The sheer expanses of stone around him had long since ceased to amaze Michael. He came here to this ancient cathedral once or twice a week for some referendum or other, together with half the town’s population. The great buttressed arches echoed with the low hum that any throng of people generates, but Michael kept his head firmly down, and joined his usual queue to make the slow progress along the length of the Cathedral’s hall to the altar.

He would be here for an hour, maybe two, whilst each vote was processed and filed ahead of him. He tried, still bleary in the early morning, to remember what this vote was for. The lifting of prohibition of alcohol, if his reading of the current referendum schedule was correct.

The stone pillars of the cathedral, those at eye level, were cloaked in the red and green banners of the People’s Sovereign Church, the self-styled “saviours of our nation”, and the only government that Michael could remember having ever lived under.