OUT OF ESSEX – CHAPTER 45

 

The revolution will not be televised

Gil Scott-Heron

 

 

God drained her shot glass, still haunted by the wrecked, homeless Londoner. Elijah and Enoch had looked rough around the edges, but nothing compared to Arthur.

Sitting opposite, Satan felt equally grim. He had just ‘grilled’ an incomer from Europe’s largest crime syndicate. The confession sickened him. ‘Hunting parties’ organised for Europe’s elites. Kidnapped children pursued and killed for pleasure in private woodland.

God drizzled more water on the sauna rocks. On Earth, astrologers said the intensity in the heavenly patterns was unparalleled for some 12,500 years, indicating a simple choice. An evolutionary human leap, or utter destruction.

As the steam rose, God’s mind drifted to a recent UN report, indicating that the world’s refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people had exceeded 50 million for the first time since World War II.

Still viewing from the wings, Maggie wondered if karma itself was being tested.

 

***

 

From the end of May 2014, investment managers observed tiny wobbles on their charts. None could decipher the minute quivers. Three days after Arthur’s mid-April visit to The Place, one of the top hedge fund performers, Pete Grice, had walked away from his partnership, without notice.

His peers assumed he had foreseen a major market calamity. Pete was known in finance circles for summarising investment strategies. Pete was your man, if you wanted the pros and cons of merger-arbitrage offerings, or deep value and special situation investments.

Pete could hardly believe his actions, nor could his peers fathom his explanation. “If it’s not good for everyone, it’s no good at all!” he would say, quoting Ubuntu philosophy.

His wife, Susan, quit her bank PR job just one day after bumping into the benevolent ninja squad in Canary Wharf. The night before her resignation, Susan and her friend Celinda got off their trollies. Four bottles of delicious Jean-Luc Colombo Cornas Terres Brûlées 2008 were downed at a Limehouse restaurant before she fell happily into a taxi.

The driver reckoned he had earlier squeezed “four weirdos”, including a giant, into his vehicle. “Took ‘em up to Tottenham. The big bastard shook my hand, gave me a right bleedin’ tingle!”

The tiniest trickle of similar resignations caught Maggie’s eye. The micro-trend included Southend’s police force.  During the first three days after he had stopped and questioned Yesh, Sid, Mahatma and Dawn, the unassuming PC Ray Wilkins felt unaccountably drawn to tell colleagues they should downplay the battle against criminals. The real enemy, he said, was free markets. Then he walked. As did a group of forensic experts in London, who were deeply networked into police, intelligence and military circles.

A small handful of London taxi drivers began to tip their customers.

Susan and Pete Grice had – inadvertently – set a medicine ball rolling. Susan’s drinking companion, Celinda, worked at the London Stock Exchange for only five more days. Her great love was buying properties. She began to fill her houses with people who lacked shelter. By mid-June, she had created a website to match the dizzying numbers of British homeless with homeowners that no longer saw their second, third and fourth homes as quite so necessary. The site, ‘My Round, Your Ground’, emphasised that no fees or rent were involved.

Her husband, Dave, was a veteran metals broker. Dave’s hero was the US hedge fund veteran John Paulson, who achieved notoriety after making US$3.7 billion in 2007 by short-selling subprime mortgages. Within a week, Dave had left the game, and was bending friends’ ears that Paulson’s actions had indirectly assisted in putting thousands of families onto America’s streets. His best friends came to agree; and soon convinced other mates. So it went.

Was common decency taking over? Certainly not on the private Mediterranean island where George holidayed. He read, unmoved, of Greek parents that had sold or given away their children because they could not afford to feed them.

Back in the UK though, ripples joined ripples, forming small waves of change. Something entirely new was bedding in. Seeded through thoughts that occurred as people awoke each morning. What can I do today for others? How can I live more truthfully, more excellently? An erasure was taking place, a deletion of delusion, Jesus later told God.

Instead of regurgitating claptrap that banks had “privatised returns and socialised risks”, some financial analysts started to authentically describe the financial sector, with words like piracy, theft and criminality. Usually just before they quit.

In Forest Gate, a woman with her possessions in a trolley began a stunningly successful campaign. Fag jutting, Celia Marley managed to persuade the Diocese of Chelmsford, whose jurisdiction stretched into East London, that its churches and other properties should be used to house and feed struggling humans.

A rough mathematics was at work. A rule of thumb became clear, eventually, that if one awoke into the new mindfulness, it took anywhere between 2 hours and two weeks to reappraise one’s life. After this incubation, all physical or verbal contact with work colleagues, friends and family was viral, triggering further reappraisals.

Whether people talked about the weather, the price of fish, or the logical impossibility of philanthropic financiers, Yesh consciousness flowed. Each recipient became too preoccupied with the well-being of fellow humans to worry about their next pay packet. Things would work out.

 

***

Was there a tipping point, where momentum became unstoppable? Scientists had found that when 10% of a population holds an unshakable belief, this can often become the majority view.

