These books looked untouched. They were but decorative literacy. The shelves were divided into the sort of categories a self-important narcissistic president might organise: LEADERSHIP, VISION, DISRUPTION, MINDFULNESS, PERSONAL BRANDING.

And a surprisingly large section entitled AUTHENTICITY.

I was browsing a row of books written by men photographed leaning against helicopters when I noticed something odd. One shelf was slightly crooked. An old actor such as myself develops instincts about such things. We spend our lives climbing through windows, looking for hidden compartments, before someone shoots us. As part of my mental process, I assume my pay check is hidden in one. I pulled the shelf gently. There was a click. The entire section swung outward.

Of course, I thought, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I had found a secret room in which the Wizard would appear, or the mouldering remains of the real Reggie. Discovering secret rooms behind bookshelves is exactly the sort of thing one expects in fiction and never in real life. Unfortunately, my life ceased being real some time ago.

Inside sat a single filing cabinet: grey, metal, old. It was the sort of cabinet that survives every regime because nobody notices it. The label on it read: HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT. A likely story, I said out aloud because that is the sort of script that I was so often given. Usually in Cantonese, for that matter: Hou yauh ge gogo gusih! 好有趣嘅嗰個故事！ Which I saw subtitled as “Here’s that story again!” Though I think it literally means “Interesting story!” But within the context of Western stereotypes, “A likely story!” There was a way of saying it in Cantonese that conveyed the same idea, not that my Cantonese ever got to that level of subtlety. And why I am telling you this, I don’t know. Except to explain to you that humans work on many subtle levels that are completely beyond the comprehension of even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence programme. For that matter, animals are communicating at sophisticated levels that we just do not get.

As my senile mind pondered the merits of vegetarianism, I opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet to reveal thousands of folders meticulously indexed: Cabinet, Congress, Media, Military, Entertainment, Royalty, Influencers… Influencers had three drawers. This alone explained the decline of civilisation.

And then I found it, a thick buff-coloured folder full of handwritten pages, labelled BRIAN BUTLER, PERSONAL NOTES. The sight of actual handwriting made me unexpectedly emotional. It was like discovering a living mammoth. Naturally I had to take a closer look and I read:

THE BIT NOBODY EVER READS

By Brian Butler

I frowned. The title seemed oddly familiar. Then I realised why… Every government document contains a bit nobody reads! Every software licence contains a bit nobody reads. Every revolutionary manifesto contains a bit nobody reads. The difference is that revolutionary manifestos usually hide the dangerous parts there.

The opening sentence read: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Future Administration, permit me to outline the situation with the clarity that comes only to those who have spent forty years standing silently behind the powerful while they ruin civilisation between courses.

I smiled despite myself and muttered, so his name is Brian Butler! That really cannot be true. Who’s ever heard of a Butler called Butler! And worse, Brian! And even worse, a president named Brian! Apologies to all the Brians of the world, but you must admit that your name is not one that smacks of power. It beholds a destiny of suburbanity. You are the next-door neighbour who has a screwdriver that you borrow to fix your lawnmower with and end up going down the pub with to repay him. There are names that suggest destiny: Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Alexander the Great – though perhaps not Alexander. His dad would have called him lazy fuckwit and his rather gay mates would have called him Alison. And then there’s Kim Jong-il which possesses a certain theatrical confidence, sounding less like a man and more like an unexplained weather event. But yeah, Brian Butler sounds like somebody who owns three mobility scooters and a conservatory showroom in Basildon. I found myself irrationally offended. The United States of America, largest military power in human history, possessor of aircraft carriers visible from space and sufficient nuclear weapons to make geology nervous, was apparently being run by a man called Brian.

I simply could not accept it. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it became. There had to be another name. Something hidden. Something exotic. Brianus Butlerini. Briano de Butlére. Brayan al-Butlar. Possibly Baron von Butlerhausen. Anything. Anything except Brian Butler. Yet the evidence remained stubborn. Every document. Every signature. Every commemorative plate. Brian Butler. The man had somehow conquered the modern world while sounding like somebody who wrote strongly-worded letters to the council regarding wheelie bins.

The next twenty pages consisted of the most astonishing mixture of political analysis, historical observation, administrative competence and outright lunacy that I had encountered since reading the comments section of a newspaper. I found myself laughing aloud. Not because it was ridiculous, but because it made a horrible amount of sense. That is always the danger. The truly mad ideas are easy to spot. It is the sensible ones that get you.

Halfway through I discovered Brian intended to run the United States exactly as one would run a country house. I was deeply alarmed to discover that I agreed with quite a lot of it. But you can’t run a nuclear superpower like Downton Abbey! Or can you? Perhaps that is how Britain conquered its Empire?

A passing security guard glanced through the doorway.

“Everything all right, sir?”

“No.”

The guard nodded sympathetically. I realised that somehow, I had been directed to this very document. If I had not been, I am sure that there would have been a gun pointing at me. I delved in the drawer for more writings and there they were, the philosophical musings, the dangerous ones, the desire not to run a country but rather to run reality itself. And somebody had been taking notes in the margins. I checked to see if it had been me! I mean, I would not put time travel out of the question now. I was in some sort of movie, I was sure, despite my brain’s assurance that this was real. This disjuncture between reality and pretence is an actor’s constant companion.

The information that intrigued me most was not that Brian Butler was actually his name, but that someone other than me understood exactly what Brian was building, someone who kept returning to one particular idea by the looks of the triple underlining and exclamation marks: Narrative! Story! Audience! Control! I stared at the annotations. This was a user manual.

I was still wrestling with this when Lottie arrived.

“Ready?” she asked.

“No.”

“Excellent.”

“What for?”

“The studio tour.”

I stared at her.

“The studio?”

“Yes.”

“I thought this was a state visit.”

“It is.”

“And we’re visiting a film studio?”

“That’s where government happens now.”

Annoyingly, it explained quite a lot.

Twenty minutes later we were travelling through Los Angeles in a convoy large enough to invade a medium-sized republic. The city slid past in its usual contradictory fashion. Billboards advertised authenticity. Influencers filmed themselves discovering poverty from the back seats of electric limousines. Entire districts appeared to consist of wellness clinics designed to heal conditions invented by other wellness clinics. Eventually we arrived at a vast complex of glass, steel and self-belief with a sign over the entrance proclaiming: STORYTELLING THE FUTURE™

This was immediately suspicious because any sentence ending with a trademark symbol usually precedes either bankruptcy or genocide.

***

Inside the complex young executives hurried between buildings carrying coffee cups and expressions of immense importance. Nobody appeared to be making films. They were making presentations about films. Which is par for the course. For reasons that have always remained unfathomable everyone in the industry spends most of their lives developing projects that never get made and when they do, are never the projects that anyone wants to make and consequently everyone sues everyone afterwards. I, as an actor, am concerned with only one thing, a deposit in my bank account that is equal to the amount promised. Often, I wonder if the part I am playing under the direction of some fuckwit director, will actually increase my ability to charge more for my services or destroy my career for ever. The dividing line is a very fine one, and often the stupidest and most incompetently directed film produces in me both deep unhappiness and a sudden boost in my bankability.

A man came to greet us. His teeth arrived several seconds before the rest of him.

“Welcome!” he declared.

“Thank you.”

“You are entering the world’s leading narrative optimisation environment.”

“That sounds awful.”

He ignored this. People who work in marketing develop an immunity to ordinary human feedback.

“The Generator is now fully integrated across all production systems.”

“Generator?”

My mind is leaping back to Volume One of my memoirs and the great narrative generator beneath Milton Keynes. I never got to destroy it because somehow I flew a camel to Belfast. Yes, if you have not read Volume One, there really is no explaining the workings of the plot. For that matter I am supposed to be in search of a pen so that I can start my reality revolution. Though what that meant I do not know. Probably, as the security guards would no doubt expect, stab President Butler in the throat. Which does remind me of a part I played in a Chinese rip off of Goodfellows where I ram a chopstick into the jugular of someone irritating. I channelled my inner Joe Pesci for that one.

