Michael Abberton

Scott Sutherland, 29, a man desperate to find a career in the media. Frustrated journalist and scriptwriter, has tried his hand at everything the new media has provided, from TikTok to podcasts, hawking his wares to anyone who will buy them. Well-researched contacts got him unpaid runner positions on a couple of low-budget Netflix movies and a TV show, but all has led to nothing. Until one day, opportunity makes a virtual knock and hints at something too tempting not to answer. 

Scott walked up to his desk and woke his laptop. This was his place of work and had been since the pandemic. The desk was sit-stand (provided by a temporary employer who had not requested it back when they had ‘regrettably no option but to let him go’. Every time he stood at the desk, that phrase popped into his head. How grateful he should be that they released him into the wild like an injured bird, one that had generously nurtured back to health, fresh worms and birdseed every day, safe from the perils of the neighbourhood cats. That, once released onto the open plains of the Serengeti, he could resume his position as the Alpha, the king of the veldt, free to hunt, to procreate, to breathe the clean air… The whir of the desk’s motor became the opening to the Lion King. He lifted his giant coffee mug into the air before him and began to sing. “Nants’ ingonyama, bakithi, baba…”

His phone and laptop chimed almost simultaneously. He opened his email on the laptop— an unsolicited message— but before he sent it to report spam, his curiosity got the better of him. 

“Opportunity for researcher/media podcaster, The Life to Come TV show”

Through gritted teeth, he opened it. It contained no media or automatic links, and there was no hidden .exe file. It was a simple email, and unsurprisingly, it was addressed to him by name.

Dear Scott,

I have the excellent opportunity for you, my friend, the break you have been awaiting. This is a doozy. 

Fifty years ago, at the beginning of the 1970s, a TV show was produced in South Korea, called The Life to Come (Dagaol Insaeng). This show was a series of short stories, like a Saturday Play House or Tales of the Unexpected, each episode a different story with a twist in the tail. The producers, writers, and most of the actors are long past. Only eight episodes were ever broadcast, from January to March of 1972. Only four of those episodes remain in the vaults of KBS. 

So why look now at an old, cancelled show? Episode 3, The Fall of the Mighty, tells of a futuristic society, ravaged by global warming, where a geriatric TV show host and self-styled millionaire loses a presidential election and incites an insurrection. Sound familiar? The script is incredibly close to the real-world events that happened in 2020. Remember at the time the US was basically occupying RoK and they were getting beaten in Vietnam. Richard Nixon was in the White House and would go on to be re-elected that November, after the shenanigans of the Watergate burglaries. Though SF and fiction, it was thinly veiled, and it is perhaps maybe this story that got the show cancelled. 

But anyway, an archivist last March found this episode again, and it was briefly on YouTube before it got taken down. The archivist also discovered that other stories also had very close connections to recent history. The COVID, Ukraine invasion, the Japan nuclear disaster, all featured in the other three episodes. All very close – too close to the real thing. More close than the Simpsons conspiracy theory even. 

So why has this not kicked off and gone viral?  Like I say, most, if not all, the people are dead, and the archivist who discovered the episode again has also disappeared. Interested?

Scott looked up from the screen and ran his fingers through his curly black hair. Could this be real, and who had written to him? If any of this was true, it would make a great podcast. Elements of the supernatural, SF, and true crime, with a bit of nostalgia thrown in? This could be huge. He read on…

Why have I not taken this myself, you are asking? I have too much to lose. You, however, are perfectly placed to do this and build contacts from ground upwards. There is no catch here; this email gives all you need. Also, the name of the archivist was Lucy Newton, from Cambridge, Mass. 

Good hunting

A friend.

The email source was anonymous and a dead end, coming from a TOR server. The time it was sent also was meaningless, though the imperfect nature of the syntax seemed to indicate that it was written by someone whose first language was not English, but even that could have been a red herring— tuning a text through translation software or generating it through an AI. 

So, Scott stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles. He fired up Google and set to work. 

He found IMDb and other references to the show, so that was real, but curiously, no Wikipedia or other encyclopaedia references. There was no Reddit, no TikTok, no YouTube. At least not that he could find. He could try running searches in Korean using translator tools, but even thinking about that gave him a headache— not enough caffeine for that yet. So he moved to the archivist. 

