NaNoWriMo November 2011 Story 1/5: “The Leader Is Dead”
The following story draws, however – thus far – obliquely, on Nazism, Churchill’s idea of democracy, the film Valkyrie, and the “Would you kill Hitler?” idea, as well as free will vs. determinism, to tell in 10k-20k words the story of Thomas Farmer, a native of late 20C west Lincolnshire who attains a career as a bookseller following a failed authorial ambition. One part of the story, the first to be mentioned, details his fall from university, his failing days as a writer and his opening a successful bookseller business. The son of a gentle if naive Tory MP, he is quite a pleasant person to many, with several friends across all spectrums of society. The second aspect of the story details the despotic regime of the Shadow in 2030s Europe, radiating out from Britain and putting all of Europe in danger: his war with Iran and his persecution of European Muslims, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and political opponents. The despotism of the Shadow is set against the background of the scientific advancements of Anglia, the new country which has emphasised scientific achievement at the cost of human rights. The main characters are scientists and politicos who respectively, as the plot goes on, invent time-travel and organise resistance movements against the regime of the Shadow. Eventually, the third part of the story (or fifth or seventh part, depending on how this is all ultimately laid out, if the first two sections are told alternating against each other, as with the LOTR films, or simply one then the other, as with the LOTR books), will detail how seemingly mild-mannered bookseller Thomas Farmer begins to be beset by one mysterious attempted assassin after another, shortly after his piquing interest in local politics lands him a position, about which he is sceptical of its worth, as a clerical assistant to the deputy mayor of Lincoln, a former associate of his father’s friend. Eventually, he learns the reason for these attempted assassinations, which number around sixteen over the course of the year 2012, unless it turns out that this rate and timespan is different. After discovering from one of the assassins that time travel back into the future is impossible, or at least for these characters who have no knowledge of the existence or workings of TARDISes, the latter not featuring or being hinted at in the story – I just don’t want to decanonise them, in the literary sense – he is persuaded to change his attitude, just as a nineteenth assassin appears from the future and badly wounds him. His friend, the sixteenth assassin, disappears shortly after he is injured and he blacks out. The next scene begins ambiguously, eventually revealing that Farmer has survived. Back in the future, the opportunity to time-travel is wiped out and explained as a stable time loop, thus closing the question of whether or not it would be right to travel back and kill Hitler: it’s not relevant, because to do so would be impossible, and we should all just go on with our lives. The title is derived verbatim from the English translation of the German phrase instructed to be typed by von Stauffenberg to Hitler’s secretaries during the July 20 plot of 1944; the relevant excerpt from Valkyrie will be featured in the story.
Eventually. If I must ask one thing of you as narrator and conveyor of truth to reader, it is – regrettably – that you be patient. This is a long and complex tale, and it is true, and yet also truly terrifying. For me, anyway. If it comes to you a cardboard box wrapped in glow-in-the-dark packaging and advertised as a wonder of wonders, I apologise. I hope that one day I will be able to tell it properly. Science is my thing, and when my understanding of my thing has been bent as badly as mine has been by the below events, it is a struggle for me, who am not by any means a born narrator, to relate it sensibly. For that, forgive me. For now, and hopefully not forever, here is my best effort.
Yours faithfully,
Dr. Peter Flauvert, PhD (Cantab.)
