​Chapter 5: Sea of Green
📞Hello? Are you receiving me? Over? Or whatever? I can’t hear you. Maybe I should call back? I can’t fathom this new fucking ap, these crap emojis. What the fuck does a circus clown in an ice-cream cone hat mean? Can you hear me? Shit! No point asking that if I can’t hear your reply: dumb, dumb, dumb! I hope you’re not already… I need to… Leave a message? The Web is going ape-shit. Are you disconnected? Fuck. I’ve just got to hope you pick this up, kid. I’ve just this moment listened to Cousin Charlie - about the Tsunami. Did you hear him? You must have heard him. Everybody heard him. Not sure I believe the son-of-a-bitch, though. I’ve never trusted him, reckon he had something to do with Marjorie’s passing. And that wife of his!
       Damn, listen to me. The thing is, if we’re all about to check out like it seems we are, there’s stuff I need to tell you, things I have to share, should have shared way back when. I love you, you know that, right? I don’t say it a lot, I know. And I haven’t hugged you properly in a long time. Actually, the first thing I should tell you is that your mom is a capital A Asshole!
       I’m sorry, kid, so sorry.
       Thing is, though, if you can hear me or you pick this up later, if you survive – please god, whatever the fuck god is – I want you to know about… About your father. I’ve held out on you, kid, and I’m sorry for that too. Thing is your dad wasn’t just a hick with a dick: I know I kinda told him to you like that. But he wasn’t like that. That’s not how it was between us. Not just a one-night stand. Well, actually, yes, exactly that: a one night.
       But there was more than that one night between us.
       I told you he was a farmer in that backwater place, harvesting the last crops as all plant life – all life but human life – was in its death throes. Actually, he’d hate to be called a farmer. They had a way of doing things, living with and off the land that was something else than agriculture. Not that I knew shit about either, and I know you won’t be able to appreciate the difference either. Not your fault. Everything has been so fucked up for so long
       So, I told you our army was there to keep the peace in a divided region, right. Well, the real story was just the opposite. Your father and his community, they were battling to restore life to nature. And they were winning: tending plants for food, nurturing bees and insects, growing fruit bushes… Once, when I was with him, a butterfly landed on my neck. Another time I ate a real blackberry that he picked from a straggly bush covered in barbs. It was so sweet and juicy and fragrant, you wouldn’t believe. Amazing.
       Totally amazing.
       And we incinerated it, every last herb, flower and vegetable, every frail butterfly, ant and bee. That was our job, that’s why we were sent there. The only conflict in the region was between the corporations and these environmentalist freaks who were bringing Earth back to life: life back to the Earth. We had U.N. on our blue helmets but it was the corporations calling the shots even back then. The U.N. was just another brand they’d acquired along with its data. Of course, for a while we pretended to be protecting this ‘noble experiment’, but that was just while the tame and lame so-called scientists gathered all the data.
       It was during that time I got to know your father. We became friends. Not lovers, just friends. We’d kid around you know, have a beer; yeah, flirt a little, I guess. He wasn’t my type, though. Back then, I liked my men city smart and ripped: metrosexuals, depilated even. Your father, he was a bear of a man, totally rural, though not in a hick way. He was smart, just tuned different. It was like he really loved the earth and the plants and the bugs, you now. He was always trying to get me to taste things, weeds he picked from these meadows they were nurturing. You know what a meadow is, right? Like a car-park only covered in grasses and wild flowers, cornflowers and… Shit, you’ll have to check out all that stuff on the Web.
       If the Web survives.
       If you do.
       Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that.
       Anyway, I felt your father differently, more like a brother. I never had a brother, so I’m guessing here. I never had a friend like your father either. He moved me in some weird way, truth be told. I had no idea what was to come. Us common grunts weren’t in the picture, we just followed orders, day by day. That was why I’d joined up, so someone else would sort out my life, give me something to do other than think about shit that would bring me way down.
       When the order came to round up the community, they told us it was a vaccination programme, that the people were prone to infections we’d brought in with us. Like some ancient history repeating itself, you know. To prevent an epidemic, vaccination had to be quick and it had to be everyone, no dissenters. So, no time for long-winded explanations, it had to be a military operation. Of course some people, your father included…
       Your father…
       He was called Alun, Alun Ap Gwyrdd. I couldn’t actually bear to name you after him. So the hospital story is true. But what I didn’t say is that it was that sign, Allan Exit, which finished me. I collapsed, wept, vomited… I couldn’t find the strength or reason to stand up, couldn’t go on… I loved him, I guess. Not just him, not just the man, all of him: the people of that community, the land they lived on, the weeds they ate, the bugs that bit… All of it was in him and he was in it all. It wasn’t just a man I lost.
       Shit, how long have we got?
       Web’s still up but sites are tumbling fast, and the rest is skewed to fuck and gone: what the hell is a virtual autonomous zone?
        No sign of you.
       Where was I?
       I need a drink… Hold on, kid.
       Iechyd da: to your very good health!
       Seriously.
       The community knew something was up, they weren’t stupid. Alun had certainly twigged. So, they fought back. They’d prepared, made plans, stock-piled resources. They knew the ground, so they did alright at first: hid out, sabotaged several vehicles, ambushed some patrols, took a few hostages. But they were fundamentally non-violent, couldn’t bring themselves to intentionally hurt a fly. That’s a sort of bug, you know that right? Anyhow, we razed their fields, bulldozed down their trees, sprayed stuff from the air to kill all the bugs: fumigated, irradiated, poisoned the water, set the land itself ablaze with napalm. They came out then, all of them desperately trying to save something, anything. Fat chance. We rounded them up easy as you like. Had to tranq a good few, though. They were hysterical – especially the men – feral, screaming, mad as all hell.
       But not Alun.
       When I found him – somehow I just knew where to look – he was kneeling quietly, not even crying. He was cradling something charred in his hands, a plant maybe. It was ash, only held together by luck or faith or the extension of his will. Fuck, what do I know? And he looked up at me and asked, just with his eyes: Why? And I had no answer. Nothing to say. What could I say? What the fuck did I know? They doped us up, you know, put drugs in our food. They didn’t tell us that, of course, but we all knew. It dulled down empathy, made us less emotional. We were propagandized too: nothing anyone of us did would make a blind bit of difference to anything in the future; but what we did all together, for the corporations, that would make the world a better place.
       Bullshit.
       The corporations part, anyhow.
       I didn’t arrest Alun. I sat down next to him, cradled him. He’d got through to me: it had all got through to me. That’s where you were conceived, in the black ashes of a meadow, still warm; that awful acrid smell, smouldering. I buried my face in his neck, breathed him in, his scent. I can still smell him.           I’ve told you that: I know you hate hearing it. But maybe now…
       I didn’t arrest Alun.
       Afterwards, I did what he wanted.
       Don’t make me say it: I can’t say it.
       He couldn’t have lived on after that… That slaughter, that wanton extinction. And I couldn’t let him be processed, turned: twisted, wrung out. That’s what they did to most of the community. Brainwashed them, then paid them off, generous compensation. Then, they connected them, set them up in apartments in the city where they could consume. Those that couldn’t be turned were burned: just a little electrical impulse decided and delivered by an algorithm and the arteries in their brain exploded. We incinerated those bodies.
       The grunts called that duty taking a smoke break. 
       I found out later that most of those they set up as good little consumers didn’t make it: they drank themselves to death, ODed, starved, went bat-shit crazy… I heard stories of people clawing out their own eyes. One woman spent everything they gave her on pillows and smothered her whole family. Then, she ate the stuffing from the pillows until she choked to death. I couldn’t have let Alun go through that. He was too strong, too caring. I loved your father, all of them, all that they were: that place; all that they did and especially what they were trying to do.
       The last place on Earth that was really Earth.
       At this moment, when their so-called ‘the good life’ is finally about to pound and drown us all to hell and gone, you must know that you should be so proud of him. It was another reason I kept quiet about Alun, in case they twigged who you really were, what’s in your DNA. They’d fear that, destroy you. God-fuck, I hope this get through to you before…
       You know, I’m so glad it’s finally over. It’s been a joyless fucking hell of a life since.   Apart from you, Allan; apart from you, my sweetheart.
       Don’t hate me, kid, just please don’t hate me ☎
 
Like many in U-City, Naughty Morty faced the prospect of a literal existentialist crisis by losing himself in a cacophony of chatter. One multi-platform forum networked vociferously around notions of a hoax, a practical joke, a media stunt, Cousin Charlie just losing his shit, a hack or a bug in the system. Another shadowy but burgeoning online community focussed on uniting any survivors in a force – “a pod” - to resist the reconstruction of U-City, it politics and its economy. Already that community had split into three factions. Constantly dropping out and buffering, the Ubiquitous Web was a frantic buzz of denial, conspiracy theories and, most of all, everyone posting a final selfie, a misspelt farewell message or the brand new Very Sad Face in Deep Doo-doo emoji that was trending all over. Billions of e-pistols flew back and fore as almost everyone sought recognition, reassurance or affirmation. Crypto currencies were frantically traded while data trading flat-lined. Credit ratings crashed as online consumer sales soared off the scale. Retailers across U-City ran out of collectable designer training shoes. An archival picture of a cartoon rabbit went viral, smashing all previous records.
       Some people who had a stash took all their drugs at once and tuned out that way. Millions blew their minds, millions more ODed and died, throwing themselves out of high-rise windows, choking on their own vomit or simply smothering to death as their muscles seized and their breathing stopped. People gutsily attempted to eat and drink themselves to death. Another demographic parked themselves resolutely in virtual reality, shooting-up hordes of zombies instead of opioids, playing sports as their favourite ripped avatar, communing with mythical beasts, having sex with multiple perfect partners or, indeed, mythical beasts. Dragon banging was hugely popular. As Cousin Charlie had forecast, online places of worship were full and their soul counting software couldn’t keep pace with the numbers of converts. Academics issued calls for papers on the ‘apocalyptic turn’: Can Marxism adapt? Whither mindfulness? The psychogeography of drowning…
       The Mortimers found Allan Exit curled in the foetal position on their winding sheet, her bare body sheened with water from the warm rain that fell a little more gently now. Mad Morty was completely out of it, his other senses overwhelmed by an acute awareness of the seething, orgiastic ecstasy of the sea. Dumbfounded, he had followed his babbling son into the dunes no longer really in search of anyone or anything but merely because he could not muster the volition to decide for himself.
       “Can I marry her now, Papa?” Naughty Morty asked agog, fondling his bulging crotch and drooling.
       Taking his father’s silence as assent Naught Morty hopped into the depression where Allan Exit lay. Landing with his blades astride her body he leered down at the inert funeral director: his nemesis, his squeeze. She was so, so… Ripe. Clarke Gable moustache twitching madly, Naughty Morty took off his white Stetson hat and cast it away like a Frisbee.
       “Yeehaw!
       Mad Morty neither moved nor said a word, transfixed by, at once, a vivid sense of the most incredible power and his own absolute impotence.
       “Will you give me away, Papa?”
       Something in the question got through to the befuddled ancient undertaker. He started and, momentarily, focussed on the scene in front of him.
       “Willingly.”
       Fingers made clumsy by his ragged excitement, Naughty Morty began to unbuckle his gun belt. As he did so a trail of drool detached itself from his mouth and fell onto Allan Exit’s upper arm. Something repugnant in Naughty Morty’s gob must have made it distinguishable from the warm rain because Alan Exit shivered, opened her eyes, looked up and grimaced, her face contorting in absolute disgust. When she turned over onto her back, revealing her sex, Naughty Morty’s own eyes bulged and almost literally came out on cartoon stalks as his jaw dropped to his chest.
       “Salope!”
       Allan Exit kicked him in the groin so hard it felt as if she’d broken her foot.
       Naughty Morty groaned, folded in on himself and doubled up.
       Sitting up, Allan Exit punched him right on the nose.
       Naughty Morty fell backwards into the puddle in the middle of the depression, spouting blood like geyser.
       Though her hand and foot both throbbed, Allan Exit leapt to her feet and prepared to follow up on the blows she’d delivered. Bursting with a primal savagery she had never before felt, she snarled and made to fall on Naughty with furious anger, her teeth bared.
       “If you touch him again,” Mad Morty said flatly, “I will be honour bound to kill you.”
       “I fucking hate him!” Allan Exit roared.
       “Me too,” Mad Morty admitted with no trace of compunction, “but he’s kin.”
       “He’s vile and pathetic!”
       “He’s all I’ve got.”
       Allan Exit looked from the hovering old man pointing his blunderbusses at her to the bloody, whimpering mess at her feet. In a spasm, some of the fierce tension jerked itself free or her body.
       “That’s terrible,” she said.
       “I know,” Mad Morty sighed ruefully, “but at this monumental moment in time family must be even more important, mustn’t it?”
       “What monumental moment is that?”
       Mad Morty paused, his face a sudden profusion of tics as he sought to control his bodily sense of impending doom and rapturous release. Raging inside him too was the panic of every legitimised U-City resident, and then some.
       “You’re disconnected,” he said in shocked whisper.
       “I am?” Allan Exit wondered and then realised wonderingly, appraising her own naked body as if her deficiency could be located there, “I am!”
       “You bitch!” Naught Morty shrilled.
       Springing to his feet in an adrenalin and hate-fuelled bound, he drew one of his colts and brought swinging it down on Allan Exit, catching her on the side of the head and knocking her back to the ground. From a sheath inside his frock coat Naughty Morty drew a wicked looking Bowie knife.
       “I wall carve off slut face, gut you and cut out your fucking womb!”
       “Leave her be!” Mad Morty commanded, twitching and ticking but, with an enormous effort, managing to maintain control of himself. He aimed his weapons at his son. “In our final…” he checked online. “Minutes. In our final minutes all we have left is to be professional, to be undertakers.”
       “Papa, please!?” Naughty Morty screeched, his eyes filling with frustrated tears as he turned to face his father.
       “No,” Mad Morty said with grim finality.
       With the Mortimers distracting each other, Allan Exit took the opportunity to scramble across the sand to retrieve her white shirt which, though sodden, remained sufficiently opaque and was long enough for her to reclaim some of her dignity, at least psychologically. Though the side of her head was sore and her exploring fingers came away bloody, she couldn’t resist pursuing this unexpected opportunity.
       “You’re a very naughty boy, Naughty,” she mocked, wagging an admonishing finger. “You listen to your Papa now.”
       “Professional undertakers,” Mad Morty reiterated.
       “Quite,” Allan Exit said, staring Naughty Morty down.
       “We must mind our business,” Mad Morty said.
       Naughty Morty pouted. Sulkily, he holstered his Colt and sheathed his Bowie knife.
       “How are the family jewels, Naughty?”
       Naughty Morty fumed, biting his lip, refusing to look at Allan Exit and denying himself the comfort of massaging his throbbing, silicon-inflated testicles. A suppurating sticky sensation made him fearful that one prized orb might actually have burst.
       The rain had all but stopped falling and the mist began to rise and clear.
       “Our concern,” Mad Morty continued pompously, “is with the dead and not with…”
       “Oh!” Naughty Morty and his father exclaimed in unison, both their mouths dropping open before closing and turning up at the corners.
       “What?” Allan Exit asked.
       “Yes!” Naughty Morty pronounced, wiping blood from his nose on his sleeve, the smile slithering across his face like the memory of a deadly snake.
       “Indeed,” Mad Morty said, pursing his lips and nodding sagely.
       “What?”
       Both Mortimers turned their full malign attention on Allan Exit.
       “What?” she asked a third time, looking nervously from one to the other, horribly disconcerted. “What the hell is it?”
       “Our sincere condolences,” Mad Morty said.
       “You just passed away,” Naughty Morty said, licking his lips.
       Allan Exit was aghast. In her newly cleared mind’s eye she slipped screaming from a giant frying pan into a blazing inferno.
       “Fuck,” she breathed.
       “Afterwards,” Naughty Morty leered, “I promise.” Once more he drew his Colt, aiming right between Allan Exit’s wide red eyes, not wanting her body to be blemished in any way when he came to lay it, and then lay it out.
       “Papa?” he checked respectfully.
       “The paperwork isn’t quite in order,” Mad Morty tutted, reviewing the files, “not what I would expect from one of our own, Director Exit. But in the circumstances, I don’t think there would be time for any eulogy and who will care that you didn’t appoint an executor?”
       “Look,” Allan Exit said, giving Naughty Morty a sickly grin but urgently addressing herself the pater familias, “I don’t fully comprehend the circumstances are, but I do know you’re obliged to wait while I make my will.”
       “No point in a will, given the impending Armageddon,” Mad Morty said, waving a dismissive hand. Almost overcome by the briny stench of dimethyl sulphide as a long dead ocean host seemed to recall life and so death and decay, the lineal funeral director managed to keep his act together and asked: “Any last words?”
       “Yes,” Allan Exit said, managing to keep the quaver from her voice, though her legs turned to jelly and threatened to let her down. “You’re a monstrous old turd and your son is a perverted sack of pus!”
       Trembling in anticipation, Naughty Morty’s finger tightened on the trigger.
       “Now Papa?”
       And then someone blew his gun hand clean off.
       “Ow,” Naughty Morty said stupidly, staring at his sudden deficit.
       “Tis but a scratch,” Riga said.
       “You cunt!” Naughty Morty screamed.
       “Well, thank you,” Riga said curtseying with a smile, “what a nice thing to say.”
       Quick as lightening despite the agony flooding in on his consciousness, Naughty Morty drew his other Colt.
       But Riga fired first.
       “Look,” she said, “no hands.”
       Naughty Morty sank to his knees, looking stupidly from one wrist to the other as both stumps began to bleed profusely, spurting into the plastic sand.
       “Bad bloody day at the office?” Riga sked unsympathetically.
       “You’re obstructing our business,” Mad Morty announced coolly, aiming his blunderbusses at Riga and hitting the tracker buttons for the second time that day.
       “Whoops!” Capten Cyboli said, grabbing the side of Mad Morty’s hover scooter and tipping him out of it to land with his preposterously well-padded posterior sticking ridiculously up in the air.
       “Shakin’ that ass!” Riga applauded, beaming.
       And with that she blew a large hole in the power unit of the scooter, which sank to the ground with an almost animate sigh.
       “We’d better get moving,” Capten Cyboli said, “in the circumstances.”
       “Hold your arses!” Allan Exit said, raising both palms.
       “I’m pretty sure it’s horses,” Capten Cyboli frowned.
       “Everyone is talking circumstances: what goddamned circumstances?”
       “You don’t know?” Riga asked, shocked.
       “I’m disconnected,” Allan Exit confided, unsure whether the admission made her feel proud or ashamed, free or enisled and fearfully lonely.
       “Shit!” Riga said, taken aback. Stirring herself, she hurried over to her boss and proffered her wrist device. “Here, catch up. But make it quick.”
       “Thanks.” Allan Exit logged in biometrically.
       “I love your new look by the way,” Riga said.    
       “Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Allan Exit said, taking in the pandemonium on the Ubiquitous Web and its cause. Then she checked to see that, yes it was true, she was dead. So, she ran an instant health check on herself, using a free app.
       “Oh my, oh my… Oh my god.”
       “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” Riga confirmed.
       “Worse than that,” Allan Exit said, “I have a minor head wound, I’m dehydrated and my blood pressure is slightly elevated.”
       “Bummer.”
       “Also I’ve just conceived.”
       “Conceived what?” Riga asked.
       “Only, we already have a plan,” Capten Cyboli chipped in.
       “I’m pregnant,” Allan Exit managed.
       Riga turned and blew Naughty Morty’s blubbering head clean off.
       “Not him,” Allan Exit said, raising her eyebrows.
       “My bad,” Riga apologised to Naughty Morty’s devastated corpse.
       “Mister Green,” Allan Exit supplied as realisation dawned.
       “Yeah, where is he at?” Riga asked, at the same time offering Allan Exit a swig of water from her canteen.
       “Everywhere and nowhere,” Capten Cyboli said, making an expansive gesture with both arms, “remember, my poppet? Now, we really must get moving.”
       “On your feet, Momma,” Riga said, helping Allan Exit up, ‘let’s get you out of here.”
       When she was standing up and sure her legs wouldn’t let her down again, Allan Exit wiped her mouth and walked over to Naughty Morty’s body and gingerly removed his gun belt, securing it about her own waist. She took his Bowie knife and slipped in under the belt. Retrieving his Colts, she holstered them with a sigh of satisfaction. Then she pulled on her boots.
       “Ready,” she pronounced, donning her top hat.
       “You’re smashing the mother-to-be fashion thing already,” Riga complimented, picking up Allan Exit’s widow-maker to pair with her own.
       “What about him?” Capten Cyboli asked, indicating the prone figure of Mad Morty.
       “Leave him,” Riga said, “he’s no danger.”
       Words, she would admit later, that were the very essence of being dead wrong.
 
