News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Yes,’ I squealed, trying not to sound annoyed and failing.

  ‘Of course you have. Forgive me. So it has been observed that his theory works for any number of dimensions. It doesn’t have to be just three. Many years ago scientists started to understand the existence of extra dimensions because of string theory. String theory was for many years what we called a “candidate theory” for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity. This is quite simply because these two things seem to require extra dimensions of space in order to make sense mathematically.’

  There was a silence. I glanced at Theda who was standing by the doorway looking at me. She didn’t respond. She was waiting for this colossal block of information to make an impression on my reptilian brain.

  ‘I don’t know anything about quantum mechanics,’ I said eventually. I wanted them to know I wasn’t stupid. I felt stupid and out of my depth but my pride was hurt. They had such a huge advantage over me, 200 years of scientific research and development in Brad’s case, and something like 400 in Theda’s, plus she had a computer brain with terabytes of power and zettabytes of memory. To paraphrase the thick kid at the back of a primary school class, ‘It’s not fair, Miss!’

  It really wasn’t fair. I couldn’t help myself, I blurted, ‘I know a great deal about mechanics, hydraulics, electronics, leverage, power-to-weight ratios, traction, newton metres of torque, even good old horsepower.’

  ‘That is wonderful knowledge and it should help you at least start to comprehend what I am explaining,’ said Brad kindly.

  ‘Okay, but I never studied quantum mechanics, I don’t even know what it means.’

  Again Brad actually smiled at me, then he said very slowly, ‘The reason we have developed an understanding of extra dimensions is because they might actually have implications for our world. They help to explain properties of matter that we’ve observed; they may even help us to repair our damaged home. So allow me to explain.’

  Brad extracted a piece of white material from his pocket and got down on all fours. He then drew a simple stickman figure on the smooth black surface of the floor. I watched in fascination at this world of advanced materials and mind-boggling graphic representations Brad was drawing on the floor with a piece of chalk.

  ‘I’d like you to try and imagine creatures that live in a two-dimensional universe. That is all they know, two dimensions, up and down, left and right. In their universe there is no forward or backward.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, impressed that he’d drawn a fairly well-

  proportioned stickman upside down for him but the right way up for me.

  ‘These creatures would have the same trouble conceptualising three dimensions that we once had when we tried to understand more than three. So what would these creatures see if a three-dimensional object passed through their universe? If a ball, a sphere, passed through this flat universe they would only see a series of disks that grew in size and then decreased in size.’

  Brad drew a circle next to the figure. ‘They would still not be able to comprehend three dimensions.’

  I smiled at this point. ‘I totally get that,’ I said. I looked up at Theda with a big grin on my face. ‘Really, I can actually understand that.’

  ‘Clever Gavin,’ she said in what could have been a patronising manner, but it was somehow reassuring and kind.

  ‘So we are capable of understanding a two-dimensional world inside a three-dimensional world, but it is very hard for us to conceptualise more than three dimensions.’ Brad stood up and spread his arms wide. ‘So, for example, if a hyper sphere, a four-dimensional sphere, passed through our universe—’ he waggled his arms around a bit; I wondered if he was simulating what a hyper sphere would look like, if he was it wasn’t working for me, ‘—all we would see was a series of spheres that grew in size and then decreased in size. The fact that we don’t observe those extra dimensions doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They are hard to conceptualise but we can calculate them mathematically.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes we can, we do, we have been doing so for a long time,’ said Brad. ‘That is why we understand how you came here, that is why we understand how Theda came here. Much of the basic research was done in your era. Particle physics gave us the key to understanding and that was well developed even back in 2011.’

  ‘CERN,’ I said, ‘I knew a few of the engineers who helped build it.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Theda. ‘That is incredible.’ She was smiling and shaking her head. ‘Did you ever meet Brian Cox?’

  ‘Um, no, who’s he?’ I asked. ‘You mean the actor? The bloke in the Bourne Trilogy?’

  ‘No, I mean Professor Brian Cox. You will find out who he is when you go back,’ said Theda, still smiling.

  ‘Well, I met some people who’d worked at CERN, but they weren’t the scientists who worked there, more the engineers who helped construct the tunnels and the infrastructure of the project. I never went there myself.’

  ‘It is good you know of the work at CERN,’ said Brad, ‘because that’s where they first discovered Kaluza-Klein particles.’

  ‘Oh blimey, I don’t know what they are, I don’t understand again,’ I said in despair.

  Brad sat down on the bench again. ‘Please don’t worry about that, Gavin. You have no need to understand Kaluza-Klein particles in any detail, all you need to know is that these particles have mass and their mass reflects extra dimensions.’

  ‘That doesn’t help.’

  ‘These particles were the initial key,’ said Theda. ‘Proof if you like that other dimensions exist and that there are methods of communicating between them.’

  Brad nodded and said, ‘Once we had proof of extra dimensions, all we needed to do was find out how to explore them, either mathematically or through direct, physical interaction.’

  He pointed at me as he said that. So I was proof of direct physical interaction. Fair enough.

