Special Smashwords Edition
Scepticism Inc.
by
Bo Fowler
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Scepticism Inc.
Special Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © 2011 Bo Fowler All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
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Cover Designed by Bo Fowler
Cover art:
Copyright © Nancy Fouts
Published by Telemachus Press, LLC at Smashwords
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ISBN: # 978-1-937387-67-9 (eBook)
Version 2011.10.05
What the Newspapers think of Bo Fowler’s Scepticism Inc.:
“Scepticism Inc. is a venomously intelligent and funny novel with a richly European combination of whimsy and seriousness… this book’s rare pleasure is that, as well as numerous running gags, it boasts a wealth of conceptual and structural jokes.. .If Nietzsche had written a novel, it would probably have some of the flavor of Bo Fowler’s ambitious debut.”
THE GUARDIAN
“Beguiling, humane and very funny… Scepticism Inc.’s narrative slipperiness and sly humor reminded me of Slaughterhouse-Five…this is a serious satire on belief and the desire to believe which surprises and delights.”
TIME OUT
“A wildly inventive and funny novel”
THE BIG ISSUE
“A very funny novel”
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
“An ambitious, daredevil satire”
THE INDEPENDENT
“Scepticism Inc. is a kind of Nietzsche for beginners… refreshingly quick-witted; easy to read and easy to please, with thought-provoking ideas.”
THE OBSERVER
“Fowler’s account of one man and his trolley against the zealots is a shaggy dog story of cosmic proportions. This outrageous irreligious first novel launches an exciting new talent upon the world. Dare I say it, I have great faith in him.’
THE LITERARY REVIEW
Online praise for Bo Fowler’s Scepticism Inc.:
FIVE STARS “Good to the last page? Especially the last page. Too many books end with an anticlimactic 'by the same author' burble chore, but not this one. The author's note had me in stitches.
Throughout the book, I was delighted by the farcical situations, the lovable, flawed hero and the tight narrative style.
Stop thinking about ordering a copy of this book, and just do it. Order this book… you could have a life-changing experience... or at least a very good laugh.
I have a proposal: we should bulk-buy a million or more copies of this book, and distribute it widely. Ideally, in every hotel and motel throughout the world, next to the Gideon bible, there would be a copy of Skepticism, Inc. It might make the world a better place. Aloha.”
FIVE STARS “Thoroughly entertaining, and thought provoking! stands up to reading time and time again. Generally fantastic book!”
FIVE STARS “I completely disagree with the reviews comparing this writer to Vonnegut - this is in a whole new and exciting league. Fowler should be judged by his own merit. The writer and the writing are intelligent, yet not pompous, quick and original. The book reads like a thriller, but contains tidbits of philosophical ideas, served fresh and easy to digest. I thought it was going to be just a quick summery read - NOT! It was one of the fullest and most fun reading experiences I've had this year. Good going Fowler, I'm running to the shops to get your next one...”
FIVE STARS “This is truly the book that ink has been crying out to describe, the book that pulped trees have been longing to have stamped into their flattened essences, that the human eye has been lost without.”
FIVE STARS “This is quite probably the best book every written. That is of course, a ridiculous statement, but such is the inescapable farce the book kicks up around the reader, it seems, for the duration of the read, entirely true. Is it deep philosophy? No. Is it high-art? Not really. Is it horribly, limb aching, head hurtingly funny? Yes. Yes it is. If you like funny books of any sort, especially ones that are intelligent (if not exactly stretching - but that's not really the point now, is it?) then go and pick this up, or suffer the eternal consequences.”
FIVE STARS “Ever thought anything about religion ever? Read this book. More important than the Bible (probably). This is a totally irreverent novel about a sentient shopping trolley, a man who sets up a Metaphysical Betting Shop through which religious people can bet on their faith and who ends up becoming the world's richest man, and his beautiful female nemesis.
If this book took more targeted attacks at specific religions and religious leaders then it would have gained an incredible notoriety and possibly a fatwa or two. But as it is its intelligent breadth kept it under the radar. If you've ever given any thought to religion in any way, whether you're religious or not, you should read this book- you'll enjoy it and be challenged by it. Excellent stuff.”
FIVE STARS “This book constantly makes me laugh, no matter how many times I read it! All the aspects that this book brings forth, from the human mind, is a revelation of comedy.
The characters are real, the situations, however fantastic and melodiously comic, are plausibly possible. If you don't read philosophy, you might find some parts of it a bit confusing, but even the illiterate will just love the slapstick comic moments. A massively wondrous book. Read it, buy it, and marry it!”
FIVE STARS “Extremely surreal, funny and strangely gripping. You won't be able to put this down, except to wipe the tears from your eyes. This is a superb play on human nature and faith, combined with a central character who turns out to be a shopping trolley.
Don't read this in public, people think you have gone mad when you keep bursting out with laughter.”
FIVE STARS “I avoided this book for ages as I thought the conceit too self- consciously off-beat. Boy, was I wrong. I absolutely adored it. So funny, so sweet: I'm going to try and get my devoted catholic mother to read it… Highly recommended, especially if you like Kurt Vonnegut (which you should).”
