I’m one row from the front, roiling in the day glo plastic drug mental of a Chemical Brothers set, when a pill warrior, eight feet tall on platform boots, his vari-coloured dreads a rain of snakes, his woman writhing property between his legs, turns and grasps my hand. ‘This is it man, this is it!’

I flash my fiend face and we nod together. This is it, the moment for which a generation sell their synapses; submit to decades of Paxil and hazy confusion, the apocryphal pumping heart of the love buzz, hours of ritual escape. With a head full of high grade acid, I bilocate; simultaneously pulsing in the maelstrom of orange Wedge; whilst observing coldly, intellectually, academically, the dissolution of social barricades and the iconic imagery of repression, confusion and alienation, with which Rowlands and Simons bind this thirty five thousand strong horde. Above us, dual fifty foot screens machine gun line drawings of blind-folded justice, animations of marching armies, blanketing bombers, troops of robots shuffling ceaselessly forward, the expressionless drones of Oceania - suddenly subverted by colour, till the images fall away, the screens a translucent cagework of industrial magnificence. The brothers chemical beneath them, wizards behind a curtain of Bond villain computer cabinets, blinking banks of lights looming behind vast curved decks.

We are utterly in their trawl, baying and pawing at the air, frightened excited animals beneath a demonic fireworks display. And as a random girl, no doubt pickled in some vast tank of pure drug, molests me like a boyscout at a Turkish bath-house; I wonder if this is not the ultimate discourse of control, rebellion sublimated to an audio-visual indoctrination cooked up in some NSA laboratory by stern moustachioed, deeply patriotic monsters. We continue the dance.

As you may know, Jackdaw Media have been lucky enough to secure the services of Pierre Rufus, one of the nations leading literary lights. We have been granted the exclusive rights to his work in progress ‘Untitled Novel’. You can check out Pierre’s ongoing efforts over at our special microsite - Jackdaw the Novel.

Noted homosexual and literary critic Cagewind Thunderblast, has read an early draft of the (as yet unwritten) manuscript and recently published the following review in the Times Literary Supplement.

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After she’d been cleared of all charges, Marjory visited Charles in the psychiatric hospital.
His throat was heavily bandaged and he had not yet regained the ability to speak, but with the aid of a pen, paper and an orderly to unstrap one arm from his strait jacket, he was able to communicate, after a fashion.

‘Why Mr Bowmont? Why?’ She asked softly, depressing the intercom switch on the bullet proof partition which separated them.
Charles scrawled for a moment, onto a sheet of soft tissue, with the large rubber safety pencil they’d given him. An orderly held his reply up to the glass.
‘Because I love you darling.’
Marjory shook her head, blinking her red rimmed eyes, somehow managing to hold back the tears.
‘Damn you. Damn you. Damn you! Don’t you know how guilty I feel? It’s not my fault that breaking that restraining order was your third strike.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Why me?’
Charles drooled a little, and the orderly carefully mopped up a small pool of saliva that had gathered on his chest. Painfully, he wiggled a rubber pencil across a moist sheet of paper once again. The orderly held out his brief retort.
‘Good point, never thought about it’.

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Charles thanked the old man in the gorcery store and told him how much Marjory would enjoy the lovely chocolates. He’d seen her three times already that day, but hidden so as not to spoil the lovely surprise. Marjory would be twenty four years old, at precisely eight minutes passed seven and he had everything prepared.

At 7pm, the band assembled beneath Marjory’s bedroom window and a truck stacked with party favors crawled stealthily up her driveway. Inside, two hundred and twelve thousand personalised musical balloons quivered. Charles had designed a unique message for each one. At five minutes past seven, a sky writer, flying high enough to be silent, but low enough to be visible in the clear Summer evening, began to inscribe the first line of Marjory’s favorite poem in infinitely delicate vaporised oil. At seven minutes past seven, Charles emerged from his hiding place in the undergrowth, in top hat and tails, checked his watch, waited, checked his watch again and signaled the release of a collage of balloons; that rose to stain the sky like multicolored butterflies. After a few more seconds, Charles signaled the band to set upon a rousing chorus.

