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Illuminati iv:
THE MAN WHO DIDN'T DO VERY MUCH OF ANYTHING
ONE OF MANY UNAPPARABLES
Put on your bathing costume
Derrick Tumbleroot once stated that the glint in a madman’s eye was akin to a disco ball inside a lava lamp. This has come to be considered, by those privileged enough to meet a madman, to be an incredibly accurate description, yet nobody has ever clearly been able to state why.
Derrick Tumbleroot used to be renowned for this kind of thing.
What he was celebrated for was his philosophy. He believed that every moment was the absolutely inevitable result of the moment immediately preceding it and so on and so on, ad infinitum. As such, everything was inevitable. The part that really drew people in though was thus:
“Whatever you're going to do, you're going to do it, so just damn well do it because you were going to do it anyway.”
Most people didn’t know that he’d stolen this from atheistically deterministic thinkers, who generally weren’t renowned for their PR skills.
Even fewer knew that they’d stolen it from an alternate version of Derrick himself who had fallen into their plane of existence.
Pretty much no-one knew that he’d stolen it from a dandy maverick known as Knitting Carver, who doesn’t feature in this particular book.
But these things are neither here nor there.
The point was, that this revelation sat well with almost all people. Too well. Before, the good folk of earth struggled to get out of dead end jobs. Idealistic youths burnt down cosmetic labs. Surrealist geniuses went around Spain, striving to paint chickens green for no real reason. Religious hard-liners burnt books.
Before, the world was mildly interesting.
But as Derrick’s word spread, so did the Blandness. People became content. The surrealists, slackers and oddballs of the world all got real jobs.
Buskers to busmen, artists to analysts.
Wild eyed preachers to mild mannered teachers
All was Zen. This seems like a good thing. There were no hate crimes, no murder, no crimes full stop. Unemployment was unheard of. Everybody was making at least twice the minimum wage. Peace was achieved in the middle east. World governments were moderately conservative.
This all happened only five years after what the media called “the Tumbleroot Revelation.”
People waited patiently in traffic jams listening to coffee table music, trying to catch out for subtle the flourishes that tied the piece together. Everybody realised it wouldn’t get better if you picked at it. Flight delays were accepted as an inevitable by-product of over-crowded skies. No-one recycled.
Five years was all it took for the worlds contrast dial to be turned down to zero.
This was the exact opposite of what Derrick was aiming for. The number of rings around his eyes grew exponentially to the number of years since his revelation. He was found dead in his room on May 23rd, 2015, five years to the day that he unleashed the Blandness.
Natural causes, said the coroner man.
By freeing the human race’s minds, he’d turned them into the shameful wet-dream of the nuclear pappy.