‘I mean, do I need to pay you for your time or anything?’
‘Pay me? No, I just thought you might want to see your drone, I’ve been working on it.’
‘Have you?’ My interest was suddenly piqued and I ignored his incorrect description. ‘Oh blimey, well, yes, I’d like to see what you’ve done.’
I followed Pete down the corridor and the two flights of stairs, along another long corridor and into the reception hall.
‘We’re just going to see Gavin’s drone,’ said Pete to the man with the unrealistic skin. The man nodded and the huge sliding doors opened.
Walking along with Pete in my new shoes was much easier than trying to keep up with Ralph. Pete was tall but on a scale I was more used to and he didn’t walk quite as fast.
‘How far is your store room?’ I asked.
‘Not far, about ten minutes,’ said Pete who then turned into a building on the corner I had failed to notice when I walked past it with Ralph. I knew what it was. I didn’t understand how I knew, I just knew.
As we descended a wide flight of stairs, many people were coming up the other way. This time it seemed to be mainly women, their faces as serious as their dress code. None of them gave me a second look. It wasn’t as if I expected them to give me a second look, but clearly I didn’t stand out as I had done the first time I ventured out of the Institute.
At the foot of the stairs was a glass barrier, the crowd of people coming the other way put their hands on the doors as the approached, the doors then slid open at great speed. I followed Pete who put his hand on the door and passed through, I did the same, the door opened at the same time as I felt the very slight, but now familiar slump sensation in the belly.
I’d worked it out, when I paid for something there was a very subtle physiological reaction, at that point I hadn’t been paid so I didn’t know what would happen if I ever received a payment.
Once past the doors we were in a very wide corridor, there were stalls selling food and drink either side, all very brightly lit and colourful.
At the far end of the corridor was an array of glass doors that went on as far as I could see. It literally disappeared into a haze, thousands of people coming and going, some waiting by doors, some chatting with each other.
Pete stood by one of the hundreds of glass doors and put his hand on a circular motif etched into the glass. A moment later something white appeared the other side of the glass. It wasn’t like some kind of magic mirage, it was a solid object that moved so fast and stopped so suddenly that to my old world eyes it simply appeared out of nowhere.
The door we were standing by slid open silently and Pete moved inside the white object that had an adjacent door already open. It was full of seats, a semi-circle of seats around a central pole. I entered the space and sat down opposite Pete, as soon as I did a white, padded, curved bar emerged from the seat and moved around my waist as another bar appeared across my right shoulder and clicked itself securely into the lap bar. It was a very simple automatic seat belt, nicely padded and not in the least constricting.
At the same time the doors slid shut silently and immediately the thing we were in started to accelerate at sports car speed. There was no warning and very little noise associated with this rapid increase in momentum.
‘What the hell is this?’ I asked.
‘We’re just getting the car over to my store,’ said Pete. ‘We could have walked but Nkoyo suggested we take a car, she said you’d paid for it which is very nice, thank you. I don’t use them much, bit expensive for me. Rich chap like you could use them all the time.’
‘This is a car?’ I asked, as I peered out of the windows. We were on some kind of underground motorway, many other vehicles like the one we were in were zipping this way and that beside us, we seemed to have joined a very fast moving convoy that was constantly adapting, taking in more vehicles and loosing others that seemed to zoom off down side tunnels.
These transportation systems didn’t feel like tunnels, like long narrow tubes, this was a vast, wide network of roadways, it was well lit, I’m not sure if there was a ceiling but if there was it was above my field of view, it was just like travelling along an urban motorway at night, brightly lit with a dark sky above.
Just as suddenly as we’d joined this frantic chaos of movement we slowed, turned a corner at neck-aching speed and pulled to a stop with just bearable violence. The seat belts retracted and the doors immediately slid open and we were in another, equally busy space, many people walking about, some maybe waiting for one of these cars. As we left the roomy interior a family of three entered the same car, the doors closed and off it zoomed.
‘Come on then,’ said Pete who I then realised was waiting for me as I stared around.
‘That is amazing, does the system cover the whole city?’
‘Yep, although if you want to go to the far North, South, West or East you’d be better off on a train.’
‘Oh, you have trains?’
‘Yeah, what d’you think, we walk two hundred K?’
I followed Pete up another flight of stairs, no sign of anything resembling an escalator but then everyone I saw around me seemed very fit. People ran up the stairs and although I like to think of myself as in relatively good shape by the time I got to the top I was actively pretending not to be puffed out. I didn’t want people thinking I was out of condition because no one else seemed in the least bit stressed by the effort. Even an old lady I noticed seemed to be bounding up the stairs like an old goat and she had some kind of bag on her back.
We emerged into another open space; this one had enormous buildings dotted around its leafy centre, some many hundreds of meters in height.
‘Wow, London seems to be one very big city,’ I said.
‘Yeah, quite big,’ said Pete.
‘How many people live here?’ I asked as we crossed the open space that formed a neat junction between the four enormous squares around us.
‘In the whole city?’ asked Pete, I nodded. ‘I have no idea, around seventy million?’
