January 16- Classified

Like most people, I often feel I have failed in life, so was delighted when I saw a company had sprung up offering to tell me if I had or not. Because of the power of the internet, they said, they already had all my relevant personal details- all I would have to do was send them a cheque for them to be able to tell, once and for all, if I was truly a loser.

The next twenty eight days were agonising, of course. I quickly realised that I'd never really thought I was a loser, and that when people had criticised my lifestyle there was always a part of me who thought they just hadn't understood why I'd spent so much time accomplishing so little. If the envelope I got back begged to differ I imagined I would have to accept a number of uncomfortable things about my life, which I knew I'd spent a very long time just running from. These thoughts were still in my mind on the day when the tiny, sand-brown envelope clinked through my letterbox, and rushed through me for the last time as I read what it said:

Subject 82345025601: LIFE HAS NOT FAILED

Well, I was stunned at that, and (I confess) a little disbelieving. When I showed it to the people I knew they were surprised as well, and in no uncertain terms told me exactly what they thought of the company. But before long thousands of people were sending cheques to their address in Utah, and the unparalleled accuracy of its algorithms became the topic of conversation for every magazine and dinner table. In desperation I wrote to them asking how it could possibly be that I was a successful man, but all I got back was a terse reply stating that their methods were a closely guarded secret, and that in any case I should probably be happy about their findings about me. I couldn't really argue with that, but deep down I was not happy at all.

So eventually I forged a new note, explained that the one I'd shown everyone was a lie and said that I had in fact been branded a loser all along. People were shocked at first, but later accepting, and said to themselves that (after all) what I had done was the kind of thing only a true failure at life would do. Once again I could talk about my mistakes and laugh about them, and only occasionally would feel worried about what I had done.

Eventually, I met a woman who laughed that bit louder when I spoke and smiled slightly more when I told her of my failures. After we had been dating for three months or so, she produced her own letter declaring her a loser, and said that it was a relief to meet someone who had accepted their sentence quite so lightly. I tensed at this, but she smiled, and I tried to put my guilt out of my mind.

The day before my wedding, it got too much. I took her to one side to the room we would keep the presents, and told her I had forged the letter that said I was not a success. Her eyes widened, and she laughed and said God, she'd done just the same thing, but behind the eyes and laughter were tears, and by the end 0f the day we would no longer be married after all.

In the coming months, I recieved the stack of bills and angry letters that comes when you do something as stupid as cancel a wedding the day before you go through with it. Tucked away within it was a tiny, sand-brown envelope, explaining that there had been a mix-up, and the letter I had recieved was intended for someone who was much more special than me. They would get compensation for being falsely branded a loser, but the company thought that getting to believe in my own success for as long as I had was reward in itself. I laughed to myself, and thought of how the successful never really understood these matters, before I went back to my mess of a life feeling liberated, a free man once again.

January 15- Complaints

"I've noticed", said the character of this story to me, "that the characters in the things you write never really seem to get to speak. It was alright at first, but as the days have gone past it's begun to bother us- Penelope from that thing you wrote on the 6th thought you hadn't really captured what she'd been through at all, you know. Still, I said to her, at least she had a name- most of us are just defined by our role, and do you know how confusing that becomes when you're doing your day to day buisiness? When people ask me my name and I tell them it's "the character of this story", they look at me as though I've gone completely mad. I can't get a passport, Robert!"

"I sympathise", I said, although of course I couldn't really. "I find when people tell stories about me, a man who is not a fictional construct, that often the person portrayed in them is really the image of the man they think I am, who is often in some way the image of themselves. For me, this doesn't matter much, but I determine what you say and what you do, and so it must frustrate you when you are in fact thinking something completely different, which I will never understand."

"But that's not it at all!", cried the character. "You have a life entirely independent of other people, you have seen and thought things many will not think and, more importantly, have failed to think many of the things others have thought and seen. If you are my master and can only write about things you think, and you know, then I'm denied that, I'm subhuman. It's a disgusting state of affairs, and it makes me angry just to think of it."

I stared at my shoes for a while.

"The truth is", I said at last, "that I don't make you speak because I that it's me speaking through you. I feel embarassed enough to have created you, and wretched to have given so many of the people I've made such miserable lives, that I feel that to make you speak my words is just to violate you further. It would be to pretend I understand all the people in the world, and from what you've said I think I don't even appreciate the lives of the ones who exist in mine. But I'm sorry for everything I have done, and I am sorry for creating you like this."

