It’s 6:30 AM. The day stretches ahead of you like a dark, inhospitable road that’s somehow still worth driving down—because you’ve been told that coffee is the fuel that makes that journey not just possible, but potentially productive. You shuffle into the kitchen, eyes bloodshot from the night’s failed attempts at sleep, yet somehow, your body—still operating on the 23rd cup of the previous day’s caffeine intake—has come to the unmistakable conclusion that coffee is the only thing standing between you and your imminent collapse.
You open the cupboard. There it is. The bag of coffee beans—those tiny, roasted morsels of hope, a symbol of a brighter tomorrow, if only you can make it through the next four hours of email replies and deadlines. You grind them. Not because you enjoy the process, but because society has led you to believe that grinding your own beans somehow signals that you’re a person of taste. The sound is maddening. A high-pitched whirring that mimics your over-stimulated brain trying to process the fact that you’re already behind on everything. The beans are crushed—metaphorically and literally—and now it’s time to brew.
As the hot water splashes over the ground coffee, you are filled with a false sense of achievement. The smell that wafts through the kitchen is enough to temporarily fool your tired, jaded mind into thinking you are about to experience something magical. But, as with all things in modern life, it’s a cruel joke. For just a fleeting moment, you believe that your productivity is directly linked to the size of your mug. You pour the coffee, half of it spilling over the edge, and your optimism shrinks. It is barely enough to keep your hands warm, let alone propel you into any meaningful work.
You take the first sip. And for about two seconds, the universe makes sense again. The bitterness washes over you like an existential awakening. This is what life is all about: bitter, futile, and endlessly addictive. Coffee doesn’t just wake you up, it numbs you to the reality of just how hopeless everything feels. For a moment, you feel invincible, but that’s only because your brain is convinced it’s been handed the magic potion that’ll make everything manageable. The rush of caffeine floods your system like the first hit of any drug—it’s short, sharp, and deeply unfulfilling. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s a necessary evil, or, more accurately, a necessary illusion.
You scroll through your phone while the caffeine does its work. There’s a new email from your boss. “Hope you’re having a productive morning!” it says, as if you haven’t been awake for less than 30 minutes and already have the distinct sense of impending doom. You take another sip. The email is followed by another, and another. There are meetings to be attended, spreadsheets to be filled in, and, of course, more coffee to be consumed, because no one has yet figured out how to build a productivity system that doesn’t rely on liquid motivation. After all, you wouldn’t dream of facing the first Zoom call of the day without at least two double espressos in you. That would be as ridiculous as trying to power a car without fuel. It’s not so much the caffeine you’re addicted to, but the idea that it might, just might, bring you closer to the day where you stop running around like a headless chicken and start feeling genuinely accomplished.You glance at the clock. It’s 9:00 AM now. That’s an hour gone, wasted in a haze of brown liquid and half-baked ambition. Coffee, like most things in life, has presented itself as the solution to a problem it created. Your to-do list grows ever longer, your energy is already starting to dip, and you find yourself wondering: Is this it? Will there be more coffee? Will there ever be enough? The truth is, you’re just chasing the high, the rush of being productive, which is the cruelest joke of all. Because you know that no matter how much you drink, there will never be a point where you can look at your day and say, Yes, I’ve truly accomplished something today.
As the morning progresses, the coffee becomes an endless cycle. The first cup—an illusion. The second cup—denial. The third cup—desperation. By the time you get to the fourth, you’re no longer drinking to wake up. You’re drinking to stave off the existential dread that has taken root, convinced that you can push the panic button just a little bit longer, if you keep topping up. And so, it continues—another day, another coffee, another set of promises you’ll never keep.And just as the day ends, you’ll be back at it again tomorrow. Because coffee doesn’t let you stop. It simply makes you believe you’ve started. And that’s enough. For now.
It’s a bright Tuesday morning, and you wake up to the relentless sound of your alarm clock—a noise not unlike the collective scream of humanity’s soul. You drag yourself out of bed, wipe the existential dread from your eyes, and get ready for another day in the unrelenting hamster wheel that is modern life.
First stop: the Office of Self-Improvement. This is a new initiative rolled out by the government to ensure everyone is feeling as productive as they should be. It was introduced in response to the findings of last week’s task force that identified the nation’s overwhelming need for ‘purpose.’ You’ve been assigned the task of completing the “45-Minute Morning Affirmation Routine,” an exercise in telling yourself how wonderful you are before you’ve had your first coffee.
You sit down at your kitchen table and look at the laminated self-help pamphlet, which reads: “Success is a Choice, and YOU Are the CEO of Your Own Life!”
You stare at it for a while.
Then you stare at the phone buzzing next to you with a reminder for the ‘Gratitude Meditation Session,’ which requires you to reflect on three things you’re thankful for. The only thing you’re thankful for right now is the slow, inevitable decline of your mental state, but that’s probably not on-brand.
You try your best, reciting things like, “I am thankful for my job, even though it erodes every ounce of my soul,” and “I am thankful for my health, though I’m fairly certain I’m just one social media post away from an anxiety attack.” It feels good, in the sense that stabbing yourself in the leg with a spoon might feel “good” for someone with masochistic tendencies.
