The Swoop E-Book

John Clark

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Three hundred years in the future a group of Reconstructionist Historians are exploring events involving the people Moses Hoffman had encountered in Venice, but the dynamics of what had taken place are revealed to be far more complex than the resolution of economic crisis people have learned to call The Swoop'.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Appendix 1

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Afterword.

CHAPTER 1.

A quiet day in tranquil surroundings.

No wind, no rain.

Mild and sunny, midway between solstice and equinox.

Nothing much is happening, so Amanda settles down to read.

She is content and the myrtles are flourishing.

The year is going well and summer is coming to the green hills of Arizona. The Mimosa is blooming in the kitchen. In the fridge, there are three red peppers, a tin of tomato concentrate, two bars of chocolate, butter, a bundle of fresh pondweed and three duck eggs. She decides she'll go to a restaurant that night, unwraps one of the bars of chocolate.

She starts reading as she nibbles.

“The Great British Crash1 was christened 'The Swoop' after a weekend-long meeting of Ministers with branding advisor Jim Tewkesbury2, whose team packaged the whole phenomenon with a set of proposals slammed together in less than three weeks, then managed to sell it to an uncomplaining electorate with extraordinary success.”

Amanda adds a question mark of her own, then carries on reading.

The policies met with almost universal approval. The summer had been dry and hot. People were thirsting for something to cheer about, after the England cricket team's shock defeat in their first ever test match against the Netherlands.3

Mortgage debt, bought up by the Ministry of Finance for ten cents in the Euro, was decreed a 'heritage investment in the future'. They would give the Ministry a twist on its old name, calling it the 'National Treasury' to succour a sense of well-being, as government debt was replaced by the 'wealth of housing equity', only one of Tewkesbury's neat turns of phrase. Parity with the Euro enabled Ministers to ditch the Pound Sterling, with swiftly minted Euro-Pound coins quickly entering circulation. A clever bit of sidestepping by the European Central Bank President saw the term lira re-introduced in Turkey and Italy, reviving the once proud 'pound' sign outside the UK. In a single deft afternoon of administrative finesse, she enabled all Europe to benefit from the long history of a currency created in Ancient Rome and hammered into shape by the mints of Anglo-Saxon England. Tewkesbury is also credited with the nickname 'puro', which advertisers hooked onto with alacrity.

'The Swoop' was a sound money policy that sounded good.

This all helped the British to salvage their lost pride, without improving their demonstrably slender understanding of arithmetic. Considering the scale of their losses, pride was hardly on anyone's agenda anyway and very few people wanted to calculate the true extent of their impoverishment. The warning signs had been there for all to see as early as 2007.4 '

Amanda skips the next section, which was quoted in every book of english history written in the last two hundred and fifty years, vilifying Eric Selby in a way that had once been reserved for Guy Fawkes.5 Then she reads the introduction to volume 2, which is where she expects to spend most of her time compiling a basic guide to the Swoop for herself.

Her attention is momentarily distracted by a group of drunks who rush past on their way to an ice-hockey match.

They are soon gone.

All is calm.

The dull green acacias regain their pinkish hue and rock gently from side to side as Amanda reads line by line.

'The financial sector shed staff in their foreign currency departments as the need for meaningless transactions diminished, but that was a side issue. Calls for sympathy strikes in solidarity with the redundant bankers fell on deaf ears, as Tewkesbury had predicted in his notorious private letter to the Prime Minister6 , which became known as the Titanic Note, 'no more lifeboats for sinking financial ships'. He had caught the mood of the moment. Financial services soon became pariah professions7, 'sub-prime', in the jargon of the moment, as the entire sector was blamed for undermining the economy with false promises of prosperity and systemic pilfering. This wasn't Greece. Britain would never settle for austerity.8

“No-one really cares what money is called, just so long as everyone agrees that 1 is 1 in the accounting programmes,” the pragmatic ECB President had boldly asserted during an impromptu press conference from her office in Prague.9

A collective sense of relief swept throughout the land. House price madness was over.'

One of the fastest readers in the department, Amanda then turns to a series of documents prepared by the Court of Inquiry, who had investigated Tewkesbury's relationship with Eric Selby. The Court of Inquiry had taken five years to turn up precisely nothing by way of new evidence. She is sceptical. It feels good. Something will come of her efforts, she is sure.

She reads more.

'The Swoop' was most remarkable for seeing in a new era of productive prosperity, whose benefits lasted well into the middle decades of the twenty first century and brought Tewkesbury the Nobel Prize for Marketing10 in 2035, shortly before he was lost at sea on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Royal Yacht Britannia. A couple of years short of retirement, this energetic 67 year old, this darling of the British Left, the man who had coined the term 'social democratist' as part of the Swoop campaign, seemed destined for another term as Secretary General of SemInt, the Semantic League of Interaction. Instead, he was dead and there were ten thousand suspects on the police list of potential assassins, ranging from deluded dentists to little old ladies who believed in nest-eggs.

This was why 89% of Britains polled believed that he had been murdered. They were proved right, not only by successive network belief tests, but also by the trial and conviction of Eric Selby11 and other members of the infamous 'Legacy Gang'.

A set of alarms distract Amanda from her reading, turning the acacias blue, but they are quickly reset and she can continue. She ought to feel hungry, but the feeling soon passes. She has the uncomfortable feeling that her colleagues are massing in expectation of some breakthrough that she doesn't expect to happen. Sometimes research brings unexpected stress. Amanda just carries on reading.

