REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES (8 page)

Since that day, now known as
the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre 2.0, pulse guns used to control
crowd disturbances must have their capacity to kill removed. That
is why we see water cannon being used in numbers here, today. The
government is very aware that it is being backed into a corner.
People are suffering in their daily lives. Job losses are at an
all-time high. Homes are being repossessed at an unforeseen rate as
families are being forced to prioritise their expenditure, buying
food in preference to paying their mortgages. Dozens of businesses
are failing daily, due to lack of both investment and customers.
The price of a loaf of bread seems to be increasing weekly. People
just can’t keep up with the effects of this global recession that
is crippling countries all over the world.

“
Scenes like this are
being repeated in cities
across the
globe
, from
London to Edinburgh. From New Orleans to New York to Chicago to Los
Angeles. From Sydney to Perth, From Kolkata to Delhi. From Rio de
Janeiro to Brasilia. No country is escaping the wrath of its
people. It’s almost as if the recession has been globally
orchestrated.

“The crowd is being forced
back – Peter, if we don’t move quick we’re going to be knocked over
and trampled – move towards the corner over there. There’s a side
street we can run down if necessary – but only if I say so! Keep
filming!”

The cameraman, Peter Kane, moved towards the relative safety
of the corner of the Square. Aarika tapped the shoulder of the
protester closest to her.

"
Sir?
Sir? Aarika Bhandari,
BT
V
News. Can you tell me why you’re here today?”

A man, in his early to
mid-twenties leaned in towards the camera.

“Why am I here? Why am I
here? ‘Cos this government has to go, that’s why! ‘Cos this
government is fucking up everything!”

“What’s the government doing
wrong, in your opinion?”

Aarika knew that this was a
stupid question, but she was paid to ask stupid
questions.

“Everything. Sky high
prices. Mass unemployment. Companies are dropping like flies. My
parents can hardly afford to feed the family. My dad’s lost his job
because of this recession. We’re living on my mum’s money now. I’m
a student. I’m studying to be an accountant. If it keeps on like
this nobody will have any money to be ‘accounted’.”

“What’s your name,
please?”

“Maurice. Maurice
Boone.”

How do you think this
recession can be stopped, Mr. Boone?”

“
I don’t know. Probably a
mass injection of cash into the economy. But where’s that going to
come from, eh? The people haven’t got it. We’re barely surviving as
it is.
If the government try to
raise money through higher taxes, it won't work. Joe Public hasn't
got the money.
”

“Are you married, Mr.
Boone?”

“Engaged. To
Karen.”

“And how do you see your
future, Mr. Boone?”

“Unless this shit gets
sorted out, I don’t really see a future. It’ll need something
really radical to sort this mess out.”

“Thank you Mr.
Boone.”

“You’re welcome.”

Maurice turned back to the
crowd and joined in their chants, his fist pumping the air. The
strains of ‘Out! Out! Out! Out! Sort this bloody mess out!’ were so
loud that even the starlings were giving Parliament Square a wide
birth that afternoon. Aarika and her cameraman walked briskly back
to their car. She chided Peter for his slowness, ignoring the fact
that he was carrying all the heavy equipment and all she was
carrying was the microphone.

“
Come on Peter, get a
move on. I don’t want to get caught up in things if the protest
turns ugly. Although I agree with the protesters, I
do
have a job and I mean to live to keep
it.”

6 a.m. Friday,
11th May, 2040

The final count was over. The
voting had closed seven hours earlier and, thanks to the new and
streamlined internet voting system, the whole of the United Kingdom
was waking up to a new government. The Order of
New
Perfectibilists had achieved a landslide victory. The
Conservative, Labour, and Social Democratic parties had all failed
to offer a meaningful solution to the recession and had allowed a
young whippersnapper of a party – the ONP – to sweep past them and
take control of the country. The voters had been swayed by the
rapid influx of investment that had suddenly been
created
in the name of the
ONP
,
not worrying about where the money had actually come from. All that
the voters knew was that it wasn’t coming out of their pockets,
that they were not expected to fund the investments. It certainly
wasn’t coming from the
previous
government; the
condition of the N
ational
H
ealth
S
ervice
was still worsening and public funding cuts were still
prevalent.

The
majority of the British public
thought that the official name of this new
party, The Order of New Perfectibilists, was a pretty stupid name
but if they could return some kind of decent living standards to
Britain then who cares what they call themselves. Anyway, the name
was always abbreviated to the
ONP
,
which rolled off the tongue quite nicely.

This scene was
being
repeated in most democratic countries around the
world. The recession was causing elections to be held even before
the incumbent government was due to go to the polls. Those
governments thought that they were looking for a vote of
confidence, an opportunity to extend their mandates by a number of
years, allowing them to
try to
rectify their
countries
'
problems. But, like a leopard stalking its
prey, the
ONP
had sprung out of nowhere and seduced
the electorates with remedial measures that not only would not take
money from the voters’ pockets but also offer them a way to
increase each voter’s income. T
he ONP,
unbeknown to the majority of people, was funded by the obscenely
wealthy Illuminati and had no need to demand funds from the general
public in order to achieve its political ambitions; it had
accumulated enormous wealth since the end of the eighteenth
century.

