‘You also had to change gear with one hand, you had to time the change with the position of your feet, you had to use the clutch to disengage the…’ I could tell two things at this point. The first and most obvious was that they didn’t have a clue what I was trying to explain, the second was a slightly chilling realisation that the technology I had once thought of as sophisticated and complex was monstrously crude and basic.
By now, the remainder of the crowd had joined us, they were all gathered close by listening to every word I said. I repeated my description of cars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, explaining the rudiments of road travel as I’d known it, the expense of owning a car and how it depreciated and how much effort was put into making them safer and how people loved them despite all the risks and damage they caused.
They seemed to be lapping it up as Professor Etheridge moved in beside me. ‘Thank you Gavin, they are clearly enjoying everything you say.’
‘Pleased to help,’ I said.
‘He must see the next installation, Professor,’ said the young male student who was standing near me, ‘we really want to hear his explanation.’
So saying, the young man gently touched my arm and guided me to the opposite side of the walkway. Directly in front of me was a large amorphous yellow shape tucked in beside the oil rig. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it previously, as it was fairly enormous but also bizarrely nondescript. It wasn’t a tent, more like a thick cloud of gas or mist. Hanging above what I took to be the entrance was what looked a bit like a film prop, a hazard sign in some kind of alien-looking sign language. I recognised one of the symbols instantly, radiation, a fairly well known symbol. Then I registered some of the other symbols, a skull icon, a burn icon and a particularly graphic animated icon of a human being vomiting and collapsing in a constantly repeating loop.
I walked through the entrance followed by the students and was frightened by what I saw. Endless rows of steel barrels all covered with similar symbols. This was Tardis time, although the exterior of this installation was fairly big, say about the size of a large warehouse unit on an out-of-town industrial estate, the interior appeared to be a hundred times bigger. It was decked out like a cave and, I suddenly noticed, it was as quiet as a cave. The general noise level in the museum was fairly high, thousands of people walking about talking to each other, the sounds of some of the displays all built up to a verifiable cacophony, however, inside this installation all that sound was removed.
The Professor moved up beside me. ‘This is real,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean this actual image you are seeing now, but the feed is live, it is coming from the deep caverns outside Trondheim where we have had to store this dangerous material from your era.’
‘You mean this is nuclear waste?’
‘Yes,’ said the Professor, ‘many thousands of tons of it. It has been a huge problem for us and will continue to be for many thousands of years. It is strange to think that the nuclear age, or the end of the dark times as we often refer to it, has left us with such a monstrous legacy.’
‘But you could have used this fuel, why didn’t you develop technology to use it?’
The Professor turned to her students. ‘Did you hear that question, does anyone have an answer?’
A very tall Japanese student smiled at me. ‘We didn’t need to use it, when the cost analysis was done it was clearly ridiculous, we admire the ingenuity and bravery of the people who tried to make this technology work.’ She looked around for reassurance on this statement, she got it from many of her fellow students who nodded and looked at me as if to reassure me. ‘However, other much safer and much, much cheaper systems of energy harvesting had been developed and the notion of burning very dangerous material became nothing other than ridiculous.’ I noticed the student glance at the Professor who discreetly nodded back. The student continued; ‘It was seen as traditionally male technology, it was seen as being from the dark times and we only have to stand in this exhibit to see the very negative consequences of such actions. If you stand quietly you can hear one of the problems we still have.’
Everyone went quiet, I could hear nothing at first except the ringing in my ears. As the peace descended I picked up a faint repetitive sound, dripping water. The classic echoing drip, drip, drip of water in a cave. I glanced around at the students.
‘The dripping sound?’
‘Yes, the dripping sound,’ said the Professor. ‘This is a problem. The nuclear waste as you call it is buried thousands of meters beneath the earth’s surface sealed off with millions of tons of reinforced concrete. It is meant to be completely sealed-off from everything and yet water has found its way into the containment area. We know for certain that if water can find its way in, it can find its way out. We know this material has to be stored for many thousands of years, we know the contamination could still spread. The surrounding thousand square kilometres is now completely sealed off and is cause for inter-city concern. The very concept of waste is such a symbolic representation of the dark times for us. We have to educate our children on what the term “waste” meant to the people of your era. We only understand waste now in terms of time, we know people can waste time and we strongly discourage it, but to waste material wealth, to waste finite resources appears to us like a form of madness.’
‘Did you really think this technology was admirable?’ asked another female student, her question wasn’t exactly accusatory, it seemed genuine but coming from such a different mindset I found it hard not to be a little offended.
‘Well, there were certainly great hopes for it when I left,’ I said. ‘I mean we understood that there were long-term problems with the, um, the waste, but we thought technology could overcome that and we could produce electricity using all the weapons’ grade materials we had left over from previous generations. It wasn’t my specialised area although I did work in related industries. Uranium extraction in Australia, I mean that was a huge business, a huge task, you know, to dig up the uranium ore to feed the, to feed the power stations around the world.’
