Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  “We haven’t been attacked,” he would say. “Our interests are not at risk. Why fight? Why send soldiers to die needlessly?”

  At first his attitude earned enmity among the international community. After 9/11, President George W. Bush branded him a coward for not lending his support to America’s War on Terror. Prime Minister Lucas responded by saying that not being a bully did not equate to being a coward. Many American citizens echoed the sentiment.

  When Bush stood for re-election in 2004, he was defeated by a senator belonging to the Black Flame Party’s US offshoot, which was called – no surprises here – Black Flame USA.

  At home, Guy was busy. He abolished the Whip’s Office. MPs were now entitled to vote on legislation entirely according to their own principles and inclinations, and didn’t have to toe the party line. He introduced a mandatory fixed four-year term for governments, as in the States. He then instituted a system of political job-sharing, whereby husbands and wives were jointly regarded as a single Member of Parliament. You voted for one, you got both. That way, an MP could attend debates at the Commons while his or her other half got on with constituency work back home. Close collaboration between the two led to a better service for voters and strengthened the domestic bond, which could often become strained between spouses when one spent so much time away from the other.

  Guy was re-elected in 2001, again in 2005, and yet again in 2009. Now, in 2013, he was about to embark on an unprecedented, record-breaking fifth term as British PM.

  THE JAGUAR GLIDED through the palace gates, saluted by members of the Queen’s Guard. The tradition of the monarch inviting the incoming prime minister to form a new government was a quaint formality, but one that Guy liked. He enjoyed his meetings with Her Majesty. She was a game old bird who teased him relentlessly about his cherished moral code, but seemed to respect it, too, and him. She and Petra also got on like a house on fire. She would be disappointed that Petra wasn’t with him today, but there was a diary clash. Alex had a trombone recital at school, and Guy and Petra had agreed that one or other of them, if not both, would always attend important dates in their children’s calendars.

  “I’m Defender of the Faith,” the Queen had said to Guy after his second victory at the polls – or was it his third? “But if you lot carry on the way you are, there may not be much of a faith left to defend.”

  She hadn’t been joking, either.

  Organised religion was on the wane, dying fast, not only in the UK but abroad, churches, cathedrals, synagogues and mosques all closing their doors. Its decline was matched by the rise of Black Flame movements across the world, a mass, pan-national consensus not to accept the dictates of ancient cults and belief systems any more, and to heed one’s own inner promptings instead, to listen to the god within.

  With the breakdown of religion had come a substantial decrease in war. Trouble spots and flashpoints were few and far between these days. The UN had more or less been disbanded.

  “Do unto others as they do unto you” was now the global mantra.

  If you weren’t attacked, don’t attack. If you weren’t offended, don’t offend. If you weren’t hated, don’t hate.

  GUY GOT OUT of the car.

  The sun was shining. The sky was blue. Pigeons flocked above the palace rooftop, exulting in the warm spring air.

  He took a deep breath, savouring the moment.

  It was an age of peace.

  An age of reason.

  An age of Satan.

  And behold, it was good.

  BIRD STRIKE

  AS BARNABY POLLARD stepped out of the Jag, a dead seagull hit him slap bang in the face.

  The bird was a large one, nearly four pounds in weight, and it collided breastbone-first with the bridge of Barnaby’s nose. He felt a sickening click, a momentary numbness, and then a crashing burst of pain. Clutching his face, he sagged back against the car, a luxury sports saloon XJ model. The seagull corpse flopped to the ground, inches from the gleaming toecaps of Barnaby’s handmade John Lobb full brogue Oxfords.

  “Take that!” someone yelled from close by. “Bird killer! Planet raper!”

  Jakob, Barnaby’s chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, moved swiftly. Having ascertained with a glance that his boss was not too badly injured, he swung towards the person who had thrown the dead gull.

  The culprit was a young man in ripped jeans and a shabby cagoule. His hair was long and matted, somewhere between terminally unwashed and dreadlocked. His neck was swathed in the kind of Mediterranean cheesecloth scarf beloved of gap-year students and eco-activists. From his left hand an empty Waitrose carrier bag hung limply like an old man’s ball sac, the container which until a minute ago had cradled the defunct bird.