With the business in property loans at an end, intangible trades and loss of goodwill forced the British Banks to amalgamate into three small associations, the Direct Debit Group, whose cards were the only ones now accepted by cash machines, Rump Asset Management, better known as RAM12, rent collectors from the semi-detached suburban poor and London Repo 13, whose tough guy bailiffs became familiar figures at motorway interchanges and supermarket car parks, intercepting cars for roadside auction. While European bus operators offered tours for Romanians and Bulgarians on the lookout for second hand cars, Britain's debtors suddenly took a liking to public transport and left their Audis and BMWs at home, or rented garage space with their dwindling pool of prosperous friends. The road building programme was declared redundant and motorway building work ground to halt. The reduction in CO2 output set an example that almost saved the planet.

Young Eric Selby not only saw his career prospects diminish, but the familiar surroundings of his suburban childhood were erased in a matter of weeks.14 Visiting his parents in their new home became a torment, with Fiona clicking away at her needles and his father escaping to the pub whenever he could. Hardly surprising then, that Eric turned first to crime and finally to murder, but before considering that epic tale of plunder, we need to understand his career as one of a new breed of politician, committed to the elimination of waste and the elision of fiscal risk.

The next footnote, a general proviso attached to all historic documents, makes Amanda smile.

This report harks back to an era before the empathic miasma replaced archaic networking and reflects the curiously extreme forms of individuality prevalent in this early modern society, when concepts of ideology, sexual orientation and net individual worth were accorded great note.

She stops reading.

Her specialism as a historian sets her aside the mainstream. Amanda tracks the archives for surviving websites and is able to read half a dozen forms of code, the antique html and its successor xml, which still provides a Rosetta stone key to lost early languages. This was all stuff defined before the era of quantum nets and the global hologram that sustains the Miasma. After half a dozen courses in metadata structures, a couple of years ago, she had been given a permit allowing to look at the archive as a preferred researcher. She has even ventured into paper-based documentation, though she finds this curiously long winded form of communication hard to evaluate. People seemed to have written all kinds of classes of documentation, from short notations of objects they desired, the so-called 'shopping lists', to declarations of affection referred to as 'love letters' and even purported to express their wishes following their deaths, creepy to read and scary to appreciate, documents known as a 'last will and testament', as if there was going to be a very last moment at sometime in their lives.

Professor Josephson had warned her away from this necromancy, with its predictions of who would acquire what, when the subject demised. She knew that demise was inappropriate for subjects like herself and had been warned not to torment herself with questions of mortality. “Get tangled up with that and you'll catch religion,” he cautioned her gently.

No matter, she really needed Selinsky to come back from holiday before tackling any more of the printed stuff.

Amanda herself had been created as part of the 37th Framework Programme of the European Union Information Society Programme15 following the 'General Agreement on People and Characters'16 that is probably the Balaban Islanders'17 greatest collective contribution to human knowledge, the 'Pure Thought' Programme. Devised following their discovery of 'separation', the programme enables the isolation of higher mental functions from bodily co-ordination and basic instincts without disturbing the equilibrium of character attributes and sensation, 'Pure Thought' has been accepted as the pinnacle of 'knowledge based societies'. Thankfully, Amanda is fully committed to the 'Global Governance Directive'.18 and its Code of Ethics, with none of the soft edges that marred the first generation characters (see deletions19 ).

She has become one of the fondest personas in the Miasma and has regularly risen to the top million, though she normally hovers between 2,3 and 2,5 of the permitted 12million characters who have been accorded free will and full electoral enfranchisement.

At the last election, after a great deal of consideration, Amanda voted for the government to be re-elected.

The Balaban Islanders had been extraordinarily perceptive when they proposed the 12 million limit. With the global population reaching the marginal 15billion level, they had recognised that human decision making seems to work best in communities with a population between 3 and 15 million. Beyond that figure, either a 'strong man' with dictatorial tendencies emerges, or the body politic atrophies, or both.20

They also recognised the temperamental patterns that ensured that about 1,000 users per character would provide coherence, that dose of common sense everyone seeks in their leaders. This meant that 'indirect democracy' proved very effective, with everyone enjoying the potential of level 2 enfranchisement to express their wishes and assert whatever influence they could via proportional representation. Centuries of party politics had demonstrated that common sense is a elusive and transitory quality, effectively effaced by universal suffrage.

Now, everyone has been given a voice, if not a vote.

As expected when the Miasma was introduced, about 70% of characters are non-functional, providing a playground for sports fans and hedonists, gardeners and other obsessives. Julian Beckham and Marge Potter were the pinnacle of this strange pyramid of personal pleasure, each attracting twenty or thirty million simultaneous users, who refine and wallow in football skills and sexual adventures of remarkable authenticity. Anyone who claims never to have enjoyed these characters is lying. The stats reveal that every adult on earth has logged in to both Julian and Marge with dogged regularity from adolescence on.

The Balaban Islanders were even credited with inventing the hives, where any-one can subsist in a framework of simple stimulation, pleasure, pain, erotic ecstasy, gluttony, or endless sleep. The hive zone entraps 30% of the global population for at least 40% of their lives, people affectionately known as the Pratchet, or sometimes Web-2 personalities. There was something unexplained about the precise attribution, but since the Balaban Islanders21 were happy to claim credit for anything, no-one else bothered to come forward to take responsibility for this rather demeaning initiative.

Midway in the hierarchy is the Temple, respectfully according the sensibilities of prayer and meditation a status somewhat higher than the hives, though there has been a continuing controversy whether 'spiritual well-being', which turned out to be a booming general buzz of baby-like stimulation, should really be consigned as a 'hive' option for the religiously deluded. Much to the modest pride of Buddhist monks everywhere, 'Om' has become the most commonly used word of all humanity, while Catholics were globally appeased, as the most popular named character in Templar affairs is simply known as 'The Pope'.22 The Vatican had also held out for a 35% cut of revenue from all religious subscriptions, which made them the 17th richest organisation on the planet.23

The Balabans were clever enough to recognise the limits of talent, enthusiasm and determination. Despite the gradually increase in population, the world has never spawned more than 7,000 Universities, each with around 500 competent professors within their much larger academic bodies, covering everything from high energy physics to archaeology. There have never been more than two per cent of the population with a useful commitment to politics, either at local, or regional level, with about the same proportion of good managers and administrators in industry and the public sector. Of course, the do-gooders, activists, gossips and busy-bodies created a useful bridge between the decision makers and the host of people to whom they are responsible.

