News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  Generally the mood in the culvert seemed subdued, no one seemed to laugh or lark about. The people I saw worked very hard, ate together and clearly looked after their children very well. I noticed no tension between people, I never once saw a disagreement or row let alone a fight. My assumption about this was that the onslaught outside was enough to sap anyone’s aggression; survival was hard enough without adding to your distress with petty bickering. But it wasn’t exactly a joyous place to live.

  Until the arrival of Cloud Eleven. Goodness me, that made a difference.

  I stood silently for a moment looking around our small apartment and tried to have a feeling. I wanted a sentimental experience so I waited. I looked around at the sparse furnishings, the dull stone walls.

  Nothing.

  I didn’t feel an attachment to this place in any way. I’d spent very little conscious time there, as I was mostly asleep in my comfortable wall pod. It wasn’t stuffy, and the air-conditioning, if that’s what it was, worked silently and effectively. It just didn’t have any soul.

  The private place that had stayed with me most since leaving 2011 had been my room at Goldacre Hall in Gardenia, that was special, and although my departure from there was so rapid and left me no time to get sentimental, it had come back to me regularly.

  I had no emotional attachment to the Chicago Culvert, it simply wasn’t that kind of place.

  By the time I’d washed, changed into my flight suit, put the boots Noshi had given me in a small backpack and finally left the little sleeping quarters, all hell had broken loose.

  Hundreds of people were rushing along the corridors. There was laughter, shouting, some people were skipping and jumping up and down, kids dashing around like mad. It was chaos, but a happy, party-time chaos.

  ‘We go,’ said Theda, as she walked through the dizzying crowds. ‘They are lowering the elevators very soon.’

  ‘Oh, blimey, the bloody elevators,’ I said with a sigh.

  ‘I think these ones are second gen,’ said Theda with a smile. ‘Bit different.’

  I jostled in the crowds through the low dark corridors with Theda and Noshi. I knew we were heading toward the reception hall where we’d first arrived.

  At one corridor junction Noshi clasped my arm. I turned to look at him; he looked so beautiful it almost winded me.

  ‘I will leave you now,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get upset in front of everyone at the reception hall. Please forgive me, Gavin.’

  ‘Hey, it’s okay. I understand,’ I said, and we embraced again, but thankfully – I feel mean even saying this – we didn’t kiss. ‘I’ll really miss you,’ I said.

  ‘Come, come,’ urged Theda. I smiled sadly at Noshi and turned away. A few metres along the corridor I was engulfed by the mass of people around me but I glanced back for one last look. Noshi had gone. I would never see him or her again.

  As we got nearer the reception hall we were joined by more and more people, again all races, ages and the air was filled with excited raised voices, shouts of greeting and whoops of joy. The arrival of Cloud Eleven was clearly a pretty big day in the culvert.

  In the enormous reception hall the drably draped commissioners were standing in a serious-looking row to one side. All around them pandemonium, movement, colour, energy, enthusiasm and excitement, but they just stood silently watching.

  Theda walked directly up to them and embraced Michiyo Nishimura, which looked a little alarming, partly because Theda was probably a metre taller that the diminutive scientist and partly because Michiyo didn’t look like a huggy sort of person. It was fairly obvious she didn’t enjoy the moment of intimacy. I took note and decided not to follow suit.

  ‘Thank you, thank you for looking after us,’ said Theda excitedly. ‘I will never forget you.’

  Michiyo smiled. ‘We will never forget you also,’ she said, then turned to me, ‘or indeed you, Mister Meckler. However, you will, if all goes to plan, completely forget us. It has been a privilege and indeed an education to meet a man from the past. We are very grateful for all the information we have gathered from you while you’ve been here.’

  Michiyo held out her hand and I shook it politely, trying not to squeeze too hard – her hand was minuscule in mine.

  ‘I hope your return journey is safe and without undue trauma,’ she said, and gave me a tiny bow.

  That sounded a bit ominous but in the excitement of the moment I didn’t really pay heed.

  ‘Doctor Dorschel will accompany you on the start of your return trip,’ said Michiyo. Brad was standing beside her, and I had already understood he was coming as he was the only member of the commissioners group to be dressed in the dull cream flight suit.

  ‘That’s good to know,’ I said and I meant it. Brad had been one of the few people I’d met in this blighted dimension who had really tried to explain things to me.

  ‘We need to get moving,’ said Brad. He had a large case with him which looked like a solid box but covered with the same material as the flight suit and sporting the regulation pale blue pad on one side.

  As he started to move off, the case raised up from the floor and followed him. I tried not to notice. I tried not to be interested in a floating case, I’d seen all kinds of things that floated just above ground level but it still caught my eye.

  ‘Thank you for letting me stay,’ I said to Michiyo as formally as I could. ‘And good luck, I hope the weather gets better.’

  Michiyo took hold of my hand and squeezed it without saying anything. She stared at me and I thought I saw something emotional happening. For me to notice something like that while all around me there was so much noise and movement means either she was very good at transmitting emotion or I had become a bit more receptive.

