The story of Zag-T and his adventures in time travel started in 2039 with the creation of an 81 year temporal loop. Unlike the time travel of science fiction, the real process was limited to re-booting an organism’s life cycle with minor modifications to its DNA. The creature would re-live its life making minutely different responses and thus changing the course of history. Zag-T’s modified genetic footprint was transported back in time from 2039 and implanted under cover in his unsuspecting pregnant mother as she parked her green Bedford CA van in Newall Street, Birmingham in 1958.
Just as the British private school system was designed to produce narrow-minded administrators for the empire, by the mid 2020s the universities had moved towards producing tunnel-vision workers for multinational corporations. Once this LinkedIn-YouTube University revolution narrowed higher education to job training, a small group known as the Revolting Thinkers rebelled against this conservative anti-intellectualism. In the early 2030s these dissident researchers set up the illegal underground university modelled on the Flying University from the 1860s in Poland under partition. Very soon, however, those researchers realised that the insanity of neo-liberal capitalism could only be stopped by a more radical intervention…
Zag-T was one of four researchers in his department who volunteered as ‘time travellers’ – who ended their lives in 2039 so that a revised version of their DNA could be sent back in time to ‘try again’. Their ‘job’ is a mission for social change: to live their lives in ways that will change the future and prevent the triple political, economic and environmental catastrophes that threatened the end of the world. The Underground University uses what they know about each traveller’s life and tweaks their DNA so that they respond in the ‘correct’ way when they encounter certain experiences in their lives. Using a scoring system based on Bourdieu’s four forms of capital – financial, cultural, social and symbolic – the researchers calculate the probability of achieving their goals with different edits to their DNA
Every 81 years, as they approach 2039, the Underground University ‘time travellers’ get a fresh chance to try again – but they don’t remember the previous attempt. All they can do is recalculate the probabilities based on their knowledge about their current life loop. Worse still, every time they get to this end stage of the loop they have to re-invent their collective idea of a good result for the world. What would they change to make the world a better place and what could they do differently to make it happen? Of course, this has created a temporal anomaly where everything they’ve done repeats infinitely and also changes fractionally each time but none of the participants know if things are getting better or worse and whether this loop can be stopped or reversed
Zag-T. Christine, Jacob and Orsonella are the four time travellers whose genetic footprint was sent back from 2039. With their modified DNA repeatedly implanted in each of their pregnant mothers, they continually re-live their lives, trying to thwart the secret program of world economic domination led by the evil aliens from the planet Harvox – the elitist cabal known as the Bullingdon Boys. Each of their previous looped lives may have been very different from the current version: like an 81 year version of Groundhog Day. Can our heroes make neo-liberal economics eat itself before it destroys the planet?
Jacob becomes a Member of Parliament in 2010 and joined the UK government between 2019 and 2022 – appearing to work for ‘the enemy’. Given that he was the poster boy for children whose sociopathic tendencies have been nurtured by the UK’s monstrous private education system, it was a shocking turn of events when, in 2035, he disowned the toxic masculinity and institutionalised violence of the conservative establishment. Donating his entire family fortune to the Underground University, Jacob was, nevertheless, often suspected of being a double agent for the Bullingdon Boys. He is perhaps the most altruistic of the volunteers, opting to be programmed to act like a selfish prick with absolutely no moral integrity in order to discredit the neo-liberal agenda.
The shocking truth, that only emerges in the last months of 2038, is that the entire neo-liberal elite are, in fact, aliens from the planet Harvox, known as the Bullingdon Boys. Although the Bullingdon Club at Oxford is the only place where they openly wear replicas of the Harvox Starfleet military uniform, these aliens comprise the entire top 1% of the earth’s wealth-holders and the vast majority of the world’s political elites. They have kept humanity supressed since they first arrived and started the Industrial Revolution, enslaving human-kind through the triple-lock of neo-liberal economics, the fantastic myth of trickle down and the lottery illusion
Orsonella is a campaigning journalist working to expose the connections between Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family and prominent western politicians and billionaires. Intercepting and de-coding some high level strategic planning communications allowed her to secretly film one of their meetings. It is through this, in 2038, that she discovers they are all aliens from the planet Harvox. The Harvox ‘double-fake’ strategy of using Fake News and Deep Fake technology allow them to undermine and discredit Orsonella’s work and she volunteers to go back in time and be re-born in the hope that her edited DNA might enable her to make that discovery years earlier.
