Categories
Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Portfolio of Poetry – Sìana L. Baker

Sìana Baker is a second year undergraduate English student at King’s College. She enjoys twentieth-century poetry, philosophy, literary theory and modern film.

I have been writing poetry, quite literally, since I learned what it was. I’ve actually been writing stories since before I could write – I used to love the Simpsons, so I would draw pictures accompanied by horizontal lines of broken zig-zags (like in the newspapers in the cartoon) and rehearse ‘reading’ the story for my reception class. My writing has always been everywhere: any English schoolwork was hung on my bedroom wall and on the walls at school and my diary, no matter where it was or at what age, always had poetry in it.

But I am not a prodigy. I wasn’t writing symphonies at seven or solving the fifth postulate, I was born in Lincolnshire trying to deal with my mother. My poetry was never that good and still isn’t where I would like it to be, but I am slowly learning.

Of all the pressures in my life, I never want poetry to be one. I want to be effortlessly good at it: I want to write poetry like I walk to school, like I tell the right person I love them or like I get over a cold; because I want to, because it is good for me and because I would be half the person without it. Pressure does not make me a diamond, it makes me a wreck. Hence, all my poetry is written in one go, in twenty minutes and never edited. I like leaving the trance behind and going about my day, or to bed; I like having something to look back on in a few months when my writing is better and being able to love what is bad and good about it.

I am raw and messy person. I can quite confidently say that it is my favourite thing about myself; I love not caring (if it’s ethical) and the comfort that gives other people to want to be themselves, or in reassuring them that things really don’t matter as much as people might suggest. I am shamelessly ragged and I like my poetry to be the same way, for myself and for the people that might see it on my social media, because I hate the idea that everything in art, and everything in social media, has to be curated as a masterpiece. I am not a masterpiece and neither is my writing and we both love ourselves endlessly for that.

I hope you enjoy!

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Contemporary Insights

Literature meets ‘Magik’, A research into Occultism and trying to understand the genre.

I would like to dedicate this post to my uncle Karl Stone, thank you for being my inspiration and sparking my interests towards this wonderful, inquisitive genre. There are a million questions I wish I could ask you about your work, but these will have to wait. Until then, I hope you have found the answers to the questions you were looking for to do with this weird and wonderful genre and we hope to make you proud with a complete ninth book.

Occultism is defined by the Oxford University Press as ‘supernatural, mystical or magical beliefs, practices or phenomena.’ The word comes from the Latin Occultare meaning ‘secrete’.

With reference to the definition above, this genre of literature is no short of a secret. It isn’t everyday you hear of people reading a book belonging to the genre of Occultism, which is often viewed as a sub-category to the supernatural or fantasy categories. For context, my uncle was an author who wrote under the penname ‘Karl Stone’. During his career, he published 8 books, with his most popular titled ‘The Moonchild of Yesod: A Grimoire of Occult Hyperchemistry, or Typhonian Sex Magick’, which was published in 2012 with only 418 copies available to purchase. Stone numbered each of the 418 copies and signed them to create authenticity and ensure that those who purchased the book would receive original copies, not duplicated ones. I was 6 years old at the time the book was published, and widely unaware of the literary mind field that Occultism was and that my uncle was a cornerstone of its writing. I always knew that whatever it was, he had a passion for it, and he was good at it.

Sadly in 2019, he passed away leaving one incomplete book. By this point I was 14 and left with more questions than ever surrounding the genre of his writing. As my passion for literature grew, I longed more than ever to be able to speak to him about his works. The questions I wanted to ask him were ones I could no longer ask, and I made it my goal to take matters into my own hands and research this mysterious, hidden part of literature – drawing light on a subject he dedicated his career to. Now that I am at KCL, it only feels right that granted the opportunity to write about something, I choose to write about him, honouring his legacy and shining light on a genre which shifts the perspective of the world into one that leaves you questioning everything from the moment you engage with it.

I am choosing to focus on The Moonchild of Yesod described as ‘a grimoire of Occult Hyper chemistry… for the use of the practicing Occultist and Hyper chemists.’[1]. My first point of call when I began my research was to find out what a ‘hyper chemist’ was and the sort of things they practice. However, I was left disappointed when I did not get a clear answer from Google. ‘What is the job of a hyper chemist?’ provided no insight into the type I figured my uncle would write about, as it was obvious that this was not just a reference to a regular pharmaceutical chemistry. Stone was viewed as a ‘hyper chemist of the Trans-Himalayan system’ to his audience who compared him to other renowned authors in the filed such as Madame Blavatsyky, a Russian American mystic; Aleister Crowley, an English Occultist and Kenneth Grant, an English ceremonial magician who was an advocate of the Thelematic religion.