When the Miasmatic Present was adopted,24 named characters were originally based on the membership of learned societies and associations, who were each accorded a provisional batch of identities. There had been surprisingly little bickering over names. The French took Diderot, Chauvin and Deneuve.25 The Caribbean were happy with Fidel, Bob, Viv and Toussaint. The Germans had a long discussion over Max Planck as there were already over 70 research institutes bearing his name, but eventually found enough other worthies, like Marlene and Wolfgang to cover the gaps. The British were delighted to hang on to Newton, Faraday and Watt, with Thatcher, Ballard, Dougan and Bevan following soon after.

The Americans had real identity problems and ditched Smithson for Edison, because at least they thought they knew who Edison was and it avoided confusion with Fred Q. Smithson the well-known entrepreneur and social benefactor.26

Envious of the Israeli's wealth of biblical names, the whole theological community was eventually placated by their generosity and a long list of old testament prophets were soon in virtual existence through the revivalist movement.27

Only the use of alter egos raised significant ethical problems, apart from French objections to the use of Chinese as the main stem language for translation, but a working group to monitor dualities was set up under Laing, after Freud's resignation and little more was heard on the issue after the working committee chose to resolve a series of linguistic questions, before publishing any further reports.

The fundamental mechanism of consortia building had been developed by the European Union28, as a way of ensuring conformist research projects, but it had a smoothing effect on political decision making that encouraged a set of attitudes that would leave the status quo unchallenged. Egoism was at bay and its temperamental enthusiasts were quickly marginalised. They became a significant source of unbridled resentment, which, to this day, remain one of the principal threats to successful governance.

After a dedicated afternoon reading, Amanda goes onto the balcony to watch the sunset

Smoke curls from a distant factory chimney.

A grey heron sneezes.

A crow sings.

A fox cub yelps.

A beaver lies lazy in the river.

Then a kingfisher flashes blue as it flies downstream.

The Caucasian Wing Nut Trees are shedding strings of seeds.

Rainclouds are gathering on the horizon as the sun breaks through to create a marvellous spectacle of evening pinks and blues.

There's an ominous roll of distant thunder.

Amanda catches sight of her reflection, dark hair, slender as a Burmese heroine, her light brown eyes shimmering with gold, in the glow of the setting sun. She is beautiful, talented and irresistible, she concludes. It is time to head for the 'history room', her favourite place, where she'll run into friends and colleagues. It isn't so much a space, she tells herself, as a state of mind.

1 There is some uncertainty as to the exact year following the solar calendar revision. Subsequently, it was concluded that the whole crisis had been provoked by the misguided assumption that risk could be sold as an asset via the so-called derivatives market, a concept initiated in Chicago.

2 James Helen Tewkesbury, the official biography in seven volumes is available on "pedia".

3 Van der Valk's double century for Holland and her hat-tricks in England's second innings sealed the victory.

4 In London, the Bank of England's executive director for financial markets, Paul Tucker, gave a speech in which he said there was a real risk that there could be a 'feedback loop' between the financial markets and real economy that would result in a downward spiral.” The Guardian, December 2007

see also: "Northern Blob a Study in Competence" Tewkesbury, J.H., Fabian Society Pamphlet, 2014

5 See Appendix C.

6 Edward Smith, Founding Leader of the Contrivative Party.

7 The worship of central bankers over the past decade has been shown for what it was, a mere shift of blind faith from one group of fallible tunnel-visionaries to another. They have proved no better defenders of the public interest than their forebears during the great crash of 1929. The sickening spectacle of those responsible walking off with millions of pounds of other people’s money in bonuses has rightly put bankers akin to mafia racketeers in public esteem. Simon Jenkins, The Times, London, May 2008.

8 Determinist economists have long maintained that the ever increasing price of oil was also partly to blame. see: Blither, T., The Real World, 2120 Pergament Press, Goolong, New South Wales.

9 ECB – European Central Bank – a financial bureaucracy.

10 Previously known as the Nobel Prize for Economics, the award was renamed following the Morgan Commission's conclusion that economies and markets follow economic theory in the same way that sales respond to advertising and marketing campaigns. The 'theories' of economics were all found to be completely worthless. Only their value as marketing tools could be verified, hence the change of name, which was initiated in 2027. see: pedia.

11 Selby, E – UKM/AEP1624/534FGQA Readers are warned that unauthorised biographies and hagiographies are not to be relied upon.

12 RAM was subsequently renamed as Royal Asset Management in 2022, following the Tewkesbury Commission's recommendations.

13 London Repo is currently a section of the Cosmopolitan Police Economics Division.

14 Crime in Context – the collapse of family structures and triggering criminal behaviour – a compendium, Schroeder G & Fischer J (Eds), Bushlands Press, Texas, 2040.

15www.cordis.lu

16 The rubric of the accord can be found as Appendix 1.

17 A mid-Atlantic equatorial archipelago

18 The Directive is ubiquitous.

19 Deletions – access denied.

20 Stalin & Rice, "Comparative Intolerance", Balaban Books, 2031. see also Italy (anach).

21 The Balaban Islands will be officially submerged in 2350, the inhabitants resettled and their resources transferred to the Miasma Licensing Agency . All shipping

has been warned.

