The genesis of metamorphosis

FLASH FICTION

One story from when paper and ink were rationed, written sparingly at one word per weekday over a whole year, a chapter for every two months of one history. As life changes daily, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a species can re-evolve in a year…

SEEDS

(i)

“Most of us are fake people. We never wanted to be, we just ended up hiding so many emotions that we started wearing a mask. We do this so easily now that we’ve taught ourselves to believe these lies are truth. It’s quite the opposite actually. We are so fake that we don’t even remember our true identity…”

I

“…It’s why we’re all locked inside now, contemplating ourselves. We’ve been forced by authority to obey for our own good. And actually, we shouldn’t resist…”

II

“…Political divisions are forgotten as quickly as new language evolves, and a dictatorial government shifts its rhetoric to one of a nation together, rather than nationalism. Old foes are united against a common new enemy and the citizens largely accept the restrictions placed upon them…”

III

“…and when we emerge, no matter how we look at it, we’ll be different. It’ll be a new world, which we approach cautiously, as we learn a new way of life. None of us will forget this, because it affected every single one of us. We’ll say it was a unifying human experience…”

IV

“…We should stay where we are for now, do as we’re told, while there’s such an opportunity to find ourselves and each other inside. We’ll need that when we all get out of here. Maybe we’ll eventually remove the masks, like we could when we were locked in together…”

V

“…A safe journey to all those who made a new humanity, and with our gratitude. You do not go in vain. We will forever remember the sentinels who changed us.”

VI

“And that’s how you indoctrinate a populace, all the while suppressing resistance, by sowing the seeds of martyrs.”

© Steve Laker, 2020

“I give it two weeks before we see martial law, unless everyone calms the fuck down and starts behaving as they’re told,” said a liberal socialist.

Cider with Shepard and Milne

POLITICS

Adding meaning to classic literature by defacing it, I’ve called this one “Piglet the gammon”…

The satire section of this blog is mainly concerned with throwing the right wing’s dogshit back over the garden fence.

How do we sleep in burning beds?

FLASH FICTION

“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

“I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” (Greta Thunberg)

As a science fiction writer who imagines future scenarios both near and far, I always keep on top of the news to see if I’m right and to get further ideas. I wrote this story late last year, when a delayed train interrupted my automation and I imagined a moment when factions might put differences aside to face a common cause. 

Next I predict water cannon, and with Trump’s planned visit imminent, curfews and martial law.

Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse, George Monbiot (Guardian)

“Had we put as much effort into preventing environmental catastrophe as we’ve spent on making excuses for inaction, we would have solved it by now. Everywhere I look, I see people engaged in furious attempts to fend off the moral challenge it presents.

“The commonest current excuse is this: “I bet those protesters have phones/go on holiday/wear leather shoes.” In other words, we won’t listen to anyone who is not living naked in a barrel, subsisting only on murky water. Of course, if you are living naked in a barrel we will dismiss you too, because you’re a hippy weirdo. Every messenger, and every message they bear, is disqualified on the grounds of either impurity or purity.”

THE EXTINCTION OF THE VICTORIANS

People remember where they were when big news events unfolded. When one strands you in a place, it’s impossible to forget where you were. I’d finished work for the week and I was at London Victoria when something changed.

It started like many evening commutes, with my train delayed, but no indication of by how long. Gradually more services were delayed, and the station concourse filled with shoppers and commuters unable to get home. I stared at the indicator boards as more and more trains were cancelled, and the station became uncomfortably crowded.

Eventually there was an announcement: There were trespassers on the line. A mixture of thoughts competed in my head: Just run them over, let them electrocute themselves, the needs of the many… But then I realised they’re human, and that it might not be a prank, but a cry for help. Unable to assist, I grew claustrophobic and decided to find a nearby bar where I could kill some time.

Blinking in the dark outside, the indicator boards were etched onto my retina: delayed, cancelled. I hoped the lives on the line wouldn’t be.

I found a pub not far from the station, where it seemed quite a few people had the same idea as me. It was a curious juxtaposition, as people who’d just been staring forlornly up at indicator boards watched a TV mounted high on the wall, captive. The news was on, and Victoria wasn’t alone.

All London termini were closing, as they became dangerously overcrowded. No trains were coming in or out of London. Outside King’s Cross, a lone man sat on a railway bridge, dangling his legs over the track. There was a single girl on a bridge outside Waterloo, and reports were coming in of others. Was this coordinated?