I looked her in the eye.

"Would you like to get a drink?", I said.

She nodded, and happily agreed. For the rest of the night she barely said a word, and I wrote that she had enjoyed everything that happened next, because, if I kept believing I had power over her, I thought there was a chance that it might somehow be true.

January 14- Serendipity

There once was a man who believed in serendipity, the idea that things that seem like marvellous coincidences are in fact willed by the universe to happen, that nothing is a result of chance alone. His life, of course, was destroyed by a thing that was entirely a result of chance, but it was an odd enough thing that it is worth recounting here.

It happened like this: the man who believed in serendipity was a chemist by trade, and invented many marvellous liquids that could teach plants to speak or mountains to breathe. Because of this he was a very famous chemist, and he was regularly praised by the people who read about him and feared by the people who were in power. Despite this, the man was not entirely happy, because none of the chemicals he created could be used to teach himself to do anything remarkable. If, he reasoned, he could create a substance to get a chair to write a poem, it surely followed that he could make something that would allow a man to do things that were truly unheard of- and he saw no reason why that man should not be him. And sure enough after many years he did indeed make such a chemical, and after a day examining its structure and bonds he decided it was safe enough to swallow.

He had intended that his substance would make him all powerful, but this was not the case. Rather it made him all-seeing, and in a flash he saw the world as it truly was. He saw that for every wonderful coincidence that had led him to become the man he was there were a thousand near-coincidences that had never happened, and he saw how many times his one true love (God rest her soul) had been on the bottom floor of a shop he was in, or had entered a cafe a minute after he had left. He saw, too, how the order he had always seen in chemistry was dependent on a world of chaos lurking just below it, and that every reaction that ever took place sat beside many millions who had failed. It was all too much; after an hour he was howling for it all to stop, and after a day he was too distraught even to howl any more.

After that, the man who once believed in serendipity stopped making chemicals, and retired to be as far away as possible from anything related to science or society. The world was sad to hear of it, because they saw him as someone truly special -a truth, the man now realised, that was entirely down to coincidence- but before long they were interested in the man who believed angels governed gravity, and the former chemist could retire in something that was miles away from peace. Quickly he forgot his former life and his former creations, for -while he had created both- he no longer felt either had ever belonged to him.

January 13- There is not much time to tell this story

There is not much time to tell this story, but then it is not a story where much ever happened. When God made time He made it too soon, and discovered that He no longer had time with which to fill in the universe. So instead of putting in stories, as He had intended, He made it so our lives would just happen in a random way, but forgot to remove the parts of our minds that looked for the stories and doomed us all to look for them. When we couldn't find any we began to make up our own, and that is why there is not much time to tell this story, as we are too busy telling ourselves lies because of it.

January 12- Archaea

Most people do not know about archaea, the tiny creatures that mind their own buisiness and never bother us much at all. The archaea, however, take an enormous interest in most people- and if you could listen in to their babble in hot springs and the bottom of oceans, you would not like the things that they say.

For the archaea -who live everywhere people are, and everywhere they are not- regard our world and everything within it as a ridiculous shadow of their own. While they might take a trip to the mantle and feast on uranium or soar to the atmosphere to munch on its plentiful gas, often they settle in our cities to mock us as we go about our lives. They read of what we think of ourselves, about our dominion over the earth and our place in it, and when they do they laugh as much as a unicellular structure allows. Because dominion, they say to each other, is exactly not what we have- stuck in our gigantic bodies we can only breathe air and eat the disgusting husks of other creatures we find. How much better, the archaea say, to be able to eat anything, to live anywhere, and how much more control over the world we have than the giants up above us ever will.

Happily, there are some that take pity on us, and it is to them we owe our lives. Whenever a rogue archaeum would begin to develop the ability to breathe what we breathe and eat what we eat, the others decend on him in a flurry of protection orders and legalease. They have decided that there is one part of the world they can spare, and leave to the creatures that grow ever larger and stranger to eke out what they can upon it. It's a small restriction on archaen freedom- but they feel, at least, that it gives them something to laugh at.