The religion of ‘Thelema’ was ‘a pre-Christian witchcraft religion’[2] which I assumed would have influenced my uncle to incorporate the theme of witchcraft and religion if Grant was his muse. As I began de-constructing the title, ‘Yesod’ is found in Jewish Philosophy. It comes from a node found in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and referencing the base. The symbol of ‘Yesod’ can be found incorporated in Stone’s book where he makes references to it, for example, “The yesodic sphere is the landscape of illusion and glamour, it is the play of Lila, the world of appearances (sattwa, essence, kalas, substance or tincture) which composes the structure of the four qabalistic worlds.”[3], “To the qabalist, the Tree of Life is a living dynamic metaphysical template which indicates the relationship between God (YHVH) and Man (Adam Kadmon).”[4]. Spiritually, it is connected to the moon and unlocks a realm of spirituality and the subconscious, hence the title ‘The Moonchild’. I personally imagine he chose this title because the Moonchild in question is awakening into this world of spirituality. This could perhaps reflect on how my uncle felt when he first delved into the realm of occultism, as a new child within this obscure literary genre. It would have been interesting to know his reasoning for the title and whether this interpretation is correct. However, based on how invested he used to be in his work, perhaps it is.

The community surrounding Occultism is relatively small, and it is not easy to find one that you can become part of. Overall, the genre lacks exposure to the public due to the nature of articulate knowledge needed and the extent of research one must conduct. Those who delve into Occultism normally have a background or interest in witchcraft, supernatural beliefs, conspiracies, religion or herbal medicinal practices. Existing communities tend to stay hidden as most members practice Occultism as a lifestyle or profession. Occultism is all about gaining an awareness of a world that goes beyond human life form and accepting that there are other entities and  supernatural elements combined with scientific elements, which people find difficult to commit to.

As for the reviews, The Moonchild of Yesod is rated a 4.55 on Goodreads, with majority of readers having a deep understanding of the genre itself. A review posted on the 30th of December wrote “This is a scholarly work that I recommend for intermediate to advanced students”[5]. Jordan Fitzgerald also went on to say, “Karl Stone will be known as one of the trailblazers of the occult avant-garde of this century.”[6]. To see such positive appraisal for my uncle was something that made me quite emotional and part of me hopes that he was able to read these reviews and be made aware of the impact his writing had on the Occultist community.

One user, named ‘C’, rated the book 2 stars, saying how he was ‘Trying to be Kenneth Grant’.[7] However, I think with a genre such as this one, it is difficult to try and impersonate a previous author because of the nature of the research and compilation that goes into producing a book like The Moonchild of Yesod. Rather than a case of ‘trying to be’, Stone wanted to show how Grant’s work inspired him, and other critiques have said to use Grant’s work as a starting point to educate as a ‘beginners guide’ to understanding The Moonchild.

From this experience, I know my research into Occultism is yet to finish as it has only just begun. As my relationship with literature continues to grow throughout my degree, my research will hopefully broaden, and I will develop a greater and in-depth understanding of the books Karl Stone has written and the ones that lay beyond. I highly encourage anyone reading to research the genre for yourself and form your own opinion towards it. The world of Occultism is one which keeps on giving and I would hope that my uncle is aware of how successful his input to the genre was.

As of 2025, my family and I are hoping to get in touch with authors and Occultist professionals to work on his incomplete manuscripts and publish his last book to add to the collection he accumulated. I know this is something he would have wanted, and the manuscript will be in good hands.

Written by Natalia Georgopoulos

 

[1] Transmutation Publishing. (2018). The Moonchild of Yesod by Karl Stone. [online] Available at: https://www.transmutationpublishing.com/inventory/moonchild-yesod-karl-stone/ [Accessed 25 Feb. 2025].

[2] White, E.D. (2018). Wicca | History & Beliefs. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wicca.

[3] Stone, K. (1AD). The Moonchild of Yesod: A Grimore of Occult Hyperchemistry, or Typhonian Sex Magick. United Kingdom: The Imaginary Book Co, p. 31.

