Neverending

10

I've been driving for so long and in such a heightened state for panic, that it starts to feel normal. I read somewhere once that the brain can't help but adapt. That adaptation helps us to endure all sorts of evolutionary difficulties and what I imagine, back in the day, was an ever-changing set of circumstances. One minute you're a shoulder-height cave-boy, play fighting with your neighbour. The next, a sabre-toothed tiger eats said neighbour and your whole family have to up sticks and walk for weeks, barefoot, across all manner of terrain to safer climes. All hell breaks loose with no warning and floods your cave and those little plants your Dad had been growing that tasted so good. There's no warning system there – just wake up, go about your day and – boom – someone's changed the game.

The thing is, we had a warning system. We had several. And we could all see it coming from miles away. This thing, this... whatever this is... you'd have had to have been a flippant, ludicrously optimistic idiot to have not known what was happening. There were many who took things as seriously as they deserved but not enough. Not nearly enough. And those that did, they were never the ones with any real influence. I almost cringe when I hear people talking about power but I guess that's what it is. The sorts of people who are in a position to change things – well, they're the sort of people that fight, bribe and whore themselves to the illusory top. They're not the sort of people I'd trust in a queue for the bar, never mind to run the State. But that's what we got. I'm not even sure if I can omit Juliette's dad amongst the sorry, predictable detritus that is City Hall. I mean, sure, he's always been reasonably nice to me (though I always, one hundred percent all of the time, got the impression that he'd really, really rather his daughter never date me. Or any man, so I don't necessarily think it was personal). But Mr Ranger never quite manages to give the impression of sincerity and for that reason, I can't help but group him in with the rest of the organisation that decide pretty much how we citizens  live our lives. And sure, when I was eight, I started asking Donna the whys. Why do I have to study sixteen subjects until I'm twenty-one. Why do I have to spend two days a month in the dessert, digging holes. Why can I only date girls for 58 days. Donna was never able to give me  answers, or certainly never the ones I wanted to hear. I'm not sure many people know the reasoning behind these and the million other questions that make up so much of City Hall's mandate but what I do know is that it's exactly the same, planet-wide. That's right, folks, one mob to rule them all. Seb and I used to do the Gandalf voice, 'one mob to find them, one mob to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them'. We were never quite sure whether it went quite as far as the last bit but we were damn certain we'd seen the mob hunt people down and bring them in. And for less than you'd think.

I digress.

The point is, we knew this was coming. We knew things were bad. And what did we do? I'll tell you exactly what we did. We did what humans have been doing since the days when tigers did eat your mates. We felt sad, but we could only bear to have a little look at the mess that had been made. Then we chucked our pal in a hole, covered him in dirt, packed up our stuff and started fresh elsewhere. And we've been doing a sort of rinse-repeat version of this for the last ten thousand years.