A child laughed somewhere in the apartment behind him, but Jack didn’t turn to look for the source. The sight below him held him transfixed.
His eldest son placed an arm on his and tried to pull him away from the sheet glass windows of his London apartment.
Jack called it his apartment, but he knew it was really a penthouse. A mansion in the sky, wedged high up into the Shard..
He had a friend, the CEO of a chain of supermarkets, who called his Suffolk mansion a cottage. A cottage with eight en suite bedrooms. It was an affectation, his friend knew this, but made no difference once when they came for him. When his money ceased to buy him protection.
He watched them, the massing crowds in the streets below, a river of people waiting to drown them.
His customers.
“Stop watching it Dad,” the young man pleaded, “there isn’t anything we can do. Anyway, the police and the army are holding them back.”
“For the moment.”
“They’ll hold them,” his son also looked down then, but as though he was trying not to see them.
Jack Ellis looked back at his son.
Aside from the strange clothes these young people were wearing these days he could have been looking into a mirror.
Jack Ellis had aged well.
Although that was nothing new; not now.
Everyone aged well these days. Looking down at burning city below he mused that aging well was no longer the problem, no need for moisturisers or multi-vitamins. Living well was the challenge nowadays.
And it was all his fault.
***
Jack Ellis recalled a boy.
A boy with too much intelligence and time on his hands, hunched over a bundle of wires and circuitry which he had purchased from his local Maplins electrical store; he remembered the warm glow of the soldering iron close to his face as the final drop of molten metal hissed into place and held tight the wires.
The other kids in his class called him a geek, but he didn’t let it bother him. Not much, at least.
Dad told him the other kids in the class would be working for him one day, “the geeks have inherited the earth, especially the science geeks”, so he let the snide comments in class wash over him.
His bedroom looked like something out of mission control, an aftereffect of a hacking phase, before he discovered how easy hacking was and grew tired of it.
He still dabbled, if he had cause, but these days he liked to experiment in other areas.
He’d adapted two of the radio kits and hooked them into his computer with the vague intention of building a computerised police scanner and, thorough as ever, he was now in the process of documenting all the frequencies he could find by broadcasting from another kit radio which he’d adapted to be a small transmitter, entering all a series of numbers into a database he’d built.
The day drifted away and before long Dad was calling him for lunch, and he slouched downstairs for a cheese and tomato sandwich which was quite dry, but filling, returning with a glass of orange juice back to his room, taking care to keep it away from his precious equipment and squeezing it onto the spare desk next to his hamster cage.
The anomaly in the numbers stared back at him from the screen when he returned.
Later, questions would be asked about why no-one else had discovered this.
Later, when his invention became ubiquitous people would muse over how no-one else had found it before, and numerous crackpots tried to claim the idea as their own.
Then they began wonder where it came from in the first place.
David Icke announced it was part of an ancient Lizard plot and the New World Order lot argued it was the Zionists.
The Bible bashers held it up as proof that the early, long lived elders of the Bible had truly had the thousand year lifespans reported in scripture and said the frequency was a punishment from Him for our wicked ways.
Far later, when everything crumbled and the governments fell, when people were hunted in the streets and he sat in his apartment watching the world burn, far later, he would regret this day, would regret his seemingly innocuous discovery.
Right now he was just a fourteen year old science geek, and without realising it he had discovered something new. Undiscovered.
A high frequency range which could almost have been mistaken for static.
It was all over the house he discovered, trailing wires and and being told off by dad for nearly breaking his leg when he tripped over wires draped across the study door.
There it was a rhythm being broadcast inside the frequency. A pattern, of which he could find no mention online, even in radio enthusiast forums.
But it was there.
Wherever he went it was there.
Holding a new mobile version of his kit up in various areas of his school and playground, oblivious to the looks this drew from his classmates, he found it was there.
He even found it in the area his father defined as “ooooop North”, at the venue of a wedding they both attended in Yorkshire, even permeating the ancient stone church, and much to the chagrin of the rector who met him coming back up the stone steps, even down in the deep crypt beneath.
The radio waves continued to reach his device.
“Dad, could you make me a lead box” he asked his father on the long drive back to London, then noticing his frown explained, “I need it for an experiment.”
