The Wicked Extinction Of Light: The Commonstate, #1

By Andy Byrne

The state bred and brutalised Damien Carver to be an administrator, a sociopath, a believer. But his talent as an overlooked novice spymaster is all his.

Now the state, obsessed with whispers of a plot the secret police can't uproot or silence needs those skills. Can the suppressed masses really hate the regime more than fear it?

For the government, this is the dawn of the struggle for its survival. For Carver, it's a deepening struggle between his brainwashing and his humanity.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy meets The Man In The High Castle, The Commonstate is a reimagined 'now' -- a window into what could have been... and a mirror of what is.

The Wicked Extinction Of Light is the first episode of The Commonstate series, now in development as a TV series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Byrne
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9780646896120

Andy Byrne

Andy Byrne grew up in London (UK), Dublin (Ireland) and Luxembourg. Today, home is Sydney, Australia with his wife and son. His writing background was journalism and radio production before moving into screenwriting. The Commonstate is also a TV series in development. In a different storytelling approach, the production will simultaneously develop this accompanying book series. These books are designed to be read by themselves, independent of the screen version in development or as part of it, enhancing the story, its characters and its unique world. The Wicked Extinction Of Light represents the first of The Commonstate's nine episodes.

Book preview

Prologue

From 1600, the British East India Company — or simply, ‘the Company’ — was the backbone of British Imperial expansion and trade. It grew to become the world’s first corporate giant and at one point had a private army of 250,000 soldiers.

But by the nineteenth century, its influence was slipping. Its wolfish, often sociopathic, leaders could see the future. The Empire it had built would eventually abandon it.

So, in the 1820s, Company leaders began working to save, what they saw as, the heart of the Imperial machine and the rightful custodian of its future. Slowly, quietly, subtly — they whispered their plans and ideology in the halls of the political and financial elite, in universities, officers clubs, gentlemen’s clubs.

1848 was the Year of Revolutions across Europe. Change swept through the continent’s royal houses giving rise to new nationalist movements, and republics.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and its wider British Empire experienced turmoil but weathered the storm.

But by January 1850, Prime Minister John Russell’s government collapsed after a string of scandals and assassinations. Furthermore, a prolonged financial crisis threatened to destabilise the nation and Empire.

The Westminster system was collapsing and the Empire itself was on the verge of implosion.

By mid-1850, Queen Victoria turned to a council of concerned countrymen to bridge the gap and restore confidence. She was convinced to employ the Company to help govern and control the Empire’s global territories.

By November, Victoria had become gravely ill. On New Year's Day 1851, fearing the worst for the Empire, Queen Victoria abdicated, placing the Crown’s power in the hands of a new caretaker authority — the Imperial Bureau. An entity entirely planned and manned by the Company.

The Company gradually, then rapidly, absorbed the Empire and the machinery of government.

Finally, in 1857 — the year Victoria died — the Crown was relegated to history and the British government replaced with a ‘government for the times’, absorbed into the now renamed ‘Bureau’.

This murky coup was presented and popularised as an inevitable and widely welcomed evolution. The past was absorbed into a manufactured narrative of the future. On December 3rd, 1857, The Commonstate of British Imperial Territories formally and discretely came into effect. The British Empire was, to all intents and purposes, now a subsidiary of the Company.

By the 1890s, The Commonstate, as it was now titled, was in control of or provided protection to 70% of the world’s population.

The ‘Buro’ — shortened to the fashion of the day — continued and deepened the traditions of the Company’s leadership, devolving into a growing club of paranoid kleptocrats and sociopaths.

Nothing changed for another 130 years... but for manufactured wars, racist pogroms and crushing oppression... until whispers arose.

Whispers of an insurrection.

Whispers, the Buro, for the first time, didn’t manufacture, couldn’t source, couldn’t contain and couldn’t control.

Whispers of the end of The Commonstate and the collapse of a dystopia. 

1. Will Them Dead

London, The Home Isles, Today

-

Damien Carver feared crowds.

Their unpredictability. Their chaos.

To his mind, if you couldn’t trust any individual, what threat then a crowd?

Then again, you don’t have to trust a crowd to survive it or engage with it.

All you need do is ensure you’re the one controlling it.

The key was to find the right controls.

Fortunately, the locks of social manipulation were entirely malleable, predictable, even amidst chaos....

Especially amidst chaos.

Such as the chaos Carver stood facing at that very moment.

First, there was the matter of The Commonstate’s most beloved orator, the Oracaster Alexander Shelton, Senior Member of the Buro. More specifically, it was Shelton’s brain matter and blood.

It pooled on the podium’s rich red carpet, slickly leeching around Carver’s shiny new black shoes. Shoes he’d only put on for the first time that morning. Part of his brand new government uniform.

Head-to-toe black, including his shirt and nineteenth-century frock coat. Dark blue bands ran around its sleeve cuffs — insignia of the rank of Senior Adminner, Class One. The highest Adminner rank.