       “Where are we going?” Allan Exit asked, careering after her companions down, out of the dunes and back onto the beach. “Are we hurtling to embrace our doom, because there’s evidently nowhere to hide?”
       The rain had petered out entirely, though the sky still threatened.
       “The beach bar,” Riga answered. Down on the flat plastic beach she broke into an intent if laboured run and, kicking off their ludicrous beach shoes, Capten Cyboli followed suit, falling into helter-skelter step alongside their beloved.
       “Beer,” Allan Exit checked, straining to catch up with the ungainly pair, “in my condition?”
       “Submarine,” Riga panted.
       “For real?”
       “Nuclear,” Capten Cyboli supplied.
       “We’ve no idea,” Riga said, staccato in rhythm with her breathing.
       “Whether it’ll withstand,” Capten Cyboli continued.
       “The force of the tsunami,” Riga finished.
       “But…” Capten Cyboli began their next dialogue.
       “It’s our only chance,” Allan Exit interjected, and, catching Riga’s thwarted frown: “Three can play at that game.”
       “This is deadly serious,” Capten Cyboli said sounding deadly serious and so wholly out of character in a way that commanded Allan Exit’s attention. “We need to get you in that submarine.”
       “Will life begin anew?” Allan Exit managed to pant. The effort of running on the sand was rendering her surprisingly short of breath.
       “There’s a chance,” Capten Cyboli said, “there is a chance.”
       “All the seeds and eggs…”
       “A fighting chance. When the waters recede.”
       “And me?”
       “A final chance,” Capten Cyboli panted, “for humanity…”
       “To change,” Riga concluded.
       “Into?”
       “Look!” Capten Cyboli said, sliding to a halt and pointed along the beach.
       Coming at them at breakneck speed from the direction of the Utopia Sands Motel, sending up a bow-wave of multi-coloured plastic beads, was a shiny black car.
       “I never thought I’d be pleased to see that junker,” Riga said, a grin spreading across her face.
       “Why is Smooth Eddie bringing the hearse here now?” Allan Exit wondered aloud.
       “Who cares,” Riga said. “That rust bucket will get us to the sub quicker. Then, we can get shot of it and Exasperating Eddie.” 
       No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a shot rang out and one of Riga’s legs disappeared from under her.
       “What the hell?” Allan Exit exclaimed, simultaneously drawing and levelling Naughty’s Colts.
       The hearse slid to a halt barely ten metres from them.
       “You blew my fucking leg off,” Riga said, hopping on the spot.
       “Only my pleasure,” Smooth Eddie crooned through his public address system.
       “You’ve been flirting with Stella, haven’t you?”
       “What on Earth are you doing?” Allan Exit demanded of the on-board.
       “My apologies, Mister Excite, but your death means that your lease has also expired.”
       “So? Just go back to your depot or whatever.”
       “No can do,” Smooth Eddie said, “I have instructions to undertake you.”
       “Instructions from who?”
       Smooth Eddie hesitated a moment and Allan Exit imagined cogs turning.
       “From everything,” Smooth Eddie provided eventually.
       “I don’t get it, where all moments way from oblivion, what have the algorithms got to gain from killing me?”
       It was Capten Cyboli who answered, still deadpan.
       “You’re the future,” they said, nodding at her midriff, “a part of it, anyway, a significant part. When the tsunami hits it’ll spread the seed and spores and eggs everywhere. And your babies will be the hybrids who will begin to learn how to care for the other young, to nurture and live among them.”
       “Babies,” Allan Exit gasped, “twins?”
       “A little anthropocentric,” Capten Cyboli scolded. “Imagine a tad beyond human norms. Did you ever catch those history of nature streams? Think acorns on an oak tree. Think spiders hatching. Your belly is already swelling.”
       “I feel sick,” Allan Exit said at the same time involuntarily cupping a hand under her stomach in the characteristic pose of an expectant mother. Not that expectant mothers characteristically held two Colt 45s of cartoon proportions.
       “Nausea is probably normal in your condition,” Capten Cyboli decided cheerily, recovering their deranged smile. “But who knows, no one has ever been in your condition before!”
       “Ahem,” Riga interrupted, “when you’ve quite finished the antenatal class.”
       “I’m sorry, my dove.”
       “Stork more like,” Riga said, indicating her remaining leg.
       “Eddie,” Allan Exit broached, recovering herself and pointing to the sea that lapped onto the beach, deceptively tranquil, “do you understand that in a very few minutes everything will be at the bottom of the ocean?”
       “I cannot permit you to reach that submarine.”
       “You know about the submarine?”
       “Fucker tipped off the Mortimers,” Riga deduced. “Their source.”
       “We have to go,” Capten Cyboli said, wafting a desperate hand in the direction of the looming sea.
       “Right now!” Riga added.
       “Eddie?” Allan Exit asked.          
       The pause again, the palpable whirring and grinding. Something, Allan Exit realised despite being disconnected, was battling the algorithms, struggling to block Eddie. The shades? Had they always…
       “Goodbye, Mister Excite,” Smooth Eddie concluded, interrupting her train of thought.
       “No!” Capten Cyboli yelled and threw themselves between Allan Exit and the hearse. Smooth Eddie’s bullet hit them in the upper arm, tearing the rainbow insignia from the sleeve. The clown screamed, loud and long and piercing.
       “Go for the cameras,” flashed on the screen of Riga’s wrist device. “It’s blind without them.”
       “The cameras!” She yelled.
       Cottoning on in an instant, Allan Exit began discharging both Colts in a blaze of noise and smoke.
       Riga too followed her own command. Falling forward onto the beach she hit rapid fire and let go with both widow-makers.
       “You fucking jalopy!” she yelled. “You banger” You clunking piece of crap!”
       “Some music?” Smooth Eddie suggested even as the hearse headed straight for Allan Exit.
       Running on adrenalin, the undertaker leapt over and across the gleaming bonnet, landing with a forward roll on the beach.
       Way beyond incongruous, the hearse began to blast out an ancient classic track ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ as it skidded around in a wide circle, heading back after Allan Exit.
       “It’s bullet-proof,” Riga yelled, “the camera.”
       Just as Smooth Eddie had his former leasee in his sights, however, he was halted by Capten Cyboli who moved between him and his target, standing with his palm raised like a traffic cop blowing a whistle, loud and shrill. Its core programming stopped the hearse dead in its tracks.
       “Okay, buddy,” Capten Cyboli said, allowing the whistle to drop from their mouth and dangle on its lanyard, “you know the law about playing music in a leisure area?”
       A moment. Then Smooth Eddie recited.
       “The Noise Act states that citizens may only play music in public space at levels of up to seventy decibels for any protracted period without a license. Licenses are obtainable online from the government via the Noise Corporation at a fee to be advised accordingly. All music played in public at any time must kept under the level of eighty-five decibels unless the audience is augmented with heavy metal mufflers and the performance had been duly authorised.”
       “And you were playing that old Beach Boys track how loud?”
       There was a pause. Convulsively, the windscreen of the hearse wiped itself clean, it shifted awkwardly on its suspension, the headlights blinked on and off. The hearse backed up a half a metre or so and then edged forward again. A digital struggle for control was evidently raging…
       “One hundred decibels,” Smooth Eddie mumbled as its core programming triumphed. If the hearse had feet, it would have been ashamedly digging its toes into the sand and squirming.
       “Going to have to ticket you, buddy,” Capten Cyboli said, taking a notepad and pen from the breast pocket of their Hawaiian shirt and approaching the car. Tearing the written ‘ticket’ from the pad, the clown spat on it and stuck it over Smooth Eddie’s front camera.
       “You - are - not - any - police - officer,” Smooth Eddie stuttered.
       Too late.
       “I’ve got the back one!” Riga shouted, having crawled over to the hearse and covered its rear camera with her top hat.
       “And I,” Allan Exit said, rolling under the hearse, “have the battery cable.”
       So saying, she sliced through the thick red wire with Naughty’s Bowie knife.
       “Insurance does not cover…” Smooth Eddie began but ran out of juice.
       “Rust in pieces, junker,” Riga said, though TruCoat meant that the hearse would not.
       “How are we?” Allan Exit asked, rolling out from under the hearse and standing up.
       “Flesh wound,” Riga said.
       Allan Exit helped her up and Riga teetered on her remaining leg, using one widow-maker as crutch.
       “Hit pretty bad here,” Capten Cyboli groaned, dropping to their knees and grasping their arm. “I’m pumping blood.”
       Concerned, Riga hobbled over to examine the clown’s wound. “
       “It’s a scratch,” she pronounced.
       “It’s deep!” Capten Cyboli objected.
       “Just like you,” Riga said, hauling the clown to their feet with her free hand. She scanned the ocean horizon and checked her wrist device.
       “We might still make it!”
       “Lean on me, my dove,” Capten Cyboli said.
       So Riga did and the clown collapsed.
       “I can make it under my own stream,” Riga assured Allan Exit.
       “Steam,” Allan Exit said, it’s a metaphor harping back to the early mechanical age.
       “You say steam, I say stream: one of us is taking the piss.”
       “Does it hurt, my petal?” Capten Cyboli asked, regaining their feet and dusting themselves down with a telescopic feather duster produced from a pocket of their voluminous shorts.
       “Only when you laugh.
       Under lowering skies, just a few of hundred metres up the beach, they could make out the stern and propellers of the yellow submarine.
       “Full speed ahead, Mister Boatswain” Allan Exit quoted.
       “I’ve seen that movie too,” Riga said, managing a grin.
      
Slow progress but one hundred metres further on and, according to the faltering Ubiquitous Web with almost ‘five minutes’, ‘two hours’ or ‘minus ten seconds’ to spare, it looked as if they could very soon be home and dry. But as Riga was prone to remark when examining Capten Cyboli’s features, looks can be deceptive.
 
Up in the dunes Mad Morty had shuffled on his space-hopper buttocks back to his wrecked scooter. Glancing over at his son’s headless corpse he thought that the boy looked more like his mother than ever. Grieving done, Mad Morty reached for the blunderbusses and pulled both triggers. With a satisfying double swoosh the two rocket missiles packed full of deadly flechettes launched. Mad Morty slumped against the scooter. Okay, he may have failed to undertake either of the bona fide deceased today but that was no reason why that disgusting walking-talking, funeral parlour defying corpse should get away with blowing a hole in Mad Morty’s hover Scooter. Not to mention bowing Naughty’s hands and head off.
       Well, see how she liked it.
 
       “What’s that noise?” Riga asked.
       “Sounds like the wind is getting up,” Capten Cyboli said, cocking an ear.
       “Oh no,” Riga said, giving them a horrified look, “and I can’t even run away.”
       “And if you hold your nose, you’ll fall over,” Capten Cyboli said, miming the preparation to fart.
       Thus primed they were obliged to stop in their tripod tracks because the pair of them were laughing fit to bust.
       “Er, guys,” Allan Exit said, indicating the direction they’d come from.
       Shrieking through the air about a metre above the beach, trailing exhaust gases, two missiles were coming straight for them.
       “Mad Morty,” Allan Exit hissed realisation even as she drew her colts and started shooting. Although the guns looked like six-guns, each held sixty rounds of advanced ammunition. Even after the showdown with Smooth Eddie, Allan Exit had enough bullets to take out these rockets.
       The only problem was hitting them.
       And they were coming so quickly.
       With an exasperated cry, Allan Exit walked towards the incoming missiles, discharging her Colts at their maximum rate of fire. In the exact moment that both weapons out of ammunition, a single bullet found its mark and one of the rockets exploded, harmlessly discharging its deadly payload in a chrysanthemum burst of steel. Powerless to do more, Allan Exit had to throw herself to the beach to avoid the second rocket as it streaked over her.
       “Riga!” she screamed.
       Standing on one leg, Riga too had been firing both widow-makers at the rockets to no effect until both her weapons also spluttered empty with a sickening hollow note.
       “Oh fuck buckets!”
       As she stood hopelessly awaiting her fate, Riga had a split second to wonder whether, after she had been cut into little bits, one tiny little bit, the smallest piece of her, might still be sentient?
       “Ye-Ha!”  
       Wearing a retro Major League Baseball cap, laughing manically and with a sudden glowing cigar clamped between their teeth, Capten Cyboli grabbed one of the widow-makers from Riga’s hopeless grip, took a few running steps forward and, wielding the weapon like a baseball bat, struck at the rocket even as it burst open disgorging its spreading cluster of flechettes.
       “Strike one and one!”     
       Not quite scoring a home run, the clown did make contact, knocking the rocket off course at the last possible moment. Miraculously, the torrent of razor sharp steel shot past, ringing Capten Cyboli like a halo and leaving them wholly unscathed. Meanwhile, grabbing the widow-maker from Riga had also caused her to fall sideways and the combined effect of that and the deflected flechettes spared her a full-on direct hit as most of the wicked missiles buried themselves in the beach. Some though, found their target.    
       “Geez Louise!” Riga exclaimed, horrified. And, were it possible, at that moment she would surely have paled.  
       Allan Exit scrambled across the beach, joining Capten Cyboli who already knelt at her assistant’s side.
       “It appears,” the clown said, holding one of Riga’s hands in both of their own, “that you no longer have a leg to stand on, my dove.”
       Riga chortled and made to cuff them across the head with her other hand but she addressed herself to Allan Exit, speaking firmly.
       “I’m already dead, remember? I can’t drown. I’m probably doomed to just bob around like a log until the sea decides the party’s over. It’ll be degrading but I’m used to that. And if the force of the tsunami is enough to finally end this shadow existence, bring it on! Either way, you should leave me.”
       “I won’t do that,” Allan Exit declared, anguish distorting her countenance.
       “You must,” Capten Cyboli said, “get to the sub. I’ll stay with her.”
       “But I have no idea how to pilot a nuclear sub!”
       “Me neither,” Capten Cyboli admitted, “but there’s a big green ON button inside, and then it should all be automatic: its computer will prompt you for inputs. If, that is, the hull survives the impact of the tsunami in the first place.”
       “Big IF!” Riga decided.
       “But worth a shout,” Capten Cyboli said, and then shouted: “SHOUT!”
       “You do make me laugh,” Riga said. She checked her wrist device. “Go!”
       “No!”
       “You only have three minutes,” Riga warned.
       Allan Exit sprang to her feet and ran full pelt for the sub.
       “I suppose a long goodbye would have been just silly,” Riga said, “but…”
       “How are you feeling, mi amor?” Capten Cyboli asked.
       “Pretty low,” Riga said, casting a look to where her legs used to be.
       “As a commissioned officer in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army I could marry us?”
       “Who to?” Riga asked mischievously.
       “Well,” Capten Cyboli considered, “there is this juggler I have a thing for.”
       “Balls!”
       “Look,” Capten Cyboli said quite calmly, indicating the ocean horizon with a nod of their head. A colossal wall of water was barrelling towards them, gaining height every instant, threatening to eclipse the sky.
       “Gulp,” Riga gulped. “Unless the ceremony is very short, I think maybe we should live in sin.”
       “Look!” Cyboli said again, but excited this time and pointing in the direction of the yellow submarine.
       “The silly bint is coming back!” Riga yelped.
       “With Mad Morty’s hover trolley,” Capten Cyboli beamed. “Smart woman!”
       “Help me lift her on,” Allan Exit panted as she skidded to a halt beside them.
       “We won’t make it,” Riga said as her companions heaved her onto the trolley. Even legless, she was still hefty.
       “Think positive, possum!” Capten Cyboli said, as both they and Allan Exit got behind the trolley and shoved for all they were worth, running side by side.
       “Do you ever run out of terms of endearment?” Riga asked. Looking sideways, she saw the gigantic tsunami towering high over them, the crest of the wave starting to break.
       “We’re not going to make it.”
       “Believe, cariad,” Capten Cyboli managed to pant.
       But though the clown and Allan Exit were running flat out, the yellow submarine seemed almost obstinately to refuse to get any closer. The tidal wave on the other hand…
       “Shit a brick,” Riga mouthed, gaping seawards.
       Finally, they reached the front of the restaurant. Barrelling through the seating area, they scattered plastic tables and chairs in all directions, heading for the beckoning open mouth of the hatch. Behind them the tsunami greedily gobbled up the beach.
       “Final push!” Allan Exit found the breath to yell.
       And, as she and Capten Cyboli strained every sinew to reach sanctuary, Allan Exit thought she saw a naked man surfing the shoulder of the wave high above, way over their heads.
       Citizen Green.

