There are stories in folk memory of the time when a peaceful earth was disturbed by an event that reordered the social system, and redefined the priorities of survival around the rules imposed by catastrophe. In those days, it may have been some overarching celestial event. A sign in the skies. Something that nobody was allowed to ignore.

MARCH 2020
After generations of relative peace and plenty, the people of the West have awakened to a new reality. Apparently, it's 'normal.' The 'new' normal.
Appearing randomly from Nature is a deadly variant of the common cold. Despite there being no identified agent of transfection from the animal world, the virus has an uncanny ability to infect humans.
Governments around the world are advised that reports of a deadly virus are coming in from scattered corners of Italy, China, Canada and South America. Swathes of the population are falling in the streets, failing to respond to hospital treatment, and finally dying of a brand new disease.
The World Health Organisation has declared a pandemic and national experts from academia have grimly agreed with the forces behind government that the only way to mitigate this unknown threat is for the world to stop everything and go home, until a solution somehow becomes available.
A LIVE EXERCISE
There's only one way to run a rearguard action against a spontaneous attack, and that's to fall back on the previously made plans for a foreign invasion.
Fear of the enemy will galvanise the population into compliance, and their attention will be focused on the moral righteousness of the desperate measures to be taken. No amount of money is too much, no draconian measure is too far, no pronouncement is too wild, if it saves just one life.
With the public operation underway, the citizens safely in front of their televisions, a new world begins construction out of sight of the herd.
IT'S DANGEROUS TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH
Philip Street is cast out of the London bubble and is holed up in the villages with Leah.
He is a changed man. Distanced from his colleagues and career, Philip has revisited his youthful ambitions to 'make a difference.'
Beyond that well-used cliché, he has also discovered a more primitive anger, prompted by the supine media and its wilful blindness in misleading the public for potentially criminal purpose.
Leah Kinsell is a fortuitous ally. A friend, a fellow traveller with professional curiosity, and ultimately unafraid to follow the evidence wherever it may lead.
In the search for answers, Leah takes to the unofficial forums and Philip buys a bodycam.
BEYOND THE BARRICADES
While Jack Boyce's neighbours stand on their doorsteps and clap for the NHS, the police patrol the empty retail parks and apprehend sparse travellers at the transport stations.
For some reason, Jack is not impressed with either manifestation of 'reinforcement and compliance.' Instead of seeing roadblocks and shuttered buildings as a way to keep a poorly-specified enemy out, the 'Covid' restrictions appear to be aimed at keeping the people in.
As he notes the suspicious glances of socially-distanced interns, he gets that old 'East Germany vibe' that so many experienced when the Berlin Wall was going up.
Jack decides that, as he is a very noble flight animal, he's going to 'do one' and head for the hills. But of course, Sgt. Prepper and Phil, and the rest of the gang, are all well aware that the resistance is not about 'doing one' in the name of self-preservation, but co-ordinating actions amongst the interested parties. And those parties seem to reach all the way to the House of Commons.
It would appear that things are starting to get real.

The third prequel to RANDOM SKIES, called SOME OF THE PEOPLE is out now as an ebook and paperback.