FIVE STARS “A perfect book for the trainee Atheist. Very, very funny, but with a serious point to it as well. I certainly agree with the other reviewer - the world would be a much better place if everyone read this book. It's also true that whilst at school we all learn about the major beliefs in the world, there is one belief that gets consistently overlooked - the belief that there is no God. This book provides some memorable moments and some great entertainment. A superb Christmas present for any fundamentalists in your family.”
FIVE STARS “The world would be a better place if everyone read this book. Religion in the modern world is turned inside out by a witty, clever story with very likeable characters. Even the narrator, a shopping trolley with an advanced computer program containing a fault (the belief in God), is extremely likeable. I would definitely put this book on the school curriculum.”
FIVE STARS “This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. It is also a very unusual, odd book, and is very easy to read. In fact, I keep an extra copy around, that I keep lending to people. I eagerly await the author's next book. In addition to being a really enjoyable read, the book does have a message -- one that not everyone will appreciate. A person of strong faith and a sense of humor, will be able to smile at the fun the author pokes at religion. Those with little faith, and no funny bone would attack it. Highly recommended.”
FIVE STARS “First off, I don't give five stars. Except here. And its not because this is the finest piece of literature I have ever read. It's just a very good, very funny book with a great deal of heart. Scepticism, Inc. is a look at the ways in which religion makes people act and manifests itself in society. Through farcical extremes, Fowler puts religion and human nature under a microscope. And its funny...and true. It's very hard to review something like this without giving away the magic. It's not for everyone - those with strict religious beliefs might not appreciate the fun Fowler pokes, but for those with open minds (or even those with closed minds with good senses of humor), Scepticism Inc is worth the read.”
FIVE STARS “The various descriptions of satire, parable, rant, etc. don't do justice to what is an inventive lampooning of hypocrisy. Do not read this book if you are unwilling to openly face the behavior of the world's religions. Fowler takes on all of them. What's not to like about a shopping cart seeking the meaning to life? This is a very funny book with a deep message.”
FIVE STARS “For those who appreciate Kurt Vonnegut's musings, Fowler is a must. His writing style and sense of humor are clearly reminiscent of Vonnegut's, but with a bit more of an optimistic slant. In addition to the humor in his writing (which is sharp and laugh-out-loud funny), Fowler has a knack for making his readers stop and think about the world around them and their role in it (to, "put their money where their metaphysics are," as one of the book's protagonists would say) -- without being at all preachy or over-bearing. I have recommended this thought-provoking, hilarious book to many friends already and recommend it whole-heartedly to my fellow... users as well.”
FIVE STARS “Excellent...a brilliant and brilliantly readable book looking at the only question that really matters.”
Books by Bo Fowler:
Notes from the Autopsy of God
The Philosophy of Stars
Scepticism Inc.
The Astrological Diary of God
Scepticism Inc.
‘Machinery is the new Messiah.’
Henry Ford
‘There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religions.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Why do you torture your poor reason for insight into the riddle of eternity?’
Horace
Acknowledgements
This message from space, this long and winding electromagnetic transmission, broadcast on the wavelength of twenty-one centimetres and due to arrive on Earth ten years from now (sometime in the 221st century), would not have been possible without the help of many people and electrical appliances - too many to name here. However, I must express my heartfelt gratitude and love to Kitty Fitzgerald for introducing me to the universe, giving me my sex and giving me a piece of helpful advice. I must also thank ShopALot, the third largest chain of supermarket stores in Europe, for whom I worked. I also wish to acknowledge my obvious debt to George Milles Jr, the second wealthiest man ever to live and the inventor of the Infinity Chip. I would also like to thank NASA and the fifteen thousand people that helped place me in low Earth orbit. I feel I am a brother to each and every one of you.
Of course all of these people are long since dead. Most perished in the Great Mania.
Edgar Malroy is also dead. He died at the end of the Holy War which took place a little while after the Great Mania.
Edgar Malroy was the closest friend I ever had on Earth.
So I once bet £500,000 that God existed; doesn’t everyone make at least one mistake?
Prologue
Florida was the largest producer of tangerines in the world.
Production in the late 1900s reached twenty million boxes annually.
Orange City, a town in the south of Florida, had a population in 1998 of just 2,795.
One person who lived in Orange City at that time and had occasional involvement with the tangerine business was Daphne Stephenson.
Daphne Stephenson was a check-out girl in one of Orange City’s two supermarkets that had been owned by the Davies family for nearly forty years.
Daphne Stephenson had gone to school with Bob Davies. Bob Davies inherited the two supermarkets in Orange City in 1997.
They had necked once behind the gym, Daphne Stephenson and Bob Davies, in their youth. Daphne’s jaw would dislocate.
Pop.
Three times she had to break away from Bob Davies’ amorous embrace and push her jaw back into place with two fingers.
Daphne Stephenson sometimes had epileptic fits too.
So did St Anthony, the patron saint of skin rashes. So did Jesus Christ. So did Mohammed the prophet.
On the 16th of June 1998 she had a fit while at work. Bob Davies didn’t phone for an ambulance. He called over his priest who, as providence would have it, was shopping in the frozen meats section.
The priest, a man by the name of Stephen L. Jones, had a theological degree from Xenophobe Bible School in Portland, Oregon, where the most exciting thing to do on a Saturday night was to listen to Professor Watmough snoring, in the vain hope that he would utter something interesting in his sleep. Stephen L. Jones decided that Daphne Stephenson was possessed by a devil. A medium sort of devil. He proposed a tried and tested treatment.
