2023: A Trilogy

A book by the KLF. ISBN:0571338089

Refs: Google, Apple Computer, Facebook, Amazon, WikiLeaks, BitCoin, Robert Anton Wilson

Excerpts

In the Spring of 2013, the undertakers Cauty & Drummond were on a tour of the Western Isles of Scotland. They were hoping to find and purchase the perfect plot of land to start work on the building of their long-promised pyramid – The Great Pyramid of the North.

they had also made a somewhat rash promise to all the families who had entrusted them with the funeral rites of their nearest and dearest, the ‘rash promise’ being they would use some of the ashes of the said ‘nearest and dearest’ in the making of a brick, and each of these bricks would then be part of a pyramid

It was while staying at Jura’s one hotel that they came across a strange-looking book on the bookshelf in the bar

The book was titled Back in the USSR and authored by someone using the name of ‘Gimpo’.

Back in the USSR was the memoir of a young woman who had been a nurse in the Falklands War in 1982

Gimpo ended up in Kiev in what was then the Soviet state of the Ukraine. Here she met up with two young women named Tat’jana and Kristina, who were to have a profound influence on her.

According to Back in the USSR, Tat’jana and Kristina went under numerous aliases, the most widely used being The KLF

They also learnt: How Tat’jana and Kristina ended up being the composers of the epoch-defining acid opera Turn Up the Strobe.

How Turn Up the Strobe did not need Tat’jana and Kristina, as in The KLF, to actually be there for it to be staged

How Turn Up the Strobe was performed hundreds of times in all sorts of unlikely venues

Also, in Back in the USSR it was claimed that Tat’jana and Kristina had been heavily influenced by a book called Двадцять Двадцять Mри! Mрилогія. This book had been originally written in English as The Twenty Twenty-Three! Trilogy, by someone calling themselves ‘George Orwell’. But this George Orwell was in turn just the pen name for a Roberta Antonia Wilson.

Tat’jana and Kristina stopped everything else they were doing in their lives and started calling themselves The Ice Cream Men (The ICMs) and then alternatively The KLF

And now, thirty-three years after it was written, it is being published for the first time in English

As for the current whereabouts of Tat’jana and Kristina, we have no idea. According to Back in the USSR, they were last seen disappearing into the depths of the Black Sea in their decommissioned Project 865 Piranha submarine. This supposed disappearance happened on 23 August 1994. Rumour on the internet has it that they would not reappear for another 23 years.

BOOK ONE The Blaster in the Pyramid

1: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?

‘The history of the world is the history of the rivalry between five competing brands.’ Stevie Dobbs, AppleTree

Winnie Smith, her Levi’s slung low and her T-shirt freshly unbranded, strides through the gates of Victory Mansions

She notes the retro fad for real fly-posters has made it to her part of town

Fernando Pó, the last nation state on Earth, is in negotiations with AppleTree to allow AppleTree to have the controlling share in their soon-to-be former nation

was once part of Equatorial Guinea, before Equatorial Guinea did their lucrative deal with WikiTube. But WikiTube decided Fernando Pó had no value to them

She then notices something else. She knows instinctively it is not another of those retro posters the Big Five have been using. This poster is crudely made

Just the year 2023 in large block numerals, followed by the question, ‘WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?’ Just black ink on cheap white paper

We now need to slip back a few years to the year 2011, and to the height of the Occupy Movement

He (we will leave his name out of this for the time being) believes what they are doing could bring about the complete collapse of the crooked and corrupt financial institutions of the world. He is right.

*By the Summer of 2013 the worldwide Occupy Movement has a physical stranglehold on all the global financial centres, at the same time as having hacked all of their computer systems. The subsequent financial crash is complete. *

AmaZaba, already the world’s largest retailer, decide to step in

Before the 2013 crash, AmaZaba were already considering a move into using Bitcoins as their main trading currency

it is no surprise the Occupy Movement adopts the Bitcoin wholesale as a way of trading internationally among themselves

AmaZaba make a deal with the Occupy Movement to run the world’s finances, using Bitcoins as the global currency. The first thing that is done is to change the name of the currency from Bitcoins to ZitCoins

By the end of 2013 AmaZaba, with the help of Occupy, have not only saved the world economy, they are the only online retailer any of us can trust

The first state to go completely bottom up in late 2013 is Greece. The newly merged WikiTube sneak in while AmaZaba are still popping the corks at their wedding breakfast and buy Greece off the EU, for a fraction of its value

There is soon a queue of nation states lining up to be willingly bought by one of the new emerging Big Five. GoogleByte, WikiTube, AmaZaba, FaceLife and AppleTree’s time has arrived.

Fast-forward again

Winnie has been on FaceLife since her twelfth birthday in 2006. Before that she was on MyFace

the Big Five have solved most of the world’s problems in less than a generation

now ISIS are just a bunch of blokes running the best channels on WikiTube

What happened is that when WikiTube saw how many hits ISIS were getting on their old YouTube set-up, they made them an offer they could not refuse

She also buys a 1950s Parker fountain pen

What she wants to do is write a diary, like Adrian Mole or even Anne Frank. A private diary in her own handwriting that is never Viewed, Liked or Shared. It can be her version of her life. The trouble with FaceLife is you always have to tell the truth because if you don’t, a million people tell you you’re lying, and the Likes start to dry up. But in your private diary you can say what you want and no one ever knows

today she writes her full name – ‘Winifred Lucie Atwell Smith’ – and today’s date – ‘23 April 2023’ – before taking her first sip

She felt a rush of lust pass through her body. But this was followed almost immediately by a surge of anger

Winnie succeeded in transferring the hatred she once had for her father to the dark-haired young man she saw across the street

This rush of hatred towards a man whose face she had not seen and whom she had never met felt real

She did not know she could still feel like this. Now she has everything she could ever want. Now world peace is guaranteed. Now we no longer have the need for prisons. Now we have harnessed the power of the sun, meaning there is no need to worry about greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere and us running out of fossil fuels and whether the ozone layer has been patched up. Now there is enough food for everyone. Now you can practise whatever religion you want, or none at all. Now the existence of God can be proved and disproved in equal measure, and all are agreed with the findings

The only trouble is that this opening up to negative thinking, which her seven years of therapy has all but sorted, reminds her of another of her previous boyfriends

He was one of those super-hackers. His name was Julian Assange

Between the years 2018 and 2020 WikiTube took over all the schools in the world, making free schooling available for everyone between the ages of four and twenty-four at the now rebranded WikiCampus

Winnie loathes Assange; she thinks he is a total fraud. It was her relationship with him that her seven years in therapy dwells upon most

Winnie’s eyes refocus on the page in the jotter in front of her. She realises that while she has been thinking about the man’s torso from yesterday with a mixture of lust and loathing, she has also been writing, as though by automatic action. In huge letters across the page she has written the following five lines, over and over again in large capitals: I HATE GOOGLEBYTE I HATE WIKITUBE I HATE AMAZABA I HATE FACELIFE I HATE APPLETREE

Dear Diary, So I have finished the first chapter of this book. Writing about Winnie starting a diary made me think that I should do the same. The pen name I’m using is George Orwell

iJaz is AppleTree’s news and current affairs channel. It was Al Jazeera until AppleTree bought out the Qatar-based company back in 2018

LabelFree is the name Fair Trade used to rebrand themselves once all trade became fair. Within weeks of Fair Trade rebranding to LabelFree, numerous major clothing brands started to adopt the LabelFree logo. This, of course, does not stop anyone with any awareness knowing exactly what brand the particular article of clothing or accessory is that is sporting a LabelFree logo