PROLOGUE
I wrote this book twenty five years ago in Seattle, where I lived with my wife and child and worked as a self-employed and often unemployed electrician. That I publish it now, after all these years may seem odd, but the ability to write a novel and then get it published are two very different skill sets. The first requires a dreamy and free ranging imagination. The second, a sharp focus on the details of day to day business. These two traits are so far apart, even opposed to one another, that one would wonder to find both in the same person.
With more of the practical I might have persevered to find a publisher. But in matters of business I was, back then, lackadaisical at best, thus my spare time. I began the story as a hobby, not a career and just as I finished the first draft, with the help of an old TX computer and a daisy wheel printer, making a few copies on a xerox for some friends, I boxed it up with all my other possessions and moved to Puerto Rico for a new business opportunity in the construction industry. This time, with two partners, the business thrived and the book was forgotten.
But the changing times in which we now live has revived my fascination with dystopian worlds and some months of leisure have allowed me to revisit the novel, edit it a bit and, in this far quicker, computer managed era, present it online.
What strikes me is the unsettling possibility that what I idly imagined over two decades ago might now actually come to pass. When I wrote it the ozone layer was melting down and on that premise I began my story. But now we have the equally serious eco-disaster of global warming, not as a threat but a reality, which may very well entail the crop failures and the seeding of the skies with permanent clouds which I long ago postulated, and this in my novel is just the beginning of the end.
My megalomaniac, billionaire, founder of a new world order, named Herbert Luke, bears a striking resemblance to one of our recent presidents, even before I’d heard his name.
But the catalyst for the fall, the plague, still lurks as a very real threat to society in the COVID virus. This with one slight gene variation, as the W.H.O. organization so frequently reminds us, could turn into a deadly pandemic. These are our times and they are fraught with peril.
Our boasted technological revolution, wondrous and widespread as it appears, also hangs upon a very slender thread, which is an electrical grid so interconnected and interdependent that I see it as a spider’s web which any violent storm in our society might blow away. And our computers, now running almost everything, are at least as vulnerable to viruses as we are, even more so, being in their infancy, like babies.
Religious fanaticism hasn’t changed. If anything, one might say it’s gotten worse in the last twenty five years. Religion and science are diametrically opposed. One is spiritualism, the other, materialism, and our human nature, which I guarantee hasn’t changed in the last twenty five years (or the last ten thousand) swings to one or the other, violently so in times of extreme stress or change. If our technology trips up and harms us, I could easily see a backlash, a paradigm shift against it and mob rule and mass destruction are not so unimaginable if the crisis is serious. For all our logic and reason, violent passions still lurk in our natures and if science fails us we might turn on it, reject it, just as a child angrily throws to the ground a broken toy and crushes it under his shoe.
And with our scientific world condemned, what better symbol of spiritualism than a blank page, because it seeks to rise above all materialism, into a heaven indescribable, uniform, universal and perfect. So the bible of the blank page is born.
But these pages aren’t blank, so read on.
CHAPTER ONE
"I, Jonathan Winslow, the most reprobate of sinners, unholy, unclean, renegade and former historian do hereby admit by this act of writing, this desecration of a white page, that I am guilty of a capital offence and deserve to be put to death by fire and terminally purified. I hereby offer myself freely to any party in authority who cares to undertake this most righteous and holy of punishments."
This succinct note was penned by a tall, gaunt, bent-over, scarecrow of a figure, careworn and timeworn, a man in his mid-fifties. Down his back to his shoulder blades ran long white hair. He wore a bleached, foot-length robe, and standing there with his staff in hand he might easily have been mistaken for an anchorite of old, a barefoot wanderer of the deserts, a pariah. And yet he retained some traces of dignity and handsomeness in his face, if one stooped to see them.
His hand was shaking with excitement as he wrote. His whole frame shuddered. The first few letters were awkward but he marvelled at how easily he regained the knack. It must have been twenty years since he’d held a pen. But it was one of those things, once you learn it... In fact, he was so excited at his discovery of the pen and paper that he paused and tried to reckon the date, to formalize the document he had just created. "That’s an old dog of a habit" he thought "and not yet dead, though it will be, with me, very soon."
But the reckoning perplexed him. "Was it twenty-five or twenty-six years since the abolishment of time?" He cursed himself for this embarrassment and lapse of memory. "No matter, it shall serve it's purpose full well without a date. It could be one big inkblot for that matter. What a fool, petty bureaucrat am I to dress it up this much even, my own death warrant. But it will serve. It will serve as is."
Next he took a length of string and poked it through the top of his note, tying a loop so that he could hang it around his neck, visible to all the world.
It was still morning. He searched the dim cellar no further. He thought for a moment that he might take up some painted knickknack or scrap that was lying about, as further evidence against him, but he was in a hurry. When he thought of the two-day journey ahead, and his old, weary legs, he decided to travel as light as possible. So he emptied the contents of his bag right there, except for a little food and water. Then he climbed up the flimsy steps and through the hatch, emerging into the brightness of day. He took one last look at the ruins of the cottage, more than half fallen to the ground, picked up his staff, and set off at an excited pace across the barren hills to the west, straight towards the sea.
Jonathan Winslow had been trying to devise his own demise for many years now. But he was a living monument to his timidity and incompetence. He was also extremely unlucky, at least as far as he could see. In fact, whenever he thought upon his late, futile attempts to end it all, as he often did, and the strange twists and flukes that ensued, a deal of anger and even madness befuddled his intellects. He couldn’t fathom the blindness of his fellow creatures whenever he put them to one of his strange tests. So he would just as blindly postulate that some malignant Gods were mocking him and toying with his fate, provoking him to even more absurd acts which he himself reviled. Yet he continued to play them out in a drama as perverse as the one which had befallen the world.
One hill after another the lone traveller made his way. It was a hazy summer day. The sky was white with the high-altitude clouds that never dissipated. In the growing heat of the hour his initial enthusiasm slaked considerably, but he kept up the pace, mumbling repeatedly, "this will be my last trek, then I shall rest."
In mid-afternoon he paused under the shade of a solitary oak tree in his path. He chewed on some dried fruits and nuts from his bag and took a few sparing sips from his flask. The only other thing that he had with him was his wooden staff, which, like himself, was leaning against the tree. It was a very special stick, as tall as his shoulder and tipped with a fine, silver head of an eagle. Below that were three wide silver bands, the insignia of high rank, and spiraling rows of standing feathers incised deeply and neatly to the bottom with another silver cap there to complete it. By these symbols he held an authority over others that provided him with all his simple needs.
He set out again and hoped to reach the coast before nightfall. There he would find sanctuary, a straw bed and perhaps a warm meal. Hovels were scattered about in these parts, the coast of what had once been western Australia, but now without a name or at least any he’d heard of, and the laws were remiss here, because of the desolation.
That's why he’d come the long and arduous way to this region. He relished the primitive hospitality that he often met with, of fishermen who still plied their age-old trade, untouched by the perversities of the towns further down the strand.
He even concealed the note under his chemise when he first smelled the salt in the air, not wishing to cause a commotion among the poor folks he might meet with. There was been enough mayhem in the turbulent years behind. He heartily despised it in any form. His own personal sanctity and rank was acquired by his power to pacify and reconcile other people’s minds. Let the authorities publicly burn him tomorrow, he was going to have a quiet and restful evening tonight.
