by Jason Ayres
Splinters in Time
(The Time Bubble Book 4)
By Jason Ayres
Text copyright © 2017 Jason Ayres
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by:
SelfPubBookCovers.com/Daniela
For Lynda
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Prologue
October 2019
Josh was lost in the wrong time.
Not only was it the wrong time, it was also the wrong universe. He didn’t even know which the right universe was anymore. Clutching the damaged, wand-like device in his hand, he was stumbling from one version of reality to another; through time bubbles he could no longer control, desperate to find a way home.
Powered only by the kinetic energy of the earth’s rotation, his malfunctioning device was sending him further and further back in time, and increasingly distant from home. Nicknamed the tachyometer in homage to an old time-travel movie, the adventure it had sent him on had gone decidedly wrong.
Every jump he now took through time sent him to a different timeline, including many nightmarish and unrecognisable worlds from his own.
Right now he was hiding behind a wall in a rubble-strewn, war-torn landscape akin to news coverage of wars in Africa and the Middle East. But this wasn’t some far-flung hotspot. A broken sign, covered in splattered mud and flecks of blood, hung askew at an angle next to the bombed-out buildings all around him, betraying his true location. Little Clarendon Street, in Oxford.
The sun was rising and he had been running and hiding all night. It didn’t matter how far he ran, or in which direction: there was no escape. Wherever he went, the sound of machine-gun fire peppered by screams of the dying could be heard all around him.
The air was choking him, thick from the incessant shelling. The latest explosion had been way too close for comfort, mere metres away, leaving him gasping for air as he was showered with small stones, with the accompanying dust covering his clothes and eyebrows.
Exhausted, his strength was almost gone. Although he had made every effort to keep fit for his travels through time, his fifty-three-year-old body just didn’t have any more to give.
Sweat poured from his brow as he clutched the tachyometer, willing it to charge faster, desperately needing the power indicator to turn green. Only then could he escape this world and move on to the next. He just prayed that this time he would find some semblance of normality as he couldn’t go on like this much longer.
Breathing a sigh of relief through the dusty air as the light went green, he held out the wand in front of him to open the time bubble. He had no way of controlling where it would take him: that luxury had been lost when it became irretrievably damaged. Now he was at the mercy of its seemingly random whim to send him into any one of what could be potentially millions of different universes.
Just as he was about to step through the bubble, a soldier came around the corner. It wasn’t one of the British soldiers he had seen earlier. He hadn’t seen any of them for hours. This one looked every inch like one of the ISIS fighters he had seen so often on the news on TV in his youth.
Covered in perspiration and with a fevered, fanatical look in his eyes, the soldier shouted something in a language Josh didn’t understand and raised his gun, ready to despatch a hail of bullets towards him. Terrified, Josh leapt forward just as the man fired.
Then he vanished, disappearing into the bubble a split second before the bullets reached him, leaving one rather confused fighter behind.
Chapter One
July 2040
England in the 2030s had been different from the previous decade.
A hundred years before, the Wall Street crash had seen the prosperous 1920s give way to a decade of economic gloom. Almost a century to the day later, another catastrophic event struck the world.
This time it was not a financial meltdown that had brought about the downturn, but an unforeseen climate event. An asteroid strike had blanketed the world in dust, blocking out the sun and stripping away the effects of decades of global warming.
A devastating winter followed, bringing Britain to its knees. With snowfall on a scale unprecedented in recorded history, power supplies failed, food became scarce, and law and order broke down. The population found themselves fighting to survive, not only against the cold, but also against each other.
Over two million people died in Britain during what was to become known as the Black Winter. This bleak title had been bestowed with the Black Death in mind, the last time nature had caused such devastating loss of life.
Many more people had fled abroad, never to return. They had been desperate to escape the Arctic conditions that had gripped Northern Europe in late-2029. Although conditions eventually abated the following spring, many were in no hurry to return, believing it to be only a temporary respite.
Sensationalist media stories that the world was on the brink of a new ice age abounded, and few wanted to risk returning to face it all over again the following winter.
Those fears proved unfounded, but the cost of the Black Winter to Britain had been incalculable. Quite aside from the human loss, the country’s livestock had been almost totally wiped out. Many native species of wild animals and insects simply hadn’t evolved to cope with conditions of such severity. Their populations had been decimated and would take decades to recover.
The landscape was desolate, devoid not just of crops but also trees, many ancient oaks and other species killed by the months of cold. Even the hardiest of Britain’s plant life had little defence against the devastating cold.
