Apocalypse Overture: "Oil's Up? What's the Worst That Can Happen?"

By Harvey Beach

By the mid-twenty-third-century fifteen billion people inhabit Earth. And they are all greedy.
The gap between exponential demand for non-sustainable technology and non-renewable resource depletion is hitting crisis point. The competition between the global mega-corporations and cartels is getting increasingly ruthless and violent. Fossil fuels, uranium, raw materials and even food are worth killing for. Lackey governments cannot stop it. They don't want to - it's their riches as well.
Bridging the gap is BARC, the vast, global renewable resources and sustainable technology group and a few others. But the gap is becoming untenable. Can a way be found to avoid the crisis before mere savage competition deteriorates into outright worldwide Resource Wars?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467884167

Harvey Beach

In a world where everyone has gone to war, not choosing sides is not an option. Lord Simon Montcalm goes to war in 1066 not just because he must be true to his oath to his overlord Duke William of Normandy upon threat of destitution or death for refusal, but because there is great profit to be had. Huge lands and properties in England - the richest kingdom in Christendom. But great profit means great risk in the gaining it and the forces of England are terrible. Being the only male of his noble line, with no male heir himself, Lord Montcalm must win through the politics of his own side and the hazard of bloody battle to earn the promised glory for his name and riches for his family - or die, leaving not just him dead but his whole noble line extinct.

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© 2012 by Harvey Beach. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 02/22/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8415-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8416-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

2

Chapter One

My name is Andrew Edwards. I must tell you that because at least, commencing this narrative, I know it to be a fact. Everything else, from here on in, I will leave to your own judgement. Having had it on the best advice from post-traumatic stress councillors that the mind plays tricks (like inventing post-traumatic stress councillors to tell you everything is all right after a crisis) I need to believe in something and my own name is as fundamental a belief as I can lay what remains of my mind to. By the way, I’m writing this on the hoof so apologies for misspelling of any place names and so forth on the way. The spell-checker isn’t omniscient and neither am I.

I am writing this chiefly to convince myself I still can think at all coherently after the last decade or so. The Wars that are now raging, with what’s left of fifteen billion people now slaughtering each other over sips, scraps and shreds, have soaked the world in such an abundance of blood that I am not sure anyone will be here to read this after the Wars have ended and the anarchy dies out. As you’re reading this, perhaps the suicidally inclined gestalt entity called Humanity has managed to find a reverse gear out of the cul-de-sac into which it has manoeuvred itself. After all, it’s survived all sorts of horrific catastrophes before. But those were purely natural cataclysms. They weren’t brought down upon it’s own head because of it’s own fundamental weaknesses and stupidity. But it’s said the only enemy you can’t defeat if yourself, so I doubt it.

If you were to see the hollow-eyed, under-weight and greying man tapping at this keyboard as I write this, you would not credit I was once a card-carrying member of the full blown beautiful club. At the age of twenty-seven I was a shade around one hundred and ninety centimetres tall (that’s six foot to all you desperate recidivist anarchists out there) with the kind of toned, tanned and sculpted body only professionals and state of the art equipment can provide when the subject’s only money concern is whether they brought the platinum or platinum diamond credit card with them that morning. From manicure to pedicure I was groomed, sleeked and coiffured into absolute perfection as befitted one of my station. And that station was Double Platinum Class and No Need To Tip The Porter. My father, Walter Alexander Hannibal Edwards the Second (my God was there a first? And why didn’t he commit patricide having been given a name like that?) pushed me, via his second wife, through the very best education mediocre raw material could achieve. The private tutor that finally managed to convince me that there was a demonstrable relationship between the area of the square extrapolated from the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and the sum of equivalently derived squared areas of the other two sides probably thought she was doing me a favour. She most certainly did, but by forcing a rudimentary knowledge of Pythagorus’s applied arithmetic through my head, all she did was ensure I gained enough pieces of paper to justify my entrance into one of the better Continental universities. It was there that I shone, because my true love is languages. It was there, among my peers, that I realised that I was not a clot; just a polyglot.

I quickly found favour among my instructresses. It’s strange that no-one before has commented on the fact that languages are almost solely taught by women. I think it must be the female talent for combining sheer bloody-minded hard work and emotional resonance that men find repulsive (if not downright impossible) that makes the difference. Probably explains why there are so many male surgeons; Lie still and stop twitching will you? Do that again and I’ll probably cut your axial whatnot! Nurse, mop up those tears! His wriggling is interfering with my promotion prospects!. Anyway, I managed to study, in three years, eight languages and became at least vocally conversant in all of them and could read and write four.

From university I didn’t have a clue what I intended to do with my life, so like most of the rich and pointless I persuaded everyone I was going to ‘travel’. This is brilliant from a pointless polyglot’s point to view. You can get your parents to stump up the readies by getting your careers advisor to tell them it’s ‘integrating academic achievement with current socio-economic realities’. You then proceed to carouse poorer countries abusing your comparatively vast purchasing power and condescend the natives, all the while knowing the locals dare not do anything too bad to you because they’ve seen the colour of your passport. That was what I had intended anyway. But I got a rather nasty shock when I arrived in the Punjab just after the first Sino-Indian war broke out. The ‘Real World’ arrived like an ice cube suppository and I suddenly, for the first time, realised the word ‘responsibility’ was not solely for other people’s use.

I was in the Sub-Continent out of curiosity. You see, they had embraced Western practices of ruthless capitalism and eagerly sucked in the wealth their disciplined, brilliantly educated population could attract to the country (compared to North American and European workforces, anyway). However, unlike the Chinese and those in the Far East they had not been suckered into Western secular amorality and the Hollywood illusion of Western petri-dish manufactured ‘culture’. They realised you could get the dosh and keep your civilisation intact. Despite being able to afford vast quantities of meat, Punjabi cuisine remained mostly vegetarian (and Punjabis avoided the cardiac side effects of the hamburger society). India was the one place in the world where worldwide burger chains just couldn’t get in, despite the hard sell.

