Something Wicked This Way Comes; A story of the near future

In 2009, I lived in one of the most populated parts of the western world. London was a world city, which contained multitudes and which properly ought to be a city state. No one had tried to kill it for seventy years, and it had not suffered plague or cholera for some 150 years, though both things marked its history.

Swine fever was not bird flu, about which there had been a silly panic a few years before. It was, instead, directly comparable to the illness that broke out, probably from the western front, in 1918, and which killed between forty and two hundred million people worldwide. It was, like the plague of Justinian, a world-challenging event.

As Mike Davis so brilliantly documented, the era of globalisation was better seen as an era of urbanisation. Vast cities and networks of cities arose on earth. People were attracted to them because rural land and incomes were devalued, and food production was both a cause and an effect in that process. The cheap food produced by dubious methods by corporations with huge economies of scale and sold by large networks of shops effectively restrained small production, and screwed down farmers. But they could feed the two hundred new slums created across the world.

In those cities and towns, people were encouraged by financial mechanisms which were based on hope and nonsense to mortgage their lives and the productions of leveraged companies to banks, who then put the nominal money made back into the construction of buildings and homes in the expanding cities, which themselves were funded by credit.

The credit broke. The cities were teeming. The food was secure, but based on methods of production which were necessary to feed so many, but productive of cancers, strange, prion-based illnesses, and sicknesses amongst the meatstock that provided it. World growth and experimentation with oil-comparable methods of fuel also put the space available for world food production under strain as silly investments in ethanol, supported by leading politicians were made.

Then the sun went into a cyclical minimum that everyone had forgotten about because idiots captured the climate change argument and people in cities had been trained to turn off their minds. Across the world, winters were harder and growing conditions were more difficult every year after 2007.

This compounded a problem of the effect of lingering droughts, caused by a suspected mechanism involving the warming of the 1990s, the oceans, and the interaction of clouds and the sun that none could really detail but which hit agriculture hard in the early years of the new millennium.

All the while, the oil that fed the city machine, and which created the ubiquitous plastic that polluted the seas, was running out. It couldn't possibly service the demands of six great, wasteful economies.

This at least was what the leadership of the People's Republic of China had seemed to realise when they took their dollar surplus and went on a spending spree to assure themselves of supplies as everyone else was throwing money at the banks and, by borrowing, them. At least this was a useful way to recycle the dollar, before it broke.

From one point of view, I was stoic. The centre of earth's wealth had been the Indian ocean for millenia anyway. It had briefly been transferred by Imperial rape to Europe. Now, it was heading back. This was a lazy, confortable, and partly truthful delusion on my part.

The bees started dying. Then swine fever, which was never predictable, emerged. The West's leaders, skilled only in their advancement through vicious networks of mediocrity, and spiritually denuded, were unable to cope. At least they had assured themselves of stocks of vaccines.

And I found myself in a world city, one night, typing these words, and wondering when the newest part of the storm would come here. I had debts which, though far below average, make it very difficult for me to leave, and practically no savings. The continent next door was about to experience a very long depression which would hit it as hard but later than the collapse that had hit Britain and America, because of the ways its banking and borrowing systems worked. Britain, anecdotally, and in overheard conversations and on practically every social observation, was seething and anxious.

This was the history of the near future. People who read it should have started stocking up on facemasks, extra food, wind up torches and batteries. In addition, it was always a good idea to have canned food, and maize or dried wheat products around. After all, by the winter of 2008-9, even supermarkets had made plans just in case shelves went empty or shops went bust. Just, of course, in case it was not fiction, and because anyway, on any rational analysis, power and gas cuts or riots were a real possibility over the next few years.

Here, in the meantime, is a public information video from the media about our economic tomorrow. It makes more sense than anything written in the mainstream press, though it is, of course, gibberish really.