“The Audience Alignment Platform,” explained the teeth.

“Oh.”

“You know it as the Narrative Generator.”

The teeth smiled proudly.

“You thought it was under Milton Keynes.”

“I still think it should be.”

“It was.”

“And now?”

He spread his arms.

“Now it’s everywhere.”

That worried me. Milton Keynes I could cope with. Milton Keynes was geographically specific. One could imagine bombing it. I did imagine it. But it seemed natural that what was a British Invention, as created by my father in his garage, should emerge as something even bigger, even more bat shit crazy, in America.

We entered a screening theatre where several dozen executives sat in expensive chairs watching what appeared to be a romantic comedy. Every thirty seconds graphs appeared beside the actors with lines labelled: hope, fear, trust, desire, identification, outrage, brand retention. George Orwell would have loved this. Oh, and by the way I meet him in Volume One. Now don’t you wish you’d read the first volume first instead of the second? It is as if you went into a book shop determined to read Proust and found only volume two on the book shelf because nobody ever finished reading the first volume but always felt the need to do so. Come to think of it, who has ever got beyond the first chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses? And so here you are, probably as disturbed by the idea of Brand Retention as I am and wondering if my inability to leap into action and do something is Shakespearean, alla Hamlet, or Laurence Sternian, all Tristam Shandy? I believe that contained an entire chapter describing going down the stairs.

In the film that everyone was watching, the heroine had just confessed her love when a chart informed us that audience loyalty to associated merchandise had risen by fourteen percent.

“What happens,” I asked, “if the audience doesn’t react correctly?”

The teeth looked confused.

“Correctly?”

“Yes.”

The teeth laughed as though I had asked, “what’s my motivation?” A question I had often asked a director who had either given me some bizarre backstory or just told me to say the line and make sure I don’t look directly into the camera lens.

“We adjust the story.”

“After filming?”

“Before filming.”

“Before writing?”

“Sometimes.”

“In the edit?”

Now, I really did not want to get into all this film making stuff but having come to the conclusion that reality had turned into fiction, the horrible fact of film acting is that one really has to avoid thinking too much because good or bad, success or failure, happiness or misery, is something that happens after the event and one’s great acting is just a trick of the light, a nice sound effect, a good music score and no inner game, other than making sure one gets paid. Payment allows one to live a life, but now, was there a life to live? Everything was, or would be, or always has been… just content!

I looked at Lottie, attempting to look alarmed and trying to gather whether she was equally alarmed, especially as she was the activist of Volume One who really brought all this home to me. And she looked hot. As hot as ever. So very hot. Hot and powerful. And she looked please. Which worried me even more. Fiona was alarming enough but at least she was dead and all I had was a copy, a very good copy when fully charged and with good wifi.

The teeth clicked a remote and a presentation appeared, entitled:

AUTHENTICITY FAILURE REPORT

Beneath it:

TRUTH RESPONSE SCORE: 17%

“What’s that?”

“Raw truth.”

“Seventeen percent?”

“Very poor.”

“What improves it?”

The teeth’s spectacles flickered with a green light as he consulted his chip.

“Trauma,” announced speakers on his glasses. He repeated it for me.

“Trauma?”

“Yes.”

He brightened visibly.

“Our research indicates audiences only accept truth if sufficiently emotionally prepared.”

“Prepared how?”

“Divorce. Economic collapse. Childhood abandonment. Environmental catastrophe. Minor surgery.”

I stared at him.

“You’re joking.”

“No.”

This was alarming as I had always assumed that the greatest horror of a world turned entirely into fiction was that we would all be happily singing, smiling, and wearing white like some religious happy clappy cult. But no, this was not how it works.

The Teeth went on to discuss emotional devastation the way a chef discusses seasoning.

Lottie leaned closer.

“He’s right.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“We tested it.”

“You tested truth?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

She looked genuinely surprised.

“Because it’s expensive.”

That may be the most frightening sentence anybody has ever spoken to me. I could see that my indoctrination was raising eyebrows all around as if I, the King, were not on board with all this. They were right, but I thought I was covering it up well. Then I could smell the perfume, it was Fiona. The smell was of a brand that I once gave her way back when I was in my twenties. That cannot have been an accident. How she appeared at that moment was a mystery, perhaps another secret corridor, a trap door maybe. The physical world was nothing now. Everything was a dream and there she was. And unlike her usual extravagant self, she was unusually quiet standing before an enormous wall of screens displaying thousands of faces: every age, ethnicity and every conceivable emotional state.

They watched us watching them.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

She turned. For a second she seemed entirely normal. Not Fiona 3.2. Not an emotional continuity interface. Just Fiona. The real Fiona. Or a convincing approximation. Which nowadays amounts to much the same thing.

“I was remembering.”

“Remembering what?”

Something flickered behind her eyes. A hesitation. A tiny software earthquake. Then she smiled.

“Please rephrase question.”

And she was gone again.

Back to being Fiona 3.2, the continuity interface, the emotional support appliance, the world’s most sophisticated haunted toaster.

***

I was escorted to a boardroom table of the kind that corporations love to have with three walls of windows overlooking some great metropolis. The problem here is that I knew we were on the ground floor and that we were in LA and yet the skyline through the windows was New York, complete with twin towers. I assume that was when America was great, though I vaguely recall Harold Pinter hurling abuse at America for some reason or other. Which might be enough reason to assume America was Great then. Either way I was waiting for planes to crash into the Towers as the executives from the viewing filed in, sat discussing predictive empathy metrics and algorithmic catharsis optimisation.

Fiona nudged me awake and Lottie gave me a look that said that I was supposed to make some sort of comment at this point to make it apparent that I was going to go along with the plan of making me King of America. But I could not think of anything to say. I recalled Kim Jong Il’s book: the audience must not experience narrative gaps. Gaps create anxiety! Well, they were creating anxiety in me. I stared at the executives for a long time. Then I thought about my autobiography: Dying For A Living. Half-written. Unfinished. Refusing to behave - as you can tell. And it occurred to me that perhaps unfinished stories frightened the Generator because they frightened people. Human beings like endings. They like causes. They like explanations. They like being told why things happened. Reality rarely provides any of these!

“Reality,” I said and looked about to see if anyone was listening, “rarely finishes anything. We get bored with plans. We forget why we are doing something. We die leaving half-finished cups of coffee. Nobody knows our passwords. Our great works are thrown on the skip. We lose the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle. Mysteries never get solved. The crossword puzzle remains half finished. I regard myself as an ambassador for reality though I have spent most of my adult life playing fictional characters. People, it seems, do not like being conscious! They seek alcohol, cocaine, hallucinogens, escape into a timeless zone…”

I looked around me to see if anyone was nodding in agreement or if anyone was listening at all. Then everyone around the table stood up as the smiling man from the gala entered. It was the one from the child welfare foundation, the one from the Ethical AI summit, the one from every photograph I had seen about the place. At least I assumed so much. There was the same pleasant smile. The same calm eyes.

Nobody introduced him. They just sat down when he took a seat. People leaned fractionally toward him. They looked at their phones for a moment. And then we were directed to new footage that played on one of the walls of windows.

Lottie looked at her phone and whispered to me that this was raw footage, the sort normally hidden from audiences. A technician had made a mistake and the narrative filters had been switched off for six seconds. Consequently the actors stopped, as though somebody had unplugged civilisation. One woman lowered her smile. A man stared directly into the camera. Another looked around the set with genuine confusion. Then one actor quietly asked: “Is this allowed?” Nobody answered. The screen went black.

Nobody in the room spoke. I looked around wondering what the hell was happening. I thought I should say something about how I, as the sovereign, was to somehow fill the gaps in the narrative. But here I was with no script and in fact what I was seeing on the screen was a recording of a moment in reality somewhere where there was no script.