They also kept their traditions, festivals, feasts, fasts, dress, marriage traditions and ceremonies and the harder the West tried to ‘Westernise’ by propaganda and stealth, the more obvious their efforts became and the easier to ignore. So in my early years the Sub-Continent was both materially wealthy and culturally rich—almost a unique phenomenon by my time. So I toured Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana before deciding to give the Himalayas a shot. I was en route to Ludhiana when it happened.

A column of vehicles, from cars to motorbikes to trucks to tractors streamed down the road into the ‘square’. They were piled high with wounded, dying and dead. Everywhere were panic-stricken men with badges and sashes and uniform sleeve-stripes yelling for water, doctors, the local magistrate (Heaven alone knows why, but if you’re going to upwardly delegate, at least aim high) and no-one in charge. Then some blasted great ogre in a turban sees a flicker of recognition in my eyes when someone yells something in a language which I should have been blissfully ignorant of, and collars me. To this day I don’t recall if it was some form of bastardised Frog or European General he was burbling but I deduced he was demanding to know if I understood what the wounded were wailing. I said I did and he set me to work interpreting what all the injured were croaking for so they could be ‘helped’. Noting the fact that the entire column hierarchy couldn’t get navvies drunk in Glasgow, I ended up taking charge of the whole exercise. You should have seen me. Yelling Punjabi left and Kashmiri right with a blood-soaked tourniquet gripped in the left hand and breaking open a bottle of some local rot-gut with my right to use as disinfectant. But it gave me my first taste of the rewards of leadership. As the grunts (as in soldiers) starting getting things done and the grunts (of pain) subsided, the crisis became manageable and order arrived out of chaos. That hell-hole started to make sense and for the first time in my life I had a wonderful feeling of elation. An elation I’d never felt before. It was called ‘Achievement’.

A very many hours later some official uniformed sod turned up to inspect all our hard work and take the credit for it now it was safe. The wounded glared balefully at him as he took charge and I upped sticks to get lost now the so-called authorities had arrived. I almost faltered when one young man reached out and grabbed for me, babbling in Hindi Brother! Do not forsake me!, which I took to mean For pity’s sake, don’t leave me in the hands of that useless frog-spawn from Hell! but I was exhausted and compassion has a remarkable short half-life when you’re without a night’s sleep and up to your nipples in other peoples’ blood and gore. Call me a shirker if you like, but you weren’t there.

This concentrated my mind remarkably and I put it, for once, to considering my future. I had heard during my upbringing the warnings about over-population, unsustainable technology, dependency on finite resources, and how everything was going to go to Hell in a Big Way when they ran out. And like the rest of my own kind, I’d walked on a couple of demonstration marches and sold a few badges to acquire a bit of street cred and then thought no more of it. Then out of the blue I’d been plunged neck deep into a war over mineral rights and literally watched men butchered and blasted over it. In brief, I cancelled the rest of my ‘cultural enrichment’ and came home, surfing the latest periodicals to find out in what sphere of activity I could best invest my unsullied talents.

There was at the time a rather interesting economic situation. Now, everyone had heard of British Alternative Resources Company, now just called BARC as it was a global mega-corporation. Everyone knew they had spawned massive industrial and commercial empires (although not many people knew quite how) and having started this economic whirlwind in the twenty-first century, in the space of fifty years became a (somewhat non-specific) world economic power that scared entire countries. It is a measure of the effect they had on the world that they managed to warp a phrase that was common parlance. Being mind-bogglingly stupid was previously know as being ‘barking mad’, in other words as mad as a rabid dog, whose chief symptom apart from hydrophobia was it’s inability to stop barking. The BARC had become so powerful, in a nebulous There’s something under my bed, nanny! kind of way when I am writing about, that no sane entity as relatively insignificant as a mid-sized nation state would offend them. Anyone that did was therefore said to be ‘BARCing mad’ as something bloody economically unpleasant inevitably happened to them if they did.

At the time, however, no-one knew of the devious and outright illegal practices in BARC’s multifluous subsidiary and operating corporations’ boardrooms. All they saw, in the corporate image of BARC, was an altruistic (and highly commercially successful) organisation with very well-turned-out scientists and executives, Personal Assistants and Celebrity Wives who started all sorts of projects converting useless, burned-out industries into sustainable successes. Everyone got used to hearing about new technical developments, better methods, more efficient and productive techniques that let them undercut competition. Companies using BARC technologies would set up, regenerate wastelands, retrain unemployed workforces to operate them, rebuild infrastructure, turn around flagging farms and ranches, reprocess landfill sites or put old mines to uses, generally get everything up and running and so on leaving everyone going Hip, Hip, Hooray! except their competition. What little competition they had, because BARC operated in areas of technology they’d virtually monopolised (in practice if not in legal terms). Having decided I not only wanted to remain rich but that Something Had To Be Done to avoid another blood-bath like the one I had so recently witnessed, I picked up my mob-comm to see which one of my network could get me an introduction to someone of influence in BARC to give me an Executive job. As you can tell, at the time I had an entitlement complex the size of Snowdon.

Suspiciously, in hindsight, I got a fairly cursory interview with a hatchet-faced harridan in Coventry a couple of weeks later. I found out she was used deliberately to interview self-assured young men from rich backgrounds on the basis that she subconsciously reminded them of their old nannies, governesses and every vulturine deputy headmistress they had ever known. She had that whiff of the cane about her. The basis of the exercise is that if you can bare-faced lie your way past that without a flicker of your bowel-dissolving panic showing to her predatory eye, you’re the sort of chap they want in the boardroom of a BARC company. In fact, they’d had their eye on getting a polyglotal, amoral blue-blood for some time and I seemed to fit the bill, I found out much later.

That was the same day the United States first threatened to annex Brazil, as I recall. I hardly noticed at the time as I was too busy buying upgrades for my datapad.

I need to take some time out from my narrative here in order to dig some foundations. You cannot possibly understand the rest of my tale without knowing how some whinging Lefty hemp-wearing lentil-gnoshers became the single most influential (if nebulous) economic entity this planet has ever endured. The short answer is, of course, they didn’t. It was the powers behind the throne that did.

