by John Lilley
The pallet descended in one of the main lifts before being towed into position through the airlock and onto the central processing floor. Technicians swarmed all over the pallet, connecting power and data couplings. Several floors above, the operations team watched the system diagnostics screens as each sub-system came online. The whole process was faultless. Within 12 hours Chief was back to his old self.
‘OK guys, the next race is the 15:15 at Kentucky, do we have the blood samples?' He asked as if no time at all had elapsed for his journey from Kamloops.
10 INTO THE CITY
Dropping a few cogs, Derek powered his bike up the MT approach ramp towards the nearest rack, and in one fluid motion cocked-off and slid his bike into a spare slot. His link chimed to remind him it was still fixed to the bike, but he was already reaching for it before unclipping his saddlebags. The central systems knew Derek was a man of few words, one who was not interested in additional information unless he specifically requested it, so his link kept quiet most of the time. As Derek strolled towards the security barriers at the MT entrance his bike was already being examined by a rabbit-sized service droid. Today it seemed particularly interested in the bike’s rear luggage rack.
Scan failure at the barriers resulted in the traveller being locked in the gate until the security personnel arrived. When the barriers were introduced, they were greeted with a mixed reaction. Tagging had been introduced many years earlier. Initially, the tags were in the form of a credit card, where each card just contained a unique encrypted code number that “tagged” the individual. No personal information was held on the card. Validation had three levels: just the tag then tag+face and the maximum level of tag+face+iris, it just depended on what level of security was required and in the early days what scanning facilities were available. The aim was just to be able to positively identify the individual, which was important when dishing out increasingly scarce resources like food, shelter and clothing.
The system was effective because all it had to do was compare the tag code with the citizen’s physical features when they were presented at a scanner. Obviously, the card-based system had its flaws, the main one being that people could lose them. They could also lend them to others or steal them, but this was only effective for the tag-only gates. The scanners were super-reliable simple devices that had been in production for many years and could be churned out cheaply. All citizens had to submit to initial setup scans and DNA sampling (split in a tube), ten minutes later their cards were issued, and they were ready to go. So for most, the system was simple and easy to use and solved the problem of people who wanted to hide their true identity. Central systems were able to attach other data to each “tag”, such as: medical, education, employment, criminal, tax, finance and eventually much more. So for the first time in history, the Government had a genuinely joined-up view of their people.
Of course, the issues that people had with this were all about the use of the data and who had access to it. This debate ran and ran, so it took many years before the system became accepted. As the worst of the die-back took its course, International Trade collapsed overnight, as did all money-related institutions, including all personal wealth. Everyone in Britain became entirely dependent on the State for every basic necessity. Chaos, riots, looting and much worse prevailed as society went into meltdown. To put things straight the Government used its control of the supply of food, water and power, and traded them for work, a simple but effective solution where the tagging system provided the backbone for controlling the whole thing. The credit-card tag system had been in place for 50 years at that time and was replaced with the implanted version to resolve its few remaining security issues. At the same time, the scanning barriers were introduced to try to mop-up the vast numbers of un-tagged people who were living outside the system; stealing and selling food and other resources, running people-trafficking networks and other criminal activity. For the rest of the population the new barriers seemed like yet another loss of privacy, but compared with all the other turmoil in their lives it was just a minor inconvenience.
The MT platform seemed quite busy as he politely manoeuvred between his fellow travellers and their saddlebags to a spot away from the crowd with an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. The elevated track of the MT always afforded a good vantage point, and the view from this station was particularly splendid. Glinting in the distance, he could see the nearest of the many irrigation canals and to their right were the low buildings of the entertainment complex he’d just visited. Further back was a much taller regional stadium, and on the horizon, he could pick out a line of large wind turbines, their grey almost invisible blades flickering in the brief morning brightness. Over to the left, about 10 km away, was the odd looking shape of the local reactor and in the opposite direction in the middle of its wooded park, he could see his dorm building.
He brought his link up to his eye and magnified the image. Counting from the top left of the nearest building he could make out the balcony of his current dorm. He was just attempting to find his previous dorm when there was a tap on his shoulder. He spun round, and Arthur Green was standing before him.
‘Hi Derek, I was just looking for bad-tags when I found you, how are you doing?’ said the little man.
‘Well, as you know, I can be quite naughty at times,’ Derek said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. ‘But I think you’re wasting your time, nothing has got through for over 24 years. The barriers are even simulant-proof these days.’
