by Jason Ayres
Jessica and the two men cheered. As Peter looked at their faces more closely, he recognised a very mature-looking Charlie and Josh. With a quick calculation he figured that they must be in their forties by now.
“At last!” exclaimed Josh. “We’ve finally got rid of the bastard.”
“And good riddance”, said Charlie.
“Welcome back, sir!” said Josh.
“I think Peter will do now, don’t you?” he replied. “After all you did leave school over twenty years ago.” He then turned his attention back to his daughter.
“Jessica” was all he said, and they hugged each other deeply.
“I’ve waited so long for you, Dad” she replied. “Mum has explained everything to me and I do understand.”
“We’ve a lot of catching up to do”, he replied. “Where is she, by the way?”
“Right here” came a voice from behind him.
He turned to see that Hannah had walked up the tunnel behind Charlie and Josh.
Although she was older now, she was still beautiful. Her face may have looked a little older, but her eyes burned as brightly as ever and she still had a fantastic figure.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking”, she said. “I must look so old!”
“You look amazing”, he replied.
“Flatterer!” she said. “Still, looking on the bright side, we don’t have to worry about the age gap between us anymore. I’m older than you are now. You’re just in time to help me celebrate my 50th birthday.”
“So what happened last time?” asked Peter.
“Well, we had a little trouble with the weather”, replied Hannah.
“That’s putting it mildly!” remarked Josh.
“Did you get my note?” he asked.
“It was a bit soggy from the flood water, but we managed to decipher it”, said Josh.
“And what about the leukaemia?” he asked.
“It’s all going to be fine”, said Hannah. “Come on. Let’s go home and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Dawn had broken by the time they left the tunnel, and the sun was already shining. It was 7.03am on a glorious spring morning, and it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day, the first one Peter had seen for over 22 years.
Over the next few weeks he learnt everything that had happened while he had been away.
He learnt about the revolutionary new cancer treatments that had saved millions of lives across the globe.
He learnt about the devastating asteroid impact that had wiped out millions of lives and blocked out the sun for two years, plunging Britain into chaos.
He signed up with a new GP, his old one having long since retired, and got started on the treatment that would save his life.
He explained away how he looked so good for a man 71 years of age by claiming he’d spent the last twenty years in a remote Himalayan monastery. The simple life of meditation and an extremely healthy diet were well known for the benefit of longevity, and he just about managed to get away with it.
He learnt all about the awful things that Dan had done over the past few years which more than justified them getting rid of him the way that they had. It seemed that the fat, obnoxious schoolboy had grown into a thoroughly nasty adult human being. His track record included things such as football hooliganism, involvement in a new and sinister far-Right political party and severe misogynistic behaviour.
When law and order had broken down during the global winter his true colours had really come to the fore. He’d done some really nasty things for which he’d never been brought to justice. Now Charlie and the others had administered their own. The town was well rid of him.
He was delighted to find that Kaylee and Charlie were now married and, not only that, they had named their first-born son after him.
He got to know the daughter who’d grown up without him and spent as much time as he could with her to make up for the years he’d missed.
He rekindled his romance with Hannah, and the two of them made plans to spend the rest of their lives together. On November 2nd 2041, 22 years to the day after he’d first stepped into the Time Bubble, they walked down the aisle with Charlie as his best man.
He spent weeks reading, learning and catching up on twenty years of history, not to mention getting to grips with the latest technology which had continued to advance at a staggering rate.
He sat down and watched a recording of a moment he thought he’d never see – England winning the World Cup Final in 2026.
Life was good and it would be another 22 years before they’d have to worry about the Time Bubble again.
Epilogue
An old man emerged from nowhere, gasping for air in the burning, poisonous air of the dying earth.
It was billions of years in the future. There was no vegetation or life of any kind as far as the eye could see. All that could be seen was the black and red scorched earth covered in rocks and rubble. All signs that man had ever existed here were long gone.
The skyline was dominated by a huge, angry, blood red sun, many times larger than it had been when the man had begun his journey back in the mid-21st century.
In 2063 Peter had made the decision to enter the Time Bubble again. After twenty wonderfully happy years of marriage he’d lost his beloved wife, Hannah, to an illness that even the modern medicine of that time could not cure.
By 2063 his health was also failing him, and he knew he had only a short time left. He hadn’t wanted to leave his daughter behind, but when the alternative was nursing him through a long, slow death, they agreed this was the best thing for him to do.
His quest to see the future had not diminished, and this was a unique opportunity for him to see things that no other man in the history of the earth would ever get the chance to see.
When Dan emerged from the tunnel, disorientated and confused by everyone’s disappearance, Peter had been waiting to jump in.
Completely in the dark about the nature of the Time Bubble, and having been declared legally dead, Dan found he was unable to continue his unsavoury lifestyle in 2063. Eventually he ended up in a psychiatric hospital and there he stayed, continuing to stick to his seemingly delusional tale that he was a time traveller from the year 2041.
