In the world’s most sophisticated skyscraper on the island city of Galatea, people are taking blind ambition to a whole new level. As sinister forces human and artificial conspire to drive everyone over the edge, the smartest will be those who learn to look down and deep within. For something truly out-of-this-world is making its way to the top, and everyone’s vision will be getting a little stranger…

The edge of the universe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The temperature was a hundred clicks below the Hadesian line, dust devil winds burned bare flesh and a tumult of spicy smog shrouded heaven’s outermost stars in a sickly, copper-coloured haze.

High in the mountains of Cys, the Tantalus Arms emptied its inebriated patrons into the desert night with a gaseous belch. Only one suction cup in the solar system’s solitary cephalopod skybar remained open. Inside, a geriatric Andavarian tenor serenaded two dewy-eyed, terminally ill aphromorphs at the VIP table. Near the reptile-wrestling pit, a trio of cyclopic scavengers lay lashed on maroon pod bays, mumbling excavation yarns into the gambling portals.

The last goddam tune I’ll ever hear, thought Lucius as he downed his final shot of M86 Throatwarmer. Waiting was the two-hearted bounty hunter’s only play now. Waiting for his two Ogressian captors, sitting slab-faced either side of him, to drag his lacerated ass to the lava gulag. Waiting to accept his sentence from the odorous overlord of Omega-69. Waiting to have his soul sucked out by the singing spidergirls of Lestrygonia, who loved to lather their victims in Kublan honeydew before drawing the terminal bleed.

Wuuupppppaaahsssshaaajjuuddeecluckercluckaphsst. The sleeping doorslith, three hundred calcics of wobbly green flesh, rocketed across the vacated gyration zone and splattered into the optics of designer toxins above the bar. An inferno of XX chromosome swept into its space. Lucius recognised her from his datacast. Electra Medici. The Syphillian galaxy’s most wanted. A hot blizzard of voluptuousness from the planet Norkus, rumoured to store the Fleece of Dragus under her scarlet spacesuit. She drew her Querff Company assault rifle and fired two plutonium parcels into the bloated bellies of his custodians. As their green guts seeped onto the sticky, sand-swept floor, osmotic tentacles twitching in tune, Lucius smirked.

Everything they said about Electra was true. The she-wolf fragrance. The crystalline eyes. The rolling, flame-coloured hair. She had journeyed fifteen celestial blocks to encircle his soul. Lucius’s eyes locked onto her Arcadian amulet, a cut of pure eroticinium. The universe’s most sacred gem. The jewel gave its owner second sight and lay like sunken treasure between a gravity distorting pair of-

“Adam!”

Outdoors on the unkept lawn, the other side of the dusty classroom window, The Pretty Girl In The Year Above with the big red backpack was glistening in the late afternoon sunshine. She was supposed to be painting a picture of the sea. Her easel was set apart from the other classmates. While they splashed their canvases with murky blues, the collage she crafted orbited a different sphere. Elegant, precise and suffused with reddish fragments torn from paper. Adam could see a grand flaming tower floating beacon-like above the waves, under which swirled lovely mermaids and lavishly detailed leviathans. A strange interpretation of the pale vista which formed the circumference of the orphanage’s world. In the make-believe sky at the top of the picture was a white disc with swirling red at its centre. Sunset on a liquid Mars, seen through the eyes of an angelic aesthete from Venus.

“Stop daydreaming!”  

A shrill sound from across the cosmos. The dragon had stirred, breathing fire from its dank pit. Adam sensed Miss Guffrey’s squinting, slate-grey eyes zero in. He pictured the saliva drooling from her mouth, falling to the floor, melting the classroom tiles and seeping downwards to poison the earth’s core.

“Pay attention and look at the board!”

The Pretty Girl In The Year Above was caressing the last scraps of paper onto the canvas. Despite the sea breeze, none blew away. Her red backpack, big enough to hold a Querff gun and both of Lucius’s hearts, lay tucked under her stool. Please turn round. Adam wanted to see her immaculate face in the post-meridian light. Savour that constellation of incorruptible beauty no one else noticed. Weirdo. Freak. Alien. The vixens would shout these names as she swished serenely down the corridors. Lance said he’d once seen her alone in the woods on the other side of the island, sitting cross-legged and staring into a makeshift fire. Happy in her solitude.

