The Archers in 2049 - A Future Fantasy

Saturday 26-FEB-2049

Tom Archer shifted his right elbow into a more comfortable position as he continued to gaze out of his window. He eyes met the earth as he gazed over his farm. He looked at the parched soil only a few metres away and wondered when it might rain again.

‘Been three months now’ he wondered in that curiously upbeat voice of his.

His eyes moved on and came across the empty pig pens that still stood in the middle field. ’What’s the point?’ he thought in a suitably more sombre tone of thought.

Tom had just celebrated his sixty eighth birthday on the twenty fifth of February 2049. Yesterday, and he could still taste the sickly sweet, artificial taste from his birthday cake.

He tried to think nice thoughts about it though as his grand-daughter, Patricia, had baked it for him. She was only ten years old so he had to make allowances, he felt. And, of course, she couldn’t possibly have used real ingredients for it. Not in February!

His mind began to wander again and his eyes seemed to accompany his thoughts.

‘The money’, he thought, as he rested his vision on his tractor. He still admired its lines; a John Deere made in 2033, the pinnacle of tractor design when diesel was still under a fiver a litre. ‘The money I spent on that!’ his thoughts raced as he remembered the second fuel crisis of the 2030’s when even red diesel went over the ten pound a litre mark. He saw the cobwebs on it, a testament to it lying idle for over eleven years. ‘If only,’ he thought, ‘If only…’

After inheriting the bulk of his grandmother’s estate upon her death, Tom though he had invested it wisely. He’d built up the farm and even provided for his mother. His relationship with Pat had never been the same following his father’s suicide but he thought he had dealt with the situation pretty well. His beloved wife, Kirsty, at his side as his advisor, he’d bought more pigs, expanded the business, steered away from organic farming and embraced the new GM crops and animal feed.

His gaze turned outward again and he had to refocus his eyes as the window had not been cleaned for some time. He looked at the pile of corpses lying in the brick-lined, incineration area. He thought, if he tried hard, he could still remember the name of every pig piled there, but as he did so, tears began to well in his eyes and his thoughts turned once again to the past.

He remembered being happy. It was not an easy memory to recall as it was buried under so many more recent, unhappy, memories. ‘2014 it must have been’ he pondered. ‘The year I got married. Yes. Yesss, that was a good year’.

A loud click followed by a deep humming sound shook him from his recollections. The power was back on for the first time in eleven days. Tom immediately wondered if that meant there was a TV signal as well. He moved as quickly as his sixty eight year old body would let him to the TV and switched it on.

The grey screen scrolled the message, NO SIGNAL, as it had done the last time the electricity was on. Tom clasped his hands together and slumped to his knees before the TV. Someone looking in through the window, just at that moment, would have thought he was praying to it.

‘Sodding hell’, thought Tom, ‘I can’t even listen to the radio. I wish the world was back to how it was, before all this happened’. He looked up and turned toward the window he had been looking through only moments ago. He could now see only the sky.

His mouth dropped open as the greyish blue turned first a butterscotch colour and then a deep, dark magenta hue. Thunder began to rumble around him and the house seemed to shake from the sound.

He turned back to the TV set and whispered, “Please help us, please…”

-

Saturday 27-FEB-2049

Jack ‘Jazzer’ McCreary wondered for the thousandth time why he had insisted on calling his only daughter Flame. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. He thought about how she had been conceived and remembered the circumstances of her birth, so Flame just seemed like an obvious name. Her mother, God rest her soul, had objected but Jazzer’s hold over her quelled any lingering fight that she had left in her.

Now, of course, the name seemed entirely ironic and Jazzer knew it. Everyone knew it. Guilt, though, was not a feeling that came readily to Jazzer and he still refused to accept that any of this was his fault.

Flame had set her twelfth fire only last week. It had raged for three days before burning itself out. “Just ran out of fuel” the chief fire-fighter, Harrison Burns, had told Pip Archer, whose barns and fields had been burned to a cinder.

“Ya cannae blame Flame, s’no her fault” Jazzer had shouted at Pip.