The powers in question were an international bunch of ruthless vulture (sorry, venture) capitalists that had formed a little club they called the Alternative Resources Circle. As there were never any minutes or records of this, no-one knows quite how or when it was conceived, except it was first done in a rather select Islington club’s card room sometime in the 2040’s. The members of the Circle had all got roughly the same idea, and it was a blinder. Monopolise—or near as dammit—the emerging sustainable technologies based on renewable resources.

The core of the idea was simple. The world had been expanding in population exponentially for centuries, all on the basis of technologies that were unsustainable because they were based on finite resources like oil, gas, uranium and coal. To the tune of nine billion by 2040 and rising fast. Although there had been efforts by large corporations to keep their first world customers and shareholders happy by lip-service to ‘green’ tech it was a pointless drop in the ocean compared to the real business of supplying the huge emergent economies like China and India and the Far East with the consumer demand of established tech. China, for example, even in the early twenty-first century had a trade surplus with Europe alone of over twenty billion Euros (as was before the Currency Segregation Directive and Bank Devolution into EuroStandard and EuroPlus zones). Then the Europeans and Americans started getting arsey because the Chinese decided to actually start buying things with it. Like Africa, for example. Or, at least the bits that had anything to buy.

The populations of these emergent economies didn’t care one jot about ‘Sustainability’ at all. They just wanted whatever they saw elsewhere that they didn’t have and wanted it now. The established global corporations were more than ready to supply it. Hydrocarbon fuelled cars and aircraft, processed food, sanitation, I.T. WorldWeb connection, i-products from A.I. infrastructures, multi-layer comms, holo-systems, datapads, i-banking, insurance and financial services of all kinds, personal and commercial transport by land, sea and air, all consumer goods and health care all along current established models. Models relying on pumping evermore mineral slime out of the earth’s crust or digging up mineral ores and processing it and basically burning it. Or turning it into something that would be used and thrown away into a landfill site. Even in 2040 the majority of plastic wasn’t recycled, even if it could be. And the rest went without reprocessing. Despite an Irish company cracking, if you’ll pardon the pun, plasti-fuel reprocessing tech thirty years before!

But as the pressures on the finite resources went up exponentially with population numbers and ‘progress’ economically, the Circle realised the more, and more ruthless and vicious, the competition there would be over said resources. Wars had already been fought over distribution and control of them. North Africa, Middle and Near East interminably over oil-fields, the South Atlantic over oil, fishing grounds and Antarctic rights, the multitude of clashes and government-assisted industrial sabotage over the Arctic continental shelf, the corporate crime wars in Eastern and Asiatic Europe over aluminium, copper, amolyte and gas reserves. These were only the tip of the future iceberg. If Humanity was just fighting over who had the biggest slice of pie, what would things be like when they started fighting over getting any pie at all?

The inevitable conclusion would be the Resource Wars, which would erupt first in bush fires and get exponentially worse as the resources exponentially diminished. The planet could only sustainably support about two billion humans, even if properly distributed and well organised. That also assumed they used every possible renewable and sustainable technology currently available. By 2040, that meant a predator die-back of two in three people at least in the Resource Wars. A nasty, sobering thought. These wars would inevitably be fought all over the globe and the Circle saw how this presented a remarkable opportunity. Altruists they bloody well weren’t.

Just as long as the Wars all happened in relative ‘penny packets’, each war zone would present a ‘brown-field site’ opportunity of massive potential. Power vacuums where governments had collapsed. Hungry, dispossessed and desperate populations with no labour laws or unions to get in the way of aggressive capitalism. Social breakdown with fluid population movements of potential labour forces. Doctrinal and value systems obliterated and discredited in war-horror. In other words, perfect places for a new power to invest, build sustainable economies and societies (in whatever form those societies developed) based on renewable resources on the back of a grateful population. He who brings clean water, food, clothes and vaccines shall be king.

Eventually, globally, the die-back would result in a sustainable population level based on sustainable technology properly distributed creating a sustainable humanity with sustainable wealth.

The Circle would control the sustainable technology. Ergo, the wealth.

‘Green’ and ‘renewable’ techniques had been in existence in penny packet form and in a multiplicity of variations for decades. But not on any severe industrial scale. Hydrogen extraction for liquid fuel using hydrogen cell tech. Reprocessing non-recyclable plastic into road fuel. Capturing from, and producing gases in, mines. Hydroelectric and water flow power generation. Photoelectric. Algae-fuel. It was all there. But in penny packets or as window dressing for the rancid technology corporations were determined to keep using. The old, proven way of strip-exploitation of the non-renewable. The Circle planned to systematically start ‘investing in’ (i.e. buying up the businesses and legal control of) these techniques and rolling them out in an integrated, planned and coordinated way.

The Circle had already put together an initial moderate investment fund and needed a place to begin rolling out their ideas to test the theory. They needed a territory mired in economic stagnation, hide-bound by rigid inflexible administration, unimaginative and self-serving local government and an ignorant and uncohesive population, devoid of initiative and with a complete lack of direction and purpose.

Welcome to the British Islands.

By the 2070’s, having been long subsumed de facto into the European State prior to said political construct’s actual creation in 2055, Britain had ceased to be an entity of itself except in the deluded minds of it’s more half-witted citizens. Instead, it was run by the quangos, a self-recruiting political-legal profession elite and huge, ineffective and/or corrupt civil service Departments who laughed every time they screwed the country up even further as they collected huge pay-offs for failure. Having thickened the feathering in their nests, they sat back and watched elected career politicians get the blame for it. The three MP’s beaten to death in their constituencies in 2057 must have had them rolling in the aisles. You could tell Parliament had long since ceased to have been anything except the distraction target for the bile of the hoi polloi when the lobby of the Palace of Westminster was bombed in 2052. Thirty-one Commons, Lords and functionaries slaughtered and no-one in the country batted an eyelid. It was business, or rather stagnation, as usual.

