Wednesday 8th July

Diary Entry – 20660228

“I was quite impressed, especially at first, by the little community living here, so deep in the bowels of Old London Town.  Right under the noses of the authorities too, who despite repeated government attempts at regionalisation, was still almost entirely congregated in G.L. (Greater London it used to be called in my youth, but now more and more we see it referred to by these initials; as if Americanising it could begin to disguise it’s ugly sprawl).  The city itself is now vast, and spreads almost from the channel right up to the Norfolk border and has swallowed up the old town of Swindon in the west.  It is as if the city has become a magnet and attracts not only millions of Europeans, especially after Turkey and Russia finally got into the EU, but has also depopulated most of Scotland and Wales.  Even the old cities of the North are being deserted as more and more young people seek their fortunes in the vast megopolis that G.L. has become.

The old concept of the UK had fallen apart soon after the Scots and then the Welsh voted for independence.  The usual story – a few years of flourishing success, cheap regional development loans and boom industries setting up, but when the Second Financial Crash came, investors flocked back to the safety of England, and G.L. just ballooned.  Now, even though the Scots and the Welsh eventually begged to be taken back, they are simply regions of England these days; and pretty squalid ones too.  What did ‘nationality’ really mean anyway?  Even England really only meant G.L., the rest was just a distribution area for the G.L. con-gloms.  But it was after everything really crashed in ’38 that the big migrations started.   G. L. now has a population of over a hundred million, small still compared to L. A. or NewNewYork but still pretty impressive.  There are rumours of even bigger cities in China, but no-one trusts anything they say any more – too many lies in the past.

All three of the con-gloms are based in G. L. anyway, and after the Super-Urbanways were constructed it made distribution so much easier.  Almost everything is made here now too.  That brief experiment of making stuff in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa has failed; the transport costs were just too high.  Now most things are made locally; the con-gloms factories are constantly updated and it easier to build duplicate factories in each of the world’s Mega-cities than make stuff in just one country and ship it about.  The con-gloms, although technically in competition with each other, are all owned by the same faceless rich bastards anyway, so all that International competition we were so obsessed by is meaningless now.  Cred has no boundaries; there are even rumours that everything, the whole caboodle, is actually owned by one Jewish-American family now.  Who knows anything for sure?  The more information you think you have the less you can trust.  The news media are all part of the same con-glom and even BSkyBC is in Mickey’s grubby little paws now.  Disnews rules the screens, the whole world is beamed to us through the eyes of a cartoon mouse.

England with its dependent old Celtic failures is still formally a part of the rump EU, which stumbles on but is a shadow of its former self.  They still grow most of the real food we eat there but their populations are much reduced and like here it is only the cities that thrive.  Now that much of the East is too cold, and the Med a bleak and damp rain-soaked turbulent place, that glamourous idea of Europe is fading fast.  Only Greater Germany with its vast population and Mega-cities is thriving, as it always has.  That old Teutonic dream of conquering Europe has become a reality, the French and Italians still cling to their culture, but have no real power, they are just pretty regions of the all-powerful Reich.  Angela Merkel the third is the real power in Europe, but even here they still kowtow to the Yanks.  And who America serves no-one knows.

I spent a few weeks with this small band of rebs deep in the old neglected tube station, but to be honest it wasn’t at all what I had expected.  They seemed so isolated and growing their own (pretty bland I must admit) manna food were more or less independent.  I had hoped they might be a part of a wider group, but despite Jonathan’s words they were more than content to simply survive.  If there was any contact with other groups I never saw it.  They were a strange bunch, mostly oldies like Jonathon but a couple of youngsters still in their forties.  Sometimes Jonathon would do a surface recce and bring in, like me, the occasional new recruit.  I tried to talk to one or two of them, but they were mostly uncrammed, from the lowest strata level and running from the Polis too.  But the group had no real idea what to do with themselves as a community except grow their manna and monitor things that were happening on the surface.  To be honest I found them and their whole set-up quite boring, they would spend hours reminiscing about life before the hypercoms or the second great crash when most of the emergency measures came into force.  I suspect that they were just trying to live out the fantasies of their youth rather than change anything.  Sitting around and talking, glasses of hooch in their hands, seemed to be the chief occupation of these ‘rebs’.  Refugees, more like.  Escapees from a world that had no place for them, they huddled together and reminisced about a time that was long gone and never to return.

I realised that I was more inquisitive than that.  I knew deep down that I could never really change anything either. It was too far gone for that, but I wanted to find out exactly how this world worked.  So much of our society was kept a secret from us, we had no real idea who owned anything, who was really making the decisions, or how it all fitted together.  There was a song I heard once by an old hippy from a century ago, that talked about knowing a man who knew a man who knew someone who knew what was going on.  But we are worse off than that because no matter how many men you might know, none of them has the foggiest idea of what is going on.  And I wanted to know, if for no other reason than to understand.  I had always been questioning, that was part of what was behind my re-building this ancient old lap-top.  I need to know how things work.

Only, in our highly strata-ed world no-one needs to know how things work anymore.  No-one needs to know anything, and worst of all nobody seems to care.  Better not to ask, just spend your cred while you still have it, and hope for a peaceful euthenasing at the end.  I don’t see anyone asking the questions that should be asked, let alone getting the answers.  They just accept it all, like dumb sheep, accepting syn-sex, accepting manna-food, accepting synthetic lives if you ask me.  That is at the root of my dissatisfaction; the fact that no-one questions anything anymore.  They have learnt it is better to keep their mouths shut, their eyes closed and their ears blocked up rather than discover any scrap of meaning to their lives.  Three little monkeys indeed.