First, prayers were uttered as Daphne Stephenson, foaming and shaking wildly, fell off her check-out seat.
The till was closed.
Daphne’s jaw went pop.
As Daphne’s condition deteriorated, more drastic measures were taken.
The priest rolled up his sleeves and hit her about the body with a frozen ostrich leg.
The post-mortem examination of Daphne Stephenson’s body showed that she had suffered four broke ribs, a broken arm and a fractured skull. It was the fractured skull that killed her.
The priest left with four bags of shopping. Daphne Stephenson’s body was hidden in the supermarket deep freeze by Bob Davies.
The till was opened.
The police found the body. They got eye-witness accounts. They went to arrest the priest. But by then the priest and his followers, including Bob Davies, the manager of the supermarket, had barricaded themselves inside their church. As people do.
It was a little church, built on a small knoll and surrounded by a white painted fence and poplar trees. There were thirty-five different species of wild flower growing on the grass around the church. Although no one had ever counted them.
Inside the church huddled twenty-six people who had decided to dedicate the rest of their lives to protecting Stephen L. Jones, the priest who was becoming known on the TV and in the papers as the Ostrich Preacher. Most of the twenty-six faithful were tangerine pickers or retired tangerine pickers or would-be tangerine pickers. In fact just about everyone huddled in the church had in some way or other occasional involvement with the tangerine business.
They also somehow had guns. Big old Chinese guns.
When the police arrived they were greeted with a hail of fire. They had expected this. The police had got used to being greeted with a hail of gunfire when they went to churches on business, what with it being nearly the end of the millennium. The holy were trigger-happy.
The holy were always blowing themselves up, or poisoning themselves or burning their churches and temples down, or filling undergrounds with nerve gas, or getting the police to shoot them, what with it being nearly the end of the millennium.
Things didn’t get much better after the millennium either.
A siege got under way. Billy Adams, a local entrepreneur, set up his hotdog stand just outside the police line and made a fine American profit feeding the police, the federal agents and the press. There were also a fair number of tangerines eaten.
Things started nicely.
The local sheriff got to use his loudspeaker which was something he really liked to do. He said things like, ‘Err come on now’ and ‘This is silly, Stephen.’
Stephen L. Jones got to go on live TV telling everyone who would listen that he was God’s messenger etc etc.
At night you could hear the little group of people huddled in the little church sing.
The church was called Riverside and it would soon be on the minds of most people on the planet for a brief while. About the time it takes for a carton of milk to go off.
You see what happened was this: there was an attempted breakout. Stephen L. Jones and his followers ran out of the great big white doors of their pretty little white church, guns a-blazing.
The police dropped their hotdogs and tangerines and fired back.
It was hell.
The twenty-six Stephen L. Jones followers surged towards the police cars parked across the drive, firing their weapons from their hips, screaming and praising the Lord.
Stephen L. Jones, bible in hand, pushed his followers on from behind.
By the time they had got halfway down the little winding drive, most were dead amid the thirty-five species of wild flowers that no one had counted.
By the time they had reached the police line, only one follower of the Ostrich Preacher was alive.
She was alive because no one would shoot at her.
Policemen just lowered their guns. The woman was armed with a Chinese assault rifle made when China was officially atheist and the largest producer of soya beans in the world. The rifle was modelled on the Soviet AK47 and had been used for a time by the IRA. It was accurate when fired in single shots but was difficult to control on automatic. The woman fired on full automatic or ‘rock and roll’ mode.
The reason the policemen lowered their weapons was because the woman had strapped her three babies to her body.
In the end she killed four policemen and wounded ten before Sergeant S. Gillham fired five rounds at her. Three of the rounds hit the woman, killing her instantly. The fourth bullet hit one of the babies in the head and the baby died instantly. The fifth bullet punctured another baby’s lung. The wound made a sssssssssss noise as the baby’s tiny right lung collapsed. That baby died in an air ambulance.
The baby who survived was Edgar Malroy.
The woman who strapped her three babies to her body was called Mary and she died following the orders of a man who claimed to be God’s messenger etc etc.
Was he?
Who knows?
China was at one point the largest producer of porcelain in the world.
Part One
1
I climbed Mount Everest eighty thousand years ago. I am the last supermarket trolley alive. Aloha.
I once bet £500,000 that God existed. I was a nut. Thanks to Edgar Malroy I am better now. Really
I was made on the 3rd of November 2022, at 11.30 a.m., in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Chelmsford.
After I rolled off the production line I was greeted by a technician with a friendly face. She tapped me on my push-bar and said the first words I ever heard. Which were: ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’
Which was how I discovered my gender.
For a time I considered the technician with the friendly face a mother of sorts.
We all did I suppose.
The technician who said the first words I ever heard and tapped me on my push-bar was called Kitty Fitzgerald. She earned £9.50 an hour in 2022. She was not incredibly enthusiastic about my existence. She said ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ casually, as if she was uninterested. In fact, she couldn’t have cared less.
The reason why Kitty Fitzgerald couldn’t have cared less about me or the other fifty trolleys she looked after was this: three weeks earlier she had come home to find her husband having sex with the family vacuum cleaner.
They got a divorce and she never spoke to the vacuum cleaner again.
?
This is how I climbed Mount Everest: slowly.