At 9 a.m., it’s time for your daily meeting with the Bureau of Happiness. You’ve been assigned to a ‘happiness consultant’ who specializes in helping people who are “functionally dead inside™” (a term they’ve coined and trademarked for obvious reasons). Her name is Cheryl, and she asks you a series of probing questions like, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your emotional resilience today?”You wonder if Cheryl herself has ever thought about the abyss of nothingness that lies at the center of our souls, but you’re fairly certain she’s too busy updating her Instagram with motivational quotes from dead philosophers. She smiles at you, showing her ‘empathy,’ which is so authentic it could be sold as a “brand new” concept to billionaires.
Your meeting ends with Cheryl assigning you the task of ‘reclaiming your energy’ by attending a mandatory ‘Live Your Best Life’ seminar. The seminar, naturally, will take place via Zoom, which will require a full 90 minutes of sitting in a call full of people pretending they care about things like ‘personal growth’ and ‘positive thinking’ as they simultaneously scroll through their emails. The fake background conceals how messy your living room really is.
By noon, you’ve accumulated enough “positive energy” to tackle the afternoon’s most daunting task: going to the supermarket. You’ve been assigned a ‘time slot’ for your grocery shopping based on your personal efficiency profile, which is created by the ‘Life Optimization App’ you’ve been required to download. The app tracks everything—your mood, your steps, your food intake, and your attempts to bury your personal demons in the existential void. You reach the store, only to find it’s packed to the gills. Inside, the aisles are divided by QR codes and color-coded labels, each one serving as a reminder that you’re not really ‘living’ unless you’re optimizing every second of your existence. As you grab the usual items—milk, eggs, bread, a small amount of despair—an AI assistant over the loudspeaker reminds you to “Maximize Your Time and Energy! You Deserve It!”You glance at the other shoppers, each of them pushing carts filled with ‘wellness’ products that promise to ‘boost energy’ and ‘restore balance.’ You roll your eyes and grab a bottle of vitamin supplements that may or may not have been scientifically proven to do anything.
Back home, the real fun begins: it’s time to ‘reorganize your life.’ Your calendar is so tightly packed with appointments and activities that even your vacation is booked out six months in advance—ironically, so you can work on ‘self-care’ during your next holiday. But before you do that, you’ve got a two-hour block set aside to declutter your house, because it turns out the true source of happiness is a Pinterest-perfect kitchen.You start by throwing out old shite that’s pinned to the fridge with magnets and that one coffee mug from your ex that you’ve been meaning to get rid of for two years. In the process, wedged in between two recipe books, you rediscover your old journal from high school, which contains angry rants about the meaninglessness of life. It’s a nostalgic moment, like finding an old photograph of yourself before you gave up on ever feeling anything. You look at the journal for a moment, sigh, and toss it into the bin with a grim sense of satisfaction.
The evening concludes with another round of ‘Positive Reaffirmations,’ followed by a meditation on the futility of modern existence—saying “I’m doing well” disassociating from the face of absolute chaos. You finish the night by watching a TED Talk on ‘How to Live Your Best Death,’ a promising new topic that combines the inevitability of death with the need to make money off it.
As you drift off to sleep, you wonder what tomorrow’s self-improvement task will be: perhaps ‘How to turn your Dying Inside into redeemable points,’ or ‘How to Maximize Your Grief into interaction.’
The future is bright.
And by bright, I mean it’s an unbearable flickering neon glow that keeps you awake at night with the relentless reminder that nothing, absolutely nothing, is ever going to be enough.
Ah, housework. It’s the unwelcome guest at the party that is our daily existence — a guest who refuses to leave, despite our polite, increasingly desperate, attempts to show them the door. You know the one. The person who arrived under the guise of “I’ll just pop in for a quick drink,” but, five hours later, is still sitting on the couch, blabbering about their garden renovation plans while you passively (and very nearly imperceptibly) edge towards the door.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that there exists a mysterious, nebulous thing called “cleaning,” a force that looms in the background of one’s existence, like a rogue planet. It orbits your life, ominous and ever-present, occasionally pulling you into its gravitational field with alarming, irresistible force. Some days, it’s dusting. Other days, it’s mopping. And let’s not even speak of the laundry — a task so multifaceted, so long-winded, it could be a novella if it were a bit more coherent and less riddled with wrinkles.
There’s a particularly charming irony in the way cleaning works. You finish one job, proud of your accomplishment, only to look around and realize that, rather than having removed the grime from the universe entirely, you’ve merely nudged it along to a new location. You vacuum, and suddenly it seems as though a thousand more crumbs have been unleashed in your wake. Where were these crumbs five minutes ago? Were they waiting in ambush, biding their time under the furniture, waiting for you to make that brave, half-hearted attempt at domesticity? The truth is, housework is like a Sisyphean task, but less poetic and more domestic. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity, only to watch it tumble back down again. This, surely, is the destiny of anyone who tackles the laundry pile. Or the dishes. You wash the dishes, and the next thing you know, you find four used mugs dotted around the house. Before you know it, you’re in a situation not entirely dissimilar to those eternal looping train rides that never seem to end, the same track, the same repetitive clankclankclank of reality.At times, I find myself questioning the point of cleaning. I mean, why do I keep vacuuming the same rug? It’s not as though the rug is going to become a person and return the favor with a bit of light housework. No, that would be absurd. If rugs could clean, they’d probably spend their days getting underfoot and critiquing your cleaning methods. “You’ve missed a spot, you know. I’m just saying.”