Main Characters:
1. Thomas Farmer, bookseller, failed writer and tentative politico from western Lincolnshire
2. Judith Francis, an orphaned Essex-dwelling nurse from the 2030s, who is the sixteenth person in 350 days (change?) to travel back and attempt his assassination
3. Malik al-Fazhad, the leader of Iran with whom the Shadow is at war
4. Hermann Detterich, the Hamburg-based leader of the Anglian resistance
5. Tara Khaled, the Muslim 2nd generation Iraqi immigrant and personal friend of Thomas Farmer, herself a librarian and occasional writer
6. Dr. Peter Flauvert, the scientist responsible for the accidental discovery of time travel
7. Hannah Porter, the leader of the UK in the new future after the neutralisation of the Shadow in his past (NB: use relevant LOTR quote – “The Shadow of the Past” - if possible). She will be featured primarily in the Shadow-reality, but will be shown as leader in the new one, which will appear only in the last chapter
8. Martin Lorchim, former German Health Secretary and key player in the Anglian resistance
9. Robert Detterich, son of Hermann: revolutionary ideologue
10. Theresa Kleinmann, girlfriend and later fiancée of Robert
11. Shari al-Fazhad, Paris college friend of Theresa and the niece of the above-mentioned Iranian President: it is through these latter four that an alliance is forged between the “Muslim world”, the Anglian Resistance and the West Anglian Scientific Institute, the organisation behind Flauvert’s discovery of time-travel while attempting to track solar-based biological lifeforms recently discovered in distant star systems
Scene 1: Thomas Farmer diary, 2011 (26). Includes a lot of political philosophy, his current job as a bookseller, his history as a university student, and his excitement about pitching his pride and joy to an editor at Lincoln’s Red Imp Publishing (possibly a confirmedly real alternate name). The book is a novel set just after the First World War and details a Lincoln cleaner who, while cleaning the cathedral, is inspired to research its architectural history: in the process of this, he stumbles across a portal to the day it was built, and must survive various antagonists in medieval Lincoln. The book is entitled Works of Heart.
Scene 2: In Norwich, the scientific discovery of time-travel, 2034, from the perspective of its discoverer, Dr. Peter Flauvert, 51 (accidental and told as he discovers it). He discovers that the time-travel invariably ends when the traveller experiences a sufficiently high level of adrenaline, during a traumatic event. This invariability is revealed over the course of later events. It is also difficult to return to anything like a time one has already travelled back to, and impossible to do it exactly.
Scene 3: On November 25, 2011, Thomas Farmer has a meeting with an editor, Hannah Porter: she tells him that his book is insufficiently interesting, lacking a wider foundation in nationwide politics and not sufficiently historically researched. He leaves in an extremely depressed mood to catch the train back to wherever he lives, possibly Metheringham. He sits back down in his living room, near a prominent personal library featuring myriad books on Lincolnshire and architectural history, picks one up, flicks through it, then slams it in disgust onto the coffee table – he is a literary man and refuses, even when in a bad mood, to risk unnecessary damage to works of intellectualism, even those he doesn’t agree with. He opens his fridge, takes out a sixpack of Carling and some Wotsits, and sits down to watch the News at Ten, which opens with a report on clashes between British Islamists and the English Defence League.
Scene 4: Dr Flauvert escapes from his time-travel experience and rushes with the knowledge to a scientific journal, which receive his discovery with scepticism, but also a promise to send an inspection team within the next few days to investigate his claimed discovery. Fairly unoptimistic, he travels to a local bar, where he meets Tara Khaled, someone he knows from the neighbourhood: she is a librarian and writer, and a 2nd-gen immigrant Muslim. She, like him, feels that something is vaguely wrong with her life and the world in general: not just the Islamophobic government, but that something feels off about the whole business of living. She is watching the news: Iranian President Malik Al-Fazhad is speaking from Turkey, denouncing the war being pursued against his country and Anglian Muslims by the Shadow, the Anglian leader. There follows a rebuttal by the Anglian Home Secretary, who makes various vaguely Islamophobic comments, annoying the Iranian man. The Home Secretary also denies the existence of any co-ordinated Anglian resistance movement. This is the background to Tara and Peter Flauvert’s discussions; motivated by the TV report and him asking her about her day, she talks wearily of protesters at her Norwich library against the Anglian government, and how the police arrived, rounded them up and took them away; of how one of the protesters was hit in the head by police and got blood on the library outer wall; of how depressing it all is. She compares the Shadow’s treatment of Muslims to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, and she also talks about the increasing drudgery of administrative work she faces, especially in the face of dwindling library patrons. She asks Flauvert about his daughter and estranged wife; he eventually gets round to telling her about his time travel discovery and the troubles with the scientific inspectors. She asks to see it for herself, and he agrees to take her round early the following morning, so that as few people as possible see him bring her in: whites fraternising with Muslims is frowned upon.
