"Robert Rankin - Armageddon the Musical" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

you watched, and when, was all yours. A constitutional right. All the government asked was that
you did watch. So, as an incentive and to ensure just reward, they had instituted a system which
was, in its way, every bit as fundamentally brilliant and divinely inspired as had been the wheel
clamp in twentieth-century London.

Every TV terminal now had an inbuilt Electronic Eye Scanning Point Indicator, or EYESPI for short.
This marvel of modern technology was capable of recognising the viewer by the individual patterns
of their irises, iris 'signatures' having, of course, been registered at birth with the mother
computer. Once recognition had been established, this ingenious little doodad totted up the number
of weekly viewing hours being put in by the active viewer in question. Once these were logged,
food, medical supplies and rehousing credits then could be allocated accordingly.

It was a wonderful system: unbiased, democratic, free for all to take advantage of and with an
obvious appeal to mankind's naturally competitive spirit. So wonderful was it in fact, that the TV


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stations felt impelled to extol its virtues every hour upon the hour. Its simple majesty being
summed up, rather succinctly (and not a little poignantly) in the famous hymn jingle, 'The more
you view the more you do, the more we vet the more you get.' (No. 4302, New World TV Hymnal.)

But, as has previously been stated, pleasing all the people all of the time is an incomplete
science. And so this system, as near to perfect as any that can be imagined, had its dissenters.
Not that any of them actually came out into the open to complain about it, of course. No chance of
that. They were far too busy glued to their TV screens in a desperate attempt to clock up
sufficient rehousing credits.

1

There are only five great men and three of them are hamburgers. Don Van Vliet

Back in those carefree days of the 1980s it was very much the vogue amongst the well-to-dos to
seek out dilapidated character properties for conversion. Medieval timber-framed barns, oast
houses, clapped out windmills, all were considered dead chic. And you really weren't anybody if
you didn't possess, at the very least, a Wesleyan chapel with all its bits and bobs intact, that
you had painstakingly tortured into a design studio, complete with en suite bathrooms, fitted
kitchen and solarium.

Few there were with sufficient foresight to consider what the twentieth century itself might offer
in the way of character property. In fact, it wasn't until well into the 1990s that the potential
of such derelict period pieces as supermarkets, Habitat stores, fast breeder reactors and battery
chicken houses was fully exploited. By the year 2050, however, there was hardly a building
standing above ground that hadn't been commandeered and converted.

Rex Mundi occupied an apartment built high in the north-west corner of Odeon Towers. The building
was of the pre-NHE persuasion and had long ago been a cinema.