The Underground University was set up as a series of isolated ‘departments’ to ensure that if one was discovered they couldn’t identify the others. This ‘need to know’ secret, compartmental system also applied to the time travellers. This explains why, despite having a demonstrably lower level of intelligence, conservative groups led by the aliens manage to maintain power. The time travellers are working in unsupervised and uncoordinated cells who are unable to share security information with each other for fear of being exposed. All around the world these clandestine groups are blindly working to overthrow the evil Bullingdon Boys from Harvox
Christine had a string of poorly paid jobs before she went back to university in 2020 to do a masters and a PhD. After the insubstantial disappointment of the 2022 COP27 summit and the continuing violence around the world, she became more and more political. In the early 2030s, as one of the founders of the illegal Underground University, she invents a string of energy-saving technologies which undermine the industries based on non-renewable technologies and scarce minerals. The aim of her temporal loops are to develop her ideas earlier in her career – at a point when it’s not already too late.
Some research conducted by the ‘time travellers’ before they started their most recent loop, suggested, counter-intuitively perhaps, that explicit and definite statements of what ‘should’ happen are the least effective form of socio-political activism. Zag-T’s Failing Upwards album was consistently described as “preachy” in reviews and social media alike. At the same time, the Underground University’s modus operandi was based on the Butterfly Effect: almost imperceptible actions that reverberated through secondary and tertiary effects to change the course of history. So what then, is the point of Zag-T given that his ‘job’ is to warn the world with a precautionary musical tale, exhorting listeners to make a change?
One of the problems that the Underground University faced by going up against simplistic neo-liberal arguments was that reality is complex and complexity is unpopular. As our understanding of psychology and sociology became more sophisticated, it also became more anti-intuitive and more difficult to explain. Zag-T’s musical message was undermined by the fact that it contains a string of political calls to action and proposals for change while simultaneously suggesting that anyone who has the confidence to believe they are right should be forbidden from wielding any significant power: an interesting twist on Groucho’s assertion that he wouldn’t join a club that would accept him as a member…
One of the unforeseen side-effects of the genetic modifications sent back in time was a tendency towards a form of solipsism. All four time travellers often felt that their internal narrative was the only ‘real truth’ and yet felt guilty about exploiting their respective privileges. Indeed, given the arguments on which the Underground University were founded – that self-doubt was logical and a belief in simple truths was a sign of a lack of intelligence – these ‘modified humans’ faced a constant battle with the daemons of human intelligence: being prone to excessive introspection and crippling crises of confidence while, at the same time, struggling with an artificially heightened sense of duty towards their moral code.
The main purpose of the Revolting Thinkers was to take an interdisciplinary approach to identifying what became known as ‘light bulb moments’ – historical instances where the process of genetic editing to influence patterns of myelin growth could provoke a small but significantly different response in the subject. Obviously, once a Butterfly Effect stimulus has occurred, the course of history is changed and the prediction of subsequent ‘light bulb moments’ and their effects is compromised. The calculations about how all these moments would interact with each other and, indeed, whether the edited myelin growth would affect other moments in unpredicted ways were probabilistic in nature.
Some of the ‘light bulb moments’ were engineered to trigger so-called ‘future memories’. In these instances, the ‘time traveller’s existing memories of experience were artificially connected in ways that produced ‘memories’ of events or people that the Revolting Thinkers knew would occur in the individual’s future. One extreme example of this happened when Zag-T was engineered to ‘remember’ details of the obituary of one of the Bullingdon Boys who died in 2036 when he met them in 2022. This was then meant to trigger him into influencing Orsonella, who had unwittingly married the man, into uncovering the Bullingdon Boy story at an earlier stage.
One of the great ironies of the Underground University project was that Orsonella, a campaigning journalist unknowingly married to one of the Bullingdon Boy aliens, also wrote about some of the key Butterfly Effect research in the early 2020s. In much the same way as some of the lesser intelligent aliens managed to co-opt certain neuroscience research into neo-liberal economic theory, her husband wrote a highly influential and hugely destructive best-seller in 2025 on how the Butterfly Effect validated the notion of trickle-down economics. Zag-T’s ‘future memory’ of the story of Orsonella and her husband was designed to prevent this destructive event.
