‘Good morning,’ I said, and although ravenously hungry and desperate to dig into my breakfast, I stared around the beautiful walled garden that surrounded us.
‘Wow, what an amazing place,’ I said, putting my plate down on the table and taking a slurp of what thankfully turned out to be delicious coffee.
‘I’m afraid this side of the building is in the sun in the morning, but if you sit down you will be shaded by the cover,’ said Nkoyo pointing up to the shade cloth. I glanced up at the building behind me and I got another shock.
I don’t know what I was expecting, just a building of a couple of stories, but it was far bigger than I expected. Probably thirty floors, maybe more. It was huge and it towered above the small garden I was in. For some reason I had got it into my head that I’d seen pretty much the whole place already. I’d barely seen one corner.
‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘Is this whole place the Institute?’
‘Yes,’ said Nkoyo.
‘It’s huge!’
Nkoyo and Doctor Markham did not react to my amazement. I’m sure if I’d been in their position, I’d have reacted when someone was amazed by something I was accustomed to; however, that was it. Forget it and move on, that’s what I thought. I sat down opposite them and started eating.
‘I take it you slept well,’ said Nkoyo. ‘Did you find the bed comfortable?’
I nodded, my mouth chock full of bacon and eggs.
‘Doctor Markham tells me you would like to buy some clothes, is that right?’ asked Nkoyo.
I continued nodding, swallowed and said. ‘Well, yes, I’ve only got the clothes I’m wearing now. They’re from Gardenia, I don’t have the clothes I was wearing when I left, well, my era, you know, like two hundred years ago. I left them at Goldacre Hall.’
‘I see.’
‘Which is where I was living in Gardenia, which doesn’t exist. Plus I left my money there, they don’t use money, I had some money in my wallet, my phone and iPad, that was about it. So I don’t have anything to pay for clothes.’
‘I understand,’ said Nkoyo. ‘It is possible we can arrange for you to do some work and earn enough money to buy some clothes. We are not in a position to donate clothes to you.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. I took another mouthful, thinking about having to work in London and what that could possibly mean. I remembered Grace bringing me clothes; there was never any suggestion of payment, or working for money. The concept sounded very bizarre even considering I’d been born and raised in a social and political environment where money ruled.
‘There is an alternative,’ Doctor Markham spoke slowly and deliberately.
‘An alternative?’ asked Nkoyo.
‘Professor Etheridge did some deep research last night.’
I must have looked nonplussed because I noticed a hint of annoyance on the normally static features of the Vanessa Redgrave lookalike. ‘You met Professor Etheridge yesterday, she was a member of your review panel,’ she said rather curtly.
‘Yes, I remember,’ I said, which I did, more or less, I knew she was one of the scary women sitting behind the table looking at me.
‘She found your records,’ said Doctor Markham. ‘The reports of your disappearance, she managed to verify your story and has traced your, I believe the word was, pension.’
‘My pension?’
‘Do you know what that is?’
‘You mean, my pension, from 2011! How the hell could that be? I mean I had a pension, wasn’t that much in it, maybe two hundred and fifty K, but I assumed, well, I didn’t even think about it but I suppose I assumed anything to do with the economy of 2011 had ceased to exist long ago.’
‘That is not the case, Gavin, your pension still exists,’ said Doctor Markham. ‘It took some finding; apparently the bank had to decrypt files from ancient data storage systems they had tucked away in a deep vault. Very few people know how to operate such devices, but thankfully some students at University College are working on a project to excavate very old data. They found someone who could collate the information.’
‘This is insane!’ I said feeling ever more disoriented.
‘Why do you feel it is insane?’ asked Doctor Markham. ‘It is just financial data stored in crude coded algorythms, I don’t think sanity has anything to do with it.’
I sat in front of them, rubbing my eyes, trying to make sense of what they’d just told me.
‘It’s a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean the data is insane, just the, well the turn of events.’ I stopped rubbing my eyes and looked up at them, trying to judge their reaction. I didn’t have a hope, they both stared at me blankly and, as usual, I didn’t have a clue what they were thinking.
‘So, I’ve got some money, is that what you’re saying?’
Nkoyo smiled at me and nodded. ‘Yes, it sounds like you have some money.’
‘Your pension is currently valued at a little over thirteen million kwo,’ said Doctor Markham calmly.
‘Kwo?’
‘Yes, Kwo, did you not have Kwo?’ asked Doctor Markham, for some reason my question seemed to offend her slightly, although on reflection my very existence seemed to offend her.
‘I’ve got no idea what you mean, is it currency?’ Again, a blank stare from both women. ‘Money,’ I said. ‘Is Kwo like money?’
‘Yes, Kwo, bits, often the common term is bits. Kwo is money, rather a lot of money,’ said Doctor Markham.
It then became clear that this information was also news to Nkoyo, she was staring at Doctor Markham and turned to me, raised her magnificent eyebrows and grinned.
‘Not bad to wake up after two hundred years and discover you have thirteen million in the bank,’ she said.
