The word summons up a winter landscape covered in a wide variety of cheap furniture half-buried beneath the snow. A vision of a future where the last humans are laid to rest in pine flat-pack coffins stacked on the roadsides of silent cities. Doll children remain where they were abandoned. Electric cameras in galleries have been watching works of art for a million years. In this place there are no animals, plants or bacteria. The DNA inside fossils has petrified. Everything is still.
The National Associated Space Agency (NASA) has recently discovered life on another planet. The planet, Kepler 186-f orbits the Kepler star, an M dwarf that is roughly 44% the size and strength of our sun. Scientists are already deciding on renaming the planet something more memorable, such as Tarkus or Izitso, due to its importance in the history of human civilization.
The planet is composed mostly of rocks and ice due to being a lot further out than Earth relative to Sol. Because of the weakness of Kepler at high noon it gets as bright as a nightclub toilet so therefore the vegetation of the planet is enormous. The leaves on the trees are each as big as satellite dishes, and of a similar shape. Fungus is also prevalent, as on Tarkus the ice gets mouldy. Due to the spectrum of light thrown from Kepler, the flowers are all ultraviolet and lack any visible colour. Kepler 186-f also has no moon and so its oceans are still. These enormous ponds are home to shark frogs and leech whales, above them fly flocks of giant flies that have the ability to sing like birds, although they do this through their proboscis and so create a sound similar to a wet trumpet. On the plains of ice live a variety of strange alien creatures that are reminiscent to some of the animals on our planet; wooly pigs, two headed cat monsters, tortoise spiders and mirrors that walk around to name but a few.
Kepler 186-f is 600 lightyears away, so we are seeing the planet 600 years ago. If the aliens living there had good enough telescope technology and were watching us, they would see the world in 1414, perhaps watching the Battle of Agincourt and wondering if we were imbeciles who ate mud and slept in chimneys. With this intergalactic empathy in mind, the supposed most intelligent being on Kepler 186-f are the Kepleroids. These strange beings look a little like us, although with eyes the size of basketballs standing on highly veined stalks. They appear to live in a village that spans entire continents, often walking for miles to visit their neighbours with what must be meat pies. They also play a variety of night sports and ride around on dead horse things with the legs replaced with wheels. The Kepleroids seem like a benign and peaceful race, and it would be ethical to eat them should the opportunity ever arise.
A NASA spokesman suggested that we build a spaceship and send it off to explore this planet and exploit it for any fossil fuels they may not be using. This alien petrol would be made from alien dinosaurs and would power a car to drive from Paris to Beijing on a single tank! NASA is currently looking for a crack team of astronauts to go on this mission and have styled the crew requirements to mirror that of the characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although a 'Wesley Crusher' isn't required.
I approach the bar with some trepidation; it has been years since I have been on a date. Due to a recent string of mysterious events I ended up on a semi-blind date with somebody I had met on the internet. The world of online dating wasn't new to me; I had used it before to help crack the case of the mysterious OKCupid Killer, although this time I wasn't seeing it through the objective lens of a criminal profiler but of the sort of embarrassed, sort of curious, sort of desperate subjective lens of a single male living in the city.
With my legs freshly shaved and the new clothes I was wearing brushing against my body like the wings of a moth, I felt like a new person. Not just new; different. I was a strong, independent man with my own life. As I pushed open the doors of the bar I decided that whatever was to happen on this date, it didn't change that fact. It was just a bit of fun, right? On the other hand I could be walking into destiny; to meet the future mother of my ten or so children who would cradle my dying body in a lethal skiing accident. I saw her waiting at the bar. She was a lot shorter than her profile said she was. As I neared I began to smell the furniture polish that would continue to dominate the olfactory senses for the rest of the night.
"Hello." I said, leaning my head slightly as I appeared into her view. She turned to me and smiled.
"Hi." she said. We introduced ourselves. She offered to buy me a drink, but I declined. We went and sat by a table by the window and began to talk, though within five minutes our conversation was drowned out by nineties RnB. After a strained conversation she suggested we go to another bar down the street, a bit quieter.
"So, what do you do then?" I asked her eventually.
"I'm between jobs at the moment, heh. You?"
"I'm a journalist." I say. She'd started to buy me drinks, the Peach Schnapps cocktails were slightly sickly sweet and not doing my empty stomach any favours.
"Oh right, like Nicholas Parsons?" she said.
"Uh...yeah." I said.
