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The Travellers, Vol 4, Pt 3: Establishing the Mission Structure

Peter and Evelyn rematerialized back in their hotel room in The Savoy during the dying days of the Second World War. The two variants of them who were already using it disassembled themselves into clone material. In the process, Cassiel jumped the two time chests they had just brought back with them into the depths of the craton in Greenland where they joined the other two that were already there.

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In his existence as a Traveller to date, Miles had been utilising a simple “loop” structure, repeating selected years of his life over and over again. When there had only been him, or at most a handful of other variants, who were intent primarily on simply acquiring skills and knowledge, this approach had served his purposes well. However, things were going to be very different from now on.

In order to achieve what they wanted to achieve, there would need to be many variants. Hundreds of them. Possibly even thousands. Certainly, there would be far too many to huddle in the time tent and jump around in loops together. Moreover, their mission was to span more than one lifetime. They planned to have children, substitute them with variants, and then live their lives too, ensuring a continuity of purpose over as long a period of time as was necessary to complete their objectives.

The easiest way to visualise the process is to imagine there is a single variant. Let’s call them Bob and say they are 20 years old in 1945 in “timeline A”. Bob has a child in 1950 in that timeline who lives a full, natural life. Let’s call his child Alice. At some point in timeline A, possibly around the first few decades of the 21st century, Bob appears to die. In fact he has faked his death and jumped backwards in time to about 1960, spawning “timeline B”. In this new timeline, they adopt the form and life of Alice. The “original” is disposed of. It’s okay though because they’ve already lived a full life. At least, that is how the variants rationalise it to themselves. As Alice, Bob now lives another life which continues until some time around the middle decades of the 21st century. And so on and so on.

If you multiply this process across many variants, interleaving their points of arrival and death, you end up with a continually regenerating (and potentially increasing) cast of agents. In each timeline, every variant except those four who can comfortably fit in a time tent will remain in situ, living a full life and dying a natural death without ever jumping away. But the turn will come for each eventually in one timeline or another.

You could picture it as a building up of timelines, layer upon layer upon layer horizontally, like a railway siding, with the branching point for each successive timeline occurring at some point after the one before it so that the build-up of variants occurs along a kind of “diagonal” timeline that results from the sequence of jumps.

The number of timelines and variants you could create in this process was almost unbounded. Cassiel could potentially bring back up to four people almost every second of every day. Moreover, he could help manage the development of backstories and the organisation of relationships between them so that variants only ever had families with other variants. The limit in practice was how many people the timeline could support before it reached saturation point and non-variants began to notice that something odd was going on. The variants didn’t want to give weight to paranoid conspiracy theories about the world being run by lizard-formed aliens. That leaned toward having smaller teams. The counterweight was that the larger the team, and the more often people arrived, the more knowledge you had, the greater the team’s capacity to act became, and the more attempts they had to get things right.

Each time a variant jumps back from the future to spawn a new timeline, they bring with them knowledge and other resources from the future. The divergence the mission aims to achieve therefore benefits from incrementally greater insight and experience as the layers build up. Inevitably, they will fail in some timelines. But, along the diagonal, they should always be able to achieve their goals, if they continue to desire to do so, even without their myriad enhanced mental and physical capabilities.

Given how powerful the variants were, you might think that perhaps their plan was to seize power by force and rule the world as gods. However, that was just not Miles’ style at all. Even if such a thing were possible, which he didn’t believe it was, he couldn’t imagine anything more horrible and stressful. The variants wanted to change things without anyone ever really becoming aware that anything out of the ordinary was going on at all at any point. Certainly, none of them wanted to present as being “alien” in any fashion whatsoever. They wanted to make the world a better place, but also wanted to have pleasant and enjoyable lives while doing so. And that would be no easy feat since, as they were well aware, the past was mostly a very unpleasant place.

The first problem they needed to solve was that of provenance. In 1945, none of them knew anyone other than their variants. They had no parents, no family, no friends, no associates, no colleagues. Especially in a society such as Britain, with its old school ties and establishment networks, that could be a significant hindrance. They had proven on numerous occasions in the past-future that they could insert documents into the official records to satisfy any and all bureaucratic requirements but, for example, while having a certificate that said you had a degree from a particular university might confer a qualification that could be used to obtain a position, it didn’t supply you with a network of peers with whom you grew up and had a catalogue of shared experiences. If you entered the public eye or behaved in ways that presented a challenge to any powerful vested interests, the veneer of your official identity might soon come tumbling down in the absence of suitable character references.

The alternative to crafting fake identities was to substitute real people. There were myriad drawbacks to this approach, many of which should be obvious. For starters, you needed to kidnap your target and make them disappear so that you could replace them with a variant in their form. Even if one ignored the fact that this arguably amounted to murder and required an act of violence which the variants did not enjoy undertaking, it was still an exceptionally difficult trick to pull off. Miles knew. He had done it many times in a previous timeline in order to build up a supporting team. Each form needed weeks of careful preparatory work to put together so that the variant mind and Traveller subsystem could be merged successfully with the non-variant body and DNA. On top of that, it required months of rehearsals to learn how to accurately mimic (and subsequently internalise) the minutiae of the target’s presentation, such as gesture, phrasing, and so on. Ideally, one also needed to conduct extended surveillance on the target so that a full picture could be gained of their context. Even so, it could be a nerve-wracking existence at times.

Even once you had achieved all of that, there was the fact that, for most people, their physical form and personal provenance contained undesirable elements. You had to be committed to a particular form and a given path for the duration of a single human lifespan, and none of the variants were especially keen to live the life of a fat, ugly, racist Tory. Occasionally, mission objectives would demand that they pursue the extreme approach of substitution, but it was always preferable to conjure an identity from thin air and then associate it with one of the many desirable pre-prepared physical forms the variants had prepared over the past few thousand years.

In their essence, all the variants were Miles. And even though he had now lived for over five millennia, Miles was a product of his original timeline and upbringing, the facts of which had only become more deeply embedded by reliving it over seventy times. His political views might be broadly described as liberal social democratic environmentalism informed by Marxist and post-Marxist political philosophy. Although he harboured no delusions about the postwar settlement in Western Europe being some kind of utopia, he certainly regarded the establishment of social market economies, welfare states, the European Union, and the United Nations in the wake of WW2 as representing something of a high water mark for the realisation of internationalist and altruistic political action. Contrariwise, he considered the ultimate defeat of that consensus and the rolling back or weakening of the institutions and policies that embodied it during the neoliberal era represented by Thatcher and Reagan to be a disaster for humanity.

It should come as no surprise therefore that the aim of the variants in all of their missions ultimately boiled down to attempts to protect, enhance, and extend the former while preventing or mitigating the impact of the latter. The further back in time they travelled, the more completely they would be able to realise their goals. Such changes to the timeline could not be achieved overnight. Not even by force, and certainly not within the self-imposed constraints on action the variants placed upon themselves.

Therefore, on this mission at least, they were not aiming to go too big, too early. They did not believe that it would be possible to prevent the failures of successive postwar governments in the UK. Nor would it be possible to suppress the rise of neoliberalism in reaction to those failures. Although it was barely emergent at the point of their arrival, many of the forces that would be opposed to the social democratic settlement were already established figures who had begun to coalesce and act in a coordinated manner. On the other hand, starting from 1945, they believed that it would be possible to shift the course of history such that they could fundamentally redirect the path of so-called “third way” liberalism that emerged in the West in the wake of the Cold War and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

The team’s approach to addressing this high-level mission goal would be broad and multi-faceted, attempting to resolve a few other areas of concern en route. For example, the physical fabric of the United Kingdom had taken a real hammering over the past fifty years. In MOT, a total mess had been made of the redevelopment, despite often good intentions. Furthermore, a widespread abrogation of responsibilities to lower income groups, especially immigrants, had contributed to a range of social and economic problems that were exacerbated by a laissez-faire attitude toward maintenance. The variants planned to try and ameliorate these problems, so far as they were able.

In a similar vein, the variants were keen to dip their toes into the world of agriculture. Although they understood that the postwar intensification of the industry was necessary, it had been a significant contributory factor in a wide range of environmental and health issues. More than anything, they were intrigued by the possibility of exploring an alternative template for intensive, yet environmentally friendly, farming.

At a more abstract level, the variants were aware that the balance of payments question and the process of deindustrialisation had been massive problems for the UK throughout the postwar period, the lingering effects of which arguably contributed to an entire spectrum of social and political ills. Broadly speaking, albeit only to a certain extent, they accepted the later thesis from MOT that deindustrialisation was an integral part of economic development. For example, it made no sense in the majority of cases for raw cotton to be imported all the way from India in order to be turned into shirts in British mills only to be sold back to Indians. It was imperialist, rather than capitalist, logic. Similarly, he regarded coal as a harmful and outmoded legacy of the early industrial revolution. Nevertheless, they were of the view that had Britain, like Germany, properly invested in research, development, productivity, and infrastructure, then it could have retained and even expanded its manufacturing interests into higher value-add areas, rather than being gutted by overseas competition.

In their unified mind, the solutions were linked. By investing in technology-based industries and some innovations in more traditional activities, they could develop export interests that would mitigate (if not solve) the balance of payments problem. A stronger, more competitive manufacturing sector might then help soften the conflict of interests that existed between it and the powerful finance and banking sector, where the latter sought high interest rates and a strong currency and the former the opposite. Achieving this might assist in the development of a more robust, diversified economy. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that they would be able to stop Britain pissing much of the income from its North Sea oil and gas reserves up the wall during the 1980s. On this mission, at least.

Then we come onto some matters dear to Miles’ heart. Despite having a lifelong love of computers, he had come to regard many of the paths down which the digital revolution had gone to be little less than a disaster for mankind. He had already enacted something of a divergence in this area in his past-future. However, within the scope of the current mission the team would be well positioned to enact a far more significant rupture that might simultaneously alleviate many of the wider social, economic, and political problems that blighted his timeline of origin.

Of course, it was easy enough to state a series of ambitions. The reality on the ground in a capitalist context was that one would need to be able to produce sufficient capital funding for an array of expensive ventures. With that in mind, the variants planned to enact a form of detournément. They were unexcited by topics such as mining, oil, and gas. Moreover, in a Cold War context, things like the nuclear industry were frankly scary. However, by utilising the potentially massive rentier income that could be easily derived from the rights to resources such as oil, gas, gold, and diamonds in particular, it would be possible to underwrite the team’s other activities. Meanwhile, pursuing some lowkey activity in the nuclear sector as a long play could help resolve certain environmental questions.

Nevertheless, even though the variants were prepared to enter such dubious industries, there were some spheres of activity which they considered to be best avoided. For example, the creative arts often have a powerful capacity to transform society. However, the ways in which they might do so can be extremely unpredictable. Not to mention unreliable. They also invite close scrutiny of the individual as “creator”. Other fields, such as medicine, while potentially noble as temporal interventions go, were unlikely to change the aspects of history he was looking to shift. As Bill and Melinda Gates have happily demonstrated, you can wipe out preventable diseases with money, but the devastating ravages of global capitalism will, if anything, only accelerate off the back of your efforts. Although they figured it might still be a good idea to throw some of their hoped-for wealth toward some medical projects, if the opportunity arose.

That was the long game. The question was how to begin.

The first generation team would be comparatively small and discreet. Couples would appear in a town or city. Maybe they would have elderly parents in tow to provide them with a kind of pseudo-provenance. They would come from, and distribute themselves to, various places throughout the UK and the rest of the world. Some of them would do very well and their names might even become known in some small way in some relatively unimportant field of activity that invites little public scrutiny. Most of them would simply try to find regular jobs or start insignificant small businesses that merely provided them with a comfortable living. Anything, so long as they remained unobtrusive, agreeable, and sufficiently uninteresting to provoke anyone to dig too deeply into their identity and their past.

A small subset of first generation team members would target a selection of real people the variants had identified for substitution in order to gain the use of the provenance they provided and/or to live out a divergent version of their life. They were not famous people — not yet, at least. Indeed, few of them would ever become famous. Mostly they were unknowns or individuals with lowly positions in the civil service, education, the clergy and the like. They mainly looked to target small and comparatively isolated family groups en masse who they would then further isolate through geographical relocation. All of Miles’ own grandparents and great-grandparents were marked. However, some of the substitution targets were people whose paths in life in MOT led to wealth and power, and the variants’ aim in substituting them was to piggyback on that potential, rather than having to compete with it, and ultimately drive their life story down a divergent path.

Whether invented or substituted, most of these variant family groups would have two, three, maybe even four children. Their offspring would be substituted between the ages of 8 and 12 in newly spawned timelines before going on to marry other variants and repeat the process. The second generation would go through the system, attending regular schools with non-variants and gaining a provenance and networks. Even though close scrutiny of their family tree might throw up some interesting questions, they would now be able to engage in more temporally intrusive and antagonistic activity. By the third generation, the likelihood of anyone picking up on the subtle peculiarities of their origins would become very low and, by the fourth, everything would be simply a matter of documentation which, if they had done things right, should present no issues at all.

Anyway, there Peter and Evelyn were: in a hotel room in The Savoy in April 1945. Their first task was to seed the first generation. In the dead of night, they jumped backwards a fractional moment in time again, transforming themselves into a new couple who joined Peter and Evelyn in the new timeline. In the timeline that they had jumped away from, there was an unpaid bill at The Savoy owed by two individuals who apparently did not exist. In the new timeline, the new couple left The Savoy to go who knows where. When they got there, they repeated the process. Peter and Evelyn, who were left behind in the timeline at The Savoy, simply lived out their lives in the postwar world as normal people much as they had done before. In the new timeline, a new couple left the other new couple and repeated the process again. And again. By the end of the year, there were variant couples distributed throughout the world, ready to go into action. With the initial team seeded, Cassiel let them all know that everyone was in position and they could begin.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 8: The New Golden Age, 1970-1990

Having been returned to power in 1970, David Moore’s new administration immediately faced a major dilemma: what to do about the United States. The Bretton Woods system was unravelling. America had been experiencing massive trade deficits for almost a decade and the strength of its currency had been seriously challenged when France and a few other countries demanded that their US dollar reserves be exchanged for gold. Moreover, even though the variants had significant manufacturing concerns in America, such as ICL, Rover, BAC, and Mercury, these companies and many others took most of their profits out of the country and stored them in London and Swiss banks as Eurodollars. There was clearly no way that the Federal Reserve could continue to support the convertibility between the US dollar and gold at a rate of US$35 to the troy ounce, especially as they were burning through cash on imports to fuel the war in Vietnam among other money pits.

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The variants had half a mind to Follow De Gaulle’s lead and demand conversion of the UK’s dollar reserves, especially since the price of gold was now going up. However, Britain had been running a steady trade surplus almost every year since 1950. The country’s reserves were a significant factor in global macroeconomics. Moreover, the “special relationship” had not been very special in recent years. Indeed, it hadn’t even been all that close, to be honest. The UK government had needed to distance themselves a little from the Americans to appease French fears in the EEC. The country had also meddled with international affairs in ways the Americans didn’t approve of while simultaneously becoming something of a spear carrier for the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected badly on the US as it suffered from race-related violence and embarrassed Washington through its reticence on the issue.

Had Ellen Falconer (née Wilde), the newly appointed Chancellor (and the first woman to ever hold the post), gone to the Americans and demanded Britain’s gold, it would certainly have precipitated a major global economic crisis. Most likely, the Americans would have been compelled to refuse the request anyway, leading directly to a massive and unavoidable deterioration in relations between the two nations. However, there was absolutely no way she was just going to sit by while the real price of gold skyrocketed and the Americans unilaterally cancelled convertibility, wiping billions off the value of British reserves. A soft touch would be required though.

A full state visit to the US had been arranged for the summer of 1970 and took place shortly after the election. Officially, this gave President Nixon a chance to congratulate David Moore in person on his recent victory. Through gritted teeth, obviously. Unofficially, it was all to do with what on earth the Americans were planning to do about convertibility.

Ellen Falconer explained to her US counterparts that she believed the current market price of gold to be undervalued by about a factor of four and that, consequently, she harboured some serious concerns about the ability of the Federal Reserve to honour its financial commitments over the coming years. Both the Bank of England and the Bundesbank had been compelled to intervene to support the dollar on several occasions in recent years and, as she explained, the Treasury was reluctant to keep doing so while the dollar was evidently overvalued. Clearly, the veiled threat was that Britain, like France, was considering withdrawing its money. The prospect sparked a degree of panic in Washington where inflation and currency crises were threatening to derail Nixon’s first term in office. Eventually, a deal was worked out in which, should convertibility ever be “temporarily” stopped, any loss in value suffered by British reserves as a consequence would be offset by reductions in the overall debt still owed to the US by the UK.

Barely a year later, Nixon was forced to do exactly what the variants knew would happen. The British debt to the US was all but wiped out over the course of the next few years and would be completely paid off by the end of the decade. Back in Blighty, the news was received by the mass of the media and the electorate as nothing less than an utter triumph for the Labour government. However, it would pale into insignificance when compared to their next trick which would come in 1973.

Whatever the variants personally thought about the various settlements that had been reached in the Middle East after World War 2, as representatives of a UN member state they were obligated to an extent to support the territorial integrity of other members. In 1973, Israel had not yet been twisted into the ruthless apartheid state it would become in MOT and, while the situation was far from being clear cut and there were very few “good guys”, the Soviet-backed Egyptian-Syrian invasion that would take place in this year was an act of aggression.

Britain under Prime Minister David Moore remained nominally neutral in the so-called Yom Kippur War. Not many people were fooled by that one though. The British had been selling arms to the Israelis since they had conspired together to provoke the Suez Crisis. Moreover, through membership of NATO and their close alliance with the US, the country was a de facto supporter of the Israeli cause by association. Thus, when OPEC announced an oil embargo on nations that had supported Israel in October 1973, Britain was included in the list of nations to whom sales would be prohibited. The global posted price of oil practically tripled overnight.

By short circuiting many of the development costs associated with the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas reserves, the variants had already connived to bring the break-even price for Brent Crude down to around US$25 per barrel. They had subsequently conspired with the oil majors to try and maintain oil prices above this level throughout the 1960s. Off the back of their success in this endeavour, the Labour government had ordered an expansion of BNOCs drilling activities during the latter half of the decade.

However, as more players entered the market, their price fixing cartel had become ever more difficult to sustain and, between 1968 and 1973, the price had begun to drop toward the US$22 mark. In the UK, the impact of this on BNOC had been papered over through the introduction of duties that resulted in Britain having comparatively higher oil prices than many other countries at the time, with much of the tax income then being rebated to BNOC to cover the shortfall. It was a neat accounting trick that attracted little attention in the media. Most were distracted by the headline imposition of the duties themselves which were justified as part of a response to a demand for action on “climate change” from a rapidly growing environmental movement the variants were also supporting.

Following the BNOC expansion, the oil embargo had absolutely zero effect on oil supplies to the UK. Instead, the nation had just acquired a licence to print money. The price per barrel would almost never drop below BNOCs breakeven point again. With their ramped-up drilling capability, BNOC became an oil exporter, clearing over 100% profit on every barrel sold.

James Hunter, who was now the minister in charge of the area, announced the country��s new “50-year plan” to drain the North Sea pursuant to a subsequent complete decarbonisation of the nation’s energy policy by 2020. As part of the same initiative, Ellen Falconer informed Parliament of the government’s intention to create a “sovereign wealth fund” to manage the proceeds from the windfall. Basically, the idea was that the nation would look to create as much money as it possibly could from oil and gas over the next 50 years and funnel the proceeds into a massive hedge fund, the proceeds from which would be utilised to support public investment in infrastructure, health, pensions, social security, education, and the environment. There were increases to grants for students and those in training. Dental and optician charges were removed and even a course of orthodontics was made free for those under the age of 21 on referral from their regular dentist.

Because the UK government was completely in control of the supply of oil and gas from the North Sea, it was able to decide exactly how much was sold for export and how much was retained for use at home. While almost every other country on earth was suffering from the paroxysms of oil induced inflation, the price in the UK remained broadly stable, rising only by virtue of government policy to increase duties to discourage excessive consumption on environmental grounds. On top of this, the country had almost completed its roll out of thorium-based nuclear power stations, so the cost of electricity had been falling consistently along with oil consumption for almost twenty years. Over the same period, the energy efficiency of the country’s housing stock had been steadily improving.

Even though Sterling offered practically no interest, the strength of the UK economy brought new problems both during the build up to, and in the wake of, the collapse of Bretton Woods. With global currencies now all operating in a de facto floating market, investors were fleeing from the US dollar. Sterling was one of their main ports of call. As a consequence, it began to rise in value against the dollar, damaging the competitiveness of the nation’s all-important exports.

Moreover, the rising value of Sterling and the fall in the dollar imperilled the deal that had been struck during the Smithsonian Conference in December 1971, once again compelling the UK and Germany to intervene to purchase overvalued dollars. The British had been at least partly to blame for this.

There had been a rather tense standoff over the question of the revaluation of Sterling against the dollar: the Americans wanted Ellen to increase by 10% from US$2.5 to US$2.75 while the UK delegation was adamant that they could not go above 4%. In the end, the British got their way and Sterling was revalued to US$2.6 while the US dollar itself was devalued by 8% with convertibility at US$38/ounce. This had been part of a bargaining ploy that aimed to apply pressure on the US and protect British industrial interests. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to fully achieve their goals.

Despite having support from several of the other leading industrialised nations that were present, the variants had once again been unable to persuade the United States of the virtues of their Bancor proposal during the Smithsonian Conference. The Nixon administration remained fixated on the restoration of convertibility because the benefits that accrued to the Federal Reserve from operating the global reserve currency were simply too great to abandon.

Within the space of a few months, it was clear that the Fed was still not going to be able to honour this new arrangement, as Ellen had already pointed out would happen at the time. At both the EEC and international level, the major European nations had already tried realigning their currencies both toward the US and each other in an abortive early attempt at a form of currency union. There seemed little option but to just go with the float. The UK government relieved the Bank of England of their duty to intervene to support the US dollar, and Pound Sterling left the last remnants of the Bretton Woods system.

However, there was a radical alternative option on the table for the members of the burgeoning European Economic Community. Following the failure of the “snake in the tunnel” European Monetary System in 1973, the British put forward their plan for a Europe-only implementation of the Bancor proposal, which they dubbed the “European Currency Unit”.

Under this scheme, member states would each retain their own sovereign currency with full control over monetary policy, but trade in each on global markets would cease. Instead, the ECU would constitute a single unified external currency facade for the whole of the union. There would be a European Central Bank (based in London, naturally) which would manage the currency and intervene to maintain its value within desired bounds, backed by a common reserve fund.

However, there was no notion that the ECU would be a conventional circulating currency for use on a day-to-day basis by the general public. Certainly not in the foreseeable future. It was predominantly a unit of accounting for the purposes of trade, both internationally and within the EEC. In the latter context, the sovereign currencies of each member state would enter the system at a fixed rate of exchange to the ECU. Trade between each of these countries would then be carried out in ECUs with imbalances potentially leading to devaluations or revaluations as necessary to achieve a balance. International trade would also be carried out in ECUs but would obviously not have any of the same sovereign currency valuation implications.

The potential benefits of the proposed system were clear to most people already since the idea hadn’t come completely out of the blue. Firstly, the ECU represented a significant step along the path toward integration, which was the whole point of the community. However, it did so in a way that allowed member states to retain control over national monetary policy while instituting a trade system that promoted equal levels of development that would open further options for alignment down the road. Furthermore, members would be protected to a certain degree from external shocks and currency attacks by combining growing European strength to create a single internationally traded currency front that would be potentially powerful enough to challenge the US dollar for hegemony. Although foreign currency traders would be very put out, there would still be more than enough scope for European financial institutions to use the fluctuations between the ECU and both EU and non-EU currencies to make tonnes of money.

The real danger was that Nixon, who had been re-elected in 1972, would throw his toys out of the pram and the Western Alliance would fracture. Quite a few European nations had done quite a few things that had pissed off the Americans in recent years, and Britain had been no exception. However, very few people, the variants included, were of the view that pursuing such a course of action without at least consulting the Americans first was a good idea. Fortunately, Nixon’s days were numbered, and he would be succeeded by the exceptionally dense Gerald Ford, followed by the considerably more affable Jimmy Carter. After a couple more years of discussion and diplomacy between Brussels and Washington, the ECU would finally become real in 1975. However, first there was another election in the UK and a lot of other things had happened in other spheres since the last time the country had gone to the polls.

From the beginning of their third term in 1970, David Moore’s Labour ministry had begun to push through the various constitutional reforms that had been pledged in their manifesto. In addition to there being a traditional first past the post general election in 1975, there would also be elections using STV for the new regional assemblies for Scotland, Wales, and the nine English regions that had been defined in line with European parliamentary constituencies. There had been considerable boundary reform to support this and a whole raft of corresponding changes to the forms and structures of local governance, for which elections would also now be conducted using STV. This brought them into line with the elections to the European Parliament which had been held since the early 1960s.

Controversially for some, the other institution for which elections were to be held in 1975 was the newly constituted second chamber of Parliament. Reforms to the House of Lords had by necessity involved a good many compromises but still entailed the inevitable constitutional spat when they refused to vote in favour of their own abolition. Obviously, it didn’t matter as the government had a large enough majority to pass the required bill in two successive sessions and force its passage into law.

The reformed House of Lords, as it was still to be named, broadly followed the abortive 2012 Conservative-Liberal Coalition government’s plans from MOT. Almost eleven-twelfths of its 400 members would henceforth be elected to serve terms of 10 years as representatives of multi-member constituencies aligned with those that had already been determined for elections to the European Parliament, with each returning nine members on average. However, candidates for election were restricted to a roster of named categories of people, including peers of the realm, ordained ministers in recognised religions, current or former directors of publicly listed companies, trades union leaders, members of various approved professional bodies in fields such as law, accounting, and science, trustees of registered charities, and other assorted worthies. As with the distribution of seats by region (determined by population), the intention was that this list could be amended via legislation as circumstances changed over time.

The remaining 40 members were to be made up of a reduced quotient of 20 Lords Spiritual and 20 “ministerial members” appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister during each term of Parliament. Due to the presence of this appointed quotient and the restrictions on eligibility for candidacy, the chamber retained its advisory role. Clearly, these changes also required, or at least suggested, a few additional reforms.

Firstly, a Supreme Court had already been established, separating the judicial functions of the Lords from its legislative role. With a few exceptions, the creation of hereditary peerages was abolished. In line with these modernisations, there was also reform to the honours system to instil a smidgen of democracy and transparency to the process and prevent it being used as a corrupt practice of political patronage, with most nominations being made at a local and regional level before being subjected to review by a Parliamentary committee. Five-year fixed term Parliaments had been introduced to prevent governments from manipulating the electoral cycle and the economy to their advantage, which was partly why there was an election in May 1975 rather than at any earlier point in time. However, there was still no proportional representation for the House of Commons.

On the domestic front, there was also a new Home Secretary: Christopher Nolan. The programme of liberalisation that had been undertaken by his predecessor, Roy Jenkins, was continued. There was a limited trial legalisation of cannabis in 1973 which was extended the following year. The drug still could not be imported, both domestic growers and retailers had to be licenced, and cannabis cafés could not sell any other form of restricted substance, such as alcohol. There was no “off licence” and advertising was banned. It was also heavily taxed, so the government made a decent chunk of cash from the new setup. In conjunction with this move came a significant increase in the budget and pay for enforcement agencies, especially the police, which was often linked to changes in structure, process, and ethnic make-up of the force.

With the press having had twenty failed years to get their own house in order, the government stepped in and created the Media Standards Commission to bring press, television, radio, film, and advertising within the purview of a single binding regulatory authority. Composed of representatives from the media, the NUJ, the government, academia, and the general public, the MSC gained stringent powers to punish flagrant breaches in standards. A privacy law was enacted in conjunction with these reforms to draw a line under the growing tendency toward invasive reporting on celebrities and public figures that had no public interest justification. At the same time, governance of the BBC was reformed with the Board of Governors gaining a democratic basis for appointment from the licence-fee-paying constituency.

The creation of the various regional assemblies was mirrored in a restructuring of central government departments. These all gained a new centre of operations in each region in a bid both to provide jobs stimulus to various parts of the UK and overcome a southeastern myopia within the civil service. As part of this reorganisation, Welsh-English bilingualism became a requirement for things like road signs and government processes in Wales going forward. A new independent Welsh language television channel was launched along with a national English-language counterpart. As in MOT, they were called S4C and Channel Four.

A selection of nationalised industries were restructured as part of a process of what was called “mutualisation”. The idea behind this was to take the next step on the path toward industrial democracy. During the Attlee years, many industries had been “nationalised”, but retained the same corporate structure and, in many cases, the same people were running them. Under mutualisation, some of these companies were to be transformed into cooperatives held in equal parts between employees, customers, and the government.

There were a few considerations around how to manage the ownership portions belonging to these respective interest groups but, at least for workers, this typically entailed holding a third of the company stock in a trust for the benefit of past and current employees. Customers were typically represented through similar trusts placed under the management of consumer groups. Meanwhile, the government would continue to express its policy concerns through retaining a sizable holding. The first testbed was the railways, but it was soon expanded to the utilities through a combination of local authorities and national bodies.

Part of the argument in favour of mutualisation was to increase the options available to the nationalised companies for obtaining credit and raising loans. New legal forms were established to support the process in which these cooperatives enjoyed a favourable tax status. They were also permitted to issue non-voting stock as a means of obtaining the funds required for expansion or modernisation.

On the international stage, global events from the perspective of the British media were mainly focused on Ireland, Europe, and the Middle East. And mostly in that order. Although the situation remained febrile in Northern Ireland, the Moore administration’s approach had begun to draw a bit of the sting from the sectarian conflict. The accession of the Republic of Ireland to membership of the EEC had necessitated an opening of the border, which had almost ceased to be policed. With some micromanagement by the Home Secretary, the UK security services were, on the whole, fulfilling their brief of being non-partisan adequately well, and paramilitary groups on both sides were gradually being hollowed out through legal prosecutions. At the political level, negotiations had been ongoing for an extended period between Whitehall, Stormont, and Dublin to seek a resolution. As a result, Stormont was to be one of the regional assemblies that would have fresh elections with STV in May 1975.

In Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith finally bowed to the inevitable after several years of escalating political, economic, and military pressure. A new constitution was agreed for an independent Zimbabwe that stipulated equal voting rights for all regardless of race or education. Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU party narrowly won the ensuing election over Robert Mugabe’s ZANU party, in part thanks to the considerable financial, military, and propaganda assistance the British had provided over the past decade.

Elsewhere, there was an opportunity to parade as an international statesman of importance. Having politely waited for the Americans to go first (and deliberately let Beijing know that this was what they were doing), David Moore visited Mao in China in 1973. They discussed a few global geopolitical issues of importance, including the future of Hong Kong. The variants had used their power of appointment to ensure that the colonial relic had been placed on a path toward gaining a properly democratic administration, which had irked the Chinese. The team fully appreciated that there was going to be no budging Beijing over the question of sovereignty when the UK’s lease on the New Territories expired. Consequently, the visit was mostly about attempting to improve relations and gradually expand Hong Kong’s connections to the mainland.

Then there were the events in Chile where Allende had been elected as president in 1970. This was a big deal for some in the trade union movement in Britain and on the left of the Labour Party. However, the situation had already diverged somewhat from MOT.

The British government had been involved in interference in the 1964 election that aimed to keep Allende from power. It had been something that had happened just before the crew ascended to power the same year. David Moore had then played host to President Frei in 1965. The UK had been an important stop on his European tour. There had subsequently been a return state visit by Queen Elizabeth in 1968.

Chile was a country in which the variants had gained a good deal of experience over the years, and it was dear to them. President Frei wasn’t a bad president but, under the terms of the constitution, he couldn’t stand for two successive terms. There were many flaws and weak links in Allende’s popular unity coalition and Chile was polarised over the matter of his election and their programme for government. However, from both a humanitarian and a political perspective, there was no way they were going to allow the Americans to replace Allende with a fascist military dictatorship. It was simply a completely unnecessary over-reaction.

The team had been active in the country since their arrival. North Star and Amoco, through various subsidiaries and investments, were a very significant presence. Far more so than Kennecott and Anaconda. Rover-Triumph and Mercury had also opened manufacturing plants in the country in the 50s and 60s, producing vehicles and consumer electronics for the Pacific and South American markets. Empyrean had owned a few media outlets in the country for several years. Even more recently, ICL and Inmos had established interests in the region and, since Allende had come to power, had been working on the creation of innovative computer systems for the new government in Santiago. Therefore, the British government was officially concerned about maintaining political and economic stability in the country and protecting Chile’s democratic traditions.

Nevertheless, the team had to tread very carefully. The US government regarded South America as their backyard and Britain had its own rather tricky negotiations to conduct with them over Bretton Woods which could easily be derailed by any heavy-handed intervention in Chile that ran counter to publicly acknowledged policy. Fortunately, much of what the Nixon administration was doing was being deliberately kept off the books, so London had a certain amount of leeway to profess innocence.

Variant influence in Chile wasn’t restricted to commercial matters. There was also the impact of postwar Britain itself. Successive Labour governments under Attlee and especially David Moore had made a big deal of the “British path to socialism”. Through the work of several academics, not the least of whom had been the economists David Chadwick and James Fox, it had come to constitute an entire school of thought which had gained authority in large part through the successes of the UK postwar economic boom.

Several influential people, variant and non-variant alike, knew Allende and various members of his administration well and were generally sympathetic toward their aims for Chile. As a result, a few of them were hired by the new government in advisory roles at CORFO and the ministry of finance. Ultimately, what they needed to achieve was to provide Allende with sufficient breathing room to operate for 6 years by resisting the twin pressures from both the left of his own coalition, who were often somewhat romantically in favour of a Cuban-style struggle, and the US-backed right-wing within the country. This wasn’t an easy trick to pull off.

Allende had come to power on the back of great promises to the many impoverished and oppressed people of his country. Moreover, most correctly perceived that they would only really get the six years of his term to effect irreversible change, so there was a considerable degree of impatience to act. However, his government faced challenges to their authority and ability to act independently almost immediately. The Americans used their political muscle to block World Bank loans, on which the Chilean economy was largely dependent, and cancelled US aid. Coinciding with an unrelated drop in the price of copper, these measures obliterated the Allende administration’s ability to pay for its proposed reforms.

New sources of loans were found among Western banks, albeit at higher rates of interest. Moreover, the UK’s international development programme was able to mitigate some of the loss of aid for the first couple of years until US objections in Whitehall became more belligerent, jeopardising the Bretton Woods negotiations. For David Moore’s government in the UK, their intervention was justified both in terms of supporting British industrial interests and taking a “cuddly bear” approach to avoid the loss of Chile to the Soviet Union. However, no one was really buying that line, neither in Washington nor even within their own civil service.

However, no one in government could really tell the variants’ private business concerns what to do in the country. In 1970, ICL had begun work on “Project Cybersyn”; an ambitious experimental system designed to facilitate the management of the Chilean national economy. Meanwhile, Rover, Mercury, and North Star were getting into the spirit of things by expanding their long-established worker ownership scheme into a full “mutualisation” programme in concert with the new government. In these efforts, they often enjoyed strong support from sections of their own workforce in the UK, many of whom were keen to be actively involved in these experiments in solidarity with those they saw as their Chilean comrades.

The presence of these major (and rather more socialistic) manufacturing concerns in the country had altered the course of events in two main ways. Firstly, they had made a significant contribution to alleviating the dependency of the country’s balance of payments on the price of copper. Secondly, they had come to strongly inform the development of the concept of “poder popular” as it was elaborated by the Allende government.

Nevertheless, the economic situation in the country did begin to deteriorate as the administration resorted to printing money to make up the shortfall in lost loans and aid and fund their reform programme. This inevitably led to a significant rise in inflation which was further exacerbated by the global economic situation after the oil shock of 1973 and the removal of British aid in response to US pressure. However, the situation was not an impossible one of hyperinflation, shortages, and rampant black markets.

This amelioration of the economic situation delayed the ability of the CIA funded domestic opposition to escalate the situation into a crisis that could feasibly result in a call for intervention by the military. Nevertheless, several policies were bitterly contested, especially land reform and the nationalisation of utilities, transport, communications, and banks.

The CIA fuelled the febrile atmosphere by funding strikes and protest groups. However, their efforts often backfired as, supported by the rapid emergence of substitute management systems, supporters of the government were able to act in a coordinated manner to mitigate their impact. Nevertheless, concerted resistance from across the prominent and important middle-class small business community in the country was difficult to counter. Ill-advised attempts by the government to counter rising inflation with price fixing that aimed to restrain wage demands and the cost of living were met with widespread hoarding and black marketeering as retailers simply refused to conduct transactions within the proposed price regime. The government response, which included the establishment of state-run outlets, merely inflamed an increasingly divisive conflict.

Fortunately, in addition to their influence within the spheres of economics, industry, and technology, the team would acquire a certain impact on military matters during Allende’s presidency. After the UK government was compelled by American pressure to halt their aid programme in Chile, they switched to selling them armaments instead. Naturally, this cut-price deal came with a coterie of British military advisors. This group was headed by a man named Lieutenant-General Robert Falconer.

A member of the 1925 generation, Robert Falconer had become a commissioned officer in 1944 at the age of 19. As a young second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, he had served as a helicopter pilot during the D-Day landings and the successful Operation Market Garden. After WW2, he had gone on to serve in southeast Asia, first during the Malayan Emergency and latterly as a British advisor to the US on counterinsurgency and jungle warfare in Vietnam. Most recently, he had been the man Downing Street had insisted was put in charge of the British Army peacekeeping force in Northern Ireland. Falconer was a specialist in hearts and minds missions and the de-escalation of sectarian violence. And he spoke Spanish. He was the obvious man for the job and, once again, Downing Street insisted on him personally for the mission. Which had nothing to do with the fact that he was married to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In Chile, Falconer was charged both with providing training and support for the armaments the British were selling the military in the country and serving in an advisory capacity to General Carlos Prats and Allende. As a result, some of the military’s grievances concerning pay and levels of equipment were addressed in return for greater levels of professionalisation and an increased commitment to the Schneider Doctrine. By way of compromise, the President took the unpopular step of disarming various sections of his support base who were exacerbating tensions in the country. A couple of low-level plots were uncovered, and minor rebellions suppressed, leading to several members of the military hierarchy being purged.

Ultimately, Allende clung on for a full term. However, despite considerable progress having been made by 1976, his programme was widely perceived to have failed to achieve most of its objectives even though the economic situation had begun to stabilise toward the end of his presidency. In the absence of another candidate of Allende’s standing, the popular unity coalition split, and Eduardo Frei won a second term. In part thanks to generous levels of financial and logistical support from the CIA, of course.

