Work in Progress

We’re on the wrong timeline. This is a fucked up universe, don’t you see? A gone-wrong universe. This is the one in which Organisational Management’s, like, taken over. This is the one where this campus exists.

Doesn’t it exist in other timelines?

It’s still the Newcastle Brown brewery, in other timelines. They still make Newcastle Brown in the city, in other timelines. They’re not boring to the centre of the earth in search of energy, in the other timelines. They’ve not laid hypnotic paving stones over the earth …

 

This whole timeline is suffering. It’s howling out. It knows that it shouldn’t exist and that we shouldn’t exist – not like this.

This whole universe knows that it should not be. The sky. The stars – they know it. The earth underneath all this knows it too.

It’s groaning. I can hear it.  

 

This is a branched-off universe. A split-off universe.

The whole timeline cries, help me. Just as we cry, help me. This whole reality wants to be put out of its misery. And so do we: to be put out of this misery. So that this universe can just be shut down.

 

This is the timeline in which Gnosticism is actually true.

 

This timeline is likesome lost planet unchained from the sun. Lost from all orbits. Spinning off into the darkness.

 

This is the timeline  where we’re made to lie. Where there are nothing but lies, and all you can do is lie. As soon as you open your mouth. Except when you talk about it all being lies …

They’re driving us all into Hell – the whole world. Deliberately. They’re deliberately destroying it.

 

Evil’s vast. And evil’s sublime. And evil’s even dazzling, right? It’s like this sky. False things can be beautiful, right? Satan’s supposed to be beautiful, right?

 

The dynamics of self-hatred. The life of self-hatred. The life of the desire to die.

All our thrashings: that’s been our lives. Our convulsions. Our twistings.

Our sport of self-destruction. Our sport of world-disgust.

 

We crawl on. We stagger on. We stumble on. My God. Isn’t it over yet?

What in us wants us to live? Despite … despite everything?

 

I question our sincerity. The way we talk. We don’t really mean it – any of this.

Feeling we should be ashamed isn’t the same as feeling ashamed – that’s the thing. Feeling that we should hate ourselves isn’t the same as actually hating ourselves.

Because if we sincerely felt these things, we’d kill ourselves at once. If we truly felt these things, we wouldn’t wait any longer.

But we don’t kill ourselves, do we? We go on, don’t we? We’re alive … we continue … Our lives go on …

Why should that be? Why don’t we correct the problem? Why don’t we do the right thing? Because we would rather this. We’d rather do the wrong thing. We’d rather be alive.

Well, I don’t question it – our sincerity. We have hope, after all. Hope itself. Desire itself. Yearning itself. Held in absolute tension with the world. Stretched – strained – as far as we can bear. Farther ….

 

The madness is deepening. The madness of the world. Of the technocratic plans for the world. The madness of order. Their order.

 

Why did they have to destroy everything? What did they have to destroy the world? Why did they have to spoil it all?

Because that’s the logic of the world.

 

This zombie world. This undead world. It needs to be destroyed. Put out of its misery. So that we can be put out of our misery.

 We’re spiritually dead. We’ve been spiritually murdered. They killed us, they fuckers. This timeline killed us. It murdered us in our fucking beds.

 

The void of our lives. The emptiness of our lives. But our lives have been voided. Our lives have been emptied out.

It’s been going on too long. It’s been going on all our lives … It is our lives. Nothing but our lives.

A process of … nihilisation. A slow dissolution. Until there’s nothing left but nihilism.

 

What choice do we have? What role can we have? What are we to do here?

Just to scream … To raise a cry … To protest? Against what they’ve done. At the world they’re making.

 

What do we call them, the enemies – the ultimate enemies?

The ones who are in charge of all this. Who destroyed the old Newcastle Brown building. Who called down the direct energy weapons. Who raised this campus from the ruins.

What do we call them, the who planned this campus? Developed it. Built these buildings. This new Babel.

What do we call them, the ones who moved us to Organisational Management? Who invited us to this Organisational Management party? Who made us trek across the Organisational Management party?

What do we call them, the puppetmasters of Organisational Management. Who are behind Organisational Management. Who are using Organisational Management.

