‘All the food on-board is paste- or liquid-based,’ said Theda as we waited. ‘It is not very nice but is perfectly nutritious.’
‘I’m not sure I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘You need to eat. There is no knowing if we can dock at Chicago, that is why all these people are here, they will all be getting off if we can make a docking.’
‘You seem to know a lot about how things work around here,’ I said as we shuffled forward a little.
‘I learn fast,’ said Theda. ‘I have been here two months, one month in the Munich Culvert, the rest on the clouds. This will be my first time in the Chicago Culvert.’
‘I know you’ve been here two months,’ I said, ‘I can just about understand that.’
‘I fell through the cloud nearly 200 years after you left London,’ said Theda, as if this information was just that, information, not a mind-shattering revelation.
‘Okay,’ I said, really wishing I could sit down. I felt a little dizzy.
Theda turned and looked at me. She almost smiled. ‘I can understand how you would find such information difficult to digest, I will try to explain in simple terms,’ she said as we slowly shuffled forwards.
‘I studied your case along with a great many other people. It was very interesting and garnered a great deal of attention. As you may know the first manifestation of shifts also happened in London, the sighting of swallows long thought to be extinct.’
I remembered being made aware of this when I was at my first press conference, the one I cried at.
‘Your arrival was obviously much more interesting, as was your departure. After you had left there was intense interest both on a personal level from all the people you interacted with directly, and from the global scientific community. So from the moment you were witnessed disappearing into the cloud until the time I left, vast resources and intellectual capital have been expended on discovering how this phenomenon could take place. How a human being and a machine could fall through time and how we could utilise this system to benefit the species.’
‘Blimey,’ I said eventually, and that was it. I certainly couldn’t speak and by this point we had shuffled to the front of the enormous queue. I was handed three soft sachets of liquid stuff by someone so young I assumed school-age children did all the cooking.
That said, there wasn’t anything to actually cook, they were just handing out identical pillows with different black labels on one side.
‘Breakfast for time shifters,’ said Theda with a big grin. ‘We need to descend to the loading bays fairly soon. Do you wish to have breakfast here before we go down?’
‘Oh, right, we have to use the elevator again.’
‘I’m afraid so, in fact more than one.’
‘Maybe I’ll wait until we go down then,’ I said, not fancying the prospect of losing my breakfast all over the people below me on the terrifying blue wall of doom.
I followed Theda through the crowd until we were in another similar wide queue that was heading toward the distant blue wall. Again I could see people sliding up and down and I tried to convince myself that this was all normal and there was nothing to be concerned about.
‘So, you didn’t know any of the people I met in London?’ I asked as we slowly moved forward.
‘No, if you think about it that would be doubtful, they would all have to be over 200 years old, but I read a great deal about them. Clearly you made a very big impression on Doctor Nkoyo Oshineye, she spoke about you with great affection and emotion.’
‘Did she?’ I said, I couldn’t help feeling a little buoyed by this news. ‘I always had the impression she found me a little bit annoying.’
Theda smiled at me. ‘Ready?’ she asked, as she turned around and stepped back toward the blue wall behind her. ‘Just keep your eyes shut, that’s what I do.’
We had made it to the front of the queue and all around us people had turned their back on the blue wall and were dropping like a torrent over a waterfall.
I turned my back on the wall, clutched the three plastic breakfast pouches to my chest and felt my clothing engage with the wall.
The descent on Cloud Nine was bad enough, but that was gentle and slow in comparison with this vertical human highway. I felt the wind rushing past me as we slid down, initially following Theda’s advice and keeping my eyes tightly shut. Curiosity got the better of me however, and I couldn’t help having a peek. I soon discovered that as long as I didn’t look down it was okay, I was just looking out at floors rushing past, the balconies and wide walkways. Just as Theda had described I caught glimpses of brightly lit school rooms full of kids, people running about playing sports, large lecture theatres and everywhere crowds of people.
I imagine the descent took all of two minutes but it felt like an hour and as we emerged into the main lobby where I’d first seen the elevator I nearly screamed. I must have been more than a hundred metres up as the vast arena of the crowded space was revealed to me; to call it a dizzying spectacle is a pathetic attempt at describing the experience. Nauseating horror at the prospect of instant and painful death would be slightly better. However, almost as soon as this terrifying scene took the breath out of my lungs, I felt a slow but powerful deceleration as we neared the floor.
‘Lean forward a little,’ said Theda. I glanced at her. Her eyes were still tightly closed and I copied her as she moved her head and shoulders away from the shimmering blue wall.
We slowed more violently until my feet made contact with the floor of the vast atrium with barely a jolt. I walked forward as best I could, knowing there were bound to be others right behind me.
‘Okay, come with me and we’ll have a look at the scene below us,’ said Theda. ‘This is my favourite part of the cloud.’
Again we made slow progress through the seemingly endless crowds of people that were slowly milling in one direction. It was very difficult; they were all heading out of the atrium area while we seemed to be crossing the flow.