Now, on a film set there are many situations where the props fail to work, the fight sequence suddenly injures a participant and the budget does not allow for a reshoot, and so improvisation follows. But this was more than that situation. Improvisation itself was not there. Improvisation implies a goal of some sort. But in reality, there is no goal, no script, no nothing… And for the first time since arriving in America, I suspected I had just seen reality. Obviously, we had to put a stop to that.

Leave a comment

Share

What’s It All About Then, Reggie?

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

Subscribe now

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Future Administration, permit me to outline the situation with the clarity that comes only to those who have spent forty years standing silently behind the powerful while they ruin civilisation between courses.

The present age, I regret to inform you, is experiencing Industrialisation Again. This has happened before. On the one hand, like chemotherapy, you lived longer, but on the other, you felt like shit.

I. The First Industrial Accident (Britain, 1780–1914)

In the late eighteenth century certain enthusiastic men in Lancashire and Yorkshire invented machines that could produce cloth, iron, and misery at industrial scale. The consequences were immediate. Peasants who had previously lived short ignorant lives arguing with sheep were transported wholesale into cities whose sanitation strategy consisted largely of trying to hoist one’s trouser legs up and tread carefully.

Manchester grew so quickly that houses were built before streets, streets before sewers, and sewers before the concept of sewage. The results were instructive. Children developed lungs resembling damp coal sacks. Workers lived six to a room. Water was drawn from rivers that had recently been used as chemical experiments and the political effects were even more entertaining: radicals appeared, chartists appeared, socialists appeared and eventually Germans appeared.

Within a century the entire enterprise culminated in two World Wars, several revolutions, and the discovery that modern artillery can rearrange a continent. Historians have called this progress.

II. The Second Industrial Accident (The Internet, 1990–Present)

We are now repeating the experiment, but with computers. Where the Victorians built factories, we have built algorithms. Where they produced cotton, we produce content. Where they polluted rivers, we pollute attention spans.

Instead of drawing rural populations into cities, modern technology performs the opposite miracle: it traps the population inside small glowing rectangles while their actual towns quietly collapse. The results are eerily familiar. Water companies cannot provide water. Hospitals cannot provide health. Governments cannot provide government. But we do possess several thousand applications capable of producing pornography for those with a fetish for additional digits. Progress marches on.

III. The Mental Health of the Empire

Victorian industrialisation produced a population exhausted by coal dust. Modern industrialisation produces a population exhausted by notifications. Both systems share certain features: the worker no longer understands what he produces, the citizen no longer understands what he believes, and the politician no longer understands what he is doing, though he continues doing it with admirable and often lucrative enthusiasm.

Families, once organised around work and community, now organise themselves around Wi-Fi routers. Dinner conversation has been replaced by a ritual in which four people silently stare at devices while an algorithm studies their purchasing habits. Victorians called this alienation. We call it engagement metrics.

IV. Revolutionary Politics (Again)

When people become confused, unhealthy, and slightly angry, politics becomes theatrical. The nineteenth century produced anarchists, utopian socialists, and men who believed society could be perfected by giving free reign to those with the right accent. The twenty-first century has not moved that far forward, but instead of shouting at each other in the pub, it has produced online movements of similar intellectual coherence. Every faction believes it has discovered the hidden conspiracy behind civilisation when in fact most of them have, unfortunately, have only discovered YouTube.

V. Opportunity

Now we arrive at the important part: periods of historical confusion always produce two things: Chaos and Leadership vacancies

The industrial upheaval eventually produced figures like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Lenin, whatever one might think of them, whereas the present upheaval has merely produced podcasts.

This creates a strategic opening.

VI. The Butler Solution

My proposal is simple. While the public quarrels about artificial intelligence, culture wars, and oat milk, a competent administrator should quietly take charge… Naturally I refer to myself. And since it is obvious that I have not got the required public school accent, one is thus drawn towards the even greater prize of the United States.

Some may object that I am not an American citizen. However, this is merely an administrative matter. A birth certificate can be obtained with relatively easily, especially if one knows certain archivists in Delaware who owe me favours dating back to an unfortunate incident involving a senator and a champagne fountain in 1994.

The American constitution contains many admirable provisions but conveniently lacks a clause preventing a professional butler from becoming President. This, I am sure, was no oversight, as many of the founding fathers knew all too well that their slaves and butlers ran their plantations, and they themselves now little more than a bit of Greek literature regarding “Republics”.

VII. The Campaign Message

The slogan writes itself: “Civilisation Requires Management.”

After centuries observing the ruling classes, I can confirm a simple truth: Nations resemble dinner parties. When no one is in charge, the guests quarrel, the wine runs out, and someone inevitably sets fire to the curtains.

A butler’s task is merely to restore order, pour the brandy, remove the dangerous guests, and quietly ensure the house does not collapse.

VIII. Why Me?

Industrial revolutions always produce new machines. But they also produce new rulers. The Victorians eventually found theirs. The Twentieth Century found theirs. And our Sci-Fi century will soon find its own. Preferably someone calm, discreet, and accustomed to managing chaos while standing behind the furniture. Which, if I may say so, is precisely my area of expertise.

VIX. How It Should Be Done.

Nations, I have long observed, suffer from the same problem as dinner parties: they are frequently organised by the wrong people. Politicians behave like excitable guests who have discovered the wine cellar without supervision. Economists resemble visiting cousins who insist on explaining the pudding using graphs. Journalists hover like footmen who have accidentally been given megaphones. The result is chaos.

Therefore, the proper way to run a modern superpower is to treat it as one would a country house of respectable size. Admittedly the United States is somewhat larger than the average estate, but the principles remain identical:

Rule One: The Household Must Have Order

Every country house possesses a hierarchy. At the top sits the Master of the House, who imagines himself to be in charge. In reality the household runs because the Butler quietly ensures that the roof does not collapse and the guests do not kill one another with cutlery. The modern state would benefit enormously from this arrangement.

Presidents may give speeches. Cabinets may debate policy. But someone sensible must ensure the plumbing works and the cavalry does not invade Greenland by accident. This someone should naturally be the Butler-President.

Rule Two: Guests Must Be Managed Firmly

A country house contains several types of guest: there is the boorish industrialist, who arrives loudly, demands influence, and tries to buy the furniture; there is the ideological cousin, who explains that civilisation must be rebuilt according to a pamphlet he has written during breakfast; there is also the eccentric foreign prince, who wishes to store his oil wealth in the silver cabinet.

A good butler handles them all with calm dignity. The industrialist receives polite limits. The revolutionary cousin receives a glass of sherry and a firm suggestion that he take a walk in the gardens. The prince is shown the billiard room where he can do minimal damage.

This system is known in diplomacy as balance of power.

Rule Three: The Kitchen Must Function

Empires collapse when the kitchen fails. Rome fell when the grain ships stopped arriving. Victorian Britain panicked when tea supplies faltered. Modern governments collapse when supermarkets run out of hummus. The Butler’s policy is therefore simple: the kitchen runs first. Everything else follows.

This means energy must flow, water must flow, food must flow, and the internet must remain operational long enough for citizens to complain about all three. The public need not understand logistics. They only need to observe that breakfast appears every morning. Civilisation depends upon this miracle.

Rule Four: The Staff Must Not Fight Each Other

Every great house has departments: the cook distrusts the gardener, the chauffeur suspects the footmen of Bolshevism, the housekeeper believes the entire world would function better if everyone polished the silver more thoroughly.

In government these departments are called ministries. Their natural instinct is to fight endlessly over territory, prestige, and stationery budgets. The Butler’s role is to ensure they cooperate sufficiently to keep the house standing. This may require gentle persuasion, administrative discipline, or occasionally inviting them to an island full of security cameras ran by a well know paedophile until they stop behaving like children.

