Above them, only not as high up and using a rather ugly font, I think it was Tahoma, the words ‘forever oppressed by the male gaze’ were hovering. The women weren’t chanting or shouting, they were just looking at the crowd with emotionless faces. Okay, there was some emotion in their expressions. That of judgemental anger I suppose, disgust maybe. I could now see this was a street riot 2211 style. The men around me were making more fuss than they possibly might just to show how much they disliked the Weaver women’s philosophy. They were rubbing it in, I suppose and this made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be a target for these angry women, the whole thing was ridiculous.
I slowly made my way up the wide steps to Pete’s front door and was hugged and lifted off my feet by the human backhoe digger that was Pete Branson.
‘Welcome home, Gavin my friend,’ he said when he finally let me go. He lifted the huge bag of furniture off my shoulder and stood to one side to allow me into the house.
There was something immediately reassuringly familiar about number eight Carson Square, it reminded me of my student digs at Leeds University when I was studying engineering there. It was the chaotic mess, the piles of components, half-built machines, tatty furniture, sheets of material leaning up against the walls and a pervasive smell of burnt food.
I stood in the front room and my spirits dropped a little. It was full of eager looking young men. I had left the Institution thinking I would get some space to myself, thinking I would be left alone, but now, in the scruffy dump that was to be my home was yet another crowd of annoyingly eager well-wishers.
They didn’t speak, they didn’t jump up and hug me or slap my back heartily, they just sat looking at me.
‘So, Gavin Meckler, we have a plan,’ said Pete. ‘And I think you’re going to like it.’
36
Weather
Forecasting weather in 2011 had certainly moved on from some grass-stalk-chewing peasant standing on a hill looking at clouds and knowing when the Hawthorne should start to blossom.
However, in London 2211, weather was a hundred per cent predictable for the coming ten days, down to the most minute fluctuations in temperature and even the shapes, heights and density of clouds.
I learned this on my first full day at number eight Carson Square, from a young man called Whitchitt. He had studied meteorology at primary school and it clearly held a fascination for him. He had specialised in the subject before he had children. He told me that when his children were older he hoped to go back to studying it and maybe get work in some research area.
He explained how global temperatures had increased by eight degrees since 2011 and how this had affected sea levels, the fact that the earth had only one polar ice cap in the Antarctic and that well-established agricultural communities had been thriving on the coasts of Greenland for over eighty years.
He unrolled a sheet of material on the large table in the kitchen of number eight. I found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying as the whole house seemed to be a hive of activity. True, most of the occupants were women but they were very different to the women I’d met at the Institute. They were younger and seemed to be talking very loudly about who was at what party and who did or didn’t have sex.
Sitting at the table in the kitchen that morning was not a relaxing experience. For a start, I felt old; the noisy banter, laughs and screams of excitement were very distracting and as a new face on the scene I received rather more attention than I desired. However, at this point I kept my head down and tried to concentrate on what Whitchitt was telling me.
‘Next Thursday morning, 7:08a.m. for approximately seven minutes the same cloud anomaly you arrived through is going to be generated again. This is down to solar activity predictions, the projected power draw at that time and the ambient temperature and prevailing wind.’
He looked up at me. I nodded, I understood what he was saying and I certainly wanted to witness this bizarre event but beyond that it didn’t mean much.
‘The same cloud event that brought you here is being repeated,’ he said, this time emphasising the word ‘same’.
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘Hey, Gavin, there’s a party tonight on the other side of the Square!’ shouted a rather scarily crazed-looking woman on the far side of the table. ’At the Erotic Museum, you’ve been to the Erotic Museum right? You know about it don’t you, the Erotic Museum?’
This woman’s repeated use of the term Erotic Museum caused much raucous laughter from the other women in the room. I noticed Whitchitt making a big effort to ignore them.
‘It’s going to be marathon mentalist, there’s no way we can get in, it’s only for poshos, but you’re famous, they’d let you in. We could be your special bodyguard!’
‘Not really my thing,’ I said, smiling weakly.
‘But you’re a hero, you’re famous, everyone wants to fuck you, I mean meet you,’ said the woman. Again this clearly intentional slip of the tongue caused another gale of laughing and cackling from her sisters.
‘Still not really my thing,’ I said. I’d never experienced anything quite like this interaction before, it was almost as if these women were a bunch of football hooligans, a bit pissed on a Saturday afternoon and they suddenly had the attention of a young woman. They were behaving like idiots. I’m sure individually they’d be perfectly charming, but in a big group like this they were positively threatening.
‘Oooh, we’re not good enough for you are we?’ said the woman, getting to her feet and looking rather aggressive. ‘Mr big-hero, I-saved-all-the-men-from-the-fucking-Weaver-bitches.’
‘Ignore her, she’s kurva blazen,’ said Whitchitt under his breath. I immediately understood the term to be Czech street slang for ‘fucking crazy’.