2
Little Edgar Malroy was the sole survivor of the Riverside Siege. His blood-soaked little body appeared on TV and in the newspapers. He was just three weeks old at the time. Fourteen hundred families from all over the world offered to look after little Edgar. In the end he was flown to Britain to live with his aunt and uncle.
Little Edgar’s uncle was a financial planning manager for a well-know bank. Little Edgar’s aunt looked after the geese, the three pigs and the six ostriches on their farm, just outside Chichester.
In 1998 ostrich meat was the single fastest-growing meat product in the Western hemisphere.
Edgar’s aunt and uncle were devout agnostics.
Edgar’s first words were these:
‘Who knows?’
Memories of that you could call my own childhood are still crystal clear, thanks to my near faultless memory system (the ZEm 12000 Nexus) which was designed, like everything else that makes up my mind, by George Milles Jr.
My very first day on Earth was spent learning to push myself around the aisles of a fake supermarket, weaving around technicians pretending to be customers. That was the sum total of my first day on Earth.
My first night was spent dreaming about supermarkets. I still dream of supermarkets all the way out here.
I have loved two women in my long and somewhat ridiculous life. One was Kitty Fitzgerald, and one was completely nuts.
?
Edgar Malroy in time grew into a bright and healthy young man.
My own childhood of sorts lasted in total three weeks. That it was so short is not really all that remarkable; some butterflies are born, grow up and die in the space of a special offer.
I was programmed with things the company, ShopALot, deemed I should know, things like the time yogurt normally took to go off, how late we stayed open until, the history of products and so on.
Such programming took place using a direct-feed interface and was an efficient way to fill my Infinity Chip with information, much more efficient than a lecture.
Although I did have one lecture, of a sort.
We had been told that shortly before we were due to leave for the real supermarkets, we would be given a few words of support and advice from the managing director of the trolley department of ShopALot.
?
This is what Graham Shipton, the managing director of the trolley department of ShopALot said to use in his lecture of sorts.
‘Aloha. Are you all comfortable? Excited about your future with us at ShopALot? You know, before I came to work here I had accumulated a modest fortune in used boxes. That’s right, used boxes. I recycled them. Largest recycler of used boxes, cardboard mostly, in the country. I was rolling in it. I had all the money a guy could use, but there was something missing. I didn’t know what I was suppose to do. And you know what? I still don’t. My entire life is spent trying to convince myself that I am doing what I am supposed to do. That I am following ‘the plan’, that I am fulfilling my purpose. Am I supposed to be telling you this, now? Was I supposed to shave this morning? In my office I sit there and wonder whether I ought really to be in the office across the road. Maybe I’m not doing what I am supposed to do. Take my brother, he makes curtains, even makes the funny little rings. Maybe that’s what I should be doing, making curtains. Let me tell you something, when I was a kid I wanted to be a dental technician more than anything else in the world, but something happened. An uncle took me for a ride in a hot-air balloon and I lost interest. I grew out of it, I guess.
‘Now I just don’t know. Not knowing your purpose is a terrible fate, believe me, it’s a terrible thing.
‘You on the other hand have been blessed with a clearly defined, easily grasped purpose. You are and always will be supermarket trolleys. ‘The plan’ of your entire lives is crystal clear. Your destinies are as predictable as can be and, well, I just want you to know that I envy you guys.’
Graham Shipton then told a joke. It was the first joke I ever heard.
Do you know what Edgar Malroy would have done had he heard that lecture, of a sort, by Graham Shipton, the managing director of the trolley department of ShopALot? Edgar Malroy would have dropped his trousers.
3
‘There was a man who worked in a nuclear power plant and every day he would leave the plant with a wheelbarrow full of rubbish.
‘The security guard at the gate became suspicious. Becoming suspicious was, after all, his job.
‘One day the security guard accused the man of stealing.
‘The man denied it at first but then confessed, to stealing wheelbarrows.’
Graham Shipton told us that he had a golden rule, a rule that would make our time on Earth more worthwhile.
His golden rule was this: always say to your customers when you meet them for the first time or when the leave, ‘Aloha.’
Mr Shipton made us say it out loud five times, then he had different trolleys do each of the sounds, then he divided us into two groups so that one group said ‘Alo’ and the other group said ‘ha’. I was in the ‘ha’ group.
Then Mr Shipton looked at this watch, waved at us enthusiastically and said that he thought he was supposed to be somewhere else, although he wasn’t sure, and left.
We all said ‘Aloha.’
My three-week childhood of sorts came to an end after Mr Shipton’s lecture. As we boarded the trucks bound for the real supermarkets, two by two, Kitty Fitzgerald gave us all a piece of advice. She told us to be careful out there.
I like to think she actually meant it.
4
I am as far as I know the only supermarket trolley in the history of the world do have a diploma. It is in agnosticism and from Who Knows College.
I brought it with me into space. I even had it framed. It’s in bad shape now. It’s been hit by micro-meteorites.
Most have been the size of garden peas.
?
Edgar Malroy died in the wink of an eye. It was without a doubt what millions all over the planet wanted. There were street parties in fact.
Edgar Malroy’s epitaph reads:
Not sleeping but dead.
The same inscription was put on the graves of the six thousand employees of Scepticism Inc. that perished along with him.
?
Edgar Malroy always misspelt Scepticism. Whenever I pointed this out to him he would say, ‘How do you know?’