Scene 5: Back in 2011, Thomas Farmer goes back to work as a bookseller; he leafs through his old university photos (make reference to The Obvious Child if suitable) and decides, once the day is over, to make a phone call to his former university flatmate, Rebekah Altam Ali, also 26 and now living as an English teacher in Norwich. Later she will turn out to be Tara’s mother. He has made the phone call in large part because he will be attending a book fair in Norwich the following week, a fact which will already have been mentioned in a previous scene. The two arrange to meet up the following Saturday morning, before the fair in the afternoon.
Scene 6: The president of Iran has a conversation with his niece regarding the deteriorating situation against Anglia; once she leaves his presence she gets on her mobile phone to her friend Theresa Kleinmann in Paris, telling her that the efforts of the Resistance need to be stepped up, as the war is worsening.
Scene 7: Peter Flauvert and Tara arrive at 6am at the Scientific Institute; he shows her the discovery and they have another experience with time-travel. At some point, Tara asks if she can go back to see her mother, who died of lung cancer in 2026. We go back and it is implied that her mother is Rebekah; Tara talks about how it was nice to see her mother happy, after her father’s death in 2020, the decline of library patrons and the rise of governmental Islamophobia. It is remarked that the year they go back to, 2019, is a couple of years after the merger of the EU into a single government, and several years before its revolution into a singular state in 2027. They discuss the coming meeting with the inspector that afternoon, and Tara wishes Peter good luck as they part company a few blocks beyond the Institute.
Scene 8: Thomas Farmer meets up with Rebekah Altam Ali and they share a conversation which puts him in mind of his failures. Towards the end of it, he propositions her and she rejects him, telling him that she has a potential boyfriend. He later goes to the book fair and fails to discover anything truly spectacular: he stays in a Premier Inn that night in Norwich and lies awake into the night listening to the traffic outside, and some kind of loud music from a nightclub. Tears glisten on his cheeks as he stares into the darkness.
Scene 9: Peter meets with the scientific inspector later in the same day when he showed Tara his discovery. The inspector is more sympathetic than the people who appointed him, even though he, like his predecessors, is unable to confirm the existence of time travel: every person Peter has shown who is not a personal friend has seen merely an airborne slideshow of clips from the past (which happen, though it’s not revealed conclusively yet, to reflect whatever the people nearby are thinking emotionally about at the time), and an anomalously large amount of static electricity and electromagnetic activity, plus a “weird feeling” in the air. The inspector is not convinced, but he assures Peter he’ll write up a preliminary report by the end of the week, and in the meantime he advises Peter to pass the news of the discovery, whatever it is, on to the president of the ANAS (Anglian National Academy of Science). Peter frequents the same bar in which he previously met Tara, and this time he sees a report on the news which follows on from all the recent protesting: a law is being drafted through the House of Auditors (a single-chamber pan-European equivalent of the UK present-day House of Commons) depriving Muslims of Anglian citizenship unless they denounce their religion. The report also details several fatal shootings of protesters, including one who climbed St. Paul’s Cathedral and draped a star and crescent flag at the top of it. It’s summer, and riots are erupting across the country and across the continent. Switzerland is flooding with protesters bearing sculptures of minarets; in France, gangs of women roam the streets in full burkas, which are outsize enough that there may be weapons concealed beneath them. The Ministers for Germany and Norway are voicing dissent against the Shadow regime, calling for calm and tolerance. A protester with a Liverpudlian accent and short beard is interviewed: his profile is blacked out.