  I nodded to the other commissioners, who nodded back to me politely, then I followed Brad and Theda towards the exit.

  ‘Got your wristband on?’ asked Theda. I held up my arm, there it was.

  It was an amazing thing to witness the chaos and disorder in the main body of the hall transform itself into hundreds of well-disciplined and orderly queues of people waiting to exit into the open square. I joined the same queue as Brad and Theda and we edged forward quite quickly. As soon as I could see ahead of me I was slightly relieved, the elevator system on Cloud Eleven was noticeably different. I watched a row of people stand in a long line with their backs to the massive blue sheet, which I knew to be hanging from the cloud. At a certain moment they all leaned back and the sheet formed itself into a kind of long seating bench and then elevated the row of people out of sight with such speed it shocked my eyes. Whoosh, they were gone, soon to be replaced by another long line of people.

  What was also different from my arrival was the fact that the individual blue elevator sheets seemed to be fairly stationary. I deduced from this that the still air I’d experienced when walking with Noshi meant the cloud was fairly static over the Chicago Culvert, but then how had it moved across the vast brown plains outside?

  I didn’t know, all I knew was I was about to be sitting on a thin sheet of material that would lift me up into the biggest man-made cloud that had ever existed.

  23

  Entering Cloud Eleven?

  I don’t know where to start.

  All the terms I have at my disposal – huge, colossal, enormous, gargantuan – they are all too frail, too weak and cannot begin to do justice.

  By comparison to things I’d seen on my journeys up to that point, Cloud Eleven was just bigger. The space elevators in Gardenia, the mile-high buildings in Beijing? Commonplace and easily absorbed into a twenty-first-century mindset. The Squares of London, the buildings of Rio, just normal stuff, advanced, mysterious at first but eventually comprehensible.

  Cloud Eleven was off every scale I have ever had at my disposal.

  Where to st
art?

  How about a 70 kilometre in diameter floating city, a brand new, squeaky clean, immaculate wonderland floating serenely above the ravaged earth?

  How about a structure with a distance from the lowest part of the base to the observation tower at the top of close to four kilometres?

  How about a floating city that could contain, feed and protect over a million people at any one time?

  Or an enormous many-gusseted balloon that could maintain structural integrity from ground level up to an altitude of 12,000 metres?

  How about a floating, self-supporting, energy-generating mega city that defied the eye and the senses with its exquisite beauty and size?

  Or most intriguingly for me, a structure that used a material on the exterior that contained nanoscale particles known as Planck Mass Reflectors, or PMRs?

  This was the first cloud to use this material. This was a new thing even in 2211 and clearly very few people knew much about it. From what I could understand, and I had the concept explained to me in great detail by Brad, a PMR is best described as a quantum gravity micro-engine.

  Doesn’t really help does it?

  Clearly it wasn’t an engine as anyone from 2011 would understand it, like a big diesel engine that powers vacuum pumps or wheels or hydraulic systems.

  This engine was a material that needed no power, a material or engine that covered many thousands of square metres in area and from a distance looked like a cloud. Cloud Eleven looked more genuinely cloud-like than any of the other clouds I’d seen.

  The little fellows embedded in the PMR material were so infinitesimally small that if, for instance, one of these high-energy particles was the size of a golf ball, then an atom would be the size of the visible universe.

  That’s about the only fact I could retain, the rest of it was fuzz-brain-inducing quantum physics, but what it meant was that Cloud Eleven, and all the other clouds being built at the time, would be capable of slow but controllable navigation. The cloud could rise and sink with less stress on the edifice of the cloud, using less energy and with greater control.

  So the scale of the thing was impossible to comprehend. The number of people on-board? Bonkers. The weight of this lighter-than-air structure? Basic-laws-of-physics-defying. However, that wasn’t the half of it. PMRs were embedded into the structure too, so the floor you walked on reduced your weight considerably. Apparently my normal weight of 81 kilograms was reduced to around 30. This didn’t mean you felt lighter – well, not immediately, although I didn’t seem to get as tired walking long distances as I did on the surface.

  Finally, and for me the biggest relief, the luxury of the accommodation on Cloud Eleven?

  Absolutely top-drawer posh.

  On both Cloud Nine and Ten, the accommodation was adequate if a little rudimentary and cramped. On-board Cloud Eleven I had a suite. Well, not a regular suite, like in a twenty-first-century hotel, not a square room like you’d have in a building, but nonetheless, the elongated bubble Brad showed me into had a volume similar to a large high-end hotel suite.

  I had my own kind of bathroom bubble at one side and best of all a huge circular window looking out over acres of the flowing flanks of Cloud Eleven and to the distant skies beyond.

  I don’t think I have ever felt safer on something that wasn’t joined to the ground, this thing was so vast and its movement so imperceptible that it was always difficult to believe it was thousands of metres in the air.

  After our initial arrival we had to wait quite a while in the truly vast reception atrium, but none of us minded as it was such a relief after the low stone ceilings of the Chicago Culvert. It struck me that whoever designed this massive floating city wanted to make a real effort to counteract the effects of being cramped underground in storm ditches, which is where most people spent most of their lives.