For the most part she talked throughout the night, of her love of football and previous relationships she had, now and then making what I imagine were meant to be flirtatious comments though she came across as a bit creepy. Nevertheless, she kept buying me drinks and before long I was feeling quite drunk and after returning from the bathroom and waiting for her to put her phone down, I couldn't help but begin to flirt back. When we left that bar her hand 'accidentally' brushed across my rock hard chest, although neither of us acknowledged it.
"I think I'll go home now." I said, looking around for a taxi.
"Yeah, it's getting late huh?" she said. I nodded and watched as she flagged down a black cab. We rode in silence, although even through the drunken haze I began to panic slightly. She hadn't given the driver her address. I should have gotten dropped off outside a shop or something. But before I could find a way out we were outside my flat. She paid the driver and looked around.
"So, it was nice meeting you." I said, smiling at her.
"Do you mind if I come in for coffee?" she said. I paused. Did she just mean coffee? Or more? She had been buying me drinks all night, surely I could make her a brew, thank her and let her leave.
She entered my flat and looked around. She seemed out of place. An intruder.
"What's that? That's mad that." she said, pointing at a framed print on the wall.
"Judith beheading Holofernes. It's by Caravaggio." I said.
"Who?"
"He's an artist. Did you say you wanted coffee?" I said, going to the kitchen. She followed me and had her hands on my hips.
"I don't need a coffee." she said, voice low. I turned around, her face was inches away from mine. The smell of furniture polish was overpowering.
"Oh." I said. She leant in for a kiss, I couldn't help but reciprocate. She was eager, at one point our teeth rubbed together like the twisting of a pearl necklace. She took a few steps back and lifted up her dress, revealing herself and looking at me expectantly. I shook my head slowly and climbed onto the kitchen counter.
She left soon after, leaving me to sit alone in my flat with a herbal infusion and Radio 6 playing in the background. There was a chime from my phone, another e-mail from the dating site. I looked out of my window and sighed. Why did I live in this dumb robot future instead of the golden days of house phones and dance halls? I rolled up a trouser leg and began to tattoo a daisy chain around my calf.
The silence penetrates the city street like imaginary snow, a pataphor for the homogeneous white washed England Nigel Farage is supposed to wish for in his uneducated dreams. In one hand I am holding the latest smart phone; a Samsung G-26 with twenty gigabytes of Wi-Fi. In my other hand I am holding a briefcase containing one hundred pounds in a variety of denominations, it weighs heavy. Footsteps. I look up, at the end of the alley appears my anonymous contact, he resembles a diabetic John Hurt. Looking over his shoulder as he walks down the street he jumps at the sound of my voice.
"Deepthroat?" I murmur.
"Are you the journalist?" he says, tilting his head back to peer at me through half-rim spectacles. I nod, showing the case in my hand. "Let's go somewhere more public." he says, leading the way down the road.
"Were you followed?" I ask.
"No."
"What is it you had to tell me?" I say. We are walking at a fast pace, past the rumble of buses and a construction site. Anyone trying to listen in will struggle to hear what we're saying.
"There's a conspiracy at the top layers of UKIP. It changes everything." he says. UKIP. The four letters that mean more to the future of politics in England moreso than any other. The party was a hard right neo-conservative grass roots amalgamation of bourgeois soft nationalism and anachronistic jingoism lead by a cabal of ridiculous husks of men. And of course, they were gaining popularity.
"How so?"
"We were wrong...so wrong." he says. We begin to cross a road and he stops, turning around. "Look, if I'm not alive by the end of this will you promise me-" a gunshot echoes from above. He looks down in slow motion and watches as a bullet sends his shirt flapping apart. And a truck hits him. I run over to his mangled body and pick him up by the shoulders, trying to shake him awake. I check his pulse, after finding nothing I bow my head.
"Goddamn it...you sons of a bitches." I say. I look up and notice the sniper on the roof of the Arndale centre. I begin to run.
Through the shops and sets of doors, I take the stairs two at a time as I reach the roof. The sniper is a good distance away from me and so I begin to sprint after him. He suddenly spins around and begins to shoot at me, though I do a forward roll and dodge the fifty millimetre teflon-coated bullets. He runs to the edge of the roof and jumps! He just about clears an alley and lands on the roof of the next building. I am not too far behind him, easily leaping the gap and running. We then begin a rooftop parkour chase across Manchester until we run out of buildings.