Scene 10: Thomas Farmer doesn’t claim the good-night guarantee against the Premier Inn, because he can’t be bothered and he can see it’s not their fault. He goes to the University of East Anglia and sits in on a history and politics lecture. When he arrives at the train station, he struggles to analyse the notes he has taken. There is an announcement saying that, because it’s Sunday, the train driver has failed to arrive and there will be an hour’s stop at Ely before he can catch the train on from there to Peterborough. Disgusted at his own perceived political ineptitude, he throws the lecture notes in a bin outside Ely station, falling and bloodying his face as he rushes up the underground slope to catch the train, which he misses by seconds (having become engrossed in his attempts to understand the notes in an Ely station cafe). Angrily, he wipes his face with a tissue and sits back down on the platform to await the next train to Peterborough, staring miserably into the howling wind and rain which accompanies this late November Sunday afternoon.
Scene 11: Peter contacts the president of ANAS, who agrees to fly in from Munich the following day with a team of experts to look at the phenomenon. In the afternoon, after he has finished conducting his scheduled research, Peter walks across Norwich to Tara’s library, where he discovers her in the almost deserted building on the phone, having a hectoring argument with the person on the other end about withdrawal of funding. He talks to her after she hangs up, and she comments that it seems like the potential closure of the library, where she has worked for years, is motivated as much by covert Islamophobia as by overt budget constraints and lack of public demand for library services. The only other occupant of the library is a man wearing a trenchcoat and perusing the section on 20th century history: he puts down John Toland’s biography of Hitler after Tara makes a remark that she’d like to show the government the Nazi concentration camps. The man turns out to be a government official sent to spy on intellectuals who might react badly to the government crackdown on Muslims and protesters, including intellectuals: he arrests her for this remark, and speaks into a communications device as he manhandles her out, saying “Got another one for you Chief – insurgent or something, judging by what she’s ranting about.” Tara admonishes him for talking in the library and shouts for Peter to lock up: he has protested against her treatment but the official has treated him with firm faux politeness, calling him “sir”, vaguely threatening him and otherwise ignoring him. Peter locks up and hurries back to the Institute, calling his daughter on the way and speaking briefly to his estranged wife, touching on the subject of the government’s “reforms”, about which they are both outraged. Near the end of the talk, though, a subject which causes dissonance between them comes up: how much Peter used to quarrel with her brother, a naive C of E minister. He shuts the phone off wearily as the bus pulls up as close as it can to the Institute. He gets out and starts to walk.
Scene 12: Late at night in Lincoln, Thomas arrives off the train and walks back through the streets; taking a drunken shortcut across an estate, he sees a couple of fights, one involving racial abuse of a Pakistani Lincoln resident, is mugged by a hooded young man with a vaguely Arabic accent. Completely penniless and robbed of his train tickets, he is forced to return to Lincoln Central rail station and spend the night there, wide awake.
Scene 13: Peter arrives at the Institute to find the President of ANAS waiting for him with a team of individuals. They have an experience with the time-travel machine which involves Peter and the president travelling through time, but only one of his six-person team. The president advises Peter that his equipment is very, very dangerous, and swears Peter to secrecy about it. Tell no-one, he says. He makes his team swear as well, though only one of them would be likely to mention anything. This one man, introduced to Peter earlier and spoken to before and during the experience, is the Jewish Leon Hauser, great-grandson of a Holocaust survivor. The president of ANAS says that he will contact Martin Lorchim of Hamburg, a vague acquaintance of Hauser who was the German Health Secretary until he lost his job following the merger of the EU. The president of ANAS has like Peter realised that there is something somehow wrong about Peter’s machine: he will go away and test the results taken by his team overnight, and will report back to Peter asap about safe methods of destroying the machine. As he leaves, he takes out his phone and begins conversing in rapid and excited German. In the background news reports, clashes between Turkey and Iran have caused Anglian troops to cross the border between the Turkish Anglian Republic and Iran; there have been skirmishes; the president of Iran is very angry. He threatens force if necessary.