“Then whooose fault is it?” Pip had retorted in that familiar drawn-out-vowels voice she still retained from her attendance, 35 years ago, at “You-knee”.

“The lass ‘as problems. We all ken that. She just cannae help it” Jazzer tried again, sounding more and more like the defeated parent he was.

“Jazzer, it hasn’t rained for nine months. The whole country is a tinderbox. You can’t just let her do what she wants” said Pip, keeping her vowels in check for once as she sensed she was gaining the upper hand in this exchange.

“Aye. Well you wanna try keeping control o’er her, Pip Archer. It’s a right old nightmare it is. I cannae be watching her twenty fours hours a day, can I? I’ve got work to do.”

Jazzer paused for a second. He almost seemed to need to catch his breath. He was 64 years old now and some of his past activities had left his body older than it should have been.

Pip sensed her opportunity and with that characteristic dismissive wave of her arm, she turned to walk away, calling over her shoulder, “You need to get her locked up Jazzer”.

As Jazzer trudged back to Greenacres, the house he had, unexpectedly, inherited from Jim Lloyd, he pondered over what to do. ‘I cannae let her keep doing this’, he thought, ‘Pip’s right, Flame is dangerous. But wha’ can I do?’

He seemed lost in thought all the way back home, lifting his head only when he was a few paces outside of his front door.

“Flame! FLAME!” Jazzer shouted as soon as the front door had shut behind him, “Where are yae?”

“What?” came the reply, a sulky voice wrapped in a few layers of defiance and dripping heavily with violent-sounding intent.

For the first twelve or so years of her life, Jazzer was proud of his relationship with his daughter. They got on well and seemed to really understand each other. They were friends as well as daughter and father.

Jazzer started to notice a change in their relationship shortly after the second great drought to affect the UK. Flame seemed almost delighted with the fact that people were suffering. That animals were suffering and dying. That the whole world seemed to be changing.

It was shortly after her fifteenth birthday that she fell in with the Recyclists. A group whom Jazzer just could not understand. “So, they’re saying it’s all our fault that the worlds gone to hell and we shouldnae do a thing to try n change it? Is that right?” Jazzer remembered asking his daughter in increasingly exasperated tones every time she came home from a meeting.

It was only a few years ago that Flame and her “Radical Recyclists” friends (an off shoot of the original Recyclists) began to try and accelerate the effects of climate change.

They would set fires when no rain had fallen for months. They would destroy dams when it had rained constantly for weeks at a time. They had drawn up plans to destroy some of the government’s atmospheric re-oxygenation plants that were rapidly being built up and down the country. They had even tried a daring sabotage raid on one of the carbon-sink complexes situated in the abandoned salt mines near Crewe.

None of which Jazzer could understand. Why would his own daughter want to do these things? Why would anyone want to jeopardise the future of the human race? Everyone knew, now, that the effects of climate change had really only just started and the next fifty years or so will only be worse. It was almost as though some of the young ‘uns weren’t prepared to take on that challenge. As though they had given up already.

Jazzer shook his head with a disbelieving look of incredulity on his face, “Well, I just don’t ken it.”

-

Saturday 20-FEB-2049

Flame McCreary snorted two words to her father as she slammed the front door of Greenacres and left. The second of those words was “off”. She’d had enough of her Dad trying to control every aspect of her life and she knew she’d be better off with Joe. He had been asking her to move in with him for some time and after he had a big argument with his dad, George, it only seemed natural to Flame that she go to him in her time of need.

She glanced up at the sky and saw the dark clouds that heralded the end of the second great drought. She could smell the rain above her and quickened her pace to avoid the worst of the deluge she knew was coming.

‘Idiots’, she thought. ‘Why did they mess up so much? What sort of life have they left for me, Joe and people our age? Surely they must have known what they were doing…?’

Her thoughts trailed off unanswered, as the first fat raindrops began to fall, one hitting her right on the tip of her nose.

Joe Grundy had just polished off his third bottle of cider and was thinking about having something to eat when there was a loud rapping at the door of Greenwood Cottage. He had heard the thunder and the loud spitting noise of the rain against the windows so was taken aback rather that someone should be outside.