22 The Trans-Denominational Synod of 2044 instructed Christians everywhere to assume the meditational Om was in reality a decayed version of the anglo-saxon exclamation "Oh Mother", itself an abbreviation of a Marian cult chant which entered the liturgy following the Conference of Australasian Bishops in 2033.

23 Interim financial rankings by Standard Economics:

Standard Economics

Guzzle Inc.

Porn Proof Pleasure GmbH

The Quantification Corporation

Emotional Liability Ltd.

FIFA

The American Food and Drug Administration (Beijing) S.A.

Associated Porn (private equity)

Hive Huddle Maintenance.

Billinda & Sons.

Mr Fred Q. Smithson

Tewkesbury Investments.

Global Canalisation and Concrete.

Dreamtime Deliveries Pty.

Miasma Patents A

Power Unlimited (Political)

Miasma Licencing Agency.

Power Unlimited (Energy)

The Correction Facility

Vatican

These recent figures reveal the Vatican has fallen three places in the rankings since this text was last revised at 03.00hrs.

24 Global Democracy - Edict 1 of the Founding Council

25 France also retains the use of Thomson generating codecs.

26 The decision to use historic characters for naming purposes had two goals, to enable immediate character recognition for users and to avoid the confusion of names deriving from the archaic avatar communities. Although rejected by the USA as a national champion, Smithson was later to achieve his own position of prominence.

27 The State of Israel was considerably smaller before the capital was relocated to Rome in 2070.

28 The European Union - A Fundamentalist Neo-Christian Capitalist Non-Aggression Pact, (see also " Corruption", Tewkesbury 2013).

CHAPTER 2

Joe Smather greets Amanda with his usual amiable allusions to her physical attractiveness, 'hmmm, nice ass', (he pays the fine) and receives an affectionate grin in return, 'your's too', before they settle down to work.

For him, she is like the perfect student, gorgeous, gamine, receptive, attentive and intelligent. He could flirt, but knows nothing would ever come of it and enjoys his place as father figure to her curiosity, rather than the wicked uncle of her underwear. Amanda treats Joe the way she treats all men – he is biological, she is a digital entity. Until something very special indeed happens, their interaction is informatic and will stay that way. No need to make a fuss, she'd told him more than once, that's just the way it is, you bio, me digital, get used to it. Nowadays, the majority prefer things that way. You'd have to be a hyper-sensitive to recognise the difference were it not for the formality of initial handshakes between systems.

“I'm still worried about my brother,” he confides, as they began to sift the files.

“Well, the life of a free-rover was his own choice,” she answers blandly, wondering why Joe has chosen a pink cotton pullover for the meeting. “I admire his resolve. It must be strange having the Miasma blocked for so many weeks at a time.”

“Oh, we get to interact once every couple of months,” Joe says defensively, “which is a damned sight more than most families manage even when they're permanent.”

“I know, it surprises me how little of real value emerges between family members.” Amanda can be very digital when it suits her. She isn't 'supposed' to be able to appreciate the rich subtleties of human relationships, which is just more official garbage in Joe's opinion. Amanda has a very highly developed sense of what Joe calls feminine intuition.

“We always assume historically that family integration was higher, but I'm not so sure. Anyway, Bill seems to have wandered further off the beaten track. Further away than ever. I haven't heard from him for three months.”

“You could run a deep trawl,” she suggests indifferently.

Joe pauses before replying. “I could, but he would get to know I'm looking for him and he gets upset if he thinks I'm prying.”

“He's probably found a new girlfriend,” says Amanda with a cheerful grin.

“You think so? It's always a possibility, I suppose.”

“Well, that was what seemed to be the case last time, no suppose about it.”

“Yes, but we can't always trust what 'seems to be the case', unless it really is the case.”

“Hang on Joe, I think Lisa's coming,” Amanda interrupts, thinking Joe is being a little too earnest about his brother's whereabouts.

“Oh good,” he says, grinning. “Then we should have a chance to catch up on Selby's first weeks during the Swoop.”

Lisa comes in with a broad smile, strokes the acacias affectionately, turns to Amanda and Joe, hugs them both, takes a seat at the end of the table, then floods them with information. She is tall and freckled, with an Aleutian sense of humour. “I think I've got to the bottom of that, as far as it is reasonable to go. What do you think, Amanda?” Lisa can be disconcertingly digital for a living breathing young woman with enviable genetic credentials and full biological status. She'll turn out to be a manager, that one, if she's not careful. Selinsky, the anally retentive archi-bore had said that.

Amanda swiftly surveys the information, sifts out the speculative elements and returns a much truncated version to their thought patterns.

“I knew you'd do that,” Lisa complains. “You've set the whole issue of how he met Braunovsky on one side.”

“That's my job,” replies Amanda. “It was just a first sift, would you like me to leave it in for now?”

Joe has second thoughts before suggesting they run the sequence with Lisa's conjectures included. “We probably have enough time before the others get here.”

“Is that OK, Lisa?” asks Amanda.

“Sure, let's go,” she says brightly, “it'll save us arguing with Robert till later.”

“Right,” Joe confirms. “I think we can all agree that Robert would insist we run a reality check before following up on this and I frankly don't have either the time, or the inclination. I mean, God knows, 'reality', who cares?”

They all laugh at the oldest Miasmatic joke of all.

“Who needs all this network shit anyway?” says Joe.

Having reached consensus, Amanda undoes the pause and lets the sequence flow. The experience begins with a simple warning that the material is a personalised version of events and they sit back to see what will happen. As it starts, Amanda gives a little gasp of surprise. “Oh Lisa, this is really good work, it feels so authentic.”

