News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  There are only two ways to survive a wind like that: get out of it or float along with it.

  I was staggered that anyone had survived, even if the information I suddenly knew was only half accurate. The tragic truth of course is that far fewer survived than you might wish for, but it wasn’t just the wind and weather that decimated the population.

  One of the things I didn’t know when I left Kingham in 2011, but which was very clear from this history, was that the population drop in certain key countries was enormous and catastrophic and it had already started back then.

  I had grown up in a world where the ‘population explosion’ was a constant topic. There were always reports about how the population, particularly in the developing world, was exploding. The global population had doubled in my lifetime from three billion to six billion. What I didn’t know was that in Europe the population was dropping, even back in 2011. Also in Japan and Russia in particular, people had just stopped having enough babies. In every country that allowed women to be educated even to a rudimentary level, and in every country where basic health services were available, the birth rate dropped rapidly and the seemingly inexorable increase started to level off.

  By 2093 an actual drop in population was finally accepted as being a problem. The global population peaked at around eight billion in 2056 and then started to reduce.

  One hundred years later in 2156, global population was back down to three billion, and by the time I arrived on this ravaged world it was down to a paltry one billion.

  There were multitudinous reasons for this decline, the main one being the weather. It just got worse.

  By 2110 most coastal cities had been abandoned and although I’d never really thought about it, I suddenly knew that the vast majority of the world’s biggest cities were on the coast. The sea level had risen enormously. I had woken up that morning knowing many different sea rise estimates from different organisations but they were all over ten metres, some as much as 15. I knew that to have been the case in both Gardenia and the Squares of London, but if you combine sea rise with catastrophic storms you can get serious problems in your seaside villa.

  I knew that coastal areas were uninhabitable because of the tidal surges and the saltwater invasion. With winds as strong as were commonplace on this earth, during bad storms seawater could be blown inland many tens of kilometres, meaning that any coastal agricultural land was decimated.

  What was also clear was that even in these extremely adverse conditions something in the human spirit persevered. The culverts were small oases in this sea of chaos, and there were thousands of them all over the place. Some were built into mountain ranges, some almost buried in deserts. The technology employed to save water, reduce temperatures and protect against the wind were, as I saw on the Chicago Culvert’s outer abutments, incredible, ingenious and effective.

  As I sat ruminating on all this stuff I could still hear the distant rumble of a storm outside. I was desperate to experience what such a wind was like, I wanted to find some place in the culvert where I could safely go outside and see it.

  I stood up, stretched, took a couple of big breaths and headed for the door.

  15

  I walked from the room and back along the corridor we came down when I arrived. I remembered some parts of the journey clearly, although all the corridors looked much the same. They were wide with dull grey walls, low ceilings and very soft lighting.

  After a long quiet walk along empty corridors I got to a T-junction and I couldn’t decide what to do. For a start, the far bigger corridor I’d just arrived at was very busy, like a tunnel at a London Tube station during rush hour. Hundreds of people were walking past and no one took a blind bit of notice of me, which was fine.

  My problem was that I had no idea where to go and, more importantly, what to do. There was nothing for me to do other than be examined and tested by a short Japanese woman and strange commissioners who wore brown floor-length tunics.

  I remembered how frustrating that feeling was when I got to the Squares of London and figured out there was nothing for me to do, to contribute there. The more I saw of this place, Chicago, if indeed that was really where I was, the more Gardenia stood out for me as being a place I wanted to be.

  I leant against the wall for a while just idly watching all these short, slightly anxious and thin people walk past me in droves.

  As I stood there I realised something that surprised me. I wanted to go back to Gardenia more than I wanted to go back home.

  All I’d ever said to people was that I wanted to go back to 2011, to Kingham, to Beth, but allowing myself to actually consider what I really wanted made me suddenly want to go back to Gardenia. To Grace.

  I wanted to see Grace and live in that peaceful world where I could actually do stuff that helped. I could fix things, maybe even build things and I could see Grace and my child.

  I don’t know why this feeling emerged, I don’t remember contemplating it before, I had just had a kind of official line that I always used if the subject arose. ‘I want to go back home,’ which I did.

  I had wanted to go back because I knew what I was doing back in 2011, I knew who I was and where I fitted in. I felt so tired of being the freak, the weird person who fell through the clouds.

  I buried my face in my hands because these thoughts gave me very strong feelings and that was still something I wasn’t used to dealing with. My heart rate had increased even though I was motionless, I felt slightly dizzy and all I was doing was thinking.

  Somehow, for 32 years before I went through the clouds, I had never been able to do this. Of course if something external happened, if my mum told me off or another boy at school hit me, then I would react to that moment. If Beth shouted at me for being uncommunicative I sensed a kind of low-grade physical reaction to that, but I could never stand on my own and just think about something and get upset.

