by Jule Owen
The 3D printer has completed its run. Mathew tests the new amplifier and connects again in the living room, ready for Clara’s lesson the next day.
At nine o’clock, just as he’s finishing, he receives an alert from the social network Consort, a connection request. He hardly ever uses Consort. It’s a cross between a school playground and a human meat market, full of tribes, shallow relationships, and vapid content. He’d like to terminate his account but doing so is tantamount to dying online. And, bizarrely, the account is unofficially required for college and employment applications.
Requests come in from random people all the time, and he ignores most of them – they barely register with him – but Clara’s name catches his eye.
“Accept,” he says.
Clara is there online, waiting.
“Thanks,” she says. “I wasn’t sure you’d accept.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because of the way I spoke to you. I was rude.”
“Yes, you were.”
She pauses and then says, “Anyway, after you left, Gen and I chatted. So I wanted to apologise and to explain.”
“You don’t have to.” He’s wondering what Gen said, guessing she told Clara about his father and now she is sorry for him. He hopes not.
“I want to. Please let me.”
“Go ahead.” His voice comes out colder than he means it to.
“Not here,” she says. “Can I come and see you sometime, in your house?”
“Sure. Just come after your lesson. I’m stuck here, remember.”
Later, Mathew logs onto the Blackweb and searches for Mr Lestrange using MUUT, the Blackweb search engine. His search returns zero results.
I need help, he thinks.
9 Drowned London
DAY THREE: Wednesday, 24 November 2055, London
Most of the Thames bridges are closed. The tunnels are all flooded. There are only a few options for getting across the river, to reach Mathew’s school.
Nan Absolem has arranged for a car to come and collect him. It’s an Aegis car, like the one his Mother and Clara travel in. It comes with a guard, too. Mathew gingerly steps past him, as he gets into the back.
One dragon zips inside in front of him, but the guard shuts the door on the other. There is nothing stopping the dragon from getting into the car, but it believes it is left behind. Mathew opens the window slightly and the dragon squeezes in. The guard, sitting in the front, opens the glass panel separating them, glances over his shoulder, and says, “Alright?”
“Yes, fine,” Mathew says. “I was just testing the windows.”
“Right,” the guard says, sniffing as he turns back to face the road.
Mathew has the black fake-leather upholstered seats in the main body of the car to himself. Like all cars, this one is arranged inside like a mini-living room, with two two-seater sofas facing one another and a coffee table, which doubles as a holovision, in between.
The backs of the doors and windows are made from unbreakable glass and act as screens. Right now they surround Mathew with a forest scene – a lake, trees, and a blue sky – but they are connected to the Nexus and can display any web page, TV channel, or video. He changes the display so he can see the world outside, and the forest melts away to reveal houses, pavements, and the road. The view is only one way. Aegis assumes its customers want anonymity.
Most cars don’t have a front seat at all. The only reason the Aegis cars have seats in the front is because they come with armed guards. The security company found that its clients were unable to relax sitting in the back of a car next to a man with a machine gun balanced on his knees.
Normally, Mathew would get to school using public transport, but all the tubes and train lines are shut. This has happened before – the flood, the transport system being brought to a standstill – but when it did, he went to a school nearer his house and he walked.
They leave Pickervance Road. All the shops and cafes on the high street are shut. Some are boarded up against looters coming from the riverside and the makeshift camp in the park and on the common. One or two of the shops look like they’ve been looted. There’s an armed policeman walking to and fro along the pavement. He guards whatever remains of the stock and the robotic shop assistants. People rarely work in shops anymore. All the shops are owned by corporates and are fully automated.
Mathew’s mother had described the camp, but he found it impossible to imagine. They drive past it now, and he’s unprepared for what he sees.
Tents, tarpaulins, and makeshift shelters cover the whole of Blackheath. Litter blows across the patchwork of grass and mud remains of the ancient common, collecting in piles. People sit on the edge of the road looking shell-shocked; others stand around between the tents. There is a long queue at a pipe with a tap at the end attached to a wooden stake. People are waiting with buckets and old milk cartons, bowls, and containers of all kinds. There’s another long queue at a bank of Portaloos. A sign above one marquee says, “Food supplies,” but there’s nothing but a table and some empty boxes.
The flooding happened ten days ago. On the news the prime minister assured his interviewer that the government would provide food, shelter, and water to all the flood victims, and that they would be re-homed within a week. There would be no repeat of what happened during previous floods, when people were without shelter for months and there was rioting and even an outbreak of cholera.
The world rolls on like a film from behind the tinted glass screens of Mathew’s car. He has to tell himself, This is real; this could be me.
They turn and drive across the common, towards the park. There are people on the road. The car slows, and its on-board computer registers the obstacle and sounds a horn, driving forward all the time. Most of the people scatter. One man in a suit that’s crumpled like it’s been slept in for the last ten nights turns and kicks the car, swearing angrily. A policeman marches towards him. Mathew turns to the back window to see what happens next, but the car drives away down the hill, and the man and the policeman are gone.