The question of organisation wasn’t part of the TV coverage, but I couldn’t help wondering if this might be some sort of protest. The alternative was far too fanciful, ghoulish, romantic and far-fetched to consider. But I’m a writer, so I considered it.

This was the time of Brexit, a homeless crisis, a Conservative government committing economic murder; of Trump, and the rise of the right. As a benefits claimant myself, I’d been abused by the government’s social cleansing agenda. I felt an empathy with these people on the bridges, and I couldn’t help wondering what might happen if they all jumped. Perhaps then an ignorant ruling dictatorship might listen. Too late for the jumpers, but they’d die martyrs.

The evening rolled on and the atmosphere in the pub wasn’t what I might have expected. People weren’t cursing impatiently at the inconvenience they’d been caused, they were phoning home to loved ones and finding places to stay the night. They were resigned to what was happening, and there was a feeling of togetherness about the place. For a moment, I felt humanity.

Road bridges were next, as jumpers sat above key motorways. No-one had seen this coming. The police didn’t have time to close bridges to prevent them being occupied, as the jumpers all came at once. Britain’s transport infrastructure was crippled. The number of lives threatening cancellation was estimated at around 900 up and down the country, and the situation was at a stalemate. The police had suspended most other operations to concentrate on the gridlock and the jumpers.

#WeWantOurLivesBack was on a banner draped over a bridge on the M25 between two jumpers, and the strangest thing: apart from one guy telling them to just jump and let him get home (he may have had pressing reasons), the stranded motorists below started getting out of their cars and slow-clapping. Others were sounding their horns, and still more were blasting music from their cars. Down there on the road, these people had become as resigned as we had in the pub. It wasn’t so much join them if you can’t beat them, but genuine empathy and support.

There’d been no response from Downing Street.

The pub was growing restless, but it didn’t make me anxious. Outside with the smokers, people clearly the worse for drink weren’t fighting each other, but chanting. There were no police on the streets. “Vive la Révolution.” The peasants were really quite revolting. Someone pointed out that Parliament Square was just around the corner.

Walking together through the streets of London at night, with no police, there was no looting, no criminal damage. It was anarchy, peace and freedom. This is what I’d dreamed of. We needed to make the most of it before the government sent the army in under the martial law which was surely coming. We’d made our point though. Something touched us that night, and captured us together.

Those martyrs were detained, delayed but not cancelled. They will not be forgotten. 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité was still far away (in France). But we’d made a start, sitting in the garden of the gated community, Anarchie au Royaume-Uni.

.

© Steve Laker, 2018

Take time off from work, bunk off of school. The Government says we’re damaging our future. But unless they act, we don’t have one. This is about all of us, and we’re camping out in their garden.

Teeth-whitening* by Rothschild

SPONSORED CONTENT

*Social cleansing (Teeth sharpening campaign, The Unfinished Advertising Agency)

A little anarchy defines democracy

THE WRITER’S LIFE

Today is seven weeks since my PIP assessment, and still no word of a result either way to calm my anxiety. I’ve had to learn not to worry about something until it happens. If I hadn’t adopted that bit of Buddhism, I’d have ceased to function by now, the awfulness of the last few months compounded by the state of the world outside my head.

CrimethInc

Much has been written (by me) about the need for a common foe or collective focus, to draw humans from different sides and of different opinions together. Lately the Brexit issue has become precisely that. Besides being a complete hatchet job by an incompetent government, this weekend it had the handy side effect of reacquainting me with some friends I’d fallen out with. We hadn’t become estranged because of Brexit, but that was the common focus for those on both sides to agree, we need to talk.

I didn’t go on the People’s Vote March, though I’d have liked to be among the voices of dissent. No matter that they’re mostly like-minded people, my social anxiety wouldn’t have coped with the estimated 700,000 crowd. Instead, I was at home, commenting on social media and joining in conversations.

The main argument in the ‘Leave’ camp is that Brexit is the will of the people, it was voted for in a referendum, and that should be respected. The ‘Remain’ camp holds that the referendum wasn’t a mandate to sell out the country and set us adrift in an unsteady wider world. When it’s clear the government is incapable, surely we, the people, all of us, need to take action? What the Brexiteers are advocating is simply standing by while a nation falls around us.

“Any idea that a second referendum would be an affront to democracy died on Saturday afternoon” (Independent).