Frei reversed most of Allende’s nationalisations and Chile more or less reverted to its previous course. Nevertheless, variant influence on the government of the country meant that the Chicago Boys, such as they still were in this timeline, were unable to use the country as the site of an experiment in neoliberal capitalist economics. The fractured left would eventually return, but for now they were too divided between radical revolutionary groups seeking an extra-parliamentary route and the centre-left Socialist Party seeking to apply pressure within the bounds of the existing constitution.

Back in the UK in 1975, despite being cushioned from many of the more detrimental economic side effects of the oil crisis, the global situation meant that growth had begun to stagnate. Even though inflation was being kept in check to an extent, the UK was by no means immune to the global economic situation and production costs were rising. The growth of several second world economies combined with the rising value of floated Sterling presented a significant challenge to the competitiveness of British industry in a few sectors, especially traditional industries such as shipping, coal, and steel. Altogether, these created a squeeze on profits which in many cases were pushing companies out of business or compelling them to offshore manufacturing concerns.

In 1974, a year before the general election, David Moore stood down from the leadership of the Labour Party and resigned as Prime Minister at the age of 68 to make way for new blood. Although there were challengers from factions on both the left and the right of the party, Ellen Falconer became the new leader and Prime Minister. The variants and their allies within the Labour movement were facing increasing pressure from both wings of the movement. The left wanted a far more aggressive push toward the implementation of a fully socialist economy and were vehemently opposed to many of the UK’s foreign policy positions regarding matters such as the “special relationship” with America, NATO, and the nuclear deterrent. Then there was a growing faction to the right of the variants who were under the sway of several interests in the City and were advocating greater freedom of action for the financial markets, the liberalisation of consumer credit regulations, reduced taxation, and a limited form of monetarist economic policy to counter inflation.

On the opposition benches, Ted Heath had attempted to cling on to the leadership of the Conservative Party even after losing his second, and the Tories’ third, successive general election. However, he had eventually been ousted. Of all people, Enoch Powell had won the ensuing leadership contest and the Conservative Party had lurched to the right. Aside from quite a lot of dog whistle racism, they were now opposed to the EEC, immigration, benefits scroungers, dope tourists, unwashed Marxist students, nationalised industry, and Keynesian monetary policy. Naturally, the party spin doctors had endeavoured to give many of their more repellent policies a veneer of respectability, attempting to justify an anti-immigration stance on economic grounds and pretending that “voluntary repatriation” was in the interests of its victims.

The 1975 election was consequently one of the most bitter and divisive that would ever be fought in the UK. Aside from the global economic uncertainty, the Labour government had done much that was controversial. The continuation and even acceleration of the policies of social liberalisation and racial and gender equality had led to profound changes in British society that a great many disliked with a rabid vehemence, especially among the older generations. The Labour government under David Moore had taken some steps to tighten immigration controls but had considered the acceptance of Kenyan and Ugandan Asians to be a moral duty. At the same time, the question had become compounded in the eyes of many voters with the implementation of freedom of movement for workers within the EEC that had become effective in 1970. These developments were linked in the mind of many with other reforms to the constitution and to the European monetary system, which were both still regarded as a work in progress that could be stopped. Voters had had sufficient time to forgive and forget the Tories for the national embarrassment of Suez while their sleaze scandals from the early 1960s now felt like trivia from a bygone age.

On the other hand, the UK had not been in such a strong political and economic position either domestically or on the world stage since the early 20th century. Whether or not one agreed with Labour’s policies, in government they had taken a leading position on the international scene and regularly stood up for the country’s interests, even against the US when the need arose. The frequency and duration of strikes had gone down and industrial relations had begun to improve markedly. The land tax, second property super taxes, and rent controls in concert with a continued social housing programme and the relaxation of some consumer credit control had led to a gradual loosening of the housing market such that it was easily possible for the vast majority to either buy or rent at an affordable price. Mutualisation had begun to grant a semblance of accountability and even control over the formerly nationalised monopolies in the utilities and transport. And oil money was beginning to promise a long, prosperous future of accumulated wealth. Having been in power for two thirds of the postwar era, Labour Party policies were widely (and correctly) regarded as having been responsible for this unprecedented good fortune by most.

Nevertheless, Labour lost a lot of white working-class votes in the 1975 general election over the question of immigration in conjunction with their refusal to intervene over a number of recent high-profile closures in the coal, steel, and shipping industries which the government had deemed to be necessary structural adjustments. Fortunately, the Tories lost almost as many votes from the left wing of their party, as some sections of the southern middle class fled from Powell’s rather unpleasant racism, anti-American imperialism, and “dangerously radical” monetarist economic proposals on which Labour had preyed extensively during the campaign. However, the main beneficiaries of the latter defection were the resurgent Liberal Party under Jeremy Thorpe.

The result was a hung parliament in which Ellen Falconer was compelled to make a deal with the Liberals to form a government with a comparatively slender majority of around 20. Thorpe demanded voting reform for elections to the House of Commons, which Ellen was delighted to accept, being one of a faction in the Labour Party who were in favour of this anyway. Other agreed proposals in their coalition programme included a minimum wage, maternity leave, the extension of state education into the provision of free pre-school childcare facilities, punitive taxes on companies with high wage differentials between the top and bottom earners and on excessive dividend payouts, corporation tax surcharges for above inflation price rises, tax breaks for investments in productivity improvements, stronger environmental controls with charges for heavy polluters, a “mutualisation” of the NHS and welfare services through elections to Local Health Authorities, and a complete end to means tested benefits through the introduction of a credit income tax scheme, and the legal formalisation of the UK constitution in conjunction with a Bill of Rights and a new Nationality Act.

Many of these policies were common to both the Liberal and Labour Party manifestos anyway, and Falconer was part of a group of “social democratic” Labour MPs who had long advocated working more closely with the Liberals, so it was a comparatively natural alliance. Nevertheless, the coalition’s ability to act remained circumscribed by opposition from factions on the left of the Labour movement, who remained opposed to various elements of the whole European deal that ceded sovereignty over a range of competencies, who could act in concert with the Conservatives to vote down the government. This group, consisting of between 20 to 30 Labour MPs, had been firmly against the creation of the ECU and the ECB in particular. They generally favoured protectionist trade policies, tighter capital flow controls, extensive state intervention in industry, the complete nationalisation of banking and insurance, and rigorous price controls to protect British workers from the vagaries of global finance and keep a lid on inflation and the rising cost of living.

By contrast, Ellen Falconer’s headline message was that the problem was global, and that the UK was going through a necessary (albeit difficult) period of structural readjustment. British manufacturing in several sectors, including the automotive, aeronautics, consumer electronics, and IT industries, were among the strongest in the world and that the government should therefore be encouraging others to drop their protections rather than raising the drawbridge and inciting them to do likewise.

Unfortunately, this process would spell the end for swathes of traditional industries, such as shipping, coal, and steel, the surviving elements of which would need the freedom and flexibility to exploit high value specialist niche areas. Although international development exacerbated the situation for these concerns, it was vital in the long term to foster new markets for the manufacture of high value goods that provided well-paying skilled jobs.

In future, the UK economy would also need to look to expand tertiary sector activities, including finance, tourism, and software, which were additionally aligned to national energy and environment policies concerning long term decarbonisation. The creation of the ECU and the existence of the ECB in London were critical to this transition since they created opportunities for finance while allowing sufficient freedom in domestic monetary policy to forestall deflationary pressures from the adherents of monetarism. Instead, the government planned to use supply side policies, introducing a new round of massive investments in productivity improvements in industry through support for automation and computerisation. Any resulting structural unemployment would be dealt with through the continuing expansion of training and education. A “National Enterprise Board” would also be created to provide startup capital in conjunction with the National Development Bank (created in the late 1940s) and the EEC. Those who fell through these provisions would still be protected by the welfare state.

Ellen Falconer’s coalition government enjoyed a respectable first term in office. The global economic situation stabilised to a certain extent over the latter half of the decade as world markets adapted to the collapse of Bretton Woods and the oil shock. After the brief blip that had occurred between 1973-5, the UK economy resumed its impressive postwar growth of 3-5% per annum, albeit at a gradually slowing rate, over the remainder of the decade. However, there was a further impending crisis looming of which not only the variants were aware. Trouble was brewing in Iran which held the potential to throw the global economy into crisis again. Indeed, various problems in the Middle East, that had been sown mainly by Western oil imperialism over the years, were coming to a head.

The variants had a few channels available to them that could be utilised in a bid to defuse the escalating situation. Through their hold on the British government, they controlled both BP and BNOC. Privately, they had maintained direct control over Amoco and, through North Star, held majority stakes in several other oil and mining companies. With Carter in the White House, there were also somewhat warmer relations between London and Washington than had been the case over the past decade or so.

Nevertheless, the Middle East was a theatre the team often found frustrating as they continually butted up against the limits of their numbers and abilities. Generally speaking, the crew didn’t micromanage any of the organisations with which they were involved and their capacity to influence events was typically limited to broad policy and strategic direction or reactive use of shareholder power. Moreover, while they had often resorted to creating clones to help progress particular low-level interests, their roles were necessarily similarly limited as the insubstantial nature of these clone identities meant that they couldn’t really undertake any operations that might make them famous.

As one might expect from Miles, the variants’ attitude toward the problems in the Middle East demonstrated a certain degree of “Irishness”: if they wanted to find the path to a peaceful solution then, quite frankly, they wouldn’t have started from here. Therefore, their primary concern was to try and delay, forestall, and redirect events such that they would mitigate the potential for the successive crises that would envelop the region and open the door to both neoliberalism in the West and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Fortunately, they did not need to do everything themselves and had numerous agencies, both corporate and governmental, to do their bidding. On the other hand, they were often constrained by the realities of politics and finance.

The Attlee administration had abstained on UN Resolution 181 and subsequently refused to help enforce the partition of Mandatory Palestine against the wishes of the existing Arab population. However, in subsequent years, the British government had become quite pally with Israel during the Suez Crisis. On coming to power in 1964, David Moore’s variant Labour administration had endeavoured to pursue a policy toward the region that was consistent with its principle of acting through and in conformance with the UN wherever and whenever possible and avoiding anything that might jeopardise the UK’s membership of METO, the NATO-like anti-Soviet Middle Eastern Treaty Organisation military alliance. Therefore, their position was to seek a two-state solution that broadly sought to implement Resolution 181 through the agreement of all sides in the dispute. It would have been better had the UN actually acted consistently in the first place and bothered to allow the population of Palestine to determine their own future, but Miles had some sympathy with the right of Israel to exist, especially now that it was a fact on the ground.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the British government had a lot of previous form, so they often had to tread very carefully when representing that institution. Consequently, many of the team’s activities were carried on through their commercial concerns in places like Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula, although they also utilised the Department for International Development and MI6 where necessary and appropriate.

Regimes such as that of the Shah in Iran were hardly benevolent, being in most cases profoundly oppressive and corrupt to the core. Nevertheless, through their commercial, political, and media influence, the team had over the years managed to get the likes of BP and Amoco to behave in rather less Machiavellian ways by persuading them to foster pro-Western sympathies in the regions in which they were operating through redistribution of profits into local development schemes, arguing that this was in the long-term self-interest of these firms. Once in government in Whitehall, they had instructed both the DID and MI6 to perform similar functions; not that these missions were always undertaken competently mind you. Behind the scenes, much as they had done with Ian Paisley, the crew themselves had preemptively assassinated a number of troublesome individuals, such as Sayyid Khomeni. Although, as always, other figures inevitably emerged to appeal to their constituencies as a route to power.

Rather more subtly, there was also the growing influence of the energy policy that they had been able to implement and maintain in the UK during the postwar era. After 1973, the impact of this had begun to become noticeable at an international level. Following the oil shock, Rover had unveiled a range of practical electric vehicles based on the results of research into battery technologies that had been ongoing at Mercury Electrical Industries since the late 1950s. These had enjoyed a certain amount of success in the US market. Moreover, in alignment with the UK government’s stated long term energy strategy, the British government had announced a scheme to extend infrastructural support for electric vehicle charging. Since the UK was now almost completely powered by thorium-based nuclear power stations, it was practically free, so electric vehicles had begun to spread in Britain too.

Britain’s nuclear programme was not cheap, but it had been copied by a number of other leading industrialised nations as well as in emerging powers, such as India. In conjunction with this, there was increasing global pressure over the still emerging issue of “the climate crisis”, which had become a matter of concern for the UN. The UK government were currently presenting it as a kind of Pascal’s Wager: if the scientists were right, then it would be essential to undertake this massive structural realignment of the economy to decarbonise; if they eventually proved themselves wrong, then the country would still have gained by undertaking significant amounts of research into cutting edge technology which would create opportunities in other areas for economic gain.

While most of the world, including the UK, remained dependent on oil for electricity generation, transport, and the production of derived materials, demand had begun to flatline in recent years as usage in each category began to move gradually over to alternatives in an ever-increasing number of places. This process was also beginning to have a significant impact on the geopolitics of the Middle East. While America still wanted to “contain” the Soviet Union as part of its grand strategy for the Cold War, many in Washington had begun to think that the region was not so critical to meeting its energy consumption demands in the long term.

The overall impact of this broad-spectrum strategy conducted over the course of several decades was manifold. The Shah was overthrown by a revolution in Iran in 1979, but it was at the hands of Mehdi Bazargan and the Freedom Movement of Iran who were seeking to enforce the 1906 constitution. This did produce a bit of an oil shock for a while but, compared to 1973, it was small and short-lived.

In a similar vein, the Saur Revolution never occurred in Afghanistan. Despite his autocratic approach and many failings, Mohammed Daoud Khan remained in power. This created a kind of “soft-Islamist” axis to the south of the USSR that generally endeavoured to maintain a non-aligned stance in the Cold War while seeking to pursue policies of modernisation in the context of which both the West and the Soviets sought influence through aid. It was a febrile and fragile situation, but one which would endure until the end of the Cold War.

Because of the emergence of this Iran-Afghanistan axis, there was also no all-out Iran-Iraq war, although there was tension and a number of border skirmishes. Ba’athist Iraq became something of a pariah state in the West due to its stance over Kuwait and consequently aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Based on its territorial claims, Iraq would often adopt a belligerent stance toward some of its neighbours, including Kuwait, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan, but it represented a threat that could be contained due to its isolation within the Arab League. That was bad news for the Kurds but unfortunately the variants had to throw some people under the bus.

As for Israel and Palestine, well, that was much the same old shit show sadly. The Americans were a little less interested in propping them up, but the Zionist lobby in the US was still strong, so their nominal position remained one of support for the territorial integrity of Israel. The team were often able to apply both official and back-channel pressure on both sides in the dispute, so there were a series of agreements in the late 70s and early 80s around a two-state solution guided by Resolution 181, but they were regularly disrupted by implacable extremists on both sides. A UN peacekeeping force would remain in the region almost in perpetuity.

In 1980, there was another round of elections to local authorities and assemblies at all levels in the UK, including the House of Commons. For the first time ever, the latter was conducted using STV. Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative Party which still represented the main opposition to Labour under Prime Minister Ellen Falconer.

In some ways, it was once again not an ideal time to go to the polls. The recent revolution in Iran had caused a bit of a blip due to the disruption in global oil supplies and a consequent increase in prices that had led to cost-push inflation. However, Ellen Falconer had long since proven herself to be a dab hand at managing such crises when they occurred.

The British government used its monopoly control over BNOC to suppress oil price rises in the UK. This considerably aided UK export manufacturing, briefly rendering it comparatively far more competitive than usual. Moreover, with the ECSB still propping up the domestic coal and steel industries as part of a long-term transition strategy, these traditional sectors received a significant boost that helped sustain them, which played well with many core Labour supporters. Although a lot of import-dependent industries often suffered unavoidably during these periods, the Treasury typically instituted a system of duty rebates to soften the blow while the NEB would sometimes step in to provide additional support if necessary. In large part due to variant influence, these were all forms of state aid that had become institutionally endorsed within the EEC that sought to minimise price fluctuations and protect European businesses from external shock. As part of this, the common agricultural and fisheries policies the variants had helped to negotiate, which included exemptions for the UK’s special relationship with the Commonwealth (which gained access to EU markets), assisted suppression of any rises in the cost of living.

For her part, Margaret Thatcher had not spent the formative years of her career watching the gradual breakdown of the postwar consensus and social democratic economic norms. At least, not in the UK. Nevertheless, her politics were driven by a deep-seated social conservatism and a pronounced adherence to forms of philosophical individualism and economic monetarism, informed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, which the variants had been unable to suppress completely. She had succeeded Powell after the debacle of their 1975 defeat by virtue of being a “compromise candidate” who was sufficiently acceptable to both wings of the party.

Britain already had a dynamic economy with a large SME sector in which it was reasonably easy to setup and do business. Marginal tax rates were also comparatively low, with the top band of income tax set at 70% and the highest corporation tax rate (for large businesses) sitting at 50%. Almost no one was opposed to this situation even though there had been plenty of debate over optimal tax rates in recent years. As you might expect, Thatcher belonged to the school of thought which advocated that they were currently too high. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party had come to endorse a more concerted switch to supply-side economics, inspired by recent experiments in Chile during President Frei’s second term in office, with balanced budgets supported by cuts to welfare and services that, in Thatcher’s view, only served to stifle innovation while propping up the lifestyles of scroungers and wastrels. Having put the overtly racist policies of the Powell years behind them, things like the cannabis cafés and associated tourism were a major focus of ire for the party’s socially conservative supporters.

Inevitably, the Tories received a certain amount of support in the media for their position, notably from titles such as The Daily Mail and The Telegraph which were not owned by Empyrean. However, many tabloids and broadsheets castigated Thatcher for being overbearing, nannying, and controlling. She was regularly lampooned as being insanely delusional for tilting at windmills, and her dowdy twinset-and-pearls image was compared unfavourably against the rather glamorously fashionable Ellen Falconer, who often appeared to have stepped off the set of Charlie’s Angels. Meanwhile, the considerable threat her policies posed to treasured institutions such as the sovereign wealth fund, the NHS, the National Development Bank, and the Land Bank were unceasingly exposed.

Thanks to the work they had already done over the course of the 20th century, Thatcher’s Conservative Party represented a significantly reduced threat compared to MOT. It was now effectively impossible to privatise things like utilities and transport since they had already been mutualised, so the government didn’t own them in the same way at all. Although a prospective government could sell off BNOC and/or exploit North Sea oil revenues in alternative ways, any suggestion of getting rid of the sovereign wealth fund was as much of a vote loser as running down the NHS.

Messing around with exchange rates for political purposes was also far more difficult: the external international exchange rate for the ECU was managed by the ECB in conjunction with the European Commission and the European Council. Meanwhile, Sterling’s internal exchange rate with the ECU was a function of its balance of trade. You could pump money into the domestic economy or reduce the currency supply and alter the central bank lending rate, but you couldn’t directly manipulate the foreign exchange rate to attract hot money, increase the value of Sterling on the international markets, and lower the cost of imports. Consequently, Thatcher was proposing to take the drastic step of exiting the European Monetary System. However, this was easily painted as extremist fanaticism in the media. The EMS had pretty much ended the need for Germany and Britain to intervene off their own bat to prop up the US dollar and brought comparative price stability to Europe within the context of the maelstrom wrought by the collapse of Bretton Woods.

Consequently, five years after Enoch Powell, the Conservative Party still looked like a bunch of people who appeared to be at best slightly batty and at worst dangerously oppressive extremists with no real experience of government, even if many voters were drawn to their rather twee tea-and-scones vision of Britain. By contrast, Labour appeared experienced, successful, statesmanlike, responsible, tolerant, and modern. Ellen Falconer had dealt with the Jeremy Thorpe scandal with ruthless efficiency and, if anything, the coalition between Labour and the Liberals had become stronger after David Steel became leader of the Liberal Party and Deputy Prime Minister.

Everybody knew going into the election in 1980 that it was almost certain that no single party would gain the outright majority required to form a government under the new STV system. Consequently, the Lib-Lab alliance was formalised, and their 1975 arrangement extended through non-compete agreements in numerous constituencies and campaigning on a joint programme. The Tories had almost no hope of winning. Ellen Falconer played a blinder on the campaign trail, something at which the variants were very old hands. Labour duly increased their vote share by almost 5%, winning back many working-class voters who had abandoned them in 1975 over the question of race and having a woman leader. The Liberals lost several seats they had gained from “soft Tory” constituencies, their share of the vote shrinking by around 4%, but it didn’t matter. Together they had almost 60% of the popular vote, 349 of the 500 seats in the Commons, and an overall majority of around 50. Moreover, on many issues they could rely on votes from the 7 members for the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the SDLP. Indeed, in the context of the reformed voting system, the victory was so comprehensive that Labour was almost able to govern alone, although Ellen Falconer dismissed such notions as belonging to old fashioned and outmoded concepts of the politics of conflict. Naturally, it still meant that they could dominate the coalition agenda behind the scenes.

Fuelled by the UK’s leading position in the emergent computer revolution and its ongoing strength in the automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics industries, the British economy continued to grow at a steady pace throughout the 1980s. Strong investment in computerisation fed increased productivity which supported increasing exploitation of emerging “second world” markets.

Although it was somewhat closer, Thatcher lost again in 1985 and was subsequently ousted by the “wets”. Michael Heseltine then became leader of the Conservative Party as part of a move toward the centre designed to make an alliance with the Liberals feasible. Having secured a strong political and economic position for the UK, the variants’ real major challenge in government was to create a continual impression of movement and progress to keep the various factions of the Labour movement on board and sustain their coalition with the Liberals.

This wasn’t always easy, especially given that some of the tougher decisions needed to be made concerning the long-term plan for winding down the coal and steel industries in the UK. Having had a decade to adjust, there were several pit and plant closures in the early 80s which provoked bitter opposition from the trade unions and led to a wave of strike actions. In a similar manner, a great deal of heavy manufacturing was starting to be offshored where it was cheaper. Many on the left of the Labour Party especially were vehemently opposed to this process, but those among the party leadership argued that it was inevitable: you couldn’t have well-paying jobs in low value-add industry. The country had to stick to its long-term industrial strategy. However, it did lead to a rise in structural unemployment and a significant increase in the cost of the welfare state in the short run.

A great deal of the impact of the oil crisis and the Nixon shock in the early 1970s had been absorbed and many potentially explosive situations in the Middle East defused. The economy of the UK and much of Western Europe had also gained institutions which provided a significant degree of shelter from external shock. Nevertheless, the global situation was far from being all sweetness and light. The threat of cost-push inflation remained ever present and, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, real interest rates rose to significant positive levels for almost the first time since the end of WW2. This contributed to the increasing difficulties being experienced in many industries in the UK and growing problems with unemployment which were further compounded by the rising cost of British exports within the ECU framework over time due to the strength of the domestic economy.

Nevertheless, these problems remained manageable. Overall growth was still being fuelled by the core concerns identified by national industrial strategy. During the 1980s, it would be further added to by a dramatic expansion in the financial sector.

Following the establishment of the ECB, London had rapidly augmented its status as a major global centre of finance as many European institutions relocated to the city. This process was accelerated during Ellen Falconer’s second term as Prime Minister which witnessed a series of major reforms to the London Stock Exchange. Nominally arising because of a restraint of trade action brought against them by the Office of Fair Trading, the exchange was fully computerised and opened up to foreign traders while its various arcane rules around commissions, brokers, and jobbers were simplified and made more transparent. The reforms also happened to coincide with the emergence of a range of new financial products, such as securities and derivatives. The result was a massive increase in trading activity and a stock market boom the likes of which had not been seen in the UK since the 19th century.

The Labour-Liberal coalition government established a Financial Services Authority to oversee the new regulatory framework that aimed to ensure market confidence, financial stability, and consumer protection. Unlike in MOT, strict rules remained in place to prevent speculation using consumer deposits and savings via the hard separation between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and pension funds or other similar institutions. Furthermore, many new rules were put in place around the form and structure of various emerging financial instruments, such as securities and credit default swaps, which could be a double-edged sword. Done right, such devices promised to bring greater security and confidence to the markets whereas, if abused for greed and profit, could lead to potentially fatal levels of exposure to risk.

In many respects, the reforms to the LSE were more than were being asked for by the business community within the UK at the time. They were very much in line with the Labour administration’s industrial strategy which freely acknowledged the potential importance of the financial services sector to the domestic economy, especially after the creation of the ECB and the ECU. On the other hand, they were something that the variants knew that they would ultimately not be able to prevent from occurring at some point in time somewhere, even if it wasn’t in the UK. Once again, it was their view that it was better than it happened first in a controlled manner within their sphere of influence. Even so, it opened a door and the regulatory framework they established would inevitably be eroded over time unless continual effort was expended at an international level to prevent this from occurring.

On the international stage, the variant crew were just about managing to keep a lid on various tensions and trends. Their ability to address concerns in this area were growing as their numbers increased and their overall position strengthened. Over the course of the 1970s, they had started to pay considerably more attention to the problem of the US.

Despite (and even sometimes because of) everything the variants had done to date, America was the global epicentre of a growing reactionary political backlash against the postwar social democratic consensus in the West. Just as had been the case in MOT, this had been developing since the 1950s and consisted of an unholy alliance between several often-disparate interest groups. In one corner, there were neoliberal Hayekians and Randians opposed to things like redistributive tax regimes and state intervention in or regulation of markets. Their tag team partners were right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Nominally committed to the promotion of socially conservative policies in reaction to the liberalism of the 1960s, they were in effect seeking to transform America into a theocracy based on evangelical Biblical literalism. In the context of the US, these strands of thought brewed into an even more toxic cocktail through its combination with anti-Federal “states’ rights” Confederate racism and libertarianism.

To try and counter some of these regressive trends, the team in America were pursuing a multi-pronged strategy that endeavoured both to foster and support opposition movements while simultaneously sowing discord among their enemy via a divide and conquer approach and denying the oxygen of publicity, or adopting an approach of litigious persecution where possible and appropriate.

Using their practically limitless supplies of cash, they promoted and sustained political candidates, grassroots campaign groups, and educational programmes at all levels in favour of causes such as social justice and the environment with one hand. Meanwhile, with the other, they helped to establish “conservative” political and religious groups, campaigns, and programmes that sought to corner the use of words such as “freedom”, “justice”, and “morality” within the context of theological and economic position that subtly undermined crude forms of intellectual phenomena such as social Darwinism and Biblical literalism through the promotion of alternate interpretations which were less fundamentally incompatible with a progressive democratic social order.

From the mid-1970s onwards, the team’s early efforts in these areas were increasingly being bolstered by an expansion of Empyrean Publishing into the Americas. They began buying up or establishing local and national newspapers and television networks along with a few film studios and production companies over the course of a decade or so. Naturally, the variants didn’t micromanage the editorial line in all these media channels which inevitably contained their share of imbeciles, charlatans, and rogues. However, as the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model argues, the combination of both their ownership and their importance as advertisers through their other ventures was more than sufficient to shape the culture and ideology of these outlets which tended on the whole to promote variant controlled groups as constituting both sides of any debate.

On top of this, there was the corporate culture that was spread through the team’s extensive involvement in the worlds of education and business. The crew had their own answer to the Mont Pelerin Society and the World Economic Forum which, by virtue of the variants’ accrued social and commercial prominence, generally eclipsed alternate forums in prestige and importance.

Last, but by no means least, there was the still emerging sphere of information technology and the internet. The team had an almost complete stranglehold on this area of development. In this timeline, the internet had been developed by ICL in conjunction with the British government in the mid to late 1960s using much the same justification as DARPA had done in MOT.

British Telecom had begun rolling out a general-purpose optical fibre network across the UK in the 1970s and the UK government under Ellen Falconer had opened up the network under state ownership to businesses in the country. The team redeployed their “Lynx and chains” based network protocols as the data transmission method and British businesses had gained the option to receive a domain and network identity for nothing from the government. As the home computing revolution began to take off in the late 70s and early 80s, the coalition administration had extended this right to private citizens. Thus, although uptake was still fairly low, a precedent had been set for state management and control of the network, which had also begun to spread to the US and Europe, in which every commercial and private entity gained one and only one user identity and network home, much as one might have a passport or a registered business.

This shift in the underlying technology in conjunction with alternate ownership and control approaches completely altered both the nature and perception of the global network. It was regarded very much as a formal, authoritative, and public phenomenon with which one interacted either in a professional context or as an identified private citizen. This deterred its usage for malign purposes and made policing the network a straightforward matter. Although the control mechanisms were not guaranteed to always remain within the remit of responsible state authorities, with any luck the established culture which surrounded it would endure.

To varying degrees, all these phenomena coalesced along with others to create a global zeitgeist or milieu which, by the late 1970s, was quite different from MOT. This was true even in the United States where the variants had not yet been nearly so active, and which had experienced significant economic difficulties arising from the oil shock and the collapse of Bretton Woods.

Right-wing evangelicalism and neoliberalism had been considerably weakened by the presence of a Christian social justice movement which, while still socially conservative, was generally aligned with the “liberal” wing of the Republican Party and promoted measures to alleviate poverty and discrimination. Among their most prominent opponents were a grouping of “left wing” Democrats who advocated many of the social democratic policies that had been implemented in Europe during the postwar period. Inevitably, extremists of various fascist, libertarian, and theocratic hues were still present, but they mainly existed on the fringes of the political debate that remained outside the Overton Window.

Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination in the 1980 US Presidential election but was defeated, going down in history as the reincarnation of Barry Goldwater. Nevertheless, the election was a close contest with the incumbent President Carter, in part because the Southern religious vote was split, and the Boomer electorate had been moving to the right since Vietnam. Yet, with no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was becoming a period of detente between Washington and Moscow, so there was little to incite the rabid anti-communists in America. Similarly, while there was civil war in Lebanon and the situation in the Middle East remained tense, there had been no Iranian hostage crisis and Carter’s standing as an international statesman had been boosted by the Camp David Accords.

With the election being fought primarily over the issue of the economy, Carter won ground through his proposals for an industrial and energy strategy which, mimicking that of the UK in many respects, aimed to focus on the automotive and aerospace industries along with the emergent technology sector. The variants had major, long-established ventures in all of these areas in the US. However, by no means did they have them to themselves and faced stiff competition from domestic concerns including big names from MOT such as IBM, Boeing, General Motors, and Ford. Nevertheless, their firms would inevitably benefit from the planned tax breaks, import tariffs, and federal government handouts.

Bob Dole would eventually win the US presidency for the Republicans in 1984 but it didn’t make all that much difference to the overall situation from a macroeconomic perspective. Although he doled out some tax cuts for the rich and cut a lot of welfare programmes, the US economy had begun to recover from the turmoil of the 1970s and the Dole administration more or less continued the industrial and energy strategy that had been started by the second Carter administration. Perhaps the most significant act the new president implemented was to copy the recent stock exchange reforms that had been completed in London. In conjunction with similar moves in Japan and the rapid growth of the internet, this ushered in a new era of globalised capitalism. However, it would be rather different from that which had developed in MOT.

Shortly after Bob Dole entered the White House, detente with the USSR gave way to full on Glasnost and the Cold War began to draw to a close. China had also begun to implement a policy of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ that sought to introduce a state delimited form of market economics that opened parts of the country to partnerships with foreign concerns.

Although the political situation between Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq remained deeply problematic, the 1980s were a decade of increasing optimism in many places, especially in the West. It had started with the final collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa after 11 years of sanctions, 4 of which had also been backed by the might of the USA, and ended with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In between, there had been a significant cooling in Cold War tensions that led to a series of multilateral agreements over nuclear reduction and non-proliferation.

There was no war in the Falklands. The British government had been in negotiations with their counterparts in Argentina since the start of the 1970s and the islands had been going through a process of normalisation of relations with the mainland ever since. Even after Galtieri came to power, the junta in Buenos Aires was under no illusions that the UK took the question of the sovereignty of the islands very seriously indeed. Under David Moore, the UK had constructed a small military base and a few research facilities around Stanley and Port Howard, mainly as a way of bolstering and supporting British claims in Antarctica. Nevertheless, in line with UN resolutions, they were prepared to cede the islands so long as that was what the residents themselves wanted. Which they didn’t. Hence the attempts to normalise relations between them and Argentina. However, with the Royal Navy regularly in the region, there was no possibility of Galtieri being able to take advantage of British apathy toward the Falklands to score political points at home. Ironically, this meant that he lasted in power for longer than in MOT.

Similarly, having largely contained the political situation in Iran, there was no full-scale conflict with Iraq; although there was still some fairly tense and even occasionally violent competition between them for political and economic pre-eminence in the region. Instead, Saddam Hussein mainly took out his frustrations on Kuwait after their oil production policies began to harm the Iraqi economy. Iraq invaded the country in 1987 and were met in response by a large multinational force mainly consisting of American, British, and French troops acting under the auspices of the UN. Although the Iraqi invasion had been an egregious act of aggression, the ensuing Gulf War was one of the more cynical tactics the variants employed partly to win elections in the UK.

Meanwhile, the divergent situation across the Middle East as a whole and in Northern Ireland meant that terrorism was a much smaller problem, especially in the UK. Of course, problems associated with inequitable international development and the support of oppressive regimes by both superpowers leading to guerilla insurgencies had by no means disappeared. Second and Third World debt was also a major issue. However, the variants had endeavoured to use their position within the UK government as a leading force within a strong Western European bloc to apply international pressure through the UN and alleviate such issues so far as was possible within the pragmatic constraints on their exercise of power.

Environmental issues and the question of the climate crisis had begun to be taken seriously by the governments of many major powers, most of whom had at least begun to put in place some form of long-term decarbonisation strategy even if it only applied to the energy generation sector. Such moves were facilitated by the global spread of comparatively cheap, modular, thorium-based nuclear power solutions since the 1950s. There had been no Chernobyl disaster and electricity was increasingly abundant even in “second world” countries.

On the agricultural front, there had been some major advances since the 1970s which had significantly increased the global food supply. Inevitably, some of these had entailed horrifically destructive industrial methods that were wreaking havoc on the earth’s ecosystems and leading to massive deforestation in places like the Amazon. However, there had been a lot of alternative approaches that were far less damaging which were widely adopted. Research into techniques such as lab-grown meat were advancing rapidly while, in the context of international development, great strides had been made by the Fair Trade and organic farming movements. There had been a devastating famine in Ethiopia but, like most famines, the root cause was primarily political.

Through concerted coordinated action by several agencies, including private variant philanthropic concerns, the World Health Organisation, the UK Department for International Development, and the mutualised British Pharmaceutical Industries among others, a number of preventable diseases were eradicated worldwide over the course of the 1980s. By the end of the decade, great strides had also been made in the search for a cure for AIDS.

Much as it had done in MOT, the 1980s culminated in the dramatic collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the fall of the Berlin Wall due to Soviet reluctance to continue propping up puppet regimes in Eastern Europe. Having focused most of their efforts to date on the North Atlantic region, it was time for the team to switch at least some of their focus east and south. There was still a real danger that Western capitalism would enact a rape of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union which held the potential to destabilise the global order. More cynically, the emerging markets in the former Communist bloc, China, India, South Africa, and Brazil presented an opportunity for them to perpetuate their hold over power in the UK by sustaining economic growth.

In the UK, the postwar boom had drawn to a definitive close during the 1980s as average growth dropped to between 2% and 2.5% per annum. The Labour-Liberal coalition government had managed to paper over this slow down through a combination of controlled deregulation of the markets and a similarly cautious relaxation on credit availability. The process of mutualisation had significantly reduced the role and importance of state expenditure within the economy which, combined with massive revenues from the sovereign wealth fund fuelled by North Sea oil and gas, meant the government was able to continue supporting a high level of provision of welfare and social services while simultaneously lowering the overall tax and regulatory burden in just enough ways to win votes.

However, there were problems on the horizon. Global consumption of oil was beginning to decline rapidly due to the implementation of energy decarbonisation plans by a few major world powers. This combined with a significant increase in output by most oil producing states to exploit their resources to their fullest extent during the implementation phase of these plans which drove down the price of oil. Although it remained above the break-even point for Brent Crude, attempts at price fixing largely failed.

Along with the rapid emergence of the IT industry and an expansion of the financial sector, it was this reversal of the oil shock of the 1970s that had been largely responsible for the recovery of the US economy and a manufacturing and consumer boom in several countries during the 1980s. However, it also hit a few oil-dependent economies, such as Venezuela, exceptionally hard, triggering sovereign debt crises in several cases. While the UK was comparatively unscathed by these events due to its economic strengths in other areas, it did hit sovereign wealth income. Fortunately, even without the money from oil and gas, it was still growing at a double-digit rate through its investments elsewhere. Nevertheless, a sustained depreciation in the value of fossil fuels held the potential to damage the UK economy and it was imperative that coordinated global action be taken to better manage the decarbonisation process.

On top of this, there was the developing situation within the EEC to concern the team. By intent, the introduction of the ECU and the European Monetary System had not generally favoured the economies of Britain, France, and Germany. It had been designed to promote equitable levels of development between EU member states and yield a balance of trade equilibrium between them over time. In this goal, it had been successful, despite inevitable attempts by the leading industrial powers within the community, including the UK, to game the system in their favour. On the whole though, it had led to significant direct investment in Greece and, following their accession to the union in 1981, Spain and Portugal. Economically, the EEC member states were far more homogeneous than they would otherwise have been, and this had facilitated further alignment in other policy areas.

Overall, the global situation was massively improved from that in MOT. Nevertheless, there were clearly significant tensions and conflicts that were developing. These had mostly been created by the variants themselves, since by intervening they merely reconfigured the sites and nature of political and economic competition for resources that was inscribed within the Western liberal model of nation state capitalism they had inherited from the Enlightenment. These further interacted with latent psychosocial trends that emerged in the wake of the two World Wars of the 20th century, albeit in a somewhat adjusted manner.

The boomer generation, raised in this timeline on the emergence of information technology and other associated divergent phenomena, were mostly in favour of individual liberty and self-determination, at least in the West. As an electorate, this made them highly susceptible to neoliberal and libertarian arguments, despite everything the variants had done and were continuing to do. Obviously, they didn’t all understand the intricacies of economics so, despite being generally convinced by the benefits of the postwar settlement, few fully appreciated the Faustian pact the variants had made between finance and oil. To compound matters, the team had effectively destroyed many of their own arguments against the socially and environmentally exploitative and destructive practices of neoliberal capitalism by sustaining the hegemony of the social democratic order. This was contributing to a growing trend toward support for deregulation and lower taxes that were almost impossible to suppress despite the crew’s significant influence within media and intellectual circles.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 7: The Postwar Consensus, 1945-1970

The 21 couples consisting of 42 variants in generation zero had grown to 84 variants in generation one born between the wars. The next “baby boomer” generation would ultimately consist of 168 variants. Generation zero were by now firmly retired and would begin to die off between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. Thus, during much of the immediate postwar era, the team would have around 250 or so operatives available.

