News from the Clouds Read online

  ‘The Anthropocene is an epoch, part of the geological time-scale. I believe it was coined in your era by a man called Eugene Stoermer.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ I said dismissively. I wanted to imply that whoever he was, he wasn’t big news in my day.

  ‘As is often the case,’ replied Michiyo, ‘there are people in every era who realise something profound but who are ignored by their peers.’

  I nodded my understanding. She had a point.

  ‘For the last 66 million years our planet has been going through the Cenozoic era, the era of mammals. The most recent epoch within that era has been the Holocene.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the Holocene,’ I said. Michiyo nodded and smiled sweetly.

  ‘The Holocene is the epoch which ended around the time period you come from. It was the epoch when human beings became the dominant species on earth. We now know the epoch ended about 250 years ago as human activities started to make measurable changes to the lithosphere. From that point on we entered the Anthropocene. The word’s roots are Greek, Anthropo meaning human and cene meaning new.’

  ‘So what are you telling me, is this—’ I waved my arms around, ‘—this mess was caused by human activities?’

  ‘Sadly that is correct. We have had to adapt to it. It has not been easy but we are getting better at it.’

  I stared out at the bleak landscape before me trying to understand. It was hopeless.

  ‘Every time I have to think about this my brain goes mushy,’ I said eventually. ‘In the world Theda comes from, I don’t know what it’s called but in that world, the weather had changed from my time, I mean it was a lot hotter in London than it had been back in 2011 but it wasn’t like this. And in Gardenia it was hotter but again, it was green, with trees and farms and clean rivers. If this is the same world I come from, what the hell happened here?’

  ‘It’s very complicated,’ said Michiyo with a kind smile. ‘The temperature here is about 12 degrees Centigrade hotter than 200 years ago, and about six degrees hotter than in the cities of the Squares or Gardenia. Here there are no polar ice caps, there is no longer a temperate region. What you would have known as the tropics is now either a swathe of uninhabitable desert or very warm and highly acidic oceans. In the deserts even culvert communities cannot survive because of the intense heat. Our weather has become very extreme and very violent. We are making progress to control the global climate but it is going to take many generations before we start to see a change. We are surviving, that is the important thing. We are surviving.’

  Suddenly above the din of the machines and the roaring wind in my ears I heard a siren sound, a series of high-pitched bleeps.

  ‘We must retire immediately,’ said Michiyo, grabbing my sleeve and pulling me back into the entrance. ‘The outer doors will soon be closing.’

  I flashed again on the scene from The Empire Strikes Back. The outer doors would be closing, the night was coming, or in this case I guessed a storm was coming.

  We stumbled across the broken ground as machines ran past us in serried ranks. The noise was overwhelming, the high-pitched beeps were a constant and painful reminder that something bad was happening. All around me dozens of low, fast-moving walking machines were funneling into the dark interior of the culvert. I looked around and saw on the distant horizon what looked like a huge brown wall; it was fairly obvious this was a sandstorm, or maybe a rock storm of fairly gargantuan proportions. It filled the horizon and the horizon was very big, I must have been able to see for hundreds of miles as there was nothing on the ground above ankle height.

  Just before I entered the structure I glanced up and caught a glimpse of what must have been Cloud Ten. It was already thousands of metres in the air but it still looked huge; a vast white ball of cloud. It really did look like a thunder cloud from this point, if I hadn’t known what it was I don’t think it would have immediately registered as a man-made object.

  ‘Come, we have no time,’ said Michiyo, with some alarm in her voice. ‘We are in danger.’

  As we passed the threshold Michiyo pulled me to one side. I noticed a bright pink line painted on the smooth graphite floor which ran around one side of the space.

  ‘You are safe here,’ she said. ‘I think you will enjoy seeing the bots pack away.’

  Although at that moment I didn’t know what she meant, when I understood I did indeed enjoy it.

  Many hundreds of these bizarrely animal-like multi-legged walking machines entered the space and formed neat rows on one side of the hall. They rapidly folded their legs away and closed themselves down. They could store themselves so closely that once they had settled they just formed a solid block of seamless machinery.

  As soon as one layer was complete, the next row of machines climbed on top and did likewise until, after a few moments there was just a large, dark complex wall that fitted together beautifully.

  Once this wall reached the height of the stone ceiling, another one started. Within about four minutes the entire space, empty when I’d first seen it, was packed solid with now silent machines.

  Then the noise really started, as a truly gargantuan door started to slide down from above. It had to be ten metres thick and the mechanics controlling this leviathan of closure devices rumbled and squeaked. With a nerve-jangling thump it finally stopped and my ears were ringing with the sudden silence. The siren beep stopped and everything was still.

  ‘Well, you had a little of everything there,’ said Michiyo. ‘You got to see the repair bots at work and you got to witness a storm closedown. The perfect end to the perfect tour, is it not?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I offered. ‘But I saw some kind of storm front that looked like it was miles away. Surely we had a bit more time? I’d like to have seen it.’