[4] Stone, K. (1AD). The Moonchild of Yesod: A Grimore of Occult Hyperchemistry, or Typhonian Sex Magick. United Kingdom: The Imaginary Book Co, p. 39.

[5] Jordan Fitzgerald, December 2015 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15763429-the-moonchild-of-yesod

[6] ibid

[7] C, January 2025 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15763429-the-moonchild-of-yesod

Categories
Cultural Production and the Organisation of Knowledge Insights Interviews

Digging Deep: An Interview with James Metcalf on Churchyard Poetics

PhD student Lai Yan Wong interviews Dr James Metcalf about his monograph Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2025), and his journey from PhD to publication. A former KCL alumnus, James is now a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Manchester, where his research explores poetry, affect, labour, gender, and sexuality.  

Unearthing the Churchyard’s Layers 

The ambition of this book is to recover the churchyard as the troubled centre of eighteenth-century poetry. (p. 1) 

Lai Yan Wong (LW): What led you to focus on churchyards as a space for understanding literature and history? 

James Metcalf (JM): My introduction to the work of poets we now know as the ‘graveyard school’ – Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young, Thomas Gray – was through epigraphs in the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe. She quoted passages of their poems, and others of the mid-eighteenth century, at the beginnings of chapters – partly, I think, to coordinate the novel’s evolving mood. These are quite moody poems: melancholy, often alarmingly visceral in their attention to the mortal body, and to varying degrees didactic. I thought then, and I still think, that at the level of tone and style, these are intriguingly unsettled poems; and their inclusion in Radcliffe’s novels, like their uptake by Romantic poets including Charlotte Smith, John Clare, and William Wordsworth, speaks to a cultural afterlife that tries to come to terms with the strained feelings these poems strive at once to express and contain. 

LW: Many of us are familiar with Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, but your book brings in poets like Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare. What’s exciting or unexpected about the way they write about churchyards? 

JM: If, as I described them above, ‘graveyard poems’ like Gray’s Elegy are at some level uneasy, they nevertheless attempt to control their unease: for Gray, that control is exerted through a pastoral retrospection that, while expressing a melancholy measure of grief, reflects on the limited lives of the buried poor as aesthetically and morally proper – they are forgotten and unmarked in the churchyard, but at least they aren’t corrupted by the world beyond its enclosure. This is simplifying the case quite a bit, and I explain in the book that such a disciplined containment of difficult political realities is neither easy nor straightforward for Gray. The contrast is a useful provocation, though, because Leapor, Yearsley, Smith, and Clare cannot or do not attempt to contain those difficult realities. From outside the borders of the ‘graveyard school’, these poets can take up its terrain for different purposes, including those of political complaint. 

Pulling back the curtain of ‘graveyard poetry’ makes the churchyard newly visible as a social landscape with its own history. (p. 18) 

LW: Why is the distinction between ‘graveyard’ and ‘churchyard’ important, and how does it shift our reading of eighteenth-century poetry? 

JM: As a rough shorthand, a churchyard is a kind of graveyard, but a graveyard is not a kind of churchyard – because (the obvious reason) it doesn’t have a church. By the eighteenth century in Britain there were different types of burial ground, including nondenominational (or at least not solely Anglican) graveyards, setting a precedent for the nineteenth-century cemetery. The reason the churchyard remains so prominent in the culture of the time, including in its poetry, is that it was the oldest and most established place of burial – and not only of burial: historians have documented just how much cultural life took place in churchyards, including markets, games, fairs, and acts of justice. Given this historical and cultural priority, it seems important to recognise that poets use the word ‘churchyard’ in their work because this site is familiar and resonant, with a deep and complicated, often contested history of life and death across communities and over millennia. 

LW: Churchyard Poetics revisits traditional poetic genres such as georgic, pastoral, elegy, and topographical poetry. Could you give an example of how one of these genres is disrupted or reshaped in the poems you examine? 

