Up to this point the man had just stared at me and said nothing.
‘Gavin, I’m sorry I haven’t introduced myself, my name is Brad Dorschel,’ he said, his American accent strong, his voice surprisingly deep for a man of such diminutive stature. ‘I decided to remain in the background just observing for a while. I hope you didn’t take offence.’
I smiled at him. ‘Not at all, Brad. To be honest, someone staring at me and not saying anything is nothing new. I’ve been the object of rather a lot of interest lately.’
‘I understand,’ said Brad, ‘I just needed to validate your existence.’
He held out his hand and I shook it.
I will admit now that I half expected to try and shake it and it would just disappear. I would discover that this perfectly normal-looking man was in fact made of some kind of gas or dark matter.
His hand was warm and solid.
‘I’m the Chief Science Officer from the Chicago Culvert,’ he said as he sat down opposite me. ‘I’m a physicist, although I guess the best way to describe my specialty is if I use the term “theoretical physicist”. That’s the nearest discipline that would have existed 200 years back. Does any of that make sense?’
‘To be perfectly honest with you, Brad, nothing makes much sense,’ I said, feeling rather pleased with myself that I had used his name in my reply and forced myself to remember it. ‘None of this makes any sense to me at all but I’m no longer surprised. I’ve been through so much weirdness that nothing has made sense to me for many months.’
‘So you’ve done one hop from 2011 to 2211? Is that right?’
‘No, three hops, Brad.’
‘Three hops!’ Brad seemed genuinely concerned.
‘Yes, one to Gardenia in 2211, then another to London in 2211, and now here, wherever here is.’
‘Well, this is the planet Earth, it’s October 2211,’ said Brad. ‘And we’re just off the coast of northern Siberia.’
‘Are we?’
‘Maybe I can explain this part,’ said Theda. She smiled at Brad but it looked a bit forced. ‘The technology we are experiencing here is extraordinary, we are presently travelling with the jet stream, our ground speed is about 300 kilometres an hour. In order to achieve this movement the clouds rise up, catch the jet stream and travel great distances at high speed. When they are approaching the desired destination, they reduce altitude and find winds that will hopefully guide them to the docking point. Their understanding and predictive technologies regarding the weather, storms, winds or stable conditions are very advanced. Often they have to wait for very strong winds to die away because the turbulence is dangerous at low levels. The surface winds can be very strong, much stronger than anything you or I have experienced.’
‘We have occasional storm winds on the surface that can exceed 500 kilometres an hour,’ said Brad. ‘As you may be able to imagine, all pre-existing structures have either been destroyed or are very badly damaged. Here on the clouds we can live with the wind as opposed to struggling to survive it. You will learn much more about life on the surface soon enough.’
‘Five hundred kilometre-an-hour winds! That’s bonkers,’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Gavin, we are very sure. Once you’ve had first-hand experience of wind speeds like that you tend not to exaggerate,’ said Brad. He wasn’t smiling as he spoke. He remained very serious.
‘So, if we are on a cloud over Siberia, where was I when I came out of the real cloud, when I was escorted to Cloud Nine by the white doughnuts?’
‘You were over central-southern England.’
‘Would that be near Didcot?’ I asked.
Brad stared at me for a moment. ‘I’d have to verify that. I don’t know the place Didcot. Does it have a resonance for you?’
‘Didcot, well, it’s just a town, well, it was back in 2011. It’s the area where I originally entered the cloud.’
‘I understand,’ said Brad. ‘Was there an existing power source there?’
‘A power source? Yes, I suppose so, there was a massive coal-burning power station at Didcot if that’s what you mean. It’s enormous, you can see it for miles. Well, it was enormous for our period – back in 2011 it was enormous. Some of the things I’ve seen since I left have made it look a bit puny.’
‘So you flew over the power source and entered an unusual cloud.’
‘Yes.’
‘And there was another power source on the other side.’
‘Yes, a giant solar kite on a tether.’
Brad nodded slowly as if making a mental note.
‘And then you went through the cloud again?’
‘Yes, a few months later it reappeared and I tried going through it in the forlorn hope it would take me back to my era, back home. I now know that was stupid but that’s what I thought it would do.’
‘Did you fly into the cloud at the same angle?’
‘I suppose so, yes. I didn’t really think about it,’ I replied. ‘As I said, it was a bit stupid.’
‘It’s not stupid,’ said Brad. ‘It is, however, incorrect.’
I sat in silence for a while trying to take this in. You didn’t need to be Inspector Morse to work out this Brad bloke seemed to know rather a lot about the cloud anomalies I’d been encountering, but he was better at asking questions than I was.
‘So you understand how this happens?’ I asked eventually.
Brad nodded.
‘Wow,’ I said. Again there was a silence.
Brad took a deep breath and held it. ‘It’s not an easy thing to explain and our understanding is still, as I have learned from Theda, rudimentary, but since the human race has started to be capable of generating ever-increasing levels of electrical power, we have observed that occasionally some inconsistencies are likely to occur, one of them being a momentary wormhole which has the side effect of ionic diffusion – massive electrical charges splitting water vapour, forming the clouds you have witnessed. Effectively, we have started to create accidental wormholes.’
