Animal Welfare
What happens to the modern heretic who says it doesn’t matter how your children live or die? If she’s a woman, it seemed to Knut, she ought hire private security the minute the digital worshipping begins. ‘But you’re a man,’ said Free, ‘so just lay back and bask.’
On the pig farm in Berkshire, Knut set off on his daily rounds of the furthest pens. It was the only way to escape the nauseating adulation in the farmhouse. One of the security guards stepped forward from the perimeter fence to wave with his automatic. Knut saluted back. It wasn’t the day he had to address them, was it? Seemed like only yesterday he’d stood before them in the yoga studio and gave a speech he made up on the spot.
At his favourite pigpen, the new girl lay in wait.
‘Namaste,’ she said. ‘I hope I’m not bothering you, and I know you want us to work things out for ourselves, but I’m desperate to learn about the philosophy of pigs.’
This arrested him for a moment. The other beautiful people were so invested in the particularity of themselves they really thought the pig book, as they called it, was about what those pigs did on that specific farm. Yet they readily extrapolated from spurious modern sources and made everything else, including him, into symbols. There was too much he didn’t understand.
Knut said, ‘Uh, four legs good, two legs… Yes, you have to be on all fours as much as possible.’ The new girl squealed with delight. Despairing again, he was helpless in the face of her advances. They frolicked in the mud, which drew the farmhouse crowd from their morning tantras up the hill to the pens, where the imitators joined him and the girl in the squelch.
Now half the group was down with a mysterious infection and the shamans were working overtime to cure everybody. But not Knut. He was immune to all the trouble he caused. To alleviate his self-loathing, he invented ever more preposterous theories so he could hate his followers more.
‘I’m super pissed off about this, Free,’ said Anemone.
‘I’m sorry, babe.’
‘But are you though? I didn’t see you volunteering for the reverse colonic. I feel like shit. Can’t you get me some antibiotics?’
‘You’ve got to be seen as one of them, you can’t be cured when no one else is.’
‘Come on, I’m in agony down there.’
‘What about trying Django from Camberwell?’
‘I’ve done that. His mushroom paste worked for a while, but only because I was off my tits.’
When the source of the infection was blamed on his favourite pigs, Knut ordered the whole pen to be slaughtered for a feast. He hoped to disgust the beautiful rich people, who used to congregate in the floating cities when the waters had been safe, so that they’d leave the farm. Then he could go back to rolling around with the pigs in peace. That would be nice. If he could wallow all day in soft mud and rub his nose against a pig’s lovely snout, then the malevolent ideas would go away. No need for them. But the mass slaughter didn’t work either. All but two of his followers confessed how much they missed bacon – and did they have permission to set up an artisan smokehouse?
‘Might as well let them,’ said Free. ‘It’ll keep them here longer.’
‘I don’t want them to stay!’ Knut wailed.
‘They’ve got money.’
‘But how much do we need?’
‘Do you know who their parents are?’
‘Yes,’ said Knut. ‘The people I despise the most.’
‘And that’s why every secret service of note has a file on you.’
‘Has it?’ He felt a little cheered. ‘Have they really? America?’
‘Yes. Well, AlphaOmega. Same thing. You can ask Nathan about it.’
‘Russia?’
‘Daria will tell you.’
‘Saudi?’
‘Yep.’
‘Vatican City?’
‘Ok, Knut, I haven’t got time to list countries. If you don’t want to do a ceremony for this announcement, leave it to me. How about some new prophecies for tomorrow night?’
Knut had never got to the bottom of whether Free was Free’s real name or if it was self-inflicted. Or if indeed it was Free and not Three, as the guy’s poor pronunciation suggested – he was something of an anomaly at the farm – and which of these, Free or Three, was the more sinister, given the guy’s church upbringing, the only company that still admitted those without means. But that raised too many questions and Knut was trying not to do that anymore.
‘All right, I’ll see.’