  Another discreet smile from Michiyo confirmed that my grasp of the elements of this world was slight. ‘The storms approach very fast, it will still be over a hundred kilometres away but it’ll hit the abutments in the next few minutes.’

  I think my silence at this appalling piece of information signified that I was awestruck.

  ‘But now,’ said Michiyo. ‘We have to vacate the machine hall as it will be pressurised to help support the door, we would not survive if we stayed in here.’

  I followed Theda and the other commissioners as they made their way around the now solid wall of repair bots and back into the long corridor. As we moved along I became aware of a low thundering noise.

  ‘I take it we are hearing the storm,’ said Theda. Michiyo merely nodded and we walked in silence as the distant rumble intensified.

  After a considerable walk along endless low-lit passages, Michiyo showed us into a small, dimly lit and rather spartan space.

  ‘This is our last available guest apartment,’ she said. ‘We are very full at the moment, I’m afraid it is fairly basic but has all the essential amenities.’

  She walked across the space and lights came on all around her. It wasn’t that bad, but again it had a very bare and slightly military bunker feel about it.

  ‘Washroom in there,’ she said, pointing to a narrow doorway in the far wall. ‘And sleeping pods on either side. You may wish to freshen up before we convene later today, we have much to ask and much to explain.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Theda.

  ‘Oh, yeah, thanks,’ I said, not entirely sure what I was thanking her for.

  Michiyo made an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.

  ‘Wow,’ said Theda.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. We stood in silence for a moment. Well, we didn’t talk but things were not silent.

  ‘Just listen to that wind,’ she said, after we had stood motionless listening to the rumble. I couldn’t be sure but it did feel like the whole structure was vibrating a bit.

  ‘Are you sure that’s wind? It could b
e machinery. You know, air conditioning or something,’ I said.

  Theda shook her head. ‘No, Gavin, that is a wind the like of which we cannot imagine.’

  ‘I’d really like to see it.’

  ‘That is not possible, if you were exposed to the exterior even for a second you would be blown away and torn to shreds by flying debris. You saw those carbon ceramic plates the machines were fixing. They are ten centimetres thick, they are made of the strongest material available and they still shatter. The impact from airborne debris is awesome.’

  ‘But aren’t there any windows we can look out from?’

  ‘Gavin, there is no transparent material strong enough to withstand the constant bombardment,’ said Theda, as if explaining to a child why you can’t stand in the middle of a busy motorway. ‘The only safe place during a storm is either in a culvert or on a cloud. The climate here is nothing short of lethal.’

  I sat down on a hard chair that was built into one wall of the room. There was nothing soft or comfortable-looking around.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend I understand what’s happened here, are we on Earth? I mean, the same planet I was born on. It feels like we’re in some other universe.’

  ‘Well, we are in another dimension, but this is the same Earth, the same planet at the same position in the galaxy and at the same time as the Squares of London you have just come from; however, it is very different in many other respects. Maybe if we both just sit calmly for a while you can absorb some of what I have learned since I’ve been here.’

  ‘You mean through the kidonge?’ I asked.

  Theda nodded and sat on the opposite side of the room, her head upright but her eyes closed. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Just try to relax,’ she said.

  ‘But what about your name?’

  ‘Just relax, you will understand.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your name was Meckler?’

  Theda didn’t answer. She sat motionless. After an agonising and frankly annoying silence she said very quietly, ‘Relax.’

  Her suggestion was about as much use as asking a five-year-old to relax after he’s eaten a tube of brightly coloured sweets and drunk a couple of cans of fizzy pop.

  No chance.

  14

  The thing is, I did relax.

  I relaxed too much; I fell asleep. I once again want to point out that this sudden daytime sleeping habit was very unusual for me. Before I went through the first wretched cloud over Didcot Power Station I cannot remember having a nap during the day, ever.

  It’s just not something I do.

  I can only put it down to nervous exhaustion or to the terror of sliding down the blue sheet, or the mind-buggering experience of living on a bloody cloud.

  Or it could have been the horrendous reality of the storm that was still raging outside the colossal structure I was in and of course the fact that, by this time, I was alone in a very hostile world when all I had been trying to do was get back home.

  But far more mystifying than any of that was that when I woke up yet again I knew a whole load of new stuff, something I never discovered during my stay in the Squares of London.

  The kidonge works when you are asleep.

  When I awoke I was alone in the small room. Theda’s sleeping compartment was empty, she must have slipped out while I dozed and I had no idea where she’d gone. She could have left a note, not that I’d seen any paper or pens in this bizarre storm ditch.

  As I woke, I knew much more about the world of culverts and clouds. I didn’t have to think about it or try and understand a new deluge of information, I just knew it like I’d known it for years.

  I knew why Theda’s family name was Meckler. That bit made my head spin. I knew it as if I’d known it all my life and yet I also knew I hadn’t known it before I fell asleep.

  She was called Meckler because when I’d been scanned in Rio de Janeiro they had used my data to print sperm. Yes, they printed a whole bucketful of Meckler sperm.

  Excuse my French, but how fucked up is that?

