Last Man in London, page 12
‘The Napoleonic Wars. The Division of Gaul was taken over during a people’s revolution led by a General Napoleon Bonaparte. He was finally stopped by a hero of the Division of Albion in OC1815 at a place called Waterloo on the mainland. Millions of people died and one of the Complex Hydrostations was named in honour of the occasion and to serve as a reminder that revolution can only cost millions of lives and can never be successful.’ George read the words out loud and looked at Tibha.
‘1815 of the Old Calendar,’ she noted. ‘That’s the period of the Romantics and yet my archive says nothing.’
‘Have you ever wondered how accurate these hy-dev archives are?’ George questioned.’ Edgar has just told me so many things that he remembers from the old days and yet I can find no record of them. Nothing at all. Perhaps he is going mad after all?’
He tapped out an instant message to both Will and Hugo, ‘what does your archive say about the infertility virus?’
‘Nothing,’ Will replied moments later.
Hugo; ‘on 15th hole, back on the complex at H16, see you in Harry’s and then we can have a look.’
‘Well,’ said Tibha, ‘I have noticed that some of the things I remember being taught as a youngster seem slightly different now that I am an adult. But I always assumed that it was because I am now fully trained and perhaps didn’t remember something clearly. Young minds do that sometimes, they store information in an unreliable way. We were always being taught that.’
‘We were taught that as every day goes by nothing much seems to change.’ George replied. ‘And then, one day we look back and everything appears to be different. They told us that was the best approach to learning history we could have. That the current archive was always accurate and not to worry if we remembered things differently.’
‘If only we still had real books,’ complained Tibha. ‘Once they were published they could not be altered. That was why they were phased out but I would love to know what they first said. What the original writers had to say. I mean, even the updating we are doing now may have already been carried out once before, if not more. The problem with the hy-dev archive George is that the information we have is only as reliable as the information somebody else puts there. Who is to say it is real? I sometimes wonder about breaking into the real book archive at the work zone and reading some of the originals.’
George looked across at her with the face of a man with important news. ‘We can,’ he told her. ‘We can do exactly that.’ George swiped his ident-card at the terminal on the table which paid his bill and grabbed Tibha by the arm.
‘Come with me,’ he demanded excitedly.
Edgar smiled to himself as he, once again, granted George access to the elevator and studied the attractive features of his companion in the camera feed on his screen. He could also hear their conversation.
‘I hope you are not thinking about going down to the work zone and....’ George interrupted her.
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘We have just the thing we need, right here.’
Edgar grinned to himself, made his way to his favourite armchair and poured a large whiskey. He felt he deserved an early one.
‘Granddad,’ George called from the elevator doorway.
‘Yes I know, you have brought Mira to meet me,’ the old man called back across the room.
George immediately stopped. Mira? He had forgotten all about her. ‘Ah, no, this is Tibha, the girl from the work zone I told you about.’
‘You have been talking about me?’ she said quietly. Tibha was pleased to hear that. George had seemed to ignore every signal she gave him and appeared to show little interest in her at all.
‘Mira is still in Cape Town, I hope.’ George replied. ‘Anyway, I promised to show Tibha some real books. She has never seen one, well not properly anyway. Can I have the key to the chest in the storeroom? The chest with all the books in it.’
Edgar was pleased with himself. He had finally sparked enough interest in George to go and start finding things out for himself. To find out what had really happened to the old democracy and how the New Order had created modern society.
‘Of course son, I am surprised you have never asked before, what with you being such a book geek.’
‘It never occurred to me before,’ replied George. ‘I had everything I needed on my hy-dev archive. Or at least, thought I did. I have thousands of books in my archive. I never needed to look for real ones; they are too heavy, too old and too dirty. Nobody looks at old book formats anymore.’
’So why now?’ Edgar asked him casually.
‘It’s a project we are working on,’ said Tibha, ‘and, by the way, it is so nice to meet you. George has told me lots about you?’
‘You too darling,’ the old man said casually as he sipped on his whiskey and turned back to his wall screen. ‘It’s on the hook in the hallway, where it has always been Georgie Boy. Just where you have walked past it every time you have been in here. Where it has always been son.’
‘I haven’t told you anything about him,’ George whispered to Tibha as they walked along the hallway.
‘Then you should have done,’ she teased.
She could barely contain her excitement at the thought of holding books for the first time in her life. She had seen them during the induction on her first day in the work zone but had been too overwhelmed to actually touch one. Now she could pick one up for the first time but, more importantly, she could see for herself what some of them said. George pushed open the solid wooden door that revealed Edgar’s neat rows of boxes and storage crates. In the far corner stood a large, heavy wooden chest with a two leather straps and a strong brass lock. George eased the key into the lock, slowly turned it and they listened to it clink open. As he lifted the heavy lid Tibha gasped, ‘oh my word,’ through the fingers that covered her mouth.
‘I never in a million years thought I would ever see this.’