Chapter 4: It’s doom alone that counts
 
Walking on the plastic sand in the spiralling heat of the day was an ever increasingly slog. Allan Exit and Riga passed a massive fully automated desalination, detoxification and de-acidification plant that went silently about it business, producing the millions of gallons of drinking water that supplied much of U-City. Apart from the oppressive heat, Allan Exit was also plagued by an incessant stream of lonely hearts pop-up adds, the hearts on offer as a sure-fire cure for loneliness being those of other human beings, sometimes multiple human beings, virtual beings that she could date off the shelf or design to taste, and robot lovers who could be similarly but materially modified.
     “Doesn’t make any sense to just keep producing more and more data,” Riga puzzled after a long while of silence between them, “as an end in itself?”
     “Nothing has ever made much sense,” Allan Exit said, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. “As the gospel according to my mother ‘in her cups’ runs, in the dim distant past the corporations turned a mutually supportive global ecosystem into a wads of cash for a handful of individuals and then had to invent ways to keep those bastards alive and things for them to spend it on in a wasteland.”
     “Absurd,” Riga decided, shaking her huge head, “fucking demented.”
     “The corporations or my mother?”
     “Why is she in her cups, is that like crockery or underwear?”
     After a couple of hours of trudging and constant delete-delete-delete in her head Allan Exit, Riga reported that they were getting close to the spot from where Mister Green had made his last blog post. Up ahead of them was a beach restaurant with its tables and chairs distributed outside on the sand. It looked a likely spot. The restaurant’s seating area was demarcated by a loosely strung blue rope hung from poles driven into the beach, each at an angle not quite vertical and not quite the same as any other. That being as it may, it was the restaurant itself that was most off kilter. It was, or had been built to resemble, a huge submarine. Surely one hundred metres long, the sub lolled on the beach slightly off level, the conning tower angled inland, the hull aligned almost but not quite parallel with the tide line. Painted yellow from stem to stern, multi-coloured graffiti along the vessel’s hull proclaimed in bell-bottomed hippy font freely adorned with flowers and peace signs: Polaris Bistro. 
     Faux or no, the effect was spectacular.
     “Maybe we can get you a beer?” Riga proposed prosaically as they angled inland, away from the sea and approached the yellow submarine.
     Before Allan Exit could moisten her dry mouth sufficiently to respond, a figure burst through a large access hatch in the hull of the Polaris Bistro. Bounding across the plastic sand on carbon fibre blades, the sudden being leapt high over the string fence to one side of the entrance opening and skidded to halt, blocking their path.
     “Naught Morty,” Allan Exit scolded, “you’re as high as five kites!”
     Hands hovering over weapons styled as outsize Colt 45 single action army revolvers holstered on his hips stood Mortimer Mortimer II, a mad glint in his exophthalmic Clark Gable eyes, a white Stetson hat atop his head. Allan Exit was quite certain that his weapons were much more sophisticated and deadly than those they mimicked.
     “Drug problem,” Naughty Morty admitted, his words tripping over themselves, “I can’t get them no more – nor no less neither!”
     More sedately than his offspring, affecting a pompous dignity by taking his own not so sweet time, old man Mortimer emerged from the submarine on his hovering mobility scooter and made his way towards them. Mad Morty had one enormous cyclops eye in the middle of his face that took everything in. His other distinguishing feature - if that was the right term - was a truly enormous posterior, ‘a massively pumped rump’, as Riga phrased it. Not resounding his son’s evident fixation with the Old West, Mad Morty wore his customary funeral director’s outfit complete with imitation silk top-hat. He brought his scooter to a halt besides his leering son, pointing the tracker blunderbusses that were swivel-mounted along it armrests at Allan Exit and Riga. These weapons, Allan Exit had heard tell, fired flechettes, small steel arrows with razor sharp points and trailing filaments that flayed flesh to the bone. Hovering behind Mad Morty’s scooter was a magnetically attached embalming trolley upon which was strapped a body covered with a sheet.
     “You came too late, Mam’selle,” Mad Morty gloated, seemingly winking his eye, “we got him roped and tied.”
     “Mister Green,” Riga said.
     “Bright girl, you’ll go far, Mad Morty sneered. “Preferably, as far from us normal, living-breathing folks as inhumanly possible.”
     “Normal, you and Wired Twerp there?!”
     “Is he..?” Allan Exit asked, indicating the prone figure on the trolley.
     “Still breathing or whatever such a freak does,” Naughty Morty supplied, twitching his head in the direction of Mister Green. “Alive if not kicking.”
     “Neuromuscular blocker?” Allan Exit checked.
     “Perfectly paralysed for pre-processing, Baby Cakes,” Naughty Morty confirmed with a stomach-turning leer.
     “How did you find him?”
     “We have our sources.”
     “That body is mine,” Allan Exit pronounced, feeling the full intensity of the sun scalding the side of her face.
     “Think you can take it?” Naughty Morty said, slavering in anticipation. Drool trailed from the corner of his mouth almost to the plastic sand.
     “Mister Green is my man,” Allan Exit said firmly.
     “You’ll have to come through me and Papa.”
     “It is like Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Riga murmured appreciatively.
     “More like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” Allan Exit said, scuffing the plastic sand with the toe of her boot.
     “We’re The Good, right?”
     “Walk away,” Mad Morty advised.
     “Unless,” Naughty Morty slavered, “you want to reconsider the offer of a merger: we could come together?”
     “He’s definitely The Ugly,” Riga decided.
     “To quote a phrase that my mother is rather too fond of,” Allan Exit said, ignoring her associate and addressing Naughty Morty, “I would rather stick pins in my eyes.”
     “I, on the other hand,” Riga said, focussing all her not inconsiderable pugnaciousness on Mad Morty, “would rather stick pins in your eye, Pops.”
     Moving deliberately slowly, Mad Morty drew a starched white handkerchief from his jacket pocket, lifted his hat and proceeded to mop his brow and his jowls. The heat now was sweltering and, though the thunder storm had moved off, the clouds had gown darker, casting a midnight blue shadow over the sea. The air crackled with the tension of the stand-off.
     “I have x-ray vision,” Mad Morty said with a lewd grin as he concluded his mopping and returned the handkerchief to his pocket, “I can literally see you wetting yourselves.”
     “I wish,” Riga said ruefully.
     “Do you even feel pain?” Mad Morty asked disgustedly, aiming his scooter’s twin blunderbusses more directly at Riga and hitting the buttons to lock the tracking. “Because I’m going to cut you in half.”
     “I’ll still blow your head off,” Riga warned.
     “My son,” Mad Morty said, turning his attention to Allan Exit, “has an augmentation that gives him the fastest hands in all of U-City.”
     “So I’ve heard,” Allan Exit allowed, nodding her head and pursing her lips, “but I also heard he’s mighty slow at asking permission about where he puts those sweaty mitts.”
     “I’ll put them right around your dyke neck!” Naughty Morty blurted, his eyes bloodshot and bugging out of his head, his hands quivering with pent up energy.
     “Go ahead,” Allan Exit said, winking sideways to Riga, “make my day.”
     For a long moment, she and Naughty Morty locked eyes while Riga and Mad Morty also fixed on each other with singular attention: hands hovered, others gripped weapons, fingers tightened on triggers... Mad Morty hands looked like a pair vultures hovering, Allan Exit thought, fighting against the almost irresistible urge to blink or swallow.
     “We’re finished, bitch,” Naughty Morty spat, hands diving towards his hips in a blur of motion, “you’re about to be my Ex!”
     “Ice cream break!”
     Naughty Morty froze mid draw, finger tips brushing the handles of his oversize Colts.
     Without relaxing the coiled spring tension in their bodies, all four protagonists turned their attention to the speaker.
     With a vintage ice-cream tray slung around his neck, the unlikely cinema usher approached them from south, the sun at his back, a shimmering pink mirage.
     “What the flaming damnation?” Mad Morty stammered.
     “Intermission,” Capten Cyboli explained matter-of-factly, moving closer with each clearly enunciated word. They wore baggy check shorts and ludicrous beach shoes with an even louder Hawaiian shirt than on the previous evening. The outfit was literally topped off with an inverted waffle cone hat.
     “All the best movie gunfights in classic Westerns develop an almost unbearable tension ever so, ever so slowly,” the clown explained.
     “He’s so right,” Riga confirmed proudly, “High Noon, Once Upon A Time In The West… And particularly The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.”
     “Really you need a soundtrack,” Capten Cyboli continued, “strings can be extremely effective.”
     “Or a harmonica,” Riga added.
     “What the shit dribbling bloody fuck are you two reeking pots of horse piss talking about?” Naughty Morty spat, eyes bugging from one to the other.
     “Language, boy!” Mad Morty admonished.
     “Given the extreme heat,” Capten Cyboli continued, unruffled, “I thought that an ice cream break might serve as a physically cooling interlude while at one and the same time acting as a theatrical device for ramping up the psychological tension. Now, what is your heart’s desire, what would titillate and tantalise your taste buds? I have simulacra of the classics from across the ages: Choc ices, Cornettos – well, just one - Fabs, Feasts, Mivis…”
     The clown ice-cream vendor was very close to the action now, their made-up white face framed by a blinding halo of sunlight.
     “And Magnums,” they concluded at the same moment as the tray fell away and their hands came into view levelling a weapon styled as a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver at each of the stunned Mortimers.
     “You’re foolin’ with me?” Naughty Morty gurgled.
     “One false move and you’re both dead,” Capten Cyboli pronounced. “If you make a real move, however, I’ll only blow your grotesquely augmented genitals right off and shoot your Pappy right in his bubblelicious buttock implants. No fooling.”     “Have you got a Rocket?” Riga asked.     “Just glad to see you,” Capten Cyboli said, favouring her with an ear to ear grin and twitching their red nose. “I’m not actually selling ice-creams, Enchantress.”     “Oh…” Riga said, pouting disappointment.     “At least I didn’t dessert you” Geddit?”     Riga frowned, “No,” she admitted.     “It wasn’t one of my best,” Capten Cyboli apologised kindly. “Now, if you two marvellous young women would like to take our friend Green and head for the hills, I will take care of these varmints.”     “Could we talk this over like civilised business people?” Mad Morty asked.     “Well, let me see,” Capten Cyboli feigned consideration, “Umm civilised… Er business… Hell no! Now, would you and your sickeningly salivating son, one at a time and very, very slowly, please lay your weapons on the beach.”     Determining no other option, Mad Morty proceeded to unclip each blunderbuss in turn from his scooter. With a pained expression, he let them drop to the plastic sand.     “Pretty please with sugar on top,” Capten Cyboli encouraged Naughty Morty who made no move to concur.     “My hero,” Riga fluttered, deeply appreciating the old movie quote.     Naughty Morty looked to his father.     Mad Morty nodded curtly, then looked away.     Watched very intently by Capten Cyboli, Allan Exit and Riga, Naughty Morty drew his Colts in stop motion, using just a thumb and forefinger on each grip, and laid them lovingly down, seething with suppressed rage that contorted his face.     “If we take Mister Green, you know what will happen?” Allan Exit asked Capten Cyboli now that the immediate threat of the Mortimers had been dealt with.     “Do any of us really know for sure what is going to happen in any situation, Ms Exit?”     “I’m an undertaker.”     “And I’m a heavily armed clown who I doubt very much you were expecting to come to your rescue? Now please, without further ado, go: quick as you like. Because it looks like rain and when it rains I do my cover of It’s Raining Men, and you do not want to be around for that, believe me: even I have to wear earplugs. Hallelujah!”     “I don’t know that song,” Riga said.     “Humidity is rising, barometer’s getting low…” Capten Cyboli began in a falsetto that was as flat and off-key as could be imagined.     Not needing to be told a third time and certainly not needing to hear another note, Riga took the lead and hurried to unstrap the body from Mad Morty’s hovering trolley. She slung Mister Green, still wound in and concealed by the white sheet, over one of her broad shoulders, grunting at the unexpected weight of her burden.     “Adieu, Temptress,” Capten Cyboli said, pursing their lips in a blown kiss.     “Add you too,” Riga responded with an awkward grin.     “You two!” Allan Exit said, and to Riga: “Let’s go!”     Riga trudged away in the direction of the dunes. Allen Exit sidled after her for a while, watching their backs with her weapon readied. Then, she turned and scurried to catch up.     “Just us boys left,” Capten Cyboli said brightly. “Shall we talk sports?”     “Let’s talk about how numbered your days are,” Mad Morty said, glaring.     “All our days are numbered,” Capten Cyboli said, “our mistake has always been counting them instead of making them count.”     “Codswallop!” Mad Morty pronounced.     “Bullshit!” Naughty Morty put in, attracting a scolding look from his father.     “Let me tell you a story,” Capten Cyboli said, “to pass the time while we wait.”     “Wait for what?” Naughty Morty demanded, spraying saliva.     “Now that,” Capten Cyboli said, “would be giving away the end of the story, wouldn’t it? If you could just try to concentrate and not watch porn, play games or retreat into virtual reality while I narrate, that would be much appreciated. But I’m certain you have already reported in to the Ministry, so I’d better get on with it. If you don’t mind, please turn around and let’s take a little stroll up the beach, away from those terribly tempting weapons that Naughty Morty the spunky junkie can’t tear his goggling eyes away from.”     Mad Morty switched a switch on his scooter and magnetically unhitched the embalming trolley, leaving it to hover in space, like a ghost of a machine.     “I will destroy you very slowly with sex toys and surgical instruments,” Naughty Morty promised before turning away to walk alongside his father’s scooter, heading north. Capten Cyboli followed ten paces behind, safely out of reach, his Magnums unwaveringly aimed at the undertakers’ backs.     “When I enlisted in the Clown Army,” the clown began, “we shared a story that had been handed down for at least fifty generations. It goes like this: Time upon a once in city that ever always was and not so far away, a king ruled over a people. This king was no better or worse than any other. In other words, he was as idiotic and wise, cruel and capricious or kind and generous as it suited him at any particular moment. Whatever he decided and whatever he did was accepted because people feared him and those who served him. And they in turn also feared him and each other too. Long ago, the people had ceased to question whether there was any justice in the King’s rule. They had, indeed, all but forgotten the word and certainly had no inkling of what it might really mean. Once a year the gates of the city were flung wide open to admit the population of the land, the farmhands, slaves and peasants, miners and makers who toiled all the rest of the year to supply the city and further enrich the already filthy rich king. They came for a weeklong festival of feasting and fun, their reward because the king knew subjection worked best when applied as not only a big stick but also a juicy - if awfully small - carrot. And along with the workers came the clowns who welcomed into their ranks the insane, the crippled, the grotesque, the will-gills, the gaga, the dwarves, the lewd and the slovenly: the excluded, shunned and shamed of the world. For that one week only, it was anything goes in the city and the clowns paraded, pranked and parodied to their hearts’ content with no fear of retribution from the brutal forces of the king. This particular year, indeed, they entertained anyone and everyone with a scathing satire of the king’s popinjay behaviour, his indulgences, his viciousness, his greed… They were hysterically funny and, like everyone else, the king himself found it all terribly amusing. He laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks and a servant had to dry his eyes for him.     “Fast forward!” Naughty Morty snarled from under his Stetson. “You’re bringing me down.”     “When the festival week was over the king, in his usual pompous manner, fluttered a hand and ordered the workers summarily expelled from the city. But the citizens looked at each other and just laughed at him. The more enraged and red in the face he became, the more they laughed. The mimicked his fluttering hand and increasing high-pitched blustering. And when, consumed by his fit of rage, the king commanded his guards to kill the citizens, the guards laughed and mimicked him too! Then the workers joined in, doubling up with mirth. Everyone rolled on the ground, belly-laughing, hugging their sides and pointing their fingers at the ludicrous figure who continued to squeal his orders at them. And that was the end of the king’s rule, though he remained in the city and lived by performing his pantomime in for amused passers-by who would throw him food scraps.”     “Bo-r- ing! I’m watching a snuff movie,” Naughty Morty declared.     “A fairy story,” Mad Morty said over his shoulder, “is that all you’ve got?”     “That fairy story inspired me to serve in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army for many a decade,” Capten Cyboli said, “but do you know what’s missing from it?”     “What comes next?” Mad Morty suggested. “That with no ruler things fall apart; there comes to pass anarchy, famine, crime and destruction?”     “Perhaps mutual aid and sufficiency,” Capten Cyboli countered, “caring and sharing.”     “Even fairy stories should maintain a credible suspension of disbelief,” Mad Morty said scornfully.     “But it’s not the end of the story that lets it down,” Capten Cyboli explained. “What is missing in it is every other thing but human beings in existence, all the animals and plants and the very soil. Whatever the liberated people decided to do next, whether to embrace the rule of the demos or return to the dictator, they would decide without regard for the other beings and objects in their world. Even the clowns missed that as we constantly re-enacted our story to battle corporations and political elites, capitalism, cronyism and corruption, fanatics and fascists. And who knew, the real battle would be against algorithms, that data would define not only freedom or the lack of it, but also, as you – er - gentlemen know all too well, even life and death itself?”     “And the point of the story is?” Mad Morty demanded impatiently.     “That there is no story,” Capten Cyboli said, “because we forgot most of the actors. All our stories are of extinction and apathy, but the scenery wasn’t just scenery; the landscape was alive, and we didn’t really give a fig, totally focussed on the anti-hero, ourselves.”     “You’re a fool,” Mad Morty decided blankly, halting and turning his scooter to face the clown.     “Get you, Mister Perceptive!” Capten Cyboli mugged an extra big clown face.     And with that a huge raindrop landed under the clown’s left eye and rolled over its tattooed replica down their cheek.     “So, what is the end of the story?” Naughty Morty demanded, swivelling on his blades to stand next to and tower over his father.     “For you two, Capten Cyboli said, gripping his revolvers more deliberately, “the story ends right here, right now.”     “You’re not the type,” Mad Morty sneered as rain spattered with increasing insistence on the padded shoulders of his frock coat.     “Know a good undertaker?” Capten Cyboli asked.     “Don’t shoot me,” Naughty Morty wailed, trying to cower behind his father, “I’m too young to die!”     “Too hung to die?” Capten Cyboli questioned.     “Get on with it,” Mad Morty growled, looking away from the sobbing, slobbering spectacle of his son.     “What is it you guys say?” Capten Cyboli asked, taking a final aim “my commiserations?”     So saying, they pulled both triggers and the Mortimers closed all three of their eyes.     The twinned reports from the Magnums weren’t quite right, however, more party-popper than hand-canon. When Mad Morty cracked open his fearful eye there stood Capten Cyboli grinning madly. From the barrel of his man-stopping revolvers flew little flags with writing on:     BANG! BANG!     With a gleeful screech the clown threw the joke-shop weapons up into the air and theatrically high-tailed it back down the beach towards the Polaris Bistro. The waffle cone hat fell off their head and landed on the beach, pointing up at the sky.     “Get him!” Mad Morty barked to his son and heir.     “I’ve pooed in my pants.”     “Get after him, you little shit!”     “Not so little…”     “He’s getting away!”     “Could I borrow your handkerchief, Papa?”     “ALLEZ!”     Terrified into action, Naughty Morty straightened up and set off on his blades, gathering an impressive speed in just a few strides.     Until, that is, the blades slipped on the film of newly fallen rain on the plastic beach, dumping the deranged, debauched and now distinctly malodourous young undertaker flat on his face.     “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Mad Morty growled, powering his scooter after Capten Cyboli and deliberately bumping it off the side of his son’s head as he glided past, “never put a boy to do a man’s job!”     And the rain began to bucket down.
Some distance away, already high up in the dunes, the rain hit Allan Exit, Riga and her burden hard. They were soaked to the skin before they could even think to delve in their packs for their waterproof ponchos. The downpour was warm and it steamed as it hit the plastic sand, enveloping them and everything else in a cloud of steam. Visibility plummeted to just a couple of metres in an instant.     “This brother’s heavy,” Riga confessed setting her burden down, “I need a breather.”     “But you don’t breathe,” Allan Exit observed.     “Whatever,” Riga said, “I’m now double done in now: dead and knackered.”     Atop a dune, they were in a perfectly circular depression about half a metre deep at its centre.     “Stay quiet and close then,” Allan Exit said, “I can’t see a thing through this weather. We’ll need to keep our ears open.”     She kneeled down beside Mister Green and freed him from the winding sheet. Instinctively, she leaned over to shelter his face from the rain with her body.     “He looks distinctly green around the gills,” Riga observed.     “Could be a side effect of the neuromuscular blocker?” Allan Exit wondered doubtfully. “Hey, he’s coming round!”     Mr Green’s eyes opened and looked up at Allan Exit from under puffy eyelids. His hand came up gently touched her cheek.     “It must be you?” He said.     “I have to…” Allan Exit began sternly but her words caught in her throat.     “Don’t cry,” Mister Green said, brushing the water from her cheek.     “It’s rain,” Allan Exit said, though she wasn’t certain.     “Perfect,” Mr Green smiled beatifically, revealing perfect pearly-white teeth, “let’s dance!”     A noise like ceramic shattering pierced the curtain of rain and steam, a single crack that resounded flatly around the dunes before being wholly absorbed by the plastic.     “A shot?” Riga asked.     “Maybe thunder?” Allan Exit offered, unconvinced.     “A shot,” Riga decided, her voice brittle. “I have to go and save Capten Cyboli.”     “No!” Allan Exit.     “I can’t leave them to the Mortimers,” Riga said, “that pair are inhuman. And Cyboli’s a clown. You wait here.”     “Don’t…” Allan Exit yelled, but her associate had already disappeared into the mist.     “I like your breasts,” Mister Green said, rising to his knees to face her.     “You have to ask before you kiss,” Allan Exit told him, angry still.     “May I?”     “We may.”     They did.     And the online tumult inside Allan Exit’s brain was stilled as if she’d managed to access the very top of the range blocking app. Available only to the elite at a fantastic data cost, the app ran only for moments, usually enough for the user to experience the ultimate terrifying high of disconnection.     Their embrace deepened.     This couldn’t be happening.     She mustn’t let it.     As her disconnection stretched towards a full minute, Allan Exit’s terror turned to exhaustion followed by an overwhelming sense of peace. Then, her own thoughts flooded into the vacuum of her mind, the miscellany of ordinary madness: a rough hand she’d once held, her own smile, the imagined scent of real violets, her first client’s eulogy, a pang of insatiable hunger, the image of an earring lost under her sofa, her mother smiling down from on high, lines of a song that Smooth Eddie had once played, repeated, repeated…     That’s me in the spotlight.     Losing my religion.     Ending the kiss and standing up, Mister Green stepped out of the sheet. Nude, he began a spastic but somehow graceful dance, spinning himself around and circling, limbs jerking, his face up-cast, eyes closed, enveloped in steam, rivulets of warm rain coursing down his lush body.     Shyly, Allen Exit joined him, shedding her frock coat, her white shirt with the missing top button and then her sports bra. She took off her boots, her socks her black trousers and finally her briefs.       She stood naked in the rain, her face cast down.     “Can’t you hear it,” Mister Green asked, his eyes still closed, “the music?”     “I don’t even know you,” Allan Exit whispered daring to glance up, but as he circled close all of her nerve endings tingled and the hair on her arms and legs stood on end, a cool shock on her skin.     “Yes,” Mister Green said his eyes opening wide, the sclera of each shockingly white, the irises flashing dark lighting across their fluorescent green, “yes you do.”     Unblinking, unabashed he took her all in. She pressed her body to him, against him and with him. They circled around each other, keeping their flesh in galvanising contact, moving to the music of the rain and the beat of waves on the beach, the song of the breeze. They danced, sometimes with each other, tantalisingly together, holding tight, holding on; sometimes for each other, enticing, exciting… And sometimes alone, gyrating, lost in themselves, loving themselves.     Loving the alien.     The music she had always never heard: the unimaginable she had always never imagined, beneath the subconscious, somewhere apart and fused, at the very centre of being.     Deep.     Down.     Unattainable.     When she led him to the winding sheet and they lay down to kiss and explore each other’s bodies with their fingers and their tongues, tasting each other, snuffling each other with their noses, listening to the different pulse and breath of each other, Allan Exit felt a familiar warmth as if they’d always been together and a terrible sense of loss as if he was always already gone. He was anguished and fruitful, now a lion, now a serpent, grotesque and alluring. Her first orgasm came when he separated from her, propped himself up on his arms and just looked at her, met her gaze, dissolved. He was enormous and elfin, a mountain and a mite. After that, she came again and again, shuddering in his mouth, astride his trunk and his limbs, and when he blew on her nipples, a zephyr that caused a storm inside her, a storm she could feel rising over all the world. Then he entered and grew inside her, swelled and swelled, filling her until the pleasure was pain and the pain pleasure. A forest. Time was not. He was not. She wasn’t. They were nowhere right here. They were one. Immaterial. Solidly together and forever alone.     Allan Exit wept as he finally burst inside her and she came all around him. She tried to cling to him as he erupted into the rain: an explosion, fragmenting into a blooming cloud of myriad seeds, spores, eggs, larva, nymphs, chrysalises, spawn …     They filled the sky.
By blind luck Riga found Capten Cyboli lying in the dunes shielded from the beach by a ridge of plastic sand. Lying on their back, the clown writhed in silent agony, teeth bared and gritted, clutching their stomach with both hands.     “Are you hit?” Riga hissed low but urgent, going down on one knee next to the stricken buffoon, one concerned hand on their chest, the other gripping her gun. Her eyes and ears strained in the direction of the beach, trying to penetrate the mist and the silence. The rain continued unabated but aware.     “Heartburn,” Capten Cyboli gasped.     “What?”     “I ate a half dozen Cornettos while I was waiting for you, and then, what with the running and all…”     “Just heartburn?”     “Trapped gas, too,” Cyboli gritted.     “Gas!” Riga exclaimed contemptuously.     “It is really painful,” Capten Cyboli stressed, peeved.     “Idiot!”     “Do you perchance have any mints?”     “I heard a shot?”     “I think one of those Mortimers may have shot the other, my sweet.”     “Don’t you ‘my sweet’ me,” Riga snarled, “I was worried sick.”     “About me?”     “Of course, about you, dummy.”     “That is so moving,” Capten Cyboli said, their lip quivering, “that I may have to break wind.”     “Don’t you dare!” Riga hissed. “They’ll hear you.”     “That might be the least of your worries,” Capten Cyboli cautioned, holding their nose and freezing their facial features in a horrified death mask.     “Don’t make me laugh,” Riga gritted, fighting to control herself.     “Er, hello!” Capten Cyboli said, pointing to himself. “Clown? It’s my job to make you laugh!”     “Why are the Mortimers shooting each other?” Riga demanded, serious once more. “Why didn’t you shoot them?”     “Even after the six Cornettos, light of my life, I was not sufficiently cold blooded.”     “They’re rotten to the core,” Riga spat, “the pair of them, you’d have been doing even this blighted world a goodly favour.”     “This world can change,” Capten Cyboli said, sitting up.     “Oh sure,” Riga intoned sceptically.     “For us, for certain sure,” Capten Cyboli said, enfolding her hand in both of their own.     The world moved.     “That’s never happened before,” Riga puzzled, “at least not this early in proceedings.”     “How was it for me?” Capten Cyboli asked.
     “You fucking shot me!” Naughty Morty wailed as he crouched on the beach.     “I shot at you,” Mad Morty corrected, ignoring the sheeting rain.     “With my own gun!”     “Thank your lucky stars I didn’t use one of my blunderbusses!”     “What kind of father shoots at his son?”     “The kind that want to make a man out of a snivelling boy”     “I am not snivelling,” Naught Morty snivelled.     “Are.”     “Not!”     “Are!”     “I’m washing my trousers in the sea,” Naughty Morty pointed out primly.     “That water’s acid,” Mad Morty cautioned, “you’ll get a rash.”     “What would you care,” Naughty Morty said sulkily, standing up and wringing out his trousers.     “Put those on now,” Mad Morty said, turning his scooter away to conceal his embarrassment. “Good lord, boy, how do you carry that length of blood sausage around? It’s no wonder you can’t run properly: I’m surprised you can even walk.”     “It was a special extension deal,” Naughty Morty said querulously, “with a free knee strap.”     “And those footballs?”     “Silicon filler, two for one offer. Who would say no to that?”     “A grown-up?”     “At least I haven’t got a big fat twerking bum!”     “If you had to sit in this damnable thing all day,” Mad Morty said, tapping the hover scooter with his knuckles, “you’d appreciate the value of extra booty.”     “A cushion would have been cheaper,” Naughty Morty sniped spitefully, trying to pull on his soaking wet trousers with dignity.     “In your case, I could say the same for a hosepipe.”     “Ladies do not marry hosepipes.”     “I haven’t noticed any ladies marrying you,” Mad Morty said unkindly, “in spite of your pythonesque prosthetic.”     “It’s not prosthetic,” Naught Morty objected, “it’s all me!”     “Does it – er – work?” Mad Morty asked over his shoulder.     “I have tablets and a splint,” Naught Morty confided, “also part of the deal.”     “Good gods!”     “I just want to make you a grandfather,” Naughty Morty pouted, “before you pass away, leaving the business to me.”     “I have no intention of passing away,” Mad Morty said, “and I hate children. You were my biggest mistake. I’m leaving the business to my lodge. The Masons will know how to run it correctly.”     “Oh Papa!” Naughty Morty wailed.      “Don’t you have underpants?”     “I threw them in the sea.”     “It didn’t even register that extra little bit of filth,” Mad Morty noted, engaging his extra sense.     “I hate the sea,” Naughty Morty said “I’ve no idea why it fascinates you so. It’s dead.”     “Precisely,” Mad Morty said, edging his scooter nearer his son. “Now look, take your stupid ‘six guns’ and let’s go and get our body back.”     “I want to kill that freaking clown,” Naughty Morty said.     “Never mind the damned clown,” Mad Morty said, “shoot it if you see it but our business is with Mister Green?”     “What about Allan and her gross deadhead assistant?”     “Shoot them too if they get in our way,” Mad Morty said, turning his scooter around, “but they’re of no value.”     “Please don’t shoot Allan,” Naughty Morty implored, catching up with his father. “I love her and I want to marry her!”     “Isn’t the funeral parlour enough for you?” Mad Morty asked, irritated.     “I want a wife that wriggles and jiggles,” Naughty Morty said, salivating crazily just at the thought of it.     “Take it from me, boy,” Mad Morty said, heading towards the dunes, though he couldn’t make out the beach more than a few metres in front of them, “the living are nothing but trouble. Your own mother, gods rest her soul, brought me only grief.”     “But she had me,” Naughty Morty wailed.     “As I said...”
The earth tremor stopped the Mortimers in their tracks. For a long moment both were literally shaken.     “What was that?” Naughty Morty asked fearfully, gripping his father’s scooter.     “I don’t know,” Mad Morty said, his face registering extreme discomfort, “but the sea is in…. It’s in… In agony.”     “The sea is in agony?” Naught Morty queried. “That’s impossible.”     “Not impossible,” Mad Morty disagreed, very visibly shaken, “look what’s happening online.”     “Oh cockwomble!” Naughty Morty exclaimed, instantly bringing up vulcanological data and news reports. What remained of his own legs turned to jelly and he had to lean heavily on his father’s scooter to remain standing.     “Not agony,” Mad Morty whispered, more deathly pale than usual, “ecstasy. The sea is ecstatic.”
     “Aw hell,” the government told the population of U-City, “things have gone real pear-shaped! And, no, I don’t know what shape a goddamned pear is neither, but it ain’t good. It’s bad apples, Jack, if you follow me. Seems there was no data to predict this, but suddenly we got a big-time volcano going off right under the ocean out west. Y’all might have felt this already – it was a real big one – and you might already have seen the reports online. Thing is, on the heels of this volcano erupting we got ourselves a mega-tsunami heading for the west coast at eight-hundred klicks per hour. When this sucker hits the algorithms predict it could be as high as two hundred metres. Yeah, folks, you heard me right, two hundred metres. Which, to use the technical term, means that we are all so deeply screwed that we’re countersunk. Whatever the hell I mean by that!”     The government took a breath and a slug of moonshine from a hip flask before continuing, racing through the announcement, slurring and tumbling over the words. The translation software proceeded to produce some very offbeat statements in several languages. The Mandarin, Arabic and Finnish programmes gave up the ghost entirely at various different points and had to reboot, causing significant angst. Oblivious, the government pressed on.     “Already, as y’all know, we’ve been helping folk to get away from the plastic coast, but that ain’t gonna do no good with a wave the size of this un, with this much water coming in. There ain’t no sense in heading for the high ground if’n the high ground is gonna be at the bottom of the ocean purdy goddamned soon! Less’n you got a gill augmentation, which some of you will have, of course. Anyways, the force of the wave’ll probably kill you fish folk. If there’s any good news, folks, it’s that this water is gonna go back where it came from quick as you can say drowned rat. Problem is, it’s gonna take things with it, houses, cars, the whole kit and caboodle. I ain’t gonna shit you, a whole bunch of folks are gonna die here. The algorithms have run the numbers and we don’t have the ships, the food stocks nor the food production technology to make it worthwhile trying to put a post tsunami strategy together for any survivors. So, you’d better hope you invested in that photosynthesis mod!     “But there really ain’t any sense in a’ panicking, folks. Praying might bring some of you a little comfort. Y’all have a couple of hours to make your peace with your gods, goddesses, gurus and post-Google Geek Girls. One thing I can tell you is that me and the first lady, we’re going to be right down there with y’all, shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wall, all hands to the pumps: we’re gonna face this together folks and, if any of us we get through it, we’re gonna rebuild U-City and all she stands for. Now, to quote one of my all-time favourite characters: Er - that’s all, folks.”     Signing off with his habitual military salute accompanied by a decidedly sickly smile, Cousin Charlie hurried to the government plane where Sujin was waiting. With just the two of them aboard, the autopilot could keep the solar assisted craft in the air for forty-eight hours. On the steps of the plane Sujin turned around and shot dead Cousin Charlie’s private secretary, a black woman whom she’d never liked and whom she suspected was of far greater service to the government than her gig spec required.     “Damnation,” Cousin Charlie said.     According to the algorithms forty-eight hours might – just might – be long enough for the sea to have receded and revealed somewhere the government plane could land. All over U-City, the data rich were taking similarly desperate measures, boarding planes and airships, ocean liners and super yachts. Without exception none of their craft would last five minutes once the servers flooded and the Ubiquitous Web went down. If there was a bright side to look on, it was that the elite were equally as doomed as everybody else.​
            Truth be told, they always had been

