The Mark of the Beast

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Revelation 13: 16-17: Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

I’m not religious, still. I’m not convinced of the existence of any God and yet, the Bible was written by some very interesting people. And, as a writer of scary stories, I have had occasion to dip into the Bible (as well as some *cough* ‘rival publications’ for fact-checking and inspiration). The Mark of the Beast is a big story plotline which nobody seriously thought would become reality.

Well, here it is. (hat tip to on Twitter).

And also here (another hat tip, this time to ) The last line of this one contains a typo –

“I want to be part of the future,” she laughs.

Surely she meant ‘furniture’. They hold parties where unchipped workers get to be assimilated for free. It’s not yet compulsory to be chipped to work there but it’s going to be damn inconvenient to be unchipped when the card readers start breaking down. Who wants to pay maintenance costs on obsolete equipment? There’s no need to ‘force’ compliance. Just make non-compliance a hassle.

These are all volunteers. They’ll be delighted with their new Borg implant that lets them open doors and operate vending machines. How long before there are doors that can only be opened by the chip? You don’t have the chip, you can’t go in there. How long before it’s simply too inconvenient to be unchipped? How long before it’s mandatory? How long before you can’t open your door or ride a bus or start your car without one? How long before resistance is genuinely futile?

Oh, the technology has been around for some time. Implanted chips are years old. Implants in pets are actually compulsory in many countries now, and you can already pay for stuff by tapping your credit card on the machine rather than going to all that hassle of slotting it in and pressing four buttons. I’m still a Luddite and use cash most of the time, and absolutely refuse to get involved with contactless when I use the card.

I can keep the cards in a screened wallet so they don’t get scanned by passing crooks, but what if it’s in your hand? Will we have to wear chain mail gloves?

Yes, people welcomed contactless technology and as I suggested at the time, if pressing four buttons is such a hassle, wouldn’t it be so much more convenient if you didn’t have to bother with the card? Why not have that contactless chip embedded in your hand? You can’t forget it or lose it and it’s unlikely to be stolen. You’d certainly notice if it was. I said at the time that it wouldn’t have to be mandatory. People will welcome such convenience.

Remember, a few years back, the calls to have children microchipped like pets so they could be traced if they went missing? Oh that met with absolute outrage! It died out and went quiet. Well it’s back now, except now they will get adults to demand them rather than force them on us all.

They could replace passports. Yes, you can be scanned remotely as you pass without even knowing your credentials are being checked. Isn’t that convenient? Any government authority can know where you are and who you’re with at a moment’s notice. Does that make you feel safe? I bet many people will answer ‘yes’ to that.

The amount of calories in your shopping could soon be displayed on your till receipt and from there it’s just a small step to a siren and red light announcing ‘too many calories!’ at the checkout. Most people will be shamed into buying fewer calories. Personally I’d see it as a challenge to set off that red light every single time.

Buying too much booze? Buying too many chocolate bars? Buying another can of fizz when you bought one only last week? Does it really sound so unlikely when even now, you buy something on Amazon and get related ads popping up on Facebook and other sites. Use your store card and they send you vouchers for money off stuff you buy. Oh yes, it’s all great until you start thinking about how much data is really stored about your life.

Your medical records can be stored on another chip. How would you sell that to people? Well, suppose you were in an accident or passed out on the street. If an ambulance crew could just scan you and get your records, it would save vital minutes and ensure they know what to treat you with right away. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Link it to your home Wifi and the medics can tell if you’re suddenly taken ill. They can also tell when you’re smoking, drinking, overeating…

All this, and the total removal of even the concept of gender, is already in Panoptica. The story I wonder about finishing – and wonder whether I should have written it at all. It seems to come true as I write it.

Although I didn’t have calorie counts on till receipts. There are no till receipts and your shopping is assembled for you depending on your State-defined dietary needs. That hasn’t happened in real life.

Yet.