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As generation zero began to die, so would any non-variants of the same vintage. The authenticity of their identities would gradually become a matter of documentation and second-hand memory. As that happened, the background and lineage of the living variants would become fully fleshed out and unquestionably “real”. There would be no potentially awkward situations where some old codger was dragged out by a nosey researcher to contradict their planted deep fake documentation and insist that one of them had never lived at such and such a place or attended some school or other. During the previous mission, when the team had created thousands of variants for every conceivable purpose and pushed somewhat harder from an earlier stage, there had inevitably been a few occasions when one or two of them had come under suspicion, especially when doing things that irritated vested interests. Obviously, their true nature was practically inconceivable but, under Cold War conditions especially, their lack of context had led to stories being circulated behind closed doors that cast aspersions on their character, background, and motives. Although several of the current crop of variants had already achieved a great deal, they had so far been far more subtle and discreet this time around.

While the crew’s interventions had improved the situation in the UK after the war, the country was still basically bankrupt, Europe was in a state of disarray, and there were shortages of almost everything throughout the continent. Several years of grinding austerity ensued that were almost unbearably hard for many to endure on the back of the war. Many of the variants were in the exceptionally privileged position of being able to spend time in places like America and the Caribbean to escape the harsh conditions. However, it was also a critical period for them during which there was a lot of work to do.

In preparation for the coming postwar world, nine of the younger male members of the 1900 generation had begun to dip their toe into the world of politics during the interwar period. Frederick “Fred” Bell, born in 1903, had been the first in this line, joining the labour movement and gaining the seat of Lambeth North in 1929. Although he had been defeated in Labour’s cataclysmic defeat of 1931, he had regained his place in Parliament in a subsequent by-election in 1934 and would hold the seat until his belated retirement from politics in 1980 at the age of 77. However, he had held no major cabinet-level positions by the end of the war.

Fred’s variant cohorts who would join him in the House were in a similar position. Nicholas Fairchild, the younger son of aviation giant Edward, entered Parliament in 1945 as the Labour MP for Bristol South. Tristan Fox did likewise for Paddington North. James Hunter was elected in Norwich North, and Lucas Shaw won in Birmingham Kings Norton (which would become Birmingham Northfield). They had all been preparing carefully over the years to claim these comparatively safe seats that had been occupied in MOT by some fairly inconsequential figures in British political history. David Moore would join them following the Battersea North by-election in 1946. Robert Chadwick, the son of a renowned Labour economist, entered Parliament as the MP for Islington North in the 1950 General Election. The last member to join them in Westminster was David Grey, who secured the seat of Morpeth in the 1954 by-election.

Despite only having a few noobs involved in party politics, the team were not without influence in the corridors of power. Their companies had comparatively good pay and conditions by the standards of the day, and were often notable for their employee-ownership schemes and promotion of a productive and mutually beneficial working relationship between labour and capital. Moreover, several of them were market leaders within sectors that were widely regarded within the political establishment as being key to Britain’s future prosperity. Additionally, the team had a few highly regarded academics from the 1900 generation working in fields such as economics who were approaching the peak of their authority in their respective fields. On top of all of that, they had made quite a few friends over the years.

It wasn’t only in Whitehall that their words often carried weight. The crew were behind one of America’s largest oil companies, a large car company, a key aircraft manufacturer, and a very significant mining concern. They were easily able to get meetings in places like Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, or Auckland if the need arose.

A couple of new variant ventures emerged during and in the wake of WW2. The first was a building materials and construction firm established by two handy chaps by the name of Geraint Jones and William Davies. Once again, the team called it Red Bull and based it out of Hereford, although they undertook work throughout the British Isles and sold materials for export. The company aimed to be central to the reconstruction effort, devising a host of innovative new materials that made the most of scarce resources, deploying them in a range of modular systems that could be utilised to erect beautiful, spacious, modern, energy efficient homes at record speeds.

Jones and Williams had been involved in farming and the lumber industry, mainly in the Welsh Marches, for many years before they branched out into construction. They had begun buying up land before the Great War and fell very much into the enterprising “gentleman farmer” category. They made full use of the estates they acquired and, in addition to the usual agricultural commodities, they had long held interests in industries and activities like brickmaking, forestry, brewing, soaps, glues, and paper. They had already started undertaking a certain amount of construction work prior to the war and their expansion in this area afterwards was a natural move for them.

The second was a new interest called Chepstow Appliances which was established by the partnership of Gareth Chadwick and Edward Fox. They sold heating systems, white goods, and other assorted appliances and homewares such as food mixers and cyclonic vacuum cleaners. As the name suggests, they were based in Chepstow. All their products were a good couple of cuts above anything else available at the time and surprisingly good value for money to boot.

Gareth and Edward’s fathers were two gentlemen by the names of David Chadwick and James Fox. Although these two did not come from the same kind of illustrious background as John Maynard Keynes, they had both established themselves as respected economists during the interwar period having been among the early intake of students at the London School of Economics in 1901. However, their eldest children had gone down a different route, having both studied engineering. Gareth and Edward were prolific inventors and their fascination with labour saving devices was rather timely. They would come to the fore just as the ability of the middle classes in the UK to hire servants declined and the consumer society arrived from America.

Then there were expansions to their existing interests. Turning their recent innovations to the needs of peacetime, BAC quickly developed a commercial passenger jet airliner. On the back of their success with the hovercraft, they also spawned a marine subsidiary that started making them for civilian purposes and came up with a host of other new designs for RORO ferries, container ships, survey vessels, and drilling platforms.

After the war, ATM rebranded themselves as “International Computers Limited”, or “ICL” for short, and began to develop a general-purpose programmable computer system for the large business and public sector markets. This made use of a wartime breakthrough by Mercury Electrical Industries: the bi-polar junction transistor.

It was a component that was also adopted by its inventors for their radios, record players, and new television sets. Mercury was also at the forefront of the development of new standards in television, for which they had some superb high-quality solutions, including a colour implementation and “trinitron” CRTs. They had put together a broadcasting system that munged elements of PAL and CCIR System E to deliver a high-definition 819-line colour image. It would first be used to film the 1948 London Olympics.

During the mid- to late-1950s, ICL made another great leap forward when they invented the silicon-based metal oxide semiconductor integrated circuit. By the end of the decade, they would be producing computers based around this new technology which would firmly establish them as global leaders in the industry. Progress in the field of PMOS and NMOS semiconductors would be rapid throughout the 1960s within both variant and non-variant concerns alike. However, eventually, toward the end of the 1960s, a new British startup called Inmos cracked the long-theorised problem of complementary metal oxide semiconductors and began producing CMOS-based general purpose processors.

During the late 1940s, Grey and Hawkins established a new company called Enterprise Energy. The firm aggressively lobbied the British, US, and Canadian governments to introduce legislation and pursue international agreement over an extension to national continental shelf boundaries to encompass a 200-mile exclusive economic interest zone at their fullest extent. Once this was secured, they then strong-armed the British and Canadian governments into granting them generous prospecting rights over the newly enclosed ocean floor. In short order, they found oil and gas in several locations. Although few of the oil fields were yet economically viable, the gas fields in the shallow regions of the North Sea off the coast of East Anglia were extremely valuable to the UK. They and a few of the easier oil pickings were soon being exploited.

However, oil and gas were not intended to be Enterprise Energy’s main concerns. They were heavily promoting the potential of thorium based nuclear power and were closely involved in the development of a PUREX processing plant and advanced boiling water reactor at Sellafield. It was a sensitive area to be working in and they had to proceed cautiously, but they would eventually get their way. Their interests also extended to other renewable energy sources including wind, wave, tidal, solar, and geothermal. Basically, Enterprise Energy was all about any “future energy sources” that would replace coal and oil over the long term. And very exciting and fashionable it all was too.

Over the course of the 1950s and 60s, the team would find that their efforts were enjoying an increasing level of support from the media. To be fair, this was not always due to their own interventions. Nevertheless, it was certainly helped by the work of two variants named Mark Ward and Gabriel Shaw. During the Allied pillage of Germany, they had used their contacts to establish themselves as the UK and US distributor for Springer Verlag and set up a concern called Empyrean Publishing. Over the course of the next couple of decades, they aggressively expanded their empire from books and journals into news media, film, and broadcasting. Starting with local and regional titles, they attempted to break the stranglehold of the British press barons on the newspaper industry in the UK. This wasn’t an easy task but, by the end of the 1960s, Empyrean had established itself as a major international presence with control over several national broadsheet and tabloid titles in the UK, television and radio franchises, and a film studio and distributor.

Collectively these ventures made a very significant contribution to the UK’s balance of trade. Nevertheless, they did not prevent the dire economic straits in which Britain found itself after the war. It would be some time before supply chains and global markets had recovered sufficiently for them to make any real dent. Austerity remained the order of the day. Moreover, despite its many great achievements, the Attlee administration contained its share of incompetent ministers, such as Manny Shinwell, and others, such as Stafford Cripps, who appeared to regard the obliteration of pleasure as a kind of religious mission. The state was more powerful than private enterprise and central planning along with price controls and rationing were conventionally accepted as being the correct approach to the situation. Bad weather compounded matters, with 1946-7 being especially severe.

On a more positive note, their efforts to date had managed to mitigate the overall impact of the war and some of the more crushing effects of the subsequent austerity. In general, the level of destruction that had been dealt on the country had been somewhat lessened. The financial cost had also been reduced, thanks in part to very preferential deals on things like aircraft and vehicles that were voluntarily offered by BAC and Rover. Currency and bullion reserves had still been severely depleted, and many government assets had been sold off, but the situation was not utterly catastrophic.

The spread of higher yielding strains of grain crops during the war lessened the severity and duration of bread rationing. Rover had never given up on electric vehicles and, if you could afford such luxuries, their postwar 100 Series “people’s car” was very fuel efficient, which made fuel rationing easier to bear. Similarly, a lot of the new houses that were being built — or the many that were renovated — were well insulated and employed a new heat exchanger system. Although they were not to everyone’s taste, there was generally more information available concerning how to make effective use of, or supplement, the foodstuffs that were available.

Ultimately, the political influence of the variants began to spread, particularly within the Labour Party where the team focused especially on Hugh Dalton. After 1945, Sterling was heavily devalued at the first opportunity to US$2.50, reneging on Churchill’s insane commitment to enter the Bretton Woods agreement at US$4 to the pound. This pissed off bankers in The City and the Americans, along with a few foreign governments in the Sterling area, and came at a considerable cost, with many balances being converted to gold or dollars at the old rate. It ended the role of Sterling as an international reserve currency, but that was already a fait accompli with Bretton Woods, and made many much-needed imports more expensive. However, it averted a run on UK currency reserves and provided a significant boost to exports.

A strategic review was undertaken of the armed forces and defence spending on conventional forces was slashed. The US$2.7 billion the country received in Marshall Aid was invested in restoring and modernising infrastructure and industry. With productivity and overseas trade recovering quickly, the Chancellor’s cheap money policy did not lead to excessive inflation. Economic growth was stratospheric, and most voters soon forgot all about the devaluation as a result.

National pride as a technological leader and global military power was rapidly restored when the UK narrowly beat the Soviets to become the world’s second nuclear power in 1949, and the first to realise the awesome power of the hydrogen bomb. Not long afterwards, the country would set a first when the civil nuclear programme opened a power station. Behind the scenes, several Soviet spies were quietly purged.

Great Britain had done very well at the 1948 London Olympics, especially the nation’s women, coming second in the medals table behind the United States. The “Grey twins” were the stars of the show. Elizabeth Grey won 3 individual golds in the women’s 100 metres, 200 metres, and 80 metre hurdles while her brother, Edward, similarly romped home in the men’s 1,500 metres, 5,000 metres, and 10,000 metres. Thanks in large part to the heroics of Matthew Ward riding Arion, Britain took gold in the individual and team equestrian jumping events. Helen Chadwick dominated the women’s swimming events, taking individual gold in all four events while Llywelyn Jones took the middleweight crown for weightlifting. The team weren’t planning all that many frivolous sporting side-adventures, but arranging this little post-war national pick-me-up had felt worthwhile.

By 1947 when convertibility of Sterling to US dollars was restored, the Labour Party was committed to a policy of the removal of all rationing at the earliest opportunity and lowering the overall tax burden, both of which were eventually achieved by the end of 1948, in plenty of time for the general election of 1950. The economy was on the up. The country was beginning to turn the corner. The national mood was optimistic after a decade of considerable suffering and hardship. Although inevitably considerably reduced, the government’s majority was still over 30 seats.

The variant MPs from the 1900 generation all managed to secure ministerial posts at varying levels of seniority over the course of their first decade in Parliament. Some of them even became cabinet members. After the 1955 election, they would be joined by several more younger members from the 1925 group, all representing Labour. While the authority of these new MPs would be quite limited for a period, it would further extend the team’s influence and lobbying capability. Using a combination of intra- and extra-Parliamentary pressure, the crew had already managed to significantly divert the UK’s postwar economic strategy, which had come to be focused on dominating European markets while retaining strong links to the Commonwealth countries in a range of key sectors. Despite significant resistance from the left of the party, the Labour leadership were cautiously in favour of the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950 in principle, so long as certain terms were met.

The UK was by far the largest coal and steel producer in Europe at the end of the war. Indeed, by 1950 its economy was larger than most other European nations combined. The British government was able to dominate the discussion over the terms for the establishment of the ECSC, which they ultimately joined in 1951. Having already invested millions of Marshall Aid dollars into modernising the industry in the UK, the country’s nationalised steel and coal industries were well placed to take full advantage of the ensuing tenfold increase in the market size over their still recovering competitors in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

After the success of this initiative, support increased for further integration. Britain would be a signatory to the Treaty of Rome, but the EEC would be more democratic, less bureaucratic, and more inclined toward becoming an economic community rather than a political union. Among other perks of membership, the UK would gain significant benefits for its important fishing fleets which had been damaged by a recent spat in which Iceland had used the new continental shelf acts to extend its own exclusive fishing rights. It was a done deal before De Gaulle came to power in France and, after he did, the British and French would forge an unlikely alliance to ensure EEC encroachments into sovereign interests were kept in check.

However, it had not all gone as the variants might have wished. Even though James Fox and David Chadwick had been part of the UK delegation at Bretton Woods along with John Maynard Keynes, they had still been unable to convince the Americans to adopt the Bancor proposal.

While they could often get a say in domestic economic policy and industrial strategy, their voice was small when it came to matters such as defence and international relations. Even though the Grey and Hawkins family had a large stake in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, they were nowhere near being majority owners while, in America, Amoco faced stiff competition. When Mossadegh nationalised AIOC assets in Iran, they had been unable to convince either the British or the US to back down from a conflict that served interests wider than their own. So, instead, they had merely been compelled to utilise the ensuing crisis to push their domestic energy security policy in the UK.

Furthermore, none of the team had had any input into or involvement into questions such as the creation of Israel, the partition of India, or the process of and approach to decolonisation. Many were matters that the British had already contrived to screw up during the interwar period and, despite their oil interests, they were not perceived as being something any of the crew members should necessarily be consulted on. Similarly, with the UK having largely entered a period of bipartisan consensus politics, some of their ideas concerning electoral and constitutional reform with devolution were little more than dinner party conversations.

Moreover, many of the policy decisions with which they were involved provoked staunch opposition in some quarters. Dockers were opposed to the containerisation of the ports. Miners resented the development of any fuel source other than coal and often opposed programmes including the development of the nation’s oil and gas reserves, the construction of power stations that utilised oil, gas, or nuclear fuel, and the modernisation of the railways. The railway workers also opposed many aspects of the network improvements that were likely to lead to job losses, including signalling automation, container-based freight, the transition to diesel and electric traction, and the introduction of rail buses on branch lines.

Among the general public, some fairly ugly views had begun to emerge over the matter of immigration and decolonisation while, with the economy booming, any moves toward implementing socially liberal policies were decried as signs of decadence by a still predominantly right-wing press. Amid an atmosphere of rising Cold War tensions, slander and suspicion were never far away from the front pages when it came to the reds at home.

During the first half of the 1950s, inflation began to rear its ugly head. This was more to do with the Iranian oil crisis and oil price fixing by the major oil companies that aimed to make money while rendering some of the British and Canadian offshore reserves economically viable. These increased the costs of production for manufacturing. However, domestic political opposition in the UK naturally blamed Labour’s cheap money policy. The government had to be seen to be doing something and, despite advice from Chadwick and Fox (by now leading advisors to the Treasury) that it was unnecessary, a policy of wage suppression was initiated in preference to increasing interest rates. This triggered stored resentment within the union movement over a range of concerns and led to a wave of strikes that served to further exacerbate factional divisions within the Labour Party over a range of issues, such as nationalisation and nuclear disarmament.

Although the variants managed to hold onto their seats, Labour narrowly lost the 1955 election to Anthony Eden’s Conservative Party. While the Tories had come to accept many of their opponents’ policies over the past 10 years, they had preyed on the failure of the Attlee administration to deal effectively with union demands that stood in the way of much needed modernisation. The Conservatives were basically promising to do what Labour had done, but better and with a little less bureaucracy and tax. And the public preferred the aristocratic charms of Eden over the ageing Attlee.

With his health failing, Attlee resigned from the leadership of the Labour Party in 1955. Many leading Labour ministers of the 1945 administration had also either died or retired. There were openings for advancement by the team’s new political candidates. Nevertheless, having held nothing more than minor posts, they were still some distance from challenging to become leader of the party. Instead, they backed Gaitskill, despite their reservations about him personally and politically. This support earned them shadow ministerial positions in housing, trade, transport, and energy from where they could promote some of their favoured causes.

Fortunately for everyone, the new Tory administration soon managed to shoot itself in the foot over Suez. Nevertheless, a lot of the public supported their aggressive stance and, with the UK economy continuing its impressive rates of growth regardless of who was in power, the Conservatives won again in 1959. However, the act of grotesque arrogance and incompetence marked by the national humiliation at Suez was then further compounded after it emerged that several senior figures in the party were involved with certain young ladies of ill repute who happened to also be close to a Soviet agent. After the Profumo scandal, the days looked numbered for the Tory administration.

Having looked a sure-fire bet to return Labour to power and become Prime Minister, Gaitskill died suddenly and unexpectedly (for most) in 1963. This time David Moore, the shadow trade secretary, stood for and won the leadership. They had control of the party and a new clutch of young team members from the 1925 generation who had entered Parliament in 1959 with several more who would soon join them. Time was up for the Tories and Labour won a close contest in 1964. However, with a majority of less than 10, they called another election in 1966. Labour had had a good first two years and, while there were some early signs that the postwar boom was running out of steam, the economy was still on the up. They were returned in a landslide with a significantly enlarged majority.

Despite their level of direct control over the Labour Party and the new administration, the courses of action open to the variants remained limited. For starters, it had not escaped attention that there was a group of Labour MPs whose families were related to one another by marriage, nor that they were further connected through various commercial interests. They were by no means universally popular within the labour movement. Moreover, their numbers were still quite small. They were by necessity compelled to appoint and work with non-variants.

In his first cabinet, David Moore appointed Lord Gardiner as Lord High Chancellor and the Earl of Longford as Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, just as Wilson had done in MOT. Richard Crossman became Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council. Roy Jenkins took the Home Office and James Callaghan the Department of Defence. Tony Benn was appointed to head up a new Department for Science and Technology to oversee funding and investment in research and development. Barbara Castle was appointed Minister for Health, and Jennie Lee took control of another new department for the arts, media, and sport. Meanwhile, Cledwyn Hughes became Secretary of State for Wales and Willie Ross his counterpart for Scotland.

Aside from the Prime Minister’s office, this left the variants in control of several key positions. Robert Chadwick became Chancellor of the Exchequer with Harold Wilson serving as his chief secretary. Frederick Bell was put in charge of the Foreign Office. Lucas Shaw took control of a new Department of Trade and Industry with responsibility for both international trade and industrial strategy. Laurence Burroughs took another new “super ministry” that combined the formerly distinct departments for employment and social security. James Hunter was installed at the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. Tristan Fox took education while Nicholas Fairchild headed up transport. Lastly, David Grey took yet another merged “super ministry” with responsibility for the environment, local government, and housing. There would be a couple of reshuffles over the coming years as egos were assuaged and power struggles fought but, ultimately, the variants would never give up authority over any of their key concerns for long. Moreover, as the 1925 generation were seen to gain the necessary experience in public perception, they had more team members available to increase their hold on power.

Beyond the limits of their numbers, the other primary driving force that demanded major differences in approach between the variant government and Wilson’s administration in MOT was the extent to which the situation had already begun to diverge significantly.

Although the Tories had applied the brakes a little while they were in power by raising interest rates to counter inflation, the problem had been minimal, real interest rates generally remained negative, and the UK economy had grown impressively year on year. While growth had not been quite as spectacular on paper as Germany or France, Britain had started from a far more advanced point. Wages had risen dramatically in real terms and, at over US$20,000, the country’s GDP per capita was by far the highest in Europe. Even with the high levels of immigration, which had often proven unpopular, there was basically full employment. Over the same period, broadly redistributive tax regimes had combined with significant levels of investment in infrastructure, public services, and welfare to massively reduce inequality.

Having been the recipients of vast amounts of investment courtesy of the Marshall Aid programme, Britain’s coal and steel industries were not only fuelling its own postwar recovery but also much of that associated with the other major European powers. It possessed several state-of-the-art container ports and a modernised railway and road network, all of which were continuing to be developed and expanded. The country was exporting cars, aircraft, electronic and white goods, and computer technology throughout the world. Even the financial sector had recovered from the shock of devaluation and the subsequent disintegration of the Sterling bloc, while the decline of the British shipping industry had been temporarily halted by the emergence of things like RORO ferries, cargo container ships, hovercraft, drilling platforms, and cutting edge catamaran designs for survey vessels and high-speed ferries in which they now specialised.

The differing economic fortunes experienced by the UK between 1945 and 1964 on the diagonal in this timeline had knock-on effects in a whole host of areas including energy, defence, education, transport, and housing. These are necessarily interlinked, but I will deal with each in turn, starting first with the situation vis-a-vis energy.

International agreement over the extension of the exclusive economic zone of interest attached to a national continental shelf had been internationally ratified in the early 1950s. In Britain, exploration of the North Sea and the Irish Sea had subsequently begun in 1953, more than a decade ahead of schedule. After Shinwell had screwed up in the winter of 1947, Frederick Bell had become Minister for Fuel and Power within the Attlee administration from 1948 to 1950. He had been succeeded by David Moore between 1950 to 1953 and Tristan Fox between 1953 and 1955. On the diagonal, they had known that these appointments were virtually assured. Securing the long-term future of North Sea oil and gas had thus been within the variants power in most timelines.

They established the government-controlled British National Oil Corporation (BNOC) in 1953 and appointed Joshua Hawkins as its first chairman. A token tender process for exploration rights was then held, following which BNOC then effectively hired Enterprise Energy to survey all the key sectors that they had established. Aside from being paid for their work, the motivation for potential tenders was a future 5% share on any profits if BNOC chose to exploit a find. Scepticism concerning the presence of either oil or gas, the technological demands of surveying many of these sectors, the improbability that any finds would be economically viable for extraction, and a departmental apathy toward promoting it meant that there were almost no other companies bidding in this process anyway.

Nevertheless, Enterprise Energy found both gas and oil soon enough. The Tories were in power by then though. A decision was taken to proceed with drilling at a small number of the more easily exploited sites at depths of between 2-3,000 metres. This was spurred in large part by the Suez Crisis since, aside from allowing the UK to get rid of “city gas”, even the couple of oil fields that had been targeted for extraction would potentially make the country self-sufficient, and thus immune to blackmail. In other words, it wasn’t an economically motivated move and BNOC was barely a break-even concern for the UK government.

Obviously, other people came to learn about these discoveries, notably the oil majors and other North Sea powers. A few British firms sold their expertise in this field and offshore exploration became an emerging field in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Several countries began to exploit some of the more easily accessible fields in their own territory. However, the precise number, location, and sizes of the British finds became something of a matter of national security. While the UK no longer had any real need to import oil, it continued to do so to meet much of the demand in the country as it was often cheaper. For successive British governments, the finds had become part of a broader long term energy policy in which they constituted a form of insurance against potential future oil price rises and a “pension” that might be drawn on to raise money in that scenario.

In many respects, a parallel situation prevailed when it came to nuclear technology. After British nuclear scientists stunned the world with their discovery of the hydrogen bomb in 1949 and then quickly followed it up with the announcement of the construction of the world’s first civil nuclear power plant, the Americans were soon knocking at the door to recommence their collaboration. As you might imagine, given the abrupt way the US had terminated lend-lease and cut the British out of the Manhattan Project, their advances were met with a certain degree of sangfroid in Whitehall. Nevertheless, the Americans still had the British under their thumb and the Cold War had begun, so they kissed and made up. Just as in MOT, a deal was struck to share research, but it was somewhat more equitable and came with significant reductions in, and improved payment terms for, the UK’s debt to America, which had already been diminished to a certain extent by variant wartime efforts.

Moreover, throughout the 1950s, the British had the cutting-edge aviation technology required for these weapons to deliver their payloads. Even after the US unveiled their new Atlas ICBMs, the Conservative government under Eden and Macmillan spent a massive chunk of the nation’s own growing wealth on developing its own system, built by BAC, in preference to purchasing missiles from the Americans.

Britain had completed construction on an advanced boiling water reactor that was attached to the PUREX processing plant at Calder Hall by 1951. The department for fuel and energy subsequently commissioned a couple of additional ABWRs to supply the processing facility for military purposes. However, the bulk of their plans for power generation were to be met by an alternative thorium-based process that was much safer, produced less hazardous waste, and had far fewer security implications. The UK was selling all these solutions globally, but especially the latter. By 1964, the two further ABWR reactors had opened along with three thorium-based power stations. There were plans to construct another forty thorium plants over the course of the next two decades to which all the major parties were officially committed to some extent or other. If realised, this scheme would see Britain’s projected electricity generation needs for the foreseeable future almost entirely met by nuclear power alone.

Education was another policy area which all parties agreed was important, even if they didn’t necessarily agree on the best route forward. The Butler Act had been passed in 1944, just as it had been in MOT, creating the postwar grammar, technical, and secondary modern system. Naturally, the Conservatives supported this solution and Labour had not challenged it between 1945-55, despite calls from the left of the party for the creation of a “comprehensive system” of education. However, the second Attlee administration had been able to achieve their cherished goal of raising the school leaving age to 16.

Similarly, everyone knew that there needed to be more universities. Labour had commissioned a report on the matter and the nation had eventually managed to get around to this in the late 1950s after the report was complete. The Tories had subsequently announced the creation of a host of new institutions. The real divergences lay in the fact that both administrations had generally spent more money in this area than they had done in MOT. Furthermore, partly due to the emergence of a sizable employee ownership sector in industry (not only from the variants), there was a great deal more emphasis on apprenticeship schemes which enjoyed cross-party support.

Elsewhere, the team had also been pumping money into schools. The nature of the funding system for state education prevented them from doing this directly. However, they were able to create organisations, clubs, and facilities around institutions, or establish things like holiday camps, all of which they did extensively. Outside of the realm of formal state funding, they were using their considerable oil and mining wealth to provide exceptionally generous levels of funding and organisational support for clubs and societies devoted to sports and games, adventuring and travel, the arts and culture, and science, engineering, and mechanics. On top of this, they made some generous endowments to universities and private schools to support an expansion of access through scholarships and outreach programmes.

As for housing and transport, these were areas in which the variants had been quite extensively involved both within and without government. For starters, a few influential prevailing theories around urban design were very different. They often emphasised the need for mixed-density, mixed-use developments within a heterogeneous transport network that combined road and rail with cycling and pedestrianisation to produce liveable environments that brought the vocabulary of the historic European city and vernacular architecture into the 20th century.

Inevitably, local authorities had their own people with their own views who were central to many postwar urban developments in the regions, so the team didn’t have everything their own way. Indeed, there was an intense national debate on the topic in which there were many vested interests involved besides themselves. However, in addition to central government influence and adherents within the architectural profession, the crew had money and technology on their side. The simple fact that they were able to offer ready-made solutions to the problems facing the nation when it came to matters of housing and transport was often decisive in their favour. On top of this, they were frequently able to pay to have them proven in practice.

Although there was a huge amount of appalling, substandard housing that was best simply demolished, a great deal of what were thought of as slums were simply buildings that had been poorly maintained and over-occupied for far too long. Several variant interests, especially Red Bull, purchased huge quantities of them in various major cities in the UK and persuaded local authorities to allow them to renovate and operate them as social housing. These projects were regularly integrated with schemes to help manage the process of large-scale immigration through the creation of adjunct social centres, educational programmes, and employment bureaus.

When it came to questions concerning technology, the variants needed to proceed with a certain amount of caution. There are some “discoveries” that are dependent upon a whole sequence of research that necessarily occurs over an extended period. On the other hand, there are many inventions that are based on existing knowledge and occur at particular times simply because someone has bothered to apply themselves to a problem and provide sufficient resources to solve it.

Almost everything they did fell into the latter category. Advanced timber, asphalt, and concrete products along with various alternative building materials or heating and insulation solutions were highly desirable for their ability to reduce costs and increase supply during a period of exceptional demand and low availability of raw materials. The fact that many of the materials the variants introduced also came with significant environmental benefits compared to conventional alternatives was a matter of almost no concern to anyone outside the team at the time. It simply enabled the country to build more houses and more roads more quickly and cheaply than would otherwise have been possible.

However, there were other cases where the variants had utilised their foreknowledge of other timelines to effectively short circuit the development of particular techniques and approaches. Clearly, they had done this extensively during the war with the introduction of things like the transistor or new engine and weapon designs, but most of their efforts in this category were rather more conservative. Having ready-made solutions for things like railway signalling improvements or ships did not stretch the bounds of credulity yet, by removing a host of intermediate steps in their emergence, the cost and time associated with their development was considerably reduced.

Nevertheless, despite all these divergent factors, many of the problems and issues that David Moore’s administration needed to deal with on the domestic front were not that far removed from those faced by Wilson in MOT. Indeed, they did many of the same things. As Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins passed a range of socially liberal measures which the variants were honest enough to admit they couldn’t have achieved any better themselves.

On the other hand, they faced far fewer economic problems. The UK economy was humming along quite nicely and required little in the way of direct stimulus. Instead, the government had to deal with a lot of European headaches, with seemingly interminable negotiations over the still emergent common agricultural and fisheries policies.

At the department for education, Tristan Fox oversaw a significant expansion of the higher and further education sector with the creation of polytechnics and the Open University. A comprehensive system was introduced with Local Education Authorities “strongly encouraged” to convert. A review of the structure and content of O and A Level syllabuses was undertaken in conjunction with a group of teachers from Ecolint in Geneva which would eventually lead to the establishment of the International Baccalaureate and the alignment of primary and secondary education in the UK toward this scheme.

There was a similarly massive investment in and restructuring of the National Health Service. A hierarchical system of local, regional, and national health authorities was established to de-duplicate service provision and increase efficiency, much as they had been in MOT. Several hospitals were designated as specialist centres for the study and treatment of various medical problems and supported with additional funding for this purpose. On top of this, a new not-for-profit British Pharmaceutical Industries company was established that was to be co-owned by the government, the various health authorities, and its employees to undertake research into new medicines and equipment and produce out-of-patent drugs and other supplies for the NHS. As part of the work of the new Department for International Development under Anthony Greenwood, their products would also be sold at cost to developing nations as part of British aid programmes.

One of David Moore’s more contentious groups of policies involved the unions and social security. The new administration was keen to move toward a “Nordic model” with high level cooperation between capital and labour that was more tolerant of structural unemployment which was underwritten by a move away from means tested benefits. Unfortunately, this required challenging existing power structures and vested interests within both the trades union movement and business. However, given good timing and the right handling, a whole package of desirable reforms was eminently feasible.

The variants in the PLP began attacking the problem by starting with party reform, addressing leadership elections, the selection of constituency candidates, and the role and functioning of the conference in determining policy. An electoral college system was introduced for selection of the party leader in future. However, both unions and constituency parties were required to ballot their members with the ultimate distribution of college votes being determined in proportion to returned ballots relative to their nominal bloc share. While pleasing the unions and party activists and giving an appearance of enhanced accountability, in practice these reforms perpetuated, or even extended, central control of the PLP over future leadership or constituency candidates and policy by virtue of it being the smallest, most coherent, and most active interest group in the college. This fact was obfuscated through the mathematics of the voting system which was little understood among the wider membership.

Once in government, union reform was aided by the fact that the UK was not going through a period of inflation and wage restraint. On the contrary, by 1964, with the previous administration having applied the brakes by raising interest rates, the country was entering an economic phase where lower interest rates and resumed growth were the order of the day.

Almost everything the variants had done in terms of wielding their influence in the economic sphere since 1945 had been directed toward ensuring that the business cycle would cast a favourable light on Labour. Having overseen a huge economic boom between 1945-55, the party was not associated in the minds of the public with economic mismanagement, even though inflation and industrial strife had undermined its second term to a degree. The unions had carried the can for that and were blamed for blocking much needed modernisation. Where the middle-class electorate had faulted Labour was in their failure to deal with either this problem or rising Cold War tensions when they were supposed to be the party who were friendly with the workers and the communists.

Consequently, their manifesto had emphasised the party’s desire to tackle questions around industrial relations and workplace democracy while remaining deliberately ambiguous concerning the form it might take. Instead, there were a lot of words about working collaboratively with the various key interest groups once in power to forge a new path that would be to the benefit of the nation as a whole.

They spent the first 2½ years while they had a very small majority working with cross-cabinet approval to forge an agreement. A commission was launched under the leadership of Lord Donovan, Hugh Clegg, and Lord Charles Delaney, now a Labour peer and the chairman of Rover-Triumph, a leading British firm known for its positive and proactive approach to industrial relations. Charles still hadn’t returned his report when David Moore called a snap election in 1966 in a bid to improve his party’s majority in Parliament. Their manifesto therefore committed them to nothing more than to consider it once the commission had completed their work and implement the required legislation where this was deemed appropriate.

Almost immediately after Labour was returned to power with a majority of over a hundred, the report came in. It received a glowing write up in much of the press who deemed it represented a much-needed programme of reform. Laurence Burroughs, the secretary of state for employment and social security who was responsible for this kind of thing, promised that the government would endeavour to implement it in full.

Laurence didn’t manage to get everything in the report past his cabinet colleagues and backbench Labour MPs, but that was part of the point. They had deliberately put in points of compromise. Things got very tetchy at times but, at the end of the day, the administration got its reforms through by the end of 1967. These included the banning of pre-entry closed shops, i.e., where union membership was required as a precondition of employment. Post-entry closed shops remained legal, but unions were required to accept all those employed by the company as members. Democratic structures were imposed on the unions to increase their accountability both to their membership and the public. Ballots were required prior to strike action and disputes had to be taken to a new independent arbitration service. In return, the unions received the legal requirement for representation on company boards where applicable and there would be annual high level collective bargaining agreements in which pay and conditions were determined in conjunction with matters such as productivity goals and other improvements.

The reforms were linked to a whole raft of “social contract” policies that saw social security arrangements concerning unemployment considerably enhanced along with massively improved state pensions and measures such as rent controls to restrain the cost of living. To sweeten the deal for the business and financial sector, there would be something of a relaxation of capital controls and rules around activities such as fund investments. These would be countered by a kind of Glass-Steagall Act for Britain which more rigorously separated commercial and investment banking to better protect individual savings from any resulting speculative activity.

The government’s ability to pass the required legislation was considerably aided by the fact that several of the variants involved in industry had been actively working to shape and direct the development of the unions in Britain since the start of the 20th century. Although none of them were union leaders themselves, they had a decent chunk of the TUC more or less in their pockets. There were still plenty of corrupt power mongers and politically motivated antagonists to contend with, but organisations such as the National Union of Cooperative and Mutual Workers, which had post-entry closed shop arrangements with the likes of Rover, BAC, and Mercury along with many others, carried a large bloc vote at congress. On the other side of the coin, people like Charles Delaney had a massive influence within organisations such as the British Chambers of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry.

The new administration’s initiatives were paid for in a variety of ways, not all of them popular. There were big hikes in the taxes payable on off-licence alcohol, tobacco, petrol, and powerful cars. In conjunction with some of the many new health and safety measures and environmental pollution controls that were being introduced, the government was pilloried in some sections of the press for being too overbearing and seeking to control the minutiae of people’s lives. It was nonsense, of course: the situation with many of these things was just insane and had to be dealt with. Acting to prevent the discharge of raw sewage and industrial waste or saying that new cars had to be at least fitted with seatbelts was hardly intrusive, but some people just object to being told that they are being anti-social arseholes.

However, the bulk of the money came from a series of significant restructurings of the revenue collection regimes that were in place. Tax reform had not really been a priority for the Attlee ministry. They had more pressing issues to deal with and urgently needed revenue. Changing the way the government received money would merely have jeopardised collection and made projecting income difficult. Naturally, the Tories saw nothing wrong with the existing approaches either. Things needed to change now though; not least because there was talk within the EEC of aligning purchase tax rates throughout the community.

The old Purchase Tax was abolished and replaced with a new “value added tax” levied at the point of sale at one of three levels: 0% for various categories of tax-free products, such as educational materials or fuel for domestic heating; 7.5% for most basic commodities; and 15% for “luxury” goods, such as television sets. A capital gains tax was introduced, and corporation tax was distinguished from private income tax, with variable rates for companies of different sizes intended to support small to medium enterprises. A banded stamp duty was introduced on transactions and property transfers above given thresholds that fell within certain categories, such as houses and stocks.

The most significant tax reform was the introduction of a variable rate land tax levied on the unimproved value of land that was banded by usage category. The rental value of private properties and business premises were already regularly assessed for local authority rates and rent boards, so it was not that much of an ask for the valuation process to implement an additional defined task. However, in England and Wales at least, it also required ownership to be declared and transfers registered in future. The resulting complete HM Land Registry records were then made public, which was interesting to say the least.

Collectively, these progressive taxation measures enabled Robert Chadwick, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, to significantly reduce the tax burden on low- and middle-income earners and substantially increase the overall revenue received by the government while simultaneously lowering the headline rate on the top income tax band.

In addition to the many tax reforms, Robert Chadwick was also responsible for the vaunted decimalisation process. This was part of a wider alignment of the UK economy to its EEC partners which also entailed the introduction of the metric system for official purposes, although general adoption remained optional. Unlike in MOT, Chadwick did not opt for a “big bang” change to the currency. A decimalised form of Sterling was unveiled in 1966 and, for two years, both it and old money were legal tender with all prices displayed in both forms. Eventually, in 1968, the old money began to be phased out with dual circulation officially ending in 1970.

Despite the many achievements made by the team’s politician members, there were some causes dear to their heart which simply were not on the table in the current climate, foremost among which was constitutional reform. Abolition of the Lords was a shibboleth within the left of Labour Party and devolution was slowly coming to the fore as an issue, in no small way due to the early discovery of oil off the coast of Scotland. However, a move away from first-past-the-post was something the variants would simply not be able to slip past their colleagues at this stage.