I sat in silence for a while, going through the now tiresome rigmarole of trying to understand what had happened in the last two hundred years, how my pension had survived the turmoil, the collapsing economies, the many revolutions, minor wars and upsets that are the norm for human life on earth. Then I considered the possibility that if where I was sitting was, as it appeared to be, another possible future completely unconnected to Gardenia, then the history of what had come before could also be completely different.
‘Are you feeling okay, Gavin?’ asked Doctor Markham.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I responded without thought. ‘I’m just trying to adjust to being a multimillionaire.’
6
Meet the Press
Finding myself sitting behind a brightly-lit table in front of literally hundreds of people was fairly taxing. I had appeared on panels back in my own era, most commonly public meetings about various large engineering projects, but I was usually there as a representative of a mining company and not the focus of attention.
This was very different. I was very much the focus of enormous amounts of attention. How anyone could enjoy this experience was hard to grasp. I felt my whole body shaking as I entered the room. People who want to be famous have to be seriously weird.
The large room I was sitting in was at the opposite end of the Institute I had by that time become slightly familiar with. After my breakfast I followed Nkoyo down the seemingly endless corridor as she explained what was going to happen.
‘There are many international worders gathered at the Institute, we can no longer contain the information about your arrival and wish to clarify the situation.’
‘Worders?’
‘Yes, worders, I think you might have called them journal makers.’
‘Journalists?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, journal-ists, we don’t have journals any more but I suppose worders do much the same thing, they interpret events and distribute the information.’
‘So you want me to talk to them?’ I asked, feeling more alarmed. ‘I’m not very good at communicating, not like
that, especially not with large groups of people.’
Nkoyo gave me sympathetic glance. ‘Don’t be anxious, Gavin, I’ll be right beside you. I will guide you. You will be fine and it won’t take long, it’ll all be over before you realise.’
Nkoyo stopped by one of the bizarre foldy doors, she laid a hand gently on my forearm, ‘The only thing we would request you avoid is an explanation of Gardenia, of a potential alternative reality running parallel to ours. There is research into this area, still in its very early stages, I think revelations of the kind you have implied to us may confuse people. Is that okay?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s fine. Don’t worry, I’ll avoid the topic,’ I said.
At that point the weird door slid open and Nkoyo stood to one side and gestured for me to enter.
As I entered I felt a new wave of fear surge through my body. I wasn’t used to surges of any kind; it was all very unsettling. It was very noisy, a huge room full of people talking. Before I made it into the glare of the spotlights on the raised stage, I stared at the crowd in abject terror. This room was full of women; I could not spot one man among them.
I was shown up two steps onto a stage on which was a long table and as soon as I appeared from the shadows, the noise from the crowd increased. I sat down behind the table as directed, Doctor Markham sat to my left and Nkoyo to my right.
There were two other people already sitting at the table when I entered, the big-armed lady at one end and a woman who I remembered was Professor Etheridge at the other. The Professor spoke first. I could see no microphone in front of her but her voice was clearly amplified.
‘Thank you for attending today,’ she said. ‘I am Professor Wendy Etheridge from the Institute of Mental Health, and I have been studying the story we are about to reveal to you today.’
I fear the shock may have been visible on my almost out-of-control face when I learned that the institute I’d been housed in was a loony bin. Mental health, so they did think I was a nutbag.
‘The news we have for you is, without doubt, fairly dramatic. The man you see before you, Gavin Meckler, is in effect two hundred and thirty-two years old. He was born in 1979.’
The crowd in the room erupted with what I assumed were questions, consternation and confusion, but it all happened at the same time so it was hard to make out any individual comment. I could see many women staring at me incredulously.
‘He was born in an area he would have known as High Wycombe, although we would now know this area as Dawson Square. The London we are familiar with now did not exist back then. He appears to be capable of controlling a manually operated drone to a certain level, although his skills failed him and as you all know this machine crashed in Franklin Square very near a children’s play area. This happened early in the morning of the fourth of August and no one, including Mister Meckler was injured.’
Another wave of concern rippled through the crowd.
‘Obviously we were alarmed when this incident came to our attention. At present an anomaly of some sort, caused, we think, by high levels of electrical energy somewhere in the vicinity of the Singh power-field at the southern end of the square.’
I noticed the Professor nod her head upwards, this made me glance behind me, what I saw momentarily took my breath away. Above and behind me was a huge screen with an incredibly detailed aerial view of the squares, it was shocking because it was exactly as I’d seen it when I emerged from the cloud. It was also shocking because it wasn’t like looking at a screen, it was like looking out of a window, a window with optically perfect glass. The image was not merely photographic, it was so real looking it had to be real, the room I was in simply had to be floating above the square, we were looking down on it. I gripped my seat instinctively, I was frightened I would fall to my death as the image spun and zoomed, I felt slightly sick and yet my body sensed no movement.
The image flew in with dizzying clarity, swinging around so the wide-open space of the Singh power-field was in the foreground. Above the field was something I immediately recognised, a very large threatening cloud, now I could see it again I realised that its formation was not natural, no naturally occurring clouds are the shape of a giant traffic cone, dark at the bottom and getting steadily brighter higher up.
