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Ganymede and Xanadu, the cities of Priceless Attributes, are unlike any other cities in the land. Cities of novelty and spectacle. There are pyramids and castles. Palaces and pleasure houses.

In the centre of Ganymede stands The Wheel, the administrative centre of Priceless Attributes. A ring of 8 sleek silver skyscrapers towering hundreds of feet into the air with one in the centre, The Hub. Bridges spread out from The Hub to each of the outlying buildings high up in the cloud cover and then from each of these to its neighbour, like a ring of children holding hands.
Reinforced glass tubes. Barely discernable from the ground, it looks as though the workers are simply walking miraculously through thin air.

There are buildings made to look like mountains Spanish galleons and huge white cruise liners clad in painted aluminium and complete with porthole windows.

Looking out over the city you see roofs in the shape of sand dunes or a series of waves. A row of buildings in the shape of giant Toltec heads. The architecture of every civilization and epoch. Pagodas, ziggurats, Greek temples, domes and minarets, gothic cathedrals, Byzantine churches, Assyrian reliefs, gargoyles, statues of forgotten gods.

There are buildings artificially aged, the hewn stone deliberately pitted and scared, lichen and moss introduced to its grooves and crevices. Real estate agents create elaborate histories around these artifices; sieges, scandals and chain clanking ghosts.

There are giant themed shopping malls such as The Caverns in Xanadu, built into artificial caves with stalagmites and stalactites, glow worms and mechanical bats.
Shopping malls like themeparks with roller coasters between floors, loud, thumping music, speed and adrenaline.
There is the Cascades, a shopping mall built on water, retail units and fast food outlets on stilts in the slow flowing, chlorine-scented canals. Shoppers are transported on gondolas by singing gondoliers in striped jerseys. Picturesque frogs croak on plastic lily pads. Fountains plash inanely. Walls painted with
copies of Venetian frescoes, or containing aquariums in which brightly coloured tropical fish swim endlessly in circles with eyes bulging and mouths agape, like the shoppers who mill idly among them.

There is a business park made to look like a zone of 19th century heavy industry, belching plumes of black smoke. There are hotels made of ice with ceilings like the nightsky. Star-twinkle and moonbeam. Meteor showers and shooting stars, and once a month, the Northern Lights appear, shifting and twisting on the ceilings as guests crane their necks in wonder.

There is an apartment complex of treehouses in giant, artificial oak trees which mimics The Wheel. With walls of plastic logs and rope bridges made to look like vine connecting the trees.

Police headquarters housed in a giant fortress complete with battlements, moat, drawbridge and portcullis. But beyond these works of pastiche, quotation, kitsch and cliché are the buildings which have made these streets famous. Buildings which are more than simple geometrical forms, series of blocks and boxes. Here walls and roofs are broken down into a series of interlocking panels, each panel a unique shape, and each panel harmonising with the others. Forms which bend inwards and outwards, writhing and unpredictable, like streamers in the wind, like fluttering seaweed. Jutting, jagged forms, like broken bottles, crystals or shark fins. Forms soft and seductive, like great fluffy clouds, green hills, female bodies, waves, the meanderings of rivers, orchids and daffodils. Forms endlessly complex, full of branches, hollows and curves and planes, bulges and protrusions, of coral reefs, bone interior, trachea pathways, veinways, sandstone cliffs.
The play of different textures is as important to these architectures as the play of forms. Treated glass, plastic and metal present an array of different textures to the feeling eye, from smooth and glossily flawless to something approaching organic. Iron with growths of surface rust, or plastic bubbled like frog spawn or cuckoo spit. Elsewhere we find hair and fur, like the dream theatre popularly known as the Great Bear, walls shaped to suggest muscle and bone under skin, or whole buildings draped under layers of thick vine and creeper, or walls which are terraced gardens in which flowers explode outwards and trees rustle gently. There are surfaces rough like asphalt or fibrous like sugar cane or muscle tissue or made of bunched wire, surfaces grained like wood or gnarled like bark, translucent like petals or lustrous as coal. Surfaces which glint and dazzle like diamonds or are even engineered to shift and undulate like sheets of silk caught in a warm zephyr, or to bristle like a threatened cat.
There are walls of light. Lights which glow steadily or which pulse and flicker like forest fires. Of all these we must mention the most impressive of them all, the shining citadel that is FeelGood headquarters. A building which appears to be made of pure white light. Without mass or solidity. Utterly numinous. A building which has transcended coarse matter altogether. A construction of angels.