As Brad stared at me with a serious face, there was something in his manner that made me want to giggle. I tried to suppress my amusement, but that just made it come out louder. Basically I laughed.
‘Why is that amusing?’ asked Brad with not a hint of a smile.
I know my eyebrows were nearly reaching my hairline but I was staggered. There was something about hearing the term ‘accidental wormholes’ being used by an American, not in a jokey, science fiction fashion but in all seriousness, it just tickled me.
‘Sorry, I’m being a bit immature,’ I said. ‘It’s the term “accidental wormhole”; for some reason I find it amusing.’
‘Okay,’ said Brad. He didn’t seem offended. ‘I don’t want to burden you with too much information too quickly, Gavin, but if I suggest that our understanding of physics, of the mathematical laws that govern time and space have increased very dramatically in the last 200 years then you might be able to accept that the concept of the wormhole is no longer speculative or indeed amusing.’
This statement rendered me silent again. I didn’t know how much they really knew about daft concepts like wormholes but Brad didn’t strike me as someone whose job it was to confuse and befuddle some poor bloke who’d fallen through time.
‘So did I fall through a wormhole?’ I asked eventually.
‘You didn’t fall through one, you appear to have flown through one,’ said Brad. He glanced at Theda. ‘However, Theda did effectively fall through, using a paraglider.’
‘You dropped through the cloud on a paraglider!’ I said, looking at this stern-faced woman. She looked about as likely to strap on an unpowered flying machine as my gran.
‘Correct,’ she said. ‘From the top of the Lichtturm in Munich.’
I stared at her nonplussed.
‘And you jumped off it?’
‘Ja,’ she said with a smile. ‘We had noticed predictable cloud formations that contained numerous anomalies in their particle signals, it was decided that someone should attempt to enter the cloud to take some more detailed measurements. I volunteered to go.’
‘Using a paraglider?’
‘Ja, as you might recall drones have been outlawed for hundreds of years, but we had seen moving images of such devices, some of them from your period of history. We recreated one, it was very successful and although the experience can best be described as disturbing, when I came out of the cloud I realised very soon I was in a different place. I was no longer surrounded by the verdant squares of Munich, rather by a cold desert of wind-blown rock. I wondered for a moment if I had been transported to an alien planet but thankfully some human people rescued me.’
‘Theda has failed to mention that she broke both legs on landing,’ said Brad. ‘If she hadn’t been lucky enough to be spotted by some observant folks from the Munich Culvert she would have died.’
I sat in silence for a while trying, yet again, to take all this information in. Clearly the authorities in London knew a lot more about the cloud than they had let on to me. If they were trying to get through it in Munich, I felt sure there would have been people in London who knew about it. Everyone knew about everything in London 2211.
‘So that means,’ I said after a while, ‘when I put this wristband thing on, I immediately knew all about Theda, but I knew nothing about you or Wekesa.’
‘That’s a very simple thing to explain,’ said Theda. ‘You have a kidonge, as do I. Through a quirk of electronics and communication protocols that are similar simply because they are created by humans, the kidonge can receive certain data from the band.’
‘The kidonge can only receive certain data from the band,’ I repeated. I felt the need to say this just to maintain my sanity.
‘Correct. Here the band is used as a low-level information, identification and guidance system on-board the cloud, it allows the crew to monitor the whereabouts of passengers. However, as you can imagine, scientists such as Mister Dorschel and his associates are very interested in the kidonge technology.’
‘So okay, you come from Munich. But forgive my crude twenty-first-century brain, would that Munich have been in the same time zone, world, reality, dimension, I don’t even know how to ask it, but was that in the same world as the London I was in?’
‘Correct. The same city but not the same historical period.’
Again I repeated what she had just said.
‘I was born in 2355,’ said Theda.
‘You were born in 2355,’ I said. ‘That is quite hard to understand.’
‘It is just a date, but, to help you understand a little more, I was born in the same dimension as you visited in London in 2211. If you had visited Munich that would be the same city I come from. It is the biggest city in Europe, including London. We have a very advanced research division connected to the power system. We managed to create what you call an anomaly by capturing the maximum amount of power and not releasing it into the grid, just for a few seconds. We had done it many times and each time the cloud formed, so the next obvious step was to explore the core of the cloud.’
‘Okay,’ I said, scratching my head furiously. ‘So if I’d travelled to Munich a few days ago I could have met you?’
‘No, I was already here, I’ve been here for two months.’
‘Two months?’
‘Yes,’ said Theda with a smile. ‘I rather like it.’
She rather liked it. She fell out of a cloud, broke both legs, left everyone she had ever known behind and ended up on a cloud with me, and the inscrutable Brad, and she liked it.
Brad spoke next.