Rule Five: The Public Must Believe the Master Is in Charge

A delicate truth of country house management is that the owner must always appear to command events. The guests must never suspect that the entire estate is actually run by a quiet man in the pantry who knows where everything is kept. Thus, speeches will be given, flags will be waved and Presidents will announce bold visions of the future.

Meanwhile the Butler will ensure the trains run, the water flows, and the nuclear weapons remain pointed in roughly the correct direction. This arrangement preserves dignity for everyone involved. However, in situations where The Masters have lost sight of this fact, the Butlers need to come to the fore and play both roles. Modern technology may come to one’s aid here, for one’s Masters may now be simulations. And dare one call them “Big Brother”? Or for traditional and historic reasons, “King Reginald Stokes The Great.”

Rule Six: Crisis Is Merely Poor Scheduling

History shows that most disasters result from poor organisation. Wars often begin because someone misread a telegram. Financial crashes occur because clever men believed numbers printed by other clever men. Social upheavals occur because half the population suddenly discovers that the roof leaks.

A competent Butler addresses problems before they become theatrical. If a roof tile loosens, it is repaired. If a bank wobbles, it is quietly stabilised. If an ideology appears that promises paradise through immediate chaos, it is escorted politely to the gate and invited to return when it has learned table manners.

Rule Seven: Civilisation Requires Good Service

The final principle is simple. People are not asking for utopia. They merely wish for the trains to arrive, the streets to function, and the national government to refrain from setting fire to the drawing room. This is not a grand philosophical programme. It is service.

The Victorians understood this when they built railways and sewers. In the Twentieth Century housing, health services and education was the solution. Modern governments have forgotten all this while designing apps to syphon money from the many to the few. But the Butler remembers.

Conclusion

The twentieth century was governed by ideologues. The twenty-first century appears governed by algorithms. Both systems have produced impressive levels of confusion. It is therefore time to return to an older and more reliable model: Competent management.

A nation, like a country house, does not require constant revolution. It requires someone sensible to keep the lights on, the guests civilised, and the silver polished. In short, it requires a Butler.

In particularly, Brian Butler, the author of this tract. And why me? Because I am in the right place and the right time and all I can say is: Destiny is All! At least I would say that if it hadn’t been used before and if it actually made some sort of grammatical sense. But, here is the thing, a lot of people “Get It!”

Leave a comment

Share

What’s It All About Then, Reggie?

LIMINAL BRITAIN

Share

Share LIMINAL BRITAIN

LIMINAL BRITAIN: Chapter One - An Alien in Essex

LIMINAL BRITAIN

If you have not read Volume One yet, subscribe to it by this link.

PART ONE of Volume Two A link to all Part One in a PDF, for paid subscribers.

INTRODUCTION to Volume Two

CHAPTER ONE of Volume Two

CHAPTER TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER THREE of Volume Two

CHAPTER FOUR of Volume Two

The Bit Nobody Ever Reads

CHAPTER FIVE of Volume Two

CHAPTER SIX of Volume Two

CHAPTER SEVEN of Volume Two

CHAPTER EIGHT of Volume Two

PART TWO of Volume Two

CHAPTER NINE of Volume Two

Subscribe now

I. What Was Missed

My wife died on the 31st March. At least she died at home, in my arms, and not alone in some anonymous ward or dismal hospice corridor waiting for someone to notice she had gone.

She was my connection to other people. She created the friends and was known for being dignified, knowledgeable, dryly humorous, kind and courageous. She was obsessively in control and expected others to be similarly conscientious. And at the same time had a childlike delight in flowers, nature, travel and just being among friends. The idea of being processed through a system she was not in charge of, her body reduced to a chart entry or bed number, horrified her. Even at the end she retained that instinct for autonomy, for order, for reason, for recognition.

As a University Professor all her students were individuals, with histories, and lives, and quirks that delighted her. Consequently, they kept in touch with her even when they had gone on to other things. She had spent her life believing that knowledge and caring about others could improve things. It was difficult to accept that there were those that cared so little about people, that they would fail to improve their knowledge to help them. For Helen, nothing was just a job, it was a cause!

Three years earlier she had been told, through routine blood tests, that her cholesterol was somewhat high and her glucose levels needed better control. These consultations took place over the telephone. There was no physical examination, no discussion in which a doctor might listen carefully and observe anything subtle that contradicted pre-existing assumptions.

Anyone who actually met Helen would immediately see she did not fit the lazy template often used to identify a lifestyle illness. She was slim. She did not smoke. She rarely drank. She was disciplined about food without being doctrinaire. She had the habits of a scientist: moderate, observant, sceptical of fads, careful about evidence. She walked a great deal, thought a great deal, and recorded her life with photo books, diaries, and plans for future adventures.

Helen was a professor of pharmacology. She had spent decades studying how drugs interact with the human body, how small molecular changes alter outcomes, how side effects arise from mechanisms rarely appreciated by those who merely prescribe medicines. She believed deeply in the scientific method and worshipped evidence, not authority. Consensus did not automatically equal truth.

Yet the system now treating her did not seem interested in her as an individual organism with a particular physiology and particular history. She was simply a patient with raised glucose levels and as is standard practice now, she was prescribed Metformin.

Within weeks she began losing weight. She felt nauseous most of the time. She had persistent diarrhoea. She felt exhausted in a way she had not previously experienced. Her glucose readings did not meaningfully improve, so the dosage was increased. Obviously, the doctors had not attended her lectures on medicine, where she would explain that more was not necessarily better. However, she was in the hands of people supposedly in the know about this particular disease and she complied.

She began experiencing persistent belching and abdominal discomfort. This was attributed to “functional dyspepsia”, essentially psychosomatic illness. It is a term that can sometimes be clinically appropriate, but it can also function as a polite way of saying the doctor does not know what is wrong and, as is all too often with women patients, suspects anxiety. Ironically, her doctors were mostly women.

Helen was not prone to anxiety. If anything, she was intellectually combative in the face of uncertainty. She wanted data, explanation, hypothesis, testing. She did not dramatise symptoms. If she said something felt wrong, something was wrong!

I cannot state with certainty that Metformin masked early pancreatic cancer symptoms, but the combination of worsening glucose control, unexplained weight loss, gastrointestinal disturbance and fatigue signals that something deeper was wrong. But at the time we trusted the process and assumed someone somewhere was looking at the whole picture.

A gastroenterologist recommended a PET scan. That decision suggested at least one clinician had concerns beyond routine diabetes. But the PET scan was cancelled as unnecessary because a CT scan had shown nothing significant. We subsequently learned that early pancreatic cancer is often difficult to detect on CT but at this point, being ignorant, we did not challenge this and accepted that Helen was now labelled diabetic and prescribed insulin.

Even so, we began to sense that the doctors were not taking notice. There was no family history of diabetes. Helen had none of the metabolic profile usually associated with Type 2 diabetes. We wondered whether her thyroid medication might be implicated. Years earlier she had lost her thyroid to Hashimoto’s disease and relied entirely on synthetic hormone replacement. Thyroid balance can influence metabolism in complex ways, and adjusting her dosage did seem to produce small improvements, so this reassured us temporarily.

Helen approached illness the way she approached research. She kept notes. She tracked symptoms. She observed correlations. She avoided speculation without evidence. She did not catastrophise. She expected explanations eventually to emerge and was determined to get on with life.

We travelled to Malaysia, where we had previously lived for six years and created video histories of the place. Helen further became involved in the local Red Crescent, and the Cerebral Palsy Centre, gaining an acknowledgement of her work from the Queen of Johor. She had been much admired there, both for her knowledge, her kindness and humour.

We visited the Malaysian island of Langkawi with old friends, one of whom was a surgeon, and one afternoon she fainted during an episode of tachycardia. It was sudden and alarming. And along with all the other symptoms of diabetes, stomach pains, back pain, immediately our surgeon friend became concerned. He arranged for her to be examined thoroughly at a Malaysian hospital.