In my opinion (on Facebook), ‘Democracy’ needs to evolve, now that it’s been hacked and redefined by a capitalist fascist ruling (not governing) political party. Throughout the history of humanity, we – as one race – have found better ways. Brexit, as it was steamrollered through us, was a wake-up call to the otherwise-blinkered.

The right to fight against something we don’t believe in remains, regardless of the vote. Parliament, your elected representatives, recently voted on your behalf that animals feel no pain. Are you happy to let such a result, made in full compliance to the constitution, stand?

Or, do you fight for what you believe in; by any means necessary?

Why should we accept what our politicians say when they’re murderers anyway, not least at home with their social cleansing agenda?

There’s a much bigger conversation which needs to take place over the next few decades, as we recover from this divisive episode. Brexit was sold on lies. This time, we’re more informed. And those who still believe in ‘democracy’, not that dictated by a fascist regime, need to move on together with the rest of us.

It all started in 1945, when our forefathers, and our allies in Europe and around the world, liberated a neighbour European country of people just like us from a fascist dictator and mass-murderer. History repeats.

Around this point, conversation turned to the debate on poppies. As a liberal lefty, I was asked if I could explain why a group of Cambridge students had sought to ban the wearing of poppies on their campus. Firstly, the story is only partially true and has been twisted by the right-wing tabloid press. Secondly, I couldn’t explain why they’d want to do such a thing (if indeed they had), but if they had, that was their human right, to have an opinion. They’re not preaching hate.

There was equal unrest on the right over the decision by the British Transport Police to not allow stickers on company vehicles:

“How do we know it’s poppy season again? The foaming rage of war-hungry gammons – and I say that as a veteran” (The Independent).

On social media again, I pointed out that like the majority of us on the left – even the pacifists – I don’t have a problem with our fellow humans who defend us (our country). We respect them just as anyone should (and I’m humbled by them), especially as many are fighting against their political will.

We understand that they’re doing a job. Also that thousands of Muslims (but why should I single them out, when Christianity has more blood on its hands?) fought for their country (Britain), and that together with our allies, Britain liberated a European neighbour from a fascist dictatorship in 1945. History repeats, and so do I.

Our problems – and they’re all of ours – are with the politicians who use those humans for political, religious and financial gain, often with a personal invested interest. It’s the same political system which repeats lies until we believe them to be the truth, blinkering us with protectionist propaganda about invisible outside threats.

And that’s what we should all have a problem with: Being pawns in a global game of chess. Or poker. Game theory holds – right up to the universal scale – that success favours the long-termists, those who can think ahead and see a bigger picture.

The time for a people’s vote has arrived, when our politicians have messed up and screwed us. If they’re too arrogant to listen to the estimated 700,000 who turned out on Saturday in London, and the millions who were there in spirit, then the next demonstration could be bigger. It might be a people’s revolt, the revolution we so badly need in our political system for the survival of our species.

If the people did rise up, the ruling fascists would most likely impose martial law. We could end up face-to-face with all those soldiers ordered into conflict by their government. Maybe we’d all sit down for a cup of tea in London, the public and the armed forces, questioning the common foe of a dictator. It might make for some ‘up-lit’ sci-fi at least: an uplifting near-future imagining.

I put a label on Saturday’s march and the conversation surrounding it: I called it ‘Anarchracy’ (and it was entirely peaceful), because a bit of anarchy can change definitions.

A horrid little newspaper

POLITICS | MEDIA

In another part of my life I’m a B3tan: a member of an online community of “Guardian-reading media types”, introvert activists who disrupt social order satirically, mess around with images in Photoshop, and make things. A fellow B3tan ‘spellingmistakescostlives‘ (AKA Darren Cullen) is making a satirical scale-model Daily Mail, which he originally distributed in Liverpool as part of a residency with RRU News.

A miniature, boiled-down version of the full paper, it’s like the Daily Mail, but distilled to its angry, horny core.

At time of writing, the project had raised over twice its original goal on Kickstarter.

THE PAPER

This compressed, hand-drawn paper draws attention to the glaring hypocrisies baked into a rag that claims to care about things like moral decency and the sexualisation of children, while also regularly publishing photographs of underage girls in bikinis or low-cut dresses. A paper who’s bread and butter is collecting the kind of ‘wardrobe malfunction’ upskirt and nip-slip photographs of strangers that would land anyone else in jail.