By 2050, the events of 2015,
the Revelation, were becoming a distant memory but the consequences
had been felt far and wide across the planet. Those that had once
been the strongest and most steadfast of the world’s
religions
were suffering,
with followers
abandoning them in their millions to ally themselves to a something
that wasn’t so much a religion as an ideology. With the existence
of reincarnation scientifically prove
n
,
millions of people doubted their religious faith. If their
scriptures, be they the Bible, the Quran, the Torah or any other
could have misled them about reincarnation, then what else had they
been told that was wrong? By 2025 large swathes of the world’s
population had become disciples of a new movement, known simply as
‘The Truth’. The Truth didn’t have any of the trappings of
conventional religions. It had no churches, it had no priests, and
it had no ceremonies. It didn’t require worship and blind obedience
to an invisible god. It didn’t overtly discriminate against
minorities on the basis of colour, race, gender, sexual preference,
disability, or age. It upheld some of the basic tenets of the old
religions. It prohibited murder and theft. For the most part, what
had previously been morally wrong was still morally wrong. But it
certainly didn’t promise a celestial paradise in the form of Heaven
or everlasting punishment in the fiery pits of Hell.

The dark side of The Truth
was that it was all part of the Illuminati strategy to create a New
World Order. The ultimate aim of the Illuminati was to create a
totalitarian world government, but the world’s religious and
political systems had been too diverse and the way that the planet
was politically divided into nation states had meant that the task
was too great…until now. Of course, there were many conspiracy
theories about how the Illuminati had already infiltrated
governments around the world, of how they controlled certain
elements of international governments, of how certain influential
members of those governments – including some world leaders - were
actually members of the Illuminati. Some of these theories were
true, some weren’t, but a true global government would not be
possible unless there were a global political party in power in
each country creating and enforcing essentially identical political
strategies in the various nation states. The Revelation of
reincarnation and the emergence of The Truth enabled such global
political reform.

The Illuminati, also known as
The Order, was coming out of the shadows but, of course, could not
do so with complete transparency. Fear and distrust were still the
prime sentiments felt whenever the name ‘Illuminati’ was mentioned.
Hence the creation of the
ONP
,
populated by Illuminati members and sympathizers, and after a slow
start – via local and regional elections – the party had burrowed
its way into the mindset of each country’s electorate by
providing solutions to problems that The Order
itself had created
. By the mid-2040s the ONP was in power in a large number
of first world countries. In some, such as the UK, the task had
been made simpler by an electoral system that allowed any party an
equal chance to grow and prosper. In the USA it was a much more
difficult task, their two party system not being conducive to
newcomers, but – with the assistance of Illuminati members already
ensconced in the American political system – these obstacles were
finally overcome. The first world was the first to fall, Northern
Europe and Oceana being less religious than many other countries.
Russia tried to resist but eventually the will of the people won
and demanded what they saw as a change for the better. The USA was
a harder nut to crack, but cracked it had been although there was
substantial resistance from the Bible belt states which required
constant containment. Many moderately religious countries had also
succumbed to ONP rule but there were significant areas of the world
that still needed to be conquered, most notably the Middle East,
and large parts of Africa and Asia. India was a strange case and
the Illuminati would have to reconsider its strategy if it were to
take power there; the Hindu majority had treated the proof of
reincarnation as justification for saying ‘I told you
so’
. Buddhists felt partly vindicated, as
they were correct about reincarnation existing but had been wrong
about reincarnation being able to cross species. Ex-Buddhists were
now able to dig the earth without the fear that the worm that they
accidentally sliced in two could have been an ancestor of
theirs.

Aaron Hunt
had died in his sleep in 2047, at the age of eighty-seven.
His wife Susan had passed away four years earlier than Aaron, and
he had never quite got over the loss. He had been forever thankful
for her love and her patience with him; many wives would have
thought their husbands crazy to spend their lives trying to prove
such a concept as reincarnation. But Susan wasn’t ‘many wives’. She
knew how dedicated Aaron was to his research and had supported him
all the way. She may have had reservations herself as to whether it
was worthwhile but it made him happy and this, in turn, made her
happy. Some may have thought that Aaron was a bumbling lunatic
looking for an imaginary pot of gold at the end of an invisible
rainbow, but Susan knew that dreams were important. So what if he
had never actually discovered by himself that there was life after
death, that reincarnation was more than a fanciful wish. Aaron had
been instrumental, a major player in The Revelation. Those who had
scoffed at his research, at his conviction that he was right, had
been forced to eat humble pie.

The car door slid back silently
along its tracks and Thomas McCann eased himself out of the
vehicle. It was bitterly cold outside and there was a thin layer of
snow on the ground. Fortunately the snow had stopped, but it still
made walking treacherous, especially for Thomas. He was wrapped up
warm in a thick grey overcoat, a crimson scarf coiled around his
neck,
with thermal
gloves
to keep his hands warm.
Under his
left
arm
he
carried a brown briefcase, while his right hand
gripped the top of the cane that he had been using ever since his
legs had ceased to be able to support his weight unaided. The
muscle wastage caused by the onset of Muscular Dystrophy wasn’t
abating and Thomas didn’t know how much longer he would be able to
walk with just the help of a stick. A parking valet took his car
keys from him with a welcoming smile. The valet didn’t know who
exactly Thomas McCall was, but he could tell that he was a very
important man. He only had to take one look at his car; these new
Audi Executive models didn’t come cheap.