And everywhere there are buildings where the walls are tangles of advertisements, like bodies tattooed in neon. Or walls which are giant screens, like the famous one on Luminere Street which films the passers-by and transposes their avatars onto dream landscapes, surfaces of alien planets, deep sea caverns, mountain strongholds, battlefields, desert caravans....

In the dream manufacturing quarter of Xanadu we find the fairy tale houses of the rich and famous. Lana Turner's palace of pink marble. Belly Bradman's Roman villa with its famed collection of erotic
statuary. Scarlett Fever's gingerbread house. Mansions in the shape of dragons or coiled serpents. Here even pavements are made to ripple and sparkle, turquoise like a tropical sea, or utterly transparent revealing the swirling sewers below. There are rainforests on traffic islands. There are waterfalls and rivers. Moving 3d images interact with passers by, promoting facial creams, supermarkets, recreational drugs, music, moving images everywhere blending seamlessly with the solid shapes around them, all one reality, all equally unreal. Lights flash and pulse and ripple, spell out words, exhortations, instructions. The night sky glitters with the holograms of ad-satellites.

The siren songs play from shop doorways. Music spreads out like a stain across the street. Lures. Stepping into the music the pedestrian passes into another world. The ache of a returning memories. Childhood worlds of eternal summer. Sun setting on corn fields. Fairgrounds and fireworks. Arcadies. Walk a few more paces and you're back on the street, traffic noise, curses, advert babble. The pedestrian is drawn back to the music, pulled towards its source, the shop.

Company plants stand on street corners or sit in popular bars or restaurants, discussing the merits of new products
'Oh, it completely changed my life darling. I couldn't live without it.'

A place where buildings are torn down and rebuilt built yearly. Where fashions change week by week. Where everything is forever new and forever recycled. People walk down the streets wearing lenses and ear pieces which turn the living environment into a game. Missions into enemy territory, double agents, alien invasions. Pedestrians can be seen pressed into doorways, wriggling through the gutters on their bellies, sprinting through hotel lobbies. For the game player a briefcase could contain a bomb, there are snipers on the rooftops and hidden cameras in the old woman’s shopping bags, wild animals lurk in alleyways and spacecraft hover menacingly overhead.

In Xanadu and Ganymede, fashion has become fancy dress. Walk through the trendier parts of town and you will find yourself sharing the streets with pirates and conquistadors, samurai, Comanche chiefs, characters from the Chinese opera, men in enormous Micronesian masks and grass skirts, geishas, maharajahs, sultans and mandarins.

These characters scorn the factory made garments the masses wear and pay huge prices for tailors to make each unique item.

This trend has given rise to a curious condition. Still extremely rare though everyone on the scene seems to know of cases. Costumes have been taking over their wearers personalities, like the boy dressed as an Inuit shaman who had dreams of being dismembered and put together again, but changed, with something new added to his makeup. Starting speaking in the language of the birds and prophesying, communing with spirits and dancing wildly in the parks, till one day he just disappeared. Or the notorious idler, a self-described artist who adopted the dress of a successful executive until he found himself on the board, 3 years later, not sure how it all happened, a trophy wife whose name he can barely remember sleeping beside him.

The great soap operas of Priceless Attributes, 'Harbour Town' and 'Monmouth Street' have been running for 30 years. A huge body of literature has built up around the twin series. There are exhaustive biographies of every significant character in the history of the soaps and quite a few of the minor ones, even Cocky Jim the barrow boy who’s total screen time amounted to 6 minutes spread over 15 episodes.
These biographies, it should be noted, are of the characters and not the actors who play them. There is no interest in the actors whatsoever. There are authorised and unauthorised biographies. The unauthorised biographies have not been approved by the series makers and often contain scandalous facts. Weekly gossip magazines add to the tattle.
These, made in collusion with the programme makers feature photographs of the characters in compromising positions, or at moments of significance in their lives, the birth of a child for example. They chart the characters fluctuating weight, their changing hairstyles and clothes, their self-esteem and personal habits. These are not limited to events described in the soap operas, though the repercussions may be felt within the soap. It is not a one-way street. Jack Flack's pornography addiction was first revealed in 'Shock, Horror' for example, and subsequently elaborated on within the show.

In addition to these hugely popular biographies and scandal sheets there are a number of scholarly histories of the areas in which they are set, fictional though they are. Sociological treatises exist by the hundred. The programme makers have been known to incorporate information from these sources into the programmes themselves. This is the highest honour their authors could ever wish for.

Lavish obituaries appear to mark the death of any character. Campaigns spring up to protest the innocence of an accused character, or to prevent the closure of a beloved institution.
Passionate love letters and death threats are sent. People dress like their favourite characters, they model the interiors of their houses after them, use their favourite phrases, ape their body language.