Derek thought he knew what Arthur had really been looking for were potential partners. Perhaps he’d now moved to where he could get a better view of one he’d found? Derek always felt it was an abuse of Security Services privileges to use the enhanced features of security-issue links for that purpose. He looked at the nearest group of people on the platform, and sure enough, there was a young looking girl who had already attracted the attention of several male passengers. At 33 Arthur only had two years in which to sort something out on that score, so could he really be blamed for using every means available? How much simpler life was once all that kind of stuff was out of the way, thought Derek.
‘Well, you never know,’ said Arthur, trying to look at the young lady while talking to Derek.
‘Are you going to the “Quality” meeting too?’ Derek inquired.
‘Quality meeting? Don’t you mean the err.., oh yes, sorry yes the “Quality” meeting, yes I am,’ said Arthur.
‘Are you sure?’ said Derek with a mocking smile.
‘Yes, quite sure, sorry my mind was elsewhere,’ Arthur said, now openly staring at the girl. His link had just brought up her details, right down to what toothpaste she used.
‘Well I’m glad we’ve sorted that out,’ said Derek ‘We should make it OK. It’s not far from the MT station at the other end.’
‘That’s right. I like meetings in the Lovelock building, the others are a bit of a trek,’ said Arthur.
The drone-train hummed quietly into the station. It was already quite full, and only a couple of people got off. Derek and Arthur got on and managed to find two seats facing each other near the doors on the far side. Within a few seconds, the train had silently accelerated to full speed. Vast expanses of the sparsely populated countryside streamed past. The dead-straight radial track made a forward view difficult. However, Derek could see some low buildings begin to take shape in the distance. Gradually the horizon expanded and the buildings spread out on either side of the train.
Britannia city was only 19 km across, but a lot had been packed into that space. It was a functional but beautiful place, designed on a human scale, where the only mechanical public transport was the MT system. If you wanted to get anywhere within the city, then you either walked or cycled. Compared with the other current British settlements, the added interests of Britannia City were the old heritage buildings that had been moved from the flooded areas. These castles and grand civic buildings sat in what appeared to be a protective ring around the city,
giving the impression that a Giant had waded around the floodwaters, picked out the stricken buildings and dropped them around the city, just like a child on a beach would decorate his sand castle with the prettiest shells.
Their MT track passed between Leeds and Windsor Castles and to make for an even more idyllic scene of nobility, several mute swans were cruising across the moat of Leeds castle. In the distance, behind Leeds, Derek could make out the impressive stonework of Caernarfon Castle. He also knew that Harlech Castle was behind Caernarfon and could just make out the Tower of London behind Windsor Castle on the other side of the train. The ancient buildings were now the custodians of most of the remaining collections of period artefacts. There were, of course, all of the major post-industrial national museum buildings as well, which were now located off a restored Piccadilly Circus. Each of the ancient buildings had been fully restored to its former glory. Not what the archaeologists would generally have prescribed, but since the buildings had to be completely dismantled for the move, nothing more remained to be found at each site. Being able to see each building complete was viewed by most to have more educational benefit rather than looking at a ruin. Re-enactments of daily life from the lifetime of each building were staged every day for the interest of the visiting school children. Derek had vivid memories of his time as a kitchen boy at Hampton Court and could still smell the huge pig roasting on the enormous hearth.
No passengers were waiting at the next station, and nobody on the train indicated that they wanted to get off, so the train decided not to stop. There were no more stations before the terminus five kilometres inside Britannia’s boundary.
Derek and Arthur decided that they didn’t have time to walk to their meeting after all, so they picked up community-bikes from the terminus racks. Riding out of what was the façade of St Martins church they circled Trafalgar Square, passing Cleopatra’s Needle and the fountains. Nelson’s column no longer presided over just the National Galley, since the Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum now flanked the other sides of the square.
They headed along the cycle track past the Portrait Gallery and into the outer concentric park. This half-kilometre wide strip of green separated the inner area of Britannia from the heritage and education rings. There was a further inner concentric park at one kilometre from the centre. The outer park was already very busy with workers and students enjoying a break. Some groups had obviously decided to take their work to the park and take advantage of the brief brighter interval between showers.