Welcome to 2042, and BINAR!, the twelfth episode of Random Skies. Humanity has finally been distilled into a new class system: the gods of finance, the kings of war, and all the way down through the executives and the professional classes to the bipedal wildlife of the wilderness. And all of them - all of them - are running a side-hustle.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Everett likened it to that old board game favourite, Monopoly.
There's something about the sight of that board with all the property and the utilities laid out next to the wads of cash in the bank.
It's a straight forward game when the grown-ups play, but it brings out the worst in kids. They can't help but break the rules and go for the big score. To own everything, take over the bank and then prey upon the other players.
Is it psychopathy that drives the urge to dominate? Is it an irresistible primitive greed to acquire surplus stores in case of a shortage? Or is it just good old-fashioned paranoia, creeping up on the lucky twerp who found something worth stealing?
Breaking the rules in Monopoly is as easy as rigging the markets in the 'real' world. When the Central Banks get a little upset at the MI for recently-discovered operations like the Pumshiri debacle, they get a plan together. They decide that the Council of Three Hundred - the CEOs of the world's top corporations - are a corrupt liability who need an extra layer of management. A Council of Thirteen.
LOOTING THE TREASURY
What is the point of being a member of the Council of Three Hundred if you can't share in the plunder of the planet Earth? After all, the UN, the IMF, the WEF and the BIS all assured you that it was there for the taking, if only you played by their rules.
When there are nests to be feathered, it's all a little bit too tempting to see all those commodities fly past the door on their way to the great accountants of the banking families.
Perhaps a little side deal with an opposite number can help to buoy up a handy little black market that stays off the books in a Binar wallet, somewhere on the darknet?
But theft is theft, and however well hidden in the metadata of a Carbon Credit, or the co-ownership of some obscure intellectual property, scams have a habit of leaking... and then they call the police.
DEAD MAN'S SWITCH
The MI have a credibility problem. All their finest criminal operations get leaked on a backchannel of the web called the Darknet. It's not their brainwashed operatives they usually have to worry about, it's the dweebs, nerds and gangling losers that handle their IT. And, if there's anything worse than that, it's the scum employed in the cubicles and repair shops of minor tech companies who run things called Binar Exchanges.
If the MI are to succeed as a subversive racket, leeching the wealth of the banks to create their own fiefdoms, then they need to destroy the crypto hubs and repopulate the tech industries with obedient, agender, non-spiritual, compliant, transhuman skinbots who sleep for twenty minutes every four hours and eat bug paste and protein-recyc from their own sewage. It's not a lot to ask, is it?
A STATE OF GRACE
The noble savage. Nature's innocents. Bomber having a piss over the edge of the guard-rail at the side of a crumbling slip-road, after driving into a goony-trap.
It's simpler times out in the wilds, as the Reaches do their best to support each other's interests. The Stiperstones Reach have been up north, supplying surplus food and Durscheimer's meds to the recovering villages of the north.
On the way back, a minor disaster leads to an introduction to a renegade called The Maküus, who trades in the wilderness with a bunch of feral kids, scavenging in the decaying remains of the rural towns.
Reid, Everett and The_Gnome, meanwhile, have a way in to the Dortmund Patent Centre where arguably the most valuable commodities in the world are stored. Intellectual property. What they discover has repercussions for the whole of the new world order.
BINAR! is a romp through the underworld of the future, percolating upwards through the foundations of power, to the rotten heights of man's darkest dreams.
And, as for Stan, well... never write someone off because they're in a home-made wheelchair.

THE SECOND PREQUEL to Random Skies takes the world right to the edge of a war on mankind that has been in the making for a hundred years.

