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| Mayflower 1973, Bob Haberfield |
Phase 1
1: At Mr. Smiles’ house in Blackheath, several co-conspirators (including the red-headed computer programmer/mogul Miss Brunner) await the arrival of Jerry Cornelius. Jerry arrives and promises to aid them in their raid on his father’s compound. However, he first wishes to visit the place by himself on a personal matter.
2: Jerry takes a launch to his father’s house off the coast of Normandy. His old friend, the caretaker John Gnatbeelson, helps him gain entry through a secret door on the fortress' cliff face. He manages to find his beloved sister Catherine, but she is drugged. When Jerry's hated brother Frank tries to capture him, he uses nerve gas grenades on Frank’s soldiers in order to escape.
3: A few days later, Jerry and the conspirators prepare for their raid on the Cornelius house. While Miss Brunner flirts with Jerry, the others discuss the apparent disintegration of modern geopolitics. Miss Brunner describes her plan to write a computer program which will encompass all human knowledge.
4: Mr. Smiles’ hover-boat and Jerry’s private launch head towards the Cornelius house where they encounter stroboscopic hallucimat towers (a hypnotic light similar to the "hypnomats" found in “The Deep Fix”). Their mercenary forces penetrate the cliff defenses and make their way into the house past a variety of booby-traps (LSD gas, nerve gas, and snipers). When one of the conspirators (Mr. Powys) falls victim to the gas, Jerry is forced to put him out of his misery. In a private moment, Miss Brunner somehow “consumes” her obsequious paramour Dmitri, revitalizing herself.
5: Jerry and his forces corner Frank in the house’s basement. After forcing Frank to open his father's locked safe, Miss Brunner is disappointed to find that the microfilm she is seeking is not there. Outside, Jerry finds that Gnatbeelson has failed to protect Catherine and is dying. Jerry confronts Frank, but Catherine is accidentally killed by a shot from Jerry’s own needle-gun. Frank rallies his soldiers and only Miss Brunner and an injured Jerry manage to escape. Jerry eventually wakes up from a coma at Sunnydale hospital.
Phase 2
6: In London, Jerry visits his favorite pinball arcade and relaxes with his old friend Shades (a self-professed assassin) and some other exotic acquaintances. Later, they head to the Friendly Bum, a club where Jerry joins the band onstage and plays lead guitar. Miss Brunner arrives and they head to the "vitamin-free" Chicken Fry, where Miss Brunner tells Jerry that Frank has escaped with the fabled Newman manuscript (a document written by an insane, now-missing astronaut - see “The Real Life Mr. Newman”). They head to an orgiastic wrestling match where Jerry is fascinated by Brunner’s new assistant, Jenny Lumley. The three of them then return to Miss Brunner’s house in order to get an early start on the next day's journey to Lapland (to seek out the Newman manuscript). In the morning, Jenny has disappeared, while Miss Brunner has an engorged appearance about her.
7: Jerry and Miss Brunner take a helicopter north into the wintry wilderness. On the way, they find a local pastor named Marek hiding out at an abandoned meteorological station. Marek states that he senses evil in the two, but Jerry argues that morality is an outdated concept. Using Frank’s bizarre doodles as a clue (left behind from his own stop-over at he station), the trio eventually find and enter a Lapland cave system which leads to a boiling underground sea. Jerry wonders if this is a manifestation of the "Hollow Earth" theory.
8: Jerry, Miss Brunner and Marek cross the boiling sea in a small dinghy and soon discover an abandoned Nazi village on the other shore. When Jerry catches up with Frank, they engage in a frantic needle-gun duel. In the end, Jerry and Miss Brunner shoot and kill Frank as he tries to flee into the sea. Miss Brunner pockets Frank’s microfilm, while Jerry inspects the Newman manuscript. The document only has the word “haha” written repeatedly on it.
Phase 3
9: Back in London, Jerry loses himself in a months-long party, while society seems to crumble around him. Most urbanites move out to the country. Miss Brunner eventually arrives with Marek as her newest admirer.
10: Miss Brunner tells Jerry that she has found an abandoned Nazi missile base in the Lapland cave system. Using the still-potent missiles to extort money from nearby countries, she has obtained enough funds to begin building the supercomputer she has always wanted.
11: Miss Brunner invites Jerry to visit her computer (named "DUEL") in Lapland. Jerry finds the center of London to be seemingly dominated by a colossal mass of flesh. Panicking, he shoots at a member of the mob (who might possibly be his friend Shades) and flees to the Friendly Bum. There, he discovers that the musicians friends have dehenerated into a slowed-down entropic mass. When Miss Brunner appears, Jerry learns of the fates of Dmitri, Jenny and Marek and tries to resist. When he succumbs, Miss Brunner calls on “the Bishop” to bring the car around.
(Miss Brunner's mysterious ability to overpower Jerry's will may come from the secrets she has found on the Cornelius microfilm. Jerry's father had, after all designed the hallucimats guarding his house.)
12: Jerry is taken north to see DUEL in the newly-refurbished Lapland base. He finds his old acquaintance Professor Hira there, helping Miss Brunner with her work. Jerry initially resists Miss Brunner's influence, but he eventually succumbs to her power. She asks Jerry to go back to London’s Wamering Research Institute on a mission to secure the final notes she needs from her “son”, a Dr. Baxter (and a former employee of Jerry’s father).
13: In London, Jerry penetrates Baxter’s lab and learns that Baxter is trying to use Cornelius’ father’s hallucimat technology to help pacify the world’s woes (a concept also explored in “The Deep Fix”). Baxter denies that Miss Brunner is his mother. After Jerry kills him, he retrieves the notes which Miss Brunner had been seeking.
14: Back at "Laplab", Miss Brunner confesses to her deception (regarding Baxter being her "son") and recommends that Jerry take a long vacation. Jerry tours through Sweden and meets a blonde teacher named Una Persson. They eventually marry and Jerry starts a local band. In time, he becomes as popular in Eskilstuna as he had been in London, although he operates under the name "Robinson Flanders".
15: Miss Brunner arrives in Eskilstuna and tracks Jerry down. Although Jerry and Una try to resist, Miss Brunner uses her strange power to force them to accompany her back to Laplab.
Phase 4
16: Emerging from some kind of mutually-beneficial experience with Miss Brunner, Jerry feels vitalized. However, Swedish police arrive at Laplab to investigate Jerry and Una's disappearance from their Eskilstuna home. Jerry is shot and loses consciousness. He eventually wakes and hears Miss Brunner addressing her scientific workforce. She announces that the sum total of human knowledge will be fed into DUEL, after which DUEL will use this final programme to create a self-perpetuating “all-purpose human being”. Jerry and Miss Brunner enter a capsule chamber where they make love as a machine transforms them into a single hermaphroditic being. DUEL then begins transferring the “final programme” into this new being’s mind.
17: "Cornelius Brunner" emerges and is worshiped by the rapt audience. This new "Messiah for the Age of Science" mesmerizes all of Europe. “Corn” soon leads millions of people into the Black Sea, but in the end, Cornelius Brunner alone remains above water.
(Miss Brunner likely used Baxter's stolen notes to perfect the Cornelius hallucimat technology and grant an amplified form of these powers to her new form as Cornelius Brunner.)
Terminal Data: At the cliffs of Normandy, Cornelius Brunner destroys the Cornelius house and uses his/her strange mesmeric power to befuddle a nearby policeman. Corn then decides to consume the rest of the world.
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