The Last Day

  Three years before the Stop, the internet had slowly shut down. The servers around the world were no longer maintained; the undersea cables ground to a sludgy halt. Then mobile phones had stopped working. Televisions had flickered and frozen. Mankind was being rapidly catapulted back through all the advances of the previous century. Diseases had resurfaced too: smallpox, freshly thawed from the Siberian permafrost, and others less baroque but no less fatal.

  The satellite network ringing the Earth had collapsed amid the chaos: another totemic achievement of mankind abandoned, superseded by the need to feed a population. Some had smashed into each other, reduced to thousands of lethal shards of debris. Perhaps a few were still in their old orbits, useless hunks of metal these days, passing overhead a dozen times a day, frying and freezing alternately.

  There was no prospect of escape: the technologists who had predicted fleeing the Earth for more habitable zones had been wrong to a man. There was no time to do anything but mothball the International Space Station, no secret fund to strike out for a new planet as this one collapsed.

  Around the edges of the continental plates, the planet’s fragile skin had ruptured in response to this insult from the heavens. Earthquakes shook and re-shook the planet as it slowed. Fissures and weals broke out across the Earth’s face; volcanic eruptions darkened the skies across thousands of miles. The world was swept with gales across its surface as the air currents wrapping the planet collapsed. Gravity had stayed functioning, despite some people’s fears: the planet was still the same mass, still exerted gravitational force. But the final years of slowing had been torment.

  The last night had lasted six months in Britain: half an old year of madness, and mayhem, and near-starvation in the dark. And then, agonizingly slowly, the sun had crawled back into the sky as the planet cruised to a stop, the boundaries of day and night locked forever.

  The dawning of the last day, they’d called it. The year was 2029.

  Now, thirty years on, here the planet hung in space, making one lazy revolution for each orbit around the sun. Thanks to the tilt of its axis, there was a slight variation in its exact position, so a slender ring of borderlands varied between total darkness and a fractional glimpse of the light.

  Even so, for the vast majority of the world, the situation was fixed. Enjoying the constant light of the sun: Europe, half of Russia, much of Africa, the Middle East, the eastern edge of North America and the top of South America. The center of that zone: meltingly hot, full of ash and the remains of cities. On the very edge, in the cool area bisecting the Indian subcontinent, Eurasia, and the Americas: sunlight so weak no human life could survive. Between the two, a slim band where one could still raise a crop, still pretend one lived in a country.

  And on the other side: darkness.

  SIX

  She’d only been in a helicopter twice before—once visiting her father in Scotland, and once traveling to a scientific summit in Copenhagen. She had argued against it as wasteful that time, but she’d been overruled. It had been considered important to show the Scandis and the Russians that Britain could still get around by helicopter if necessary.

  Inside, she faced the two of them. Warwick was looking out over the sea with apparent interest. The man, Blake, had fallen asleep almost immediately, his grayish skin puckered where his headphones dug into it.

  The water passed beneath them. By the rig it had been darker, lying in thick, churning ridges. Here it was choppier, bluer, lighter. As they flew, the sun’s altitude was changing fraction by fraction—imperceptible now, but by the time they arrived, it would be noticeably higher. The only way to experience a proper dawn or a sunset these days would be to travel Coldside to Warmside in a jet. But the days of jets were long gone.

  Aged seventeen, Hopper had thought she remembered real sunsets. Later, she had realized those memories were of nothing more than watching them on film. Or she was misremembering those of her very earliest years. Toward the end of the Slow, the sunsets had been languorous and otherworldly, breathtakingly beautiful. The last one had taken a month.

  Then, of course, had come the collapse, and a few years after that, the turbulent Reconstitution. And the Earth had rolled around the sun in its new orbit for just over thirty years.

  This fortress built by Nature for herself . . . The phrase came to her unbidden. Against infection and the hand of war.

  That bloody speech. She—her whole class—had been compelled to learn it. It had been painted in the school hall as a mural, the unicorn and lion flanking it miscolored, the curly script rendering it near illegible. And yet, after prayers each week, they had read it en masse. Even now she could see the light streaming through the windows at the end of the hall, the headmistress conducting them like an orchestra. There were others flanking it—Henry V on the English, or Measure for Measure on death—but the Richard II had been supreme.

  They never learned the final lines of the speech. Part of her had been unsurprised when she eventually looked it up. This sceptered isle, she discovered, had made a shameful conquest of itself. The teachers had declined to teach them that.

  And now, ahead of them, there it was. Britain, one of the world’s last hopes, the great slaver nation; warm and stagnant in the sun’s constant light. “The luck of the British,” they’d called it. On the Warmside, far enough in to raise crops but far enough out to still be habitable. The Goldilocks Zone. Not like those poor bastards in southern Europe. “Locust fuckers,” they had called the southern Europeans, back when there were still enough of them to insult. And here, the Highlands suddenly a new agricultural powerhouse. The sheer dumb luck of it.

  They would miss Ireland, Warwick had explained before takeoff, and would pass over the mouth of the River Severn instead. Ireland was very successful these days, she had added, with what Hopper considered unwarranted pride.

