Not the End of the World

Sometime in the not too distant future, Merc Swingly - a young, naive employee of one of the seven multi-national companies, which control the world through figurehead politicians - dreams that the world has come to an end.

He is instructed by a weird creature, who calls himself a ''Third Degree Representative', to go back and prevent this happening.

Sometime in the future, who knows how far away, all the things which people have been dreading and issuing warnings about for years are beginning to happen.

The planet earth has finally become one political unit. Its capital city is now called Nexus Luxuria. Luxury, after all, is clearly the thing most people have been aiming for all their lives.

Life has developed in an almost exactly similar fashion to the threatened forecasts. The world has at last achieved all those marvellous things we've at present only started to acquire for ourselves - global warming; over-use and exhaustion of fossil fuels; a third world with slave labour factories; globalization of commerce until just seven multi-national companies are running the entire planet (under a titular World President with seven Vice Presidents - a Government with no real power, but considerable wealth and status); and a population kept happy by recreational drugs, which are no longer frowned on but instead encouraged. In fact, an other-earthly paradise - not

Oh, and at a guess the future time when all this is happening is about a hundred years ahead of ours. Or is it only fifty?