21 December 2012 last day before Year Zero

"The first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728." in Memoirs of the Twentieth Century written in 1733 by the Rev. Samuel Madden, D.D., commonly called "Premium" Madden. We are all praying that our guardian angel watches over us as we get closer to 21 December, 2012 every day. The end of the Mayan Long Count Calender is also the last day of 2012 in England. 22 December will be Day One of Year Zero. Today Osiris came round to see my new container appartment. Containers are the easiest mass housing to construct with our limited resources, and they are stacked up, one upon another, in a compound that makes security an easy task. The curfew has been lowered to 8pm in the evenings, so I am glad to have a living space with good communications built in, instead of the run down place I used to have in Notting Hill. Osiris is our boffin, the master of our underworld. He used to be an astronomer, but these days he works in the Ministry as a software engineer. He's an old world geek in a Harris Tweed jacket, and I'm sure that, if we could find him some tobacco, he would pull a pipe out of his pocket. He's our time travel guru, the man who worked out how to configure the iPhone to send the quantum packets of information back through time. Osiris told me that the idea of year zero, in his opinion, is that we can have another one a year later if need be. Losing track of time would help the Chairman's plans to recondition everyone to the new order of things. Past is bad, future is good, the Chairman loves to say. So it may be necessary to postpone the good for a while till things on the ground get a little better. We are so short of skilled people in all segments of society that many services, taken for granted a few years ago, no longer exist. The Romans had bread and games. We have ration cards and netbooks with super fast gaming processors. We live in a virtual paradise, and just to keep it that way we have prescription drugs that control attention deficit, keep your seratonin and dopamine in good order, and make you feel high as you play the latest episode of Grail Warcraft. That's my main job, keeping the updates coming and making sure that the story rolls on, and that the gamers don't get bored. User brain activity is monitored, so that the personal dose of medicine can be adjusted as required. People love it, as it keeps them occupied. They have no idea of the extent to which they are being manipulated. In a way it's just as well. With so many outcasts living in the now closed London Underground, a docile population leaves the security services enough time and resources to hunt down the outcasts. Otherwise the chaos would be even worse. Alphas and Betas rarely leave the secure areas of the Sectors, so they hardly ever come into contact with the ugly reality outside. We live in a hybrid world, part real, part virtual, and only a select few still have an overview of what is happening. That's why Isis keeps saying that time is of the essence, before all is lost. Once our memories are gone it will not be possible to reconstruct the past, so we shall have no compass for the future.