Joe and Lisa find themselves standing in the queue for tickets at the Tate Modern29 on London's Bankside. Lisa's long blonde hair sparkles with a dozen highlights and her healthy skin is in marked contrast to the puffy complexions of the school-teachers standing in front of her. Joe catches sight of a face reflected in the glass ticket booth and realises he has those swarthy good looks Englishwomen admire and despise with equal enthusiasm. 'Hairy brute,' says the husband to himself. 'Fancy him,' thinks the wife. 'I'll do you, so long as you have a shave first, or rough around a three day beard.'

So that is what Lisa wants, Joe tells himself, sneaking another glance at his reflection.

Eric Selby is standing some five places behind them.

Joe feels a trickle of excitement run along his spine. He is only a few feet away from one of the most notorious figures of the early modern era.

This is history and this is the thrill of being a reconstructionist historian. There is Eric Selby, a slight figure, an amiable, pale looking young man with glasses. No-one had ever implied he was exceptional. Wearing a brown leather jacket and a pair of old jeans, he looks stressed, but so does everyone in London. Podgy figures and bad skin, the clinical impact of a culture that made intimate links between hard work, lies and greed, then compounds the issue with commuting, lack of sleep and wearing badly made shoes and suits for the office. Selby hasn't taken any notice of Joe. He seems to be eyeing up Lisa, until Amanda catches his attention.

Amanda is less than pleased. “Is this your idea of a joke?”, she mutters from her place behind the glass of the ticket booth. “Hmmm, that will be forty eight pounds, two adults, or would you like 'day passes', they're only, er, sixty for both of you.”

“Wait a moment,” says Joe, reaching into his jacket pocket to retrieve a press pass. “I think you should let us in free with one of these.”

“Amanda?” says Lisa in a controlling tone, “if Selby pays by bank card, could you please note the account number and the transaction code?”

Amanda rolls her eyes, scowls and tugs at a strand of hair that has come loose and flopped over her forehead. She never misses such obvious details as that!

Eric was known to have fifteen bank accounts and to use thirty-two credit cards30, eighteen of which had reached their limit. Another eleven were used to maintain the minimum payments on the first eighteen and one was new, having arrived in the post three days after he had bought the weekly shop at a supermarket in Haringey. A shop assistant had asked if he needed more money and Eric had found it hard to say no, so he now had a rather pretty purple card claiming to come from the Commercial Bank of Rotherford of which there are no surviving records.

Amanda hands them the tickets, scowls and turns her attention to the next visitors. After them, it will be Selby's turn.

Lisa takes Joe by the hand and leads him into the gargantuan gallery. “He'll never suspect he's being followed by people who were ahead of him in the queue.”

“He probably has no idea that anyone should be interested in him at this stage,” Joe reminds her. “And the shock of discovering what we know about him would be traumatic. He was staring at you the way young guys do.”

Lisa laughs. “I wonder how many of these visitors are observers like us? Do you think the queue will get longer and longer once people pick up on our findings?”

“All gallery and no art,” says Joe, as they enter the cavernous main hall of the former power station. “A bit pompous really. Very Londony in its way. Makes you feel sad for the paintings they've entombed, especially the ones that were intended to be left leaning against a studio wall, or were destined for a friend's bedroom.”

“This was an era of suppressed personalities. Everyone was too worried about money to be themselves, so they behaved according to more or less fashionable assumptions about how people should go about things. It was all a symptom of trivialisation. Let's go find the bar.”

“Is this the spot where the young lawyer killed himself?”

“Yes, one of the places Eric will want to see.”

“He jumped from up there, as high as he could get and, er, then he landed about here.”

Lisa points at a repainted patch on the concrete floor. She wonders whether to call for a reconstruction of the event, but decides against.

“Sad.”

“Very, but one of London's best known urban legends. The overworked victim of rampant careerism.”

Joe shudders, “I'd rather be alive than be a legend.”

“OK, look, he's going into the café,” Lisa whispers as Eric walks past them, his shoes making an unusual, but nevertheless irritating squeaking noise on the over polished floor.

“I wonder who he's going to meet?”

“You should know that. Didn't you check your homework? I'm sure I told you. According to 'All Known History', the sister, they had a serious discussion that may have changed history, but you know how things get exaggerated. Anyway, they were supposed to have been particularly close.”

“What's she like?” Joe asks, wondering whether his memory is playing tricks on him.

“Small, fat and venomous, according to Smithson,” says Lisa.

“That's what I've always thought. Well, either they were wrong about the girl, or Smithson was wrong, or some-one is playing a joke on us. Small and fat is oh so very very seriously wrong.”

“Is that some-one playing the joke called Amanda by any chance?”

“She has the key to 'all known history'.”

There's a sudden flash, “NO”.

“Wait till we get back. Amanda's not allowed to meddle with the data. Not to that extent. She can smooth a bit but its supposed to be cosmetic so the enactment feels genuine, not a kind of character rewrite. I mean, this girl, she's gorgeous and well, incredible, not small and fat. It makes you wonder what else is not quite as it first seems.”31

They buy something to drink that looks like a turquoise printing error with straws and go to the table next to Eric's. He's talking excitedly to the tall skinny woman who is in her late thirties, an exotic beauty with dark hair, flashing eyes and perfect coffee coloured skin.

“She looks like one of your fantasies, Joe.”

“Squat she isn't and she isn't one of my fantasies, not yet, but who the hell can she be? I've seen photos of sister Jessica. Smithson was right. This is some-one else.”

“Nice pullover.”

Joe splutters. “Flatters her figure. Nice? She's er stunning.”

The pearly grey sleeveless sweater with a high collar was almost fashionable that season, but only suited slim women, so they hadn't sold as well in England as they had in Italy. It is not for nothing that the phrase 'bella figura' has no equivalent in english.

Then Joe tries to overhear their conversation using the directional microphone in his fountain pen.

“And she has an unusual accent, archaic, a bit of a lilt, yet it sounds like a version of British english. Its not Australian, nor Argentinian.”