The Daily Mail is the pervert the Daily Mail warned us about.

DIANA PULL OUT

This 24 page version of the regular paper inevitably comes with a Princess Diana pull-out, ‘DIANA: THE ENEMY WITHIN’ which details the paper’s historic opposition to any of the issues Diana came to be lauded for. From her work against landmine arms sales to humanising the victims of HIV/AIDs, her relationship with a Muslim migrant to her meeting with the “terrorist” Nelson Mandela; the Mail had terrible things to say about all of it at the time, but now Diana is dead, the paper can safely exploit her memory for cash without having to deal her inconveniently liberal politics.

Containing all the misogynistic, racist, war-and-fear-mongering you’ve come to love and expect from the Daily Mail, this Kickstarter campaign is to raise funds to reprint this miniature fun/hate-sized paper so people outside of Liverpool can get their own copy.

Pledge and reserve your copy here.

All artwork (except masthead) © Darren Cullen.

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.

A shaved Bungle from Rainbow

THE WRITER’S LIFE

If I were asked to describe Donald Trump in metaphors, I’d probably go with a cross between a head injury and a plastic sack wrapped around a lamp post in the wind. But I wasn’t asked.

Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris are the writers behind Charlie Brooker’s Wipe, but sadly Wipe 2017 was cancelled as Brooker was too busy making more episodes of Black Mirror. They’ve shared some notes they made which came from a brainstorm, “Describe Donald Trump,” and put them on a charity T-shirt, with all profits going to The Refugee Community Kitchen, a charity providing meals to displaced people both in the UK and abroad. The insults on the shirt are splendidly juvenile, and it’s all in a good cause.

My shirt arrived today, and the full text on the front (see below) reads as follows:

A man who looks like he’s constantly shitting. The face from a leaflet about blood pressure. Pig off of Pipkins. Father Jack. A guinea pig in a Toby Jug. Your first girlfriend’s horrible dad. The evil Beach Boy. Someone trick or treating as Paddy Ashdown. A kitten balanced on a Chelsea bun. A fist full of straw. A live-action reboot of President Business from the Lego Movie. A talking haystack. A totem pole made of fish paste. A cross between Silvio Berlusconi and Boss Hogg. A walking wig named after a fart. Worzel Gummidge after a spa weekend. A man who’s sprayed the top of his head with so much thickener, it’s got into his brain. The evil Bruce Forsyth. The Cheshire Cunt. Less a politician than a bag of hair through which stupid ideas could pass. Fascist Bagpuss. Primitive He-Man doll made by a feral child out of straw and turnips. Ageing He-Man cosplayer dressed for court appearance. A fist with hair. A home-made Alec Baldwin. A baboon’s arse poking out from under a fucked doormat. An American businessman from a Two Ronnies Dallas sketch. Hitler Simpson. Donnie Dorko. The sheriff from Live and Let Die. The crude bigoted mayor from a simplistic children’s film about racial tolerance. A shaved Bungle. A billionaire bigot who looks a bit sweaty because he’s trying to smuggle the prototype of a giant Shredded Wheat out of the factory by hiding it above his forehead. A Vic Reeves drawing of Jimmy Savile. Your dad, drunk on Boxing Day, but with a Tribble on his head. An orange supremacist. The words ‘HOW HARD CAN IT BE’ in a suit. The American Boris Johnson, but like their milkshakes, the American version is much, much thicker – and even worse for you. A man who looks like a clingfilm bag of tinned frankfurters that’s been kicked through a cobweb. A character that, had it been invented by Roald Dahl, wouldn’t have made it to the end of a factory visit. A lame 80s fish-out-of-water movie president. The furious orange. Mickey Blowoff. Gropey Doo. Buzz Shiteyear. Head like a cartoon cat squashed into a mailbox. His smashed handbag of a face. The sort of face David Cameron might stick his dick in for a bet. The kind of face that if it appeared outside your window might, ironically, make you consider building a wall to keep it out. If he kissed a baby, it’d probably just be a first step in a long game of going to bed with it in eighteen years. A soulless rich white male who claims to represent ordinary, hard-working people – in much the same way I could be said to represent the Brazilian grimecore community or the nineteen-headed creatures of the planet Blitheroid or the international carpet-eating association. It was surprising to find out that he was a juvenile, entitled, chauvinist locker room dick, because he looks more like a horse rapist. Farage compared him to a Silverback gorilla, probably meaning that once in captivity in the White House, he’d sulk in a corner, masturbating and going insane.