On occasion the laws of Priceless Attributes have been changed following a precedent set on either Harbour Town or Monmouth Street.
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What is immediately noticeable on entering Albion City is the paleness. The pallor. In a land where almost everyone is of mixed racial origin you are startled by the milky skin tones, the blonde hair and blue eyes. Then you are start noticing the price paid for 'purity' the small and endlessly recycled gene pool giving rise to birth defects, abnormalities, shrunken heads and enormous ears, long spidery legs and arms grafted onto dwarfish torsos, rampant obesity, even in the young, feet so small sufferers are forced to use sticks to support themselves while walking, strange bulges on the face and limbs as if a number of walnuts had been inserted beneath the epidermis.
Not that such misfortune is universal, far from it, but it affects about 1 in 10 and serves to make the proud, handsome face and manly physique of John Bull even more impressive to his followers.

Albion City is rows and rows of terraced houses. Two up two down. Grey slate roofs. Smoking chimneys. Cobbled streets. A skyline of church steeples. Corner shops selling Spam, cabbage, marrows, potatoes. Smoky pubs with carpets smelling of sour beer, a dart board, the wall around it pockmarked.
The images of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria are everywhere. The patron saints of Albion City. The union Jack flying everywhere. The music of Vera Lynn, and George Formby.


Sebastian Roe is the head of the athlete breeding programme at Priceless Attributes. He rose to prominence as the agent of legendary stud Buck Thompson, arguably the greatest Crunch player the game has known. The production of elite athletes is a major concern at Priceless Attributes. Their statistics show that 85% of males throughout Establishment territory watch some form of sport at least once a week and Buck Thompson has sired more elite athletes than anyone. There are currently 15 sons and daughters of Thompson participating in top grade sport today including world heavyweight mixed martial arts champion Bruce Thompson, record holding sprinter Lucy Thompson and no fewer than 8 premiership Crunch players including current crowd favourite Malachi Thompson.
Crunch, a violent son of rugby is the most popular sport of them all. As in rugby the ball must be placed down behind the opposition try line. Scrums are replaced by one-on-ones in which the first knockdown wins. Tackles can be made in any way the tackler chooses. There are no penalties for, say, high tackles or spear tackles. Rucks are no holds barred. Stamping, gouging, kicking etc are all legitimate tactics. Players wear head and groin guards.
'IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIItttttttttttttttttttttttttttsssss CRUNCHTIME'
The crowd erupts.
The crowd are an integral part of the spectacle. Coloured smoke from a thousand flares. Banners, flags, totems and war drums.
Roaring with bloodlust, baring teeth and growling. They hurl themselves at the clear plastic partition which separates the two sets of fans, snarling and yelling abuse. They bombard the opposition players with abuse, goading them, insulting them, their family and loved ones sometimes getting so fired up that they run onto the pitch to attack a player. The crowd roars as one as the spectator is beaten to a pulp, huge muscled men of 25 stone kicking his prone body before flinging him unceremoniously back into the crowd where he is treated like a hero.

Athletics has undergone a dramatic revival in popularity ever since the manufacturers championship was introduced. The two championships run concurrently. The athletes vie for dominance in their respective events. The manufacturers compete to create the compounds which will power their athletes to success. Records have tumbled to hitherto unimaginable levels. An athlete's life is short but glorious often ending in huge aneurysms in the midst of competition. The site of an sprinter collapsing, frothing from the mouth, eyes bursting from the sockets, weeping blood and convulsing wildly midrace, is not uncommon.
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Pelican Bay Correctional Facility. Maximum Security. Maximum Punishment.
Total isolation. Once entered the cell is never left until the sentence has been served. Prisoners are issued with colostomy bags. Showers heads are built into the cell ceiling. The shower is switched on at the jailers discretion. There are a number of punishments which can be administered without the potential risk of coming face to face with the prisoner. The temperature of the cell can be raised or lowered to excruciating extremes. Gas can be released from dispensers in the ceiling. Walls and floor can be electrified. Walls and ceiling can be contracted to the point at which the inmate is forced onto his haunches, head bowed. Speakers in the wall can be used to broadcast distressing material, sometimes simply white noise played at a painful volume. Frequencies which cause a loss of bowel control, vomiting etc. In other cases psychologically disturbing material is broadcast. For example, the sound of an inmates wife having sexual intercourse with another man. Technology exists which allows all sorts of possibilities. A favourite trick is to make the man fucking his wife the same man responsible for his arrest, or the judge who sentenced him to Pelican Bay.
Punishment cells include insect cells, crawling with fire ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies and millipedes and giant poisonous centipedes, rat cells, shit cells where the inmate is knee deep in human excrement and the dreaded itching cells. An irritant is released into the air which makes inmates itch until they rend their own flesh. Inmates have emerged from the itching cells with strips of flesh hanging from them like rag dolls.
Other punishments include allowing an inmate a pet, usually a dog or cat. With no other company the inmate forms a deep bond with the pet. He cares deeply for the animal. The pet is then tortured and killed in front of him, while the guards laugh uproariously.

