Don called the movers. This time the nephew of the Pakistani citizen, who had in the meantime become a British citizen, came, a greasy young guy with gold chains. Probably smart to have invested in gold. Thought Don randomly. She had packed, and now her fat brother and spaced-out mother loaded. They got into the moving van and Don would surely have cried if she were the type for it, but instead she just averted her eyes and stared at the brown neck of the Pakistani.

His name was

PATUK

DISABILITY: left-handed

HOBBIES: betting, gold chains, nice trousers

INTELLIGENCE: average

POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high

CREDITWORTHINESS: not available

USABILITY: unclear

ETHNICITY: Asian

TERRORIST DANGER LEVEL: of course

And he had landed in Rochdale as a youth. The moment to make a grand restart in England was a bit ineptly chosen. The big attacks in London hadn’t yet been totally forgotten. Same with the one on the World Trade Center. And Paris. And so on. The imaginary memorials were still hung with notes, prayers, and teddy bears, all sorts of pop stars had sung stirring songs in front of the bears and notes and hearts, war against the axis of evil had been declared, and the first conspiracy theories about the gradual takeover of the West by Islam were circulating. The moderate distrust of Muslims by the non-Muslim Western world hadn’t diminished. To put it mildly.

9/11, as the thing would later be called, was probably one of the triggers of it all. The retreating into populist sentiment on all sides, the mass surveillance, the new dictatorships, the conspicuous transformation of the Western world. Later there were adherents to the conspiracy theory that the first attacks and the refugee crisis had been engineered. Planned by a few American industrialists who wanted to profit from chaos in Europe and the probable wars. Or the Vatican, which wanted to prove its theory of the apocalypse. Or China, which wanted to tip the West into chaos, in order to … doesn’t matter.

Anyway. The EU broke apart, people ran around like chickens. Of course there was no plan behind the fleeing refugees. It would have been great if there had been a plan. But there were as many ideas and interests as people on the planet, and none of them were really wise. It’s gotten too crowded on earth. It made people nervous and caused scientists to make foolhardy prognoses. They all ended in catastrophe, having to do with a halving of the world population, with war, euthanasia.