The movement for change piggy-backed and naturally accelerated on truths emerging from Jimmy Savile’s industrial-scale abuse of British children. Among these, the fortunes Savile received for procuring minors for paedophile rings, able to operate through the political and business establishment, the public services and the police. Witnesses claiming they were warned off by Special Branch officers and out-of-control security services were almost too numerous to count

The grim reality was described in early July 2014 by former health minister Lord Warner. Powerful people had targeted childrens’ homes to serve as a “supply line” for paedophiles, he said. Now files and dossiers naming Establishment figures were somehow ‘missing’. The animals were cornered, desperate.

The social contract had long been broken.  To harm an innocent child in any way was inexcusable. To seek to cover up child rape, torture and, in some cases, murder, was beyond comprehension. Yet child murderers, abusers and torturers were walking around in Parliament.

With no fuss or violence, a widening group of British citizens began to withdraw consent to be governed, as various chairs for an enquiry were discussed. They looked their inept politicians up and down, shrugged, and said: “You have no power over us anymore.”

Like training wheels quietly coming off a bike, this was the first breach of the control system. Bearing no name, no label that could be vilified.

Maggie watched in a daze, as knowledge of paedophilia within her cabinet became widespread. Her heart ached harder as her eyes opened. People began to look again at former PM Ted Heath, his love of yachting, and the many children that ‘disappeared’ from the Haut de la Garenne boys home in the Channel Islands. Journalists found new evidence indicating that the unexplained death in 1999 of journalist Jill Dando was directly linked to knowledge of Savile’s crimes.

UK citizens realised in ever more powerful numbers that little in their history had happened by accident. The role of the so-called ‘intelligence services’ in the death of David Kelly – a British weapons inspector who refused to justify the invasion of Iraq – was just a start. People looked back askance as new details emerged on secret service chicaneries behind the Dunblane massacre; and MI6’s collaboration with CIA and Mossad gangsters in establishing a secret prison in Diego Garcia for rendition and torture.

While rear views were important, living in the moment was critical. Pete Grice found several mind-blowing meditations, found himself feeling part of something far bigger than himself. “You have to transcend this world to escape its judgements,” smiled an onlooking Buddha.

Imperceptibly, time itself began to change. Susan Grice invested some of hers in looking after three vulnerable citizens in Hampstead. Pete gave his Rolexes away. Then his paintings. Turned five of his six British properties into communal centres for the homeless. “The number of things any sane person needs is small,” he told his wife. “We need to sleep and relax more; and quit buying stuff.”

Gandhi observed with fascination. He surmised that “the gaps in between the old rewards and goals have expanded”. The little Indian saw a clearly turning tide as a steadily expanding stream of valets, butlers, maids, cooks, footmen and the whole shebang of once-loyal domestic servants jumped ship. Bankers faced the ghastly prospect of cleaning their own houses. Lords, viscounts and baronesses had to shop and cook for themselves; learn to use their lawn mowers and make their beds. Royals had to walk their dogs themselves, as the next breach of the control system bedded down.

God was overjoyed. “The crapocracy cannot counter this, because it cannot understand it,” she bellowed, calculating that nearly one million Brits had noiselessly re-claimed their sovereignty by midsumer 2014. “No riots, no law-breaking, no excuse for London mayor Boris Johnson to wheel out his silly water cannons,” grinned Satan. “People are living from the heart,” Jesus reassured his mum, who was beginning to believe in the future.

The sublime nature of the new transmitted itself through a reproduction number (R) that bubbled under official radar.

Not all Britons were infected: millions continued to read newspapers as if they told the truth. But for others, enlightenment compelled them to stay in posts that served their communities. Utility workers recognised the need to maintain water, sewage and energy services: but working less hours, and teaching their skill-sets to local volunteers that lacked employment, so that workloads were shared. Farmers and those who processed food had never felt so useful; hospitals, supermarkets, postal and refuse collection services cheerfully carried on working. Firemen continued to save lives. These and other sectors transformed themselves into the hubs of an economy that honoured life, while delivering essentials.

Carers were fully valued, whereas employment figures fell steadily in the sales and insurance sectors. Guards walked from G4S and SERCO detention centres. Resignations at their MI5 and MI6 offices astounded the clans, whose waking thoughts remained dominated by ideas of control, performance and profit.

A rising desperation at their fading empires was often visible among the most degenerate. In late June, Pope Francis showed his hand when he described as “dangerous” the temptation to believe that one can have “a personal, direct, immediate relationship with Jesus Christ without communion with and the mediation of the church.”

God bent over double with laughter. “Too late boy”, she roared. “People are shredding the notion of leaders.”

Iceland continued to jail financiers, while lower banking orders scampered from poorly paid servitude.

 

***

Steve Landais ran into a puzzle one afternoon. Standing alone, sober, at the counters of his local bank branch, to pay in Dawn’s coins, he noted two security mirrors. The nearest showed the empty customer hall. Looking across the room to a second mirror, he saw a queue of seven or eight people.

 

***

By the time that remaining staff at Britain’s Serious Fraud Office opened a mid-July probe into widespread banking collusions in foreign exchange markets, money’s days appeared to be numbered. Many now believed that it had been maliciously introduced as a tool of enslavement and division, rather than through trade and barter, as Disney historians contended. As if two worlds were superimposed upon one another. This belief, above all else, was humanity’s key ticket out of the matrix.