They wind their way down to the river. The flood level is dropping, and people whose houses were swamped are clearing the mess as the water retreats from their homes. Mattresses are pulled over walls to dry. Piles of ruined household things lie around with detritus from the river – branches, leaves, sodden paper, fabric, cans, bottles, and sludge. The car pauses while people walk across the road carrying a table, and Mathew gazes straight into the eyes of an old woman sitting on the wall of her house. It’s as if she’s staring at him, and he has to remind himself that she wouldn’t be able to see through the tinted glass. She wears an expression of total despair. Mathew wants to open his door and help, but the car drives on.
Down one of the streets, next to some half-flooded factory buildings, there’s a makeshift ferry. Like Aegis, many entrepreneurial people are finding ways of benefitting from the disaster.
The car stops, and the guard does a quick check of the area, walking to the water’s edge to talk to the ferryman, before he comes back to open Mathew’s door.
“Go with that man,” he says, pointing. “You’ll be safe. The boat will take you to the Embankment. There’ll be another car waiting for you there.”
Mathew looks at the ferryman, a man in his twenties, small but muscled and heavily tattooed. He isn’t confident about going with this man and glances back uncertainly at his guard, now the most reassuring figure imaginable.
“We have a tracker on you,” the guard says. “We know where you are at all times. We’ll be waiting for you when you come back this afternoon.”
“The boat’s this way,” says the ferryman. Mathew has no choice but to follow.
A small number of people are waiting in a makeshift shelter by the water’s edge. They are “respectable” people in suits and clean clothes. Mathew finds himself thinking he will be safe with these people. The group is silent. They are as shocked and uncomfortable as he is. The stench from the river is overpower
ing, and many of them are holding their ties or t-shirts across their mouth and nose. When the riverside streets of London flooded, so did the sewers.
The group is waiting for Mathew.
At the water’s edge a boat, forty feet long and half as wide, sits low in the water. In the back stands a guard in black combats, a machine gun hanging from his arm casually, like a kit bag or a coat. The ferryman steadies a rickety wooden walkway leading onto the boat and helps the passengers on. On the deck an assortment of plastic and wooden chairs, crates and boxes serve as seats.
When they have all found somewhere to sit, a young boy, from the look of him the ferryman’s brother, or perhaps even his son, hands them all umbrellas, mostly old-fashioned black ones. “To keep the sun off,” the boy says. It’s a novel idea of service, Mathew thinks, opening his gratefully. It’s already hot. His umbrella has a broken spoke.
The ferryman starts the engine. The boy pulls in the wooden ramp, then runs to the front of the boat and jumps off onto dry land. He pushes the boat into the water until he is waist deep and then heaves himself up, head first, his legs dangling in the air. Mathew doesn’t want to think about what the boy was wading in. He finds himself pulling his t-shirt over his nose, like the others, and breathes in the clean detergent smell.
The boat powers away from the shore and heads into the centre of the river, racing along, the current behind them.
Mathew has travelled along the river many times in ferryboats in better times, but the Thames is transformed. It was never a pretty river. It was always too powerful and at high tide slightly disturbing, like a wild animal running through the heart of civilisation. Now it is positively feral, spreading its arms anywhere to grab at the land.
The Royal Naval College is half-submerged, buildings sunk beneath the thick brown water lapping through broken windows and tugging on sodden curtains. The old tea clipper, the Cutty Sark, is on one final voyage, its glass skirt shattered by the force of the incoming water, steel ties worked loose. It sails again along the Thames, a ghost ship, rigging flapping, its Muntz metal bottom glistening in the sunshine as it cuts through the muddy sludge of the river. The wooden sailor climbing on its mast surveys the surrounding devastation, facing north across the river to the strange, newly formed wetlands of the Isle of Dogs.
The South Dock Marina and Greenland Dock have been breached, boats sunk and broken against their moorings, some broken free, wild horses in the incoming tidal surge, untapped now by the overrun Thames Barrier downriver.
Northwards, Canary Wharf is a sunken forest of skyscrapers, the bright day reflected in the newly formed lake washing the panes of the glass sides of the first four stories. It’s a city of mirrors floating in the sky.
As they travel on, the boatman expertly dodging flotsam, they see more crew-less yachts cut loose from London’s many marinas, along with uprooted trees, branches, park benches, and furniture washed from riverside homes. The boatman pushes larger objects away with a long oar.
Then he cuts the engine, and they watch him push away a strange bundle. It turns in the water, and Mathew sees it is a distended corpse, made bloated and grotesque by days in the river.
“Shouldn’t we pull it out?” someone says.
The boatman turns and grins. “Do ya want it sittin' wif ya?”
The one voice of conscience is silenced, and no one else speaks.