Scene 14: The private house of the Iranian president. Pan away from him and up to his niece’s room; she is in the middle of a phone call, to Theresa and, this time, Robert. They introduce a young man by the name of Leon Hauser, who says that he may have found a solution to the problem of a co-ordinated Resistance action. Between them, the four agree that, if this solution doesn’t work, they will go ahead with their captain contact in the English Anglian Republic army, and discuss whether or not they have the necessary plans of government offices. As well as discussing their counter-propaganda initiative with Hannah Porter, the BBC’s secretly pro-Resistance political correspondent, they also discuss how Leon’s boss, Robert’s father, the leader of the Resistance, is being made aware of the matter and will likely be acting to some degree on it.
Scene 15: The phone call ends on Robert and Theresa’s side of the call, at a house in Hamburg, German Anglian Republic. They are standing in the hall near the door, with coats and suitcases. They discuss in grave voices the latest idea for action, reasoning that they will have to resort to Plan B if it doesn’t work; they will find that out within two days. Obviously very much in love, they embrace and kiss passionately before opening the door into the Hamburg rain as lights pull up outside; they get into the taxi, and give directions to the airport.
Scene 16: In the morning, Thomas Farmer reports the theft of his debit cards, getting them cancelled and new ones issued. He goes back to his work as a bookseller, and has a relatively good day: he sells a lot of things, goes to see a film and calls his sister in Cheltenham, resolving to leave the phone call to his parents in Gainsborough until the following day. Relaxing with a single can of Carlsberg, he watches TV in his pyjamas, unshaven (he’s not that happy yet). The TV is halfway through a documentary on dolphins when the power suddenly crackles and goes out; he switches it off at the mains and begins to count down, not too unhappily, from forty. He drains the can, goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He stretches as he counts past seventeen, and when he hits five the kettle boils, shortly after he has implored it to “come on”. It boils and he goes back into the living room to drink it, not seeing the eyes, attached to blonde hair and a black hood, watching from outside the bottom of his kitchen window.
Scene 17: Peter visits Tara in local police custody; he tells her in secret what he has been told about the discovery. As he leaves, he receives an urgent call: meet in the dark pub near Carrow Road instantly: a matter of grave importance concerning your discovery has arisen. The man doing most of the speaking has a distinct German accent, but one which wavers in and out, as if he is accustomed to trying to hide it. He hurries off towards the pub in question, pulling his overcoat around him.
Scene 18: Robert and Theresa arrive at Heathrow Airport, and prepare to board a flight to Norwich. Robert calls his father. Since Theresa speaks limited German (her name is a result of her German father who was raised primarily in England, and the fact that she lives in Germany means a lot less now that English is the official language of the Anglian regime), Robert holds this conversation with his father in English, but not particularly loud: in order to make the phone call, the two slip into a Heathrow Airport bathroom disguised as lovers, making sure it’s empty. The phone call is extremely short: Robert learns that his father is also on his way to Norwich, under the pretext that his private health corporation (actually a front for the Resistance) is flying him to the Gallic Academy of Sciences in order to discuss the development of advanced screening techniques against biological weapon concealment, an issue the Anglian government is very passionate about. They agree to meet up. After the phone call ends, Robert and Theresa decide to attempt to alleviate their mounting stress by becoming what they are disguised as: they have sex in the bathroom.
Scene 19: Sometime later, Robert and Theresa are met in the dead of night by a car containing three men: Robert’s father, Leon, and Dr. Flauvert. They drive to Peter’s equipment at the WASI. Robert and Theresa discuss the Resistance and this discovery’s relevance to it in urgent whispers (they’ve become accustomed to whispering) with Leon: all are in the back seat. Peter is the front passenger; Robert’s father is driving. When they arrive, Robert and Theresa manipulate the device: they talk about going back to the Shadow before he took power. They do, and they find themselves outside a suburban window which has a suspiciously familiar description to the audience. They duck out of the experience, and order Peter to crank the controls up to experimental levels. He initially refuses, but eventually they compromise with him telling them how dangerous it could be to attempt to bring such a temporal disruption into fully clear focus, and as they watch, a man in pyjamas walks into the room and boils a kettle. Theresa tells the others to go back; she has an idea, and will see them in a minute. They go back; she goes into the high-powered time machine, the first person ever to enter it at such experimental energy levels. It later transpires that because of the heightening of this energy, a) it cannot be lowered again, because to touch the machine is to receive electric shock, and b) Theresa cannot return to the future from such a solid past, and neither can any future user of the machine.