He gave himself up for the servicing. His early conditioning had trained him not to disappoint. Girls and boys – they were barely adults – wanted to give themselves in thanks. When Sukarah first brought him to the pig farm she’d inherited, he was content to oblige. But, once, when he’d opened his eyes and saw the girl concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice his horrified look, he realised he was being serviced.
He’d accidentally started a cult and now he was trapped. ‘It’s a movement,’ said Free, but Knut knew a closed circuit when he saw one. He’d grown up in the Children of the Light on a rocky island in Norway’s far north, where he should have stayed. He was said to resemble Nansen, the explorer, for the intensity of his jackdaw eyes. The mystical north was very alluring to the disillusioned youth of England, who’d lost their own far north when the new cod wars led to independence from what their parents called the ‘passenger regions’.
‘Why didn’t you stop him slaughtering those pigs?’ Free asked. ‘I can’t watch him all the time.’
‘It’s all right for you, dashing off to the City with your special visa,’ Anemone said, ‘but I’m stuck here with these morons. Should I have glued myself to a pig? You’re the one who told Knut to agree to the smokehouse.’
‘What else could I do? We lost the vegan crowdfunding after some idiot posted those photos of the feast, so I had to think of something for another income stream. But actually I think it’s an opportunity. If Sukarah is into the idea, then we can refocus the whole farm around the smokehouse and it gives us something specific to build the spiritual values on, which then become the heart of the business strategy. Getting our registration will be much quicker and easier.’
‘Then why did you tell the other donors we had a new variant of swine flu?’ Anemone asked.
‘I’m sorry. Bad timing. Nathan messaged me about the slaughter as I was going into a meeting about our application, and I just fired it off. I didn’t know about the feast until afterwards. So…the other thing is, we’ve got the animal welfare inspectors coming tomorrow. Can you keep Knut out of the way?’
‘What if the universe is an organic being, just as we are?’ Knut said that evening, at the seminar timed to coincide with the phase of the moon that was said to draw seedlings from the earth. The new girl, Anemone, grinned in the front row. She was sitting bolt upright while the others found their way into each other’s loose clothing in a way that would have aroused him, if he hadn’t been worrying about whether he was truly worshipped, or if he’d just become the latest drug. A sickening despair now gripped him when he woke in the night. Would the new girl insist on watching him sleep? What would she think about his despair?
‘What if our universe is one universe creature among many?’ he continued. ‘What if we are to the universe what microbes in our gut are to us? We can never know what’s outside the universe that contains us because when we die we’re still contained. Unless there’s some part of us that, like a microbe, is excreted into some other place?’
It felt so good to speak like this, saying whatever came into his head at the moment of its appearing. This was true freedom – from himself. It frightened him how many ideas he had. He’d only started writing them down as a way to quieten his head. Throughout his life he’d tried to dope himself in the usual ways, but for days afterwards his mind would race and the ideas would come in legions. They appeared in words, in pictures, in notes and beats; they moved parts of his body when he didn’t want to be moved. He couldn’t suppress them so he had to channel them through, like malevolent spirits, to be rid of them. He drew, he painted. He played all the instruments he knew and he sang, but that only woke up more of the ideas. Writing helped, as long as he didn’t use a pencil on paper, as when a boy he’d been forced to write his prophecies alongside the other children.
If it had been the world of his youth he could have got himself sectioned. But the authorities didn’t do that anymore. The frequent kidnap and ransom of wives and children were the price of the nation’s liberty, and those who could barricade themselves into their homes and closed communities did so. The commercial incarceration sector had collapsed since independence, and security was the career of choice for those who couldn’t get into one of the private religions. New games had evolved among the elites to prevent their children’s conscription into the means-tested national service that patrolled the new borders and fought the ideological wars.
