When First We Practice As Deceivers
2019-2022:
Boris Johnson (Conservative)
def 2019: (Majority) Jeremy Corbyn (Labour), Nicola Sturgeon (SNP), Jo Swinson (Liberal Democrats)
2022-2022: Liz Truss (Conservative)
2022-2024: Penny Mourdant (Conservative)
2024-2027:
Keir Starmer (Labour)
def 2024: (Minority with SNP confidence and supply) Penny Mourdant (Conservative), Richard Tice (Reform), Angus Robertson (SNP), Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats)
2025 Scottish Independence Referendum: 51.7% YES, 48.3% NO
def 2026: (Coalition with Liberal Democrats) Mike Heaver (Reform), Richard Foord (Liberal Democrats), Tobias Ellwood (One Britain One Nation), Adam Price (Plaid Cymru), Nadine Dorries (Conservative)
2027-2029:
Richard Foord (Liberal Democrats leading coalition with "PR" Labour)
2029-2031:
Edward "Remeece" Freeman (Reform)
def 2029: (Minority) Richard Foord (Liberal Democrat--People's Alliance), Keir Starmer (Labour), Bin Afolami (One Britain One Nation), Jackie Weaver (We Have The Authority), Nadine Dorries (Conservative), Carla Denyer & Adrian Ramsay (Green--People's Alliance), Adam Price (Plaid Cymru), Cat Smith (Independent Labour--People's Alliance)
2031-2031:
Martin Daubney (Reform)
2031-2032: Edward "Remeece" Freeman (Reform)
2032-2034:
Ben Wallace (Independent leading Government of all the talents)
def 2032: (Minority) Jackie Weaver (We Have The Authority), Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour), Monica Harding & Stephen Kinnock (Liberal & People's Alliance), Edward "Remeece" Freeman (Reform), Carla Denyer & Adrian Ramsay (Green), Jessica Zbinden-Webster (One Britain One Nation), Delyth Jewell (Plaid Cymru), Alice Grant (Conservative)
2034-2057
: Jackie Weaver (We Have The Authority)
def 2034: (Majority) Ben Wallace (Government Of All The Talents)
2038 Enabling Act Referendum: 79% YES, 21% NO
2057-
XXXX: "Jackie Weaver" (We Have The Authority) [disputed]
Your name and details? Just a formality for the official immigration records.
Jute. Edgar Jute. 49 years old, white male. Engineer. I've been in Gretna Refugee Camp One for...three years. Seems longer, really.
Right. With that out of the way...it says here you were employed by the British government between 2035 and 2059. Is that correct?
Yeah. I was hired right out of Warwick--should have been a red flag, really. I started out in the Office of Telecommunications, but after a year, some...they needed more people to work on a project, and I fit...experience that I had, apparently that was needed. So I was moved over to UK-GNSS--the people who, uh, they make satellites. So there I was responsible for a lot more R&D. It was a good position.
This project was known as the Malachi Network, correct?
...fuck.
It's not that bad, Mr Jute. If you give us any valuable information on it, we'll take it into consideration at your trial.
I...look, I appreciate it, but I think any info you give me will just keep me in prison for longer.
I'll start at the beginning, right? Just to give some context, however bad it still looks.
Feel free to take your time.
Right. So you've got to remember that, well, we'd had 22 years of political chaos--that was, at the time, nearly my whole life. Nearly my whole life had been uncertainity, governments toppling over themselves with populist or antipopulist agendas, parties splitting apart from referenda, ever-more crazed rhetoric...we left the EU, let you lot leave
us, got rid of FPTP, but nothing seemed to help. It never stopped. All these false messiahs kept rising to the top, and the establishments that they chafed with just threw them over once they turned out to be clowns, or something outside their control broke everything anyway. The man who got my first vote--a rapper, you wouldn't have heard of him--went from PM to backbencher to PM again in ten months! Because of a flood!
It was all just a big bubble. A talking shop, for people who thought they were above ordinary Brits. The idea was to break it all up, forever, and...that still doesn't justify what I did. Doing what I was ordered to do. Not in the slightest.
Could you please explain what it was you were ordered to do?
Sure, I'm just...I'm just getting to that bit.
First, you've got to circle back around a bit. Jackie Weaver. You know her, you love her, you can see her face broadcasted on giant screens just over the border, and if you're lucky a bunch of choreographed dancers making a giant aerial representation of same. Now, you're not going to believe this...but there's something
not entirely normal about her.