“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

The reptile was advancing, dragging her gammy leg.

“Sorry Miss Guffrey, I thought I saw something out the window.”

“Yes Adam. Your life passing you by.”

Claws clasped on hips. Venom stewing behind the eyes. Slapped-on lavender lipstick. The bobbles on her fossil-grey cardigan reminded Adam of lunar craters. Below her yellowy-white matronly blouse was a long skirt the colour of graphite, which she probably ironed religiously every evening while spawning visions of geometric cruelty in her soul. Grey in dress. Grey in face. A creature who’d emerged fully formed from the leaden walls of the staff room. Her breath stank too, as if she’d just lowered twitching vermin by the tail into her slobbering chops. The whole school was like that. Bland, inconspicuous monsters lurked in every corner. What a crazy idea. To turn an old prison for funny people into a place for lonely children.

“Now you’re back on planet Earth, please answer the question every other member of the class has managed.”

“Sorry Miss can you –”

“Whaaat will you be when you grow up?”

The rest of the art class had headed to the dormitories, but The Pretty Girl In The Year Above wasn’t finished. She’d seen them off one by one, like Electra. Maybe she would read Adam’s story with second sight too. Softly prise him apart, sensitively tuning into the space-age symphonies stirring in his head, then leading him out of boredom’s abyss on the blaze of a million mystical torches.

“The answer’s on the board, Adam. Not on the bleedin’ horizon.”

The Bleeding Horizon is available to buy at Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.

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To shape the future, why not take inspiration from the past? Phil Parrish travels back in time to 1966 for some valuable lessons in creativity from four famous Liverpudlians. 

This article was written on behalf of 44communications.co.uk, one of the UK’s leading creative internal communication agencies.

As a week to be British, it wasn’t bad at all. The summer had (typically) been a wet and dull one, yet London was swinging, mods and miniskirts were mesmerising passers-by on Carnaby Street and the previous Saturday, a young Mancunian striker called Geoff Hurst had blasted a hat-trick at Wembley to make his country champions of the world.

Then the following Friday, with the nation still ecstatic from winning the world’s biggest footballing jamboree, the four most famous Englishmen on the planet kicked off the weekend by releasing their brand new album to millions of excited pop fans.

Sadly, those hungry for euphoric anthems may have been disappointed when they listened to The Beatles’ Revolver for the first time on 5^th August 1966. There was some sweet pop magic on the record for sure – the romantic tenderness of Here, There and Everywhere, the nursery rhyme jollity of Yellow Submarine and the lusty, brassy energy of Got to Get You Into My Life.

But there was oddness too, like the funereal ballad about a lonely girl called Eleanor Rigby who keeps her face in a jar by the door, a sarcastic rant at the Inland Revenue on Taxman, and the exotic use of sitar on the tranquil Love You To. Most bizarre of all though was the album’s closing number, a blistering, two minute 58 second hurricane of distortive noise unlike anything the quartet had done before.

Creative evolution

Tomorrow Never Knows still feels disorientating today: half a century ago it must have felt like the world’s biggest band had recorded it from the padded cells of a lunatic asylum. But to the song’s chief writer John Lennon, it was a quantum leap in the band’s creative evolution, as they withdrew from live performances to concentrate on studio innovation, paving the way to the psychedelic strangeness of Sgt Pepper the following summer.

Aptly enough, retreating within, channelling your creative impulses and expanding your horizons is what Tomorrow Never Knows is all about. From its opening invitation to ‘Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream’, it plunges you into a weirdly exhilarating aural landscape. And amid the arresting percussion, whirring bird sounds and spaced-out vocals, there are four valuable lessons on creativity for anyone seeking inspiration:

1: Fuse disparate elements

The future is what happens when past meets with present – and Tomorrow Never Knows epitomises that with its daring blend of the ancient and the avant-garde.

The song’s creative origins begun 2,000 years ago in the Himalayas, with a sacred Buddhist text called the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Adapted for the 1960s hippy generation by psychologist Timothy Leary, the book’s spiritual messages were the chief influence behind Lennon’s meditative, Zen-like lyrics.  