Twice Knut had run away from the pig farm, but the disciples had found him so quickly he hadn’t the heart to try again. The first time he’d felt like a fugitive and he loved it. He was alive, as he hadn’t been since he ran away from his parents and the Children of the Light. Only then had he discovered that his childhood prophecies had preceded him. The extent of his celebrity was terrifying. He couldn’t go near a connected device for fear of his squeaky voice. The look in his own eyes scared him. He didn’t even have a coherent system of beliefs; he didn’t need one. Coherence was an illusion, created by people to make themselves feel safe. The chaotic pig farm was his sanctuary.
Free spent the morning sweeping the cobbled yard and hosing away the slurry that collected in the channel around the subsiding farmhouse. Knut wandered in and out of the house and outbuildings, watching. His mood lightened as Free became more panicked about the animal welfare inspection. Already that morning there’d been a comedy tussle over Django’s sculpture. Free had taken it upon himself to remove from the front yard the rusted and bent pieces of obsolete vehicles that Django said he was welding into a monument. Knut was glad to see this go. He didn’t agree with the essence Django had reduced him to by rendering him in the abstract. The sculpture made him feel that he wasn’t in full possession of his body. It was too stark a reminder of how easily he could be removed from his organic form, then chipped and rehoused in Django’s monstrosity.
Around midday Free went to check the pigpens that were to be inspected. Knut sent a message through the air to his pig friends to cast off their green berets and unravel the ribbons from their tails, or whatever it was Free had been doing up there all night. Anemone was instructing the group to stay indoors and away from the windows. But then someone spotted a car and van proceeding up the track from the main road, and a bedraggled crowd in ethnic prints gathered where Django’s sculpture had been. Anemone tried to usher inside the people who were most obviously still tripping, but they were naked and slippery and despite her determined grappling they kept collapsing to the ground in hysterical laughter. As the inspectors’ vehicles pulled up, the capoeira group that had been practising in the barn danced into the yard. Knut couldn’t have been more delighted to watch the inspectors tentatively step out of their vehicles to the sound of the berimbau, drum and cowbell, as the capoeiristas assembled into a roda and began to cartwheel, kick and ginga.
‘Good morning,’ Knut said brightly to the inspectors. ‘Or is it the afternoon? As you can see, conventional measures of time are irrelevant here. We live by natural rhythms. Unfortunately, one man’s nature is another man’s abomination. And what does nature mean when so many of us have been modified. What do you think?’
The eldest of the three inspectors scowled. The middle one stared blankly, while the youngest one smiled shyly at Knut.
‘Well, quite,’ said Knut. ‘Shall I show you –?’
‘I’ll take it from here.’ Anemone rushed over. One side of her face was shiny from the coconut oil that eased the naked people through their unsupervised ayahuasca trip. The smart blue blouse she’d put on for the occasion was dotted with greasy fingerprints.
‘And you are?’ asked the scowling inspector.
‘Anemone.’ She held out her lubricated hand.
The inspector ignored it. ‘An-en-ome. I see. Do you all have these sorts of names?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. And it’s not “An enemy”. It’s Anemone.’
‘They sound the same to me.’
‘Well, they’re not.’
‘Is it like the flower, or the marine animal with tentacles?’ the youngest inspector asked. Anemone nodded.
‘Which one are you?’
‘The flower, of course.’
‘Let’s see what the inspection of the pigs tells us,’ said the inspector, and Anemone frowned.
Knut said, ‘Is man’s supposed dominion over the earth and all its creatures not just a form of narcissism but at the species level?’
‘What a fascinating idea.’ Anemone gave him a look that suggested this visionary might be better dead. ‘Knut, why don’t you find somewhere quiet to think, so you can talk to us about it tonight. The inspection will be terribly boring–’ The inspector glared at her. ‘Absolutely critical, of course. But not for you to trouble yourself with. I’ll accompany the inspectors to the pens, and Free will show them around.’
Knut was being sidelined, he saw it plainly. ‘No, I’ll come. I think better while I walk.’