  The faces of the people around us were happy and excited. They were alive, they were safe, they would not have to listen to the wind battering their culvert day after day.

  In the sky, when you are floating, there is no wind.

  Once the crowds had started to disperse, Brad led us along an incredibly wide and light tubular corridor and through an intriguing airlock that was entirely flexible. It was almost organic in the way it allowed our solid bodies to pass through but kept the elements at bay. I was so intrigued by the experience of squishing myself through this opening I had to do it numerous times to try and understand what was going on.

  Imagine a taut white curtain with a split down the middle, not a big, obvious gap, in fact you only know there is a potential split there because you’ve watched someone else pass through it before you.

  As you approach it you are essentially walking towards a blank white wall. You push yourself against it and it expands and allows you through. Not without a little effort; the tightness of the material was more like the skin of a drum, it looked like a sheet of solid white material but you could slither between its skintight wall.

  Once I’d got over the weirdness of the air lock, I found myself along with a great many other people on a kind of flat, open area somewhat similar to where the Yuneec had been landed on Cloud Nine.

  However, this was three times bigger and the walls of cloud structures rising up above and behind me were breathtaking and dizzying in their magnificent beauty.

  ‘This must be the viewing platform,’ said Brad. He was clearly excited about this, as no one from the Chicago Culvert had been on this cloud before. At last, I wasn’t the only one stumbling about saying, ‘Oh wow, look at that!’ every three seconds.

  ‘We should be able to get an aerial view of the culvert as we move off,’ said Brad, leading the way to a distant gathering of people.

  So try to picture this: you know you’re on a cloud, you know that it’s stable and safe, at least you hope it is, although it’s brand new and has only been in the air a few days. You are on a vast, open, white kind of square surrounded by the truly awe-inspiring towers of cloud-like structures. The ground is soft underfoot but not bouncy, so walking isn’t too difficult.

  Before you is a wide vista, an opening in these cloud-like structures that gives you an uninterrupted view of the landscape and sky. Then as you approach the long row of people with their backs to you, you discover this is merely the back row of a vast, tiered viewing auditorium. This is like a rock venue on a scale that makes Glastonbury Festival look like a village fête, except people aren’t looking at a band, they’re looking at their world.

  We made our way down one of the many gangways between the already jam-packed seating arrangement, row after row of people sitting quietly looking out over the vast plains of what had once been Illinois. Due to the dazzling setting sun on the distant horizon, most of them were wearing the slightly spooky-looking goggles.

  I had mine on, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to them, but when you saw thousands of people wearing them it looked a little eerie, a bit like the black and white pictures of scientists watching the first atomic detonations.

  We eventually found a space about halfway down the vast, slightly curved auditorium and took our seats. I had Brad on one side and Theda on the other.

  ‘Pretty impressive, huh?’ said Brad, once we’d settled.

  ‘It’s beyond anything,’ I said, and then felt stupid. What a dumb thing to say, but then I wasn’t really concentrating on being cool.

  Brad smiled, which was unusual. He pointed ahead of us. ‘The haze you can see to the left, that’s Lake Michigan.’

  ‘I was there today, I walked there with Noshi!’ I exclaimed.

  As was often the case with Brad and Theda, there was no response to this statement, they didn’t do idle chit-chat. We sat in silence for a moment and I stared along with everyone else. I then focused my attention on a small dark patch of brown dirt that lined up with the edge of Cloud Eleven way down below me
. By doing this I assumed I’d be able to judge our speed, and yet it wasn’t moving. It seems the cloud was entirely static. I then realised I could feel a gentle wind around me.

  ‘I can’t tell if we’re moving,’ I said eventually.

  ‘We are static at present,’ said Brad. He then went on to explain to me about PMR material and Cloud Eleven’s ability to maintain a static position above a culvert with local wind speeds of up to 15 kilometres per hour. He explained how the leading side of the structure, the one facing the wind, was inflated at a many times higher pressure than the rest of the cloud in order to maintain its integrity.

  ‘We will start to move very soon,’ said Brad, ‘and then the culvert will be right in front of us.’

  As usual, I wanted to know more, but I didn’t even know how to frame questions into coherent sentences, the technology I was surrounded by was so extreme that I had no common point of reference.

  After a few minutes I noticed the landscape below us start to shift. To be fair, what really made me notice was the rise in noise and excitement from the crowds surrounding me. The only way of telling we were moving was from the slowly shifting view in front of us and the fact that the shadows from the setting sun began to slowly slide across the seating banks to my left.

  Then slowly the vast ramparts of the Chicago Culvert began to appear below us. Although they were not that far below us to start with, I could initially only see the distant edge of the black tile-clad mountain.

  After a few minutes the entire complex came into view and this time it made much more sense seeing it from above than it had ever done when I’d been inside. It resembled a giant eye or maybe a fish, essentially two huge ramparts joining each other at a narrow junction at either end. In the centre, well below the upper surface of the outer abutments, there was a large and complex industrial array of what I took to be life support systems, energy gathering devices and presumably communication aerials, although I could be mistaken about those.