There are prisons for every type of offender. Not every regime is as brutal as Pelican Bay. In the vast majority of prisons inmates are used as slave labour which gives often, though not always, gets them out of the cells, provides exercise, company and mental stimulation.

Priceless Attributes have created a world in which all subjects consider themselves to be living in the best of all possible fiefdoms. Their factories manufacture a large range of clothing.
The subject is free to chose to wear anything manufactured by the factories of Priceless Attributes. The Music Subsidiaries of Priceless Attributes control the careers of a large number of musicians operating in a variety of genres. The subject of free to listen to the work of any of these musicians.
Here is pop star Ricky Dandelion, he is doing a sexy dance to his new song ‘Priceless’ Soon all the youth will be performing this same dance, in the school playgrounds and in the streets and bedrooms.

Priceless Attributes sponsor a range of political parties. The subjects are free to vote for any one of these parties once every five years. Current Chairman of Priceless Attributes is ex-porn star turned pop idol, star of a million fantasies, Agatha Orchid. She has held the position of Chairman for the past 5 years but is thought likely to be deposed on account of her fading looks, though some argue her recent breast augmentation will help her see out another term of office.

The pharmacological subsidiaries of Priceless Attributes manufacture a range of recreational drugs. These are all legal and available to all subjects.
Here is Bobby Bluestocking, he’s really charged up on compound X. Look how hard he’s working! He’s in a frenzied state, eyes wild, going quicker than anyone else on the assembly line.
Look at Sheila Shill, the video of Priceless is on her wall-screen, she’s in an ecstasy of communion with Ricky Dandelion, she’s doing the Priceless dance, step for step with the 3D image that dances alongside her, she’s singing along, she’s completely in sync with the song.

The philosophy of Priceless Attributes is that the carrot is a far more effective method of control than the stick. Pleasure a more powerful motivation than pain. Give the people bliss and they’re yours forever.
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The Phoenicians, the merchant caste which is aligned to no state, government, private company or any other authority anywhere in the world. Only the Phoenicians can cross borders and boundaries with complete freedom, anywhere in the world. Their status as neutrals, conduits for food and other tradable items, is universally respected.
The Phoenicians have no homeland. The only territory they claim are their ships and every international port and harbour under the sun. Their ships are huge, up to half a mile long. They are crewed by extended family groups and affiliates. It is the ships which are their cities, huge and heavily populated as they are. Tyre, Carthage, etc etc The Phoenicians are recognisable by the purple, made of the murex shell, with which their cloaks and dresses are dyed. The murex shell also serves as the insignia under which their ships sail.

On board the city of Carthage children are laughing as they watch dolphins from the portholes. The city bears the imprints of generations of Phoenicians. Frescos and scrawled graffiti, wall hangings, Persian rugs encoded with Sufi injunctions, chandeliers and candelabra from abandoned mansions and country estates, lecterns, gargoyles and icons from derelict cathedrals, Polynesian masks, voodoo fetishes, the statues of obsolete gods, plump and curvaceous figurines of fertility cults, spiraling shells of exquisite beauty, fossils of pregnant sea-dragons, exotic specimens in formaldehyde, double-headed snakes and mutant toads, archeological rarities, golden spears, codices, illuminated bibles, comic books, scandal sheets, the hides and skeletons of extinct beasts, a narwhales horn, a hippos jaw, a leopards skin with ruby eyes, a stuffed polar bear, mastodon tusks and dinosaur bones. Libraries dense with information in all languages of the earth. (the Phoenicians are expert linguists) The spoils and trophies, the treasures and curiosities of lifetimes of adventure and exploration.
The Phoenicians are Renaissance humanists. Painters, scholars, poets, alchemists, magicians, musicians, scientists. The long hours spent at sea lend themselves to contemplation, study and experiment. Treatises, theories, sonnets, equations and inventions are swapped between ships leading to a friendly competition which gives energy to their pursuits. Officially non-partisan the Phoenicians are unable to distribute their knowledge and art throughout closed societies. Unofficially the denizens of Nogo do it for them.