Counterpointing these are the song’s signature reverse tape effects, inspired by the weird sonic experiments of German musician, electronic pioneer and Beatles’ contemporary Karlheinz Stockhausen.

It’s this fusion of completely disparate elements that’s the secret to Tomorrow Never Knows’ originality. And it’s also how Stephen King came up with the idea for his breakthrough novel Carrie, when he recalled a LIFE magazine article about telekinesis at the same time he was thinking about an adolescent girl being bullied at school.

2: Look at the world through the eyes of a child

Children don’t care what’s impossible or not – only grown-ups are that boring. And in the mid-sixties, The Beatles were big kids in love with a playground called Abbey Road Studios, where they could play with their toys like restless, excited schoolboys.

The playthings on Tomorrow Never Knows are a dizzying mix of classical instruments and the latest sixties technology: Indian sitars and tanpuras, electric guitars, organs, distorted piano, reverse looping across five different tape machines and the radical use of a sound-altering Leslie speaker, through which producer George Martin ran Lennon’s trippy vocals to mimic the sound of monks chanting from a distant mountain top.  

Tomorrow Never Knows pulsates with playfulness, epitomised by Lennon’s curious, incoherent plea to ‘listen to the colour of your dreams’ and the closing sutra-like incantation to ‘Play the game existence to the end… of the beginning’.  

It was the same kind of naïve, liberated creative abandon – who says you can’t do it? – which saw 25-year-old first-time director Orson Welles make Citizen Kane and change cinema forever, an experience he would later describe as playing with the ‘biggest electric train set a boy ever had’.

3: The creative process may be long, but the result must be simple  

Delirious and demented on the surface, Tomorrow Never Knows is actually a very simplistic song when it comes to structure, lyrics and rhythm.

A virtuoso percussion loop from Ringo Starr thunders repeatedly throughout,  while Lennon’s vocals follow a deliberate two-line sequence of statement followed by present participle (dying, shining, being, knowing, believing), a cadence that reverberates throughout the song like a temple bell calling us to prayer. The result is a taut, focused and lean piece of music, surging forward on a single chord E that sacrifices melody and chorus for the pure, hard shock of the new.

“Simple can be harder than complex,” said Apple founder Steve Jobs. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Or, as fellow perfectionist Leonardo da Vinci once said – a man rumoured to have spent days loitering around the jails of Milan for a model on which to base the shadowed Judas Iscariot in The Last Supper – “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. 

4: Believe in people’s creative potential

When you look beyond its experimental techniques, myriad influences and orchestrated wildness, Tomorrow Never Knows has a very positive, heartfelt message – to release the creative potential we all have within us.

It may have taken fame and money for The Beatles to conceive and record Tomorrow Never Knows, but above all it took self-belief. This inner conviction is echoed in the song’s persuasive plea that through introspection (‘that you may see the meaning of within’), intuition (‘lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void’) and interdependence (‘love is all and love is everyone’) that we can, together, create something more remarkable and out-of-this-world than we could have at first possibly imagined.

To Lennon, the true source of insight and inspiration comes from both inside and out: a process of trusting your instincts, drawing on your own unique experiences and embracing the dizzying array of people, places and perspectives surrounding you.  

Open your heart to yourself, the world and all its wonders, say The Beatles. And remember that in truth, tomorrow never really knows. Because tomorrow is a question only we can answer, an idea lying deep within us that’s just waiting to be created.

In the world’s most sophisticated skyscraper on the island city of Galatea, people are taking blind ambition to a whole new level. As sinister forces human and artificial conspire to drive everyone over the edge, the smartest will be those who learn to look down and deep within. For something truly out-of-this-world is making its way to the top, and everyone’s vision will be getting a little stranger…

The Imagineering Zone of Galatea. 172 minutes before the Fall.

She’s still down here, realised Hal Haze. The Martian security officer shone his torch down the underground staircase spiralling ten storeys into the earth. His semi-functional location tracker showed a solitary white circle with a red dot at the centre, tagged with the dehumanising soubriquet 2781694. It was floating fifty metres from the outer service exit, one of the few doors in the building which could be overridden manually. Alexis was holding out against the insurrection, like some stubborn red-headed Celtic princess with broadsword unsheathed.