With politics being the art of the possible, they focused on what they could achieve. Reports were commissioned to investigate options for reform to the upper chamber, devolution, the honours system, the way elections were held, the funding of political parties, the functioning of the media, and the role of lobbying. However, no firm commitments were made at this point to enact anything based on what they returned. Nevertheless, it widened a public debate on the matter which had already been started by various campaign groups the team were funding.

When it came to matters of foreign policy, David Moore’s variant Labour administration was able to diverge rather more radically from the path pursued by Wilson in MOT. Broadly, they endeavoured to implement an ethical “socialist” foreign policy that would play well with their electoral base. However, situations often called for a degree of realpolitik which the team were not averse to utilising. Ultimately, with the potential for serious global economic and political crises looming on the horizon, they were primarily concerned with strengthening the UK’s position so that they would have firm ground on which to bargain when the storm broke.

Down in Africa, the previous Conservative administration had already (ineptly) seen to it that almost all of Britain’s former colonies on the continent had obtained their independence by 1964. Nevertheless, the UK obviously retained considerable interests in the region. Just as had happened in MOT, there would be several major incidents that called for action on the part of the British government.

The first of these kicked off in Rhodesia, thanks to having been sold a hospital pass by the previous administration. Much as Wilson had done in MOT, Frederick Bell, the new variant Labour secretary of state for foreign affairs, insisted that constitutional racial equality and equal voting rights were a precondition for the UK granting independence to Southern Rhodesia. Again, just as it had done in MOT, Ian Smith responded with a unilateral declaration of independence. The British government then took the matter to the United Nations where they enjoyed considerable support in favour of firm action against the renegade regime in Salisbury.

For the new Labour administration, the Rhodesian problem was an important one. An international campaign had been mounting over the previous decade to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. It had been an election campaign issue in 1964 and, while stopping short of an explicit commitment to sanctions per se, party policy was to “investigate” potential avenues for bringing political and economic pressure to bear on the situation. The new government was taking a clear stance in favour of acting to promote and support racial and gender equality both at home and abroad which was reaffirmed by the passing of an Equality Act shortly after coming to power.

To the considerable annoyance of a few influential business types in the UK and the Americans, David Moore had switched sides and was now confirming the support of the British government for UN Resolution 1761. No firm action had been taken yet, but things like a complete embargo on the sale of oil and weapons were on the table along with measures such as prohibitions on capital investments in South Africa, the freezing of overseas accounts, and the seizure of assets.

However, before any of that could happen (or at least be effective), they really needed to persuade the US to support it. Inevitably, the Americans had terms. These involved British military support for the war in Vietnam and an unpopulated Indian ocean island for use as a military base. The variants were either not prepared to concede on these points or were unable to comply. Certainly, they weren’t sending troops to Vietnam, nor were they going to start the whole Chagossian scandal.

Consequently, progress was painfully slow. While negotiations continued with Ian Smith, an oil embargo was placed on Rhodesia. However, despite support from both BP and Amoco, the world’s two largest oil majors, it was not easy to enforce while other companies, operating in cahoots with the Portuguese and South African governments, persisted in openly flouting these measures. Meanwhile, the British began to supply arms and military training indirectly and covertly to Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU movement as a preferable alternative to Robert Mugabe’s Marxist ZANU party.

When Nixon was elected in 1968, the prospect of American support for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa disappeared over the horizon. Nevertheless, with extensive support from among the other nations of the UN, a large majority in Parliament after the 1966 general election, and the situation in Rhodesia still unresolved, extensive sanctions were enacted anyway against both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in 1969. The combination of diplomatic, economic, and military pressure would lead to a negotiated settlement in Zimbabwe within five years. Within 10 years, South Africa was also crumbling.

The Americans still got their Indian Ocean base: they waved dollars in the face of the government of newly independent Mauritius who then booted the Chagossians off Diego Garcia themselves. The British didn’t get to use it. That didn’t really matter though. The Moore administration had a new Euro-centric defence policy that meant such places had almost no strategic value to the UK anymore. Britain retained significantly scaled down bases in Brunei, Singapore, Kenya, and Qatar anyway, so had no urgent need for an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The country’s economic situation meant that there was no pressing demand to withdraw forces east of Suez beyond the fact that the money could be far better spent elsewhere. Nevertheless, rather than operate major bases themselves, the UK government was now seeking to establish what were being called “lily pads”: sites owned and operated by friendly foreign powers that British forces had easy access to as and when required.

Another troubling situation that flared up in Africa during the late 1960s was the secession of Biafra and the ensuing Nigerian Civil War. Much as the variants sympathised with the appallingly cack-handed way in which borders had been drawn during both the colonisation and decolonisation processes, when acting as representatives of the UK government they had little option but to side with the official regime in Lagos. However, their motives were not entirely pure.

Although Britain was potentially self-sufficient in oil, BP had extensive interests in the Biafran territories. Part of the problem the crisis threw up was that the French were stirring the pot after the Biafran rebels promised them all the oil if they gained independence. Idealism often had to give way to a certain degree of realpolitik. It wasn’t a good look for their administration but, in many respects, the best thing they could do was to become very actively involved both militarily and as arbiters in the dispute with the aim of restraining ethnic tensions to shorten the duration and restrict the impact of the conflict. In 1968, a British-led UN peacekeeping force arrived in the country with the aim of reaching a negotiated settlement. They would remain there for almost a decade.

There were some issues that either didn’t occur or had already happened due to the interventions to date by the variants. For example, the Cod Wars had already been “fought” and lost by the previous Conservative administration. Britain had been at the forefront of nations pushing for the 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone and Iceland had immediately latched onto the potential for its fishing industry. An agreement had been cobbled together at the end of the day, but ultimately it had cost many fishing communities dear in Britain. The loss of livelihoods was at least partially offset by a massive investment in pisciculture and kelp cultivation by several firms including Hunter & Lockwood. At the same time, the distant water fleet of large trawlers was reconfigured to focus on inshore fishing with smaller boats organised into cooperatives that shared a quota pool.

The UK and many other countries had followed Iceland’s lead in the aftermath of the dispute. Along with weapons testing, this was one of the reasons that Britain did all kinds of crazy stuff in a bid to claim Rockall. The variants were not uninvolved in this amusement. They were partly responsible for the design of a wind-powered radio antenna and light beacon on the rock in the early 1960s. This also had a hydroponics lab capable of growing enough food (in conjunction with some fishing) to feed two people who lived in it for a year as part of a bid that, not only was the rock sovereign territory, but that it could support economic life. Of course, no one else was buying this argument but it had been worth it for the lulz.

Trouble was also brewing in Cyprus. The island had achieved independence in 1960 but there had been regular ethnic conflict within the population that was split about 80/20 between Eastern Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks. Having refused an earlier British offer for a union with Greece after WW1, postwar administrations in Athens had instituted a policy of covert support for Cypriot enosis and was attempting to exercise control over the political situation in the country with a view to annexation. However, Turkey also laid claim to the island and any attempt by the other to press the matter would certainly result in war between two members of NATO.

On coming to power in 1964, the variant Labour administration began to use diplomatic channels to make it clear to the Greek government that they would not tolerate any infringement of the 1960 London and Zurich agreements and that they expected Athens to publicly distance itself from any such notions and reject the possibility of enosis outright.

Initially, this was uncontroversial since the centrist administration of Giorgios Papandereou had been (more or less) in power since 1963. A working visit was arranged in early 1965 for Britain to show its support and appreciation to a country in which a number of major British companies had come to have significant sums invested since 1945. Greece was the second fastest growing economy in the world at the time, so there was a lot of hand shaking and “hope this can continue, and we can all remain friends” kind of speeches.

However, behind the scenes, the variants were endeavouring to get some of the damage the British had inflicted on the country in the wake of World War 2 undone. This was made more difficult by the fact that the CIA had firmly picked up the baton from them and, under the Truman Doctrine, had been heavily funding and supporting extreme right wing authoritarian groups within Greece. The team had a couple of representatives and some allies within the British intelligence services, but they were very far from having complete control over either MI5 or MI6, despite being in charge of the official government of the country.

Nevertheless, if you have knowledge of an event in advance of its occurrence it is usually possible to do something to forestall it if you so wish. In this case, they needed the putschists in the Greek military to step over the line but be foiled so that they would be discredited. It was a dangerous ploy but easy enough to achieve given that surprise was key to the success of their coup in MOT.

There was a period of political instability in Greece following the visit to the country by Prime Minister David Moore and foreign secretary Fred Bell after King Constantine dismissed Giorgios Papandreou over the issue of sacking leading members of the military who were members of IDEA. Evidence of a conspiracy emerged in the early months of 1967 and the leading figures involved were rounded up and put on trial. Greece went into an apoplexy of political rage which reflected the deep divisions within the country. The US and British secret services were also engaged in something of a power struggle over a region that the latter saw as falling within their sphere of influence. Things wouldn’t be pretty but that was partly just the way politics and law was done in Greece.

With the young King Constantine chastened by the attempted coup, the civilian government rallied, and the military was purged of extreme right-wing elements. The Papandreou’s would emerge as the heroes of the crisis in the media, especially Andreas. The ageing Giorgios Papandreou formed a government consisting of his Centre Union party in alliance with the United Democratic Left. A couple of years later, Greece joined the European Economic Community and any notions of a union with Cyprus simply went away.

The thorniest international relations issue faced by the British government between 1964 and 1970 was technically not even a foreign policy question. I am referring, of course, to Northern Ireland. At the time, it was a quasi-independent country within the union that had its own Parliament at Stormont. Nominally, it came within the ministerial portfolio of Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, but Terence O’Neill was Prime Minister and successive administrations in Whitehall had more or less left Northern Ireland to do its own thing.

Since coming to power, O’Neill had been making something of a valiant solo effort to incrementally deescalate sectarian divisions within the six counties and slightly improve the lot of the sizable Catholic nationalist minority. However, he had been fought every step of the way by Ulster loyalists and progress had been both slow and inadequate.

Naturally, the crew had seen this problem coming from a long way off and had been playing a long and often very dirty game. For example, they had quietly disposed of Ian Paisley between the wars when he was still a child. Inevitably, other figures of opposition had emerged in his place, and they had also taken preemptive steps against a few of these. However, they couldn’t assassinate everybody, and it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem even if they did. Nevertheless, they had succeeded in taking some of the fight out of the loyalists. On the other hand, David Moore’s Labour administration was not popular in Northern Ireland. The party was regarded as harbouring nationalist sympathies, and its socially liberal Home Secretary was a figure of vilification. They therefore needed to tread very carefully.

Having passed the Equality Act which outlawed discrimination based on race, gender, and religion, pressure was being gently applied to a number of the UK’s dependent territories, suggesting that membership of the union meant being a little more open minded and tolerant in certain policy areas.

At the same time, channels were opened to Dublin to warm relations with the Republic of Ireland and try to get them to back away from demands for a full political union of the island. Under normal circumstances, that might have been thought to be a very difficult conversation. However, along with Greece and several other European nations, Eire was currently in the process of applying for membership of the EEC and needed the UK not to veto it. The Moore administration had no intention of doing so but fully appreciated the potential for the removal of many border constraints Irish membership would entail to defuse the fraught situation in Northern Ireland.

They stopped short of arranging a full state visit or doing anything inflammatory like issuing a formal apology for the famine. Nevertheless, David Moore and Fred Bell undertook another “working visit” to Dublin in 1965 during which some careful words of regret were spoken concerning some of the more traumatic elements of past relations between the two countries and emphasising a desire for constructive and mutually beneficial partnership in the future while ruling out any possibility of reopening the partition question.

However, despite their best efforts, the situation continued to deteriorate in the six counties as loyalist opposition to the Catholic civil rights movement coalesced. Fuelled by endemic prejudices, gerrymandered constituencies, and vehemently partisan police force, violence began to break out on the part of Loyalists against Catholics.

Officially, the variants were compelled to watch this from the sidelines until intervention was requested by the Stormont government. However, they obviously had some influence on MI5. Aside from being privy to security briefings, a few team members regularly aided British Intelligence on the sly. Moreover, they had one person on the inside as a highly regarded agent, and both David Moore and Fred Bell had been at Worcester College with Roger Hollis, albeit not in the same year group. When Hollis retired in 1965, they were able to press the claim for their insider to become his successor even though the decision officially lay with Roy Jenkins.

When the situation began to deteriorate, agents were dispatched to Northern Ireland with instructions to monitor illegal activity by both Nationalist and Loyalist groups, including within the RUC. Evidence was gathered on a host of individuals, although prosecuting them often proved problematic. Just as it had done in MOT, order began to break down in 1969.

Terence O’Neill requested the deployment of British armed forces to restore order. Meanwhile in Dublin, Taoiseach Jack Lynch wanted a United Nations peacekeeping force. The dilemma here was that the variants did not trust the British army to be sufficiently impartial in the conflict but resorting to the UN would constitute a humiliating confession that the UK was not able to keep its own house in order and would be incredibly unpopular with voters of almost all persuasions in Britain.

Ultimately, they had little choice but to deploy the army. On the horizontals, this often played out just as tragically as it had done in MOT. However, on the diagonal, they were at least able to utilise their advance intelligence to forestall any calamitous misjudgements by commanders in the field. The rules of engagement were scrupulously strict and, eventually, the intervention would be able to de-escalate the situation leading to new elections and the restoration of civil government. That would be a few years away yet though and the results of the election still wouldn’t resolve the fundamental problems of sectarianism. They would require far longer and would only even begin to dissipate gradually after Ireland became an EEC member in 1971 and the importance of the border for social and economic life on the island of Ireland began to fade.

With the UK economy still steadily on the rise and growth showing little outward sign of stopping any time soon, David Moore went to the polls in May 1970 where Labour won an unprecedented third successive victory, albeit with a majority that was halved from over 100 in 1966 to just over 50.

Devolution and reform to the House of Lords and the honours system were all in the manifesto following the return of the various reports that had been commissioned into these questions. Unfortunately, changes to the electoral system for general elections to the House of Commons were still off the agenda, but it was proposed that STV would be trialled for the new upper chamber, devolved assemblies, and at a local government level. Having liberalised British society and “solved” the problem of the unions during their first term, the election was widely interpreted as a kind of plebiscite on the proposed constitutional reforms. Many of these were also supported by the Liberal Party but opposed by the Tories with predictable vehemence.

A lot of the things the government had done over the past 6 years were deeply unpopular with large segments of the population; but mainly the over-50s in the southeast of England. The younger generations had been overwhelmingly in favour and, having lowered the voting age to 18, Labour made up for some of their loss of support among older voters from this demographic. Similarly, many English people were opposed to devolution, but it was a massive vote winner in Scotland and almost completely neutralised the still emergent Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.

The 1900 generation politicians were all still in their mid-60s, so had at least one term of government still in them. However, over the course of the coming Parliament, it would be the turn of the 1925 generation to come to the fore. They had been groomed for their forthcoming roles through appointments to significant positions since 1964 and were now coming to be seen as the new rising stars in the party. With the twin spectres of monetarism and neoliberalism prowling on the horizon, the crew could not afford to slip up now. They would need to hold on to power for at least the next decade and preferably the eighties too.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 6: The Second World War

Clearly, by the 1930s, several of the variants had succeeded in making something of a name for themselves. The likes of Delaney and Moore, Fairchild and Falconer, or Nolan and Wilde were well known and often highly regarded people in their respective industries. However, they were not public figures and far from being anything like celebrities, as such things were at the time. You could quite easily buy a Rover car or a wireless set from Mercury without having any idea who owned these companies. Similarly, neither Edward Fairchild nor Maurice Falconer had been the face of any of their spectacular flying feats. Many of the others were still toiling away quietly in the medical profession or academia, earning a respectable living but hardly making headlines. Their collective impact on the world had not been insignificant but, by deliberate design, it had been a long way from world changing. Events continued to unfold much as they had in MOT.

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Naturally though, given their positions, several members of the team were contacted by the British and American governments and military establishments during the 1930s. The British army wanted new tanks and vehicles and the RAF wanted planes. Lots of them. And they all needed radios and electronics. Some of the more secretive interests in the establishment were keen to know what the Advanced Tabulating Machine Company or some of the variant academics might be able to do to help the country in its hour of need.

Ultimately, the British (and the Americans) would have access to a range of rather good fighter and bomber aircraft from BAC along with some very effective vehicles from Rover. Their efforts to decrypt German communications at Bletchley would be even more effective than it had been in MOT, while the British forces themselves gained an encrypted telegraph device that used elliptic key pairs to secure their comms without the need for any shared secrets. The Allies built bombs capable of homing in on radio or heat signals and possessed radar-guided anti-aircraft defence systems. The British, Canadian, and Australian treasuries received quite a significant boost from North Star’s mining operations. The Ministry of Food was proactively supported by Lockwood & Hunter, with many of the practices and products they advocated effectively spreading by government edict, along with some much-needed capital investment in machinery. There was as a result a slight improvement in the nation’s ability to feed itself. By the end of the war, BAC had started to build jet-powered aircraft and even came up with a gas turbine engine that was used to drive helicopters and hovercraft. They were a massive boon for the D-Day landings. In the end, they shortened the war in Europe by almost 6 months.

However, the overall nature of the conflict was largely unchanged. Much as had been the case with the Great War, the period over which the hostilities continued was as much to do with attrition and logistics as it was specific weapons, while the resulting settlement was more to do with political agreements than anything else. Germany was partitioned and the Soviets gained their desired sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The war in Asia was eventually settled by the Americans using the Atom bomb before the USSR could advance far enough into China to stake a claim in the peace. At least the slightly early finish in Europe did allow for a proper harvest throughout much of the continent in 1945.

As they had done in the last war, the variants did their bit without going overboard with any divergent interventions. Generation zero, officially born in the 1870s, came out of retirement to oversee business concerns, to serve as doctors and nurses, or join the Home Guard. They provided a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, took in as many evacuee children as they could house, and turned as much of their land over to intensive food production as was feasible.

Meanwhile, the first generation, born around 1900 and in their mid to late thirties at the start of the conflict, were mostly serving in roles such as doctors, nurses, scientists, cryptographers, engineers, and translators. However, a few, like the Greys before them, had opted to pursue the “pure” military path and gain rank prior to the conflict with one eye on subsequent careers in politics. As for their children, born from around the mid-1920s onwards, they were too young to be involved. Even the eldest among them who reached conscriptable age toward the end of the conflict all went on to university and were thus exempt, even if they were nonetheless required to contribute to the war effort in whatever ways were felt appropriate to young lads of their age, social background, and skill set.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 5: The Interwar Years

Having survived the First World War, the members of the team could breathe a collective sigh of relief. They were none too concerned about the Spanish Flu. Many of their children who now constituted “generation one” had begun to come of age just as the war was ending. They had all attended good schools where they had excelled academically, as well as in their sporting and extracurricular endeavours, and they now started to head off to university.

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Generation one would face much the same dilemma as generation zero. They would mostly be in their mid to late thirties by the time the Second World War broke out and would be expected to do their duty. However, none of them would be the type of person who might be liable to be sacrificed in the path of German tanks or aircraft.

For example, Edward Nolan and Thomas Wilde, the older sons of Arthur Nolan and David Wilde, would take over the family business in the early 1930s. Their fathers would be called back out of retirement during the war to run the business again but only because their sons had important consulting positions as officers within the RAF engineering corps. William Nolan, Edward’s younger brother, was a noted scientist with a specialisation in atomic physics. He spent the war working for the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. As did Oliver Wilde, Thomas’ younger brother, who was a bit of an expert in things like radio detection.

Naturally, Rover, the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and Mercury Electrical Industries would once again be vital to the war effort and there was no question that anyone in charge of running those companies, or performing a critical role in the product development process, would be conscripted.

A couple of new variant ventures emerged during the interwar years, too. The team had been investors in the British Tabulating Machine Company for several years before buying them out in 1919. The leading figures in the takeover bid were two former army surgeons by the names of Joseph Bell and Nicholas Burroughs. Their eldest sons were both studying mathematics at Cambridge, and they had some ideas concerning the potential capabilities of these tabulating machines. They renamed the company “Advanced Tabulating Machines”, or “ATM” for short, as it was less parochial. They then started building machines to their own original designs, rather than simply importing or reconstructing American “Hollerith” tabulators.

Their other new interest was based in East Anglia and was being led by a gentleman called Charles Lockwood in partnership with another local variant by the name of Philip Hunter. Charles had purchased Little Massingham Manor in 1916 and the pair of them owned a few farms in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. During the 1920s, they began to expand their interests, becoming involved in the development of organic fertilisers, new crop strains, and improved livestock feeds, which eventually led to the establishment of an agribusiness called Lockwood & Hunter that commercialised the results of their research.

Lockwood & Hunter were quite different from some other concerns that were working at the forefront of agricultural science. They had a rather unfashionable interest in sustainability and traditional farming practices, often arguing that these could be significantly improved in ways that would provide sufficient yields over a longer term without resorting to what their owners regarded as environmentally and socially damaging techniques. By no means were they always listened to, but they had supporters. Most of whom were fascists.

Mercury grew rapidly following the war as the age of the wireless exploded onto the scene. They made some lovely sets under their “Audiophile” badge that became known for the quality of their sound reproduction. They were also making some amazing “Apollo” cameras. Their sound engineers travelled the globe recording artists of all kinds and genres, both famous and obscure, for their associated record label.

Rover-Triumph also went from strength to strength as motorised transport continued to spread. Triumph entered cars into the emerging racing scene and enjoyed a good deal of success while, powered by their engines, Rover focused on the burgeoning mass market in passenger, commercial, and agricultural vehicles.

The Bristol Aeroplane Company likewise continued their steady progress, keeping pace with developments in the industry elsewhere while setting some landmark firsts and breaking a few records in the process. They had snaffled £10,000 with John Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1918 after the BAC team successfully flew a specially adapted “Type 3” non-stop from Newfoundland to Galway, a distance of over 1,900 miles. However, since it was announced in 1919, the Orteig Prize had upped the ante for the first team to successfully complete a non-stop transatlantic flight over the much greater distance of over 3,500 miles between New York and Paris.

By 1924, BAC had developed the Bristol Type 14 “Belle”. In many respects, it was a Cessna 172 with a Cessna 350-style aerodynamic fuselage constructed from UNS 6061-O aluminium-titanium alloy with a basic 6-instrument panel (revolutionary at the time). It was tricked out with additional fuel tanks, notably on the wing tips, to extend its range, and a retractable landing gear to reduce drag. It was powered by a standard supercharged 4-stroke piston engine that took high-octane aviation fuel to power its single propeller. BAC would go on to sell many units of a less pimped out version over the years. However, for now, it was still a prototype.

In 1925, Edward Fairchild and Maurice Falconer approached Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman to be their pilots. At the end of August 1926, after over a solid year of training and preparation, they took off from New York. It was a very dry month with weak Atlantic fronts and only light rainfall. Earhart and Coleman landed in Paris just under 30 hours later to win the prize to rapturous acclaim and jubilation. Both pilots became overnight sensations, and each would go on to achieve many more feats of aviation. Fairchild and Falconer subsequently established subsidised gliding clubs all over the country and opened a free flying school at Filton at which any British imperial subject could gain a pilot’s licence.

Rover, BAC, and Mercury all expanded and established manufacturing facilities abroad, most notably in the US. In America, BAC set up shop appropriately enough in Bristol PA after acquiring Keystone Aircraft. Rover based themselves in Cleveland. Mercury focused on New Haven, giving them a convenient position close to Yale and between Harvard and Columbia in Boston and New York. In each case, they adjusted their branding and image to present themselves as “all American” firms.

The variants were not operating from an all-powerful position where they could control everything, so a lot of things went against them and, as in MOT, trends emerged that they personally wouldn’t have chosen. The price of oil dropped dramatically, and its associated infrastructure grew rapidly. This fuelled the rise of the internal combustion engine and sales of Rover’s battery powered models declined, becoming something of a niche area for the company. Similarly, all their firms faced significant challenges as postwar global economic conditions led to a rise in protectionist policies. However, they did have some notable victories they were proud of.

Controversy erupted in 1924 as the serious negative health impacts of tetraethyl lead on refinery workers was revealed. The development of the use of TEL as an antiknock agent had been a joint effort between DuPont, Standard Oil, and General Motors. Amoco were pushing the use of ethanol for this purpose. However, while it is far less poisonous, ethanol is not as effective an agent as tetraethyllead and carries significant corrosive potential that needs to be factored into engine design and construction. Amoco funded an astroturf campaign against tetraethyllead and pursued DuPont and their partners through the US legal and political system over the course of the 1920s. Fortunately, a rather excellent young chemist at Yale by the name of John Martin discovered something called ferrocene, for which he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their campaign subsequently managed to get TEL banned almost everywhere by the 1930s.

They were funding a similar campaign against asbestos, the health hazards of which had begun to be noted shortly after their arrival. John Martin was again involved in the development of safer alternative materials. Although success in this area took a little longer to achieve, they would eventually win after the Second World War.

Other than all of that, while they were all working very hard, they were also enjoying themselves. Despite the pressures faced by some of their businesses during the depression, the personal wealth of the individual team members was effectively assured. Aside from the fresh injections of capital they received from the future on the diagonal when they substituted their offspring or data jumps arrived, they had plenty of money to share around between them and were more than capable of subtly playing the markets, or even gambling, to obtain a plentiful supply of ready cash. On top of that, Hawkins and Grey had set up a prospecting company called North Star that had a great deal of success, finding oil, gas, gold, silver, diamonds, and a host of other precious resources in Africa, North America, and Australasia.

They purchased nice country pads for themselves, acquired works by emerging artists and old masters, and travelled the world in luxury. The Delaneys, who acquired Litley Court, demolished the decidedly average early Victorian house and had a far better Arts & Crafts style mansion built in its place by Edwin Lutyens. The Moore, Nolan, and Wilde families had all also relocated to Herefordshire, which was down the railway line from Longbridge, and the team began to take an active interest in the development of the county through public works, commercial developments, investments, and housing projects. The Chadwick family, another scion of the team, were also in the county, having been the ones to acquire Brinsop Court this time around.

Many among the older generation of variants handed over control of their business concerns to their children and retired to these estates where they often did things like take up a bit of farming. They even published some cookery books and self-sufficiency guides. Eventually however, after 15 years of messing around, the storm clouds began to form over Europe. The salad days were over.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 4: The Early Years

By the end of 1899, the variants had dispersed themselves around the globe. Two “families” had chosen to base themselves in the United States; the remainder were spread throughout the United Kingdom and its vast empire. They would typically turn up in one of the world’s major metropolitan centres, such as London or New York, often with middle aged clones in tow perhaps playing the role of their sadly widowed mother or father. Their backstory would usually entail them having grown up in some other part of the world. If they were arriving in the UK, this would likely be in the US or South America, to limit the potential for bumping into other former colonial types, whereas vice versa in America they came from the British Empire. Either way, their origins lay in some other suitably anonymous major metropolitan centre where no one would be surprised not to have encountered them before even if they had spent time in the relevant region.

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Many of the couples in generation zero started out simply and modestly, focusing on what would become reserved occupations when conscription was enacted during the First World War. Some of them used a chunk of their startup fund to buy farms. Many were still young enough to enrol at university and then study medicine or similar. Others might then enter the teaching profession or even the Church.

In contrast, they could take what might at first appear to be a far riskier route and sign up for the British Army or the US Navy. Their chances of surviving interventions by these respective armed forces in either the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion in China, both of which were kicking off at the time of their arrival, were far greater than they would be facing German guns on the Western Front between 1914-18. Besides which, their involvement in either conflict would be very much limited by their initial need to complete officer training. They would then have a relatively peaceful global geopolitical period lasting over a decade during which they would be able to attain a decent rank. Not only would this mean that their statistical chances of being killed during WW1 were actually comparatively low, but they might also be able to assist a number of the other variants who were taking by far the most dangerous path.

In this latter category were the Delaney and Moore families, the protagonists for which in generation zero were William and Cara Delaney and John and Alice Moore. We have met them before. However, this time they were going to be a little different.

The Delaneys and the Moores had now chosen to base themselves in Kings Norton on the outskirts of Birmingham so that Thomas Walsh, who was an engineer by trade, might look for work in England’s industrial heartland. However, rather than go and work for anyone else, William and John had persuaded him to help them establish their own company building motorcars, motorcycles, and bicycles.

Established in 1900, the company was called Delaney & Moore and they quickly set about building their first model which they took to races and motoring events to show off. They got a few orders from this because their vehicle was rather good. However, they were just a small garage outfit so, at the same time, they introduced themselves to John Kemp Starley to discuss bringing their designs to the Rover Cycle Company. When Starley died suddenly in October 1901 at the age of 45, they took over the company. Not long afterwards, they teamed up with Siegfried Bettmann and purchased the Triumph Cycle Company, turning it into the Triumph Motor Company under a Rover-Triumph umbrella, under which it would focus on engine development, sports and racing cars, and motorcycles.

Rover-Triumph built a new factory near their Kings Norton base at Longbridge where William Delaney and John Moore introduced groundbreaking management and manufacturing processes and techniques to the firm. In 1906, they unveiled their brand new “Rover Model 1” automobile. By the standards of the day, it was a comparatively affordable, efficient, and easy to drive mass produced vehicle that brought motoring to a wider market than ever before in the UK.

The Model 1 was available in a range of configurations, including vans and flatbeds targeted at the commercial market and had an option for a battery-powered electric drive chain, as such things were at the time. The firm then began to expand into the agricultural sector. After Rudolf Diesel’s UK patents expired in 1908, the company began to work on the development of effective engines utilising the principles behind his original designs to build more powerful and versatile tractors and commercial vehicles. By the time the First World War started, Rover-Triumph were one of Britain’s foremost manufacturers of motorcars, motorbikes, vans, lorries, tractors, and bicycles. They became a major supplier to the British armed forces and were even quite heavily involved in the development of the first tanks, concerning which we will learn more in due course. It had been a massive gamble but, as individuals working in industries vital to the war effort, William and John were exempted from military service.

The Delaney’s and the Moore’s were not alone in Kings Norton. Following their arrival in the town they had quickly met and befriended another similarly cosmopolitan group of new arrivals: the Nolan family and the Wilde family. Arthur Nolan and David Wilde were two young gentlemen of a similar age to William and John who had a background in electronics. They ran a small boutique operation with the rather grand sounding name of Mercury Electrical Industries. The company produced a small range of expensive goods in limited numbers, including gramophones (called “the audiophile”) and cameras (called “the Apollo”) along with associated parts, accessories, and media. However, it was predominantly a vehicle for its two slightly eccentric proprietors to explore their interests in the field of electronics, sound, and light, among which was the recent discovery of radio waves. Clearly, this was an even more risky path than entering the automotive industry. However, eventually you will see where these variants were going with this.

Down in Bristol, at the other end of the Midland Railway’s Bristol and Birmingham line, were another couple of young entrepreneurs by the name of Edward Fairchild and Maurice Falconer. Along with their parents, these young men had recently moved to the area just north of Bristol where they had begun establishing themselves as landowners, quietly acquiring an extensive estate around Stoke Gifford and Filton. However, Edward and Maurice were far more interested in technology than in farming. Their particular interest was flight. As early as 1904, they were beginning to look for investors who might support a new venture of theirs that they were calling the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Needless to say, they managed to find a few, including the owners of Rover-Triumph. Their capital funds were also enlarged after winning several aviation prizes.

The interventions by Edward and Maurice did not significantly diverge the course of the development of flight from MOT. A couple of their competitors picked up a few tips and tricks, but everyone was very secretive about their own designs. And with good reason. Their early efforts were just about good enough to get off the ground and win some cash, but little more. Nevertheless, after 1910 they teamed up with Triumph as an engine developer and began to make some reasonable progress. Again, nothing drastic. Nonetheless, their efforts were good enough to merit a commission from the Royal Flying Corps.

Much as Rover had sneaked in a few improvements to diesel engines to power their tanks, the Bristol Aeroplane Company had a few key innovations up their sleeve which they unveiled for their warplanes. One of these was the ability to fire forward through the propeller of the aircraft. The other was the ability to communicate by radio with the other pilots in one’s squadron. This was the brainchild of Mercury Electrical Industries, and it was a feature the aircraft shared with the tanks. Fully aware that radio communications could be intercepted by the enemy, the British military establishment were exceptionally wary of the invention. Their preference throughout the war was for hard connections through landlines. However, that was obviously not possible for mobile units. Mercury had come up with a system which scrambled the signal using a dial setting that the pilots or tank commanders would set before embarking on a mission. It was a cut above carrier pigeons, but not by a great distance. Fortunately for Arthur Nolan and David Wilde, it did gain them an exemption from conscription as important suppliers to the military.

Meanwhile, over in America, the Hughes family, supported by the Martin family, had founded a company called “The American Oil Company” or “Amoco” and were working to buy up land and drilling rights in as much of Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas as they could lay their hands on. It was a filthy bloody business, but that is exactly why the variants felt they were almost obliged to become involved. That and the fact that it would make them squillions of dollars.

It wasn’t only in the US that the team was pulling this trick. In 1906 over in Persia, or Iran as they themselves preferred to be called, William Knox d’Arcy had been looking for oil for 5 years. Having failed to find any, he was starting to run out of money. He was approached by a respectable gentleman in his early 50s who went by the name of Mr Edward Grey who was interested in buying some or all his rights in the venture.

Edward Grey’s son was a chap named Captain John Grey, a recently commissioned officer in the British Army signal corps who, by virtue of speaking Arabic and Farsi, had been stationed in the Middle East. So the story would later go, John had run into a rather remarkable young archaeologist-geologist fellow in a bar in Cairo one night by the name of Daniel Hawkins. Supposedly, he had spent the last few years exploring the wild and hostile lands of southeastern Persia and Mesopotamia. He’d bumped into a few of d’Arcy’s team during that time and the two of them were laughing about the fact that they couldn’t find anything even though Hawkins swore blind that the whole place was swimming in oil. Eventually, Edward Grey managed to persuade d’Arcy to sell him a large chunk of his stake. Daniel Hawkins then proceeded to direct George Reynolds, APOC’s geologist, to several sizable oil fields in 1908.

Unlike in the US, the crew’s involvement with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company would not alter the course of its history very much. The British government still effectively nationalised it in 1914, taking a 51% stake. However, the team would earn a lot of money from a pretty small initial investment, while John Grey and Daniel Hawkins would later go on to become names that were closely associated with the industry in the UK and the Middle East.

Ultimately, their efforts had the desired outcome. Although a few of the variants who had gone into medicine volunteered as army doctors and nurses, none of them were conscripted for the front. The only one of them to serve through the war was Lieutenant-Colonel John Grey, as he had become by 1914. However, while he visited the front on a few occasions and witnessed some of its horrors, he was not involved in fighting there. He mainly spent the war ensconced in Cairo.

In a manner that was similarly close to their intentions, although some of their technological interventions did improve the outcome of several events, including the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, it barely altered the course of the war. They did help shorten the conflict by a couple of months, but its duration was as much to do with logistics and attrition as it was to do with guns and tanks. Moreover, it takes more than weapons to win. You need to know how to deploy them strategically and have people capable of carrying out those orders.

Nor did they have anything even vaguely resembling the sort of power and influence that might have been required to affect the settlement that was imposed by the victorious powers at Versailles. Even if they had wanted to. Hitler survived. He had been very impressed by Britain’s tanks and aircraft.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 3: The Second Pass Begins

Charles, Anne, Henry, and Florence re-emerged during the dead of night back in their hotel room in The Savoy at the end of April 1899, just after the team had initially returned from their voyage around the world to establish provenance for a host of fake identities. Expecting their arrival, the eight in situ variants and clones made way for them in one of the time-honoured fashions of their choosing.

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Not long after their departure, over the course of the same night, these four new arrivals from the future would also vanish. On the horizontal they left behind, some seemingly respectable guests would disappear from The Savoy without settling their bill. Almost no one knew anything about them, and no one would ever see or hear from them again. Meanwhile, shortly before their departure on the diagonal and unbeknown to anyone, four visitors from the future would appear in a hotel room in The Savoy to join the four who had just arrived. All eight would then vanish, once again recreating a horizontal that was equivalent in every outward respect to the first.

The crew would repeat this process five times in all, additionally creating or recreating any necessary middle aged clone parents after they had completed all the necessary jumps. At the end of it, there were 21 couples aged between 18 and 23 along with a number of middle-aged individuals. Their hotel room might have become very crowded except for the fact that, following each arrival, the extra guests excused themselves and, taking the keys for the rental properties the very first team members had gone to the effort to acquire, dispersed themselves across London.

Once again thanks to the efforts of the original team and the subsequent augmentation of their fund pool on each jump back, each couple had a substantial startup fund. The Cassiels took most of this money back with them to Greenland. Each couple would then be able to incrementally launder it into the banking system as they saw fit.

As you may have already discerned, the number of couples was quite particular. Unlike on their previous passes at this loop, the team were not planning to have any children that weren’t substituted. On the diagonal, they would constitute a completely self-contained and self-supporting collection of families. The first couples, all officially born between 1875 and 1880, represented “generation zero”. Averaged across them, they would each have four children between 1900 and 1905 who would marry into one of the other variant families. This first generation would also have four children on average during the mid-1920s. The second generation would then have a couple more children each in the years after the war. They would almost certainly be the last variants in this mission. For them to all be able to marry within their own circle without any dodgy inbreeding, 21 was the smallest number of couples they could start with. Should they decide to continue beyond the third generation, they would be able to recycle the intermarriage pattern after the postwar generation if necessary.

As it had been on the first pass, there was no way to structure the mission such that none of them would be of service age during either the First or Second World Wars. The crew members had lived through both conflicts twice already. Miles was also thoroughly trained and had seen combat during his past-future, albeit nothing on the same scale of wanton destruction and stupidity as the global conflicts that defined the 20th century. He knew that many of the male variants (for it was only really the men who might be called up) would be able to make themselves sufficiently useful that they would be unlikely to be sent to serve on the frontlines. However, there were now far more of them who all had fifteen years to go before the outbreak of WW1. In that conflict in particular, there were plenty of well-known people with both skills and intelligence who were used as cannon fodder. They couldn’t all really enter the armaments industry. Besides which, they hadn’t been very keen on that approach to begin with. It had served a purpose, but this time they planned to be somewhat more adventurous.