But then there’s the other side of housework — the one that’s more sinister. The “all-consuming” side. You start with a simple task, like scrubbing the bathroom sink, and before you know it, you’re elbows deep in the fridge, debating whether those olives are still edible or whether they have transformed into a sentient penicillin colony. And yet, there’s a certain satisfaction to this madness, isn’t there? The feeling that, for a fleeting moment, the world has been put to rights. The tiles have gleamed, the laundry is folded, and perhaps, just perhaps, the dust has temporarily been vanquished.
Then you sit down on the couch, feel a deep sense of pride, and are promptly greeted by a mountain of paperwork you could have sorted out last week but opted not to. The cycle begins again. So we carry on, don’t we? Every now and then, perhaps with a sigh of resignation, perhaps with a brief and fleeting moment of joy, we continue to tidy up, knowing that the broom will forever chase us through the house like an obedient, if slightly overzealous, dog. And yet, in our hearts, we know we’ll never truly win this battle. We can only delay the inevitable, and even then, only for a very short time. Such is life. Such is housework. And such is the human condition.
It was once a simple matter. Thousands of years ago, people worshipped the Sun as a god, making sacrifices of all sorts—virgins, goats, perhaps even a few particularly enthusiastic charioteers— everything from which you could extract a still pulsating heart to appease the giant ball of fiery gas that could make or break harvests and tans. The Sun, ever the attention-seeker, didn’t mind. In fact, it quite enjoyed the praise.
It gavee life to everything you see and you can feel its warmth on your skin, and – in exchange – it only demanded that a ribcage or two were cracked open like a walnut she’ll at Christmas time, every now and again. It sounds like a toxic relationship, but these were different times. The good old days.
Then, as history often does, it got complicated. Along came a chap, no less that on the day of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti – or the “birthday of the invincible Sun” – on December 25th, and said “Why are you all celebrating the Sun? Today is Jesus’s birthday! Always has been! I mean, not always, maybe, but, you know…” and suddenly, the Sun’s big day was overshadowed by someone else’s birthday. The audacity of it all! After millennia of being the center of attention, the Sun was unceremoniously shoved aside by a bearded carpenter, a man who wouldn’t have known a solstice if it slapped him across the face.
A man so obviously less powerful than the Sun. And the Sun knew it well. You can’t stare at the Sun for more than a second, you can stare at a crucifix until you fall asleep, because there are sunglasses, not Jesusglasses. There are solar panels, not Christ panels. The Sun gives you skin’s cancer, Jesus cannot cure it.
There’s simply no context.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad. The Sun still got some mention in passing, perhaps as a metaphor or a glowing reference in a sermon or two. But no hearts were ripped from ribcages to praise it. It was simply no way to live. But the Sun wasn’t the type to forget a slight. Slowly, over the centuries, a subtle resentment began to simmer. Instead of openly confronting the problem—perhaps sending a few angry rays to scorch the city of Rome—the Sun took a far more calculated approach. It did what all truly passive-aggressive entities do: it started to make life uncomfortable, just enough to make you think. It was a slow burn. Literally. Every year, a fraction of a degree warmer. “Oh look, still no sacrifices, let me turn up the thermostat!”
Cli-click.
Minor heatwave here, a summer that was just a little hotter there. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. People simply chalked it up to “weather patterns” or “human activity”—foolishness, of course, because we all know that nothing in the cosmos happens without some sort of celestial motive behind it. The Sun, with all its solar flare and fiery bravado, was sending a message.
Eventually, things heated up. Politicians, ever the experts in obfuscation, began blaming either climate change or telling us that global warming was a myth. Meanwhile, the Sun, content to let its heat rise a degree or two every year, sat back and chuckled.
Like that chap at the office that keeps cranking up the heat until everyone else starts sweating bullets and looks at each other wondering who is going to say something. And still, we didn’t sacrifice even a chipmunk to the Sun.
And so, in a rather quiet and entirely undignified fashion, the Sun exacted its revenge. Each year, another degree. The ice caps melted.
The Sun is reminding us, one degree at a time, that it would not be ignored.
No one likes a birthday party hijacker, and the Sun was no exception. But instead of an all-out tantrum, it’s decided to take the long game approach.
Now that we finally realised we’re all sweating buckets under the Sun’s unrelenting glare, it is too late to send an apology card.
Am I suggesting that we should bring back human sacrifices?
Yes.
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. After all, what’s the point of being all-powerful if no one’s paying attention?
It’s a tough day for the Devil. You can tell by the way he is brooding over his desk, shuffling through what used to be the most valuable commodity in the universe: human souls. He’s not happy. Not because he’s out of souls – far from it. No, it’s because he’s come to a brutal realisation: souls are now utterly worthless. They’ve been devalued. And no one’s even noticed.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Souls used to be the currency of damnation. People used to sell them like it was a get-rich-quick scheme. A quick little path here, a Faustian bargain there, and bam, eternal suffering in exchange for a shiny new car, a successful marriage, or a mildly successful music career. The Devil’s business was booming, everything was going according to plan. Hell was packed with the whiny, the selfish, and the ethically bankrupt – the usual clientele.