There were seemingly thousands of people with that name in both Cambridges, but he found a Lucy Newton-Paisley, graduated cum laude in 2019 from Harvard, who went on to work in the library there as an archivist specialising in media, film, and audio. He widened the search and found a couple of local news stories and a feature in the Harvard Crimson from only a few months prior. 

Harvard Librarian still missing – family desperate ran one of the headlines. Lucy was 27, engaged to be married to a local businessman, a respectable, Democrat voter, was in the badminton club, her master’s dissertation was The Impact of Television in History – Archivist or Activist. His eyebrows went up at that. But he couldn’t find a published copy and he couldn’t get past the university firewall without the proper ID. But if that was her background, he could see why this show would pique her interest. 

He stood back and lowered the desk again. Screen break. And more coffee.

Lucy had taken a contract from KBS to go over to Seoul for four months and oversee the transfer of their film stocks and archives to their new building, at the same time looking at potential materials for display in the on-site museum and online. Everything was going fine until one morning she didn’t show up for work. CCTV at her hotel in central Seoul showed that she had not returned from work the previous night, though she had taken a taxi that had dropped her just down the street from the hotel, unable to  get closer due to traffic and construction work. So somewhere in the three blocks from the taxi to the hotel she had simply disappeared.

Lucy was tall, 5’10” and had short blonde hair. She wouldn’t easily blend into the crowds on the street despite the number of foreign workers and tourists in the city. Nevertheless, no one came forward to say that they had seen her on that street or in the surrounding area. Her phone had been switched off whilst she was at work (company rules) and had not been reactivated – the taxi was a regular booking, at the same time every day. Everything up  to that point had been routine – no strange calls. Email, what could be accessed, also gave no clues, though her laptop had disappeared with her. There was no mention of this  in these stories about how she had momentarily that same month sent Dagaol Insaeng viral – as if that never happened. 

Scott started to check Korean English papers and blogs – and here he got a couple of interesting hits. Using his Google skills to the max, he found a blog published by a local English conversation teacher – with only 12 regular views, that talked about the whole theory. The last entry on that blog was three weeks ago, and the teacher was only identified by an alias. However, using reverse picture search within half an hour, he had the teacher’s address, place of work, and could guess their name. Richard Fox, originally from Sydney, working at the same language school in Seoul since 2022. 

It also looked like there was more than a casual connection with Fox – as if he actually knew Lucy or had spent some time with her socially. So Scott sent him an email through an alias anonymiser.

The second lead was British, so it had the advantage of being at least in  the same hemisphere. This was another blogger, UFOlogist, and X-Files fan – Sophie Kaur. She had some links to previous posts about the TV show and Lucy’s disappearance, but the links were all dead. Her last post had only been two days ago. Another email was fired, as Scott broke for lunch. Pot Noodle. 

After his heart meal, Scott checked his email again, but unsurprisingly, nothing. After this, it seemed his only possible way forward would be to contact Lucy’s family or fiancé, and that was something he wanted to avoid if at all possible. 

So he decided to go for a walk and perhaps buy some more coffee. And instant ramen. 

When he returned, he woke the computer again, and there was an email from Sophie. 

I don’t know who you are, but I’ve done everything I was told. Please leave me alone. 

Scott wrote back. But there is more that you need to do. You know what the consequences will be. I need to speak to you. WhatsApp?

The reply came back almost immediately, and in minutes, he was calling Sophie. He didn’t bother to hide his face, and when she came online, he was relieved to see that she didn’t either, though she had blurred her background . Sophie was obviously of Indian heritage, and though she spoke English at almost incomprehensible speed, there was a trace of an accent. His long black hair was uncombed and looked nervous – but then her expression changed when she saw Scott.

“Who the fuck are you?” she said, reaching for the phone. 

“Hi. Sorry to bother you and perhaps lead you on a bit. My name’s Scott. I’m an investigative journalist, and I’m putting a story together about Lucy Newton and The Life to Come. Your name popped up…”

“Where? Oh my god, what did I miss? I took everything down…”

“It was an internet archive site. It still has the links to your blog posts, though the posts themselves are gone. I’d like to…”

“Oh NO!” she said, starting to lose her composure. 