Nevertheless, the team’s strategy remained mostly unchanged on the whole. They would set about turning themselves into the kinds of people who might be considered invaluable to the war effort as quickly as possible. However, their life plans involved different rates of emergence into maturity and any potential for the public gaze needed to be staggered. Alternatively therefore, some of them would adopt avoidance strategies, such as secluding themselves as people in places and/or professions where they would not be conscripted.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 2: The First Pass

By the autumn of 1899, the crew had settled into their new homes in Marylebone. It was a fashionable address, within striking distance of Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Lord’s Cricket Ground, and the clubland of Mayfair and St. James’ as well as being an easy hansom cab ride into the financial centre of the square mile. However, their houses were neither the newest, largest, nor most expensive. The square was predominantly occupied by the very upper echelons of the educated urban middle classes, among whose company the variants were nouveau riche parvenus. The team made a few friends and contacts but mainly minded their own business and, in the teeming heart of Britain’s empire, most were content to pay them no more mind than everyday courtesies demanded. They settled into their new lives and, between 1902 and 1905, both young married couples in the team gave birth to a gender mirrored pair of children.

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This situation suited the variants. On their first pass through the 20th century, they had no plans to become famous. They met regularly with their brokers and gained entry to various social circles, both through them and by virtue of becoming involved as investors in several companies. Despite their lack of society credentials, the growing wealth and investment success enjoyed by William Delaney and John Moore endeared them to their money-grubbing social superiors.

The team’s capital was guaranteed to grow by at least 20% per annum since they could always simply buy bullion and turn it into cash to earn this kind of margin on the seigniorage. Obviously, that was a rather tedious way to make money. Given that they had a complete data set from the ‘Investors Monthly Manual’ and other historical sources, it was also unnecessary: there were plenty of good options around for generating a significant alpha if you knew which way the markets were going ahead of time. By 1910, a combination of the rapidly increasing value of their stocks and a plentiful supply of dividend payments meant that they were doing very well for themselves. A growing circle of connections within the worlds of business and finance also meant that they felt ready to take the next step.

William Delaney purchased Brinsop Court and Rotherwas Court in Herefordshire. They repaired the fire damage at Rotherwas, restoring the house to its former glory, and set about modernising and extending Brinsop Court (and doing a far better job of it than Hubert Astley had done in MOT). The purchases propelled them straight into the top tier of society in the county, not least because the fate of the Rotherwas estate had been a matter of considerable concern in the region over the past few years.

Brinsop Court became their family home. It was big enough for both the Delaney family and the Moore family, especially seeing as how their offspring were approaching an age where they would be packed off to boarding school at Malvern College or Cheltenham Ladies College. They developed the estate as a working mixed farm with a few side ventures involving meat, dairy, grains, fruits, and seed oils in the manner they had long since become very familiar with. Rotherwas on the other hand they turned into the primary business.

The whole team, especially the younger male variants, were acutely aware that World War 1 was fast approaching. They had a few strategies for dodging conscription, among which were their farm at Brinsop and their Irish heritage. However, they wanted to do everything they could to ensure that they would not be called up and packed off to the front, even if it meant being somewhat unethical. From their perspective, it was very much the case that they figured that, without drastically changing the course of the timeline (which was something they wished to avoid for now), they could hardly make the impending conflict much worse than it was going to be.

With this in mind, John Moore and William Delaney had begun to submit a number of patents for key design elements in a few armament systems and brought a small number of investors on board from among their new contacts. Their new venture was called “Precision Arms Limited”, or “PAL” for short. The company existed initially to develop a couple of ideas that the crew had nicked from what would be the very near future in MOT: the Lewis gun, or light machine gun, and the Stokes trench mortar.

These new weapons were in the hands of the British armed forces by 1912. PAL would become an important supplier for the army over the course of the next six years. The government had also constructed a Royal Ordnance factory next to PAL’s factory during the war, much as they had done in MOT. As a result, William and John, as the chief executive and engineer of the firm, were exempted from military service. Meanwhile, their clone parents were too old by the start of the war, and their offspring still too young by its end. Of course, they also made a great deal of money from the venture even though they made a patriotic point of selling with very low margins to avoid accusations of war profiteering.

When the war ended, the crew disavowed themselves of the armaments industry and sold all of PAL’s intellectual property to Vickers. Having carefully kept their property assets separate, they established a new company called Delaney & Moore on the Rotherwas estate and retooled their facility to turn out products for the domestic heating, cooking, homewares, and appliances markets. They also spawned a new construction and building materials concern which they called ‘Red Bull Construction’, much as they had done on the previous mission. Their agricultural sidelines likewise went through a process of expansion after the Moore family acquired Hampton Court Castle and its attached estate on the banks of the River Lugg.

Their companies, both those that were newly established and their longer running agricultural concerns, did reasonably well but were rarely spectacular. They made William and John important figures in Hereford, but little more than that. Meanwhile, they continued to pursue their investment strategies which led to them having an increasingly comfortable and enjoyable existence in the past.

Their children, who had not been substituted in this timeline, grew up and went to university or got married. They would all eventually become involved in the family businesses during the 1930s having spent some years idling away their youth. During the same period, having nominally entered their seventh decade, their clone grandparents began to die from natural causes. Meanwhile, their variant parents continued to quietly cultivate various social, business, and political connections in several places throughout the world. In addition to their homes in London and Hereford, they acquired property in New York which. They spent a great deal of their time travelling for both business and pleasure.

They went to watch Donald Bradman bat on several occasions, saw Bix Beiderbecke perform in concert, played at being in an Agatha Christie novel on the Orient Express and on a Nile cruise, went on safari in Africa and India, and attended the very first years of Glyndebourne. They met, and even occasionally played host in their home, to many of the leading figures of the day, including Churchill, Mosley, and Hitler.

However, they were never regarded as being anything more than somewhat anonymous and rather uninteresting businesspeople and investors, albeit ones who had enjoyed a good deal of success over the years. Rarely were any of them heard to proffer an opinion that ventured much beyond the conventional wisdom of the day. Although they did tell Hitler that, personally, they were rather fond of Jews and that his whole conspiracy theory sounded like utter bunkum to them.

The years between their arrival and the start of the Second World War had often been difficult for the variants. They had needed to hit the ground running, and there were many facets of daily life and interactions for which their extensive research had not prepared them. The lack of many technologies could be frustrating at times and the pervasive prejudice and bigotry was a challenge. Moreover, the absence of computer technology and the paucity of digital data meant that Cassiel’s ability to support their efforts was far more restricted than it had been on previous missions.

It had been particularly hard for the team to watch the disintegration of the situation in Ireland, Miles’ ancestral home. However, they were in no position to change that on this mission. They noted with interest the arrival of a certain Patrick McCarthy to Manchester in 1920. Miles’ great grandfather had proceeded to marry another protestant Irish emigre named Rosie Quinn who had likewise come to the industrial north of England looking for work and fleeing the war of independence in their homeland. It was an uncanny experience for the team members whose only real memories of Patrick and Rosie came from photographs, family stories, and the half-remembered fog of infancy. They all steered well clear of the young couple though, not wanting to alter the course of their lives in any significant manner.

Overall, on the positive side, they had met and befriended plenty of lovely people who were on the right side of history. In many other ways, life was more civilised and the pace far more congenial. As much as the members of the team themselves had contributed to the timeline, they had learned from their new surroundings and those who inhabited it.

Naturally, as the dark clouds of fascism began to descend over Europe, the variants did their bit, despite being in their sixties. They supported the Kindertransport and took in several evacuees for the duration of the war. Among a variety of services they performed, William and John joined the Home Guard, while Cara and Alice signed up for the Women’s Voluntary Service. Meanwhile their daughters, Florence Delaney and Anne Moore, looked after the farm and many of the two families’ business concerns.

By the time the Second World War started, their children were between 34 and 37 years of age. Despite being no spring chickens, their boys, Charles Delaney and Henry Moore, both signed up for the RAF immediately and were both far too old to be told “No”. The variants blamed themselves: both had fallen in love with aeroplanes when they were young and had been indulged by their parents with flying lessons. They even had their own light aircraft: a Bristol “Brownie” and a de Havilland “Humming Bird”. As qualified pilots, they were in great demand. Sadly, Charles died during the Battle of Britain. Henry was also shot down during a bombing raid. He managed to parachute to safety, but spent most of the war in a German POW camp. It was an experience following which he would never be quite the same again.

After the war, the variants themselves retired and their children took over the running of the trusts that owned and ran all their business concerns. It was Florence and Anne who mainly continued to take care of the day to day running of affairs. ‘Red Bull’ and ‘Delaney & Moore’ continued to do well under their guidance. They were intelligent women although, having been raised in a loving family environment by indulgent parents, perhaps a little too soft-hearted at times.

Having gained de facto control, they gave places on the board of the trust to their rather less intelligent husbands who proceeded to ignore all female advice and make some ill-informed decisions. They over-leveraged Red Bull during the postwar construction boom. By the time the variants’ grandchildren began to take over in the 1970s, the whole thing had degenerated into squabbling, divorce, and unmanageable debt. They were compelled to sell off many of the stable, high-quality Delaney & Moore brands to international conglomerates in a futile bid to service debt payments before ultimately losing Red Bull too in the early 1980s.

It didn’t have all that much of an adverse impact on their grandchildren personally. The trust was still in a very healthy state, and they still had the Brinsop and Hampton Court estates along with some of the associated side ventures that the team had spawned over the years that hadn’t yet been sold off. Financial deregulation and the ensuing stock market boom of the early neoliberal period would eventually propel the variants’ great-grandchildren into the realms of the super-rich.

However, the team members themselves would never get to see that stage of this timeline. Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, they began to fake their own deaths from a variety of causes associated with old age. Those who went first pulled the usual trick of proceeding to hide out in an alternate form in New York while awaiting the others. Alice Moore was the last to go in 1967.

After Alice’s funeral, they all met up at the appointed rendezvous and called upon Cassiel. They then proceeded to jump back to the summer of 1913. That year, they had all travelled to the United States where, after sailing over in first class on the RMS Olympic and done some business in the big city, they had enjoyed a delightful holiday in the wilds of upstate New York, going hiking and swimming in the lake next to their cabin in the woods. Aside from their clone nanny and private secretary, they hadn’t brought any of their servants with them or anything like that. It had all been a big adventure for the kids during which they had got to spend lots of time with their usually very busy parents. It had been a time they had all looked back on with great fondness later in life; a blissful summer before the breaking of the dam and the onset of the war in the months before the first of them were packed off to boarding school. In the new timeline the team had now created, the children would return seemingly far more mentally mature, having been substituted during the vacation.

William, Cara, John, and Alice would continue to play out their parts just as they had done before. There was no need for them to change anything. Similarly, the girls, Florence and Anne, would live broadly similar lives. However, Florence would eventually marry Henry Moore while Anne would hook up with Charles Delaney. They would all do very well at school and go off to university, even Florence and Anne. However, whereas previously Charles and Henry had rather conventionally opted to study classics and law, the boys now became fascinated by science and engineering.

After graduation, Henry and Charles continued to work in academia while also expanding the family business interests into the still emerging field of electrical engineering, spawning a couple of subsidiaries. The first, which they called ‘Mercury Electrical Industries’, produced wirelesses and gramophones, among other things. The second, called ‘Chepstow Appliances’, entered another emergent market, manufacturing a range of household appliances including vacuum cleaners and washing machines. When the war started, Henry and John were recruited into the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

After the war, the two couples simply continued to foster their various business concerns in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing while bolstering their private wealth through their ever-growing investment portfolio. Although there were many challenges, they were quite successful on the whole as strong postwar growth led to an expansion in the market for consumer goods. Over the course of the postwar decades, they also began to move into the hospitality business, buying up several bankrupt estates and turning them into luxury hotels targeted mainly at American and Japanese tourists or outdoor activity holiday parks for the masses.

Their activities did have a significant impact on postwar Britain, especially through Red Bull’s construction activities. However, the variants themselves remained decidedly non-famous and, just as they had hoped, they produced almost no significant divergence from MOT.

Much as they had done while in the form of their now ageing parents in the initial timeline, the younger crew members regularly took the opportunity to do a bit of time tourism. They went to see Thelonius Monk during his legendary Five Spot Cafe residency as well catching the likes of Dizzy Gillespie at the Newport Jazz Festival. Then they’d gone to see Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and others in the Biggest Show of Stars in Pittsburgh in 1957 and saw The Beatles playing at The Cavern Club in Liverpool. It was all stuff the variants had done before but, from their perspective, that had all been quite a long time ago.

Over the course of the 1960s, the variants began to hand over control of the family trust and its associated business concerns to their unsubstituted children, who had been born in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, they were eventually compelled to relocate most of the firm’s core business and manufacturing interests overseas due to the failings of industrial and monetary policy in the UK during the postwar and neoliberal eras and a few of their firms and brands were sold to large multinationals.

Ultimately, as per their intent, the team had had almost no impact on the timeline. A lot of people lived in some different looking houses which might be filled with appliances and homewares with labels that didn’t exist in MOT. The crew had generously supported several environmental and public health campaigns, some of which they had even been proactive in initiating, so there had been some marginal beneficial shifts in these areas. The city of Hereford looked rather different and rather lovely, as they had spent a great deal of money on the place over the years. However, overall, matters had proceeded as they had always done in MOT.

Charles, Henry, Florence, and Anne had begun to die off during the early 1980s. Florence would be the last to go in 1990. They had long been retired, living comfortably in Herefordshire, during which time they had noted the arrival in the county of a family from Manchester who had recently moved into Willow Lodge in Hampton Bishop. The second-generation variants didn’t live to see what became of Miles in this timeline though. They checked up on his progress before departing, at which time he had just finished his fourth year at the Cathedral School. They had bumped into him on a couple of occasions while visiting the school as patrons and governors and taken the opportunity to impart a few sage words of advice, but had no more involvement either with him or his family. As had been the case at the outset of the previous mission, they regarded him as little more than a potentially useful substitution target.

They all met once again back at the rendezvous in New York in 1990. Completing all the usual rituals, they packed the things they needed, prepared the jump routine, donned the time robes, entered the tent, and jumped away never to be seen in this horizontal again.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 1: The Arrival

Once again, four variants rematerialised during the pitch-black night on Rannoch Moor. The year was 1898. The crew were en route to a more distant point in the past where they planned to undertake a huge mission. However, ever cautious and desiring to be as well prepared as possible, they had decided to stop at this point to stretch and test their readiness. Moreover, while they had already seen 1968, Miles really wanted to take a good close look at the so-called “golden age” of capitalism. There were so many things he wanted to see, and on their next mission it was probable that none of them would happen in quite the same way. Naturally, they planned to intervene a little bit here and there eventually. However, they weren’t intending to create thousands of variants this time. It would be more about discovering how much they could achieve with a comparatively small team.

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They had packed much as they had done for their escapades in the post-war period. They had a couple of changes of clothes along with a few essential bits and pieces, some period spending money, and a stash of bullion to create a startup fund. However, they weren’t carrying much in the way of identity documentation this time. They wouldn’t really need anything like that.

It took the crew an hour or so to fully recover from the physical side effects of the jump. Fortunately, they were in the middle of nowhere on a moonless spring night that they had specifically chosen for its clear, dry, and relatively warm weather conditions for the time of year. At least, that’s what the weather station records they had access to had told them. Depending on which way you looked at it, they had a stroke of luck that these were a little off. Rannoch Moor was enveloped in a thick, freezing fog. As soon as they were mobile, they packed away the time tent into one of the two device chests they brought with them. An hour later, the chests vanished, transporting themselves to the variants’ favoured secure storage location, within the craton deep beneath the earth under several hundred metres of ice and rock in the middle of the frozen wastes of Greenland.

Dawn was imminent by the time they had finished all these manoeuvres. The team needed to get into position. They headed out across the moor towards the new railway station that had been opened just 6 years earlier. They timed their arrival for an early local train, emerging onto the platform in the gloam of dawn as if they had been passengers. In their current forms, they looked like four decent young chaps in their early 20s on a jolly healthy holiday in the Scottish Highlands. After making it look as though they had gone for a lovely stroll in the surrounding countryside, they repaired to a nearby inn for breakfast before purchasing first class tickets for the sleeper train to London, which arrived more or less on time at around a quarter to eleven in the morning.

The Caledonian Sleeper eventually pulled into London St Pancras at 5:30 AM the following morning. They checked into the best available rooms at the Midland Grand Hotel and, over the course of their first week, they went shopping to acquire complete wardrobes and sets of accessories while exploring their new situation. As soon as they had acquired the trappings of (sufficient but not ostentatious) wealth, they relocated themselves to The Savoy, which had electric lighting and ensuite bathrooms.

The team stayed for a couple of weeks at The Savoy, generally endeavouring to be unobtrusive and entirely forgettable while planning the logistics for their next steps and keeping one eye open for a more permanent address in the city. However, before they could begin to think about doing anything like setting up home, there was some preparatory work to complete.

For now, the team were using transient forms and identities which they intended to shed in due course. During their stay in London, they visited accountants and bankers in The City and established several corporate and trust structures under various names with associated bank accounts. They would use these facilities over the coming months to start feeding their untraceable forged coinage money into the system to build up a financial provenance for their long-term personas. Meanwhile, the team as currently incarnated would mainly rely on replicated notes and coins.

With their business in London complete, they settled their bill and checked out from The Savoy. The four of them would spend most of the summer travelling to various places in the British Isles. With Cassiel’s assistance, they broke into churches, records offices, schools, and other similar institutions. Here they would locate and scan relevant documents which were then reproduced as deep fakes to support a chronology for the invented identities they and their other planned variants would eventually assume. These identities would have no physical relations nor any real context or associations. However, that would not matter all that much for what the first generation would need to achieve. By the time anyone was even potentially likely to be interested in investigating their past, most memories and recollections would be lost to time. All that would remain would be the documents, and they would speak the only truth that mattered.

Toward the end of summer, the crew jumped on a liner and headed south, continuing their deep fake operation. They travelled down to the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and South Africa. Never staying in one place for more than a few days, they proceeded up the east coast of Africa before heading over to India and down to Australia and New Zealand. From the depths of Australasia, they cruised over the Pacific to Santiago in Chile from where they travelled by land to Buenos Aires. They then proceeded up the east coast of South America via Brazil and through the Caribbean to New York before heading back to England at the end of April 1899.

All told, they had been away travelling for over 250 days. While they had not necessarily achieved everything they needed to do on the journey in terms of planting documentation, they had gathered more than enough intelligence to be able to fill in any remaining gaps at a later date. Moreover, over the course of their travels they had been regularly paying money into their accounts in London. By the time the team had arrived in Belem in northern Brazil, their forms had changed, and their number had increased to eight through the addition of four clones. They were now the Delaney and Moore families. Both were respectable but would generally be perceived as coming from the ranks of the middle classes. However, their fortunes were on the rise, and they had a decent amount of capital.

In May 1899, William Delaney was a young man of 23 to 24 years of age who had recently married the 19-to-20-year-old Cara Walsh. His father, also called William, had been a businessman of modest wealth from Manchester and William Jr, an only child, had spent most of his youth being dragged around South America during his vain search for get rich quick schemes. His old man had died young from a malarial infection contracted in the Amazon. Consequently, he had inherited some money while his mother was also supporting him. She was a woman of Irish birth from Manchester named Anne — or “Annie” to her friends — and was a 48-to-49-year-old clone.

Cara was the daughter of William Snr’s close aide and companion, an Irishman named Thomas Walsh (the second clone, also aged around 50). Thomas had survived the fateful expedition but was nonetheless a widower. Cara’s mother, Bridget (or “Bridie” to her friends), had died shortly after giving birth to her. After their tragedy in South America, Thomas and Anne had grown close. Although they were not officially a couple, they were taking care of one another. Clearly, their children had also become close.

John Moore was a 19-to-20-year-old self-taught mechanic and engineer who had been an employee of William Snr. Having spent his early years in an orphanage in London, he had been taken in by the Delaney family at the age of 12. He was accompanied by his young wife, an American girl of similar age named Alice Clarke. John had met her during a layover in New York on their way back to England from South America and they had married after a whirlwind romance. Alice was accompanied by her parents, David and Elizabeth, both in their mid-40s. She was an only child because, sadly, Elizabeth had found herself unable to conceive again following Alice’s birth.

Having disembarked at Southampton, they made their way back to London and once again checked into The Savoy, but this time using their assumed long-term names and appearances. They also took possession of the keys for a few rental properties in the city which they had acquired through an agent while on their travels. The crew spent around a month staying at the hotel while they awaited finalisation of the exchange on a couple of handsome late Georgian terraced houses on Montagu Square in Marylebone. In the mid-summer of 1899, they moved in.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 5: The First Contact

It was not long after their 106th year at Caer Hywen, or the year 8Ʌ as they called it, that the team made first contact with non-variants from beyond the settlement. As had become their way, a small hunting party had left to spend a few weeks on Dartmoor in the lead up to the festival of Lammas. The young elk, aurochs, and deer that could be obtained there at this time of year were good eating that provided a welcome variation and addition to the diet along with excellent hides and suchlike. Sometimes they would also be accompanied by miners.

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The crew were aware that other humans visited Dartmoor, which they called Haytor, reasonably regularly since they often ran across evidence of their presence, such as the ashes from a fire and the discarded remains of tools and consumed foodstuffs. Conversely, there could be little doubt that the other visitors to the moor were aware of the presence of the variants. After all, they were conducting some pretty expansive land management interventions in order to keep swathes of the moor open to game and prevent it becoming overtaken by forest.

Nevertheless, the hunting grounds on Dartmoor were vast and the landscape provided many ways in which one’s presence might be concealed. It was quite feasible that they had spent extended periods in more or less the same place as other tribes at the same time and yet not bumped into them. Moreover, the variants’ hunting parties had often been deliberately circumspect, especially during the early years when Caer Hywen was still small and vulnerable.

Things were different now though. The population of Caer Hywen numbered nearly 600. The defences were mature, and every member of the team was armed with weapons in the use of which they were highly skilled. Every hunter-gatherer in the British Isles could attack their settlement at the same time and they could be reasonably confident of being able to hold their own at the very least. Obviously, a small hunting party was rather more exposed to danger, but they were by now riding horses specially bred for the purpose that were up to 16 hands in size. If need be, they could be safely back home inside a day. In many ways, the party was seeking an encounter. Consequently, they had become more brazen in recent years.

The team had been on Dartmoor and spent a successful couple of weeks hunting. However, they had become aware over the course of their trip that they were being tracked and watched from afar. God knows what the observers must have made of these people who rode on horses with their strange clothes, flashing blades, and metal-tipped arrows. They were so different, so alien, and yet clearly so alike to themselves that they could probably only comprehend them as being some form of divine being. The hunting party did not attempt to confront them and merely carried on with what they were doing.

In the usual way, having caught as much as they could take back with them, they settled in at their camp for a few days to prepare some of the carcasses ready for transport and enjoy a taster of the fruits of their efforts. While they were doing so, curiosity clearly having got the better of them, their followers came out from their hiding places to introduce themselves.

Both sides did their best to make it clear that they had no threatening intentions, but communication was far from straightforward. The variants knew the language of the native inhabitants reasonably well, having lived and interacted with some of them during the layovers enroute back to 6000 BC. However, their most recent knowledge was derived from what was effectively four hundred years in the future in another timeline remembered from their last usage of it over a century ago. Nevertheless, they were able to convey enough in a combination of halting speech and body language, and they shared a meal together.

Needless to say, the natives were fascinated by the variants, especially their metal tools, intriguing techniques, and strange animals. Over the next three days, they travelled back to Caer Hywen with the hunting party, where their interest turned to amazement. They stayed for the celebration of Lammas. And for 5½ weeks afterwards. It was not until after the feast of Mabon at the vernal equinox that they set off to return to join the rest of their tribe at their winter digs on the Somerset Levels. They took with them a collection of gifts including clothing and leather goods, a few hunting bows and quivers of arrows, some herbal remedies that would help to relieve a few basic ailments, and a load of beer and wine, all loaded onto one of the mule-type pack horses the variants were breeding.

Even though the Somerset natives’ camp was only about a weeks’ walk away, they didn’t see them again over the winter. However, the variants were reasonably sure that they had agreed to meet again around the time of the spring equinox at Haytor. Lo and behold, while the timekeeping abilities of their new friends were not very refined, they eventually turned up a little over a week after the equinox. All of them by the looks. Rather than the small party they had encountered the previous year, they came en masse along with their children. There were about a hundred or so of them.

The experience was a little intimidating, but the variants had also come in somewhat greater numbers, with all their elders and derwid present to represent them. Moreover, it quickly became clear that they inspired a considerable degree of fear, and even veneration, in their acquaintances, especially the derwid who, as their standard practice dictated, had been the point of reference for all their unique skills and knowledge.

One thing was for certain and that was that, while there were a few misunderstandings, there was no hostility between the two groups. They were not in competition with each other in any way. Indeed, their new indigenous friends were clearly exceptionally keen to establish favourable relations so that they might be able to obtain some of the things like metal tools, cloth, horses, and the magical creams and liquids the variants produced. The problem really was that they had almost nothing the variants needed to offer in return, and Caer Hywen didn’t produce a huge surplus.

Nevertheless, they all spent a fairly enjoyable week feasting and partying together before they parted ways once again having exchanged gifts. Their meetup became a regular annual affair. Caer Hywen spawned a second settlement called Caer Odor, as they had always planned, which they located to the north of the Somerset Levels near the mouth of the River Avon. The native tribes based in the southeast and East Anglia became aware of the variants and also began to attend these get togethers which, for the sake of mutual travelling convenience as well as symbolism, were relocated and rescheduled to occur on Salisbury Plain at the summer solstice.

As the team approached 150 years in situ, a third settlement was spawned. And then a fourth and a fifth. These were often located near to the territories of the native hunter-gatherer tribes they befriended who, while copying some of the variants’ practices and adopting many of their beliefs, usually carried on their long-established ways of life for the most part. By the start of their second century of the mission, there were eight farming settlements that were home to around 4,000 variants and their offspring in the British Isles. Alongside them were about 5 or 6 other similar settlements with a total population of about 2,500 people that had emerged in imitation of them as the result of hunter-gatherer tribes deciding to adopt farming for themselves. Beyond these were a further 2,500 to 3,000 itinerant hunter-gatherer tribespeople. The variants had ceased to substitute all their offspring, intermarriages had become reasonably common to forge bonds of kinship, and the derwid had begun to train a few non-variants.

A century later again, there were nearly 33,000 variants and non-variants in almost 60 settlements spread throughout much of the British Isles. Almost all the native inhabitants had been fully assimilated, bar a few wandering tribes who chose to continue their traditional way of life and mostly functioned as hunters and “park rangers”, keeping the game trails open and selling deer, elk, and hides to the settlements in exchange for metal tools, cloth, and medicines. A kind of university community had been established by several derwid to serve as a centre of advanced education. It was situated on Ynys Mons, which was a central point between their far-flung settlements that stretched up into the far north of the islands.

By the time the team celebrated their third base-12 “cantury” (or 432 years in base-10), the population of the British Isles numbered almost 540,000 people spread over nearly 940 caer-style settlements. Population growth was such that the “holtan” ceremony through which new settlements were spawned was a more than annual occurrence, with 5 or 6 new “caers” being established every year. Their society had become complex and sophisticated in many new ways to deal with their increase in numbers and govern society across the huge extent of their territorial claims.

However, despite the rapid expansion, there was still plenty of wilderness. Although their territories were dwindling rapidly, a few tribes numbering about a thousand people in total still clung to the old ways. More and more often though it came to be the case that these people were being assimilated as members of a settlement who simply had particular roles and lived in a certain way.

On the other hand, the influence of the growth of the variants’ society was now being felt farther afield across the Channel on the European continental mainland. Visitors had begun to appear who had travelled very long distances at great peril to trade or seek aid. Attracted by the wonders and abundance of which they had heard tell, some even came with hostile intent. Artefacts created by the variant civilization began to spread to distant lands, often as valuable objects of wonder. Occasionally, a small group from the British Isles might even venture abroad themselves.

On the whole though, even expansion to over ½ million people had little effect on their society and culture. This many people were easily swallowed up by the islands of Britain and Ireland, and their settlements were widely dispersed. While interaction and exchange between one or more of these groups was regular, it was by no means a daily occurrence. Although some of their villages lacked resources in which others were abundant, they all remained predominantly self-sufficient by necessity. Moreover, almost half the total population, over half of all the adults, and almost all the derwid were still variants. It would be quite a different matter two canturies later.

By the year 500 AM (or 720 in base-10), equivalent to the year 5280 BC, there were over 2¼ million people living in the British Isles spread over almost 4,000 settlements occupying around 7¼ million acres, approximately a tenth of the total land area of the archipelago. Collectively, these people also constituted about a tenth of the entire global human population and “Albion”, as it was known, was the most densely populated and advanced civilisation on earth by a considerable margin. The influence of this culture was now spreading fast from a coastal belt that stretched from southern Scandinavia to southwestern Iberia. Still constituting almost a tenth of the total population, the variants remained very much in control of the situation. However, this numerical and geographical growth had necessitated several technological and ideological innovations in order to address the challenges it presented.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 4: The First Century

It is the year 106 “anno mundi”, recorded in the team’s base-12 numeral system as 8Ʌ AM. There are now 566 people living at Caer Hywen, of which 112 are as yet unsubstituted, natural born children below the age of 12. The remainder are all still variants. It will be another two centuries before that ceases to be the case. The settlement has really come along. In a decade or so, they will have a surplus population and a couple of hundred of the inhabitants will leave to set up a new community.

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Surprising as it may seem, the team have not interacted with a single native inhabitant since they arrived. Britain is a sufficiently large island that traversing the whole thing on foot is a major undertaking at this time. The hunter-gatherers simply have no need to hike all the way down to Land’s End and the variants have no need to travel elsewhere either. There were groups based around the Somerset Levels and the Isle of Wight who mainly exploited the marshy coastlines of those regions and they often travelled as far west as Dartmoor and Bodmin on a seasonal basis to hunt game and visited the north coast of the peninsula to obtain and work flint but there was little to draw them any farther from home. There had once been a small group based near Caer Hywen around Boskenna but they had long since either died out or abandoned the site as sea levels rose.

The entire area around Caer Hywen had been completely transformed over the course of the team’s first century in situ. This was especially true of an area of around 2,000 acres that stretched from what would be known in MOT as Long Rock and Perranuthnoe which they had been actively cultivating.

Extensive pastures and meadows had been assarted out of the hinterlands of the settlement. Each of the 24 farms had about 14-15 acres allocated outside the defensive perimeter that encircled the core of Caer Hywen, on which they mainly tended to graze cattle or used to make hay. These assarted spaces were interspersed with managed woodlands.

The forestry team had cultivated misty and mysterious carrs of alder and willow around the marshes and rivers. Aside from being a valuable source of wood for boats, baskets, and buildings, they provided a valuable habitat for numerous bird species and crawled with a variety of reptiles and amphibians. One could only navigate much of their expanse along causeways the variants had built for the purpose.

On the exposed rocky headland at Perranuthnoe near the far end of their territory lay a pinewood filled with Scots Pine, Yew, Silver Birch, Aspen, Rowan, and Juniper. Red squirrels darted from tree to tree, and you could regularly see wildcats and pine martens. This landscape segued into a birchwood carpeted with bluebells, violets, and anemones.

Between these lay dark and shady broadleaf woods populated by Oak, Ash, and Beech with an understorey of Hazel. The forest floor, strewn with leaves and dead wood, teemed with a huge variety of mosses, lichen, and fungi that supported a similarly diverse range of insects and lepidoptera. Woodpeckers hammered at the tree trunks that also provided a roost for bats. Hedgehogs shuffled through the litter while badgers and foxes dug sets into the roots.

In various places there are a good number of trees that an educated observer would quickly recognise as introduced species. Among these are Walnut and Laburnum as well as what looks like a kind of Mulberry. They are all being carefully cultivated for several purposes. The “mulberry” in particular, which they call Bwabren, is a species they have specifically engineered for the desirable properties of its wood for the manufacture of flat-faced laminated recurve bows. Similarly, they use the Laburnum wood to make rather less sophisticated D-profile hunting bows. As for the Walnut, its wood was nice for decorative work, but more important were its oil-rich nuts and medicinal leaves.

Beyond these nearby managed projects, various members of the team had endeavoured to keep the game trails and open grasslands clear using a range of techniques to hold back the encroaching forest. This had helped to foster herds of larger wild fauna that were seriously endangered by habitat loss in the region. From the Cassiel satellite imagery, you could clearly see their impact throughout Penwith. As a result, the moorlands along the north coast around Pendeen were home to good-sized herds of the small native equines, bovines, and elk.

From the air, you could also easily discern the various paths that the variants had been treading over the past century. As they approached the perimeter defences of Caer Hywen, they became ever more clearly delineated, even constituting gravelled roads in places. On the embankment itself, the original bare palisade fence had been consumed by the now mature Holly and Hazel hedge that was about 15 feet high and presented a substantial obstacle to any creature bigger than a hedgehog. The frames of the five gates had become entwined within, and strengthened by, living trees. Beside the gates, and at intervals along the length of the perimeter hedge, wooden gantries and lookout posts had been constructed on the interior side of the embankment. The ditches that had been dug along the exposed outer stretches had been incorporated into a sophisticated water and sewage system and were filled with clean water at almost all times of the year as it cycled into and out of the settlement.

On passing through any of the gates and ascending uphill along one of the approach roads to the centre of the settlement, you enter an initial zone of intensive grain, vegetable, and fruit cultivation. Each of the 24 farms had around 14-15 acres allocated for their use in this area, and the farmsteads were clustered in groups of four to facilitate the sharing of tools, infrastructure, and labour. Fields of around 2 to 3 acres in size were mainly being farmed on a 6-year rotation using no-till methods that utilised intercropping and companion planting for weed, pest, and disease control.

Much as the bare fence around the perimeter was now a thing of the past, the fields were typically defined by mature hedgerows lined with nitrogen-fixing species of trees and intertwined with shrubs that provided a feast of berries. Their cultivars and cultigens had come a long way over the course of a century and they had well adapted strains of wheat, rye, barley, oats, sorghum, flax, hemp, rape, hops, peas, beans, mustard, clover, beet, chard, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, asparagus, chicory, lettuce, cucumber, apples, pears, raspberries, red, white, and blackcurrants, strawberries, blackberries, cherries, plums, and grapes, along with various herbs and dyestuffs that were either delicious or useful and generally yielded well. In a similar manner, their selective breeding programme had provided them with domesticated breeds of horses, goats, sheep, cows, pigs, ducks, geese, and pigeon that could be used for a variety of purposes from beasts of burden to meat or dairy production.

As you travelled through this intensive farming zone, you would be able to see the variants using many types of simple machinery to ease their tasks or moving good-sized loads around on Chinese-style wheelbarrows, sometimes driven by a sail or drawn by a small mule-like horse, or larger consignments of heavier materials using two or four-wheeled carts powered by one or two oxen. Farmers might be accompanied by a few eager, attentive, and agile shepherd dogs on their way out to the pastures while domesticated cats sunbathe or hunt for rodents in the long grass that is being trimmed by a herd of goats. You might be passed by a small crew of hunters, foragers, or foresters riding out on horseback with saddles, reins, and stirrups, possibly with a pack of long-limbed, soft-mouthed hounds. Or perhaps they are miners or quarrymen heading off in a large four-wheeled cart to continue excavations in a bell or clay pit they are working on nearby.

To either side of this well-surfaced road are ditches to accommodate water runoff. Most of the rainwater is eventually captured for various purposes, such as irrigation, but everything eventually gets fed through the sewerage system of reed beds and filtration tanks that are used to clean the outgoing black and grey water from the settlement before it is fed into one of the nearby marshes. Underneath your feet, buried a foot or so underground, are miles of terracotta pipes that are being used to supply fresh water to the outlying farmsteads. Toward the centre of the settlement on the crest of the headland, you can see the sails of a few wind-powered structures. One of these is clearly a water tower that is pumping up water into its tank to feed this gravity-powered distribution system. Obviously, it has its limitations, but it serves their needs well on the whole. If winter storms smash the rigging or a high-pressure front in summer stills the wind for an extended period, they can always hook up some oxen or horses to power it for a bit if need be.

Caer Hywen is not a big place, and you soon reach the centre. Here there is a cluster of about 72 houses arrayed along stone-paved streets that radiate from the central square and marketplace. The ditches now give way to covered cobblestone pavements lined with fruit trees. Each dwelling is customised to the individual needs of its inhabitants, but they nonetheless follow a broadly similar pattern and typically utilise the same construction techniques and materials. Most consist of a rectangular block about 10 x 5 metres with its longer side facing the street. This is abutted to a similarly sized block at the rear to create an L-shape. The plot extends out behind this such that it is about 10 x 30 metres in size and is capable of containing any necessary outbuildings along with a small garden for growing fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

These rearward spaces do not generally have clearly delineated plot boundaries. Nevertheless, they can usually be discerned by virtue of the fact that collections of trellises, walls, and outbuildings have sprung up within them to create heat sinks, sun traps, wind breaks, or shaded spots for various plants or to service other needs and activities. They have a tendency to suggest borders and provide some private outdoor space within what otherwise remains an open, communal garden and work area.

The main housing blocks are single-storey affairs constructed in local stone. Roofed in turf interspersed with bird boxes and bat roosts, they sprout into a glorious technicolour display of wildflowers in spring to the accompaniment of thousands of birds.

The team have recently started making glass at Caer Hywen, but most buildings are still unglazed and rely on wooden shutters to keep out the elements in winter. Fortunately, the climate will be rather good for at least another 2,000 years so this isn’t too much of a hardship.

The L-shaped dwellings are mainly for craftspeople, so the street-facing block is generally “open” since it functions as a workshop or similar. The rear block is where they live and those who have separate specialist places of work might only have this on a 5 x 30 metre plot. They provide a cosy and comfortable living space that is well-insulated against temperature extremes, despite being open to the rafters. Beneath the outer stone skin, there is an underlayer of hempcrete blocks. The external oak shutters fit snugly to the window frames, while a tripartite leather, wool, and linen internal curtain arrangement allows for varying degrees of light and weather exclusion depending on the time of day and season. The roof is lined with bitumen sheets and alder to provide waterproofing beneath the thick layer of turf that shields the house from anything the skies can hurl.

In the interior, battens and willow lathes are attached to the walls and coated with clay plaster. This envelops a single kitchen-dining-living space with mezzanines at either end for sleeping. It provides a sizable wood-fired oven and hearth for heating and cooking. Water is available on tap (most of the time) and the oven is also designed to heat this at need. Every home has bathing and washing facilities, and these acts also typically take place in this single room. The floor is paved with stone or clay tiles over aggregate that is laced with tiny clay pipes. The oven also heats water that is run through these pipes, providing an additional system of radiant underfloor heating when needed. You can easily maintain a comfortable interior temperature year-round with a minimal expenditure of either fuel or effort. Not that it matters too much since most of the inhabitants spend most of their time outdoors anyway.