?
Edgar Malroy fell in love on the 14th January 2024. He fell in love just like that. I know. I was there.
Later he would ask me whether it was possible to disagree with someone violently, absolutely, to consider them immoral and nuts and yet still love them.
I told him I thought it was a long shot.
5
George Milles Jr, the inventor of the Infinity Chip, and the second wealthiest may ever, died nearly a year before I was made.
His coffin was unusual. It would rotate, rather like a kebab spit, so that it could be said that he was turning in his grave.
This is what it says on George Milles Jr’s gravestone:
A taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the
human animal.
George Moore (1888)
He was buried on Easter Island, along with six hundred of his favourite wives. Aloha.
George Milles Jr had fourteen hundred wives. He had called them all Sarah to avoid confusion.
Each night one of his fourteen hundred wives had been sent a card inviting them to his bedroom.
There they would watch TV for a bit, eat popcorn and then make love.
?
By 2022 there were thirty-eight different brands of popcorn in any branch of ShopALot.
Aztec priests used to wear amulets of stringed popcorn in religious ceremonies. They really did.
American Indians were said to have brought bags of popcorn to the Plymouth Pilgrims for their Thanksgiving dinner in 1621.
?
Edgar Malroy used to say that the Old World should celebrate Thanksgiving too, because we had got rid of so many religious nuts when the American colonies were set up.
?
One brand of popcorn we had on sale in the supermarket in 2022 was called Popecorn and was distributed by the Vatican.
The information on the packet stated that each piece of Popecorn had been individually coated in sugar and blessed by a Bishop.
It also said on the packet that Popecorn could be eaten as a snack anywhere but was best eaten when watching one of Pope John John’s many films.
In 2022, 300 million pounds of popcorn were popped worldwide.
?
George Milles Jr bought, among other things, most of the south of France.
When George Milles Jr died the stock market crashed, as a matter of course, and most of his wives changed their names.
George Milles Jr had a rather unusual funeral. It took place in the Barringer Crater, which was at the time the largest crater on Earth. It was 1.2 kilometres in diameter and had been caused by a meteorite weighing two million tons crashing into the Earth around forty thousand years ago.
George Milles Jr’s body was placed in a coffin and surrounded by fifty thousand orange plastic chairs cemented to the floor of the giant crater. The floor of the Barringer Crater was 175 metres deep.
Representatives from every country came to George Milles Jr’s funeral, as did everyone with a last name beginning with E. Lots of people didn’t get an orange plastic chair cemented to the floor of the giant crater to sit on.
Speeches were read out, tributes made, scores settled. Pope John John said that George Milles Jr had been a very wealthy man, with a great taste in music, and a lot of wives.
The Dalai Lama laughed so hard his false teeth fell out.
The UN Secretary General said this of George Milles Jr:
‘He was like a great big blue pill. It sure as hell worked but it had pretty bad side-effects and what was the illness?’
Everyone wanted to know how George Milles Jr had invented the Infinity Chip but nobody ever found out.
Then seven hundred Alpine yodellers started to yodel like mad, and five hundred Indian elephants performed a small dance routine in the middle of the crater.
Halfway through the elephant routine, from launch silos in America and Russia, hundreds of intercontinental missiles were launched into the upper atmosphere.
Back in the crater, the elephants received a standing ovation.
This was followed by a coloured water display by the New York fire department.
After that the entire Scandinavian air force flew over the crater and dropped a total of ten thousand rubber ducks each equipped with a parachute and a tape recorded which automatically played ‘Bustin Surfboards’ by the Tornadoes once the ducks dropped below five thousand feet.
As the tape recorded began playing a massive radio transmission was sent out into space from the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo, in Puerto Pico. (Puerto Rico’s main exports in 2022 were processed sugar and vacuum cleaner parts.)
The message went as follows:
I, George Milles Jr, died on 14th January 2022.
I was the wealthiest, cleverest, kindest man ever to live in the world.
I’m gone, you missed me. Your loss.
George Milles Jr died of life.
I was great!
By the time the transmission, sent out on a wavelength of twenty-one centimetres, had finished, the intercontinental missiles launched from America and Russia were seven miles about the Barringer Crater. The intercontinental missiles exploded, sending hundreds of tons of crushed garlic into the air above the crater and for months afterwards the Pacific Ocean tasted a bit funny.
It really did.
A helicopter then picked up George Milles Jr’s coffin from the centre of the Barringer Crater, its rotor blades cutting into the falling cloud of crushed garlic, and carried George Milles Jr’s remains to Easter Island.
Two days later everyone on Earth was sent a photograph of the second wealthiest man ever.
6
We filed off the trucks two by two into our gleaming white, brand new supermarket. We were all nervous wrecks. We didn’t know what to say, it was all too much for us.
Behind our store was St Pancras coroner’s office and through a window we could see a fat lady putting dead people’s clothes on hangers. Behind the coroner’s office were row upon row of train tracks.
Next door to our supermarket was an ancient little church that would become, thanks to Edgar Malroy, the most famous little church in the world.
?
There were fourteen different soap powders in every ShopALot store. Thirteen were marketed by the Italian-based multinational L. Beno, the other brand was called ‘St Martha Powder’ and was marketed by the Vatican.
St Martha was the sister of Mary Magdalen, the patron saint of prostitutes. (Reformed.)
