Day 2-4

1.

This is a test. Hello, Hello. Hello. You are listening to a recording. How about that? I am recording onto a Lanier LCR5D Desktop Cassette Voice Recorder that belonged to my father, who worked as a court reporter in his twenties. There is a house one of my relatives owns, which he used to live in but has never sold or rented out, and which various generations and distant arms of my family have used as a permanent storage facility for furniture and items they no longer have room for, but don’t want to take to the tip. I found the Lanier there, next to his steno machine. I hoped I would. It has an epidermis of dust and a metal foot pedal, and has been for some time an unavailable and obsolete piece of equipment. It is, however, the only piece of equipment I can find that records onto tape. Tape is an easily destroyed medium which is impossible to play back without possessing a similarly long-discontinued device, and this will hopefully give me greater control over where the contents of this recording are distributed. I am hoping this means not into the hands of the John Steeds, but just in case it does, I will not be using anyone’s real names.

2.

The Lanier works fine, you will be relieved to hear. So I will begin without further ado. This is the personal account of the right-hand man to the leader of the ‘E-Gunpowder Plot’, as it was dubbed by some. We ourselves had no name for the operation. It was simply the course of action that Emperor Angel, the ringleader, deemed as necessary in order to plunge the country back into the Dark Ages. If, that is, you believe that the period before the Voyeur System constituted Dark Ages. Some people do. Some people believe that the world was literally in the dark prior to the invention of the light bulb and, similarly, that the world was practically, to all intents an purposes, in the dark before the invention of the Voyeur System. The reason I am recording this tape, however, is that I believe those people are far, far fewer in number than those who realise – maybe only deep down, beneath a great crust of apathy – that we should not live in a world where nothing is private. That living under a constant eye – even an eye whose possessor changes on a monthly basis – is living under tyranny.

I am recording this tape for them, perhaps in the hope that they will find some inspiration in our attempts and learn from our mistakes. I will explain as much as I can of how we came so close to dismantling the Voyeur System from within, of how we evaded detection for so long, what elements leant to our successes and what elements also led to our ultimate failure.

With regards to our failure, I am not ashamed or downtrodden. Most attempts to change things for the better are doomed. I will quote a character from a book I have been reading – it is the autobiography of Dale Cooper. Dale’s dad tells his son that “we all fail, and that we would again and again, and that was just the way it was.”

Some will reject that. Some are determined to succeed. But I think failure is more important than success. Successful people don’t know what they’re missing. The only reason they’re constantly succeeding is that they’re trying to do all the wrong things. Mostly, they’re trying to do what has already proven to be achievable. So no, I am not at all bitter that we failed. I look forward to failing again. I believe a person is no more than a ridiculously complex machine with a ridiculously simple function. That function being to slip on a banana skin. There is no point in railing against this function. It’s what we were built to do. That is why we do it so often, and why we enjoy it so much when we see others at it.

I am also recording this with some kind of posterity in mind. I aim to bury copies of this tape in protective boxes for future generations. I don’t know how I will do this yet – not without my Voyeur noticing – but I will do my best to figure something out. For the benefit of those future generations I will attempt to explain everything that may date or be written out of history. I am not particularly technologically complement, but a rudimentary description will, I hope, suffice.

I said earlier that I am – or was - the right-hand man to Emperor Angel, but you will have noticed from my voice I am a woman. Well done on that. You’ve narrowed down your list of suspects to half the population. I confess I have no idea how to distort my voice when recording onto tape, so I don’t believe I can hide that fact any more than I could from the long list of perfect strangers who have seen me unclothed, seen my 34A cups and rampant crop of pubic hair. Excuse me, my voice is dry.

3.

I have a cup of coffee, which I will sip throughout the course of the recording. I first want to try to document why it was I was convinced by Emperor Angel’s plan, so here I go.

(This now goes back to Day 1! Argh!)