News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Okay,’ I said quietly, and turned to look at the beautiful woman before me. ‘I’m impressed,’ I said, ‘but I’m not going to pretend I understand what that means.’

  ‘What that means, Mister Meckler, is that I know what is going to happen here today. All these interactions and your simple desire to set the agenda, control events and guide your destiny are nothing more than minor annoyances. Shall we proceed to the Yuneec?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation from Brad and Hector, which clearly annoyed the Nordic Goddess.

  ‘Yes?’ she snapped.

  Hector coughed and said, ‘Certainly, it’s been brought out of storage and is currently in position on the rear patio.’

  Ebrikke clicked her long fingers. The sound she produced was like a mini gunshot; it hurt my ears.

  Her small entourage immediately turned and started walking toward the far end of the white tube.

  Brad held my arm as we watched them lope off toward a circular hole in the far wall. Once they had disappeared I turned to Brad and Hector. Hector breathed out and relaxed.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ he said. ‘I somehow always forget just how bloody terrifying that woman is.’

  ‘The Yuneec!’ I said as quietly as I could. ‘You mean my plane! Why does she want to see my plane?’

  ‘This is where it’s going to get very difficult,’ said Brad discreetly. ‘Ebrikke is a fiercely intelligent and sensitive person, she’s a level five, she can pick up minute variants in our behaviour and speech patterns. She knows what we’re thinking, and remember she does this without a kidonge.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said, feeling increasingly alarmed. ‘But why does she want to see the Yuneec?’

  ‘I believe she wishes to travel with you,’ said Brad. ‘We all know this is not possible, I have a feeling she knows it’s not possible but, well, the crews of the Original Five are often very complicated to negotiate with.’

  ‘Well I can help there,’ I said proudly, ‘because she’s not coming.’

  ‘It might not be as easy as that,’ said Brad.

  ‘No, seriously,’ I said, ‘it’s as easy as that. I’m not having that computer-brained control freak in my Yuneec.’

  ‘Please don’t call her that, old chap,’ pleaded Hector, ‘it really isn’t going to help inter-cloud relations. She is very difficult to dissuade, believe me, we’ve tried on many occasions in the past.’

  ‘Can she fly a heavier-than-air machine?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Brad, ‘no one can.’

  ‘There’s your answer then,’ I said, clapping my hands together as if brushing the dust off.

  ‘But she can very easily convince you that it’s a good idea to explain how to do it,’ said Hector. ‘She’s convinced me to travel halfway around the world when I really didn’t need to go before. The Tbilisi Culvert evacuation, I told you about it when you first arrived on Cloud Nine. That was at Ebrikke’s suggestion.’

  ‘Well, if I won’t fly, she can’t go. I’ve been away for so long I’m not in some kind of desperate rush to get back.’

  ‘I wish it were that simple, Gavin,’ said Brad, ‘but your meteorological window is tight enough as it is. If you don’t catch the predicted anomaly it could be months, even years before we can be here and make use of the situation again. To be honest, it really is now or never.’

  27

  The yuneec looked so reassuring that I almost burst into tears when I laid eyes on it.

  It looked pristine and wonderful sitting on the inflated rear patio of Cloud Nine in the late afternoon sun. There was beautiful light brushing the wings and it stirred something in me I didn’t expect.

  I can only describe it as some kind of longing, the feeling of a light breeze on my skin as I walked toward the plane on Enstone Airfield on a summer morning. The knowledge of Beth, the sense of place, of belonging somewhere, of knowing people even if I had never wanted to talk to them.

  Suddenly I wanted to talk to them, to find out how they were feeling. Not just other pilots at Enstone, but Beth, Kevin at the flying club, the lovely lady at the Kingham stores who was always nice to me even though I ignored her most of the time. My mum and dad, even my brother, Giles.

  I wanted to know about them. I could not remember feeling that before, all I knew when I was back in 2011 was that people existed. I had to acknowledge their existence because they could have an impact on my life, but I never had any desire to know what was going on in their lives. As I stood staring at the Yuneec, I did want to know, even though they’d been dead for hundreds of years. I wanted to see them again and find out what was happening to them.

  I must have been staring at the Yuneec for some time, because when I turned around Hector was standing next to me.

  ‘We’re just passing the coast of southern England,’ he said under his breath. ‘We’re heading north at 50 kilometres an hour, ground speed.’

  Standing in the perfectly still air on the patio deck of Cloud Nine did not give you any indication you were moving. It was quiet and still.

  The patio deck had a transparent barrier around the edge which made looking down to the surface very easy. I had been eager to see England in post-storm 2211 but low-level cloud cover made seeing anything on the surface impossible.

  Although we were floating at about a thousand metres above the ground we were also above the cloud cover, which seemed eerily smooth and uniform. In all my previous flying experience, I’d never seen anything like it. The uniform grey cloud cover looked like a recently painted concrete floor.

  ‘Is that normal?’ I said to Hector, nodding down in the direction of the low clouds.

