The Demi-Monde: Summer (61 page)

ABBA:
that ABBA is the Lord and Creator of the Kosmos and that She is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnibenevolent.

wu wei
:
The effortless action of the enlightened soul and the power of the Nothingness, both of which can lead to success and victory without success or victory ever being sought. It is progress without ambition, endeavour without intended result. The Superior Soul possesses
wu wei
; the Inferior Soul does not. The Superior Soul cares about virtue; the Inferior Soul cares about material things. The Superior Soul makes love; the Inferior Soul fucks. The Superior Soul seeks discipline; the Inferior Soul seeks favours. The Superior Ruler leads; the Inferior Ruler drives. Only the Superior Soul might possess
wu wei
.

Yin/Yang:
The binary opposites of the Kosmos, representing,
inter alia
, dark and light, cold and hot, female and male. But though Yin and Yang are opposites, they are complementary and mutually dependent: one cannot exist without the other and they strive unceasingly to create the balance that will bring harmony to the Kosmos and ABBAsoluteness to HumanKind. When this is accomplished, Yin will fuse with Yang to create Ying, the ultimate transcendental Peace. The achieving of Ying by the purification of the Astral Ether is the ultimate aim of all WunZian Confusionists.

zadnik:
Demi-Mondian slang for a male homosexual and, more generally, for a NoirVillian male. The word is derived from the Russian
zad
meaning arse.

ABBA:
ABBA (Archival, Behavioural, Biological Acquisition) is a Quanputer-based system developed and operated by ParaDigm CyberResearch Limited. By utilising an Invent-TenN® Gravitational Condenser incorporating an Etirovac Field Suppressor®, ABBA is the only computer to achieve a full SupaUnPositioned/DisEntangled CyberAmbiance. As a consequence, ABBA is capable of prodigiously rapid analysis (a fully tethered 30 yottaQuFlops) to give the bioNeural-kinetic engineers at ParaDigm access to almost unlimited processing power.

BaQTraQ:
Ever since its inception, ABBA has been a treasure trove for genealogists, containing, as it does, digitised records of all government, parish, court and tax information back to the year 1700. But since the introduction of the PollyScan in 2018, whereby documents can be scanned into ABBA simply by laying a Polly on top of a pile of documents, the ABBA-platformed BaQTraQ program has been gathering pace and has now reached a level where the role of the historian in our society is being reassessed. BaQTraQ encourages everybody in the country to scan
everything
into ABBA: holiday snaps and postcards; letters from husbands, wives, uncles and aunts; bills and invoices; old cine films; school-report cards . . . anything and everything.

bioSignatures:
The means by which a digital identity can be verified. BioSignatures include,
inter alia
: fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA and pheromonic analysis.

biPsych:
Those who have a simultaneous existence in both the Real World (as a NowLived) and in the Demi-Monde (as a Dupe).

eyeMail:
An ABBA-platformed means of transmitting person-to-person messages, the privacy and integrity of the message being assured by ParaDigm’s RetinQek Verification Program.

eyeSpy:
Hover-capable and independently programmable SurveillanceBot.

eyeVid:
An ABBA-platformed means of transmitting person-to-person digital moving-image messages.

Flexi-Plexi:
Digital wallpaper. When connected to a Polly a wall covered with Flexi-Plexi is able to display any digital image to a size and shape determined by the viewer.

Fun/Funs:
Street/marketing name for the Fun-Loving Funda -mentalists, the Christian youth movement established and headed by Norma Williams.

Get-Me-Straighter Meter:
Aka GMS Meter. A device used by Norma Williams to eradicate addictive behaviour.

INDOCTRANS:
Indoctrination and Training Command: the department of the US military responsible for the operation of the Demi-Monde.

moteBots:
Nano-sized, independently viable and dynamically flexible surveillance cameras. The use of moteBots was declared illegal by the League of Nations’ Universal Charter of Human Rights and Privacy of 2015.