As soon as he had opened the door his face transformed from a curious frown to a delighted, amused grin as he saw Flame before him, utterly drenched but with an equally big smile on her face.

“What the hell are you doing you daft bugger, get in here” he said before enveloping her in a hug and pulling her inside in one smooth movement. The water continued to drip from every possible point of Flame’s clothing as they embraced and kissed for a good three minutes.

“Oh Joe, Joe, oh Joe” was all Flame could say for a while before finally becoming a little more articulate. “I’ve had enough. Of me Dad. I left home. Can I stay here?” she asked in staccato sentences between the sodden shivers that seemed to have taken hold of her whole, soaked body.

“Course you can”, said Joe, “Course you can. Stay as long as you like. The longer the better.” As the young man finished the final sentence he looked at Flame and thought how beautiful she looked even when soaking wet. “You can stay forever if you want” he added.

This is what Flame had wanted to hear and she buried herself in Joe’s warm embrace even deeper. “Aww, thanks Joe” she sighed as the couple became more one single, damp entity rather than a wet one and a dry one.

Later that evening Joe and Flame were huddled under a duvet in a post coital glow that almost seemed to illuminate the bedroom. The rain still fell violently outside but neither of them seemed to hear it now.

“It’s going to work out really well” Joe said in a voice only slightly above a whisper, “Me and you together. We can really shake things up with the Radical Recyclists and everything.”

Flame stirred from her almost perfect relaxed slumber, “What?” she asked quietly.

“Me and you” said Joe, shifting his elbow to a more comfortable position, “with my knack for all things electronic…” he sniggered as he turned his head so he could see Flame’s eyes in the dwindling light. “…and your, um, special talent, well, we could really achieve something. We can show that Henry Archer what for anyway. He thinks he knows it all, him, but we could show him. Me and you together, we could be running the Radical Recyclists around here before too long…” His voice trailed off as he realised that Flame had fallen asleep.

‘Yeah, that’d show him’ he thought as he lay on his back, eyes open, looking at the ever darkening ceiling and planning the new future.

The rain became more intense for a short period as Joe Grundy lay awake for several minutes plotting, planning and scheming. As an utterly outrageous thought suddenly occurred to him, the room was illuminated by a lightening bolt not far way and we could see the smile form on Joe’s face. As the room darkened again there was the most ominous rumble of thunder anyone had ever heard.

-

Saturday 27-FEB-2049

The Jet d’Eau had been switched off due to the lack of water in Lake Geneva when Henry Archer was there only a few weeks before. He’d been “celebrating” his 38^th birthday and, as he now flicked through the photos on his iPalm, he was more than a little disappointed. Geneva just didn’t look like Geneva without the towering jet of water in the background. All the more ironic thought Henry as it had not stopped raining since he’d been back in Borsetshire.

His mother, Helen, still looked stunningly beautiful at 69 years of age; smiling back at him in several of the photos he had taken of friends and family, but that was not the main reason for his visit to Switzerland.

As the leader of the Recyclists in Borsetshire, he had also attended a conference on tactics and strategy for the next five years. He liked to keep up with what the Recyclists were planning despite the fact that he had abandoned their policies nearly two years ago now. It was around that time that he had founded the Radical Recyclists. An off shoot from the official organisation composed of Recyclists who were disillusioned with the progress being made by their leaders in negotiating with the world’s governments.

Henry had always found it easy to rebel. He never could understand why, he could only guess at reasons. His mother had told him about his father, or rather his lack of a father, when he was twelve. He thought he understood at the time but as he grew older he seemed to become more confused with the idea. He remembered various different men as he was growing up, and he remembered giving up thinking they were his “new Dad” at around the age of nine. They just seemed to come and go, often associated with days of shouting toward the end of each one’s tenure.

He had joined the Recyclists in 2033 and became leader of the Borsetshire group only eight years later. He had been a leader characterised by his willingness to listen to all views from group members. He had been a listening leader but decisive when he needed to be.

