Day of Rebellion (5 page)

B
ack inside the lab, it was at least warm. They had raided the stores, managed to stoke up an ancient stove and the remains of a meal sat between them. Jack flicked through the report that they had retrieved from the rig and shook his head.

“So we’re none the wiser,” Angus said. “We know your dad and Fenton must have been here – but not what’s happened to them. All we’ve got is an ancient, wrecked Chinese oil rig and a bunch of ice.”

Jack nodded, “Maybe we need to make another search to see if we can find any more clues?” He looked at the array of terminals again. “But where do we start?”

The steady warmth from the stove and some food and drink were helping clear Jack’s mind a little.

“All that ice up there… wouldn’t just happen in forty years – it takes hundreds… thousands of years. And when Dad got here and discovered the whole world had ended in some icy hell… like us, he’s must’ve asked why?” Jack rubbed his chin. “Question for us is, what did he do next?”

Suddenly, he had a brainwave.

“The Timeline Simulator! You know, the computer program they use to simulate how changes in history can affect the future. It must be accessed from one of these terminals. Dad might have
used it to try and work out what happened in the past to cause the climate to flip.”

Jack turned to the first terminal and started pounding away at the keyboard.

“Different icons… nothing here… maybe this one is better.” Jack turned to another computer that was also on standby.

Angus moved behind Jack just as an application opened and the words –
Timeline Simulator Version 7.3.1
– flashed onto the screen.

“Nice one.”

Jack tapped the screen, “Saved simulations. And the last one – look! It was saved …
two days ago
. That must have been Dad! I’m going to run it.”

They waited as the program opened. Jack leaned back. The screen showed a map of the world. In one corner there was a date counter. It started to count forward, and as is it did so, coloured shading on a map, showing the relative power of countries around the world, started to grow or recede.

Jack explained: “The counter starts at 1750 – so this scenario of Dad’s starts then.”

The small red blob showing Britain in the middle of the map slowly started to expand. As the counter cycled its way through the nineteenth century, the red shading across parts of the world spread like an infectious disease, enveloping India, Australia and Africa.

“I think that’s showing the growth of the British Empire,” Jack said.

The expansion of power of the other European nations was spreading too: blue for France and black for a unified Germany.
The counter then moved on through the twentieth century to show the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States and the decline of the old European countries. As the counter reached and then passed the year 2000 another country started to grow in the East. Bar charts in the corner of the screen were changing rapidly, as that country began to overtake all others in population, wealth and military power.

“See – that must be the growth of China. It’s taking off big time.”

“It’s stopped,” Angus said.

“Hold on, what’s happening?”

A message popped up on the screen:

Then:

“It’s back at 1750; it’s starting again. This must be a new scenario that Dad modelled…”

Again, they saw the power of Britain and the other European countries start to grow, then something happened. In the Far East, in Southern China, in fact, a small black blob appeared that had not been on the map before. The blob started to get
bigger. Jack looked at the date counter as it passed 1860. Suddenly, the black blob enveloped the whole of China and then started to spread into Japan and other parts of the Far East.

“This is completely different from the first scenario – look at all the economic and military growth numbers. They’re topping out at thirty-two per cent growth a year – that’s really high, isn’t it? It must mean that black blob which has taken over the whole of China is increasing its wealth and power incredibly quickly.”

Suddenly the simulation stopped. The date stopped and winked back at them:

“What does that mean?”

Jack looked down at the table. A notebook and pile of papers lay beside the terminal – he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed them before.

“Maybe there’s something in this lot. Look someone’s been scribbling here.” He flicked through the pages until he reached one page with only a few words scrawled on it:

The last sentence had three bold lines scrawled under it.

“Look at this Angus… I reckon Dad wrote this. That’s definitely his handwriting.”

Angus shook his head. “End of civilisation, 2040s… that doesn’t sound too clever… Hang on, that’s now, we’re in 2046 now!”

But Jack wasn’t listening. He was deep in thought – it was like trying to assemble a complicated jigsaw puzzle in his head: the wrecked Chinese oil rig, the rise of China in the Timeline Simulator and his dad’s notes.

“OK, this is what I think happened. Dad was at the Revisionist base and he wanted us to join him to show us something. But, before we arrived, he met this Fenton guy and maybe those two others and there was some sort of big bust up. The two men died, Dad got injured too and he used the Taurus to escape. He went to the future, and Fenton followed him. In the future he discovered something weird had happened. The climate had completely changed. At first he was shocked – like us – but then he started looking for clues. He went outside and saw the oil rig and he investigated. He discovered it was a Chinese oil rig – there was a picture of that Xiuquan guy from China in the 1850s, from the Taiping Rebellion, and that’s really weird, because if I remember right from what I learned at the museum – the Taiping were defeated. But I think something has happened in the past to change that, and to make them victorious. Their victory would have led to other changes… they took over the whole of China and then pretty much the rest of Asia. You saw it in the simulation.”

“And if China became a really powerful country – maybe they needed oil and that would explain how they came to be building big oil rigs for the Arctic in the 1970s,” said Angus.

“Exactly. So Dad ran the Timeline Simulator to see if it could tell him what had happened. His notes talk about an
intervention in the past
and a
Point of Divergence in 1860
– that’s the point in history when something happened to change the future – there was a split and somewhere along the line a different future started.”

“So what caused the change in 1860? And how did it affect the climate so that everything turned to ice so quickly?”

“I have no idea. But Dad’s note says the Taiping might have taken Shanghai, which is a big Chinese trading city and port. We have to find Dad… question is, where’s he gone?” Worry lines creased Jack’s forehead but suddenly his face lit up. “Of course, what an idiot I‘ve been! We know exactly where he’s gone!”

Angus followed Jack as he rushed back into the Taurus chamber. The great machine loomed over them as Jack examined the output from the control terminal.

“The online activity log…” Jack said. “It’s all here…”

Jack stabbed his finger at the screen, “There! China! Dad is in China! In fact, Shanghai – just as we thought.”

“In the year 1860,” Angus added.

“And look here – Fenton has followed him again!”

“Fenton has followed Dad right back to China. But it looks like he arrived in Shanghai
before
Dad…”

“So he could spring a little surprise for your dad when he gets there. Says something about the harbour area.”

“Yes. But this helps,” Jack said hopefully. “We know Dad is in Shanghai, near the Harbour, in China in 1860. We know he’s gone there because he’s discovered that something has changed there in the past to alter the future. And it has to be something big – because it changed the climate and, well, it seems to have wiped every living thing off the earth. He’s gone back to try and find out what’s done that and to try and fix it.”

“But in the meantime, this Fenton guy is right on his tail.”

Jack looked at Angus, “I think it’s pretty obvious what we do now, don’t you?”

Angus’s lip curled, “I’ve always fancied a trip East.”

A
shop. To be precise, a hardware shop. Jack first realised this when Angus – disorientated having been catapulted through the temporary wormhole – fell away from the landing spot and careered straight into a tall rack of wooden shelves. The shelving unit collapsed as Angus tumbled into it and there was a loud crash as boxes of nails, screws and washers sprayed everywhere. Angus groaned as he lay in a heap on top of the upended shelving with dust from the floor billowing all around.

Jack helped him on to his feet. “You OK?”

“I’ll survive… where are we?”

Jack looked around anxiously. Their noisy arrival would cause consternation – in seconds they could be surrounded by irate customers and shop assistants. But as his eyes adjusted from the flash of light that signalled their arrival from the twenty-first century, he realised that the shop was strangely dark. In fact the only light seemed to come from the cracks between a series of crude wooden planks nailed across the front windows. It was dusty and gloomy and fortunately there was no one home.

Jack had managed to grab a Revisionist undervest before they’d left – the time phone fitted snuggly inside it. He pulled out the device from its pouch and flicked it open: 

His heart gave a little jump.