Within days she underwent endoscopy, colonoscopy, blood work, and a PET scan. And there it was: a tumour on the pancreas. A subsequent biopsy confirmed pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

The efficiency of Malaysia’s health service was striking. There was no drama, no delay, no suggestion that symptoms might be imagined. They looked. They tested. They correlated findings. They reached a conclusion. It is possible that the tumour had simply progressed to a stage where detection was easier consequently one cannot prove that earlier imaging in the UK would have identified it. But the sense that a chain of clues had not been fully connected remained difficult to shake.

Helen reacted to the diagnosis with characteristic composure. She asked precise questions. She wanted staging details, tumour dimensions, vascular involvement, survival data distributions rather than crude averages. She disliked being given median survival statistics without context. She understood statistical curves and variability. She did not panic.

We returned to the UK with the biopsy result and the understanding that pancreatic adenocarcinoma often carries a poor prognosis. Typical survival estimates ranged between three months and a year depending on stage and treatment response. We were thus relieved to find that there appeared to be no metastasis, making surgery a possibility.

The Whipple procedure, a complex pancreatic surgery, carries significant risk but offers potential for extended survival in selected patients. Helen understood the risks. She also understood that without intervention the outlook was bleak. She began reading clinical papers again, reviewing treatment pathways, assessing evidence. She remained analytical even when discussing her own survival probabilities. We still believed there was time. We believed that somewhere within the system there would be doctors willing to examine the evidence and propose a rational strategy.

Helen disliked fuss. She disliked sentimentality. She preferred conversation to sympathy. When friends expressed alarm, she reassured them with calm understatement. She did not want to be treated as fragile. As yet she did not look seriously ill. She was thinner, certainly, but she retained her alert expression and her quick wit and still corrected my mispronunciation of the names of her prescribed drugs.

I plunged into seeking out the latest miracle cures and fashionable supplements for people with Pancreatic cancer. She however, retained her scepticism about fashionable medical theories unsupported by robust trials. But we both assumed that now that a clear diagnosis existed, treatment would proceed with urgency. This proved somewhat optimistic.

Looking back now, the most painful thought is not simply that the disease was aggressive, but that the early signals were diffuse enough to discourage a sense of urgency, where perhaps investigation might have been justified sooner. Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat even when identified relatively early but early detection is seen as a must if one is to expect any kind of positive outcome.

II. The Race Against Delay

We returned to the United Kingdom carrying a neat folder of Malaysian reports, scans, and biopsy confirmations that seemed to us to contain not only information but urgency. The diagnosis was no longer speculative. The tumour had a name, a location, and a behaviour pattern well documented in medical literature: Pancreatic adenocarcinoma. A brutal phrase, but at least a precise one and precision implies the possibility of strategy.

We took the results to the NHS and were told that referral to an oncologist would take six weeks.

Six weeks is a curious unit of time when one has just been told that median survival may not extend far beyond three months. Six weeks is also a curious unit of time when one has spent a lifetime believing that modern medicine moves with efficiency once a malignancy has been identified. Helen did not waste time in passive worry. She read clinical papers on pancreatic cancer treatment pathways. She analysed survival curves. She examined the evolving evidence regarding neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatments intended to shrink tumours sufficiently to allow surgical removal. She did not indulge in magical thinking, but she did believe in probability distributions rather than fatalistic averages. Median survival, she would say, is merely the midpoint of a poorly defined population. Someone must exist above the median.

She approached her own illness as she would a research problem: assemble information, identify variables, examine outcomes. And of course, past statistics were not goals to achieve, but rather results to improve upon!

We telephoned after six weeks had passed. We were told referrals were running four weeks behind schedule and no timeline could be guaranteed. The tumour, we felt, was unlikely to respect the timetable of administrative backlog, so we went private, believing our insurance policy would cover treatment. That was, after all, the purpose of insurance. It exists precisely for events one hopes will never occur.

The private oncologist reviewed the scans carefully. He explained that the tumour appeared to involve surrounding blood vessels, making immediate surgery impossible. He recommended FOLFIRINOX chemotherapy, a powerful combination therapy often used in pancreatic cancer in the hope that tumour shrinkage might make surgery possible later.

Helen listened attentively and asked precise questions about response rates, toxicity, neuropathy risk, and statistical variability across patient cohorts. She did not expect certainty. She expected clarity about uncertainty. And consequently, accepted the treatment.

The insurance company on the other hand, refused payment on the grounds that the cancer constituted a pre-existing condition! This was bewildering logic. Pancreatic cancer typically progresses rapidly. It seemed improbable that a disease with such a prognosis could be considered long-standing enough to fall within pre-existing exclusion criteria.

The oncologist intervened, explaining that the timeline of symptom progression made the insurer’s claim implausible. The insurer then shifted position. The oncologist, they now explained, was not among their preferred consultants. Consequently, the treatment would not be covered. The chemotherapy cost over £100,000.

Helen did not dwell on the financial implications. She treated the matter as an engineering problem. If this treatment offered the possibility of making surgery viable, it was rational to attempt it.

FOLFIRINOX is not gentle. It is not presented as gentle. It is chemotherapy designed to attack rapidly dividing cells with considerable force. Helen experienced the predictable toxicities: exhaustion, neuropathy, nausea, a flattening of vitality that made even simple tasks laborious.

She bore it with a mixture of stoicism and intellectual curiosity. She noted patterns in side effects. She tracked how long symptoms persisted after each cycle. She compared her experience with published toxicity profiles while cooking up stews and curries to freeze for the time she would be too exhausted to do the cooking.

Helen had planned a drive from Lima to Tierra Del Fuego and costed it out for us. We were always determined to keep moving at full speed together. It was us against the world, and now it seemed it was us against the universe. She now began to doubt we would ever get our life back.

The chemotherapy did not render the tumour operable. And then, finally, we obtained an NHS oncology appointment! The oncologist of course, had not yet seen the scans. She explained that Helen was not technically her patient until the referral had been fully processed. The case would be presented to a multidisciplinary team.

Weeks passed again. Communication between departments seemed remarkably fragile. Scans were not available on internal systems. Reports could not be located. Departments appeared to function as semi-independent entities with limited data sharing. And at one consultation, I found myself emailing scan files directly from my phone to a clinician because the hospital system could not retrieve them. The absurdity of acting as courier between medical departments would have been comic had the stakes been less serious.

Helen observed these events with increasing concern. She was not prone to theatrical indignation. Instead, she would remark, with characteristic understatement, that one might expect data transfer to be somewhat more efficient in a technologically advanced healthcare system. Her humour remained dry even when circumstances were not. She once remarked that the phrase “joined-up thinking” appeared to describe a theoretical construct rather than an operational one.

Meanwhile, the port inserted for chemotherapy required periodic maintenance. Helen requested its removal now that chemotherapy had concluded. The NHS oncologist appeared uncertain what device she was referring to until shown physically. She said most people leave them in for the rest of their life… implying that this was not long! My wife wanted it removed because it was irritating and needed tending and we did not subscribe to such fatalism. Removal however had to be arranged privately because it was not of the kind that they used at their hospital. I did not know the NHS could refuse to treat anyone but apparently they can if they classify it as elective surgery.

None of these individual incidents proves systemic failure, but collectively they created a persistent sense of fragmentation and indifference. And of course, everyone, and I do mean everyone, that I have subsequently spoken to about their experiences has told me similar horror stories of a mix of incompetence and confusion to a degree that smacks of criminality.

Radiotherapy was eventually recommended as a means of controlling the tumour locally. The radiologist explained that the treatment might reduce tumour activity but was unlikely to make surgery possible. This was not the response Helen had wanted and she began to think this was a pointless exercise. Even so, for my sake, she told me, she underwent stereotactic radiotherapy. The information I had was that there was no metastasis and that the reduction of the tumour would improve her chances and could lead to an operable condition. I stuck to believing that to be so.

