Edge of Unison(From the book "Tales of Shattered Earth")By :
Deborah Susan Jones :
Editor One
of the pioneering illustrations from the 90's series of short Dark
Science Fiction stories that appeared on the early web that formed a
prototype electronic commerce project with Barclays Bank in the UK. At
that time, it was impossible to trade in small amounts of money
electronically over the web and the Bank was experimenting with the
idea of a downloadable electronic wallet for use with a credit card.
Peter wrote and illustrated the stories that were encrypted web pages
synced to the "Barclaycoin" technology, and it worked!At the end of the project the stories lay dormant until we decided to assemble them into a book.The
stories are set in a post-consumer boom environment (the Artist
correctly predicted the current financial crisis) and revolve around
the emotional traumas experienced by ordinary people suddenly finding
themselves cut-off from their daily fix of "urban adrenalin rush" and
how the personalities and behavior of inhabitants of the consumer
citadel become extended, enlarged, and balloon to grotesque levels.Peter says >"The
idea came to me one morning as I cut through my local shopping centre
to the tube station to go to a meeting and a lady with a child in a
baby-buggy, who was the only other occupant of the ground floor we were
on, as it was very early, just after opening tine, and she was SO
fixated on the ATM machine I was passing, she cut diagonally across the
concourse, from her position totally on the opposite side of it to me,
and accelerated at speed, pushing the buggy, collided with the wall on
my side of the concourse, turned to almost run, with the buggy,
parallel to the wall and I just knew, knew, what she was going to do
next, which was to mow me down, on her panic-stricken race to reach the
ATM machine close to where I was walking. As she aggressively attempted
to drive the buggy up the front of my body and scalp me with the axles
I extricated myself at speed, sideways, but the closely following
utterance of "Sowwy, sowwy, sowwy, so sowwy" was actually quite amusing
because I could tell she wasn't an assassin and really had only one
thing exclusively on her mind, the ATM, and I was invisible,
screened-out of her consciousness by fear, so desperate was her plight
for cash."As it happened, the ATM denied her the cash and she spun 'round, heading for the exit shrieking "s'not fair, s'not fair", her dream of morning cappuccino dashed by her bank's denial of credit, I assumed."I
sat on the train a little while later, pondering how much stress
ordinary people can carry, and what might happen if there were
absolutely no limits to how it might affect their behavior?""Killer
Robots who hunt down people over their credit limits. Aliens who invade
Earth, because we'd unwittingly used their decendents to build our
lifestyles."Revengeful
gangs of giant insects that ride motorcyles, super-bugs, evolved from
those left to fend for themselves in abandoned Californian pools of
sub-prime mortgaged houses left abandoned by fleeing mortgage debtors."The
"real world" starts to take revenge on the inhabitants of the consumer
citadel who failed to see the consequences of oversize pizzas . . . . .
. ."Dark and bleak though the stories are, they do have a bit of a twist of humour.12 short stories = "12 screams from the near future" (that finally arrived . . . . )
Deborah Susan Jones
