The South London Mountains

From the refuge high in the South London Mountains he looked down on the rows of Edwardian semis and the spaceport that nestled between them. Car headlights swept around the hairpins leading up to the abandoned broadcast tower and the Crystal Palace casino complex which shone out like a beacon among the towering Redwood trees.

Well... when he could see at all.

But now his sight and his sense of smell seemed to be returning and he was hit by a searing stinking wave of Neutrino 90 emanating from the hydroponic pastures far down on the Croydon plains.

The asteroid that had decimated central France had fucked up all the seasons as well as the topography. Birds of paradise nested around the chateau but he could see to the east of London a glacier gleaming quite clearly. That is, he could whenever the monsoons abated and between the monstrous tremors and associated blindness of the waves which ripped through his body.

They had given him the 'permanent' spike when he had been active in the ecstasy wars in the twenties. How was he to know it had been the Department of Health behind the network of dealers? They sure took it badly when he found that pill factory in Dagenham, they'd killed his partner, drugged him and dragged him here, shoved him into this armchair and filled him with Sodium Pentathol.

"Who had he told? What had he seen? How long had he known?" Jab after jab until he could taste the shit. He spilled his innocent guts time after time but they weren't having it; they figured he was from some wanky liberal UN hit team, which would undoubtedly have expressed some concern about one of its founder members routinely drugging up its population.

The best way of silencing such a man they thought, was to administer a 'permanent'. "Scupper his body, and his brain will follow", he heard them say. The dirty deed done - under clinical conditions of course - they had left and he hadn't moved from this armchair for fifteen years or so. Well it seemed like fifteen years. That estimate might have been ten years out in either direction. He was aware that somebody changed him and fed him from time to time but why did they bother he wondered?

He knew he'd been crying...

The 'permanent' had set off a jet stream of wind through his head - warm but irresistible, moaning, often shrieking, an incessantly rushing tinnitus. When they'd taped the soft sponges to the hinges of his jaws the visions had begun: he remembered fighting with some Bedouin, being severed at the waist and blood transfusions - perhaps some of it had been real.

Rendered immobile by the medication he was left in a sitting position, arms on the rests chin down. Whenever they came to move him he remained in the same position, comically rigid.

Then the spaceport had started running huge magenta personnel air freighters past the back of the shaking house. The booming ships usually carried incoming engineers home on leave, or outbound shoppers visiting the Blue Sky satellite mall tethered three miles above the clouds, just over the Brixton Cliffs.

It pushed him to panic every five or six minutes.

Each passing craft would cause acrid fuel vapour to burst into his face and the stench of it washed through the empty rooms. It ripped at his mouth, nose and throat, at his blind black eyes, and made his terror complete. But somehow, each time he had felt he wanted to give in, to let go and fall into the welcoming, swirl of the abyss, some spark within had flickered and driven him like a mauled insect clawing up the precipice yet again to flop feebly over into the right side of sanity. Every few minutes this had been happening, every night and every day for between fifteen and twenty five years. He knew he had endured the seemingly unendurable but too weary for triumph, he was only dumbly aware it had been right that he'd tried to survive.

They'd be back for him, now they knew he was recovering. But surely they wouldn't want to interrogate him again. He must have told them everything he'd ever known. The memory of the bitter taste of the truth drug lingered on.

He thought about his appearance for the millionth time. His hair would inevitably be white by now he figured but he couldn't be sure, since there were no mirrors. They and all the other reflective surfaces had been removed, the 180-degree floor to ceiling windows had all been treated so as to give no clue as to who he had become. There was only a blurred but incrementally expanding view of a world he hadn't set foot in or touched for half his life.

The sentence they had passed on him - the exquisitely agonising, hyper real nerve-edge on to which they had forced him to teeter for so long, somehow hadn't yet killed him and should therefore make him stronger… he hoped.

But then miraculously, with each moment his vision started clearing. The hurricane in his head was calming to an almost manageable rushing gale. In a month or two he might be able to move his mouth. With more time, maybe a couple of years he could consider trying to think his three shiny steel lower limbs into movement.

The woman narrowed her eyes at the stirring man opposite. He, was preoccupied by the progress of a spider as it made its way up over her knee and disappeared under the hem of her skirt. This sort of mild hallucination was run of the mill.

Unexpectedly he was gripped by a huge convulsion, the biggest he'd experienced in maybe ten years. His head dropped down between his shoulders, and, from the small of his back to the top of his head, he shuddered violently like a wet dog, teeth clenched, arms flailing, eyes jammed shut. But when the attack eventually passed, it left behind it a deep sense of finality, and a glimmer of hope that perhaps this seemingly eternal experience might all soon be over.

Then he was able to get his eyes half open. His vision became clearer and he even felt his numb mouth twitch. A day, or was it a week later, the mists cleared enough for him to realise that he was smiling at the woman, leering even.

"Hello Stephen", she smiled. "You've been away ages this time."

It didn't matter right now who this woman was, he had a far more burning question. "How long?" he gasped, uttering his first words in years. She looked at her watch. "About 30 seconds or so this time," she smiled.

They told him that he had been suffering from malaria, that the experimental treatment he had volunteered for was causing him to experience side effects - disorientation, slight memory loss and possibly mild hallucinations. He might be a little delusional perhaps, but nothing lasting.

When he talked of conspiracy, assassination, time shifting and ecological disaster they'd just smile indulgently and tell him it would soon all pass, and at least he would never have malaria again. He insisted, shouting, screaming but they and he grew weary of the questions after a while and acceptance set in.

But fifty times a day he was compelled to walk awkwardly to the window and resting on his tripod of legs, look down at the spaceport's shining tower. He was relieved that at least he was not insane; he was just on a different plain.

He earned money of course, as much money as anyone could spend. The companies that paid him so well always had trouble reverse engineering the fantastical machines he developed for them, but they were extremely grateful for the plans and maps of the future that he routinely handed over. At the same time they were full of pity for this melancholy yet vigorous young man who only ever saw himself white haired and stooping over his robotic limbs and who only feigned recognition of the wife who in reality was young and beautiful but to him was an aged stranger.

He had seen the future; he was living in it still and he was doomed to remain in it. For him there could be no return. That was the price you paid. Time's magnetic draw had robbed him of the youth that he still retained.