‘It is now accepted that there are many todays happening. You might like to think of it as a ring around the sun. There are many 2211s happening at the same time.’
‘Brain’s melting,’ I said, rubbing my face. As usual Brad took little notice of my interruption.
‘We don’t know how many, most estimates seem to indicate 11. Before you came, we only knew of one for certain, the one Theda came from, but you have already confirmed there are two. Grenada and the cities of squares.’
‘Gardenia,’ I corrected. I felt slightly annoyed that he’d got it wrong.
‘I apologise, Gardenia,’ said Brad. ‘We know they exist and I would suggest that in a few hundred years’ time we will be able to travel between these worlds with ease. However, at present it is very precarious as you have experienced.’
‘So you understand how I travelled here.’
‘Not quite correct. We understand how you travelled from Gardenia to London, and from London to here, but we don’t fully understand how you travelled from 200 years ago into now, the future. That is something we are learning fast, particularly since Theda has come here from the future. All this will greatly interest my research colleagues in the Chicago Culvert.’
‘Oh Lord,’ I said. ‘Do I have to go to Chicago and be measured and prodded and scanned and dissected?’ I said with a weary tone. ‘I just want to go back home.’
Brad smiled at me and put a gentle hand on my left forearm. ‘No one is going to do anything to you. We may want to talk to you, we may wish to inspect the drone you arrived in but no one is going to do anything to you. Your arrival here is fascinating, not entirely unexpected, but fascinating nonetheless.’ He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about this. ‘You’re familiar with string theory, Gavin,’ said Brad. I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. I’d heard of the term ‘string theory’ but it wasn’t something I would claim to understand.
Brad took my silence as an admission of ignorance.
‘String theory – I know for certain people were discussing it back in your times. That’s how you’re here, we use it all the time.’
‘You use string theory?’ I said. I knew enough about string theory to know it was a quirky notion discussed by particle physicists and involved inexplicable phenomena to do with space, time and dimensions and what happened before the Big Bang, but that didn’t really help me.
‘Sure,’ said Brad. ‘How else would you shift?’
‘Shift? I don’t know, I’ve flown through a bizarre cloud three times and my life has gone insane as a result.’
Brad patted me on the shoulder. ‘Hey now, you’re doing very well. You’ve been through three shifts, that’s enough to burn anyone’s synapses a little. But you’ve been shifting sideways and that’s not good. I don’t mean it’s dangerous, I mean side shifting is fine if you were born in like, 2179, but for you this is not good. You need to go back, right?’
‘Yes, I need to go back. I don’t belong here.’
‘You want to go back to where you left, to when you left That’s what’s going on here, that’s why we were waiting for you. We’re kind of confident that you will, that’s what we’re working on.’
I know I didn’t respond. I know I was frozen mute as Brad was talking.
I was hearing someone speak who seemed to understand how I had jumped forward 200 years from way back in the twenty-first century. No one else I’d met on my ridiculous travels had much clue as to how this happened. An anomaly was all I heard in Gardenia, some mention of flocks of birds in London. But here on the cloud it seemed there was a complete acceptance and understanding of the process. I slowly took comfort in the realisation that no one here was particularly surprised or interested in seeing someone arrive from 200 years earlier because they knew how someone could. At least I assumed they all knew.
‘We have one problem,’ said Brad. ‘And this one requir
es your complete co-operation.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. Somehow this didn’t sound good.
‘Although myself, Theda and some of the crew on-board Cloud Nine are aware of your origins, there are people around who, um, how should I put this…?’
‘Are you talking about the Original Five?’ I asked, feeling rather smug that I had remembered.
‘Oh, Captain Hector has already informed you.’
‘Well, kind of, the fact that there are five rubbish clouds around the equator, inhabited by weirdo’s who blame me for everything that’s ever happened in human history.’
‘Something like that,’ said Brad, with just the merest hint of a smile playing on his lips. ‘So, the general populace knows nothing about your dimension of origin.’
‘My what?’
‘The fact that you were born back in 1979.’
‘Oh, when do people think I was born?’
‘2179.’
‘Do they?’
‘Well, the ones that have met you, yes. Any crew who have access to your tracking data will know this. The few dozen people who witnessed your arrival on-board Cloud Nine believe you to have come from another dimension but in the same timeline as the one we’re in now. They do not know you come from the past.’
‘And that’s a problem?’
‘General opinion on the actions of our forebears is negative,’ said Brad flatly.
I nodded. ‘Okay, so it’s not just the Original Five clouds?’
‘They have certainly taken the belief system to an extreme which is not helpful or constructive, but they have many sympathisers.’
‘Oh, okay,’ I said. ‘You mean there are people on this cloud who might hate my guts, too.’
‘There is a strong cultural thread that lays the blame for our current woes on the actions of your era and the ones preceding it. The actions of the people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made our lives very complicated. Although there is very little logic to this way of thinking, it is the predominant meme. So the few scientists who know the facts are keen to keep them discreetly obscured for the time being.’
News from the Clouds Page 7