The Man in the Warm Fleece

On the 11th of March 2021, a leading banking firm offered accounts to those with no 

fixed abode so that they could access money without keeping it on them at all times.

In March 2031, a better solution was found.

People staggered down the back alley all the time. 

Lovers, strangers, people who cared and had no means to help, people who had the 

means to help but didn’t care. Some who staggered spat into the ratty hat left in front 

of the homeless man. Two teenagers dropped rocks into it, giggled, moved on. 

There were many who staggered down the back alley.

But one person was new. Different. Not like the others.

Garth Mendis staggered down the alley with his tie askew, his top button undone and 

his dreams shattered. 

He swigged from the bottle of tonic wine freely, looking up at the obelisk flats, their 

endless slat windows, the permanent haze of smog. 

At some point in the twenty first century, there was some much broken civilisation 

that the horrorscape became a day-to-day. Garth whistled to himself. 

He tipped his hat to a man laying in a nearby gutter, covered by a simple slat of 

corrugated cardboard. He knelt down and whispered into his ear. It didn’t matter, 

nothing did. 

The solution didn’t work.

The homeless man heard him. 

He felt something being pressed up against his wrist. 

A friendly beep. 

A green light.

A sigh.

Garth carried on down the alley towards the river. He sat by the riverbank and 

watched it. Flowing, rippling. Nobody caring if the river solved the problems. 

It seemed like a good thing to climb into. To float down, to leave all of it. And finally 

dissipate, where the river meets the sea.

“Hello?”

“Hello sir?”

He opened his eyes. Rheumy, unfocused. He blinked twice, but the man was still 

there. 

The valet stood in the middle of the alley, a suit jacket hanging over his arm. 

“If you would like to change, sir. I have brought along a business suit for you.”

The homeless man stood up. He didn’t quite know who was offering him clothes but 

he knew one thing for certain, the fleece he had always worn was not 

something he particularly wanted to take off.

“M’okay.”

The valet looked him up and down. If he had any thoughts, he kept them concealed.

“Very good sir. Your car is at the end of the street, if you’d quite like to follow me.”

He followed the valet to the end of the alley which broke out into the city proper.

The noise, the traffic. He was happy to follow this strange man into the world beyond 

but-

“My name’s not sir. Not important enough. Call me Michael if you’d like.”

The valet nodded.

“If Michael is what you wish to be called, then I will not argue against you. If you 

wish to change your name, I’m certain you can do so on your UPoints Profile.”

The valet gave him a knowing look.

Michael Fergus swiped his middle finger and index finger across his wrist, bringing 

up his implanted social credit. 

Only the account wasn’t for Michael Fergus, UPoints 000,000,078. 

The account number that floated in neon numbers, circling his wrist, was for

Garth Mendis, UPoints 637,127,952.

The valet gestured to the car that had pulled up and he climbed in.

The smells of bergamot and leather polish hit his nostrils as he climbed in, wrapping 

his hands around his tattered clothes. 

The car took off, shooting across the road and forwards. The new Garth stared out of 

the window at the cityscape unfurling in front of him. A billboard standing above a 

rusted plinth showed a thin woman in a striped red bikini standing in front of a 

cityscape and blowing a kiss. 

The words across the advert read ‘Get beach body ready! Sea levels predicted to meet 

this sector within the next three years!”

Across the bottom was a swimwear logo.

The car tilted and turned through a street filled with people idly sitting on their 

doorsteps and swiping through their phones, trading digital pictures and texts, 

hoping their posts and messages were noticed by UPoints Regulators who would 

inject their account with UPoints. 

Dayjob messengers. 

It wasn’t much, but it was a way to get by if you were lucky 

enough to have a mobile phone, either your own or one you had managed to 

‘appropriate’ and paid a Phoneturner who would change ownership to yours.

The car continued onwards and pulled up outside of a oblique building just before 

lunchtime, wherein ‘Garth’ was shepherded out. 

The Embassy of Points stood in front of him, the name of the building emblazoned on

 two separate gilded plaques shaped like gigantic hands, the words spiralling across 

the wrists.

