News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘But this should be very interesting,’ said Theda as we approached a group of people standing to one side of a vast space we had entered. They looked eager and a little solemn but not particularly threatening, all of them wearing similar floor-length brown robes.

  ‘Our greeting party I believe,’ said Theda discreetly.

  I stared in bemusement as we approached; they looked a fairly raggle-taggle bunch, some tall and thin, some short and stout, men and women, old and young. Most of them were smiling, but as we got closer I noticed a few of them looked a little frightened.

  Brad joined them and turned toward us with one arm outstretched.

  ‘Commissioners!’ he bellowed. ‘May I introduce you to the two most remarkable people on the planet right now. Theda Meckler and Gavin Meckler.’

  There was a small smattering of slightly embarrassed applause. I almost took a bow, but glanced at Theda who had her hands together in front of her like someone at prayer. I copied her as inconspicuously as I could, which I admit would not have been very inconspicuous but I didn’t want to stand out. It was only after I stood up straight that the introduction I’d just heard registered. Theda Meckler. She had the same name as me.

  Why hadn’t I noticed that when I got all the information about her through the kidonge?

  I somehow knew immediately that this wasn’t my error; I would just have known her name was Theda Meckler. I wouldn’t have to wonder. She had somehow blocked that piece of information from me. I didn’t know why but I really wanted to find out.

  12

  ‘Welcome to chicago!’ shouted a very short Japanese woman. ‘I hope your journey was uneventful.’

  ‘It was very relaxing,’ said Theda, adding in a much louder voice, ‘thank you, Commissioner.’

  ‘And how about you, Gavin, did you have a relaxing time on Cloud Ten?’

  I smiled; this little woman was so unthreatening and charming I couldn’t help it. ‘Uh, yeah, it was okay.’ Her face looked perturbed, so I shouted, ‘Yeah, it was fine. Thanks.’

  ‘So, let us retire from the noise and bustle. We have some solid food waiting, you may wish to chew something again.’

  ‘Chewing would be good,’ I shouted.

  The commissioners, whoever they were, made a gangway for us, staring at us all the while as we passed between them. At this point we were in an enormous low-ceilinged building, well, maybe the ceiling wasn’t that low but it looked low because the room was so vast. It had to be many thousands of square metres in size but it was hard to tell, it was very dimly lit. There were what looked like natural daylight openings in the ceiling and some artificial lighting around the wall we were near, but the thing that jangled my nerves was the noise. It was very noisy; the small Japanese woman had been shouting at us, she was standing right in front of us and I could still only just hear her. So many people in a big room with low ceilings meant the acoustics were pretty terrible. It was the first time I’d been able to articulate a criticism of any technology or structure I’d seen since leaving 2011.

  Where some of the hallways and atriums on Cloud Ten had been breathtaking in their elaborate and enormous vision, this building was ultra-utilitarian, almost like a military facility. No decorative embellishments anywhere.

  We passed through a very wide, low opening and into another low-ceilinged room. This one had a large circular table in the centre beneath what I took to be a natural light opening above. Along one side of the room was a kind of buffet, but again it was all displayed in regimented rows of black containers. There was nothing gentle or pretty to look at.

  The crowd of commissioners followed us but stood around the walls looking at us as we wandered about. I tried to stay next to Theda, who seemed to absolutely tower above everyone else in the room.

  The Japanese woman emerged out of the brown-clad throng. I noticed the cloth she was wearing was very fine. It wasn’t as if all these brown-clad people were a bunch of monks in crudely woven tunics, the material was very fine and light.

  ‘Now we can hear ourselves think,’ she said. ‘Allow me to introduce myself: I am Michiyo Nishimura, I sit on the Council of Commissioners here in Chicago. We are a community of just over four million people and, as I believe Doctor Dorschel has explained, not everyone in the culvert knows the full details of your arrival. However, in this room we all know and there is great excitement among our small scientific community. I want you to feel assured that you are both very welcome here and I want to underline the fact for you, Gavin, you are safe here.’

  ‘Gavin is fully aware of the threat posed by the Original Five,’ said Brad. I nodded to confirm this, which was of course ridiculous as I had no real idea of who the hell the Original Five where, how many sympathisers they had, if they had secret agents hidden in small terror cells on Cloud Ten or even in the Chicago Culvert. I was dimly aware of some clouds called the Original Five, that was all.

  Michiyo made a small, almost imperceptible bow to which I responded with a low bow. I’d worked in Japan and knew all about bowing; however, my movement caused a small ripple of mirth among the other brown-clad commissioners. I grimaced.

  ‘Do not worry, Gavin,’ said Michiyo. ‘There will be many things we don’t understand about each other but we will both learn fast enough I’m sure.’

  She turned toward the long table with the black food containers and gestured gracefully. ‘Please help yourself to food, we have been awaiting your arrival and will join you if that is acceptable.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Theda.

  ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ I said. A short African man handed me a large black plate. It was incredibly lightweight and my forearm jerked up a little when I took possession. My muscle memory must have assumed it was going to be heavy because it was so large, so I did that arm jerk thing. Again this caused amusement to the crowd of people staring at me.

