I nod.
“But,” he continues, “…once those tests are done, then I’ll give you a little piece of cheese as a reward, and let you out of your mouse cage to roam free as you see fit. Just don’t get eaten by any cats!”
He smiles at me.
“James, please, I know this is all very weird. Very strange. But first and foremost, I am your friend. I am here to help you. And to do my best to see that you get back to Sarah, whichever one you now choose to go to. I do, if possible, as a scientist, want to take advantage of the miracle that you have become and to try and learn something from you - I would certainly be a mad professor if I didn’t want to – but, and I want to make this clear, you are under NO obligation to do anything I request, and if you say no, there will be no armed response teams putting bags over your head and whisking you away in the night and dissecting you in an underground secret laboratory!”
I listen the Professor’s words. I can hear from the tone of his voice, and from his facial expressions that he is sincere. And I feel a little ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I exhale loudly, and lower my head into my hands, closing my eyes.
I stand up, and walk to the window, resting my hand against the windowpane.
“It’s just… ” I start to explain, but no explanation comes out.
“Don’t worry, James. I understand.”
A moment’s silence.
The Professor gives me some space, and pours himself some coffee from the pot on the table.
“You mentioned a View Portal? What’s that?”
“The video conferencing screen. Since the lock-in started no one can go to meet anyone else in person, but business carries on as much as possible. View Portal is one of the best video-conferencing technologies around. Everyone is using it. It’s very secure, high-definition, and …well… it’s excellent. You’ll see for yourself.”
“Can I use it to talk to Sarah and Kenneth?” I immediately ask, quickly seeing its potential.
“In theory, yes. It’s how families keep in touch. Almost everyone has the View Portal technology nowadays. All you need is a TV or monitor connected to the internet and access to the View Portal app. Follow me… and bring your coffee.”
The Professor stands up and walks through to the lounge. He picks up a TV remote control and points it to the large flat-screen TV attached to one of the walls. It quickly springs to life. The Professor drops the remote onto the sofa, and speaks directly to the TV.”
“Hello Rosa, please load the View Portal LT.”
“Who’s Rosa,” I ask.
“My personal assistant.”
I look around the room, and the Professor sees the confusion on my face then quickly clarifies what’s going on.
“No…she’s not human. It’s just an Artificial Intelligence software programme that runs on the TV. The TV’s more like a computer now. A personal communication system that can connect you to anything you want. I call her Rosa…”
“After your fiancée,” I add. “I understand.”
“Yes, Rosa keeps me company. And helps me remember…” He bites his lip, then smiles, and carries on. “Anyway, I’ve got to keep remembering that you’ve missed out on the past eight years. This is all new to you.”
The screen suddenly fills with graphics and the logo of the View Portal, and a female voice says she’s ready and asks who the Professor would like to call.
“Is the voice like Rosa’s too?” I ask, wondering how that could be possible.
“Yes, a bit. Not perfect, but good enough to help fool me sometimes when I’ve had a glass of whisky and I’m feeling lonely. I had an old tape of her speaking and singing in a choir performance in Prague, and I got a friend at the university to synthesise her voice based upon her recordings on the tape.”
He thinks for a moment, then asks Rosa to call Gavin.
“Gavin is a friend who lives near Fort William. We sometimes meet for a walk in the glens around here.”
For a few seconds I can hear ringing and then a person appears on the screen. I can see another room, an office, and someone is sitting at a desk, looking forward towards the camera.
“Gavin, hi, are you okay?”
“Yes, yes, you?”
“I just wanted to check you’re still on for meeting for our walk next week? And that you’re still well?”
They talk for a few moments, then the Professor hangs up.
“So, what do you think?” he turns to me and asks.
“It’s all a bit 1984. Screens on the wall. People watching you. Robots listening to you. Being watched every second of the day. Is it not all a bit intrusive?”
“You just switch it off.”
“That’s what the guy in 1984 thought he could do, But it turned out he was being watched anyway. They were spying on him constantly.”
“You think they’re spying on me now?”
“How do you know they’re not?”
The Professor purses his lips, and nods.
“The truth is, I don’t. I just assume they’re not. Anyway, why would someone want to spy into my house. I’m nothing special…” The Professor began to say, before I cut him off dead.
“Nothing special? A Nobel prize winner who is just discussing life, love and the universe with the first official time traveller in human history? I think you are ever so slightly underestimating yourself. Not to mention that you are just about to speak to the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom.”
I lean forward and stare at the top edge of the TV, examining what I quickly guess is a camera built into the TV itself.
“Based on what happened in 1984, if it can happen in a book, it can happen in real-life. You should at least get a little cover to put across the camera when you’re not using it, and maybe you should pull out the plug from the wall when you want to switch the TV off. At least that way, you can be sure that no one is listening in to you or watching you when you think the TV is switched off!”
“Are you not being a little paranoid, James my boy. This is after all, 2021, not 1984.”
