Hey guys. Here's a little project I been working on. My attempt at something of a unified Black Mirror universe. Enjoy!
World of Black Mirror, 2034
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It's January 1st, 2034, and as a new year dawns, even the staunchest of techno-optimists are watching with their fingers crossed. This is a future that few (save one or two British satirists) could have seen coming. History diverges from our own timeline in 2004: in March, while America was still reeling from a certain scandalous event at that year's Superbowl, Dick Cheney went hunting quail at a ranch in Texas. Unfortunately, all he managed to bag was a 67 year old sheriff named Roland Walter Quayle (predictably, there was no shortage of lame jokes about his name on late-night talk shows).
After alcohol was found in the Vice President's system, he announced his resignation, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was selected as his replacement. Before they'd even finished scraping Cheney's name off his office door, the Bush administration was under fire once again, this time in response to the poor handling of Hurricane Frances, a category 5 storm which devastated the city of New Orleans in August. The final name in the Bush administration's coffin came after it emerged that Homeland Security had been asked to raise the nation's threat alert level in the hopes of scaring moderates into voting Republican. In November, Bush and Frist were defeated by the Democratic ticket of John Edwards and Tom Vilsack.
April 1, 2005 began on a decidedly unfunny note with the Comedy Central massacre (a.k.a. the Day the Laughter Died), when a lone Islamic extremist opened fire at South Park Studios in California, killing showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker amongst others, the attack seemingly motivated by the cartoon's previous depiction of the prophet Muhammad. President Edwards offered his condolences to the victims' families, and shortly afterwards, was hit by a far more personal tragedy, when his wife, First Lady Elizabeth Edwards, was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The Comedy Central massacre was not America's first, nor would it be her last, brush with Islamic extremism: on 25 December, 2006, a date now known as Black Christmas, seven planes travelling between the United Kingdom and the US were downed using bombs disguised as energy drinks. The death toll of Black Christmas surpassed that of the previous 9/11 attacks, resulting in a greatly expanded War on Terror, and for a while, there were genuine concerns of the war spreading into Iran, although ultimately, cooler heads prevailed. Patriotism because even more widespread, and flag burning was banned under the controversial 29th Amendment, having passed by a single vote[1].
President Edwards enjoyed tremendous support in Black Christmas' aftermath, although this was not to last (shocker, I know): just a few weeks after his wife's untimely passing, a White House secretary named Zephyr Twelvetrees, became pregnant, and claimed that John Edwards was the child's father. Edwards initially denied these allegations, although agreed to undergo a paternity test. When the results came back positive, Edwards resigned in disgrace on 7 November, 2007, becoming the second President in US history to do so (coincidentally, mere hours after his resignation, his son, David Twelvetrees, was born prematurely).
President Vilsack faced tough competition from Hillary Clinton, although narrowly secured his party's nomination in 2008, ultimately being defeated by the Republican ticket of John McCain and Olympia Snowe. The McCain administration is generally regarded as having done more harm than good in mitigating the effects of the Great Recession, and with Prescott's Curse alive and well, he too lost his re-election bid, losing to Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh (with some pundits taking Hillary in the Oval Office as a sure sign that 2012 really would be the end of the world).
Clinton's first year in office saw an unsuccessful attempt at capturing Osama bin Laden, ending in multiple American casualties (with Osama happily detailing the circumstances of his nigh-miraculous escape over video), and the Taft High School shooting (also known as the 'Jake the Killer massacre') in October. Shortly before Halloween, 17 year old Jacob Falconer killed 44 students at William Howard Taft High School, in the hopes of appeasing the fictional entity known as Jake the Killer (unsurprisingly, this led to some panic relating to online creepypasta, and its affects on young people, with several video games and a movie cancelled in the aftermath).
In March of 2014, almost forty years to the day after the attempting kidnapping of Princess Anne, Britain's darling, Princess Susannah Mulholland (sometimes called the Persona Princess, as she announced her engagement to Prince William on the social media platform of the same name[2]) was kidnapped after attending a friend's wedding. Her captor uploaded a video to YouTube, where the terrified Princess was forced to read out a letter addressed directly to the Prime Minister, 43 year old Michael Kermit 'Froggy' Callow: in exchange for her safe release, Callow must have sex with a pig, live on national television. After exhausting all other options, the Prime Minister gave in to the kidnapper's demands, and the event was watched by millions worldwide, with the Princess being released unharmed several minutes before the programme started. A year later, Susannah gave birth to her and Prince William's first son, Prince Arthur, while the Prime Minister and his wife, Jane Callow, would divorce.
Immediately, all recordings of the Callow broadcast were outlawed in the United Kingdom, although the tape can still be found on sites like LiveLeak. A few months after the occurrence, a disgruntled American technician evoked outrage after replacing an episode of the children's cartoon series Peppa Pig with four minutes of Callow getting down and dirty with a barnyard animal. The events of the Susannah Affair were dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie
The Princess and the Pig, and for a time, Callow's approval ratings were the highest of any Prime Minister in the 21st century. Unfortunately, he and his wife would separate two years later, their relationship having worsened since the royal kidnapping.