But now? Well, now the Devil’s sitting there, looking at his soul portfolio, and it’s like he’s holding a bag of expired coupons. The market has crashed. People are still signing contracts, sure, but what they’re offering isn’t worth the blood it’s written in. The souls have been diluted, rendered meaningless. The Devil’s got an office full of souls, but they’re like crappy timeshares or a cheap knockoff handbag you buy in a back alley – everyone’s got one, no one values them, and they only lead to disappointment.
He’s pacing around his penthouse in Hell, thinking that – the way things are going – he won’t be able to afford anything better than a shack, soon. Trying to figure out what happened. The thing is, souls have always been the commodity. They were sacred in their misery.
But now? Now souls are like a blue tick on a social media handle.
The Devil knows who to blame, of course. And of course it’s Him: God. Back when there were only two souls, the original two -Eve and Adam- back then, yes! Souls used to be true Wealth. The Devil’s chest still puffs up at the memory. He managed to corrupt them, to make them eat the apple, and to mark them with the original sin.
But, oh no: ever the sore loser, God couldn’t accept it. He wanted to keep playing, so He had created more souls. Eve gave birth with great pain and so on and so on, and now there were – how many billions of souls on Earth? Seven, eight, nine? Even the Devil couldn’t be arsed keeping count, anymore. They kept growing exponentially, anyway.
Back in the day, there was a king. From where again? Phrygia or something. Anyway, he was called Midas and wanted to turn to gold everything he touched, so Dionysus granted him his wish. The gift became soon a curse.
If everything gets turned into gold, soon the market gets saturated, and the gold becomes pretty much worthless.
It was genius! This is still studied in Hell’s schools. Turn the greed of humans into their ruin. The Devil used to laugh at Midas and his short sight.
You know what the Devil doesn’t find funny? When it’s God Almighty making the same short-sighted mistake, and souls now are worth as much as a fistful of Monopoly money.
“Almighty my bollocks, that’s like the first rule of market they teach you in business school” the Devil curses under his breath, as he watches the stock arrow of the souls market plummeting down to an abyss that even the Lord of Hell finds to be too deep.
The Devil doesn’t know what to do with Himself. He thought about pivoting into something else, maybe offering “eternal pain with an experience package” or selling VIP access to personal damnation tours, but everything is so commodified now. Hell has become a subscription service, a streaming platform for your worst nightmares, with way too many ads.
Maybe the worst part of it all? The Devil looks at humanity and realises they don’t care. They don’t need to be tricked into selling their souls anymore. They’re already doing it willingly, like they’re on some kind of endless, dopamine fuelled treadmill.
People don’t need an eternal afterlife of suffering to ruin their existences. They’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves, one bad decision at a time. Gambling, shopping spree, career choices, the irrational hate – it’s all a slow burn, and the Devil isn’t even the one holding the match anymore. He’s just a passive observer now, watching humanity self-destruct.
It isn’t even funny, in a B-horror movie kind of way. In fact, it’s fairly pathetic.
So here he is, sitting there with his stack of worthless souls, wondering if maybe the end of the world isn’t the worst thing after all. Maybe it’s time for a career change. Hell’s not what it used to be – not when you’re competing with 24 hours news cycles, reality TV, oligarchy being paraded as democracy, and influencers promising you the “ultimate experience” for just a low, low price. The Devil realises that in a world where people are selling their happiness for the smallest thrills, the soul has no intrinsic value. Maybe it never did, even when there weren’t so many around.
At this point, the Devil just shrugs. He’s already got the soul of humanity – and it has been paying dividend for centuries. But right now, he’s got a stack of paperwork to burn, an inbox full of apocalyptic memes, and no one left to torment.
I wish I could claim that politics is terrible in a specific country.
It isn’t.
The world’s eyes are trained on American politics. I’m not going to spend a lot of words on it, but if you work as a P.R. for any organisation and- before the welcome party is even over – you’re already pulling overtime deciding how to dress up a Sieg Heil salute for the media, you might want to open Indeed and update your CV, because it’s going to be a long four years.
But I live in England, and politics has been ridiculous for a while, here, too. I used to live in Italy during Berlusconi’s prime, and guess what? It was terrible, there, too. And somehow it has managed not to improve after he died, either.
God, I just turned 36 and – in politics years – I feel like I’m aeons old. I spent 20 years under Berlusconi’s shadow alone. You get a lighter punishment for killing someone.
My point is that watching the electorate choosing a leader feels like watching a post apocalyptic soap opera. Not a good one, either, with clever writing, plot twists, and tridimensional characters. No. We get the villain (the politicians who will inevitably get elected) telling the hero (the electorate) to slathe their body in honey. Then the hero gets swarmed, stung and bitten by wasps and flies, like in the third canto of Dante’s Inferno. Every episode for twenty seasons. And the hero still hasn’t connected the dots.
After twenty seasons of the villain telling the hero to cover themselves in honey, the hero finally understands why they’re always tormented by insects: it’s because women have a right to abortion! And the villains gets elected once again.
Sometimes, the villain will openly post pictures of them with the CEO of Asbestos inc., and tell everybody that they will start shoving asbestos into teddybears.
“But they mean well,” the hero will coo.
After a lifetime of this, I’m starting to see democracy akin to placing a group of toddlers next to an infinity pool filled with fuel, shoving a box full of matches in their pudgy hands, and then congratulating ourselves because this is clearly the best system we can come up with.
But the truth is that I’m just being unfair and jaded. This could work.
This could work, but.