‘Really? Seventy million people in one city? No, surely it’s not possible. How on earth can that work?’
‘We all chip in,’ was the only response I got to my question. I suddenly felt all the questions I’d thought about since I arrived in London were about to burst out. I had to use enormous self-control not to grab Pete’s arm and scream a torrent of enquiries. How did this incredible, crowded, overpowering city work? I knew I had to pace myself, for a start, there was so much to learn I feared I may have a mental breakdown if I received too much information but I felt compelled to start somewhere.
‘Pete, tell me about the power-field.’
‘Which one?’ said Pete without alarm.
‘The Singh power-field, the one I appeared over.’
‘It’s just a power-field; there’s loads of them.’
‘Yeah, okay, so there’s loads of them, but remember, I don’t know what a power-field is, I’ve never seen one before.’
‘Haven’t you?’ Pete slowed down for a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I thought you’d have had them, they’re really old.’
‘Not as old as me.’
‘Okay, so solar satellites thousands of kilometres up microwave power down, it’s laser locked so the grid buried in the power-field collects the power and distributes in through the network. It’s very simple.’
‘So there’s no physical link between the ground and the satellite?’
‘What?’ This time Pete seemed almost annoyed at my stupidity. ‘How can there be a physical link? Why would anyone want a physical link? It’s just a satellite, d’you know what a satellite is?’
‘Yes, we had them.’
‘Right, so it’s just a satellite that collects solar radiation and beams it to earth, they’re really old
.’
‘And do they make clouds?’
Again, I received a curt ‘What?’
‘I don’t mean do they make all the clouds, I know how clouds are formed, but do the power-fields, the satellites, the beams, the microwave beam things, do they produce unusual cloud formations.’
‘Yeah, every now and then.’
‘Right,’ I said, gratified that I had finally understood.
‘Okay, now one other thing, you mentioned Weavers to me, the day we met in the canteen.’
‘Yes, I remember, what about them?’ said Pete.
‘Well, can you explain them to me?’
‘How come you don’t know all about this, are you a bit thick or something?’
I glanced at Pete as we walked along, there was something in the way he said this quite rude thing about me that didn’t sound rude, it sounded like a question with no hidden subtext, he was just asking me if I was thick.
‘Maybe I am,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I would know about the Weavers, you know, I mean I just arrived from two hundred years ago, obviously I should understand everything.’
My sarcasm fell on deaf ears. I waited a moment, then Pete said:
‘The Weaver women don’t like us. They are mostly from Nairobi, Durban, New York, Riyadh or Hanoi.’
‘What, they don’t like Londoners? Why not?’
‘No, not Londoners, us, men, me and you, male people, boys, men.’
‘Oh, they don’t like men. I see, and why not?’
Pete stopped in his tracks and stared at me, he looked genuinely concerned. ‘You’ve got to work this out, you should know this. Have you talked to Doctor Markham or Nkoyo about it? There’s something wrong with you, maybe it’s your history brain, maybe it doesn’t work, you should get them to have a look at it, really.’ He shook his head and gave me a pat on the back, getting a friendly pat on the back from Pete was a bit like being nudged by a train.
I followed Pete down a shaded passage between two impressively lofty structures. Unlike rubbish-strewn alleys between buildings in American cop movies, this was very tidy and clean.
I don’t know why, but I ran my hands along the wall of the building near me; it looked so smooth I wanted to know what the material was. It felt warm to the touch, like wood, but it wasn’t wood, it was some incredibly smooth substance. Maybe I was doing this to resist the urge to ask more and more questions, after seeing his face when I’d asked a stupid question I decided Pete was not the right person to relentlessly pester.
‘This is my store, this is where I fix stuff,’ said Pete as he stood by what appeared to be some kind of large door you’d find on a factory or aircraft hangar. A young man emerged from a narrow opening. He was about my height and looked to be about fourteen years old. He immediately shook my hand and I felt a warm wave of well-being flow through my stomach, nothing as violent as a shudder, just a vague feeling of fullness, of health and I suppose, wealth.
‘Hey, welcome, Gavin, amazing to meet you. I’m Yuseff, are you ready?’
I stood motionless, I knew by this point that if someone I’d never met before asked me if I was ready, something very weird was about to happen.
‘We’ve got your Yuneec in here, has Pete explained?’
‘Gavin knows all about it,’ said Pete rather quickly.
‘I, um, I’m not sure…’ I said, I didn’t want to upset Pete, he was so bloody enormous no one in their right mind would want to upset him, but I was feeling increasingly confused.
The young man put his hand on my back and confidently guided me towards the door. It slid open a little more and I was greeted with a round of applause. Not from five or ten people, no, this was applause from a massive audience.
The door continued to open revealing the most extraordinary spectacle.
The Yuneec, well, many parts of the Yuneec were displayed on a kind of stage. Around three sides of this were steep seating banks in which sat hundreds of people. They were all clapping, hooting and waving as I was ushered forward.