“Look, don’t  worry about it. I can send you the link and how to  remove it, but in return, I want to know what was in those posts. Also, what are you afraid of, Sophie, if I can call you Sophie…?”

Scott tried to move his phone, realising that the camera angle from below might make him look imposing and was up his nose. 

“Look, even this app isn’t safe.”

“I’m in Hackney,” he lied. “If you want to meet up somewhere…?”

“I need that info urgently. I can meet you… you know the Waterstones in Trafalgar Square?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“I’ll meet you in the café there at… half-past four.”

Scott was two hours away by car and an hour by train – he could make it easily. 

“See you then – but while you’re…”

But she was gone, and the chat was deleted. 

It was a lead at least, and having exhausted all but his contacts of last resort, he put his laptop in his bag, took his jacket off the back of the door, and headed out to his car. 

He found it surprisingly easy to find a parking spot at the station and was in London early, and so took the time to wander across town rather than taking the tube. London was populated at this time by its usual mix of foreign and domestic tourists, and locals desperately trying to eke as much usefulness as possible from their lunch break. He wandered down into Trafalgar Square past St. Martins’. The grand piazza itself was fenced off with seemingly every available square metre filled with huts, cables, scaffolding, and a stage at the foot of the column. There was no indication of what all this was in aid of. He walked under the shelter of the columns and went into the shop – still with an hour to kill, he wandered through the departments, on the off chance checking the media and culture sections for anything about Korean T.V. All he found was K-pop and K-drama, which seemed to be closer to Hispanic telenovelas than anything else. 

And so he found himself sitting in the café, at a table by the wall, sipping a (VERY strong even for him) oat cappuccino. He fired up his laptop, VPN, and then the free Wi-Fi. Popping in his AirPods, he scrolled absently through some TikTok. His usual fare of cat videos, political satire, and dashcam horror drifted slowly into something else. It started with excerpts from the Men in Black franchise, Will Smith being Will Smith before the slap. Then a sequence from the X-Files, from one of his favourite episodes, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space. A man sits in his garage when his garage door opens by itself and a black limousine drives in at high speed and stops. The window rolls down to reveal the ex-pro wrestler Jesse Ventura as a Man in Black, who proceeds to recite statistics at the man about how UFO sightings were most commonly explained away as being nothing more than sightings of the planet Venus. He ends threatening the man’s life if he continues to spread such rumours, before reversing the car out in precisely the same way he came in (the same clip played forwards and backwards). Scott chuckled to himself, remembering the next encounter with the Men in Black where one is revealed to be Alex Trebek, the longtime host of the gameshow Jeopardy. 

The feed went back to other Men in Black clips, another cat video, and then what at first seemed to be the same X-Files  clip as before – but the angle was different. Ventura stepped out of the car and was talking directly to the camera. 

“Since the rise in the popularity and usage of social media, people have been able to communicate their everyday experiences, the mundane and the irrelevant, to large numbers of people in a very short time. The simple and meaningless occasions where something is misremembered become a wild and ridiculous antiscientific theory just because a handful of people make the same mistake.”

Ventura paced around the garage, gesticulating wildly, always returning to the camera— which seemed to be at eye level for someone sitting in a chair— with no cuts to the other actor in the original scene. He continued at speed, his voice loud and his pronunciation and enunciation clipped and precise. 

“The Mandela Effect is just such a social phenomenon where a large group of people misremember a specific detail about an event, person, place, or situation. The term was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome after she discovered that she and others had a false memory of Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela actually died in 2013, after serving as South Africa’s first president from 1994 to 1999. Now there are even more of these idiotic and unconnected errors from the Barenstain Bears to Mickey Mouse’s suspenders. All this is nothing more than confabulation, the brain creating things to fill in gaps that appear as the memory fades and cognition deteriorates with age. Like, for example, a precognitive Korean TV show that in fact never existed and is just a fantasy, a creation of a weak and unstable mind. Anyone participating in such frivolous nonsense is just showing how intellectually weak they are and may suffer catastrophic damage to their professional and personal relationships as a result.”

