Recycling the middle classes

FLASH FICTION

As I begin, I don’t know how I’ll end. After a gestation of roughly nine months., we’re in the latter stages of the pandemic. For many, the end of days. Tonight’s lottery is the last, so I have little time to write this…

REDUNTANT OCCUPATION

It’s all happened so quickly. The last year has seen situations develop and casualties rise, more than in any global military conflict. A year ago, we were fighting over toilet roll. Even then, Brexit had been largely forgotten.

Those of us who wrote conspiracies in the UK, theorised that Coronavirus was the perfect smokescreen to divert the media’s attention from trade deals the government was signing with the USA, China and Saudi Arabia.

With the mainstream news agencies diverted, a few of us took up unofficial journalism posts, writing mainly for free in the gig economy. We were certain that Corvid-19 was a population control mechanism of human construction.

Having recently made my way through the social cleansing apparatus of the UK benefits system, I was grateful to have won back my human rights, at one of the last tribunals to be held before the system was shut down. I had to put the freedom and liberty I’d regained to good use. I had to explore to be able to report.

After the government departments closed, the indirect death toll from the disease increased the overall figures dramatically. But there was a bigger story.

A man-made virus, designed to reduce the financial state burden of the weak and elderly, benefited the balance sheets of disaster speculators, spread betting on casualty numbers, as hospitals were re-purposed and operations deemed non-essential were postponed. Eventually patients with existing terminal diagnoses were included in this group.

We suspected that those with underlying medical conditions and the over-70s were “shielded” for three months to give doctors time to hasten their demise. The weak and costly were being erased by social cleansing.

Over just a few months, there was a ripple effect. Medical staff succumbed to the virus, so that a situation could be forecast where those needing care outnumbered those able to provide it. Then a financial tsunami, for the invested gamblers and their sponsors. In the last few weeks, despite curfews and marshal law, the streets have become post-apocalyptic, while the protected hide away with their money.

The shops closed months ago and there have been no deliveries for weeks now. The law enforcers have fallen just as quickly as those they’re meant to police and protect. Most stay home, like they were told. A few hunt the rich.

The now invisible government has published a guide, available only sporadically online since the telecoms infrastructure is burning out under the pressure of human want and need. I got hold of a copy, which is why I needed to write.

The document is entitled ‘Professional Education: A New Vision for a Revised Population’. It prioritises specific occupations, and plans to switch education funding to support those professions. They include lawmakers and medics, educators and builders; First and Third class.

And that’s why I had little time to write what may be my last journalistic dispatch. Because like everyone else not in those categories of jobs listed, I’m in the lottery. I may be needed to help care for one of those people in the other two groups.

This is the day of the lottery, when a knock on the door may herald the beginning of many new lives, as disposable people like me are taken to provide blood, limbs and organs for those who need them the most.

It was a financial as well as a public health catastrophe, for all but the disaster capitalists. Suicides increased the death toll but helped as donors for the survivors. They were just part of the gamble to reap the harvest.

Clinical waste, where once we were slaves. 

© Steve Laker, 2020

Pray the universe, dad to keep

THE WRITER’S LIFE | FICTION

After many months of not being able to write much about my dad, today I can. Until now there have been many open narratives, no closure and much speculation. Last night a chapter ended when I found out dad won’t be returning home.

Over the last few weeks, things have progressed steadily, while dad has deteriorated on the same undefined scale. The final diagnosis is that he has a kind of double dementia, a bit like having Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s living in your head at the same time, chipping away at your memory and sense of self. Either on their own would be bad enough, but there are two of them in there, vandalising the place. He’s at a point where he requires round-the-clock care, which my mum and his home carers can’t fully provide. It’s every family’s worst waking dream when they have to put one of their own into a care home.

Dad will never get better, and this move could hasten his demise. I wish I could have done more. I wish I could do something besides hope that he makes friends in his new home, rather than give up. I wish I could talk him out of it, if that’s what he’s planning. I wish I could swap places, or at least be there so that he wasn’t so alone. I wish I could turn back time. There’s a cloud stuck in my head, which is why it keeps raining on my face.

Kevin necessary

TIME FOR BED

I’ve been to my own funeral. I was there as they lowered me into the pit. There were people there. That was when I woke up and made the first jump. I didn’t mean to, I was pushed. Onto my death bed. Before I left, I wondered, will people visit my grave?

Now I found myself back in the hospital bed where I’d died, with no visitors. But when you’re buried in the ground, you have no way of knowing what time it is.

I asked myself what the point was, and perhaps explaining to myself why I’d died. I’d switched myself off in boredom and frustration at the loneliness. If I just go back to sleep, maybe I can get back there, to my own funeral.

It didn’t work. I went the wrong way. When I woke up, I’d reversed to the first night I spent in that bed in the care home.

I don’t know who decided to put me there, like some kind of monster which had to be caged, out of the way where I couldn’t bother them. They visited, but with me incarcerated, they got to choose how much of me they’d put up with. A bit like visiting a grave, when the occupant can’t come to you.

After they’d left on that first night, I slept, trying to remember how I got there, how I’d come to be in this new place alone, when I’d spent much of my life sharing a warmer bed.

The next day I woke up in that other place, but it was cold. I lifted the sheets next to me but there was no indentation of a person. My partner had already left. I slept and I tried to dream.