Social observers compared the rapidly changing perceptions of money to the ‘morphic resonance’ displayed in the 1950s by the UK’s blue tit population. About a million birds had learned how to peck through aluminium seals on milk bottles, via a discovered knowledge that passed rapidly through the whole species. Now, money still circulating continued to be used as units of exchange. But barter burgeoned.

Some sages, several with large spliffs, said that time itself might be warping. That if capitalism faded, so would its in-built idea of how time works. That lunar cycles and sunrises might become new chronological punctuation marks.

Reality kept mutating. Electricity sector workers dreamed up a structure where gas, water and food, in addition to a weekly cash consideration, comprised their remuneration. Other industries followed; drew closer to each other; founded ever-wider bartering pools that allowed the cash component to shrink further, and usage of local goods and services to increase.

The finance world suffered further whittlings. Loans were shunned as people saw through the sleight of hand; saw they had been in abusive relationships with not just banks, but governments and corporations.

In casting off their slumbers, many Brits walked joyfully away from their ‘debts’, including credit card outstandings estimated to average £4,500. Others showed their friends and family how to repay ‘debts’ to banks by drawing up their own promissory notes. Students disowned ‘debts’ which represented years of power and control for the providers. Hordes of mortgage payers ceased further amortisations.

Jesus sensed when the control system’s third breach kicked in. He hailed a tacit agreement by nearly one third of the UK population to cease using electronic money as the death knell for banks. “Get in there!” he shouted. “We have just witnessed the end of psychological winter for planet Earth,” he told a meeting of the Firm.

Not all were swayed. Facing shrinking staffing levels, many senior hedge fund managers pronounced that sterling’s crash was long overdue, making the UK a potentially dangerous base. Few mourned their departure to offshore centres dotted around Europe, where they would scavenge and ‘scalp’ for profits.

Luckily for the clans, people in the emerging world resisted the notion of vengeance. “Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched,” said George Bush Senior, in a December 1992 interview. 22 years later, forgiveness helped save the planet.

Education survived: teachers had good hearts. But emerging curricula became more humane, jettisoning the aim of preparing children for an obedient 9 to 5 existence that generally enriched somebody else. This dovetailed neatly with a decline in the left brain-driven administration, archiving, book- and record-keeping that had propped up global institutions. Accountancy became clearly perceived for the drudgery it had always been.

While there was no discarding of reading, writing and simple mathematics, spiritual self-sufficiency was actively encouraged. One of the first things that revitalised British teachers came to teach their youngest pupils was Ian Dury’s wisdom from 1977:

What a jolly bad show,

If all you ever do is business you don’t like

 

Inevitably, Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy flourished. Right-brain openness began to balance the planning mind. This facilitated children’s natural interests in music, art and nature. Meditation and tai chi were taught alongside sport and self-defence. Practical skills – plumbing, building, gardening, cooking and woodwork – were pursued by many teenagers, to complement IT and computer skills that still underpinned society.

By their mid-teens, kids would naturally engage in classroom debate over drugs, sex and the nature of death, as an interest in ideas resurrected itself. One question took a far greater precedence: How can I best express myself in this life?

As timeworn notions of examination and grading faded, ideas of hierarchy become risible in the new world. No head teachers were required, no managing directors or chief executives needed in the flat organisations that emerged. “All were created to be neither a slave nor a master,” said Jesus, punching the air in celebration. Social divisions based on privilege, class and wealth were crumbling. It had always pissed off Micky Gaze that Eton schoolboys could get to run Britain without ever growing up.

National media withered on the vine. Local news assumed its natural precedence as the general nature of television channels and daily newspapers was identified: a diet of fear-porn and social programming, dreamed up and sponsored by the wealthy thugs behind the old world’s problems. The awakening to the BBC’s role in facilitating Savile’s misdemeanours and its censoring and twisting of endless news items meant it was soon an ex-service. Yet some Britons continued to read The Sun newspaper, whose headlines had included sublime gems of insight such as ‘Werewolf seized in Southend’ and ‘There are no virgins in Essex’.

In that august county, Dan was assembling his imaginative novel, which began with Maggie’s death. He would often be caught singing the 1966 hit, Paperback Writer. But his priority was helping Southchurch Park find its communal feet again. The park’s farming effort re-intensified.

Oceans could not contain Yesh consciousness, which some later described as a reverse zombie apocalypse. In the US, the flimsy mistruths about 9/11 were among the historical distortions that received the harshest scrutiny, including JFK’s death and the darkness surrounding the Federal Reserve.

Kennedy had spoken candidly to the American public of “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy”. Osama Bin Laden, who had freely owned up to terrorist acts in Yemen, had said a “government within a government within the United States” was responsible for 9/11. Without any need for a civil rights movement, the Fed, the CIA, and TSA disappeared, among other odious old world institutions. With them went the artifice of domestic ‘terrorism’, hatched primarily to ensure the population traded its freedoms for ‘security’.

Satan was chuffed, almost to tears. “Scumbaggery seem to be coming to a welcome end”, he noted. Others hazarded that a Gnostic sensibility was returning.

