by Femi Fadugba
Contents
PART I: DISTANCE CHAPTER 1: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 2: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 3: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 4: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 5: ESSO · NOW
PART II: TIME CHAPTER 6: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 7: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 8: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 9: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 10: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 11: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 12: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 13: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 14: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 15: ESSO · NOW
PART III: MATTER CHAPTER 16: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 17: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 18: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 19: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 20: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 21: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 22: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 23: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 24: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
PART IV: ENERGY CHAPTER 25: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 26: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 27: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 28: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 29: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 30: ESSO · NOW
CHAPTER 31: RHIA · 15 YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 32: ESSO · TIME UNDEFINED
THE AFTER-MATH EPILOGUE: ESSO · 16.5 YEARS LATER
APPENDICES APPENDIX I: PYTHAGORAS’ PROOF (FROM ESSO ADENON’S SCHOOL NOTEBOOK)
APPENDIX II: SPEED OF LIGHT DERIVATION (FROM RHIA’S NOTEBOOK)
APPENDIX III: FROM RHIA BLACK’S SCRAPBOOK
APPENDIX IV: FROM RHIA BLACK’S SCRAPBOOK
APPENDIX V: FROM RHIA BLACK’S CLOUD ACCOUNT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Femi Fadugba has a Master’s degree from Oxford University where he published in Quantum Physics and subsequently studied as a Thouron Scholar at University of Pennsylvania. Femi has worked as a science tutor as well in solar energy and consulting. He currently lives between Peckham, London and Baltimore, USA. THE UPPER WORLD is his first book.
Praise for
‘To have a book that marries real London life, time travel and relativity in an illuminating and entertaining way is stuff I used to dream about. I had The Upper World in my hands until I finished it. So happy this exists.’
DANIEL KALUUYA
‘Wow! The Upper World is a time-twisting, mind-bending thrill ride. I raced through the pages trying to keep up with Esso and Rhia – if I could read at the speed of light, I would have! This south London epic will stay with you long after the final page.’
HOLLY JACKSON
‘A thrilling, electric book – so sharp and quick, so witty and wise it leaves you gasping.’
KATHERINE RUNDELL
‘A rollercoaster of a story, like Patrice Lawrence’s Orangeboy with an Inception-style twist. Exhilarating and exceptional!’
KAT ELLIS
‘An audacious blend of quantum physics, Ancient Greek philosophy and south London gang culture, The Upper World is a blistering, ferocious science-fiction story that asks what we would change if we could, and what would happen if we couldn’t. Make some room at the table, Doctor Who – there’s a new time-travelling hero in town.’
MELINDA SALISBURY
‘The Upper World is an astoundingly impressive debut. Thought-provoking, thrilling, funny, and brilliant in every sense of the word.’
KATHERINE WEBBER
‘Truly mind-bending, fiendishly clever, original and stylish – I was blown away by this novel.
Philosophy meets physics meets Peckham … No doubt about it, The Upper World is destined to stand the test of time.’
AMY McCULLOCH
‘[An] ambitious and highly addictive sci-fi thriller … The theory of relativity and time-travel science may drive the incredibly tense and compelling plot, but it is Fadugba’s skill in weaving this around complex characters and a very powerful human story that makes The Upper World so special.’
FIONA NOBLE, THE BOOKSELLER
‘A deeply unique, masterfully plotted time-travel adventure spanning generations. Accurate science combined with fun, vividly realistic characters – what’s not to love?’
LAUREN JAMES
‘What a ride … I loved it.’
SALLY GREEN
‘The Upper World is brilliant and engrossing. Femi Fadugba debuts with an awesome and riveting thrill ride of a book. He’s definitely one to watch.’
DAPO ADEOLA
‘A mind-blowingly brilliant mash-up of physics, guns, philosophy, love, hate and time travel.’
ANDREINA CORDANI
‘A truly epic sci-fi thriller that makes maths feel EXTREMELY cool … An outstanding book.’
RASHMI SIRDESHPANDE
‘Such a stunning read!! I had to keep pausing just to catch my breath. Femi Fadugba is the real deal.’
TỌLÁ OKOGWU
For Cam
PART I: DISTANCE
* * *
FROM BLAISE ADENON’S NOTEBOOK: LETTER 1
To Esso,
Once upon a time, a group of prisoners lived in a cave.
For their whole lives, they’d knelt in cold dirt, facing stone, with chains wrapped round their necks so tightly they couldn’t even turn round to see where the amber light in the cave was coming from.
So each day they watched shadows flicker and dance on the stone wall, lit up by that hidden light behind them. They studied the shadows, named them, prayed to them.
Then, one morning, one of the prisoners broke free. He turned towards that bright light shining at the far end of the cave and he stared at it in wonder, desperate to know where it came from, where it led.
His friends, still chained, warned him: ‘Stay, you fool! You don’t know where you’re going. You’ll die if you roam too far!’
But he ignored them.
When he stepped outside the cave, nothing he saw – not the trees, lakes, animals, nor the sun – made sense to him. Energy flowed so freely out there it almost felt … wrong. But over time he got to grips with his new reality, finally realizing that his entire life, and all he’d ever known in the cave, had been a mere shadow of this bigger place.