Tibha began to take books out of the chest. She fanned through the pages of some of them, brushed the dust off a few others and started to place them neatly upon one of the empty shelves with the spines facing towards her so she could read each title and author.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Treasure Island, the original copy. David Copperfield, it’s you Mr Dickens, nice to finally meet you in person,’ she said as she held it up to the light.
As they lifted the books out and placed them along the shelf George’s attention was finally drawn to something else, stored neatly towards the bottom of the chest.
‘And what on earth is this?’ he asked.
Tibha stared into the chest and studied the object.
‘I have no clue at all,’ she replied quietly.
Chapter Eight
‘It’s called a laptop.’ Edgar informed them as Tibha placed in upon the table in front of him. ‘It’s my old laptop. Where did you find that? I haven’t seen this in forty years.’
‘It was in the chest with the books.’ George told him. ‘What is this?’ He was holding a lead with a three pin plug on the end of it.
‘It’s the power cable. In those days we used to have to plug things into an electricity system. And pay for it. We didn’t have free wireless hydrogen power in those days.’
‘So you couldn’t take it any further than the length of this,’ Tibha pointed at the cable.
Edgar ignored the question but instead replied, ‘but when Wi-Hy became available and everybody could simply connect to the wireless power supply we could use a little USB converter.’
Edgar pointed to the hydrogen USB power supply plugged in to the side of the laptop. ‘It is exactly the same thing as your hy-dev, only an older version.’ He told them. ‘And they had hard drive storage, not the modern applications, so we would download information and it was stored as it was. Not like the apps you have nowadays that can be updated automatically. With those laptops we had to do that manually. Half of us didn’t bother. They were phased out after Incorporation and everybody was allocated one of the early hy-devs. I don’t even know why I kept that,’ Edgar continued. ‘Try it, it might even still work. There is no reason why not.’
George and Tibha stared at the old relic. Neither had seen anything quite so old fashioned before.
‘Maybe later granddad.’
‘You have some fabulous books in there sir,’ Tibha exclaimed as she took George’s hand to lead him back towards the store room. Patiently and carefully they continued to lift out the books and line them along the shelving. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Animal Farm, Robinson Crusoe, Brave New World. George began to arrange them in alphabetical order and Tibha said excitedly, ‘look, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Wasn’t it Mark Twain who invented the word ‘America?’
George was busy organising Edgar’s books. ‘Crime and Punishment, Dracula, 1984, Tale of Two Cities. He stopped and fingered the hard cover before turning it over to read the sleeve notes. He read the first line out loud, ‘Annotated version with modernised sentence structure.’
‘Why does that surprise you?’ asked Tibha. ‘So they were updating and modernising the content of later versions of old books. That’s all we are doing and I suppose it will always be done. The English language is a living thing George. It is always evolving. Nobody speaks like Shakespeare anymore. Who ever said to you ‘where for art thou’ instead of ‘where are you?’
‘I understand that,’ said George. ‘But this could be important. You see the whole book is about London and Paris. They are the two cities of the title and it is all about the period of time in Paris and London during the French Revolution and the war with England. The Napoleonic Wars. Edgar said it was French prisoners of those wars that built these buildings.’
‘So what?’ asked Tibha
‘I’ll tell you so what,’ replied George. ‘It means if they were real, if those men were actually here, then this is not pure fiction is it. It means Charles Dickens did not invent the war or London or Paris. They could have been real events, real places. And if so where were they?’
‘So the correcting or the annotating, as it says there, wasn’t simply updating the language for the modern reader, it was re-writing history. They were actually changing it, not correcting or updating it.’ Tibha seemed to understand.
‘Exactly,’ George responded as he sat down onto the floor and opened A Tale of Two Cities. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven.’
‘There is that word ‘heaven’ again,’ said George. ‘Dickens used it a lot.’ As he was about to read some more his hy-dev pinged him a message. It was from Hugo; ‘in Harry’s Bar, where you?’
George carefully placed the laptop into his bag and told Edgar they would be back in a few hours. Hugo was waiting at a table by the fireplace where a huge log fire was now crackling away and warming his frozen bones.
‘I don’t even know why you play golf in this weather.’ George told him.
‘I was with Dr Abraham, my old supervisor before he was withdrawn.’ Hugo said, ‘I like to see him once every few months and he is a keen golfer. It’s the best way to spend any time with him.’
‘Yes I remember him,’ George said as he sat down. ‘He was the son of Lord Kingston, a member of the last government.’
Hugo nodded and then introduced himself to Tibha. ‘I remember you from the induction,’ he told her. ‘Why aren’t you in Cape Town?’ he asked George.
‘Long story,’ George told him as he studied Harry’s Bar menu on his hy-dev. After he had placed an order for some pizza and a bottle of fine red wine George reached into his bag and pulled out Edgar’s old laptop.
‘Dr Abraham has one of those,’ Hugo noted. ‘It was his father’s. Here, I will show you how it works. They are not like Hydrogen Devices that only store information in applications; laptops each have their own storage facility. Like a mini server inside that can only be updated manually and never remotely as they are these days. I can’t imagine ever working on one of those but they all used to in the old days.’