 

23 thoughts on “The Mark of the Beast”

  2. Every system like this shit fails on the competency of middle management. Where I work I am prohibited from certain areas on my swipe card, like the ladies locker room (probably for good reason, though no-one has complained, least of all myself), but everybody has access to the “Comms Room” – this is a room where all the landline phones and data cabinets are housed, anyone with any nouse of comms could get in and shut the place down in as long as it takes to rip out all the RJ45 sockets from the terminals, but then again I don’t wish to, as I wouldn’t get paid.

    Also the IT/Comms guys would be filling their boots working overtime trying to patch it all back into the correct sockets, and they are overpaid enough…

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    • I was once a tech with a company that had a contract with Martin Marietta.There were all kinds of restrictions on where I could go etc. They gave me a work space of my own in an unrestricted building where all the phone line racks were!

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  4. I have been a fan of eschatology all my life, so I know that the massive changes I have seen in my lifetime have Satanic roots, as per my comments under your last post.

    You say that you’re not religious, but I would suggest that everyone is religious.

    Religion:
    A pursuit or interest followed with great devotion. ‘consumerism is the new religion’ (Oxford)

    Regular readers know that consumerism isn’t your religion, but people who don’t necessarily believe in the Bible still have corresponding ideas as to how the universe came into existence and how life began and so on.

    Scientists still don’t know how the first self-replicating molecule came to be, as the first ‘simple’ cell would still have been incredibly complex. This is why some of evolution’s high priests, including Dr Dawkins, have suggested that life was ‘seeded’ on Earth.

    Of course, this just transfers the problem of the first SRM to another planet. From my own discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, it is clear that many people believe that aliens might have been responsible for life on Earth.

    That’s religion. Famous evolutionist and anti-Creationist Michael Ruse admitted that evolution is and always has been a religion, “An explicit substitute for Christianity”. I understand he regrets saying it now.

    I have looked at hundreds of atheists’ Twitter profiles and they tend to be “proud” about their belief system and hold Dawkins, Hitchins and Sagan in particular to be secular saints. It’s embarrassing to see them fawning over these people, who are, after all, indoctrinating the masses with their brand of “science” which isn’t matched by the evidence and is therefore a belief system – a religion.

    As Paul told the Hebrews, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

    That describes exactly the position of evolutionists.

    Another interesting aspect of all this is that many ‘atheists’ do not want there to be a God. Thomas Nagel, philosophy and law professor at NY Uni said,

    I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

    Do you think he’s being objective? It sounds like he’s stamping his feet in a tantrum, like a four year-old whose mummy has refuse to buy him sweeties at the supermarket checkout.

    Yet, he is considered a ‘rationalist” and I am a fundamentalist religious bigot who believes in the mythology of ‘Bronze Age goat herders’!

    “Imagine believing in a 2,000 year-old book,” said the atheist who believes in a world view that was doing the rounds centuries before.

    A wide-ranging study a decade ago suggested that children were ‘hard-wired’ to believe in the Deity and life after death and that “Atheism is definitely an acquired position,”

    The mark of the Beast: what is it?

    You know that it might not be the microchip implant after all, but those people who are not Torah-observant.

    Not that I intend to get chipped either way. Things will get worse. The non-chipped will have to live in ghettos with little or no electricity and other basics, like the proles in ‘1984’.

    The answer to 1984 is AD 33.

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    • “The non-chipped will have to live in ghettos with little or no electricity…..”

      Have you been listening to the news today that HMG wants people to generate and sell their own electricity by 2050? Perhaps non-chipping will become the punishment when all the prisons are full and there’s no room to build more! One of the few ways of earning a crust is to sell your own electricity – but only if you’re chipped!

      Can you imagine it though: Sharon’s buying her leckie from Mrs Miggins; they have a falling out about a remark Sharon’s made on Facebook about Mrs Miggins’s Vicky and her leckie’s cut off; she then gets it from Tracy’s mum til Tracy hears about Vicky…. The storyline in the Soaps could run for years 🙂

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      • No, I didn’t see that. As L-I alludes to, you could write the news in advance.

        Because the government likes to give the illusion of ‘choice’, there will probably be AC electricity, DC electricity and LGBT electricity.