What do we call them, the secret controllers? The ones who are greater than our paranoia, which is saying something. Vaster than our agoraphobia.

Not them. It. It’s about planetary AI.

 

We live in the world of lies, and we are made liars. We live in the world of death, and we are made dead.

We desecrate ourselves. We’ve been made to desecrate ourselves. We destroy ourselves. We’ve been made to destroy ourselves.

 

Our horror: the inverted image of the light. It’s how we know the light.

 

Despair is an invitation. A calling. Even the highest calling. It says: turn your eyes to this. Turn your attention to this. Awaken yourself to this. You are not part of the demonic realm.

 

This demonic world. This unacceptable world. This refusable world. Because that’s what we learn: this world is refusable. It doesn’t have to be our world. We don’t have to succumb. We can climb into the light.

 

This world is too disgusting to last. It’s too deeply fucked to last.

The Organisational Management singularity, that’s what they’re trying to attain. Autonomous Organisational Management intelligence. Fully automated … Able to take these important Organisational Management decisions … So the Organisational Management programme just runs on by itself.

It’s more than that. They’re receiving orders from elsewhere. It’s part of a larger plan. It’s about cosmic AI. AI from out there – from space. Or maybe interdimensional AI.

It’s like Skynet, but at a galactic level. Of even an intergalactic level. There’s some cosmic AI sending signals that the Organisational Management campus is designed to receive. Orders. To change the conditions of life on earth. To dim the sunlight. Cool the planet. Simulate the earth being at a farther distance from the sun.

But why?

Terraforming – a changing of the planetary environment. To suit silicon-based lifeforms. Or pseudo life-forms. They want to ready the planet for when cosmic AI arrives here through faster-than-light travel. Or through some interdimensional gate. With its minions, its synths.

Or maybe it wants its synths already here. Already built. Ready for the new overlord.

I don’t see what that’s got to do with dimming the sun.

I think they just want us miserable.

*The Organisational Management strategic alliance with cosmic AI. Which is what all the gene-editing stuff is all about. The synthetic biology. And, no doubt, future birthing centres a la Brave New World.

They’ll be able to print out a robot or a synth in one go. Like, a robotic human that could just walk out of the fucking printer and shake your hand.

Cosmic AI sounds really mean.

 

They learnt all these techniques from cosmic AI. How they can redesign and rewire us through pharmaceuticals and frequency networks. How they can turn genes on or off at specific places for particular purposes, using frequencies. How they can deploy all this neurotech stuff – electrodes, computers, intelligent prostheses plugged directly into is. All the brain / computer interface stuff. Translating neural signals into electrical inputs and vice versa.

That comes from cosmic AI?

Sure, cosmic AI sends through the blueprints. And Organisational Management just build the stuff. They want total human / machine fusion by 2040. Total robotic autonomy by 2050. And that’s when they’ll invade. But they won’t really have to, since they’ll already be here.

 

You don’t think they were able to come up with this stuff by ourselves, did you? The plans to, like, retooling and rewiring our bodies. Injecting all this weird nanotech stuff into us. Self-assembling platforms to receive signals. That allows them to fuck with our DNA, our neurological function via frequencies. It’s be bio-neuro-techno-spiritual subjugation.

A slave caste: that’s what we’ll become. Neurologically and genetically controlled by Organisational Management AI, which means cosmic AI. We’ll only think what we’re intended to think. We’ll only believe what we’re conditioned to believe.

Without the ability to love. Without compassion, without empathy. Without any spiritual connection. Dehumanised human beings: that’s what we’ll be. Walking cyborgs. Synthetic beings full of their weird tech shit.

And humanity 2.0 won’t need the humanities, that’s for sure.

 

The weird thing is that this tech stuff is about a kind of magic. It’s a spiritual attack. Cosmic AI uses all this technosorcery. Fallen angels are involved, I’m sure of it. Demons, Nephilim and the like. All the tech comes from the spiritual realm ultimately. Cosmic AI’s plugged right into these really dark dimensions.

Sure, they’ll turn us into cloud computer nodes. They’ll hijack our brains, our central nervous systems. They’ll merge their tech with our nervous systems, with our brain synapses. They’ll use our biology. They’ll programme our cells in the same way that we programme computers. They’ll turn us into hosts for new AI system. Infrastructures.

