Stosorak-1 (Albion)

Everyone's favourite fashion designer, Argon Anthrax, launched his hyperbolic fashion label House of Anthrax in 2019. Brands including Dollar-Dollar and Kleidung have since hustled to collaborate with him. This Londonista dreamweaver tells Moda Magazine his fantasy day:

I'd wake up at Be'Joocay's London crib and we'd eat an ergonomically streamlined breakfast of grapefruit essence. We'd work out in the sweatbox, then take our pick from Be'Joocay's walk-in closet of designer hazmats. I'd obviously be wearing the Be'Joocay's new fragrance Joodeetee and have full hachuring, with a sequinned monobrow. Then up to the rooftop bar and helipad, where we'd board a private kopter with the full Moda team and fly to New York for a retail extravaganza with...

Skylar looked at the photograph of Argon Anthrax whose henna-brown skin was cosmetically shaded like the contours of a map. His unnaturally green eyes were bedecked with one thick, glittery eyebrow. She couldn't bear to read any more of this word salad with its newly coined phrases; a hybrid nonsense language imposed by their American overlords. She folded the travel company’s complimentary magazine, which had been her constant companion on the twenty-eight-hour journey, and slipped it into the pocket of the seat in front of her.

On leaving her Office, Skylar had selected a substantial novel from her bookcase, but it had been confiscated by the Identity Confirmation Officers at the boarding checkpoint.

“Professor Bakunina,” the uniformed bureaucrat had remarked, after examining her domestic passport, “I’m afraid this publication, er... Anna Karenina, exceeds our weight limit for hand luggage. Such an object could potentially be weaponised.” Skylar was flabbergasted, although she realised that her name and her preference for Russian literature made her an object of suspicion. “Do you mean to suggest that I might hit someone on the head with it?” The Officer had nodded, then turned and fed Tolstoy’s great work into an industrial-sized shredder.

“I don’t know why she doesn’t download it to her phone,” she heard one Officer remark, as she walked towards the boarding bay, but Skylar was extremely resistant to the extermination of printed matter. She was after all the Senior Conservation Officer, Department of Russian Literature, at the Library of the Glorious Exit.

All public institutions had been renamed in such a manner since her country had liberated itself from the Continental Oppressors. This bus station itself had once been named after a Queen of England, but now went by the ridiculous title, Terminus of the 20th Anniversary of Our Recaptured Sovereignty. Although everyone she knew still referred to it as Victoria Coach Station.

Hours later and Skylar was now almost alone on the bus. Her fellow passengers had gradually disappeared since crossing the Russo-Scottish border. As they approached the floodlit checkpoint, they had all simultaneously fished around in their midriff pouches for their passports. Those with dual-nationality bringing out two forms of ID and proof of residency permits, just in case. The Administration had promised to iron out such problems years ago, but blamed the perpetual recession for their inability to streamline the paperwork system. “Surely we could all be micro-chipped nowadays?” Skylar heard someone near the front say. “Aye, like they can afford it!” her companion had replied. “They haven’t resurfaced the A1 since I was a boy.”

It’s true, thought Skylar. It wasn’t all the checkpoint stops which had made the journey so arduous, so much as the snail-like pace at which they travelled. The bus driver had taken protracted detours to avoid particularly pothole infested stretches of motorway and had crossed from East to West coast in a zigzag fashion.

In addition to her external and internal passports, Skylar was travelling with a tattered copy of her birth certificate, Drivers Licence and her Library security pass attached to a lanyard. This was because her name frequently resulted in lengthy discussions regarding her rights of residency with immigration officials. “As it says right there”, she had repeated to the jobsworth at the border between Lancashire and West Yorkshire, jabbing her finger at the typed words, “I was born in Birmingham, England, Albion.” He had shrugged and moved along the bus to harass a less well-prepared traveller.

Although she had made this expedition to her mother’s house many times before, Skylar had not yet learned to submit to the inconveniences of the journey and let the experience wash over her. Unlike some of her fellow passengers who simply slept or watched movies on their phones, the constant stop-start process put Skylar on edge. The stress had given her a stomach ache, much exacerbated by a serving of oleaginous sausage roll and rancid sauerkraut at the Greasers Service Station in Leeds.

She rehearsed in her mind the remainder of her journey: the terminus was at Bezrukava and she would disembark there and get a taxi the outskirts of the city (once known as Inverness) where she would, due to secrecy laws and the fact that her mother’s town did not appear on any maps, walk to the Security and Immigration Control Centre at Stosorak-1.

“Why’s it called Bezrukava now?” She heard someone in the darkened coach ask their travelling companion. “Dunno. Just some Rusky word innit?” her partner had responded. Skylar knew the answer and years of teaching at universities made her desperate to elucidate the pair. However, she bit her tongue, knowing from experience that they would not find it nearly as funny or interesting as she did.

Skylar recited the lecture to an imaginary audience of captivated students: “After the global financial collapse of 2020,” she said, waving a pointer towards an illuminated map. “By which we really mean the financial collapse of the USA and her European financial territories.” She tapped the former United Kingdom with her baton. “The Russians bought up everything they could lay their hands on. They now own Pepsi, McDonalds, KFC and the Scottish oil fields, with the rest of Scotland thrown in for good measure."

“The newly Sovereign State of Albion escaped this Russian landgrab, as the Americans used some of the proceeds of this fast food bonanza to buy England and Wales and turn them into a huge missile base, atomic recycling plant and military airstrip. The shared language of American-English and the ubiquitous American culture meant that very few people in Albion actually noticed this change.”

“The Russians needed to establish their cultural and linguistic claim on their new northern territory of Scotland and so the first thing they did was rename significant towns and cities. Henceforth, the city of Inverness was known as Bezrukava. This was due to linguistic misunderstanding at the Kremlin, whose language experts thought that the word meant a sleeveless coat. The inverness was indeed an archaic item of clothing with a detachable cape, but as we know, the town of Inverness was named for its location at the mouth of the River Ness…”

Skylar missed teaching and was in full-flow, enjoying her fantasy lecture series on the origins of Russo-Scotland and the Sovereign State of Albion, but unfortunately the daydream was rudely interrupted by the sigh-fart of the coach’s air brakes and the sudden illumination of the blinding blue strip lights.

“Bezrukava!” the driver shouted “Bezrukava! All passengers alight here!”