By stagnation, I mean the real thing. Considering that all ‘public servants’ exist off the labours of the money-generating private sector economy, it beggars belief that they were so unremittingly hostile to anything that created wealth. You’d have thought they’d have encouraged the private sector to get richer so they could feast all the more richly themselves. But no. Nothing of any serious merit had been developed in Britain in nearly a century. The first instinct of the British establishment to anything new in the field of economic activity was to drown it at birth in red tape and stunt it’s growth through taxation leading to capital starvation. Take plasti-fuels. Reprocessing non-recyclable plastics into hydro-carbon fuel (without having to break it down back into crude and re-crack it) was developed in Eire but rolled out in Britain in 2010. And lo, before it’d even got it’s foot under the table of mass usage, it was being taxed to death. The Exchequer, via statutory instruments not even mentioned in the budget speech, let alone debated, had extended the Hydrocarbon Oils Duties Act of 1979 to tax anything that was used to make road fuel in the nineteen nineties. Bio-fuels, algae, everything. Even old chip fat. Unable to compete with the established mass production and supply economies of scale, the people who developed the tech gave up on Britain and took the tech overseas (you can find land-fill sites in any ‘first world’ country full of non-recyclable plastic) and left Britain in the dark ages. Anyone British who had any new or good ideas or made any breakthroughs just upped sticks and took it overseas.

As Britain had started plundering it’s non-renewable resources first in the Industrial Revolution, ergo it ran out first. By the 2040’s it’s only ‘manufacturing’ was kit assembly of bits manufactured elsewhere. The area had long ceased bothering importing raw materials. No-one in the British Islands would have known what the hell to do with them. The last steel works closed in 2021. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, British governments of all types proved brilliant at destroying established industries and completely incapable of replacing them. They preferred to spend the windfall of North Sea oil and gas on paying dole cheques or keeping fit people ‘on the sick’. Not a penny of the billions a year went into economic regeneration, new industrial or agricultural development or even sustaining the basic infrastructure of transport, energy or communication. In fact by the end of the twentieth century, the national governments, so desperate for money and coincidentally always with vacuous ‘social policies’ to justify each family silver yard-sale, had sold off any control of these fundamental under-pinnings for economic success to private corporations—effectively selling monopolies. King James The First would have been proud of them.

As a result, there was practically zero take-cheap-raw-material-and-make-into-expensive-finished-product wealth creation at all. All Britain’s mass manufacturing companies, barring about half a dozen strange exceptions, were overseas owned and that’s where all the profits of British labour went—overseas shareholders. Whenever the overseas company felt a financial chill, they just sacked their British employees and closed the businesses. If you checked the corporate ladder, virtually no British worker actually worked for anyone British.

Agriculture had long since ceased as a major wealth generator. Farmers were encouraged into hedgerow management and newt protection instead of growing crops and rearing animals. Only a few farms specialising in high-end produce exported their goods. The exception was elements of the dairy industry. They just about (no thanks to governments who made no effort to tackle the supermarket cartel strangleholds) made ends meet through milk sales and brought money into the country by the export of veal calves overseas. The dairy industry never broke the entrenched truism that veal equals bad, even though British veal was pink veal and humanely reared. Oh, and nicer. Take my world for it.

There were a tiny number of other niche business models. But they were the great exceptions to the rule. Britain itself was a net importer of food to an alarming degree, worse even than when the country was almost starved into becoming Nazi in World War Two. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it was importing two thirds of it’s food (though if they had still taught kids elementary domestic skills like cooking and larder management God knows how many hundreds of thousands of tons of that wouldn’t have gone directly to landfill). All the British Islands’ energy production and distribution assets were overseas owned and even it’s water. Considering it falls out the sky onto your country for free, and as islanders they were surrounded by the bloody stuff, how come Britons ended up having to line foreigners’ pockets just to wash in the morning?

Like a profilgate son, Britain had inherited vast wealth from the nineteenth century from when it was simply the richest empire ever in the history of the planet. In the twentieth century, Britain promptly squandered that wealth in hideously reckless fashion, taking it totally for granted (as all unearned wealth is, just look at me) and when it was spent, wondered who was going to pay their bills now? The Empire disintegrated as the money holding it together ran out. Except the really poor bits who wanted to squeeze the pips to get a cash injection from the ‘Mother Country’ by screaming ‘Imperialism’ at the politicians that had been given a politically correct indoctrination (sorry, education). Like the country squire with champagne airs and patched trousers, Britain was still expected to hand over a shilling to any beggar with a bowl, even if it meant getting even further overdrawn.

The only way to make ends meet occasionally, between pouring money overseas in ‘overseas development’ (i.e. investing in other country’s economies while Britain’s rotted) and paying millions of unemployables to do nothing, was to ‘earn’ money through the ‘invisible’ (i.e. fictional) sector. That meant the investment banks and ‘financial products’ (another brilliant contradiction in terms and bastardisation of good English) which depended entirely on how the fantasy banking was faring elsewhere in the world (where other countries still had a real economy to fall back on if the fantasy one blew a fuse). The ‘United Kingdom’ throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first (before it ceased to exist) lived on the never-never, occasionally repaying some of it when the fruit machine paid out (known a ‘budget surplus’). Except when the fruit machine didn’t pay out they had to hide from the tally-man or go hawking international political credibility or lending out the army, navy and air force in return for ‘loans’. The exception to this was when there was a ‘progressive’ or ‘reforming’ government with a budget surplus. They didn’t even bother with the token repayments on the debt mountain. Instead they’d waste it on pot-latch social engineering projects which are by their very nature doomed to failure and foreign wars that were none of Britain’s business to stoke their vanity as ‘world leaders’.

Before it ceased to exist, ‘Great’ Britain had become the laughing-stock of the world family, the arthritic old uncle sitting in his corner cottage rambling on about his hey-day and what he did in the War whilst fretting over how he was going to stretch his pension to cover the winter gas bill. No real economy, no initiative, an undereducated and demoralised population, downward social mobility and racial and religious social division—frequently violent. People whose only aspiration was to win the Lottery or a tacky ‘talent show’ and hawk their pearlies on ‘reality’ T.V. Each generation poorer than the last, both economically and culturally. Those with any skill and ability took what they could and ran overseas and the downward spiral continued.

