Serial Sunday: Running Out Of Time, Part I
- 5 hours ago
- 11 min read
Edited by David Flin.
Written by:
Heath Aberdeen
Falisha Adiguna
Eesha Haq
Teddy Harrison
Jaiden-David Hinds
Ame Lock
Eden Murray
Betsy Street
Introduction
There’s a junior school in south London – it doesn’t matter which one – where I work.
One of the things I do there is run an after-school club for some of the older children (aged 9-11). The children in the club work together to tell a story, which I write down and tidy up a little. I’m a sort of a cross between editor and amanuensis.
Essentially, it’s their story. I’m constantly awed by their inventiveness and enthusiasm (which is extraordinarily tiring, by the way). Over the last couple of years, I’ve helped seven different groups produce seven different books, including The Three Who Loved Pizza.
The latest book is Running Out Of Time, and its relevance to SLP is that it has an interesting take on time travel. I don’t want to spoil the story by revealing too much, but suffice it to say that they leapt at the chance to play with Time Paradoxes (Paradoxi?)
At this point in time, I have to say that the enthusiasm and creativity of these young authors stands in stark contrast to the cynicism and the chic, sophisticated ennui in their elders. If you want a vision of hope and optimism for the future, look to the youth, the 10-year-olds. They’re exhausting, but they’re the future.
Prologue
29 July 2061
Halley’s Comet had just passed as close as it would come to the Earth. Huge numbers of people watched the night sky, both on Earth and in the cities on the Moon. Even on the rockets in space, people were watching while they were pressed up against the windows.
People on the new colony on Mars weren’t able to watch, as it was on the side of Mars that was currently facing away from the Earth.
Everyone who was watching was not actually looking at Halley’s Comet, even though this was the last time it would come near the Earth. Instead, they were watching an asteroid that was approaching in its shadow.
“It will pass close to the Earth,” astronomers said when they first spotted it.
“It will pass very close to the Earth,” they said after they had studied it for a bit.
They then studied it a bit more, and said: “It’s going to hit the Earth and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. It’ll completely destroy the world, but there’s no need to worry. Everything will be, well, it won’t be fine, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
As the asteroid got closer, the people on the Moon and in the spaceships and on Mars said that they would rebuild the world afterwards.
Then the asteroid hit the Earth and the Earth exploded into a billion billion pieces.
1000 Years Later
It had taken humanity over a thousand years to rebuild the Earth. A lot had been learnt over the years. They had learned a lot about a lot of things such as building spaceships and geology and teleportation and how to hold a planet together while the rocks fused together.
Rebuilding the Earth still wasn’t yet finished, but it had reached the point where people could again live on it. It wasn’t easy. They still needed gravity bondings to keep everything together.
The Earth was still not solidified. It was like quicksand, like a giant ball pit where everything sinks and moves. They couldn’t build cities on the surface, so they built hover platforms that could support flying cities.
Cars had to fly, because there wasn’t enough room at ground level.
There was still a lot of work to do, but everyone felt they’d made a good start.
Chapter One.
Four children sneaked off of the ship and onto the landing platform of the floating city of Nauril. The Earth wasn’t yet stable enough to support cities, but the floating cities let people live close to Earth.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” Eliana asked, pushing a hand through her ginger hair.
“Not a chance,” Toby replied. “Why should they?”
“Because if they find us, they’ll take us back. We don’t want that,” said Mei, stroking Silverlemon, her falcat. It purred and spread its wings.
Jason tried to think of something funny to say, something that would lighten the mood, but he couldn’t think of anything. “What next?” he asked.
“We have to find somewhere to hide,” Mei said. “Near the top would be best. Not as many people live there, so it will be easier to find somewhere.”
“And if we need to escape, we can jump out of a window and land lower down in the city,” Eliana said. “If we jumped out of a window on the bottom level, well, there would be nothing beneath us except a 10-mile fall.”
“I’m not going back to the orphanage,” Toby said, arms folded across his chest.
“None of us want to, Toby. We won’t be going back,” said Mei.
All the children shuddered at the prospect of returning to the orphanage.
They looked around for a quiet place where they could hide. The orphanage would be looking for them, and they didn’t want to go back there. That meant they had to avoid the CCTVs that were dotted around the city.
Their talkie-watches rang. The orphanage kept calling them to find out where they were.
“Maybe we should get rid of the watches,” Toby suggested.
“They’re too useful,” Mei replied. “They let us talk to each other. They connect with computers and talk to them. We can take pictures with them and they tell us where we are. They’re just too useful.”
“Do you know what they don’t do?” said Jason. “They don’t tell the time.”
They walked upwards towards the heights of the city, looking at the steel buildings which were becoming less shiny and bright and more tarnished. People were wearing clothes that were rather grubby and worn out.