Investigations burrowed into US history, shining light upon a murky 1871 Act that turned the US into a corporation obliged to repay bankers its sizeable revolutionary war debt. It became more widely known that in 1933, when Franklin D Roosevelt talked of his ‘New Deal’, the US quietly entered bankruptcy. And that the IRS held a Puerto Rico base, from where money was transferred to the Philippines, and then onwards to who knows where.

In Canada, citizens made public statistics and letters proving that over 50,000 First Nation children were deliberately wiped out by church and state from 1900-1996 to get rid of the “Indian problem”.

Structures that had bound humanity tightly loosened. Eastern Europe, Germany and Italy shrank their dependence upon Russian natural gas, finding local, renewable energy solutions. Regional and local sourcing of all needs became almost standard, rendering most long-distance shipping unnecessary.

Globally, ‘flocks’ drifted away from sheepish proclivities in churches, mosques and synagogues, many switching to yoga and meditation. God, Jesus, Buddha, even Satan, heard far fewer chants praising their names, as new generations of so-called ‘indigo children’ helped their parents plug into more unorganised, older ways of thinking. Sid noted that two new chakras were emerging in humans. An emerald coloured heart chakra, able to directly receive and give love. Beneath their feet, a brown earth chakra, providing a grounding as human bodies were radiating at higher frequencies.

In parts of Japan, the press gag on Fukushima disappeared, allowing a more national discussion of the huge radiation problem. A plan was drawn up to entomb the plant in hundreds of yards of concrete, using robots. This would stop contaminated water pouring into the Pacific. Buddha focused his efforts on cleansing that ocean. Healers from around the world inaugurated Japanese clinics complementing traditional cancer treatments.

New governments in Israel and Palestine ceased hostilities, eventually, as war’s futility stood stark. Some French politicians, in their last days of power, admitted collusion with British secret services in the murder of Diana Spencer. In Australia, it emerged that various corporations, masquerading as a Canberra-based government, were registered in Washington DC. In Holland, the control of police and politicians by the “Octopus” crime syndicate came to light.

Soon, a  number of armed forces disbanded willingly, in the absence of threats. Army engineers were at the heart of massive informal programmes to teach homeless and jobless humans to renovate homes or build their own properties. To express the creativity surging through him, former soldier Alex trained to be a tattooist. Bus driver Jess taught an astral sex course.

George took refuge in Switzerland, always more impervious to change than elsewhere. The country’s links to the Vatican were always clear in the square flags. In the Swiss Guard, the noble ‘Defenders of the Church’s Freedom’. In truth, neither George nor other clan members that had bloated themselves on armaments, banking, narcotics and privatisation understood the birthing new world, lacking the corruptions of taxation and other centralised nonsenses. Without servants, without victims, power waning, the crime families struggled to function as before.

 

***

Towards the end of the decade, Butler-Sloss day entered a new UK public holiday calendar. Named after one of the judges deemed unsuitable to chair Britain’s child abuse investigations, it reminded countless Britons of when they began to reclaim individual sovereign power. It became an occasion for people to dress in suits, ridiculing the daft uniforms of yesteryear.

The dogma and deceit of party politics seemed from another time. God and Satan would howl with mirth as they watched MPs and Lords with the most resistant DNA turn up hopefully in Britain’s Parliament, only to find their underlings vanished. No canteen, no bar, no clean toilets, no researchers, no security, no cameras, no gophers.

An alternative national body had pieced itself together in the borough of Hinckley and Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where Ordnance Survey had calculated the exact centre of England. A field at Lindley Hall Farm, in Fenny Drayton. Although the land continued to be used for crops, around 100 individuals met for the first time in March 2015. They represented each of the new administrative areas (‘hundreds’) formed to override old boundaries of influence. They gathered around a monument made from a railway sleeper.

The selection process was based on ability to tell the truth. Only just 18, Genevieve Landais was chosen unanimously for the south-east Essex hundred. This assembled at Southchurch Park, on just a handful of necessary occasions. Genevieve told it like it was, from her heart, reminding some of Dennis Skinner.

Based on her inability to dissemble, she won a ballot to be England’s national leader. Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi smiled again at her conception, ‘beyond time’, in the waft of primeval ooze. An Essex triumph.

The new national body was little more than token. Very local and utterly flat forms of government – based on recurrent referenda – became an entrenched model across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Significantly, the Midlands monument was located a few miles from where the 1485 Battle of Bosworth marked the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.

The British monarchy – whose real Saxe-Gotha-Coburg surname became common knowledge – tucked itself away on a quiet estate, and yielded others to the public good. An older Royal Family member spent his days in a converted golf buggy, on which a machine gun was mounted. Contentedly, he would rifle trees and undergrowth with round after round, ejaculating with joy whenever a rabbit or stray deer was blown to pieces.

The demise of monarchic power and influence in the new world was accompanied by the complete jettisoning of the biased, twisted legal system that had evolved over thousands of years alongside money systems and supposedly “royal” bloodlines that stretched back to early Sumerian days.

