GUT – Chapter 1

Pippa Sandberg chewed the end of her HB pencil and wondered how she could change the world. She wasn’t so ambitious as to want to change the whole world, not yet, her immediate one would do for starters, and anyway, whatever she did would have to come from within the G.U.T.

The G.U.T. was the Global Union of Telecommunications that counted 200 members, a smidgeon more than the United Nations. Pippa was proud to work for the G.U.T. because it did include members such as the Principality of Waterland and the Republic of Utopia, to name just the two most radical and latest members. They weren’t considered to be real countries, but then, what was, these days?

Pippa knew all about countries, real or not in traditional terms, because her job at the G.U.T. was to find codes for each and every one of them, and considering that the alphabet had only 26 letters, well, you do the sums.

It had not always been like that though. When Pippa first came to work at the G.U.T. ten odd, very odd, months ago, her job was to fish radio stations out of the water and put them back onto the coastlines of a large map of the world.

Her colleagues then included a noble Dutchman who had forgotten how to fly and an Islander washed onto the shores of the G.U.T. after having lost his way looking for seashells. In fact, that was the name of his homeland, although Pippa thought, the spelling was wonky.

When Pippa took breaks from her fishing work she would wander about the catacombed halls of the building she worked in at the G.U.T. There she came across bronze figures, busts, of men and women who also had wanted to change the world, and some of them, most of them, even had.

On one such walk, Pippa came across the bronze bust of Alexander Graham Bell. “The inventor of the telegraph”, the brass plaque said where his heart would have been had more than his head and neck been kept. Pippa traced her finger over the plaque.

“That tickles,” said a soft deep voice.