“Exactly, it’s almost forty years later. If they can send a man to the moon…”
“Mars!” the Professor interrupts me.”
“…to Mars and back?” I carry on, and see the Professor nodding – indicating another great step for man, and a giant leap for mankind again that I missed – “Well, if they can do that, then the secret service, police or computer hackers will definitely have figured out a way by now how to take over your TV and spy on you, even if you think it’s turned off! Maybe your smart TV is an awful lot smarter than you think!”
“Who knows, my boy. You may be right. But I hope not. Just in case though, I’ll get one of those camera covers you mentioned. For now though, and until we talk with the Home Secretary, this will have to do,” says the Professor, taking out a handkerchief from his pocket, folding it in two, and lying it across the top of the TV and the camera.
“Now, let’s sit down and talk. There’s something I want to give you, and something you must do…”
Chapter Seventeen
Catching up.
.
We sit down on the sofas surrounding a large coffee table in front of the TV.
“So, James, how are you?” The Professor asks.
“Fine. I think…” I sense this conversation is going somewhere. That was just his opening question.
“Well, what’s your plan? Do you have one, yet?”
The Professor’s question catches me by surprise. It seems a little early for me to have a plan. The truth is, I haven’t got a clue, what I’m going to do. As the thought passes through my mind, it reminds me of a line from one of my favourite songs: Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen.
“As I thought, James. But don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to have one, yet.” He smiles. “But, since it’s possible you may be spending a bit of time in this world, I think you need to start getting up to speed on just what this new world is. So…,” the Professor stands up,
mentions that I should wait where I am, and walks out of the room. He returns a moment later carrying a big cardboard box, which he puts down on the table in front of me. “So, I spent some time last night going through all my old newspapers and magazines from my garage - I’ve become a bit of a hoarder – and I’ve pulled out a selection for you to read. And when you’re done, you should perhaps spend a day or two bingeing on news streams and Film channels on I-Vision.”
“What’s I-Vision?” I ask.
“Aha, a case in point. I know I called it a TV a few minutes ago, but that’s only because old habits die hard. Nowadays we normally call it the I-Vision box, where the ‘I’ stands for Internet. Programmes, films and music are now all streamed over the internet, and you watch or listen to them via I-Vision.”
“You’ll need to give me a lesson how,” I laugh, leaning forward and skimming through some of the papers and magazines in the box.
“Don’t get me wrong, James. It’s a pleasure having you here, and you should consider yourself my guest until you can get yourself on your own two feet again. But, unless you say differently, the plan is still to get you to make the Jump back to your world. Once we measure your new weight, and make some new tweaks that I’ve thought of, to my calculations then maybe we can calculate how long you’re going to be with us, this time around.”
“Yes… At the moment, that’s still the plan,” I reply, pulling out one of the papers which has the headline, ‘China invades Japan’, on it. My eye catches the date, 2018. I turn it round and show it to the Professor. “Did this really happen?”
“Oh, yes. It did. We came close to the brink of World War Three. Very close. But then the pandemic started, the Chinese soldiers started dying along with hundreds of thousands of Japanese. And the Chinese then pulled out, and went home. At first they thought Japan had used some sort of biological weapon on them, but then everyone started getting sick. Within a week, it was global. Their soldiers stayed in Nepal though. They didn’t go home. Unfortunately, they’re probably there for good now.”
“Nepal?”
“Yes, the Chinese and the Nepalese have clashed over Nepal for years. About three years ago they marched about two hundred thousand troops into the Himalayas, and no one could stop them. I think annexing Nepal was the first step in seeing what they could get away with. Japan would have been next, were it not for an enemy so small they can’t fight it!”
“The Virus?”
“Exactly. Just like the book War of the Worlds, by HG Wells. The Chinese and the Martians were both beaten by the same enemy.”
I shake my head.
“I think the sooner you get started on that box, the better, James. How about I make you some nice fresh coffee?”
I nod.
A few minutes later I am engrossed in an incredible history lesson, and much like the time I spent in Jane’s house learning for the first time about life in this parallel world, I am once again soon totally absorbed learning about all the things that have happened in the past eight years.
Now my past, just two days ago, it was all in the future.
I discover that we do, really, have a small colony on Mars. And a larger one on the moon, which acted as a stepping stone to the Red Planet.
I learn that much of the world is now electric, and that since California in America, one of the financial powerhouses of the world, was declared an uninhabitable zone in 2017 because of the forest fires which killed thousands of people and turned the state to charcoal, becoming Carbon Neutral has been an issue that all countries of the world have been pursuing in earnest, and out of fear for the future. In 2016, the newly elected President of the United States had successfully pushed all the nations of the world to sign up to a Climate Change Treaty, which, originally scheduled for Paris, had finally taken place in Rome. Since then, almost every newspaper had been full of doom and gloom about the damage that humans had done to the planet, and even though there was now almost universal accord that by 2025 most countries would be carbon neutral, there was a growing fear that it was too late.