In contrast to the commonalty, there were those who could establish a career path through the gravy trains of politics and into Europe. Elbowing their way in through the established career channels of local government, the unions or the right university and degree course by virtue of having the right relatives and friends wasn’t easy—but God it was lucrative. Especially for those whose main talent is to ooze credibility without substance and appear sincere whilst blatantly lying. The elite had it’s own preferred methods of self-recruitment, naturally. Just look at the family trees of the professional politicians and quangocrats. Most of them were at least three generations removed from a wealth-generating occupation. The main reason Britain never stood a chance of avoiding becoming part of the Eurostate was every member of the elite needed Britain in it to further their own career paths. Once deprived of their quango, White Hall or Westminster truffle trough they needed to find another trough to get their snouts into, after all.

As a result, the British Islands Region of the Eurostate became the first parasite economy, purely dependent on overseas economies for it’s survival and living permanently in debt without there ever being any prospect of getting out of it. There was no investment in the private sector economy because of taxation, it lurched from crisis to crisis because of knee-jerk reaction administration and an absentee landlord Frankfurt government and did a very good impersonation of a rudderless tub on a disturbed sea, going wherever the world economic winds blew, including onto the rocks with alarming regularity. In short, perfect ground for the Alternative Resources Circle seeds to settle.

It was in 2063 that things got moving. The Circle invited a group of perhaps thirty young and not so young scientists and researchers in various fields of renewable resources and alternative technology to a meeting in a Liverpool hotel. They were made an offer. With a little practical administrative help, a research and development company would be set up to develop their ideas and to invest in new ones. When they had a prototype worth exploiting, the Circle would set up a separate company to roll out the technology whilst the researchers got on with new ideas. No ‘pure’ research. Just the investigation of the practicality of ideas to prototype level. As a certain meerkat would say, Seemples.

Most of them, who had been turned down by far too many bank managers already, took up the offer. With each new technology, or leap of existing tech, a subsidiary was created and it was rolled out. Profits were reinvested in expansion. That was the credo—expand, expand, expand. New sites, new areas, new pastures. None of the subsidiaries were stock exchange listed. Capitalisation and ownership was ARC members. Then subsidiaries started cooperating on joint projects of mutual interest and fields of expertise. Subsidiaries created subsidiaries of their own, reinvesting their profits in expansion. And so the businesses grew. And grew. Brown field dirt-cheap sites were developed in unemployment black-spots with cheap labour. They all started small but expanded, increasing everything by stealth. Water desalination in the run-down dockyards and hydrogen extraction for road fuel and electricity generation with water production as by-product. Medical plant greenhouses in derelict housing areas, with some of the housing done up as staff accommodation and offices. And an associated company that could refine the medicines and sell them. Plasti-fuel to run the recycling and gas reclamation on landfill sites. Wherever there was a brown-field site, British Alternative Resources Company had a tech for it’s small-scale (initially small, anyway) redevelopment. They swapped surplus production or assets and hoarded centralised investment funds. Any net profits after reinvestment went back to centre to fund the next small-scale project. And so it grew.

The youthful idealists got what they wanted. When they had established suitable proven technologies, BARC set up ARC sister groups elsewhere, starting in South America, India, China and then Africa. But BARC remained in the centre, coordinating liaison between all the BARC businesses, encouraging mutual aid, acquiring ‘outside’ technology and head-hunting the next generation of scientists, technicians and inventors. A majority stake in plasti-fuel was rapidly acquired. Desalination was extensively targeted and hydrogen extraction was nigh on monopolised. So was solar cell technology when they started operating in the equatorial regions, especially North Africa. Any established renewable and sustainable tech they could get their claws into was grasped, whilst monopolising new ideas and keeping the research and developmental results flowing out of BARC. By 2080 the corporate group and associated companies (if you could work your way through the corporate holdings’ maze) was the biggest in the Western European Administrative Sector and had altruistically clubbed together to stump up a half billion EuroPlus to bail out the health system when the China Grey super-bug arrived (to be repaid at central bank base rate over ten years). By 2095 the turnover of the extended group was bigger than the entire Eurostate budget and it’s current asset reserves could fund an entire year’s Eurostate public sector borrowing requirement. It was shortly after that the breakthrough on fixed-nitrate multiple carbon bonding was made practical and a purchasing rep bought up, for a China Alternative Resources Corporation (CHARC) operating company, eight per cent of the agricultural districts of Hunan province. BARC increased cereals ten per cent in two years and it was permanently sustainable. The day the monthly gross agricultural yield forecasts for 2100 came out, a dozen futures’ traders on Wall Street packed their bags because they finally realised they hadn’t got one. Only BARC did, it seemed.

It was amazing that once BARC and it’s subsidiaries had got rolling, it rapidly became clear that there was a vast untapped economic potential out there that had simply been ignored. Firstly, petroleum substitutes. Britain had been developing road fuels from vegetable seed, unsold alcohol and suchlike that were just as good as made no difference to the mineral slime originals for well over half a century but had just never got around to doing it on full industrial scale. After a brief but very brutal argument with the Land Use Designation Board in 2075, the British Islands Region managed to win through the legal precedent that the determining factor for defining land use was not what was grown on it but the end use that the product was put to. Therefore, thousands of hectares of formerly ‘agricultural’ land that came under the Agricultural Directives and thus economically and productively useless was immediately bought by a BARC operation (Spud-U-Like Project or something) and put under root vegetable, oilseed and cane strains fit for maximum bioethanol fuel production and the first of the soon-to-be-thousands of industrial vegetable-based fuel refineries worldwide came on line in 2077. Thousands of tons of industrial vegetation went in and thousands of tons of road fuel came out to be sold at a profit margin over one hundred percent greater than the now ruinously expensive imported petroleum products. One of my predecessors then went over to the Ukraine and started chatting to the local semi-impoverished landowners and the Ukrainian expansion of agri-fuels started. By 2100 there were over two thousand such small-scale refineries. They were all based around a small town or large village group providing fuel for domestic transport and the major local agricultural economy. It suited ‘cottage’ industry—fermenting and distilling ethanol out of beet or cane doesn’t require anything like the plant and kit for crude oil cracking. There weren’t any transport costs, either—their customers came to them. Every large but economically disadvantaged and human-resource rich country (huge, over-populated and poor) were literally hammering on the local ARC Company offices to jump on the band-wagon shortly after.