"It's over." I say. The sniper looks at me with scared eyes. There's nowhere left to go, unless he was just mad enough to jump down. The sniper turns and begins to run in slow motion. "Son of a bitch." I say to myself, running after him. Just as he's leaps off the building I reach forward and grab his ankle, swinging him down through the window in the floor below us. He crashes through the glass and disappears from view, though once I've swung myself down it doesn't look like he's going to run again. My expensive shoes crunch fragments of glass into the plush red carpet as I walk towards him.
"Looks like you need an ambulance." I say, looking at the lacerations all over his body.
"Leave me alone!"
"No way pal, we're just getting to know each other. Now how about you tell me who sent you to shoot Stuart Wheeler and I won't break your face! Quid pro quo motherfucker." I say, kneeling down.
"Nigel sent me."
"Farage?" I say, eyes narrowing.
"Please...kill me." he says.
"With pleasure." I say, picking him up and tossing him back out of the window. Turns out Farage had sent an assassin to kill one of the members of his staff. But why? What secret did my informant have for me? I flash back to earlier that afternoon, for some reason everything is white and blue and all the sound is really echoey. I replay my meeting with the snitch. "Deepthroat...conspiracy....changes everything....wrong...promise me...deepthroat...promise me...wrong...throat...everything...everything changes...deepthroat..." I focus more, putting my fingers to my temples. I remember what he was wearing, zooming into his inside jacket pocket. There was the menu for a takeaway tucked in there, I knew it as being close to a budget hotel in the area. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Half an hour later I am emptying out a suitcase belonging to my contact as I stand in his hotel room. After rooting through his dirty laundry I manage to find a keypass to a UKIP facility just outside of Manchester. I drive as the sun sets, listening to a shitload of retrofuture cruelpop.
I enter the compound, flashing the keycard to the guard on the gate and park up outside. The night is a cool turquoise around, the lights from the city twinkle like distant nebula clusters against a cubist backdrop. There is a soldier stationed on one of the doors. "Hey bub, you got a light?" I say, taking a Lucky Strike from out of its packet. He nods, taking out a zippo and holding it out, shielding the flame with his hand. I give him an uppercut to the jaw and knock him out. "Didn't anyone tell you that smoking is bad for your health." I say, giving a little 'heh' afterwards before taking the uzi submachine gun off him and checking the ammo. I go through the door and do this weird sidestep sort of skipping as I dodge from crate to crate, stopping once I reach a corner and peeking around it, sweat gathering on my brow. Two guards are quietly talking to each other in the middle of the corridor. At the end there are a set of double doors with radiation signs printed onto the windows. I tap on the wall. "Huh?" says both of the guards at the same time. They begin to walk towards me. Just as they're about to turn the corner I leap out and bang their heads together.
I pause just before I enter the next room. Who knew what secrets this facility held? Toxic waste mutants, cyborg animals, a clone army. I cocked the uzi and burst into the room. Farage was stood in the centre, lit by a single spotlight, drinking a pint of bitter in the darkness. "Farage." I growl. "You should have let me know you were coming. I'd have got one for you." he says, taking a sip of his beer. I walk up to him and point the gun at his face. "Give me one good reason not to blow you to kingdom come dirtbag." I say. "Just one? How about...five?" he says. Behind him a wall of televisions turn on, showing a map of the UK. There are five atomic symbols marked in the same places as London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast...and Manchester! "Is that what I think it is?" "If you think that I have five nukes hidden in the most important cities in the UK, then yes. You're right." "Why I oughta-" I say, though Farage cuts me off with a flourish of his hand, revealing a detonator. "Now now, no need to lose our temper. Let's talk, shall we?" he says. I notice he sounds similar to Jeremy Irons in Die Hard With A Vengeance. "Sure...let's talk." I say, lowering my gun. Farage takes a sip of beer and begins his monologue.
"The United Kingdom Independence Party is my child. Literally. I gave birth to a conceptual humanoid that has over one thousand heads, although those are attached to the bodies of actual people. Are you familiar with mind control? I am...a puppet master. I was trained in the KGB then sent undercover to England to pose as a right wing politician, although my true mission is to separate the UK from the EU, destabilising the continent for Putin to come and take over. England is the anus of Europe, everything ends up going through this country before crossing the Atlantic. An excellent place to launch an attack against America from, wouldn't you agree? I am not a politician for pot smoking I.T consultants to complain about on the internet, I am who your parents vote for as they get older and more racist. I am the most important person in European history since Franz Ferdinand. I hope a future band names themselves after me too. I am the alpha and the omega. I am the one who knocks." he says. I look behind him at the map of the UK. Maybe five cities were worth trading to stop this maniac. But I wasn't a murderer. I simply lean forward and spit in his beer.