We’re never aware of the moment we fall asleep. When we wake, we may remember some of our dreams, but we can never recall the point where we fell. I dreamed I was running through a woods, then I tripped, and I forgot my dream. I woke with a start. My jumps were taking me back in time.

I remembered my mum tucking me into bed and dad reading me a bedtime story, then checking under the bed for monsters. He said they only hid under there because they were scared. How ever many tales he told at the bedside, essentially they were all this one.

The scariest thing is this final jump into the past, the last chapter before the light goes out.

When you die at the end of your life, you may lose your own memories but you’ll be remembered by others. It’s but a comfort blanket to think we’re only truly gone when we’re forgotten.

Others will live on who’ve lived their lives with us, but I won’t be remembered when I’ve forgotten the people around me. When life ends the way mine will, I’ll regress to a time and place where I never existed. It’s not the loneliness I felt in hospital; it’s a bed without me in it. And no-one to read a story, no beginning before the book is even opened.

Memories become visions of the future when you’re living life in reverse, but I can’t see the future. I knew I was never going home. Like a baby given up at birth.

They think I didn’t feel anything, but this is how it feels.

I’m alone and I’m afraid.

And so an ending is written, a few words carved in stone. My story is here, hiding under the bed, in the ground beneath your feet, the wind in your ears, and the memory of when we’d only just met.

© Steve Laker, 2019

So many opportunities at the beginning of life, so few at the end. So much discovery in the closing chapters, when there were few clues at the start. We learn as we live, and even though my dad’s hardware is defective, I hope his memory will be stored on some device out there. Maybe he could plug himself in, so that me and him can keep talking.

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align, and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”

-Timothy Ferris

Twisted naked blonde ambitions

THE WORLD THROUGH A LENS

As we witness Boris Johnson – no longer the UK’s Foreign Secretary but our most visible liability abroad – caricaturing himself, it’s clear to me what he’s trying to do. 

In this age of cartoon leaders and surreal news, the plots are transparent but the shameless actors win the adulation of crowds wherever they go (in their own minds at least). Johnson is trying to breed fear and normalise racism, grooming the country for BoJo as PM. You only have to look across the Atlantic to see how easily-led the paranoid and ignorant are. He’s playing to the far-right, just like his comic book orange hero.

Science fiction writers look to the world around us for stories, and for the most part we make them at least plausible. Although time travel is theoretically possible, in the current accepted model, space time is not a pre-determined block. The past is written and recorded, the present is what we observe, and the future is yet to be written (there are other articles on quantum mechanics and particle entanglement elsewhere on this blog). Sci-fi writers can imagine near- and far-future bright and bleak scenarios, hoping to help readers determine a future they’d like to live in, and spot the early signs of darkness approaching.

It’s August 2019 and Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of the UK. The Tory party split in the aftermath of Johnson’s comments in The Daily Telegraph about Muslim women’s niqabs making them look like “bank robbers” or “letterboxes”. Those on the centre-right couldn’t align behind an overt racist, and Johnson knew this. He’d whipped up enough racial paranoia among right-wing voters that joining with UKIP was inevitable, and expected by those of us who saw right through him.

The UK crashed out of the EU with a ‘No-deal’ Brexit. It was “The will of the public,” but the nation had been lied to. The no-deal scenario was part of the capitalist plan, as the UK became a country of little regulation, and a low-wage production centre for cheap exported goods. Like local and national services before, the NHS was privatised and became a machine to make money, saving lives only selectively: those who could afford to be saved. A biblical prophesy of Revelations, made real through social cleansing more visible even than the mass murder of Grenfell.

No deal meant that Britain was, for a time, unique in the world (besides recently being voted ‘Most stupid’), having no trade deals with any other country. With so many global threats (nuclear war and climate change), the UK simply cut loose and set itself adrift.

The value of Sterling plunged and, coupled with strict border controls, the UK quickly dropped down the list of international tourism destinations. With their currency worth little overseas, few Britons could afford to travel and holiday abroad. Air travel became a luxury, and the preserve of the rich and entitled. It was a return to the heyday of British aviation in the 1950s and 60s.

As Johnson did his best to lose allies and alienate nations, swingeing import taxes were placed on British goods exported abroad. The Foreign Office once again created an intentionally ‘hostile environment’ for non-Brtish nationals, and the social cleansing was aided by increased hostility towards outsiders, normalised by Johnson’s party and overlooked by an underfunded police force. The UK had become a paranoid and insular society, groomed by Johnson on his path to power.

The Prime Minister resided over a prison state, terrorised by his false rhetoric of outside threats. It was a self-sustaining economy, feeding ownership and driving nails into the coffins of workers who could no longer afford even to bury themselves. It was social cleansing in full flow. President Trump had seen all this coming. It was part of a greater plan.

Trump offered an olive branch to the UK economy, with trade deals which no other country was prepared to sanction. With no other rescuer in sight, the US became saviour and the UK was indebted, becoming a de facto 51^st state, where those who remain meat-eaters feast on chlorinated chicken and steroid beef, while living in dangerous public housing, hastily built in a deregulated market to solve the housing crisis. In reality, death traps to continue the social cleansing.

Among those who write and speculate on such things, there are some who think Trump could hold the UK to ransom. In return for propping our economy up (and with a lot of nuclear weapons), he could demand sovereignty, make the UK a republic and sell the royal estate. The royals are the acceptable face of entitlement, and the good causes they support are not in keeping with the global social cleansing plan.

Apart from that last bit, it’s all perfectly plausible.