Scene 20: In his diary, Thomas thinks more favourably about the history and politics lecture notes he made at UEA. He has a relatively good couple of days at bookselling, and settles down on Thursday night to watch Question Time, after making one phone call before leaving the shop: can the electricity guy come round on Friday to look at the TV? He can? Great. He thinks to himself: typical that the electrical device on the fritz should be the one of his few electrical devices (TV, CD player, kettle, toaster, fridge, freezer, blanket) he most cares about. Unlike two nights ago, he has resolved to drink just a mug of tea, with no sugar: he doesn’t want to be up until 2 like he was last night even with the relative relaxation that brought, compared to the preceding days (he couldn’t shake the vague feeling of being watched). He goes into the kitchen and boils the kettle, conducting the TV off-and-on-again routine for the third night in a row. He drinks the tea, and suddenly he is convulsing on the floor: the mysterious face outside the window casts off her hood, revealing herself to be Theresa. She watches as he becomes still, then leaves. Seconds later, he jerks and reaches for the phone, calling 999.
Scene 20: Peter arrives back at his Norwich house in the middle of the night, and ponders on the ANAS president’s advice that, asap, the equipment should be destroyed. Certainly, what it seemed the young girl was proposing to do was a fairly traumatic and ethically questionable event: he pitied her that she felt driven to do it. He calls his wife and daughter again, and then attempts to put through a call to the police station to speak to Tara, but he is told she is not available: imprisoned potential political terrorists are newly banned from visitation rights, in accordance with the government edict of earlier that evening. He sleeps uneasily, and ponders on the wrongness of his life.
Scene 21: Hannah Porter is in her Lincoln office. It’s late at night and she receives a phone call from her associate, telling her that the copy will shortly be available for her to review of the book on relationships between key figures on both sides of the Crusades period. She expresses distaste for the author over the phone, saying that his take on the Crusades as a phenomenon is disturbingly flippant about the violence. She discourses on politics and how a man can think in such a way in this day and age. Still, a job’s a job’s a job. She doesn’t expect to sleep through the night anyway: she’s nervous about her mayoral deputisation ceremony the next morning. Her colleague, who she is also dating, reassures her. He suggests a takeaway the following night, and she admonishes him about the adverse effects of the Indian they had the previous evening, which made her throw up this morning.
Scene 22: Theresa fails to return to Robert and Leon, which tells them that obviously the attempt on the young Shadow’s life didn’t work, and that it felt disturbing anyway to attempt his murder. However, the measures being taken against Muslims and protesters are quickly reaching epidemic proportions, and Robert, frantic with worry about Theresa’s fate and increasingly desperate due to the regime, decides to go back himself and make one more attempt. He instructs the others to shore up the plans for the other resistance strategies, in the event that he too is unsuccessful.
Scene 23: Thomas wakes up in the hospital to discover that he has been poisoned. The police say they will be looking into it, and he will be shortly discharged.
Scene 24: Tara languishes in the Norwich police cell, unable to contact anyone. She thinks about her mother, who she recently saw through Peter’s time-travel device: she recalls one Christmas when she was eight years old, celebrating and receiving and giving gifts with and to both parents. She thinks about how right the world seemed then, and marvels sadly at how wrong it has gone since.
Scene 25: Over the Christmas period, Thomas’ bookselling becomes increasingly unsuccessful – despite the drab and out of the way location of his store, he puts this down to decreasing public demand for literature, which depresses him. He spends Christmas in Gainsborough with his parents and his sister; depressed at their relative success, he listens to his father the following morning when the man, a Tory MP, offers him a job as an administrative assistant in the Lincoln mayor’s office: he decides to go for the interview, scheduled to be on January 4th, 2012. On the morning in question, he wakes up and takes a taxi to the station, only to experience someone (Robert) ramming a car into his taxi - he sees him briefly through the window as he loses consciousness, but then the guy disappears. He reschedules the interview for January 5th and gets the job.
