The constant moment

Each one was a constant moment, a frozen instant in time.  They were laid out like an exhibition in a gallery even though it was technically a room in Ms. Blunt’s laboratory.  And what no-one told you was that if you tried to touch one of these moments, or you accidentally brushed against it, or someone jokingly pushed into it, then you fell into the moment itself, and were held there, an invisible observer of what was happening until someone on the outside pulled you out.  Usually it was Ms. Blunt herself who pulled you out, and gave you a little lecture, admonishing you for your insensitivity to what was on display.  Then afterwards you were intercepted by a quiet little man who seemed innocuous until you tried to push past him, when he took your elbow in a grip like steel and escorted you off to another room whether you wanted to help him or not.  This room contained someone else, and it varied from day to day, week to week.  It also contained a comfortable leather chair with strong leather straps, and you weren’t allowed out of that chair until whoever was in the room with you was satisfied that you’d told them all about the constant moment.

“So you were in moment 930-C this time?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see what it was called.  Someone just pushed me into the room, and when I tried to get out I was thrown–“

“There was no-one with you.  We have the security camera footage, it clearly shows you walking into the room, looking around the exhibits and then stepping into 930-C.”

“You don’t! You can’t have, because it didn’t happen!”

“We have.  You’ll be shown it before you leave.”

“…damn you, why are you doing this to me?  It’s persecution, you keep pushing me into these moments, these other times.  Why can’t you pick–“

“Describe moment 930-C to me.”

“Why can’t you pick on someone else for a change?”

“Describe moment 930-C to me.  Please.”

“No.”

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

“…”

“Haven’t we?”

“(Yes.)”

“So will you describe moment 930-C to me?  Or do I need to persuade you?  Again.”

*

“There’s the ringing of a bell when you enter, it’s quite loud and… harsh, I suppose.  It’s a get-out-of-the-way bell, not a church bell or anything like that.  It’s a definite move-move sound.  There’s a smell like, I don’t know, an animal, something big maybe, sweaty.  What?  Yes, it could be a horse, I’ve never sniffed one of those.  There’s that, there’s the bell, and then there’s the heartrate.  Your heartrate just shoots up and you start panting for breath and sweat springs out on your head.  It was like I’d been running in a race or something.  I felt kind of terrified, but I didn’t know what I was terrified of.  There was screaming, off to my left I think.  Maybe in front of me too.  High-pitched, more like women than men I think.  Men tend to bellow when they scream don’t they?  Well I don’t know, I don’t scream.

That’s when I started looking around, and I realised that there’s this big tram-like vehicle and its bearing down on me.  It’s too close, I can’t get around it from where I am, and it’s not slowing down.  I remember looking down at the ground, wondering if there was enough room for me to lie down and have it just go over me and there wasn’t, there was this big decorative panel all the way around that would catch me up like a cow-catcher and push me along.

The bell keeps ringing the whole time you’re in there though, it’s incessant and it gave me a headache after a bit.  Then the headache pounds in time with the bells rings– What?  Oh ok, the pealing of the bells, but it doesn’t sound anything like a church bell you know?  It sounds more electric than that.  Bells can’t really buzz, can they?  Oh fine, you write whatever you want.  It’ll be just like your camera footage of me volunteering for your little experiment.

Ouch!

The bus thing, the vehicle, it gets closer while you’re in there.  Everytime I looked at it it had inched closer.  Not by much, but every time a little further.  It’s really scary, because you can’t move.  The people around are moving too, equally slowly.  They’re getting out of the way, it’s like they know what’s going to happen too. I don’t know, there’s an air of… is sacrifice too weird a word?  It’s like it’s deliberate but no-one asked me if I wanted to take part.”

*

“I would recommend that we close 930-C down for the moment.  We can reopen it later when the constant moments are better understood.  He definitely saw movement within the moment this time, and that can’t be called constant, can it?”

“We’ll think about it.  Write your recommendation up and submit it to Sheila, she’s back from holiday now.  Next, when do you think he’ll be ready for moment 940-A?”