Inextricably linked to the moneyed political class, the profession had enriched itself even as its practitioners shamelessly watched the introductions of internment without trial, secret trials, injunctions against the free press and the steady extermination of free legal aid.

The perceived role of the very apex of the British legal profession in expediting child abuse cover ups was a last straw for many, who saw these echelons as complicit in the highly ritualistic rape and murder of children.

There was no need for legal reform: few were the quarrels unable to be settled amicably. If anything, people were inclined to find too generously in favour of the other.

Genevieve summed it up succinctly: “No need to win – no need for lawyers.”

The odd dispute or two went to a grouping of neighbours or peer businesses, sparking up keen Socratic-style dialogues, and a relatively quick and fair outcome. Notions of property rights disappeared, swiftly followed by estate agents and landlords. As the rule of imposed law ceased to apply, anarchy – the realm of Natural Law and freedom – spread its inherent fairness.

The police force disbanded itself. A much smaller group of “helpers”, as they became known, attended various events to direct crowds, and help in local emergencies. Violence and theft were soon looked back upon as an abhorrence, a mental illness.

Across the south-east Essex hundred, the former focus on eradicating crime was replaced with a new target: eliminating all plastic.

 

***

The last milestone breach of the control system came on Exxon Day, as it was later tagged. Howard had returned to Wales to heal his collarbone. Living with his aunt in Newport, he began to work shifts in an Esso petrol station on the Chepstow Road in spring 2015.

At first hand, he witnessed the chaos of the barter system. An initial preference for cash in the till had dwindled as the accounting side of all businesses lost importance. The forecourt and inside of the garage shop was heaped with a litany of petrol payments. Food, electrical and gardening equipment, clothing, bikes, beds and koi carp were among the items exchanged for fuel. A horse was tethered by the pumps.

Howard would recite the story every year back at Southchurch Park, during his habitual return visit on Butler-Sloss day.

“Was it a stroke of bloody genius? Buggered if I know, boyo. It were a stifling May morning, there were a bloody great queue, and I needed a crap. A lorry driver reckoned he was paying with umpteen tins of catfood, his U2 CDs, and a bunch of cheap sandals he’d got for mending his neighbour’s vibrator.”

“So what did you say Howard?” roared the circle of old friends, in unison. “What did you say?”

They sat happily in Little Venice, around the statues erected in memory of Dave Dawson, Satan and Gandhi.

“Dunno if I should tell you,” he grinned. Looking through the open café door, he saw the British banknotes of yore plastered across the walls. The building was listed now. They launched into the chant.

 

“Now tell, o tell – the words that changed the world!”

“Please tell, do tell, how joy and light unfurled.”

 

Claire and Alex looked on, flanking their first child, the rainbow-haired Daphne. Arthur’s eyes were welling up. He had not envisaged finding a home again, let alone being useful. Having learned the community’s history, he gave guided tours for visitors. For those who lingered, he told of the evening he was taken to Heaven for a sleepover.

Ed Fawkes led the ritualistic call and response.

 

Was it karma, was it luck?

What said you to man with truck?”

 

Mary loved this nonsense. Dan captured it faithfully on camera, remembering with goose pimples his fear as the tsunami waters climbed the Leigh hillside. Howard called back:

 

“I made it clear, I made it plain,

That things in me were under strain.”

 

Ed pulled himself up to his full six foot three, trying not to laugh. Alex had tattooed WTC7 on both Ed’s forearms. His book on 9/11 was hailed as the definitive study.

 

“Tell us now what you did say.

To make that truckman drive away.”

 

Howard narrowed his eyes, recalled the sweaty driver. Theatrically, he swung a pointed finger across the faces in the circle.

 

“Don’t pay for petrol from that pump.

Just take the fuel; I need a dump.”

 

He had told the rest of the queue to do the same, and to pass the message on. Morphic resonance did the rest. Within a week, a hefty chunk of Britain was kicking itself at how simple the society could have been all along.

Inevitably, other countries began to follow suit.

“It was all in place: every last service,” Arthur told tourists. His smile was infectious. “So why not provide everything for free? No money, no barter, no countertrade.”

Farmers continued to provide food to butchers, markets and factories. When the farmer needed new wellies, he or she took the right size from their nearest shop. When the tractor broke, a mechanic repaired it. The mechanic walked into the local supermarket, shop or market and took enough food to feed upon. Electricity, water, gas and telephone/Internet services flowed freely to homes and businesses, sent by workers who walked into local stores and took enough to feed, dress and recreate.

One provided one’s contribution to maintain the wider society, taking only what was necessary in return.

Premiership footballers and musicians played for free, in front of crowds which continued to admire and adore their skills, travelling to venues on free public transport. Actors, comedians and writers still plied their trades, hoping for encouraging feedback. Gambling vanished; the mafia disappeared; prostitution transformed itself within a much wider morphing of social interaction.

People still drank alcohol, in bars and clubs staffed by those who enjoyed the atmosphere. Youths naturally experimented by drinking more than the recommended amounts. Sex remained the great pleasure, but came to incorporate a greater spiritual component.