A place he named the Upper World.
He sprinted back into the cave, excited to share the good news with his friends. But, when he explained what he had seen in the Upper World, they mocked him, calling him insane. And, when he offered to break them free from their chains, they threatened to kill him.
A real man named Socrates told that story over 2,300 years ago in Athens. Most people who heard it interpreted it as a whimsical fairy tale, a metaphor about how lonely it can feel to venture into the unknown. But what people overlook, my child, is that Socrates really believed in the Upper World. And that, when he told people what he’d seen up there, he was executed.
CHAPTER 1
Esso · Now
It takes an impressive mix of stupidity and bad luck not to be in a gang, but still find yourself in the middle of a gang war. I’d managed it in less than a week. And that was before the time travel.
I knelt down, resting my elbows on the one corner of the mattress where the sheet hadn’t peeled off. Tired and alone in my bedroom, I was desperate for heavenly backup. But I couldn’t make a call between Jesus, his mum, Thor, Prophet Mohammed (and the big man he works for), that bald Asian dude in orange robes, Jesus’ dad, Emperor Haile Selassie, my grandad’s voodoo sculpture, Morgan Freeman, or that metal slab on the moon in the olden-day film 2001. So, to be safe, I prayed to the whole team.
‘Dear Holy Aven
gers,’ I pleaded into my interlaced fingers. ‘First off, please forgive me for being a prick on Monday. And for lying to Mum about what happened.’
MONDAY (FOUR DAYS AGO)
Before Monday went off the rails, I actually learnt something in class. (Was that how school was meant to feel all the time?)
Penny Hill Secondary sat on the border between Peckham and Brixton. That wasn’t an issue in the forties, when they built it, but became one once the mandem arrived. Now you had kids from two rival ends forced to spend seven hours a day with each other, and the rest of us expected to learn with that in the background.
Our classroom was arranged in four rows of eight desks. The ceiling hung a foot too low, making you feel like a chicken in a battery cage if you sat near the middle, like me. Miss Purdy was head of PE and doubled as a maths teacher. She could teach, though; as in, she actually knew what she was talking about and actually gave a shit. Her class had the fewest fights and highest marks because of it. Even my assignments were coming back with the odd B these days. Maths had always held some appeal with me. The naive part of me clung to the idea that one day I’d have a boatload of money and maths would have helped me get it.
I’d always just respected the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. I spent most days switching between my African home voice, my semi-roadman voice, my reading-out-loud-in-English-lit-class voice, and the telephone voice I put on when I needed BT to send someone round to come fix the router. I liked that all that stuff mattered less in maths class. The teacher could think I was a dickhead all she wanted, but 2 + 2 was still gonna equal 4.
What I couldn’t have known, sitting there that Monday morning, was that the three-sided shapes Miss Purdy was drawing on the whiteboard would end up opening my eyes to all four dimensions. In fact, if anyone had tried to warn me I’d be moving like a superhero-psychic by the end of the week, I’d have told them they were on crack, then shown them the abandoned flat in Lewisham where they could meet some like-minded people.
‘Today, we’re revising Pythagoras’ theorem,’ Purdy said, circling an equation she’d just written on the board. ‘And we’ll be using it to figure out the length of the longest side of the triangle.’
Purdy waited, arms folded, for the class to quiet down.
‘Shhhhhhhhh!’ Nadia said, whipping her neck round to glare at two girls chatting behind her.
Nadia wasn’t a teacher’s pet by any stretch, and she didn’t always care that much about class. But we had our GCSE mocks coming up, and she clearly wasn’t about to get dragged down by kids who didn’t care at all.
Meanwhile, I was staring off in the distance, doing the pouted-lip serious stare I’d practised in the mirror that morning. Nadia’s eyes had to swing past me on their way back to the whiteboard and I wanted to leave the best impression possible. No cap: it was straight-up embarrassing how often I did stuff like that for her. I probably spent sixty to seventy per cent of each class either: a) staring creepily at the back of her head; b) glancing at her in my periphery; or c) pouting and hoping she’d pay attention to me, which I never got to confirm either way since I’d always be staring off into the distance like an aftershave model.
Purdy turned to the board with two different coloured markers in hand. ‘To make this feel a bit real, I’ll use a practical example. Let’s say you’re walking through Burgess Park. You start all the way down here at the south gate and need to get up to the top by Old Kent Road. There are basically two different paths you can take: the first path, up the side and along the top, is what you cool kids might call a “long ting”.’
She waited for someone to laugh … Anyone. After a long, cold dose of silence, she moved on. ‘Tough Monday. So, taking the long path means staying on the pavement and going all the way up one side, then all the way across the top. But the alternative, shorter route just cuts diagonally across the grass.’
After she stepped away from the board, we could see that she’d written numbers next to two sides of a triangle, but left a question mark next to the longest edge. A collective sigh went round the room as we realized she was going to strip-search one of us for the answer.
‘Let’s start with the shortest edge of the triangle. Can anyone tell me what number I get, when I take the number 3 and square it?’