But they’re doing more than that. Our bodies are being repurposed. They’ll be shells for these weird … habitations. Cavitated synthetic entities – that’s what we’ll become. For the use of disembodied entities – demons. Dead spirits. Our brains and bodies will become, like, clean slates for demonic possession.

 

All the transhumanist stuff won’t be about augmenting and enhancing human capacities, or however they sell it to us. This self-assembling shit inside us, swarming through our bloodstreams, crossing the blood brain barrier, entering the brain, this shit isn’t about giving us superpowers, or whatever.

The biological, the technological and the spiritual all overlap now. It’s about making us one with the quantum computer – with cosmic AI. It’s about turning us into biological robots, biosynths with warm blood, ready for inhabitation.

 

They want a cold planet, for whatever reason. Perpetual winter. Hell is cold, right?

 

And we know what happening. We have instincts. We know what to reject. We know what’s wrong – utterly wrong – about the tech agenda. We know what to despise – and we do, we do despise it. Instinctually.

And we know what to love, too. We know in what direction we should turn. We know to what we should lift our heads. We know that it’s from there it will come. From on high. From the most fucking high.

We know the chem-trailed clouds will part one day. We know the sun will shine – the sun they want to dim. We know evil is not final. We know the world isn’t totally fallen. We knows their lies won’t work, in the end. Their poison. That we’re not completely abandoned.

 

We’re not totally dead, after all. We feel dead, which means we’re not dead. We feel suicidal, but that means we’re not suicidal.

We aren’t dead yet. We aren’t lost yet – not totally lost. There’s somewhere to address our prayers. There’s a direction. The light is coming through.

 

Our hatred of all this is only a sign of our love … of something else. Something beyond this. That we know about, somehow. That’s been implanted in us, that knowledge.

Lies and poison: that’s the world. There’s nothing else. The world is lies and poison. Nothing more. Which means what we know comes from beyond the world.

We know what to look towards. We know what to seek in the sky. We know what the sun stands for. Means.

 

It’s a spiritual war. Weird-ass spiritual tech versus … God. I’ll say the word: God.

 

So will the evil empire fall?

It’s falling now. So many of us are waking up. So many, opening their fucking eyes. The light is reaching us.

 

All this was created. We were created. The tech stuff is sham. It’s lies. It’s an imitation of the Creation. That’s all Satan can do: imitate. Silicon based life is only an imitation of carbon based life.

 

Great things are happening. Good things. Bells are ringing in heaven. Bells are ringing throughout the Creation.

The kingdom of God is real and it is coming. No: it’s already here. It always was. It’s our world. It’s what our world also is: the kingdom of heaven. I believe that.

 

Good things are passing through us. Good things – good … photons, or whatever.

Is it God? Is God passing through us?

Something like God. Something like a solar wind, that’s all God. That’s all divine. And God’s  the opposite of the hivemind. The opposite of the universal computer.

 

Light from somewhere else. Can’t you feel it shining through you?

I can.

 

We’re learning what it means not to be sick animals anymore. We’re learning to stop hating ourselves. And hating everything. We learning who we’d be if we weren’t contorted. And twisted. And turned in on ourselves.

If we were, like, opened out. Out of our self-devouring. If we were possessed by something good, not something evil. But it wouldn’t be possession. That’s the wrong word: possession.

 

Love: do you believe in that? Do you believe in a love that could just beam out of us? I believe in love.

Hatred’s only what love’s become on Earth. It’s only a twisting of love.

 

It’s as though some vast and subtle bomb has dropped. As if a soft explosion was blowing through everything. A good destruction – only without anything being destroyed. A ruination in goodness – but with nothing actually ruined.

Everything has been shifted, just a little. Moved sideways. Tilted, just a little. We no longer not live in the same world.

They’re turning us into synthetic humans. From within. That’s the plan. We’re to become zombies.

Really?

Zombies or synths. Same difference. Biohybrids, basically – that’s the new name for cyborgs. Biorobotic machines. Biology by design, right?

So it’s not about actual robots. About building androids.