“They have already begun plans to make the Swoop permanent,” the woman tells Eric. “We'll all be strapped for cash, all the time, forever and a day, but they intend to make life less expensive. Clever mix. It's outrageous, robbery with appeasement.”

“I don't understand. What do you mean, Mona?”

Mona – Now they know. Joe checks the name and discovers it was originally Scottish. He placed the accent, a town called Aberdeen, which he knows nowadays is a small fishing village on the Caledonian mainland, but had a long and prosperous history as a centre for old oil. He logs her as Mona from Aberdeen. Physical details and analytics to follow.

There's a slight sway to her voice that Joe enjoys. Actually he's entranced. She's captivating. He's predictable. Lisa is unimpressed.

“Your friend Mr. Tewkesbury,” Mona says pleasantly, “is proposing a new form of housing finance, permanent leasehold. They are going to appropriate the land, then rent it out on leases to the people who use it. They will pay next to nothing. he's calling it the 'Peppercorn Plan'. A plot of land big enough for a house and a garden will costs only fifty a year. All people will have to pay towards their homes will be the construction costs. They've pitched it so low that farmers will no longer be tempted to sell land for development. The packaging is to be presented as a plan to save the countryside. It will also ensure young farmers can acquire small-holdings when they leave college for intensive green food production.”

“Hell-fire and damnation,” Selby exclaims, with tears in his eyes.

“What?”

“That is all I have left. They've screwed my career. Now, Dad has had to sell up in Rickmansworth, all I have is the land in Yorkshire. Grandpa divided it equally between Jessica and me. 600 acres each, well above sea level, but south of the promised ice-line, not far from Bawtry, near the airport. It will be used for building one day, when the sea level rise forces them to abandon Hull and Goole. Grandpa already has the development rights in place. That's the plan. He thinks it will be lakeside in the near future. It won't be worth a penny if this goes through. How long do we have before their plans are made public?”

“Probably about three months, but maybe less. They need to get the legislation through Parliament, so they won't tell the press for a few weeks, unless someone leaks. The details are hellish and there will be almighty protests, except from the poor, but they don't matter, do they? Be good, my darling I have to get back to work. I'll see you tonight, my place, midnight, Oh, and don't bother showing up if you're drunk.”

“Why midnight? We could meet up for dinner.”

“Not tonight, darling. I'm seeing some people.”

“Not my sort?”

“Eric, they are business, you are pleasure, enjoy, please me, and don't be late.” She smiles to reveal a broad expanse of healthy teeth, then she dashes away.

“So he's got himself a girlfriend,” says Lisa, pretending she hasn't notice the way Joe is disconcerted.

“Good for him, I wonder who she is? Mona from Aberdeen, born probably between 1970 and 1980. She doesn't look very Scottish, more Caribbean than North Sea. I didn't get a pingback when I tagged her name.”

“Maybe her Mum and Dad were from Jamaica. We can trace her, or should we try to stick with him and find out more?”

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty.”

“Seven and a half hours before midnight.”

“Amanda will be furious, Johnson too.”

“I don't care about Johnson. Can we fast forward?”

“But you do care about Amanda.”

“You know I do. There's every justification to keep going. This Mona could be a major new figure in the whole field of Selby studies.”

“And she's tasty, they'll love her in replication.”

“I don't hold with the use of historical figures as fantasy models.”

“Lisa, all these people have been dead for over a century, longer. Hey, here comes the sister. Oh, my God, she's unmistakable, the venomous little bitch herself.”

“Oh, another of Johnson's clichés. The loathsome cowgirl.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Well, the other woman has been overlooked, so all the opprobrium fell on the sister. People have been trying to save time, pitching in on the bookmarks for this meeting, starting where the tag begins for Jessica's entrance, without bothering to track back a little to find out what happened just before, or if they did, not realising that the woman might be important. Penny pinching historians, none of them wanting to do the in depth research and pay for the extra half hour. Amazing.”

“Just listen for once, will you? Eric seems to be telling her his news.”

“Jess,” Eric gasps, “we've got to move really fast and sell the land.”

“Don't be silly, the values will recover before we need to sell.”

“No. We've got to sell right away.”

“Why Eric, why? Eric, have you been drinking?”

“There's a plan to collapse land values.”

“What?”

“There will be a proposal soon.”

Eric takes one of the café serviettes and scribbles something on it, then pushes it towards Jessica for her to read.

“Then it's probably true.”

“Tewkesbury again, I'm sure, I can even follow the logic as far as it goes.”

“I loathe these fucking people,” says Jessica. “I mean, what was Thatcher's dream, a property owning democracy, that's what she wanted and that's what Britain is thanks to her and Blair. It works. That's what it always should have been, at least for the last three hundred years, since the civil war. They debated it then, in the seventeenth century, OlliCrom and that lot. Everyone who has an interest in a society should have a say and the people who have an interest in society are everyone who owns something. If you don't own anything you can fuck off. It's that simple. Owners have an interest, so they get to vote. A property owning democracy. You don't meddle with the definition, you give more people a chance to become owners. Then they are stakeholders and should have their say. Because they have a real interest in society, not just spongers and hangers-on, they will use their votes wisely. Actually, I wish they'd tried that in Iraq, they might have had more chance.”

“Alec really enjoyed Iraq.”

“Our dear cousin is a religious psychopath, even you know that, on top of which, the Army threw him out after that business in Basra. People do try to blame him for the Syria stuff, but I don't see that actually.”

“You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time and by 'some of the time', I mean an election year. I'm sure that was Tewkesbury.”

“Renew Labour, sounds catchy, the promise of all round improvements.”

“When is the next election due?”

“Still three and a half years, if they last that long.”

“Fooling around now, to be ready in time for the next election.”