On the march up the hill to the pens, Free and Anemone beguiled the inspectors with the false certainties of their management talk. Why hadn’t Knut noticed this bamboozling tactic before? Even the scowling inspector was laughing at Anemone’s jokes about the arrival farce, though he was still scowling. Perhaps that was just his resting face. What else was going on under the surface?
As they arrived at the pens, the scowling inspector said, ‘Well, I’m not often surprised, but this is quite something.’
Free nudged Anemone behind the inspector’s back and she beamed.
Hanging back with the youngest inspector, who was carrying a bulky satchel, Knut said glumly, ‘It was my idea to design the pens as play parks and put in lots of puzzles, knowing how intelligent pigs are.’
The bagman’s face lit up. ‘You should tell my boss that.’
‘What’s the point? Those two will only shut me out.’
‘Then I’ll tell him.’ The bagman went over to interrupt Free and repeated what Knut had said.
The inspector beckoned Knut. ‘Your approach is very innovative, I commend you. I have to admit, I jumped at the chance to do this inspection, it’s so rare to see intelligent animals being farmed these days. And to see the very best practice being followed here, it’s a real pleasure.’
‘Oh, I haven’t read any of the guidelines,’ Knut said.
‘Really? So, you’ve done all this instinctively?’
‘Yes, I imagined what I’d want if I were a pig, and then it was easy.’
‘And that’s why you’re the visionary, Knut, and the rest of us,’ – the bagman looked at Free and Anemone – ‘are the humble servants.’
‘Don’t get carried away, Martin.’
Back at the farmhouse, the capoeira had devolved, as everything always devolved. It wasn’t as if Knut wanted to lead the group on a spiritual expedition towards a peak of enlightenment, but still. Why did everything have to end in flirtatious wrestling matches then open-air sex, as if they were live-streaming to alien voyeurs who watched from beyond the shredded atmosphere?
The elder inspectors shook hands with Free and Anemone, waved at Knut and went to their vehicles. Martin, the assistant, dropped his satchel to the ground and said, ‘Sorry, chaps, but I’m staying.’
‘But I thought we passed?’ Free said.
‘You did.’ The scowling inspector discovered new ways to fold his face. ‘Martin, think very carefully about what you’re about to do.’
‘I’ve thought about nothing else for months,’ Martin said.
‘Mar-tin…’
‘I want to stay as part of the group. I want to join–’
‘You can’t,’ Free interrupted. ‘There’s the application process, I’m afraid. But it’s all online. It’s open to anyone.’
This time Knut didn’t miss the manoeuvre. Martin was unfashionably short, and, yes, nice in his own way, but bland and unattractive. Evidently, he’d been born into a family that couldn’t afford the usual upgrades. For all Knut’s parents’ faults, and they were countless, they’d had enough sense to do this for him. His perfection was the reason they’d been admitted into the Children of the Light. They owed him everything.
‘I’ve applied seventeen times,’ said Martin. ‘But I never heard back.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ – but Free didn’t look sorry – ‘that’s just the application process for the application process. Knut’s very selective.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Knut said. ‘The only I believe in is chance. Humans believe they’re the centre of everything, when the truth is–’
‘Yes, all right. But–’
‘Seeing as you’re already here, Martin,’ said Knut, ready for mischief again, ‘you might as well stay.’
‘Why can we not feel our own existence without needing another human to recognise it?’ Knut said. Martin grinned from the front row. Knut grinned back. ‘Why are we told that, like pigs, we’re social creatures at heart, then have sharing and waiting our turn drilled into us when young? There must be some reinforcement going on here. What do they not want us to discover for ourselves?’
‘Intriguing lecture,’ Nathan said later, when he asked for a private word with Knut and Free. ‘Because the back doors to the systems have already been built in. I’d like to be naive enough to believe it was haste or negligence, however–’
‘No one wants to be at a disadvantage when the race for ultimate power starts,’ said Free.
‘Quite possibly. With the flick of a moral switch–’
‘Think what we could do.’