  I knew there were loads of Mecklers knocking around a hundred years after I left London, mostly male children, but Theda was one of the few female German Mecklers.

  Apparently my sperm was really popular in Munich. I knew this like it was just something I’d always known. I knew it like it was something amusing I could say at parties: ‘Yeah, my sperm is really popular in Munich.’ Not that I would ever say that but I don’t know how else to explain it.

  This knowledge was preposterous and it made me want to go back to Rio again and inform them that I thought it was a diabolical liberty.

  It was distressing enough having this sudden influx of personal knowledge but that wasn’t the half of it. I also knew, although saying ‘knew’ doesn’t really describe the sensation you have, but I just understood what had happened in the world I woke up in and it wasn’t a very pretty story.

  The previous 200 years of this world were profoundly different to the histories I’d learned in Gardenia or the Squares of London; profoundly different and not in a good way.

  Essentially, from around 2015 onwards, the global climate changed far faster than even the most pessimistic projections made by climate scientists in my era suggested.

  I’m not going to lie to you, I was a climate sceptic back in 2011. Not a denier, a sceptic, there’s a really important difference.

  It wasn’t like I was some God-bothering nutter from the American Midwest who believed President Obama was a Muslim Communist who wanted to force people into poverty to placate his green fascism, or some other swivel-eyed-loon theory, but a lot of the science I’d been aware of at the time seemed very easily refutable.

  When temperatures rise, so does CO2; it had happened before in pre-human history, there was ample evidence to back that up from ice cores drilled out of the Arctic and Antarctic shelves.

  There seemed to me to be no reason why it couldn’t happen again. That was the bottom line: which came first, temperature or CO2? Could it be the sun? A natural cycle? It wasn’t clear to me.

  The annoying CO2 argument seemed a bit flakey and flimsy, but maybe it was the company I kept. A lot of engineers working in the mining industry and particularly in coal extraction do not make a likely group of CO2-obsessed eco-warriors. Personally I was always open to debate on the matter whereas a lot of my work colleagues were fervent and often angry climate change deniers. They kind of had to be, their jobs were dependent on those industries continuing their work.

  However, in this timeline at least, I was badly mistaken and all those scientists with their computer projections, weather satellites and global temperature monitors were proven very right. In fact they were proven to have been far too optimistic.

  Colder winters, stronger storms and hotter, drier summers affected large swathes of the Northern Hemisphere. They also had to deal with heavier rain, larger tidal surges, terrible floods, typhoons of greater strength, and hurricanes of greater size than had ever previously been recorded.

  In North America, the central belt came under increasing attack from mind-numbingly huge tornadoes and crop-

  destroying drought but still no one did anything to change the way they extracted and produced their energy. They continued to dig and drill and burn for years.

  In the Southern Hemisphere, the winds became hugely destructive, temperature records in places like Brazil, Africa, India and Australia went off the scale. Droughts meant crop failures, crop failures led to hunger, hunger led to lower birth rates.

  It was just disaster after disaster.

  Somehow, through the first 30 years or so of this horrific turn of events, my generation continued as if nothing was happening. That was until things started to really go wrong. The costs of maintaining the old political and economic order just became un
sustainable and things went from bad to worse. The cost of maintaining the oil and gas extraction equipment when massive storms ripped the structures to bits clearly put a bit of a crimp on their enthusiasm to continue.

  In the history of the world in Gardenia, the collapse of the old order, while I’m sure disturbing for the people who lived through it, seemed essentially non-violent and gentle. It took a long time and the human race slowly adapted to their new environment.

  The history I’d gleaned while in London 2211 appeared to be a continuous period of economic and political stability as women slowly took over the management of the planet.

  In this world – for a start there was no name for it, it was just the world – the previous 200 years had simply been a battle for survival.

  There were no big wars, merely countless little ones, but even the wars stopped because it rained too much or it was too hot, too cold or too windy to do any proper fighting. You wouldn’t covet your neighbour’s house because it had either been blown down or flooded, you wouldn’t covet their fields because they’d been turned into a rock-strewn scorching desert or saltwater wasteland. There was nothing to fight for, the only worthy opponent was the weather, in particular the wind, and that needed fighting around the clock.

  A hundred years before I arrived, most of the structures built by the human race in the previous thousand years had either been destroyed or damaged beyond repair by the ferocious winds; it was during this period that the culverts started to be constructed. People dug in, literally digging themselves into enormous ditches to get out of the wind.

  I think of wind as being quite benign. I can recall standing on mountain tops in Wales and Scotland when I was on family holidays as a kid and laughing at the force of the wind. My brother and I would try and lean into it as it flapped the sleeves of our windcheater jackets. Those winds were probably 60 or 70 kilometres an hour. That’s strong if you’re a scrawny 12-year-old kid, a sudden gust can blow you off your feet.

  A 500 kilometre per hour wind is something else. That kind of force can pick up rocks and carry them hundreds of metres until they smash into things. It can tear down buildings and scatter the rubble for hundreds of miles. I don’t even want to think about what it could do to human bodies, to animals, to forests and prairies.