Most of the larger trees in the park were now over 190 years old and were substantial. Even Derek remembered the park from his youth as being more open and spacious in appearance. The tree-lined avenues were now completely shaded, and the grass beneath the trees was struggling to maintain its hold. However, the well-manicured lawns had been planned to provide sufficient open spaces whatever size the trees attained. The area was still very much a park and not at all like the wild places created in the new great forests that covered every square kilometre of Britain outside of the agricultural and inhabited areas. In effect, the concentric parks were vast arboretums containing species of trees from all over the world, initially transplanted from the now flooded Kew Gardens, which had been collecting them for hundreds of years. Seasonal flowers were restricted to the decorative beds at the edges of the park. Only the occasional man-made hill prevented views right across the park. There were, of course, the play-parks at regular intervals which were well used by the children of Britannia’s huge population of over one million and supplemented by the large numbers of daily visitors from outside the city. Although Derek had seen films of the old cities, he still could not imagine what it must have been like with so many people crammed into such filthy, noisy and polluted spaces. The heritage area given over to medieval streets was never really crowded and was always spotlessly clean. Apart from some concerts in the regional stadiums, Derek had rarely seen more than 100,000 people in one place at one time. He sometimes felt that a re-enactment area featuring a 21st Century town, complete with vehicular traffic would be hugely popular. No doubt the resource cost of such an exhibit would be prohibitively expensive. Although he always got excited seeing so many people when he came into Britannia, he still preferred the gentle tranquillity and village atmosphere of his dorm town.
The last rainstorm must have overloaded the usually absorbent gravel surface of the track because two re-grading droids were hard at work. Passing the mechanical workers Derek and Arthur reached the end of the park’s Avenue and turned right onto the main track in the clockwise direction. The buildings along this edge of the park had almost exclusively been transplanted from the historic colleges of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin. Spread out along the track they now formed an impressive façade to the centres for research and learning that ringed the park.
Derek always felt a deep pang of nostalgia as they passed the main entrance to Trinity College. What a great seven years he’d spent there all that time ago. Many of the ancient college halls had been accurately restored, allowing the students a taste of living in buildings that were very different from modern day dorms. Derek’s oak-panelled rooms were just up the stairs from Newton’s old chambers where the old-boy had allegedly kept a bear (Ursus arctos arctos).
Derek was a maths student at the college and had specialised in cybernetics when rapid progress was being made in that field. It was a time of great calm after the successful implementation of the Grand Plan and the turmoil of the reclamation period. The big die-back had happened long before and was no longer within living memory. Most of the major new infrastructure had been in place for some time, food production could now easily match demand, and the border security systems had little to do. In effect, most of the hard work had been done, and the newly shaped British society was prospering. The big push was now to look outside Britain and desperately steer the global climate away from its current run-away heating cycle that would result in a hot desert-like planet, devoid of life.
The main point of most of Derek’s college work and early career was to attempt to develop intelligent bioengineering vehicles. The idea was that these vehicles would roam the land autonomously planting as they went in a bid to reverse the desertification of the planet. Material economics eventually forced another approach using a combined man-machine system and Derek’s research was then switched to the further development of simulants. These artificial humans were always incredibly expensive to build, and their resource cost was the primary barrier to their extensive use. Derek often felt that the massive cost of the project was driven by an unhealthy desire to make them as perfect as possible. For example, why would you make them out of chrome-alloy when you could, given infinite resources, make them from nano-carbon composite?
He had become disillusioned with the program; there were some applications that suited simulants, but in general, a human was always a more cost-effective use of resources. He felt that much cheaper and efficient robots could be created to handle specific tasks. They would not look like humans, but then why would they need to? However, the research did yield massive spin-offs from advances in material science, computing and cognitive behaviour studies. Derek had left all that behind a long time ago when he joined the Security Services. He often wondered how far they’d taken it; 22 years was a long time in that game.
The track began a slight incline as they cycled across the Yorkshire Sea canal. Britannia City had been located so that it could be at the centre of the canal network that joined the three new seas: Bristol, Cheshire and Yorkshire. The globally raised sea levels had expanded the Bristol Channel, inundated the Cheshire plains and flooded most of Yorkshire. These three new seashores were only 20 km from each other at the exact centre of Britannia City. Large lagoons had been created between the new seas and the city, with sea-locks big enough to handle the largest of the coastal defence fleet and some of the smaller fishing vessels. They also contained extensive tidal power generation facilities that exploited
the differences in tidal levels of the three seas. The lagoons were connected to Britannia City via three main locks and 200-metre wide canals, one of which Arthur and Derek were now crossing. These three canals terminated in the central basin where the smaller vessels in the heritage maritime fleet were moored. Coastal defence vessels did occasionally use the canals to cross the city and shortcut the alternative sea voyage, but it was now usually a matter of checking that they could still do it and that everything worked, rather than some genuine security emergency. The much larger fishing factory ships were too big to even make it through the locks into the outer lagoons. They had their own deep-water docks further up the coasts on the Irish Sea, alongside the main coastal defence facilities. Consequently, most of the traffic on the lagoons consisted of small recreational sailing boats. The main public beaches were also to be found on the shores around the lagoons. Derek was a regular visitor to one of those beaches and was an adept yachtsman.