It was eight o’clock in the evening. Augusta’s celebratory speech had been rescheduled twice. Twenty minutes earlier, the rioters broke through the supposedly impenetrable electrified fence. Since then, Tiresias had indulged in cat and mouse with the rebels, switching off power infrastructure from below ground to Level 25. Access to higher levels was prohibited to all but black and red ring-bearers. Blue-fingered foot soldiers like Hal would be left to face a ravenous blur of arms, fists and bad teeth that would soon smash through the atrium’s glass exterior and swarm across the hallowed marble floor.

Don’t let yourself be a victim Hally, Alexis once said. Neither should she, despite Augusta’s cruelty. Everyone knew Straker was a funny fish, but she didn’t deserve to be gutted like this. It angered Hal he was the one chosen to wield the blade. Tiresias sent the Black Flag notification to Hal’s phone while he was sitting on the toilet in a Level 30 restroom. He was playing e-solitaire, trying to take his mind off the party’s collapse and the strange rash spreading down his inner thighs.

“Alexis Straker’s employment terminated with immediate effect. Please remove her from the building by 2015 hours by any means necessary. Tiresias.”

Hal squirted, stood, zipped and flushed so swiftly he nearly dropped his device into the churning water. Failure to execute would mean his own termination. Experience taught him every security guy is a prisoner in the end.

He moved gingerly downstairs, flat feet and weak ankles struggling to bear his plump, middle-aged frame. The Imagineering Zone was a subterranean labyrinth where hundreds of worker bees sustained the hive mind, and where lost souls drifted in political purgatory. How they used to gawp cluelessly at each other, trying to create plausible stories from the maniacal dreams spunked upon them from above. A scattered shipwreck of slaves sunk in an ocean of confusion, swept this way and that by the tempestuous whims of an islanded elite. Those guys talk a foreign language up there. In Hal’s tenure, at least six Martians had been hospitalised with over-stimulation. If the rest ever rushed to the surface to witness the true light of day, their heads might explode with the bends. Which would mean even more shit to clean up.

Hal hated what this place had done to Alexis. What it had done to his country. His awakening came during a graveyard shift, when he mistakenly entered one of Galatea Zero’s recuperation cells. Conceived by Roland, these small windowless chambers were hidden in the building’s walls and only accessible via camouflaged doors, for reasons Hal never understood. The cells offered bubbles of solitary despair where Martians could reinvigorate themselves after prolonged exposure to the pressures of fabricated politicking.

During a dizzy spell on patrol, Hal leaned against a wall on Level 3 and accidentally activated a cell door with his blue ring. The pod slid open silently, opening onto a black space illuminated by wafting nebulae of green and violet on the walls. Fragmented legends scrolled portentously across the synthetic sky. You are the sublime. Abundance is nothing. Move to higher ground. Twirling through hidden speakers came a bastardised form of psychedelic space jazz. A tinny, turgid sound, like it was being piped through an antiquated music box.

On the floor was an unoccupied red Maars Mindscape meditation cushion. Crawled up in a ball lay one of the party’s legal counsels (Bill? Bob? Baxter?), wearing only pink boxer shorts and a sweat-stained grey shirt. A cuddly, bee-shaped stress toy was tucked between his twig-thin knees. There was a teary look of confused longing on his face. From his mouth tumbled incoherent phrases about cherry cola. Just a puff of wind and this man of law would wither to colourless ash, emitting a noise so feeble only owls would hear it. Hal backed away from the door slowly. He didn’t sleep for two nights afterwards.

Tonight, the reckoning had come. According to Tiresias’s data, not a soul was hiding in the recuperation cells. The Martian lemmings had scrambled to the promised land of Level 25 and above. The T-Chat was flooded with bravado. Many Martians claimed they would enjoy a better view of the slaughter and weren’t afraid at all. Which meant they didn’t want to face the consequences of their actions. Everybody knew the landslide was a fraud too far.

The Bleeding Horizon is available to buy at Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.

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