        I hope the government doesn’t expect me to get on an exercise bike to generate lecky. I don’t do the ‘E’ word. That will probably be compulsory as well when the telescreens are installed.

        I might have thought that this was far-fetched until last year when the Tartan Junta made my landlord install smoke detectors all over the house – all connected to the mains and to each other.

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        • Because the government likes to give the illusion of ‘choice’, there will probably be AC electricity, DC electricity and LGBT electricity.

          Now that made me laugh 😀

          I’ve also experienced the rule about smoke alarms. My current landlord pays lip service to it – but he did have to get CO alarms too. In any room with a potentially useable fireplace and above the gas hob in the kitchen.

          Thing is, these are fixed, in two rooms, to ceilings that are 10 feet high. By the time they go off, the room is already deadly!

          I open the windows a lot…

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          • I was thinking about LGBT electricity – the bed springs wired up to the national grid – but I didn’t dwell on those thoughts.

            My ceilings are about ten foot high as well. After the electrician had drilled down from the landing to fit a smoke alarm in the hall, he set about fitting one in the living room not far from the door, about six feet from the hall alarm.

            When I questioned the sanity of it, he asked me to consider the possibility of being in the living room with the door closed and a fire breaking out if I fell asleep.

            I suppose I should be happy that Nicola Sturgeon cares more about my safety than I do.

            I’m glad I didn’t have to pay the bill to have electricians here for two days. Day One was testing the wiring by opening up ceiling lights, sockets, light switches, etc. Electrical appliances were tested and nice wee labels stuck on to say that the SNP says I’m allowed to use these things (or something).

            Lip service would be the best option. I doubt many people would go to that trouble for themselves. Some battery-powered alarms you can stick on yourself in a couple of minutes would be enough for most people.

            The result will be that the costs are passed to the tenant and it will deter potential landlords from letting, so a double whammy against the poor ‘hardworking families’ so beloved of the politicians (not).

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  5. At my last job they introduced a hand scanner for clocking in and we were threatened with non-payment if we didn’t use it. The scanner was made by a company owned by Lockheed Martin, the company which ran the last UK census.
    LM has a fine history of aeroplane development but it seemed a strange means of clocking in when we were already using individual electronic ID passes.
    Our biometric data is now, presumably, in the possession of a foreign private company.
    The sad thing is that one guy agreed to use the scanner if the company provided – in writing – the promise that he wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t use the hand-scanner. The company did not do so and he is still getting paid without having to use the scanner. It’s a pity that we didn’t all do that.

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  7. “….and wonder whether I should have written it at all. It seems to come true as I write it.”

    I seem to recall many years ago Michael Wharton (Peter Simple in the Telegraph) expressing a similar sentiment.

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  8. The silicon chip inside her head
    Gets switched to overload
    And nobody’s gonna go to school today
    She’s going to make them stay at home…

    Boomtown Rats – July 1979

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  9. What happens when people get fed up and decide to quit? Or get a better job? Is the chip removed or left in situ? Do they want to walk around with a piece of unshielded, possibly hackable piece of RFID inside them?

    The law of unforeseen consequences enters downstage right, grinning fiercely.

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  11. I’ve been pondering the cuts to public services, especially the police. It seems mighty odd to cut police numbers and yet at the same time introduce unlimited migration and open borders. It almost seems that the government are doing it on purpose! So what are they going to replace the police with? Drones? Robots? Sounds even more big brother. You can bet it won’t be to our advantage…

    :o)

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    • I have just read,

      Senior medical leaders in Scotland have warned that hospitals and services may have to go if the NHS is to make the best use of scarce resources. (Scotsman)

      Why? Staff shortages, money shortages, a growing population and an ageing population.

      Solution? Keep allowing hundreds of thousands of unqualified people to live here.

      It’s so obvious. It’s like Frau Merkel’s answer to Islamic terrorism is to invite more in.

      It all makes perfect sense when you realise that destroying our countries and our freedom is what they are being paid to do.

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  13. Pingback: Missile From ‘Merica: Incoming! – Library of Libraries

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