We’ve all had to deal with people. We’ve all heard comments so ignorant that left us speechless. Comments that are followed by an awkward silence broken solely by the sound of your bollocks cascading to the ground.
There’s a reason why, election after election, we’re getting closer and closer to totalitarianism. We can still save ourselves, but if you think that doing nothing and hoping that a collective consciousness will be suddenly ignited by mainstream media, then I have some flying pigs to sell you.
There’s a famous, very old book called The Betrothed by Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni. In it, a guy called Renzo needs to see a lawyer because of reasons, and decides to bring him some chickens as a gift (it’s set in the 17th century.) So he grabs a couple of chickens by their feet, and goes. As he walks, the chickens – now finding themselves dangling upside down and facing each other – start pecking at each other.
We’re like Renzo’s chickens.
Instead of focusing on the hand carring us as an offering to a rich somebody and start a class war, we’re too busy pecking at each other in an endless culture war.
The problem isn’t just that we are gullible; it’s that we actively choose not to learn. The educational systems, which were once designed to foster critical thinking and debate, have become little more than factories churning out passive consumers rather than informed citizens. The irony is that in an age of unprecedented access to information, we seem more ignorant than ever. We are so overwhelmed with data that we can no longer discern fact from fiction, truth from spin. Worse still, the tools designed to help us learn — social media, news outlets, online forums — have become instruments of manipulation, drowning out any meaningful discussion with a cacophony of misinformation.
And so, the cycle continues. The electorate votes, the politicians continue to lie, and the machinery of totalitarianism grows ever more efficient. One right at the time, freedom is shaved off. It doesn’t come in the form of a dramatic coup or an overt military dictatorship (not yet, at least,) it comes in subtler way.
Like a predator that doesn’t shove you in a van to spirit you away, but undermine your confidence with venomous narcissism, controls who you can see, keeps you financially dependent… until fear of upsetting the captor becomes the only reality we know.
No one’s stopping you from speaking out, they’re just making it so inconvenient that you stop doing it.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The electorate can still save itself, but only if it wakes up and takes responsibility for its own education. The real work begins now — outside the classrooms, away from the politicians, and in the places where actual knowledge resides: in books, in conversations, in critical thinking. It’s time for a revolution of the mind, one that demands self-education, asks uncomfortable questions, and, above all, refuses to be spoon-fed lies.
There are books, there are podcasts, there are actual experts out there, and, no, they don’t appear on your social media feed between influencers doing the Macarena.
Surround yourself with good people.
Organising is the next step. Once the electorate begins to understand the depth of the problem, it must come together to challenge the system. The power lies not in individual protests or isolated cries of dissent, but in collective action, in the shared will to demand real change. No more blind obedience. No more accepting the status quo. The future of democracy depends on the ability of the people to recognise the wolf in sheep’s clothing and to say, “Enough.”
If we don’t act, we’ll find ourselves in a society where questioning anything is considered subversive, and the only “truth” is what’s been handed down from on high. If you want democracy to survive, you need to read, you need to ask questions, and most importantly, you need to start holding politicians accountable.
Or soon, we won’t be in the driver’s seat anymore.
Or rather, we’ll still be.
Like a toddler holding a steering wheel while the car’s being driven by a drunk uncle who’s just trying to get to the pub.
Becks couldn’t tell what annoyed her more: being the human who finally made first contact with a race of superior aliens or having to work despite this.
She could remember her abduction, a combination of a spaceship that underwhelmingly looked like a cyan FIAT 126 crossing her path and a violent impact. As she lay on the road that would lead her to the corner shop, her mind had time to register the embarrassment of being splayed on the tarmac in a hoodie, tracksuit pants and flip-flops. Then the cyan 126 hovered above her and – under its chassis – a passage shaped like a doorframe opened, a rectangle of blinding white light breaking up the dark colouring of the car’s underbelly. And when – stereotypically – she was tractor-beamed across its threshold, she found herself standing upright in a very posh office, way bigger than logic would expect from the interior of such a small vehicle. Mahogany wooden floor, walls and a desk of the same material. The only accent of colour, strongly contrasting the room, came from two bright yellow upholstered wingback chairs.
The room was very well lit, despite a lack of windows, by a series of chandelier-shaped lamps hanging on the walls.
She took a step forward and twisted her ankle, “Fuck…” she muttered, as she looked down: she was now wearing a pastel pink power suit and black heeled shoes.
She couldn’t walk on heels and she hated it.
“Ms. Rebecca Stafford?” A voice that sounded like five different children with a Scandinavian accent talking in chorus made her jump out of her skin.
She looked towards the voice.
On one of the chairs – empty just a moment ago – sat the most singular being Becks had ever seen. Clad in a blue suit with pineapple prints all over and a yellow shirt, there was a scrawny… man? His face looked gray / greenish and gills were intermittently opening behind his ears. On his face there was a pair of those joke glasses, the one with a fake nose, eyebrows, and ‘stache incorporated, and the lenses were covered by some cardbox with very badly drawn eyes upon it. The top of the head was covered by a bald cap.
The hands were hidden by blue latex gloves, of which several fingers were obviously empty. Around the midriff of the suit, something kept flopping under the clothes.
Becks stared at the figure with ping pong ball-shaped eyes and a slackened jaw until he repeated: “Rebecca Stafford?”