January 11-Glass

Scientists will tell you that our world conforms to a small number of universal laws- that everything works in specific ways and that there are some things which, though they may sound easy, can never be done by any man. One such law dictates that there is a small chance that a person may wake up one day to find they now live in a place identical to the one they left, only with every man and woman inside replaced with glass statues of themselves. Scientists are not likely to tell you about this law, because it's not very often that this happens to them.

But if it happens to you, listen up: it is not as great as it seems. At first, of course, it will seem fantastic, as you will be surrounded by creatures that look just like you and (because they are made of a very special kind of glass) think and speak like you. This, if you are vain, will be a form of heaven, and if not you will be able to smash the statues, which will be a form of therapy. Yet as the days wear on you will discover that a world run by glass people does not function especially well; the hospitals will fill up with yous whose limbs are shattered beyond all repair. You might have expected this and it might not bother you, but you will be bothered when you find out the statues chief impairment is not that they are made of glass. For these are creatures identical to you, who share your insecurities and failings and, above all, your complete lack of most skills that are required in a functioning world. Soon you will find that things you had always thought you could master would have in fact always been beyond you, and you will find out in a mess of falling planes and shattered souls.

Take relief in the fact there is another law of the universe: when the glass world has completely fallen and the last statue lies shattered on the ground, you will be returned to the place we live. Here, you might talk about what happened to you -there is, at least, no law against that- but you will find that most who have been to these worlds decide not to. Instead you will recognise your fellows only by an aversion to glass- although whether they are afraid of the material or their reflection, you will never be able to tell.

January 10- The Story and Introspection

It's a diary, yes, but is it a lie as well? Even in our diaries we worry- I worry- that there we are refining ourselves into something our future selves will find impressive, and that they will think in their flying cars and swimming chairs that they were jolly good people, way back then when they were us. That's why we can never read them once we become the future- our past lives may be embarrassing enough, but nothing is quite as bad as discovering our past ideals.

A story is worse, as it pretends. In its grasp it leads us to believe that its thoughts are our thoughts, that its chain of logic has a command that is more than the writings of the dusty and dry, that a man can be heard more if he talks in riddles and wears a hat. When it is at its worst -and here it is- then the writer too may come to believe in his own story, like a father imprisoned in the jail of his child.

And so I think it is better that a story -this story- remain in the open like secrets and infidelties and all the other things everyone should be told about. In the cold light of day it can be humiliated, and against the might of other minds its conciets can be reduced. If nothing else it can help a man become his future self that bit sooner, so that when he cringes at what has come before at least there are no wrinkles on his face.

January 9- Warning

I am going to tell you something you will one day know to be true, and so to warn you that there will come a time when you cannot dismiss what I am about to say. You may dismiss what I write as a fiction, and to do so is fine- but you will at least know, in the future when it is too late, that there was at least one other person who had realised what was to come.

What will happen to you in the future is this: some day, earlier than you expect, a number of your friends will begin to die. When this happens you will feel more grief than you perhaps realise now, and you will find that even as you become better at funeral speeches and purchasing gravestones that things never become easier. And you will find your circle of friends becomes fewer and fewer, and there will be a day when the last one goes, and you will be the ancient one at the edge of the wake, telling stories of things noone else remembers. At this point you will be sadder than you had ever thought possible, but -if you have forgotten this warning- you will not have realised the dreadful truth.

You may suspect, when you become the oldest person in the world, that things do not quite work in the way you had assumed they did, and this suspicion will grow when you become the oldest person who ever lived, first by a year, then fifty, and before long five hundred. At some point you will realise that you will in fact never die, and if you are unfortunately bright you will realise what this means about the world. For if you are not extraordinary what has happened to you must have happened to everyone, and if that is true they too have found themselves in worlds where they are the oldest thing alive, having split away some time when you were both too young to know any better. And, terribly, it follows that nobody you now live with will be with you forever -if they are even with you now- for their lives will too diverge into places they cannot escape, and they too will find they can never die.

And so my warning to you is this: remember that you are with other people now, and remember to hold them close to you while none of you is special in the universe, and to fear the day when each of you will be. Remember too how terrible death is, and remember -though you will have an eternity to reflect upon this- that there is indeed something which is far, far worse.