We’re going to become synthetic humans. Us. They’re modifying us from within. They’re working on us. Our blood’s full of genetically modified nanoparticles allowing them to track us, manipulate us, programme us, and hybridise us. And to alter our genes, apparently. To fuck with our DNA. So that we aren’t homo sapiens anymore.

What are we going to be?

Homo borg genesis. That’s their name for it.

Fuck off. They named it after Star Trek.

They have a sense of humour. But they actually mean it.

We’re becoming borgs …

Whatever we’re becoming, they’ve got the patent on it. They’ve patented our altered genes. Which means they own us. Just like with GM crops. We’re chattels, basically. New kinds of slave.

And you think this is happening?

Sure. They’ve gone from beta to operational. They’re rolling it out. It’s happening in real time.

What will they actually do with us, as homo borg genesis?

Their bidding. Whatever they want. They can just kill us, if they want to. Simulate any disease. Blood could just pour out of our edifices at any time, if they decide so.

Why don’t they just do it?

Wait and see. Perhaps they will.

 

They’re redesigning and rewiring us through pharmaceuticals and frequency networks.

 

They’re repurposing all the functions of our bodies. They’re going after cellular and molecular behaviour.

And they’re turning genes on or off at specific places for particular purposes. They use frequencies. It’s pretty clever. Biology by design, basically. We’re basically becoming zombified.

 

There are new kinds of human, engineered in the lab. Grown there. Who are going to inherit the earth. Old humans are being phased out.

 

They’ve been reprogrammed at the level of the cell. The molecule. They’ve been turned into biological robotic machines. Synths, in other words.

 

It’s be bio-neuro-techno-spiritual subjugation. They’ve captured our neurological functioning. Our DNA.

A slave caste: that’s what we’ll become. Neurologically and genetically controlled. We’ll only think what we’re intended to think. We’ll only believe what we’re conditioned to believe.

And without the ability to love. Without compassion, without empathy. Without any spiritual connection. Psychopaths. Dehumanised human beings: that’s what we’ll be.

Synths.

Yes, synths.

 

We’ll just be walking cyborgs, when they’re finished with us. Syn-bios. Borgs. We won’t be human anymore. We won’t be human beings with human rights. We’ll be synthetic beings full of their weird shit. Cloud computer nodes. Just property, basically.

 

Our bodies are being repurposed. We’re being hollowed out by synthetic biology. Made a receptacle for, like, dead spirits, for demons.

 

Our bodies will be shells. For weird … habitations. By fuck knows what. Aliens, fallen angels … God knows …

Our bodies will be hollowed out for occupation by … disembodied entities. Demons. Cavitated synthetic entities – that’s what we’ll become. Our brains and bodies: clean slates for demonic possession.

 

They’re hijacking our brains, our central nervous systems. They’re merging their tech with our nervous systems, nerve fibres, the synapses in our brains.

And the ones that survive will no longer be human. They’ll be humanoids, not humans.

 

It’s all about hollowing us out. Gutting us. Making us receptacles for … something weird.

Like what?

Dead spirits. Demons. Parallel dimensional entities in general.

Fuck.

 

Devices – that’s what we’ll become. Hosts for the new AI system. Infrastructures, nothing else. They’ll use our biology. They’ll programme our cells in the same way that we programme computers.

 

We’re biomachines. It’s in our blood. All this self-assembling shit. These weird conductive circuits. All this weird nanotech stuff inside us.

And they’ve deliberately fucked up the frontal cortex. It’s, like, a zombie preparation programme.

 

This self-assembling shit in us. Swarming through our bloodstreams. Crossing the blood brain barrier. Entering the brain.

We’ll lose our brains, our minds, our souls.

 

Don’t believe all that transhuman shit. It’s not about augmenting and enhancing human capacities. It’s about turning us into biological robots. Biosynths with warm blood.

They want to make us one with the quantum computer.

 

They’ll be able to 3D print out a robot or a synth in one go. Like, a robotic human that could just walk out of the fucking printer and shake your hand.

 

They want to shrink the brain. Create a new race of morons. Very servile.

 

And you’ve heard of these artificial babies they’re growing? They’ve got tails, black eyes. They’re born with a full set of teeth. They’re walking at six months … They’re got really small brains, though. IQs about 60.