  Jakob sized up the youth. The youth, in turn, took in the bodyguard’s immense bulk, the barrel chest that strained the buttons of his double-breasted Tom Ford suit jacket, the close-cropped hair, the rock-solid jaw – and blenched. All at once it occurred to him that he might have just made a terrible mistake.

  Actually, no ‘might have’ about it.

  Jakob Beit was a Jewish Afrikaner by origin. His racial heritage was that of both oppressor and oppressed, his personality a thin-skinned mix of superiority complex and inferiority complex. It made him doubly quick-tempered, twice as likely to take offence and lash out.

  The gull flinger turned to run, but Jakob caught up with him in three strides. He grabbed him by the hood of his cagoule and spun him round.

  “Please, n-no,” the youth stammered, hands raised defensively. “I didn’t mean to – It was a political statement – My mum’s a lawyer –”

  Jakob’s implacable expression was the warship’s bows over which these waves of argument broke uselessly.

  “Boss?” he said to Barnaby over his shoulder. “How’s your nose? Is it broken?”

  “I think so,” Barnaby replied. His sinuses felt on fire. It was as though someone was boring upwards into his skull with an electric drill.

  “Is that all? Nothing worse?”

  “Yes.”

  Jakob turned his attention back to the youth. “Just that, then, you bliksem. A nose for a nose.”

  A fist smacked.

  Blood spurted.

  The youth shrieked.

  THE SEXINESS STAKES

  THE INCIDENT OCCURRED in broad daylight, during the morning rush hour, on a busy central London street, outside one of the tallest of the capital’s new skyscrapers, the GloCo Tower.

  Which meant eyewitnesses, plenty of them. In particular, it meant phone cameras.

  Nobody had shot footage of the assault with a dead seagull. That had come out of the blue, a complete surprise.

  The retaliation was what got filmed. Between the attack on Barnaby Pollard and the punch that decked his assailant, a dozen phones came out, a dozen video apps were deployed, a dozen thumbs pressed Record.

  How it looked was that the bodyguard had carried out a disproportionate act of aggression on a passerby who happened to have shouted a few derogatory comments at Barnaby. This was the story that spread virally, starting in the paddling pool of social media before graduating to the adult swim of the news networks: big business violently and bloodily curbing the common man’s right to freedom of speech.

  Barnaby had his PR people disseminate the counter-story, with pictures of the dead seagull and his red, swollen nose as proof that Jakob’s retaliation was warranted and appropriate.

  But his side of things didn’t receive nearly as much airtime. It wasn’t as interesting. It didn’t fit with the ongoing popular narrative. It wasn’t sexy.

  He was outdone in the sexiness stakes by cagoule-wearing Tarquin Johnson, upper-middle-class dropout, self-styled green warrior.

  Tarquin lived in a squat in Kilburn while his parents sat snug in a multimillion-pound mansion on Primrose Hill.

  Tarquin smoked roll-ups and rode a bike and loved nature and abhorred what he regarded as the environmental sins being perpetrated by Barnaby’s corporation, GloCo.


  Tarquin was good TV. He hunched on morning-show sofas and played the part of the wounded, blameless victim well.

  “I just couldn’t, y’know, let it lie,” he said, peering out over a broad strip of bandage, his eyes black like a panda’s. “Knowing there’s sea birds and, like, all manner of marine life dying out there – dying in oil spills created by GloCo tankers and rigs and refineries. Pollard’s company’s sort of, y’know, toxic. Toxic to the earth. He’s killing us all. I had to do something. I found the seagull lying beside the Thames at Shoreditch. Like, dead of natural causes. It was a sign, a gift from the universe. Throwing it at Pollard – it seemed like the right thing to do. Fitting, you know what I mean? Poetic justice. I’m sorry I broke his nose. I didn’t mean to. But he didn’t have to go and have his Nazi goon break mine.”

