*

Maxine’s investigation gets off badly after very shaky start. She interviews key suspects who will not let her into their apartment or apartments and only talk to her thru a keyhole. Her head is filled more and more with lies, disinformation, false information, counter-intelligence and generalised nonsense.

Months pass. Investigation founders (sic) and the globalised slowdown continues. War comes along also, long rumoured but always anyway “something of a surprise” and the Agency that Maxine works for – providing ‘professional services in vicinity of reading’ – goes bust cos most of their workers in Endland are swiftly conscripted on a precarious contract and shipped off to the front line of wherever. Even that army needs people that can read.

Not wanting to be any part of the war and sacked from her incompetent investigation into the corrupt competition as already mentioned Maxine doesn’t know what to do. She loses faith in the free market, then loses faith in religion and patriarchy but not necessarily in that order. Before long she ends up down on her luck and on her knees, alienated and sleeping in a bed made with unhappy vibes down the Food Bank along with rest of the scruffs and n’er do wells of that era and area, hungry, and indeed just like totally demoralised.

There is a long complicated induction process where M. is explained the methods of checking food in and out of Food Bank, application of Compound Interest etc, system of E-Numbers and Additives and fines for overdue returns etc. After that she gets to work chatting w disgruntled other paupers and also roped into helping people w their increasingly lunatic Tax forms, Psych Assessments and curse of Pharaoh’s Nightclub. The work is hard and morale all set to general low, also not helped by the slowdown which is still substantive in effect or daily operation.

One day when she hits rock bottom eating a cold re-heated tinned soup and starving to her own bones, Maxine resolves to leave town alone, setting off w/out appropriate clothing or footwear.

*

Outside City Limits she pass first through a rocky wilderness, then through a green pasture, then through another rocky wilderness etc in which (i.e the latter, second wilderness, after the pasture) she gets total lost. Without water and without a map or workable sense of direction M. becomes dehydrated and in deep trouble of her life.

Come night fall, in the thrall of her starvation delirium Maxine finds wreckage of a vehicle from a convoy that was probably burned up very long time back. On the bonnet or windscreen dirt and/or dust someone has written the words DIE FOREIGN DIE and below it in a different hand, PAY ATTENTION MOTHERFUCKERS. She crawls inside to shelter the night and soon listens to howl of wolves from darkness beyond. At night when the temperature drops below zero (0) and there is no functional WiFi, Maxine is hallucinating, shivering and experience what the pessimist scientists call signs of upcoming extinction.