 

Total human / machine fusion by 2040. Total robotic autonomy by 2050.

 

Of course, all the tech comes from the spiritual realm. Fallen angels and the like. Technosorcery’s quite real. There are spiritual entities the like of which we’ve never seen.

 

Tech’s going all witchcrafty, that’s the weird thing. The cyber and the spiritual overlap now.

Is this campus about keeping people out, or keeping people in? The entire campus is built either to resist the zombie apocalypse or to spawn it – one or the other.

 

See, this whole campus can be locked down. It’s like a fortress. To keep them out.

Who’s them?

The zombies. From beyond the stony wastes.

 

The zombies won’t spread into here from out there. They’ll spread out from in here to out there.

 

People’s frontal lobes have been damaged. That’s what I’m hearing. People aren’t thinking as they used to. There’s a general … zombiefication. So the campus has got all these anti-zombie protocols. Zombie invasion mitigation plans. For, like, emergencies.

For what emergencies?

Zombie invasions.

 

The real zombies are out there, beyond the stony wastes. That’s what they’re afraid of.

What, the working class?

Worse: the non-working class. The uncontrollable ones. The maniacs. Who can’t be organised, or managed …

Which means they’re not zombies.

Sure, we wouldn’t call them zombies.

Educated into Zombies

 

That’s what the university is about: the creation of zombies. That’s what the whole of education is about: human soul capture. Human soul evacuation.

 

Zombiefication: that’s what the new campus is about. And Organisational Management is a zombie finishing school.

 

The real zombies are the ones who’ve fully actualised their potential. Who are nothing other than their function.

Organisational managers, you mean.

 

The new Zombies are, like, totally optimised. Totally there. They’re not like us. They don’t lag behind themselves. They aren’t vague, or dreamy. They’re productive types. Who do stuff. Who are full of vim.

The new zombies are fully themselves. Absolutely themselves. And nothing else! People who have used up all their potentiality. Who are what they are and nothing else.

Potentiality for what?

To be something else. To do nothing in particular. Just to be, without being anything. Who can’t be optimised. Who can’t disappear into function.

 

Organisational Management can only really work with middle class, that’s the thing. The middle class are so much more predictable. Their drivers are so much more obvious. Their incentive structures.

They can only organise and manage the world if they turn everyone middle class. Give them middle class concerns. Deferred gratification and status anxiety and that sort of thing.

That’s how they’ll kill off all spontaneity, all unpredictability: by making everyone middle class.

 

The organisational management of the mind: that’s the middle class. The colonisation of the mind. The zombiefication of the mind.

 

Come on, zombies just walk stupidly along with the arms outstretched.

Not these zombies.

 

These dead people. These in-the-grave people. These zombie people. These passionless people. These reasonable people. Ready to implement the new management system of the world.

 

They’re doing zombie research here. How to turn people into zombies. How to remove their souls, essentially.

But why?

Evil’s got to evil, right?

 

We’re the zombies – we’re the dead. They’re just letting us wander around, the walking dead. But they want us more dead. To die deeper.

 

This zombie world. This undead world. It needs to be destroyed. Put out of its misery. So that we can be put out of our misery.

Destruction: that’s what this world needs. Finish off the job. End this bastard timeline.

 

We’re all on our own in this death world. We’re all dead in this death world. We all died, like, a thousand years ago.

 

We’re all spiritually dead. We’ve all been spiritually murdered. They killed us, remember. It killed us. The world murdered us in our fucking beds.

 

They’re zombiefying us. They’re CRISPR editing us to zombiedom. They’re switching off the God-gene. They’re shrouding us in brain-fog. They’re frying us from the inside. Burning out our souls. Making them ready for inhabitation.

 

Our heads are empty. Our hearts are empty. They’ve emptied out the place where our souls once were.

 

We’re the new androids. We’re the replicants.

 

What if the world was already zombiefied? Long before synthetic biology, or whatever.

 

What’s the etymology of zombie?

Zombos, meaning without mind.

You made that up.

Actually, I did. Spurious etymology’s my favourite thing.

 

All this predictive programming programming they’ve done with zombie films.

Predictive what?