Hugo pulled the laptop across the table, fingered the hydrogen converter to make sure it was securely in place and pressed the power button. All three sat patiently watching the blank screen for what appeared to be about ten minutes before a rotating logo appeared before their eyes.
‘What’s Windows 8?’ asked Tibha.
‘An old operating system,’ Hugo told her. ‘These were the first that actually used apps but they also had their own storage drives. It will be interesting to see what Edgar kept on his.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said George. ‘You mean there will be information on here that has never been updated or corrected?’
‘That depends on whether your grandfather ever updated anything.’
‘He hasn’t touched it for forty years,’ said George. ‘This is going to be good, especially as he worked on the antidote to the infertility virus. I wonder what his notes say.’
‘That’s if you believe in the virus,’ replied Hugo. ‘Dr Abraham once told me that it was deliberate and that the Corporation had intentionally introduced it.’
The three of them looked at each other as they waited for the logo to stop spinning and the laptop to finally turn itself on.
‘It works,’ cried Hugo. ‘Here, I will show you how the information is stored.’
Hugo began to navigate the files and George stopped him at one that was called The Sunday Globe. Inside were editions that Edgar had downloaded and that were stored on his own hard drive. George realised this was the first time anybody had been given access to Edgar’s files in two generations and he reached into his pocket for some diazepam as he felt the anxiety sweeping through his bones.
‘Open that one,’ he asked Hugo, ‘let’s see what the news was in OC 2015.’ Hugo clicked on the icon of the file and opened the The Sunday Globe of March 1st 2015. The front page editorial ran a satire in the shape of a letter written to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama.
‘The second to last President of the democracy,’ Hugo pointed out. The headline read;
‘A Letter of Advice to the President cc David Cameron and Angela Merkel.’
Dear Mr President, (or can I call you Barry, now that we are about to become friends?) I hope this finds you well and sleeping soundly in the White House. However I, myself, have been up all night and have finally solved the U.S Debt Crisis on the back of a whiskey label.
It turns out to be quite simple. Leave Islam and the Middle East alone. Withdraw everybody – soldiers, diplomats, medical and teaching personnel, builders, security guys, experts and anybody else that your predecessor in the White House, the orangutan, (remember him?) sent there in the first place.
Then, don’t send any more cash, guns, drones or medical aid and put some of that 4 – 6 Trillion Dollars you will save towards finding a new way to fuel your cars. Then you won’t need the Arabs anymore. The rest of it you can use to get yourselves out of the crap and reduce your borrowing by one third, at a single stroke.
Now, of course, I have thought about the consequences of such an action. What serious presidential advisor wouldn’t? The result is that the medieval Islamic tribes will all immediately set about killing each other because they believe their version of Islam is the right one and that all the others must die, as horribly as possible. That’s a shame, but isn’t that what you want anyway? And think of all those young American, and other Western, lives you will save because they are NOT THERE.
Oh, but leave Fox News out there so that all of your other religious types of people can watch the inevitable bloodbath on their HD plasma flat-screens. From their armchairs with a cold beer and a hot dog. In fact, why don’t you base Fox News there and you will be rid of them too in the end. And also don’t worry about what the Arabs think from a PR point of view. They will still be celebrating their victory over the infidels in the streets and burning flags and throwing sandals around and shooting the guns (we gave them) into the air long before they realize they are on their own now. By the time it dawns on them we will all be rich again and they will all be hiding from each other in caves.
You can then start reducing the tax you charge your citizens so they can spend more money on donuts and imported beer to stimulate your tattered economy. The Middle East will begin depopulating itself, without your help, which will please the Eiderberg Group and finally silence all the conspiracy theorists. That way everyone is happy and you will be re-elected again as Life President.
Oh, no you can’t. That’s not going to happen is it. But for Cameron and Merkel? Well it’s a win-win for those two. Think of your friends. The Israelis too... They can expand into the newly barren lands, become a holiday resort and offer helicopter tours of former war zones. There can be treks to photograph real life cave-men and they could even re-introduce hunting. Now that it is banned in most of Africa, western hunters can find new, defenceless, animals to bag, take home and make rugs out of. Or trophy heads for their lake cabins. I can see that being big business and the Israelis love that above everything else.
There is another major advantage. Withdrawing now will make sure that your legacy, and David Cameron’s legacy, will not be that Tony Blair and George Bush, who started all this in the first place, will be remembered as World Statesmen, or even fondly, which is exactly what you two are achieving at the moment. And nobody wants to see that do they? You and Dave certainly don’t. Nor do I, I am on your side.
Why has nobody else thought of this? Am I a Genius? You can have that policy for free Mr President, sorry, Barry. It’s on me, in the name of world peace. Well, peace in the West but then who cares about anybody else. I certainly don’t. And another thing, you should sack all of your other advisors; they should have thought of this before me. They have had longer on it.