The following summer, the growing season never got started. The frost had penetrated so deep into the ground that it remained frozen, even into July. Although the following winter was not as devastating as feared, it was still much colder and longer than average so the harvest the following year was very poor. This set the pattern for the years ahead as a succession of very cold winters and cool, wet summers put even more pressure on Britain.
The country was in shock and had been left in a mess. It took years to restore all the transport links and public services to their previous levels, by which time the country was effectively bankrupt. The resulting depression made the Great Depression of the 1930s look relatively benign.
With so little home-grown food available, the Government had had no choice but to import heavily from unaffected Australia and New Zealand, as well as Southern Europe. Rationing had to be reintroduced for the first time since the post-war austerity era. This was something very few still alive could remember.
Some countries sought to take advantage of the situation, exploiting their advantage in a desire to punish Britain for leaving the European Union a decade before. This led to angry scenes in Parliament and recriminations all round from those who said that Britain should never have gone down the Brexit route. Australia and New Zealand, by
comparison, were only too happy to help, the additional exports to Britain boosting their thriving economies still further.
Regardless of the politics of the situation, by 2035 Britain was in a mess. The climate was still around two degrees cooler than it had been a decade before, and this was continuing to have a major effect on farming. The growing season was starting weeks later than before, with vulnerable crops at risk from frosts far later than had previously been the case. It was clearly going to be a long time before agriculture would get back to anywhere near normal.
Britain had become so reliant on its infrastructure and technology that the people were serious crippled by the sudden change of circumstances. Power lines and cables had been destroyed during the big freeze. Roads and railways had been severely damaged, with huge potholes that took years to repair, and hundreds of miles of buckled, unusable rails.
Internet access, on which so much depended, was non-existent for several months and then unreliable for a good couple of years after that. During the 2020s, internet radio had completely replaced FM and DAB, just as digital TV had replaced analogue a couple of decades earlier. This left the country in a situation where, if the internet was down, nothing worked and many people simply didn’t know what was going on a lot of the time. There was a great deal of civil unrest as a result.
Again the Government was blamed, with many criticising the decision to shut down all of the BBC’s FM transmitters. A few enterprising individuals restarted what had once been known as pirate radio, playing old-fashioned vinyl records to a small band of followers who had dusted down their ancient radios. Others built their own crystal sets, before the retailers caught on and started selling traditional radios again. The resurgence of this seemingly archaic equipment was a stark reminder of the dangers of relying too much on technology.
Had the Black Winter occurred fifty or a hundred years before, it would most likely have had a far less devastating impact. Britain was more agricultural then, and would have had plenty of locally grown produce stored for the winter. People knew how to store potatoes, apples and other staples in those times. Back then, before the dawn of the superstore and 24-hour shopping, people didn’t take it for granted that they could just nip to Tesco’s for whatever they wanted all year round.
Also back then, many more houses still had working fireplaces. People would have been able to forage for firewood to keep warm. Communities would have been able to work together far more effectively, relying on what they produced locally, just as they had done throughout history.
Britain had suffered more than most European countries. People further north, in Scandinavia, were used to harsh winters and had weathered the storm fairly well. Elsewhere, on mainland Europe, people had been able to travel south more easily to escape the worst.
In Britain’s case, that hadn’t been so easy. The sea, so often its protector, this time became a barrier. Many died attempting to sail across it using inadequate boats. There were scenes reminiscent of the deaths in the Mediterranean during the migrant crisis earlier in the century.
If they had been able to wait a little longer they could have walked across it. By February 2030, with temperatures on the South Coast averaging minus 20 degrees, the English Channel had frozen over completely for the first time since the last ice age. But it was too late. By then, those that had tried to make their escapes had already made it, perished in the attempt, or given up and sought shelter inland.
As the 2030s wore on, eventually things began to improve. Having thrown herself on the mercy of the rest of Europe, Britain had received the assistance she needed, amid much political wrangling.
Satirical European magazines enjoyed a field day with the UK’s plight, lampooning the British in sketches and cartoons. One picture from a Paris-based magazine became famous the world over. It depicted a stereotypical bowler-hatted businessmen on his hands and knees holding out a begging bowl. The accompanying caption translated as “Please sir, can I have some more?
At home, a coalition government had put their differences aside and decided to work together for the good of the country. Neither politicians nor people at home had the heart to argue any longer about whether EU membership was a good or a bad thing. They just wanted to be sure they could put food on the table. In the early years they frequently couldn’t, and the sight of long queues outside soup kitchens became a depressing sight on the streets of many cities, particularly in the harder hit North and Scotland.