​
Chapter 3: Sand dunes and salty air
 
     “What is that?” Allan Exit demanded.
     “Bucket and spade.”
     “This is not a holiday!”
     “But you said…”
     “Get in.”
     “Good morning would be nice,” Riga huffed, pouting.
     “Would you care for musical ambiance on the journey, Mister Excite?” Smooth Eddie piped up as they set off on the long journey to the west coast.
     “No, thank you. And it’s Ms Exit: M-I-Z E – X –I – T.”
     “Which exit would you like me to take, sir?”
     “Just shut it, toaster,” Riga growled, “we’re not in the mood.”
     “I have taken the liberty of compiling a bespoke playlist to compliment the business in hand,” Smooth Eddie continued, not programmed to be abashed, “courtesy of this hour’s sponsors, MuStream.”
     “They sound like the symptom of a bad head cold,” Allan Exit observed.
     “Featuring golden oldies such as: Don’t fear the reaper; Funeral for friend; Another one bites the dust; Monster mash, a graveyard smash.…”
     “I’ll smash you,” Riga gritted. “Regardless of the consequences, I swear, just one more peep…”
     “No music, Eddie,” Allan Exit commanded, “just get us there as quickly as possible please. And as quietly as possible too, please.”
     “Yes sir, Mister Excite!”
     “Ah, peace at last,” Riga sighed.
     “Peep,” Eddie peeped.
     “Is it programmed to wind me up?” Riga asked her boss.
     “Ignore Eddie and let’s see if we can’t find Mister Green,” Allan Exit said, shrugging her way out of her frock coat. “I’ve sent you the auxiliary data I got from the Ministry. I was up half the night cutting through red tape to get just this little bit of gen.”
     “They’re tight as a moll-man’s posing pouch with data,” Riga sympathised.
     “Let’s work with what we have,” Allan Exit said tightly, one prudish eyebrow raised, “see if we can find a lead. You start back at his blog, work out from the comments, likes and shares. I’ll sift through the little extra background that the Ministry sent.”       
     So the undertakers got down to it, tracking Mister Green across the virtual world. Smooth Eddie had estimated that it was a little over eight hours drive to the west coast. Since climate had warmed, polar ice had long since melted and the seas had risen and flooded so much of the land, it was never so very far to the coast from anywhere in U-City. Although their current journey was only nine-hundred and ninety-nine nine kilometres, however, it would be slow going, skirting war-zones, some of the worst ganglands, areas of persistent high radiation, chemical and bio-contamination. To make the undertakers’ journey even more interesting, few of the roads were maintained at all, many amounting to not much more than a continuum of potholes, some of which verged on being classifiable as craters. That said, the hearse’s grand prix nitrogen suspension and predictive hover technology meant that, as Smooth Eddie assured them, they should enjoy a largely smooth journey.
     “Farmhouse last words,” Riga said.
     “Famous,” Smooth Eddie corrected.
     “No, farmhouse: they’re bullshit!”
     “Cannot compute.”
     “Data dummy!”
     Occasionally during the journey, Allan Exit would look out of the window, focussing on the distance beyond the plethora of tasks and distractions writhing inside her head and consciously exercising her eyes. On one occasion when she was taking such a break they were passing through a perfectly replicated suburbia. The boxy little houses came complete with plastic hedges, lurid green 12G AstroTurf lawns and herbaceous borders replete with purple, orange and yellow artificial flowers. Here a there a garden gnome stared sightlessly at an incessant water feature. On the sidewalk a young couple were teaching a child to ride a bicycle. The child, Allan Exit observed, was a robot. There were giveaways, signs that she was supposed to know in her trade – too shiny, too smiley - but in the end the judgement came down to instinct. This whole neighbourhood was protected by a network of automatic gun turrets, discretely situated on the Victorian style street lamps and in the ersatz trees. Wiping away a tear from the corner of her eyes, Allan Exit wondered why it upset her to see weapons of death sullying trees, even though these trees, in common with any trees that she or most anyone else still alive had ever known, were totally fake.
     A boxwood bush was perfectly pruned in the shape of a domestic cat. The cat appeared to be drinking from a garden pond. Allan Exit knew cats because they were a popular virtual pet and they still featured in commercials, purring to encourage the purchase of everything from perfume to personal protective equipment. Perched on one of the cat’s ears, a bird trilled, chirped and piped in the morning sun, celebrating the advent of another day. A song thrush, Allan Exit checked online, Turdus philomelos.
     Well, it did look a bit shit.
     A drone, obviously.
     Apart from this fleeting reproduction of the historic suburban idyll, what Allan Exit mostly saw on their journey was urban devastation and abandoned neighbourhoods. She spotted just the odd soul – perhaps a disconnected one – tracking the hearse warily from the cover of a burnt out basement or via a periscope eye-stalk peeping from behind an improvised barricade of obsolete and discarded consumer non-durables. At one point someone took a pot-shot at them but the hearse was bullet-proof and Smooth Eddie, programmed in line with cross-corporate and so government policy never to ignore an attack, propelled a grenade to annihilate the injudicious sniper.
     “Fuck’s sake,” Riga grumbled, roused by the flash of the explosion.
     As they got closer to their destination, they had to avoid getting caught up with columns of refugees fleeing the coast despite Cousin Charlie’s reassurances. Most trudged along on foot as any vehicular technology had been programmed not to leave the area. A few lucky ones had old-fashioned bicycles or tricycles, paniers stuffed, trailers heavily loaded. Allan Exit spied an ancient looking couple on a tandem, both men pedalling gamely, flying a tattered rainbow pennant. She felt for these people on the move, their chances of being welcomed in any relatively clean and peaceful inland area were mighty slim. Wherever they headed they were likely to be met by extreme prejudice and deadly local hostility. Overcrowded and dysfunctional refugee camps were already a common feature in innumerable places, forcing many erstwhile residents to themselves up-sticks and try to make a move. Identifying itself in cyberspace, at least the hearse was not challenged by any of the corporate police forces tasked with turning back the streams of refugees. Roadblocks opened for them automatically and only on one occasion did Allan Exit catch sight of a robot tank, its canon spewing a jet of fire as it traversed a junction.
     Almost needless to say, after only an hour or so Riga had fallen sound asleep, snoring loudly through the rest of the journey. She stirred as they pulled into a budget robot motel that backed on to Utopia Sands. With appropriately mechanical reasoning, the palace was called the Utopia Sands Motel.
     “Got him!” Riga announced, suddenly wide awake. “He’s just posted a message online that our tracking satellite ap pinpoints as coming from just twelve klicks up the coast, north from here.”
     “What does it say?” Allan Exit asked, mentally filing her own extensive – and extremely worrisome - research on the deceased Mister Green.
     “It says: ‘Better late than never!’”
     “Let’s get ourselves settled in,” Allan Exit said, “have something to eat and make a plan for tomorrow.”
     “Can I take your bag, sir?” the robot porter asked when Allan Exit got out of the hearse.
     “Madam,” the funeral director gritted.
     “My name is Martin,” the robot told her, “and I’m your porter.”
     “You look like an antique shopping trolley,” Riga observed.
     “You are not animate,” Martin responded.
     “Touché!” Allan Exit said, handing the robot her bag.
     “No, Martin,” the porter reaffirmed.
     Once they’d checked in, Martin had shown them to their twin bedded room, they’d taken turns to take a shower, Riga had fallen asleep again, and Allan Exit had deleted innumerable junk mails and other messages and filed a brief progress report with the Ministry, they headed for the Motel restaurant. Given the situation with rumours of imminent extreme weather and the fact of intense police activity in the area, they were not much surprised to find themselves the only diners. Although the oceans had been devoid of life for centuries, everything on the menu was a synthetic simulacra of seafood. Their robot waitress, was called Stella ‘my-pleasure-to-serve-you’ and Allan Exit wondered, not for the first time, why they always built gender into these robots. She ordered a starter of garlic prawns followed by Dover sole with a seaweed and samphire salad for her main course. Unusually for her, she also ordered a bottle of the house wine, opting for the red though Stella-my-pleasure formulaically advised her it would overwhelm the seafood and so recommended their dry white. Sticking to her guns, not literally of course, that would have been overkill, Allan Exit went with the Shiraz: not much of a vintage but robust with dark fruit flavours and spicy peppery notes, at least according to the online menu. Allan Exit ignored her knowledge that it was synthesised from reprocessed urine, had artificial colour derived from flourone and tar added, and that its palate depended wholly upon synthetic flavourings. Sitting opposite her in the open air dining room that looked out to sea, scrolling through the menu on her wrist device, Riga merely yearned.
     Until, that is, they received the first surprise visitor of the evening.
     “Lovely ladies, handmaids of Arawn,” Capten Cyboli greeted them effusively as they approached their table. A pantomime tourist, the clown captain was in mufti, sporting a technicolour explosion Hawaiian shirt in shocking pink, canary yellow and electric blue hues, baggy check shorts and comically over large red and green beach shoes. They took Riga’s immense hand in their own gloved one and placed an ostentatious kiss on her sausage fingers. As they bent to the task, the gesture was, in true clown style, accompanied by a loud farting noise, which made Riga laugh like the proverbial drain.
     “You!” Allan Exit exclaimed.
     “Is it?” Capten Cyboli gawped, miming a surprised self-examination, patting their body down. “I thought I recognised somebody! I wonder, could borrow your lovely companion for stroll along the beach. The moonlight on the multi-coloured plastic is a sight to behold. And it is best shared.”
     This entire peninsula was indeed built on a raft of plastic waste from time immemorial, hence the coast’s name. The sand on beach was actually comprised of tiny plastic beads, mermaids’ tears. Exploring the coastline, tourists loved to guess at the original shape and usage of the storm-sculpted polymer masses that washed up on the micro-plastics beach, skeletons from a mythic age.
     “What are you doing here?” Allan Exit stuttered.
     “A short break from the toil of the beloved garden,” Capten Cyboli explained, theatrically massaging the small of their back. “Some rest and recreation, perchance a little romance….” They batted preposterously long false eye-lashes at Riga until one fell off and was lost under the table.
     “It’s okay, I think it’s crawled away,” Capten Cyboli observed, not bothering to begin a search.
     “No coincidence,” Allan Exit stated bluntly, “you being here.”
     “I’m fond of sand dunes and salty air.”
     “I’d love to see the beach,” Riga interjected, reciprocating the clown’s flirtatiousness and batting her own eyelids.
     “Do bring your bucket and spade, oh depilated damsel,” Capten Cyboli said with a wicked smile, “for who knows what grand designs we might raise this portentous night?”
     And with that they were on their way, the clown captain with the living dead on his arm. Riga towered over her buffoon suitor, gaily twirling her bucket and spade like a parasol at her side.
     “Who is Arawn?” Allan Exit heard her assistant ask.
     At that moment the undertaker might have leapt to her feet to intercede, but a number of things happened simultaneously to distract her. First Stella-my-pleasure arrived with her starter. Looking at the food placed before her, out of the blue Allan Exit felt a pang that pierced to her core. Though she loathed it when Riga watched her eat, dining alone was a forlorn prospect. Surely she wasn’t jealous of a clown so barmy that they apparently spent most of their time planting imaginary seeds? To underscore her acute sense of abandonment, the wine waiter, Sheridan ‘enjoy your evening’, delivered Allan Exit’s bottle of synthetic Shiraz and a single glass. Before she could bring herself to sip the imperial-purple wine or taste the bubble-gum pink prawn concoction, however, she received a person to person video call, a data-dear code blue for ‘coming through no matter what you do!’
     “Bonsoir, Director Exit,” a distorted Clark Gable face leered before her, its hologram eyes bulging, rakish smile cocked to display too perfect but also too prominent teeth, “you haven’t been returning my calls.”
     “Mortimer Mortimer the second,” Allan Exit winced. Not only was Mortimer Mortimer II her professional nemesis, he was also obsessed with her, principally in his uniquely degenerate amorous way but also because of the data rich prospect of merging their businesses. In the trade Mortimer Mortimer II was known as Naughty Morty to distinguish a terminally rotten bastard from his truly evil sick-bucket of a dad, Mad Morty. The Mortimers could trace their Norman origins back to 12th century France and the family had always been in the death business, whether as grave diggers or grave robbers, embalmers or body snatchers, coffin makers or monumental masons. For several centuries the Mortimers had been morticians. Morty, father and son, were infamous not only for their disreputable undertaking practices, some of which were unthinkable let alone unspeakable, but also for their mutual obsession with ever more bizarre augmentations.
     “Check your mail on your male, Sweetcheeks,” Naughty Morty told Allan Exit with demented salacious emphasis, “it’s open season on Mister Green. Papa and I are on the job, hard-on the trail and coming your way even as we speak!”
     “You’ll be disappointed, Morty,” Allan Exit warned, at the same time searching to confirm that the Ministry had indeed just declared her deceased a funereal free for all. “First off, we all but have Mister Green on the trolley and second I have absolutely no intention of wearing my itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie yellow polka-dot bikini on the beach, and certainly not of permitting you to rub factor three hundred sun lotion on my back. Nor, indeed, my front.”
     The second part of her warning so inflamed Naughty Morty’s licentious imagination that he literally drooled. The slaver on his hologram chin was flecked with an appallingly suspicious red.
     “Stay well away, Morty,” Allan Exit advised, her face a grimace of disgust, “on every level.”
     “Not on your life,” Naughty Mort replied, flexing his steroid inflated biceps until the sleeves of his frock coat burst their seams, “I’ve packed my speedos, my shades, my snorkel and all my rubber gear, and Papa simply loves the ocean. He has a sense augmentation that lets him detect sea levels rising, tides turning, the temperature fluctuations of ocean currents… He feels the suffering of the drowned, the icy void of the ocean deep. All linked to his new prostate, you understand? Mister Green is ours, Sugarplum, so just give it up. On every level. Be seeing you!”
     “Not,” Allan Exit said coolly, refusing to betray the perturbation she felt so intensely that it cramped her stomach, “if I see you first, you primped and pumped-up pervert.”
     “Were I you,” Mister Green said exactly on cue as Allan Exit enraged Naughty Morty sufficiently so that he hung up the code blue call, “I wouldn’t eat those prawns.”
     The man who sat suddenly opposite Allan Exit was at once a thousand year old sage and a wicked tease of a youth. A vibrant contrast to Morty’s morbid hologram, he was as grave as he was mischievous, as innocent as he was lewd. Thick, sinuous and vital, his hair – no - his corona – seemed alive, shimmering and somehow hungry. The man’s piercing green eyes were set wide apart, twinkling like sunlit emeralds. His nose was aquiline, mouth wide, lips full above a strong chin still evident under a bushy growth of beard. His face looked bruised, swollen, as if he’d been in a fist fight.
     Distended, Allan Exit thought.
     In the glow of the restaurant, at least, Mister Green had an eponymously appropriate viridescent glow. If on one hand he looked a like a bloodied Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies caught under green neon city lights, on the other he resembled the framed image of a corpse flower that Allan Exit kept in her office. The image was a gift from her mother that was so steeped in disapproval of her career choice that she had just had to give it pride of place on her desk, though she had disabled its nauseating olfactory capability. Had she been compelled to pick a single word to describe the disconcerting complexity before her, Allan Exit might have plumped for fecund, though in her mesmerised state she had no idea where that description had sprung from or what, in today’s reality, it might actually mean.
      “I would join you in a glass of wine, however, if invited?” His sonorous voice was lightened by his evident amusement.
     “Your funeral,” Allan Exit managed, watching paralysed as Mister Green poured wine into the glass, sipped, assayed, mustered a dubious half smile, and extended it to her.
     “I mean,” Allan Exit managed, accepting the glass but not drinking the wine, “it is your funeral.”
     “If in the midst of life we are in death,” Mister Green inquired with a winsome smile, “then the opposite must also be true, no?”
     Allan Exit nodded dumbly, compelled but uncertain of what she was agreeing with, or to.  The digital clamour in her head, she realised with a start, was mute, on hold, buffering.
     “So drink up and be merry, for tomorrow….” Mister Green left his invitation hanging.
     “Not we,” Allan Exit manged, “you.” She sipped the wine. It tasted like the synthetic fruit gums she’d sucked as a kid while day-dreaming of saving dragons and slaying princes. Locking eye contact with Mister Green, she drained her glass in a single draft.
     “The Dover sole is just about edible,” Mister Green advised, topping up their shared glass, “no better than that, but as good as it currently gets. Do not touch the gumbo.”
     “You should be dead,” Allan Exit said.
     “It must be you,” Mister Green told her, raising the glass in a bittersweet toast, then following her example and quaffing the contents in one, the purple liquid seeping from the corners of his mouth. And with that he half rose, leaned across the table and kissed the undertaker full on the mouth, parting her lips the merest fraction with the peppery tip of his tongue.
     But when Allan Exit made to react, to kiss back or to bite – she hadn’t decided which - he was already gone.
     “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
     And she was all alone, a little girl whose mummy didn’t really want her, didn’t love her or didn’t know how to. Too busy. A mummy who worked security, weapon holstered on her hip, and who left Allan Exit with strangers paid to care for but not about her. A mummy who shied from eye contact with her daughter; a daughter who, in turn, held herself back, cut herself off, piece by piece, who didn’t love mummy too much because that would open her up to all the hurting. So, the kept her love in lock-down to kept the pain in check. An only lonely child. Alone when she found the old man next door dead in his chair because of the heat wave. And she sat and held his hand and fanned him with her comic book and talked to him all afternoon until mummy came home routinely late from work. That evening she watched long and hard through her bedroom window, squeezing tight Marti, her stuffed toy polar bear, until, long after dark. Under the light of the street lamps, in heat that still sweltered, she watched as the stone-faced undertakers finally wheeled the old man from his home to their shiny black limousine and drove silently away. Tears in the corners of her eyes now, but not then. And mummy calling up the stairs, was she alright?
     “Desert?”
     “I’m sorry?” a distracted Allan Exit said.
     “Would you like to see the desert menu?” Stella-my-pleasure asked.
     “Dessert.”
     “Tonight, we have ice cream...”
     “We all scream for ice cream.”
 
😱               😂
 
Why couldn't the teddy bear finish his pudding?
Because he was stuffed.
 
Do bears shit in the woods?
What are woods?
 
A horse walks into a bar and the barman says, why the long face?
And the horse says, so I can keep an eye out for predators while I graze: Duh!
 
Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,
Your house is on fire, your children shall burn!
All save one, the last of her kind
If it’s any consolation, no one will mind
 
How many species does it take to change a light bulb?
How many light bulbs does it take to change a species?
 
What do you call a retired vegetable?
A has-bean.
 
What did the sweet potato say to the pumpkin?
I yam what I yam.
 
Knock! Knock!
Who’s there?
Noah.
Noah who?
Noah floods coming?
 
Which vegetable did Noah leave off the Ark?
Leeks
 
Knock, Knock
Who’s there?
Lettuce
Lettuce Who?
Lettuce into the damned ark, Noah!
 
What’s the fastest vegetable?
A runner bean
 
Why did fungi become extinct?
Because they took up too mushroom.
 
Why don’t eggs tell jokes?
They’d crack each other up!
 
Why did the chicken cross the road?
She was egged on.
 
But which came first, the extinction of the chicken or the egg?
 
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Mike.
Mike who?
Microbe.
Now you’re bugging me.
 
A woman went to the doctor’s the other day and the doctor said, visit the seaside, it's great for flu."
So she went. And she caught it.
 
I hear Ebola has gone viral.
 
A crab goes to the doctor and says, “Doc I think I got humans?”
 
A lobster and a cat walk into a bar together. The lobster orders a beer just for itself. The cat says, “Now you’re just being shellfish!”
 
A seal walks into a club...
 
Testudines are all gone, more than three-hundred species. It’s a turtle disaster.
 
When is a soup unkind to reptiles?
When it’s mock turtle.
 
A woman went to the zoo. There was only one dog in it. It was a Shih Tzu.
 
What do you call an alligator in a vest?
An Investigator
 
What's the difference between a guitar and a fish?
You can't tuna fish.
 
What do you call a pile of kittens?
A meowntain
 
What did the daddy monkey say to his offspring?
You’re a chimp off the old block.
 