They eventually spotted a deserted building, small and grubby but empty.
There was just one problem: there was a CCTV camera outside pointed straight at the entrance. If they were caught on the CCTV, the orphanage would find out where they were and take them back.
“I’ve got a plan,” said Toby. “We take a picture of the entrance, without us in the picture. We make sure we get it the right size, exactly the right size. Then we print the picture, put it in a frame, then fix the frame over the camera so that it is showing the picture and no-one will notice it’s not showing the door because it will look like it is.”
“Or we could just put mud over the camera so that it shows nothing. Everything up here is broken, anway,” said Eliana.
“I liked my plan better,” Toby said after they had muddied up the cameras.
The building had three rooms, all of them covered with dust and accumulated rubbish. Paint was peeling off of the walls; because they were so high up above the surface of the Earth, the air was very thin. They had never been so high and they had to take great gulps of air in order to breath properly.
Mei searched their new room. It was cold; freezing as air seeped in through a broken window high up in the wall. The heating elements weren’t working, and water dripped down the plasteen walls. Sugarlemon flew to the roof. When she landed, she dislodged something, which fell to the ground.
The four children gathered around it to see what it was. They saw a large gem on the ground, a glowing gemstone.
The gem kept changing colour from ruby red to sapphire blue to emerald green and back again.
“What’s this?” Mei asked. “Why is it doing that?”
“I guess we’ll never find out,” Jason said.
*****
Lillibet worked on a teleport pad near the top of the Nauril floating city. It was only a small pad. It was, like most things near the top of Nauril, broken. Everybody was so keen to keep working on remaking the Earth that everything else got forgotten. Sooner or later, stuff broke and there wasn’t enough people to fix everything.
She checked the cameras for the adjoining rooms. Some of the cameras were broken, but none of them showed anyone nearby. That meant she could safely test the pad out.
She pressed the button to start the telepads.
*****
“What’s going on?” shouted Jason.
The gem was glowing brightly and changing colours rapidly. The room felt like it was swirling around like a frantic roundabout. Bits of the wall started to crumble, but instead of falling to the floor, they whirled around like they were caught in a hurricane. Lights flashed around the room like a disco.
“Maybe we should have gone somewhere else,” Jason said. “People will notice.”
A loud noise sounded. It was like a peal of thunder in the room, and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light; the gem shattered and shards flew in all directions, and then all the children felt a sudden lurch before they tumbled to the ground.
*****
“Well, it wasn’t supposed to do that,” Lillibet said, looking at the smoke coming out of the teleport machine. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of smouldering rubber.
“It’s really broken now,” she said, packing her tools away. “It was lucky that no-one was nearby.”
*****
The four children had fallen to the ground. They stood up carefully.
They were in a strange room in a strange house.
Four people – two adults and two children – sat at a table, staring at the new arrivals. They each had a kind of plate in front of them with strange lumps of hot animal and vegetable parts on it. Each of them had a metal implement in each hand.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.
“Why are you wearing such strange clothes?” the boy asked.
“How can I get hair like yours?” the girl asked Eliana.
Chapter Two.
As the children arrived, they saw four fragments of the gem glimmer and shimmer next to them before each fragment shot away very quickly, passing through walls like they weren’t there.
Each child felt as though they were somehow linked to one of the gems, that they needed to get them. Each gem seemed to talk to one of them, but it was somehow talking straight into their mind, telling them what direction they were from them.
“What was that?” Toby asked.
“Whatever it was, let’s not do it again,” Jason replied.
Mei frowned. “I think we might need to if we want to get back. Where are we?”
The children looked around the strange room. Everything here was strange. There was a screen showing a moving picture. The picture seemed to involve a man with light brown hair sticking out in all directions and an enormous brown dog with black spots, both of them running away from a floating white sheet.
The people around the table still stared at the children.
“Are you new here?” the girl asked. “We’ve not seen you around before.”
“We certainly haven’t seen you in our dining room at dinner time without any warning or even coming through the front door like normal people,” said the man.
“I’m sorry,” Mei said.
“No, we’re not,” said Eliana. “We didn’t choose to come here. We can’t be sorry for something we had no control over.”
“Now that you’re here,” said the woman, “do you want a cup of tea?”
The four children looked blankly at each other. “What’s a cuppatea?” Jason asked.
“Oh,” the boy said. “You must be American. They don’t drink tea. They just throw it in the sea. Are you American?”
“What’s American?” Toby asked.
“It’s well, someone from America.”
“Oh, I remember learning about America. It’s near the Statue of Liberty where Holly Wood made the first cross between cows and people. They were called cowboys,” said Mei. “Like falcats,” she added, stroking Sugarlemon.