How did poor people afford franchises, I hear you ask. Easy. The contract stated an annual licence cost 2% of their gross turnover, to be calculated at year’s end. They therefore didn’t stump up the readies initially because they didn’t know how much it would be. But they reserved the legal right to patent with a one EuroPlus deposit to keep it all legal and make it very easy for the BARC legal hatchet men to bankrupt anyone who operated the tech without a licence.

Another great money-spinner was in natural gases. The company invested heavily in the field. Highly efficient gas separators that could purify and refine out any combination required of core gasses (carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen, oxygen) from a compound or mixture were developed. Also, new strains of algae. They created a genetic splice of ordinary green algae and yeast. Like ordinary algae, it grew at a phenomenal rate under prime conditions but produced alcohol, methane and carbon dioxide as by-products. One enterprising Technologies Application Researcher came up with the idea of using it in addition to plasti-fuel recycling of land-fill sites. A dirt cheap (another pun, sorry) site would be bought. Plastics would be separated for plasti-fuel. Metals would be recycled. While this was going on, gases would be released and separated, leaving a mess of other gunk. This remainder, when the standing gases were exhausted, would be mixed with waste water in sealed tanks with transparent roofs and they’d chuck in a couple of litres of this algae. Within days, this algae had chewed up anything organic digestible left and they would collect the resultant products like alcohol and gases. Initial outlay minimal. They were virtually giving landfill sites away, especially in places like New York. The whole city by then was almost one great garbage mound. One of the first acquisitions was ‘Fresh Kills’.

The product was highly lucrative. Bottled oxygen and medical alcohol for hospitals, methane for domestic fuel, other trace gases for industrial purposes, liquid hydrogen for hydrogen cell electricity production to run the plants. They then slung a natural herbicide into the slurry once it was processed out to kill off the algae (just imagine what would have happened if that stuff had got into Manhattan Bay). Once any remaining non-slurry had been sieved out, the result was dried into a vegetable powder used to bulk out animal feed. What’s left was pounded into a hardcore lining for the huge landscaped pit which would be turned into a fish farm or water reservoir or whatever else could be profitable on the site. In 2070, ‘Fresh Kills’, won it’s first environmental award, and the world’s biggest farmed salmon to have been caught by rod and line had been landed there in 2081.

It was with these and scores of other integrated techniques even more bizarre and, frankly, beyond my comprehension that saw the vast, rapid and exponential growth of the Corporation. BARC itself remained just a research and development unit (to all outside scrutiny), then out the results went into the nether world of companies, organisations and conglomerates of firms to turn the patents into bank notes. When coal mines were finally exhausted and capped, we waited a couple of years for them to fill up with ‘dangerous’ gases, bought them, popped their corks, pumped out the gases and sold them. Wherever the old finite technologies reached their unnatural end, we would step in and find a way to recycle or exploit what was left. When others tried to get in on the act, they found that we had already head-hunted all the brains and patented the ideas, even if we hadn’t been able to develop a working application from them yet. And all the while the relentless P.R. people of all the myriad of projects, firms, companies and associations based around BARC spent millions on making sure everyone knew what marvellous things were being achieved, how many zillions of hectares of brown-field site was redeveloped, thousands of people put into new work, how much old industrial wasteland now converted and active again and all in the name of saving the planet. If anyone stood in our way they could be roasted on the spit of public opinion or black-mailed into silence by the threat of withdrawal of our technologies and franchises and loss of tax revenues.

Without a doubt, by the time I started my career as a Sales Executive for BARC (South American Liaison), BARC and it’s mammoth associated businesses was the biggest, most influential economic power in world history. Bill Gates was a match-stick salesman in comparison. Whole governments treated the Senior Executives with more deference than many other country’s Heads of State. What had started off as a small experiment by a clique of rich investors in a club card room now bestrode the globe like a ‘benevolent’ colossus.

My first job, having recovered from my massive celebratory bender at getting a BARC appointment, was with a dual industrial and agricultural combine in South America where my Spanish could be best put to use. The combine was called the Pan-Savannah Cooperative, and was a group of one hundred and forty-three ranchers, small industrialists and farms. My role would be to act as chief Sales Coordinator, using their collective production power to do deals with large customers for bulk supply. It was the obverse of my counter-part Theresa Anchova, the Purchasing Coordinator who used the mass orders to get good materials, fertilizer, seed, plant and equipment deals. The year was 2139, it was Spring (which means becoming-almost-unbearably-hot as opposed to almost-unbearably-hot out there) and I landed after a very comfortable flight in a BARC executive jet at San Antonio in Bolivia. I was to meet my mentor and line manager Sir Godfrey Arnold, the non-executive Regional Director of the South American Alternative Resources Corporation—SAARC. SAARC had sponsored the original combine to act as test grounds for new agricultural developments produced by BARC Agriculture. He was flying in from the Pucallpa office in Peru having set up a temporary headquarters there. We were originally going to meet in Sao Paulo in Brazil but the Yanks were still making a lot of sabre-rattling noises and threatening to bomb the place.

I saw very little of the town of San Antonio itself as I was whisked by limousine from the airport to the SAARC offices on the outskirts by a couple of handsome, smiling thugs the moment I cleared Customs. They were there courtesy of the Cooperative. It seemed that my luggage had magically managed to be cleared in the eight and a half minutes it took me to get from the disembarkation lounge and through the executive and diplomatic reception suite. Before I knew it we were passed through the gates by the local armed uniforms that might have been police or military. Not that there was any way to tell where the one stopped and other started at that point. Water rationing and power shortages were already biting hard because of fuel prices being virtually unaffordable and large sections of just about every South American city were no-go areas unless you were carrying automatic weapons and wearing a uniform that stated to anyone who saw you that you considered vagrants target practice. The windows of the car were shaded and one-way. I could see the rotting slums, with lack-lustre people in the early afternoon heat slouched in the clogged gutters not even bothering to watch us go by. It was to rapidly become clear to me that it was not pride or contempt, merely disinterest. The car represented a social strata that was simply so far unattainable to the commonalty they had long since ceased wasting their time thinking about it. They only paid attention to anyone who they could steal from or people with guns.

