The Binding Problem

I admit I was worried. My productivity was down and the year-on-year figures weren’t good. We had to attend a mandatory meeting, even Black Death. Black Death, in the good old—bad days—had wiped out over half the population of Europe. He had even better figures in the rest of the known world. The unknown world didn’t expect Black Death to be so fat and to waddle as he walked. Fat was associated with being wealthy, and rich enough not to eat one of your children. He wore one of those swirling cloaks that were in vogue in the Middle Ages. And a nose cone surgeons said warded off the vapours in the ether that helped transmit the disease. I envied Black Death. The Chief Executive thought he could do no wrong, that was right, but because when he had to attend any of these stupid meetings he could sleep through it for hundreds of years and wake up fresh as the day he was born. He was just waiting for another chance.

We were to go over again the basic principles of harm. A going back to the core idea, we weren’t all in it together. Much loved by our PR department, a bald guy, almost human, with a ginger beard. He was a whiz at producing acronyms such as DDM. 

Denial—it couldn’t happen to me. Distortion and blank denial anyone could have a true understanding of anything. Rene Descartes’ idea that the soul could be found in the pineal gland, for example, meant cogito ergo sum and empiricism had no validity in modern science. He wasn’t thinking straight, not because he was a dualist, but because he was a French nut with a funny-sounding name. He couldn’t be trusted. Minimalization, smoking and drinking aren’t that bad. Every reasonable person knows somebody had a granny that lived to 110 and smoked and drank every day of her life. In fact, her mother was an alcoholic and she began drinking even before she was born—it was in her blood—and she never took a day off work. Died smiling in her sleep.  

There was always some bearded professor willing to become a stakeholder and validate ICERmk. The Incidental Core Effect Ratio of Mass Killing and how it benefited mankind, directly and indirectly, and also saved the planet. We were the good-bad-guys, in an unholy war in which only he would speak the truth on behalf of the common, suffering people.

He told everybody, on multiple platforms, he was proud to be a conservative, which had its roots in conservation of the planet. Good Christian principles entombed in the stony ground of the Via Dolorosa. The House of Pontius Pilot, for example, who washed his hands of any affairs that would affect his popularity with his boss. And the house next door to Mr Pilot, The Rich Man who Refused to give Alms to the Poor. The Hebraic Fuck-You of populist politics, eat my shoe dust and die. A role model for the contemporary conservation of his own wealth and status. Epitomised by Margaret Thatcher’s ‘let the poppies grow tall’ speech in the early eighties, which was such a wow for rich Reaganites, willing to make the world in their own image, and ban poor people from being poor.

I’d received a memo asking me to report directly to the Director of Rumours regarding our new rota. She was, usually, an officious younger woman with dyed blonde hair and big tits. But if you weren’t that way inclined, she could be a six-foot four black man with tight curls and a scowling face. She was entirely unreliable, even to gender and sexual preference. The Compliance Manager, who used terms like ‘derogate’ was sure to agree with her. So it was best to get on the best side of her, whatever side that was.  

Her breeze-block office looked onto the tarred carpark, but she moved it about a lot and so you were never quite sure whose door you were chapping or whom you would find inside. At private, or public meetings, The Director of Rumours insisted you wear a hospital gown that tied at the back and with your bare bum showing, so you could be routinely shafted.   

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were, of course, quorum, exempt from such a dress code. The Director of Rumours suggested they were busy playing chess with humanity, but in the irregular morning meetings they deigned to attend, they were rather fun figures. Like middle-managers, laughing and chortling with each other over the latest catastrophe. I envied them having a room to their own, the on-call room, and thought they probably got their eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep every night.

They played snap with dirty face cards that hung in the air and the victims that matched died particularly gruesome deaths. I once stepped in to play a hand of cards for Famine. He’d nipped off to feed his horse, Pestilence (sometimes called Plague) quarter of a green crab apple, and to find out what was happening with the newest WDT, Work and Time Directive. He’d smacked me in the back of the head when he came back, because I’d missed an obvious Snap.