  He nodded. ‘Sea mist. The sea is probably a bit warmer than it was back in your day. In still weather like this the mist is about 200 metres thick, it’s probably quite cold down on the ground.’

  The flat grey blanket stretched off as far as I could see. I was in a two-tone world, a flat grey sheet below and a crystal-clear blue dome above.

  I turned to see Ebrikke and Brad busy in conversation.

  ‘You see, the thing is,’ said Hector moving me away from them and the rest of the Cloud Three crew, ‘I think Brad has already told you Ebrikke is in a spot of bother.’

  ‘He told me she has a computer brain and that she’s a machine,’ I answered.

  ‘Yes, well, since the law has been passed, it’s all got a bit difficult for her.’

  ‘Oh, right, because she’s had her brain mashed up she’s on the run?’

  Hector’s face folded as he struggled to understand what I’d just said.

  ‘I think so, old chap,’ he said eventually. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble in the past with artificial brains, artificial intelligence and suchlike, that’s why the law was passed. It’s globally binding but obviously with renegade cloud dwellers it gets a bit difficult to enforce. So our lovely Ebrikke is now in rather a lot of trouble, hence her desire to use your Yuneec.’

  ‘Bloody Nora,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘No, I mean, what a nightmare. This is going to get very ugly.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Hector.

  Suddenly there was that loud clicking noise again. I looked over at Brad and Ebrikke, she was looking at Hector with her spooky blue eyes.

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ said Hector. He patted me on the back, gave me a look that oozed resignation and walked toward them.

  I tried to watch without making it too obvious. I wasn’t worried, there was no way I was going to get in the plane with that annoying know-all woman even if she was gorgeous.

  Hector stood near Ebrikke and rocked up and down on his toes, his hands behind his back. I suppose it was a sort of ‘captain’-type stance but it wasn’t very convincing.

  It had
crossed my mind to make a dash for the Yuneec and try and take off without telling anyone, but the rest of the crew from Cloud Three were standing around looking at the plane.

  One of them, a tall African man, beckoned me over.

  ‘This is electric powered?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes it is,’ I replied.

  ‘Did you change it?’

  ‘No, that’s how it was built,’ I said. I was going to explain how it had been rebuilt in London but thought better of it.

  ‘You mean you had electric planes back in 1979?’

  ‘No, I was born in 1979. This plane was made in 2009, it was an early model.’

  ‘So other machines you used, they burnt fuel?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t want to elaborate. I had surmised that this crowd would make Greenpeace activists look like Republican tar sands extractors; they were a fairly hardcore bunch.

  ‘Millions of machines,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Then he suddenly put on a kind of weird, nasal British accent and twisted his face into a pinched up expression. ‘But we didn’t know it would be a problem to burn all those hydrocarbons, we thought it would be okay. It’s not our fault.’

  I suppose I was offended because I supposed he was doing an impression of me. It was doubly chilling because I’d never said those things other than to Brad and Theda. It was even more distressing because his fellow crewmates all fell about laughing.

  An older man moved forward and I started a little, only because his skin was as white as a sheet of paper.

  ‘We didn’t know it would have any effect. It’s not our fault,’ he said, in an even more extreme nasal accent. He added to this by doing a kind of knock-kneed walk which increased the laughter of his pals.

  ‘Little bit immature for people of advanced intelligence maybe?’ I suggested, when the noise of their laughter died down.

  The looks I got for saying that were far from friendly. In all the bizarre places I ended up, other than the Weaver Woman, this was the only time I felt threatened by anyone. These people were very angry and it seemed it was all directed at me.

  ‘Okay, chaps, you’ve had your fun, let’s leave Mister Meckler alone,’ said Hector who was suddenly standing beside me. I was very grateful for the support.

  The African man bristled at this. ‘Oh, we’ve got to be polite to your guest have we? The first time we have ever met a responsible one from the way back and we have to be fucking polite.’

  ‘When you’re on my cloud, sonny Jim, you have to be polite,’ said Hector calmly. It had suddenly become a stand-off between these two. The tension was broken by yet another loud click in my left ear.

  ‘Enough,’ said Ebrikke, who was also now suddenly standing beside me.

  The crew of Cloud Three stood back, clearly very intimidated by the diminutive figure standing beside me.

  In various situations I’d encountered I’d felt confused, anxious or utterly out of my depth, but never more so than at that moment.

  It was painfully obvious even to me that if a physical skirmish had taken place I wouldn’t have lasted a second. ‘No one is even considering the use of physical force,’ Ebrikke said to me. I stared at her exquisite face. She was staring at me in that way again. I noticed something about her eyes, they were weird. Not altogether human.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ I said.

  ‘And no one is considering flying with you in the Yuneec.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. At least I wasn’t going to have to confront that particular notion. However, Ebrikke had moved so that she stood between me and the Yuneec.

  ‘You like life on the clouds, don’t you, Gavin?’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ I replied. I didn’t want to be rude but I also didn’t want to say anything more. I could not fathom this woman out; she wasn’t nasty to me, although it was clear she looked down on me as some kind of sub-species.