  I had a strong sense that if I just let these thoughts, desires and emotional feelings run away with themselves I would start going insane and that was a genuinely frightening prospect.

  I somehow knew that if I went mad, it wasn’t like dying or sleeping, it wasn’t as if the ‘me’ that I was aware of would just stop being and I would turn into a deranged person. I could sense that the pain I was feeling now, the longing to escape from this distressing place, would overwhelm me and I’d be drowning in pain. Not drowning to death, just lost in a swirl of emotion and feeling stuff, but still be me. A me with no escape.

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hand and coughed, took a big gulp of air and stood up.

  I would deal with the world around me. I would try to take it in and deal with it, I would try to find out how to get back somewhere; home, Gardenia, I didn’t care, anywhere but this blighted ditch on this even more blighted barren world.

  I noticed that a lot of the people passing by along the corridor were carrying bundles of vegetables, some had large sacks slung over their shoulders and a few were carrying what appeared to be boxes of fruit. I decided that while I was stuck in the Chicago Culvert I might as well try to discover how they fed themselves, so I walked in the opposite direction to the flow to see where the shops where, if indeed they had shops in Chicago.

  As I made my way through crowds of people, I remembered the old Chicago, the twenty-first-century Chicago, the Windy City. The irony of that twentieth-century nickname made me smile. However windy it had been when they built those huge towers, it was a lot more bloody windy now.

  I’d visited Chicago for an engineering consultancy job back in 2008. The memory was still fresh for me, even though the actual trip had taken place over 200 years ago.

  On my first morning in the old Chicago I sat in a huge office on something like the 23rd floor of a glass tower near the State Street shopping centre. It was glorious: the morning sun was glinting off Lake Michigan as I
drank American coffee and discussed a huge mining project due to start in Brazil with a couple of very funny old engineers.

  It was a happy memory: I was young, full of energy and excitement at the scale of the project. The memory of this visit made me feel something. Although the memory was a happy one, the feeling I was sensing was sadness. I smiled as I walked along; having a little bit of time to myself had allowed me to reflect on these insights. Once again I could sense a feeling fairly quickly after I had it, a skill I’d clearly learned when I was in the Institute in London.

  Those two old engineers back in 2008 weren’t evil, they didn’t want to destroy the world. They were just digging for manganese ore in Brazil. They weren’t even drilling for oil or mining coal, they were just extracting raw materials from an area that was fairly desolate before the digging started.

  Actually, now that I remember, it had been an area of rainforest, but by the time we planned this mine the trees had long been felled and burned. Remembering that didn’t make me feel much better. The important thing was, none of the people I worked with then wanted to destroy the world, they wanted to make it better. Okay, so it could be argued that the companies they worked for had one intention and that was to make as much money as possible in the least amount of time and with the least regard for the long-term impacts of their activities.

  I couldn’t argue with that, especially not after seeing the state of the planet outside the carbon ceramic bastions of the Chicago Culvert.

  More than anything else I’d witnessed in any of the dimensions I’d visited, the sight of a wind-blasted debris desert had hammered home to me the importance of long-term planning. The process of assessing the full impact of any particular activity and weighing those things very carefully was certainly not something I’d ever considered or been encouraged to consider during my training or subsequent career in engineering.

  I made my way slowly along the corridor trying my best not to get in the way. The vast majority of people were walking in the opposite direction so it wasn’t easy.

  Eventually I discovered where they were all coming from.

  Something you don’t often expect to walk into after you’ve had a bit of a think about the state of your soul is a giant greenhouse full of trees. But that’s what I was confronted with when I emerged from the end of the corridor.

  I managed to find a corner of the balcony I’d walked onto so I could get a good look at this place without being in anyone’s way. A flight of wide steps led up to this balcony and that’s where the crowds were coming from, a seeming endless stream of people slowly making their way up the steps and off down the corridor. On the opposite side of the enormous space I could see the same slow journey being made on a similar structure of steps and balconies by even more people.

  Below me, and stretching off into the distance, were multiple layers of verdant gardens, intensive vegetable cultivation on stepped beds that looked like they could be moved and stacked. Directly beneath me were rows of carefully manicured fruit trees and everywhere, hundreds of people working.

  A greenhouse, that’s not a very good description, try a massive glass structure covering an area the size of a small town. This place was on a par with the London Museum of History where I’d seen my Yuneec hanging as an exhibit, so it was big.

  I glanced up and knew at once I was looking at something I’d never seen before. The sky was brown, not blue or grey, not white clouds or low grey rain clouds. It was a dirty brown whirlwind going overhead at such speed I had the sensation that the structure I was standing in was moving fast, like when you’re on a stationary train and another train moves but you think it’s you. It was a dizzying sight.

  Through this swirly dirt haze I could see the bright sphere of the sun. It was very high in the sky, which gave me some indication of the time, either late morning or early afternoon. Whatever time it was, I shouldn’t have been sleeping.