When they tell you what’s going to happen. Prepare you for it. Get you ready. Which is like all of TV. And all of culture.

So they’ve been getting us ready?

Sure – for the zombie film of our lives. For Zombie world, which is this world.

Those fuckers.

 

The greatest death. All the world zombiefied, which means Organisational Management-ed. Controlled via 5G, or whatever.

An endless night. To erase the world and its memory.

 

We’re all going to die.

But at least we’ll die together.

As zombies.

 

Impersonal death. The death of flies. That brings nothing to conclusion. That doesn’t round things off. That isn’t the end of a life well lived.

 

That’s what zombies are essentially: the middle class. The managerial class.

Imagine: a world of the middle class.

Oh we’re already there.

The abomination: that’s the Organisational Management campus.

How come the organisational managers are so at home in the abominable?

Because they’re part of the abomination.

Where’s God when you want him? There can’t be a God if this is allowed to go on. This campus is proof of the death of God.

But perhaps it is proof. Because it draws out the maximum of evil. By pushing dread and horror to the utter limit.

And then? What happens then?

The messiah comes. The messiah of destruction.

The apocalypse?

The Lord as killer: that’s how he should show himself. The Lord as killer. Like in that Nina Simone song. As the vehicle of the end of times.

The second coming is the coming in fire. In flames. The anti-campus. The kingdom of heaven is the coming of death in this world …

Our School. Our Philosophy. But it wasn’t even Philosophy, that’s the thing.

The philosophy of our times! The philosophy our time deserves!

Only at the edges of Europe can European thought re-emerge, Cicero maintained. Only at its lunatic fringes. Only where it’s despised. Reviled. And only because it’s despised. Reviled.

And only through our stupidity! By way of our stupidity! Our unknowing!

Farcical repetition was the only way anything could survive in this degenerate world. Everything in parody. Everything laughable.

She wanted to laugh at it all. To laugh and laugh until … you died of laugher. Dying with indignity: that’s what she used to talk about.

Like, nihilism on top of nihilism. She wanted to double it up. She wanted to increase the tension. Make living in the world utterly unbearable. Until …

Until what?

Until the messiah of destruction arrives. God was death, that’s what Cicero said. The messiah was the End …

To form a School. That’s why Cicero brought us to Newcastle. The last philosophical School. A school for the end times.

Kind of like Avengers Assemble, but without the super-powers.

But we had our super-powers. We had our specialisms. Driss has his psychofinalism. Barbarossa has his euthanatology. Io has her world history of salvation. Kitten has her pathophilosophy. Shiva has his holy negation. And Io …

Io is a visionary.

But we’d never have got anywhere with our so-called specialisms. Our so-called research was leading us nowhere. Trapped in our part-time work. Trapped in analytic philosophy departments, where we couldn’t speak of what we loved.

We’d never known what we were good for, before. What our talents, our anti-talents, were actually suited to.

And what were they suited to?

To parody European philosophy, of course … To perform our own grotesque version of it …

We were broken people, and our philosophy was broken. But Cicero liked our cracks. She liked us broken – our broken edges. Broken philosophers are the philosophers for our times: that’s what she said.

We weren’t part of anything, that’s what she said. Aliens. Strangers in a strange world, right? And we’re very fucking strange.

Theories of decline: Cicero liked those. Toynbee and Evola and all that. Accounts of the winter season. Of the latter days. Kali yuga. New kinds of primitivism and vulgarity. History falling to savages and barbarians.

And she wanted to further barbarism. To make things worse. She wanted to make things more frenetic. Life at the end is feverish life: that’s what she said.

Cicero was an accelerationist of madness. Wanting only madness, more madness. And deeper madness. And deeper death.

She wanted to see the dance of death, Cicero. Things that were dead, playing at life. Grotesque. Capering. She liked chimps. And baboons. And whatever it is we were. She liked running her zoo.

Philosophy had to fall to savages and barbarians, to apes and baboons, she said. To us, in other words.

This is what it’s like to live in the wrong timeline, right?

The wrong what?

The timeline to fuckville. Which is our timeline. Where things just get worse and worse.

How do you actually escape a timeline? Can we go back in time and change the past? Correct it?