A muffled sort of pop sound roused Henry from his recollective mood. He straightened and looked right and left in rapid succession. He could see nothing. He went to the window and looked out, scanning the horizon. Still he could see nothing. Then, some four hundred metres away, he noticed one of the cable TV posts was lying at anything but a right angle to the ground. Faint wisps of bluish smoke wafted around it’s base as it leaned over at an alarming sixty degree angle to the ground.

‘Oh bugger,’ thought Henry, ‘not this again’.

He knew what had happened. Some of the younger Recyclists had become a little restless recently. It was just juvenile exuberance mixed with more than a little angst supplied by the extraordinary position everyone now found themselves in. Some, though, had wanted to take it further and Joe Grundy, Henry’s old friend, had even spoken openly about starting a new group, more radical than the Recyclists. More willing to take “direct action” as Joe called it.

Henry sighed. He knew already that Joe and his friends were responsible and he knew he would take some of the blame for their actions as the “agent” in their midst.

He also knew that he would have to do something about it.

With a determined tightening of his lips, Henry turned toward the front door, grabbing his mac as he went. Struggling to get his arms into the sleeves of the raincoat faster than was physically possible, he tried to calm himself. ‘It’s the old Grundy versus Archer battle again’ he thought as he finally got the coat on.

As he walked out of The Lodge into the pouring rain, Henry had only one other thought on his mind. He had to stop Joe Grundy from ruining everything.

-

Saturday 06-MAR-2049

“Did you hear that?” asked Joe.

“Hear what?” replied Flame not bothering to lift her head. She was concentrating on a rather delicate part of the assembly of her latest incendiary device. Using her own version of napalm and a new initiator of white phosphorous, she had to be very careful not to allow any leakage onto the circuit board that controlled detonation. 'Fire, walk with me' she thought as she went happily about her work.

“What they just said on the news” continued Joe.

Flame’s eyes never left the device she was assembling as she grunted, “Mmhmm”.

The news had, in fact, reported the start up of a new atmospheric greenhouse gas inhibitor (AGGI’s they were called officially but in Borsetshire, they were colloquially known as scrubbers) just outside Penny Hassett. It was a huge plant that removed tonnes of surplus carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and methane from the atmosphere. The gases were converted into liquid form and then mixed with an inert medium, usually plant fibres, so that they could then be stored safely. Plants like these were springing up all over the country as part of the government’s efforts to reduce global warming and, more pressingly, to meet the commitment to the Miami agreement of 2042. The G15 conference of 2042 had been due to be held in Miami but the city had disappeared below the Atlantic Ocean only a few months before the summit was due to be held.

“Well, we knew it would happen I guess” continued Joe, “it just means we’ll have a bigger…”

His words were cut short by a loud banging at the door.

Just as Joe turned his eyes to look toward the door, it flew open and Henry Archer stumbled into Greenwood Cottage still holding the crowbar he had used to gain entry.

“What the f… Oh, hello Henry” was all that Joe could say to mask his surprise and indignation at the intrusion. “Door sticking again?”

“We need to talk. Now!” Henry spat the words across the room as he glanced at Flame who during the interruption had not lifted her eyes or her soldering iron once from her ID assembly.

“OK mate, let’s talk” said Joe in an agreeably soothing voice, “but not here. Outside yeah?”

Flame had nearly completed the assembly of her fire bomb, as she liked to think of it, when she started to hear the raised voices from outside. As she snapped shut the metal casing on the timing board, she heard Joe shout, “I don’t give a monkey’s front teeth what you or they think, H, we both know it needs to be done!”

She looked up for the first time in a good twenty minutes and turned her gaze to the curtained window. She strained to hear more as the raindrops smacked at the window. She heard Henry shout, “What good will it do? Tell me that!” then Joe reply, “It’ll show them we’re serious and we have the means to…” There was a sort of shuffling sound, like someone dragging their feet that masked the next exchange, but Flame, listening intently now, soon heard Henry continue.

“You just don’t get it, do you? Understand my position I mean. Do you?” Henry said in what started as a shout but faded, during the sentence, to a raised voice.

A gust of wind spat more rain at the window and she lost the next few seconds of shouts.

There were more sounds, almost like distant thunder, that prevented Flame from hearing more until there was a series of dull-sounding thuds. Flame then thought she heard the sound of footsteps, receding. At a fast pace though, like the sound of running away.