JM: The presence of the churchyard in these poems pushes poetic genres to accommodate the challenging subjects of death and the suffering of bodies under duress. For example, Robert Blair’s long didactic poem The Grave is often read as an exemplary ‘graveyard poem’ for its gory fixation on the decaying corpse and its orthodox didacticism to lead a righteous life before it’s too late. I read the poem differently, as a kind of ‘churchyard georgic’, to highlight how its dying and dead bodies emerge in the poem as implements of work, icons of the hard life of labour, which means they cannot so easily be elevated by a religious imperative to look to the afterlife. This reading also reshapes georgic, which is a genre of agricultural didacticism exercised by its striving against death and decay – the recalcitrant elements of nature against which the labouring body contends. So, ‘churchyard georgic’ reconfigures both the churchyard poem and the georgic poem because it brings to the surface the difficult matter of the body that both traditions, in their different ways, try to overcome or set aside. 

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Insights

Commuting in London – by TOONI ALABI.

Tooni Alabi is a third-year English Literature student who has enjoyed her degree in the way it’s helped her explore different periods and a range of writings, thus shaping and re-shaping her perspective. Tooni is an avid reader of different genres and hopes to be an author one day. Her passion for reading has translated into a love for creative writing, and she desires to help others escape through her writing and bring them closer to God. 

The beep of the card or oyster. The mad dash through the barriers as your adrenaline pumps, in the rush to the platform, to serve at the altar. Slowly, it draws masses of people, and lures them into an inevitable synchronised dance, to experience the collision of multicultural London. The Underground acts as a skilful puppet master, yet it too is a slave to mankind. Every day is a reminder of its inescapable destiny to run up and down the same train tracks like an animal trapped in its cage. Carefully slotting millions of passengers into its various mouths, harbouring them in its digestive system, before finally spitting them out in places around the capital.

Today is just another day on the underground.

‘Kennington via Charring Cross leaves the platform in two minutes’ the omniscient voice announces over the tannoy

The frantic scuttle of commuter’s feet parodies each other, and we’re all puppets at the hands of the puppet master. We’re assigned different roles, as the tannoy evokes our brain into distinct responses. The choice to causally walk, and potentially run the risk of having to catch the next train, the fast walk and pray you don’t have to break into a run, because you would rather people weren’t watching you run, or you just run and guarantee your spot on the train. The tannoy has presented us with our options and we all participate in the game of the underground. You choose the fast walk, ducking in and out of those exiting the station, all obstacles to your goal, before finally doing quick jolt-like steps for the grand finale of a heroic jump into the carriage. A minute later the hiss of a closed door. The train begins to move, leaving blurred images of the casualties left behind. You already know how they feel. They’re left with marks to remember. The mixture of anger, frustration, and nonchalance. The truth is we all know how it feels to miss the train, and even more so to watch its slithering body race away from you. It successfully stirs up the memory of when you were left behind on your first day of nursery leaving you with the inevitable bitter gnawing of abandonment.

The thoughts of those who have failed the game’s first stage, quickly disappear and you settle into the next stage of the journey. The routine on the train is a response to Snapchat notifications, music and some light reading, the underground essentials if you want to survive the long commute. You find yourself thinking back on when you first became a devoted commuter, naively offering your money, which was inevitably swallowed at the moment of contact. You used to take in the sights of London, the merging of the city from the outskirts to the centre. But like everything in life that used to hold excitement and wonder, it burns bright like a comet or a falling star, before inevitably fading into the wasteland of lacklustre.

The screech and the jolts that come with the Northern line are familiar and comforting but may be a product of your desensitisation as it slides along the tracks. The train stops and starts as it makes its way closer to the centre of London, people getting in and out, adding and eliminating. Then the tunnel that establishes the entering into the Underground looms ominously, in the words of the psalmist King David ‘As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil’. Tunnels elicit two reactions nonchalance or hyperawareness. When you’ve been commuting for a while, tunnels are just the necessary points to help you get from A to B. However, tunnels experienced on the Northern line are a dark and noisy time machine. One moment you’re in the light, and the next moment you’re plunged into the valley of never-ending darkness, further perpetuated if the train has to wait for the signal. There are strange moments in the tunnel connecting Golders Green to Hampstead, where you see another train

straying off the track, a small glimpse into other people’s lives where you’re suddenly a voyeur. It’s two ships passing in the night and suddenly, they’re gone, making you think did you see that or is your imagination deciding to play tricks on you?