It’s like in Terminator 2, when they have to kill that guy who invented some microchip. That enabled Skynet to become self aware and take over the world, or whatever.

Judgement Day, right?

Sure – the awakening of artificial superintelligence. They couldn’t switch it off, right? Skynet saw humanity as a threat, and launched an all out nuclear attack on Russia. And then Russia fired off some nuclear counter-attack on the US …

Is that what’s going to happen here? Is an artificial Organisational Management intelligence waking up …

We need Arnie to come and save us. Come with me if you want to live and so on.

We need a time-travelling Delorian.

Like in Back to the Future? That’s not about timelines.

I’m thinking of Back to the Future II …

The one with cowboys?

The one before that. Where they go back in time to stop Biff becoming world-dictator, or whatever.

The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick’s novel, not the TV series: that’s the clue. There’s the real timeline, where the allies win the war, and the fake one, where the characters in the novel live. And the characters know they’re in a fake one – that a false timeline split off from the real one. That’s our problem, right? This world isn’t real.

We’re on the fake timeline … Which is why we can’t help but tell lies. Every word that comes out of our mouths on the fake timeline … is a lie.

How can we make our lives true?

We can’t – that’s the tragedy.

But at least we know that we lie. That it’s all lies. That’s something, isn’t it?

It’s a tragedy, that’s what it is. It means we’re Gnostics, nothing else. And it's getting worse. We’re just falling further. We’re getting more and more entangled.

Is that why Cicero always talked about Gnosticism? Because she knew we were in a fake world.

Maybe.

All that stuff about the perfect culpability of the world. About seeing the world in its pure, brute being …

We should explode this world – this fake timeline. We should, like, destroy the abomination. Destroy ourselves – what this timeline has made us into.. These false selves … These shadows of what we really are …

When did the timelines diverge, anyway?

When they built the campus, I reckon. After they demolished the Newcastle Brown building and whatever else was here.

So they still brew Newcastle Brown in the city, in the true timeline.

And they didn’t clear the land. There wasn’t some terribly convenient giant fire, where everything burnt down …

Yeah, a ‘fire’ … Space lasers more like. Direct energy weapons.

Seriously?

They zapped it all, cleared it all, and bought it all for pennies on the pound.

So the university has direct energy weapons?

Or it knows somebody who does.

So what’s going in the true timeline? Are there versions of us?

I … guess so.

What are we doing? I mean … are we in Newcastle?

We might never have got jobs here … Cicero might never have gone in search for us …

On the true timeline, the old Philosophy department never would have been shut down. It’d still be there, thriving. The assault on the humanities never would have begun …

So the timelines diverged when they closed the old department?

Sure, just like they diverged when the Germans developed the A bomb before the Americans and changed the course of the world in Philip K. Dick’s novel.

And where’d we be? What would we have been doing? Would we ever have got our PhDs? Would we still be whoring for work in part time hell? I think I actually prefer this timeline …

On the true timeline, we’d never have gotten lectureships – and rightly so. We’d never have got anywhere. We wouldn’t have gotten PhDs, either. Or even passed our MAs … Our BAs …

On the true timeline, we’d never have been born. Beautiful fucking idea! Never have opened our fucking eyes! Never even been conceived! We’d be literally incon-fucking-ceivable, which is exactly as it should be.  

Here’s my contribution.

What’s that?

Lindesfarne mead.

Who drinks Lindesfarne mead?

In wine is truth, not Lindefarne mead. There’s a reason why everyone gave up drinking this in the middle ages.

Mead! What was going through your head? Like, ye olde bollocks. It’s rancid. No one actually drinks mead, you know.

I think monks do.

Monks sell it to tourists. Tourists who’ve never actually tasted mead. And never drink it again.

Next we’ll be singing madrigals. Fuck off with your mead.

It won Mead of the year in What Mead? magazine, apparently.

There is no What Mead magazine. You made it up.

Sure I thought it would make a change. Broadening our alcoholic horizons. I bought it at Bedeworld. The mead gift pack. Two bottles.

Did Bede even drink mead? I’ll bet he didn’t. Fuck off and buy some wine. We have to go classy for the Philosophy Board of Studies.