I find it fascinating to read that in 2017, and as a result of the Rome Climate Change agreement, a consortium of the world’s top economies had been buying up vast tracts of land in Brazil, and investing heavily in the Brazilian economy. One of the ideas suggested in the Rome agreement was that over a ten year plan, the rain-forest would be replanted and protected, and within twenty years Brazil would be turned into a model economy built upon new self-sustaining energy resources, and producing goods for the rest of the planet using new automated machinery which was all carbon neutral. And the Amazon rain forest would be back on the road to recovery. Hopefully.
I also find it scary to discover that the pandemic may have been something that we brought upon ourselves, as a direct result of global warming. Although in all my reading I can’t find anything that manages to explain where the virus came from -it’s origin seems to be something of great debate – I do read an informative article that describes how the rising daily temperatures caused by our wanton use of fossil fuels has caused many animal species to learn to adapt to higher temperatures than they’ve ever experienced before. This has led to viruses circulating within their blood adapting to surviving at higher temperatures. For example, in bats, viruses in their blood can now survive at well over forty degrees Celsius. The problem is that when such a virus transfers to a human, the virus can survive in the person’s blood at temperatures over forty degrees. A normal response to an invading virus is for the human body to heat up, and get so hot that the virus dies…which is basically what a fever is. Unfortunately, the scientists predicted in the article I read, that in an attempt to kill the new viruses, which can easily live well above forty degrees, the human body heats up, and up, and when it gets to above forty-one degrees, the human dies, but the virus survives, at least for a while longer until the human rots away.
What was even more worrying, was that the scientists had been predicting that the more of the Amazon and other rain forests across the world were killed, the more likely it would be that some animal with evolved viruses in their blood would come to the edge of the remaining forest and into close contact with a human, and transfer a deadly contagion.
And now the Amazon rainforest was gone. And the world was in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
Was it coincidence?
The more I read, the more I was amazed. As expected, there were incredible advances which had been made in science and technology. For hour after hour I read news and studied adverts about new inventions and new discoveries. In the space of a few years, on the back of these new discoveries new trillion dollar companies had grown and become household names, and many of the old brands that I had become so familiar with in this world, were now gone.
But what amazed me most was how politics and the economies of the different countries had evolved. China was now the most powerful country in the world. Japan was no longer an independent economic powerhouse. The European Union was in disarray, having lost its mojo after France had left the organisation, with people saying it was only a matter of time before it fell apart and broke up.
Russia had collapsed, completely, and many of its citizens were starving. Almost everyone was expecting another form of Russian Revolution to take place sooner rather than later, but this time around, westernisation and democracy would be the driver. Putin’s communist revival had failed. The country needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, and after decades of austerity, the people had had enough. “Down with Communism, long live Capitalism!” was the modern mantra of the people.
Canada, surprisingly, was now one of powerhouses on the world economic stage. In 2013 they had adopted a five year plan to adopt new technology, go green, and build sustainable industries that did not destroy the environment. For the first few years the government had made extensive plans and invested billions, but by the fourth year, new industries were up and running, and countries fearing the rise of China had begun to be attracted to the gr
eener production capabilities of Canada. A second five-year plan swiftly followed, and now Canada was unstoppable. Their green energy was cheaper than any other nations, their manufacturing capacity was doubling every two years, and the cost of their goods and labour was going down and down. Profits were high. Canada was the place to be!
Britain, once the greatest nation on the planet, had seen mixed fortunes. There had been three different governments in the past eight years, with each successive Prime Minister stumbling from one crisis to another.
The present Prime Minister was Douglas Young, a liberal democrat who believed passionately in the EU, and was determined to plant more trees in the UK in the next two years than had been cut down in the last hundred. His slogan, ‘Plant a tree-a-day, to keep Climate Catastrophe at bay!” had proven highly effective, so much so that the Liberal Democrats had been renamed the “Tree Party.”
In general, until ‘The ’18’ virus (named after the year the pandemic started, but whose full name was written in one of the papers as SARS-COV-2 and was apparently a type of virus family known as a Coronavirus, so-called because early pictures of that family of RNA viruses reminded scientists of pictures of the solar corona) had started to wreck the economy, PM Douglas Young had been doing a brilliant job. Now the economy was in tatters and people were predicting a global depression worse than the one in the 1930s which led to the Second World War.
“Let’s go for a walk!” The Professor’s voice catches me by surprise. “There’s something I want to show you!”
Chapter Eighteen
Fortunes lost and found
.
We walk in silence for a few minutes, me trying to keep up with the Professor. There’s been a marked change in him since I last saw him. Eight years ago - I laugh internally at the thought, I’m still struggling to accept it - he was definitely an old man who struggled to keep up with me. Now, it’s just embarrassing.
Am I Dead? Page 11