Suddenly a very recognisable image of my plane appeared out of the cloud and flew in a slightly crazed manner, a little reminiscent of a fly around a naked bulb, slowly descending toward the middle of the square.
I felt I understood something then. They had the same clouds in London as they had in Gardenia and as I’d seen over Didcot. The cloud over London had to be formed by similar vast amounts of electrical energy causing the anomaly in Gardenia but there was no cable visible, no tether. This was evidently something very different.
‘We have now completed our investigation as to how this happened, and while the exact cause is still unclear, we did record a massive power surge which registered in accumulators and ultra-capacitors in the vicinity of Mister Meckler’s appearance.’
People in the crowd were now shouting questions, I still couldn’t make out any individual voice but they were obviously upset. An image of some kind appeared on the screen, I could not understand any of it, I assumed it was a representation of data but in a form I was completely unfamiliar with.
‘At present there is no need to assume a repeat performance is possible, but we are looking into safety measures. I don’t need to explain that this kind of breach in the stability of space–time is clearly a major security issue.’
Again the room erupted into a cacophony of questions, shouts and general conversation.
‘Mister Meckler has undergone a battery of tests and is of no immediate danger to anyone. He is disease-free and although his body carries an alarmingly high array of toxins, they are not of a communicable nature and only a danger to him. They were toxins he would have been exposed to due to the crudity of the technology he was surrounded by in his era.’
I was learning as much about myself as the crowd were; all of them were now listening in rapt silence. I never knew I was so full of toxins. All that organic food I’d spent so much money on with Beth? Bit of a waste of time by the sound of things.
The Professor continued.
‘At first we had no way of verifying his claims. He was interviewed by Doctor Alice Markham who some of you may know is London’s leading psychological reader. Doctor Markham registered that Mister Meckler is incapable of sophisticated psychic deception, his development in this area is, as one would expect of a person from two hundred years ago, rudimentary to say the least.’
I did a kind of smiley shrug as if to say, ‘that’s me, I’m a psychological thicko’, which was partly true, as I had no idea what she was talking about. My reaction caused another wave of noise to erupt from the crowd.
Professor Etheridge glanced across at me as a teacher would glance at an unruly six-year-old, cleared her throat and carried on.
‘We have now been able to check out his claims using deep data restoration, and indeed there was a man who exactly matches his description who was born in 1979 and who also disappeared in 2011 while flying a manually operated drone which matches the description of the one that crashed in Franklin Square. It appears the authorities at the time assumed he was missing due to crashing into the ocean. Even though it seems highly unlikely, everything Mister Meckler has told us appears to be true. I’ll now hand you over to Nkoyo Oshineye.’
Professor Etheridge sat back at this point and exchanged words with Nkoyo who then turned to me and said, ‘Are you ready?’
I was going to say ‘ready for what?’ but I didn’t get the chance, she leaned forward and started addressing the audience.
‘Good morning everyone, my name is Doctor Nkoyo Oshineye, I’m the director of the Institute and I’d just like to lay a few fears to rest. As you may know, we already deal
with a number of extreme cases here at the Institute but this is something very out of the ordinary. Dealing with the sudden arrival of Mister Meckler has been a challenge. As you will soon discover, he is a gentle and sensitive man, not exactly what we might have expected to emerge from the dark times but it’s just possible we have a lot to learn from him about our distant past.’
I know my eyebrows raised a little when I heard my era referred to as ‘the dark times.’ I also noticed many members of the audience took note of my reaction. I turned back to look at Nkoyo which, if I’m being honest, was not a chore.
‘I would ask that you try and control your inquisitiveness and give him time to answer. He is highly intelligent and understands most of what we say, although he may not be familiar with some of the eastern European or African terms that have entered our language over the past one hundred years or so. I would suggest you phrase your questions carefully and in as traditional English as you can manage.’
At this point, Nkoyo pointed to a woman in about the third row. As soon as she spoke I could hear her voice coming through a very sophisticated public address system.
‘Gavin, can you tell us if it is your intention to try and influence our menfolk and cause upset and discord?’
I looked over to Nkoyo, I needed help with the very first question. She nodded at me as if to say ‘the floor is yours’.
I turned toward the woman who’d asked the question then looked down at the table for some kind of microphone, there wasn’t one.
‘Well,’ I said and got a shock, my voice was amplified, crystal clear, in fact it sounded rather good. ‘Wow, that’s amazing, I’ll need someone to explain to me how the amplification in here works.’
I could see this comment caused confusion, even mild alarm among the members of the audience. I smiled.
‘Sorry, I don’t know exactly what you mean, but I have no intention of causing upset, I am far more confused than any of you. I don’t know why I’m here and I don’t know how I got here. I’m an engineer not a politician, from what I have already witnessed, I can see that you live in a very civilised city and I only want to learn how everything works.’
News from the Squares Page 6