Then, for the first time in six years, Britain had a hot summer in 2035. This lifted spirits and produced the first set of decent crops since the disaster. By the following winter, which was mercifully mild and snow-free, things were just about returning to some semblance of normality. The buses and trains were running, not always on time, but then they hadn’t been much better before the disaster. Electricity supplies and internet access were both reliable again, and at last the country was growing enough food to cut down on expensive imports.
Despite repeated criticism of Britain’s reliance on technology being a major cause of it ending up in such a mess, ultimately technological advances played a big part in the recovery. Incredible developments in robotics had continued apace elsewhere in the world whilst Britain had been in the recovery position.
Investing in some of this new technology, the farming industry was now able to unleash a fleet of robotic bees, designed to do the job that the severely depleted native bee population was struggling with. Coated in a special sticky gel, the robotic bees were programmed to land on flowering crops, allowing pollen grains to stick lightly to the gel before being rubbed off on the next flower visited.
Developments such as these were part of a robotic revolution which was transforming the world as it headed towards the mid-21st century. It was clear that robots were going to play a huge role in future society, with every role from cleaner to sex worker being carried out by increasingly complex artificially intelligent machines.
Despite the assistance that this new robotic army was bringing, the mood of the people remained that Britain must learn from the mistakes of the past. Listening to the people, for once, the Government vowed that it would make Britain self-sufficient again. They invested large sums in farming, incentivising the industry with tax breaks, making it an attractive career option again.
For the first time in generations, the amount of Britain’s acreage given over to farming began to increase, attracting young people into the business. Although robots were utilised on the farms, the humans running the farms ensured they had a Plan B in place in the event of any future apocalyptic scenario developing.
There was no longer any pressure from town planners to build on any of the existing farmland, as Britain no longer had a housing crisis. With a few million less inhabitants than before, there was suddenly an abundance of housing stock. The lack of demand also meant that for the first time in a long time, people could actually afford to buy them.
Even with the increasing use of robots, there was no shortage of work to go round repairing the damage done by the Black Winter. Many of Britain’s workers rediscovered the joys of manual labour, repairing and putting right the damage that had been done. They didn’t complain: they were being well paid for it by a government desperate to get the country back on track. With money in people’s pockets, suddenly there was a feel-good factor around again.
Britain had been through a lot, but in many ways the people were happier than they had been before. Many remembered their grandparents talking about the spirit of the Blitz. Now they were discovering for themselves the camaraderie that came with pulling together in the face of adversity. Against all odds, Britain began to prosper again as the decade drew to a close. It remained a very different world to the one it had been ten years earlier, but the general consensus was that this was a good thing.
What none of the people knew was that, for some, it really was a different world. For one woman in particular, decisions made during that fateful winter led to two possible outcome
s – one in which she lived, and one in which she died.
Chapter Two
July 2040
Lauren Watson awoke with a start, feverish and sweaty from the recurring nightmare that had once again gripped her during the night.
She sat up, her black bob of hair falling into shape around her cute, rounded face. She was in her late-thirties now but didn’t look much different from the schoolgirl she had once been. Her body’s only concession to age was the few extra pounds she had acquired over the years.
She looked around the room, reassuring herself that everything was normal. The familiar, cluttered mess in which she lived quickly helped her return to a state of calm, but the memory of the dream still lingered.
Lauren was in her bedroom, above The Red Lion pub which she had run for the past ten years. It was an old building, standing on the town’s main street since the 17th century, and it showed. Her room was in serious need of redecoration. There were large cracks in the wall, which had appeared some years ago, possibly as a result of damage caused by the freezing weather a decade earlier.
The once white paint was yellowing with age and there were cobwebs in the corners. Her clothes were strewn all over the floor and the small window facing down to the street below was filthy on both sides. It left the room in a permanent state of gloom, even when it was sunny outside. Tidiness and cleanliness had never been Lauren’s strong points.
Climbing out of bed, she made her way through to the small kitchen in search of coffee and toast, tripping over a pair of shoes she had left by the bedroom door on her way.
The Red Lion was the only pub remaining in a town that had once had dozens. Pubs up and down the country had closed in their droves in the first three decades of the century. A smoking ban, cheap beer from supermarkets, and ever-increasing advances in home entertainment had rendered pubs redundant for all but the most hardened drinkers.