As I was trying to explain, I became increasingly aware of the blank stares of utter disbelief my explanation was resulting in. They really thought I was mad to say such things. ‘Um, but I’m learning now,’ I said, feeling that back tracking was probably the best option, ‘that this technology probably didn’t work out and we left behind a bit of a mess.’
The Professor gave me a forgiving smile. It didn’t really make me feel any better but at least I felt she didn’t hate me. I spent some time looking down the long lines of dimly lit corridors of deadly material. I couldn’t see the far end, it literally disappeared. On a small table to one side was a screen, really the first screen I had seen in the museum, indeed in the whole time I’d been in London. As I looked down at it I could hear the easily recognisable clicking of a Geiger counter, I knew then that this was also a live feed coming from the radioactive tomb buried under Trondheim. Above the meter reading on the screen which showed dangerously high levels of radiation in the space, there was a countdown figure. It was at 49,782 years; that was how long it would be before the material in the storage vault would be safe. I couldn’t help it, I laughed sardonically. Yes, it was utterly insane. I stood looking at this installation for a long time, I had always put my faith in nuclear technology, I firmly believed it was the answer to many of the problems I knew we were facing in the twenty-first century and I was not alone. Pretty much all the scientists and engineers I knew would have agreed with me. Using this massive stockpile of plutonium was surely far preferable to relentlessly burning hydrocarbons. This train of thought sent me down a long road into a deep sense of misery and possibly some guilt. I was very much part of the problem on this one. I wanted to argue with the students, I wanted to point out that they had in fact ‘wasted’ an opportunity, if they had continued to develop the technology they could have used this toxic nightmare as fuel, it seeme
d such a waste to me.
When I turned I was surprised to see I was alone, I glanced about, I was alone in a silent cave with millions of tons of highly radioactive waste, it wasn’t a nice place to be.
I left the installation and rejoined the students and Professor Etheridge in the noisy museum. ‘Wow, that is fairly sobering,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is the one exhibition in this section which is a little chilling,’ agreed the Professor. We started to move along the crowded walkway.
‘But what I want to know,’ I said, ‘is what happened after I left?’
The Professor gestured toward a large doorway. ‘We arrived in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century entrance, the next room is the start of the twenty-first century, about the time you left your world.’
We headed toward the door.
12
Museum of our Future
‘Does it make you feel sad?’ asked a young man who walked beside me as we passed through the enormous door between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
‘What, seeing the whole world I knew as museum relics? No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But then I’ve never had the verbal capa-city to explain my feelings.’
‘You must be able to feel things though,’ said the young lad.
‘Yes, I probably can feel things but they don’t make much sense.’
Behind the unusually diminutive figure of the young man, I recognised an image on the wall. It was a giant, blown-up picture of the Queen and Tony Blair awkwardly holding hands in the ‘Millennium Dome’, as it was then known, in Greenwich on New Year’s Eve, 2000. My body flooded with feelings, more than I knew what to do with. A longing for Beth, for home, for familiarity and a world I had confidence in.
‘Okay, that picture makes me have feelings,’ I said.
‘Who are those people? Did you know them?’ asked the young student.
‘I didn’t know them personally, the old lady, she was the Queen, sort of like a Mayor but of the whole country, and the man beside her, he was the Prime Minister, sort of like a Mayor too.’
The young man didn’t ask any more questions, he clearly wasn’t interested in who these people were and moved on with the rest of the crowd of students. I stared at the iconic image for a while, studying the faces of the Queen and Tony Blair, so familiar but now just a dusty footnote in the human story. They seemed, and probably indeed felt, as if they were important at the time, and yet a mere two hundred years later, even a highly educated student had little idea who they really were and even less interest in finding out. Of course, what this really brought home to me is that I should have been an even lesser footnote in history, just in some list at the back. Long gone and forgotten and yet here I was, standing alive and looking back through time at them.
We continued along the raised walkway, along the wall to one side were posters and photographic images I recognised; adverts for SKY television, the 2012 Olympics that the country was preparing for when I left, tube station signs, road signs, village name plates, countless examples of ephemera from my world neatly displayed behind glass.
‘Personally I prefer the Tudor period,’ said the small male student walking beside me. ‘That was a fascinating period and I love the architecture, the food they had to eat, the way they made cloth and the clothes they wore.’
‘Judd likes dressing up as a Tudor page boy,’ whispered one of his fellow students, an alarmingly tall Japanese girl standing behind him.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘Yeah, people back in my day liked dressing up too. Mostly as characters from science fiction movies and TV shows.’
This meant nothing judging by their blank stares. I let the subject drop, but I stared at Judd as he wandered along looking at the objects in the glass cases. It wasn’t hard to believe. Judd as a Tudor pageboy, I could just picture him in doublet and hose.