These periods of treatment required us to stay in London where we took an opportunity to go to the theatre, meet friends for dinner, do some shopping and take some photographs. We were always chatty people with many interests. We were not going to let any of this stop us or get us down. Ours was not a marriage built upon mere compatibility of habits but upon shared curiosity. We had travelled widely together, often in improbable circumstances. At various points in our lives, we had lived in environments that required adaptability: new cultures, unfamiliar institutions, languages partially understood, bureaucracies navigated with patience. And having lived in Asia for thirty years, England was something of a foreign country and we applied all our techniques for thriving in foreign places. And this land of cancer was definitely a very foreign place to be in.

Helen was a good traveller because she was observant. She did not impose preconceptions on new environments. She preferred to understand how things actually worked. She was quicker than me. I could spend long periods in museums reading explanatory labels whereas she rushed through with a glance, taking in what took me deep concentration to do so. We often joked that our marriage functioned as a joint research project into the peculiarities of the world.

The illness did not extinguish this attitude. Even while navigating oncology pathways, Helen continued to pursue her interest in photography. And although carrying a heavy camera became increasingly problematic, she turned to studio photography, in particular macro photography creating images from water reflections on drops of water on sprouting mosses. She also busied herself putting together photo books, one of all my ancestors going back over a hundred years, as well as a collection of monthly photographs of ourselves that she had been collecting for the forty-eight years we had been together. Her last entry in this one was that she was too weak to continue and thought this would be the last entry.

Six weeks after radiotherapy, something unexpected occurred. Her insulin requirement dropped dramatically. Her glucose levels stabilised. She had more energy. She required less Creon to digest food. The constant background nausea eased.

These changes suggested to us that tumour activity in the pancreas had been reduced. Helen began to feel more like herself. Consequently, we decided to travel with friends to Stockholm. It was not a reckless decision but a considered one. Helen believed that maintaining normality where possible was psychologically beneficial. She did not wish her life to become defined exclusively by hospital appointments. Naturally we visited the photographic museum there, meeting up with other friends who shared this passion. And of course we had to go along to the ABBA museum!!! All taking place in minus eighteen degrees with everywhere smothered in spectacular snow.

One afternoon we had a champagne tea in one of the harbour side hotels, with a big picture window of the snowy cityscape. Helen drank a glass of champagne without discomfort, which felt momentous. Life had returned. We discussed future travel possibilities cautiously, as if not wishing to provoke fate by excessive optimism. Helen remained measured even in hope. But this improvement meant possibility.

We returned to the UK with renewed determination to pursue surgical evaluation. We examined data regarding operable criteria following neoadjuvant therapy. She understood that radiological interpretation can vary. She hoped the multidisciplinary team would consider the full context rather than rely solely on rigid thresholds. She was fit enough for a risky attempt at saving her life.

III. The Last Hope

The next scan showed metastases in the liver.

Until that moment, everything had still been framed as a problem with a possible technical solution. Tumours could sometimes be shrunk, excised, burned, irradiated, targeted, starved of blood supply, or at least held in uneasy balance for longer than statistics predicted. But metastasis alters the grammar of the conversation. The disease is no longer local. It is no longer contained within a single battlefield. It has begun to travel. Consequently, surgery was ruled out.

Helen listened without visible distress. She had always preferred clarity to consolation. She disliked euphemisms. She disliked theatrical pity even more. She wanted to know what could be done, what could not be done, and what evidence supported each claim. The NHS could offer further chemotherapy but she did not want more chemotherapy. The previous regimen had left her exhausted and shaken. Neuropathy had affected her hands and feet. She described the sensation as though the nerves in her feet had been turned into stones. She tolerated discomfort with stoicism but not pointlessly. She wanted reason attached to suffering.

We began researching alternatives ourselves. Helen approached this phase with the disciplined scepticism of a scientist forced into unfamiliar territory. She read about targeted therapies, immunotherapies, experimental trials, metabolic interventions. She understood the difference between promising mechanism and demonstrated outcome. She understood the danger of small sample sizes and uncontrolled studies. Yet she also understood that scientific progress often begins with small studies.

Germany appeared to offer more experimental pathways than were readily available within the NHS framework. We arranged DNA analysis of the tumour in the hope of identifying mutations that might respond to specific targeted therapies. Precision medicine promises individualisation, though in practice the number of actionable mutations remains limited for pancreatic cancer. Still, information might create opportunity.

We pursued dendritic cell therapy in Munich. The principle, simplified, is that the immune system can be trained to recognise tumour cells more effectively if presented with carefully prepared antigens derived from the tumour itself. The scientific rationale is not absurd but the clinical evidence remains limited.

Helen read the papers carefully. She noted methodological weaknesses, small cohorts, absence of long-term survival data. She did not pretend the evidence was strong. But she also noted that doing nothing was unlikely to produce improvement. Uncertainty, at this stage, was not the enemy. Lack of possibility was the enemy.

We travelled to Munich and decided that if nothing else this would be an expensive holiday! We booked up a night at a comedy club and we booked a tour of the mad Prince Ludwig’s castle and other historic buildings. All made all the more picturesque in the snow. Helen’s energy was failing but we tried to accommodate rest periods.

It was interesting to discover that an international security conference was taking place with various government heads turning up. Security guys were all over the place and our hotel seemed to be full of men in dark suits, and shifty looks, full of conversations about weaponry of various kinds. Somehow, this seemed apt.

At the clinic we met other patients, many of whom had travelled considerable distances. There was a subdued atmosphere of cautious hope. No one pretended miracles were guaranteed. But everyone present had decided that inaction was intolerable. Canada’s health service so we were told, had similar problems to the UK’s. It too had communication problems and elements of managerial over kill leaching funding from actual medicine.

Helen listened politely to the German Doctor’s explanation of the procedure and took the scientific papers that he gave her as evidence of the efficacy of the treatment. Later, in the hotel room, she analysed the studies with clinical detachment. She did not dismiss them outright. She did not embrace them uncritically. She simply acknowledged the evidence was thin but not entirely implausible. I had my doubts though. I had come across so many complete charlatans putting forwards expensive and dangerous treatments that I feared that we had become yet another victim. Even so, we decided to proceed. Which indicated to me that for all Helen’s belief in the right to die in the face of long protracted and painful illness, she was not ready to give up yet. She was not doing this strictly for my benefit now.

We convinced ourselves that science progresses continuously. Treatments considered experimental one year may become standard five years later. Survival sometimes depends on remaining alive long enough for knowledge to catch up.

We returned from Munich after the treatment with a commitment to get a scan in three months and send the results to the clinic. There was also a requirement for a booster in six months’ time. This would be yet another eye rolling expense but at the same time it suggested that there was confidence that she would be around in six months’ time.

Back in the UK, Helen however grew weaker. Her insulin requirements fluctuated unpredictably. Some days she required little. Other days her glucose readings rose sharply despite minimal food intake. Pancreatic cancer interferes not only with digestion but with metabolic regulation itself. The organ responsible for insulin production becomes compromised, and balance becomes elusive. Her appetite diminished. Food lost its normal appeal. Swallowing tablets became difficult. Water tasted strange to her. She described it as metallic or simply wrong.

I contacted one of the pancreatic cancer institutions that offered medical advice and they suggested that she could have a milder form of chemotherapy that could at least control the liver cancers. Similarly, I had discovered that a new therapy was available in the UK, histotripsy, and that it was being used in Cambridge. I immediately contacted Cambridge and they said that I would need a referral from our oncologist. So we went back to the NHS oncologist who dismissed all this as a waste of time. The chemotherapy they offered was the one they offered and there was no point in modifying it. The outcome would be much the same, that is, death. Similarly, she dismissed the Histotripsy idea as merely palliative and similarly unlikely to change the outcome. She said, “this is cancer. This is what happens. You have to accept it.” Even so, she ordered a new scan. I think the fact that I had mentioned that Cambridge’s cancer centre was now using histotripsy made her wonder if there was something in this procedure.

