I thought it was Tuesday, maybe Thursday. But it turned out to be Sunday. The Old Easter Sunday, actually (I see the irony now.) You know, that day we used to celebrate with chocolate egg hunts and fuzzy rabbits. You know they used to eat rabbits—real meat—right? Now we’re just fed bugs and the same old bullshit.

  It came as it always came—as a notification in a news flash. Back then everyone stared quietly at their phones in public places and silently shared the things they saw. Back then it was all about the now. Now this tech will do this. Now this new, innovative, ground-breaking digital tool will make your life easier. Blahh. Buy me. BUY ME. Buy me. (Though we never really owned it, just paid for the pleasure of using it, of renting convince)

  And there it was, right on my screen. HER. I remember the day well, not the actual day of the week—but you know what I mean. The where were you moment of my generation was this day. The day we celebrated Jesus rising form the dead, was the day that our ancestors—all of ancestors—lives were now ‘opened’ (they said)

  Opened? I thought. Maybe I muttered it out. Maybe I blurted it out. But who cares. All I remember—about that moment of that day—was that I was alone, hunched down the back of an stinking alley, with a stinking hangover, thinking stinking stuff about this, yes, stinking world. I mean it really did stink.

  I worked for Genesis Refuse. Yes: I collected trash for a company named after the first book of the Bible, and we didn’t do a very good job, let’s just say that. And I was sat here, on my break, smoking a cigg that I ‘borrowed’ from a tramp—how can a tramp afford things I can’t? No rent I guess. No responsibilities. Just sleeping in the junk that I didn’t collect and giving anyone anything they asked for—and I stared into my phone at this short from a spokesperson, with their plain grey t-shirt, that probably cost more than… whatever: you know what I mean. I’m rambling. Anyway, let me get back on track. This woman, stood behind a giant projector, started talking about HER. HER this, HER that. I was like, who is this woman? What has she done? Then she—stood like a technological Prophet—said: Hereditary Environment Records are who we are, and now, we can finally peel back the curtains of our history and see the lives that were left for the dead. She actually said that, those exact words. Peel back the curtains? Things left for the dead? What in God’s name is going on?

  I saw the irony there. On the day Jesus—supposedly—rose from the dead. We could now ‘peel back the curtains and view the dead.’ That me, working as a private Trashman, for a company named Genesis—what has Noah’s ark, the Tower of Babel, and Jacob and Joseph have to do with picking up other people’s waste got to do with trash? Apart from the stories, of course. Madness, these lot. Genesis. But they pay well, not great, not bad—just well. So, I did what every sane person would do—check the comments. And they did not disappoint.

  Fake news bro.

  These deepfakes are getting out of hand.

  Bullshit.

  Who cares about the past.

  Loved it. Chuckled deeply about it for all the six minutes and few drags I had left. I went back to picking up junk and filling up the truck, thinking about whatever it was that I was thinking about. I finished, went home, ate a steak stew from a packet—I remember this as I think of the taste of meat a lot now. I scrolled. It was everywhere; HER. It was on the news. It was on the socials. It was even on the adverts. They said—I paraphrase—buy this product and view the life of your ancestors.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  I saw irony in of it all. I’m good at that, seeing the joke between the lines of what’s said. But there’s one thing, I admit, I didn’t see.

  That was ten years ago. Life moves on. Things happen. We continue. But this HER, didn’t go away. Instead, it metastasized—spread in the minds and the bodies and across the world. It was easy: you handed over your DNA and a credit card, and they handed you a headset and subscription to the dead. You got to see how your father lived up until the point of, well, I said that bit. With your mother, you watch yourself being born. Being born! Christ. Oh, again, the irony. Whilst we’re on that, let me tell you about this bit—it will help when you understand what this world has become. Jesus was real. Who would have thought? The real kicker though—this is my favourite—Ol’ Mary there—that’s his mother if you didn’t know—had it off with one of the iron hands behind his workshop; made the whole virgin thing up. Joseph went along with it, of course, although he knew. But a little lie about a virgin and the ‘Son of God’ was easier to swallow than his wife shacking up with the bloke who fixed their fence. I mean, he didn’t think that a little lie coming out of the current nowhere place of Bethlehem would… well, we know where that one went.

  So, Christianity was screwed as hard as Mary was behind that hammering workshop. I couldn’t resist; I’m sorry. I love a joke between the lines.

  Oh, I almost forgot. Jesus had his secrets too. Roll up, roll up, Mary Magdalene (same name as your mum? You weird little dirty dog.) She had a kid, Jesus’s kid. Two actually. Sarah and Joseph (named after his (fake) father—keep up now.) They had kids, and so on. And we saw it all. Literally watched the reality of it all—edited and highlighted, of course—unfold on the big screens, (not cinema, that died out years ago. Cramped up in a dark room with a bunch of strangers, whose ancestors were mostly murderers: no thanks.) Some guy, Malcom someone—he was one of Jesus’s descendant—chopped it all up and made a film about it. Madness, these lot. And so The Royal Bloodline of Jesus and Mary was born. Even though they openly admit, Mary was a little cheater—they still preach from the same sheet that, ‘it was a significant era in our evolution of a species’ and that ‘with understanding, we can forget the past and move forward with our understanding.’ What? The worst thing about it all, is that we all knew they were spouting dirty water and claiming it be wine. “With understanding, we can see that it’s all a big mix up. But let’s forget that, and give us some credit as we enslaved billions of minds to a fake ideology for two-thousand years that governed our entire outlook on life and built a culture of a relentless pursuit of making an Almighty Being happy or when you died you would burn in fire for all of eternity.” Or something like that.

  This isn’t even the half of it. Not even a little bit. Where to next? Is the burning question I can feel you wondering. With all our history, and all our stories, and all of our… ‘human behaviours,’ it turns out that our heroes weren’t much that. Of course, after slaughtering hundreds or thousands of innocent people, the winners of the so called ‘wars’ of the past, got to write their version of the events. So let’s start with the big ones, the non-heroes, of course. Hitler didn’t take a cyanide pill—the Americans faked that—they caught him and tortured him for days (no complaints there,) but they did keep his daughter alive, rehomed her in a nice little American town named Climax, just outside of Illinois. She had a nice life, grew up on south Church Street, had a husband who was an accountant (the nephew of the director of the CIA at the time. Keep your friends close and your enemies daughters close and all that) And yes, they had children. So there’s an Adolf bloodline now: although some are more proud of that than others—nice to be a part of history’s lies though.

  Then there’s Genghis Khan. And wow, what a shit show that was. He really spread his seed about (not consensually, but a lot.) So, there’s that. And I mean, a lot of that. He set up what he called, Generation Camps. They were basically breeding camps where he went to a region, killed all the men and kept the women as his sex slaves for years. And he conquered a lot of places. They say conquered, but it was genocide, let’s be clear about that. Even so, people were mostly proud of that, too. To be a part of history. I would hear them chatting in the street about who they were descends of, one guy had direct ancestral lineage from Genghis and Adolf! He just batted it off in the coffee shop like it was another day, and that’s the thing, it was just another day. Another day of another tale being seen for what it was, and you know what it did the most? It was normalised. What’s in the past, is in the past. We were savages back then. We’ve matured as a culture. Bullshit, I thought. We’re no better today than we were a thousand years ago, it’s just we have tighter rules and more surveillance—let those go and you’ll really see what people can do. But now; now we know our whole lives are on show for our future children’s children’s children’s. And with that, everything changed.