The valet escorted the homeless man to the door, at which point people in suede 

waistcoats were wrestling with each other to hold the door open for the raggedy,

bearded man. Officials did not murmur, for to murmur would be to risk UPoint Loss,

but they shared glimpses to suggest that the man wending his way 

towards reception was not, in fact, Garth Mendis.

The valet gestured to a bell on the reception desk and the man in the warm

fleece picked it up. He pulled at the button on top, which yielded no noise. He 

pressed it, and it let out a high-pitched ring, startling him. He dropped the bell.

“Mr Mendis. Thank you for joining us. If you’d like to leave any belongings in the 

lobby, The Green Room or with one of our attendants.”

He stared at the receptionist, then dropped his gaze to the ground.

“Please don’t take my things.” he muttered. “They’re all I have.”

The receptionist nodded. “That’s no problem sir, if you’ll just follow on through, the 

meeting is already in partial to complete attendance and you may join whenever 

you’re ready.”

He nodded.

As he headed through to the main room, whispers could be heard throughout the 

chamber. Already, people had purchased the exact make and design of the fleece and 

many people, and they waited outside to hear the verdict.

‘Garth’ sat down.

A person opposite him with perfectly coiffed blonde hair, adjusted the corner pocket 

of his suit and began to speak.

“You are Garth Mendis, writer of The Fourteen Principles of Fairness, creator of 

UPoints and progenitor of the later changes to the UPoint system. You are nephew to 

Lewis Mendis, creator of the UPoint System in twenty thirty one, is this not correct?”

The man in the ragged coat stared. 

“Matthew twenty six and twenty four.” he replied. “And I just want to help 

people.”

Susurrations rose up from across the room. 

“A noble cause.” replied the suited man. “One that we perhaps share, 

although we may have differing vehicles of getting there.”

He stood, took another look at his corner pocket, adjusted it yet again.

“Tell me, what are your microeconomic incentives to calibrate public spending? Do 

you feel subtle UPoint inflation is suitable or that people will naturally gravitate 

towards a point where we can assume mass civility without outside influence?”

The man in the ragged coat said nothing. 

From across the room, people stared. Adjudicating officials, UPoint Ambassadors and 

several UPoint Regulators. Those who had gained access to the meeting through high 

UPoint scoring and those who had gained access through an electoral ballot. 

“I think,” said the man in the ragged coat. “I would like others to be nice to me.”

On the far end of the building, several officers left police cars. The body of a man in a 

well-tailored suit had washed up on an embankment, his UPoints score reading zero 

but his face familiar to most of the global population. Once he had been identified, 

they had managed to get a tracker on the last UPoint Transaction that he had made.

 

They wore flak jackets, just in case.

The outbursts and laughter had died down.

“Nice? You wish to make a sociopolitical system upon the aspects of people being 

nice to each other?”

A woman stood up from the back of the stands. As she stood, she felt the static buzz 

in her arm as eyes turned towards her and her UPoint score sank.

“Do you have a question?”

All eyes turned.

Alice Finnegan surveyed the room. “I think what he’s saying is that we need to get 

back to what matters, we need to investigate what it means to be useful to a society, 

we can’t just work off of metrics or people will simply attempt to game the system.”

The buzz turned into a warm hum in her left arm and Alice sank back into her seat as 

she felt her UPoints begin to rise, as every man and woman in the room let out their 

immutable psychic agreement. 

The man with the corner pocket surveyed him.

“Is that what you’re saying?”

The man in the coat opened his mouth but any words were drowned out by the 

slamming of the doors.

The police had found him.

Michael Fergus ran.

The sirens seemed to follow him forever as he ran, throwing himself behind 

smokestacks to avoid the spotlights, clinging to the bottom of the cars, making his 

way through the gullies and sub-streets that most don’t know about, scrambling 

himself in the rubix cube maze of industrialisation.

One time a car pulled up by him only for him to duck into a disused hallway house 

that fed into Grimsway Street that fed into a disused block of housing. 

Deeper into the gauntlet, with old buildings smothered under the abandoned facilities 

and buried to make land for disused community centres for a community that no 

longer existed. He ran from afternoon into the night, as he knew the buildings others 

did not. He could find shelter where others thought it did not exist. 