  ‘Forgive us, please,’ said Michiyo kindly. ‘We are all so fascinated to meet you, we are fairly isolated here and have never previously had visitors from the other dimensions, let alone other historic periods.’

  Over the next few minutes I slowly put things on my plate, all the time watching how other members of the small gathering did theirs. I didn’t want to pile up a great mound and then notice that everyone else was eating a mere morsel, but the plate was so big. The reason for this became apparent when I saw that everyone arranged small piles of the different ingredients in a neat pattern around the plate.

  I say different ingredients – it was all vegetables and fermented curds, beans and salads, not exactly the burger and chips that I had visualised when told there would be something to chew on.

  ‘Your journeys here must have been spectacular and full of anxiety,’ said Michiyo, when we had sat down on small stools around the circular table. ‘It is very hard for us to imagine what you have been through.’

  I just nodded, it was such a relief to not be the sole centre of attention. Theda held forth in her slightly clipped German accent while I stuffed my mouth with perfectly adequate vegetarian food. I’m not saying it was rubbish – it didn’t have quite the complexity of flavours and freshness of Gardenian cuisine or the reassuring familiarity of the printed food I’d had in London – but it was better than the creamy grey paste I’d been sucking on in Cloud Ten.

  ‘And, Gavin, for you this must have been even more terrifying. Had you never seen clouds before in your world?’

  I glanced around the large circular table. Everyone was suddenly looking at me and of course I had my mouth full of salad.

  I wasn’t sure what I could say. I didn’t know for sure if some of the Original Five people were in the room. I had no idea who all the people were; they could have been mad axe murderers for all I knew, just waiting for their chance to express their anger at the destruction wrought by my generation.

  ‘It’s okay, Ga
vin, you can speak safely here,’ said Brad calmly.

  I chewed faster, swallowed and hoped I wouldn’t spit bits of salad onto the table as I spoke.

  ‘I’d seen clouds, yes, well, obviously, you know, we had clouds. We had everything, you know, clouds, sea, mountains, rivers and stuff. But it wasn’t like this. We could be outside any day of the year, you know. I mean we had weather, it rained a lot in England, where I’m from, that was normal, but there were sunny days that weren’t too hot, and cold days that weren’t too cold. I suppose you could call our weather benign, it was calm most of the time. There was the hurricane in 1987, when I was a kid. A tree came down in our garden and crushed my dad’s shed, my brother and I thought it was great but my dad’s lawnmower was mashed up so he wasn’t too happy.’

  It was too late, I was rambling. I wanted to stop but everyone was listening. All I really wanted to find out was why Theda hadn’t let me know she had the same name as me. I wanted to know if there was a connection but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her in front of all these people. While I was thinking this, my mouth was still going, blabbering out nonsense.

  ‘I mean, it wasn’t that different, you know, back in 2011, well, I don’t really know what it’s like here, I’ve only seen the clouds so far. They are incredible, I mean we only had clouds made of water vapour, not ones people live on. It’s very difficult to understand, I mean, it wasn’t as if people weren’t talking about things like global warming and stuff back then, they were, loads of people talked about it, they had big conferences in places like Copenhagen saying they were going to do something about it, they had worldwide agreements on things like carbon emissions but it didn’t seem like people were actually doing anything about it other than talking. Some people were saying that the weather would change due to what we were all doing back then, but it was normal, what we were doing seemed normal to us. I’d never seen a world where there wasn’t, I don’t know, like cheap, abundant energy. I want to say to you that not everything we did was wrong; we were making amazing jumps in technology and our understanding of the world. I know it will seem crude and ridiculous to you now, I mean, I can look back at the people who made early steam trains and water pumps and be amazed at how crude and imperfect those things were, but I admire them, too. They didn’t set out to destroy the world by burning coal; they set out to make the world better. They didn’t know what the long-term consequences would be and neither did we. That’s all I want to say really. Oh yes, and I’m really sorry for the mess we seem to have made for you,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you, Gavin, that is very interesting,’ said Michiyo. ‘This information is very useful to us. If it is acceptable to you, I would like you to tell us a great deal more. Not now, you need to rest and acclimatise to life in the culvert, but over the next few days my team would very much appreciate all the information you can give us about the past. We live in very different times. The only thing I can say now is welcome to the Anthropocene.’

  13

  I have a powerful memory of watching The Empire Strikes Back when I was about 12. My dad had a VHS copy of the film and it was a big treat one winter Sunday afternoon to sit in front of the telly and watch a proper film with no advertising breaks.

  For some reason the early scene where the rebels close the outer doors on the ice planet Hoth had a lasting emotional impact on me.

  ‘Close the outer doors!’ shouted someone dressed in an orange jumpsuit. People ran about getting ready for the outer doors to close because night-time temperatures on Hoth were not to be messed with.

  Luke was still out in the icy wastes. He was going to die! Thankfully Han Solo found him before it was too late. He used Luke’s lightsaber to cut open the belly of the dead Tauntaun and then stuffed Luke’s half-frozen body into its stinking stomach cavity to keep him warm. That was also a moment burned into my memory.

