Beyond An Accidental Shoreline (1/4) By Christopher Skolik

(1/4), (2/4), (3/4), (4/4).

1. A Start Dennison had covered some disturbing assignments in his time; Neo-psychopathology and its preoccupations concerning future psychological abnormality. Contagious mental illness and media psychosis, the way suicide or spree killing spread thru lines of communication. Mutant-criminology and the adaptation of deviancy in our strange new psychological landscape.

The Death Camp Theme Park where those inclined (and wealthy enough) could play out roles against a backdrop of genocide and atrocity (like the brochure says 'The perfect antidote to 21st century ennui.'). 'Jack Mishap' a.k.a. Jasper Smith, a serial killer with a penchant for the spectacular. Suggested death toll runs into thousands, he didn't even notice if less than 50 died in one of his 'artistic disasters'. In his wake commuter trains twist together like mating slugs, oil rigs explode scorching the darkness white hot, the sea into boiling tar. Planes clatter out of the sky in a shriek of burning jet fuel.

Dennison had become a specialist in the ragged edges of a future that was taking shape around us, coalescing like the onset of psychosis.

2. Interview Scenario MacGregor sat at his desk, office minimal, to the point of looking unoccupied. It had a temporary spectral quality, as if with the minimum of difficulty it could be wiped away and reassembled somewhere else, which was kind of appropriate as the Government department that MacGregor worked for existed in the grey zone between the Department of Health and the Home Office, between the present and the future, and maybe even between fact and fiction... MacGregor's manner was chilly, clinical even, and yet he was as oily as a career politician.

There was something coldly insinuating in him, just behind the eyes. Dennison could imagine him not exactly earning, but rather slithering into his position. MacGregor smiled, the effect was not wholly pleasing; "We had to find a solution to this most pressing of social problems and as it lies somewhere between criminality and sickness we had to be rather, shall we say inventive?"

'No shit' Dennison thought. Beyond the smudged, filthy window a helicopter was being prepped for take off. "But isn't it fair to say that as a condition there can be few things that are more likely to cause folks to form a lynch mob?" "Yes, it strikes at the most basic, raw human feelings, and because we believe it incurable we have, of necessity had to become radical. This is the best solution to a very difficult problem. People will see this, eventually. There is also some suggestion that it has an infectious component, and so to stop the spread of the disease we have decided on a policy of isolation.

Continued... Next Page (2/4)

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