What do you call an elephant that doesn't matter?
An irrelephant.
 
How do you make an Octopus laugh?
With ten-tickles
 
Check for parasites?
Tic.
 
What did the beaver say to the tree?
It’s been nice gnawing you!
 
Why do Platanus Occidentalis have to see the doctor more than any other trees?
Because they are sycamore.
 
A dung beetle walks into a bar and says, “Excuse me, is this stool taken?”
 
I heard all the environmentalists’ arguments for banning plastic products.
They were just grasping at straws.
 
One heifer says to another: “What do you reckon on this mad cow disease?”
“Doesn’t bother me, I’m a squirrel!” say the second heifer trying to climb a tree to stash her acorns.
(Isn’t that nuts?)
 
A bull walks into a china shop. The owner says: “I got no beef with you.”
 
I had to shoot my dog today.
Was he mad?
He weren’t none too damned pleased.
 
What's the difference between Cousin Charlie and a catfish?
One's a scum-sucking, bottom-feeder and the other's a fish.
 
😂               😱
 
     “He’ll pay for that,” Allan Exit told Riga early the next morning as she dressed, angrily buttoning her shirt. Despite her pledge, she noted that Riga had not polish her shoes, sponged her suit or brushed your topper. I’m not sharing anymore stories with you, Allan Exit thought spitefully. Stories were data after all, not to be taken lightly.
     “We mostly talked about gardening and food,” Riga said absently, sitting on her bed in her underwear and studying a smooth yellowish-orange object that she turned over and over in her hand.
     “He had no right,” Allan Exit said, breaking a thread and losing her top button. “Fuck!”
     “They must be like one of those people we saw at the Italian restaurant: Mural flossers? Morbid fossils?”
     “Moral philosophers!”
     “That’s the badger,” Riga said, and then: “They kept saying that whenever we found a name for something we were talking about but couldn’t recall… What’s a badger?”
     “They’re obviously in this together, your captain clown and this Green character,” Allan Exit growled, “leading us a not so merry dance.”
     “We did dance,” Riga said blissfully, “on the beach, in the moonlight; a last waltz, they said.”
     “A waltz, in those ludicrous shoes?”
     “They’re actually very light on their feet,” Riga said dreamily.
     “Look, pull yourself together,” Allan Exit commanded, “and get dressed!” Riga’s suit, she noted disapprovingly, lay in a wrinkled heap on the floor and her top-hat was under the bed.
     “They told me about a million jokes,” Riga continued, oblivious, “almost all of which I didn’t get at all, but they amused themselves so much it was infectious. And so I laughed until I would have cried if my tear-ducts hadn’t ossified.”
     “Put some clothes on, please, we have to move!”
     “They found so much that we had in common,” Riga continued, staying as she was, turning her precious object over and over. “They garden but have no seeds; I’m hungry but can’t eat… They said that one day they would grow me food in our garden.”
     “Pigs might fly!” Allan Exit said nastily, standing in front of the bathroom mirror and, unusually for her, deciding to wear a little eye shadow, spring green.
     “Wasn’t a pig an animal with no wings?”
     “Exactly,” Allan Exit said out of the side of her mouth, her face held taut.
     “Was it like a badger?”
     “I never heard of a badger.”
     “They said they would grow potatoes for me,” Riga said, “it’s the sweetest thing I ever heard.”
     “Sweet potatoes, eh?” Allan Exit sneered. “Impossibly romantic but also literally impossible.”
     “Capten Cyboli says that with valiant hearts anything is possible.”
     “Were I to attempt the impossible,” Allan Exit said disparagingly, “I’d go with Olympic grade ventricular augmentation. Screw valiant.”
     “Mister Green got to you?” Riga surmised.
     “He has it coming,” Allan Exit snarled, applying a vicious slash of black lipstick. “Now get yourself dressed and let’s find him before the Mortimers do. This sucker is definitely mine.”
     “Capten Cyboli told me that Mister Green is everywhere and nowhere,” Riga said, still not rising from the bed or arresting her perusal of the yellowish-orange object.
     “There’s no hiding place,” Allan Exit said firmly, quitting the bathroom after one final check in the mirror. “Is that plastic from the beach?”
     “From the beach,” Riga confirmed, holding the smooth, semi spherical object that tapered towards the top. It was about the size of a human eyeball. “But not plastic. They told me it was amber, something very old, even before plastic. And look, look inside.”
     “What is that?” Allan Exit asked, bending to peer closely into the cloudy amber teardrop that Riga held up.
     “A seed, that’s what they said.”
     “Looks more like a bug.”
     “I love it,” Riga sighed.
     “A love bug, then.”
 
After bolting an early breakfast of croissants with the consistency of chewing-gum, washed down with a couple of Starcos double espressos, Allan Exit took her bespoke daily cocktail of supplements and synthetic bacteria in a concoction that was supposed to resemble fruit juice. It didn’t, at least not as far as the funeral director could tell. It tasted the way that newly disinfected but not very well cleaned rest-rooms smelled. Having spruced their professional appearance up as much as possible with the aid of a clothes brush and some wipes, Allan Exit and Riga left Smooth Eddie washing and waxing himself in the Utopia Sands Motel carpark. It was a discomfortingly masturbatory process or, as Riga summed it up in in passing:
       “Wanker!”
       They would head for where the satellites had pinpointed Mister Green’s last blog post, which after all was said and done was all they had to go on. Although the hearse could surely have negotiated the beach terrain if not the sea itself, Allan Exit wanted to do this old-school, boots on the ground, bodies on the line, mano a mano, so to speak. Stella-my-pleasure had made them a packed lunch: tuna sandwiches, larverbread, some kelp cookies, a flask filled with even more Startcos, and ‘have a nice day!’
       “Classic service expression,” Riga observed admiringly.
       “Let’s do this thing,” Allan Exit said
       Handing Riga one of the range-finding, military grade automatic weapons known as new widow-makers that she’d retrieved from the hearse’s weapons locker, she took a second for herself. Like most contemporary weapons, the widow-makers were trackers, laser-locking onto any target and choosing the appropriate ammo. Once the trigger was pulled a tracker like this kept firing until it logged a sure-fire kill or destroy, whatever it was programmed for and whether the user still held it or not. Trackers automatically compensated for changes of range, wind speed and direction. They also live-streamed the action to several online platforms, though Allan Exit had hacked this function and reprogrammed these particular widow-makers to record.
       “No subtly required, nothing fancy, no frills,” she told Riga. “This guy is well past his die by date, and he deserves everything he gets.” Allan Exit licked her lips. “Lock and load!”
       “You promise not to shoot Capten Cyboli?”
       “Not unless they stick their big red nose into our business.”
       Allan Exit applied total sunblock to her hands and face. Then, the undertakers donned backpacks containing emergency kit, including first aid and, in Allan Exit’s case, a two litre camelback of water. There was also a body-bag in each pack.
       “Two, in case of red nosiness,” Allan Exit quipped cruelly.
       Side by side, weapons slung over their shoulders, they made their asymmetric way north along the beach, casting long shadows over the sea as the sun crept higher in the sky and light streamed over the dunes and the largely deserted hotels and apartment blocks that lined the coast. A gusting wind swirled around them, stirring up eddies of mermaids’ tears so that the undertakers scanned the beach stretched before them through slitted eyes. There was not, it seemed, another soul on the beach, hardy, foolhardy or otherwise. Trudging along, their feet sliding and sinking into the polymer sands, their progress was hard going. They chose to walk along the tideline where the beach was a little firmer. The tide, Allan Exit noted, dismissing a stream of pop-up ads for penis piercing, was coming in. For twenty minutes they settled stoically to their task. Eventually, she broke the toiling silence.
       “You’ve never really spoken about your private life, how it was before…”
       “Before you bust a cap in my ass?” Riga checked. “Not much to tell, a couple of centuries as a bouncer, living in a rent-a-bed block, sharing a couchette with strangers I never met: round the clock sleeping in shifts.”
       “Before that,” Allan Exit pressed. “Any significant others?”
       “I had a baby once,” Riga said, stopping her undertaker employer dead in her tracks. Riga halted too, turning to meet Allan Exit’s startled gaze.
       “The birth mother was my partner,” she elaborated, “back then I presented as male.”
       “Wow!” was all Allan Exit could manage.
       “It was stillborn,” Riga said, “a boy. We broke up not long after that, just a decade maybe. I can’t even remember the woman’s face. Her name was Louisette.”
       “I’m so sorry,” Allan Exit said.
       “It’s not such a bad name.”
       “I mean sorry about your loss.”
       “I know you say that to all the girls,” Riga said, contriving a wry grin that couldn’t disguise the sorrow that suddenly furrowed deep into her countenance and further clouded her perennially clouded grey eyes.
       “And the boys, actually,” Allan Exit admitted, picking up on the need to recapture their habitual, protective light-heartedness, “almost every day.”
       “Let’s step up the pace,” Riga said, “isn’t it already getting hot for you?”
       They resumed their trek with fresh vim, silent again for a few minutes, both contemplating their new intimacy, each in their singular way.
       “There aren’t many human births anymore,” Allan Exit observed. “People live longer and they – we - seem to have lost the reproductive urge, if not the ability.”
       “Yet kiddie porn is the most popular by a stretch,” Riga observed disgustedly, “go figure.”
       “Beats me,” Allan Exit grimaced, “and I am so glad that I really don’t get it.”
       “People are too busy concentrating on their own selves to have kids and care for them,” Riga snarled dismissively, “trying to live forever, stay forever young.”
       “The population is declining,” Allan Exit mused, “slowly but surely.”
       “That can’t be good for our business, can it,” Riga observed.
       “Sadly, our business thrives on war and epidemics,” Allan Exit observed. “We also do okay out of natural disasters, so-called all be they all obviously  human-made. But most of our business comes via the Ministry algorithms, determinated deaths, when they decide someone’s time is up. To be honest, though, there’s still not really enough death to go around.”
       “Hence the morbid Mortimers getting in on Mister Green’s funeral arrangements, like you said.”
       “I think there’s more going on there,” Allan Exit confided, frowning, “the Ministry algorithms seem desperate for Mister C. Green to rest in peace. I’ve never sensed anything like it through the ether, it’s almost like…” she paused, considering.
       “Like panic.”
       “The guy does have a shed-load of followers online,” Riga said, “unbelievable for someone who doesn’t say much, even less that makes any sense, and then not very often. There are literally a billion people regularly hanging on his every word, even his silences. And that’s just legit internet users using public channels.”
       “What does he post about?” Allan Exit asked, simultaneously searching cyberspace for an answer to her own question.
       “Three months ago he posted a selfie – he’s changed his appearance a lot by the way, judging from available images and the footage you sent me from last night.”
       “At least I did manage to hit record,” Allan Exit mused, simultaneously examining the many faces of Mister Green.
       “Six hundred and sixty-six million odd hits on Green’s last selfie, more than half a million loves, and two-hundred million shares.”
       “Just a selfie?”
       “With a caption: ‘What does it mean to have feelings? How would meaning feel?’”
       “That’s it?”
       “Kind of creepy, kind of cool, eh?”
       “Reading between the lines of the gen that the Ministry gave us so grudgingly, I think the algorithms must be afraid that he’s a guru in the making.”
       “So what,” Riga asked, “we make him a martyr instead? That’ll work… Not! Even I know enough history to get that.”
       “Martyrdom isn’t what it used to be, I guess: who today has the attention span for belief, for optimism or hope? The algorithm analysis must amount to ‘best dead, soonest forgotten, to borrow and bend a phrase.”
       “Well,” Riga shrugged, “luckily all that isn’t our concern: we just take them down, let the machines worry about whether they stay down.”
       “The C stands for Citizen, by the way,” Allan Exit said, “Citizen Green.”
       “Crazy name, crazy guy.”   
       “We have done okay since, you know, you came to work with me?” Allan Exit asked, changing tack after another contemplative lull in their conversation, a lull in which a vast Cumulonimbus formation had taken shape on the horizon over the sea: an anvil awaiting the crash of Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, she thought, recalling teenage comic books, then the taste of synthetic fruit gums, and back full-circle to Mister Green…
       “You mean since you killed me by mistake and then took me on as your assistant because you felt guilty?” Riga countered, piercing Allan Exit’s incipient reverie.
       “I guess that’s exactly what I mean,” Allan Exit confirmed, a little shame-faced.
       “Well it’s not any barrel of laughs.”
       “It’s not supposed to be fun exactly, but….” Allan Exit left her words fluttering in the arid morning air.
       “It’s been emotional,” Riga shrugged in acknowledgement after a long moment’s consideration, her phraseology honouring their shared interest in old movies.
       “Lock, stock,” Allan Exit said with a fond smile.
       A larger than usual wave broke noisily and rolled foaming up the beach, sending them scuttling inland a few paces. The acidity of the sea water was such that it could rot footwear and burn the skin, the latter a concern for Allan Exit at least.
       “Each time we undertake somebody,” Riga continued, “I get to wonder why it is that I’m still here, what it means to be alive or to be dead, and then what it means to be like me, undead.”
       “I don’t think about it much,” Allan Exit said, “but I guess having you around does make the work feel more rewarding somehow – despite the fact that you drive me crazy.”
       “Who needs any driving?” Riga asked archly.
       Allan Exit logged into a mindfulness session in cyberspace. It muted the flood of other stuff in her head, the ads, the news, the sport, the never ending tide of messages, pitches, comments, charity appeals, photos, images, petitions, video clips, tweets, trills, snaps, spats and pornography – most of it targeting her as a heterosexual male and/or a paedophile. Faintly, hoping against hope, she kept alive the idea that her seeming cyber absorption would also make her less visible, less audible, that the algorithms might lose track of her a little.
       “Do you ever wonder why the Ministry needs us,” she asked Riga quietly, “why they don’t just retire folks by zapping them through their chips, like Joleon Soames told us?”
       “Never gave it much thought,” Riga shrugged. “I guess it would be awkward to deal with the cadavers without us? Imagine, they zap old Joleon, then what:  his smart vak sucks him up, puts him on ice in the freezer that then delivers him to the front door when drones arrive to airlift the dude to reprocessing? That’d be a whole new internet of things, a whole new generation of smart vaks for a start, big muthas!”
       “It could be just a technical problem,” Allan Exit mused, “something that’s relatively easy to solve, but not economically worth it for the scale of the task…”
       “You mean like because we do specialist shit that they can’t make anything much from so they leave us to it?”
       “That must be part of it, I think,” Allan Exit said. “Of course, they could just have the deceased deliver themselves for reprocessing.”
       “I like to think the deceased kind of value the ritual of us.”
“Maybe,” Allan Exit allowed, wiping sweat from her brow on her sleeve. Not only was it physically hot but she sensed a malevolent online presence lurking in the cloud, circling, homing in.
“I suspect something else is going on,” she whispered fearfully.
       “Like what?” Riga demanded, her own brow furrowing.
       “Well the corporations are gathering data from us all the time,” Allan Exit said, still speaking deliberately softly and affecting a deliberately odd inflection in what was probably a pathetic attempt to confuse voice recognition tracing, “And, with the exception of the odd specialist or token human, their board members are algorithms…”
       “Fucking data vultures!” Riga pronounced, apparently ignorant of her employer’s affected intonations.
       “Precisely!” Allan Exit exclaimed in a staccato hiss. “I think that’s mainly why they let us carry on doing what we do, both pre and post mortem: they’re gathering data to learn how to manage a human population in future on Mars or beyond even that; they want to learn more about death, how we react to taking life and to dying, to processing the dead; they want to how we relate to each other in extremis.”
       “Those freaky fucking fucks!”
       “Of course, that’s just my own wild guess,” Allan Exit admitted. The mindfulness session was drawing to a close. She still had the sense of a predator stalking her but its presence flared and faded as if unable to get near enough to spring. Something seemed to be keeping it at bay, hunting the hunter.
       “In common with everybody else,” Allan Exit told Riga, trying to counter the extreme unease that she felt so viscerally, “I have no real idea of how these algorithms actually function. All we can know is that their bottom line, the reasoning at the heart of their programs, is to maximise the flow of data, its volume and velocity, so they can learn more to increase that flow ad infinitum.”
       “You lost me,” Riga said, waving a hand in the air, “all that foreign ‘in extremely’ and ‘addling infinity’ shit.”     
       “The crux is,” Allan Exit said quietly as thunder rumbled in the far distance, “what if people don’t ultimately feature in that equation?”
       Lightening arced red across the sky.
       “Then you’re all toast.” 
​

​Chapter 2: Mourning has broken
The government of U-City popped up online live and direct to everyone, pausing all their lives no matter what they’d been doing, why or where they’d been doing it. ‘Everyone’ meant everyone with biotech inplants or, in other words, every living human being though some, the data rich, were much better connected than others. The real others, though, by dint of not having inplants, were not human, or at least not the same species of human. Among the citizenry, across the many cultures and appropriations of U-City, these others went by various disdainful or downright disgusting names, most often those of extinct mammalian scourges and parasites: lice, maggots, leeches, tapeworms… If they were ever referred to officially by government or any wing of the corporations, which was seldom, they were known with skewering accuracy as ‘the disconnected’.
     The government of U-City was a guy named Charlie, a former cold-caller with an obscure bionic limb company, ImpossiBod Four Point Zero.
     “Hi y’all,” Charlie greeted the world, ‘sorry to patch in on y’all and all, but some heavy shit is going to go down unless we all get our crap together to scoop that poop!”
     Simultaneously translated into every known language and dialect, spoken or embodied, everyone was compelled to hear this, there was no blocking, no mute, no logging out. The government had preceded the announcement with a wake-up call so shatteringly loud, alarmingly pitched and coruscating that, as Allan Exit explained it to Riga, in an unwittingly unkind turn of phrase, “it could awaken the dead.” In fact, only the dead, the comatose and, if the rumours were true, the shades could have avoided it. The street-slang term ‘shades’ covered criminal and terrorist elements who could allegedly hack their way beyond the reach of the Ubiquitous Web, which was ubiquitously known as the U-Web. Shades haunted the internet via SinWeb, shorthand for the Sinistrous Web. Therein they could make themselves deaf and silent, invisible and untouchable, at least to technology that wasn’t specifically targeted to track, trace and trap them, technology that they were always already locked in mortal digital combat with.
     According to accepted wisdom, the algorithms had chosen Charlie as the government because he held the majority opinion about almost everything almost all of the time. He had succeeded Marjorie who, whether by coincidence or no, had been a kissing cousin. When Marjorie’s time had come, when she was still just a young woman of not quite two hundred years of age, people were so shocked that many community share sites overloaded and went down, albeit briefly: an extremely rare phenomenon. Some people even went so far as to question the algorithms and demanded a rationale. There were unprecedented rumblings of discontent, all duly gathered as future data for the algorithms, “naturally”. But Marjorie’s funeral had been the grandest multimedia event anyone could remember. Everyone wept and loved every second of it, wallowing in an exquisitely curated and choreographed soft-focus and Saccharin grief, and forgetting to be quizzical let alone angry. Whilst in office, Marjorie had done U-City proud, presiding over the quelling of rebellions, the stemming of psychological pandemics and increasing the Gross Data Product, the latter achieved via ditching all but a lingering notion of private data in law and wholly deregulating the velocity of data flow.
     The icing on the political cake was that Marjorie also had a great ass, which made her the most searched celebrity CGI porno link by middle-aged men of all races, plus she erotically attracted a ratings boosting percentile of women. Notably, her salacious status survived her passing and Marjorie’s avatar was a very busy body indeed.
     Charlie, by contrast, was surely no-one’s fantasy, and his was a spectacularly unspectacular government. It was controversial selecting successive white presidents, let alone members of the same family but, hey, the ways of the algorithms were as mysterious as they were incontrovertible. Charlie’s appeal was as the everyman, your affable brother, your bumbling centrist dad, your Dutch uncle, your slacker husband, your drinking buddy: a good ol’ boy; but a sho’nuff bad cat too, cos Charlie weren’t no racist. Not even a lead-guitar sexist, it seemed, though his Latino first wife had published a damning memoir after he was selected for office. Allegations of chauvinism, objectification of women and even sexual harassment didn’t much damage his largely rock-steady ratings, though, causing mere blips. If Charlie had traded intimate favours for discounts on bionic prosthetics in the past, no one really wanted to know, or at least no one wanted to condemn a guy for just being a guy and doing regular guy type stuff with body parts. And people liked his current wife, a prejudice countering and popularity boosting d-list Sino celebrity, Suyin, who had been runner-up in a second-string reality show. Contestants had competed for a bonanza of enhancements by belittling, bullying, betraying and even bushwhacking each other, all done against the backdrop of volunteering in U-City’s leading – indeed only - children’s hospital. Charlie’s future wife lost out because she’d seemingly been too squeamish to pull the plug on a premature baby’s incubator in order to incriminate her opponent. Dubbed into every language in U-City, her refusal, complete with shrieks of horrified incomprehension and achingly poignant outpourings of exotic maternal feeling, jerked tears from almost every beholding eyes.
     Following full gender reassignment, the winner got extra-long mega-model prosthetic legs, breast enhancement to the unsupportable max, along, obviously, with the necessary titanium spine strengthening technology, plus a counter-balancing bouncy butt augmentation, self-polishing nails, labial sculpting, programmatic in-corporeal pubic alopecia, full-body and face tattooing by a leading artist, unlimited piercings for life and an extra sense that allowed her to consciously detect, analyse and respond in-kind to pheromone secretions.
     Suyin got Charlie.         
     After watching her final shaming and ejection from the reality show by the gloating c-list judges, not only had Charlie arranged for an upgrade on all four of Suyin’s limbs, he’d also splashed out to increase her connectivity to the brain frizzling legal limit with a life-time’s supply of the necessary acceptance medication thrown in. Such generosity had evidently made him irresistible to Suyin and they married three days after her hair had grown back. Paradoxically, while Suyin prospered, her reality show nemesis was quickly forgotten and committed a barely reported suicide just hours after having a demonic embryo tattooed on her tongue.
     Politically, Charlie’s strongest suit was that he despised the disconnected with a vicious, eviscerating passion.
     “Now, we’ve all got mighty used to some goddamned funny weather,” Charlie told the listening world, “a-chopping and a-changing and giving us seven kinds of hell, but there are rumours spreading like wildfire that we’re about to get hit with by something that’ll make the hurricanes, tornados and floods we’ve survived so far look like a school picnic on a summer’s day with synthetic daisies and bluebird drones a’ tweeting by. U-City ain’t nowhere much more’n fifty metres above sea level and a lot of inland neighbourhoods are actually way below that, so I don’t wonder that y’all get freaked by any rumour of flooding.”
     Though he tended to the garrulous, Charlie nevertheless had a way with words that conjured images people could appreciate.
     “Already,” Charlie continued, “we have folk packing up and fleeing from the plastic coast out west, bumping the hell into each other and fighting over stuff an’ all. Various police forces have even had to smoke a few cats to stop ‘em hitting on exposed families.”            
     Charlie let his words hang in the air for a moment so people could take them in while watching the simultaneously streamed video clips, machine edited to horrify and excite but not offend. Whether the editing was also designed to mislead was not something the audience conjectured much about.
     “Well lookee here, Charlie continued, “I’m online to tell y’all for certain sure that these rumours are bullshit. Yep, I done said the big bad B word on air; had to do it; folks, and sorry an’ all, ma and Reverend Simms back down home. But the algorithms ain’t coming up with any hint of a major extreme weather event in the offing. Repeat: it ain’t gonna happen, people! Now you plastic coasters, y’all go back home right now and have yourselves a beer and a barbecue; you’re as safe as houses. Matter of fact, you’re way safer given some of the jerry built shanties and condemned bomb-sites that some of y’all insist on inhabiting down that-a-way despite the widespread provision of tied social housing by your caring-sharing government in partnership with… But, hey, listen to me, off on my high horse again! I just worry about all you good folks is all.”
     Behind Charlie, his words had triggered a promotional video for the conglomerate that implemented the government’s social housing programme. The film was directed by a top arthouse filmmaker, famous for her excoriating visual critiques of elite power. Fully exploiting and so disarming irony, the housing promo featured a development called Little Boxes and a family named Simpson.
     “Getting back to the matter in hand,” Charlie continued, “we can all make a bitchin’ guess at where these unfounded rumours of impending meteorological doom sprung up from.” Charlie’s trademark arch look implicated the disconnected with absolutely no need to spell it out.
     “Well, they’ve gone too far time, causing real data producing folk to get a’ hurt and killed. In my book, that adds up to terrorism. So stay tuned to the news feeds because some bodies are going to pay a heavy price for that evil. And it ain’t gonna be purdy, I can promise y’all that!”
     With military pogroms of the disconnected duly authorised, militia bloodletting tacitly endorsed, individual hate strikes similarly excused and media companies already in a bidding war for the streaming rights to guaranteed mayhem and prime-time-all-the-time viewing, Charlie signed off with a smart military style salute to the irresistibly rousing opening bars of the computer composed U-City anthem before the sponsors’ ads kicked in. Actually, there were only opening bars: the anthem didn’t have a chorus, let alone a grand finale. And, of course, Charlie had never served in the military. At no point in his address had he explained how a group defined by their lack of internet access could promulgate online rumours. He didn’t have to. Real people knew exactly where Charlie was coming from.
 