Nadia’s hand went up, the one needle you could spot in the haystack. Purdy ignored it – she had to give the rest of us a chance once in a while, after all – and turned to someone paying much less attention.
‘Rob, what is 3 squared?’
You’d have thought Miss Purdy was made of glass by how Rob looked straight through her.
Please tell me he knows that 3 × 3 = 9, I said to myself. Along with Kato, Rob was my best friend, and I knew maths wasn’t really his thing. To be honest, not much at school was Rob’s thing. But ask him the difference between UK drill, NY drill and Chicago drill, and he turned into Einstein. Or tell him about a story you heard on the evening news and watch him find an ingenious way to connect it back to the Illuminati and their plot to take down Blacks, Browns and Eastern Europeans. He was Polish as well. But knowing that didn’t really tell you much about him.
Kato, sitting on Rob’s other side, whispered to him, ‘Afghanistan! The answer’s Afghanistan – trust me.’
‘Afghanistan,’ Rob repeated, showing his proudest face to Purdy.
She must have blinked three or four times in confusion. His response was so off it robbed her of words, and she had no choice but to shut her jaw and look away.
Kato was in pieces, using his sleeves to wipe at the tears of joy collecting on the ledge of his eye. Everything in life was hilarious to that boy. Probably because everything in life came so easily to him.
Rob glared at him, kissing his teeth till the spit ran out. I sometimes worried that, if I ever had to leave school for more than a week, I’d come back and find our fragile friendship cracked into three pieces. But ask anyone else at Penny Hill, and they’d swear we were unbreakable – the happy package known as ‘Kato, Esso and Rob’. Even when only one of us fucked up, all three of us got in trouble for it. ‘Kato, Esso and Rob did it!’ As if those were the three names printed on my passport.
‘Esso?’ Purdy turned to me with desperation in her eyes.
‘You just take the number and multiply it by itself, innit?’ I replied. I didn’t mean for my answer to come out sounding like a question but couldn’t help my voice squeaking at the end. She tilted her head forward, waiting for me to land. ‘So, it’s just 3 times 3, which is 9,’ I added.
She made me go through each step, releasing me only once I’d given her equation the TLC she felt it deserved. ‘So, c – the long edge – is equal to 5,’ I finally answered.
I’d calculated the final number in my head a few seconds early, and while she wrote it all out on the board, I debated whether to ask my follow-up question. Miss Purdy had told us at the start of the class that Pythagoras came up with his famous equation 2,500 years ago. Two thousand five hundred years ago! I’m pretty sure that was before paper was even invented. But how?
Problem was, regardless of what adults said, there was such a thing as a rubbish question. In fact, most questions I asked earned me that ‘what a rubbish question’ look from them. At school, a teacher could cuss me for bringing up a topic that wasn’t on the curriculum. And at home, I’d get the same harsh treatment from my mum for asking a question about Dad. Any sentence starting with ‘why’ or ‘how’ was scary to someone.
But once a question took shape in my head I had trouble leaving the hole empty. It helped that Miss Purdy was still smiling at me, and that she usually took it well when the mid-rowers raised their hands. Fuck it, I thought silently, clearing my throat in preparation. What’s the worst that could happen?
‘How did Pythagoras come up with that equation in the first place?’ I did my best to sound detached when, in fact, the missing answer was a crater that doubled in size every second.
Then came a flick to my ear. Fast and crisp, but light
. Was that … a ball of paper?
‘Neeeeeeeeek!’ Kato hollered. I turned to see him circling his fingers round his eyes like glasses.
Rob laughed as well, followed by the back half of the class. I need new mates, I decided. But then Nadia turned to me with an expression that was equal bits surprised and impressed; a look that made all the embarrassment dissolve. I put my R&B pout back on just in time.
Miss Purdy spent the next five minutes showing us how Pythagoras had turned his hunch about triangles into a mathematical law that would have to be obeyed for the rest of eternity, everywhere in the universe.
The second Purdy finished explaining, I felt like a rusty padlock sprang open in my head.fn1 And, for only the second or third time in my life, I felt like maybe – just maybe – I might live in a world where things made sense.
When she turned her back, I punched ‘Pythagoras’ into Google on my phone. Turns out, like most of the sharp ones, my man was a nutter. According to the internets, he ran some cult where everyone swore never to eat black beans or piss in the direction of the sun. Oh, and they all worshipped the number 10 and believed that if you lifted the bonnet off what we all see as reality, you’d find nothing but maths under the hood – the language the gods wrote the universe in. Apparently.
There were also ‘related’ links to a few of his stans – one guy called Plato, another Socrates – that I didn’t bother clicking. It was all getting a bit too trippy, so I put my phone away, knowing I was lucky I hadn’t been spotted by Purdy. I was in her good books and had no intention of leaving them.
And then Gideon Ahenkroh walked in.
Even with his cap pulled down, you could just about make out Gideon’s eyes as they traced the floor on the walk to his seat. Like every other boy at Penny Hill, he hung his trousers as low round his thighs as he could. Most girls did the same with their skirts, just pulled in the opposite direction.
