THE CHESS GAME

This is a sample of my novel. It’s a love story set against the pandemic, with political undertones and metaphysical overtones.

“The Chess Game” is part II.

25th of March. The apocalypse begins.

It was the first day of lockdown and earth changed shape all of a sudden. So many people who’d been encouraged for decades to go out and spend their pennies on places where other people also spend their pennies, were now told to stay in. That’s it, no more drinking out, concerts, events. The world stopped. Suddenly less cars on the road; it was beautiful. Helped by this unusually mild, sunny winter.

They said it was a bad thing that happened. Bad deaths and never-before-seen medical tragedies, but that was all out of sight; what the average person saw looking out their window was a fresh new, quiet world. It was eerie. But they had the internet, so it wasn’t truly lonely. And it’s OK, they still had online shopping. So was it really that bad? Some thought so. The officials finally acknowledged that the new virus needed measures of quarantine. It came like lightning. So, from indifference and an unabashed embrace of the Darwinian method of ignoring the virus, almost praising it for culling the population — we were now onto a new chapter: FEAR.

By magic the news changed tone and pumped fear through the television. And all the screens people had around them which were more of a reality than any non screen objects. You couldn’t be lectured by your socks or fork, but this cute little device with moving pictures and colors on it — everyone’s best friend, and foe — the phone, could hypnotize you with an endless stream of information. If you wanted to call it that. It was bytes, for sure.

First, it was important to blame the crisis on a suitable entity that fit into with the rest of the narrative that supported our times like a skeleton. Had to make it clear who the bad guy was in this Western paradigm. China. It came from China. Those barbarians eat disgusting things and don’t wash their hands or something and look what they did. With their slimy culinary habits, they got us civilised folk infected. It might even have been true. We don’t know.

That’s perhaps the magic of the whole 2020 year and surrounding decades: invaded by so much data, yet no one knows anything for sure. Or at least not with their own computing chip. Medieval peasants watching sheep on the hills of Transylvania would have more of a genuine idea of what is going on, based on their own stream of thoughts and deductions, than your average British or American person. This side of the fence, people were astute and fancy white collar professionals, with professional speaking tones and thick rimmed glasses, but most of the verbosity in their mouths came ready made from a dichotomy of the Guardian — Fox News opinion factories.

And the new apocalypse, a strange world-uniting disaster that made life stop… would make people navigate even firmer in opposite corners of an artificially generated dichotomy. Almost like pawns in a game of chess. They don’t choose to be there. Fighting each other. It’s the hand from the sky moving them to guard a Queen and King they haven’t even once seen. Nor need to see, in order to offer their lives for them. Such beautiful dedication. Such self sacrifice of the pawns.