The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  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 outcomes – 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.

  This pub had survived largely because of its excellent restaurant, run by former landlady, Debbie Kent. She and her husband were long gone now. They had left for Cyprus just before the Black Winter, leaving Lauren in temporary charge. It was a position she had never relinquished.

  After the horrors of that winter, during which Lauren had nearly lost her life, she had eventually returned to live in the pub, even though it remained closed for almost a year afterwards. She simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. Her mother was dead and she had long ago lost contact with her father.

  When the pub did eventually reopen, she was pleasantly surprised by the amount of trade it did. People in the community had a renewed need to bond together after all that had happened, and the pub was the perfect place to do it.

  With the country’s financial systems in disarray, Lauren took over the running of the place on a largely cash basis. This was something quite quaint by the standards of an era in which contactless payments had become the norm. In the aftermath of the crisis, people had once again found a fondness for cash. It seemed safer and more real in a world where so much had become uncertain.

  From Debbie and Richard Kent, she had heard nothing. After a while, she had just assumed they must be dead. No one had ever questioned her right to be there or come to claim ownership of the lease. So she had just carried on as before, acting as if she owned the place, even though she didn’t have a scrap of documentation to support that claim.

  She used her considerable charms to blag a local brewery into giving her credit, until she had enough cash to be self-sufficient, and never looked back.

  Her newfound popularity and local status bestowed on her with an award from the honours system also gave her an air of authenticity. Her OBE was awarded for the many lives she had saved running a refuge at an abandoned Army camp during the Black Winter.

  It was a pretty decent life now, apart from the nightmares. They all stemmed back to those dark winter days, in particular the terrifying events of Halloween 2029. That was the day when she had first been taken to the camp. It was being run by her nemesis since schooldays, the misogynistic, racist and all-round nasty piece of work, Daniel Fisher.

  His men had captured her while she was foraging for food in an abandoned supermarket and forced her to go back to the base against her will. On arrival, she had been frogmarched in to see Dan in his office. Then she was left alone in his clutches, as he tried to force himself on her in revenge for years of spurning his advances.

  Then something seriously strange had happened, something she still couldn’t adequately explain to this day.

  Threatened with a gun, and with Dan attempting to rape her, the situation had been pretty desperate. Then another man had entered the room and intervened, pushing Dan out of the way. Lauren, temporarily freed, had grabbed the gun in panic and in her tormented state had turned it upon Dan and fired.

  It was only then that she got a proper look at the face of her rescuer. He looked exactly like Dan, only older, and was clearly horrified at seeing the younger Dan shot at point-blank range.

  As if that wasn’t weird enough, she then thought she caught a glimpse of her ex-boyfriend, Josh, looking in through the window of the hut. It was only a split-second glimpse, but she remembered that he, too, looked much older. Turning back she saw the older Dan who had come to her salvation vanish before her eyes. When she looked back to the window, the image of Josh was gone, too.

  This whole turn of events had been so quick, a matter of a few seconds, and so traumatic, she was unsure how much of it had really happened the way she thought she remembered it. She knew that the mind could play strange tricks on itself in times of extreme stress and had become convinced over the years that she had hallucinated much of it.

  Perhaps it was all some sort of defence mechanism to divert her attention away from the fact that she had killed a man, even one as odious and deserving of it as Dan.

  And now it was her sleeping, subconscious mind that was playing tricks on her. Over and over in her dreams, the events of that fateful day played again and again but with one crucial difference. In the dream there was always a different outcome.

  In her sleeping version of events, there was no mysterious Dan look-alike coming to her aid or anyone at the window. In this reality, she was destined to find no salvation. Dan attacked her with the same result every time. She always fell, hitting her head and killing herself in the fall. Even though she always knew it was coming, she remained powerless within the dreamland to prevent it.

  Sometimes the dream went further and she could picture her body, lying cold and lifeless in the woods, the blood that had seeped from her fractured skull quickly freezing on the snowy ground.

  For years she had remained traumatised by this, so much so that she had kept it to herself, not even confiding in Kaylee, her closest friend. By avoiding thinking about it in her waking hours and getting on with life, she had hoped that the dreams would eventually fade, but if anything the opposite was happening. The nightmares were growing stronger and becoming more frequent now that she had reached the point where she felt she was going to have to talk to someone. It was affecting her sleep so badly that she had recently lost a relationship because of it.

  After years of drifting in and out of relationships with mostly men, and occasionally women, she had met a girl she really liked a few months before. Amber was young and pretty, with gorgeous red hair that fitted her name, something Lauren had always found desirable in both sexes.

  Amber had come into the pub for the evening with her friends, and when Lauren had started flirting with her, the girl had flirted back. When Lauren had asked her if she was a natural ginger, the cheeky, freckled girl had suggestively replied, “Well, there’s only one way you’re going to find out.”

  Lauren instinctively felt a connection, and from that moment onwards it was a foregone conclusion she would be taking Amber upstairs at the end of the night. Running a pub had been good for Lauren’s sex life. She didn’t need to go out to find partners, they came to her. Being in charge of the pub gave her a certain appeal, in addition to her popularity as a local heroine. She could pretty much have whoever she wanted, and had certainly taken advantage over the years.

  Some people had labelled her a slapper, particularly when she fell out with certain customers. This inevitably happened from time to time, when people had to be removed from the pub for their behaviour, calling her all sorts on their forced ejection. But none of their comments fazed Lauren. She was just a young, single woman enjoying her body, and prided herself that she had never cheated on a partner during the occasional spells when
she was actually in a relationship.

  With Amber, what had started as a one-night stand developed into something more when her new flame simply didn’t go home the next day. When Lauren got up to the smell of cooking bacon and found Amber in the kitchen making breakfast in just her bra and panties, she knew she was on to a good thing.

  There was quite an age gap between them. Amber was only twenty-two, some fifteen years younger than Lauren, but it didn’t bother either of them. For a few months they were blissfully happy, but then Lauren’s night terrors got worse. Her endless nightmares and screaming during the night began to unsettle the younger woman.

  In addition, Lauren’s poor sleep quality and resultant irritability made her highly volatile during the day. She began to take it out on Amber, pushing away the young girl who had grown to idolise her. Eventually, and inevitably, they split up. She hadn’t seen Amber since the day she left, three months before, and there had been no communication between them either.

  Now Lauren was alone again, with no one to hold at night and reassure her that everything was going to be OK. As she sat alone in the kitchen where Amber had once made her fry-ups, surrounded by the previous day’s washing up, she munched on a piece of toast and reflected on the situation. There was no getting away from it. With no signs that the dreams were going away anytime soon, she just couldn’t keep it to herself any longer.

  Her lifelong friends were meeting up that evening for a meal. The Time Bubble Team, as they liked to call themselves, had an important matter to discuss. This would be as good a time as any to seek their support. It had been ages since she had seen some of them, and perhaps they could help her find some answers.

  Her ex-boyfriend, Josh, in particular might be able to help. He had theories about more or less everything and hopefully that would include dreams. She could also mention seeing his face at the window. Perhaps that was her mind’s way of suggesting speaking to him for help. His wife probably wouldn’t like it, but Lauren couldn’t help that. What went on between Lauren and Josh was almost twenty years ago, and Alice needed to get over it.