As with life in general, his promotion that morning had not been of his choosing. He hadn’t forged this upward path — it had been forced upon him. Up until a year ago, he’d been invisible, locked in a flatlined, substandard career.

Still, he’d blankly expressed his appreciation to his superiors that very morning. Of course, blank appreciation expressed to one’s betters was not only permitted, it was expected.

But, for far more hidden and personal reasons — themselves, certainly forbidden for an Adminner — he genuinely appreciated the opportunities this promotion had brought.

The most immediate and minor were his new uniform’s shiny black shoes. Beautifully crafted. Supremely comfortable.

Sadly now, those pristine new shoes were tarnished.

Carver frowned internally. 

Externally, he wore his empty Adminner expression, known as Set Eyes, as he surveyed Shelton’s fresh corpse, flat on its back on that lush carpet.

No one had rushed out to attend to him when he dropped. Carver fully knew no one would.

Now, Shelton’s familiar sweaty, messy mop of white-blonde hair, loved and reviled by The Commonstate’s four billions, lay peeled back from the gaping hole where his forehead had been until— how long was it? A minute? Seconds...? Seconds.

Carver sniffed the air — a sickly blend of iron-tinged goo along with Shelton’s dog-sweat hair and piercing cologne.

He ran an eye over the great man’s black suit with its red, white and blue cuff insignia and, ironically, blood-red shirt. They all looked odd to Carver. Unkempt. Discarded. Tatty. Meaningless. Like the ridiculous words and corrupt life of this venomous clown. A disgusting amoral political monster that had merely occupied a human form for fifty-seven years and had now just been evicted from it.

Shelton, the Buro’s greatest living orator— until briefly ago.

Its greatest mouthpiece, greatest stirrer of the greatest race riots, greatest drum-banger of the greatest massacres and wars, greatest mocker of the victims of the greatest famines and epidemics...

All of it, gone, but for the waste he’d laid on behalf of the unholy triumvirate of the Buro, the Company, the Commonstate.

Carver’s gaze settled on Shelton’s shoes.

Naturally, of a much higher quality than even his own new pair. Shelton’s shoes were befitting a Senior Member of the Buro. They seemed crafted in another universe to the one Carver lived in. Two universes away from that of the Commoners.

Carver calmly looked down to the podium below his. Just out of his view was the ‘Snappergalley’, an industrialised mass gallows. Remaining there, trying not to wriggle too much in their neck braces, the fifty-one traitors and criminals due to be hanged in tonight’s broadcast. All in their yellow uniforms and black head sacks.

One man amongst them was laughing from an unhinged mind. The sound cackled up to Carver like some mocking operatic motif to Shelton’s corpse and legacy. Like the afterlife was laughing at him through a tiny window.

Carver felt it creeping into his own mind, his own plans... Was he also being laughed at? Did they know?

He shook it off, refocused, looked out past the microphone bank. To the vast crowds of plainly dressed Commoners cautiously draining away from the stage.

If it suited the Buro and the Company, not one of these people would leave this place alive. They were a mass witness to a first in the history of the Commonstate — the very public assassination of a senior member of the regime.

Resolving this issue was mere mathematics. The only facts The Commonstate allowed to breathe were pragmatic ones.

Deleting a witness required one bullet.

Deleting twenty thousand witnesses, required twenty-thousand bullets.

Facts.

And every member of that crowd inherently knew this.

Carver listened to the eerie near-silence out amongst the mass-condemned. You could pick up individual whimpering and tears. A sea of twenty-thousand people terrified mute by the brutal regime they’d just been cheering on to murder people they probably knew.

If ever there was a microcosm of the state, Carver thought, this was it.

Some eyes out there dared scan the stadium’s upper levels where three thousand troops of the Commonstate Army remained ceremoniously still, eyes dead ahead.

But even they were awaiting orders. Carver could make out army officers and NCOs desperately listening into confused radio chatter for instructions.

Innovative thought, akin to treachery, had long been bred out of the regime’s apparatus, including its armed forces.

In this superstate of brutal centralised power and paranoia, you lived and died by the Buro’s whims... and their protocols.

What to do. How to do it. What to do when it went wrong.

But there was no protocol for this scenario. No triggered response, no preset reaction. The Buro would only later discover, there was a suspicious gap in their response protocols that day. Specifically, the assassination response protocol documents were entirely missing from their shelves.

Complicating the response, the fractious members of the Buro were unable to fill the void and give orders. They were too busy pompously scurrying off the podium behind and above Carver. Even from here, the notorious collective cologne of these cowards, wafted down, rasping the back of Carver’s throat.

He was casually aware of the other Senior Adminners around him, glancing over their shoulders to the upper podium.

As the last Buro Member vanished, immediately, but reverently, the Senior Adminners mimicked their masters’ vacating, keeping as wide a berth from Shelton’s body as possible, as if avoiding guilt, or even fate, by proximity.

Only Carver remained in place as the retreating tide of his robot-eyed colleagues, passed by, until the only ones on the podium were him and Shelton’s leaky corpse.

It was then, the crowd became louder as a flush of fear washed over them. They realised their time was running out. The innocent and frightened would shortly be the guilty and dead.

