

09.27 Sunday 23 April 2023

There are some who have decreed order is the natural order of not only the human condition but of everything that has ever existed and is ever likely to exist.

And there are those who have proclaimed chaos is the natural order not only of the human condition but of everything that has ever existed and is ever likely to exist.

And there are those who have made it their lives’ work to exploit our natural hunger for order.

And there are those who have made it their lives’ work to exploit our natural hunger for chaos.

It is a free market for all of you living in the free world.

Whereas I am on the island of Fernando Pó, off the west coast of Africa. It is where I was born and bred. I may have disagreed with the island being a tax haven, but I so abhor it being bought by AppleTree. Or, for that matter, by any of the other Big Five. I am totally and completely against what they are doing with the world. Womankind needs to have war, famine and inequality to function properly: without them we as a species will be over within a couple of generations. As for religion, we need as many as we can have to compete for our souls. The more radical the religion, the better.

That is why I am here with these five dolls I have made to represent the founding mothers of each of the Big Five, and over the next few days I will be sticking my needle made from bamboo into them. You may think this is a futile and primitive approach to bringing about world change, but it worked for my ancestors and it already seems to be working for me. Last night I began testing the process by putting a needle just a short way into the doll that is Stevie Dobbs, and I think it was successful. I can already sense her days are numbered.

Bought by AppleTree … the tax haven of Fernando Pó. Photograph: Alamy

Meanwhile:

Winnie strides across the street, the caffeine gently coursing its way around her body. She looks up to see if the squirrel is about – she is. She is building a dray. Or that is what Winnie assumes it to be. On reaching the age of 28 Winnie is wondering when her maternal instinct might kick in and start taking over her life. As yet it has not, but in some deep recess of her mind she is crossing off her fertile years. This, unbeknown to her, is influencing completely random aspects of her character. For a start there is a man called O’Brien at GoogleByte who she has only ever seen a handful of times, a man she would not have looked at twice a couple of years ago, but for some reason he keeps coming into her mind.

It is while she is dismissing the thought of O’Brien that she notices the window of the pet shop next to the cornershop at the base of her block has been done in, and the tanks containing the tropical fish have also been smashed. There are a couple of police cars and what look like two plainclothes officers from a period police drama standing about. Winnie never liked the idea of this shop and seeing those fish kept in their prison tanks but … she doesn’t think any more about it.

Instead she goes over to the wall that has the poster on it. The “2023: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?” poster. Without thinking, she stretches out her arm and touches the poster with the open palm of her hand. She is surprised to find it still wet. Her arm recoils and she looks at her palm. It is covered with something that looks very much like male semen. Instinctively she sniffs it.

A lone cloud drifts across the blue sky.

Winnie enters Victory Mansions, and instead of taking the lift to her floor she runs up all seven flights. As she is just about to enter her apartment to get on with her day’s work for GoogleByte, she hears the voice of her neighbour Tammy. “Winnie, it’s the kids’ mac-Bot again. It’s crashed three times today and it’s driving my children mad. They are on the Junior WikiCampus and it keeps returning, ‘Translation failed’, then the whole thing crashes. Can you have a quick look at it?”

Although Winnie is totally psyched up for her day in front of the screen, she knows it is the neighbourly thing to do to give her a hand. She is on a push to be less selfish. “Yeah, I should be able to sort it.”

She likes the smell of their apartment, as if Tammy is always cooking an interesting meal. Always trying out another dish from another part of the world. Winnie usually eats out or gets a takeaway. Tammy’s partner George also freelances for GoogleByte, but on the sales side of things. George and Tammy have two children, Tina (seven) and Richey (nine). Winnie being asked to sort something out on their mac-Bot is becoming a regular thing and she wonders if Tina and Richey create something wrong with their mac-Bot just to get her in. They usually tease her and ask about boyfriends, but it’s all friendly.

Winnie has always thought Tammy’s a bit of an odd one. She was once a singer, even sang on a hit record by the Utah Saints, but now she’s stuck at home bringing up a couple of kids. Once Winnie sorts out whatever the problem is, Tammy usually tries to get her to stay for a coffee. But this time the problem with the mac-Bot does not seem to be something engineered by Tina and Richey. There is something else going on. George has left numerous pages open and they are all about the Illuminati.

Winnie has not thought about the Illuminati for years. When she was at school in her early teens, there was a conspiracy theory craze all the boys were into. They were always going on about the secret powers that really pulled the levers in the world. Back then it was Obama, Putin, Merkel, Jinping and Akihito who were the players, the ones who ran the Big Five countries. But the boys in her class had this idea that there was another secret Five that actually ran everything in the world. And had done so for thousands of years.

Conspiracy theory … who secretly runs the world? Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

“I got some Peruvian Organic Mountain Beans especially for you. Do you want a mug of coffee while you try and sort things out?”

‘No, it’s OK, Tammy. I will just get this done and then I need to get back to work.”

Then there was this whole story about J-Zee and Beyon-Say being members of the Illuminati, and the proof was in the fact they called their daughter Purple Ivy. This name was supposedly a secret code revealing her membership of an “ancient and all-powerful occult society”. Since then, when Winnie had just turned 17, she knew boys and the male species in general were fundamentally stupid. It was one thing thinking there must be someone else in charge of things, other than the President of the US, but to think whoever it was would want to hang out with pop stars, however great she used to think Beyon-Say was, was just lame.

Looking at all of these pages on the Illuminati that George has left open, and which are slowing everything down on his system, it seems he has not grown out of it all. Maybe, Winnie thinks, George is just getting a surge of nostalgia for those days when the world was totally fucked up and about to collapse. Even Winnie sometimes, after a couple of glasses of red, feels nostalgia for those days. She knows it’s stupid.

Something inside keeps pushing her to read more and more of these pages on the Illuminati that have been left open.

“You sure you don’t want a mug?”

The aroma of the freshly ground beans gets the better of her. “OK, Tammy. Black, no sugar. Thanks.”

“But you always drink latte at Starbucks.”

“Yeah, but that’s my breakfast coffee, this is my working coffee.”

She is thinking about the words in the diary she has recently started. The words she had no idea she was going to write. The “I HATE” words. It is as if her appetite to read these pages about the Illuminati feeds that same need in her. But on another level she knows that if it is something GoogleByte could find that easily, then it is no threat at all. Anything really real, as in a real threat to our society, a threat to our hard-won world peace, would not be just there for all of us to read.

Tammy brings the mug of coffee through to where Winnie is at the screen. “Don’t you want to have children? You’d make such a great mum.”

Meanwhile:

Stevie Dobbs is walking through a glade of Sequoias in the Redwood National World Park in northern California. It is where she goes to get away from all the politics of AppleTree Boulevard. It is also where she does her best thinking.

Suddenly she feels this sharp pain in the left side of her gut. Excruciating pain. Like someone has just jabbed her with a sharpened knitting needle. This is the second time this has happened to her today, but this time it is a lot worse.

Meanwhile:

Winnie takes her sip from the mug of coffee while not listening to what Tammy is telling her about her children. Instead Winnie is thinking it would be great if there was a secret society that actually controlled everything. And if that was the case, there could be another organisation that could attempt to undermine it all. Be at war with the Illuminati. An eternal war. She reads more of these pages. It seems there is another organisation called The Justified Ancients of Mummu who do just that. They exist to undermine the Illuminati and spread chaos in the world. They are called The JAMs for short.

• Extract taken from 2023: A Trilogy by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, published on 23 August by Faber & Faber, price £20.