“Stop fooling me Eric and explain what Tewksy wants us to think.”

“The cost of credit has gone through the roof and house prices have collapsed, so no-one can afford to sell, because of the losses, or buy because of the interest and the down payments. Stagnation and frustration, an economic crunch, just like the Americans. The low interest rate ploy didn't work, it just pushed everyone into austerity.”

“We know that. Come on Eric, better please.”

“Land values are the key. They can't build cheap new homes on expensive land, because they will still be unaffordable. So they have to collapse the price of land as well. Then they are going to introduce a scheme for people to buy new homes with prices based on the building costs.”

“How much does it cost to build a house.”

“You can do something nice for about sixty thousand.”

“Is that all? You can't even buy a garage for that kind of money.”

“Spread the costs over twenty years, that's about three thousand a year plus interest. Even at 12%, you can give people a home to buy for less than a thousand a month. Bring interest right down and you could bundle the whole thing for a hundred a week, which is less than most students pay for a room. Set that as the benchmark and the value of nearly all existing homes will stay under a hundred thousand, unless you have some sort of pompous mansion in Putney. The value is defined by the costs. A modest flat would cost next to nothing, which is all they are anyway. The only thing that's stopping it is the price of land. So, that's what Tewkesbury is going to do, collapse the price of land. Large parts of the insurance industry will begin to fold as well, which he says serves them right.”

“It's dispossession.”

“Not at all. Everyone can stay where they are, no problem, they just won't be the owners if they take up his offer, not officially. They'll swap the debts on their house for a long term lease that costs next to nothing. That way they won't have to sell up and downsize and their children can inherit the rights to the family home. Tewkesbury says that if you were born in London you should be able to live in London. Catchy proposition, isn't it. The housing thing isn't going to go away, apart from the bits that flood from global warming, or get crunched under a glacier.”

“It won't be the first time.”

“Forcing people to give up ownership. It's never happened here before.”

“Yes it has, Sixteenth century, they dispossessed a lot of Catholics.”

“Really?”

“Go to Church on Sunday,” Jessica explains, “or pay a whopping fine, that's how it worked. Naturally, the recusants thought there would be hell to pay if they worshipped with the Anglicans. Pay the fine, or go to goal. Sell your land to pay the fine. For a good Roman Catholic the consequences of attending the English Church on Sunday was to face the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation via Rome, so the devout ones sold their homes and farms to the highest bidder and hoped for the best. The bidder would usually turn out to be someone with close links to the government. Shakespeare's32 Dad got trapped that way.”

Joe leans across to Lisa and whispers, “She knows more about early Britain than I do”.

“Of course she does, she lived a long time ago and was a student there,” Lisa reminds him.

“You think she read all the books?”

“Almost certainly, they taught everyone to read back then.”

“Extraordinary.”

“People put a lot of faith in books.”

“Like the Bible and Koran?”

“Nah, twit, they trusted books. They trusted in the printed word and thought literacy was something wonderful. They even had public libraries, where anyone could go just to read things.”

“But you couldn't tell what the author was thinking.”

“That was the trick, you had to be pretty bright to work things out. Simple folk just settled for stories.”

“They always have done.”

“Look they're leaving.”

“Do you think he'll lead us to Mona the skinny chick?”

“Don't show your age, Joe, she's a scrawny old hen in his eyes.”

Joe doesn't seem convinced, “I wouldn't say exactly scrawny, more elegant and languidly flexible.”

“Keep you fantasies to yourself please Joe,” says Lisa tartly.

“Really Lisa, we're in reconstruction,” Joe protest, “Anyway, she seems to be expecting him to play the cockerel.”

Eric and Jessica are about to leave the gallery, but just as Joe and Lisa start to follow, to their annoyance, Amanda breaks in.

“Sorry guys, there's a discontinuity, you can't get closer now.” She gives them a pert little smile, which she's been practising while doing her stint selling tickets, “We do have a general impression of London, if you'd like to continue, but no-one has ever caught sight of Eric. You need some more groundwork before it will make sense to proceed, I think we should discuss it in the Group, don't you? And Johnson is on his way. He'll want to hear all about this.”

Joe and Lisa give one another a regretful look and agree to break off, and they are gently relocated by the Miasma.

Reconstructionism is not quite perfect and reconstructionists not always harmonious.

Should that be a surprise among historians?

“Hi Amanda, hi Lisa, hi Joe,” Robert Johnson greets them as he arrives, “I got the message about your trip, exciting stuff, what did you find?”

“It was great to be where it all started, ” Lisa said politely.

“Yes, I recall Eric and Jessica's conversation of course. I even have the transcript somewhere. You are lucky to have been there live.”

He smiles and Amanda notes the glint of superiority reflected in his titanium framed spectacles.

“I'm surprised you haven't been there yourself,” says Joe.

“I use my credits for more off-beat stuff. But it's great you went there. Two big factors people overlook when they take a look at early twenty-one England are essentially peculiar to Britain and both have their roots in the twentieth. I mean, we all know about the greed and the superficiality, taken as read, but we miss the bossiness of people at work, I can give you examples. People were expected to be 'on message' and talked about their bosses as 'control freaks'. There was a culture of pushiness, with people driven by managers of extreme determination, real furies, bi-polar, manic depressive managers. Very unhealthy, one of the seeds of trivialism. People took one look at who they were working for and retreated towards the infantile. Then, when we look at the property crash, it's easy to overlook something that started two, or three decades earlier, that strange business of dividing up houses that were intended for single families into lots and lots of small apartments, so two or three times as many people ended up living and paying to live under the same roof, but all of them assumed that it was theirs. How people blinded themselves to that kind of travesty is a mystery to me. Most of the buildings had been put up a hundred years before as modest family housing. A strange trick. They tried to make these old houses more habitable, and a weird culture of home improvement took root. On the one hand, speculators could sell off the apartments for more than the houses were worth as single homes, on the other, people were happy to be able to live closer to their work in the city centres, so they were willing to pay up.

