City of Shadows

Chapter 73

2067, Piccadilly Circus, London

Another warm sunset across the overgrown ruins of mankind. The cry of a fox, the chirp of crickets. The gently swaying ochre sea of tall grass. The predatory swoop of a hawk.

A peaceful grave of humankind. Like some windswept site of archaeological interest — the ruins of Troy, of ancient Sparta, Babylon. Now, just like those places, worn stubs of masonry overgrown by an emerald carpet of nature. Tumbledown walls, caved-in roofs. Nothing lasts forever.

Here bleached bones lie amid the tangled roots of wild grass, doing a far better job of weathering time than the rusting, flaking skeletons of cars.

Peaceful, like a prairie, like the Serengeti, like an African veldt.

But now there’s a fresh breeze, and the faintest distant rumble. The peach-coloured sunset sky has suddenly gained a faint twisting ribbon of black. At first as thin as a pencil scribble following the line of the horizon across a landscape painting. But, very quickly, becoming as thick as a marker pen as it approaches rapidly, and seconds later a looming, dark, continental crust swallowing the land beneath it.

A dozen seconds of deafening chaos as this black horizon sweeps in over the ruins of London and this peaceful post-human world is swept away; a possible future that had its short chance to exist. Swept away to join a million other begrudging futures that will never get a chance to see the light of day.

It’s replaced by noise and chaos of a wholly different kind.

London, 2067.

The grass is gone. Piccadilly Circus heaves with humanity, a city crowded with thirty million inhabitants. The statue of Eros looks up at looming mega-skyscrapers encrusted with holographic displays and garish adverts for soyo-protein products. The sky buzzes with corporate jyro-copters and police air-skimmers with winking blue lights and brilliant white searchlights tracking and monitoring the heaving populace below. A torrential downpour cascades from an unhealthy, lemon-tinted sky, overcast with polluted clouds.

Rain-slicked pedestrians push and jostle each other across waterlogged pavements, every last one of them wearing air filters on their faces.

London: one of a couple of dozen metropolises around the world playing host to its share of the migrating billions. Even though this city’s levees that hold back the swollen Thames are sure to fail one day soon and it will join New York as another city lost to the rising seas, every day thousands more people swarm in and live cheek by jowl in cluttered tenement blocks that dwarf the old buildings of Canary Wharf.

In a way it’s not so very different from the conditions of Whitechapel nearly two centuries ago.

London buzzes like a shaken beehive. Pounding music from hawkers on the street and second-tier pedestrian walkways above. A deafening riot of noise and movement and colour. Kerbside bazaars sell snake-oil cures for toxin-induced asthma. A trader sells slabs of pink-coloured dough that he’s claiming is real meat. If it is… God knows what creature it once was. Genetically engineered apelike work-units marked by tattoo bar-codes and dressed in orange overalls move sullenly among the press of people, clearing trash, carelessly tossing the body of some starved-to-death immigrant into the back of a waste recycler.

This is the London that will exist a mere five decades after the last-ever Olympic Games are held here. Back in a time before the inevitable end was writ large for all to see and then foolishly ignored by one and all. Back before the first big oil shock, when supplies began to falter, before the sea level really started rising fast, the sky discolouring, crops failing, ecosystems collapsing.

But of course this is the way it has to be. This is the timeline a certain Roald Waldstein is so very desperate to preserve… at all costs. It has to be this.

And nothing else but this.