In moments like this, you take the opportunity to observe people on the train, knowing that London produces anti-social people. During the journey of racing to the heart of the capital, people are silent and glued to their phones, laptops, or music. To reinforce the need for silence the facial expressions say it all ‘Don’t talk to me otherwise we’re going to have a problem’. On the other hand, perhaps you embellish because not everyone is like that on the Underground, with the look of doom and gloom. The truth is that some people have an inviting facial expression and do acts of service by allowing someone else to take their seat. But, unfortunately, they’re rare because of the Underground’s unpredictable rhythms, the circumstances and the problems of different lives all seem to collide and, nobody feels like talking. We all resign into our separate worlds because it’s safer that way, it’s easier and, we don’t have to be social and interact. It’s the one place we can safely detach and as George Simmel put it adopt a Blasé attitude.

In philosophical moments like this, the Underground continues not waiting for your thoughts as it collects and releases passengers in a constant cycle. The carriages rush past like a game of Russian roulette or Tinder where we swipe right for the carriage we want. The countdown of stations begins, Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square, Charring Cross and finally Embankment. The train releases you with a hiss reflecting its serpentine characteristics, to find yourself in the heart of another train’s digestive system, as it whisks you to the next stop. Temple. A congregation for Kings Students getting on or off the train. It appears like a relic stuck in time, its pillars decorated in red and white, as though it once held up a royal palace in its youth before the ravages of time crept in. The stairs hold that same withered look. The weight of the passenger’s footsteps that have broken its soul. Then as though being transported from the past to the present and future, you see the waters outside Temple gently ebb in a greeting, sparkling and dancing in the sunlight. Or rather a gloomy sinister warning awaiting you, with echoes of what lies beneath the surface. The strong pillars of London loom in the background the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie building and those that surround it as sentinels. The journey of the Underground leaves you with a piece of beauty at the end before you inevitably turn away.

As you return home you encounter the joys of rush hour, a maniacal battle. Passengers inevitably squished against the carriage doors, as though the train is bursting at the seams. You manage to get yourself on, watching final heroic leaps into the carriage, as you desperately pray that you can get off at your stop, the overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia. You try to block out rush hour. Passengers are slow as though they’re walking through a field of daisies. Passengers are ignorant of which platform they’re going to and, stand there as though they’re an emperor overlooking their vast empire and wealth causing you to do a frustrated manoeuvre. The escalator stairs fall like a waterfall, offering a temporary moment of peace. However, you observe some obstacles. Somebody leaves a huge gap, someone standing on the left-hand side blocking those that need to get past them urgently. At the end of the waterfall, you find your train nearly here. It arrives at the platform like a wounded soldier returning from battle, unable to withstand the onslaught of rush hour. You discover your reaction is to enter, drawn to it like moths are to light. Though some who have just arrived barge past you, or some are too slow and want you to be abandoned by the train. Finding a seat during rush hour is like gold and you take it outwitting your competitors who were too slow.

The train speeds and screeches under the weight of its eternal imprisonment, condemned like Atlas to uphold a part of the world. You find yourself back on the outskirts of London, the sun tucked away, as night covers the scene with intermittent glowing lights of the city. You leave the Underground games and it leaves you to your fate of what night brings.

By Tooni Alabi.

Categories
Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

An Extract: How Mewing Can Improve Your Profile

Daniel is a mature undergraduate currently pursuing an English BA at King’s College London, while also working as an English and guitar tutor. Originally from Birmingham, where he spent the majority of his life, he was once a songwriter and performer. During his time in Birmingham, he fronted several bands, including the psychedelic indie band Sleep Patterns. To make ends meet, he took on various day jobs over the years, including working in an art shop, a library, in social care, and being involved in musical projects with the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) and the music/arts collective DIE DAS DER, in addition to teaching guitar. In recent years, his focus has shifted from songwriting to prose writing.

His literary influences are varied, with a particular admiration for writers who possess unique, characterful styles such as Dickens, Nabokov, and, more recently, Jean Rhys with her angst-ridden prose. He also has a deep appreciation for science fiction, particularly the works of authors like Ursula K. le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and Ray Bradbury, who blend literary sensibilities with the genre. He believes that literature is most powerful when it serves a clear purpose, and sees science fiction as a means to reflect and stylize our world and times, often in a distorted or exaggerated manner. Writers such as Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood have done this effectively, and it is in this tradition that Daniel has been experimenting with writing his own short science fiction stories.

For his most recent story, Daniel was inspired by the way a small number of Silicon Valley companies have shaped our digital culture, driven by their competitive, libertarian values. The book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win It Back) by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams sparked further reflection on how this influence has quietly crept into society, prompting him to consider what might happen if it were taken just a step or two further.