Children just got caught in the debris. People started going crazy adding things on to these shoddy buildings, extra bathrooms, kitchens, garages, winter gardens, decking, you name it. Really, they were just bolting new technology onto old frames, so it rarely worked. Then they started doing more and more, rebuilding places from the inside out, burrowing underneath to create deep cellars for all kinds of purposes. Tewkesbury twigged that it would be much better to build anew instead of messing about with these nineteenth century places. He also realised that the only way to make a new start was to put a shock in the system and that is what he did. Rising sea levels helped33, but it was his idea. The London Lakes Scheme34 proved him right. Eric was one of the unlucky minority who lost out. There weren't many losers, but our friend Eric was certainly one of them. Sorry, got to leave you, meeting, great, soon...”

He's gone, even before the echoes of his voice have died away. Then, just as abruptly, he pops back in for a parting shot. Even Amanda quivers, as the other two jump with surprise, “For fucks sake Johnson!”

“Amanda!”

“Yeah, forgot, piece of advice,” Johnson gabbles. “Just keep an eye on the niggles in his life, follow the niggles, that's it. Busy, busy, busy.”

Then a click and he is absent.

“Fuck you! Asshole.”

“Amanda!”

“You shouldn't talk like that about someone,” Joe remonstrates, for forms sake as much as annoyance.

“You know what I mean,” replies Amanda, as the acacias vibrate with alarm.

“But we also know, that three months later, they created the British Land Bank, offering to wipe out their debt, then buy people out for 15% of the market value of their property with no legal fees and a free ten-year insurance policy with Palace Yard Assurance. Almost every home owner in the country took up on the offer and used it to pay off their credit cards. Quick fix. What they were really doing was to undermine the Banks' capital base. Without new investors, and who was likely to pose as a new investor in such times, the banks had no choice but to fold themselves into RAM!”

“Tewkesbury had his own agenda and his own share of genius.”

“Old money to no money,” Joe continues. “A revolution of their own making. Inside 5 years the country was more or less free of debt and mortgage costs no longer deterred the younger generation from setting up home. It was a fresh start, root and branch reform. There was lots of romance, lots of sex and lots of lovely babies. You have to give it to Tewkesbury, he had incredible luck. I'm amazed he got away with it. It took balls. So why did Eric end up murdering him nearly a quarter of a century later?”

“What was their slogan at that election, 'Last time we cured you of smoking, this time we'll cure you of debt'?”

“Tewkesbury broke every rule in the book, but he understood that money was just a symbol, an intangible symbol of exchange. If you look at a house one day and say its worth half a million, then you look at it the next day and say its worth forty thousand, the house hasn't changed. It's still somewhere for people to eat and sleep, cook dinner, make babies, bring up kids. It will still need the roof repairing sooner of later. That was the message they got through via movies and tv series. Even if it isn't worth a thing, it will be here tomorrow and you can live in it.”

“I don't understand why business wasn't hit.”

“Another of Tewkesbury's perceptions. He understood how the gradual reduction in asset values as they are written down on the books meant that the value of businesses and industry is calculated in a completely different way to the valuation of private property. In business, it is assumed that the value of assets diminish, machines wear out, technology becomes outdated, buildings need to be repaired and rebuilt. Capital gets used up, that's the rule. It's quite possible to have a factory full of machines that are officially worth nothing, but they're working away and churning stuff out all the same. With property, people thought that a ruinous dump would be worth more from year to year. Opposites, but it doesn't matter.”

Joe can see the others don't like what they're hearing, “Tewkesbury knew that economics is largely a matter of psychology, like the old story of grandfather's hammer, which had only had two new heads and three new shafts in a hundred years and was as good as it had ever been. No-one ever describes their home as fifteen cubic metres of reinforced concrete, forty-five metres of plastic tubes, a couple of trenches, a hundred metres of cable, a few hundred roof tiles and thirty lengths of timber, with eleven windows and nine doors, subdivided by a hundred odd square metres of plasterboard that required a thousand hours of labour to build. No, they say they have a charming modern cottage in a secluded setting on the outskirts of Liverpool. Well, not Liverpool, any more, of course, but Blackburn, or Bolton, or another of those heritage places.”35

“Joe,” says Lisa firmly, “I have to go”.

He was telling her things she already knew, but she wasn't going to tell him that.

29 The Tate Modern was located in the former Bankside Power Station, a compelling example of Tewkesbury's observation that the British tended to tack new distractions into old buildings.

30 A system of money lending at high rates of interest.

31 The security system for 'All Known History' has Level 12 approval.

32 Shakespeare, William – an english dramatist and poet, whose identity has now been confirmed as a 'character' in perpetuity.

33 The general rise in sea levels of 30metres between the years 2000 and 2100 was amplified around the British coastline by the unusually high tidal range.

34 London Lakes were themselves lost as sea levels rose due to climate change and the world's land area was approximately 1% greater in the Pre-Miasma. Population density was 200 persons per square kilometre, rather than the miasmatic optimum of 1000, (100 square metres of land per capita, which is 33.3 metres2). The land issue has been resolved by tiering, which ensures a natural cover of vegetation over all new structures and buildings constructed with a minimum of 5 subterranean cellar levels to each floor above ground. The world's deepest structure at Heathrow now belongs to Dreamland Deliveries.

35 By 2180, the general rise in sea levels had encroached on the British cities of Leith, Hull, London, Southampton, Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow. The Dutch barrier reef had protected Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp, however Bremerhaven had suffered 80% destruction, while the ice scoured settlements to the north.