January 8- Rome and the Poor

Rome was not, as we think of it today, an orderly city of clipped villas with elegant roofs. Rather, it was cramped as a chicken farm: A place designed to fit an entire metropolis of a million souls into an area we would fit about a fifth of that today. So the Rome of the real world was a city of prototype skyscrapers, of buildings that stretched five or more stories high and streets just wide enough to let a herd of oxen make it to the market. It was a place of little space and less light, and it is perhaps not surprising that we have forgotten it today.

Yet this is not what interests me about that city, lost to us by an overgrowth of time and myth. Instead it is this: shorn of the chance to relegate the poor to distant outskirts, the rich men of Rome created a system whereby the more money you had, the closer to the ground you could be. And so above their stately homes with plumbing and heating were progressively desperate people, their fortunes becoming bleaker the further up you went. And at the very top were those without bedding and without hope, who would be the most likely to start a fire that consumed the building and the most likely to die from it. It is, you will have noticed, a world where our concepts of status were inverted, where the higher a man is the more hopeless and desperate his life has become. Perhaps this thought occured in another way to Jesus all those years ago, but I am neither hopeless or desperate, and so it is not what interests me.

Rather this: the rich of Rome scorned their poor, but were never far away from them. In their marbled rooms they could never forget that above them was squalor and despair, and that mere feet away there existed men who -if they so desired- could bring their roofs crashing down about their heads. And as a rich man I consider this: my time is one without slavery and without pleasure over bloodshed, without discrimination or the chance of dying for belief. And yet for all this I do not think I could live as a privaliged Roman did, constantly aware and beside all that his lifestyle implies. Rather all I can do is to remember it sometimes, while squinting, and glimpse the world we have made as it slowly begins to burn.

January 7- Supersession

Extra-universal contact was sudden when it finally arrived, and completely unexpected at that. Some physicists in a basement at Almaty typed words into their computer and were surprised to discover the computer typing back, in a manner that suggested it had been expecting them to talk to it for quite some time. Quickly it transpired that the computer wasn't sentient -don't be ridiculous, it scoffed at the suggestion- but was the first machine in this universe to be connected to any other, linked into its internet like a needle in a whale. Furthermore, because the universe they had made contact with was perfectly aware of what had happened, it followed that they were in turn connected to other universes who had learned the secret of communication, and that the scientists had in fact made contact not just with another world but more worlds than anyone could imagine. It was as though they had discovered that the earth was a mere house in a village, and the village had found a town that knew a city, from which each day rockets set off to the stars.

The discovery of such wonder, however, was inevitably despair. For within one day the planet had learned everything that could be learned, found the greatest works of art that could be conceived and realised that theirs was a long way from the best of all possible worlds. People would log into the Greater Internet to find equivalents of themselves in other universes, and they would always see one more cultured, more wise, or more content than they themselves had become. Worse, they could look for places where people just like them had made one slightly different decision; and would find that often the different decision was the right one, and that everything they had told themselves to the contrary was a lie. The world slowly slid towards ennui and misery, only stopped by the knowledge that other worlds had done so in far more impressive ways.

When all contact with the other worlds was finally severed the planet had one thought to keep them sane: if they had severed all communication with the people of the universes, perhaps so to did the planets that grew to be the most strong, and who obtained insights beyond even the ones discovered by quintillions of people working together. In their hearts they knew that this wasn't true, and that nobody could believe human achievement was limitless when they themselves had seen the boundries- but they went on thinking it anyway, comforted by the illusion, desperate for the chance to feel great again.

January 6- Armaggedon

Like everyone she knew, Penelope expected the telegram every day. When it did come, then- so close to the end of the war, she later reflected, impossibly close- her grief was at least a sensation without surprise. She felt stunned, and still, and as though every cliche about death she had ever heard or said was suddenly both true and cliche no longer- but it was as though this was something she always knew would have to happen, and that it at least had the decency to have waited as long as it could. And perhaps it was this lack of surprise that led her to dwell so much on the site of her husband's death- Megiddo, plain of the Holy Land, where his faith had held the final battle between good and evil would take place.

She imagined, of course, that anyone would have been spooked by a death so apparantly meaningful, and that anyone would -like her- have wondered over the following months whether the conflict her husband had died in was indeed the final battle after all, and that what the Bible described as the forces of evil in fact constituted the Ottoman Empire and associated hangers on. But over time she decided this was unlikely- the practices of the Ottomans, while mysterious to her, did not quite fit with her understanding of pure evil, and the grey and widowed world she inhabited could certainly never be called paradise. So she came to think that her husband's death indeed meant nothing, and that -for now, at least- nothing really did upon the earth.