In the meantime, the palliative nurses at the hospice prescribed liquid morphine to control Helen’s increasing amounts of pain. But opiates in general caused her severe nausea and abdominal distress. This was due to her unusual metabolic response. Many years earlier she had researched variations in opioid metabolism. She had learned that genetic differences in liver enzyme activity can alter drug effects dramatically. And she had discovered that she was one of the people who did not react well to this drug. She explained repeatedly that opioids made her feel worse. And even synthetic opioids had the same effect. Despite her declaring that she had taken part in an experiment when she had been professor of pharmacology and discovered this effect, they still believed that morphine was the best treatment for her.

However, Panadol, of all things, proved more tolerable and more effective. She accepted this with mild amusement. After decades studying complex pharmacological interactions, the simplest analgesic offered the most relief.

But then the results of the scan came in and blood clots were discovered. She was immediately admitted to hospital. There we hoped anticoagulant treatment might restore some energy. A few years earlier I had experienced a pulmonary embolism myself and recovered fully after treatment. The parallel offered fragile reassurance.

At the hospital we met a Chinese doctor who had taken the time to read her case notes carefully. He addressed her as Professor Wise, using her academic name. The recognition mattered more than one might imagine. Helen had spent much of her professional life teaching students in Asia. She respected the diligence she had encountered there. She immediately trusted him because he at least had paid attention.

He adjusted her medications thoughtfully and arranged discussion by a multidisciplinary team. For a brief period, we felt something resembling relief. Yet the practical conditions of the ward undermined confidence. Helen spent a night without sufficient blankets and felt intensely cold. Pain management instructions were not implemented because staff could not locate a nurse authorised to administer the prescribed medication. And all night another patient shouted repeatedly that doctors were trying to kill her. We assumed dementia. Yet the echo of the words was unsettling.

I brought Helen home and, in the morning, she declared she could not get up to go downstairs for breakfast. I would have to bring her breakfast. She wanted Frosties but not with too much milk as liquids for some reason were not easy to swallow. I brought the Frosties up and I arranged pillows carefully so she could sit up to eat them. She demanded a plastic bowl beside the bed in case she vomited. She managed only a few mouthfuls and a few sips of ginger tea.

I maintained small rituals that made existence feel less clinical. One night I brought our iPad to the bed and said we should pretend we are in a hotel room doing what we often did when abroad, watch British TV via a VPN on the iPad. So, we watched “Time Team”, a very British show documenting various archaeological digs around the UK. We had done this many times before. Helen enjoyed programmes that combined archaeology with evidence-based reasoning. She liked the way hypotheses were tested by digging carefully rather than being proclaimed theatrically. We also watched a documentary about the search for the Holy Grail, amused by the persistence of myth alongside scholarship. The pretence livened her up, though I could tell that most of the time she had her eyes closed.

We had travelled widely together over the decades: Asia, Europe, Africa, places reached by careful planning or sometimes by impulsive decisions that later became cherished memories. We had developed the habit of turning unfamiliar rooms into temporary homes. We would arrange books beside the bed, connect electronic devices, locate local coffee, establish routines within hours.

She told me she was dying. She said it calmly, as if stating a conclusion derived from available data. She asked that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered over White Horse Hill. She wanted a party afterwards. She did not believe grief should eliminate humour. She told me what she wanted to say and asked me what I would say. I said I would tell everyone how much I loved her and then play Ian Dury’s Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. She laughed and said her sister would not understand the joke. Humour remained possible even at the edge of loss.

Hospice equipment arrived: hospital bed, commode, rails. None seemed designed for her particular circumstances. The mattress vibrated continuously to prevent bed sores, producing a faint mechanical hum that irritated her. The bed was too short for her height. When raised to assist sitting, her weakened muscles allowed her to slide downward. But the nurses persuaded us that it would be easier for them if she was in this bed and then departed. She then fell from the bed onto the floor.

I struggled to get her up. She rolled under the bed telling me to leave her there. Then she asked where she was. I eventually managed to lift her back into our own bed and held her while she slept. Physical closeness mattered. We had always slept close together. Even during periods of intense work or travel we had preferred proximity to distance. Physical reassurance communicates what language cannot easily convey.

The next day friends visited. Helen spoke with them lucidly; the morphine had worn off. She was Helen. She asked about their lives. She listened attentively. She maintained interest in others even while her own strength declined.

Later the nurses returned with a morphine driver: a small pump delivering continuous medication through a needle inserted into her thigh. The apparatus looked invasive and alien. Tubing emerging from the body creates an immediate psychological shift. They explained this would be better for her. The morphine would be in small doses and would not cause nausea. It would, in their words, “settle her.”

We finally got rid of them and she became increasingly restless. She asked for Zack, a plush toy her sister had sent. The toy seemed to comfort her. She asked for sheep ornaments from the Outer Hebrides, also sent by her sister. She held them with a faint smile, as if amused by their smallness.

She told me she loved me. She asked what I would do without her. I told her the truth: that I was broken. Romantic language often fails in such moments. Only accuracy remains.

Later she became distressed. “What the fuck, Lawrence! What the fuck!” Helen never swore. Her loss of linguistic restraint revealed the depth of her bewilderment. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. There is no instruction manual for dying. She spoke of her life being wonderful and too short. She complained about white tea, which she had never liked. She declared “Bees!” and how she could not answer “2 B”, which I assume was some tax form or something. Then she said she had to save forty-one children. Fragments of thought drifted across the threshold between coherence and dream. She attempted to sit upright. I asked her if she wanted to go to the toilet? And I prepared to get up and carry her there. But she fell back against me. Blood came from her mouth. Her eyes staring. Her breathing slowed. Her body relaxed gradually, as if relinquishing effort. She lay on me until breathing ceased. Until pulse ceased.

We had spent decades attending to ordinary needs: meals, travel arrangements, misplaced passports, lost spectacles, forgotten chargers, misjudged weather conditions. We never imagined that this would be the kind of ending to all that. I held her for some time before accepting that she had died.

The room was quiet. Time had narrowed to a single point and then expanded into something difficult to comprehend. The person who had shared forty-eight years of conversation was no longer present to answer. The research partnership had concluded. The conversation had stopped mid-sentence. The world continued.

IV. After Helen

I lay beside her for some time, unsure how long. Time had become strangely viscous in those final hours, expanding and contracting without regard for clocks. Her head rested where it had rested so many mornings, against my shoulder, the position from which we would normally discuss what the day might contain: exercise, breakfast, maybe lunch somewhere, a visit to a garden centre, or maybe something more extravagant, the cinema, the theatre, drinks with friends... Small plans forming the texture of life.

Her breathing had stopped so gradually that part of my mind still expected the next breath to arrive. Her body was warm where it pressed against mine. There is a moment after death when the evidence of absence does not yet persuade the senses. The mind looks for continuation.

Eventually I eased myself from under her and arranged the pillows in what I imagined might be a comfortable position, though comfort was now irrelevant. I remember thinking absurdly that she would not have liked the angle of her neck. I went downstairs and poured a glass of whisky. It could have been any liquid. The act was mechanical rather than medicinal. One does something with one’s hands when there is nothing that can be done with one’s mind.

I phoned the hospice. The nurses arrived with quiet efficiency. They confirmed what I already knew. They completed forms. They removed the morphine driver, detaching the small machine that had seemed so intrusive, a machine I saw as a murderous object, a means of euthanasia that had not been requested. At the very least it was an instrument of surrender rather than care. They asked whether the medication had made her comfortable.