     “We’ve got another job from the Ministry,” Riga told Allan Exit even as Smooth Eddie drew up back outside Exit Funeral Services, “old dude, standard priority, no real rush.”
     “But I haven’t reported in on Mister Green yet,” Allan Exit objected, simultaneously liking without thinking an online post expressing approval of Charlie’s don’t panic, persecute speech. Thumbs up.
     “I guess they’ve ticked that one off.”
     “I’ll have to inform them of today’s – er - setback,” Allan Exit said, massaging her temples. Absently noting the identity of an incoming call, she instantly declined it.
     “I’ve already requested access to more data on the deceased.”
     “We’re home courtesy of Novashock, your favourite site for streaming body horror, slasher and snuff,” Smooth Edie reported, name-checking one of the hearse’s lease sponsors.
     “I wish I could snuff you,” Riga growled.
     “You’re welcome!” Smooth Eddie piped cheerily.
     “What Cousin Charlie said about the plastic west coast,” Allan Exit asked, deploying the nickname everyone used for the government, “where has our missing cadaver gone to the seaside?”
     “Blog doesn’t say,” Riga reported, scrolling on her wrist device, “but from around these parts, at this time of year, with atmospheric pollution patterns, the wind direction and residual radioactive fallout, who in their right mind would go east?”
     “At this point I wouldn’t like to bet that Mister Green R.I.P. is anything like in his right mind,” Allan Exit said. “What sane man skips out on his own funeral?”
     “I know one sane woman who tried pretty damned hard,” Riga sniffed.
     “There was a glitch,” Allan Exit explained for the umpteenth time, “I couldn’t know that you were in remission.”
     “A stay of execution.”
     “You know I hate that terminology.”
     “I know you shot me,” Riga said, “no hard feelings. In fact, no feelings at all. Because. I’m. Dead!”
     “Your abiding anger is quite understandable,” Allan Exit soothed. “Have you considered going back to counselling?”
     “My counsellor is still in hospital, “Riga said, “he’s asked not to see me again.”
     “That’s reasonable, I suppose, in the circumstances.”
     “PTSD aside,” Riga said, “he actually sent me a thank-you text. With the insurance pay-out they’ve rebuilt him. They have the technology, the capability to make him better than before; better, stronger, faster.”
     “Is he going back to work?”
     “Sure is. He’s afforded an empathy boosting sense, had it built in along with the physical upgrades. Ground floor office this time too.”
     “Sensible choice.”
     “He should never have advised me to count to ten to keep from losing my temper: maths always drives me crazy!”
     “I’m sure he’s taken note.”
     “What about my emotional problems, though?”
     “Perhaps we should do this new job straight after lunch,” Allan Exit suggested. “Would that make you feel better?”
     “Can I watch you eat?” Riga asked.
     “If you absolutely must,” Allan Exit conceded because she couldn’t shake her feelings of guilt.
     The experience of Riga watching her eat always made her distinctly queasy and usually meant that she had little appetite anyway. Whilst alive, Riga had loved her food, albeit that she ate the same unappetizing crap synthesised from shitty air and, indeed, literal shit that everyone endured. One alternative to bland dietary dissatisfaction involved taste bud modification, which was within the means of only the very few, big-data harvesting execs and the like.
     “Chloroplast cell modification can free you from the schlep of a boring mammalian diet,” Smooth Eddie chimed in, “photosynthesise up to ninety percent of the nutrients you need for a longer and healthier life. Let Nutribrite free you from the downtime of mealtimes forever.”
     “Thanks,” Allan Exit acknowledged, “but there was a reason all plant life became extinct.”
     “I would give my eye teeth to shut this fucker up,” Riga growled menacingly, clenching a massive fist.
     “Any damage to the vehicle, including its on-board, will result in corporate police action,” Smooth Eddie intoned. “Go on punk, make my day!”
     “It’s just: Go ahead, make my day.” Allan Exit corrected, unable not to intone her exasperation despite herself. “Elsewhere, Harry Callahan says: You've got to ask yourself one question: 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?”
     “The toaster can’t even quote classic movies right,” Riga sneered, “I wouldn’t soil my hands. Let’s go eat.”
     “Ban Appétit!” Smooth Eddie delivered as the undertakers left the hearse to find a café where one of them could eat an unpalatable lunch and the other could watch, mentally salivating.
     “Bon, you digital dickhead!”
 
     “You know, Allan Exit said when the hearse was out of sight, “Smooth Eddie might have meant ban, it could be one of the sponsors’ messages?”
     “Just a terminological error,” Smooth Eddie sent.
     “Out of sight but not out of mind,” Allen Exit murmured, forcibly reminded that she could never be out of digital earshot, never disconnect.
     “That clunker pisses me off,” Riga growled, unaware of her boss’ embodied communication with the hearse’s on-board.
     “Built to serve and never swerve,” Smooth Eddie sent, “courtesy of D-day Data Services, your communications sponsor for the next seventy-two minutes.”
 
Following lunch for one at a little Sicilian place that they quite often frequented, Allan Exit and Riga set out to commit the late Mister Joleon Soames. Riga had evidently enjoyed the repast more than her boss. Don Vito’s had produced a decent semblance of gnocchi from block carbohydrate, and she really appreciated the way they coloured, textured and sliced the reprocessed protein to look like salami, albeit a very shocking-pink salami. Though no one working in the catering industry could be anywhere near ancient enough to have seen meat for real, processed or otherwise, making synthesised food resemble its fleshy progenitors was an obsession across all the cultures of U-City. Simulated sausages were particularly popular, whether they be styled after frankfurters, boerewors, merguez or chorizo, though no one had yet been bold enough to market a take on black pudding. The cooks of U-City somehow managed to make the whole range of bangers look different one from the other. And, up to a point, with the odd overly lurid exception, they all looked the part too. Unfortunately, they all tasted much the same, putting the consumer in mind of faeces and fungus. For Allan Exit the best part of the meal, apart from when it was mercifully finished, had been the dietary fibre, vitamin C, manganese and vitamin K, which the café had served in a reasonably palatable smoothie. Although gene editing had significantly reduced people’s daily requirements, everyone still needed supplements, the proportions of which were derived from continuous online diagnosis and fed-back for each individual. Along with her melanin supplement, the smoothie also contained the synthetic bacteria required to digest food and otherwise maintain good health. So, Don Vito’s connected processing technology dispensed a bespoke cocktail for its funeral directing diner.
     “Did you notice the Mafia types at the table by the window?” Riga asked as they walked back to the office and Smooth Eddie.
     “Moral philosophers,” Allan Exit suppled while checking out the re-mastered old movies newly available for personal online holfactory immersion, “they’ve got a think-tank operation just a couple of blocks from our office.”
     “Who needs moral philosophy?” Riga asked absently, somewhat preoccupied by wishing that she could still eat because then she could have farted. She really missed farting.
     “We all do,” Allan exit said, unaware that her assistant’s attention had already drifted. Simultaneously as she formed her next sentence she dismissed pirate pop-up ads for an erotic masseur, data credit, a gigolo, x-treme sports betting, erectile dysfunction, and an ap to block pirate pop-up ads. Once again, she declined an incoming call: he was persistent.
     “The algorithms can’t do ethical dilemmas except maybe on a strictly quantitative consequentialist paradigm,” she informed Riga, “ten lives are more valuable than nine; ones and zeros.”
     “Lost you,” Riga said, “tuned out, gone…” She began to whistle tunelessly.
     “Take our job,” Allan Exit said, attempting to reengage her apprentice’s interest, “who decides for us who dies?”
     “The Ministry,” Riga said, “algorithms, duh.”
     “And how do they decide?”
     “Data, of course, great big bloody data!”
     “Big bloody data, exactly. Immense sets of data that computers analyse to reveal patterns and trends in our behaviour and how we relate to each other. But why does the analysis result in, say, the death of our Mister Green?”
     “I know this,” Riga said, scratching vigorously under one of her breasts, “I saw a podcast about it. Give me a moment… Er… Um… No, it’s gone.”
     “Somewhere in programming all the computer algorithms,” Allan Exit explained as she scrolled through reviews of the best all-weather adaptable jackets for this ‘season’, which would likely amount to four seasons in one day once again, “somewhere, someone has made a judgement about what’s best for U-City as a whole, actually mediated through zillions of simple digital decisions: Does Mister Green have a criminal record? One equals no, zero equals yes. Does he have a genetic propensity to develop this, that or the other disease? Is he an activist? Does he have a prosthetic enhancement? Most importantly, does he generate data: how much judged against successive scales, one and zeros, how marketable, and so on and so on almost ad infinitum until the scales tips and the final zero equals death.”
     “Seems fair enough,” Riga decided.
     “But is it?” Allan Exit pressed. “Is it justice when that the decision is made before he commits murder, before he develops a costly illness, before he takes direct action, because he’s not very active online? Simply because he doesn’t shop enough, maybe?”
     “Better safe than sorry, I suppose.”
     “But you’re living proof… Sorry, I’ll rephrase that. You’re walking dead proof that the algorithms can make mistakes.”
     “Could moral philosophy have saved me?” Riga asked, instantly more attentive.
     “Perhaps,” Allan Exit shrugged, embarrassed, “who knows, certainly not me. Anyway, that’s what the moral philosophers’ think-tank does: feeds back data on ethical dilemmas and analyses algorithms for the subjective bias that people almost inevitably programmed in back in the early days before algorithms wrote their own algorithms.”
     “Someone didn’t like me,” Riga growled, clenching her fists.
     “Don’t take it personally,” Allan Exit advised, “it was more likely a preponderance of innumerable male programmers who didn’t fancy big women.”
     “Snivelling little shits!”
     “Or just someone who held a grudge against night-club bouncers.”
     “I was good at my job,” Riga said proudly, “never hurt anyone. Well not anyone who didn’t deserve it. And I never failed to complete the Actual Bodily Harm Assessment form, ABHA 0805 stroke 67, always using the prescribed company terminology, especially where I did have to throw some bollocksy little bastard out on his pimply arse.”
     “Was that the prescribed terminology?”
     “Restrain, reprove and/or eject an overly boisterous client,” Riga recited.
     “Anyway, we’re just speculating with a couple of random possibilities in a whole sea of potential contributory factors, you see?” Allan Exit tried to explain. “We have no real idea why the algorithms deceased you or indeed why they then changed that decision, albeit a whisker too late.”
     “Snot-nosed geek boy programmers with tiny dicks, just wait till I next meet up with one of the fuckers!”
     Allan Exit sighed, contemplating the nuances of algorithm logic was evidently not one of Riga’s strong suits. Luckily there was no more time for her to describe the vengeances she planned to extract on sexist programmers and bellicose drunkards because they arrived back at the hearse.
     “Let’s focus on the late Mister Soames, shall we,” Allan Exit proposed as she slid into her seat. “Show some respect.”
     “Just so long as he doesn’t fuck with us,” Riga warned, “and isn’t a dick.”
    
Joleon Soames, as it turned out, was the most perfectly organised and accommodating cadaver that Allan Exit could recall. Something of a godsend, as some faith groups would term it, after the morning the undertakers had experienced. As Riga guilelessly put it later: “This mourning sure beat this morning.” Joleon Soames was one of an increasingly rare breed of the deceased who had elected to see in coming. These days, many of the undertakers’ jobs involved taking their clients out by surprise. That way they usually passed painlessly and ignorant of the fact. In that regard, Riga had been a notable exception to the rule on two counts: she had both sensed it coming and, to speak both figuratively and literally, tried exceptionally hard to dodge the bullet.
     “Come in, come in,” Joleon Soames greeted them cheerily, opening his Kevlar front door wide, “I’ve been expecting you.”
     “Our commiserations,” Allan Exit said, tucking her top hat under her arm and following the deceased inside.
     Even with her own top hat off and breathing in, Riga had to crouch and turn sideways to squeeze through the doorway of Joleon Soames’ 3-D printed dome home. The door latch still caught her painfully in the left buttock.
     “Bijou, ain’t she?” Joleon Soames beamed. “Or pokey little shithole as we used to say.”
     The area where Joleon Soames lived was a war zone. On the way here Smooth Eddie had been obliged to take quite a long diversion to avoid a firefight between rival militias. Whether they be gangs, tribal groupings or sects, Cousin Charlie mostly left the warring parties to it. Unless, that is, the algorithms detected a threat that they calculated meant something significant. At that point, drone strikes were likely to level entire neighbourhoods in an instant. While they raged bloody but insignificant, though, inner city skirmishes made for great public viewing. Bread and circuses was seemingly a concept deeply inscribed into the algorithms. As for the rival combatants, well, it kept them on the street, generating precious primal data.
     “Absolutely everything is in order,” an impressed Allan Exit told Joleon Soames when they were all packed into the dome’s central bed sitting room and she had checked through the relevant online files.
      “Accounts closed, provisions cancelled, memberships annulled, will made, order of service completed, eulogy written… Thank you so much, Mister Soames, I sincerely wish all our clients were so thorough.”
     “Any remaining proprietary data rights’ claims officially relinquished,” Joleon Soames concluded with a satisfied air, “all done and almost dust to dusted.”
     He was a truly ancient black guy, five hundred and five years old! Way back in the day, before disease and injury negation became the dominant paradigm and any medical diagnosis and treatment had been completely automated, he’d been a hospital doctor. Allan Exit noticed that Riga was as fascinated as she by the former medico’s hair, not because of the unusually tall flattop style so much as its natural white colour. Like the snow in Fargo, her assistant would observe later. What fell as snow in their own time came in shades of grey.
     “I bet you have some stories, sir,” Allan Exit said, making conversation.
     If anyone deserved a little time to pass over peacefully, it was the supremely acquiescent Joleon Soames. So, she sat down to join the deceased in a cup of Startcos that Riga cheerfully made for them almost unbidden, not even complaining when she banged her head in the cupboard that was the kitchen.
     “Call me Joleon, please,” their cadaver said with a toothy smile, “after all it is my funeral.”
     “Joleon,” Allan Exit obliged, raising her cup to toast her client.
     “Thank the good lord I won’t have to drink this crap no more,” Joleon said, grimacing after taking a mouthful.
     “You’ve had such a good innings, Joleon,” Allan Exit said, almost forgetting and taking a sip of her own steaming cup of Starcos.
     Riga frowned.
     “To use the vernacular, good and long are very different animals, son,” Joleon said.
     “Actually…” Allan Exit began apologetically even as Riga tried and failed to stifle a guffaw.
     “Oh, I’m sorry,” Joleon said, grinning and foolishly embarrassedly as he realised his gender mistake, “you see just how ancient I’ve gotten!?”
     “You worked as an actual doctor, examining real live patients and everything?” Riga asked, her pug nose inadvertently wrinkling in something closely akin to disgust.
     “Yes, mam,” Joleon confirmed, “right there on the frontline in an Accident and Emergency Department for the best part of four decades. I specialised in treating acute traumatic injuries.”
     “You saw people’s blood and bone and guts and everything?” Riga pressed, morbidly fascinated.
     “I could tell you stories make your hair curl.”
     Riga cleared her throat, deliberately twitching her brow up and down. And it was Allan Exit’s turn to be amused, which she did much more decorously than her assistant, allowing herself merely a fleeting smile.
     “Present company excepted,” Joleon apologised to Riga, acknowledging her baldness, indeed the total absence of body hair indicated by her lack of either eyebrows or eyelashes.
     “Take my pulse,” Riga said, extending her arm to the deceased.
     Joleon Soames duly set to the task in hand, feeling around her wrist.
     “Well,” he said, meeting Riga’s eyes and taking in her pleased with herself smirk, “don’t that beat all!”  
     “Do you remember meat?” Riga asked, changing tack in a way that most people would find disconcerting.
     “No one is that old!” Joleon scoffed, unfazed. “But my daddy done told me that when he was a boy he ate beefsteak pretty near every darned week.”
     Both Riga and Allan Exit were stunned to open-mouthed silence, contemplating the simultaneous barbarity, debauched indulgence and environmental harm of such an action.
     “He was raised on a farm,” Joleon said, compounding their stupefaction by adding, “They grew wheat to supply the baking industry, bread makers and so on.”
     “Did you ever…” Riga began.
     “When I was growing up we sometimes ate pancakes on special occasions, Conspicuous Consumption Day and the like. Of course, they were made with spelt flour by then, which had to be bought under the counter.”
     “How did they taste?” Riga asked yearningly.
     “Good,” Joleon said simply but with a relish that instantly made Riga’s mouth water.
     “And when you retired as a doctor?” Allan Exit asked, because she could see it would be some time before her assistant was able to speak again, lost in a world of flavours imagined from no basis in physical experience whatsoever.
     “Did nothing for half a century,” Joleon said, “lapsed into lackadaisical leisure and superfluous shopping, like most everyone else. Logged into virtual worlds played the hero, played the fool, played the games and played the game: watched every kind of porn; ordered up the new recreational drugs online as fast as they could develop them and took the trips.”
     Allan Exit’s skin prickled and she strove to keep her heartbeat regular. She felt it becoming stuffy in the little dome room, close.
     “I was always a tad restless, though,” Joleon continued, “uncomfortable with futility. When the first ship of colonists headed for Mars and the Irrelevance Riots kicked off….”
     “The Irrelevance Riots were what sparked The Unrest,” Allan Exit contributed, excited despite her sense of foreboding. “That was before U-City was even one unified territory. The Mars flights were when people realised that life was literally leaving them behind?”
     “The mass of people, anyway,” Joleon said, “ergo the irrelevant. The technology-owning elite sent their up-loadable intelligences, life-histories and their DNA with the colonists, of course.”
     “A parting of the ways,” Allan Exit mused.
     “I came out of retirement then,” Joleon continued, “treated gunshot, gassed and bludgeoned protesters, rioters and a good many innocents caught in the crossfire. Eventually, started up my own A and E unit in an abandoned shale-gas power plant: called up some former colleagues, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and got right back to work. Just like old times only better, worse that is – we had bodies bleeding every which way all over that fart-smelling mausoleum of a place!”
     “Anyone who rioted was excluded from medi-care?” Allan Exit checked her history.
     “Damn straight they were,” Joleon confirmed. “First thing we had to do after the riots really caught fire was to dig out people’s chips because the algorithms were frying the frontal lobes of anyone detected out of place for too long. I think it was the first time they tried that shit.”
     “And you?” Riga manged, catching up with the conversation.
     “One of my colleagues dug out mine and I dug out his. Hell of a guy: Alejandro!” Joleon toasted his friend in the coffee substitute that he’d evidently forgotten for the moment he hated.
     “One hell of guy.”
     “You were disconnected?!” Allan Exit queried, unable to hide her amazement in spite of herself.
     But Joleon was momentarily lost in a reverie, patently recalling a sparkling romance.
     “You were disconnected, Joleon?” Allan Exit found herself repeating even as she ran her finger under her high collar: the room felt increasingly warm and discomfiting.
     “For about a decade,” the deceased roused himself, “we all were. During The Unrest a group of neighbourhoods in our area came together to form a ZAD and we declared ourselves autonomous. We held out for almost ten years of bitter fighting. The drones dropped bombs, nerve gas, biological weapons. Then we had a couple of bitter years of intense street fighting against their mercenaries... All record-breaking viewer ratings, year on year.”
     “Was that Holding?” Allan Exit enquired nervously.
     “Holding was an inspiration for all of us,” Joleon told her. “In the end, when they’d had their fun and public opinion was swaying our way, the corporate police rounded up what was left of us. Some got away, though, the clowns….”
     “CLOWNS?” Riga enquired shrilly, beating Allan Exit to the exclamation by just a nanosecond but a logarithmic order of decibels.
     “From the start some of the rioters dressed up as clowns,” Joleon explained, ‘took on this ancient protest culture, very militant but crazy funny with it, and I mean crazy, like a sect of something. They wore goofed up military uniforms and had a whole different way of looking at things, of being: ‘innocent as lambs, wily as coyotes, rascally as racoons’. That’s the sort of language they used for themselves, conjuring extinct animals all the time. They were some kind of heroes, though, in the end.”
     “Like a deviant militia,” Allan Exit murmured.
     “Well, the clowns and some other groups with enough gumption escaped the round-up in our ZAD, slipped the net as the Rats closed in.”
     “Rats?” Allen Exit asked.
     “The street name for CorpoRATe Police,” Joleon supplied, stressing the syllable. “I’d have gone with the clowns if not for my patients.”
     A clap of thunder sounded like the renting of the earth, shaking the walls of the dome and and then rumbling long and low for what seemed like an age. Each one of the trio sat around the table looked to the heavens, though there was no skylight or even a window to reveal the weather to them. Allan Exit noted an amber double-plus storm warning flashing in her internet connection.
     “And what happened to you, Joleon?” she asked, as the thunder pealled away.
     “Spent the next half century banged up here, imprisoned in this dome; tagged and tethered, re-chipped but with restricted connectivity. If I’d ever tried to leave, they’d have zapped me. And I could only access ‘public information data’ and the deluge of corporate marketing bullshit: couldn’t contact my friends, couldn’t access social media, nothing. The motherfuckers wouldn’t even let me keep up with medical advances, closed those forums to me. Basically they sedated and brainwashed me for fifty years!”
     “Wow,” Riga mouthed. “And then?”
     “Then I was released, rebooted and reconnected.”
     “And?”
     “And I’ve been waiting for you ever since. This isn’t any living. Give me incarceration over irrelevance anytime. And I’d take the desperation and deprivations of the ZAD, the bone and blood and guts, mucus, puke and pus, over both every day of the week.”
     Outside the storm broke with tremendous force, a cacophony of hailstones hammering on the roof of the dome.
     “Sir,” Allan Exit said urgently, raising her voice to be heard, “I should caution you….”
     She was aware, almost painfully aware, of an unprecedented lull in the internet traffic in her brain, approaching silence, almost no layers, and no pop-up ads.
     “Too late for that,” Joleon said, grinning, “I’m already dead, remember!”
     “Sir!”
     And the intensity of the appeal in her voice caused Joleon Soames’ grin to slide from his face like a molten mask. He made a telling eye contact with the funeral director, sharply informed by the perturbation arcing across her ruby corneas.
     “But you two mustn’t take any notice of the rantings of crazy old dead guy,” Joleon said with a forced chuckle.
     With an effort, he reformed his features to look cheery again, though to the close observer the result this time around was more a rictus grin.
     “Thank you, Joleon,” Allan Exit said, aware of the digital brouhaha beginning to reassert itself in her head, the velocity and volume increasing to a tumultuous whirlwind blur once more, inundating and concussing her. “I’m sure it’s a relief to get your –er – sins off your chest.”
     “Sure is,” Joleon said, again meeting her eyes, and in this encounter the grey and stony flatness of his own gaze told Allan Exit all she needed - and more than she wanted – to know.
     “Life is what we make of it,” Allan Exit offered a hook.
     “I’ve kept a virtual dog these last decades,” Joleon responded, “Spot.”
     “A comfort, I’m sure.”
     “We met a clown,” Riga interjected suddenly, ingenuous of the tension but not oblivious of the spark that her words returned to the deceased’s eyes, “just today.”
     “Not the type of clown as you referred to, though” Allan Exit said, contriving to sound – and trying feel – very certain, meanwhile fixing Riga with an admonishing look.
     “Can we get this over with?” Joleon sighed impatiently, running his long fingers through his fierce hair and massaging his scalp.
     “Just do your thing.”
     “We already did, Joleon, sir,” Allan Exit said, slipping her blue gloves from her jacket pocket.
     “In the Starcos?” Joleon gaped.
     “I’m sorry for your loss,” Allan Exit said.
     Uncharacteristically gentle, Riga took the cup from Joleon Soames’ limp hand before he spilled a single drop.
 