Attached to the main block, usually in a small lean-to structure on the north side of the building, can be found a small suite of service rooms containing a cool store or “buttery”, a dry store or “pantry”, and a waterless composting toilet facility with a kind of bidet next to it. These are all pretty functional, and there are strict limits to how often the toilet can be used, but they do their jobs well. And, if you do need to wipe, they have a surfeit of low-grade paper available which they manufacture from a mix of flax, hemp, rape, shives, and recycled material.

Caer Hywen is little more than a small village by modern standards, so you soon reach the centre. This has changed beyond all recognition from the scrubby patch of grassland fringed by a collection of hastily assembled stone dwellings we last saw in year five.

The sapling the team planted at its centre is now a handsome tree. It is still youthful by the standards of a Yew, but mature. Plas Hywen, as it is called, is now about 60 x 40 metres in size, albeit somewhat irregular and rounded in shape, like an avocado, as it follows the lines of the hill atop which it sits. As is the case with all the streets in the centre, its circumference is bounded by a well-gravelled road fringed by pavements under which run sewerage and water services.

The central space is all beautifully paved in dressed cobblestones of local granite and encircled with a ring of apple, cherry, and plum trees. There are also raised beds at several points, similarly constructed from granite, that are planted with fragrant herbs and flowers and double up as places to sit.

Arranged in the remaining space around the central Yew tree are a good number of wooden market stalls with tables, benches, and awnings; for Plas Hywen is where the variants gather to exchange the products of their labour and, when the weather is fine, to discuss administrative matters.

On the north side of the square are two buildings that are a good deal larger than any of the dwellings. The first of these is the stone-built water tower, topped by the windmill that we saw from afar which powers a simple pump. The tower itself is round, about 60 to 70 feet tall, and topped by a campanile containing a good-sized bell cast in bronze. Structurally, the tower is constructed from two skins of stone blockwork between which runs a spiral staircase that provides access to the various levels of the wind pump mechanism, the water tank, and the rooftop campanile. The wind pump sail structure itself is a heavy timber frame affair that perches over the top of the campanile such that its axle is free to rotate 360 degrees, as oriented by a tail sail.

Next to the water tower is a sizable public hall that functions as a meeting or market space during inclement weather, an occasional entertainment venue, and a school for their offspring. While its neighbour is an impressive feat of construction and engineering, the hall is beautiful. Its huge, pitched roof is covered in turf, much like most buildings in the settlement, but being almost 20 metres wide facing the square and 60 metres deep, it is far larger and presents its gable to the street. From the ridge line, it plunges down in a festival of grass and flowers to timber colonnades that run along either side of the main body of the building. The gable also frames a portico and balcony on the facade through the application of generous bargeboards. All the timber work is an essay in flowing lines inspired by the forms of nature, replete with intricate tracery, painted in bright colours, and inlaid with gold, silver, and bronze. Rising from the roof ridge above the facade is a small wooden tower. It functions in part as a nesting place for birds, but mainly serves as a clock, since its street facing side is dominated by a large bronze sun and moon dial that is also inlaid with silver, gold, and coloured enamel.

Nestled within this huge wood and turf canopy, the main stone-built body of the building is punctuated with large windows. Further illumination is provided to the interior through regular dormer windows. All are glazed. In the case of the dormer windows, this has been done with stained glass which, in the right light conditions, conducts a polychrome symphony on the tiled floor of the hall’s interior. The hall can be entered from the street front through an impressive set of intricately carved and inlaid double doors. There are also smaller entrances or exits to each side, and two to the rear either side of the platform which sits at the far end of the room. Behind this, at the far end of the building, is an enclosed foyer that constitutes a kind of mirror in enclosed form to the portico and balcony on the street front and provides access via two elegant spiral staircases to the gallery that surrounds the main hall, and via which one reaches the street front balcony.

During the hours of darkness, aside from the firelight of two huge hearths on either side of the hall, the interior can be lit by oil lamps made from glass and brass. Some of these are fitted at regular intervals to the walls. However, the attention grabbers are three large chandeliers that look like constellations of glass and wire orbs in the stylised forms of the sun and moon hanging in space within the hammerbeam roof whose Celtic blue woad-painted vaults are dotted with a plethora of stars inlaid in gold and silver. At both ground and balcony level, every inch of the vertical walls between the windows, doors, and fireplaces are adorned with colourful carved painted stonework in writhing geometric forms and Celtic knots within which are set several mosaics in a similar style that depict figures and scenes from the myths and legends the variants were propagating within their culture. ‘Yr lys mawr’, or “great hall”, as the building is known by the inhabitants, is a masterpiece that has only recently been completed and represents a labour of love that has absorbed most of the community for over a quarter of a century.

On the south side of Plas Hywen are more impressive edifices, albeit somewhat smaller and more modest than those to the north. The first is about double the size of one of their regular houses and is the residence of their brewer, vintner, and distiller, which also serves as a tavern. Many members of the team gather here regularly both to drink and take their meals. It often makes sense to have one place doing the cooking and providing the heating and lighting. Besides which, it’s a lot more fun than shutting yourself up at home.

Next door to the tavern is a good-sized wooden structure with few stone-built appendages. It looks almost Japanese in the way its facade consists entirely of slatted doors that are left open to the elements during the summer months. Inside is a large hot bath, washing facilities, saunas, and steam rooms that are for public use. Much as gathering to eat and drink next door can be both more enjoyable while realising an efficiency gain, the bath house exploits the constant utilisation of fire and hot water by the nearby tavern, bakery, chandlery, forge, and glassworks to provide useful services to the inhabitants that are especially desirable during the winter months. It’s not exactly a 5-star hotel, but it is effectively their own spa. And it is not only for pampering people: it also provides invaluable facilities for washing and drying clothes. It works well. Hunkered with its solid back against the prevailing winds, it is sheltered yet well-ventilated, and as well-lit as it can be while protecting its users from the elements.

The team are all living this world for real, much as they have always done. The variants may all be fundamentally scions of the same person, but their distinct physical forms and varying experiences mean that they are sufficiently individual to require a certain level of social organisation without the need for any pretence or “acting in character”. Indeed, although they remain intimately connected in the way that only Travellers can be, the original four members of the mission team had been divergent individuals for far longer than they had been physically the same person. More important though was the fact that it was vital that the world they were creating was fully rounded and fleshed out.

While every inhabitant of Caer Hywen above the age of 12 was a variant on the diagonal, they had spawned a new horizontal every time they had jumped back to substitute one of their offspring, as was usual in the layered structure of these missions. Their civilisation would continue to exist on these horizontals, becoming completely devoid of variants within a century as those who remained behind died out. Moreover, they would also be sharing the world they were creating with non-variants long before they reached their maximum team size of \~200,000.

In their community of almost 600 individuals, most people still have to do a range of jobs, but they have reached a point where they have begun to specialise to the extent that each person does a particular thing most of the time.

The most important role belongs to the farmers. Far more so than any mining or metallurgical activities, agricultural produce forms the bedrock on which their fledgling economy is based. With twenty-four households dedicated to this area, the farmers also constitute by far the most numerous role in their society.

While everyone has to pitch in on various seasonal jobs, such as the all-important harvest, the farms are designed to be small enough to be managed for most of the year by a single household despite the incredibly intensive nature of their cultivation practices. Over the course of the past century, the team have developed cultivars and cultigens for a wide range of crops. In some cases, they have introduced species, so long as they are native to Western Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean and could conceivably be grown in their current climate and fit the migration backstory of their civilisation. They thus lacked some of their favourites, such as potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and coffee, and a host of flavoursome spices, but they had everything they needed.

The farmers grow wheat and rye which they harvest, thresh, and winnow to produce straw, chaff, and grain. Some of the grain they retain for planting; the remainder is sold to a miller. The chaff gets sold to a feed, fertiliser, and animal bedding specialist. Similar processes apply to the barley, oats, and sorghum which they also grow. However, a good chunk of the resulting barley grain goes to the brewer, and they use a lot of the oats to bulk out livestock feed. Much of the straw is turned into bales, but some is used to grow mushrooms. Just as the farmers buy in the resulting improved feeds, fertiliser, and bedding, their fungi feed base is augmented by adding in the spent grain that is a byproduct of their brewing and fertiliser manufacturing processes. Sorghum they mainly turn into livestock feed and ethanol, but the fibrous stalks are invaluable for making brooms and brushes.

The farms also produce large quantities of crops that are primarily used to produce fibres and oils. Among these are flax, hemp, rape, nettles, sorghum, and poppies. Typically, these are harvested, retted, and scutched on site to produce bast fibres, seeds, and shives. The fibres are then turned into bales, and most is sold to their textile millers and weavers, of which they have a few because the demand for cloth is incessant. The seed goes to the miller to be cold pressed into oil. The shives and some of the bales are used to make paper. The remaining shives go into the manufacture of animal bedding.

Then there were root crops, which required a lot of labour and soil nutrients to produce but were important to grow on a somewhat larger scale than mere garden crops to provide raw material for several processes, for use in livestock feeds, and to bring variety and nutrients to their diet. In this category, they were cultivating beets, chard, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, asparagus, chicory, lettuce, and cucumber.

Fruit farming occupied a similar position since almost all clan members were growing some as a garden crop and much was available in the wild. Nevertheless, there were things like apples, pears, raspberries, red, white, and blackcurrants, strawberries, blackberries, cherries, plums, and grapes that they had engineered and consumed on a fairly large scale. Hops also fell into this category.

The variants were not vegans. Although it was mainly oriented around the more expansive and less intensively cultivated hinterlands beyond the perimeter hedge, livestock and dairy farming was just as vital to their community as arable and fruit farming or market gardening. Aside from consuming the meat and dairy produce, they obviously needed things like collagen and bones as well as beasts of burden and transport. Over the course of the past century, their breeding programmes had produced domesticated strains of goats, sheep, cows, and pigs along with some more or less tame tame fowl that included species of ducks, geese, and pigeon. There were no chickens though.

The sheep and goats could be sheared annually to produce valuable wool. Along with some of their cows, they could also be milked regularly. The farmers themselves would then turn this into butter, yoghurt, and cheese on site. The animals that were not needed for either their breeding plans or for dairy were slaughtered. The hides would then be sold on to the team’s tanners while the blood and the carcass would be processed by their butcher. The efficiency with which the crew processed byproducts into livestock feed, combined with their crop rotation strategies and the abundance of pasture, meant that they could easily keep as many animals as they needed over winter.

Last, but by no means least, the farmers all have at least one hive of bees each which they keep in horizontal top-bar hives. Aside from the fact that the honey is obviously delicious to eat, it has several other uses, including in medicine, and the wax is valuable while the bees provide an essential pollination service.

After the farmers, the next most important primary sector role at Caer Hywen belonged to the foresters and woodcutters. They had about ten households dedicated to this task that were clustered in the northwest of the settlement where they could share service and storage buildings along with a wind-powered sawmill. As you might already have ascertained from the descriptions of their work above, they did far more than simply chop down trees.

Aside from activities such as regular coppicing for firewood or planting trees and felling timber for a host of purposes including construction and tool manufacture, they were actively creating and managing a range of environments much as the farmers were. Some of their introduced species were intolerant of the predominantly acidic soils of the region, so there were other regular jobs such as applying wood ash or burned lime to increase its pH levels. Regardless, the result of their activities was minimally processed timber that they sold on to individual households for firewood or secondary processors, including wood workers, the sawmill, or the charcoal maker.

Despite the presence of nearby building stone and ore, wood was the community’s most important fuel and material. The demand for it was incessant and they needed to range their activities over a wide area to satisfy it without undermining the sustainability of their sources. Some of the species they relied on required over a century to reach maturity, so their work demanded careful planning. Along with crops like wheat and their capacity to support livestock, the availability of sustainable sources of timber was one of key elements in determining the range of the community’s area of regular active cultivation, their subsequent perception of the territory to which they were laying claim, and a limiting factor on their potential for population growth.

Next up, of course, came the miners, quarrymen, and clay diggers. The demand for metal and stone was by no means constant and both resources were straightforward to recycle and reuse once extracted. However, it took a hell of a lot of work to do so in the first instance in each case. Moreover, these households were doing far more than merely hewing the ground with picks. In addition to having to prospect decent seams, they were doing a range of manufacturing and processing chores relating to their core specialism, including burning lime, making pozzolans, firing bricks or hempcrete blocks, and dressing stone. In total, there were around twenty households at Caer Hywen, situated in a cluster on the northeastern edge of the settlement centre, who were primarily devoted to this sphere of work. However, because processing stone and ore could generally wait, they were usually among the first people to down tools and help elsewhere whenever the need arose.

What we might call the community’s fishermen and women were another group that fell within what can be modelled as the primary sector of the economy. They had around four households who specialised in this area that were based in the southeast of the settlement around the system of wooden quays and piers that had been constructed in the sheltered head of the creek in what would later become the eastern side of Mount’s Bay in MOT.

These households have a couple of catamarans that provide a stable platform for fishing using either a net or rod, and they will go out several times a week whenever conditions permit. They also farm mussels and oysters and lay traps for lobster and crab. Some is sold fresh to market while much is then smoked, salted, or otherwise preserved for later sale. The seafood they harvest provides a supplement and variety to the diet, but they do not depend on it at Caer Hywen and the consumption of the flesh is among the lesser reasons for their jobs. The chandler will buy up things like fish guts or bones and the shells of crustaceans and bivalves while the tanners are keen to acquire the skins. All can be processed to make things that can only be done with these ingredients.

Even more important than the byproducts of their pisciculture was their responsibility for making salt and collecting kelp. Some of the latter was eaten, but most was sold to the crew’s fertiliser specialist. As for the former, it was obviously vital to everyone. They have a saltern facility just to the east of the isthmus where there is a shallow lagoon within the salt marsh in which the water is exceptionally saline, the sun having already evaporated much of the water. A small wind-powered water lifting device uses an Archimedes screw to take water from this to the saltern where it is reduced until the salt can be extracted and then dried.

Finally, there were the hunters and foragers. The community’s dependence on this kind of activity was by now practically non-existent. They only had a couple of households that did it more or less full time and their jobs might be more accurately described as scout and park ranger. Having a reasonably regular supply of things like venison, wild boar, elk, and aurochs was a luxury they saw no reason to forego, especially since they were creating particularly favourable habitats for some of these species that meant it was a good idea to have a bit of a cull occasionally. Similarly, certain types of wild berries and fungi were plentiful and there was little point cultivating them when a few individuals could just pop out occasionally and pick a load while they were also building or maintaining traps or hides. The small hunting team was also responsible for doing things like conducting controlled burnings to prevent game trails being swamped by pioneer species of trees and shrubs.

Around a third of the inhabitants of Caer Hywen were primarily engaged in activities that might be characterised as belonging to the secondary or even the tertiary sector. The variants working in these areas took the raw materials produced by the farmers, miners, fishers, and hunters and transformed them into processed and manufactured goods. One of the most important among these was the miller.

Currently, the settlement only needs one miller. Their household is located on the eastern edge of the central built-up area next to the farmlands and occupies an oversized plot that is required to safely house the wind-powered mill on-site. For a primitive machine, it is efficient and versatile and covers all of their needs concerning grinding, pressing, and cutting. In the (rare) absence of sufficient wind, it can be powered by horse or oxen.

The miller’s household buys wheat and rye grain from the farmers and turns them into flour and middlings which they then sell on to the baker, the butcher, and individual households. They also buy the seeds of flax, hemp, rape, and poppies (along with the wheat germ obtained from grinding flour) that they press into oil. There are several consumers for these products, in addition to individuals, among whom the most important are the chandler, the derwid, and the livestock feed maker.

Of comparable importance to the miller, occupying the first stage of processing in a vital production chain, are the tanners. There are around four households who primarily occupy themselves with this often somewhat unpleasant task. They obtain their hides and skins directly from the farmers, who slaughter livestock on site, and the fishing folk, along with bark from the woodcutting and foresting team, and transform them into prepared leather which they then sell on, mainly to the leatherworkers. Their houses are located to the east of the settlement centre where the prevailing winds blow away the pungent effects of their work. Several occupations that are water-intensive and produce pollution are located here. The sewerage system will clean this up before releasing it into the marsh at the far eastern side of Mount’s Bay.

A similarly vital group of water-intensive, polluting processors are the weavers. The preparation of cloth and thread can be a time-consuming job, so it is something that quite a few people will contribute their time to on a fairly regular basis. However, the settlement has four households who are specialists. They take the raw wool and fibre bales from the farmers and wash, card, comb, and dye it as necessary before spinning it into thread and yarn, some of which is woven into cloth.

Over on this slightly smelly side of town is also the butcher. Again, they only need one household on this who take the carcasses and blood from the farmers’ slaughterhouses, and fish from the fishermen, along with things like middlings from the miller, and turn them into a variety of things. The slaughter of livestock must be carefully coordinated because fresh prime cuts of meat cannot be kept for long, even though almost all residences have a decent cold store. The butcher is one of the main people responsible for preserving this food source and produces charcuterie and other preserved meat products. They also transform the less savoury parts of the animal into food for the working dogs and domesticated cats who have jobs to do. A lot of the remaining animal byproducts go to the chandler.

The other household on the east side of the town with the water and sewage intensive operations in that of the paper miller. They have yet another windmill which drives hammers to pound recycled rags and offcuts into a paper pulp ready for pressing and drying. They also tend to make ink from things like oak galls, charcoal or bone char, dyestuffs, tree sap, honey, and egg. It isn’t a life-or-death business for the variants: they can survive without paper and ink, but it is important both to the functioning of their society and their mission. Their resident derwids maintain records concerning a range of matters from the weather and harvests to financial transactions and have authored a good many books to serve as technical manuals, provide philosophical guidance, or excite the imagination. These are often vital to the education of their offspring and for supporting the non-variants who continue to live in the horizontals their substitution activity leaves behind.

Some of the cleaned bones that are left over from the butcher’s work go along with a lot of firewood to the team’s charcoal maker, who has his base of operations to the south of Plas Hywen behind the bathhouse, along with a few other “energy intensive” industries. They don’t use turf for this: the charcoal maker has an exceptionally efficient retort muffle oven which recycles and burns the combustion gases to create superb lumpwood charcoal and bone char. Bones are also burned in an oxygenated environment to create bone ash which the potters use to make chinaware. The fly ash created by these burns is captured and used by the miners and quarrymen for use as a pozzolan in the creation of hempcrete, while the coarser wood ash goes to the chandler.

The charcoal maker is joined in this part of town by a couple of forge households who do smelting and smithing of metals, a potter, and a glassworks. Metal is obviously very important at Caer Hywen, but they don’t have huge quantities of it: they have extracted more than they need over the years and continue to do so but most of the work is about re-forging and reworking, or repairing, existing tools.

The team has obtained small quantities of gold and silver over the years. This is mainly used in decorative architectural work, with the great hall having consumed many of their “luxury” resources over the past century. However, most of the adult variants, male and female, wear some jewellery which the smiths make when they do find precious metals. This being Cornwall though, most of their work involves copper and tin with some zinc, manganese, lead, lithium, and arsenic, which they forge into bronze, brass, and pewter, or use as fluxing agents. The resulting metals go almost exclusively into the manufacture of tools, weapons, and utensils.

The furnaces get used very regularly by the households of the potter and glassmaker. They make a lot of everyday items such as crockery and containers of various kinds from either ceramics or glass. Some of these pieces are very fine indeed since the quarrying team has access to several nearby sources of kaolin, which they use to make bone china, as well as quartz and manganese, which the glassblowers use to produce crystal glass. Inevitably, these ceramic and glass wares break regularly and need replacing. Not that the broken stuff gets wasted. The broken ceramics are bound into mosaic works, used in aggregate by the builders, or ground down for use as a drainage aid in soil. Old glass is used as a pozzolan.

Also located in what might be called “the fire quarter” is the household of the chandler. This is a catch-all term for the transformation of mainly agricultural commodities and animal byproducts into a range of extremely valuable items through grinding, mixing, and heating.

Among the chandler’s products are obviously things like wax candles, which are extremely useful even though they mainly use oil lamps with seed-based lamp oil at Caer Hywen. However, their main jobs are to make soap and sugar. In the former process, they transform the plentiful wood ash into lye which can then be used in conjunction with seed oil and optional fragrances and colouring agents to produce good quality soap. They make sugar from the beets produced by the farmers and the resulting pulp byproduct goes into livestock feeds. The chandlery also makes toothpaste, with the ground shells of mussels and oysters being among the key ingredients, in conjunction with various flavouring agents, and a variety of glues, cosmetics, dyes, and powders for a range of purposes.

There is some overlap in interests and techniques between the chandler and the brewer, vintner, and distiller who also runs the tavern and general social hang out at Caer Hywen. They brew a whole range of wines, beers, and spirits from fruits and grains. In a world in which they have to make all their own entertainment, these are understandably nice to have. However, they also make ethanol (mainly from sorghum), which has vital medical and first aid applications among other uses, and distilled essential oils, mainly for use as fragrances and flavourings.

On the west side of town are a few households that are primarily dedicated to a range of useful crafts, the products of which predominantly derive from agricultural commodities and timber where the required manufacturing processes are not heavily dependent on large volumes of either water or fire.

There are about three households here who are primarily devoted to leather work. They buy the tanned hides and fish skins from the tanners and turn them into a wide range of clothing, accessories, and other useful items. The community is not so specialised that they have separate saddlers, glovers, and cobblers, so these people also make things like tack and harnesses for horses and oxen, as well as shoes and gloves; basically, anything that involves shaping, cutting, and sewing leather.

A further three households are devoted to carpentry and woodworking. Much as the leather workers must encompass all aspects of their trade, their work might involve anything from making furniture, through building work, to finishing tools made by the smith, or forming wheels and barrels. Alongside them are another three households who form the backbone of a building and construction team. Both groups have a lot to do, and they are by no means the only people who spend time either building structures or working with wood: almost everyone in the community will do so on a reasonably regular basis. However, they are the ones who specialise and devote most time to it.

It’s a similar story for the one household that is currently dedicated to the craft of producing brooms, brushes, and baskets. There is an insatiable demand for these types of items which have a limited lifespan and typically see regular, hard usage. They take things like the sorghum stalks, bits of wood, willow lathes, hog bristles, and horsehair and turn them into a host of useful items. Again, a lot of people do a bit of this kind of thing, but you can’t have farmers and other key workers spending valuable time making their own toothbrushes, brooms, and log baskets. The same goes for clothes, so Caer Hywen also has a dedicated tailor in this quarter of town.

This brings us on finally to the household of the derwid. The “druid” at Caer Hywen is not some kind of weird priest or mystic. They have a lot of practical and important jobs to do. Moreover, at this point in time, they are the only one who maintains any kind of regular contact with Cassiel.

They do not yet have any significant requirements for policing or government, but it is still the responsibility of the derwid to convene administrative assemblies and record the law as they make it. They also serve as the community treasurer and accountant with responsibility for managing the books of their “bank”, in which the issuing and receipt of currency is recorded.

The derwid are also required to serve as teachers, imparting skills in reading, writing, and maths to their non-variant offspring between the ages of 6 and 12, and to further train their long-term replacement (they are currently onto their third generation of derwid). Regular measurements must be taken of things like temperature, rainfall, sea level, wind speed, tides, and the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.

Moreover, while the adult variants are exceptionally hardy and resilient, they are not immune to illness or accident and their children (and livestock) are susceptible to disease in the normal way. Whenever medical attention or surgery is required, it is the job of the derwid to provide it, as well as to prepare the tools and medicines necessary to fulfil this role. All their accrued knowledge must also be recorded and conveyed to others as appropriate.

On top of the demands of running a general practice, they had to function as biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers. If there were to be any innovative new machines or devices introduced, or unusual architectural requirements to satisfy, it was the job of the derwid to produce the necessary designs and direct the work.

Last, and by no means least, the derwid are required to be performers. With their unsubstituted offspring present and non-variant adults in the abandoned horizontals, it is the derwid’s job to retell the myths and orchestrate the seasonal ceremonies that punctuate the year at Caer Hywen.

Being a derwid was a demanding job. The word basically meant “oak tree” in their language and the idea was very much along the lines that the derwid took nutrients from the putative roots of their culture and passing phenomena of the sky and nature to form a strong, binding structure for the community as a whole.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to do it alone. Aside from the fact that all the variants had a huge range of skills and knowledge, even if they weren’t currently all using them, a “household” in all the above only very rarely means a single nuclear family. While there would be a place of work that doubled up as a dwelling in most cases, it wasn’t necessarily the case that the partner of a derwid was also a derwid, or that that of a carpenter was also a carpenter. Not everyone was coupled up all the time, those that were often worked in places other than where their partner did, and jobs changed hands from family to family between generations. By “household” I mean a structure or collection of structures in which at least two more or less full-time workers are engaged in a particular activity, usually with one to two apprentices between the ages of 12 and 18 and/or a “light” or occasional worker, such as an elderly individual.

This brings us to the final place we need to visit at Caer Hywen: the nominal “place of work” for the druids or derwid, whatever we want to call them. Since its completion, schooling of the young has mostly begun to be undertaken in the great hall when either the topic or the weather conditions demand it be done indoors. However, the great hall is not the only impressive “public” work which the variants have built over the past century. Over on the mount is the base of operations for the derwid at Caer Hywen.

You proceed down the hill past the fishing households, out of town by the south gate, and through the marshy alder and willow carr that grows on the isthmus. Where the ground begins to broaden and rise, the swamp mists and trees start to clear after you pass through a kind of living archway, and you will see that they have turned the tip of the isthmus into a kind of woodland park and rockery garden. Plant species that can handle the acidic soils and saline conditions of the promontory cover the craggy exposed rocks. Four good sized clearings have been made in the woods that are sewn with grasses and wildflowers. It is in these places that they hold their seasonal ceremonies and, if you look from the air, you would see that they are arranged in a semi-circle at regular intervals in front of the mount.

Paths lead between and through these clearings up to the top of the mount where there is a collection of stone-built structures set within a fairly substantial wall. Right at the top, above everything else on the southern side of the crest, is a circular space in which the stone pavement is inscribed with a series of elliptic lines and glyphs inlaid with bronze that indicate the hours of the day and days of the year. In front of these lines on the southern side of the ring is a large slate gnomon; behind them at the northern zenith is a pedestal on which is set a large, ornate bronze armillary sundial constructed of rings within rings.

Just beyond these open-air sundials, set on the northern edge of the plaza, is a windowless, drum-like, stone building standing about 40 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter with a single door at the foot of the building on the south side. Although difficult to make out in the darkness of the interior, the white plastered walls are also inscribed with elliptic lines, but inlaid this time in gold and silver. Although it is almost impossible to discern from the ground, the south face of the tower has a kind of dish-like depression in the stonework at the centre of which is set a pinhole gnomon and a series of quartz prisms that project an image of the sun surrounded by rainbows into the dimly lit interior that pinpoints the time and date on the north wall. If you turn around, you will see that camera obscura techniques are also used in the north face of the tower to project a panoramic image of Caer Hywen around the south side of the interior.

Arrayed around the rest of the plaza to the northeast and northwest, in a manner that is largely dictated by the demands of the rugged site, are a couple of rather more conventional rectilinear structures. One of these is a large two-storey structure in which the ground floor has slatted windows, a bit like Venetian blinds, to block out direct sunlight. The upper storey is a timber framed affair that offers considerably more generous lighting conditions. This building serves as a kind of records office and library for the collection of works on paper that the team have written over the past century. The other building is rather more barn-like and provides a simple covered space for use by the derwid as a kind of lab or workshop. It also sees regular service as a second classroom.

As you can no doubt tell, the variants have been keeping themselves busy. However, they have by no means been overworking themselves. Once weekends and festivals are accounted for, they only really work for two thirds of the year at most. Moreover, they don’t aim to produce much more than they need, so it is often unnecessary to do anything in particular and time can be devoted to labours of love. Additionally, there are some days when the winds are pounding in from the southwest and the rain is hammering against the shutters when the only thing many of them can do is batten down the hatches and hunker up in the tavern. By modern standards, productivity is really very low at Caer Hywen. Even where they do spend long hours on particular aspects of their work, it is not alienated labour and there are many aspects of it which they find satisfying.

There have been some tough times when the natural world had thrown up challenges that, even with advance warning, were not easy to deal with. In some horizontals, they had experienced sequential years of multiple crop failure, or times when previously unknown diseases and viral strains had afflicted people or livestock, sometimes almost wiping them out in the process. However, by the time it came to deal with these problems on the diagonal, the crew had usually managed to find solutions, even if it had occasionally required Cassiel’s analytical abilities to do so.

Most of the time though, the climate was good, food was abundant, and they had plenty of spare time on their hands to enjoy themselves. It was sometimes a relief not to have non-variant shit to deal with, beyond the usual trials of children. You could just gather at the pub between your first and second sleep to gaze up at the thick blanket of stars in the clear summer night sky and think about all that had happened over the years. On the other hand, they missed non-variants. It was less fun playing the game on your own.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

Text

The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 3: The Civilization

Non-variants would soon enter the picture. The team members would have natural born offspring. They would encounter the pre-existing inhabitants of the British Isles. More newcomers might arrive from the continent. It was vitally important therefore that their culture and civilisation had a coherent and complete form. They needed concepts that were expressed in language, technology, art, music, myth, and philosophy to tell their own people, and those they met, who they were. Naturally, they all had their stories straight on this score. They had been thinking about it and trying stuff out for long enough. Their ideas would inevitably be subject to change over time as non-variants became increasingly significant players in the cultural, political, economic, and intellectual development of their society, and this was a desirable phenomenon from their perspective. Nevertheless, the starting position was critical.

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On top of the increasing presence of non-variants, there were the criteria by which the team would ultimately judge the success or otherwise of their mission. Although they possessed more latitude than before in the means through which they might be realised, these were little different to the goals they had consistently pursued through all of their interventions.

The crew wanted the civilisation they built to be as equitable and meritocratic as possible without imposing oppressive homogeneity that impinged upon vital creativity, liberty, and difference. They aimed for it to value peace and be open and welcoming to others while being sufficiently strong and coherent to resist aggression and threats to its integrity when necessary. It was important that it would value and reward knowledge, skill, inventiveness, and human achievement yet possess a sufficient level of wisdom and humility to maintain a critical attitude towards itself and remain appreciative of its relationship to, and dependence upon, other cultures and the natural world. The people should be both capable of and willing to educate and nurture their young and care for their sick, elderly, and disabled. Also, it should be fun loving, not take itself too seriously, and have a sense of humour and an enjoyment of entertainment that did not revolve around cruelty and humiliation.

At the heart of many cultures, one can find a concept of truth, even if it is only tacit. Indeed, cultural identity as such might be described as a set of humans defined by the presence of a sufficient degree of correlation in their beliefs concerning what is or is not true. For everyday purposes, this concept of truth needs to be simple and intuitive enough for most people to be able to apply it instinctively most of the time.

The variants would deploy a concept of truth that drew on correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories. In broad outline, this held that something was true if it could be demonstrated in practice to correspond to an actual state of affairs and did not contradict other known truths (in which event one must be false). This formulation, which probably appears rather simple and obvious to someone from MOT raised in the Western philosophical tradition, has far reaching and significant implications.

Clearly, it demands a language grammar and vocabulary for expressing truth statements. However, it further suggests the concept of the “experiment” which necessitates shared systems of quantification and measurement. These amplify the importance of literacy and numeracy, which in turn transform one’s relationship to a host of phenomena, including time and memory. Although they would start slowly, the culture of “Albion” that the variants were developing would start at the outset with an alphabet based on Latin, a base-12 floating point numeric system with a zero concept derived from Indo-Arabic numerals, and units of measurement for length, angles, area, mass, volume, time (a lunisolar calendar, sundials, and sand or water timers), and even temperature (using bi-metallic strips).

They would benefit from a whole matrix of technologies that are either necessarily associated with, or can be easily inferred from, the existence of some of these ideas that would form the basis of their civilization. Some of these I have already mentioned: blades, bows, saws, shovels, picks, planes, hoes, wheels, sails, pulleys, levers, screws and the like. Others such as pens, ink, and paper were also in the mix. Indeed, there were so many that it is probably more illustrative to provide some examples of things that were most definitely not going to be given in this context.

Things like heat engines, electricity, the wave character of light and sound, the atomic nature of matter, the functioning of planetary and stellar rotations and orbits: all of these are non-obvious ideas that can be modelled in different ways for practical purposes and the accurate elaboration of which typically depends on a whole series of complex intellectual and technical developments. The new society the team was building would know nothing of these things at the outset. So long as you could potentially measure the angle of the sun, the speed of something or other, or the temperature of an oven, that was a sufficient starting point.

It should be self-explanatory by now that any society capable of developing this kind of intellectual and technical base within a fairly short period of time could not be theocratic. They had to have been people who valued knowledge and believed that it could be obtained through human action and thought, rather than simply being conferred upon them from above. Nevertheless, plenty of unknowns remained and they would require an ethical framework of higher order concepts to prevent them doing harm to themselves, others, or the world in general. Moreover, such matters would necessitate narratives to facilitate the effective communication of abstract ideas in addition to providing an explanatory structure for the origin of things and the nature of certain unknowns. Last, but by no means least, it would be convenient for the variants if these made it easier for them to do some of the more magical things they needed to do, such as substitution of their own children.

Despite their modernist aims and conceptions of truth, the variants were not naive positivists. They had no desire to peddle scientism and were well aware of the fact that people often need a belief system that provides meaning, purpose, and the possibility of redemption, even if it is essentially untrue. Shared systems of faith also provide a valuable tool for developing and sustaining social coherence. However, since they would almost certainly evolve into an organised religion over time that fed into myriad political and economic aspects of the civilisation, the choice concerning what to believe was vital.

Therefore, beyond simple binary notions of true and false, their frameworks of thought, language, and grammar would support ternary or even quaternary truth concepts, the additional positions within which might be summarised as “not true” and “not false”. These named the unknowable, the unnameable, or that which was in the process of being disclosed or concealed. Consequently, falsehood was not an absolute negation of truth per se but an independent idea of “untruth” that existed on a scale between it and the verified truth along which belief might be held as true or false in particular ways or pending certain facts.

At its root, the variants had developed a collection of mythological narratives over the years that told the story of the creation of the universe from the nothingness of the Big Bang and the ensuing collisions of matter in space, but in a highly simplified and anthropomorphised form. This creation myth ultimately ended with the births of numerous constellations of stars, the sun (“Haul”), the moon (“Lun”), and earth (“Naear”). Ultimately, there were also figures in this pantheon for all the major features of their immediate landscape, such as the British Isles as a whole (the giant “Albion”), the islands of Britain (“Pryddana”) and Ireland (“Eriu”), right down to important hills and rivers (such as “Tamesis” and “Hafren”).

At the outset at least, and on the part of the variants, there would be little pretence that these were anything other than stories which helped explain certain aspects of the world which they had left unexplained, guide ethical action, and aid a few more practical concerns, such as navigation.

The ternary concepts of nothingness and somethingness along with the disclosive space in between would be fundamental to their myths in other ways too. Aside from providing an illustration of numeric concepts, they established a context for the “otherworld” (which they called “Annwn”) of things like birth, death, dreams, and intuition. The emergence of life from nothingness and its subsumption into death was elaborated as a symbiotic cycle in which all the elements of the visible waking world were balanced by counterparts in the otherworld of Annwn.

Annwn provided a valuable spirit world which opened the way to the notion of communication with, traversal between, or even return from it. In addition to facilitating substitution, it enhanced the sacrality of the natural world in a manner that could be leveraged to promote care for it. It also riffed on ideas such as ying/yang and karma: a death and departure from the waking world was a birth or arrival in Annwn and vice-versa. The spirit of those thought to have been good in life might return in a new form to help overcome evil in this or those who had committed wicked acts might win redemption in the world of the spirits if they learned the error of their ways and atoned.

Over the long term, the maintenance and telling of these stories would be the province of a technocratic class of learned men and women known as the “derwid”. These people would be less a “priesthood” than an intellectual caste who, aside from telling didactic stories which made abstract concepts more tangible, would serve as philosophers, scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons, architects, lawyers, historians, and artists. Their numbers would be heavily skewed toward variants, and their exclusive hold over advanced knowledge throughout the early years of their culture (before they began to write books) would help to obfuscate their origins in the mists of time.

Alongside these myths was another tranche of stories which we might call legends or folktales that, while still used by the derwid, were not their exclusive domain. These legends provided origin stories and role models through narratives that were centred around definitively human action. They involved figures such as the prototypal derwids, Orin and Aeron, the valiant leaders, Lugh and Lleua, and the nurturing leaders, Ceri and Carys, the smith, Gofannon, and the farmer, Amaethon among many others.

The myth and legend cycles also lent explanatory power to other phenomena and social structures, especially the calendar. As had been the case whenever possible on prior missions, the variants were going to be using their preferred perennial lunisolar system. However, they had made a few modifications to its structure.

The year would be split into 52 weeks (with 1 to 2 intercalary days) that provided a rhythmic structure with regular breaks from work every 7th day (known as the “setath”). These sat within a larger structure consisting of four seasons, each around 12 weeks long, that were divided by the week-long festivals of Ostara, Litha, Mabon, and Gheol that were set around the solstices and equinoxes. These seasons were further subdivided into two halves by the lesser festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain. The precise points in the tropical year at which these occurred would move over the coming millennia as the inclination of the earth’s axis changed, so their calculation was inevitably the province of the derwid. The variants fully intended to introduce thematic ceremonies as a focal point of these festivals. However, they would mainly be an opportunity for people to let off steam and have a good time.

The cycles of the seasons were loosely reflected in a series of tripartite divisions for the path of life. The period from birth until 6 years of age was considered to be a period of infancy during which there were few social expectations other than to survive, grow, and learn the basics of movement and speech. Upon reaching one’s 6th summer, one would be initiated into the community during the festival of Litha. From then until the age of 12, one became properly a “child” and expected to learn the fundamentals of knowledge, including reading, writing, and maths that would lay the foundations for your participation in society. Another rite followed in your 12th summer when you officially became a “youth”. At this point, while still not a fully-fledged member of one’s tribe qualified to do things like swear oaths or bear witness, you would gain the right to do things like carry a knife (which you would be given) and would be held accountable for your actions. During one’s youth, between the ages of 12 and 18, you would continue to learn but also start to contribute by taking apprenticeships or being packed off to study with the derwid. At the age of 18, you became a fully-fledged adult with all the responsibilities that came with that status. In addition to being gifted symbolic artefacts during each of these rites of passage, one was tattooed as a permanent mark of attainment and belonging. However, your life was hopefully far from over.

The three stages of development (infancy, childhood, and youth) were followed by three further stages of adulthood, each again lasting 6 years, during which one was expected to gain first knowledge, then experience, and finally wisdom. If one reached the age of 36, one gained elevated status as an elder. Nevertheless, once again, one’s development was hopefully not finished yet. The third meta-phase of life was similarly divided into three stages of “evaluation” or “consideration”, “compassion” or “insight”, and “judgement” or “transcendence”. However, this time each period lasted 18 years. Frankly, if you lived much beyond 90 years in the absence of modern medicine, vaccines, and antibiotics it was a miracle. But it wouldn’t be unheard of in their society.