  Tarquin’s mother, a highly successful human rights lawyer, sued GloCo for damages. By rights Barnaby could have countersued, claiming unprovoked common assault and actual bodily harm, but his legal team advised against. Whatever the technicalities of the case, a jury’s sympathies would not lie with him. So instead he settled out of court. The payout was a seven-figure sum, enough to keep Tarquin in Golden Virginia and cheesecloth scarves for the rest of his life.

  In fact, Tarquin moved out of the Kilburn squat immediately and used some of his windfall to buy an organic smallholding in Devon, not far from Totnes. He published a blog for a while: Diary Of An Extreme Farmer. Toiling on the land in the constant Dartmoor drizzle proved to be too much like hard work, however, so he sold up and moved to India, opening a beachside bar in Goa – a far more congenial climate and job. He died a year later when a tsunami roared in from the Arabian Sea and devastated a whole swathe of the Subcontinent’s western coastline. The oceans didn’t seem to care much about the valiant efforts Tarquin had made on their behalf, unless this inundation was their obscure way of rewarding him, clawing him into their deep, damp embrace.

  RESET

  BARNABY’S NOSE RECOVERED, although the same could not be said for his reputation. But then, his reputation had never been that great to begin with.

  A doctor reset the nasal bones and said there was nothing further he could do. Time and ibuprofen were all that were needed.

  Barnaby resumed work at GloCo, making money. The corporation was a massive entity with an annual turnover equivalent to the gross national product of a small Asian democracy. Its assets were distributed worldwide, most of them in the field of energy generation and distribution. Oil, gas and coal formed the lion’s share of its business portfolio, but GloCo owned and ran a handful of nuclear plants as well.

  It almost went without saying that GloCo boasted very few green credentials. Its primary concern was making profit from fossil fuels and enriched uranium. It did not, as a corporation, consider the long-term consequences of its activities. It could not afford to. Its horizon extended no further than the next set of quarterly accounts, the next share dividend payout, the next round of end-of-year bonuses.

  Barnaby perched at the vertex of a pyramid he had built, with thousands of employees below him, spread across the world. He orchestrated their symphony of industry with an unerring hand. The staff of GloCo moved in unison to do their CEO’s bidding, reaping the earth’s natural resources and transforming them into cold hard cash.

  The corporation was popular with its stockholders. It was blue chip, firmly ensconced in the FTSE 100, a steady, reliable source of income and capital growth. Barnaby was a celebrity among the City fraternity. Those in the financial know feted him.

  The wider world took a somewhat dimmer view of GloCo. In recent years there had been a groundswell of hostility rising against all the energy corporations. Investment banks still headed the anti-capitalists’ shit-list, but energy giants such as GloCo ran them a close second. They were icons of greed and rapaciousness, in the eyes of many. Unprincipled. Unaccountable. Crazed monolithic gods gorging on the meat and muscle of the planet. Giant assemblages of human beings who had collectively lost their humanity and their individuality, becoming no more than cells in a mindless-brute body.

  So there had been a constant background hum of carping and criticism, mainly in the left-wing newspapers and academic journals; GloCo was not well thought of by the bien pensant. There had been the occasional protest rally outside one or other of its places of business, including the corporate headquarters at GloCo Tower. It was nothing, though, that the company could not shrug off, much as an elephant might shrug off the stinging of flies.

  Until Tarquin Johnson threw that dead seagull.

  This was a catalysing moment. An inciting incident.

  What Tarquin had done was actually quite funny. It was an ironic, apposite act of vengeance against a man whose corporation had indeed, as Tarquin claimed, suffered a number of unfortunate escapes of crude oil which had resulted in large, lethal slicks. These were all accidents, of course. Tankers ran aground in foul weather. Offshore drilling platforms experienced wellhead blowouts. It happened. It couldn’t be prevented. But what people remembered most vividly about these events were the pictures of sea birds with oil-sodden feathers, wings flapping ineffectually as they struggled to free themselves from a beach that had become a black, tarry mire. The pathetic plight of a stricken guillemot or tern became indelibly etched in the public’s minds. They saw a creature that was natural, noble and free, besmirched and doomed by the clumsy, ruinous hand of man. GloCo was to blame. Tarquin’s seagull had been a neat, pithy way of making that point.