She’d finished the ninth fire bomb she’d made that evening, so pushed back the chair at which she’d been sitting and listening. It made a scraping sound against the concrete floor before Flame began the short walk to the door.

As she pushed it open and saw the body of her lover, Joe Grundy, lying before her in a pool of blood, she nearly choked on the vomit that came into her throat just as she was about to burst into tears and emit a loud and continuous scream.

-

Saturday 13-MAR-2049

The concrete felt rough beneath Flame’s fingers as she moved her hand through a portion of the pool of blood forming beneath her lover's body. She rubbed her blood coated second finger against her thumb and the liquid felt warm and slightly sticky between her digits.
Her eyes moved over Joe's chest. She dare not look at his face just yet. The taste of vomit still in her mouth, she forced herself to look at him.
His mouth seemed to have frozen in mid word. She wondered what that word might have been for a second before moving her gaze up to Joe's eyes. They seemed to contain a mixture of hate and fear in a frozen moment of time that Flame could scarcely begin to imagine.
She began to sob again, softly and intermittently at first but developing into huge lung-bursting gasps of tear-filled air. The physical sense of loss she felt seemed to be trying to punch their way out of her body. Through her mouth, her eyes, her nose and her snot, every brittle fibre of spent emotion seemed to want to expel itself from her all at the same time. She thought she would literally choke on her grief

Henry Archer puffed his cheeks out as he sat in the chair outside his chief officer’s London office. He had given the officer, whom Henry knew only by the name Jennings, a full debrief of the events that had led to him shooting Joe Grundy. He had been sure that Joe had guessed the true nature of his mission and had seen no alternative. The stakes were spiralling in height and Henry had acted in the manner he had been trained. Two silenced shots and get away. Fast. It was up to Jennings and then Control as to what should happen next. Henry had given them all the facts he knew, apart from one perhaps, identified the probable target and the probable means as well. He could do more now other than wait for his new orders.

Flame carefully unpacked her back pack. She had already thrown the few clothes she would need into the top drawer of the chest that was to the right of the bed. With slightly trembling hands she placed all ten completed fire bombs in a line on the bed.

After she had composed herself, some twenty minutes after Joe had been shot; she had made up her mind what she needed to do. She had completed all the incendiaries and quickly packed them and a few clothes into a rucksack. She had found a room at the Lloyd hotel in Felpersham that evening and was now, as if on autopilot, completing phase two of the operation that she and Joe had agreed days before.

She looked at the bombs on the bed. The slightly crooked line in which they were arranged suddenly caused an image of Joe’s body to barge into her mind.

“Oh.” She whimpered aloud, although she had not meant to speak, as her grief came flooding back. She started to feel completely impotent and overwhelmed. ‘What am I doing?’ she though, to herself. ‘I can’t do this. Not on my own. Not without Joe. Joe. Oh Joe…’ Her thoughts mingled with the images burnt into her memory of Joe’s face as he lay dead before her. The look in his eyes, the questioning mouth that had been frozen in time.

She had, of course, guessed what must have happened. Henry had shot Joe and then ran off. But why? She knew that Henry was jealous of Joe but to kill him? Why would he do that?

Flame took a deep breath and tried to compose herself once again. She remembered what Joe had told her only a few days ago and a kind of determined calm seemed to come over her. It was as though she were about to begin a journey into destiny. It was a strange feeling but one she couldn’t shake as she sat on the bed next to the bombs she had built.

Henry had been called back into Jennings’ office after a twenty minute wait outside. He had listened to his orders and was now waiting for a train to Felpersham on platform six of Euston station.

He had bought a newspaper and was glancing at the headlines as he waited for the, already ten minutes late, train.

“Severe flooding in south and west expected” read one headline.

“Terror gang leader found dead in village” said another.

Henry folded the paper and tucked it under his arm having decided to read no more. He turned and wandered toward the end of the platform. He pulled his iPalm out of his jacket pocket and turned it on for the first time in two days. He looked down at the screen that told him he had no messages and a look of disappointment seemed to flit across his face for a moment.