“Well that helps a lot,” Toby said sarcastically.
Mary and Brian both stared at Sugarlemon the falcat. “What is that?” Mary asked, pointing at it.
“That’s Sugarlemon. She’s my falcat,” Mei replied.
Mary and Brian stared at Sugarlemon. “What’s a falcat?” they asked. “Is it like a cockerpoo?”
“A cockerpoo?” Jason asked. “Is that a cross between a cockatoo and a polar bear?”
The people in the house looked at each other. This was going to take some explaining.
“Why don’t we show them the town?” the boy said. “My name is Brian. This is Mary, my sister. C’mon, let’s go.”
The four children pressed a button on their talkie-watches. Their clothes shimmered and changed into clothes that were suitable for wearing outdoors.
“How did you do that?” Mary asked.
“They’re just memory clothes,” Toby said. “You know, you put clothes together and collapse them into one set and then you can pick whichever clothes you want.”
Mary and Brian were fascinated by this as they went outside.
“What were you doing with those piles of stuff on the plate?” Mei asked.
“That was food,” Brian replied. “Just food, you know.”
“Surely that’s not food?” Jason said. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of pills. “This is food,” he said.
Mary and Brian looked at the food suspiciously. “Food? But they’re just pills, like little sweets,” Brian said, taking a handful and chewing them.
“Wait! That’s a whole bunch of meals. Each pill is a meal. You can’t eat Crambas like that. You’ll get fat.”
Then Jason shouted and pointed at some cars in the road. “Look!” he called out. “There are cars on the ground and they’re moving.”
“Yes? So what?” said Brian and Mary. They were puzzled. “What of it?”
“It’s dangerous. They could hit pedestrians. Cars should be flying. Hey, why aren’t there any cars flying? Why are they all on the ground where they can hit people?”
“Because cars can’t fly!” Mary said.
“Why not?” Eliana asked. “I mean, people hit by a car will get hurt.” She pointed. “Look, there are people crossing the road and there are cars on the road. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“What are those big buildings?” Toby asked.
“They’re shops,” Mary replied.
The four children stared at these shops. Mary and Brian didn’t seem at all surprised at the shops, but the four children were.
“What are they for?” Jason asked.
“They’re just shops. You buy things in them.”
“You mean you leave your house, walk all the way to the shops, buy things, and then what, you actually carry them back home?”
Mary and Brian looked at each other. “Where are you from?” Mary asked. “Don’t you have any shops?”
The four children tried to explain, all of them speaking at once.
“Nauril,” said Jason.
“Escaping from the orphanage,” said Toby.
“It’s hard to say because the cities float, so they move relative to the Earth,” Mei explained.
“The future,” said Eliana.
“What?” asked Toby, Jason, and Mei. Brian and Mary just looked confused.
“It’s obvious,” Eliana said. “This is the Earth. It can’t have been destroyed because look, here we are standing on it. If it’s not been destroyed, this must be before the asteroid hits it. That means that this must be the past which means we must be from their future. It’s obvious.”
“That explains why they eat primitive food,” Toby said.
“And why their cars don’t fly.”
“And why all their furniture is on the ground and they don’t have any gravity chairs on the walls.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Mary. “What did you say about an asteroid destroying the Earth? When was that?”
“Oh, it was ages ago. We’ve been rebuilding it for a thousand years, nearly.”
“Yes, but the Earth hasn’t been destroyed here, so the asteroid must still be coming,” said Eliana.
“How much in the future?” Brian asked.
“What time is it?” joked Jason with a chuckle.
“It was on Impact Day,” explained Mei.
“Since Impact Day is still in the future here, there’s not much point telling them it’s on Impact Day if they don’t know anything about Impact Day,” Jason said. “It was when Halley’s Comet appeared.”
“That’s why no-one saw the asteroid coming. It was concealed by Halley’s Comet. Bam. It hit the Earth and shattered it into a gazillion pieces. Only the people on the Moon and Mars and on the spaceships survived. It must have been epic.”
“We’ve been rebuilding the Earth ever since,” Jason explained.
Mary looked at Brian; Brian looked at Mary. “We have to stop the asteroid hitting. We don’t have spaceships or people living on the Moon or on Mars. We’re all here on Earth,” said Mary.
“Even if we have to do it ourselves,” Brian added.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Toby, not really paying attention to them. “What do you think guys?” he said to Eliana, Mei and Jason. “Do we need to find those bits of gem?”
Brian and Mary walked to the library. They had to learn a lot about Halley’s Comet and asteroids and stuff. They were determined to save the Earth.
David Flin has written & edited a large number of alternate history books and all-ages novels, and edited Comedy Throughout the (P)Ages and How To Write Alternate History.
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