I think I must have said ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me’ many hundreds of times as we slowly made our way toward a small opening in the side of the space. As soon as we’d cleared the crowds we moved faster.
‘Can you sense that we are still descending?’ asked Theda as she walked briskly along a slight downward slope in the long white balloon corridor.
‘I think my senses are fried,’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The lower observation deck, hopefully we will have time to have a look before we disembark. I am taking a risk, this is not something I normally like to do, but since my initial journey through the anomaly cloud I have been less risk-averse. Have you found this to be the case?’
I was almost running now to keep up with the tall figure striding slightly ahead of me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right, I certainly don’t feel the need for the kind of planning and control over my life I used to worry about. I just do things and then weird stuff happens. Maybe I’m getting used to it.’
‘Exhilarating isn’t it?’ said Theda with a big toothy smile, ‘Down here.’
I was faced with another blue wall, this one only wide enough for maybe four people side by side, a kind of B road of vertical human highways.
Theda almost threw herself against the blue surface and immediately disappeared down the chute. I hesitated for a moment, said ‘Oh fuck it,’ and followed her.
Thankfully the descent was over in a few seconds and I found myself in the centre of a circular room with a handful of people all looking out of large windows around one half of the space. The windows were clearly designed for looking down as they were sloped outward. A reassuringly stout support rail you could lean on ran horizontally at waist height above the floor. I stumbled about looking for Theda, but when everyone wears much the same outfit it’s hard to pick an individual out from a crowd.
/> ‘Gavin, over here!’ I heard, and turned to see Theda by one of the windows. ‘Look down there,’ she said, pointing down. ‘Mein Gott, that is impressive!’
As soon as I joined her I saw what she meant. A giant curved wall, no, more like a small mountain range stretching away into the mist. It was smooth, curved, shining, man-made and vast beyond comprehension. To one side a plain of light brown dirt, rocks and what could have been broken pieces of concrete. To the other side, beneath odd-looking transparent dome structures was lush vegetation, the domes surrounded by low protuberances of baffling design and even more baffling purpose.
‘The Chicago Culvert,’ said Theda. ‘The largest culvert on the planet.’
11
I don’t want to go on about the cloud Ten elevators too much, but they are very difficult things to forget once you’ve been on them. The internal ones are challenging enough; I think for me it was the total lack of any mechanical support, no handrails, footrests or padded hydraulic safety enclosures. You literally slid up and down a blue sheet and relied entirely on a bizarre system of electro-magnetic materials that you just had to believe wouldn’t fling you to your doom.
I had understood that Cloud Ten was so ridiculously vast that it could not ‘land’ in any conventional way. It could only come within about 50 metres of the Earth’s surface if the winds were low enough, which I had to assume they were because we were clearly approaching the surface.
While I was looking down on the eye-popping spectacle of the Chicago Culvert I felt a tingle on my left wrist. It was the band I was wearing – it had gone a bright red colour.
‘We have to go,’ said Theda. ‘Brad is waiting for us.’
Once again we shot up the short blue elevator and made our way back along the tubular corridor to the huge atrium at the foot of Elevator 20. By this time I could sense that one side of the wristband was tingling. Although at that moment I didn’t know why, after a little thought as we made our way through the still slow-moving crowds I realised it was tingling in the direction we were headed.
The tingling faded when I made out the diminutive figure of Brad standing by one of the bizarre candy-twist inflated supports that dotted the structure we were in.
‘We have a limited window for descent. Currently the weather is calm and we need to get off here,’ he said, grabbing my arm and pulling me into the slow-moving crowd. ‘Did you get a chance to see the abutments?’ he said, as we slowly shuffled forward.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t understand what I was looking at but it was very big.’
‘It’s an engineering miracle,’ said Brad proudly, ‘the biggest abutments on the planet, 90 kilometres long and just over one kilometre high.’
‘Yep, that sounds big,’ I said.
‘It’s covered in over 40 million carbon ceramic tiles.’
‘That’s a lot of tiles,’ I said.
‘It’s a work of beauty as well as life-saving protection for the culvert,’ said Brad. ‘But first, I urgently need to explain about the exit elevator. You need to listen carefully.’
‘Exit elevator?’
‘Yes, it’s just the same as the elevators you’ve used on-board, the only difference being that the logistics needed to get this many people on and off the cloud requires discipline. As soon as we make contact with ground you must stick with me, we will be turning to our left and we must make our way very rapidly into the clearing area. Don’t hang around looking up and around. For a first-timer it is a spectacular sight but I really need an assurance from you that you will resist the temptation. Move fast, stick with me, Theda will be right behind you. Okay, Theda?’
‘Good for me,’ she said, and gave me a reassuring pat on the back. ‘You will be fine, Gavin.’