Viviraft

It wasn't the end of the world, though a lot of us had thought it would be.  The Climate Changed, much as the scientists had been predicting, only a little bit faster and a little bit more violently.  In true British fashion the storm that sunk the Isles was named Summer, and when all that was left above water were some of the rockier bits of Scotland and bits of the Pennines, those of us who had been lucky found ourselves slightly adrift on the gigantic vivirafts.
They were intended to house a couple of thousand people each, and those thousand were supposed to be politicians, royalty, and the rich – the people who believed that the country depended on them and their bloodlines (or in the case of the politicians, their opinions).  A separate viviraft had been dedicated to the diplomats, presumably in case the politicians couldn't find an opinion to agree on.  All of the vivirafts had launched, but none of them had carried their intended cargo, as their simply hadn't been the time.  By the time Storm Summer reached Britain people were cheerfully going about as though it was any other squall of bad weather, refusing to believe that it wasn't anything they weren't already used to.  When it hit, there was an hour of horrifically strong winds and torrential rain, and then everything went quiet.  The British mostly assumed that the storm was over.  When it re-emerged, gaining energy in some novel atmospheric system that fed energy from four different directions into a cataclysmic climatic explosion, the country flooded to a standstill in less than half-an-hour.  Eighteen hours later, and it was sunk.
I found myself aboard a viviraft because it floated by while I was trying to drown in peace.  A rope snaked over the edge and landed in the water beside me with a splash, and so I grabbed hold and was hauled in.
The man who hauled me in, with the aid of cunningly powered winch machinery, told me his name was Jonathan, and that he'd been the caretaker of the viviraft, waiting for the people who were supposed to populating it to arrive.  When the flooding effectively launched the viviraft by itself he put the list of approved passengers back in the safe and got on with bundling everybody nearby on board.
"You've been shanghaied," he said with a grin.  "Consider yourself crew now!"
The viviraft was mostly made of some indestructable non-bio-degradeable plastic intended to see out generations at sea.  There was an entire deck of hydroponics to provide sufficient protein for 2,500 people, and an upper poop deck was like a jungle in miniature.  In there, I found Melissa and Sam, biologists who were cooing delightedly over the plants and insects that were there.
"It's like a little pharmacopoeia," said Sam, who had a beard and was nearly twice my height.  "Unless there was a serious emergency we can pretty much make all the basic medicines, and make a good stab at some of the more complex ones.  We can even make anti-venin!"  He proudly pointed out a nest of snakes that I'd not seen, and I screamed and jumped over the railing to the deck below.
"We've got good telemetry, fuel for about six months, generators and redundant generators, and solar power," said Derek, who told me he used to be an accountant with a hobby in civil engineering.  "I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but I've been downloading stuff off the internet to learn more about it, and it looks like there'll be some decent on-the-job experience!"
"How do you get to the internet when we're on a boat and the country just sank?" I asked.
"Satellite," he replied.  "Not everywhere's gone yet."
"And when it is?" I said, my heart in my throat.  "What then?"
"Then we'd better hope we've downloaded enough of it already," he said, his face suddenly serious again.
"So what do I do?" I asked Jonathan over tea that night, which was something green and soupy, and may have been plankton.  It even tasted green.
"Entertainer?" he said, and by the look on his face he wasn't joking.  "Chef – this food is rank –, navigator, cleaner,... look, the list is as long as your arm.  Even if you just did whatever needed doing when you were near it it would help at the moment.   Just don't do nothing."
I nodded, and sighed a little.  "I was hoping to be a playboy," I said, with a little laugh.  "But I guess I can be more useful than that."

Disasters and other experiments

The headline hadn't caught his attention, but the first line of the article had.  "Disasters and other experiments carried out by the aluminum industry..." it started, and he'd had to stop and buy the paper.  Then, knowing that he was now twenty-seven seconds behind schedule, he'd hurried up, pushing through the people trying to get to the tube-station, elbowing men, women and children aside, waving his Oyster card gracelessly at the reader, and half-running down the escalator.  He reached the platform three seconds ahead of when he normally did, so he stopped, arranged his tie, and then walked along the platform to his accustomed spot, where the train would stop and open doors right in front of him.  It was important to get these things right.
He read the first line of the article again as the train closed its doors and pulled away from the station, leaving behind the light and barrelling into the darkness.  The carriage shuddered, the lights flickered, and the wheels screeched against the track as it cornered, then it settled down again.  The article was disturbing.
Not least for the American spelling of aluminium in a British newspaper; he was aware that some misplaced sense of journalistic integrity had probably impelled the writer to keep the spelling the same as the report they were quoting from.  But the lack of a comma after Disasters – now there was as issue.
Because, as he was very well aware, a certain sector of the aluminium industry (well, aluminum, he allowed in the privacy of his head, because it was after all American-owned and -funded) was very definitely conducting experiments with disasters.  The public weren't supposed to know about it though.  Most of the people involved in the experimental disasters didn't know that they were part of an experiment.  Even the analysts who looked over the rubble afterwards, collected data and drew conclusions rarely knew that what they were looking at had all been carefully orchestrated.  Now and then an unusually percipient investigator – usually a woman, though they'd not identified why yet – would note that there seemed to be rather more data than she might have expected, or that surprising care had been taken in preserving records prior to the event.  But that was expected, and there was a protocol built in to each experiment now to deal with that.
He decided he'd prefer not to think about the protocols.  They were long documents, very carefully protected.  No-one connected with the documents wanted to find themselves answering questions about them, whether in a board meeting, a news conference, or a court room.  There were sections... entire pages, actually, in those documents that no-one was proud of.  That no-one actually wanted to have to carry out.  But had been on at least –no, he really didn't have to think these thoughts.
He looked back at the article and its damning first line.  The journalist would have to be found.  His grammar evaluated.  Possibly interrogated.  To find out why the comma that should have come after the word Disasters was missing.
The wheels of the carriage screeched again as it rounded another corner, and lights appeared outside the windows again as the train came into the station.  He stood, and exited the train, waiting for exactly two people to leave before him, and then overtaking them with quick, meticulous steps on the platform.  This was a reasonably high underground station and there were stairs to exit rather than lifts or escalators, and he took them two at a time, his long legs allowing him to stride up them without running or seeming anxious.  Appearing calm at all times was important.
There were people already at the gates to the tube station, and men dressed as police were starting to turn people away from the station approach.  The public were as always, mostly moving away with the occasional protest.  Foreign exchange students seemed to have most difficulty with the concept that the station could just be closed like that, at a peak time, and the British would simply locate an alternate route and wander on, thinking about how they'd present this importunation when they spoke to their family or colleagues later on.
He walked out of the station and checked his watch; exactly on time.  Behind him the gates rattled shut and he heard the click as they locked.  There was no outcry yet, the other passengers would still be looking to see what was happening and what they were supposed to do next.
He sighed, and made himself turn round.  He didn't want to, but protocol required that there was an eyewitness for this disaster experiment.
He waited, his fingers resting lightly on the dial of his watch so that he could feel the tiny pulse of each passing second.  Four to go.  Three.  Two.  On–