Just when it seemed that the year 2014 had overdosed on crack, that same October, during a special by-election, a vulgar cartoon bear came in second place to conservative MP Liam Monroe. Created by British comedian Jimmy Salter and named after one of his old schoolteachers, Waldo the Bear may not have won the election, he clearly won the hearts and minds of many - the Waldo meme was particularly popular amongst members of the far-right, taking on a status similar to Pepe in OTL. The 'Waldo Election', as it is now known, may have been small, but there have been so many direct comparisons to real-world politicians like Elon Musk, Vivienne Rook and Donald Trump (who won the popular vote in 2016), to the point of being trite. Waldo would ultimately have his revenge against Liam Munroe, in the form of the latter being accidentally decapitated in a freak drone accident in 2019.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, much harder than in our timeline. Trump passed away on July 4, and not long afterwards, leading contenders in the Democratic primaries succumbed to the virus, including Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Ultimately, the election was won by Sherrod Brown, with Chris Christie[3] soon conceding his defeat shortly afterwards (there was, at least, no Capitol siege). Brown is the first President since Bill Clinton to have won re-election, and was succeeded in 2029 by the incumbent President, trillionaire Elon Musk. It's anyone's guess as to who the Democrats will select as their candidate in 2036, although Senator East, who started out as a left-wing YouTube commentator, has already thrown her hat into the ring. What is certain however, is that the following election will be the first in which the President is elected directly by the people, the Electoral College having been abolished by the passing of the 30th Amendment last year.
The pandemic claimed the lives of any number of famous faces, including Oprah Winfrey, Stephen King, Elton John, Tom Hanks and Matt Groening. With even more restrictive lockdowns than OTL, it's little wonder 2020 is popularly remembered as the 'Lost Year'. Even fourteen years after the pandemic, masks remain a common sight in many European nations, and the phrase 'gone the way of the handshake' has entered common vernacular, referring to something once common that was done away with due to health and safety concerns. With Queen Elizabeth and her husband having fallen victim to COVID, the current monarch being 85 year old Prince Charles (who rules under the name of King George VII, but is still known as 'King Charles' to most). Rumors abound about a supposed love affair between Charles and current Prime Minister Vivienne Rook, but that's all Fake News, and in a world where leaders make love to pigs, really, does anyone care?
While recovery from the pandemic was slow, the 2020s also saw a whole new wave of incredible technological advancements, particularly in the field of neuroscience. Experts at San Junipero Industries are confident that mind uploading is just a few years away (yeah, mind uploading is this timeline's nuclear fusion - always just around the corner). There is also a new device which allows for sensations to transferred between human subjects - despite its rather gruesome origins (who could forget Dr. Peter Dawson, the so-called 'Pain Addict'?), it has seen its uses, particularly in the sex toy industry.
There are also reports of this technology being used as a form of punishment in some nations - for instance, where one party causing severe physical harm to another, they are forced to experience every painful moment of their victim's recovery. Similarly, it is possible not only to erase memories, but also to analyze them, using a device known as a recaller. Some people have been known to remove memories of painful relationships, a la
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while others have been known to erase all traces of their favourite media, just so they can go back and enjoy it from the beginning all over again.
Memory viewing has a variety of uses, sometimes being used in court as evidence, also in the insurance business. There was of course the infamous case of British architect Mia Nolan, who killed multiple people in an effort to hide all evidence of a drunk driving accident around fifteen years prior. Nolan was, ironically, ultimately being identified through memories extracted from her victims' pet gerbil, and is popularly known as 'Crocodile Nolan' in the UK, due to the tears she shed after being arrested by police. In the year 2026, there was a year-long manhunt for six year old Jemima Sykes, who vanished from her home in south England in March. The culprit, Iain Rannoch, would go on to commit suicide in prison, delaying courtroom proceedings.
After Rannoch's death, Great Britain, having endured what felt like a lifetime's worth of trials and tribulations over the past ten years, turned all its seething anger towards Rannoch's fiance, 31 year old Victoria Skillane, who gleefully recorded young Jemima's gruesome death. Skillane is currently held in the White Bear Justice Park, where she is the unwitting star of various staged performances, only to have her memories of each day's trauma erased after learning her true identity.
White Bear Justice Park has attracted immense controversy over the years since its conception, although few politicians are willing to defend the accomplice of a convicted child murderer. The Park's defenders would argue that someone like Skillane cannot (or should not) be rehabilitated, and besides, the Park supposedly acts as a criminal deterrent, and rakes in huge piles of cash, some of which is donated to various child protection organizations. In short, what you call 'torture', we call 'jolly good fun'. For the moment, White Bear Justice Park remain one of a kind - as horrific as Mia Nolan's crimes were, there was, at least, some reasoning (however twisted) behind her murder spree, while Rannoch and Skillane's crime was motivated by pure cruelty and sadism.
Despite Jeff Bezos' death in 2022, space tourism is a growing industry, with President Musk promising a manned Mars landing before the decade is out. There is a US Department of Technology, the SecTech being an only slightly shady individual named Rolo Haynes. Holographic 'face filters' used to display emojis are all the rage with the younger generation. With bee populations on the decline worldwide, Granular Industries is turning to some more unorthodox solutions, and there are growing concerns that some are taking a new app, allowing them to rate others on a scale of one to five stars, a bit too seriously...
[1] With flag burning now illegal nationwide, some protestors have been known to instead burn US flags with the wrong number of stars/stripes, which is still technically allowed.
[2] Social media is a bit different: Instagram and YouTube are the same, Persona is our Facebook analog, Hitcher is Uber/Lyft, and Smithereen is Twitter (Smithereen's founder and CEO, William 'Billy' Bauer, ran against Musk in 2032 - the Smithereen Hostage Crisis of 2014 was brought up a fair few times in that year's election cycle).
[3] Vice President under the Trump administration.