Ventura opened the limo door and got in, closing the door with a thunk. 

“And if you spread such nonsense, you’re a dead man.”

The window wound up, the garage door opened, and the car reversed out into the street. The app then automatically scrolled back to another cat video. Scott swiped down, but the video that played now was the original X-Files scene from the show. A cold shiver ran up Scott’s spine. Did that just happen? Did I fall asleep?

He didn’t have more time to ruminate, as when he looked up from his phone, now held with a white-knuckle grip, he saw Sophie. She reminded Scott of someone he knew, and then he placed that – she looked like the British Indian actress that had taken a role in ER, but he couldn’t remember her name. He waved, but she had already spotted him, and came over, putting her bag down beside the chair opposite him. He stood up and proffered his hand, which she looked at disdainfully.

“Would you like a drink, I’ll…?”

“I’ll get my own thanks. And whilst I’m at the counter, please switch off your laptop and put your phone in this.” She fished a small phone-sized bag from her pocket, made of shiny plastic, it had a self-adhesive tape at one end so that it could be sealed. It was a Faraday bag, and Scott had used them before at gigs and film premieres. He did as he was told, and when she returned with some sort of tea, the phone was sitting on the table, secured inside the shiny bag. 

She sat down, shrugging off a long black woollen coat and scarf. Under that she was wearing a black hand-knitted jumper, the collar of a purple blouse showing underneath. Saying nothing, she sat there for several minutes whilst her tea steeped, the water becoming a deeper colour of orange, but all Scott could smell was steam with a citrus twang. A couple of times he started to say something but each time she silenced him with a wave of her hand and a look that could have stopped an Irish nun at twenty paces. 

“All right,” she said at length. I think I can trust you. But you clearly have no idea what you are getting yourself into.” 

“I’m beginning to suspect, I think,” he said, with a nervous smile. “Just before you came in, I…” 

“You are probably being told already by people that this show never existed, that the disappearance in Seoul was unrelated, that the whole story is completely nuts.” She blew across the surface of the tea and took a sip. 

“Um… people?” he said, finding himself taking a sip of his cold coffee dregs. 

“Perhaps you aren’t at that stage yet. But if you continue after that, they will come to you and tell you in no uncertain terms to stop, or else.”

“Or else…”

She passed him a folded-up piece of paper. “Take that, don’t look at it outside or in a public place. That’s the complete list of all eight episodes, including the ones that Newton found and were on the internet. You’re probably thinking that you can contact her family and co-workers. Don’t try. Her fiancé is fake, she was never in a relationship, he only appeared on the scene after she disappeared. He’s a government agent. If you manage to get her co-workers, they will pretty much give you exactly the same story each time, memorised.” 

“What else can you tell me?”

“What you can tell me is what you found and how I can permanently and completely erase it. Then I’m on my way, and hopefully, I’ll never hear of you again.”

Scott started to regain a piece of his composure. For all he knew, she had somehow hacked his phone before she came into the café, and so far, he had seen no other reason to be afraid other than what she had told him. The other things could be coincidental and nothing more than the way things sometimes go viral and then disappear to the point where the same search terms won’t retrieve them. 

“Now just hang on a sec,” Scott said, pulling his chair closer to the table. “You’ve got to give me more than that. These titles mean nothing unless I can get more, if not the episodes themselves. Was the show franchised anywhere? Could illicit tapes have been made in some fan’s basement?” 

Sophie’s look of anger returned, but this time Scott held his ground, physically and mentally. 

“This was the early seventies, the franchise model didn’t really exist yet outside of individual deals between big networks for shows. And outside of Korea, nobody speaks Korean, it’s not like it was ever dubbed into Chinese or Japanese. It had subtitles, but…”

“It had subtitles? In English?”   

“Yes. The country was full of US servicemen and war profiteers, hangovers from the occupation after the war and, of course, Vietnam. That’s how the show became known to the… agencies.” 

“You mean the CIA? Intelligence?” he said in a hoarse whisper. 

She sat back and laughed. “You’re not very good at this, are you, Scott? You aren’t exactly Dispatches  or 60 Minutes material, are you?” 