The body is taken into the current, just another piece of flood debris, and they power away from it, the smell lingering long enough for them all to find it hard to forget.
They pass a block of flats where people have made a camp on the roof, a fire burning smokily away. A boat is tethered to the wall, and someone is returning via the unsubmerged part of a fire escape. Then Mathew notices that many waterside rooftops have people on them, with improvised shelters built to protect them from the rain and the sun. Even though it is November, the sun is harsh.
“Why do they stay?” one of the passengers asks a companion.
“Nowhere else to go. Or to protect their stuff. There’s so much looting. Who knows what you would do if this happened to you.”
“The river’s miles from my house. It will never happen to me.”
A police boat powers past them, disappearing around the bend of the river. When they reach it again, the police are pulling three men and a woman into the boat, all handcuffed.
“Looters,” someone says.
“Wouldn’t like to be in their shoes.”
“What will happen to them, do you think?”
“Who cares?”
They pass Wapping and progress under Tower Bridge, both spans of the bascule up. Water laps high on the walls of the Tower of London. They continue under London Bridge and Southwark Bridge and just scrape under the Millennium Bridge. They watch other, taller boats pulling to the side and offloading their passengers.
“The water level must be dropping at last,” the talkative passenger says. “We couldn’t travel this far on Monday.”
Victoria Embankment is flooded, as are the lower floors of all the buildings on it. They have to pull in before Westminster Bridge, a part of the river their ferryman says is impassable, so they make their way along Northumberland Avenue, branch off by Craven Street and stop next to the Playhouse Theatre. The boy jumps off at the waterline, pulls in and steadies the boat. The ferryman stops the engine and puts down the plank.
Mathew sees a number of cars waiting at the top of the lane with their armed men, broadcasting the names of the people they’re waiting for, type hanging above their heads. There are a number of real policemen amongst them.
The passengers begin filing off. Mathew walks slowly along the road until he spots a floating tag reading “Erlang.” The guard reads Mathew’s Nexus information but still wants to check his ID card, examining it critically and scanning the chip before opening the car door.
It takes a while for the road to clear of cars. Once away from the river, the familiar streets are relatively everyday, except there are far fewer pedestrians and there are piles of sandbags around the doorways of the buildings nearest the waterline.
At Trafalgar Square things are different. Whitehall is blockaded. There are army vehicles parked in the street and packs of soldiers, some in exoskeletons. They are standing still, poised, but if needed they are capable of running twice as fast as the fastest man and crushing human bones with their robotic hands.
Surveillance robots, black metal dogs without faces, patrol the area, sniffing for explosives or people. When they move from one area to the next, they bound with an uncanny gait.
He glances above, noticing movement. A couple of drones fly over the roof of the National Gallery.
They start to drive along Charing Cross Road and sit for a while in traffic. Through the glass separating Mathew from the guard he hears a sudden flurry of noise. The guard speaks to the on-board computer, turns, pulls back the glass plate, and says to Mathew, “We’re going to take a detour. Nothing to worry about.” This immediately makes Mathew anxious.
The car swings off to the right. They head along St Martin’s Lane. As they get to Seven Dials, Mathew peers along Cranbourn Street.
There are people everywhere, and many of them are throwing things. A car is on fire, and furniture is piled in the road, also alight. An armoured police van drives into the pile of burning furniture, sending it flying, knocking people aside. There’s the sound of gunfire.
Mathew’s car turns sharply onto Garrick Street away from the disturbance. As they drive away, he hears an explosion. They drive along Floral Street. Covent Garden is deserted. The guard turns back to Mathew, grinning, “Told you. Safe as houses.”
Five minutes later, they park in front of Mathew’s school. He walks up the steps, shaky and unnerved. There are guards here too, checking people’s ID. As they move through the doors, he joins the line, thinking he’d never expected to be grateful to come into this building.
10 Robot Building
They are sitting in a windowl
ess room facing a large Canvas screen. When the students are all assembled, a video starts to play, providing their challenge instructions. Some people start to write notes on their personal Paper devices, their super-thin portable computer interfaces. Mathew doesn’t bother. He switches off his dragons in order to concentrate.
The challenge is to build any kind of robot, but extra points will be awarded to the group for originality and planning.
Mathew knows the room is well scattered with cameras and that the real purpose of the exercise is to test how each individual scores against the academy’s latest template for leadership and teamwork. The criteria change depending on the academic staff involved. It’s impossible to discover who is setting and assessing the test, so it’s impossible to game the system.
Mathew hates these exercises.
He scans the room and recognises all of the fifteen assembled, including Alison Gai and Kaleb Merryfield, his physics partner, but his heart sinks when he spots Theo Arkam.
He realises his arms are folded across his chest, and this appears defensive. Arkam is contemplating him with a slight smile and an ironic twinkle. He is sitting back in his chair with his arms behind his head.
“Great way to start, Erling,” he says. “Awesome body language.”