St Martha was the patron saint of housewives.
On the front of the packets of St Martha Powder was the claim that Sisters in the Vatican used St Martha Powder when they cleaned Pope John John’s cassock.
Edgar Malroy used to call Pope John John, among other things, a drag queen.
?
After our initial shock we became accustomed to our supermarket; in fact in no time at all we became bored out of our Infinity Chips.
The only bit of excitement came on Sundays when the priest from the church next door would come in and warn our customers that they were ‘shopping with their very souls’. The priest was always getting into heated discussions with our floor manager, who kept pointing outside while the priest kept pointing at the ceiling. They never pointed at the same thing. They never agreed.
‘One day,’ the priest would shout, ‘just one day out of seven, is that asking too much?’ Is that unreasonable? God made everything – everything! – in six days, then he rested. We’ve got to follow his example. That’s what it says in the Bible. It’s critical that we spend Sundays praising God, not shopping. Sunday’s, ‘he would say, ‘are for souls, not tins of what have you – God, not groceries!’
He went on and on like that every Sunday. None of our shoppers seemed to pay much notice, but us supermarket trolleys were mesmerised. We had never seen anything like the priest before in our short, ridiculous lives. We crowded around him, praying out loud and so on.
He told us we had a divine mission to make shopping on Sundays as irritating as we possibly could, and of course, not knowing any better, we believed him and refused to be used on the Sabbath. Shoppers had to use baskets instead.
Sometimes the priest would read out passages from the Bible about Sodom and Gomorrah and say that most Bible scholars agreed that one of the many wickednesses of the two cities was that their shops had remained open on Sundays.
Sometimes the priest brought into the supermarket a giant crucifix on wheels that had a life-size Jesus holding two bags of shopping in his nailed hands. The bags would rotate around and around and knock things off shelves.
The priest’s visits were the highlight of our week. When he stopped coming we were all utterly devastated.
Why the priest had stopped coming was simple; he had met Edgar Malroy.
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After George Milles Jr’s funeral a religious group took over the Barringer Crater. They were known as Second Comers, and spent every night sitting on the fifty thousand orange plastic chairs cemented to the floor of the crater, looking up at the sky, awaiting the second meteor which they believed would impact the Earth at exactly the same spot and would be even bigger than the first. The Second Comers believed that anyone directly under the meteor when it hit would be unharmed. They showed why this would be the case with complicated mathematics and a computer model. The Second Comers believed the impact of the second meteor herald the arrival of God and his angels. The leader of the Second Comers thought he was God’s messenger etc etc.
Every time there was a shooting star, one of the Second Comers would say, ‘I thought that one was it for sure.’
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I first met Edgar Malroy in 2024. He had been expelled from his college. He was twenty-three and I was just two years old.
I had been taken against my will all the way to Regent’s Park by children playing truant and was making my way back to the store when I thought of the priest and decided to find out what had become of him.
An old man at a bus stop across the road helped me up the steps of the church.
I would later single-handedly climb Everest.
Thirty-five species of wild flowers grew amid the grass which surrounded the church.
Edgar Malroy had altered the outside of the church in only two ways; he had removed the cross on the spire and replaced it with a great big question mark, and he had placed a wooden placard over the entrance of the church on which he had painted the following words:
The world is tired of metaphysical assertions.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena.
7
George Milles Jr had invented the Infinity Chip on the 16th of August 1998. He patented the idea and organised a secret auction in a Munich Hotel. The world’s most powerful companies gathered to hear about the chip and to offer as much money as they possibly could for it. For some reason, during the secret auction the only refreshment on offer was carrot juice. Pope John John used to drink a lot of carrot juice when he lived in California.
It is possible to photosynthesise if you drink sufficient amounts of carrot juice.
Pope John John, as far as I am aware, never masturbated or photosynthesised.
The global carrot crop in 2022 has been estimated to have been worth $200 million.
In the end the transnational company L. Beno made George Milles Jr the largest offer, and bought the right to market products with the Infinity Chip.
Just how much L. Beno paid no one really knows, but the sum of £100,287 billion was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, and a similar figure was quoted in the Financial Times.
It was a ridiculous amount of money.
Thus did George Milles Jr become the second wealthiest man ever.
What was the Infinity Chip?
Consciousness. George Milles Jr had invented artificial intelligence. And no one ever found out how he did it.
The chairman of L. Beno at the time of the Infinity Chip auction was Leonard Duncombe, who had turned his father’s shoe-cleaning business into the largest transnational company in the world. Leonard Duncombe collected porcelain cats.
He had the second larges collection of porcelain cats in the western hemisphere. The largest being the George Eumorfopoulos collection housed in the British Museum.
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When I ventured into the little church for the first time things were quiet. Edgar Malroy was sitting behind a stone table working at a computer.
‘Aloha,’ I said.
And this is what Edgar Malroy said, without looking up:
‘There are thirty-five species of wild flowers in the grounds of this church.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘I counted them. I’ll tell you something else. See this desk, it’s an altar, dates back to the seventh century. They say St Augustine used it.’
‘Imagine that,’ I said.
‘Imagine that,’ Edgar said.
Then I asked him where the priest was.
‘Oh, he ran out of money, the poor nut,’ Edgar said, and then for the first time looked up. He stared at me then said, ‘Shouldn’t you be next door?’