I didn’t mind. Juniors, like myself, all adored the Four Horsemen. They seemed safe pairs of hands to start the third world war and coming apocalypse with little help. But the Director of Rumours said they’d the moron’s moron in America on speed dial. But the American President thought, like many others, he was bigger and brasher than them. Only he could finish what he started.

In the scales of Famine, the moron’s moron didn’t weigh diddly squat. The Roman Empire too believed he would never fall, even if Rome burned. But like Corpy buses, if you waited long enough, two empires were sure to come at once. And with them, Plague galloping through the lands. All good vote winners and a warm-up for the Four Horsemen.  

The Chief Executive was surprised to see me. He’d an outside squarish head from all that thinking about cost cutting and he wore the mandatory grey pinstripe suit. His clothing was later left on the hangar for the next Chief Executive to wear.

‘You sent for me,’ I reminded him.

His office was two rooms knocked into one, with a desk the size of a duck pond and a lime-coloured leather couch to rest his head on. But the Director of Time sat ticking on the couch. A clock suspended on hinged arms hung above his head. He wore a suit of armour with the visor shut. But you could hear his wheezing, which was that of an older man. And that breath would be his last—or perhaps yours.

He didn’t sweat, we sweated on his behalf. But smelled bad as a matter of principle.

Beside him sat the Director of Compliance. Big round glasses and an owl-like and kind looking face, which made him very unpopular. He tended to dress in hospital scrubs and carried forceps in his hand to stretch any wound that needed opening.

The Director of Rumours said that the Director of Time and Director of Compliance were more than good friends. They were, in fact, the same person. The Director of Time hinted that The Director of Rumours time would come, when fact were no longer facts. But it wasn’t clear who had started that particular story. Or how it would end, which made the Chief Executive nervous.

He obviously hadn’t read the latest manual concerning DDM. Believed himself irreplaceable. Other people were a sub-species of the true race, especially common people. He’d learned at a very early age to despise their common as muck faces, with their screeching accents and lack of manners. They really didn’t know how to behave. The proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, niggers and wogs, Pakis, poofs and queers were little more than insects that should be trodden underfoot, but whom sometimes could be useful to people like him. Especially, the girls, older women were exiled to the basement offices, unseen and unheard.

He liked to have a blonde bit of stuff. And he’d a whole bank of secretaries typing away on his latest directive that he’d not fully thought through yet—or not at all—but would come back to it later. The din of their work punctuating the day and grew louder as you approached his suite of offices.

The Directors of Time and Compliance knew when later was.

The Chief Executive ummed and ahhed and looked for further clues why I was here. ‘You sent me a memo?’

‘I sent an email to the Director of Information Control.’

He blustered on. ‘Ah, that’s what I thought. You’re doing a damn good job. I just wanted to thank you, personally.’ His gaze swept around the room, and the typing in the outer offices stopped. ‘Perhaps you’ve time for a coffee?’

‘I don’t drink coffee.’ The Director of Information Control had worked, iron-fist in glove, with the Department of Complaints to produce a poster decrying the use of stimulants such as coffee and tea. Outlawing their use in the controlled world of outliers. ‘It’s bad for the immune system,’ I reminded him of official policy.

‘Ah,’ he cried, but with a smile on his face. ‘Everything’s bad for one nowadays, booze and cigarettes, food and sugar. Sex…’ he sniggered, in the way only a public-school boy could. ‘Even our water. But I’m sure with my help we can make a pretty decent job of making it far worse…Don’t you think?’

 ‘I couldn’t do your job, I admitted, and he swelled with pride, like a melanoma.

‘I couldn’t do yours,’ he replied, and would have shook my hand, only to turn away suddenly when he found out the hands sticking out of my gown were claw-like incisors.

 I scuttled away, the meeting that hadn’t been a meeting was finished. I went back to the lab that had re-created me. Waiting to find out when I’d be allowed out into the wider world.

Keeping to the dimly lit labyrinth of corridors underneath his office. People went missing. Rumours rumbled up from the vaults, never to be believed, only later to become official policy. Later there was to be a dinner party, more a small toxic gathering, to commemorate the moron moron’s re-election.