SO (Social Order) thought they’d dealt with Jon Do when they vaporised him and shut down or disrupted all his networks. They were wrong – his avatar stayed alive on the Net. The programmers and teckies tried everything in and out of the book to neutralise this ghost, but nothing worked. The only way would be to terminate and rebuild the entire system, but that would lead to chaos – the last thing they could face. All they could do was to try and drown him out. Meanwhile …

Jon, or whatever his real name was and few people outside of SO’s inner core knew it, had started small. At first he merely asked questions – innocuous sounding ones like: are you happy? From there he, if it was a ‘he’ and no-one outside of Central Control knew for sure, moved to more challenging matters such as: ‘Give me reasons why you’re not happy’. Slowly his readership grew until the monitors began to take note, but by then it was too late – people were waking up. Word spread and soon others were joining in. The acceptance and passivity that SO had created was being questioned and that could not be tolerated. The hunt was on for the source of this disruption.

It took time. Jon and his ‘Do something’ campaign proved extremely elusive but, in the end, he was caught, allegedly in the Cape Verde Islands, and brought back to face justice. Of course, that all happened in secret – the charges, the trial, the verdict and the sentence – and all reports were silenced … but not before some were noticed. For a while SO relaxed, but then the debates were renewed. Like a bubble of air in a closed plastic bag, as soon as one was squashed, it appeared somewhere else. At first the search concentrated on locating Do’s remaining disciples, but it soon became clear that he hadn’t been completely erased – some version of his mind was still alive and active. How this could happen baffled the experts.

All the usual tricks were tried – from sites, enticing those who agreed, to fake versions of Jon’s ident preaching contradictory messages. Some worked but the infection remained, His icon, the black carnation, could be copied by phoney on-line posters but that just spread the ideas further – they even started appearing on walls in workers’ colonies in many countries.