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