  I then became aware of a background noise that had increased in intensity as I emerged into this vast and busy space. I stood still trying to work out where it was coming from. It sounded a bit like rain on a metal roof, the sort of noise you get when you sit in a motionless car during a storm. It didn’t take me long to work out this was grit landing on the substantial transparent panels high above me. It was loud and it was terrifying.

  I looked back down at the people working in the giant greenhouse; they were paying no attention to the maelstrom going on above them.

  So I was seeing the storm raging outside and it was utterly horrific, it didn’t look real, nothing I had ever previously witnessed on planet Earth was anything like this. It was instantly obvious that anything standing in the way of this onslaught would be immediately destroyed if it wasn’t protected by huge constructions covered in the hardest and most resilient materials.

  I assumed the roof I was looking up at was well below the tops of the ramparts outside. This really was a window looking up from the bottom of a ditch.

  ‘There’s your storm,’ said Theda’s voice right behind me. As always it took me by surprise. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know why but people have always been able to creep up on me and say something clever and make me jump. I was certainly fully immersed in staring through a transparent roof structure 50 metres above my head at a swirling dirt storm of doom. I mean, it’s not something you see every day.

  ‘Well, I find it encouraging that you don’t know everything, Theda,’ I said, trying not to acknowledge the shock she’d just given me. ‘You told me there was no transparent material that could withstand the onslaught of the storm.’

  ‘We are at the bottom of a very deep hole,’ said Brad. This time I really did get a shock, I suppose because Theda was so tall and Brad so short I genuinely hadn’t seen him. I jumped when he spoke but he didn’t seem to take offence.

  ‘Oh, right, yeah, of course,’ I said trying to disguise my alarm.

  ‘The debris you see flying across the sky is mostly the lighter particles, dust and small pieces of grit picked up by the wind. The larger pieces are currently smashing into the abutments you saw earlier.’

  I nodded. I didn’t really need this explanation, it was pretty obvious what was happening.

  ‘Thankfully the days of the truly destructive storms seem to be behind us. Thirty or 40 years ago you would have seen very large objects flying through the air. This structure does have a protective canopy that can be closed but apparently it hasn’t been used in years.’

  I nodded again. The two people, a very tall woman and a very short man, just stood looking at me.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ I asked, when the realisation struck me. I hadn’t spoken to anyone, seen anyone I recognised or told anyone or any system where I was going. More to the point, I didn’t know where I was going. I was just stumbling along.

  ‘You have a kidonge and thankfully you are still wearing your flightband,’ said Theda. ‘It wasn’t hard to find you. If you want to be alone, just take off your band and leave it in our room.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said glancing at the thin band that was still wrapped around my left wrist. ‘Of course.’

  Brad was just staring at me, he didn’t say a word. It was awkward, his look didn’t transmit hostility or even annoyance, I don’t know what he was thinking, but I didn’t get the impression he was totally thrilled to be in my company.

  ‘So,’ I said eventually, ‘what’s occurring?’

  As I was soon to find out, something rather important was occurring.

  16

  It was a proper big screen in a large dark room. Okay, well that sounds like a cinema, but the large room I entered with Theda and Brad wasn’t a cinema, it was a meeting room of some kind and it contained a great many people.

  They were sitting on simple benches that circled a small area that was slightly brighter. That said, the whole room was fairly d
ark, like pretty much every room I’d seen in the Chicago Culvert.

  I was shown to the slightly brighter raised area near the centre of the room, but unlike my experiences in the Squares of London I wasn’t the sole focus of attention. I was with Theda and I was very relieved for her to take the lead.

  There was a semicircular bench on a raised plinth and Theda sat down on it as if she knew what to do. I sat beside her and stared around the room.

  The crowd were all busy chatting to each other, some of them looking at Theda and me as if they were viewing monsters or ghosts, a look I had grown used to receiving.

  ‘Good afternoon, everybody,’ said Michiyo Nishimura, who was also standing on the raised plinth thing. The room fell silent as soon as she spoke. This time Michiyo was wearing a kind of golden cloak over her brown floor-length tunic and she looked quite regal.

  ‘Thank you for attending, and thank you in advance for your contributions. As we all know we are graced with the presence of two extraordinary people, Theda and Gavin Meckler, and as you also know they are related, although not in any conventional way.’

  Michiyo smiled at me and put her hand on my shoulder as if to reassure me. I was grateful that I knew about the situation regarding Theda’s heritage before she spoke. If I’d found out I was effectively Theda’s dad while exposed in front of so many people it would have been awkward to say the least.

  ‘In traditional biology Gavin would be Theda’s great-

  grandfather, although indirectly he is her father. This is obviously confusing for us as, I’m sure Theda won’t take offence in me pointing out, she is Gavin’s senior by 17 years. Such is the paradox of time and multiverse shifting without control.’