Life Plus 2M

Oxford, Sunday Morning September 1st 2066

The writer in his attic room looked out from his sky-light at the traffic coming down the High Street.

Mostly it was swans, ducks and geese - a stately armada of water fowl in search of nesting places. They usually found them in bell towers and the castellated roof-tops of colleges.

Bells no longer chimed and no buses roared in the watery stillness.

The writer hadn't written anything for a long time, except for the occasional shopping list. He had thought that when the great silence fell on the city that he would find it much easier to compose his sentences than when the city had chattered to itself with the terrible energy of a preacher possessed. But as the students, estate agents, buskers and professors had departed, so too had his creative muse.

A dog-collared clergyman rowed steadily away down Queens Street, looking like the Reverend Dodgson in search of Liddle Girls. But there were no little girls in Oxford now.

“Alas, lack-a-day. A lack-a-Alices,” the writer sung to himself idly.

It was as if with the coming of the great silence, time itself had become moribund. The writer noted that the sun shone dimly but continuously in the milky blue sky above Carfax tower both night and day, and they had so dissolved into each other that it was impossible to say which was which.

“Night and day you are the one, only you beneath the moon and under the sea,” the writer sang to himself idly.

He sat down to compose another shopping list.

The city slowly shook itself from slumber and came into a form of tepid life. A pleasure cruiser full of Andean villagers ploughed slowly down Cornmarket, the passengers lolling over the rails, pointing their cameras at the remaining visible third of the city. These people were now financial kings of the silent world, where Altitude had become the new gold standard. Their attention was taken by a game of water-croquet being played in one of the side-streets. Water rats were being used as balls, the hoops provided by the looping necks of swans.

The players were a new breed of man-dolphin, the result of some successful (though controversial) genetic experiments in the darker corners of the university science area in previous decades. It was hoped that these beings would inherit the earth, but the natural inclination of dolphins towards play had resulted in a species that just wanted to party. At other times they played complex games of tag in the submerged shops, cafes, dining halls and crypts of the old city.

And now the mountainous, black, arching backs of a school of whales came down The Broad, demolishing the pillars of the Bodleian library, causing its neo-classical facade to crumble into the water. Pages from a billion books dispersed in the swell and became plankton in the industrial vacuum cleaner filters of the whales' mouths. Never before had so much literature been devoured in the university city – an entire national depository library sucked into a dozen leviathan guts in ten minutes.

The writer observed the demise of ancient, scholarly buildings from his disadvantage point, noting that they dissolved like sand-castles to an incoming tide.

“So this is the end, my only friend,” he intoned in morose Jim Morrison tones. “The actors are all gone under the hill, the dancers have left the ball-room, and I am left – perhaps the last island of beauty in this world of water.”

He hunched down among an early autumn fall of shopping lists. He sat crouched, hugging his legs in the absence of anything else to hug.

“I guess we chanced it a bit too often. Couldn't kick that fossil fuel habit. Understandable. We wanted to have fun, live a little. No child wants to be told when it's late and time to stop playing and go in for the night.”

“You've got to laugh a little, cry a little, until the clouds roll by a little...” sang the writer.

He still couldn't think of anything to write.