Scene 26: Robert fails to return to the future, convincing Leon and other resistance members that he, too, was obviously unsuccessful. The Resistance cell agree to shore up their two contingency plans to be set off as planned. All of them leave feeling deeply uneasy, but Leon decides something different. He picks up the phone and calls a contact in the Resistance, leaving him the address of Peter’s lab, instructions on how to operate the machine, and an imperative for as many members as possible to converge on it as soon as possible, but to be as clandestine as possible in doing so. At the end the contact is revealed: a black-jacketed, bearded man riding a deserted London tube carriage. He looks at the address on his notepad before striding to the exit as the train pulls into the nearest station. He leaves the train and examines the Underground map on the ascending wall.
Scene 27: It’s 2034, and Hannah Porter receives a late-at-night phone call from Leon, asking her if she’s ready with the propaganda distribution initiative. She calls her daughter at university in Liverpool and checks if she’s okay. She hints again at wanting her to pull out of her own personal role in the propaganda delivery system, but Valerie insists.
Scene 28: An army barracks. After a brief, hushed and discomfited parting word to a subordinate, a dishevelled-looking man in uniform, Captain John Reynolds, fully enters (prior to doing so he was in the doorway), picks up the ringing phone and talks to Leon, who asks him if his men are ready with the devices. He replies in the affirmative and stares into space for a few moments after putting the phone down. Sighing, he picks up the phone again and calls his wife.
Scene 29: Three months later, it is the end of March and the beginning of April 2012. Thomas is ensconced in his administrative work, and has gained commendations from his superiors for his efficiency. He has also made friends among his equal colleagues: one of them invites him to a party the following evening, April 1st, to have a drink and a talk about cool and important things. He accepts, albeit somewhat reluctantly. That evening, March 31st, as he is leaving work via the complex’s underground car park, he is confronted by the man from the underground tube train, who stabs him in the side. He goes once more to hospital.
Scene 30: Stranded in the past, Robert and Theresa set out to find each other.
Scene 31: Peter goes to visit his wife and daughter, and ends up having an argument with his wife. Drunk to an extent, he drives back to his lab instead of his house and sits reproaching himself silently for his drink-driving. He almost smashes the time-travel machine, but thinks differently of it. He falls asleep at his desk in the next room, and is awoken by a break-in. He arrives in the time-travel machine room to discover two people using it: he has arrived too late to stop them, but not before he hears one of them say “Let’s vaporise this sucker”. He cringes at the thought of organism bombs being set off in the vicinity of the time machine, but there is nothing he can do. He leaves the laboratory and sits on the kerb across the road, drinking from a paper bag. Nothing yet happens.
Scene 32: Late spring. Robert and Theresa locate each other and lay low, trying to work out what to do. They conclude that life is deterministic and wallow in misery, eventually visiting the deaths of their respective mothers. They resolve to approach the Shadow on a rational basis, try to change his destiny from within.
Scene 33: Mid-June 2012. Thomas, now a much more prominent socialite, being big in the Anglo-Saxon Religious Freedom Party, which was part of the nature of the gathering his workmates had invited him to, is interviewed for a position as aide to the Mayor of Lincoln, and is offered the job, which he takes. He goes to visit his sister and her kids for a weekend in Cheltenham shortly thereafter; the following afternoon, he visits a local pub to see coverage of England’s 2nd group Euro 2012 match, against Denmark (they already narrowly won 2-1 against hosts Poland), and have Bosnia to come. At half-time, with England 2-1 up, he goes upstairs to the distant pub toilets, and is followed in by two men, who set off bombs: he survives, despite being knocked into the wall, but is shaken. Both of the men are vaporised, but the walls of the toilet are barely touched. He leaves and, in shock, watches the rest of the match (England go 2-3 down before equalising at the last minute. He walks back to his sister’s house two hundred yards away, jumping at shadows. He reflects that he himself is basically just a shadow of his former self tonight: the shadow, too, of the man he used to be back when he was a bookseller. He gets on with his life, says goodbye to his sister, and takes the train from Cheltenham to Oxford, where he will tomorrow be speaking at a meeting of the ASRFP, before returning to Metheringham. Robert and Theresa are in the pub, and following him up the stairs when he comes back down: they are close enough to hear the blast, and rush past him to behold the scene of an exploded organism bomb with revulsion.
