Alone, a young woman is wandering about her twelfth floor flat shuffling papers and things about here, moving things into the kitchen sink there and wiping the week’s stains away from everywhere.
She has finished with the integrated home entertainment system and the screen is blank in more ways than one. There is a smell of pine and stale air. She moves over to the window and is vaguely aware of the distant muffled sounds of the city. It is dark outside, and stormy. She is talking to herself, up there in her head, now and all the time, all by herself.
Look at him! Sirens. His mind is a sewer and everything that flows through it is sewerage. I could walk through those tubes. It’s so obvious. On patrol. I’d have to hold a scented handkerchief to my delicate nose. Traffic. That’s as maybe, but just think about the three of them. I can’t stop it man, I can’t switch it off. Yes, but two of them have minds that are sewer systems and the poor girl is just not there at all. Sunshiny bright and clean. Inside of her skull, it’s like an empty cathedral with the sun burning on the inside. Radioactive space, I know, I’ve done the tourism. Girl, boy? What’s the difference? That’s an aggressive shout. What are you getting at? If you can’t tell the difference there’s no difference to matter. You’re blabbering, Rabbit. Blue boils. Acne glows. Rabbiting on like that! It’s a disgrace. The sewerage in the Born Again Priest’s head flows freely in floods into the pretty world and it stinks it all up and it festers your fingers and you can’t get it off and you’re corrupted by it while he’s wallowing in shit in his sewer works, and he works hard. And poor Peter, pretty with his permanently surprised eyes? If I were prone to religious epithets, hell, I am, sometimes, must have been my methodist childhood, I’d call him saintly. Dettol. A smell of pine and castor oil and caramel somewhere in memory store. I’ve walked his tubes hankie in hand too. So you’ve seen that his brain is a sewerage just the same, right? A disgrace. Full of sewerage. The same, right? There are no leaks there though. If anything, the only person who suffers from the smell is pretty Peter himself, and it serves him right, right? Wrong! He lives with it and he doesn’t smear it all about, nobody gets festered. Pretty saint Peter. No acne on him. And this other one? The third person here, on the list. Number sixty nine. This one? Well well! Nothing has ever occurred in her simple system that’s ever needed much disinfecting. Boy or girl, it’s the same. A dedicated protestant boy. Dettoled to death. Nineteen sixty nine. Chloroxylenol. Nineteen sixty nine. Beatles were always cleaner than Stones. Innocent. Cuddly. Homely. I could never get into the Stones. Her! She’s never ever ever had to make a choice between any different standpoints. Here or there? This or that? These or those? The questions simply never arose in her simple cathedral mind. Brainwashed. Dettoled to death. She’s just not all there. Parachlorometaxylenol. Dead in the head. You can clean yourself to death with Dettol. It’s happened. I read about it somewhere. Sad. Sadder still, she’s The Born Again Priest’s cannon fodder, a good catholic girl, bang bang bang, and the very type Peter is dedicated to fighting to protect, child! Children. Pine. Watery white pine. Fully skimmed milk. PCMX.
In two thousand and eight the first tentative steps were taken towards the construction of a machine that could read a person’s thoughts. The announcement was made in the scientific press and made little or no impact on a wider, more public, level.
In the year two thousand and fifteen agents of The Born Again Priest, on behalf of shadow organisations working for the ICAC*, bought the first portable versions of this machine for their travelling missionaries.
In two thousand and twenty more advanced versions of these portable machines could read minds at moderately long distances as long as there were no major obstructions between the probe and the subject being investigated.
On the twelfth floor of a block of flats on The Cambridge Estate the neighbours hear the sound of heavily booted feet in the stairwells and hallways, then a short silence followed by loud knocking.
On the seventh Bill mutters to himself, “Shit!”
He has heard the boots on their way downstairs.
Too late.
*The International Court of The Alliance of Civilisations