  ‘But you want to get home to Beth, you want to get back to a time you understand, a simpler time where the world was still green and inhabitable.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said flatly, although I surprised myself by sensing where she was heading with her slightly chilling observations. She knew about Beth, she probably knew as much about me as anyone I’d met on my travels. I don’t know how she knew, I suppose she could ‘read my mind’ or maybe she had managed to extract a copy of my mind when she put her gentle fingers on my temples when I’d arrived.

  I could tell she was trying to talk me round to giving up, to not attempt to get home. She wanted something else but I wasn’t sure what.

  ‘But you know if you go back from here there might not be a Beth, there might not be a home and indeed, you might meet yourself, which would of course be fatal. You might find that another Gavin Meckler is following a completely different path in life, or you might never have existed because your father would not be your father, your mother may never have been born and the socio-political system you knew and understood may be so different you may feel just as lost there as you do here.’

  I didn’t say anything. This sounded very different to everything else I’d been told.

  ‘Not quite what you’d expected to hear, is it?’ she suggested.

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said carefully after some thought. I had to accept that up to that point I hadn’t questioned the information Brad and Theda had fed to me. I had no more reason to believe them than I did to accept that Ebrikke was telling the truth.

  ‘So now you are thinking, is it worth me going back? Will I just travel to yet another dimension in the same time sector, that’s what you’re thinking now isn’t it, Mister Meckler? How will you know, how could you know, it is not possible for you to know. You can only do this journey on faith. You have no scientific understanding. It is just faith in the people you have met here that is driving you.’

  Something was happening to me as she spoke. I was feeling weak and hopeless. What she said made total sense. I had listened to the people of the clouds and believed every word they’d said to me. Somehow Ebrikke had turned all their rock-solid predictions and advanced understanding of dimensions and string theory to silly mush.

  Basically I felt like a fool, and when this had happened to me in the past, I became angry and tended to lash out. I don’t mean I hit people but I could say cruel things.

  At that moment as I stood facing Ebrikke I had nothing, no anger, no fear, merely resignation and acceptance.

  ‘I operate at a higher brain function than you, I don’t blame you for your frailty in this area and I know you will eventually co-operate with me.’

  I looked at Brad and Hector, who were both busy studying their shoes.

  I stood silently staring at Ebrikke for a while as I went through my response in my head. No doubt she could hear my dull brain clunking through a few mediocre thoughts but I didn’t let that stop me. I searched for my anger. I knew I should feel angry, I really wanted to feel angry. I didn’t want to accept that this woman with her fake brain really was that superior to me, or to any of the other people I’d met on the clouds.

  I clenched my fists as tightly as I could and somehow got my pulse to race, I started to feel angry and that made me very happy.

  ‘I can see that you intimidate the rest of the crew on Cloud Nine,’ I said. ‘I understand they need to maintain good relations with you and the rest of the Original Five, but I don’t.’

  I adopted a smile at that point. She didn’t react.

  ‘I don’t care if you hate me or think I have the intellect of a slug, but I’m leaving and like you said, you’re not coming with me.’

  Then Ebrikke smiled. The smile was instant and yes, it was unnerving and my anger fled as soon as it had arrived.

  She looked utterly beautiful when she smiled. Her teeth
were so perfect; her skin had such a glorious sheen of health and her eyes sparkled more than any eyes I’d seen before.

  ‘You are correct on all counts, Mister Meckler,’ she said after a long pause. ‘You, unlike the crew here, have nothing to lose. The new clouds are, as you suggest, intimidated by me and you do indeed have the insight of a mollusc.’

  She stared at me for a while and I couldn’t make myself look away, or sneer, or even come back with some witty and cutting reposts.

  ‘You are also correct in the assumption that I am not going with you in the Yuneec. That would be pointless. However, more accurately, you are not coming with me.’

  My silence became a prison. I could say nothing.

  ‘I am going to control the Yuneec myself, alone.’

  28

  It’s not something i am going to easily forget. I would surmise it took months if not years off my total life expectancy. The sight of the Yuneec flying into a monstrous cloud formation a few kilometres off the eastern side of Cloud Nine is a vision I cannot forget.

  My Yuneec, finally gone.

  My last possible chance of returning to my real life. It was devastating, like a judge putting on the black cap in a pre-1965 English courtroom.

  To explain how Ebrikke had managed to talk me into not only letting her fly away in the Yuneec but also explain to her in great detail exactly how to fly the plane makes me feel so uncomfortable I don’t wish to recall anything about it.

  But recall it I must because it is the single most terrifying thing I have ever experienced. I’ll go further. The ability this woman had could be the single most terrifying prospect the human race has had to deal with.

  Forget the endless march of machines that take over the world and use our crude minds as an energy source. Forget the end of money, forget the end of fossil fuel or the Armageddon of the Anthropocene age.

  The fact that one human being can take over the mind of another, make them do exactly what they want even though during the entire experience the victim is fully aware of the situation, fully aware, with their mind screaming at them to stop but with no ability to resist? It’s terrifying.