The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

orders and puts away groceries, does basic plumbing and electrical repairs, and answers the door. They got it as a perk from Mathew’s mother’s company. 

Now it stands at the bottom of the stairs with one of its robot arms extended, sucking dirt from the carpet. The house is always spotless.

“Do you want me to fix you breakfast, Mathew?” Leibniz asks. 

“I'll make breakfast myself, thank you, Leibniz.” 

“Okay, Mathew,” Leibniz says and starts vacuuming again.

In the kitchen, Mathew calls up the news while he hunts in the cupboards for something natural and organic. He is trying to get his mother to buy in to the real-food movement, but she says naturally grown food is a waste of resources. Abandoning his search, he pours himself a bowl of standard lab-grown cornflakes. They don't actually taste any different from the natural, organic ones his grandmother eats. Mathew programs the SuperChef food replicator to make coffee, gets milk from the fridge and takes a seat at the kitchen table.

The Canvas is a super-thin, transparent, multimedia viewing sheet hanging from the ceiling, powered by wireless electricity, as all their devices are now. On it, he watches a report on the flood. 

Looting has taken place in the houses on the river. The images on the screen cut to follow rescue workers on a boat. The boat slows as they pass partly submerged buildings. Three frogmen fall backwards into the water. A camera shakily follows them, bubbles floating to the surface. The water is murky. Bits of debris float by the lens. One of the frogmen shines a light ahead. He turns slowly to the camera and points. The camera pans around. From the gloom emerges the distinctive red and blue and white of a tube sign. It’s Embankment underground station. 

Next, the mayor of London, Bartholomew Dearlove, a fleshy man with pale skin and pink drinker’s cheeks, is interviewed. In the interview, he promises to champion new laws to make it easier to prosecute and deter looters. 

“The new Thames Barrier is in planning,” he says, “and the government will spare no expense in protecting the capital city from further flooding. The Garden Party and their naive and defeatist policies of adaptation would have us abandon this great, historic city, but we want to save London, and we will save it.” 

Mayor Dearlove walks off, purposefully ignoring questions from journalists concerning the cost of building the new Thames Barrier and where the money will come from.

There is an interview with an angry London resident whose face looms unfocused, too close to the camera lens. “This is the fourth time in ten years the barrier has failed. Each time the government claims they will invest more, and nothing ever happens.” 

Mathew finishes his breakfast. Leibniz sweeps in to the kitchen with uncanny anticipation and starts tidying things away. It puts the dishes in the dishwasher and switches it on, waits the thirty seconds for the cycle to complete, and puts them away in the cupboard. 

Although Mathew has only used the kitchen sink to pour a glass of water, Leibniz sets the miniature cleaner to work.

This is relatively new technology, bacterial germ-eating gloop. The little cleaning machines are hidden inside small bodies mimicking brightly coloured, friendly insects with cartoon eyes and smiley mouths, because consumer research said people didn’t like the idea of barely visible, constantly morphing sludge moving around their houses. Their kitchen cleaner has a body the shape and colour of an oversized ladybird. The cleaner in the bathroom is a pink and purple polka dot snail. The ones they have permanently living in the toilets are like frogs. 

His grandmother hates this technology. She says it terrifies her, and the next world war will involve similar bio-goop aimed at destroying people’s immune systems. His mother says there are extremely tight controls and regulations around the use of intelligent bio-agents.

A message flashes in floating white words, hovering above the sideboard, projected via Mathew’s Lenz from someone on his Allowed List. It says: 

Are you alone?

He says, “Accept and respond” to the program in his e-Pin, the earring studs that pierce the inner part of his ears and provide audio to his Lenz.

“Okay to talk?” his grandmother, Ju Chen, asks. 

She speaks to him via simultaneous translation. Her English is rudimentary, so she prefers to speak fluidly in her own language and have what she says automatically turned into idiom friends and family from her adopted nation will relate to. Mathew has heard her natural voice once or twice, but he associates her with the smooth English voice he is listening to now, calibrated and deepened slightly to account for her age.

“Yes.” 

“Are you watching the news?” is the next thing she says. Not “hello” or “how are you?” like normal people. But, as his mother is always telling him, his grandmother isn’t normal. 

“Yes, I’m watching the news.”

“Did you notice they didn’t interview anyone from the Garden Party?”

“I did notice, yes.” 

“There was no opposition point of view at all.”

“Strictly speaking, the mayor did mention adaptation policy.”

“You sound like your mother.”

“I’m joking, Grandma.”

“Oh.” She takes a moment to process this and then says, “What’s it like there? Are there lots of soldiers?”

“Not here. But we’re a mile from the river. I haven’t gone out yet because of the curfew. School is suspended, and we’re doing all our lessons remotely until further notice. Not that it makes much difference anyway.”