Scott felt his neck redden. “This is a big story, and at the back of all this is a missing woman. I thought you might have some concern for her at least,” he said, though he knew up to that point he hadn’t given Newton’s well-being a second thought. 

“Let’s be at least honest with each other, Scott, if that is your real name. Lucy Newton is not why you are here. And yes, online the story was that some of the episodes were too close to Nixon. Someone in the CIA let Nixon know. He thought the whole thing was about him, and so he pulled strings to get the show taken down. And that would have been the end of the story until it got resurrected. It wasn’t anything to do with Nixon; it was always Trump.  And right now, circumstances have changed.”

“How so?”

“You do know about the US election, right? And Trump’s admiration for dictators?” 

“Yes…” 

“In the past few days, Trump has resurrected his intention to charge South Korea for all the US forces stationed there, to the tune of $10 billion – that they can’t afford. Korea would have to become dependent on Japan, and Japan would have to massively increase its defence spending in breach of its own treaties with China and the US after WW2. The entire region would be destabilised at a stroke.”

“God, he is literally insane.”

“No sensible person wants that to happen, and so if we can get a story together before the November election, we might find more support than opposition.” 

“You said we –  you want back in on this?”

“Even with the possible change in attitude, no. Let’s not forget some of the dirt from this falls on the current administration, especially if they have orchestrated the cover-up. I meant what I said earlier. After today, we have no more contact. I have too much to lose. Whilst I think all you have is perhaps a cat.”

Scott didn’t want to let her know that he didn’t even have that. 

She drank some more of her tea and considered him again.

“I’ll give you two contacts. One is only reachable through a messaging service on the dark web, though they say that they are based in Taiwan.  The other is… well, make of it what you will. He is reachable online and claims to be…” she sighed, “ex-Australian SBS.”

“SBS… Special Boat Squad? The Navy equivalent of the SAS?” 

“Yes. But take everything he gives you with a pinch of salt.” She went into her bag and pulled out two yellow Post-it notes, folded in half. 

“Now,” she said, taking out her own laptop and powering it up, “you are going to show me what I need.”

Scott tried again to cajole her into changing her mind, providing more assistance, or partnering up, but she was having none of it, though on the way out, she did shake his hand and wish him good hunting. He sat back down again and took his phone out of the Faraday pouch. It was designed to be single-use, and so the only way to open it was to rip it off. He powered it on and checked messages. Nothing— but his email notification was flagged. He decided to look at that when he got back, and so he left, heading this time back to the tube station, saving time but unfortunately heading into the rush-hour crush. 

He checked the contacts, the open one first. As it turned out, this was the same conversation teacher he had already found in Seoul— and in fact, he had received an email from him. The time difference between Seoul and the UK was crazy— it was already tomorrow. If he replied first thing tomorrow, he might be able to set up a chat. But from the email, it didn’t look too promising. 

“Yes, I’d be interested in chatting to you about poor Lucy – the government is behind the whole thing, so serious opsec situation, if you get me. Only use encrypted email and platforms – keep everything deniable and backed up offline, you get me.” 

This had been sent using Gmail. 

This guy was definitely not special forces. But he was possibly special in other ways. Nevertheless, Scott sent him a message for a FaceTime call on WhatsApp first thing tomorrow, to see what the guy knew, and if he didn’t know anything, he was actually in Seoul and so if he was crafty he might be able to use him as boots on the ground. 

Scott didn’t know what to make of these mysterious threats. The incident with TikTok he had practically already discounted as some kind of prank. He could see the possible ramifications but the whole story was easily debunked. That’s what made it perfect for a podcast, especially now. But he didn’t see how it could possibly have legs. Thinking about it, he was reckoning that this was more something to get his name out there and opening doors rather than being a potential big earner in its own right. 

The next morning he quickly showered and got dressed before sitting down with a coffee and opening the chat. Right on time, Richard Fox appeared. He was wearing a baseball cap, the phone seemingly on a table from the angle. He looked older than Scott had expected, probably in his late 40s. He was wearing a blue pilot shirt, open at the collar, and seemed very slightly built for a trained killer. 