The man in the warm fleece was used to running.

For certain people, with certain levels of UPoints, sometimes it was worthwhile when

the lowest you could go was far below the people hunting you.

“Hi.”

He flinched and fell back into the sewer water.

He made his way through the aqueducts between two disused publics housing grids, 

very far below the city and far below the city before, on a frequent basis. It was rare

to find someone else else down here.

But yet here was was someone, right in front of him. And yet she looked so familiar.

She leaned down and looked him straight in the eyes.

“Up ahead, they’ve set a trap for you. Follow that out and up and they’ll have you 

picked up before sunrise. Hold back, at least for now.”

She knelt down and held out a bottle for him.

The man in the warm fleece took the bottle and sipped. 

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

She smiled at him.

“Unfortunately.”

She screwed on the top of the bottle.

“A man has thrust his identity onto you. And you, unfortunately, are the highest 

UPoints owner. Any identity you had before is gone. Given that the highest UPoints 

owner becomes the leader, it wouldn’t surprise me if people were attempting to find 

out the make of your exact fleece and buying them up en mass. It wouldn’t surprise 

me if people were leaving their homes and staying out in the streets. Your movements 

and actions are going to be those that influence those of everyone who wants to 

socially climb through the UPoint system. Do you have a message for them?

The man in the warm fleece took a moment and then stood up.

“I do.”

The lady smiled and pointed to a ladder rising up towards the bright city. 

“Go on ahead, you’ll get caught. Want things to be different, go up.”

He didn’t hesitate.

As ‘Garth’ climbed up, Alice Finnegan felt the warm vibration in her left hand as her 

UPoints increased.

The guns trained on him from all across the street as he pushed over the manhole 

cover. A thousand red pinpoints flickered.

Hands with cracked fingernails raised aloft. Crooked teeth in a smile. Golden sunlight 

shafting through the gaps in the giant metropolis. 

A different man in a different suit with a different corner pocket who looked exactly 

like the Embassy officiate stepped forward and offered a perfectly manicured hand.

One dirty hand interlaced and there was 

An irritated beep.

A red light.

“You’re not under arrest, Michael Fergus of no fixed abode. You have been deducted 

fifty UPoints and may go on to do whatever it is you wish to do.”

The man with the perfectly crisp suit and iron t-shirt turned around.

“Out of interest, Michael, what would you have done if we hadn’t caught you?”

Michael swayed. The police had dispersed, the snipers had stepped down. All that 

was left was two people, standing in front of each other, at the breaking of the dawn.

“Hoped people would be kinder to each other.”

The man in front of him nodded, stoically.

He turned and walked away.

A noise rose in his throat and to any onlooker it might have even seemed that he was 

stifling a cough.

Or a laugh.

Michael dragged himself down a back alley. He found a cardboard slot to pull over 

himself and awaited the morning foot traffic. 

People staggered down the back alley all the time. 

Lovers, strangers, people who cared and had no means to help, people who had the 

means to help but didn’t care. Some who staggered spat into a gingham jacket left in 

front of the homeless man. Three teenagers dropped crisp packets into it, chuckled, 

moved on. 

There were many who staggered down the back alley.

But one person was new. Different. Not like the others.

Alice Finnegan walked quietly, disguising her footsteps. She stood in front of the man 

on the pavement for a while, watching him as he slept on. Perhaps the only man to 

lead a nation, with his head two feet away from a wall streaked with piss.

She touched the silver locket under her neckline. Behind the clasp, hidden in 

darkness, a smiling child. A husband with long dark hair and a bristling beard, 

pushing the child on a rubber tyre swing. Better times.

She leaned down and pressed the back of her hand to the dirty hand that twitched, 

lazily, on the pavement. 

A blue light.

A chime.

Neon letters rose up from his hand.

Michael Fergus, UPoints 000,001,028. 

He turned over briefly, letting out a grunt. For a brief moment, Alice thought he had 

woken up. Feared? Hoped? Those weren’t the right words. Not here, not at this time.

Not in this place. Not on this world.

Alice walked on, moving back in the city proper from the back alley.

Not once did she look back at the man, laying under the cardboard slat, who had 

almost changed everything.