On the day Peter left in 2063 there was a train going overhead, but by the time he arrived in 2108 the line had fallen silent. Huge advances in teleconferencing facilities and holographic techniques had rendered the HS2 more or less obsolete by the time it was completed.
Less than twenty years after the first train ran, the lines fell silent. The whole thing had been one huge, expensive mistake.
By the time Peter arrived in 2198, the tunnel was gone altogether and the tracks removed. He was out in the open and there were people around. He couldn’t hang around or one of them would end up in the Bubble. So he jumped on to 2377 and then 2736.
By now the world was completely unrecognisable from the one he’d left. Around him rose amazing futuristic, gleaming metal and plastic buildings, more fantastic than anything that he’d ever seen in any science-fiction movies.
Every time he jumped the world around him changed dramatically. Each time he tried to spend a little time looking around but he could never stray far from the entrance to the Bubble for fear of not finding it again. He wanted to go on as far as he possibly could.
And then suddenly it was all gone. He arrived in the year 7760 to discover everything in ruins, rusting girders and collapsed buildings everywhere. By the time of his next visit in 13,506, all evidence of it had vanished completely, replaced by huge giant tropical rainforests, populated by some seriously huge and nasty looking insects.
As his jumps got longer and longer, the climate seemed to lurch from one extreme to another. Of mankind there was never another sign. Either they were all dead or they’d gone off into space and abandoned the Earth.
A few million years into the future, he found the planet once again blanketed by snow and ice. It was so cold this time that it mad
e his previous experience in the frozen tunnel seem like afternoon tea on the lawn. He didn’t hang around long there, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a minute in those temperatures.
The next time he jumped he found himself in the middle of a vast ocean with no sign of land anywhere to be seen. Circling overheard were vast swarms of what looked like giant flying sharks with wings where the fins should have been, and huge teeth.
When they spotted him they began swooping down towards him. He just about managed to swim back into the Time Bubble before they devoured him.
Fortunately he emerged to find himself once again back on dry land, once again surrounded by tropical vegetation. He didn’t think he’d be safe for long, though. There were horrible screeching and roaring noises from who knows what kind of horrors emanating from all around him.
And so he jumped on and on, losing count of the number of times he’d leapt. Josh had estimated he’d need to jump about 27 times to reach the end of the world and now as he emerged he was pretty sure he was there.
The heat was unbearable; he couldn’t breathe and he knew that this must be the end. His eyes gazed in wonder at the huge red giant the sun had become, dominating the skyline as it prepared to swallow up the earth.
As he fell to the ground dying, he was comforted by the thought it had all been worth it. He’d cheated death, spent two decades with a woman he loved, and brought a lovely and caring daughter into the world. He’d seen things with his eyes no other human ever would see and he’d outlived them all.
His mind went blank and the last man on earth closed his eyes for the final time.
The end…but now the adventure continues in Global Cooling…
Global Cooling
Prologue
Astronomers had known about asteroid Apophis for nearly a quarter of a century. There was a minor panic back in 2004 when a news story broke claiming there was a 1-in-60 chance that it would hit Earth in 2029.
These claims were soon discounted. It was categorically stated that the asteroid would miss Earth by a distance of 18,600 miles. This was a mere hair’s breadth in astronomical terms, but far enough for the planet’s inhabitants to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
There was no need to disbelieve the claims of the astronomers. After all, the sun rose and set every day when it was supposed to. Tide tables could be calculated centuries in advance, as could solar eclipses. In short, the solar system was a very ordered and predictable place.
Collisions with sizeable asteroids were rare for modern Earth, unlike the early days of the planet when huge objects crashed into the surface on a regular basis. In fact, Earth was living through a comparatively balmy period. There had been no catastrophic volcanic eruptions, ice ages or major disasters of any kind for thousands of years.
It was a major contributing factor as to why, after millions of years on the planet, humankind had made massive advances in an extremely short space of time. Technology now ruled supreme. Everything from communication to the food chain was completely automated, completely reliable and extremely efficient. Apart from a few war-torn and famine-stricken areas, by 2029 the majority of the world’s population led an extremely pampered and comfortable lifestyle.
On the downside, the vast majority of that population possessed very few skills of their ancestors. They had no need to. Who needed to know how to mill wheat, fashion tools, or make a candle anymore? Such skills were no longer necessary. It was all done for us. Collectively the human race knew how to do everything – individually they knew very little.
The thought that basic services everyone took for granted such as running water, electricity and lightning-fast internet access might one day not be available never even crossed anyone’s minds. If it had, they might have been better prepared for what was to come.
But they had no reason to prepare. The astronomers had said Apophis would miss us, and the astronomers were never wrong. So people got on with their daily lives, and apart from a few cranks parading around with banners proclaiming “The end of the world is nigh,” the whole thing was pretty much ignored. The end of the world had been wrongly predicted countless times over the years. By now, everyone was completely blasé about such proclamations.