Scott explained what he was after and asked Richard what he knew – anything more than the republished rumours and stories from his blog. 

“Well, I’ve been round the hotel and where she was dropped off. I’ve got some video of that I was going to post. Hey, can I use your name… no I didn’t think so. Obviously! Anyway, yeah, that hotel, the Ibis, it’s a business hotel and part of the international chain, but it’s always loaded with parties of Russian and US businessmen if you get my drift. And these men are always together, all have the same haircut, all stacked like proverbial shithouses, if you get me?”

“Are you saying that the Russians could have taken her?” 

“Well, maybe. But I think it’s the yanks. Yeah. That fiancé, he’s a dodgy bloke as well. He was staying at the hotel for a bit for he pissed off back where he came from. I asked the reception staff about him, and they said that Lucy had never had any visitors whilst she was there, at least not that they knew about – and the only place they had seen this gut before she went missing was on the news. He never went there. The whole thing was fake.” 

“What about the parents?”

“Well, that’s the other funny thing, right? You’d expect them to come over, that’s what usually happens in cases like this. But they’ve been nowhere near.” 

“So, going back to the hotel, what do you think happened, Richard?”

“Call me Rick. Well, it’s quite a popular area in the centre of the city. Just where the taxi stopped is a side street loaded with fast food and tourist restaurants, but it’s mostly accessory and cosmetic shops. Very popular with the Japanese tourists. That street is always busy, and she could have been taken anywhere from there. There’s usually street preachers, hawkers, buskers, you name it, so it would have been fairly easy to organise a diversion whilst she was spirited away. And besides, if a bunch of foreigners is acting weird, the locals are not about to intervene, you get me?” 

“I see. Now what I really want is video. I understand that there was video online before – did you manage to download any, or do you have a local contact who has it?” 

 “No, sorry mate. I missed out on all that as well, and I don’t know anybody with connections to the TV. I could put some feelers out though – there’s a lot of professional business types at my school, and if I don’t teach someone myself I might be able to talk to some of my workmates.” 

“That would be brilliant, Rick, yes. And if you could find anyone who might have seen Lucy being abducted… you do speak Korean?” 

Rick grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, enough to get by, you know?”

Which probably translated to no.

“Great. So how about if we catch up this time tomorrow – if that’s OK at your end?”

“Yeah. No worries, speak to you then!” 

Scott sighed. Perhaps the actual secure contact would be better. He followed the instructions on the post-it, going on to the dark web and setting up a secure email account to use, before sending the email. The reply came back after a couple of minutes. The English seemed perfect, perhaps even too perfect. Anyway, he asked if the contact had any of the video. Again the reply came back straight away. Yes, they did have the video of the first four episodes, with subtitles (a detail Scott hadn’t mentioned) but it would cost. A lot. And would require Scott to purchase and work the transfer in crypto.  Something that he had never done and would not be inclined to do even if he could afford it. 

Well, perhaps he would only need a short clip of the episode – so he emailed back asking for a sample, before he paid for the whole thing. And the sample would have to be pertinent – so actually from the controversial episode itself. 

He didn’t get a response for ten minutes, then twenty. He went back onto TikTok to kill time, but now his entire feed was Men in Black, the X-Files clip, and then the edited version. Scott closed it down, checking the time. It had been a full hour with no reply, and he was starting to think he had blown it when he got another message, directing him to a file-sharing site. Scott was excited but at the same time, terrified. What if this video was something… unsavoury? Something that he could get sent down for. At the same time, he was curious, and by now, even a little hooked on the whole story. So he went to the site, and using the access he had been given, downloaded the file – which was quite large. Then , going offline, he ran the file through every malware and virus scanner he had, and almost sick with worry, decompressed and opened the file. 

It opened like an old video, with noise on the screen before this resolved into a time card, like a TV version of a clapper board, with a clock on it, but everything was written on it obviously in Korean. Then the theme music started. The music sounded familiar, it wasn’t Korean, but Western, European classical music. Mozart – the Requiem. As the music pulsed and got louder, the opening credits faded onto the screen. And the subtitles appeared underneath them, though were a bit clumsy at first. 

