herself into a union of flesh and technology. And beyond that would come the singularity, the point at which human technologies became smarter than humans themselves. It would all exponentiate away into a glittering transcendence, out of anybody’s control, the opening up of a new realm of enhanced existence. She had been reading about this for years, for half her lifetime. When the singularity came she would be able to live forever, if she chose. And she would be able to step seamlessly between one world and another, between the dull world of Manchester and the shining realm of HeadSpace. She could be with her child, in the light, as real as Linda was.
But the singularity was slow in coming.
She rarely heard from her transhumanist contacts now. As the floods bit away there were power-outs or, worse, failures at the ISPs that linked her to Linda in HeadSpace. And Maria herself was distracted from her time with her child. Forever hungry, thirsty, cold, she found herself spending hours in queues for food and medicines, even fresh water.
The fact was, her access to HeadSpace was the product of a complex and interconnected society, the capstone of a pyramid grounded in very old technologies, in farming and mining and manufacture and transport and energy production. It was only as that essential pyramid was crumbling that Maria became fully aware of its existence. The singularity came to seem more and more out of reach-an absurdity, actually. You couldn’t have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.
It was a Sunday morning when the HeadSpace website finally crashed. She kept trying to access it through that day, over and over, into the night. She didn’t accept it had gone for good for twenty-four hours, when her own internet connection failed.
Then the power went. She sat in her dark, cooling flat, her open hand against the dead screen, longing to pass through out of Dullworld to join Linda in the pixelated sunlight.
At last she began to mourn.
37
May 2019
“You have to leave Postbridge, Amanda. You and the kids. ow.”
Amanda stared at her sister. Lily stood in the door of the caravan, her rucksack at her feet, wearing a scuffed blue coverall stitched with AxysCorp logos. Lily was deeply tanned, her graying hair shaved short. She looked fit, lean and intent.
Wayne sat at the caravan’s single table, shaping a bit of leather for a harness. At thirty-one he was younger than either of the women. Amanda was aware of the way he appraised Lily’s body, the curves flattened and hidden by the coverall. He was like that with every woman he met, even those close to him-including, uncomfortably, fourteen-year-old Kristie. It was a habit Amanda had learned to ignore.
Lily ignored him too. She kept her gaze fixed on Amanda’s face. Amanda said,“How long is it since I’ve seen you? More than a year.. Where did you say you’ve been working?”
“Peru. A big AxysCorp project there.”
“Peru? South America? I thought Nathan was going to hole up on Iceland.”
“Change of plan.”
“Peru, though, Jesus! Well, it’s doing you good.”
“You have to leave,” Lily said again.
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Lily, strained. “Come with me to London. There’s transport out of the country arranged from there. I’ve got a car. It got stopped by the roadblocks and I had to walk, but it will pick us up at Cheriton Bishop.” That was on the A30, the main trunk road east out of Dartmoor.
“London’s drowned,” Wayne scoffed at Lily. His own London accent came out strongly. Drah-ned.
Lily said patiently to Amanda, “There’s a boat at Marlow. Then, further downstream, a helicopter.”
Amanda asked, “Why can’t the helicopter just come here?”
“It’s not safe.”
Amanda knew what she meant. Everybody was a bit insular up here on Dartmoor, hostile to the Londoners and the Brummies who still came pouring from their flooded suburbs across Salisbury Plain or the Cotswolds. The roadblocks were one thing, but there had been a rumor that somebody had taken out a police chopper with a surface-to-air missile, like some terrorist in Beirut.
Lily said, “AxysCorp says-”
“AxysCorp this, AxysCorp that,” Wayne said. “Big corporations. Journeys across the country. You’re like a relic from the past, from the last century, you’re irrelevant.”
“She’s my sister,” Amanda said, keeping her voice level, trying not to provoke him.“And she’s come all this way to talk to me. I ought to listen at least-”
“Bollocks.” Wayne dumped the leather pieces on the table, tucked his knife into his belt and stood. He was a big-framed man, muscular, tanned after the outdoor work, though some of his “London fat,” as he called it, still clung to his frame, even after eight or nine months up here on the moor. You’d call him handsome, Amanda thought, seeing him through Lily’s eyes. His best features were his blue eyes. But those eyes were cold as he stared down at Lily, and his expression was blank.
“You’re family,” he said to Lily. “You can have bed and board for a night. Beyond that, if you want to stay here, you have to work. Everybody has to work. That’s the way of things now. We don’t have room for dossers.”
“My business is with my sister,” Lily said quietly.
He stepped closer and shouted down at her,“We’re together now, me and Amanda and the kids. So it is my business, got that?”
Lily stood utterly still, her slight form dwarfed by his. She had changed so much, Amanda thought. She had noticed that habit of stillness about Lily after her captivity. She was also, of course, a USAF veteran. Amanda had no doubt that if Wayne kept on threatening her he would end up on his back with a broken arm.
She stepped between the two of them and took Lily’s hand. “Look, we’ll talk this over. That can’t do any harm, can it?”
Wayne snorted, his eyes still fixed on Lily’s face. But he backed off. He sat down again, pulled out his knife and went back to shaping the leather with hard, firm gestures.
“Come on,” Amanda said to Lily. “Let’s sit down and have a cup of tea.”
“You still have tea?”
“Well, no,” Amanda said ruefully.“Used up the last of my stash months ago. But you can make a reasonable brew out of nettles-”
“Can we walk?” Lily asked sharply.
Wayne looked up. “I’m not too subtle, me, darling. If you’ve got a problem with me then say it plain.”
“I’ve nothing to say to you,” Lily said.
There was no contempt in her voice, but Amanda knew that was the kind of remark likely to inflame Wayne, who didn’t like to be disregarded. She grabbed her jacket from a hook behind the door and pushed her feet into her boots. “We’ll walk,” she said firmly. “I’ll show you around…”
Lily picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulders, as if she had no intention of returning.
They walked through Postbridge, not speaking. Amanda sensed they needed time to let the tension from the scene in the caravan drain out.
Postbridge was a pretty little village, right in the middle of Dartmoor, not much more than a scattering of farms, an inn and a chapel. A stone bridge crossed the East Dart River, a medieval construction Amanda had learned to call a clapper bridge. The sun was low. It was a bright spring day. This was a characteristically English postcard scene, though studded with modernity, telephone poles and power pylons and a mobile-phone mast.
You’d never have known anything had changed, Amanda thought suddenly. They were a long way from the coast here. You’d never know that an immense flooding had disrupted the whole world and drowned Britain to thirty meters or more, turning much of southern England into an archipelago. What was different? Kids out playing on a school day, maybe, or even working in the fields like her own two; the village school was reporting only fifty percent