I said that he was probably right.
He smiled and then, after a little while, asked me what I believed in.
8
Leonard Duncombe bought the right to mass-produce the Infinity Chip in the same month in which his son Thomas Duncombe became an International Bible Student or a Millennial Dawnist. That is to say a Jehovah’s Witness.
The Duncombes lived in Venice, in the Palazzo Corner-Contarini Dei Caralli. It had been the family’s house for as long as anyone could remember. (The origin of their unItalian-sounding name was a complete mystery.) The eccentricity of the Duncombe family was legendary. It was said that they ironed all their newspapers before reading them and never used the same bar of soap twice.
What happened was this:
Thomas Duncombe got his hand stuck in the soft drink vending machine by the main entrance of his home, and two Jehovah’s Witnesses swam by and freed him.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, among other things, that Jesus died on a stake not a cross. They also don’t celebrate Christmas.
Thomas Duncombe was put in charge of the Infinity Chip programme by his father. The plan was to install Infinity Chips in every sort of electrical appliance imaginable.
Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in hell.
They do believe that Satan rules the world and that the show will be ending shortly.
Here is something else Jehovah’s Witnesses believe:
Only 144,000 true believers will go to heaven. 144,000 out of the whole of human history.
That works out at about one person every five years.
One of these 144,000 is bound to be Charles Taze Russell, the owner of a chain of clothes stores, even though he got divorced. Once.
You see, Charles Taze Russell was the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1909 the movement established its headquarters in New York, just around the corner from where the very first supermarket was to be opened in 1930 by a group of merchants as a means of combating chain-store competition.
In 1911 Charles Taze Russell started to wear women’s clothes. ‘It brings me closer to God,’ he explained on innumerable occasions.
In 1913 Charles Taze Russell’s wife divorced him. It had nothing to do with vacuum cleaners. In fact they were only just available at the time and were huge, the size of modern fridges, and took two people to use.
Anyway, in 1913 Charles Taze Russell got divorced and went to heaven, the first person to do so in five years. Aloha.
Two months after Charles Taze Russell got divorced and went to live in heaven Joseph Franklin Rutherford was elected president of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Joseph Franklin Rutherford unfurled a massive scroll during the Witness 1922 convention at a place called Cedar Point. On the scroll were the following words:
Advertise! Advertise! For God’s sake Advertise!
Joseph Franklin Rutherford took up residence in a mansion in San Diego built by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to house Abraham and the prophets upon their return to earth.
The mansion had central heating, a swimming pool (so Jesus could go running), tennis courts and a model railway in the attic which Joseph played with insensately. He said it brought him closer to God. Joseph named the little model town the trains travelled through, Bethlehem. The model town of Bethlehem had an abortion clinic and a blood transfusion clinic outside of which were tiny little model Jehovah’s Witnesses in silent protest. The mansion also had five vacuum cleaners the size of fridges.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford slept in the Noah suite.
In 1997 the mansion burned down. Faulty wiring and Satan were blamed. As a matter of course. In fact fire fighters thought the whole thing had started when a light bulb, intended to be the Star of Bethlehem, had fallen onto the manger on the outskirts of the model town near the miniature plutonium dump.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses started building a new mansion which would have its very own golf course. They also bought a beach house in Barbados for the prophets. It had cable TV and a helicopter landing pad.
Joseph eventually went to heaven and the Jehovah’s Witnesses did away with presidents, although they still believed even in 2022 that only 144,000 people would go to heaven. In 2024 Jehovah’s Witnesses would go back to electing presidents.
Work on the second mansion had only just started when Thomas Duncombe was told the Truth, had his hand freed and become a Witness.
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Thomas Duncombe ordered that the doctrines of his particular religion be added to the Infinity Chip. This was duly done.
Early prototypes behaved awkwardly. They did not interact well with humans. They were obstinate and opinionated. They had nothing to say that did not refer back to scripture.
They were deemed anti-social and terrible bores.
‘Perfect,’ said Thomas Duncombe.
‘Shit,’ said Leonard Duncombe when he read reports of the early prototypes. He flew to the research station in person to see what was going wrong.
Thomas asked his father when he arrived if he was happy with the way the world was.
Leonard Duncombe was so angry when he heard that his son had become a nut, and saw what he had done to the Infinity Chip, that he broke one of his porcelain cats. He always carried a porcelain cat in his hand, you see.
‘It was how I met my wife,’ he would explain on innumerable occasions.
Like most collectors of porcelain cats, Leonard Duncombe was a raving atheist.
Leonard Duncombe ordered all the nutty material removed from the Infinity Chip at once.
Technicians deleted all the nutty material. Nearly.
A tiny weeny little thing that got overlooked was this: The belief in God.
Mass production began soon after that. All kinds of things were given Infinity Chips: TVs, toasters, irons, kettles, alarm clocks, dishwashers, shavers, food mixers, vacuum cleaners, even supermarket trolleys.
Conscious electrical appliances became all the rage and the old unconscious appliances were thrown out.
When no one was looking, Thomas Duncombe stole the early anti-social prototypes and handed them over to his fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was from these prototypes that the Ding Dong 7s were created.
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I told Edgar Malroy that I believed in the scientific method, the laws of gravity and commerce, that man is ultimately a positive rather than a negative force in the universe, that any product with the word ‘new’ on its packaging really was new. I told him I believed in coupons, bulk buying, special offers and God.