  However, I never wanted to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be one of the rebel technicians behind the closed outer doors. They knew you had to close those outer doors before the freezing storm killed everyone; they understood things and knew what to do.

  During the afternoon of my first day in the Chicago Culvert, a very similar scene was played out in a very frightening and real way. It was nothing short of spooky, almost as if there had been some kind of subconscious meta-memory leaking back into the mind of George Lucas in the 1980s.

  Michiyo and a few of the other commissioners took Theda and me through a maze of dark corridors, down a couple of flights of steps that I would guess, from the sound our feet made on them, were made of some kind of carbon composite, and into a large hangar area.

  As we stood looking around this vast hall, Michiyo explained that we were actually under what they called the Outer Abutment: the giant tiled mountain range I’d seen from Cloud Ten.

  On one side of this enormous space was an opening to the outside world and what I saw through that opening was distressing.

  A sun-bleached blasted rock desert for as far as I could see, which due to the deep blue sky and clear air was quite a long way. Not a trace of vegetation, no hint of a man-made structure, just a great open expanse of rubble going on forever. The sky above seemed clear and blue. It wasn’t cold like the ice planet Hoth, in fact the wind blowing in through the wide doorway was hot, dry and unpleasant.

  There was so much going on it was impossible for me to take it all in. Although very few people were in the space it was still incredibly busy. Machines, walking machines, were going in and out of the doorway non-stop. These multi-legged robots, most about the size of small cars, didn’t have some bloke dressed in orange overalls driving them; they were sleek, efficient and clearly fully autonomous machines. The ones passing me by as I stood in the wide entrance were carrying enormous piles of some very smooth black sheet material on their flat backs.

  ‘Do not fear them,’ said Michiyo. ‘They are aware of your presence, they will not harm you but it’s best we leave them to get on with their vital tasks. They have to work very fast.’

  We stood at one side of the entrance as I stared slack-jawed at the mechanical mayhem going on around me. The bots kept their distance, skirting around us as we stepped onto the broken ground just outside the culvert. Here the wind was hot, dry and very strong.

  ‘It is best we go no further than this,’ said Michiyo. ‘We may need to return at any moment, the weather patterns are highly unstable.’

  I nodded my understanding. The noise around us was intense, but even from this sheltered vantage point I could assess the true scale of the structure I had been in.

  As far as I could see in either direction was a massive man-made mountain of black plates or tiles disappearing into the distance. In the far haze I could see machines working but other than us I did not spot any signs of human life.

  All along the culvert protection abutment, multi-legged robots too numerous to count were busy clearing rubble from the lower areas by picking it up piece by piece with their numerous arm-type appendages and flinging it many tens of metres away. The piles they were creating were then being crushed flat by large autonomous caterpillar tracked machines fitted with enormous backhoe digging arms. They also had some kind of spray attachment fitted to the rear, which dispensed a thick grey goo over the rubble. It was guesswork on my part but I assumed this was to secure loose particles that would otherwise be picked up by the wind, causing damage to the outer walls.

  These activities were noisy and to my human eye utterly chaotic, they made no sense to me. It seemed like a pointless activity; the bots weren’t making anything or if they were, it just looked like a mess, like an endless quarry that produced nothing. These weren’t mining machines, that much was obvious. They weren’t extracting ore, they just seemed to be expending huge amounts of energy pointlessly moving stuff about.

  Michiyo pointed to an area above us and to our right. I spotted a cluster of multi-legged machin
es busy replacing a large area of black tiles. I say tiles, they were each the size of a double bed but because the wall before me was so vast, when in place they looked like tiny mosaic tiles.

  ‘We had a severe impact up there during the last storm so we have to repair it before the next,’ she shouted. ‘The bots work whenever the wind is low enough for them to carry out the task.’

  ‘It seems fairly windy at the moment,’ I shouted as the air thundered around us.

  Michiyo smiled. ‘Gavin, believe me, this is a calm day.’

  Theda was busy talking to one of the other commissioners in German so I couldn’t follow what they were talking about, but I could tell it was an explanation of some sort – they did a lot of pointing and nodding.

  I turned back to Michiyo. Something she had said when we were eating our rather plain vegetarian lunch had concerned me.

  ‘Michiyo, what was that term you used when we were eating? You welcomed me to something, you used a word I don’t know.’

  ‘The Anthropocene.’

  ‘The Anthropocene?’

  ‘You’ve never heard that term?’

  ‘No, what does it mean?’

  ‘This,’ said Michiyo, spreading her small arms wide, ‘is the Anthropocene.’

  She held the pose for a while, I suppose for dramatic impact, although that kind of thing is usually lost on me. I was looking at a diminutive Japanese woman standing on a dusty rock-strewn vista with a hot wind blowing around her.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I was none the wiser. ‘So, um, are you telling me this Anthropocene is a bad thing?’

  Michiyo smiled at me. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I replied as calmly as I could. I was beginning to feel irked, she was using a word I’d never come across before and expected me to understand it. In my experience that is not how you learn.