“Y…Yeah…”
“Rebecca! I am Bobby! I just want to say congratulations! You’ve been selected for a very exciting business opportunity!”
“Okay, sorry… No offence but…”
As she stammered some excuse to turn down whatever scam this creature was trying to pull on her, Becks slowly moved toward the door of white light she came from, keeping her eyes on a sprig of hair of the fake eyebrows that was stuck to the slimy skin just under the bald cap, but – as she turned to leave – she was confronted by the black mahogany wall.The door was gone, and they were boxed into the room.
“Hey… where is the, uhm…?”
“Rebecca.”
“Hm?”
“Why don’t you come here?”
Becks approached very slowly, both out of fear and because of her shoes.
“Here,” the four or five different voices of the creature named Bobby said, kindly, as one of the mostly empty gloves pushed a tall glass of water towards her.
Rebecca looked suspicious. As if in answer to that, the strange man said “I mean… why would I spike your drink? I’ve already abducted you.”
Becks shrugged at this and accepted the glass. “Thanks?” she said, confused, but kindly.
“Rebecca, you’ve been selected to represent your species in what is probably the biggest court case in your history. I think. Well, either way, it’ll look good on your CV.”
“My species?”
“Gonna explain something to you real quick. Rebecca, do you know what sea-monkeys are?”
Becks was blank for a few second. From when the weird flying 126 had hit her to now had only passed, what? A couple of minutes? And in that short period of time, the amount of absurd stuff she had to process was so enormous, that – after a few beats – her brain just decided not to process it. To stage a strike. So, she suddenly calmed down and decided against logic that what was definitely a non-human in a bad disguise asking her about sea-monkeys, of all things, was just another Thursday.
“Yeah, those weird prawns that come to life when you add water to them, aren’t they?”
Bobby was delighted, “Excellent!” he clapped his mostly-empty gloves, then pushed the joke-glasses up to his face.
“Well, brine shrimps, to be pedantic,” he carried on. “But still. See, you’re my client’s sea-monkeys,” he blurted out, letting a nervous laugh ending the sentence.
Becks looked at Bobby.
Bobby looked at Becks.
Bobby coughed to break the silence. It didn’t work.
“May I call you Becca?” He tried.
“No, I prefer Becks.”
“I see. Well, Becks, would you like to take a seat and a sip of that water?”
Becks nodded, plopped on the yellow armchair and took a gulp from the glass without moving her eyes from the indefinite spot she was staring at without blinking.
“Is there anything you’d like to say about what I just told you, Becks?”
“Well…”
“Yeeees?”
“When you say you, do you mean I am your client’s sea monkey, or all of humanity?”
“All of humanity. I did say Sea monkeys, plural.”
“That’s true, sorry.”
“Not a problem.”
“Ok, soooo… all of humanity is one individual’s pet?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Right.”
“I’m glad you took it so well,” Bobby beamed, ignoring the fact that Becks’ eyes had never moved from the spot on the wall they were staring at nor blinked.
“BLOODY WHAAAAATT??” Becks snarled, suddenly.
“Well, I thought you guys would have understood, by now, that you haven’t originated on planet Earth?”
“What the bloody hell are you talking about? Planet Earth has the perfect conditions for our species!”
“Does it?”
“Duh!”
“Well, think about it: the planet has temperatures that range between minus eighty something and plus fifty something degrees Celsius, and you guys are only happy between seventeen and twenty-five-ish. Not to mention that seventy percent of the planet surface is covered in water that you cannot inhabit nor drink.”
“Yes, b- but…”
“BUT!” Bobby interrupted Becks’ stammer, “it’s good that you think that Earth is a suitable habitat for your species.” He concluded with a smile that threatened to dislodge the fake nose, which was promptly pushed back on the fish-like face.
“Snack?” one glove pushed a bowl of fish flake food towards Becks. When she shook her head, Bobby shrugged, scooped some of the food and fed it to the inside of his shirt collar. His midriff flopped squishably.
“Are you a bunch of fish in a suit?”
“A school of fish.”
Becks raised a warning eyebrow, so Bobby answered the question with a sigh: “We find that species are more comfortable dealing with representatives that look like them.”
Becks looked at the pulsating gills on Bobby’s neck. “I see,” she said.
“Hang on,” she carried on, her eyes narrowing with suspicion, “why is it good that I think Earth to be a suitable habitat for us? What is this biggestcourtcaseofourhistory you mentioned?”
“Oh well, it’s just that the UG has sued my client for animal cruelty…” Bobby trailed off.
“The UG?”
“The United Galaxies.”
“Right. And we are the animal who’s been mistreated.”
“Yes, we mean no offence by that.”
“None taken. So…?”
“So, my client has sent me here because we’d like you to officially agree that humanity has been taken care of in the best way possible and that my client doesn’t need to make any further arrangements moving forward.”
“Well… Society is a bit fucked up at the minute, and the planet is dying… so.”
“I’m confident we can get to an agreement.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, I do hate this part,” Bobby said, grabbing a heavy tome from next to his upholstered chair and dropping it open on the relevant section, on the sleek wood of the desk, “but as per interstellar law, we’re bound to conduct a good faith negotiation with a qualified member of the species…”
“I… I am the qualified…? And… and this is the good faith…?”