The teenager who’d shown me in waved his hand at the audience and they slowly settled down.
‘Okay guys, this is Gavin Meckler, the man who flew the Yuneec e430 into a tree.’
A roar went up from the auditorium, it was from the timbre of this roar that I realised that the vast majority if not every member of this audience was male. The sound was very different to my press conference. It sounded like a crowd at a football match, deep and very loud.
To describe myself as a rabbit in headlights is to gloss over the whole experience. I was struck dumb and felt myself rapidly closing down. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be a spectacle for all these cheering people.
A number of other young men were standing around the Yuneec. They all looked very charming, like models in a Benetton advert, every race and body shape represented. They were surrounded by machinery, what could have been tool racks although I didn’t recognise any of the tools. I saw a kind of large trolley loaded with materials, long metallic struts, neatly mounted rolls of sheet material and several containers of small parts.
‘So, Gavin, what do you think?’ said the young man who’d guided me in. ‘We are all going to witness the re-build of your fabulous manually operated drone.’
This announcement was greeted with another cheer from the audience. I didn’t say anything as I was led toward the pile of bits that was once my beloved Yuneec.
Pete appeared beside me. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said slightly under his breath. ‘Normally it’s just me fixing stuff in here, but some friends asked if they could bring people along to watch.’
‘Guys,’ said the young man, he addressed the packed seats in the room while confidently standing in front of the wreckage. ‘I think we should all be a bit quieter, I don’t think Gavin was expecting this kind of event.’
He turned to me and gestured to one side. ‘Gavin, take a seat and we’ll let Pete and the lads continue.’
I saw two large sofa things placed to one side of the stage area, the confident young man led me over. I sat down but kept looking over my shoulder at the Yuneec behind me. I wanted to know what they were doing to it, not that they could bust it up much more. It was totally written off. I turned back to the young man when he spoke.
‘This has got to be fairly intense for you,’ he said, only then did I register that his voice was amplified.
‘It’s all a bit much,’ I said. My voice was also amplified but I suppose I was expecting it this time.
The response from the crowd was oddly re-assuring. It was the sound a father makes when he holds a young child who’s fallen over. It was a gentle sound, not the sarcastic ‘aww diddums’ I’d regularly heard from TV chat show audiences back in my day. This was a genuine expression of care, the men in the room felt genuinely sorry for me. They were actually expressing empathy, something Beth had constantly told me I was not very good at.
I glanced behind me again, the young men who’d been standing around the Yuneec started to get busy. Pete was clearly the lead figure in the procedure. He was using an unidentified small tool in the battered nose cone assembly. Even from this distance I could see that many changes had already taken place in the engine compartment.
‘Let me explain, Gavin,’ said the young man. I turned back to listen to him. ‘I run a number of maker schemes in London, we like to learn about engineering and making things, fixing things, stuff like that. These guys here,’ he gestured toward the audience, ‘are students and individuals who’re interested in machines and systems. Obviously when you crash-landed this little baby we were all fascinated. We don’t do winged flight any more, so we are not familiar with the systems used to achieve it. That’s why we’re here, we want to learn. Oh, I should also explain that there’s a couple of hundred mill watching this at home right now.’
‘It’s now seven hundred mill,’ said a voice from behind us.
‘Okay, seven hundred mill, there you go, Gavin, I think you can see there’s a lot of interest in what you’ve brought to us, and not just in London, I mean all over the world.’
I could feel my head shaking; I took a deep breath and tried to contain the feelings rattling around inside me. This was a ridiculous experience. What on earth was I meant to do? In all the time I’d been in Gardenia I’d never experienced anything like this. Of course Gardenia was disturbing, confusing and bizarre when I first arrived, but it was gentle and things happened slowly enough that I felt I had time to take things in.
Here in London it was just over the top, things happened before I could mentally prepare for them, people kept asking me if I was ready. How could I ever be ready for this? Around five hundred men had gathered in a large dark room to watch some kids and an overgrown weirdo rebuild a two-hundred-year-old aircraft while the man who’d flown it in through a tear in the fabric of space time was being interviewed by a teenager. How was I supposed to grok that?
I suddenly remembered my catch phrase, I hesitated, I worried it might sound a little cheesy but went ahead anyway. ‘I really am Gavin Meckler,’ I said. ‘I really was born in 1979. I really shouldn’t be here, but I am.’
Again the unusual sound of five hundred men expressing very gentle concern reached me across the large space.
‘I understand you want to know about me, or you want to know about my plane, I know you call it a drone but I call it a plane, an aeroplane. Anyway, I also know you can look that up. I’m sure, judging by the technology you have at your disposal, you have the ability to study history. Particularly from my period as this was the flowering of what we then called, “the digital revolution”.’
‘The digital revolution,’ repeated Yuseff. ‘That is spectacular.’
‘The thing is,’ I said, slowly feeling my confidence building. ‘I want to learn about your world, your public address systems, how you generate power and dispose of waste, how your doors work, I want to know about your financial and political systems. I want to know what you all do.’
News from the Squares Page 11