When Zag-T joined the Revolting Thinkers in 2030, the Underground University was still in its embryonic stage. One of the features of his genetic programming was to use ‘light bulb moments’ to swing his mood from the periods of supreme over-confidence required to develop certain ideas towards the crippling lack of confidence required to maintain the ‘permanent revolution’ of self-doubt. This was also a phase in which the Revolting Thinkers began a period of open public debate with Bullingdon Boy neo-liberal economics. During this period the two sides engaged in what Jacob later called “a giant and pointless game of chess” although the basic level of discourse and personal animosity involved suggest that more violent metaphors might be apt.
When Brian Eno made his explosive pronouncements on the Failing Upwards album, the social media storm and subsequent press frenzy threw the whole ‘time travel’ project into chaos. Indeed, when the Revolting Thinkers started on the time travel project, this was the first ‘light bulb moment’ that they identified as having the potential for a substantial edit. It also threw up the intriguing prospect that in previous temporal loops Zag-T might have enjoyed success earlier in his career and that this might have got the message out in a more timely and effective manner than this ‘twilight years’ project. However, musicologists have stated that the inconsistent and lacklustre nature of his early recordings make this unlikely.
One further necessary characteristic of the Underground University’s Butterfly Effect strategy was its piecemeal nature. The idea of ‘chipping away’ at history rather than attempting any single radical intervention proved controversial with some of the Revolting Thinkers. Some traditional socialists still clung onto the idea of a single radical moment of change but the so-called ‘eco-Trotskyists’ took over control of the University’s senate in 2034 and their hybrid mixture of Small Is Beautiful and Permanent International Revolution held sway. Indeed, Girls Aloud’s ‘Revolution In The Head’ became the anthem for the 2035 Air Tax Riots in Los Angeles
The most radical idea that emerged from the Revolting Thinkers at the Underground University concerned Jacob. After his contraversial conversion and decision to donate his family wealth to the cause, the family, backed by the Bullingdon Boys, had him diagnosed as mentally unfit and started legal proceedings to retrieve the money. In May 2039, the Revolting Thinkers pulled off the infamous ‘Nanny Heist’, kidnapping Jacob and sending him back in time with DNA edited to make his public persona even more ridiculous and outrageously venal and cruel. This ‘Trojan horse time traveller’ then grew up within the alien Bullingdon Boy community with his non-human nature being even more apparent and repellent.
By the mid 2030s, Christine’s energy-saving inventions were being bought up and withheld from distribution by the Bullingdon Boys. By using the international media to sell the idea that these inventions would destroy the world economy, they managed to persuade the population to support a series of ‘non-proliferation’ treaties to prop up their own highly profitable energy intensive industries. It was only through three separate and unrelated acts of remarkable self-sacrifice by Cher, Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus that the aliens were prevented from capturing the secrets of the ‘time travel’ project itself.
One of the key features of Harvox economic and political strategy which had permeated the 19th and 20th centuries but which came to a head in the 21st, was to diffuse and deflect the energies of humans using diversionary and divisive tactics. It was impressive that they so frequently managed to arm both sides in a conflict while claiming that this was necessary to protect the fabric of capitalism – which was, of course, also sold as a synonym for freedom and democracy. In 2033, the infamous Bullingdon-funded arms dealer, known as ‘Mister Clever’, funded several European and North American right wing insurrections fuelled by online conspiracy theories deflecting anger and blame away from the rich towards powerless minorities.
By the late 2030s, the triple catastrophe is fully underway. Extreme political divisions have become deeply entrenched around the world and the resulting violence is producing a breakdown of societies everywhere. The Bullingdon Boys blame the simultaneous economic collapse on the violence rather than on the ever-increasing inequality and commercialisation of every aspect of life. This continued headlong rush down the road of neoliberal economics means, of course, that the climate emergency continues unabated and large parts of the earth become uninhabitable. Given the enormity of the problems, several of the Revolting Thinkers suffer an existential crisis: are they really making any difference? Meanwhile, in 2038, it is revealed that the Bullingdon Boys have built underground bunkers and bought remote islands to provide them with a place to hide.
The crisis at the Underground University deepens but the four ‘time travellers’ resolve to undertake another loop despite questioning whether their previous work is making anything better. In February 2039 it becomes clear that the university’s security has been compromised and the Bullingdom Boys’ alien army is closing in on several of the secret campus sites. Zag-T, Jacob, Christine and Orsonella manage to get through to their ‘time machines’ in the secret bunkers. Just in the moment before the time shift will shut him down and send his DNA back for another loop, Zag-T realises that his job is, actually, to fail as a musician. Failure is the spur that triggers his role in founding the Underground University. The Failing Upwards album has to sink into obscurity or the world will end in a terrible, squalid cataclysm…