Angus dusted himself down, “What next? Fancy a Chinese?”

“Follow our plan. Try and blend in and make our way to the harbour area so we are ready to meet Dad when the activity log says he will arrive – in three days’ time.”

“We need to be on our guard though. Fenton arrives tomorrow.”

“And he might not be too friendly.”

Jack didn’t hear what Angus said because, as he looked around, something on one of the shelves in the shop distracted him. For a moment he didn’t take any notice, because it was such an everyday object. But as his eyes adjusted further to the gloom in the cluttered shop, he saw there was a whole row of them. He frowned.

“You coming, Jack? We don’t want the shopkeeper to find we’ve trashed his store…”

“Angus?”

“What?”

“I’m looking at the time phone – and it says we’re in 1860 right… I mean in Shanghai in 1860?”

“Right.”

“Did they really have electric kettles then?” Jack nodded to the row of kettles on the shelf in front of them.

“Sorry?” Angus followed Jack’s gaze. “Yeah – you’re right.
And look, over there… they’ve got… well they look like
hair dryers
.”

Jack took a neat little torch from his slim backpack and started to flash it around the room. He spotted something on the wall near the shop doorway. A light switch. He flicked it on. There was an alarming crackling noise and then the whole shop was washed in a flickering, weak grey light. The full contents of the shop were unveiled before them – and it was an extraordinary sight. The shop was cluttered with all manner of ironmongery and hardware. But there were also electrical goods – kettles, lamps and heaters. They were electrical consumer goods – but their designs were not modern. They were crudely made and some had strange patterns and markings on them. Jack looked at Angus, who stood in the middle of the shop with a bemused expression on his face.

“Did they even have electricity… you know, in 1860?” Angus asked, mystified.

“Well, I think they did, er, do,” Jack said. “But I’m pretty sure they didn’t have electrification of whole cities – you know, to power shops like this one, or to power all the electrical goods in here. It’s incredible. This sort of technology, well, it seems completely out of place – it’s maybe seventy or eighty years ahead of its time…”

“There’s other stuff over here,” Angus said, “but I don’t think these are electrical. Sewing machines, maybe? But these look like they’re…” Angus peered closer, “
Steam
driven.”

“And look at those weird things – pumps. This one looks like it’s attached to a lawn mower engine or something…”

Angus placed his hand on the device, “I’d know one of these anywhere – it’s a spark plug, and that’s a carburettor and there’s a little fuel tank there… it’s a petrol engine.”

“Well that makes no sense either – I’m sure these designs are too advanced for 1860.”

“What do you think it means, Jack?”

“I don’t know. It’s weird… all these different technologies in one place – steam, electricity, petrol – it’s like everything has been kind of mixed up together somehow… or,” he bit his lip, “like technology is developing really quickly, so stuff like steam and petrol, have been discovered at the same time.”

“What, or who, has triggered such a massive change?” Angus asked. “How did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” Jack shook his head. “Anyway, it makes no difference; we need to follow the same plan. Work our way across the city to the harbour to find Dad. Let’s check the map on the app.”

Jack reached into his undervest and pulled out his VIGIL device. Before their departure he had downloaded plenty of information from the Revisionist system about
nineteenth-century
China, including a rudimentary map of Shanghai.

“Here we go… first of all we need to try and work out where we are and then how we get to the harbour.” Jack looked at Angus. “You ready for this?”

They unbolted the shop door and stepped out onto the street. It was humid and warm. In some ways it was what Jack imagined a Chinese city street to look like – flowing banners and signs in Chinese and a huge range of little shops and stalls.
But there was something Jack had not expected. The street was completely deserted. Just like the hardware shop where they had arrived. Everywhere was boarded up and there were no signs of life. Further along Jack noticed a makeshift barricade that had been erected across the street. There was no obvious way through it, and Jack had no idea why it was there. He walked further out into the street to get a better view of their new surroundings.

Suddenly, Angus screamed, “Jack, look out!”