The Life to Come. Episode 4 – The End of the Dream. 

Scott glanced at the timer – this was the whole episode! Forty-eight minutes. He wouldn’t need to go back to the dodgy contact at all. This would be all he needed. He pulled out his phone so that he could make a voice memo as he went, watching the time indication. 

Cheap model effects of a futuristic city went into a world, obviously supposed to be the US, where a popular T show host – who was also a criminal, a serial abuser, and claimed to be a millionaire – was somehow elected to the presidency. He crashed the economy, was responsible for thousands of deaths in a plague, and almost started a war. When he lost his second election, he incited a rebellion that almost resulted in the murder of the vice president. Four years passed, and he came back again, but this time far worse than before. A pure fascist, leading a personality cult that threatened not only the constitution of his own country but world peace. And the episode ended just before the results were confirmed… 

A Korean woman in traditional attire appeared on the screen, standing in front of an upside-down map of the world. Smiling, she delivered the closing moral. 

“So, dear watcher, you desire to know what happened – or what will happen. Was our story so far away from the truth of what will happen in the future? Perhaps that is not for us to know. Perhaps in the future, when these things happen, they will know, they will realise, but perhaps too late, and the warning from the past will not be seen or heard. We know how democracy itself can be turned on its head, then can we not take some vicarious pleasure in watching the so-called leader of this fictional world’s democracy, the nation that holds itself to be the example of freedom and democracy, destroyed as the citizens of that society willingly vote away their freedoms and their sacred constitution in order to be ruled by a dictator. So many times this has happened in the past, and history will repeat itself, created as it is by the same critically flawed and stupid apes that we are. Such is The Life To Come. Good night.”

It really was all  he needed. Looking at the time, Scott decided to hit the sack, and tomorrow he would be able to start writing the first story or podcast post.

Scott was shaken awake. Bright blue light shone directly into his eyes, surrounded by darkness. Then the duvet was thrown aside, he was rolled over, and he felt his wrists being zip-tied, tightly.

He looked around and was dazzled again as someone switched on the overhead light (he never used that). The room was full of people dressed in black tactical gear, with helmets and facemarks. Some had submachine guns slung at their sides as they began tearing his bedroom apart as if looking for something. 

“Hey! HEY! What the fuck is going on? Who are you?” he said, starting to become aware he was only wearing a light blue T-shirt and Felix the Cat boxer shorts. 

One of the figures  manhandled him into a sitting position before taking off his helmet and mask. It was Rick, but now the sheepish grin and the Australian accent had both disappeared. 

“I’m  arresting you on a charge of treason. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you will later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence. Is there anything you wish to say now, Mr Sutherland?”

“What are you talking about, treason? And that was you I spoke to in… that’s entrapment!”

“I think you’ve been watching too many US crime dramas, Mr Sutherland. What you did do is contact a known Chinese intelligence operative in the Ministry of State Security and download contraband material. But we can talk about that later.” 

Scott was pulled upright and escorted out his front door into the cold night. Outside, the road and car park were blocked with more police cars and vans than he had ever seen. Gravel and damp made him walk even more oddly, and he almost lost his footing on the stairs. One of the officers caught him under the arm, and at that point, Scott looked down to see someone sitting in the driver’s seat of a large black Range Rover. It was Sophie. She gave him that same disdainful look  before being obscured entirely as the tinted window rolled up.

“It’s a stitch-up!” he found himself shouting, as his neighbours stood outside their door, in a variety of dressing gowns, shaking their heads and tutting almost audibly. 

He was bundled into the back of one of the Range Rovers before being followed by another officer. The tailgate was closed with a thunk. 

Scene – night. Suburban car park outside a row of flats. People standing outside flats looking down as police officers in uniform and riot gear get into cars ready to leave. Camera pans and then zooms out, to reveal a Korean woman in formal dress. She looks directly at the camera and smiles.

Fade to black. 

End credits and closing theme music. 

Scott Sutherland, looking for fortune and fame in the media, found only a deeper obscurity. That when you dig too greedily and too deep, you don’t know what you will find waiting – and sometimes, the most obscure, the most absurd reason and story is the only one that is correct, when you enter the Twilight Zone.