Howard’s peristaltic brainwave hammered the final nail into a society that had been hierarchical, egotistical, fearful and consumption-driven. The rot was replaced by an honourable and equitable ethos: a determination not to compete for resources, or to abrogate the rights of another. “You allright with that?” became the social watchword. Houses, the great economic prize of the neoliberal era, eventually became like fresh air. Available wherever one required.

Inevitably there were hiccups and insufficiencies. Of course. In response, people found ways to fill gaps and adapt. Yesh consciousness was the underpinning. It always asked: ‘What can I do for others today?’

 

***

Still waiting, Maggie watched Mike Burper on the screens. He was standing next to Satan as they witnessed Southend light up on Exxon Day 2020. Solar power had already been overtaken by Nikola Tesla’s so-called ‘zero-point’ energy technologies, one of which cleaned local water supplies through ionisation.

Southend’s ceremonial illumination marked it as one of many British towns and cities being remade in the image of Jacques Fresco’s Venus project. This had viewed war, poverty, hunger, debt, and unnecessary human suffering not only as avoidable, but as totally unacceptable. As with Tesla’s innovations, Fresco’s ideas found no traction until 2014 turned the world on its head.

“So Mike, here’s a question,” said Satan. They had just necked some delicious locally-brewed craft beer in the Railway Hotel, waiting for the May sunshine to die before making the short stroll to High Thames Street.

“How excellent is it to reside in an environment where work still exists, but the main aim of daily life is to improve personal knowledge, enjoy hobbies, or solve problems that improve everyone’s standard of living?”

Mike was off to see Spurs play West Ham the next day, at the Olympic Stadium, with his grandkids. His contentment was unassailable these days. “Do you happen to mean somewhere that would allow you to change naturally into a more spiritual being?” he replied. “Somewhere you could find real happiness by creating and maintaining non-aggressive relationships, and where most forms of mental illness had died natural deaths?”

In bed, Sheena loved to tease him about his growing view that the animal kingdom was equal in importance to humanity; and should be treated like brothers and sisters. He had read that morning, with some wonder, about shamanistic cultures. The onset of ultrafast mobile networks would allow him to listen to a shaman in Brazil, interactively, as he later walked home to Southchurch. This shaman taught that souls lived lives simultaneously, so that healing in one life healed other, concurrent incarnations.

Mike thought back to his lunch that day. “And I’m guessing you mean an environment where GMO crops are banned, and where is so much turmeric, garlic, ginger and other fresh herbs packed into cuisine that it has led to a monstrous decline in cancer?” he asked. “A way of living with a totally organic permaculture, including vertical farming in dedicated tall buildings, where sunlight is optimised, and crops can be grown all year round, without pesticides?”

They both looked up at the surrounding skyline, testament to the freedom and abundance produced by planting seeds. The soaring buildings had cemented the local connection between food production and consumption, providing tasks aplenty for construction workers.

A unifying spirit ran through everything. Millions of people went barefoot, including Sally, the Abbot at the Leigh Buddhist Centre. She had taught Mike to meditate and tune into space between thoughts. Sally told him that chanting would help his brain act as a synchronised whole, allowing him to couple with the underlying field of intelligence. “It wants the very best for you Mike,” she smiled.

She suggested he should train as a healer. His peripheral vision had broadened, his body was strong, and he lived permanently in the present. He savoured input from all his senses, while time had slowed so much that he felt like he was seeing the magic and wonder of life as a child, but without the negative emotions of his childhood.

As Mike had walked along the Thorpe Bay coastline that morning, the thought occurred: “I remember, this happened to me before.” He had the insight that people are always born where they need to be, based upon their soul journeys. And that these journeys eventually collapse polarities.

He turned to see Sal smiling. The Devil never let Mike forget that he was there only by the grace of Maggie. Satan’s green eyes danced with joy whenever he recalled more karma: the kick to Mike’s face, administered by the dark mercenary, on the very field where Burper once booted his soccer opponents.

However you viewed him, Satan was brilliantly stimulating company. But Mike wondered. Was his companion feeling empty, as the flow of incomers to his lowest dungeons had tailed off?

“You nailed it Sal. It is fantastically fucking good to be alive here. Remind me again of the alternative.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” said Satan. “A world where the modern Mafia were the same people who ran the Catholic Church and the Italian government. A world where the Western nations most heavily invested in the ‘war on terror’ were also the countries most heavily involved in global arms trading. A world where British intelligence paid al-Qaeda in 1996 to fund an assassination plot against Libya’s leader, who had brought his people a standard of living unknown elsewhere in Africa. A world where the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s first-ever democratic elections, and was then declared a terrorist organisation despite its tradition of non-violence. A world where Iraq was reduced from having a best-in-the-region educational system, and the finest free health care in the Middle East, to becoming a twilight death zone after the US-led invasion. A world where President Obama’s defence secretary, Charles Hagel, unwittingly argued a decade later that “you cannot go around the world and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation”. While his country helped tear apart Libya, Yemen and Syria.

Mike grimaced. “How did we live in that world?”

