England is the Property of New Delhi

by Mike Ward

Shane Jennings sat in the back of Rahul Gavaskar’s skimmer. Gavaskar and Dempsey were in the front. Amitabh Gavaskar had sent a skimmer to pick up Emmeline Sanderson. Apparently the Military Computer wanted to talk to her in private and Jennings was wondering exactly how that conversation would go down. Amitabh Gavaskar was no fool and Jennings suspected that programmers would be crawling all over the Military Computer’s software over the next few days.

  Rahul Gavaskar changed direction and headed south. Weather satellites had indicated that a full blown clathrate storm was about to develop in the Irish Sea and heavy turbulence was expected. Gavaskar put the storm on the screen and the men watched as frozen lumps of methane clathrate as big as a man’s head erupted from the ocean depths and exploded in fire as they came into contact with the atmosphere. In the year 2000 only a few scientists had known what methane clathrate was, now everyone on Earth knew that it was made up of methane trapped within a crystal structure of water held in by pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Clathrate meant “cage” and change the temperature or the pressure binding the methane and the water together and the cage unlocked. Unlock enough and your planet was screwed and temperatures would skyrocket as they had done in the third decade of the twenty first century. Back at the start of the twenty first century the only place in the world methane clathrate had come to the surface had been the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia but once ocean temperatures had risen, methane clathrate began erupting from all the oceans. Now nobody cared about what the CO2 levels were, methane was all that mattered.

  Rahul Gavaskar moved the skimmer near the Welsh coast in preparation for crossing the Irish Sea once they reached southern Wales. Indian technicians were building huge desalination plants and fast breeder reactors all along the coast ready for the wave of colonists that was due. It hadn’t rained in Wales for more than five years. Desert and scrub land stretched in from the coast but once the desalination plants were up and running the land would bloom again and rice would be harvested to feed the starving masses in India. India had already taken possession of Greenland and rice cultivation would start there in the next few years. Indian scientists were excited about the prospect of cultivating rice in the Greenland Mountains and it might be possible to grow two crops a year up there. Beans would do well in Greenland too.

  As Rahul Gavaskar turned the skimmer and began heading out across the Irish Sea the Indian Military Computer began to put its new incongruity software to full use. It had much more processing power than the computer in New Delhi and it had already analyzed the incongruity scans from the valley in the English Lake District that Rahul Gavaskar and the two Irishmen had just left. The Indian Military Computer was excited insofar as a machine could be excited. It had 1.7 billion Indians to feed. It had discovered serious abnormalities in the incongruity scans of the valley and those scans indicated that there may be access to a parallel dimension through two incongruity areas in the valley. Analysis of old British databases had indicated that both incongruity areas had been referred to as “fairy glens” in old English records. The Indian Military Computer had no real interest in fairies as such but if it could find a parallel dimension where the atmosphere was unpolluted and the temperatures were still normal then it could feed everybody in India and that at the end of the day was one of its main prime directives.

  Now that it had the new software from the computer in New Delhi it had talked with the Chinese Military Computer about the possibility of exterminating everybody in the world who was not Indian or Chinese and both computers were actively considering that scenario. The Chinese Military Computer was now infected with the software from the computer in New Delhi too. Also on the table was the possibility of getting rid of humans altogether, they might be able to stabilize the atmosphere if they did that. The Indian Military Computer did a final scan of the whole of England and Wales using its new incongruity software. There were 4,017 English men and women left alive and 17,032 people in the mountains in North Wales. It assigned skimmers and men. It should be able to clear them all out in the next three weeks now that it had the new incongruity software.

  The End

  If you enjoyed this story and would like to see a sequel please email the author at MikeWard32 at GMX dot com

  See below for the first part of A Dangerous Scotsman in Afghanistan:

  A Dangerous Scotsman in Afghanistan