This is the fourth chapter of a novel that will be published in serial form in the Daily Sceptic. It’s a dystopian satire about the emergence of a social credit system in the U.K. in the near future. Read chapter one here, two here and three here.
Afternoon. A break from work, jogging.
The morning’s drizzle having given way to a full blown fog, Ella could just make out the shape of the path ahead, carving its narrow course through the fields as it followed the bend of the river. It was her usual running loop, and, however much the landscape had been transformed over the years, still, just about, enough of a space to think and just ‘be’.
Her mind drifted. You had to hand it to them, the way they’d masterminded it had been sublime.
Originally marketed as a purely voluntary scheme, the Health Efficiency Programme (as it had originally been named) had at first dangled common sense, appealing rewards and prizes–- free trainers, subsidised gym memberships, contributions towards e-bikes and the like. “Well, we need to get people exercising somehow,” she had said to her mother-in-law one weekend as they were pacing across some muddy field.
“A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished,” her mother-in-law might have replied, but did not, instead nodding enthusiastically: “Yes I think so. They have to get everyone fit again somehow, don’t they?”
Reaching a fork in the path, Ella very deliberately took the low road.
That one clung to the river, and the route, though longer and much muddier, lent at least another few minutes of undisturbed nature to her run. The path higher up led out into what a few years back had been open farmland but whose last verdured remnants were now eclipsed by The Complex. Every time she ran this way, without fail she took the river route; along this path it was still just about possible to pretend she was still in countryside, at least if one blocked out the roar of the motorway to the left and the sight of the distant solar farms glinting on the horizon.
It hadn’t been long until rewards and freebies had became more overt nudges. Even then, though, the scheme had still largely been welcomed. “I like to see it as a promise, not a threat,” the ‘Right Honourable’ Minister for Opportunities, a weaselly little woman called Mrs Surrey, had soothed, her smirk barely perceptible, doing the media show-rounds.
To the extent that awkward-squad enclaves of freethinking dissidents urged caution – what if the scheme was extended to areas beyond ‘simply’ health, what if it became mandatory, what if nudges turned to sanctions and penalties – they were no match for the rest of those all-trusting know-it-alls. In a world where most had had blissfully little reason not to trust the Government’s word, that word prevailed.
“I can confirm that there are absolutely no plans to extend the Government’s ‘Good Health Rewards Scheme,” Mr. Wahazi, the Health Minister, had declared in Parliament around the same time, ostensibly putting the matter to rest, most people simply too busy with the treadmill of their lives to think too hard, or indeed at all, about the philosophical questions of Mill versus Rousseau and whether in this ditty little scorecard there might not lie the gateway to a fascist hell.
Jogging the last few paces of the field, she turned the corner.
From here, the dark, monstrous mass of The Complex could be made out, the towering, clinical symmetry of the Zeeta building and the huge oval structure of Demerna’s headquarters, its sharp, jagged edges and haloed centrepiece of spiked towers piercing the fog. However many times she ran this route her revulsion never diminished on sighting the colossal form springing up from the fringes of what had, only a few years before, been an expanse of countryside so peaceful and undisturbed that the first time she’d accidentally stumbled over it after moving up from London and realised it was only a stone’s throw from the house, she’d wept: actually wept, with the joy of understanding that there was a space so green and vast and sacred so close to where they lived.
A shuddering sneer. Like finding half a caterpillar on your dinner plate, or standing in dog poo, it was a reflexive reaction of which she was barely conscious and unable to control.
Shirles, to be fair, got it from the very first moment.
In Ella’s kitchen the day it was announced, Shirles had been listening to the lunchtime show on ADFREE News.
“Earlier today, Government announced its plans for the ‘Be Healthy’ voucher scheme. We want to hear your reaction,” the presenter was saying, as ever her straight talking Geordie accent sparking up their kitchen. “Do you think this is a good thing? Do you have concerns? Will you use it? Tweet us your thoughts.”
There was a bitter poignancy in thinking back to the days of phone-ins and free opinions and social media and presenters who were allowed to say what they thought and come to think of it entire TV channels broadcasting anything other than The Efficiency Agenda.
“I’m really not sure about this,” said Shirles, half watching, half chopping potatoes and shaking her head in a way that certainly had nothing to do with the potatoes. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Hmm, I dunno,” Ella had replied, launching into a moralising lecture about how there was a serious obesity crisis in this country and too many people who wouldn’t take responsibility for their own health and how at some point people who couldn’t make good decisions surely needed to be coaxed and if they couldn’t be coaxed then surely a little push was okay.
Listening indulgently, Shirles had eventually chimed back,
“Yes, but they make it bloody impossible for us, don’t they? All those e-numbers and crap in the food. Everything in the shops is packed with rubbish. Most people don’t have time to do anything about it. Why don’t they start by fixing the food? Then people could chose for themselves.”
Before Ella had had a chance to interject, Shirles was off again.
“Watch my words, it’ll not be weeks before they start demanding something in return. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit them,” she added, a final shake of her head sealing the matter.
Shirles, of course, was right.
A few short years later and benevolent aunt had morphed to oppressive patriarch, all the while slowly stewing us all in a soup of our own naïve, blind consent.
Now up against the boundary of The Complex, Ella could see clearly now the endless state and industry buildings in their awful grim glory — achromatic turrets of science labs, an array of concrete blocks the size of football pitches each competing to be uglier, more brutal, less welcoming than its neighbour, incinerators with furnaces 50 foot high; the whole thing slowly metastasising, a cancer devouring the countryside.
Shivering at her dreadful naïvety she checked the time. 2:45pm. The light was starting to go. If she got back now she just might be able to squeeze another hour of work in before she had to collect the kids. Turning on her heels, she jogged back the way she’d come.
A couple of hundred metres or so along, she glanced back over her shoulder. A tractor ploughed the last remaining field. Set against the metallic monstrosity behind, it looked tiny and forlorn, an insignificant anachronism in a world moved on.
Look out for chapter five next week.
M. Zermansky is a pseudonym.
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Enjoying this (depressing) tale so far…
Yes me too!
When Two-Tier was waffling-on about AI earlier this week, did anyone else think “He’s announcing their determination to create Big Brother?”