The slum around the airport was nothing like as huge as the other really big ones, maybe only sixty thousand strong. Within a few minutes we had left the town and were driving out through the shimmering afternoon, me deliciously cool in my enviroconned little paradise sipping from a bottle of distilled water, through the agricultural belt. Here I saw the first indications of company activity. Tall, chain-link fences with watchtowers, with a occasional armed guard and dog patrolling inside. Behind them the vast hectares of thick standing grain crops with ears twelve inches tall. Wheat and barley at first. Then sugar cane—augmented sugar content with self-generating catalysts, I recalled from my introductory pack I’d read on the plane. The ethanol for fuel was converted from the sugars by roughly the same strain of yeast pioneered in Brazil during the first decade of the twenty-first century, developed by the godmother of bio-fuel science, Rosie Annie, as she was affectionately known. She had been in at the very beginning of the big push into massive farming development there and had spent most of her life developing the perfect strain of yeast. Eventually she came up with one that could convert sugars with 99% efficiency. The only thing the scientists could do to improve matters was simply get a strain of crop with higher and higher sugar content that matured faster and faster and develop special growth-enhancing enzymes and yeast nutrient to speed the fermentation process. And breed the canes taller, of course. Gene splicing with bamboo was a huge breakthrough. The field I passed had canes about nine feet tall—halfway to maturing. Hers was really one of the miracle practical advances in bio-tech and it’s amazing that so few people even knew she’d existed. The lack of publicity for her achievements in the journals was not surprising, though. Jealousy. She’d learned her trade on the farms doing the job, not in a Harvard or Cambridge classroom, so the professional scholars shunned her because she blew apart the myth that these professional academics were special. Thanks to her, when I joined BARC, Brazilian agriculture was over three-quarters fuel self-sufficient. Not bad for an industry whose idea of a small combine or tractor fleet was sixty vehicles.

It required concentrated periods of intense sunshine to grow these particular types of crops for fuel production. Ironically it also meant massive irrigation efforts to supply all the water needed to keep these plants at maximum growth rate. Every mile or so I would see cutting and harvesting gangs, four to seven gangs working together, each several score men at work as the crops reached maturity in rotation. Nearby, newly cut fields were being mechanically cleared of root for re-ploughing and re-fertilising. Others were being resown. Overshadowing it all were the huge pumping stations that filled the underground network of water feeders. Then it was industrial root vegetables in as great a proliferation as the previous crops. I was curious. I tapped the comm to talk to one of my escort.

Yes, Señor? he said in only marginally accented English.

I replied in Spanish to get the flavour of the local dialect. Why so few guards? Why don’t the local people raid the crops?

There was a short silence which I realised was surprise. They are not edible, Señor. Eat them, a healthy man gets very sick. A starving man dies! Then he gathered himself. Even so, the local peasants would not offend the Great Benefactor.

Who? I asked.

Why, the Cooperative, Señor. Another pause. Sir, over five hundred hectares of these fields in scattered parts are edible food crops. The locals do not know which are food and which not. But every sundown after the working day, the hundreds of peasants that have been chosen that week for labour return to their homes with harvest from those special plantings. They also keep their work clothes, a new set each week, and are given more for their families. In the slum itself is a large plaza of water spouts. For one hour, morning and evening, the plaza fountains and troughs are flowing with clean, fresh water. The Cooperative does more, and is seen to do more, for the people of San Antonio than their own Government. The people would rather see the Government overthrown than the Cooperative offended.

I suddenly realised what was scratching at the back of my mind as we went through the slums. Why so many of the peasants looked the same. The majority of them were wearing almost identical clothes—plain cheap cotton or hemp slacks and shirts and cheap canvas plimsolls, both men and women, boys and girls. No Corporate logo, or anything that crass, that would have been rubbing it in, but they must all be Company issue nonetheless.

How many locals are used by the Company? I asked. I haven’t had my local acclimatisation yet.

He suddenly sounded nervous. Oh, sir, please pardon me. I did not know . . . . That would explain your not being in uniform.

Uniform? I asked.

The Executive Dress Code, sir. All Cooperative and Company men of rank wear dress codes. They vary by grade, of course. For SAARC it is light tan, sky blue or pale grey suit and shoes, white shirt, tie and pin. The Savannah Cooperative have one very similar. The women have their own codes, but very similar and just as smart. He grinned wolfishly. They are most striking, sir. I responded with a matey grin and nod. We were puzzled to be sent to receive an important Company man but when we saw you were not in uniform we realised why such an escort was required. In Company or Cooperative dress you could walk the most foetid slums in San Antonio in perfect safety. No-one would dare even approach you, but out of uniform you would be taken for a foolish foreigner and have your throat cut almost instantly.

So what about my question. How many are employed? I went on, for the first time seeing the true power wielded by this SAARC operating subsidiary and being taken aback by it.

About a thousand are lucky enough to be salaried in dollars and so have contracts of employment, like ourselves. About five thousand are signed weekly for unskilled or semi-skilled itinerant labour, he went on casually.

I tried not to let my throat constrict. So they’re not paid?

Of course not, sir. What would they do with money? Once the bastard Government tax men have taken eight out of every ten Sols they had in the first place, what would they spend it on anyway? There is nothing. The last market in San Antonio closed down ten years ago. The Cooperative feed and clothe their workers, give them clean water to cook and wash. They even, twice a month, send the Cooperative doctors out into the slums to pass out medicines and treat the sick. They immunise the children and there is a midwifery clinic to deliver the babies and tend the mothers. Cooperative engineers make safe derelict buildings and hand over spare iron sheeting and scrap wood and broken tools. Rope and cable. Wire. Screws, nails, nuts and bolt—anything no longer of use to the Cooperative, for the peasants to build and improvise shelter and work. Or burn as fuel. Whatever. They are extremely skilled improvisers, the peasants—as all desperate people are. Even when there is an exceptional seed crop of the food plants, they will give away the spare seed for them to garden for themselves. Excess compost, too.