PINC:
A Personal Implanted nanoComputer; developed by ParaDigm Technologies as a means of radically reducing training times and to find a more efficient method of inculcating students and trainees with specific knowledge sets. PINC is a nano-sized Memory Supplement which is biologically compatible with the human brain. Once in contact with the brain, PINC fuses with its organic tissue and is able to graft information – pain-lessly and seamlessly – into a person’s memory bank.

PanOptika:
The ABBA-platformed program which links all surveillance apparatus (whether private or state) and all databases (whether private or state) to develop a full 360-degree cyber-portrait of individual citizens.

Polly:
Street name for a polyFunctional Digital Device which encompasses, in one dockable device, an individual’s complete computational, communication, security, biomonitoring and entertainment requirements.

PollyMorph:
An ABBA-based program which enables digital modifications applied to one part of a moving-image digital stream to be automatically replicated through the digital stream. Analogous to PaintShop for videos.

Shielders:
Anti-SurveillanceBots.

Socialistic Surveillance:
The belief that to be both successful and acceptable, surveillance must be indiscriminate and totally arbitrary, and that it is utterly fair and equal in its scope.
It is the rather naïve understanding that ‘everyone is equal before a surveillance camera’.

TIS:
The Total Immersion Shroud used to encase the bodies of Real World visitors to the Demi-Monde in order to preserve muscular viability.

Young Believers:
The name of the Christian youth movement established and run by the American evangelists Jim and Marsha Kenton, and subsequently subsumed into the Fun/Funs.

I write this book in the anticipation that it will never be read, that the powers that be – or will be – will seek to suppress it. That being the case, you, my Dear Reader (if such a creature is ever permitted to exist), must forgive me if I am a little didactic, and I assume you are unfamiliar with the tenets of Confusionism. And considering the state of education in the Coven, to suppose ignorance in his or, possibly, her readership is, in this day and age, the most reliable attitude for a writer to adopt.

So, to begin.

Confusionism is the religio-philosophical system that has held sway in the Coven since the Confinement.

For almost one thousand years Confusionism has informed all of Covenite life, thought and moral attitudes. Based on the teachings of the Master as recorded in his two MasterWorks – the iChing and the BiAlects – Confusionism differs from all other Demi-Mondian religions in that it refuses to provide a definitive guide to its followers as to what a Confusionist should believe and how he or she should act. The ‘Confusion’ inherent in Confusionism is a result of the Master’s teachings being represented by the opposite interpretations of the Purpose of Life evinced by two mythical philosophical opponents – the female Wun Zi and the male Too Zi – and their inability – nay, refusal – to fuse these conflicting views into a single coherent gospel.

Perhaps the most intractable source of dissension between WunZian
and TooZian Confusionists is with regard to the subject of ABBA. Whilst WunZians believe there most certainly is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Supreme Deity called ABBA, TooZians are generally pretty dismissive of the whole idea. The way we see it, the whole God thing is just a pile of poop.

Unfortunately for TooZian philosophers (of which, for my sins, I am one), the fact remains that there are certain aspects of the Demi-Monde which point to the involvement of an external power in its construction and management. These include
inter alia,
the existence of the impenetrable Boundary Layer, the occasional manifestation of Daemons, and the construction of the Demi-Monde such that it is innately confrontational and seemingly designed to promote war. These make it difficult for even the most committed of TooZians to dismiss the concept of ABBA out of hand.

Now whilst I would accept that this external force (and let’s, for the sake of convenience, call it ABBA) is extraordinarily powerful (after all, the Boundary Layer is a pretty neat trick), it does not give anyone the right (least of all those soppy WunZians) to believe it is a
Divine
power. My ABBA isn’t the ABBA of religious fame – all-smiting, blighting and downright fucking frightening – no, mine is pragmatic and hard-nosed and has built the Demi-Monde for a purpose that has thus far eluded all enquiry. HeShe moves in mysterious ways.