‘Why is everyone so desperate to follow?’ Knut was exasperated. He wanted to hang out with Martin – he hated these private words of Nathan’s – and he’d been up all night being serviced then had to write prophecies for the relief, but this time it hadn’t worked. Why hadn’t his parents thought about what it would be like to live as the product of a wild experiment? ‘Is everybody so afraid of their freedom that they must create a prison to be free of it?’
‘Why don’t you find somewhere quiet to write about it?’ said Free. ‘We’ll talk about it at the session tomorrow.’
How Knut hated to talk. It transported you away from where you happily were with your pigs, and into speculation, remembrance or anxiety. ‘Do what you like, I’ll be off nurturing my sympathy for the genocidal despot.’
Free read out the prophecies the next evening while Knut skulked in the corridor with Martin, both in their new pigskin slippers.
‘Knut challenges us,’ Free said to his audience, ‘to ask ourselves: Is it the terror of scarcity that keeps people compliant with social norms? If we’re focused on human needs and everything else exists only to serve the human project, material scarcity feels very real. How many of your ancestors have been gathering resources to themselves bit by bit over the centuries? Controlling access. Harvesting fear and shame – all this aggregated self-consciousness, that you can never be good, never be pure, never be right. The shaming, says Knut, is to keep you small and compliant. It’s how a parent controls a child.’
‘See,’ Knut whispered to Martin. ‘He’s given it his own spin. That’s not what I wrote at all. It might be what I meant, I don’t know. But he’s diverging from my views.’
‘Let me investigate a little,’ said Martin. ‘Nobody expects the inquisition.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re too busy taking themselves seriously.’
A new slogan for the group emerged: Join Them to Beat Them. Knut wasn’t invited to give this one his benediction. Free had been running things for too long now.
‘We’ve got to make Knut’s proclamations into a coherent system of beliefs,’ Free said to Anemone. ‘Enough for the smokehouse business case and strategy.’
‘But they’re so random,’ she said.
‘They’ll be connected somehow because they’re connected in him. Find out what he genuinely believes, what he’s not saying. Then you’ll be able make enough sense of it all to bind it together.’
‘How am I going to do that with his little friend around? They’re inseparable. He hasn’t asked me to sleep with him once since the inspection.’
‘Then use Martin as a champion. You’re the management consultant, Nemi, you know how to do this. Martin works for a regulatory body, he’ll see the sense of it even if Knut doesn’t. No one has to believe it, we just need to get the registration as a private religion. Then we can do what we like with Knut. Every company moves on from its founder once they’re gone. I’m in the ballot for the next round of conscriptions, so I have to make this work, ok?’
‘Yes, I do know,’ Anemone said. ‘Of course I don’t want you conscripted. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve only got a year left on my exemption. It’s not enough time to start again somewhere else, it’d take me that long to find a position. I’ll find a way with Knut.’
‘If the machinery for– What can we call it?’ Martin said to Nathan. ‘Human husbandry, let’s say. If it’s already in place, then what’s to stop it happening?’
‘The flick of a few moral switches in the major governments,’ Nathan replied.
‘Oh dear.’
‘So, do you want me to set it up?’
‘People don’t know what to do with their creations,’ said Knut. ‘They let their creations control them. They can’t be trusted, they’re far better at destroying.’
‘Yes, true. But do you want me to set it up? Come on, let’s do it. Let’s make “Join Them to Beat Them” actually happen.’
‘What did Free and Anemone say?’ Martin asked.
‘Free doesn’t get it,’ Nathan replied. Free had said, ‘You want us to merge with the big religions that regularly perjure themselves before grand juries?’
‘That’s my dad you’re talking about,’ Nathan had replied.
‘Which is what I’m worried about. Didn’t he recently win one of those tenders to govern the latest alliance of countries that’s too poor to fend off its neighbours?’
‘He didn’t exactly win, the alliance asked him to run the tendering. But, yes,’ – Nathan laughed – ‘he’s basically an emperor now.’