Support Refugee Community Kitchen and wear an offensive stream of consciousness upon your person.

A White House invitation to Britain’s Got Talent*

WORLD NEWS | POLITICS

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to update this. So now that our shameless Prime Minister and her morally corrupt government have invited her puppet master to the UK, it was time to dust it off. With the visit planned for Friday 7/13, as it will come to be known, what could possibly go wrong? This just in…

SuBo previously caused controversy at T in The Park

SUSAN BOYLE ASKED TO WELCOME US PRESIDENT TO BRITAIN

Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle has confirmed that she’s been approached by the US president to perform a welcoming ceremony for his “most excellent” forthcoming UK visit, it is alleged.

The hairy cornflake said she was initially asked to sing I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables – the song which catapulted her to fame on Britain’s Got Talent – but she declined, referring to Emanuel Macron’s recent visit to Washington: “He watches one Russell Crowe film with the French president, and he thinks he knows history and politics?”

When pressed on the song she’d perform instead, she replied: “I’ve never done politics, so I asked wee Nicola Sturgeon what she thought. I told her I’d been approached, that it was for Donald, Theresa, and their special relationship, then she just came out with the song.”

Asked to confirm the planned welcoming anthem, Boyle confirmed, “Och, aye. It’s So what! by The Anti-Nowhere League. See, wee Nicky even knew the lyrics: ‘I’ve been to Hastings, I’ve been to Brighton, I’ve been to Eastbourne too…’ and so on. Well Donald’s been everywhere, before he was in politics, but now he’s coming to the UK. I doubt the prime minister will show him how Tory cuts have destroyed our seaside towns, but at least he’ll know what he’s buying. I’m glad I asked the wee lass.”

Asked how she came to be approached to perform for the president, Boyle said, “I think he got me mixed up with someone else. Elaine Paige maybe? But feck it, I’ve got a new album coming out and this is a good excuse to plug it. I’m not proud.”

Asked to explain her choice of song, Boyle said: “I started telling his people about The Anti-Nowhere League, and how they’re Christian revolutionaries, which is a complete lie, so I thought Donald would appreciate it. I went on to explain how So What! is an anthem. You know? Donald’s done all this stuff but, so what! He’s president! They didn’t even want to hear the lyrics, they were so convinced this would be the perfect, rousing song. Sold on a pack of lies, a bit like Brexit, and Trump himself.”

Boyle has a new record out in the Spring. ‘Bairns of the Revolution’ is an album of covers and tributes to her favourite recording artists. Other tracks include The Angelic Upstarts’ Last Night Another Soldier, David Bowie’s Saviour Machine, and The Sex Pistols’ Who Killed Bambi? Of the latter, Boyle said, “I thought that was a nice one for Donald’s sons. Maybe him and Theresa May could run through National Trust properties, shooting peasants while the Prime Minister sells off the country.”

So What! Lyrics at Genius.com

*None of this is true.

The planets orbiting my mind

THE WRITER’S LIFE

In the beginning there was the Big Bang, when subatomic particles split in two, and each retains a quantum link to its counterparts spread all around the universe. Each and every thing in the cosmos is linked to every other. It’s a matrix the mere concept of which blows the mind somewhat, but when you can dream lucidly, you’re connected to that network and have the freedom of the universe. It’s pure science, and it’s the stuff which can trouble an enquiring and expanding mind.

The human brain contains a multi-dimensional universe within, according to latest research (Core Spirit)

I don’t think the world has been at a more pivotal point than the one we find ourselves in now. Not far from now are two very different worlds, not unlike our own. They’re worlds I see more clearly after my recent depressive episode, which culminated in a mini breakdown at the weekend. Thankfully my adopted kid sister caught my fall.

In one world, a third global conflict wiped out half the human and animal population, and those who are left face a slow death from radiation poisoning. Future historians may conclude that it was a war founded on lies, like Brexit and the election of President Trump before, which had sewn the seeds of war.

The Russians hacked our democracy and influenced world politics, creating new alliances and divisions which were more suited to the longer-term Kremlin game. It made them the obvious place to point fingers of suspicion, and the ideal stooge to the UK plan.

