His flat was on the second floor in a block on the corner of Grange Road, giving him a view out over Bermondsey Spa Gardens. Over the last four years, a group of volunteers had progressively reseeded the park with grass. It didn’t have an irrigation system when they began, so they’d installed tanks and slowly laid out a network of old drainpipes scavenged from nearby buildings. Dead and desiccated London plane trees and sycamores still stood silent sentry duty around the perimeter, but now the grass provided a welcome emerald blanket in the midst of the urban desert. It was a popular venue at all times of the day.
As soon as the call with Gwendoline ended, he got two cases out of the cupboard. The first contained all the essentials he’d packed three years ago – which on reflection were now either utterly worthless or embarrassingly stupid, and too many were both. The second contained the portal, a simple twenty-centimetre circle with a grey pseudosurface. His altme confirmed it was still operational – not that he doubted Gwendoline, but it was becoming critical now. He set it up vertically, ready to thread up as soon as he got back. Probably the last portal left that you have to thread up; the settled worlds all use expansion rim models now.
When he started pedalling along Bacon Grove, a jazz band was playing to an appreciative audience on the old basketball court; they’d settled in for the evening with picnics and wine. Even now, London had few working streetlights, and none at all down Bacon Grove, which was so narrow it didn’t even have a clear path. He had to rely on the bike’s dynamo-powered headlight and his own memory. Bacon Grove narrowed to a short bollarded path that quickly opened out onto Curtis Street. A couple of hundred metres later he was at the back of the old business park.
The big brick and carbon-panel warehouses had been an ideal place to site the community exchange centre. Horatio looked up at the walls with their brown cladding of dead ivy, so old now the leaves were brittle and crumbling from entropy. He felt both elated and depressed. Exchanges like this had achieved so much, helped so many. Now he was going to abandon it, fleeing to the safety of the settled worlds and exodus. So what was the point?
For a long moment he stood there immersed in self-pity. Then, angry at himself for such weakness, he pushed the small rear door open. As soon as he was inside, embraced by the noise and smell of the recycling systems, those treacherous doubts vanished. He knew it had all been worthwhile.
Once power had returned to the city’s grid, and domestic printers came online again, people were left with the problem of finding supplies of processed compounds needed for fabrication – of anything. London’s economy now was so very different from the one he’d grown up with. That had been the one outcome of Blitz2 that delighted him. The Universal culture’s hyper-capitalist consumerism that worshipped product and status was gone, replaced by a kinder, more thoughtful system – and best of all, one completely community oriented.
Horatio had been one of the pioneers in setting up an exchange. His time with the Benjamin agency meant he knew kids who recycled stuff a long way outside any corporate licensing or monitoring by the Dangerous Substance Inspectorate. They built their semi-legal products for untraceable cryptoken payments – mainly for London’s major crime families or local flea stalls. It was an underground market that he knew he could bring out into the open and adapt to help people regain a reasonable standard of living.
Over the years he’d helped expand the concept, and now it was fundamental to London’s post-Blitz2 way of life. Nothing was imported any more, outside of essential organic fluids and pellets for food. So people would bring their old and defunct printed items to the exchange, receiving local recrypt-tokens in payment. The exchange would recycle the products in huge Clemson vats or metal-eating geobactor silos, which the community teams had built and maintained. Then the various raw sludges would be processed in more conventional refineries to produce valuable compounds that could be bought for recrypt-tokens and used in the printers again.
At first, the newly refurbished printers turned out simple household components that had failed due to long disuse – primarily water pumps and filters. Horatio was always amazed what a difference restoring drinking water had made to everyone’s standard of living. Then, with fundamentals available again, new clothes started to appear, along with a plethora of solar cells coating walls and roofs.
Most districts had exchanges, each with their own tokens. That was one of the hardest parts of the enterprise to ratify, so these days Horatio had become a kind of local treasury official, overseeing the various recrypt-tokens and ensuring they were regulated sensibly, setting costs and making sure those same innovative kids didn’t forge or abuse the system. He knew he’d been reasonably successful by how much he was in demand.
‘A proper corporate financier,’ Gwendoline would tease him during their calls. But she advised how the trade could be structured and secured against mishandling. Good advice, he admitted, as she explained how it was derived from her original designs for Corbyzan’s economy – her project to build a society that mirrored Utopial post-scarcity society but one based on Universal policy. It remained a source of mild shame that he’d never quite realized just how knowledgeable his wife was in her field.
He wheeled the bike past the tall cylindrical vats that churned with genetically modified microbes, nesting amid a chaotic jumble of mismatched pipes. Everything was scavenged, everything was repurposed. But it worked. He waved at the duty