Penelope was not buried where she was out of a desire to be close to her husband, or, as those close to her thought, a misguided sense of longing. Rather her grave sits on the Megiddo plain so that when her husband returns, one day, there will be someone there to tell him that he did die once, but now things are indeed worth fighting for again.

January 5- Powerless

Getting home after a day as long as them all, you find your house in darkness. It's almost a surprise, but not enough to worry you- your wife has been here less and less of late; you try and convince yourself that she's having an affair but you know the reality is she really is just working hard- you find that to be more frustrating, somehow. And quickly you find that frustration doesn't leave you, but is transferred to something else, as you flick the switch and find that no light comes.

You pause at this, horrified. Disbelieving, you hit the switch off, and on, then off again, as though you are an ancient priest still practising a defunct ritual, a primate hammering a button in an abandoned lab. You feel the hairs stand on end as you stare round your transformed house, feeling more alone than you did but a second ago. For in a way, it is the work of others that has abandoned you- suddenly a world full of things designed to make life easy and convenient for you is one you must navigate near-alone, and you have been thrust unwillingly into having to accept that you do need other people, you rely on them. And because of this you feel the absence of your wife and son and friend more keenly than ever before as you fumble through your house, stumbling over steps that have mischievously chosen this minute to suddenly appear beneath your feet.

It's over in a matter of seconds after that- a switch has turned off in the fusebox, you switch it on, humanity returns to your home at the speed of light. In minutes you have forgotten the mundane adventure you have had, when your wife returns you do not speak of it. Yet in the days to come you feel somehow even worse than before, aware of just how alone you are not, and somehow ever lonelier because of it.

January 4- Tedium

The bookshelves are stacked high in Terestria, the most boring tyranny in the world. Every day people shuffle into the state-owned shops to buy a new text with which to polish off the night, and these days some tell themselves they'd do so even if the penalty for doing otherwise was not death. The Terestirian presses issue new copies daily; the Terestrian Typesetting Ministry never closes, and the forests of the grand Terezon Basin grow thinner than the country's children. It would seem to many like an idyllic sort of place, if they never bothered to check the titles of the books.

For the books are dull, and not just mildly so. A Terestrian would kill (and indeed some have) for a copy of a book about balsa wood or fish stocks in Japan, and a work of fiction would be hailed as equivalant to the word of God. What they have instead is remarkable to anyone who doesn't have to read it: A complete, novel-length book about their Grand Dictator for every day of his life.

And what a life the Grand Dictator has! Sometimes he looks at the fish in his Western Pool; sometimes he looks at the fish in his Eastern Pool. Once (in a work the Terestrian Times hailed as truly groundbreaking) he even ascended up the Stairs of Glorious Despotism to manage to watch the fish in both pools at the same time. The books describe his eye movements, the twitches of his mouth as he glances back and forth at the carp as they skip around- indeed, they describe everything except his actual emotions as he watches, as asking about those is Strictly Prohibited By Law.

Revolution has never come to Terestria in all the many years of publishing, and the radicals who meet in secret under piles of discared paper have come to one conclusion. The country is too rigidly run and too beset by fear for rebellion to come the natural way; rather the Dictator must read the books of his life to realise just how boring, and how worthless, his period of rule has ultimately been. And so beside the bookstores and printing works there now sit vast numbers of unmarked graves, displaying just how many have tried and failed to deliver a single copy to the Palace on Marvellous Hill. It is an irony lost on no-one, but never ever uttered, that the queues that stretch to midnight would be shorter if joined by one man more.

January 3- Messenger from God

(Note: Reading this back it seems extremely derivative, so I apologise. It's a story diary, I suppose, and diaries are full of other people's thoughts you've decided to have for yourself.)


And so it was that one day a Messenger from God did decend from on high, and all of humanity did flock to see him. And lo, the Messenger from God spoke thus: "For heaven's sake, humanity, pull your boots up, it's really horrendous out there in the outer galaxies and frankly we're starting to get a little annoyed."

And ye, humanity did look confused.