Mr Jute, sarcasm will not get you very far with us.
Fine, fine, fine. My point still stands, though. I mean, it started out small, at first. The Zoom video she was in, y'know, the one where that bloke tells her she doesn't have any authority--fuck me, I must have watched that a thousand times by now--that was only when she was, what, sixty-something? We're all lucky that it didn't come on full-bloom when she was a tot. Maybe it needed the Internet to work, or something. There's still so much we'll nev--we don't know. It--the video launched a thousand ships, metaphorically. Then they put her on TV, and all hell broke loose. After that damn reality show, she was being touted as the ideal outsider, someone who'd turn over the shoddy state of British politics, and somehow, that got her into Parliament, and it all just grew from there. You ever seen a snowball rolling down a hill? Not in real life, of course, in a cartoon, where it rolls and rolls and just keeps getting bigger and bigger? Like that.
All of this was despite her never really
doing or
saying anything that'd explain it. She was only moderately funny, had pretty standardly dull political views, all the charisma of, well, a sixty-year-old parish councillor--she shouldn't have even won the reality show! Campbell just gave her a bunch of extra points for "leadership"! She just had this inexplicable aura around her, that let her cheat her way through politics. Made everyone just jump out of her way.
It wasn't everybody who was suckered by her...whatever. Her campaign manager--I forget his name--he was maybe a bit more immune than the rest. Once she got into No10, he started work on a project. That's when they called me in. I had some...relevant experience.
What was this experience in?
[indistinct mumbling]
Mr Jute, if you could speak up, please?
Fetish sites. I wrote for a hypnosis fetish site. I was a horny teenager, and it wasn't harming anybody. Well, it put me in a position to harm
everybody. Not sure if that's the same thing, though.
Anyway, what that meant was that I knew a decent amount about
actual hypnosis. Which was...aligned to the goal of making the Malachai Network. The idea was that we'd prevent all the chaos, the splits, the factions, the stupid ideas coming down from the top. Just have one "ordinary" but charismatic figurehead to be beloved by the masses but utterly impotent, and
we'd get on with managing things properly. The same old philosopher-king bollocks you can get from any midwit civil servant anywhere after 2 pints.
It doesn't properly explain why we did what we did, really. I'm half-certain that most of us were already doped up on Weaver, and our conscious minds were just filtering through a rationalisation for our crazed decisions. The network went up all the same, though, because the people with doubts didn't do bollocks to stop it.
What...was the Malachi Network, exactly?
I told you where I worked, didn't I? Satellites. They were a system of satellites. Didn't start out that way--originally we were just going to do subliminal stuff in TV broadcasts, but no-one watches live TV anymore and all the mobile service providers had been brought out by people a continent away from our legislative powers. It was easier to get a radio dish up into geosynchronous orbit than to regulate Apple.
We'd managed to isolate the signal Weaver produced by then. It was--well, if you asked two people in the department, you'd get three answers. Whatever it was she produced when recorded, we could replicate it. Intensify it, even. A concentrated form of Weaver-Beam raining down on the UK from space. This frequency did something to the brain, that manifested as
devotion. A sincere love, a belief in their ability to lead and be one of them. Thomas--the campaign manager, he went on a lot about how we'd found the source of leadership. Alexander, Hong Xiuquang, BoJo, every king or rebel or popular politician through history, all of them, according to him, just people lucky enough to extrude this super-charisma.
What we didn't realise was quite what the effects of constant, 24-7 exposure to...to effectively
brainwashing, would have on the British psyche.
Honestly, I think Jackie had the worst time of it out of anybody. She never asked to be in charge of an organic personality cult. She didn't ask for one Zoom meeting where she got a bit bolshy to be played on every channel 'til Kingdom Come. She didn't ask for people naming their kids after her, or postrating themselves before her in the street, or setting up shrines to her old shoes. I mean, imagine that life--infinite theoretical power, but you can't have a normal conversation with anyone. The only human in a kingdom of dogs. Every time I saw her, if I took a minute or two to push away the urge to throw myself into a fire if she asked, she just looked...confused. Confused, and tired, and wanting to go home. Not that anyone would let her.
So...if Weaver isn't in control, who is?
