Tag: Author
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Like almost all of some parts of the rest of the world, Panic Town had the choice of nearly twenty-seven television channels. Yet for most people, 123 Celebrity News was the only channel of choice.123 Celebrity News was beamed, bounced, screened, recorded, streamed, downloaded, torrented, zipped, compressed, shared, copied, replayed, burnt, backed-up, archived, data-managed and saved for later all day every day so that Panic Town could gorge itself on celebrity news until it fell into an audiovisual stupor.
The breaking news this morning was coming live from the steps of the Town Hall and promised to be a celebrity feast like no other had ever been witnessed. It was guaranteed to revitalise even the most constipated of viewers.
‘Hi everyone, my name is Juniper Jarvis and I’m reporting live for 123 Celebrity News. I’m with that well-known bad guy and all-round celebrity super-villain, the legendary Dr Don’t Know.’
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Hi Everyone
I am delighted to announce that after much pleading and cajoling I have finally been able to get permission from all those involved to serialize the adventures of everyone’s (?) favourite but fairly hopeless hero, Falcon Boy, as he fights to save the planet from the evil machinations of the infamous Dr Don’t Know.
Armed with only his determination to somehow make a difference (if at all possible) Falcon Boy, along with his silent sidekick, Bewilder Bird, resolves to take a stand on behalf of all that is worth taking a stand for – and some things definitely less stand-worthy.For your delight and delectation Chapter One begins immediately after this announcement, so join me now for Volume 1 of the Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero series – Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets …
Chapter 1. Welcome to the Queue
You are too late. Nothing works anymore. The world has gone wrong. The planet still spins in space but forlornly now, sullen, lopsided; different somehow.
Everything is broken.
All the whole world does now is queue. Whole countries united in their queuing. Continents. The whole world. As far as the eye can see. Visible from space.
No one can remember a time before the Queue. Only the Queue. Now. And nothing else. Forever.
But no one cares. All they care about is the Queue. There is nothing else to care about. Only the Queue.
What a way to live your life. Being born. Growing up. Dying. All in the Queue. A life defined by waiting in line. Life after life after life. One after the other. Everyone in the Queue.
Forever. All you will ever know. Nothing more. Only the Queue.
The world is really rubbish now. Really rubbish.
Really, really rubbish.
So what has gone wrong?
Dr Don’t Know is what has gone wrong.
Dr Don’t Know?
The world’s greatest super-villain.
The world’s last super-villain.
Last?
Well, he won, didn’t he? His evil plan succeeded. And now the world looks the way he has always wanted it to.
His evil plan?
You had better come with me.
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As I lay beneath this ragged tarpaulin after a hard day’s destruction I struggle to find the strength to keep writing this account but someone has to do something and though I know that they will shoot me when they catch me I have to keep writing so that maybe someone one day will find it and read about the time that the world still had hope.
Because all the while that I can write then all is not lost.
And all the while that all is not lost then the whole world can still wait and hope and pray (if that is your thing) for that time when it may well be that all this waiting and hoping (and praying) will bring about an upturn in this planet’s fortunes.
End of Book I
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Amidst the chaos and the screaming and the suffering and the hatred and the horror and the hopelessness and the gunfire and the pleading and the taunting and the sheer futility of it all a small child works alone in Front Square. A small child with a broken nose who works all day, using a household hammer to smash bricks until her arm burns and she cannot lift it any more. Spent and close to collapse, this small child then falls asleep near where I am laying. No one pays her any mind.
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And yet existence can live alongside the very destruction of the same and though the notion of life here is clearly finite in its duration it is the same life that resolves to sing as the firing squad takes aim or signal eternal defiance with a shout from the scaffold and until there is no-one left to hear the song or hear the shout then there is always the hope that even songs and shouting might actually signal something more than simple silent resignation. And even in the darkest darkness ever to have descended from way beyond on-high there are still voices to be heard. They may be single. They may be strangled. They may be shortened. But they are voices all the same.
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The evil of the NotBeSpeak would make great art, were both things possible of existing in the same space. Which, of course, in this instance, they are not.
New and dizzying depictions of Hell and human suffering to be captured with oil and gauche and mechanical reproduction.
Images capturing earthly contortions and the agony of existence with a clarity and ferocity not witnessed since the Renaissance.
But much like an invisible ink designed to disappear during the very act of writing any recording is doomed and must likely die in the same second that it is born.
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None of this is to suggest or even suppose that the evil of the NotBeSpeak is founded on coffee, committee and conversation. This evil is very different altogether.
It is of the random.
The indifferent.
The deliberate.
Mechanical.
And other words now.
Cold.
Impassive.
Indurated.
Wholly detached from reason and emotion and therefore alive in the heart of other words.
Unfathomable.
Bottomless.
Abysmal.
Illimitable.
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Alternatively, these explorers might just leave this planet and cross it off as ‘dead’ on their maps and never wonder how Humanity lost its light. After all, the universe is scattered with countless stars all vying for the attention of anyone capable of exploring them.
So in this way why should the Earth be any more privileged than any other dead rock floating in the endless void?
Imagine a list complied somewhere and then put before a committee and each item on the list was a planet being considered for further investigation.
What claim the Earth over any other?
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Once the pride of the city centre, Stephens Green Shopping Centre is now a festering pile of broken glass and looted shops. Pulled to the ground by a frenzied mob while shots were fired over their heads and water cannons set upon them, this site of civic consumerism now resembles a Renaissance painting depicting Hell in all its profane glory.
In millennia to come when brave explorers from another solar system land upon a non-responsive planet and start to look around they will find the Shopping Centre long-buried and over-grown and perhaps marvel at the possibility that a significant battle was fought at such an important-looking archaeological site.
The simple song of the NotBeSpeak is not something they will likely ever hear.
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For most people in Panic Town, the concept of twenty-four hour news meant exactly what it said. They imagined that presenters like Juniper had to present the news for twenty-four hours at a time.
BARNABY TAYLOR 