Sal frowned. “Strictly speaking you didn’t. You lived here in the UK, where it was forbidden by Parliament to even discuss the fact that the Queen kept her wealth a secret, and the Royal Family was exempt from Freedom of Information requests. A society where a few rich parasites lauded by society and media leeched from a mass of heavily indebted minimum wage worker-serfs. One where, if an ordinary man robbed a bank, he went to prison; but if a banker robbed an ordinary man, he got a bonus.” Mike smiled at that.

“A country where a family lost their home every 11 minutes; and whose government spied on its own citizens, forced terminally ill people to work and used public money to take the EU to court to save bankers’ bonuses, operating on behalf of a transnational elite that owed loyalty to no country. A society which contained nine of the top ten poorest regions in Northern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people could no longer afford to feed themselves.”

“A world of shite,” said Mike.

“A world where as long as there was money there was insufficiency. Totally insane”, said Sal.

The Bank of England had recently been demolished in front of cheering crowds and replaced with a playground, alongside a cemetery for ATOS and Bedroom Tax victims. Like Flanders memorials, it was a permanent reminder that none of this should never happen again. Even more than Southend, London had changed beyond recognition, as the financial buildings had given way to benevolence: myriad forms of greenery and creativity.

 

***

They strolled south to look out over Southend’s rebuilt pier. Mike couldn’t stop himself asking. “How do you stay busy these days?”

A flicker crossed Satan’s face. “It might spoil your day if I told you.”

Mike felt his stomach spin mildly, while Sal searched for the right words.

“There is a second world Mike.”

“What you talking about? You been drinking all day?”

“A world where 80% of humans still live on less than $10/day. Where the bottom third live on an average $1.25/day. Where 30,000 a day die of malnutrition and starvation.”

“Mate stop fucking around. That’s all done with.”

“A world where 17 investment companies that control $50 trillion of wealth are all invested in each other. Where corporations bigger than countries hang out at Davos. Where about 300 people control global policy-making. Where injections of miracle money from central banks are incessantly pounded down the cess-holes of bond and stock markets.”

“Where? That nightmare world has gone.”

“Parallel.”

“What, shit, like an old Earth?”

Satan nodded.

“No…How?”

“Lots of humans didn’t want to change. They clung to the familiar. They stayed put in space and time.”

“Fuck. Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.”

“Is it still mad?”

“Judge for yourself Mike. In Britain, emergency food parcel handouts are sky-rocketing. The wider world has freak weather events, from blazing forests in the Amazon and bushfires across Australia to Storm Dennis, which flooded much of the UK a few months ago. America has a president called Donald Trump, with orange hair and all the gross subtlety of a rhino. Britain’s leader is Boris Johnson.”

“Get the fuck out of it. That floppy-haired Eton cunt? He’s a trickster. A lord of misrule.”

“Debt levels are as insane as ever. Governments owe $58 trillion. Throw in company and personal debt, and you’re looking at well over $250 trillion globally. The average US citizen owes $50k in debt.”

“Shit. Will I be able to stay here, in this world?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. You helped create it with your thoughts and actions.”

“Fuck. Sal, I’m shocked. Sick to the core that people got left behind.”

“It was and is their choice. They refused to tap into their power. Desisted from critical thinking. If you thought things were bad six years ago, you would hate it now. The general public has developed Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Hang on, I’ve learned about that. Don’t hostages or victims of abuse bond with their abusers?”

“Most humans on planet Earth have fallen even harder for their captors.”

“What’s going on then?”

“I’ll stick to Britain, your backyard. In 2016, the population marginally voted to leave the European Union, probably based on being shafted, ignored, abused and generally ground into the shit by years of austerity. Having kidded themselves that they stuck it up the elite, they kept voting Tory. They are now unable to live their lives in any way without being told how and what to do.”

“Why? Is there a new event, or crisis?”

“The Firm is still looking. We can’t be sure.”

“Just tell me.”

“It’s still early days Mike. A virus named COVID-19 has spread across the old globe. It belongs to the common cold family. Sadly, it seems to kill the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. Lethality rate might be around 0.2%, maximum, for the infected. If you’ve got a functioning immune system, you’ll almost certainly fend it off.”

“Sounds like one of those nasty flu years, maybe a bit worse.”

“That’s exactly the right comparison. Until now, the world would address that by protecting the vulnerable, respectfully mourning the dead then going about its business. But not this time.”

“So what’s different?”

“Many countries are being locked down, with constitutional rights suspended, under medical martial law. Britain is especially weird. The government told everyone to stay home in late March, three days after Public Health England declassified Covid-19 as not being a High Consequence Infectious Disease due to the low mortality rate.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“People around much of the globe have been instructed to ‘social distance’. In the UK, by staying two metres apart. Kids are being brainwashed with ‘isolation boxes’ chalked out in pre-school playgrounds, yet government advisors are flouting the ban. In parts of France, you need permission papers to walk to the local store. Small and large businesses are collapsing everywhere in the West. A coming economic depression is inevitable. Looks like it will be blamed on this virus, rather than on the lockdown that really caused it.”

Sal explained that media narrative was as twisted as ever. “They churn out this looney idea – astoundingly illogical and unscientific – that only vaccination can save the world from something that is more or less harmless to the majority. And that deeper surveillance technology is necessary.”