Scene 34: Peter calls his wife again, only for her to tell him it’s late and to get some sleep. He goes home and tries to do just that, but on the way he is contacted by the president of ANAS, who tells him that the results are back and that the machine must be destroyed: Peter tells him it has been cranked up and the man, appalled, tells him it must be destroyed within three days. He tells Peter that he and two others will amass the equipment and return forthwith to Norwich, and to expect them in no later than two days’ time. Peter goes home and sleeps fitfully, dreaming about explosions, thugs and dictators. In the morning, he watches Valkyrie on DVD, having woken up early, before going back into work, where he spends the whole day trying to ignore the machine, which has begun a constant low and ominous fizzing.
Scene 35: Robert and Theresa confront Thomas in Metheringham, where Theresa snaps and tries to kill him again. He apprehends her and they get to talking: she tells him the truth about why she is trying to kill him, and after comparing himself to Miles Bennett Dyson, he offers to bring them as guests to a few party meetings and to quit if they don’t like what they see. He still owns the shop where he was bookselling; he just hasn’t actively tried very hard recently to flog stuff: the business is failing, after all.
Scene 36: The night after the call from the president of ANAS, Peter, following a day of massive government building bombings across Anglia and a massive propaganda campaign organising armed civil disobedience the following month, gets into a massive argument with his wife, who threatens to attempt to cut him off from custody of his daughter. He also discovers that Tara is still cut off in prison. He gets very drunk and angry and, after spending a day wandering the streets witnessing government atrocities, he decides to travel to the institute and smash the machine himself, without waiting for the ANAS delegation. He enters the room where the machine is and attempts to smash it; he is partially successful but is then electrocuted and plummets back in time unconscious. He lands on something soft and rolls over to discover a young man in an apartment: has he killed him?
Scene 37: The answer, after a bit of deliberate ambiguity, turns out to be no. Robert and Theresa agree to help Thomas with the running of his bookstore; Peter becomes depressed at being stuck in the past.
Scene 38: The following night in 2034. Chaos reigns across the whole of the Anglian continent: the Shadow finally reveals himself at the head of a governmental repression column. In Norwich, the men arrive to destroy the time machine and find Peter’s wife and daughter inside, searching for him. They discover it is already partially destroyed and prepare to finish the job: Peter’s wife realises she loves him and she and her daughter freak out about his whereabouts and smashed and dangerous-feeling office. The men destroy the time-machine and the Shadow disappears: everything disappears except for the room with the time machine, and Peter’s wife and daughter wait inside with the men as the world outside reforms.
Scene 39: November 2025. Robert and Theresa are partners in Thomas’ successful bookstore chain; he leaves a physical therapy session and reflects on his emotional ones of a decade ago. He reflects on his increasingly middle-age body, and meets Robert and Theresa, neither of whom have aged at all since 2011. They discuss with Peter the facts of how time appears to be moving towards something peacefully reminiscent of the future time they came from (Peter hasn’t aged either) and espouse again the theory that they can’t age as they are not in the right time period. Peter, who is a married scientist, is overcoming marital troubles again, but has no kids with his wife. Thomas is dating Rebekah Ali from Norwich, where he lives and operates one of his chain of bookstores, and helping to raise her daughter Tara.
Scene 40: 2034, revised. The government is a perfectly peaceful, tolerant, awesome one led by Hannah Porter. Robert and Theresa meet up again with their families. Tara is free; the world of the previous 2034 is revealed to have been a construct of the time machine’s creation and destruction, remembered only by those who have close emotional contact with the machine, thus including Tara.
No comments:
Post a Comment