 

How Mewing Can Improve Your Profile

By Daniel Sheridan

 

Marcus can’t stop looking at the palm of his hand. He leans back on the training bench and stares at the rising numbers on the screen encased in his skin – kg’s lifted, treadmill milage, water intake – his profile updating automatically. Two hours at the gym won’t enhance his visibility much, not compared to the sponsored content he’d paid for this morning. It’s all good profile maintenance, though.

He passes the woman in the grey tank top he’d seen doing leg presses. Her toned body alone is clickbait. Some guy is talking to her. Marcus clocks his torso – too thin between those bulking upper arms. He needs to get his workout plan sorted, competition on OneProfile is ramping up; the algorithms are merciless. But if Miss Clickbait wants to laugh at his weak jokes they’re welcome to each other.

Another glance at his palm-device as he leaves: his content is performing well.

 

 

 

Black BOSS shirt. Navy chinos. He places each item of dry-cleaned clothing on the bed. White Calvin Kleins. Marcus trims his eyebrows then slips his boxers – some minor topiary. He massages a hair growth stimulant into his cheeks after moisturising. Thirty years old and his beard is still little more than bumfluff.

Marcus is sculpting his hair when his palm-device buzzes. It’s Eliot. He steps onto the balcony to take the call, palm against his ear. The upper portion of the sky is a clear, pearlescent blue above a few puffs of low hanging cloud. From his fourteenth floor Hackney pad, he takes in the horizon dominated by the vaunting financial district.

‘Shit, Marcus, are you following the news about Bristol? Their system is still shut down. Are we culpable?’ Eliot is getting paranoid. ‘I’m shitting it about that last malware protection update, we rushed it through.’

They have all worked hard for these contracts. Eliot is ruining the glory for himself. It had taken the full range of Marcus’s wily charms to sell the software to the North Bristol Trust, adding tens of thousands to the income from healthcare companies in Lagos and Hanoi and Mumbai and he forgets where else. CyberFort Security is a global success.

‘We both know the software wasn’t built for Health Records systems. And I had someone asking me some weird questions outside the office last week. It could have been someone from the media, or the police.’

‘You’re worrying too much, Eliot. Just keep on with the patching work. And check your bank balance – it works like a diazepam.’

Marcus is beginning to feel he has the legitimacy to breathe in and out the same air as those FTSE 100 elites. To breathe the brightest, cleanest air, the purest oxygen cut from the atmosphere by the peak of The Shard, its spire puncturing the sky to let out the air of excess.

He tells Eliot to chill and taps his palm to end the call.

 

 

 

Marcus inhales some of the strawberry of Sarah’s vape clouds as she scrolls through her profile – fitness, education, income; stopping at the personal details section, she points to her date of birth.

‘Wow. You look much younger.’

‘Well, of course.’ It was supposed to have been a compliment – they had matched on OneProfile, so he’d already glanced through her breakdown. ‘Don’t you understand how much work we have to have done now? Each year closer to forty and fucking OneProfile’s algorithms drag down our visibility, much faster than for you blokes. You understand that, right?’

‘But if it works…’

‘Works for who?’

‘It brought us together tonight, for one thing.’ He coils an arm around Sarah’s waist as he gently rocks his hips to the Latin guitar noodling from the beer garden speakers. ‘And it sounds like you practically run this– what is it, a podcast? So you hire your own staff, I presume…’ A brief nod. He’s starting to think she’s not into him, but he’ll make his point anyway. ‘When all this was spread across different platforms – professional linking, photo sharing, dating – it was a mess.’ Since the Silicon Valley Merger, life has become streamlined. No one can argue against the convenience of having those key platforms operating under one point of reference – one profile. Performances across all areas – followers, qualifications, income, days without sick leave – all contribute to OneProfile visibility. ‘It makes sense for you to see your candidates’ merits all laid out before you, surely. Like a stats screen in a video game.’ Marcus grins.

‘I’m not a gamer.’

‘But when you’re hiring, you just skim the most visible profiles, right? Simple. Think of all the time we used to waste on inefficient people.’

‘Personally,’ Sarah takes a micro-step away from him, ‘I think it needs regulation’.