At that very instant, the ancient silver and red train appeared and rolled slowly and silently to a stop before him.

“All passengers for the 10:12 to Liverpool, please board the train now waiting at platform six” the computerised voice declared through the tannoy.

Henry looked to his left and then to his right and boarded the train. He felt as though he was about to begin a journey into destiny. It was a strange feeling but one he couldn’t shake as he found a seat.

-

Saturday 20-MAR-2049

A hum of machinery filled the air. The scrubbers throbbed as they cleaned the air of Borsetshire. Every second the intake stacks sucked in hundreds of litres of air and the chemical and nano-tube filters removed grams of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and methane almost instantly. The removed gases were stored in huge pressure containers before they were ready to be mixed with inert filler that would render them storable, in a solid state, for millions of years.

Flame McCreary had placed nine of her ten incendiary bombs in the places already agreed, weeks before, when she and Joe Archer were planning a strategy for the destruction of AGGI #38 located not far from Penny Hassett. As she crept toward the methane silo that would be the site of the last bomb, she had to force herself not to think of Joe for about the hundredth time that day. She concentrated on her task and wrinkled her forehead, narrowed her eyes and headed toward CH₄ silo #4.

Henry Archer watched Flame through the telescopic sight of his sniper rifle and grinned. From the place of concealment he had found hours ago he had been watching Flame since she first broke into the plant 52 minutes ago. He had always found the way that Flame wrinkled her forehead when she was concentrating, utterly charming.

‘She looks so beautiful when she does that’ he thought as the grin widened slightly. He seemed lost in thought for a moment as the dull thrubs of sound pervaded the very material of the plants walls.

AGGI #34 was a converted mega-dairy, the government buying it from former owner, Alice Aldridge, only three years before and it was already fully operational, removing 4.3 tonnes of greenhouse gases from the air of Borsetshire every day.

‘What a waste of time’, thought Flame as she knelt near the base of the silo. ‘If only people knew what was really happening to the atmosphere…Well, this will wake them up, the government will never be able to cover this up’ she continued to think to herself as she assembled the final bomb almost as if on autopilot – she had done it so many times, she barely needed to think about it at all. As she clicked the switch on the last bomb to “ARM”, she stretched back on her haunches. 'That's that then' she thought and pulled the remote detonator out of the bag and crawled back toward the window she had broken into 58 minutes ago.

As Flame’s cat like body shape, carefully crawling against a grey coloured wall, filled Henry’s view through the sight of his rifle, a single thought occurred to him. ‘Am I doing the right thi…?’ The thought remained half formed as he pulled the trigger and 7.62 millimetres of high velocity bullet was sent toward Flame’s right temple. Less than one thousandth of a second later, it hit it’s target. Henry never missed but in that split second of time he seemed to see Flame turn toward him and look directly into his eyes. It was a look that would live with him for the rest of his life and he shuddered slightly as he pulled out his iPalm.

Jennings looked blankly at his computer screen from his office in Whitehall as the message arrived from Henry. “It’s done” read Jennings and a slight smile began to form on his face. “Intelligence good. No apparent timed detonation. Perp down” the message ended and Jennings’ face almost cracked into a broad smile.

Henry walked toward Flame’s body as the throbbing sounds from the scrubbers continued unabated. He turned her body over and pulled the remote detonator from her left hand. Looking at it, his forehead suddenly became wrinkled and his eyes narrowed as he wondered what the flashing blue light just below the letters “DMH” meant. The illuminated red letters of the word “ACTIVATED” that suddenly shone out from the remote control left him in no doubt however, and his mouth opened, his head turned upward and another thought came to him.

Jennings clicked on the close button to his instant messaging window just as the growing London dusk seemed almost to be put on hold by a bright flash in the sky from the north west.

As Jennings turned his head toward the window the light grew brighter and more intense, almost as if a star were being born. A few seconds later the light in the sky was already beginning to fade and lights on Jennings’ many computer screens seem to replace it as they flashed on, urgently. Jennings took one last glance out of the window and, as he saw the blood red sun setting in the west, a shiver went down his spine.