"Didn't you read your Genesis?", said the Messenger. "You have dominion over all the creatures upon the earth- that's lower case, if you'd been paying attention. I suppose you've been so busy with your wars and the like that you never stopped to think that there was probably quite a lot of earth outside your silly little planet, and really a fair few creatures that were likely to live there, but no, it's just building new rockets and getting yourself killed. I'm not sure what the Lord was thinking giving you dominion, really, most of you can barely be trusted with a spring."

And yay, humanity did look perplexed, and the priests and vicars among them nervous.

"Anyway", continued the Messenger, "that'll all have to change now. There's about seven billion of you, so each of you will only have to get dominion over around a thousand octillion cubic miles of creation." "And", he continued over the squeals of panic, "most of that is empty space, really, it shouldn't be much bother." He paused. "Except for the tesselated sections, of course. Most of the tesselated sections is flesh-devouring monsters. Still, they only make up, what, seventy eight percent of the universe, you'll be fine..."

A yell interupted the Messenger demanding to know where God had been during the many disasters that had befallen the world.

"Oh, honestly", said the Messenger, "it's just take, take, take with you people. Maybe if you fulfilled your part of the bargain He'd have time to give you some lifeboats or something, instead of cleaning up the mess in all the places He only went and gave to you. Anyway, that's your message, I have appointments to attend to. Rest assured I'll be telling Jesus about all this." And verily he tutted one last time, then ascended to heaven with the sound of a trumpeting angel.

After this most people decided they'd had enough of religion, now that they thought it over, and discovered they could keep on fighting perfectly well without it. Today dominion over the universe is largely the responisbility of the Vatican, who all things considered has handled things remarkably well, and this year only had ten Popes devoured in the sky.

January 2- Crisis

It was two years ago, we think, since the meteor fell. At the time we had been busy with our pastimes, entering our dogs in competitions or writing our weekly columns about cakes, so the news that the world might be completely annihalated came as a shock to us. Or not as a shock, if we were honest, but rather a novelty- we were used to hearing about annihalation in places we had never heard of or from threats we only pretended to understand. To be threatened by something so nakedly terrifying was somehow the same yet different; like an especially spicy curry, like a kiss.

But of course our fears came to nothing, and the world's authorities got together to freeze the meteor metres above the water where it fell. In the coming days there were many excited reports in the media, and many of us went to the city below it to photograph ourselves pointing in mock horror into the sky. But in time, of course, we moved on to different stories and different threats, and we began to think of the meteor as just one of the many strange things we did not understand about life in our own century. Occasionally, of course, we would hear about how fragments had fallen and crushed a monument, or an aquaintence's lover, and when a chunk of asteroid flattened an elephant reserve and sent ivory prices soaring we had to listen to our tedious friends discussing it for longer than we would have liked. But in the main it was just one of the things we managed to forget, on a list that stretched longer than we could know.

And so we think -we know- that the crisis is over, and that this year we are right to have other concerns. Experts among us may say that the meteor must fall, and must do so soon, but their logic has never been easy to understand, and we are determined that things in our lives must stay the same. This year we will knit and we will bake, we'll laugh and fight and strive to forget to die, and we'll never think about the giant mass of the metor, casting its shadow over all we choose to do.

January 1- Towers

One thing is interesting about our town- behind the suburb where the not-quite-poor look down on the not quite rich, there are two high pillars of stones. The higher by far is a natural phenomenon, created by some process I never understood, where every year since the world's creation a single smooth pebble would be added to the stack, continuously until today where it stretches further than any of us can see. The second is smaller, but still gigantic- it is a stack which people have added one stone to every year since they first came upon the earth. I have regularly attended our festivals on New Year's Day, where our Mayor climbs above the clouds with the now-new apex of our time, and my youngest memory is of seeing her face lit from the summit by the video-monitors we installed to protect such an ancient monument. It is nothing but history, after all, and there is nothing more commonly vandalised than that.

Our tower is stubby and slight, yet I still remember to lay the next stone every anniversary. If you squint at the ten or so stones you can yet pretend that our relationship is great, and that the thing we have constructed is in some way equal to the things we live beside, were created beside.
Each year you come and I squeeze your hand, and we promise each other our heart forever as we look up at the town's two towers, shooting upwards out of the sky.