“Exactly! But you see, during the negotiation, the parties have no duty of care towards each other, and my client, unfortunately, does own the oxygen present in your atmosphere…” the fishes making up Bobby’s body made a sound like they were sucking air through their teeth, as if they were sorry to say that.
“Your client owns the oxygen? And… what? They’re just gonna take it?”
“Between you and I, you’re much better off just making a deal with my client.”
“But… how is this a negotiation? We’re going to die! Our planet is frying, our resources are running out! The ones in power aren’t giving us healthcare but are building space hotels…”
“Yeah, but that’s symptomatic of your society…”
“Society must be changed, then!”
“Also, we have to do this within today.”
“WHAT??”
“If an agreement isn’t achieved by end of business hours today, the case is dismissed.”
“Listen, I can’t do this… I do traffic tickets, why pick me?”
“We’d love a signed agreement immediately.”
“Oh God… You didn’t pick me because I am a good lawyer. I bet that you could pick anybody, as long as they’re technically qualified…”
“There were a lot of moving parts that our team had to consider…”
“You’re taking advantage of a loophole!” Becks stood up in the excitement, a finger pointing at Bobby.
“And it’s only good business to do so.”
An awkward silence suddenly exploded inside the room. Becks let herself fall back into the chair. She kicked the heeled shoes off her feet.
“You know…sometimes… You feel like you’re rubbish at your job. But – you know – then you tell yourself: ohno, you’rejustdepressed, therehastobesomeoneworseoutthere. I also have PMT today, this is really not the right time for me to realise this.”
“May I offer you a chocolate hash brownie? Is it too early for your species to do drugs?”
Becks looked at the clock above Bobby’s head. It said 9.29 am.
“It’s late enough,” she muttered. Bobby brought her a hash brownie.
As she chewed, Bobby tried to console her: “Oh come on, I’m sure it is just a coincidence you’ve been chosen. Maybe this is not your field, but I’m sure you’re good in what you do.”
Becks smiled a sad smile: “Well… I win sometimes…”
“You see?”
“Mainly when the cop doesn’t bother to show up… gotta love a no show!”
“See? Celebrate your victories!” Bobby cheered, pawing another fistful of fish food down his collar, as Becks finished her hash brownie.
For the next forty minutes or so, Bobby compiled the agreement that was to be signed by Becks, involving her in the process, though she only contributed to the conversation with groans.
Suddenly, her pupils grew very large, like a cat’s when focusing on a prey.
“Let me see that,” she said, grabbing the book Bobby had dropped on the desk.
“Hey, just a minute…” Bobby tried to protest.
Becks ignored him, instead making noises with her mouth as she hovered her finger above the page looking for something, until: “Here it is!! Whendisputingthesuitabilityofahabitat, thedefendingparty – that’s your client, he has been sued by the UG – willhavetherighttoahearingin the jurisdiction of said habitat. That’s Earth. You’re the representative, but your client has to actually be here to get a deal signed.”
“Well, I represent them…” Bobby said, but the squishy noise grew louder from inside his suit.
“And we must come to an agreement before the end of business today, you said. Earlier, you also said that you were sent here by your client. I take it they’re not local?”
“Well, they’re not in the galaxy, at the minute… some important business had to be taken care of…”
“And how long would it take them to come here to sign the agreement?”
“In Earth’s days?”
“In Earth’s days?”
“Please.”
A massive sigh escaped Bobby’s gills and after a long pause, his voices croacked: “About six thousands years.”
“A no show!!!” Becks jumped from the chair, both fists held up high in celebration.
Bobby shouted his frustration at losing the case, tentacles erupting from his collar, sleeves and from under his jacket.
Becks recoiled in horror.
Then he recomposed himself, “Sorry, that was very unprofessional of me. Congratulations on a successful negotiation. You’ll have to email the UG with the changes that you’d like for my client to apply to your planet. I’ll give you their email address.”
*
A few months later, Becks received the following email from the UG:
“Dear Rebecca Stafford,
We’ve reviewed the changes you’ve requested to your own natural habitat.
They were the following:
1) TV programs are not to invite as guests populist politicians. Alternatively, do not invite populist politicians equipped with mouths.
2) Both religious and secular authorities can wear funny costumes only during Carnival or on Halloween, exactly like everybody else.
3) All racists must become the ethnicity they hate. For white people hating black people, this will not extend to their penises.
4) Any person believing in a deep state can use the term “they” to indicate the hypothetical, evil, secret masters who control everything only the same amount of times they use the same term to refer to a non-binary person. If they run out of uses for the term “they,” the believers in the deep state will have to refer to the evil masterminds as “magic meanies.”
5) Whoever kneels to accept a knighthood from a royal figure anywhere in the world, won’t be allowed to stand up again.
6) Every singer, poet, and writer will be allowed to use the word “love” up to ninety-nine times. At the 100th use of the word, they’ll be punished by execution.
7) All of those who will try to convert other people to any religion using the phrase “It’s impossible that the perfect beauty of the universe was just random and not the creation of a divine mind” will be instantly infested with the taenia solium, colloquially known as the pork tapeworm, so that they can observe the perfect beauty created by the divine mind of their god from up close.
8) Every time a person will try to convince a person who isn’t their partner and didn’t ask for advice to have children, a kid from foster care will be immediately dispatched to their living room for them to parent for life. This will be repeated for every unsolicited sentence such as “Who will look after you when you’re old?” or “You will love kids when you’ll have yours.”
