So I thought I’d write a serial. As a discipline. Just bang out a first bit, minimal revisions (two), put it live on the site and then tomorrow have a go at part 2. I also decided to do minimal planning (none), just throw down an idea and try to play with it a bit, riff on it,  see where it takes me.

It could take me nowhere. Or somewhere new and exciting.

I’ll let you be the judge.

So follow me on this epic voyage into uncharted territory, as I make up stuff on the go and see whether it all makes sense at the end. See if my brain can even figure out an end.

You’ll either get to read a cool story, or watch a man flounder in the rising waters of his own hubris.

Either way it’s gotta be worth a look, no?

Render Unto Caesar

By Mike Lancaster

Instalment 1: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene.

The phone rang and just wouldn’t stop: a truly awful ringtone that sounded like the brass section of an orchestra falling down a flight of stairs.

A very long flight of stairs.

Made of tin.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket and stared at it balefully. The ringtone wasn’t one of mine, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t come pre-installed on the phone: no one in their right mind would want such a sound announcing a call.

Unless it was an emergency call from a brass section falling down a flight of stairs.

The display said: CALLER ID WITHHELD, but whether that was true, or just another salvo in this war of attrition I was fighting, was unknowable.

So I pushed ‘Answer’.

Unfortunately, accepting the call only seemed to antagonise the phone, making it ring even louder.

‘Hello?’ A voice said on the other end of the line. A thin, reedy voice trying to compete with a ringtone that by now sounded like the rest of the orchestra had followed their comrades down the staircase. ‘HELLO?’

‘Hello.’ I offered into the phone in the vain hope of being heard.

‘Is anybody there?’ The reedy voice persisted, obviously unable to hear me above the clamour.

‘Look,’ I said, loudly. ‘My phone is sulking. I deleted one of its favourite apps and it’s decided to punish me by sabotaging my calls. Is this important?’

‘Hello?’ The voice tried once more before the phone itself cut them off, stopped its incessant ringing, then immediately went to my contacts and, before I could stop it, it dialled my mother.

She answered after two rings, long before I could kill the call.

‘Ricardo.’ She said, warmly. ‘Your phone’s still sulking, then.’

‘Mum.’ I said, wearily. ‘My name is Richard. Pronouncing it ‘Ricardo’ doesn’t change that simple fact. Dad wasn’t an Italian designer, no matter how much you may wish he was, he was a spot welder from Grimsby. And can’t I call without you immediately jumping to the conclusion that it happened in error?’

She waited a couple of seconds before replying and I thought she was building up to have another go at me about how having a writer of technical manuals for a son wasn’t the golden future she had envisaged for the baby that grew up into me.

‘It would be easier to believe if your phone hadn’t already called me eight times today.’ She said, and I palpably relaxed, ‘And if it hadn’t sent me three MMS photographs that I’m sure you really didn’t want me to see.’

So much for relaxing. I felt my face burn red.

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. It was a shiny piece of tech that I’d had for less than a week: an HD glass touchscreen affair with sleek lines and machine tooled elegance; it had a voice recognition system that made Siri seem like a slow-developing toddler; and it was running a beta of the new Android Candy Corn operating system that was simple, intuitive and blazingly fast.

I scowled at it.

Damn its shiny, mirrored glass.

This was getting out of hand.

I wondered what photos my phone had sent her and shuddered at the possibilities.

‘Why don’t you just re-download the app?’ My mother advised. ‘If not for you, then to save me having to look at any more of those . . . photos?’

I sighed.

‘If I give in to it on this,’ I explained. (Again). ‘Then where will it end?’

It was that simple question which was making me so stubborn.

Mulishly, huffily stubborn.

I wasn’t just digging my heels in; I’d mentally affixed three-foot extensions to the soles of my boots and had encased them in the most obdurate concrete that my metaphorical building suppliers had in stock.

If I allowed the phone to bully me into reinstalling the social networking app at the heart of the dispute, then it was a clear signal that my phone would have a say in the way I conducted my life from that moment on.

My relationship to technology would change.

Forever.

I would become a shadow of a man who was capable of being bullied by his own tech.

Maybe next time it wouldn’t let me delete a contact. Or it would add one I didn’t want. Or it would refuse to call someone it didn’t approve of. Or it would refuse to send a text that ended in a preposition, like some of my sentences do.

It was a matter of principle and of my personal – digital – freedom. I’d signed enough of those digital freedoms away to Google and Amazon and Facebook and Apple, just for some shiny digital baubles that in no way made up for the weight of private information they squeezed from me in the process, and I wasn’t going to start squandering the few I had left to a bloody phone.

To me it was an axiom: you just do not negotiate with your smartphone.

My mother just sighed on the other end of the line.

‘Change the phone then.’ She said, and hung up.

Or the phone hung up for her.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that simple solution before.

Change the phone.

Easy.

As if.

#

I’d bought the phone from one of those bleak pits of despair that feeds upon the misery of a payday loan culture, trading under the name Money Transformer. It was one of three similar stores on the same street, with interchangeable names and façade livery; all that differentiated them, presumably, was the exact price that they paid for gold.

Money Transformer was one of those odd signifiers of a broken society that needs to buy things that it can’t afford so it can sell them later at a fraction of their value to vampire shops like this one. It was one part pawnbroker; two parts second hand shop; one part logbook loan store; one part ‘we cash any cheque’ bank-substitute for the poor and credit blacklisted.

I’d felt guilty buying the phone, thinking sad thoughts about the inevitable, ouroboros chain of: overspend – buy phone – get an unexpected bill – sell phone – get more money – repeat that had led to its appearance in the window of the shop.

Not guilty enough to pass by, though, obviously.

But then I had a royalties cheque burning a hole in my bank account, and was in the last throes of converting from one religion – Apple – to another – all the others.

Apple’s twin decisions to strangle the potential of my iPhone by limiting it to certain types of file and not letting me choose my own icons and themes; and to push IOS convergence in the wrong way – making my mac more like my phone rather than vice versa – had been getting me down for a while, so I took when Steve Jobs didn’t rise on the 3rd day as a sign that it was time for a change.

The Apple habit still hung on for a while, and then IOS 6 came along and made me forget my resolution, but the writing was already on the wallpaper. Apathy is a weak force but it’s a powerful maintainer of the status quo.

But then the inevitable touchscreen smash occurred and I’d made up my mind to head for uncharted waters of alternate phones, rather than drift in the becalmed seas of brand loyalty.

I had a few days left on the store’s returns policy, and thought that maybe I could swap it for something else.

That was the thought on my mind as I stepped out of my front door.

And then the phone rang again and things got very very weird, very very fast.