He had thought he’d found a good alternative to Miss Clickbait tonight. A few exchanged messages and Sarah had agreed to meet immediately, his trending profile already working its magic. Marcus had been mewing in the angled mirrors behind the bar, checking out his side-profile when she’d tapped him on the shoulder. He’ll take a good pic of that improved jawline later. She’d been interested in his work, asking about the way he tests his company’s antivirus software, those lucrative contracts. But once the conversation had gotten onto things more personal, she’d seemed to go cold.

‘These things we used to call phones,’ Sarah spreads open her hand, displaying her palm-device, ‘we can’t truly compete on the jobs market without modelling ourselves through them. You say it suits employers, but if our bodies must be gamified like this, public ownership of OneProfile is the only way we can all have a say.’

‘But OneProfile and palm-devices both came from the private sector. They met a demand. People have always loved their beautiful tech.’

‘And you don’t think it’s a problem to have no alternatives?’ Sarah breathes a fresh fruity plume.

‘But it’s like – realistically, Amazon is the only company people order their shit from now. Is anyone calling for alternatives there?’ With a service that slick, no need to talk about healthy competition or ethics. Get my fucking drill bit to my door tomorrow morning. I need it. ‘It works. Like OneProfile, keeping everything running smoothly, including your business,’ he says, disentangling his arm. He snatches a glance at his palm-device: twenty-nine missed calls from Eliot.

 

*

 

He tries the four-seven-eight breathing technique encouraged by David, his forensic psychologist. A course of therapy is one of the conditions of his bail. The defence had managed to soften his sentence by claiming ‘mental ill health’ as a factor.

David counts and Marcus breathes. Four seconds breathing in – hold for seven – eight seconds out. Four plus seven plus eight is nineteen.

He tries not to imagine what a criminal record will do to his profile. CyberFort Security’s business ratings have already dropped, pummelling his visibility. He tugs at the bandage covering his palm and starts to hyperventilate again.

David asks if he would like a glass of water. No, he doesn’t want any water, he doesn’t want to breathe stillness into his body. He wants to pace up and down the ribbed carpet of the magnolia-walled room. He wants to check his profile. He can’t function without knowing the damage. Marcus stares at a piece of sodden sky though the narrow, open window. He’s fallen far beneath that superior FTSE air now, raggedly sucking in the dregs, a bottom feeder gagging on the mud. A cold draft chills his clammy skin.

A police officer enters the room. His heart thuds at the bang of the wind-slammed door. It’s nothing to do with Marcus, David assures him, not to worry, this is still his space.

Marcus is against therapy. An ex had once urged that he try it after he’d become too obsessive and spreadsheety with his profile goals. But no, everyone knows the diagnosis of a psychiatric condition makes you less algorithm-friendly, even if the official line is that OneProfile can’t access medical details.

‘Let’s go back to the numbers,’ says David. He can’t forget that last glimpse of his lamed profile – his stats had been decimated. ‘I find it helps clients to work towards acceptance of guilt by beginning with the data, to start seeing the unchangeable facts of the situation as they are.’

‘I … I need to see it.’ He pulls at the corners of the bandage.

‘Let’s just focus on those facts. The hospital cyber-attack in Bristol caused delays in treatment for,’ David taps his palm-device, ‘two-hundred-and-sixteen patients, the complications of which included seven deaths.’

‘What? I thought we were talking about my profile data…’ Marcus had listened to Sarah’s investigative podcast. She’d called him a ‘purveyor of the cybersecurity equivalent of combustible cladding’. His only real digital talent, Sarah claimed, was in manipulating OneProfile visibility to his company’s advantage, shouldering CyberFort to the fore in search engine results. He’d swipe-righted his way into a honey trap.

‘And then there’s the Vietnamese clinic–’

‘I need to see my profile,’ Marcus says through clenched teeth. David removes his horn-rimmed glasses and slowly cleans the lenses with a cloth. He’d get more engagement if he’d only invest in some fashionable glasses.

‘You’re obsessing again, Marcus.’

He knuckles away hot tears with his bandaged hand. David continues tapping his palm-device. His voice softens. ‘How do you feel?’ Marcus’s lungs feel algorithmically suppressed.

He rips the bandage from his hand. His device has been confiscated, leaving a raw, rectangular hollow in the flesh of his palm. The veins mapping across red-brown sheets of exposed muscle seem to flicker, splitting apart, forming and reforming into a jargon of nonsense words and numbers incessantly scripting in the wound.

Marcus feels illegitimate.