Carver took a shaky breath.

Stepped over Shelton’s bloody pool and body.

Stepped up to the microphones.

The moment had come.

He took a breath, listened to it ripple over the masses and echo off the stadium’s distant walls and brutalist towers.

He looked down at his new shoes and... 

2. The Principle of Common Freedom

’A citizen is unfettered by law in regard to their actions, behaviours and/or morality unless such actions, behaviours and/or morality are deemed contrary to the needs of the Company’

Principle 1: The Principle of Common Freedom (The Four Principles Doctrine, 1862)

-

London, The Home Isles, One Year Ago

-

Junior Adminner Damien Carver, as he was then, lived on the 10th floor of a brutalist tower block built to house only Junior Adminners, Class Four — the lowest rank of Adminner.

His apartment was effectively a bare concrete box. Sparse, relatively spacious, surprisingly warm in winter and oven-like in summer. Any similarity with a prison was purely coincidental.

This morning he stood at one of the three narrow glassed slits running floor to ceiling — windows designed to prevent break-ins and limit damage from rocket attacks.

Carver was dressed for work.

Hair combed immaculately.

Black frock coat, white shirt.

Sleeve cuff bands in white and dark blue — the insignia of his Junior Adminner rank.

His left shoe sat on the floor at his feet. The right shoe was in his hands.

He held it with a woodworker’s focus, carefully planing its already well-worn upper against the edge of the window’s metal frame.

He glanced at the plain wall clock — 7:45.

From the TV on the far wall, Shelton ranted, When I hear whispers of complaints I always find my thoughts leading me back to Principle One.

Shelton was in his famed leather armchair in his famed opulent nineteenth-century study replete with crackling fire.

For those who complain, he rolled on, I remind them of the freedoms they enjoy from the tyranny of laws our enemies strangle their own slavish citizenry with.

He leaned forward to the camera, neck veins bulging, anger rising.

"I remind you, you little bastards, you have an agreement with The Commonstate. It guarantees you freedom to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t diminish The Commonstate. Maybe that’s too simple for you. Maybe you’re just too fucking greedy. People like you— no, vermin like you — need to be drowned and strangled and your children along with you in case your diseased thinking has spread to them—!"

Carver pressed the TV’s off button and returned to the window.

He inspected his shoe-work.

Both shoes, manufactured in black leather, now wavered in the crappy weathered brown spectrum. No polish had they seen since the factory. Nor would they ever.

Carver had a reason for this.

The reason was his lipless nicoteeth’d supervisor, Senior Adminner, Lieutenant Director Nunes.

Nunes relished mocking the condition of Carver’s footwear. Tediously.

It wasn’t personal, per se — though it often was, deeply. However, mocking — or dousing — a junior rank to remind them of their class, was expected of a senior rank. It was the way the regime’s pseudo-military culture had operated since the East India Company liberated the Old Empire. 

Failure to douse doomed your career. It suggested you didn’t have what it took to assume your rank. It smacked of mollycoddling obsoletisms such as equality. It undermined evolutionary doctrine.

As such, knowing his place as a lowly Junior Adminner, Class Four, Carver ensured his shoes were always in poor state for Nunes’ pleasure.

Each January, when Carver was issued with a new uniform, he’d rush home to scuff his shiny new shoes against the concrete walls of his flat. Rub filth and brick dust in, both of which London had an endless supply of.

And Nunes would notice. He’d even given names to the individual scuffs, cracks and creases. He’d comment on their incrementally declining health.

Carver, for his part, learned to vary the distress and patina to feed Nunes points of interest, to add character to these names. Feed the beast.

So much so, that in their morning instructional meeting, Nunes often spent more time on shoe commentary than work-related instructions or questions.

Carver was good like that. Clever, without being considered as such.

This particular morning, he’d widened a crease across his toes on the right shoe. Nunes had named it ‘Cranbrook’ for some obscure snooty reason.

Carver inspected his latest improvement to Cranbrook. Like some anti-cobbler, he’d skilfully lengthened it without breaching the leather.

Nunes would be aghast at this new damage.

He’d dramatically, painfully, wonder how Carver’s shoes incurred such damage in such a spot. He’d likely accuse Carver of secretly learning ballet. A familiar unoriginality. But a dangerous one — to suggest an Adminner had private interests outside of their lifework.

And Carver would deny it, yet would still do a pathetic, emotionless pirouette for Nunes because that’s the other part of dousing — feeding the ego by denigrating oneself.

Carver sat down on his rudimentary bottle green couch and started putting his right shoe on. He tied the laces slowly, precisely — an act and state of measure quite at odds with the condition of the shoes. There was a meditativeness to it. And in a way, it felt like an act of rebellion.

Nunes never noticed the precise shoelace knots. Then again, as Carver knew... strange truths hide best amongst common lies.

Carver now sat back, glanced around his silent concrete box.

The large TV with the five channels — news, serials, movies, documentaries and living landscapes.

A small bland bedroom, en suite