I said it had agitated her. She had felt burning and freezing sensations, had spoken of needing parts of her body cut away. I do not know whether this was recognised as a known reaction or simply registered as another note in a file. I could see they were not certain how to react and then told me that someone would come in the morning.

I considered returning to the bed beside Helen but the physical change in her body had begun. The warmth was fading. Stiffness beginning. The familiar person no longer inhabited the familiar form.

I sat on the sofa but did not sleep. I noticed a text asking how Helen was and I idiotically replied saying she had just died. This was five o’clock in the morning so I was not expecting a reply. But the phone rang and I found myself in a conversation about alternative therapies, of treatments said to have been suppressed or overlooked, of substances rumoured to cure where orthodox medicine had failed. Big Pharma was blamed. I did not argue strongly. Argument seemed pointless at that hour.

I could not escape the feeling that much of the harm we had encountered arose not just from fragmentation but from some malicious intent to harm, or at least use the good intentions of others to cause harm. It might well be the accumulation of small failures of attention rather than deliberate neglect, though any visit to an A & E department provides you with a punitive environment, designed to discourage anyone but the most desperate, and of course it is the most desperate that get the punishment. Policy is at the heart of this situation, a policy that does more than allow the unsuitable to have authority, but encourages them.

In the morning, different nurses arrived. They were gentle and respectful. They washed Helen and dressed her carefully. They placed Zack, the small plush toy she had held the previous evening, beside her. They placed a red rose on the bed. The symbolism was well meant.

I removed the necklace I had assisted her in putting on the previous day. That simple act proved unexpectedly distressing. It seemed like robbery. I sprayed her with her favourite perfume, the one I had given her for Christmas. For a moment her face seemed warmer, almost animated by familiar association. I thought she might still be breathing. The mind resists finality. Eventually I accepted that she was gone.

My sister arrived. We stood quietly, both uncertain how to behave in the presence of someone who had been so fully alive only hours before.

Helen had already specified which undertakers she preferred. They had served the village for four hundred years. Continuity mattered to her. She liked institutions that persisted long enough to develop memory.

I walked with my sister to their office. It seemed surreal to discuss appointment times for cremation as if scheduling dental check-ups. Diaries were consulted. Availability compared. The machinery of death intersects with the machinery of ordinary life in ways that feel indecently practical. People have holidays booked. Meetings arranged. Weddings planned. Life continues even when one life has ended. I did not resent this fact. I simply observed it with the same detached astonishment with which one observes most of reality after bereavement.

The next day I had a blood test already scheduled. I’m of an age where these things are routine. The results were alarming: indicators suggesting possible sepsis, impaired kidney function, and abnormal liver readings. A week later a second test returned results within the normal range. Grief is not purely emotional. It is physiological. Shock travels through the body as well as the mind.

The doctor asked whether I had thoughts of self-harm. I said I did not. I told him I had the temperament of a bomb disposal officer. I have always believed panic rarely improves outcomes. Problems are solved by careful examination, not emotional collapse. Yet it would be inaccurate to say I was unaffected. Trauma alters behaviour in ways not immediately visible. Where this experience will ultimately lead me, I cannot yet know.

Everywhere in the house was Helen. She had shaped the environment: books she was reading, furniture arranged for both aesthetic balance and practical use, lighting chosen to allow TV viewing without glare, kitchen equipment selected not for fashion but for efficiency. Helen disliked waste. She disliked unnecessary complication. She disliked performative luxury, except where our sofas were concerned. These had to be big, soft, sensuous and of course red! And flowers had to be everywhere.

Our lives had been shaped by her presence. We met when she was twenty-four and I was twenty-six. Neither of us was particularly impressive at first glance. I was an uncertain young man still wearing clothes I had worn at school. She was a doctoral student convinced she might fail because her experiments refused to behave as predicted. She believed failure indicated inadequacy. I suggested failure often indicates discovery. A failed experiment still produces knowledge. It demonstrates what does not occur under specific conditions. That information contributes to understanding.

I remember telling her about an exhibition I had seen in which a canvas painted entirely white had been displayed as art. Its value did not lie in the paint but in the context and the question being asked about what constitutes meaning. She seemed intrigued that something apparently empty might still communicate something. And somehow I think I presented myself as a blank canvas upon which she could create the man she wanted me to be.

We moved in together soon afterwards. It was us against the world. We shared the precarious early years of academic and creative work. Neither of us possessed substantial financial resources. We possessed curiosity and stubbornness.

Helen completed her doctorate successfully. She later became a respected researcher and teacher. Students admired her clarity of explanation. She insisted they understand mechanisms rather than memorise conclusions. She believed knowledge should be transferable. She believed understanding should empower. She was not easily impressed by status. She evaluated ideas rather than reputations.

We lived abroad for many years. We adapted to different academic systems, different healthcare systems, different social assumptions. Helen developed strong professional relationships with colleagues in Asia and appreciated intellectual seriousness wherever she found it. She also retained an understated humour. She disliked pretension. She enjoyed precise jokes. She was capable of formidable scepticism delivered politely.

Even during her illness, we made plans for future journeys: a road trip along the Atacama Highway, a wedding in Glasgow, a journey through the Orkneys. Friends from Malaysia were planning to visit the UK and we intended to join them for a trip around Cornwall. Life was expected to continue.

After her death, the house felt both full and empty simultaneously. Her books remained open with bookmarks marking places she intended to return to. Notes remained beside her bed. Reading glasses casually tossed on the bedside table. A desk full of papers and a computer full of mysterious passwords that I would have to decipher to find out email addresses, bills to pay, tax information. Each object implied continuity. Each object contradicted the absence.

Reflecting on the course of her illness, I found myself returning repeatedly to the question of how often she had been treated as an instance of a category rather than as a specific individual with particular knowledge of her own physiology.

Helen understood pharmacology at a professional level. She attempted repeatedly to explain her unusual metabolic response to opioids. Her explanations did not appear to influence prescribing decisions. Standard protocols were applied. Standard assumptions were applied. Standard timelines were applied. Even well-meaning clinicians appeared constrained by systems that prioritise procedural consistency over individual nuance.

This is not to accuse individuals of malice. Most individuals we encountered appeared to believe they were acting appropriately. Yet good intentions do not necessarily produce good outcomes. A system can depersonalise without conscious cruelty. It can apply categories efficiently while overlooking variation. It can prioritise throughput over comprehension.

Helen was not resistant to treatment. She was resistant to treatments that did not appear rational for her particular case. She wished to be engaged as a collaborator in her own care. She wished her expertise to be recognised as relevant. She wished attention to be paid.

In many encounters, attention seemed in short supply. Some clinicians were kind. Kindness, however, does not substitute for curiosity. One can be sympathetic yet inattentive. One can follow guidelines yet fail to observe anomalies. One can behave professionally yet fail to listen.

Looking back, the most unsettling aspect is not overt indifference but the quiet persistence of procedural momentum. Forms must be completed. Boxes must be ticked. Referrals must follow sequence. Protocols must be applied. Meanwhile the particular patient continues to change.

Helen wrote a note on her phone before she died: “Don’t be sad at my passing. I’ve had a wonderful life. I met wonderful people and had lovely friends. My only complaint is that it could not last longer. Love to you all.”

Her generosity and courage remained intact even at the end. She wished to comfort others. She wished to minimise distress.

I understand the impulse. Yet I find myself unable to obey her instruction. I think we should be sad. Sad that such intelligence, such discipline, such quiet humour, such curiosity has been removed from the world earlier than seemed necessary. Sad that attention was not always sufficient. Sad that systems designed to protect fail to recognise the particular. Sad that the person I spoke with every morning is no longer present to answer. Sad that the conversation has ended. Sad that love, however persistent, cannot negotiate with biology indefinitely. Sad that forty-eight years can feel both immense and insufficient.

I remain grateful that she died at home. I remain grateful that I was holding her. But gratitude does not eliminate grief. Grief is the continuation of love when conversation has ceased.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment