Day of Rebellion (18 page)

Tom smiled and put an arm around his wife's shoulders, “She's a bit of a show-off sometimes…”

Jack closed his eyes and sank back onto the bed. Despite the pain, he felt happy.

“Don't go to sleep, Jack, you need to get up. We have to leave the base now. We've been talking…”

“Yeah, and we've made a decision…” Angus said.

Jack opened his eyes again.

“We've decided it's over.”

“What do you mean?” Jack said, his voice weak.

Christie smiled, “Mum's right. Meddling in the past is too dangerous. It's nearly got us all killed… nearly got you killed, Jack. I'm sorry for what I've put you guys through. I'm going to make it up with the VIGIL team…” he pointed at his backpack on the floor, “But I've got the backup here for our version of the Timeline Simulator. I reckon we can use the models to predict what happens in the future. Maybe we can use that to help influence what we do today to make the future a better place… for all of us. We have enough here to do some good… maybe lobby governments… and it will have to be enough.”

“But no time travel, right?” Carole said.

Christie gave a little shrug, “No, our time-travel days are over…” he smiled, “Promise.”

Jack heard the words and he felt relieved. But there was a tinge of sadness at the same time – that their adventures of the last few months were over. Their mission now would be to keep the reality of the Taurus and time travel a secret.

“So what about this place?”

Jack's mum and dad looked at each other knowingly, “Well – it's going to have to go…”

Jack stood in front of the great blast screen of the Revisionist Taurus for the last time. The mighty machine loomed up in front of him and he felt mixed emotions. He could hear the familiar whine of the generators building and the vibrations rising through the floor.

Christie pressed him, “Come on Jack… we need to go now… it's going to go off in under ten minutes. You don't want to be here for that, I can tell you.”

But Jack was rooted the spot, mesmerised by the hulking machine as it readied itself – not to send time travellers to the future or the past this time – but to use its own awesome power to rip itself apart.

Christie dragged him away. “Let's go. The energy limiters are off. When it blows the whole complex will be destroyed. There will be nothing left except a few holes deep inside the rock… We need to get down to the sea tunnel where we'll be safe.”

Jack was still woozy and his shoulder still hurt, but he allowed
his father to pull him away and they headed back through the complex and out to the lift where Angus and Carole waited anxiously.

“What have you guys being doing?” Carole demanded.

“Relax…” Christie said, closing the lift door, “We were just having a final look…”

Carole rolled her eyes.

Christie pressed the button on the elevator for the undersea access level which would take them to the tunnel and back out to Tantallon. The elevator set off and started to rattle its way down through the lift shaft. They could still hear the generators which were getting louder and louder – even the metal lift cage was starting to shake.

“Things are hotting up… we got out of there in the nick of time,” Christie said.

But no sooner had the words come out of Christie's mouth than the whole lift suddenly shuddered to a halt. Christie frantically pushed the control buttons and then in frustration gave the side of the lift cage a hefty kick.

“What's happened, Tom?” Jack could hear the panic in his mother's voice.

Way above, Jack heard the generators shrieking now. In seconds they would explode. Jack knew that the explosion would rip through the entire complex and envelop the lift shaft. They would be vaporised.

“There's only one option,” Christie said.

Jack could sense his father fumbling in the darkness and suddenly a speck of yellow light glinted from his palm.

“A time phone?”

“A souvenir… I took a souvenir…” Christie said sheepishly. “But look, it's got a time signal… And I think it's our only chance…” There was a pause before he added, “We can go to the past or we can go to the future… anywhere you like.” Despite the danger, Christie's voice sounded strangely excited.

“Tom…” Carole said, her voice concerned. “What are you talking about? Just get us out of here before the whole place goes up…”

“But…” for a moment it seemed that Christie was going to change his mind.

The pain in Jack's shoulder throbbed and he scarcely had the energy to stand, he felt he was about to lose consciousness again, but he had the energy to say one final thing.

“Home, Dad. Not to the past or to the future. We just want to go home, please, Dad.”

In the gloom Jack saw Christie set the time phone.

Suddenly, the air pressure changed. Jack felt as if his chest was going to burst and then there was an ear-splitting explosion. For a moment, the whole lift shaft was bathed in white light. Jack felt the heat on his face and then… darkness.

J
ack was lying in a field. He blinked. It was a fine summer’s day – perhaps late afternoon. He stared up into a pristine blue sky. Rolling onto his side there was a stab of pain in his shoulder. He winced. Not far away in the distance he could see a white house. It was Cairnfield. They were home. As he came to his senses, Jack noticed that Angus was nearby, pulling himself to his feet. Jack’s mother and father were walking towards them.

“That was a close-run thing… not quite accurate, but it could have been a lot worse,” His father said.

Carole harangued her husband, “Idiot! I can’t believe you nearly changed your mind…”

“Just keeping you on your toes…”

“We’re home then?” Jack asked.

“Yes – we’re home.”

“And not in some time warp, or alternative history with cleaver-wielding nutters or a future where the world’s dead… I mean, we’re in the present…?” Angus said.

“All present and correct,” Christie confirmed.

“And no more time travelling, right?” Carole said.

“Right. Next stop VIGIL. I’m handing in my licence and gun. This time for good.”

“Well that’s a relief,” Angus said as he helped Jack to his feet. “Suppose life’s going to be a bit boring now… but to be honest, I think history is overrated – I mean – it’s all in the past.”

The Taurus and its energy source stay in one place. In order to move through time and space, the time traveller needs to have physical contact with a time phone, which is controlled and tracked by the Taurus. Time travel is only possible, however, when the Taurus has enough energy and when there is a strong enough carrier signal. As Jack and Angus have discovered, the signal can be as unpredictable as the weather. Periods of time open up and then close, like shifting sands, so that no location is constantly accessible. Then there is the ‘Armageddon Scenario’, which suggests that, if you revisit the same point in space and time more than once, you dramatically increase the risk of a continuum meltdown. Imagine space and time as a piece of tissue paper – each visit makes a hole in that tissue paper, as if you had pushed through the tissue with your finger. The tissue would hold together for a while, but with too many holes, it would disintegrate. It is dangerous, therefore, to repeat too many trips to exactly the same point and the Taurus will seek to avoid such scenarios. The precise parameters of this constraint are not known and have not, of course, been tested.

I
n
Day of Rebellion
, Jack and Angus travel back to China in the 1800s. This was a time of great change for China, as the ruling Qing dynasty faced rebellions from its own citizens and military threats from abroad. The notes below give a little more information on the real people and events of the time.

The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war in southern China which took place between 1850 and 1864. It was the worst civil war of all time, killing in excess of thirty million people – more than the First World War. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a Cantonese clerk who fell into a trance after failing his civil service exams and came to believe that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. The Taiping movement was unusual in China because it loosely followed the Christian doctrine – which is why it initially gained some support from sympathisers in Western Europe. The Taiping Rebellion was one of a number of insurrections in China at the time, rebelling against the corruption of the ruling Manchu (Qing) government. The Taiping had a formidable army (with talented generals – such as Li Xiucheng – who appears in
Day of Rebellion
). However, the failure of the Taiping to take the sea port of Shanghai in
1860 – owing much to the intervention of European troops on the side of the Qing government – proved a turning point and the rebellion was finally defeated in 1864. By this point, Hong Xiuquan had already died from food poisoning.

This was the period of the ‘Opium Wars’, from 1839 to 1860, which were disputes between the Chinese Qing Dynasty and the British Empire over the trading of opium. Instead of silver, the British East India Company traded the drug with Chinese smugglers who distributed it through China, against Chinese law. Aware that the trade was costing the country money and that there was a growing problem of addiction, the emperor tried to ban it. In response, the British government sent in the military to force a settlement. As a result, the Treaty of Nanking was drawn up in 1842. This allowed for further opium trade, and also the opening of four more Chinese ports to allow foreign trade. It also gave Britain control over Hong Kong. Later, in the Treaties of Tientsin agreed between China and Britain, France, Russia and the United States, China agreed to further concessions including the legalising of opium trade and the opening of ten more ports. These treaties became known as the ‘Unequal Treaties’, and had a big effect on British Chinese relations for generations.

In 1860, to force the Chinese to meet their obligation under the treaties, eleven thousand British troops, led by General James Hope Grant, and nearly seven thousand French, led by General Cousin-Montauban, landed in the north and marched towards Beijing. The Emperor sent ministers for peace talks when the army neared Beijing, however, the British diplomatic envoy, Harry Parkes, together with Henry Loch and a small group of men travelling with them were arrested during negotiations and at this point the talks broke down. At the Battle of Palikao Bridge, near Beijing (known as Peking at this time) Chinese forces met with the Anglo–French army. The Qing army was destroyed as a result, and the Emperor fled. Although Parkes and Loch were released, a number of their group were interrogated, tortured and died. As punishment for the treatment of the prisoners, British and French troops looted and then burned the Summer Palaces near Beijing (including the Yuan Ming Yuan Haiyan – the beautiful palace that features in the game
Point-of-Departure – Day of Rebellion
and which Jack and Angus also see for real). Looting by occupying armies was a common occurrence – but the destruction of the exquisite Summer Palaces is now considered a terrible act of vandalism.

Charles Babbage lived from 1791 to 1871 and was a British mathematician and engineer. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University from 1828 to 1839. Babbage designed mechanical, programmable computers more
than a hundred years before the age of computing and information technology. In the 1820s he designed and worked on a prototype for his first computer – called his ‘Difference Engine’ – although it was never completed. He later designed an improved version, called ‘Difference Engine No. 2’. This was actually built in 1989–91 using Babbage’s plans and it worked! The experiment was carried out at the London Science Museum, where you can still see the Difference Engine No. 2 today. Later, Babbage started designing a more complicated machine called ‘the Analytical Engine’, which could be programmed using punched cards. Babbage had a wide range of other interests too – he was an inventor, astronomer and code-breaker and even stood for a seat in parliament twice, although he never won.

John Herschel lived from 1792 to 1871 and was a mathematician, astronomer, chemist and botanist. He was also a pioneer of photography, and his work in this area included ground-breaking developments such as the invention of sensitised paper. He was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1845. Herschel was a friend of Charles Babbage and also influenced the young Charles Darwin.

Imperial Yi Concubine, also known as Yehonala and later
Empress Tzu-hsi, lived from 1835 to 1908 and effectively ruled China aggressively and ruthlessly for nearly fifty years. She was the daughter of a Manchu captain and because of her beauty she was chosen when she was only sixteen to be one of the emperor’s concubines. When she gave birth to the emperor’s only son in 1856, she cemented her political power at the Chinese Imperial court, and when the emperor died she defeated her rivals at court, to become effective ruler of China – even after her son died in 1873. She seems to have been a key mover in China’s resistance when Lord Elgin led British and French troops on an attack against Beijing during the Opium Wars, and was one of the reasons that China resisted modernisation and change in the later nineteenth century. Soon after her death, China became a republic. The other characters featured in
Day of
Rebellion
, including Shu-Fei, Colonel Lai, and Josiah Backhouse, are fictional.

The Forbidden City, in the centre of Beijing (known as Peking at this time), was built nearly six hundred years ago as the Chinese imperial palace. It was the home of Chinese emperors and the centre of Chinese government. It has nearly a thousand buildings and houses a fantastic collection of artwork from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The Great Wall of China dates back more than two thousand years and was built to protect China’s northern borders from invasion. It is actually made up of several walls that have been built and linked since the fifth century BC. The wall stretches along an arc that more or less follows the edge of Inner Mongolia. It is around 5,500 miles in total and is one of the largest building projects every undertaken. However, the wall did not offer complete protection: the Manchus invaded China from the north in the seventeenth century and went on to form the Qing dynasty which lasted until the end of the nineteenth century.

No. The accelerated industrial revolution depicted in
Day of Rebellion
, caused by Babbage’s access to a VIGIL smart device, is fictional, as is the early industrialisation of China. Ferdinand Adolph Heinrich von Zeppelin designed the first airships, which were built and used by the Germans in the early 1900s. Although used in the First World War, airships proved vulnerable to attack and fragile in poor weather conditions. The airships relied for their buoyancy on the use of a lighter-than-air gas. As only the US possessed helium – a rare gas – in usable quantities, during wartime the Germans were forced to use hydrogen, which was highly flammable. In peacetime, however, German airships did clock up many tens of thousands of passenger miles in safety. However, the age of the airship was dealt a death blow in 1937,
when a ship called the
Hindenberg
exploded when landing in the United States – an event that was captured on newsreel film. The description of the Zeppelin in
Day of Rebellion
is essentially accurate – including the astonishing sub-cloud car (or
Spahkorb
) which Jack experiences first hand. These were adopted on some army airships to spot bombing targets when the airship was above cloud level. Manning a
Spahkorb
was cold and dangerous – especially when bombs were dropped from the airship above! However, it was surprisingly popular amongst crewmembers as it was the only place on the airship that they could smoke safely.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and is situated near Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. Nearly 8,000 scientists and engineers (including around half of the world’s particle physicists), work on experiments conducted at CERN – using CERN’s giant particle accelerator. CERN also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data-processing facilities. To date, physicists at CERN have not discovered time travel, although some believe it may be possible.