‘Free’s not up for it,’ Nathan said to Martin and Knut.
‘That’s a relief,’ said Martin.
‘But the rest of us are. I mean, where’s all this going if not galactic? My dad’s got the land, the rockets, the comms and data. If I show him what can be done by us actually doing it, he’ll go for it big time. He won’t be able to help himself.’
‘Knut?’ Martin had a worried expression.
‘Ah…’ said Knut.
‘You know Free and Anemone are just using you as a figurehead,’ Nathan said. ‘Are they really taking this group where you want it to go?’
‘Um…’
‘What do you think they’ll do to you once they’ve got what they want?’
‘Are you saying they’ll kill me?’ Knut asked, and Nathan shrugged. ‘I knew I should have kept my misery to myself.’
If only he’d stayed in Norway, lived alone on a rock, hunting and fishing and foraging to live, and accepted that he was without purpose, then everyone could have continued fighting over the smaller things so they could hide from the truth – they were all born to die and the quicker they did it as a species the better for the rest of the world. Why had he not kept his madness to himself, instead of pouring it into the world of people who believed every thought must be acted upon, every impulse made real and shared?
There was no running away now. There was nowhere to run to – even the ocean depths were on camera. He had to stop Nathan and his dad; he had to stop Free and Anemone, and whoever came after that. The time for mass suicide had passed. He had to take the helm himself.
It seemed the natural consequence of where everything was leading. Was this the purpose of his early conditioning in the Children of the Light, to prepare him for global – or galactic, if Nathan were to be believed, and he’d been to the moon so he’d know – takeover by the back door? Did Knut have a mission after all, but was too humble, as all good saviours must be, to admit it to himself until the evidence was undeniable?
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed inevitable. He’d been preparing all his life but like a good messiah he hadn’t known. This was the way, it was always the way – the Chosen One would fight the hardest against his destiny. That was him, wasn’t it? He’d been resisting since his modified birth but now he couldn’t refuse the call.
The world’s souls were already in the ether, disembodied in the cloud, all just waiting to learn how they could become an army. Only Knut could save the planet by turning everything over to the digital, and blasting each and every body into the stars.
‘I don’t want to, but there’s no other way,’ Knut said. ‘Nathan, set it up. Martin, you’ll help me deal with Free and Anemone, won’t you?’
Knut was awake, doing his service of being serviced, when the security guard came to tell him that assassins had breached the perimeter. Knut followed him to the yoga studio in the barn. Martin was waiting.
‘Is there a bunker under the barn?’ Knut asked. ‘I knew there must be one for Nathan and Daria at least, but no one would ever tell me where it was.’
‘I’m sorry, Knut,’ said Martin.
‘That’s all right, I’m just glad to know there is one.’
‘Not about that. You’ll only let yourself be exploited by the next people who try to raise themselves by questioning profit.’
Knut noticed the gun in Martin’s hand. ‘Is this about what Free and Anemone are up to?’
‘Partly,’ Martin said, and shot him.
Martin found the registration paperwork in Free and Anemone’s room. It was terrifying how close they’d come to creating something from nothing. Martin’s boss would relish the opportunity for granular analysis of the debacle. He might even set up a new department and appoint Martin as the head.
Free and Anemone were dead in a sitting position, cowering in a nook beside the wardrobe. Martin removed the bug from the smiling Buddha above their bed. The security guard who’d put it there would also have to be returned to the palm of the Buddha, as it were. Martin knew it was necessary. But all these targeted killings on top of the senseless ones, where would it end?
He set the room alight and waited until the timber frame caught, then went to raise the alarm. The fire, the ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and measures going out… Knut, like Heraclitus, had been too obscure. He’d left Martin no choice.
All other interpretations would have collapsed, if only Knut had said in public what he’d confided to Martin: ‘Look at the world beyond the human, isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it magical. It doesn’t matter whether the sea rises or falls, we’ll adapt if we remember that we too are animals.’
*