     “Well, that almost took a rather – er - peculiar turn,” Allan Exit said quietly when they were back in the hearse with the body of Joleon Soames safely pre-processing in one of the vehicle’s twin active-coffin pods. Allan Exit wasn’t so old-school that she wished to undertake pre-processing manually. Serendipitously, the storm had ceased in time for them to transport the deceased in an appropriately dignified manner without having to use the Dyneema canopy on their coffin trolley. A freshly emerged sun was beginning to melt the hogback of agglomerated hailstones in the roadside gutters. In the distance, lightening arced silent across a greasy orange sky.
     “Weird old cove,” Riga said, “but I kinda liked him.”
     “It takes all sorts, as they say,” Allan Exit recited tritely, declining another call: this was getting tiresome.
     “Reprocessing Centre?” Smooth Eddie enquired blandly.
     “Fast as you can,” Allan Exit instructed.
     “The service should be short,” Riga said, checking on her wrist device what Joleon Soames had specified, “even I can read this eulogy: he was born; he was a doctor; he lived a while, existed longer; he died; he is survived by no dependents, no known friends nor former lovers.”
     “Short is sweet,” Allan Exit said, nodding her head but frowning.
     “I’m going to add that he had a fine head of hair,” Riga decided.       “Whatever,” Allen Exit allowed, uncharacteristically distracted from her normally scrupulous professionalism. “The sooner we’re done the better. We need to get back to the office. Today’s events dictate an infernal amount of bureaucracy.”
     “I have something I need to do this evening,” Riga said, squirming in her seat.
     “No worries, you can leave the admin to me,” Allan Exit said affably, noting her assistant’s gape, delightedly surprised at the facility of her escape.
     “Thank you,” Riga acknowledged, awkwardly sincere, “it’s not my strongest suit.”
     “But could you manage to come in early tomorrow?” Allan Exit asked, guilelessly.
     “Sure, no bother,” Riga concurred with a shrug.
     “Pack a bag, would you, essentials for a day or two.”
     “Why? Where are we off to?”
     “Where the brass bands apparently play tiddely-om-pom-pom?”
     “Beside the seaside?”
​

​🌊🌊🌊
 
The sea; an ocean.
     It literally staggered them. Its immensity, stretching the horizon, far and away, away, away. Its beauty and its beauty and again its boundless, inexplicable beauty. The whole of their being is agape to this wonder.
     Slate. Aquamarine. Aegean. Clouded then clear: shimmering the sun, silver scales, rippled by an onshore breeze.
     They gasped.
     Their first time.
     Other times, they sensed, the ocean would surge, waves towering over the shore and breaking with the crash of thunder, the hammer of a god. The mightiest force: a force of forces; gravity and the gale.
     Hurt and humbled now, shrieking pain and debasement.
     When they felt its awesome power and then its terrible, terrifying emptiness, they did fall to their knees. There were understandings lost with this extinction, behaviours even they could not comprehend, foresights, strategies, alliances… The ghosts of more than a million species flooded in on them from all time before, churning and demanding. They registered these spectres not as numbers but as an overwhelming implosion of senses and affects: the icy light in myriad eyes, seeming to implore and yet… A well of pity, the tang of salt on the air, stinging their eyes, delicious on their tongue. Awestruck, breathless. Scales and spines and tentacles trailing beneath their fingers. A broken scallop shell, jagged edges and dripping blood. Disorientation and destruction.
     Sorrow.
     Grief.
     The taste.
     Of it.
     First as tragedy
     Closing their eyes, they dug their fingers deep into the moist, cool sand of the beach, clawed, gripped, held tight. Held on; barely. Crustaceans, krill, dolphins, molluscs, sea snakes, phytoplankton, whales, coral… At the moment in time which they felt most keenly of all the moments that welled inside them, bursting out of them, sundering them; of all these times that they knew all at once and forever, at that random moment, they did sense quantities, a deluge of vibrant data, writhing before them. Before them: the being of over a quarter of a million animal species; more than eighteen thousand species of fish; some four trillion individual fish. Feeding, breeding, and swapping sex.
     Easily
     Too easy.
     Outrageous.
     Gone.
     Polluted, poisoned, hunted, hooked, harpooned, gaffed, speared, netted, dredged, then mongered, boiled alive, suffocated, gaping and gasping.
     Dead.
     Inside.
     Them.
     But…
     But
     There are selkies too; mermaids and the song of sirens. Seduction, sea gods and submerged cities. Sunken galleons, shivered timbers and treasure chests; Davy Jones and the fourth drowned, ‘thirst like a dredger, died of blisters’. Alcyone of Thessaly who, grief-stricken, drowned herself in the ocean but who was returned as a kingfisher;  the nymph Elektre who married Thaumas the sea god and gave birth to Iris, the goddess of rainbows; Pleione, protector of sailors, daughter of Oceanus, the sea personified, and mother of Merope, who became human. And faded away. Submarines, sea cucumbers and sponges. The mortal terrors of Leviathan, Isonade and kraken. Poseidon and Neptune, Prince Namor and Aquaman. Troy Tempest aboard Stingray. Surf boards and pearl fishers.
     Coming up for air.
     An octopus is not a toaster.
     A feeling of the ocean, an observation about that feeling, a theory about observation, the scent of observed feeling, the molecules of a scent, a perfume bottle, glass, frozen fluid, liquefied grains of sand, an unending stretch of beach, a bleaching porpoise skeleton, stranded jellyfish teased by an oblivious turning tide, sandpipers scuttling the waterline in search of food, worms… A wormhole, unknowable.
     Over, under and through the waves: The Nautilus, Titanic, Kon-Tiki, The Mary Celeste, A pedallo.
     Driftwood.
     Oil spills.
     Mermaids’ tears.
     Casting away as refugees drown.
     Leg irons, rusting.
     Slave ships…
     Slave ships!
     They wretched and spewed.
     The moat of a child’s shell-encrusted sandcastle fills with water, at first a trickle, a tiny breach, then a flood. And the castle crumbles, undermined, awash, fallen and reunited. The sea tinkling stones and shells as it seeps away. Returns. Seeps away. A lullaby. Rock pools remain. Teem. A yellow shrimp net on a plastic stick, moulded to mimic a bamboo cane, abandoned. Somewhere, deeper, farther away, there are salmon leaping to spawning grounds and dolphins spinning in the air for the pure joy of it, twisting like a carnival of ribbons, show-offs from a super-pod.
     Skimming stones: one, two, three, three, four, five…
     Once I caught a fish, alive.
     A floating shard of plastic, formerly a bottle for ‘electrolyte enhanced alkaline mineral water’, is colonised first by algae, then barnacles establish themselves, sea skaters arrive and lay their eggs, reproduce and thrive on it.
     A hermit crab makes its home in a tin-can that once held mackerel in tomato sauce.
     And then as farce. 
     Flying fish flock, hover between death and death: the jaws of dorado streaking murderous in the water below them, the scimitar bills of frigate birds spearing from the skies above.
     The tears of the sea, weep from you and me.
     They wipe the spew from their chin, laugh like a bottle-nosed dolphin captured and confined, performing tricks and going stir-crazy, an hysterical chirruping, toothy cackle.
     That isn’t any laughing.
     This is not laughter.
     Upside down.
     It makes them smile.

Chapter 1: Going Down
​
     “Mister Green is going down,” Riga said.
     The corner of undertaker Allan Exit’s mouth twitched, disapproving her assistant’s flippant tone. At the same time, though, she nodded gravely in agreement with the statement’s facticity. Inside her head fizzed the constant inescapable flurry and furore that was connectivity. Allan Exit had received the sad news about Mister Green from the Ministry and shared it with Riga via a message to the antique wrist device that they had managed to source for her from a retro-pirate. At a not inconsiderable cost, Allan Exit might have added, though only in one of her rare miserly bookkeeping moments. Riga, of course, did not have biotech implants that connected her to the Ubiquitous Web, not that still functioned anyway.
     “Express entombment,” Riga noted almost excitedly, contrasting her habitual lugubriousness, “prime priority!”
     “I’ve already called the hearse,” Allan Exit said, “we can go to work.” She blinked to reject the offer of a date with an unsuitable suitor, a personal trainer with great abs, full body tats, a less than modest IQ, and very few interests outside of the gym, unless, alarmingly obviously from his profile picture, it was inside of the bedroom stroke dungeon.
     “Greenie hasn’t made a will,” Riga observed, tapping her wrist screen with a big blunt finger to access a folder of the Ministry file that Allan Exit had shared with her.
     “Ahh,” Allan Exit sighed, “well let’s just hope that it’s a peaceful passing.”
     But it wasn’t.
 
     By the time they’d donned their frock coats and top hats, the hearse had drawn up outside the office. As they approached, the doors opened automatically and Allan Exit slid nimbly into her seat, facing forward. Meanwhile, just about managing to squeeze her frame through what for most beings would be the more than ample doorway of the extra-long wheelbase vehicle, Riga cursed and sat cramped opposite her boss. She was built like a shot-putter from a bygone age when the Olympic Games was still a thing - not fat but, as she put it herself: “Well meaty”. The hearse was jet-black with sparkling chrome trim, the interior lined with dark blue velvet. Although she was that unique being, a first generation undertaker, Allan Exit favoured a highly traditional approach to her profession. Every morning, in front of the bathroom mirror, she worked on developing a dolorous countenance. Whenever she relaxed, however, she thought her face inclined to levity, which she found really quite annoying.
     “A Mister C. Green,” she told Smooth Eddie, the hearse’s on-board, “1417 Olden Way, Holding.”
     “One hundred and twenty-seven point seven kilometres,” Smooth Eddie reported back instantly, his synthesised monotone devoid of any accent; “journey time fifty-nine minutes; E.T.A. oh-eight hundred hours precisely.
     ‘That would be precisely one hour ago,” Allan Exit said wearily.
     ‘Re-calculating,’ Smooth Eddie intoned, already accelerating the powerful solar-charged electric vehicle silently in the direction of the sun that glimmered low in a pallid morning sky. The entire body of the car absorbed sunlight and stored the energy.
     “E.T.A. ten hundred hours,” Allan Exit mouthed sotto voce.
     “E.T.A. ten hundred hours,” Smooth Eddie supplied.
     Machine intelligence!
     “So, go on then,” Riga coaxed her employer, “finish telling me how you got your wack-job name?”
     Allan Exit sighed and closed her eyes.
     “It’ll pass the time,” Riga wheedled, settling even more heavily into her seat and smiling her outlandish smile by way of encouragement. She looked like Buddha on MDMA.
     The hearse slid its way through their largely deserted, traffic free and characterless neighbourhood, a designated enterprise area for start-ups and small businesses. Unlike Exit Funeral Services, some of the businesses accommodated in Dinkside were neither small nor legit. For the most part they could not be faulted for their enterprise, however.
     “I’ll polish your shoes, sponge your suit and brush your topper for a whole month,” Riga bid.
     ‘Three.”   
     “Two.”
     “Ten weeks.”
     “Done!”
     Allan Exit took Riga’s huge left hand and shook it to seal the deal. Simultaneously, she muted the playlist her music provider had curated for her today, compelled to accept that their commercials would still pop-up unless she unsubscribed, a task deliberately designed to be beyond tedious and strewn with pitfalls that instantly signed the would-be unsubscriber up again.
     “Well, you probably think that mine is an appropriate name for an undertaker….”
     “Except…” Riga pressed impatiently. She’d heard this bit.
     “Except that, last time I checked, Allan Exit was pretty much all brown woman.   “Definitely at the shocking-pink extreme of the gender spectrum,” Riga confirmed.
     “More the black widow zone,” Allan Exit said deadpan.
     “And Allan is a male name,” Riga said delightedly, folding her hands in her lap, “at least in this neck of the woods. Not that we have any woods, obviously: duh.”
     Alan Exit experienced the searing hollow pang she always felt whenever the realisation of their single species existence hit home. Striking randomly, the desolate feeling never diminished. Lately, indeed, it struck more often and pierced her more deeply than ever.
     “Remember I told you that my mother chose the name after a little adventure, or rather misadventure, serving with the armed forces back-in-the-day?”
     “You told me your mum was a soldier, anyway.”
     “Not even conscripted or press-ganged, Mother volunteered.”
     “Crazy lady!”
     “And back then it was a United Nations force, not corporate military.”
     “Coercion without branding, bonuses and product placement? Unbe-fucking-lievable!”
     “She should tell you this herself,” Allan Exit said fretfully, “I tend to forget names and details.”
     “You’re going to introduce me to your mum?!”
     “Actually, I’m not sure which of you would be more perturbed. But on second thoughts…”
     “Restart!” Riga encouraged.
     “Well, Mother’s garrison was stationed in some tiny remote region that had laid claim to being a country, part of a larger occupying state that had itself been part of a major federation until it slid into extreme-right nationalist populism and opted out.”
     “Predictably,” Allan Exit continued, recalling a MOOC lecture given by a prominent academic who was later exposed as a terrorist, in league with anarchists and sex criminals, “that state then imploded with catastrophic consequences: famine, riots, repression… The full maelstrom, all the usual historical stuff that follows imposing an unfettered market as policy: deregulation, privatisation and ever escalating levels of exploitation and oppression, extreme wealth and acute widespread poverty.”
     “They fucked up,” Riga summarised gruffly.
     “Ah, so you’ve studied the dismal science?” Allan Exit asked wryly. “You seem to have the terminology off pat, at least.”
     “It’s not racket science,” Riga said, “it’s what humans do, like us, like here, like always: we fuck up.”
     “You really do have a grasp of economics,” Allan Exit sounded impressed even as she accessed Wiki to check something out: “But, historically, the expression was ‘rocket science’.”
     “I’ll stick with racket.”
     “Corporate greed, crony capitalism, corruption… You may have a point.”
     “Fast-Forward,” Riga demanded, ever impatient, “the story!”
     “Mind you,” Allan Exit mused, for the moment ignoring the spur, “I don’t think any previous society has – er – messed up on quite the same epic scale as us,”
     “You got that right,” Riga said, indicating with a sweep of her hand the sterile, grey and exclusively human landscape of U-City that stretched interminably in every direction beyond the hearse’s one-way windows.
     “We really did it, didn’t we,” Allan Exit mused, “we missed the big picture by a zillion country miles…”
     “Story!”
     “Yes, well,” Allan Exit gathered herself, declining to mentally click on a persistently repeated pop-up ad for single-use designer underwear, “the UN troopers were sent into this region to take over and end their civil wars, disarm the militias, set up internal refugee camps, deliver humanitarian aid...”
     “And protect the elites, their assets and their asses.”
     “Are you a Marxist?”
     “Sagittarius.”
     “I mean…”
     “Story! Story! Story!”
     “Okay, I am getting there: be cool honey-bunny.” Allan Exit smiled, quoting classic old movie dialogue she knew that Riga also loved. Being movie buffs was a rare thing they’d found in common while passing excruciatingly idle hours together in Exit Funeral Services office, time they termed B.C., Between Cadavers. Watching, reviewing and simply shooting the breeze about old movies passed the time away between folk passing away.
     The sun beat down with a sharp increase in intensely that was palpable and Smooth Eddie turned up the air con without the need for instruction.
     “Too cold already,” Allan Exit told the on-board.
     Riga shrugged, insensible to temperature.
     “So,” Allan Exit continued, “my mother, not widely noted for her generosity on all fronts, was seemingly very open to sharing her – um - virtue at the drop of a hat. Or a rifle. Or, in the case of my father evidently, a pitchfork. He was a native and she seduced him after watching him working on the harvest.”
     “They were growing stuff that recently?” Riga asked, her eyes wide.
     “Mother is three-hundred and fifty years old.”
     “Still sprightly?”
     “Incorrigibly so,” Allan Exit sighed. “Anyway, yes, according to Mother, back then they could still grow a little of a few hardy, unmodified crops in some of those rural backwaters.”
     “Wild oats?”
     “Mildly amusing. And you got the expression correct, so mildly amusing and a minor miracle.”
     Sarky,” Riga sniffed.
     “Mother even has a few photos stored,” Allan Exit continued. “There’s this burly, bearded, hirsute white guy with his shirt off pitching a bale of hay…” Allan Exit shuddered as she physically recalled the image.
     “A substantial cube of dried grass; grasses being a formerly common and unspectacular herbaceous plant family…” Smooth Eddie supplied without being asked.
     “Shut the fuck up, Knowledge-Box,” Riga told the on-board. “Even I know what grass was.”
     “So,” Allan Exit continued, “that was dad: a barbarian pitching a hay bale up onto a trailer.”
     “And he was called Exit?”
     “Toooo obvious.”
     “Allan?”
     Allan Exit shook her head, glancing out of the window long enough to note that they had entered a shanty neighbourhood. Here people eyed the shiny black car intently, most with blank expressions, some with fear sparking in their eyes, a few with flaming hostility. There were no jobs here, hadn’t been for decades.
     “My mother claims that she can’t remember his name, if she ever knew it,” Allan Exit continued, dragging her attention back to her attentive assistant, “though, to my perennial embarrassment, she’s very sharp on recalling the details of his scent. She used to say that I smelled like him. Like hay. Like sunshine. Like….
     “Are you blushing?”
     “Like sweat and sex,” Allan Exit managed to conclude, being professionally well practiced in talking through awkward and uncomfortable moments in a conversation. “Thankfully, my name is not too directly linked with that distressingly juicy portion of my mother’s memory…”
     “You could have been called Jiz or…”
     “Enough!” Allan Exit commanded, raising a forestalling palm. “My name came from a little later in the misadventure, when Mother got the result of her pregnancy test. Still in that backwater, she went to a hospital that UN forces had requisitioned. I understand that there was an epidemic of super- gonorrhoea at the time.”
     “Don’t tell me…” Riga was truly aghast.
     “Not as far as I’m aware, thank the stars.”
     The hearse stopped at a traffic signal at a junction and a small Hispanic looking boy with a bucket and sponge approached. Smooth Eddie repelled him with a high-pitched alarm tone that made the boy drop his paraphernalia and desperately clasp his hands over his ears.
     “He only wanted to clean your fucking screen,” Riga growled as the arrows changed and the hearse surged away.
     “I am entirely self-valeting,” Smooth Eddie announced, somehow managing to make his monotone sound pompous. “In addition, there have been acid attacks on executive limousines in adjacent districts in recent months.”
     “I wonder why?” Riga asked.
     “Could you please rephrase your question?” Smooth Eddie wasn’t programmed for sarcasm, let alone political insights.
     “Never mind,” Allan Exit interceded warily. It always ended badly when Riga lost the plot with machines, especially Smooth Eddie, and Exit Funeral Services could ill afford the repair bills. So, its proprietor resumed her story.
     “After Mother had been told the ‘good news’,” she wiggled ironic quotation mark fingers, “she was floundering around the hospital corridors, in a daze, looking for a way out so she could skin-up and suck in some leaf, get a stiff drink too, no doubt, and never mind all the medical advice she’d surely only just that minute been given. The way that she indulged, I’m luck I’m not stunted or…”
     “Your name?!” Riga demanded, palpably bursting.
     “So, right then, in that frantic moment, that’s when mother saw the sign: Allan Exit. And here I am.”
     “Far out!”
     “Actually it means ‘Way Out’ in their ancient tongue: Allan means exit. I searched the archive. It was pronounced, Athlan, or something like that.”
     “Wow that makes it an even better undertaker name: Exit Exit!”
     “But not such a great handle for a nubile young woman, brimming with life.”
     “So, you’re okay with it, then?”
     “Not funny.”
     “Not such a great handle for a young woman trying to pull!” Riga quipped, quaking with mirth at her own pun, hugging her vast quaking flanks.
     “You’re fired.”
     “You can’t fire a corpse,” Riga said. “It’s literally illegal, probably, and extremely unsympathetic, for certain sure. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
     “I’m still extremely sorry,” Allan Exit recalled, flinching. “You’re reinstated.”
     “Then, I want a rise.”
     “But I don’t pay you anything!”
     “Twenty-percent across the board” Riga demanded, “or I’m going straight to the union!”
     “Fifteen?”
     “Ten!”
     “Done,” Allan Exit conceded, Riga having bargained herself down. “Er, but there are no unions?”
     “Manner of speaking,” Riga sniffed, “I’d have gone to one of the extortion firms: plenty in our neighbourhood.”
     Without warning a hailstorm hit and battered the car with golf-ball size nuggets. For a moment the drumming racket inside was deafening, but no sooner had the storm started than it stopped.
     “No damage to the paintwork,” the on-board reported, “that TruCoat worked out.”
     “Eddie,” Allan Exit said, feeling an incipient headache, “could I have a cup of coffee.”
     “Don’t say coffee, say Startcos!” the on-board piped with instantly irritating cheeriness.
     “A cup of coffee,” Allan Exit repeated, “black, extra-shot, no sugar. And please cut the marketing.”
     “With a moderate data concession you can upgrade to ad-free?” Smooth Eddie offered.
     “No thank-you.”
     “It comes with mute?”
     “Very tempting, but no.”
     “One regular Startcos noir-plus no-cal, coming right up, Mister Excite!”
     “Moon’s sake!” Allan Exit groaned.
     “You get what you pay for,” Riga said, smirking.
    