All these beliefs and rites naturally informed the political and economic structure that their civilisation would adopt, at least at the outset. It should come as no surprise that it would probably best be described as a technocratic gerontocracy.

Although their members would often be embedded within settlements, the derwid would ultimately form a tribe apart consisting of experts and specialists who were frequently itinerant. It was regarded as a vocation, rather than a job. While it would be taboo to refuse hospitality to one of their number, and unadvisable to shun their aid or advice, they would receive no remuneration for their work and would not constitute any formal part of political administration as such. Similarly, while everyone was required to learn a variety of combat skills from the age of twelve, train regularly, and do their duty when called upon to do so, derwid were not required or even expected to fight, although many would.

On a day-to-day basis, tribal affairs at a local level would be governed by a council or assembly of the elders (i.e. those of 36 years of age and above) known as the “laenoriad” who would elect a leader. This leader, who gained the honorific title “Ben”, did not necessarily need to come from among their number: it could be any nominated adult (i.e. at least 18 years of age). This chief would also serve as a judge with the laenoriad functioning as a jury. Thus, they would collectively form the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Beyond these outline constraints, how they arranged their affairs internally was entirely up to them to decide, but the principle that power came with responsibility which could only exercised effectively by those in possession of wisdom and that power was conferred (or revoked) through an act of consensus were both key. Eventually, as the number and size of settlements increased, a hierarchical series of supra-tribal councils would emerge consisting of all the leaders from a particular region and from across the British Isles as a whole.

Another important problem that it was vital to nail early on were the systems of distribution and exchange. Even when they only had the one settlement, people would not be able to do everything for themselves and stuff would need to be shared around. There were several basic options.

Barter is commonly regarded as a kind of default solution to the problem of exchange. In the absence of any other formal mechanism, this is correct insofar as people will arbitrarily exchange things in their possession or power to obtain others that are not which they need or desire, on an ad hoc basis. As a fallback, it is something that is liable to occur in any context. However, as a systemic approach it is deeply flawed. Barter encourages the appropriation and hoarding of resources, often through the violent exercise of power. It rapidly degenerates into a social order based on brute force that exhibits extreme forms of oppression and inequality. This is why it is typically regarded as an inverse index of civilization. Its very presence is indicative of barbarism.

A widespread early alternative was the so-called “palace economy”, or command economy, in which all resources are pooled with a central authority that is subsequently responsible for their distribution based on whatever criteria are deemed to be appropriate. While this method can in theory be egalitarian, it is deeply susceptible to corruption and tyranny. Moreover, by building in a single point of failure it becomes prone to political instability since, whenever failure occurs, there is typically no fallback other than a return to barter.

Another solution that was often developed in the ancient world was that of the gift economy. These often demonstrated beneficial side effects in terms of things like social coherence and trust. They operate through the extension of a form of loan in which goods or services are advanced by one party in return for social credit and the expectation of a return on this investment at a later date. Such things are all well and good but, as an exclusive system, it rather limits the ability of people or groups to proactively secure the resources they need right now. Consequently, it often tends to exist in conjunction with other forms of exchange, such as barter.

Then of course there are market economies. Obviously, that is a big and complex topic. I use the plural “market economies” deliberately because there are many different types of market, only one of which is the ideologically charged concept of a “capitalist free market” economy. For my purposes here, I am going to define a market economy as a set of one or more governed forums that exist within the context of the same coherent legal framework in which individuals or groups exchange goods and services via an intermediate form that consists of a representation of value.

Markets are an excellent structure for exchange. Their capacity to adopt a distributed, cellular form gives them the potential to be flexible and resilient. However, from the standpoint of the above definition, they are merely the bread in an economic sandwich that one loads up with the desired ideological fillings. These fillings are typically embodied in the legal frameworks of governance and the intermediary form utilised to represent value as an exchange medium.

The variants had never lost their agreement with certain fundamental aspects of a Marxist analysis of capitalism. Indeed, they had developed their position to an unparalleled degree of refinement over the years. One of Marx’s arguments with which they agreed was that, within the context of a capitalist market economy, the exchange value of commodities is ultimately regulated by socially necessary labour time. However, unlike Marx, they did not support a commodity theory of money. In their view, things like the gold specie standard merely served to obfuscate the more accurate description of money as an expression of purchasing power that ultimately reflected social status and class. Money in this context was always an abstract relative value, even if one rather foolishly chose to base one’s currency system on a scarce commodity. On past missions, the team had adopted metallic currencies for reasons of expediency and inherited context. Now that they were freed from such constraints, they were going to go down a different path.

The unit of currency in their new civilization would be based on labour time. In principle, this can be used to determine both wages and prices. For example, let’s say that 1 currency unit is equal to 1 hour (as defined at the point of the summer solstice, since they were using sundials, and winter and summer time divisions were of differing absolute duration).

Now let’s say for the sake of an example that, on average, a baker can produce 10 loaves of bread per hour, a potter can make 1 pot per hour, and a blacksmith can make 1 blade in 10 hours. In theory, the baker’s “wage” production costs would be 0.1 currency units per hour while the potter would earn 1 unit and the blacksmith 10 units; i.e. assuming that all the commodities they produce have an equal use value, we can posit their wage rate as 1 hour divided by the average number of these commodities that are produced per hour. The sale price would then be the wage cost plus the price of the materials required to produce it. Thus, ignoring the cost of materials and other capital expenditure, they each earn 10 currency units from the sale of the produce from 10 hours of labour time.

However, this can penalise time intensive functions or promote redundant production on the false assumption that all commodities are of equal value. In reality, practically no one was a wage labourer in their society anyway. Certainly not yet. When that phenomenon did rear its ugly head, wage levels would be set in the usual “capitalist” way as a function of supply and demand combined with political pressure and negotiation. In the variants’ civilization, at least at the outset while the economy remained very small and simple, prices would be determined firstly by the derwid as a function of a determination of socially necessary labour time such that everyone possessed a more or less equal purchasing power that would enable them to obtain an equitable share of the total available produce, and secondly by the laenoriad as a means of promoting socially necessary production.

The critical point about using time hours as an index of currency value was that debts would be redeemable at the last resort through the one resource to which everyone had free access: time. Moreover, it provided a tangible baseline for assessments of value with easily understood judicial ramifications. Nevertheless, once again, it wouldn’t work in practice that if you lent your mate Bob a tenner and he failed to pay it back you could literally make him work as your own indentured slave for a period of time. Like any debt in our world, you would have to lodge your claim in court. If the loan agreement was deemed to be legal, and Bob was found to have defaulted, then the “state” would simply issue the money to pay you what was owed and a certain amount of either Bob’s time or income would revert to the state for use in the public interest. Or their own personal enrichment, depending on how your tribe was running itself at the time.

This legal procedure also indicates how money would come into existence: the state would simply create it and spend it into circulation. Once again, time-based monetary units help to provide an indication of how much money should be created since the total value of all currency in circulation should be sufficient to pay everyone for all their time. In the case of our crude baker, potter, and blacksmith example, if these were the only three people in your economy, then you would need to issue the equivalent of 11.1 units per hour of work to be completed.

One of the other major questions that needed to be addressed was the physical form that the currency would take. Part of the appeal of metallic currencies was that, even in the event of the collapse of the issuing authority, people still had faith in the idea that the base metal itself would be accepted widely enough as a barter exchange medium. Moreover, making coins from expensive scarce materials over which it was comparatively easy to exert monopoly control discouraged counterfeiting. Paper money, as one alternative, lacks both qualities. Matters such as theft and durability are also pertinent issues. For the variants, the answer to these questions lay in the comparative simplicity of their society and economy and the control it would exercise over markets through its legal framework.

They intended to largely resolve the questions of theft, counterfeiting, and durability by simply not issuing the currency in a physical form at all. Or, rather, by inventing a form of banking and operating this as an exclusive state monopoly.

On market days, or at any other time one wished to go shopping or do business, one would visit the bank and make a withdrawal from one’s balance. In return, one would receive some suitably authorised paper scrip (or a quantity thereof in various values) which named you as the owner of this money and detailed the date on which it was issued and the date when it would expire (usually no more than 1 day). When you purchased something, you would name the recipient and add your own signature in the relevant space. The recipient would then return it to the bank at the end of the day’s trading at which point a balance transfer would be completed.

If you wished to shop at another, more distant, market you could still use the same scrip, so long as it had not expired. It would eventually be reconciled and, if you ran up a line of credit this way by racing back home and withdrawing more, you would soon be caught and punished. You would owe money or labour time in accordance with the court’s estimation of the rate at which this should apply.

Alternatively, you could carry a simple dated balance statement which would be added to your account at the destination following which you would be able to withdraw scrip in the usual manner. However, you would not be able to withdraw any more scrips from your “home” bank until you returned the updated balance document which would have been given to you when you banked the scrip at the distant market.

For foreign trade, you would need to withdraw scrip to purchase gold, silver, or some other commodity for use in a barter exchange. That’s what international trade is at heart. Especially in the days before globalisation. Certainly, it barely even existed at the time the variants were currently living in, and it would be a very long time before it was regulated at all.

Thus their “bank” was more of a “tally shop”. Money was simply a temporary localised physical representation of part of this balance; a series of chits and tokens produced on cheap, plentiful, ephemeral material for the purpose of value exchange and transfer. It did not bear interest and, although it could potentially be loaned, the charging of interest on such would be specifically prohibited. Courts would be under no obligation to bail you out for irresponsible loans. The creation of the money in the first instance would be entirely the province of the state who would simply spend it into existence via an act of accounting.

Of course, in the early days of their settlement, hardly any money was used, and no one really needed to worry if they had none. The essentials of life were shared freely and, since the population consisted overwhelmingly of variants, there was practically no conflict or contention over this.

Indeed, one might wonder why they didn’t simply operate a much simpler palace economy. Such a system would have satisfied their needs at the beginning. However, for the reasons noted above, it wouldn’t scale effectively. Moreover, a well-governed market economy utilising a sensible currency system can be liberating.

In a command economy, one is effectively an employee of a single monolithic state bound to follow their instructions concerning what to produce. You are subsequently given very little choice about what one consumes and when. Selling into and buying from a market allows one to choose what one produces or consumes, how much, and when. If you want to blow all your credits on ale, then go for it. Alternatively, if you have a yen to try making something radically different, you can have a pop.

The idea that someone might try and fail brings us conveniently on to the topic of welfare and other forms of social care and the structures that surround them. On the whole, this was a non-problem for them. The way in which their currency worked meant that, so long as they didn’t issue so much credit that there was inflation, it was positively beneficial to the economy for them to run social programmes and infrastructural development projects.

The derwid would be nominally responsible for healthcare and education. However, they wouldn’t be able to do it alone. Special buildings would need to be constructed. Nurses, assistant teachers, and other supporting staff would be required. Raw materials would be a regular input. Associated with primary medical care, there would almost certainly need to be some provision for palliative and old age care which came with similar requirements.

There will always be a few people who simply don’t want to be a part of your society and wish to have little to do with your carefully organised institutions. They should not be unduly punished for this. Contrariwise, one of the fundamental goals of the variants’ economy was that no one should suffer from want due to misfortune in life or by birth. Nevertheless, it was not intended to be a free-for-all. A lot of work needed to be done. From everyone according to their ability would be a basic tenet. Thus, their general welfare provision would mainly consist of the creation of currency for the purposes of direct employment by the state where necessary. This would be supplemented by ad hoc debt jubilees and regular citizen dividends.

Beyond the political, economic, and judicial concerns of the state lay many diverse cultural questions that ranged from matters such as childrearing all the way to seemingly trivial matters like fashion. The variants considered all of them to be of vital importance, even those that might appear frivolous. I will deal with only the two mentioned above at this point.

At a fundamental level, the civilisation of Albion would eschew many notions concerning both the nuclear family and private property. Individuals of any gender would be at liberty to commit themselves exclusively to each other for sexual or other purposes, and there would be ceremonies associated with this process that enabled the oaths made to be recognised in official contexts. However, there would be absolutely no necessity to commit in such a manner. When it came to sex and reproduction, the free consent of all parties was assumed to be the primary imperative. Any offspring would inherit their primary identity in a matrilineal manner and, while a social and legal onus would be placed on both parents to ensure their children fulfilled their obligations, child rearing would predominantly be undertaken by the “clan” as a whole.

This collectivism fed through into property law. As a member of a clan, one would gain certain rights and protections, including matters such as having one’s basic needs for food and shelter met. One might occupy a house or a farm that could be considered “your property”, by virtue of fulfilling a particular role within a particular group, with which you were free to do as you wished. However, this did not confer the right to exchange it: it remained the property of the clan from whom it could not be alienated. The same applied to all land. Property was something one gained as a form of privilege through the fulfilment of a responsibility or obligation. This applies as much to the tribe, whose land belonged to the natural world of which they were to serve as guardians, as it did to the individual.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 2: The First Settlement

Upon reaching their destination, the team setup camp next to the river between the dunes and the forest in a small patch of grassland that lay a short distance inland beneath the headland.

The climate of the British Isles at this time was somewhat warmer than it would eventually become. In recent times, there had been a significant cold period that had lasted a couple of hundred years and had once again thinned out the population. However, currently it might almost be described as tropical. Rain could be a problem, but the growing season was long and the temperatures good for an extended part of the year. Nevertheless, they had arrived in what was effectively the early part of spring. It was still early in the morning and conditions were decidedly chilly. Their first priorities were to get shelter, water, fire, and food.

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They unpacked the canes and rolls of hide they had hauled with them from the landing site and proceeded to build a couple of reasonably comfortable and substantial yurt-style tents. While one couple remained in the camp to collect wood and water, forage, make a fire, and keep an eye on things, the other two members of the team went off to hunt for dinner. They didn’t need to go far and returned a couple of hours later with a dead boar. As the sun rose, a lovely warm spring day unfolded. They set up their spit over the fire, enjoyed a nice meal, and absorbed the wonder of their new surroundings.

The next morning, they called on Cassiel who arrived an hour later. Over the long term, the variants were not planning to make extensive use of the time devices beyond the things that obviously only it could do. Aside from being used for jumps to create the conventional layered structure of the mission in which they substituted their offspring, they were really for emergency use only. Technically, the variants didn’t even really need to do things like eat or shit since Cassiel could simply reform them instead. However, that wasn’t a sustainable approach. Besides which, it wasn’t the way the variants rolled. They had plenty of time to allow events to take their “natural” course. Nevertheless, right now their team was too small and very vulnerable. It wasn’t just other humans they needed to worry about: the four of them could easily be killed by a herd of aurochs or bears or wolves. They needed more people and they needed to produce some more supplies.

The four members of the team performed a micro-jump back to spawn a new horizontal in which there were now eight of them. In the original timeline, they had simply disappeared forever. Their presence had been so minimal that it would leave no trace. Next, four of the eight jumped back again, creating a team of twelve. The four who remained behind destroyed themselves using the remaining time device since there was no point remaining in a horizontal in which the team was unsustainably small. They repeated this until there were twenty-four of them in total. At this point, they stopped replicating themselves, since too many people would be difficult to feed and they needed to consolidate their position first.

With each jump, they had created more tools and weapons made from wood, bronze, stone, and animal products, along with the materials required to construct more yurts. Eight members of the enlarged team were loosely assigned to hunting, four to fishing, four to gathering and processing wood, four to farming and foraging, and four to construction and development.

They soon had a little ring of twelve tents and the team set to work feverishly over the course of the spring, summer, and autumn. Despite their increase in numbers, their immediate priorities remained hunting, foraging, and wood. However, development needed to proceed apace in parallel.

They surveyed an area of around ~460 acres around the camp and began to ring bark and clear the trees, processing them into stakes, planks, firewood, and charcoal. In the space they cleared, the team began to build fences or stone walls and plant hedges. They had a small supply of seeds for grains of varying types that would be grown around this time in the Middle East, as though they brought these with them on their supposed migration west. It would be some time before they had a decent sized crop, but they needed to get something in the ground as soon as possible. Fortunately, they wouldn’t need ploughs and draft oxen. Instead, they used a no-till method, covering the seed in a layer of mulch and manure. Thousands of years later, this technique would be seen as a signature of the civilization of Albion.

Hides were tanned and they began to put together a couple of kayaks and a little sailing catamaran. They built traps for crabs and lobster, constructed oyster beds, wove rope for many purposes including to make nets and on which to farm mussels.

By the time autumn set in, they had one reasonably good-sized stone and timber-built dwelling roofed in shingles and earth in which they could all shelter if need be. It contained some basic furniture and had a proper floor, chimney, hearth, wood-fired oven, composting toilet, and attached woodshed. A little distance from the camp, they had a smokehouse, a dry storehouse, a rudimentary muffle oven for making charcoal, and a furnace for firing clay. Separate again were a compost heap, manure pile, and waste dump. They took in their first small harvest of grains and fibre crops, had a beehive, and some livestock and wildfowl, either from local wild populations that they had managed to corral or cloned from domesticated animals that might have come with them from the east on their putative migration.

The crew had cheated in a few areas to speed things up, such as using the time device to create nails, weave rope, transport goods, dress stone, or clone dogs to help hunt, but mostly it had been all their own hard work. Much as they might have liked to use the device on more occasions, the variants had to be very careful with the time tent: it could be quite susceptible to damage from things like focused impacts. While effecting repairs was not beyond their powers so long as they still had one operational device, they were made using some very rare materials that would be difficult for them to obtain for many years yet, so there was considerable risk involved that was best avoided. Nevertheless, they still had a trick up their sleeves to help speed things along. Or, rather, Cassiel did.

If you placed one time device inside another along with the requisite materials, Cassiel had long since learned how to transform himself into a variety of robotic forms, capable of teleportation via forward jumps and great feats of speed, strength, and perception. Even in an android form, he wouldn’t pass as human, but that didn’t really matter to the variants right now. Although subject to all the same constraints as the time device itself, Cassiel’s capabilities in these forms were formidable and invaluable.

Their first winter would be neither plentiful nor especially comfortable but they would survive. During the short days of autumn and winter, while the hunting, fishing, foraging, and wood teams continued their work, the farmers joined up with the builders. Over the winter they would continue to quarry and prepare building materials for more dwellings. However, before the ground went hard, they began the long slog of digging a large trench and constructing a sizable earthen embankment topped by a palisade fence and hedge around the entire ~460-acre site of the settlement.

They encountered no other humans. The team had chosen this part of the country because, at this time, it was still well away from the usual migration paths for the few tribes of the archipelago and was basically uninhabited. Of course, things might have changed if some wandering group of hunters had seen the smoke from their fire from afar and decided to check it out, but that didn’t happen. All things being equal, it was unlikely that anyone was going to come this far out of their way for almost another thousand years. All things weren’t going to be equal though: the variants expected to have occupied the entirety of the British Isles by then.

In late autumn, shortly after the vernal equinox, the team sowed their first winter wheat. It was followed, after the winter solstice, by other cover and feed crops, vegetables, herbs, and fruiting trees and shrubs. The farming team were busy creating cultivars and cultigens for a variety of existing native species and their clones of contemporary Fertile Crescent varietals. Although both their store of seed and typical yields would likely remain low by modern standards, they would have a greater quantity and variety of food come the next harvest.

Over the course of the second summer, the builders completed work on three more dwellings and good progress was made on their outer defences. The latter weren’t really intended to keep out people so much as wandering bears, roaming wolf packs, or rampaging herds of aurochs.

Following the second harvest, the crew felt sufficiently confident about both their current situation and food supplies to take the next step. Summoning Cassiel, they once again began to spawn new horizontals, reproducing themselves until they had doubled their number to 48. The variants they left behind once again abandoned their horizontals, destroying themselves and many of the things they had with them. Eventually, in years to come when mankind developed an interest in prehistoric times and the skills required to investigate such matters, someone might discover the imprint of their long-destroyed camp, or pieces of pottery or metal they left behind. However, it was unlikely. Sea levels were now stabilising but would rise a few metres yet over the coming millennia. Even if the ground wasn’t excessively disturbed and they looked in the right place, most of it would be underwater and have been battered by the sea for over a thousand years.

Back on the diagonal, the augmented team continued their work at an accelerated pace. By the end of their fourth year, they were farming properly. Their cultivars and cultigens were yielding well, and they were harvesting more than enough wheat, rye, barley, oats, flax, hemp, leeks, onions, parsnips, carrots, chard, peas, beans, beets, asparagus, chicory, lettuce, cucumber, apples, pears, plums, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries for their needs. Moreover, their selective breeding programme had begun to produce some useful results and their dependence on hunting and foraging was in steep decline. All the trees within the perimeter of the settlement that needed to go had been completely cleared, as had those for a stretch beyond the now completed outer ditch, embankment, and fence. Work was proceeding apace on the construction of more dwellings along with service buildings, such as barns, pigsties, field shelters, and stables.

By the end of year five, all 24 couples had a proper stone house in which to live in relative warmth and comfort. It was time to expand again. They spawned another horizontal, creating more variants until their settlement numbered 88 individuals who ranged in physical age between about 12 to 14 years old at one end and those in their late 20s at the other, weighted toward childless couples of around 21 years of age: it was as though some couples had already had children a number of years ago while the others would do so soon, and there were a few kids who would do likewise in years to come.

The mission structure called for “generational periods” of about 36 years, during which time each woman would have about four surviving children on average. The total population growth rate would thus be about 2.14%, almost double that of the modern world in MOT. By the end of “generation zero” in year 36, their settlement would number 144 individuals; by the end of the first generation there would be 288 people. And so on. Although their children would be natural born, they would all be substituted between the ages of 10 to 12 for the first 8 to 9 generations until sometime around the year 330 to 340, by which time the population would number ~72,000 spread across over 120 settlements of about 500 to 600 people each.

If their plan worked as intended, the population would pass 525K around the year 430 and the team would need to engineer a significant reduction in the total population rate such that it dropped to around 0.5%, just under half of that of the modern world in MOT. As they approached the year 1300, there would be almost 40 million people who would spill out beyond the British Isles and the rate would need to halve again to somewhere closer to 0.25% to prevent a calamity. One of the key mission goals was to try and produce a civilization that could manage its relationship to nature without simply relying on disease, famine, and war to do it for them.

Back in year five, those they left behind in the abandoned horizontals at this point destroyed themselves. However, this would be the last time that they did so. Their numbers were now sufficient not only to perform all the tasks that they wished to complete on a day-to-day level, but also to provide a viable gene pool, so long as they continued to employ some careful social engineering for a period. It was time to start breeding and living in this time branch for real.

Nevertheless, there was one final job for Cassiel. He transported himself to various points along a route from Syria to the British Isles via Anatolia, the Balkans, and France. At each, he carefully buried various artefacts, such as tools, weapons, and pottery, along with seed, animal bones, and other waste. In years to come, were these items ever found, they would support the hypothesis of a migration from the Near East to the British Isles over the course of several hundred years of the people who came to build the first real civilization of the archipelago.

So, here it was: the team’s first settlement. It was by no means complete yet, but all the essential pieces were in place and it was developing fast. The coastline around St. Michael’s Mount (which they were calling “Pencarreg”) looked quite different. The rocky outcrop was still a distinctive and notable landmark but was surrounded by woodlands and salt marshes laced with creeks. There were beaches, but at most points they were a good couple of hundred metres farther out beyond the low barriers of sedimentary rock that were protecting the marshes from the sea.

The variants had chosen to focus the settlement around the main headland which was joined to Pencarreg by a narrow isthmus of solid land. The whole 460 or so acres of the site followed the contours of the hillock that formed the headland. In the southwest, the outer perimeter ran from where the river drained into the marsh up along its course until it began to turn eastward in front of another marsh that was created by the meeting of the river and several of its tributaries in a natural depression. It then began to curve southward toward the tip of another rocky outcrop that lay behind the coastal marshland before turning sharply westward, past the head of a creek that housed a sheltered wooden pier and a small tidal mill, following the line of the firm, rocky land back to its starting point. The whole was thus broadly circular in form but with a kind of squat and squashed bowling pin quality to its shape.

The boundary line was steeply embanked and topped by a strong oak palisade woven together with willow along its entire length with puncture gaps at key points that housed some very sturdy wooden gates. Hedges were being grown on either side of the palisade: holly around the outer face and hazel on the inner. Along the stretches that possessed no natural defences such as the marsh and river, a large ditch had been dug that emphasised the height of the embankment even further.

The main centre of the settlement was situated atop the crest of the main headland which, overlooking the Pencarreg isthmus, was offset toward the southwest of the geographical centre of the boundary as a whole. It provided a good view over the surroundings, so it had been here that the variants had constructed their first 24 proper dwellings, set out in two rows of 12 on either side of a large central gathering space containing a well and a yew sapling they had symbolically planted. They had plans to complete the square through the construction of a large public hall as a ceremonial and administrative space, and a sizable tavern for get-togethers. From the square, the most trodden paths headed off in five main directions towards the gates in the outer defences.

One road ran south, down a steep hill and over the isthmus to Pencarreg. Although they had big plans for the mount, they weren’t doing much with it at the moment. Nevertheless, it was still a great place to come and chill out when the weather was good and watch the vast flocks of wading birds and waterfowl as the sun went down. It was also the way out to catch eels or crabs, check the oyster beds or mussel ropes, or hunt ducks and the like.

Another ran east to west broadly along what would eventually become the coastline, navigating through the marshes to the west and following the course of the higher land behind them to the east. The fourth and fifth paths ran north-north-west and north-north-east inland toward the river, woods, and hills beyond the settlement. They had mainly been trodden by the team’s regular hunting and foraging parties. However, since most of the trees that they wished to clear within the perimeter had now been cleared, it had also become where they needed to go to obtain large timbers for construction purposes. Also, just beyond the perimeter to the north-north-east, near to a place that would be known in MOT as Gwallon, they had begun a small open cast mining operation extracting tin, copper, and quartz.

As these paths headed out from the centre toward the gates in the perimeter fence, they passed through fields defined by fences and still developing hedgerows. Around these fields, and along the ways between them, many mature nitrogen-fixing trees had not been cleared, especially Alder and Elder. They were interspersed with saplings of the same and developing groves of managed beech and ash for firewood and charcoal along with emerging orchards of fruiting trees created from cultivars and cultigens.

Dotted here and there along these routes were a small selection of functional service buildings: a raised grain store, a hay and threshing barn, an oasthouse, a livestock pen and barn for milking and lambing, a dairy, a slaughterhouse and butchery, a brewery and distillery, a smokehouse, and a forge.

Starting to emerge next to the fields at some points along the way were some new houses intended for the farming variants who would be mainly responsible for looking after this side of things. Eventually, the whole area of the settlement would be divided into about 24 manageable farms of around 14-15 acres each with the remaining 115 to 116 acres being given over to a more concentrated area of houses, manufacturing works, and public or social buildings around the centre. The whole would be capable of comfortably supporting up to around 600 people.

Anticipating this expansion in numbers, the development team had started to build a sewerage system based on reed filtration that cleaned their wastewater before draining it into the marsh to the west of the settlement. Their clay and alder wood pipes, and the first of the ditches that traced their intended route, were visible along the west bound path. Work had also begun on windmills and wind pumps to power things like saws, bellows, hammers, or millstones and provide a water management system capable of supporting the population. There would be drainage ditches for the way paths that would eventually be paved, and irrigation systems for the fields. But all that was some way off yet and, without the assistance of an android Cassiel, development would be somewhat slower in the near future.

They called this place “Caer Hywen”, which meant “yew tree settlement” in the invented Celto-Latin Esperanto language they had come to use between themselves over the past few centuries and would be using in this time branch as their native tongue.

So long as they could maintain their planned total fertility rate, they would have had enough offspring that a new sub-group of 144 people would be able to split off from Caer Hywen and establish a new settlement after a couple of generations over the course of a century or so. Half a century after that, both settlements would be able to do so again. And so on and so on. After about a millennium, they would have nearly 16,000 such settlements spread throughout the British Isles. Another 500 years later, there would be over 116,000, the total population would be more than 65M of whom only around 210,000 would be variants. They would occupy the entirety of the archipelago, most of northwestern Europe, and their influence would be visible throughout much of the world.

Although it would look very different from (and remain far smaller than) a modern city in MOT, Caer Hywen would be an important port and trading centre by this time and people would travel great distances to visit it. With the variants totalling barely a hundredth of even the resident population, there would be all the usual challenges associated with a large and complex civilisation. In the years ahead, the people would face many challenges, some of which, such as major climate shifts, were beyond anyone’s power to control. However, having given the matter some considerable thought over their countless years on earth, the team had some ideas about the best way to set their new culture up so that it stood the best chance of success.

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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 1: The Arrival

This was the mission that the variants had been waiting for; the one for which they had really been preparing for so many thousands of years now. It was also likely to be their last. They planned to stay in this time branch for about 8,000 years but, after that, they had intentions of retiring from the Traveller’s life. Or, at least, attempting something completely different.

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The tropical year was that which we would think of as 6,000 BC. The variants would refer to it as year zero. The initial mission team of 4 had been travelling back in 500 year intervals, remaining at each point for around 50 years to counter the effects of the jump, survey the current global situation, and collect any data or items they needed.

As had long since become standard practice, they have landed back in Chauvet Cave before jumping again into a region of the British Isles known to us as Cornwall. Neither the islands nor the region will bear these names in this time branch, but it still offers them an excellent combination of resources in a compact area defended by the sea. And it is as close to a blank slate as they want to get.

The variants are not alone on this island though. They will be sharing it with a few thousand other humans. The existing residents are hunter-gatherers who generally move seasonally between two or more different places of occupation. They are not completely primitive: they build settlements with homes and other facilities, hunt with domesticated dogs, forage for grains, fruits, and roots, use spears, barbed hooks, and other tools and weapons of all kinds that they craft with great skill. There are both stupid and clever individuals among them and they have beliefs, emotions, and motives both good and bad like anyone else. They are modern humans in every respect.

Nevertheless, most of the current population mainly prefer to occupy the eastern and northeastern coastal regions where there are good flints to be found and abundant wildlife to hunt among the post-glacial wetlands that have been created over the past few thousand years by the warming climate and rising sea levels. In years gone by, they would have lived and hunted on the plains of Doggerland. However, they had been shrinking for a long time until, quite recently, and really rather suddenly as such massive changes in the natural world go, what remained was completely inundated and Britain was separated from the continental mainland and became an island.

To all intents and purposes, the environment was practically unaffected by the few humans who were dotted about. The variant team had seen and lived in it for a brief period only 500 years later. They knew what to expect and it had barely changed over the intervening period.

While arboreal cover had re-established itself quickly after the Ice Age and was very extensive, the landscape was not entirely dominated by trees. The image of deep and dark primordial forest blanketing the land from shore to shore is a figment of the modern imagination from MOT. Land cover in the British Isles consisted in many places of groves of trees surrounding the migration paths of the larger remaining herbivores whose numbers prevented arboreal spread by feeding on the saplings and the protective shrubbery they needed to survive.

These trails often traversed between the more expansive areas of moorland and heath such animals used as mating grounds. They were and always have been devoid of trees for reasons of altitude, soil conditions, or exposure to harsh weather conditions or salt-laden winds. Such regions included much of the southern downlands as well as Dartmoor and the most northerly of the highlands of Scotland among others. Understandably, the human inhabitants also tended to visit these game-rich lands during mating season.

Grasslands, as distinct from moorland and heath, were primarily concentrated in the migration corridors of the herbivores that were drawn to them. Large areas of open grassland did exist but were rare. Whether “open” or “closed”, they were dominated by local strains of seeding grasses and plants. Also widespread, especially on the margins beneath and within the canopy of the trees, other important plants flourished, such as stinging nettles and a diverse range of rosaceae shrubs.

Beyond the paths and grazing lands of large herbivores, especially on the more inaccessible slopes, one would quickly find oneself within the dense forest that more closely accords with romantic modern images. Their dark, leaf-strewn underbrush was home to a dizzying array of mosses and fungi.

The species of trees that populated these varying types of woodland would be recognisable to a contemporary observer, consisting of Birch, Aspen, Willow, Scots Pine, Hazel, Alder, Oak, Lime, Elm, Holly, Ash, Beech, Hornbeam, and Maple. As a pioneer species, ‘quercus robur’, commonly known as the English or European Oak, was prominent but by no means dominant. However, the dense, dark forest that cloaked many of the less hospitable regions was dominated by ‘quercus petraea’, or Sessile Oak.

The inexorable trend over the past few millennia since the end of the Ice Age had been in favour of tree cover. Already, the sparse and open landscapes of first-generation pioneer species such as Birch and Scots Pine were giving way to more densely populated woodland of Oak and Ash with thick understoreys of Hazel that promoted smaller mammals at the expense of some of the larger fauna. Nevertheless, dwindling herds of large game still clung on in the ever-diminishing open grassland spaces.

In terms of fauna, the king of the grassland migration corridors was the legendary aurochs. They were both larger and far more dangerous than most modern domesticated bovines, especially the bulls. They existed throughout post-glacial Europe.

As a species, aurochs exhibited a high degree of sexual dimorphism. Bulls generally grew to stand around 1.8 metres tall at the shoulder and cows around 1.5 metres. The former were almost universally black with a white eel stripe down the spine whereas the latter were reddish-brown. Both sexes possessed long legs, a short trunk and dewlap, a large, long, and straight skull with distinctive forward-facing horns that were especially massive in males. An S-shaped backline with high shoulder splines and a slim belly and slender waist was also a feature of both sexes but was especially emphatic in bulls. A healthy, fully-grown aurochs was safe from any predator except man. However, grey wolf packs, widespread at this time, would hunt the young, elderly, and injured among the herd.

Brown bears were solitary and less common than wolves in the British Isles yet could potentially take down a young auroch. They almost never did so, but would scavenge on wolf kills. The risk of being gored was unnecessary given that this landscape was in many ways ideal for them. Foraging, and smaller, safer kills were both plentiful in the groves and thin woodland that skirted and pockmarked the grassland migration corridors, and fish were abundant in the numerous wetlands, rivers, and lakes.

In addition to herds of aurochs were wisent, or European Bison, and vast numbers of spritely red and roe deer and nimble mouflon. Alongside them ran herds of tarpan. Wild boar, badgers, stoats, weasels, polecats, red squirrels, wild forest cats, and pine martens scuttled within the skirting woodlands. Upon the moorlands and uplands especially, elk were also still found in large numbers, along with smaller mammals such as the mountain hare. Here too, between the forest and moor, were red fox and lynx.

For most intents and purposes, the types of small bird species and songbirds were the same as those that would adapt to inhabit contemporary suburban gardens in MOT. Many of the same types of eagles, hawks, kites, buzzards, ospreys, owls, and corvids hunted them in addition to fish or small mammals. The most magnificent of these was the white-tailed sea eagle which ranged freely over the northwestern regions of the archipelago especially, often feeding on the large colonies of seabirds among which could be found the likes of the Great Auk.

Among the upland elk and hare lived moor-dwelling birds such as the ptarmigan. Elsewhere, vast and vibrant wetland areas provided an ideal home to a wide array of species including beaver, otter, woodcock, duck, moorhen, and crane. In addition to the coastal marshes that were gradually being consumed by rising sea levels, many inland areas that would later become grassland or forest were currently wetland habitats centred around lakes left by retreating glaciers that were particularly favoured by the few hunter-gatherer groups in the British Isles.

The team had arrived with a “survival kit” similar to that which they had used during previous missions, although it was heavily customised to their current situation and plan. Certainly, things like money would be of no use to them here. Along with two time chests and four nanosatellites, they had another chest packed to the brim with the refined elemental ingredients required to create a range of useful tools, weapons, and other supplies, stored in their most compact and stable form.

They were wearing clothes of furs, leather, and linen, and were equipped with recurve bows, knives, and walking staves. However, they had little need to concern themselves with appearing “contemporary”. While they had no intention of introducing anything that we might think of as “modern” technology, their aim was to bend this time to their will immediately, rather than attempt to blend in. So long as the materials they used were sufficiently biodegradable, almost all physical evidence of their futuristic presence at this point in time would be long gone before any non-variant even thought to look for it.

Nevertheless, the variants did not look completely out of place. In later years, should anyone uncover the bones of one of their physical forms and conduct a DNA analysis, it would appear as though they had migrated from the Middle East somewhere around Syria. They had wavy black hair, chocolate skin, and blue or hazel coloured eyes. And they were all absolutely gorgeous. Pimped out with an array of genetic enhancements and infused with nanites, they were lean, muscular, and athletic with great strength and stamina, well-formed symmetrical features, and flawless skin. The enhancements they had made did not make them superhuman but would give them and many of their descendants a fairly significant advantage.

Having transformed their packed elemental resources into a collection of tools and supplies, dispatched the nanosatellites into orbit, and jumped the time chests into their secure storage within the craton beneath Greenland, the variant team of four headed off to find a suitable place in which to camp. They had a decent idea where to look.

Fairly near to where they had landed was a little isthmus or spit of land consisting of marsh and woodland with some rocky outcrops that linked to a raised headland containing a few small areas clear of trees and a nearby game trail along which animals travelled to a stream that ran through a narrow valley. It ticked all their boxes. The stream provided fresh water. The sea was full of fish. The salt marsh and rock pools attracted birds and marine life of all kinds. There was a plentiful supply of wood. Although the patches of grassland on the headland were not as fertile as the heavily forested valley areas around the streams, they were more than fertile enough for growing crops on, and the surrounding woodland and nearby game trail provided superb foraging and hunting potential. There was a little rocky hillock at the head of the spit that could be easily defended should anyone turn up with hostile intent. Last, and by no means least, the whole area sat at the head of some rich veins of ore, and you could even find gold in some of the streams if you looked.

It was St. Michael’s Mount and the area around Marazion.

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ankulometes · 2 years ago

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Willow Lodge

Most of the McCarthy family left 6 Victoria Avenue in West Didsbury on the morning of Sunday the 10th of March 1985. They piled into the green Volvo 260 estate along with their assorted luggage and drove down to Herefordshire. Ellen drove and Marie, their current au pair, sat in the front while Martin, Miles, and Emily squeezed into the back. That evening they stayed at the Butcher’s Arms in Woolhope. Michael remained behind among the boxes to deal with the removal men. He came down in his red Opel Monza GSE with the family’s two cats and met up with the others, along with the removal lorries, on the Monday morning to move in at Willow Lodge.

No sooner had Michael locked up at 6 Victoria Avenue and driven off for the last time, than a man who looked very much like one of the estate agents responsible for the sale of the property walked around the corner. He unlocked the door, went inside, and proceeded to begin inspecting various nooks and crannies. The following day, a woman who bore the exact appearance of Miles’ form teacher would turn up at an empty Moor Allerton school during the half-term holiday. If anyone had challenged her, which they didn’t, she had supposedly come to collect some things she had left in the classroom, but then proceeded to wander around the school, examining a host of areas, including the bathrooms.