Any other adult would have called him on this, told him it was important for him to mix with kids his own age and how the social part of school was as important as the lessons. But not his grandmother. Instead, she says, “But your mother is still going in to work?”

“Yes. She can’t work remotely. She needs her lab. Panacea have organised security clearance for her.” 

“I bet they have. Big business must go on. But how does she get in to the city? I thought the tube was flooded.”

“It is. They send a car for her with an Aegis personal armed guard.” 

“Aegis must be rolling in money! Think of all the people they’re ferrying backwards and forwards to London, now there’s no public transport. Did your mum say what it was like by the river?”

“She leaves early and gets home late. We don’t have much time to talk. She did mention it was bad and she felt sorry for the people living in the ruined houses with nowhere else to go.”

“I saw on Psychopomp there’s a lot of makeshift camps being established all across the south where people were flooded from their homes. Conditions are terrible, and the military has established cordons around them. There is nothing on the BBC, of course.”

“You watch that channel?”

“Of course I do. How else am I going to know what’s going on?”

“But I thought you didn’t like the holovision?”

“I don’t much like it. I find the Darkroom claustrophobic, but needs must.”

Psychopomp is on the Blackweb, not the Nexus. He is careful not to say either of these words aloud, as it would be likely to trip the Nexus’s automatic surveillance – though his grandmother saying the word ‘Psychopomp’ has probably already done the trick. She must know this. “How did you set it up?” he asks.

“Oh, I have friends who know these things. One young friend in particular, actually. Name of . . . No. Never mind.”

Mathew closes his eyes, sniffs, and shakes his head. His grandmother is something else.

She lives in Elgol, a notoriously kooky experimental living community in Scotland. It was the ancestral estate of the wife of the leader of the opposition, but she developed it into a model village to prove the viability of sustainable living, traditional farming, and low-impact technologies. 

As a child he’d spent a lot of time there, staying with his grandmother alone during long summer holidays. 

Time spent in Elgol always rolled along pleasantly compared to London. People took their leisure over things. Minutes and hours were stretched. And, of course, being so far north, there was the endless light, the days extending into night through the summer months. Even then, he savoured the time, some uncanny instinct telling him it was precious, glad to eke out the days before returning to school, something he always dreaded.

All Elgol community members were given chores, and as a guest he was expected to do his bit to pay his way. His grandmother worked on vegetable production, and she got him weeding, tending plants in the polytunnels, checking the water quality in the hydroponics building while the fish swam around nibbling his hand, and helping to build new no-dig beds with straw and manure he barrowed from the stables, where the farm’s huge shire horses lived. It wasn’t work to him. It was an adventure. London, in contrast, seemed so cooped up and claustrophobic. 

On rest days, they would swim in the crystalline waters off the nearby beach or take one of the community’s dinghies shore-hopping to remote coves to picnic. His grandmother let him take control of the little outboard motor, powered with recycled cooking oil converted into biodiesel. 

Vividly, he recalls the smell of the fuel and the seawater, the sand, which inevitably got into his sandwiches and coffee. She would sit in the front of the boat and tell him stories of days past and how the sea used to be teeming with fish you caught with a line and hook or with nets and took home to cook and eat. 

She told him there were once seals, whales, and dolphins in the bay, and the dolphins would sometimes escort the boats, skimming through the waves, so close you could reach out and touch them. It seemed strange and fantastical to him, as did many things she told him. 

In the evenings he would sit with his grandmother in her wood-framed, straw-baled house, and she would read snippets to him from real paper books from her library, telling him stories of how the world used to be and why it is the way it is now, showing him pictures of extinct animals, like rhinos, tigers, and elephants. 

His parents always came for the last two weeks of his stay. His father, Soren, loved to help with the projects there, connecting new solar panels or windmills, drilling wells for water, advising the community technicians on energy storage. 

They all helped to build his grandmother’s house, the community coming together to heft the wood poles of the A-frame and carry in the straw bales made from grass grown on the estate. They limed the walls together, and his father held the ladder as Mathew climbed up to sow seeds on his grandmother’s grass roof. 

He used to love going to Elgol, but now his memories are bruised and tinged with sadness. 

Mathew says, “I guess the floods mean you’re not coming to visit?”

“There’re no trains. The lines are all flooded and broken in parts. It will take months for them to fix it. I tried to get a flight, but there’s nothing affordable. I’ll come as soon as things are better. I was going to send you a box of vegetables, but they’d probably be rotten by the time they got to you, if they reached you at all.”

“Mum wouldn’t like it anyway.”

“I know. But you would. And I like to think of you getting some proper nutrition for a change instead of the frankenfood she buys.”

“It’s real food, Grandma. It doesn’t hurt you.”

“The problem is no one knows. These scientists