Good question. A very, very, good question. The idea was that it was, well,
us. The men in grey suits, made immune to Weaver's aura. The problem was that, well, none of us actually had immunity. We all just
thought we did because we were able to rationalise our way around our decisions. We were just checking in on the quality of the broadcasts, caught up in the crowd's emotions, operating to make sure the propaganda had the maximum reach...that sort of thing.
It...if you've ever met an alcoholic, y'know, one of the high-functioning ones? They're always making excuses. It's a hot day, better have a drink, oh this is just for the builders, not for me, it's just a small drink, something to start the day off with...that's what it was like, in Whitehall, by the end. Everyone making excuses as to why they weren't like the addled masses, even as they huddled around the screens blaring Weaver's faces like drunks around a tap. By the end, most of the meetings were about providing more forms of Weaver to the public, and by extension, to us. Infrastructure, housing, the climate--all of that was out of the window. I watched people I respected and looked up to as pillars of savvy intellect beat each other to death with bare fists for the right to touch an old woman's discarded shirt.
...fucking hell.
Bit unprofessional of you, there. What kind of standards are the Scottish government demanding these days?
Sorry. Continue.
Right. Anyway, I'd love to say that I fled, and ended up here, sweating through withdrawal with all the other economically destitute Weaver junkies, because I was sickened at my own actions and had a change of heart. I didn't. I left because we'd made a society of addicts, and were about to run out of the supply.
Run out of...what?
Weaver's dead. Nasty fall, five years ago. All the servants were too overawed to touch her, and...yeah.
None of us made plans, or contingencies, because, well, we were all addled, weren't we? We all thought she'd survive forever, somehow. We didn't even want to
think of a world without her. The day we made the announcement, Thomas--the campaign guy, closest thing we had to a leader--he walked out of the room dead silent. We found him a few hours later, hanging from the rafters.
We could just have kept running the same videos again and again, and they did. They are. The thing is, though, like any group of addicts, the public of the UK--whatever's left of them--the British public get desensitised. You have to keep upping the dosage, or changing it up, because the old stuff won't work any more. I'm sure your government's noticed. They're restive, spend longer times at the performances or what have you, hollow eyes, paler skin, more aggressive...eventually, nothing will be enough to keep them sated. My old mates, the ones left at the top, they've got grand schemes of trying to find a replacement, or desperate bluffs of trying to create new activites or ways to venerate her. Me, I just thought I'd leave before I was eaten by a mob of lunatics trying to sniff Buckingham Palace's carpets.
Do you know what you're going to try and do next?
I do. Wish I didn't.
...why not?
Look, this is nothing personal, alright? You've been a decent interviewer, the free biscuits were good, and you haven't punched me in the face for destroying an entire country's psyche. But I
know what's going to happen, because you're a professional. You're going to give this interview to your boss.
Your boss will read through it, and then they'll send it on to
their boss. And so on, and so forth, and every time it moves up the chain, some data, some vital element of it--the look on my face, the words I used, the implications of this fucking
jungle of slowly dying Englishmen huddled around photos of an unlucky parish councillor right outside the door here--will be lost. All that'll remain is the idea.
It's dangerous times, these days. The economy's always spiralling or stagnating, the seas are rising, extremists are all over the place. It's hard to keep a nation stable. How wonderful it would be, if there was some way to bypass all that! To just make people
believe in a country again! Or at least believe in some figure that represents the country. Some charismatic individual, who can make people feel better about their shithole lives just by existing.
Remember, if Thomas was right, then
everyone produces some sort of mind-whammy charisma beams. Amping up Weaver made Western accounts of North Korea look sane, but amping up some actor or staffer with a satellite system, well, that could be controlled, couldn't it? Even if it can't, do you want to take the risk that some foreign government could make their own super-figurehead? We've got to do it, and save the nation forever, and stay in power forever. We'll bring some sense back, prevent all the chaos, shut the useless talking shop.
There's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into the nice shiny tube.
Some day, a week or two from now, a very nice car is going to drive through Gretna. Someone will walk out of that car, shiny shoes splashing in the muck of thousands of people in barely human housing. They'll pace through our excuses for streets, until they get to a dismal shed leaning next to an old tree. They'll push open the door, and see me squatting on my matress, and ask "Mr Jute, we'd like you to replicate some of your earlier work for us."
And I'll say "Make me, Prime Minister".