He paused to take a drag of his cigarillo. Wives and partners of Cooperative and SAARC executives oversee these operations as the Cooperative Outreach Project, set up by the wife of Sir Godfrey Arnold. He grinned again. A most excellent and forceful lady. It would serve you well if you were to approach her to volunteer. Saving her the effort of twisting your arm would be a feather in your cap, if you’ll pardon my impudence in making the suggestion, he added. I made a mental note as he returned to his theme. The bastard Government would just be willing to let them rot. And the Cooperative liaises with the international aid agencies to work freely among their workers and families, and so the world hears how our own government, he spat the word, sit in their palaces whilst the workers starve and die of disease. No, the people of San Antonio have many reasons to have named the Cooperative the Great Benefactor.

I thanked him and turned off the comm. Well, wasn’t that a pretty state of affairs. A bundle of low grade off-the-peg clothing, plus an extra water pipe from the irrigation system and a couple of day’s overtime for the engineers and medical staff. A bit of land to grow some ordinary food crops as a routine part of their production process. Basic dollar-a-shot immunisation jabs and some T.L.C. In return they’ve got on tap with no industrial relations strings attached a totally compliant unskilled and semi-skilled work force and a convenient dumping ground for broken tools and inconvenient corrugated iron or crocked fence-posts and industrially insignificant seed and compost overproduction it would be uneconomical to ship out elsewhere or recycle. And by immunising the kids, they ensure a supply of fit and healthy future labour. Even these two clearly trusted and responsible driver-cum-bodyguards think of this arm of SAARC as second only to God. And they let the international busy-bodies loose to be told by their workers how bloody awful the local autocrats are and how bloody wonderful the company is in comparison so the propaganda message can be sent all over the world for free.

I tried to think of any way the company could have things more neatly sewn up here for the rest of the hour and a half journey. I failed.

Chapter Two

Sir Godfrey Arnold was a very surprising package for a senior executive in a multi-faceted multinational. He was in his mid-forties, half Caucasian and half Negro, tall, thickening about the middle and with a pair of spectacles which he seemed to clean more often than was warranted (no contact lenses, let alone laser surgery or implanted correctors, note). He exhaled the perplexed, slightly-offended atmosphere of an English prep school master who couldn’t quite work out how he had ended up half-way to Khatmandu teaching the children of the local wog dignitaries Shakespeare. His act took me in for about two and a half nanoseconds. This bloke hadn’t become a BARC Regional Liaison Director in South America for nothing and his wife, note, had been the architect behind the stitch-up job I’d just witnessed.

I met the man for the first time over breakfast the following morning. I had expected our initial meeting to be conducted in a more formal way. Then, of course, I was too green to have learnt the BARC Inverse Rule of Business Negotiation—the more formally something is done, the less it matters. I soon found out, only what happened behind the scenes counted.

I’d woken up in my very nice apartment in the SAARC building feeling very refreshed and well rested. The previous afternoon the two heavies had deposited me in front of the receptionist, who had taken my thumb print, retina scan and DNA sample for base print identification in double-quick time. Within seconds a middle-aged local woman described as the ‘chatelaine’ took me in hand. The suite on the fourth floor of the central building of the SAARC compound consisted of study-cum-lounge, bathroom and bedroom. All of it was very well appointed and tastefully decorated in the usual dove greys, sky blues, ocean greens and rose pinks of the company. The chatelaine scraped me down from the ceiling after the rooms greeted me with Good afternoon, Mister Edwards!. She explained that my Personal Artificial Intelligence awaited my detailed instructions and I was free to explore all the luxuries that a Sales Executive was heir to. I was not disappointed.

I started with the voice-programmable Personal Artificial Intelligence (that I firstly changed to a female voice on the basis that it’s brutal efficiency might be less intimidating if it sounded fluffier) which I filled up with everything an absent-minded exec might need someone to remember for him. The P.A.I. included a reactive self-correcting calendar, year planner and separate personal diary, word processing, spread sheets, databases and statistical data management stuff, computer assisted design, holo presentation software, company-wide double encrypt comm connections and recording systems and a dozen other applications I didn’t realise at the time weren’t superfluous. The bathroom had a tub with subsonic vibro-massage and a full range of sprays, atomisers and lotions which I noted were all selected with an eye to my rather rare skin allergy. Whoever had stocked my bathroom had been very carefully briefed from my company medical, but I hadn’t realised then that BARC functionaries were second only to Trappist monks for treating things confidentially. And that included the drivers. The bedroom furnishings were of the finest pure North American cotton or Thai silk and even the pillows were real eiderdown. It had taken very little encouragement for me, once I had programmed Mandy, as I christened my P.A.I., to hit the cool of my shower and change into something more ‘Company’. A huge selection of kit was in the large wardrobe, all tailored to fit me (I wondered what the biometric 3-D scan had been for).

Before I went out and faced the troops I poured myself a snifter from the study drinks cabinet. I needed time to reflect. Everything was going a little too well and too quickly. I was still young and inexperienced enough to be surprised at the magical efficiency. Even with my privileged background, I was still used to the mail sometimes being late, the family finance manager whining a bank statement was wrong, the transport being delayed and suchlike. I hadn’t yet become used to everything happening totally smoothly, the way executives of really big companies do. I wasn’t reconciled to the fact that as an Executive it was my right to expect that things just happened. So I looked out over the compound, took a few deep breaths, sipped my drink and let things gel in my mind.

My first impression of the compound itself was it’s beauty. It may have been for company propaganda, or out of local pride, or whatever, but there it was. For whatever reason or motive the effort and care that had gone into the grounds of SAARC Peru H.Q. was astonishing. The central building was five stories and very tastefully done, set in immaculate lawns with little coppices and a slender stream running through it. There were fountains