  One thing they hadn’t missed, could not miss, was the beginning of the TDZ.

  The Tidal Defense Zone was the ring of coastline around the country, two miles out from shore. Some of it was afloat; the vast majority was not. Even here, just a hundred meters off the coast, Hopper saw the occasional tip of white fracturing the surface of the sea. Below the water, heaps of metal lurked—the ships of the last century, scuttled to drag down any that approached today. Britain had locked itself in while the rest of the world fell apart.

  Bristol’s coastal defenses were by no means the most impressive part of the ring of jetsam imprisoning the country—safeguarding it, as Davenport and his ministers would say, from foreign invasion. The real achievement was the longest chain of the TDZ, south of the mainland: the Channel Barrier. The great asset of the British, the great crime, perpetrated in the name of security.

  The English Channel—slightly shrunken these days, but still nineteen miles wide at its narrowest—was studded along almost its whole southern length with teeth of submerged scrap. Thirty years ago, in the year of the Stop, the government had begun sinking any ships they could acquire, starting in the shallowest waters. Around those, mines had been planted, concrete poured, huge floating defenses and platforms set up: anything to make the crossing impossible for deep-draft ships.

  The navy had sunk the container ships first. They were longer, and there were thousands of them. They had been easy to garner. The people who had populated those ships would now be either dead or in the Breadbasket, unless they were among the few brought to the mainland as possessing Special Skills.

  The sinkings had not been comprehensive: not until twenty-four years ago, at the time of the second collapse, the Hotzone collapse, when Davenport had finished the job he had started six years before. At that second phase—after he had taken office—the initial sinkings had grown and grown, had become a huge midden of rust, stretching the length of the Channel. The only crossings surviving today were those left for the navy, and those for the huge grain ferries from the Breadbasket and the Fishing Fleet.


  Hopper thought of the most recent sinkings, the topmost layers of the vast pile of rotten metal clogging the gates to the rest of the world, and remembered how many had been sunk with their crews and passengers still aboard. And her stomach turned at the reminder of how she had learned that fact.

  Here, outside the Severn, were three old warships still barely afloat, interceptors once intended to scoop up the rare boats from South America or South Africa that had made it through the TDZ and transport their desperate passengers to the Breadbasket. And here, inside the rusted fangs under the water, was the government’s first investment, the huge antiflood defenses, once gleaming, now green and furred, abandoned for decades. The water was lower these days. The concrete fortifications showed their foundations like an elderly mouthful of teeth, the gums receding and decayed, part of a face no longer bothering to conceal its decline.

  Beyond these last defenses lay Bristol. It looked washed out in the sunshine, the elegant buildings by the former shoreline crumbling and dowdy, their decay visible even from this height. The streets looked busier than she recalled, though, and she thought there were new buildings too. Perhaps things really were improving.

  The flood damage was now a distant memory, at any rate. The SS Great Britain still sat at anchor in its original spot. The areas flooded at the time of the Stop had been cleared, and ten thousand homes built on the new plain; brick too, a step up from canvas or corrugated iron. The brick factories in the Midlands were building the Britain of tomorrow. Hopper shook her head. Half the words in her head these days were from some propaganda report.

  Bath was visible a few miles away, the thin railway line running between the two cities like a bracelet linking two jewels. She’d been there on holiday with David before they married, and she remembered with a pang how boyishly he had enthused about its buildings. It was still largely intact—the beneficiary of a rare City Preservation Order—still the same rich honey color, its rooftops darker, the spires still poking blindly into the sky. Some miles south of there were the beginnings of the American Zone. Hopper kept looking out, hungry for more.

  A voice crackled in her ear, making her jump. “Look any different?” Opposite her, Warwick was watching her, smiling. Without opening his eyes, the man, Blake, raised his hand and flicked a switch on his headphones, presumably muting them both, before pushing himself further into his seat and folding his arms.

  Hopper felt an irrational irritation at the question, at Warwick’s unwitting intrusion into a private memory. “I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve seen it from the air.”

  Warwick shrugged. “I thought you might have noticed. As a scientist, I mean. The soil around the city has improved hugely in the last few years. It’s a real success story.”

  Hopper nodded, unsure what she was supposed to do with this information.

  Warwick spoke again. “Progress, Doctor. Progress every year, on land and at sea.” She gazed out at it, looking maternal. So that was it. Warwick must be a true believer in the whole Davenport project.

  Bristol and Bath were behind them now. The land was beautiful from up here; a patchwork of browns, greens, yellows, the occasional river threading its way across the land back in the direction they’d come from. Warwick started reading some paperwork, and her colleague slept on. Half a century ago, they might have been bored commuters on a train. Maybe this was a normal day for them.

  Below them now was a huge expanse of concrete, studded at regular intervals with shapes Hopper recognized only vaguely as planes. It wasn’t much of a waste really. Planes were only useful if there was somewhere worth going, and right now, Britain was one of perhaps twenty habitable places left on the planet.

  Hopper closed her own eyes, and the face of Edward Thorne appeared to her: coolly observant, intelligent, and sorrowful, writing his letter to her over and over. Other faces arrived: her brother, her mother, David. The green lawns at school, and the barbed wire marking the edge of the grounds.