Of course, both people had been David. He had gone to do the clean-up operation, removing all the tiny surveillance devices he had previously installed. Then, returning to Lapwing Lane, he packed up his things and destroyed all the clothes and other belongings Miles had been using while they waited for their substitution window. David had already closed on his new home on Hampton Park Road. Not having much in the way of stuff to move, he had mostly been able to conduct the operation at a distance over the phone. He paid up the rent on the flat at Brankgate Court until the end of April and gave notice to the landlord of his intention not to renew the lease. Having already jumped the time chests to their new storage location in Hereford, he threw his rucksack and messenger bag onto the back seat of the Saab and headed south.

About the same time David drove off, Miles and Martin were searching for the football among the family’s packed belongings in order to go and play in their massive new back garden. Willow Lodge was a wonderful house. Miles had come to feel truly privileged to have been able to grow up in such a place. However, in March 1985, it had seen better days.

The McCarthy’s had purchased the property from the children of the last long-term owner-occupant. She had been a widow who had lived in the property since marrying in the early 1920s. Her husband had died during the Second World War, and she had lived as a widow until her death in 1971. All she had had to live on was her war widow’s pension, and Willow Lodge had gradually fallen to wreck and ruin. Her three children had all moved overseas to Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s. After their mother had died, they had tried to sell Willow Lodge to pay the tax bill the inheritance of the property entailed. However, they had failed to secure a buyer at anything approaching an acceptable price. They had subsequently separated the house crudely into three apartments and rented it out. Willow Lodge continued to degrade as the absentee landlords sought ever more dubious tenants who were prepared to live among the shambles of the once-proud home. By the early 1980s, when they had visited the UK again, it had become inescapably evident that they needed to get rid of the property, no matter the price. And that was when Michael had made them an offer of £185K, which was £15K less than their asking price. Despite its condition, Willow Lodge wasn’t a cheap property by the standards of Herefordshire at that time. But it was still a bargain for a superb regional example of a Regency villa-style farmhouse with 12 acres of land.

Like many houses in Hampton Bishop, Willow Lodge was set back behind a flood ditch from the small country lane next to which it sat. The property boundary backed right onto the embankment, known locally as The Stank, which protected the low-lying village from total inundation by the Lugg and Wye rivers every time the waters rose. Nevertheless, the fact that the lanes filled with water on an almost annual basis was simply a part of life in Hampton Bishop, despite the defences. Willow Lodge was right on the frontline whenever the waters did spill around or – God forbid – over The Stank. The ditches were lined by mature trees, including the eponymous willows that were to be found on either side of a wall, about 5 foot tall and made from a patchwork of old brick and local stone, that delimited much of the roadside boundary of the property.

The McCarthy’s had swept in through the gateway – which no longer had any gates – and into the gravel driveway on the northwest side. It swept up toward the service wing on the north side of the house and around to what was once the main formal entrance to the property on the west front. This was behind a front lawn that, despite being the smallest of the gardens at Willow Lodge, was still larger than the backyard the McCarthy’s had enjoyed at 6 Victoria Avenue. Beyond the lawn were the tumble-down ruins of an old stone wall that would, once upon a time, have been a small walled kitchen garden. It was all now rather unkempt. The lawn was patchy and ill-maintained, the shrubs had all been allowed to grow wild, and whatever flower beds there once were had been all but absorbed by the combination of weeds, shrubs, and grass.

Ellen fumbled through all the various sets of keys the agent had given her, searching for the right one as she tried them out in the door, and eventually they entered by the rear porch. This led into the former service wing that had been one of the three apartments into which Willow Lodge had been divided in the 1970s. From the porch, one door led into the back hall of the main block of the house, via which the upstairs rooms of the north wing apartment could be reached. Another door led through into a dank corridor that provided access to the old kitchen, pantry, butlery, laundry, scullery, and boot room. The kitchen still had an oil-fired Aga that had been fitted in the 1930s but, as Miles could recall from his first childhood, it never got up to heat and was utterly useless for anything but drying boots. The rest of the room had been refitted in the 1970s with a load of cheap plywood cabinets and a tile-imitation vinyl floor that now rippled and curled over the damp, mouldy concrete beneath. The old butler’s room had been used in recent times as a pokey little sitting room while the scullery had been turned into a WC that was as rank as the other rooms. Ellen went around excitedly, explaining what everything was going to look like eventually while Michael asked questions about how much it was going to cost.

Fortunately, the former owners had taken such a cheap approach to the division of the property that it was still possible to traverse it as an uninterrupted whole. Their tactic had simply been to lock the doors at key points and cover them in cheap plywood panels that had recently been removed as the tenants had left in order to facilitate showing the property to prospective buyers. Thus, from the maze-like corridor in the north wing, one could still walk through into the old library. Like many of the rooms in the main part of the house, it was about 5 by 5 metres – they were dimensions that were largely dictated by the grid upon which the classical proportions of the floorplan were based. The original unit would almost certainly have been 1 rod. The room was dominated by a glorious Venetian window-cum-garden-door that led out onto the expansive lawn on the more sheltered and private east side of the property. The library had been used as the “kitchen” in recent times for the apartment formed from the downstairs rooms in the main house. And, by kitchen, the owners had meant that a 4-ring electric hob and oven had been fitted in one corner along with a sink and sideboard. The previous tenants had used the old Victorian bookcases to store food and equipment. Sadly, these were now falling to pieces, along with most of the paint, wallpaper, and plasterwork.

A door on the opposite side of the library led into another small back corridor that provided access to what Ellen referred to as “the music room”. It was a circular room, again just under 5 metres in diameter, that must have been utterly delightful when it was first built. The arc of the circle formed part of a bow front on the east garden façade of the house and was dominated by another wonderful, curved Venetian window and garden door. The walls of the room were decorated with wooden panels that had once been beautifully painted with intricate floral motifs. Sadly, over a century of sunlight had combined with some brutal treatment in recent times to render them a pale, flaking, battered shadow of their former glory.

At the end of the corridor was another room the same size as the study, which Ellen introduced as “the morning room”. In addition to having another glorious Venetian-style French window leading out onto the east lawn, it had yet another identical window on the south facade that led into a smaller patio-garden that provided another sizable lawn dotted with mature fruit trees. Its aspect meant that it was fabulously bright and well-lit, which at present meant that the extent of the wear and tear was very visible. Exposed to the beams of sunlight that battered their way through the expanse of dusty glazing, the walls, floors, ceilings, paintwork, woodwork, and plasterwork all cried out for love and attention. Incongruously, there was a sink fitted in one corner of the room. It had amounted to a luxury feature in the 70s when the tenants had used the room as a bedroom and the presence of a sink was like having an ensuite by the standards of British properties. The sink did look like it might have doubled up as a toilet on occasions, since it was stained with streaks of yellow.

From the morning room, Ellen led them all back out through the corridor to the main hallway. This was a double-height square space, dominated by an elegant, sweeping, semi-circular staircase. It was lit from above by a skylight and from the west through half-glazed doors to a porch flanked by a little used cloakroom and WC. The hall itself had seen service as a lounge in recent times while the old cloakroom had been converted into a small bathroom. Mercifully, it was one of the better-preserved spaces in Willow Lodge. The upstairs landing had been crudely boarded out to block off the upstairs apartment but it was clearly so flimsy that you could probably kick it down in less than an hour and have the old hall more or less fully restored.

Off the hall to the north was the old dining room. It had evidently been just as fabulous as the music room once upon a time, but was now equally run down. The space had been formed into an octagon through the use of floor-to-ceiling wooden panels that had been painted in a Japonisme style in imitation of lacquerware in blacks, reds, and golds, presumably at some point in the 1890s. Concealed draws and cupboards for crockery and cutlery were built into the corners where the panels cut off the edge of the room. Originally, you would even have entered the room through such a concealed door, but that little flourish had evidently been lost at some point. Everything that remained was faded, scratched, cracked, and broken.

On the other side of the hall, was “the living room”. That name, as both Miles and Martin would have already been expected to know, meant that no one was allowed to live in it and it would not be permitted to contain a television. It would be used only for special occasions and important visitors. At about 5 x 7 metres, it was the largest room in the house. Like its neighbour, the morning room, it had a large Venetian-style French window leading out onto the south garden. It was also a similar condition, right down to the eccentric sink in one corner.

The upstairs rooms in the main part of the house had generally fared a little better. Evidently, the apartment that had occupied the first floor here had been the most desirable one, or it had been fortunate to gain the most considerate tenants. Arranged as a flat, it consisted of six rooms and a bathroom, with most of them being more or less aligned with the rooms on the ground floor. They all looked in need of new wallpaper or a lick of paint and some fresh carpets and curtains, but other than that they only required a few minor repairs here and there. Emily was assigned one of the two bedrooms above the living room for now and Marie took the one above the library which Miles aimed to claim for himself in years to come. The

Ellen bagsied the one over the morning room. She had great plans to turn that and the room above the music room into her own little kingdom with a dressing room and luxurious ensuite bathroom. As Miles knew, it would be a wonderful little suite eventually, with gorgeous views south and east over the meadows and the rolling Herefordshire countryside beyond. It would become one of the things that always made her very reluctant to move house again. In his previous timeline, he had begged her to sell up after Michael died in 2029. The ever increasing frequency and severity of floods afflicting Hampton Bishop had combined with a succession of property price crashes to render Willow Lodge practically worthless by then. Ellen had a live-in nurse during the 2030s, and Emily was living nearby, but other than that she was just banging around in the big house by herself. Miles had flown over from New Zealand to visit her when the village had flooded again in November 2039. His last memory of his mother was her as a frail 91-year-old woman, sitting staring out of the window of her lovely bedroom, gazing at the flooded landscape through watery eyes. She contracted pneumonia and died the following February, a month shy of her 92nd birthday party which Miles had been due to attend.

The remaining two bedrooms in the main part of the house were set aside as guest rooms. As agreed prior to their departure from Manchester, Martin and Miles were to have the rooms in the north wing that would originally have provided accommodation for the servants. This part of the house was quite remote and separate from the rest, which was why Martin and the original Miles had wanted it. They would be able to make plenty of noise and mess without disturbing everyone else. Moreover, since Ellen was eventually planning to renovate the whole of the north wing, they had carte blanche to do whatever they liked with the decor before the work commenced.

A corridor ran along the west side of the north wing. To the right at its start was a grotty 1960s bathroom with an underpowered electric shower over an old enamel bath, a filthy old sink and toilet, a mouldy carpet, and plumbing that was heavily plagued with limescale. The room was lit by a single wooden casement window that had replaced the original sash at some unspecified point in the past, probably the 1950s. Either way, the wood was already rotting and the frame was falling apart. Being east facing, the bathroom really didn’t get much light once the sun passed the yardarm each day, which was a significant contributory factor to the generally dark and dank nature of the room.

The room that Martin had claimed lay at the far end of the corridor and spanned the full-width of the wing from east to west. The one that Miles was to have sat in between it and the bathroom. At four metres deep and a little under three metres in width, it wasn’t pokey but could hardly be described as large. Although mercifully somewhat drier than the bathroom, it had many similar qualities of lighting and general state of repair as its neighbour. It was lit by a single bulb that descended on a wire from a yellowing 1960s plastic light fitting in the middle of the ceiling. As with all the upstairs rooms in the north wing, the sash had been replaced by a poor quality wooden casement window, although at least the one in Miles’ bedroom closed properly. As he recalled though, it got terrible condensation in winter that would freeze on the inside of the window when it was cold. Any ornate cornicing or similar that there might once have been had long since been stripped. It was currently a plain, bare cell with a threadbare beige carpet that smelled of tobacco and white-painted walls stained with nicotine. Miles was tempted to change his mind and ask his mother if he could have the room next to Emily, but that would have been out of character. The young Miles would have wanted to be next to his big brother.

The gardens and fields surrounding Willow Lodge were far more bare and open than Miles remembered them being without all the trees that would grow to maturity during his life. On the other hand, there were a few old specimens that wouldn’t survive all that much longer, such as the big Scots Pine in the middle of the east lawn. Of the surrounding outbuildings that came with Willow Lodge, the old carriage house between the south and east gardens was currently a total ruin, its roof full of holes, the timbers beginning to collapse, and the walls starting to crumble. It would need drastic intervention soon if it was to survive, and it would get it. The old timber-framed barn beyond the north wing between the east garden and the orchard was faring slightly better but had obviously lacked any real purpose for many decades now. The previous owners had cleared it of most of the rubbish before handing over the property, but whomever they had paid to do that job had left quite a bit of rusty old pre-war agricultural equipment that had presumably just been too heavy or awkward to move.

Miles’ image of the gardens came from what his parents made of them after planting loads of trees and shrubs and generally lavishing a lifetime of well-funded love on their home. Currently, all the fields were rented out as pasture to one of the local farmers. They would gradually be reclaimed by the McCarthy’s as they found other uses for them over the coming decade. First the small paddock at the end of the east lawn and old barn would be used as the site for a tennis court, cricket net, and football pitch. The barn itself would be converted into an indoor-outdoor swimming pool and garden room. Then, about 1990, Emily would finally manage to persuade their parents to get her a horse. Consequently, after a brief stint as a games room, the carriage house would then become stables. The middle paddock would become her jumping arena and the two paddocks beyond that would mainly be used to provide grazing for the horse. Then half of the south garden and the orchard behind the old barn would be sold off as building plots and Michael would turn the hay field that ran behind The Stank into woodland and “wild garden”. But that was all some way off. Right now, it looked exactly like what it was: an old smallholding that had suffered from a lack of maintenance for too long.

For now though, after a game of football with Martin and Emily and some time spent exploring the grounds, it was time to unpack. Michael and the removal men had placed most of the tea chests and major items of furniture in the required rooms, as instructed first by their labels and then by Ellen again after she decided she had changed her mind. In Miles’ room, there was now a single bed with an oiled pine frame and an overly-soft mattress located in the far corner from the door. Underneath were two, large, matching roll-out drawers. Along the wall opposite the bed was a table and chair, also both in oiled pine. In between them, underneath the window, was a low, wooden bookshelf painted in a shade of pea-green. On top of the table, leaning against the wall, was a large cork board with an oiled pine frame. Positioned against the wall behind the door was a somewhat flimsy wardrobe with mirror doors that was from the same range as the bed.

In the middle of the floor were two tea chests containing the worldly possessions of the original Miles. There was quite a bit of Lego, mainly from the space range, a good collection of Star Wars figures with a Slave I toy (Boba-Fett’s ship) and an Imperial Scout Walker, a load of Scalextric track with a good selection of cars of various kinds, a small collection of children’s books by authors including Roald Dahl, A.A. Milne, J.R.R. Tolkein, and John Christopher, and a 48K ZX Spectrum. A lot of it was stuff he shared with Martin, who had boxes containing many similar items in his room. Then there were things like clothes, shoes, and bedding along with more personal items, such as posters. The walls of the original Miles’ bedroom had been decorated with a selection of anti-nuclear protest works from CND. This was the 1980s after all. Miles sat cross-legged on the floor and inspected each item fondly before arranging everything neatly into place and making himself at home. That much was entirely in character. Miles had always been a neat and slightly fastidious child who couldn’t bear things being in the wrong position.

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ankulometes · 3 years ago

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A Guide to Albion, Part 3: Climate

The territories encompassed by the contemporary nation state of the United Cynban are located throughout the globe and experience a wide range of climatic conditions. In this essay, I will outline in more detail those that generally prevail within what they call The Cartrefi, which is an informal designation for the Alban islands in the North Atlantic.

Albion possesses a temperate oceanic climate with regular light rainfall all year round. The temperature varies with the seasons seldom dropping below -7°C or rising above 43°C. However, within these constraints, there is a significant degree of variation from south to north and west to east.

The north is progressively colder than the south while the west is somewhat wetter and milder than the east. Regions such as Faroe and Setyr in the far north experience a subpolar oceanic climate that is moderated by the Gulf Stream.

Albion’s climate is often described as “ideal” insofar as it is neither too hot nor too cold and neither too wet nor too dry. Historically, it is thought to have been a factor in the early development of civilisation and, more recently, of advanced, industrialised, and urbanised society in the country due to the benign conditions it creates on the whole for agriculture. Moreover, although conditions can be variable on a day-to-day basis, the long range weather patterns affecting the county are broadly predictable.

From a global climatological perspective, there are a number of macro patterns that impact climate and weather conditions in Albion. These include the North Atlantic Oscillation and Polar Jet Stream, the Gulf Stream, El Niño, and the boundary of the Polar Cell and Ferrel Cell.

Overall, Albion enjoys warmer weather than other countries at the same latitude. This is in part due to the moderating effects of being an archipelago but is mainly down to the presence of the Gulf Stream. This is a major current of warm water from the Gulf of Mecsico. As it passes the mid-Atlantic ridge, it splits off into a number of branches.

The largest of these eastern branches of the Gulf Stream runs up the west coast of Eirean and Godan toward the arctic. Another northerly branch splits off and heads around Tyrodan and Faroe. A third runs directly into the southwest tip of Brytan and heads up through the Alban Sea past Cerno and Cymran. The final branch heads south past the coast of Portiwgal and northwestern Africa, where it circles around to meet the mid-Atlantic split point again.

The Polar and Ferrel Cells are not unrelated to ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. They are part of the large-scale system of air currents in the atmosphere by means of which thermal energy is distributed across the planet and are caused by a number of things, including the variable heating effect of the sun at different latitudes and the rotation of the earth. However, they can be defined by the laws of thermodynamics and are structurally constant within those terms even if long term climate phases cause them to shift. Since the end of the last Ice Age, the boundary of the Polar and Ferrel Cells has sat just off the north coast of the Godanish mainland at around 4b latitude.

Jet streams are narrow, fast-flowing, meandering, high-altitude air currents that occur between the troposphere and stratosphere around the boundaries of the atmospheric cells. The Polar Jet Stream is that which forms between the Polar and Ferrel Cells.

The route of the Polar Jet Stream is strongly influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation. This is defined by the two relative centres of high and low pressure known to contemporary meteorologists as the Asores High and the Tyrodanar Low.

The interaction of the Gulf Stream and the Jet Stream with the North Atlantic Oscillation are the primary factors in long range weather patterns surrounding the Brytanic Isles.

During summertime and wintertime, a relative equilibrium exists between the Asores High and the Tyrodanar Low that results in a more northerly “obstructed” route for the Polar Jet Stream. This is referred to by meteorologists as a “negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) phase”. It results in wet weather being carried predominantly farther north, leaving Albion comparatively settled.

Furthermore, the relative difference in pressure between these high and low regions leads to predominantly cyclonic or anticyclonic weather systems during winter and summer, respectively. High pressure, anticyclonic weather patterns result in warm southwesterly or southerly winds. Low pressure, cyclonic systems bring cold northwesterly to easterly winds.

During autumn and spring, more rapid heating or cooling around the arctic or equator leads to a pressure difference between the Tyrodanar Low and the Asores High resulting in a “positive NAO phase” and a more southerly, direct path of the Polar Jet Stream. This typically brings changeable, wet, and stormy weather to Brytanic shores.

At ground level, this is most noticeable in the phenomenon known to residents of Albion as the Autumn Showers. Usually these occur around the time of the equinox in the middle of the month they call Albanhydrhi which falls within the tropical year at a point we would think of as late September to early October. These rains traditionally herald the end of summer.

At the high point of the Atlantic hurricane season, a positive NAO phase leads to the tailend of hurricanes in the western Atlantic being blown over to Albion as late-summer storms.

A similar, albeit less intense, phase is responsible for the corresponding Spring Showers. They are a feature of the weather in March and April (in their calendar) that has historically been seen as marking the end of winter. At this time of year, a more rapidly warming Asores High once again creates a pressure disequilibrium with the Tyrodanar Low. However, overall cooler sea and air temperatures in the North Atlantic and disassociation from the hurricane season means that the resulting winds generally carry less precipitation.

In between, the prevalent stabilisation of pressure differences in the North Atlantic Oscillation usually lead to a more northerly Jet Stream. In Albion, this results in warm, settled weather in summer, with prevailing Gulf Stream southwesterlies, and cold, settled winters, with dry easterly or wet northwesterly to northeasterly winds.

During El Niño events, increased wind shear over the western Atlantic can lead to reduced hurricane formation. This generally leads to wetter, stormier autumns in the Brytanic Isles as the hot, moist air is instead blown directly across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream. This can sometimes cause flash floods in vulnerable regions during the latter half of the months of Albanhydrhi and Hydrev.

The weather in Albion becomes generally wetter, colder, and more unsettled the farther north one travels due to the location of the Ferrel and Polar Cells and higher average altitudes in the more mountainous northern regions. Similarly, the west coasts of Eirean and Godan experience the highest levels of rainfall because they are both mountainous areas and bear the brunt of the wet Atlantic winds.

By the residents of Albion, spring is generally reckoned as beginning at the start of March. The official date used is the vernal equinox that occurs during Aurely. The weather at this time of year is characterised by the lengthening of the day leading to calm, dry weather that, while still cool at night, is noticeably warmer than the cold of late winter that precedes it. As the great poet T.S. Eliot expressed it, “Yr mis arcreul Awreli man, bridanythvy / othimarwtyr lilacan.”

Whilst it is not what Eliot meant, Aurely can be cruel because it is often a “false spring”. Aside from the tendency for storms and rains to arrive with the Spring Showers as temperatures begin to rise later in the month, it can also bring snow. There is about a 3∝ chance that the positive NAO phase around the spring equinox can suddenly bring strong easterly winds from Siberia that result in exceptional snowfall. This is often very bad news, especially for farmers. The freezing temperatures can kill germinating crops and young lambs or calves whilst the meltwater, combined with the rains that still arrive from the west afterwards, can cause waterlogging and flooding.

Nevertheless, with the exception of climate periods such as the Little Ice Age, the weather has always settled by early April. There is only about a 2∝ chance of the Spring Showers continuing beyond the first week of this month, which is widely regarded as the beginning of what is known as the “low summer”: in Albion, they unofficially divide the year into six “little seasons”.

The weather in late spring is typified by the gradual tailing off of the Spring Showers. The winds decrease in ferocity and increase in temperature, becoming a gentle breeze by early April. Average temperatures also increase from around Ɛ-15°C in Aurely and March to settle in the high ‘seens and low twendys. Because there is often still quite a lot of water about, humidity tends to rise as the winds drop. Rainfall remains very regular as a consequence. A typical day starts bright, clear, and fresh before getting humid and clouding over in the afternoon when there is likely to be rain.

Furthermore, while it is quite likely to get cloudy toward late afternoon and evening, the inhabitants tend to be a bit disappointed if it isn’t sunny for most of the day. Of the summer months, July is usually the hottest and most humid. It also tends to mark a shift from the humid “low” summer, during which rain remains regular but light, to the “high” summer of August that feels quite different.

August tends to be quite hot and dry as blocking mid-Atlantic highs cause winds to disappear and temperatures to rise. While there are almost always some high-altitude clouds, you might not see rain until very late in the month. When it does come, it often arrives in the form of violent summer storms that vanish overnight. On a number of occasions over the course of history, their early or otherwise timely arrival has come to the rescue against the threat of invading forces.

If these spectacular storms come in early August rather than September, it is often taken as a sign that the Autumn Showers will also arrive early. This is nonsense though. The two are largely unrelated. It is quite possible to have August storms followed by a hot and relatively dry Albanhydrhi which may on rare occasions even stretch into Hydrev. When this happens, it is referred to as an “Indian” or “second” summer.

Autumn is generally reckoned as starting around the middle of Albanhydrhi. The official date in the modern United Cynban is the equinox of the 11th or 12th of Albanhydrhi. It is almost always marked by the onset of the mild, wet, and windy weather that defines the Autumn Showers. These arrive around the middle of the month and a discrepancy of more than two weeks in either direction is very abnormal.

The storms increase in severity throughout October. There is a good chance of flash floods in a number of places throughout the country. However, winds in excess of 55 mph are rare across most of the two mainlands. Nonetheless, they generally cause a good number of trees to fall with consequent loss of life and damage to property. On the west coast of Eirean and Godan and in Faroe, these storms can be very severe indeed.

Most people think of winter as starting in November and lasting until the end of February. It is often further subdivided into two little seasons of “low winter” (November and December) and “high winter” (January and February). The Autumn Showers have usually dissipated by November. Whether they have or not, the weather at the start of month tends to provide a strong indication of what to expect for the next four months. According to received wisdom, there are three types of winters in Albion: cold and dry, cold and wet, or mild and wet.

In the first type, the strong southwesterlies and rains associated with the Autumn Showers die down during early November and the weather turns clear, cold, and still. Eventually, at some point during late December or early January, freezing easterlies arrive. These affect the east of the country most harshly. Hoar frosts, freezing fog, light snowfall, and temperatures around zero will dominate for the remainder of “high winter” and there will be little rain over the course of winter as a whole.

The impact of these cold, dry winters is lessened the farther west one travels in the country. In many parts of southwest Brytan and Eirean, you will get freezing temperatures and frosts but you’re unlikely to see snow. The skies will remain predominantly clear and sunny. While this may be fairly pleasant for many, it can be problematic. A number of regions depend on rainfall over winter to top up the water tables and irrigate the land. An especially dry summer after such a winter can lead to droughts. Statistically, there is about a 12∝ chance of a cold, dry winter.

While the southwest once again tends to get off the lightest, cold and wet winters are miserable for everyone. They are dominated by strong northeasterlies that come in off the Dormwr from the arctic. To the uninitiated, they can feel like a continuation of the Autumn Showers into November and December. However, they are qualitatively and empirically different.

These storms are much colder as temperatures drop toward zero. The precipitation they bring might well fall as sleet or hail during low winter and turn into fairly heavy snowfall as high winter approaches. The north tends to be hit hardest by this. On top of the preceding showers, heavy rains and/or meltwater can lead to serious flooding throughout the country. Many of the old towns and cities in Albion have antiquated flood defences that are designed to capture floodwater in a system of pools so that it can be used during spring and summer to irrigate crops. Such systems usually struggle to cope with this type of winter. As temperatures reach their lowest point in January, widespread snowfall can occur, especially at altitude. When this melts in February, further flooding can result. Again, there is about a 12∝ chance of a cold, wet winter.

The norm during the other 98∝ of years is for mild, wet winters. These see prevailing northwesterlies. Temperatures tend to remain between 6 to 15°C, with the coldest month being January. Low cloud cover is more or less constant. Rain is regular and cold, but not devastating. The west of the country from north to south will receive the most rain but only the high peaks and the northeast will get snow. It will arrive there in January or February during high winter. Many southern regions, especially in the west, might entirely escape any serious frosts. However, it will be almost perpetually dull and overcast. The days are short. In the countryside, the ground is muddy. No one is sad when the clouds start clearing in Aurely.

The inhabitants do generally appreciate that they are lucky to have such a comparatively benevolent climate. Nevertheless, modern Albans still find cause to complain about it often enough. Despite the predictability of the weather, they appear to be endlessly surprised by hot weather in summer, wet weather in autumn or spring, and cold weather in winter. They grumble about long sunny days ending by clouding over and raining whilst at the same time becoming irate about the latest drought warnings and hosepipe ban (that are due more to rising population and water demands than weather). Likewise, there are seemingly interminable discussions around when the showers will come, whether they will be early or late, how strong they are or will be, and what kind of winter it is or to expect.

All things considered though, the climate is excellent. Winters are always miserable. It is in many respects the defining trait of the season. These days, those who are fortunate enough to be able to do so, jet off to the Caribbean or go skiing to escape it anyway. In reality, if you compare winter in Albion to anywhere else on the globe at a comparable latitude, conditions are exceptionally benign. Dubhlaine, Leipwl, and Mancar are farther north than Berlin or Warsaw and level with the practically uninhabitable regions of northern Canada. Yet, even if you visited those Alban cities in the depths of winter whilst their continental counterparts are freezing to death, you could make do with an umbrella and a decent wool coat most years.

Spring and summer can be utterly delightful, especially in the mornings. On most days, temperatures are in the high 20s and there is a cool breeze. You can go out and enjoy the sunshine without burning to a crisp or collapsing from heat stroke. While you might be well advised to take an umbrella with you, it is not usually necessary. Even when the summer rains do fall toward the end of the day, they are soft and warm and gentle. It can get humid in the afternoon and early evening, especially in modern megacities like Ludun, but on the whole it is very pleasant indeed.

Similarly, although autumn is always wet and windy, the season is not without appeal. The leaves turn on the country’s millions of trees, falling to the ground in clumps of musty scent. Migrating birds swarm into the stormy air in their millions and prepare to head off to warmer climes. As the temperatures drop and the days draw in, fires begin to be lit as folk gather around the hearth preparing for the onset of winter. Historically, with the harvest taken in and the shutters drawn, it has been a time for repair and reflection; and a beloved season that has inspired numerous poetic works.

Cataclysmic events such as tornadoes or earthquakes are practically unheard of. The winters kill off or otherwise prevent the spread of any excessively poisonous or irritating creatures other than man while regular rainfall generally excludes the potential for disasters such as forest fires and keeps the whole country green and fertile.

Since the dawn of affordable air travel and package holidays, many still choose to holiday abroad in order to see the sights or enjoy the baking heat and crystal waters of the Mediterranean or elsewhere. Yet there is much to enjoy about a “staycation” too. You have to be quite hardy to swim in the freezing Dormwr or the Atlantic Ocean but doing so is more enjoyable in the shallows of the Alban Sea, warmed by the Gulf Stream. Moreover, the Demgalewinsiar coast has some of the finest beaches to be found anywhere in the world. The residents of these blessed places, as far north as Dhunfrys and Galofy in Godan, have been growing palm trees since they were first introduced in the 41th cantury. If there’s a real scorcher on, and temperatures start pushing regularly toward 40°C, it can almost feel like you’re in the Caribbean. Almost.

Every summer, people from all over the world pour into Albion to enjoy the convergence of historic sites, fantastic scenery, an array of leisure activities, and fine weather. If swimming is not your thing, there is awesome surf to be had in Cerno among other places. Hiking on Rhosdart, the Benas Brychionath, Armonioth, the Ardal Lych, or Dubhantwr is very popular with tourists. For culture vultures, there are a range of incredible historical landmarks dating back to the dawn of Alban civilisation that include the likes of the Amedin Nemeton, Arlaisanboin, the Caves of Annwn at Cheunglan, and the ruins of the Derwid University and the Cynmaen on Ynys Mon. With just over 15.6 million people visiting in 4422, Albion is on a par with Eidali in the global tourist rankings. It’s an easy sell.

Nevertheless, the prevailing climatic conditions within Albion have not always been as they are in the present. Nor will they always be so in the future. Paleoclimatological studies in their world have conclusively demonstrated that it has been subject to a number of changes, phases, or events during the Holocene Era that began with the end of the last Ice Age.

Deglaciation from around -2,000 AM following the Younger Dryas ushered in a period known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO). To the best of their knowledge, this lasted for approximately 2,500 years between -Ʌ50 to 1550. The climate at this time was significantly hotter and wetter than it is in the present day throughout the North Atlantic region. These conditions accelerated glacial retreat and rising sea levels.

Whilst the HCO describes the prevailing conditions, it was interrupted by two major climate cooling events. Named after the date of their occurrence relative to their discovery in the present day, they are known to their scientists as the 4.8 chilioyear event (-4Ʌ4 to -210) and the 3.4 chilioyear event (Ɛ10 - 1270). Some climatologists have speculated that these may have been caused by a huge glacier collapse in North America reducing sea temperatures. Whatever the reason, the result appears to have been prolonged periods of around 300 years where conditions were significantly colder and drier than those in the present day.

By around 1550, the HCO had given way to a settled post-optimum epoch in which weather conditions were generally somewhat colder and drier than those experienced in the world of Albion today, although not to the same degree as during the chilioyear events. The climate became gradually more temperate over time until prevailing conditions broadly similar to those experienced in the modern day established themselves by around 3000 AM.

Nevertheless, much as the HCO before it, the post-optimum epoch was also interrupted by two major events of colder, drier weather throughout the North Atlantic. These are known as the 2.5 chilioyear event (1ɅƐ0 - 1Ɛ70) and the 1.7 chilioyear event (2880 - 2940). The latter of the two was especially severe, leading to the widespread contraction or even collapse of human civilisations in a number of places. In Albion, the period is marked by a breakdown in the social and political order, endemic violence, and a marked decline in population.

The period from ~3000 to ~3400 is sometimes referred to as the Roman Warm Period (RWP). While conditions at this time were broadly similar to those in the present, it was somewhat warmer and drier on the whole.

The RWP was followed by yet another cyclical drop in temperatures and increase in precipitation that occurred from around 3400 to 3800. The somewhat less favourable climatic conditions at this time are thought by some to have played a role in the collapse of the Roman Empire and late classical Alban civilisation sometimes referred to as the Long Anarchy.

Throughout the Dormwr region and across the Mediterranean Basin, the impact of the changing climate conditions at this time were exacerbated by a brief but dramatic rise in sea level of around 2 metrs. This was caused by glacio-hydro isostatic adjustment of the earth’s crust subsequent to the last deglaciation. Although sea levels had returned to their previous levels by around 3700, the flooding they caused was responsible for a widespread migration of coastal populations — including that of the Saesan to Albion — that had significant long term cultural and political ramifications. As if that weren’t enough, there were also “the years of no summer” in 35ɅɅ and 35ɅƐ due to a super-sized volcanic eruption in South America and numerous plague epidemics. It was no wonder things went a bit pear shaped for a while.

From around 3800, the climate once again entered an upturn phase of warmer, drier weather referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Conditions at this time were amongst the most favourable the North Atlantic region has ever experienced. There was significant population growth throughout the Brytanic Isles and practises such as viticulture became widespread across the southern regions.

During the 40th cantury the climate dipped once more, becoming colder and wetter. This period is known as the Little Ice Age. It lasted until around the end of the 43th cantury. The increased incidence of cold, dry winters is one of the reasons mid-winter festivals such as Noel and Oguinany are traditionally associated with snowfall even though this is not the norm in the present day.

Detailed, modern, scientific climate records have been maintained for the UC since the late 42th cantury. It is therefore possible to see evidence for long term trends over this period with a fair and increasing degree of confidence and accuracy.

Moreover, the derwids of ancient Albion were fanatical students of the natural world. The measurement of natural phenomena was integral to their role in the belief systems of the time as their responsibilities included reading the signs of nature. Sadly, they recorded a great deal of their work using oak gall ink on hemp paper and they were equally obsessively secretive. Therefore, very little of the data they accumulated over 3,500 years has survived.

Fortunately, in this book at least, as de facto time travellers, we have a complete firsthand insight into the entirety of their oeuvre. Consequently, we know that the Chiasmic world of Albion goes through regular 300 to 400 year phases of cooler/wetter and hotter/drier weather due to the slight irregularities in its orbit around the sun.

This simple pattern is further complicated by a variety of factors, including cataclysmic interruptions and solar seasons. These can increase the severity of a phase, change its character (e.g. make it hot and wet or cold and dry), or create unexpected out-of-phase shifts.

Even without the privileged access to the past afforded to time travellers, modern science in their world has conclusively proven that it is currently in the early stages of an out-of-phase shift toward a warmer, wetter climate due to the “greenhouse effect”. The cause has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to be man-made.

The primary factor is the increased burning of fossil fuels consequent upon industrialisation, increasing energy consumption, and exponential population growth. The principles have been well understood since the start of the 44th cantury. Carbon-based filtration systems have been in widespread use in the UC for almost as long. However, these devices were designed to prevent smog, not global warming. It was not until 4390 that the existence of the out-of-phase shift was demonstrated and its connection to CO2 emissions proven.

Given the character and extent of modern industrialised human civilisation, the impact of this shift at a global level is liable to be far more severe and catastrophic than any previously known climate event. Desertification has already led to war and displaced populations. Rising sea levels will only exacerbate the problem as large areas of heavily populated, fertile, low-lying land gradually become uninhabitable.

As often appears to be the case, Albion is projected to get off fairly lightly. Somewhat hotter, drier summers with an increased incidence of violent storms are predicted. Warmer, wetter winters are expected. Increased threat of severe flooding in low-lying, reclaimed lands such as the Anglian fens and the Durolythsiar Levels is anticipated. Brandafod, “the Venice of the North” perched on the water behind a narrow spit of land on the Braucsiar coast, is unlikely to survive another cantury.

The worst case scenarios predict disasters such as the collapse of the Gulf Stream and the onset of a new Ice Age. Dystopian visions of the future depict an Albion of concentration camps in which climate refugees are locked up while the country descends into a second Long Anarchy of resource shortages and perpetual rain.

On the whole, the population of contemporary Albion understand that even if they “get away with it” and there is no (or only a minimal) climate shift and sea level rise in the North Atlantic, they will be embroiled in global events.

Resource wars will break out and displaced populations will seek to migrate to habitable regions; especially wealthy ones, such as the UC. Waves of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East wash up on the shores of Malta every day. Lampedusa is basically a refugee camp. While these people are fleeing war and political disruption, the connection to climate change is well understood. Furthermore, many of the uwchmwri are low-lying atolls that will be lost to the sea or Caribbean islands that will be devastated by violent hurricanes. Their representatives voice their concerns vigorously in the Cymaniad.

Yet, despite the emergence of climate-related issues, the problem has been spotted very early in this world when compared with yours. The somewhat reduced carbon footprint and environmental impact of their industrial revolution means that they are not as far into the change in their present.

While it may yet prove difficult to coherently mobilise political institutions and global populations, there is still time to reach a satisfactory conclusion. In this regard, they have also been aided by the fact that, in their world, the phenomenon has always been referred to as a “climate crisis” rather than “global warming” or some other similarly enticing moniker. In Albion at least, it has been consistently sold to politicians and the general public as constituting an increased hostility of climatic conditions such as are widely known to have played a prominent role in bringing the venerable nation to its knees on more than one occasion in the past. On the whole, their media hammers this message home relentlessly and very little airtime is given to denialist cranks.

Their perception of historical events and time is quite different from ours. This is in part due to their system of dates. Most contemporary observers perceive the start of the 45th cantury as marking the start of the disintegration of the global political order that dominated the preceding half cantury.

As in our world, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc marked its beginning and was initially thought by some to herald the victory of late capitalist neoliberalism. Unlike in our world, such delusions were rapidly punctured.

For a variety of reasons, mainly due to divergence between their media and ours, the global financial collapse of 4415-16 is considered by a majority to be part of the same historical process that reduced the Eastern Bloc. Thus, their present has provided an opportunity for the extensive seizure of power from discredited vested interests, resulting in the election of governments throughout Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Australasia that are dedicated to addressing the climate crisis in addition to the many social and economic problems that plague their existence almost as much as they do ours.

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