It wasn’t long before Marjory’s door opened and she raced into the driveway. In her hand was an angry Taser, and upon her face a mixture of terror and incomprehensible shame.

‘Marjory dear,’ Charles sang, as the band played a march of his own devising.
‘My love for you is like the clear blue sky.’ Behind him, a team of majorettes set to tossing their batons into the air, and twirling around in synchronized elegance.
‘My love for you will never…’
‘Die, Die, Die,’ screamed Marjory, plunging the metal pike of the Taser deep into Charles’s throat and coursing fifty thousand volts through his system.

Charles dropped to the ground like a string-less marionette, a box of handmade chocolates falling with him to the tarmac, where it smacked like the wet thud of his head. The orchestra stopped playing and all was silent save a distant siren.

‘This man,’ Marjory began, her voice cracking, her whole body wracked with sobs.’Has been stalking me for eight years.’ A tuba player put his arm around her shoulder and she began to sob against his broad chest. Looking up, she finished in a whisper, ‘He’s ruined everything, even my birthday.’

In the sky the plane banked out of a steep ‘O’, the sentence done. At Marjory’s feet, Charles’s body gurgled, but remained unconscious. Marjory gazed skyward, up to where the plane has finished its illumination. In the air, the letters hung, stark and terrifying.

‘You do not do, you do not do.’

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

‘Will you look at this shit?’ Cavana said, stubbing out a Marlborough Light.

‘Humf?’ Kelly was only half listening, absorbed in his own corrections.

‘Listen to this,’ Cavana continued, and read out the whole first paragraph.
Kelly, who’d been engrossed in a particularly puerile misunderstanding of Dickinson, took a moment to respond.

‘That,’ he said, pausing to rub at tired eyes. ‘Is quite simply, bare faced cheek.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ agreed Cavana, shaking his head.

‘There’s always one,’ he said, quoting the Tayto add; thinking how much he would enjoy a jumbo pack of Cheese and Onion.

‘There’s always one,’ Kelly agreed. ‘You going to show that to the supervisor?’
Cavana thought for a second, took a look at the enormous box of yet to be corrected manuscripts.

‘Yeah, feck it. Serve the impertinent shit right.’

‘Aye,’ Kelly agreed. ‘Will you grab us a bottle of Fanta from the machine while you’re at it?’

Cavana frowned.

‘Fair enough. Diet or regular?’

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‘Judy baby, Judy baby, Judy.’

‘I tolt ya nah ta call me dah.’

‘Ah love, me love, ya’ve goh me babby in ya.’

Gilly’s eyes are sun burnt bloodshot, his hand tight on a can of fizzy sedative. Judy’s concentrating on Little Britain, mouthing the repeat’s stale dialogue, feigning a laugh.

‘Did ya noh hear me madra?’ he asks, and spits on the sticky carpet, the broken saliva string, silting his chin.

Judy lights another cigarette, her hand shaking, and ignores him, coughing on the first cool drag. She’s quiet for a moment.

‘Come ‘ere,’ she says, her eyes never leaving the set. ‘When’s Anto calling round? When’s he round? Ya said he’s was comin’ round.’

Gilly stands uncertainly, drops the can and stumbles to the kitchen, his vision a weaving pendulum. At the sink he pauses, fists the tap and swings his face under the icy stream. His eyes, open to the water, burn, and he swallows and snorts a head full out against the basin. Judy’s at his side, hand under his chin, holding him up; the hotness and roundness of her belly between them.

‘Is he comin’ Gilly? I’m hur’in.’

He shakes his head and wraps thin arms around her; her poppyseed skin and wilt of cheek, her hair slick and greased and bound. Still beautiful. They share a kiss, the fume of lung butter a sweet tar exchange. The baby kicks between them.  It’s all good.

Times wus hard. Real hard.
When I had ta sell Molley, I made sure and promised her I’d take care a tha kids.
‘Steve’, she said, ‘Steve’, tears collectin’ in her eyes as some mother gunned a muscle car, readin’ to take her away.
‘Take care a little Suzie and Steve Jr. You’ll watch em close now for me won’t ya?’
I could hardly talk for the lump in my throat.
‘I sure will honey,’ I said, promising to do my best by our fine pair a young-uns.