PANDORA'S BOX
When the billionaires meet, in boardrooms and conference hotels, they swap out the robes in which they swore their oaths of loyalty and adopt the public costume of western-style business suits and lack of tie.
It's to try and make them look more... human, so that when the official video is released, the public see only hard-working businessmen, doggedly labouring at the table of economics and management, to create a wellspring of future profit from which all of us talentless drones can drink.
We forgive the corporate boilerplate speeches with their switch-flicking mantras of 'inclusivity, diversity and sustainable stakeholder capitalism.' We put it down to the unimaginative speech of accountants and dull people who did a business course at Harvard or the London School of Economics.
But they talk in code. The top down pyramid of control from the central banking system, through the ownership class of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, extends through the corporate structures beneath, like the veins of a deadly fungus that taint the system.
What they really speak of, are dark horrors of a 'great work' which must be done, if they are to reap the promised reward of global domination.
The lies they tell are perfectly justified to each other and themselves, because they have been convinced through ritual persuasion, that the unavoidable course of action is the only way forward.
In a haze of their own medication, their souls having left their bodies, they gather under the Chairman's gaze, and approve the proposal. Even if it involves the extermination of billions of 'useless eaters.'
OUTSIDE THE ILLUSION
Independent journalist Philip Street spent forty years in the professional bubble of newsprint, media agency staff, and the carefully curated narratives of anonymous Secret Service lackeys.
It's a jolt when the surety and familiarity of a chosen career expires, and all that's left is the big, wide world. When Philip found doors closed and answering machines enabled, colleagues he once mistook for friends disappeared into their own self-interest.
He was left with the loose ends of his last stories, and forty years of notes on current and world events. Funny, how those sane and reasoned notebooks, annotated with sources and corroboration also came within the orbit of less reputable material and the kind of fringe characters that usually made mainstream hit pieces.
But once outside the illusion of mainstream news, Philip's enquiring mind leads him into a city that is tranforming before his eyes. An Indian microbiologist has intimated that, behind the distractions of Number Ten, Downing Street, is a shadow government plan to 'reimagine' life in the West.
Looking a little deeper, it seems that the shadow government is also procuring a shadow population, that the public are informed are 'refugees' in serch of charity. Exposed to this new 'bartertown' of gangmasters and their slaves, Philip can feel the cold eye of authority tracking his every enquiring move.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
Philip's old pal Jack conducted an unlikely orchestra of underground heroes and casual anarchists. It seemed that at the higher end of the intellectual spectrum, a university professor called Everett Bolstrode was encouraging his security and programming students to explore cyberspace with a little more freedom that the curriculum would allow.
When they begin to crack the encryption of a hard drive they 'found ' on a US FTP site, the value of the information they uncover becomes a new problem. And there is always that hoary old problem waiting in the wings. That information longs to be free. How long can they keep it chained up, and what if someone comes looking for it?
WILD IDEAS
Jack Boyce is desperately searching for the easy life. The lure of farmhouse sausages and free-range eggs in a pan, out amongst the sweet heather of the Long Mynd, keeps him coming back with ideas of renovating the old barn studio and moving permanently to the wilds.
First, he has to juggle the sale of offices in town, and the resolution of businesses and their extensive paraphernalia.
But it's never that easy. Philip wants Jack's help and persuades him to come to London. There's a trip to the lair of Sgt. Prepper and a waltz around the back lanes of the Southern Reach in Dorset. And back in the Black Country, Ronnie is creating a whole new set of problems.

THE NEW EPISODE of Random Skies has dug its way out of jail, and is scarpering through the desert brush.