  She must have slept. The next thing to disturb her was a burst of static in her ears, then the pilot’s voice: “Outskirts of London in ten minutes.”

  She opened her eyes. For a moment she was disoriented, staring at the thin wall of the helicopter without thoughts. Then her gaze shifted to the back of the pilot’s head, and the events of the morning returned: the slippery ladder back down to the Rig Rocket, the spiral amulet still in her pocket now, the heaped corpses on the boat.

  Warwick and her colleague were in conference, their heads almost touching over a paper. They were making occasional notes with a pencil and speaking—on a private channel, she guessed, as she could hear nothing they were saying. Beneath them the landscape was a mess of greens and browns.

  And then she looked ahead. As far as she could see on either side, the city stretched out. It was overwhelmingly big, the sclerotic heart of the new British Empire. London.

  From up here, at least, the outskirts had lost a little of the depressed quality she recalled from three years ago. The houses were still dilapidated, occasionally smeared with the telltale blackening of a fire. And the gardens were predominantly soil still, studded with buttons of green.

  And yet even here there were signs of improvement. New houses, brighter rooftops. A few of the gardens had lawns, even. Hopper felt a little bump of hope.

  London’s population was a third lower than before the Slow; it hadn’t been possible to support ten million with the first erratic harvests after the Stop. Then the Breadbasket had been set up in what remained of Europe, of course, and there had been more food. Perhaps it was true—perhaps the city was recovering. Below her, she saw a string of vehicles: enormous water tankers, making their way into town from the purification plants farther up the Thames.

  A flash of light from the ground caught her eye. As she looked for exactly where it had come from, there came another, a brief gleam that could have been a reflection from a mirror. She pressed the button at the side of her headset.

  “What are those lights down there?”

  Warwick looked down and pressed at her own headset.

  “Some suburbers enjoy loosing off fireworks at anyone flying overhead. Just bored kids, mostly. The odds of anyone hitting us from down there are negligible.” Blake, Hopper noted, had not looked up from his paper at the conversation.

  “Bored kids?”

  Warwick smiled. “Nobody’s managed to bring down a helicopter for several years, Dr. Hopper. I think we’ll get through all right.”

  Hopper looked at the pilot. He had not visibly reacted to the flashes, and stayed in his seat, occasionally adjusting the instruments before him. But she could see the tendons in his neck standing taut as they flew on.

  They were approaching the Roadblock now, the barrier between central London and the rest of the country. Viewed from above, it might almost not be there. The only thing that made it visible was the shadows cast by the buildings of the shantytown that had sprung up outside it.

  London had been designated the first of the key defense zones, soon after Davenport had taken over. And so: the Roadblock. A ragged line of soldiers at first, soon supplemented by rows of concrete blocks, mushrooming in erratic patterns to halt truck and car bombs. And then, eventually, proper brick huts, and extra concrete emplacements, and all the paranoid paraphernalia of a state in retreat from its own people. It was easy to get out these days; harder to get in.

  They were coming in fast, south of the river. She had lived around here for a year when she and David were going out, remembered the tiny stairwell, saw him curled up in her little armchair with a book. Battersea Power Station, its single remaining tower leaning at a crazy angle; and on the right, the Houses of Parliament, the high tidemark from the old floods visible even from the air.

  They were descending—toward Green Park, she guessed. She was right. They sank toward it across Westminster, and as the ground loomed up, Hopper felt a needle of
excitement in spite of this unsettling morning and the people who had forced it on her. London: the place she had come after university and built whatever life she could, and just as rapidly thrown it away.

  The helipad was visible now, two soldiers waving them down with paddles. Once they had landed, Blake heaved himself out of the seat, smoothing his greasy hair as he went. Warwick followed. Hopper moved last.

  It was always strange, walking on dry land after the rig. Hopper missed the slight instability as she stared out at the park, surprised at the lush green surrounding her. She looked at her watch: only three hours since she’d left her cell.

  London smelled of tar. She had forgotten that. The same pollution, she guessed, the same industrial works belching out poison as when she had left. The air was thick with it: a warm oiliness pervading the air, almost visible, a thick yellow blanket lying on the city. It made its way everywhere: into the pores, into the deepest recesses of the lungs, between clothing and skin, creeping thick and hot, industrial and intimate. After thirty seconds she felt suffused with it and waited for her nose to adjust. But London didn’t let you acclimatize: every time she moved, the tar reasserted itself.

  Thirty meters from the pad was a little hut; beyond that, a car park. Warwick spoke again. “Step this way, Dr. Hopper. A few little checks to go through.”

  “Worried about what I’m bringing with me?”

  Warwick smiled. “There’s no harm in safety, Doctor.”

  Inside the hut, Hopper’s name was taken by an elderly, mustachioed customs official in a uniform of faded blue, very worn at the collar and lapels.

  “Passport?”

  Her passport—a battered clump of papers bearing the right stamps and a few official seals—was matched with her records on an ancient desktop computer. Her bag was placed on the table and searched, and Hopper given a stare of impersonal but practiced disdain.