Sally Formica is at work. She has a bottle of Zoop Juice on her work bench. Ricky Dandelion drinks Zoop Juice. He has a special arrangement with the company. He drinks it in all his videos and even mentions it in his lyrics. He has similar arrangements with a number of other commercial sponsers.
Sally is wearing her workclothes. A kind of jumpsuit in pink velour. All the girls wear them. The boys have identical jumpsuits in baby blue. She works hard. She doesn't want to be the one in the dunces cap, not again. The shame of it! It's Nancy Drain wearing it this week, that's three weeks running for her. She's beginning to take on the apperancce of a martyr. As if she has taken this burden upon herself, to spare the others. But it's wearing her down. And she's missing out on all the perks the others can earn. Like the free bottles of Zoop juice. Sally wants to wear the crown. That's the perogative of the most productive worker. Darren Haynes has been wearing it ever since she started here. He's like a machine! He gets his compound X free now. Two tablets per day and as much Zoop Juice as he wants. He doesn't speak to anyone. Not while he's working. Doesn't even look at anyone. Only has eyes for his work. He's a legend. So Sally's not sure she'll ever wear the crown. Not while Darren's around. But there's all sorts of other awards you can win. She's had one already. Most improved worker. She won that the week after wearing the dunce's cap. The ignominy spurred her on and it felt so good when they recognised her efforts. She's an important member of the team now. They told her so. In front of everybody. She felt like she would burst with pride. It was at Team Assessment. They have those every week. They all get together on Friday night. That's where they crown the employee of the week and where they give out the dunce's cap. They read out everyone's figures. You have to stand on the stage while they read out your figures. They have figures for everything. Punctuality, productivity. They even have the number of times you took a toilet break logged and if its a really high number they read it out and everyone laughs and mocks you. Everyone cheers when they read out Darren's figures. Management always says those figures just show go to what's possible if you are dedicated enough. They say Darren serves as an inspiration to us all. When they read out the figures of the least productive workers everyone boos and catcalls. They even sometimes get things thrown at them. It seems unfair but really they are letting the whole team down and undermining the efforts of hard workers like Darren. They have to make a pledge to improve and have to think up a sacrifice they can make to show they are serious. When Sally was up there, she was mortified. So she thought of a big sacrifice, so people wouldn't hate her as much. She said she would work all week without pay and that Darren could have her money. When she got her award for most improved worker Darren gave her the money back. He told her not to tell anyone about it. It was the first time he had ever talked to her. She protested at first, said she didn't deserve it, but there was something about the way he looked at her, in the way he spoke, some high moral seriousness that made her aquiese. He's never spoken to her since, but sometimes he makes eye contact in the lunch hall, briefly and solemnly. Intense dark eyes under thick black eyebrows. A teenager's acne though he must be almost 30. Maybe even older.
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Gary Mutt is in the Star and Garter sitting in front of a pint of warm bitter, picking at his pack of pork scratchings. He gazes idly at the pictures behind the bar; Barbara Windsor, the Two Ronnies, Clive of India, Princess Diana, Bomber Harris, Paul Gascoigne, a grim faced Geoffery Boycott, Terry Butcher with bloody bandages wrapped tight around his head like a casualty of war, Cliff Richard in tennis whites. Icons of Englishness. He takes a sip of his bitter and feels proud.
"England will never die you horrible cunts" he bellows. The barman coughs softly and polishes a pint glass with a grubby beer towel.
A 14 inch television screen splutters on a wall bracket in a corner of the room. Only Albion City still has television. John Bull, in one of his more celebrated speeches, declared that if Englishness means anything it means hanging on to your traditions. The BBC broadcast John Bull's addressess to the nation and repeats of Coronation Street, Emerdale Farm, old episodes of The Goodies, Hale and Pace and classic sitcoms such as Are You Being Served, Upstairs, Downstairs, Love Thy Neighbour and Men Behaving Badly.
The television screen is showing footage of the 1966 world cup final.
Gary mouths the words alongside the commentator, words seared onto the heart of every true Englishman
"they think it's all over"
he rises to his feet, mimes kicking a football into the corner of the net
"IT IS NOW YOU FUCKING KRAUTY CUNTS"
raises his arms aloft in triumph and embarks in a victory lap around the pub, arms spread outwards in imitation of a Spitfire flying over the Channel.
"you can take away our red phone boxes, you can decomission our double-decker buses and auction off our manor houses but youll never take our pride
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, IN--GER--LUUND"