The year is 2008. Humankind is a generally happy race, with flashes of British madness evident on the occasional Tuesday morning. The weather is controlled by the Met Office, but the weather reporters continue to report it incorrectly.

We have computers, but they remain unconnected. Tim Berners-Lee never existed, so I don’t know how I’m aware of his name (slipped up there). Telephones remain the primary source of communication, but SMS texting on mobile phones is becoming increasingly more popular. Scarily, SMS is now part of the European Teaching Curriculum, as is how to make the perfect beef stroganoff. As a result, beef stroganoff is our national dish, and the spelling has been reduced to bf strgnf to coincide with the new Oxford SMS Dictionary.

Our main mode of transport is wheeled horses, which was the natural upgrade from horse and cart. Top speed is around 200mph, as all horses are powered on hydrogen power stations inserted into their hooves. I don’t quite know why we still bother with the whole horse thing, but I guess it’s what people are used to.

The government has been privatised, and is now joint-owned by Google and Coca Cola, resulting in ridiculous amounts of advertising placements, and a stark increase in the colour red. Google expanded their AdWords campaign from the internet to include people’s foreheads. There is an upside – it’s only people with criminal records who are eligible to have AdWord boards fused to their heads.

Around the same time the government became privatised, all prisons were demolished and replaced with massive Coca Cola bottles to hold the prisoners. When somebody commits a serious crime (dropping Coke bottles, saying bad things about Google), the offender is airlifted to the top of the bottle and dropped in. As a result, crime has dropped by 50%.

As a final blow to a previously civilised human race, the CEOs of Coca Cola and Google decided to change everybody’s surname to Borg, citing a childhood love of Star Trek as the reason. Nobody argued.

Craig Borg, reporting from an alternate reality Britain.

Search

Who am I?

I'm Craig Burgess. I'm a graphic designer. I like writing (obviously), and I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. I also take a keen interest in photography, even though I take a lot of pictures of my thumbs and fingers.

Stuff I Like

The Last
Leck My Arse
A Word In Your Ear
...and this Republic is in Panic.
Darfuria
RewiredMind

Maybe you've come too far down the page and you'd like a quick way to go back to the top. Maybe you'd like to know who has created this blog. In that case, it's Craig Burgess. If you've come here to find out what powers this website, then that's Textpattern. And last but not least, it's hosted by the kind chaps at Bionic Hosting.