     “We have arrived at our destination,” Smooth Eddie announced, “1417 Olden Way, Holding.”
     Allan Exit roused herself from the doze that she’d fallen into. Checking her mail, she deleted a string of enlarging and enhancing body offers, a parallel batch offering to extend life expectancy by supplements or surgery via substitution and simulacra. No business messages, and nothing personal. Reflexively, she unsubscribed from an augmentation network newsletter that she’d never signed up for in the first place. Her cup of coffee sat in its holder, largely untouched but keeping itself warm. The synthesised muck was insipid, almost undrinkable, she’d only ordered it to avoid dehydration and for the caffeine to help her stay awake. Yawning and massaging her throbbing temples, Allan Exit realised her plan had failed on both counts.
     “It’s a wasteland,” she objected after half a minute spent making a panoramic scan through the windows of the hearse.
     ‘Re-calculating.”
     “Where are we?” a blurry Riga demanded, having also been asleep - or whatever the equivalent state was for an animated corpse.
     “Nowhere, middle of,” Allan Exit informed her.
     “We have arrived at our destination,” Smooth Eddie repeated, sounding steadfast, even stubborn.
     Ever testy, Riga waved a hand indicating that Smooth Eddie should open the door. The on-board was programmed for gesture control.
     “Wait!” Allan Exit interjected quickly. “First check air quality. Some of us need to breathe.”
 
Smooth Eddie’s analysis indicated that air quality was typical for U-City: Nitrogen Oxides, Sulphur Dioxide, Ozone, Carbon Monoxide and Lead all deleteriously high but not fatal; particulates, PM10 and especially PM2.5, off the scale, nano-particles too. Allan Exit donned her tastefully mid-grey facemask. Garish and ghoulish designs were the current vogue, prints of the mouth of skulls, demons or vampires. The undertaker’s technically top of the range mask filtered out more than 95% of the pollution and she, in common with everyone else who could manage to afford it, took supplements to mitigate the inevitable harm done to her lungs by the tinniest particles that inevitably got through. Around forty PM2.5 particles could be placed across the width of a single human hair. The synthetic activated charcoal in Allan Exit’s mask also reduced her exposure to the harmful gases in the miasma that these days passed for fresh air in U-City.
     “Oxygen concentration eighteen point seven percent,” Smooth Eddie cautioned as the hearse doors opened, “don’t get too sporty out there!”
     Gene modification had anticipated evolution for the connected population of U-City, all of whom, apart from the extremely elderly and the increasingly rare new-born infant, could breathe at a minimum oxygen concentration of seventeen point five percent when at rest. The disconnected tended to congregate in low altitude areas where the higher air pressure made respiration easier.
     “No body here,” Riga observed needlessly, nevertheless emulating her boss and pulling on blue nitrile work gloves.
     She and Allan Exit stood side by side in front of the hearse in the middle of an extensive area of parched and barren ground. They made an odd pair. Riga’s height and bulk in stark contrast to the slight build of her boss. To her eternal cost, however, Riga was aware that the apparently delicate creature beside her was surprising strong: wiry, whiplash quick and deadly. Allan Exit wore her straightened black hair in ponytail that barely reached from beneath her top hat to her high collar. By contrast again, since her demise, Riga had lost all of her hair and she sorely missed sporting a high bouffant: on her the hairdo had always turned heads, caused jaws to drop open and, on one irksome occasion, a blind-date to pass out when he caught sight of her.  
     The sun beat down and Allan Exit willed the sweat not to form on her furrowed brow. Her ruby red eyes took in the emptiness that stretched before them. Apart from the sunblock she applied to doubly insure the protection offered by her dietary melanin supplement, Allan Exit wore no make-up, and her smooth face was tawny brown. Riga needed no sunblock even though she was bloodless and as white as the proverbial sheet.
     A small dust-devil swirled across the ground in front of them, dispersing on the periphery of the open ground as quickly as it had formed. The whole clearing was about the size of a soccer field, flanked on all sides by windowless low-rise concrete buildings, possibly storage facilities: extensive constructs where people who either no longer existed or didn’t care anymore kept the material things that were not, in all probability, any longer of any value to them or anyone else.
     Curiously, the earth beneath the feet of the undertaker and her assistant had been meticulously worked into raised rows.
     As they walked aimlessly forward into the void, Allan Exit felt oddly embarrassed trampling the rows and so attempted to place her feet in the depressions between them. Dust quickly occluded the polished black sheen of her shoes. Riga clumped her way across the ground heedless of the carefully worked earth. The air thickened and pressed down upon them. Allan Exit felt light-headed and her vison swam in phase with the shimmering heat haze. She swallowed and fought the panic rising in her chest, struggling to keep her breath even and not inhale excessive quantities of the grimy and toxic air.
     Something was building.
     Something was awry.
     Another dust-devil formed, much larger this time. It swept across the ground rapid as an electric arc, enveloping them in a trice. Allan Exit tried to shield her eyes with her arm, wishing she’d brought goggles from the hearse. Her top hat blew off. Riga was similarly discomfited, removing her hat, she pulled her frockcoat completely over her head and crouched against the maelstrom. But she was too late, already hawking dust and convulsed by a coughing fit. Through the thickening cloud a nebulous figure emerged in front of Allan Exit.
     “Mister Green?” she managed to query.
     The face that then appeared close before her eyes caused Allan Exit to gasp and take a step backwards. When the distended mouth opened to speak the voice was strangled and ethereal.
     “The time is not yet ripe.”
     “My commiserations,” Allan Exit managed, still literally taken aback but intent on doing her professional duty. The voice gave her goose-bumps and she felt giddy. “However, you are booked out for today.”
     “Not yet ripe, my nidus.” Whispered but certain.
     The swirling grit assailed Allan Exit’s eyes and she could no longer focus on the blotched and distorted visage before her as it writhed and swelled. The undertaker felt fear and… And something else. Aroused! How on earth could that be? She gasped out loud. Mister Green was twisted, grotesque. In her ear, muting the internal clamour of the Ubiquitous Web, a gravelly voice croaked a folk song, low and haunting:
     “My lips they are as cold as my clay / My breath is heavy and strong / If thou was to kiss my lily white lips / Thy days would not be long…”
     A sudden increase in the force of the dust-devil turned the undertaker round, round, right around, whirling her in circles: dancing down to die…
     And then it was gone: the wind still, the song silent, the desire chilling within her.
     Allan Exit span into Riga with a bump.
     “Oof!”
     “Did you see him?” Allan Exit demanded, too agitated even to apologise.
     “Who?” Riga asked, surfacing from under her improvised cowl.
     “Mister Green?”
     “There’s no body here,” Riga indicated with a sweep of the hand in which she held fast to her top hat, “just us stiffs.” She coughed and spat.
     “Where…” Allan Exit stared wildly across the impossibly empty landscape. She felt at once violated and bereft. Her own top hat lay at her feet and she stooped to pick it up, dusting herself down and trying to compose herself.
     One kiss, one kiss of your lily white lips, one kiss is all I crave.
     “I’ve got that fucking dust in my eyes: can’t see,” Riga growled.
     “Drops in the first-aid kit in the hearse,” Allan Exit responded reflexively. Health and safety at work was ingrained, an essential value for the age they lived in.
     Grumbling, Riga stomped her way back towards the car which, thanks to Smooth Eddie’s smart use of TruCoat’s electrostatic dust repellent app, still shone incongruously dirt free about twenty metres away. Indeed, it stood out like a big black sore thumb.
     “Don’t rub your eyes,” Allan Exit automatically admonished Riga while at the same time turning her attention back to the deserted plot.
     Except that, once again, it wasn’t.
 
     “Excuse me,” Allan Exit said, “but what are you doing?”
     “What does it look like?” the clown asked. “I’m gardening.”
     Squatting on his haunches in the corner of the barren patch of ground farthest from where the hearse had entered and parked, the clown was indeed filling sundry flower pots with a soil that was, of course, devoid of humus and constituted of nothing more than sterile grit and dust. Patting it down carefully, the clown used a little finger to make holes in the centre of each pot.
     “But what are you really doing?” Allan Exit pressed, unable to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing.
     “For the seeds,” the clown explained patently, holding a flower pot up to enable the undertaker to take a closer look.
     “But there are no seeds,” Allan Exit said, frowning quizzically.
     “Not yet,” the clown smiled a big rouged smile. “No seeds, no spores, no rhizomes…”
     The clown’s white painted face centred on a false red nose and on the right cheek was drawn a small, classically shaped heart but shaded florescent green. A teardrop decorated the corner of the left eye. Meanwhile, the clown’s costume was madcap paramilitary: oversize paratrooper boots, one painted red the other green; baggy khaki pants with many bulging pockets and various pinned and stitched-on fabric patches; a pink fun-fur sporran; a bright orange synthetic feather duster stuck in a Sam Browne belt; a jungle print camouflage shirt adorned with numerous badges made the clown perversely conspicuous in the barren urban environment. One large badge caught Allan Exit’s eye. It pictured a long extinct mammal and the motto ‘Friends Not Food’. Atop the clown’s head, worn sideways, the peak over the left ear, the fittingly madcap figure sported an improbably high army officer’s cap. It reminded the undertaker of movies and archive footage that featured the high-stepping armies of ancient dictatorships. A plastic daffodil and a toy rabbit were tucked into the band of the cap above the clown’s face. Again, Allan Exit recognised the flower and the rabbit from movies and archive film footage that she’d accessed long, long ago when she was teenager questing identity. Unless, that is, she’d mixed a rabbit up with something else - a kangaroo maybe? No, her Wiki access identified and confirmed what she was seeing: rabbit, possibly Easter bunny or hare; folkloric symbol associated with Ēostre, a mythical goddess of the dawn, reluctant bringer of light…”
     “Looks like rain,” the clown said, shielding heavily made-up eyes to peer up into the cloudless sky.
     “Who are you?” Allan Exit asked. “What are you?”
     “Sorry, bach,” the clown said, standing up with a low groan and a grimace as, accompanied by an audible creaking of the knees. Dusting the earth from calloused hands, the clown came to attention and threw Allan Exit an elaborate salute.
     “Capten Cyboli at your service.”
     “Carbolic?”
     “Cyboli, c – y – b – o –l – i, pronounced with a hard c and a soft heart.”
     Soft head more like, Allan Exit thought, but held her peace.
     “Formerly of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” Capten Cyboli continued proudly.
     “And you’re…” Allan Exit asked hesitantly, acutely aware of the Funeral Directors’ Code of Practice Sensitivity Regulations on Race, Ableness, Gender, Sexuality and Size. In the trade, the regulations were insensitively known as the Rags Regs.
     “Preferred pronouns they, them, theirs,” Capten Cyboli supplied. “Other than that your guess is as good as mine.”
     The badges of rank on the sleeves of the clown’s shirt, Allan Exit noted, were inverted rainbows.
     “Gardening is my activist service these days,” Cyboli explained.
     “Do you know a Mister Green?” Allan Exit asked.
     “Oh yes,” Capten Cyboli confirmed, “he grew up around her. He’s promised to help with the community garden.”
     “I’m sorry to say he’s terminally ill, imminently.”
     “Well he did look a bit green around the gills this morning,” Capten Cyboli allowed, “but full of beans nonetheless. I thought he might just be a bit under the weather.”
     “The reaper often arrives out of the blue,” Allan Exit said, “death is part of life’s mystery. We’re here to commit him.”
     “Like a crime?” Cyboli questioned, still beaming.
     “Like a fond farewell to a friend,” Allan Exit corrected.
     “Well, goodbye then,” Capten Cyboli said and crouched to resume their work.
     “Do you know where Mister Green is?” Allan Exit persisted, somewhat nonplussed by the unfamiliar lack of cooperation. Most people, even the nearest and dearest, were helpful, being at least a little bit pleased that it wasn’t their own precious time that was up.
     “Do you know who he is?” Capten Cyboli countered.
     “Do you know where he lives?” Allan Exit tried.
     “Do you know what love is?” Capten Cyboli sang into a microphone imagined in the handle of their trowel.
     “This is absurd!”
     “Thank you, you’re too kind. I’m here all week!”
     “Was Mister Green here just a few minutes ago,” Allan Exit asked, “before the dust storm?”
     “I couldn’t say,” Capten Cyboli said.
     “If it was him I saw, he doesn’t look very much like his photograph.”
     “He is a man for all seasons.”
     “What’s going on?” Riga demanded, joining them.
     “I wish I knew,” Allan Exit said sharply.
     “You’re crying,” Capten Cyboli observed, looking up at Riga and pursing overly rouged lips sympathetically.
     “Eye drops,” Riga said.
     “Better pick it up, then!”
     “You’re a clown,” Riga said.
     “No pulling the wool over your weeping eyes, is there?”
     “I hate clowns,” Riga said.
     “Coulrophobia, eh?” Capten Cyboli considered, batting luxuriant false eyelashes. “Shame, I think we might have made an enchanting couple.”
     “Are you flirting with her?” Allan Exit asked, aghast.
     “Well,” Capten Cyboli mimed twirling an imagined waxed moustache, “she is dashed attractive.”
     “She’s dead!”
     “Every body needs some body sometime,” Capten Cyboli recited.
     “We’re leaving,” Allan Exit declared, proffering what she considered an impeccably tasteful business flyer to the clown: black with embossed gold lettering and an appropriately gothic font.
     “If Mister Green comes back, you are legally obliged to call us. And please do try to keep him here. Come, Riga.”
     Ten paces back towards the hearse, Allan Exit realised her assistant wasn’t with her. She looked back to see Riga kneeling down with the clown captain who passed something to her and patted her hand.
     “Ahem!” Allan Exit pronounced loudly.
     Slowly, Riga got to her feet and came to join her boss, casting a wistful look back over her shoulder.
     Capten Cyboli waved and blew her a kiss.
     “We’ll be back,” Allan Exit told the clown.
     “I’ll make custard pies,” Capten Cyboli called, “we can have a tea party.”
     “Their fun,” Riga told Allan Exit in an uncharacteristically soft voice as the two of them walked together back to her hearse.
     “I thought you hated clowns?”
     “I think my phobia’s cured.”
     “Their ancient!”
     “They make me feel young,” Riga said pettishly.
     Though she herself was now striding along angry and oblivious, Allan Exit noted that her assistant was trying her best to place her large, moon-booted feet between the fragile rows worked on the surface of the ground.
     “What did Capten Cyboli give you?” Allan Exit demanded sharply.
     The perfect miniature peace crane that Riga reluctantly handed over was folded from the undertaker’s flyer. And, when Allan Exit darted a glance behind them, the clown had gone the way of Mister Green.
     Vanished into thin air.
     It began to rain.
 
In the wake of their encounters, Allan Exit was far too wired to sleep on the journey back to the office. So, while Riga was intent on her own research via her wrist device, the undertaker combined looking out of the windows with going inside her own head to search the internet.
     Spatter was ablaze with a vicious row between a cage-fighter, a mega-model and a  social media mogul who were splitting up as a cohabiting love-triangle because the cage fighter was intent on getting a third breast while the mega-model wanted compensation for the sabre tooth enhancements the social media mogul had had knocked out by a contract thug. Under arrest, the one-armed thug was suing for breach of contract because the media mogul hadn’t come through with the lead role in the biopic of a famous merman musician that had allegedly been part of the deal. Controversially, the ex-cage fighter had landed that role, though she had no acting experience, was tone deaf and couldn’t swim.
     Ignoring that spat, all the other gossip and the inexorable backlog of unopened announcements stacked virtually before her, Allan Exit wanted to find out more about the funeral they’d just flunked. She started with place. The Holding that she’d slept through on the way she now observed through the hearse’s windows. It was a desolate area with many bombed and bullet-ridden concrete buildings, craters in the road, burned out vehicles… Wiki revealed it had been a ZAD, from the French “Zone À Défendre”. This ZAD had started as an occupation to halt the development of a commercial space port. Eventually, against all the odds and after many confrontations and casualties, the occupiers and the remaining original residents who had resisted won that battle and the corporations moved on, choosing a less militant place for their project.
     That’s when the real trouble began.
     Rather than move out or move on to the next protest, the ZADists who had come to the aid of the community stayed as part of it, attempting to create an autonomous space in the midst of U-city, producing their own food, bartering, generating their own energy, rebuilding and refurbishing, making their own political decisions… The place where Allan Exit thought she’d seen Mr Green – that experience already seemed like a hallucination or a mirage – had been dubbed ‘The Agora’, a market square and public meeting place, the hub of the community. (How, then, had the Ministry given her the address of what was now a wasteland for Mister Green’s residence?) The ZADists must have seen it coming, because the corporations were never going to stand for loosing that many souls and, more critically, their data from the market. Even more pertinently, they weren’t going to let Holding, as the ZADists had named the community that had been carved from several different neighbourhoods, set a bad example. Alternative news reports from back then, accessible to Allan Exit only because of her professional security clearance, all be that quite lowly, reported people flocking to Holding and several copy-cat social experiments popping-up all over U-City.
     The strategic bombing and subsequent invasion by corporate storm troops put a stop to all that.
     Holding had, a powerful social media strand of the time claimed, been a nest of vipers, not just anarchists and scroungers but drug cartels, people traffickers, paedophile rings, illegal migrants and, inevitably, terrorists: outlawed religious fundamentalists, Maoist guerrillas, and environmental fanatics intent on monkey-wrenching the world into somehow re-naturing.
     These days all that remained of the Holding ZAD were disparate small, cloistered groups of ageing hippies and irascible anarchists, still trying to live the dream in a nightmare world, sheltering the disconnected, deranged and drug-addled. These groups lived in basement communes and underground shelters, scavenging, begging and stealing a living from neighbouring suburbs: ‘parasites, leeches, scum...’ Like the clown, Capten Cyboli. At least that was the official version. Going deeper and darker on the Web, Allan Exit found makers who still operated in Holding, crafts people and a variety of artisanal specialists. She also picked up on persistent rumours of community kitchens, clinics, care centres and theatres where companies of actors presented live shows.
     Scanning the streets again, Allan Exit spotted the odd person: someone knitting a blanket on a second floor balcony; a woman making furniture on a flat roof top; two graffiti artists at work on the wall of a former bank; a busker with an accordion on a street corner entertaining a trio of skate-boarders who’d stopped to listen, sitting absorbed on their decks. There was no sign of any of the usual so-called ‘high-street’ shops, no designer outlets, no chain stores or franchise bars, no cheap and cheerless discounters… No Startcos! Now that was quite something. Even deep in a warzone there’d be a Startcos, even in a refugee camp, a tribal trust land, a faith zone, a hood or a gangland. Throughout the phantasmagoria that was U-City, Startcos was everywhere.
     But not here.
    
They were back in Dinkside, cruising soundlessly through deserted streets. Allan Exit sent a message to the Ministry, querying the address given for Mister Green and formally requesting more information about the case. Thus far she had nothing of real substance about her should-be cadaver beyond his name and – it turned out – bogus address. There was no consumer history, no friends or contacts listed, no next of kin, no will. His browsing history had been redacted. Allan Exit turned her attention to Riga.
     “So,” she asked, “what have you come up with?”
     “Sorry?” Riga dragged her attention from the hologram projection of her wrist device, an image that Allan Exit couldn’t quite make out as Riga was effectively shielding it with her bulk.
     “What have you found out about our case?”
     “The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army was disbanded a century ago. They were a global network of direct action affinity groups, non-violent rebels using absurdist theatre to ridicule authority. It says here that they were clowns ‘because what else can one be in such a crazy, fucked-up world.’ And they were an army ‘on a planet in a perpetual war of money against life’. There was and is no record of any Capten Cyboli serving in the Clown Army, they don’t exist,” Riga confided glumly.
     “And you don’t even have one of their coloured pantomime boots to try on your queue of suitors.”
     “Their boots?”
     “Never mind the stupid clown! Could you please try to trace our deceased?”
     “Mister Green?”
     “Yes, of course, Mister Green!”
     “Well, he says on his blog that he’s off to the seaside, quote: ‘walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches’.”
     “He has a blog?!”

Also in Dark Times
 
While on holiday in Denmark I wrote this song, which Lotte Reimer has come up with a tune for already! The song is inspired by a Bertholt Brecht quote that I came across when reading Lynne Segal’s inspiring Radical Happiness: moments of collective happiness. I'd like to dedicate it to our comrade and friend Cynthia Cockburn.
 
Yes, in dark times there will be singing
Yes, in dark times we’ll write new songs
For in dark times we will bringing
Words and music, right the wrongs
 
Yes, in dark times there will be dancing
Yes, in dark times we will all dance
And in dark times we’ll be advancing
Step by step to take our chance
 
Yes, in dark times there will be joking
Yes, in dark times we will poke fun
For in dark times joy must be woken
Laugh at tyrants, everyone
 
Also, in dark times there will be loving
Yes, in dark times we will make love
For in dark times there is nothing
No power on Earth nor up above…
 
                Can stop us acting up together
                Keep us from taking to the street
                Stamping boots of vegan leather
                We’ll dance the darkness off its feet!
 
Love, laugh, dance and sing together
In dark times forever shine a light
Love, laugh, dance and sing together
Together we’ll make dark times bright

Delighted to receive my copy of Climate Change, Consumption and Intergenerational Justice in the post today. I first met Kristina Diprose, the lead author, at a geographers conference in London a good few years ago - maybe 7 or 8! - when, I think she was just starting her PhD. It's brilliant when all that work comes to fruition, as in this book I imagine. Congratualtions Kristina! I reviewed the book for the publisher, really liked it and was hopefully able to give some constructive feedback to the authors. I'm pleased as punch to be quoted on the back cover too! And I'm glad to still be bringing a tiny bit of kudos to the University of Liverpool, where I was an Associate for too short a time.