This consideration caused me to develop the oft-dismissed and ridiculed concept of unBelievability. And here I must digress for a moment to iterate some of the fundamentals of this micro-philosophy.

It is scientific orthodoxy throughout the Demi-Monde that we humans perceive our world through the offices of our five senses and that the information ‘inputted’ by these senses is interpreted by our mind to give a picture of the world about us. Religion – inevitably – cannot tolerate something so simple and obvious. All religions of the Demi-Monde contend (in one form or another) that the mind is itself merely a manifestation of the soul that inhabits our Solidified Astral Ether. According to these religious numbskulls, the soul is the means by which
the body is connected to the mind and the mind connected to ABBA.

Religious types, beset as they are with a compulsion to make folks’ lives as miserable as fucking possible, also propose that the purer the individual’s SAE, the more profound becomes the soul’s communion with ABBA. This is the basis for the embracing of the denial that underpins most religions and which I have named the Principle of Don’t: Don’t Do This, Don’t Do That, and, for fuck’s sake, Don’t Enjoy Yourself when You’re Not Doing It, especially if that enjoyment involves the use of a cucumber. Unfortunately, for a TooZian like me, in recent years this Principle of Don’t has been given some experimental credence as a consequence of the discoveries made regarding the infant ‘science’ of Auralism by the Sacred and All-Seeing Convent of Visual Virgins in Venice.

The aura is the multicoloured halo, supposedly produced by the soul, which surrounds each and every living body. By the examination of these auras certain adepts – Auralists – have shown that all of HumanKind’s SAE is, to a greater or lesser extent, contaminated by cravings (notably for blood), desires (notably for sex) and emotions (notably with regard to everything else). But to the Auralists’ great disappointment, thus far they have failed to detect any individual possessed of a ‘pure’ aura. Whilst this confirmed what I have long suspected – that Demi-Mondians are a venal and vicious bunch of bastards – it also raised the question that if our SAE is contaminated, does this not
also
mean that the information provided by the senses and processed by the mind is similarly corrupted? If this is indeed the case, then our perception of the world about us must be fallible and inconsistent.

This question was most ably argued by the Anglo thinker Aldous Huxley in his
The Doors of misPerception,
which propounded the theory that, because of their contaminated SAE, the way each Demi-Mondian perceives the world is unique and hence each individual sees ‘reality’ differently. It is a challenging idea and one which led to Huxley being purged by King Henry.

But as always happens when someone comes up with a Really
Interesting Idea, some silly sod (me, as it happens) takes things to extremes and the Interesting is stretched and mutilated until it becomes the Absurd. Taking Huxley’s arguments and extending them, I propositioned that as the purity of the SAE varies in each Demi-Mondian, it follows that each individual’s perception of Reality is similarly different and hence there is no definitive Reality. QED, Reality cannot exist.

In my pamphlet ‘Through the Bottom of a Glass, Darkly’ – so named because the insight came to me when I was pissed – I conjectured that HumanKind’s perception of the Demi-Monde isn’t just wrong, but is a fabrication foisted upon us by a mischievous ABBA, that we live in a Shadow World or, as I prefer to call it, a Virtual World. This is the Proposition of unBelievability which I defined as follows:

Anyway, WunZians, as might have been expected, got really bent outta shape about unBelievability (but then, according to WunZians, anything that TooZians proposition must be bollocks), saying there was no perceptual ambiguity that they had noticed and that with ABBA what you see (and hear and smell and touch and taste) is what you get. This led to a really nasty little confrontation with one particularly truculent WunZian (a young girl named Su Xiaoxiao, who seems preternaturally and precociously intelligent, damn her) arguing the toss with a rabidly opinionated TooZian (me again, it was a slow day).

And you know what this sneaky bitch Su Xiaoxiao did? She provided proof that Perceived Reality coincided with Real Reality!