The Salisbury poisonings were carried out by agents known to the UK security forces, but it was easy to blame Russia. The UK Prime Minister needed a distraction from the mess of Brexit, perhaps hoping that our EU partners would suggest simply reversing the UK’s withdrawal, given the importance of alliances in a world of geopolitical turbulence. Plan B was to hasten partnerships with the USA in a post-Brexit world. The alleged Russian chemical attack in Syria was a gift.

Theresa May’s spouse is a shareholder in BAE, and stands to gain financially from any British involvement in future conflicts. The decision to bomb the alleged chemical weapons facilities in Syria was made unilaterally by the Cabinet, “In the public interest”. Many thought that was why we have a Parliament and a democratic process of electing our representatives. But apparently that’s not the case and the Tories know better: The governing party which refuses to accept unaccompanied child refugees from the war zone, some of whom may have been orphaned by UK military action.

Now I predict further cyber meddling (imagine if internet access were held to ransom), and I wouldn’t rule out a chemical attack on home soil, blamed on Russia, but again, perhaps a smokescreen and a means to a government’s ends (“Conspiracy theorist” is a derogatory term applied to those who think differently).

Whether or not the situation in Syria escalates, Theresa May has what she needs for now: the “Special relationship” with the USA, paving the way for peacetime trade deals, relaxing of regulations, lowering taxes and wages. If Brexit does still go the distance, the UK will be little more than the 52^nd US state.

When it comes to the US nuclear option, the commander-in-chief’s state of mind is the unilateral decision-maker, and here’s a contender for the world’s scariest fact: The US nuclear launch protocol lacks any safeguard of allowing another US official to countermand a presidential order.

That potential world not far from now, came about because humans became so inward-looking and insecure. It came from nations putting themselves first and looking backwards. From insecurity comes mistrust and conflict, and we have the weapons to enforce and defend our agenda.

In that world, we gave up. We opened our eyes and looked around us, at all we’d done: Invented AI and machines which could turn against us; polluted every part of the planet and all who live on it with micro-plastics; and developed weapons of mass destruction as deterrents, but which were dangerous in the wrong hands. If we’d invested in exploration instead, the power we harnessed in our bombs could have taken us to the stars, and to colonise other planets, lessening the burden on Earth. But that would have required co-operation and trust, which humanity lacks. We were stuck and it became an entire species’ suicide, and the genocide of all those we share the planet with.

And that’s where I was at, with my personal life. The world around me seemed to be ending, and although I got over the idea of ridding the planet of me, I was on the verge of giving up. I stopped writing and I withdrew, but trapped in my head, with so much going on inside and out, is not a nice place to be alone.

I felt like walking out on life, slamming the door, and muttering those last words: “Fuck you…”. Then I remembered I live alone and would have locked myself out.

There’s another world out there, where we realise there might just be hope and that we may not be too late to save ourselves and the planet. It’s a world where we create self-replicating nano machines to clear the planet of plastic pollution (although scientists have accidentally discovered an enzyme which feeds on plastic), and with our increased awareness of those whose planet we share, we might at least co-operate in a moral duty to clear up our mess. Then perhaps we can continue these alliances and use technology to start leaving the planet and exploring beyond ourselves.

I’ve decided to live in that latter world, where I can imagine hope as well as despair, write utopian as well as dystopian stories, and keep myself busy expelling all the thoughts in my head. It was contact with another human – my kid sister catching my fall – which changed my mind.

I highly recommend breaking the leash and biting into Steve Laker’s Delirium. He keeps producing deeply aware material and philosophical gems. People are often chained dogs sniffing stale ground, but in sobering moments during our bondage state, we can be masters of our own freewill and observers of life.

It takes creative voodoo to sit me down and give me a novel to read. It takes even more dark magic to get me excited about a fictional piece of work. I only respond to mental stimulation that puts me in a story. I want to feel the turmoil and go on the author’s journey; to taste the outcome.

There was something profoundly honest and unhinged in Steve Laker’s blog that pinned my eyes to the screen. The intrigue began in that moment. It’s so rare to find an author who is willing to write in a style that’s so vulnerable in order to give the gift of storytelling to his or her readers. If you like your mind massaged, start reading Steve Laker’s books and short stories. If you like your mind fucked, make sure you keep reading them all the way to the last word.

Goran Zivanovic, author of Acupuncture of the Mind.

When I get reviews like that, it’s worth writing on. One person from each of my real and virtual lives, were what re-connected the matrix of my mind.