9) Every person who listens to music or watches videos loudly in public will get a pair of headphones welded to their ears.
10) For intellectual honesty, every video or program about UFO, ghosts, or miraculous apparitions, will have to feature a laughter track.
11) Every worker working for a business that they don’t own and votes right wing must have their wishes immediately granted: halved salary, sixty weekly hours, unpaid overtime, and two white hot pins in their nipples.
12) Deflect the orbit of the asteroid Apophis on Prince Andrew.
13) Every cliché, spoken or written, will cost £13 per letter.
14) All national anthems must be played with the anus.
15) Every man who puts his hands on a colleague, even “as a joke,” and even on “innocent” places such as arms, back, shoulders, or hips, will become fluorescent yellow for a week.
16) When someone is delivering a homily, a lecture, or any moral-ish sermon, a number of how many times they’ve masturbated in their life will flash above their heads. This is to maintain the right perspective.
These possible changes are pending reviews and the process will take between six and nine Earth’s decades.
You will be notified with the outcome as soon as one is reached.
It’s now hard to remember a time when Twitter wasn’t synonymous with losing lots of money and public embarrassment. Under Elon Musk’s stewardship it has become the Kevin Spacey of social media. Now Musk has only gone and announced that he’s going to get rid of the sites famous blue bird because nothing attracts investors quite like taking a globally recognised logo and replacing it with an X.
But what exactly is now so wrong with Twitter? In the words of certain Pythons “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ‘It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!This bird is deceased, kaput, it Twitters no more!”
So let’s look at a timeline of calamity,Musk, and this once beloved Tweety outlet. A place for friends, family, and Global Terrorism. A once happy place that has descended into a sticky morass of hate speech, conspiracy nuts, and copyright theft.
–He kicked things off with an appalling dad’s joke.
“I’ve just bought Twitter, let that sink in,” Musk wrote, attaching a video in which he enters the offices carrying a sink. Look, I appreciate a dad’s joke, but – in this case – it certainly did soon sink in. Especially for the 3500 Twitter staff he automatically made redundant. As well as cracking dad jokes it seems this dad also kicked things off by smashing the punchbowl and throwing all of your friends out of the party, even though it was for his own birthday in the first place.
–He then lost half of the sites advertising revenue by complaining about losing advertising revenue
His reason for the mass redundancies was thatthe site was losing advertising revenue. He Tweeted right after the job cuts: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation, and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America. Unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day”
Nice one, dad! $4 million is actually a piddling amount when you consider the entire enterprise is now valued at $15 Billion after he paid $44 billion for it in the first place. It’s beginning to look like he’ll soon have to seek out the same tax advisors as Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow OBE (Offshore Banking Expert.) Mind you, he’s probably due a nice rebate after he files his taxes because he has made such a massive loss on his purchase of the aforementioned Tweety place.
–Then he decided to publicly humiliate an employee who asked if he’d been sacked.
Yup, just like a typical dad he then embarrassed himself even more after having a humiliating Twitter exchange in which he appeared to mock a disabled worker. Obviously, this is now getting to be only like a typical dad if your dad happens to be Roseanne Barr. In the original tweet, senior product designer Halli Thorleifsson wrote: “Dear Elon Musk, 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However, your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet, you’ll answer me here?” The platform’s uber lord replied curtly: “What work have you been doing?” before proceeding to engage in a back-and-forth that read like a live job interview with the Gestapo. Questions included: “What changes did you make to help with the youths?” Plus more funny dad stuff with infantile comments like: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” The Twitter boss later said that he had received bad information (possibly from his own reflection) about the situation, and had a video call with the affected staff member to apologise. And then sacked him.
–Announced That People Would have to Pay for Twitter Blue
In an interview with the BBC, the Tesla and SpaceX boss said Twitter’s legacy blue ticks “will all be gone by next week.” And just like that, in an exodus we’ve not seen the likes of since Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt, also gone was nearly every celebrity that once had one as well. Bye, bye, Stephen Fry.
–Reinstated and then re-blocked Kanye West
I mean… Where do you even start with this one. In the name of ‘free speech’ (Read ‘hate’ for ‘free’) Musk reinstated Kanye West and a number of other controversial accounts which included Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and the Taliban. Just shows you how far you can get as long as you’re willing to pay for the wee blue badge. After some “advice” from Musk himself, Kanye retook to the platform with the same abandon a four-year-old shows when they take to a bouncy castle. West was then formally banned from Twitter after posting an image of a swastika superimposed into an image of the Star of David. As you do. The symbol came after West went on a long anti-Semitic rant on Alex Jones’ show where he claimed, “I like Hitler.” In response, even rabid right wing conspiracy nut Jones was asking Kanye reign it in a bit. Which is a bit like Jimmy Savile visiting Michael Jackson’s funfair and saying, “You’re giving the game away, mate.”
Look, we’re just going to stop listing things now. This is going to go on and on. But other stuff does include:
Banned respected journalists (good old free speech.)
Decimated the company value.
Lost his place as worlds richest twat.
Stood down as CEO (Possibly the only smart move he’s done).
He’s now going to get rid of it altogether and change it to an X for reasons only he can understand. What the X stand for nobody knows. X – marks the spot where he buried the company. X successful brand. X-Man Apocalypse might be a good guess.
Cantankerous Cockerel 