The drinking sessions through the night in Southchurch had taught Mike that Sal would talk forever if you kept quiet. Across the Thames, he watched the play of the sinking sun, lighting up remnants of the old port and power station on the Isle of Grain. Part of the old world. Almost Dickensian now.

“It seems that I may be pulled out of retirement,” said Sal. “God is banging on about a ‘Health Mafia’, based in and around the World Health Organisation, which uses huge sums of money to sway governments and government influencers towards a vaccine solution.”

“Do you have any individuals lined up in your sights? For visits?”

Satan’s pupils were dilating. “Same policy as always Mike. Follow the money trail. To the financiers, the pharmaceutical companies, but above all to the nerd, the multi-billionaire who wants to vaccinate all of the old world.”

He paused. “But we might have it wrong. It really might be that he is an altruist. Or that COVID-19 is a true apocalypse, a final death knell for that old world, thrown out wisely by Mother Nature herself, sick of the unbalanced, ecologically unsound set of arrangements that are still unspooling at horrifying speed.”

“So you’re going back in? To find out for yourself?”

“You might say that the Devil makes work for idle hands. I may even discover that certain powers-that-be are using the virus as a cover to mask a new financial collapse.”

 

***

In the new world, Dawn Landais still washed screens at Kent Elms, but electric cars produced less grime. For a hobby, she became the drummer for Parklife.

She would sometimes recall her words to Genevieve when her daughter was still young. “Nothing’s worthwhile if you can’t be kind. But don’t be soft. When you know something, get the details clear, and never back down. Never.”

 

***

The simple touch of an ascended master had engendeded thought patterns able to reconfigure the genetic code, and bring spiritual maturity to human DNA. In its old setting, this was still being bombarded and assaulted by the ferocious increase in computer processing power, which had multiplied by an average 100-fold every 10 years; and 1 million-fold each 30 years.

It dawned on Maggie that this acceleration had allowed capitalism to become pernicious, before Yesh stepped in. The ability of people across the world to earn enough to live had itself become a “market inefficiency” that computers began to eradicate. Perhaps worse, information technology had also made it possible for people sitting thousands of miles away to execute other humans using screens and military drones.

Now with two worlds to keep an eye on, God often wondered if she had created or just thrown dice.

Maggie watched and waited, anxious for another spin on the karmic roundabout.

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.

Edgar Cayce

 

The horrible chaos was fading, mercifully. Too quickly? Torn between the now, the morning, and……the future?

Maggie found herself sobbing. Karate and whisky and a place. How could….? Which place? South of the church? Saturn? Impossible. Old Father Thames? Mary and Morgan. Who was dumping?

Denis was absent. His leg always trailed across the bed. Dare she open her eyes? She peeked through one. Royal blue wallpaper, fleur de lis. Her dressing table, her jewellery. She sat up, wiping wet cheeks. She needed toast. And coffee, to ease her constipation. She pulled on her dressing gown, checked on the twins across the landing. Both asleep. Yesh they were.

A peek out across Kent. Dawn. Dawn? Tiptoeing down the stairs. A beige envelope on the doormat. She picked it up, grateful for the solidity.

Lamberhurst……this was her reality. She filled the kettle, sat at the formica table. Last night’s sherry bottle left out. She changed her mind. She wanted…….yes, tea. In her new Prince Albert set. Comforting patterns on the bone china. Two slices of white in the toaster. Denis’ scotch on the shelf. Reassuring.

She did not normally dream. Settled, she poured. Buttered the toast. One word neatly adorned the envelope. Margaret. Using a clean knife, she opened the letter. The paper inside was slightly scented, expensive.

 

Dearest M

I very much enjoyed our get together last month. You are one of the few politicians who speak their mind without fear of retribution. It makes for rather good company.

I think we agreed it has been quite a memorable year for the country, if not a good one. The morale boost from Mr Ramsey’s boys cannot be over-stated for the working man. However, you and I know full well that football solves nothing. Sterling is weak. PM Wilson, as I stressed, will be forced to devalue next year.

Your speech at the Conservative conference two weeks ago created a good impression, not least your insight that lower taxes serve as an incentive to work hard. You are beginning to catch eyes and ears that matter. It is no secret that some influential people are in fulsome agreement with your views on the distortions caused by price controls.

Margaret, big changes are coming. It is no exaggeration to say Britain’s moribund practices are in desperate need of radical overhaul, or that private capital must hugely expand its current role. Old shackles must be cast adrift, creating losers as well as winners. Such is life’s perpetual tempest.

I think you are fully aware that a Shadow Cabinet role awaits. Please think in terms of higher rungs. A decision has already been made, within the highest circles.

You will, in the medium- to long-term future, run the Conservative Party. All being well, you will take the honour of becoming our first female Prime Minister. That is, I realise, a lot to take in. Nonetheless I suspect you will not be totally shocked.

The challenges will be considerable, but preparation time abounds. The key point to remember, always, is that my friends and I will back you firmly, during the toughest moments.

For now, pre-emptive congratulations. I know your father will be so proud.

Shall we meet for our next talk on 10 November?  

 

Yours, as ever

 

VR

28/10/66

 

 

THE END