The crowd in front of us thinned out and I glanced up into an even bigger space, the sheer scale of it took my breath away. I had entered a structure so vast the opposite end was far enough away to be slightly obscured by the internal atmosphere. It was big enough to cover a small town. The roof was so high up I couldn’t quite make out the design, certainly elements of a geodesic structure, many thousands of triangles a little like the enclosed courtyard on the British Museum of old, just ten thousand times bigger.
‘Heaven above!’ I said. I smiled as I looked at the students. ‘I just said that so I could avoid saying something rude.’
‘What is something rude?’ asked the petite female leader of the students.
‘Well, I said “heavens above” to stop myself saying “fuck my old boots”, which would be a more vulgar expression from my era.’
‘Did men have sex with shoes?’ asked Judd, the doublet and hose boy.
‘I’m sure some did,’ I said with a grin, ‘but I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally, it was just an odd expression. You could also say “fuck me” and not want to have sex with anyone, or “Jesus fucking Christ” and not mean to be offensive to a religious figure.’ I stood there grinning. I wasn’t getting a lot of grins back. ‘I admit now, standing here with you lot it, all does sound a bit weird.’
I turned back and looked into the space we had entered. To call it a room, or even a hall, is ridiculous, it actually had clouds floating about in the upper reaches. To give some idea of scale, I would guess a couple of kilometres long, at least five hundred metres high and maybe a kilometre wide with no supporting pillars. How anyone could build a roof with the span of a suspension bridge was beyond me.
This vast arena was teeming with people, thousands milled around its spacious, multi-layered exhibits. The walkway we were on had a kind of ramp gently sloping down to the ground floor. I was guided that way by the flow of people we were among.
Something caught my eye, a logo I was familiar with, the Android logo was on a dusty illuminated sign to my right, I then saw that behind that was a Google logo.
‘Is that still going?’ I asked.
‘What?’ asked the bright young woman student.
‘Google, is it still going, is it still a company?’
She shook her head as if I was mad. ‘Do you remember it?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it was one of the largest, wealthiest companies the world had ever known.’
‘I’ve read about Google,’ said a young woman I hadn’t spoken too before. ‘They were a kind of library weren’t they?’
I felt my eyebrows rise automatically. ‘Yes, I suppose you could call them that, I suppose we called them a digital information search company.’
‘A digital information search company,’ she repeated, making it obvious she was hearing about something so obscure and distant that the only equivalence to me would be a manual printing press used by Caxton.
‘Was it a good digital information search company?’
‘Well, it was very useful,’ I said, ‘very popular.’
We reached the ground floor and I turned to look at the Google display. Glass boxes that appeared to float above the floor displayed a laptop, a chrome book I think, a few variants of Android phones and an iPhone 5.
‘Ahh, that one shouldn’t be in there,’ I said, pointing to the iPhone. ‘That was made by a rival manufacturer called Apple.’
‘Apple? Like the fruit?’ asked the young woman.
‘You’ve not heard of Apple? Apple Mac. MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, iPads?’
She shook her head.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Never mind, they made a few computers and phones back in my day. They were sort of fairly successful, like, unbelievably successful.’
My comments drew no discernible interest, so I stared at the collection of electronics in the case; all of them looked insignificant, grey and very, very old. The glass on the iPhone had clearly gone a bi
t manky, it was a kind of matt green colour. All that innovation and excitement, the feeling that these things were world-changing tech, now so dated and useless other than as museum exhibits.
I followed the small group who were in turn following the Professor. I glanced up for yet another heart-stopping moment. Directly in front of us was the Shard, it did look fairly massive as we were standing on ground level looking up at it, however, the roof of the building was just above its highest point.
‘That is uncanny,’ I said, ‘I remember seeing that being built.’ This comment caused a bit of amazement among the little troupe, they stood looking at me and then at the Shard, then shaking their heads in amazement.
Around the base of the Shard were a large number of exhibits, a civilian HumVee next to a Chevrolet Volt, a Range Rover Sport and a Nissan Leaf. Exhibited next to this odd collection were many different styles of motorbikes and bicycles and hanging above them all a Robinson R22 helicopter and an Airbus a380.
No, I’m not getting it wrong, I know my planes, a full sized Airbus A380 was somehow suspended above our heads, no thick wires were visible, it just seemed to float there.
Further along the wide walkway were a series of funny looking little pod cars.
‘Wow, when are these from?’ I said slowly moving toward the exhibit.
‘Those are early Urbee units,’ said Judd, the young man who liked the Tudor period.
‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said. ‘After my time obviously.’
I got to the railing in front of the plinth displaying the machines. They suddenly looked a little wonky and archaic, even I could understand the construction methods used to produce them, the pressed panels, the crude mechanics of the doors, they looked dusty and worn out and yet they dated from a period of history long after my departure.
A series of diagrams and a description appeared in front of me making me momentarily close my eyes and rub them with the back of my hands. Alarmingly the words were still there even though my eyes were shut.
News from the Squares Page 14