Unfortunately, the astronomers hadn’t taken into account a random element that could not possibly have been predicted.
Out way beyond the solar system, millions of comets are ploughing lonely, long-term orbits which bring them close to the sun only very infrequently. The vast majority are unknown to astronomers and are only discovered when they approach the inner solar system and become visible. About ten or so are discovered each year.
In the spring of 2029, one such comet was heading towards the sun after thousands of years in the cold, outer reaches of the solar system. It was a relatively small comet, and wasn’t even spotted until it had passed the orbit of Jupiter. By this time it was only a few weeks from Earth.
Its discovery went almost unnoticed by the general public to begin with. It wasn’t until it came within a few days of Earth that it became visible to the naked eye. But there was nothing to worry about. Astronomers tracking its orbit noted that it would pass relatively close to Earth, but would miss us.
But there was one crucial factor they had failed to notice. Or if they had, they certainly hadn’t let on to the rest of the world’s population. The comet was on a collision course for asteroid Apophis, and that was about to change everything.
Chapter One
As Charlie Adams drove into work on Thursday morning he was in a happy and contented mood. The radio was playing an old noughties classic, the sun was shining, and it was already nearly 20 degrees Celsius. Such temperatures would have seemed remarkable at this time of year even a decade ago, but global warming meant they had become the norm.
With the driverless car handling all the hard work for him, he was able to sit back, relax and enjoy the view.
Life was good for Charlie. As the end of the decade approached, he had plenty of things to feel positive about. It was over ten years now since he’d got together with his childhood sweetheart, Kaylee, and they’d been inseparable ever since.
Some had said that it wouldn’t last, that they would grow apart when they went to university, but they got around that problem by going to the same one.
Whilst Kaylee studied Physics in pursuit of a career in meteorology, Charlie had taken a degree in Business Studies. After a year of sneaking in and out of each other’s rooms at night, by their second year they had set up home together in a tiny flat in the Clifton area of Bristol.
Combining studies with working in a pizza restaurant, they spent three blissfully happy years together.
Once graduated, they returned to their home town in Oxfordshire. Charlie went to work as a graduate trainee for a big marketing company in Oxford, whilst Kaylee was lucky enough to land a dream job with the Met Office. Although based in Exeter, huge advances in telecommunications allowed her, like most of the population, to work from home most of the time.
The icing on the cake had come the previous summer when they’d married in the very church where they’d played Mary and Joseph in the school nativity play over twenty years ago.
Now they lived in the modern house Charlie had once shared with his mother. She had begun a new relationship with Kaylee’s father following his divorce. They had moved abroad to live in the Canary Islands, leaving Charlie and Kaylee to take over the family home.
With a booming economy, good job prospects and an increasingly agreeable climate, the future was looking bright. Had he known of the global events about to unfold, things would have seemed distinctly less rosy, but, like almost everyone else, he was blissfully unaware.
He and Kaylee had been quite late getting to bed the previous evening. They had gone outside to get a glimpse of the amazingly bright new comet that had appeared in the night sky. Comets visible without a telescope were a rarity in the modern, brightly lit world, but this one was spectacular. The ball-shaped head
had an impressive tail spread out behind it. Kaylee had remarked that it looked like a peacock strutting its feathers.
Despite it being only early April, they had been quite able to sit comfortably out on the patio and share a bottle of wine. The weather was so good that they were planning to invite their old friend Josh over for a barbecue at the weekend.
Charlie didn’t have to worry that the weather might turn. One advantage of having a wife who worked for the Met Office was that he had his own personal source of weather information to hand at all times.
He was only a mile from his turning off the A34 when the traffic began slowing down. Despite huge improvements to the road system, smart, driverless cars, and more people than ever working from home, one thing never changed. The traffic around Oxford remained unremittingly awful.
It was getting warm in the car. One downside of all the good weather was that wearing a suit and tie every day could get quite uncomfortable during the warmer months. He looked in the mirror, noting small beads of sweat forming beneath his short, dark hair. His green eyes looked tired – he really ought to get to bed earlier in the evening and lay off the wine for a few days.
The traffic continued to crawl along, and he knew he was late when the 9am news came onto the radio. Most days it wouldn’t have mattered, but his boss insisted on the team having their “Thursday morning huddle” each week at quarter past nine. He’d be lucky if he could grab a coffee and get there on time now.
Not that he was particularly bothered. The Thursday morning meetings were a tedious waste of time. He and his colleagues would sit in a room listening to the boss spouting endless marketing verbal diarrhoea. Then they’d each have to report on the current sales position with their clients.
The whole thing went on until at least 11am, by which time Charlie was usually losing the will to live. The irony was that, whilst they were wasting time sitting in the conference room listening to the boss admonishing them for not hitting their sales targets, they could actually have been out there selling.