  ‘One of the reasons we believe our research into this area is in advance of other dimensions,’ said Brad, ‘by that I mean places you’ve been, Gardenia and London, places on the same horizontal timeline, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  ‘Well, once we were able to survive the storms, we had a lot of time on our hands. We’ve been able to spend large amounts of time thinking. As long as we have enough to eat and are safe from the storms, our minds have focused on this issue with an end goal of understanding what went so catastrophically wrong in this dimension and hopefully discovering ways of rectifying that.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said after a short pause, ‘so you want me to go back to 2011 and do something about it all, change history so you don’t get the storms?’

  This time both Brad and Theda smiled at me and there’s no point trying to gloss over it. The smile was one that an adult gives to a baby when the kid rubs chocolate biscuit all over its cherubic face and gurgles in delight. It’s not a horrible moment, in fact it’s quite charming, but you’ve just asked the baby to explain how to understand long division and all you get back is a chocolate-covered mush.

  ‘No, we don’t want you to do that and more importantly, even if you could steer events of such gargantuan scale, the results could be far worse. Any tiny change in the timeline will, as I’m sure you can understand, have utterly unpredictable consequences. We have to deal with enough of those already.’

  ‘Okay, so, I go back to 2011, to my home, to my era, and then what?’

  ‘Then nothing. You live your life, you maybe procreate, you die,’ said Theda as if she was giving me a list of basic tasks.

  ‘But what about everything I’ve seen? Everything I’ve learned since I came through the first cloud?’

  ‘You cannot take that knowledge back with you,’ said Brad.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. I was outraged, what were they going to
do, give me electric-convulsive therapy and fry my simple mind?

  ‘I’m not saying we won’t allow you, I’m saying it is not possible. Your mind cannot contain all the information you have been exposed to. It would kill you. It’s not to do with psychology or sanity, it’s to do with electronics. The synapses in your brain cannot deal with the flow of electrons it will encounter as you down-jump. What you have done so far is jump forwards and then sideways. Both of these activities result in the electrical activity in your brain being considerably reduced during the transition but that only results in temporary tiredness. Travelling back to 2011 from here would create a fatal increase in synaptic connections, the actual tissue in your brain would fry and you will be brain-dead, as Michiyo explained. That is why you cannot go back to 2011 from here.’

  I burst out laughing. I’d felt the laugh building all the time Brad was talking. What he was saying was so preposterous that I imagine a few of my synapses had fried anyway and the fact that I could maybe go back home ‘but not from here’ was utterly baffling.

  ‘There was a joke I heard years ago,’ I said when I managed to regain my composure. ‘A young couple on holiday in the countryside – I know you don’t have countryside anymore but I mean an open area outside a city – anyway, they are travelling around in a car, a mechanical, wheeled, ground-based transportation unit, and they are lost. So they stop and speak to an old man who is leaning on a gate. They ask him directions to a certain village. The old man says he knows the village, but he says – and then of course I’ve got to explain to you the social and class system for any of this to work – but the old man has an old accent, a way of speaking which defines him as being local, of not having travelled far from his home, so with his strong rural accent he says, “Oh, sorry m’dears, you can’t start from here.”’

  I’d adopted my best West Country drawl to deliver the punchline. The response was total silence from my audience of two.

  ‘You can’t start from here,’ I repeated.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Brad.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Theda.

  I buried my face in my hands for a moment, then slowly looked up.

  ‘You are saying I can go back to 2011, but I can’t start from here.’

  Brad nodded. ‘I see your confusion here, Gavin,’ he said calmly. ‘Indeed, you can start your journey from here, you can transverse dimensions from here and go back from your original dimension.’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  ‘The dimension you originally jumped to. The one that was connected to your timeline at the moment you passed through the original cloud. You have to go back to Gardenia.’

  18

  I’m not going to gloss over it, life in the Chicago Culvert was not exactly a bag of laughs. For a start, the storm that erupted soon after my arrival lasted for five long days. It was a non-stop grit blast, but I soon grew used to the distant rumble.

  There was one moment when I heard something a bit more ominous, a massive thump, which seemed to shake the foundations of the whole structure. I discovered later that it was caused by a very large lump of concrete from some devastated bridge that had been half buried a few hundred metres from the outer culvert walls. The vicious wind had finally lifted this multi-ton missile out of the surrounding dirt and hurled it at the walls.

  ‘A big repair job on that one,’ was all Brad told me.

  However, during these five days I learned a great deal about the lives of the people of the culverts. The occupants were from all over the world; they all seemed to be in transit from somewhere and on their way somewhere else.

  The ones in transit had travel plans that were simply that: travel plans. Eventually they hoped to get to the Beijing Culvert or the Moscow Culvert or somewhere I’d never heard of. They simply had to wait for the weather, not only the immediate local storm we were trapped by, but suitable conditions to allow the arrival of one of the clouds, one that was hopefully going the right way.

  However, there was a fair-sized community of people who, to my ear at least, were American, possibly natives of Chicago, born and bred in what had once been the USA.