***
A week later he placed his scanner in the heavy rough hewn container which had been ‘knocked up’ by one of his dads junior techs and placed it and his Nexus 7 inside. The tablet was set to scan and record the frequency when closed and he was fully expecting to hear nothing, for the frequency to be finally muted, but there it was still. Playing it’s infernal beat.
Yet, when he removed the device an hour later and played back the recording the beat was still there. The frequency went through lead as if it were neutrinos diving through the earth.
His dad, a structural engineer said it sounded interesting, but there was little evidence of interest in his eyes, the boy thought, and returned to his room, taking time to replace the water on his hamster cage, his elderly hamster Clive waddling gratefully over to the nozzle.
“Your cage needs a good clean,” he told the small creature, who twitched his nose in response.
The only thing which stopped the rhythm, Jack discovered, after months of experimenting, was that if he combined his two transmitters and some new circuits from Maplins he could generate a magnetic field which disrupted the frequency and when boosted blocked it out entirely.
Whether this was a good or bad thing, he had no idea. It was just a thing.
***
Time went on.
After writing up his experiments and persuading his Dad to let him patent his Blocker, agreeing the cost of the process could be his fifteenth birthday present, in theory at least, well aware his Dad would likely feel guilty nearer the time and buy him a proper present as well (the guilt of a single parent), he realised, interesting as this was, there was scant practical use for it.
So the Blocker sat on his desk.
Beaming out filtering waves and keeping his room free of the frequency, as Jack moved onto new projects: A Levels and University. The Blocker sat forgotten. Like so many other toys.
It was only when he was packing up his things to go in the car to Oxford that he looked at his pet radio project again, and recalled the hours he’d spent creating it.
It had continued to broadcast it’s shield against the secret frequency and he decided to take it with him, for old times sake; his first invention.
He tapped his hamster cage, and Clive, looking spritely, jogged over to greet him.
Jack was amazed Clive was still in the world. Let alone fit and well and ready to join him on the journey to Oxford.
Dwarf Hamsters were meant to live to what, three? Yet Clive was going strong at eight. Looking better than he had at three.
He replaced the water bottle and filled the hamster bowl, then unplugged all his computer equipment to pack into boxes, ready for the new home in halls. The University had some major computing power on campus, but he liked to have his own kit with him as well.
Clive watched him as he unpacked the contents, recreating a shadow of his room in the historic hall of residence, minus the more childish remnants of home, apart from Clive of course.
He’d intended to plug the blocker back in, for old times sake, but added a new desk lamp to the socket instead, and forgot about it.
A week after moving into his college halls Clive lay dead in the straw of his cage.
He was happy to put his sudden demise down to the disruption of the move at first, but a strange thought occurred to him and he picked up the Blocker and stared at it, turning it over in his hands.
The thought became a theory and before long he was down in one of the biology labs talking to a female geek who would later become his girlfriend, then his wife, beautiful awkward Cassandra.
It took months of experimenting, but he had it. He had the beginnings of proof. It slowed aging. Prevented illness and disease. Even when he added influenza and later the HIV virus to the mix, the cells fought it off and became virus free within a week.
More testing was needed, but he recognised the possibilities it the up.
He had discovered the elixir of life, although now, a new thought occurred to him.
Where did the broadcast come from? He’d spend the remainder of his life heading projects to track the source, but like Einstein seeking a Unified Theory of Everything he would one day fail in his search.
Was it naturally occurring, more background from the big bang, or did someone or something out there control it? He dismissed the thought. Pah, naturally occurring. Had to be.
Otherwise people would have been living to a thousand since forever, since biblical times.
A vague memory surfaced, of his Mum before she died, telling him bedtime bible stories about how in the old days they lived to a thousand as a matter of course, although he didn’t believe it, any of it, was true.
That had been Mum’s thing, but before the end, cancer flooding her body, she lost her faith. An atheist in her foxhole.
“It’s not fair,” she told him, “to not let me see the man you become, it’s not fair. There is nothing there. He’s not there.”
He thought about his Mum as he watched cancer cells on a petri dish shrink and disappear, before slipping off in search of a professor whose wife had recently been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer to described his results and propose an unorthodox trial.
The Professor readily agreed to have the device in his house, although the cancer was in her blood and her bones, irrevocably her doctors said, streaming through her body, so he was sceptical it would do any good.
“Can’t do any harm though, I suppose.” His Professor looked empty, wasted away himself; fading. “The doctor says dose her on morphine. Make her comfortable. These can be my final straws to clutch.”
Whilst he took the prototype away, Jack continued to refine the original box into the small oval shaped transmitter which would sit in almost every pocket within a year.
Within two weeks Professor Greenaways wife was substantially better and within two months the cancer had gone.
“It’s a miracle,” Greenaway told them, almost bouncing round the room, “they’ve scanned her, and the cancers completely gone. Doctor’s say they’re baffled.”
Jack noticed something new: Professor Greenaway himself looked ten years younger. Twenty even. He was aging backwards. Skin becoming supple and smooth again. The round pot belly which has once pressed firmly against the bermuda shirts he liked to wear under his labcoat was shrinking. He could have been thirty. Not less than forty.
The first thousand units took around a month to sell out, the production funding crowd-sourced.
The next thousand, released six months later, took an hour and sold for over a thousand pounds unit.
Soon every house in the civilised world had at least one and Jack became something of a celebrity, the British Mark Zuckerberg, photographed falling out of nightclubs with Cassie.
It took twenty years for everything to begin to fail, fifty for the real crash.
People don’t like to go hungry; hungry people make noise.
Still, they tried, but people will only eat so much quorn.
In the end even that ran out. You needed energy to make all this stuff and there just wasn’t enough to go round.
That boy he recalled, the clever one with too much time on his hands had his bright idea nearly a hundred years ago, Jack regretted that boy had ever found the damn thing.
It wasn’t just that life stretched on forever, that he could cope with, although many people had killed themselves just to relieve the boredom.
There were six billion people on the planet when he made his discovery.
There were over twenty billion before the food riots started. He might have cured cancer, but the people were the cancer now.
There were maybe fifteen billion now. Still far too many.
The Blocker had many strengths, but it wouldn’t stop you starving to death any more than it would stop one of the cannibal gangs from eating you.
The squeamishness about that particular taboo a thing of the past for many of those on the streets. Humanity once again demonstrating its adaptability in the face of adversity.
Cassie, his darling Cassandra who had one studied biology before there was no longer any need; she left him five years ago, throwing herself from Southwark Bridge before his very eyes. Pleading with him to join her.
“Come for a swim my dear,” her eyes already seeing some other reality, “I hear the water’s lovely this time of year.”
Some of the lucky ones had taken to space to seek new worlds to fill up. Now time was no longer an issue for them, interstellar travel was a reality, and Jack wondered if soon the humans on those spaceships would be the only ones left.
Or would humanity somehow find a level at which they could survive. Like a bacterial infection which cripples the population without completely killing everyone.
Far below the crowds had broken through the army lines. Even more like bacteria from up on his Crystal perch.
Two of his grandchildren were throwing a tennis ball back and forth and Jack marvelled for a moment at the normality of the action, before returning his gaze to the teeming crowds below.
There it was. The end he supposed, as he realised the army line in that section, the soldiers tasked with protection of his equally rich associates, had turned and joined the rioters.
They were heading into the building.
He rounded up his three sons and eight grandchildren.
“Quick,” hurrying them along, suddenly all action, “time to go in the panic room. There are guns in there if you need them. Time to go! Now!”
They could survive in there maybe a week, if the building wasn’t burnt down, then they would be on their own.
His eldest son looked at him out of teenage eyes, even though he must have been at least sixty now himself. Honestly Jack had lost track of things like the age of children.
“You’re not coming in are you?”
“I’ve had enough of it. Besides, I hear the water’s lovely this time of year.”
After what remained of his family had hidden themselves away, surrounded by bottled water, canned meat and various fruit in syrup he watched the door clunk shut, leaving a plain blank wall which he hoped would keep them safe, for a time.
Then he crossed the room, turned off his Blocker, opened his front door and went to sit in his favorite armchair to greet his customers to once they arrived.
I hope you enjoyed this story. If you did there are lots more (mostly free/mostly sci-fi) here:
In Bloom 