By this time we had neared yet another blue wall. This one clearly only went down, as there was a large inflated kind of cushion just above head height running along the top. The cushions glowed a dull green colour and made a noticeable humming noise, the sort of noise made by very powerful electrical equipment; it was a low and dangerous hum and it didn’t make me relax.
All the time I was trying to take this in, we were nearing the blue wall; however, at that moment I noticed there was another identical wall on the other side of the tubular corridor we were in. There were hundreds of people appearing up that one and rapidly moving off into the central area of Cloud Ten. They didn’t look happy or terrified, just determined. Although the people popping up the inbound elevator were as diverse as everyone I’d seen on the cloud, the white members of this group looked paler, if anything a little pallid and ill.
The crowd I was shuffling along with all looked a bit healthier and happier. Maybe the cloud was like a holiday camp, the sort of place I remember my parents describing: bizarre ex-military camps that were converted into makeshift holiday resorts after World War II. I wondered for a moment whether if you stood by the gates of a holiday gulag back in the 1950s and watched the people leaving passing the people arriving, that a similar contrast would be visible. I decided this floating holiday camp was probably a little more extreme.
The people in front us were turning and descending in their hundreds on either side but due to the sheer numbers it still took a while for us to get up close.
Before long we neared the opening and I could feel warm air rising out of the opening that people in front of me were disappearing down.
Brad grabbed my arm and pulled me forward as we moved along the row rapidly until there was just one row of people with their backs to the wall. They all leant back in unison and immediately slid out of sight.
‘Turn,’ said Brad. By now at least I was used to the sensation and fell back against the wall.
‘Stick with me,’ Brad shouted as we descended. I gave him the thumbs-up sign as I knew there was no way I could talk. I was right.
This descent was even more terrifying than the last. For a start the blue wall was not static. In all my previous experience with this ridiculous transportation system the wall had been still and I just had to accept that whatever was holding me wasn’t going to fail. The big difference to the internal elevators was that this blue wall billowed and twisted quite violently – I now assume it was from the winds but at the time I just felt just sheer terror, I didn’t think anything. Sometimes it felt like going down a kids’ slide, as there was something beneath me that I was sliding down, but the next moment I was literally hanging maybe 80 metres in the air with seemingly nothing holding me there.
Below me I could see crowds of people moving in one direction and next to them another long line moving in another. For some bizarre reason it reminded me of films I’d seen of vast parades in Communist countries like China and Soviet Russia; no individuals, just huge masses of people creating patterns with their precise, regimented movements.
As the blue sheet billowed again I felt a strong movement of warm air blasting me in the face. Warm and very dry air thundered in my ears and everything suddenly seemed violent and dangerous.
At one point the giant blue wall more resembled a thin bed sheet blowing in the wind on laundry day. My eyes were dazzled by what I saw. On another elevator I spotted thousands of people going up into the cloud. I heard screams of terror from children, I heard shouts from men, everything chaotic and panicked.
‘Ready?’ shouted Brad. I glanced down, beneath me I could see long lines of people moving off to my left but we seemed to be coming down right on top of them. A bald man’s head looked as if it was directly beneath my feet.
At this point I realised many things in a split second. The blue elevator sheet I was attached to was part of Cloud Ten, it was joined on and Cloud Ten was moving. This meant the bottom of the blue elevators were also not static, they were moving across what looked like a large paved area sunken into the top of the Chicago Culvert.
They were moving
across this paved area at speed.
‘Lean forward!’ shouted Brad. I did so, and my feet made contact with hard ground. It felt like someone had just hammered the soles of my feet. I felt heavy and had the wind knocked out of me.
‘Go, move! Fast!’ Brad shouted and I followed him. We moved at a slow jog, there were hundreds of people in front of him all moving in the same direction. We were jogging in a line alongside the blue sheet, in fact we were running at an angle to the sheet because it was moving towards my left shoulder all the time.
‘Don’t look up!’ shouted Brad.
‘This is fucking crazy,’ said Theda, who I sensed at once was right behind me. ‘Keep going!’
I heard a noise to one side of me; a small Chinese woman landed right next to me and started moving at the same pace as everyone else. She barely batted an eyelash. She had just slid down a hundred metres of flapping blue electro-magnetic sheet and started walking briskly with the crowd.
Moments later an African man who was taller than me appeared to my left. It was literally raining every ethnicity of humanity around me and still we kept moving.
Everyone was moving as fast as they could, young and old, some people carrying small children, everyone’s face set in grim determination.
At the same speed that the whole chaos and terror of the descent had started, it stopped. We ran under a substantial concrete lintel and entered an enormous hall where the massed ranks of people descending from the cloud spread out like a bucket of water spilled on a kitchen floor.
‘That was immense,’ said Theda. She was still half pushing me forward, but the pushing turned into a series of slaps on the back. ‘I cannot believe we survived that, was that not seriously immense, Gavin?’
‘It was, it was very immense,’ I said, now almost running to keep up with the briskly walking Brad.
News from the Clouds Page 9