Well, times they do get harder. A man can get sick, soul sick, so no doctor ‘ill cure em. Sick a workin, and sick a tha sight a himself in the mirror. Shit I did my best, but like I say, pretty soon it got hard and I had to start thinkin’ a possibilities.
Time come I’d done all a man could do to keep it together, and it just wasn’t near good enough. So I had to consider the unthinkable. I had to prepare myself ta sell Steve Jr. Exceptin’ this time, my old pal Billy-Ray, whose been a good old boy through all recent troubles and all my troubles past, he says..

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In the quiet of the basement, Garvin readied his machine. It was round and flat, shelled in hard plastic, with a thin wide gap like the mouth of a clam. High up on the wall, half open skylights let drizzle through to wet the basement floor. On the old steel work-bench his calculations sat, twinkling on heaps of unlined paper. It was finished.

As he slipped into a figure-hugging silken body sock, Garvin Erasmus wondered at the future. He’d picked a hundred years ahead, enough time he hoped for profound, but comprehensible change. A dizzying melody of maybes ran through his head. Would America, perhaps the world, have fallen under the jack boot of Christian fascism; handmaidens waiting on feudal patriarchs and gays stoned in the streets, in a grimly literalist theocracy?
Perhaps nuclear attacks or a pandemic will have reduced the world to barbarism, he thought darkly. There were of course countless predicted futures. In preparation for the trip he’d read them all, from Alvin Toffler to Ray Kurzweil.
The singularity too was possible, a rapture of the geeks. Man empowered by the titanic potential of superhuman AI, to transform the world around him. Clouds of nanobots constructing real objects in concrete software. That, or a grey all consuming goo. A part of Garvin expected to emerge in space, the earth consumed for fuel by her departing children.

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Butterfingers perched despondently in his highchair. His slick, waist length hair cresting the seatback, a brunette film. His dirty face was streaked with tears. Once more the voice came, dulled by the heavy oaken door.
‘Choody? Choody it’s me’.
Butterfingers shivered, and not for the first time, or the last, wished he still had a mouth.
‘Choody, please. Why don’t you answer?’
Wearily, he dropped to the foor, and padded once again to the old thick-planked door. His brothers voice was plaintive, and Butterfingers was sufuced with burning shame. Once more he pawed the handle futilely, once more it dripped with dairy essence. He slammed the chode of his bonce against the door, and would have keened, but couldn’t. That voice again, so supple..
‘Choody, I’ve a fierce yearn to love you. Choody!’
The tromp of legs stalking away. He took his chair again. Alone.

Cooth, uncooth, cooth, uncooth. Hello, whats this? It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed such brazen fuckwittery at the ministry of chum!
‘Jenkins’, I yell, levering the machine to a screechy halt. Out he trots from some unionized cubby, round maw loose and crabbed with gammy din.
‘Jenkins, you pillock’, I bellow, checking him short.
Up and down the line, the minions wait, craning under the great presses and shivering blades, to catch the fuss.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’, I ask quietly.
Thugging a digit to his pudge. He looks obediently down at the belt, where a fresh poo lies, imperfect.
‘Looks awrite ta me sir’, he stammers, picking at the brill creamed quiff under his flat cap.
‘Count the rings’, I tell him, with inhuman patience.
‘I’m sorry Mr. Thrustlewhait?’
‘Count’, I repeat, pinching his scruff and smuging him to the churl; rubbing his nose in it.
‘The rings!’
Released, he springs back into place, sways a little, and bends over, broken Jack in the box.
‘There are seven rings, are there not Jenkins?’
‘Aye sir’, he pants, scrunching cap in hand like wash rag. His snout is red at nib from where it tipped the melty.
‘And how many rings should there be?’, I ask, cuffing him pointedly about the hear lobe.
‘Seven sir’, he blugs, huffing back the wa wa’s.
‘I don’t have to tell you, Jenkins’, I tell him, bellying up to the wee smurf, whose noodles gone all red and puffed with yikes.
‘..that I will not have inferior artificial poos, leaving my factory’.
He shakes a no, the chubbed mug, and I flick his bloody snot plug for good measure.
You just can’t get the help.