The woman who’d invited me to the marathon mentalist party leant right across the table and grabbed Whitchitt’s face in her impressively large hand. ‘You sulking because you’re not pozvany?’ she said. I knew this meant ‘invited’ but I was getting concerned for Whitchitt’s well-being. I was considering physical intervention when Pete entered the kitchen looking like he’d just got out of bed, which of course he had. The whole atmosphere reminded me of student life, the chaos of freedom after years living with your parents, except this crowd didn’t seem young enough, certainly not student age as I would have understood it.
‘Please, Wendy,’ said Pete to the woman. I may already have known her name was Wendy but hearing Pete say Wendy was a surprise. She didn’t look like a Wendy, she looked like a mad woman. Which, I was soon to learn, she was. Interestingly Wendy’s rather violent grip of Whitchitt’s face instantly relaxed and she stroked his cheek quite tenderly.
‘Sorry, Whitchitt, I’m a total bastard, ignore me,’ she said and slid back across the table and sat quietly.
‘I’m sorry I was rude, Wendy, ignore me more,’ said Whitchitt, and from then on they ignored each other. Baffling.
‘Has Whitchitt told you about the cloud in Franklin Square on Thursday morning?’ said Pete as he sat down next to me and started eating a mango. No question, a bowl of fruit on a table was a common sight everywhere I’d been in 2211. It just seemed the natural thing to eat.
‘He has, it’s fascinating. Can we go and see it?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, we’ll see it okay,’ said Pete with a big grin. Pete’s grin was big enough for me to get my shoe into, sideways. ‘I got Whitchitt to check because he really knows about the wetter.’
I blinked a couple of times, not fully understanding what Pete meant. Did they called weather wetter because of rain, or did only Pete call it that because he was a bit messed up in the head? All these possibilities raced through my thoughts until I suddenly knew it was simply German for weather.
Pete grinned at me and we sat in silence for a moment. The noise level in the room start
ed to rise again as some other women arrived, there was a lot of screaming, shouting and gesticulating going on.
‘While they’re making all this noise, I’ll tell you what we plan to do,’ said Pete, leaning close to my ear. ‘All this noise means our signals should go unnoticed, if you don’t want to do the plan, just say and I’ll never mention it again.’
‘Depends what it is you’re planning,’ I said, speaking directly into Pete’s oversized ear.
‘Oh, I think you’ll like it drone man. I think you’ll like it very much.’
37
Fly Away Home
It was a ridiculous plan, in any other circumstances I wouldn’t want anything to do with it, but the feeling I had in London 2211 was always as follows; I have nothing to lose, nothing to live for and most importantly nothing to do. So the chance of getting caught as I followed the small group into the museum in the dead of night and doing something profoundly wrong held less terror than I would normally have felt.
I’m absurdly law abiding, I hadn’t even considered exactly how law abiding until that night. I’ve never murdered anyone, raped anyone, cheated on my tax return, I’ve never had a speeding ticket, never been interviewed by the police and never taken anything that wasn’t mine.
Now I was hiding inside the Shard building with fourteen men, wearing skin-tight black body suits with a very uncomfortable black band of some unknown material wrapped tightly around my left shin.
We had gone to the Museum of Human History in the mid-afternoon. I travelled with Pete, the rest of the group arrived in small groups or pairs. We viewed the exhibits along with the crowds which, unfortunately for us were a little less numerous than on my first visit. At a pre-arranged time we entered the front door of the Shard building which contained exhibits about the history of corporations from the turn of the nineteenth century until 2070.
Behind one of the large exhibit stands was a doorway, by the time Pete and I arrived it had been opened so quite how that was accomplished I never knew. We knew the door was there, we waited, looking as interested as we could at a description of the demise of corporate governance in late 2050, then Pete tapped my arm and we quickly moved around exhibit and slipped through the door.
The interior of the rest of the building was clearly not quite the same as when it had originally been constructed at the start of the twenty-first century. The entire building was hollow, held in place by a mesh of organically grown concrete branches emanating from a central pillar.
We walked though this labyrinth of strangely shaped stonework until Pete spotted a man called Vull. I’d met Vull briefly at number eight, he was even taller than Pete and originally, I would guess, of South Eastern European extraction. He looked like a giant Serb, big thick eyebrows and almost black eyes, a huge nose and a small mouth to which he held his finger as we approached and gestured that we should get down behind the bizarre outcrop at the far end of the space.
It’s hard to describe the interior of this building. I’d never been inside when it first opened in London although I had met one of the architectural engineers who worked on it. The building wasn’t complete when I left Enstone airfield so I have no idea what was originally there. As I squatted next to Pete, Vull and a small gang of other young men I stared up through the curling branches of solid, nanobotically shaped concrete above my head. Whatever the interior of the shard was like in 2012, it wasn’t like this. I tried to picture the many floors, steel trusses, lift shafts, service shafts, wiring systems and air conditioning, all the old paraphernalia of old-fashioned buildings that would once have been so proudly installed.