  THE SEAGULL MOVEMENT

  AND SO THE Seagull Movement took shape.

  It began in low-key fashion. Overnight, somebody dumped a couple of dead sea birds on the doorstep outside the ground-floor lobby of the GloCo Tower.

  The next night, it was ten birds.

  The night after that, dozens.

  Barnaby made a call to the Commissioner of the Met, who was a friend of a friend. Out-of-hours police-car patrols in the area were doubled. A number of suspects were arrested, caught acting furtively in the vicinity of GloCo HQ. They were found, most of them, to be carrying dead seagulls in their backpacks.

  The subsequent phase saw a group of demonstrators turning up at the Tower during the daytime, dressed as seagulls. They prostrated themselves on the pavement and lay stock still, transformed into a representation of avian slaughter. TV stations had been alerted beforehand and reporters were there to capture the protest on camera. It made the lunchtime and evening news bulletins, and featured prominently in all the following morning’s papers.

  In no time at all, it was an international phenomenon. Wherever there was a GloCo subsidiary, a GloCo plant, a GloCo holding of any sort, there was a flashmob flock of activists outside it, mostly youngsters, clad in bird costumes, playing dead. They didn’t necessarily come as seagulls. Some were canaries or eagles or ostriches or swans. The rules were loose. As long as the outfit was suitably birdlike, it was allowable.

  They filmed themselves doing it. They posted clips online. They set up Facebook pages. In the space of a month the Seagull Movement went from daft stunt to worldwide meme, and an albatross around Barnaby’s neck.

  GloCo became the punchline to jokes by stand-up comedians and chat show hosts. Someone at Barnaby’s squash club yelled, “Caw, caw!” across the changing room, and elicited a ripple of chuckles. In parliament, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition described the Prime Minister’s policies “lying in tatters around him like a heap of dead seagull impersonators in front of a GloCo building,” not the wittiest quip ever made, but it still brought the House down.

  The net result of this campaign of sustained mockery was a small but significant drop in GloCo’s market value. The corporation had become a laughing-stock, but that was no laughing matter for anyone who held stock in it.

  Something had to be done to arrest the decline. If GloCo shares continued to dip, there might be a panic, a run on the company, investors scrabbling to extract their money before the slide turned into a
n unstoppable avalanche.

  Barnaby held an emergency meeting with his public relations department. His PR team were all bright young things, wedded to their BlackBerrys and iPad minis, Prada-neat, gym-honed, skilled in the arts of looking good and making others look good. They spoke in a pidgin of buzzwords like some futuristic cargo cult: “next-gen,” “turnkey,” “mission-critical,” “bleeding-edge,” “client-centric.” They advised Barnaby that GloCo should “repurpose its iconic best-of-breed status” and “develop a groundbreaking, feature-rich solution” to its current “cross-platform synergistic perfect storm” if it wanted to stave off the likelihood of a “never-before top-down paradigm shift without an available exit strategy.”

  Barnaby translated this as: the company needed to do something urgent and radical now, or else it was up shit creek without a paddle.

  “Ideas, anyone?” he asked.

  The PR people had ideas. Oh, they had ideas.

  Restructuring. Repositioning. Rebranding.

  “Change?” said Barnaby.

  “Yes,” said someone.

  “Genuine change? Or the appearance of change?”

  This was a moot point with the PR department, for whom “genuine” and “appearance” were synonyms.

  “Whatever you feel comfortable with, Mr Pollard.”

  As was so often the case with PR meetings, Barnaby found himself having to devise a strategy in spite of, rather than thanks to, the advice he was being given. He treated his PR people as a kind of Delphic oracle: they delivered vague, gnomic pronouncements which he interpreted as he saw fit, to the best of his own abilities. They helped him by raising a cloudy mirror to his thoughts, whose reflection he could then study and clarify. This was their main use to him, and the sole reason he kept them on the payroll. In every other respect they were just a gaggle of jargon-obsessed, otherwise unemployable morons.