DATA DUMPS
Actions have consequences. When the actions of politicians have consequences for the voters, the media are there to hold the government's feet to the fire on the voters' behalf. Aren't they?
In the world of the 'government-hesitant,' the 'media-deniers' would rather see the paperwork for themselves. Even, or perhaps, especially the paperwork that both government and media harmoniously redact for reasons of 'national security.'
So, the public data-dump is born. Truth that is toxic to the state is 'made available' via whistleblower to a public back-channel. If the contents are particularly powerful, and the new publishers are foolish enough to advertise themselves, then they are relying on uncorrupted courts to keep them safe from the revenge of the exposed. I guess you know the game is up, when the courts roll over and there is only a prison cell for your trouble.
EATING ITSELF
When the geeks on the Stiperstones Reach receive a trove of encrypted GLiDs through the darknet, the MI definitely want it back. As Everett and Reid begin to discover, the events surrounding the disappearance of the Zura SkyKruiser are very likely the machinations of an internecine war between the great corporations of the New World Order, who have carved up the world amongst themselves.
For all the efforts of the freedom fighters and the inner city dissidents, it seems that within just fifteen years of global governance, the cabal of bankers, industrialists and merchants that form the Committee of Three Hundred are fighting each other to the death. As the data-dump starts to unravel, Everett is coming round to the opinion that the New World Order is 'eating itself.'
DOING TIME
In the dry wastes of the mountains on the border of Afghanistan is the MI trading post of Pumshiri. It's an illicit racket in the finest traditions of the Western Secret Services. Diverting trade from the new Silk Road, or reclassifying less acceptable goods for private sale, the MI run a rendition prison and secret labs for their 'shareholders.'
Prisoners are less than people, stripped of their internet GLiD credentials and repurposed as simple raw materials. Their lives are otherwise valueless and inconsequential, should their owners write down their value on the books, to zero.
At the other end of the scale is Wildmeadow-on-Froom, a village retirement community in rural England. The privileged relatives of still-active elite citizens are housed in environmentally-sustainable 'luxury' housing with an allowance for food and consumer junk. So conditioned are they to the mental prison of living a 'sustainable' life, that they have stopped caring that the roads out of the village simply peter out after a mile. Beyond is the double-walled chain-link boundary fencing, keeping them 'safe' from the wild countryside beyond.
GROWING UP
The liberal eco-warriors of the currently dying age love to protect "Nature" from the dirty, tramping feet of mankind. Shiny-faced students everywhere will super-glue themselves to trees in a rainforest to prevent development. They sob uncontrollably on board ship as they 'Facebook' a glacier 'calving' into the ocean. Any bug or toxic gelatinous sea blob is universally praised as 'beaty-foo' through teary smiles as they celebrate its survival of man's destructive predation. And rightly so, their virtuous and child-like chidings are broadcast via wifi through the iPhones of their suburban in-group.
Had they survived the collapse of their world, would their future selves have been so uncritical of unhindered development, if they had witnessed the children of the Reach, growing up in the forgotten fields of a new Eden?
Without the processed foods of the supermarket and the nutritionally-deficient offerings of the fast-food industry, the children of the Reach grow up without allergies, obesity and cancer. Without television, 'formal education' and the media's hypnotic programming, there is no mental illness for the psychiatric business of centralised health systems to diagnose.
Without the soulless make-work jobs of an increasingly bloated urban public sector, the children learn real values from working the land, harvesting their livelihood and living within the their natural means.
When subsistence turns to surplus, the higher things of civilisation start to flourish. The questions of the innocent are anwered with lessons from history, and maybe, as the Reachmen surmise, there is a way forward for the survivors.

THE FIRST PREQUEL is out now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format.

"Slowly at first, and then all at once." That's how they say collapses occur. Financial, economic, political, or national. What was years in the making has a tipping point and it blindsides everyone when it is reached.
Like a ghastly rollercoaster that reaches the top of its opening rise, dragged up by the clanking chains of a straining engine, it pauses for a second and then comes the rush.
So, what happened to hasten the beginning of the end? Perhaps a perfect storm of world events that triggered the age-old plans of a world shadow government that we were all told didn't exist.

It's July 2019 and Britain's cold civil war over Brexit has taken a turn with the selection of a third Prime Minister to Downing Street, charged by the public with decoupling from the European superstate. He is seen as a populist, an uncontrolled maverick in the mould of Donald Trump.
But politics and showbusiness are two sides of the same coin. Boris Johnson's perceived eccentricity hides deep rooted ritual in the centuries old control grid of Westminster. Maxstoke and Lewes are two of the MI team assigned to Johnson's security detail. Their orders are to keep the wayward pragmatist safe from political, if not physical, assassination while ensuring that "the actions of those in office don't interfere with the plans of those in power."
The MI team are briefed at a higher level than Downing Street and are the first to find out that there are imminent plans to engineer a situation that will collapse the populist narrative worldwide and usher in a new and unelected global government.
Meanwhile, as state-controlled western media are drip-fed the preamble to coming events, an independent London journalist called Philip Street, who earns a living regurgitating MI talking points for the news media, is cautiously inducted into the required frame of mind for a world-changing narrative.
But the veteran reporter has made many contacts over the years and when a colleague suddenly quits and moves back home to a remote Irish community, Street is fed the first 'red pill.'
He is introduced online to a government scientist in exile with a fantastical story about the development of bioweapons aimed at culling civilian populations. In seeking out an old friend in the biomedical field, he discovers patents for subdermal skin tattoos and a worldwide scheme for pre-printed death certificates in the event of a global emergency.
Street's next 'red pill' is buried in his journalist's notebooks from twenty years ago when an old friend ran a scurrilous, low-circulation magazine about conspiracy theories. What was considered laughable in 1997, is suddenly not so funny anymore.