We waited a long time in that little hideaway. I became thirsty after about an hour and took a sip out of the fluid pack I had in my belt. It was very tasty fruit juice which contained something that really gave you a kick in the pants.
‘Don’t waste that,’ said Pete. ‘You’ll need it later, here, have a suck on my viz.’
I remained motionless as I waited to understand what viz was. It took enough time for the other men to be amused. It was water, the Hungarian word for water, I suddenly knew and then realised that Pete had been using odd terms all the time and I’d known what they were without hesitation. However, due to the kidonge blocker strapped around my left shin there was a delay of quite a few seconds before the information made itself available to me.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and accepted the oddly pink-coloured tube coming from Pete’s sleeve. My mouth filled with cold water and I gulped away which again caused some mirth in the hushed assembly.
‘That looks sikilmis bizarre,’ said Vull. Again a slight delay until the translation arrived. Fucking. Sikilmis was Azerbaijani for fucking. The image of me sucking Pete’s pink tube looked fucking bizarre, I couldn’t disagree with that.
After another long silence during which time I could tell the museum outside the Shard was getting darker, Vull motioned for us to gather around.
‘Okay, we have about an hour at best, the authorities will be aware that there’s an anomaly in numbers, a discrepancy between the entry and exit figure.’ I had the impression this was being explained for my benefit. ‘The only advantage we should have is the trans-bands and the heat suits. Everybody has their bands on, yeah?’
One by one people showed the various limbs their kidonges were located in. We had discovered this the night before when another man, I believe his name was Kevin although I only met him very briefly, used a small scanning device to locate where our particular kidonges were lodged. Mine was discovered in my left shin bone hence the rather uncomfortable band around my leg. A lot of the men had their kidonges in their fingers and merely wore a kind of black bandage around the digit in question. I learned that fingers or toes are the most common location for people who are fed their kidonge when they are babies.
The black bandages were transmitters, they didn’t block the signal, that was illegal and could result in long periods in talking therapy which, I was amused to note, none of the men in this small company was keen to embark on. The bandages sent the kidonge signal to a remote location, in my case number eight, Carson Square. If anyone ever checked in future, it would appear that ‘on the night in question’ I was sleeping in the house. Not that, theoretically at least, there was any need for me to be concerned one way of the other. I was, however, concerned for the others.
While we were in the museum, the authorities, and I still had no idea who they might be, but the authorities would not be able to locate us. The reason we struggled as quietly as we could into our one-piece black body suits was to eliminate our heat signal from any sensors there might be in the building.
I heard a small beep which I assumed came from a device someone was carrying.
‘We climb,’ said Vull. He stood up to his fairly impressive height, I’d guess around two and a half meters tall at the very least and moved silently to the central nanobotically grown concrete trunk of the support tree that had been grown inside the shard.
I’m a pilot, I don’t get vertigo. At least, that’s the theory. I started to climb up the small inset footholes that I assume had been grown into the original Shard support structure so for the first fifty meters or so the climb was relatively easy. The oddly organic-looking concrete structure initially formed a gentle slope but before long it became truly vertical. The footholes and handgrips were secure and plentiful; anyone who’d ever done any rock climbing would find it easy. I’d never done any rock climbing and my heart was pounding like a bass drum in a Led Zeppelin drum solo.
Only once did I make the fatal error of looking down, I could see the ten or so black-clad figures climbing up below me but the angles and terrifying distance to the ground made my head spin. I pushed my head against the inert mass of the concrete tree and tried to regain my composure.
‘You’re okay,’ said Pete who was right behind me. ‘I’ll catch you if you ucm
aq.’
I was too stressed out to receive a translation but it was fairly obvious what he meant. If there was ever a human being who could catch a full-grown man as he fell off a nanobotically-grown concrete support structure inside a twenty-first-century office tower, it was Pete.
I concentrated on making sure I always had three contact points as Vull had instructed me, and climbed for what felt like hours. As both my arms and legs were shaking with exertion I heard a deep voice above me say softly, ‘I’ve got you.’
I felt myself lifted up as Vull, who looked like a fairly strong bloke, took my entire weight with one hand gripping the webbing safety harness I was wearing and hauled me onto a wide flat area very near the top of the building. I could understand where we were by the narrow structure above my head. I was literally standing in the pointy bit of this extraordinary building.
‘Thanks,’ I whispered to Vull, I couldn’t see his face as with all of us, it was covered in heat restraining material. We all looked like weird ‘Black Theatre of Prague’ mime artists crossed with extreme mountaineers.
I sat down with my back against a massive outcrop of concrete and waited until normal breathing returned. I had to wait a while and in that time the entire group assembled around me. Annoyingly they all seemed fairly relaxed and happy as they clambered up over the edge of the concrete platform.
Pete then clambered up the concrete plinth I was leaning against and reached above his head before very slowly and quietly removing a metal panel from the structure of the original building. Through that you could see a spar of the massive roof that covered the museum so far below.
News from the Squares Page 34