  One of them I had seen before and I was initially very wary of him or her. This was Noshi and he or she told me more about life in the culvert than anyone else.

  When I say he or she, that’s only because I’m still not sure which one Noshi was. It clearly wasn’t a problem for him or her. I think I’m going to refer to Noshi as him but I want to underline the fact that it really wasn’t clear to me.

  He was very beautiful, at a guess a mix of African and Asian, quite tall, slender with a dark honey skin tone. He had wide shoulders, long limbs and a very feminine narrow waist.

  Noshi was either a very masculine and attractive woman, or a very feminine and attractive man. That might make me sound like I’m a bit of a Betty Bothways, which I don’t think I am. Well, I didn’t until I met Noshi.

  I would challenge the most confidently heterosexual man not to find something faintly alluring about him.

  I met Noshi again on my first day working in the garden. I didn’t apply for a job or add my name to a waiting list to work in the garden. I didn’t get paid to work there but I had very little else to do.

  Noshi was the first person I spoke to when I arrived on the work floor and I recognised him immediately. It was hard not to.

  ‘Hello, Gavin,’ he said, ‘I’m very pleased you are going to help us in the garden.’

  So he already knew I was going to be working there. I only knew that morning when Theda introduced me to a very old woman who, I assumed, organised the work shifts in the garden dome.

  I felt a little guarded, saying anything to Noshi at first, mainly because of what had happened at the meeting in the circular room where they played back my dream.

  When Theda pointed him out and he was asked to leave it gave me the clear impression that there was something seriously amiss. I suppose because I didn’t have a clue what it was I found it easy to ask him why.

  ‘I am still considered a renegade,’ he answered.

  ‘A renegade?’

  ‘Yes. A person who doesn’t agree with the majority decision. I have changed my mind but they are still upset with me.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘The Culvert authorities, the people in the room with you the other day.’

  ‘Oh, right, and what didn’t you agree with?’ I asked.

  ‘Many things, but certainly neural enhancements, holding back technology like that when we have to live like this. I used to think that it wasn’t a very sensible idea.’

  ‘I see,’ I said carefully. Here I was trying to understand a disagreement way above my non-existent pay grade. ‘Do you have any of these enhancements?’ I asked.

  Noshi looked a little shocked and then he laughed. ‘Me? No, I don’t have anything like that. D’you think I’d be weeding pulses if I had upgrades?’ He laughed again.

  ‘I think you already know enough about me to understand that most of what’s going on is a mystery to me,’ I said. I was feeling quite confident I could be honest with Noshi because he’d heard my story in the circular room. Not only that, he was probably the least threatening person I’d ever met.

  ‘I used to live on Cloud Four,’ he said as he weeded a long box of vegetable seedlings. ‘I left many years ago but because of that, the authorities don’t trust me.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘so you are from one of the Original Five.’

  ‘Not really. I lived on Cloud Four because they picked me up from the Da Lat Culvert when I was 12 years old.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘So you don’t think that everything that’s gone wrong here is, well, my fault?’

  Again Noshi laughed and reached out to touch my arm. ‘No, Gavin, don’t be silly.’

  No
shi was very kind to me and only once did I sense any kind of sexual vibe coming from him. I couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight, never mind which gender.

  Noshi and many other local people seemed to be the main workforce in the massive protected garden that I ended up spending most of my waking hours working in.

  It was a delightful environment. It smelt gorgeous, it was generally lighter than the rest of the culvert and it didn’t feel so claustrophobic. I had taken a great dislike to the low stone ceilings in the living quarters, so being in a large airy space with a very high semi-transparent roof was a blessed relief.

  Up until my entrance into the cloud over Didcot Power Station, I don’t think I’d done any gardening other than planting some cress seeds on blotting paper when I was at primary school. It was never something that interested me and even though my mum grew flowers around the dull lawn of her back garden, it wasn’t something I’d grown up being involved with.

  Since working in the gardens at the Institute in London I’d started to develop a genuine interest in planting regimes, drip-feed irrigation, hydroponics and the many related skills required for producing gargantuan amounts of food in very small areas.

  They had that down to a fine art in the Chicago Culvert, it was essentially industrial-scale gardening in many ways similar to the arrangements I’d seen in the Squares of London. However, this system was highly mechanised, each bulging bed of vegetable growth was on a slowly rotating mechanical rig that brought the soil surface to the right height for human crop management.

  The towers containing these slowly rotating beds were tens of metres high and there were many levels of gantry where workers could give the plants attention and check growth.

  Noshi initially showed me how to work on one of the long narrow beds of densely packed root vegetables. It was easy to reach the whole soil surface from a standing position, mainly thinning or weeding around the new shoots. It was fiddly manual work and by the time I’d finished one bed it would all be a bit uncomfortable. However, as soon as I was bending down to reach the last offending weed, another bed would come down the rack and I’d start working on that. Beans, peas, pulses of all sorts, some plants I’d never seen before. Some of them not in soil, just held in a mesh with their roots exposed but covered in a fine mist.