The story migrates to the soot-blackened industrial towns of the British Midlands. Independent music producer, Jack Boyce is trying to sell up in the city and retire to his property in the wilds of Shropshire.
Birmingham is a sprawling post-industrial brownfield, scarred with abandoned monuments to the industrial revolution and shanty town flats of the local Housing Associations.
The old culture and character of the places and people have gone, leaving Boyce to clear out his old offices and fiddle with pet projects like The Switching Station website. It's a public window into the whistleblower boards where professionals can air their grievances and gossip. Even that is a struggle for inspiration, until he gets a phone call from London.
To accompany the despondent workers of Birmingham on their daily grind, is the Metropolitan Internet Radio Station. It grows a large, undiscerning audience with its cross platform broadcasts, and distinctly lightweight flavour of local 'personalities.'
Out of the blue, the loosely financed station, with banal and politically incorrect content, heads into unexpected and increasingly sticky legal trouble.

What happened to the Britain of Random Skies in the years that directly preceded Quorum? How did a country that, only a century before, controlled one sixth of the planet's political and economic direction, fall so quickly into a totalitarian wasteland during the decade of the 2020s?

After two world wars had destroyed the population of breeding males, the country stood like a newly emptied building. It was a slow and patient process to organise and rig the explosive charges against the underpinnings of a wounded society. To destroy the industry and therefore the wealth. To imbue the subsequently unemployed and the marginalised with bitterness and resentment. To destroy the family unit with nihilism and the youth with hopelessness and demoralization. To distract a sensation-starved public with mindless novelty and the amoral spectacle of gratification through empty excess. To de-educate the people, deny them their history and accuse them of crimes against the world. To open the floodgates to the world's poor and dispossessed, borrowing unrepayable money to fund the new citizens who would never owe anything to their elevated status. To mobilise the mentally ill and the professional terrorists to tear down the institutions and monuments in the name of justice. To seek out the educated, the creators and the commentators and put them to the sword before they can expose the brainwashing and the propaganda. To hate the truth and those who speak it. To level the country like a brownfield building site, ready for the inhuman, authoritarian, anti-life control matrix of the new world order to be built on the ruins. To see the world of 2030 rise like a conjured demon over the West, a black sun of eternal shadow cast over the internment camps of the last unmodified humans. To only find happiness in impending death.

The parallel world of Random Skies shares the best hopes of humanity with the worst instincts of the psychotic powerbrokers of our own time. The unseen overlords, the Hidden Hand, are not interested in fame or the adulation of a dimwit population that they despise, any more than a farmer expects his herd to be grateful for his stewardship. The herd are there to provide economic beneft to the farmer. To work, to be traded, or to be consumed.
In 2032, the mandatory microchipping of the last resistant British citizens marked the beginning of the first truly transhuman society. All British citizens were now the genetically modified property of the corporations that had settled in the largely depopulated country. How did it come to this?
It had been a slow build up in the 2020s, when the story of 'naturally evolving viruses' that caused pandemics was replaced with the growing human catastrophe of vaccine-induced deaths. The winter of 2023-2024 saw the biggest die off in recorded history. A respiratory disease gripped the country, leaking across borders before travel could be banned. In the space of a few months, city warehouses and abandoned factories became emergency body storage, while a crippled bureaucracy mulled the options.
The first prequel covers just a few months of 2019. It is a nod to the end of a world that, however wretched, would one day far into the future, be looked upon as a golden age. Those who were paying attention, however, were becoming aware of something else. That while society's children were playing out in the open air, the predators that had been silently watching them over the years, were now poised to make their move.