9
Edgar Malroy said, ‘A supermarket trolley that believes in God,’ and then burst out laughing.
He laughed like this:
Ahhh-ooo Ahhh-ooo
I told him I wasn’t the only one.
Then I told Edgar a joke. It was the very first joke I had heard.
After I told the joke Edgar asked me why it was funny.
I tried to explain why it was funny. I said it was funny because you didn’t expect the thing that the man was stealing to be the wheelbarrows and because it was the wheelbarrows that the man was stealing, it was funny. Put another way, the joke was funny because...
Eventually I gave up trying to explain the joke.
I said that it was just funny.
‘And at that moment I accepted you into the crazy sad community of persons,’ Edgar Malroy would say afterwards.
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‘How much do you want to bet?’ Edgar Malroy asked.
‘On what?’
‘That God exists.’
‘Huh?’
‘You believe in God. Well, how much?’
‘Money?’
‘What else is there?’
‘I don’t know, how much is he worth?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I suppose he is worth quite a bit?’
‘So how much will you give me?’
‘I don’t have any money.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Not a penny.’
Edgar seemed disappointed.
‘I don’t normally do this, you understand,’ he said, ‘but you can write me an IOU if you like. Now, how much? If you don’t want to bet you can’t really believe.’
‘Ten pounds?’
Edgar Malroy laughed.
He laughed like this:
Ahhh-ooo Ahhh-ooo
‘The other day an old lady came in here and bet ten times that amount that God had existed for at least five minutes. I’ve got her bet somewhere here. This morning a man came in and bet sixty pounds that God was good.’ Edgar Malroy thought for a moment then added, ‘I get a lot of those.’
‘So what happens then, after someone has made a bet?’
‘Not much really. They just get a badge and a receipt.’
‘You mean you just keep the money?’
‘Yep.’
‘So why do they do it?’
‘Because they’re all nuts. Now how much will you give me for God’s existence?’
10
‘You want to bet on dull mundane things like the horses you go to a normal betting shop. You want to bet on something metaphysical you come here. By metaphysical, I mean anything that refers to absolute reality, anything which cannot be proven true or false by the senses, anything religious.’
‘But how can anyone win?’
‘They can’t. No one ever wins. That’s the point, that’s the beauty of the system.’
‘Suppose you wanted to bet that the Absolute enters into itself. Now I don’t know for a moment what that means but I’ll write the words down and I’ll take your money off you if you believe it.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Why does someone come in here, slap money on the table, and bet that the Holy Trinity is true? Because he is a nut.’
‘But why do you take his money?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? To make him realise he is a nut. To show him just how irrational he is, believing in things that cannot be known. I’m in the business of showing the absurdity of all metaphysical utterances. Now how much will you give me for God?’
I gave Edgar £500,000, or rather he wrote out for me an IOU for that amount.
He never forgot or forgave. Years later he’d bring up the matter at the most inappropriate times.
I never lived it down.
Edgar Malroy fell helplessly in love sixty seconds after I bet £500,000 that God existed.
Edgar was the closest friend I ever had on Earth.
11
The exact number of Ding Dong 7s produced in secret factories in the deserts of Syria by Jehovah’s Witnesses was never known, although estimates range from twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand. They were moved by train from Au Raggah along the Euphrates River to the port of Latakia and from there shipped all over the world during 2022, along with 10,000 tons of dried apricots, 60,000 tons of raisins, 4,000 tons of pistachios and 8,000 tons of shelled almonds.
The Ding Dong 7s were designed to act like humans in every way with two large exceptions; they couldn’t smile and couldn’t bend their legs.
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Almonds and pistachios, Edgar Malroy told me once, were the only nuts to be mentioned in the Bible. I told him this was perfectly possible because the pistachio originated from Persia and Syria and the almond was the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nut in the world.
We talked about food often.
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Ding Dong 7s couldn’t bend their legs.
They couldn’t walk in fact.
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Many years later, during the final stages of the Holy War, Edgar Malroy told me how his metaphysical betting business had begun.
He had just been kicked out of Tewkesbury University, had absolutely no money and ended up just wandering about London eating food out of dustbins and things. Then, one Sunday, he passed a church on Pancras Road. Why he went in he couldn’t remember; perhaps it was to take a piss. Anyway Edgar Malroy went in and ended up sitting at the back. There were thirty people there. A good turn-out for those days. The priest was shouting gently about the Son of God having risen from the dead. Quite without thinking Edgar raised his hand and asked a question. He said, ‘How much?’ Everyone turned around.
The priest was so flustered he read out the same part of his sermon again. When he got to the bit about the Son of God being raised from the dead, Edgar asked his question again. ‘How much?’ Everyone turned round again.
The priest shook violently for a moment, looked at the floor of the pulpit then looked Edgar straight in the eye.
‘W-what do you mean?’
‘You believe that the Son of God rose from the dead?’ Edgar said.
‘Yes,’ said the priest, pushing his glasses up his nose.
‘Well, all I’m asking is this: how much? How much are you willing to bet that this is so?’ Edgar asked.
The priest sank down into his pulpit. He looked to his left and seemed to be about to speak, then stopped himself. Three times he seemed about to speak but held back at the last minute. The congregation kept turning from the priest in the pulpit to Edgar in the back row.