City of Shadows

Chapter 12

11 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut

The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.

SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of plastic bags all to himself.

They all freshened up, each of them relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner. They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.

The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now his words were being dissected by news hosts in meticulous detail.

Foster was slumped in the room’s only chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.

‘You want to know what the future’s like?’ said Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows some of it.’

The old man nodded. ‘Only what was available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year 2054.’

Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year your secret agency originates from?’

‘I suppose that must be it,’ Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all up and took it back to 2001.’

‘2054? I was just a small boy then!’ Rashim laughed.

‘Go on, please. Tell us what you can,’ said Liam.

Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011. In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at which it all began to go bad.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, whether it was the population explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the world crossed the line and was doomed.’

‘ Peak oil? What’s that?’ asked Liam.

‘Peak oil is the term for the point at which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being trialled on a small scale: renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another being fought for the remaining oil fields, while the world continued to warm up as we ferociously burned our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the oceans continued to rise.

‘I have a question for you.’ Rashim lifted his head and looked at them all. ‘Any of you heard of the Fermi Paradox?’

Maddy did, or thought she did. ‘Isn’t that the puzzle to do with why we haven’t yet found any alien civilizations out there in the universe?’

He nodded. ‘A mathematician called Fermi calculated the odds of there being other alien life forms out there in the big wide galaxy. He took into account all the usual variables: the number of stars at the right point in their life cycles, the average number of likely planets per star, the probability of any of those planets existing within the “Goldilocks Zone” around the star, the likelihood of a planet having liquid water… all those important variables.

‘Anyway, while the odds were stacked against any one solar system containing intelligent life, given that there are literally trillions of stars, his maths delivered an answer that there must be hundreds of thousands of alien civilizations out there, and tens of thousands of civilizations advanced enough in technology to be putting out radio waves, intentionally or not.

‘So the point is,’ continued Rashim, ‘when we started looking into space for radio signals, we should have stumbled across them almost immediately. According to Fermi’s maths, we should have been swimming in alien radio signals.’

‘But instead we never found anything,’ said Maddy.

‘Right. And that’s the Fermi Paradox. Why isn’t every frequency full of alien signals?’ He sighed. ‘Because we’re alone. And why are we alone?’ He smiled. He wasn’t expecting them to answer. ‘Well… in my time we figured that out for ourselves. Within a century of discovering radio waves, mankind managed to exhaust the raw materials of the planet. The raw materials, the free energy source that every emerging technological civilization gets as a gift from its historical past — fossil fuels. It’s that package of free energy that we should have used carefully while we took our time to discover and harness quantum energy. Humankind never got a chance to take anything more than a few baby steps into space. We never got the time to mature, to reach out into space, for other worlds. Hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. Oil. We used it all up far too quickly. Too many people wanting too many things. We used it up,’ he said, sighing, ‘and then, as it began to run out, we turned on each other.’

‘The Oil Wars?’ said Liam. He had heard another traveller from Rashim’s time mention them. A man called Locke.

‘Yes. Wars between India and China. Japan and Korea. The first of those was in the 2040s. Russia and the European Bloc, there was a short war between those. And, of course, what we should have been doing is trying to fix another bigger problem. The world itself dying: warming up, rising tides, poisoned blooms of algae killing the seas.’

Rashim fell silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox; most — if not all — civilizations either destroy themselves or mine themselves dry long before they ever spread out to other planets and are able to mine, harvest them for resources. Once you’ve exhausted your home planet… it’s all over for you. Either you become extinct, or you eventually end up being cavemen once more.’

‘It’s a one-shot deal?’ said Maddy.

He nodded. ‘And perhaps every civilization makes the same mistake. Spends what it has, thinking it will never run out. Then, all of a sudden, it does.’

‘Wonderful,’ sighed Maddy.

‘But on Earth we didn’t just run out. We decided to destroy ourselves in style.’ Rashim snorted. ‘It was some kind of a genetically engineered virus… pretty much wiped us all out in the space of a few weeks. We made a nice tidy job of pretty much erasing ourselves from history.’

‘Shadd-yah,’ whispered Sal after a while. ‘This is depressing! You’re great fun to hang out with, you know that, don’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘You did ask what the future’s going to be like.’

‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘It was Liam who asked.’

‘Aye, and now I wish I bleedin’ well hadn’t.’